2041

Imagine thirty years from now, when I am 91, or not.  It will be 2041, whether I am here to witness it, or not.  We will know more about Global Warming by then.  We will be several generations smarter.  I hope to still be going to the gym, in geriatric workout clothes. I don’t know if they make a granny panty thong; perhaps they will by then, so my panty line doesn’t show under my yoga pants. Perhaps you will be able to see the little lumps of muscles under all that skin which should be about as far South as its going.

Perhaps I’ll be competing in the You’ve Got to Be Kidding Division of some sport or other.  I don’t know why I would since I’m already far from those days when I relished setting myself against someone else(s) and pushing myself to beat them.  But if I do, in 2041, perhaps it will be something unimaginable now, like flying the furthest by meditation alone, or ripening the tomato with the greatest concentration in the shortest time.

Or healing.  Maybe all of us will have the power to heal all manner of things, transform all manner of matter into its better, more complete self. Maybe that is what we’ll be doing in 2041.

I entered this reverie this morning simply by listing all I would like to have done before guests arrive in two days time.  I started thinking of the time line while making the second-day list for the plumber.  He’ll be back this morning with more faucets and renewed determination to make the hot water heat work in the guest house.

I started imagining this list as stretching far into the future, sitting on the shoulder of all the lists, or at least all my lists, stretching backwards.  I think I came into this world with a list;  suckle, poop, pee, nap, suckle poop pee, nap. I probably didn’t put on that list wide-open-wonder-at-this-world-I-have-landed-in, just as I don’t now.

Yesterday was one of those days.

The sky!  God, the sky, opening and closing in pure technicolor. One moment nothing but a gray backdrop, the next, an arc of primary colors against a dark background, a brilliant sun on the other side.  Then!  Slashes of brilliant crimson crossed through with black. It seemed impossible this color.  Two women employees took pictures just outside the doors at Lowe’s, pulled outdoors by the spectacle.  Then!  Moments later, it had all disappeared, as though it never happened.

That was not on my list.  The faucet was.  Which turned out to be the wrong one.

Again.

Instead of going on the list, again, John, the one of us who knows about faucets, went back to the store last night and got the right one. Maybe.

Did you see the sky? I had said to him earlier.  No, he said, puzzled. It was all gray when I looked, all gray.

This was just before he pointed out that I had gotten the wrong faucet.  And out of my mouth came I don’t give a s- - -.

Smart man that he is, he took a step backwards. I’m not sure what I just stepped in, said John.

I didn’t either.  I was making dinner I was too tired to make, after a day which on the surface of it didn’t look very stressful.  Who knew that one’s good nature could drown in a list, even when flooding that list was a rainbow and moments of tearful astonishment?

Days and days and days of working the list, accommodating accommodating, accommodating, as each item seemed to require more of me than I anticipated.  And everything on it seemed to have a mousetrap at the end, something that just refused to be easily resolved.  Over and over.  I was growing weary and I didn’t even know it.  It was time for a movie about a dog with a happy ending. And some breathing.

It is all working out, maybe.  The plumber is coming back today, maybe, and maybe one of the faucets will work, the one we got, or the one he’s bringing.  The house guests will come, maybe, and will have hot water in the new shower, maybe or maybe not.

I do know this.  There will be a whole other set of astonishments today.  Like right now, the stubble of emerging trees against the dawn sky.   Maybe or maybe not I’ll notice.  Maybe or maybe not more things will get crossed off The List.  But if I’m here in 2041, I’ll hope for more astonishments than accomplishments.

I think I’ll put that on my list. . .

Bah Humbug Lite

I’m not sure how it got to be December already. But November seemed particularly greedy, gobbling up the days getting ready for Thanksgiving, then afterwards a few more days getting bed linens washed and my head rearranged. There was travel and there were medical tests (all normal, thank you), both of which tend to take up more than their space on the calendar.

Travel reaches out on both sides, before and after.  Before, with all the tiny bottles that have to be fetched. Afterwards with the dissipation of I'm-still-somewhere-else while trying to get through the piles of all that got postponed so you could leave, plus all that blew up under the door while you were gone.  

Medical tests take up a different kind of room.  Anxiety is a mental narcissist, how dare you pay attention to anything else. Days can go by in a scratchy blur.  Then the tests.  Time suspended.  Then the results and a new place to stand.

A deep outbreath.  It is December.

The first of the month, for a few days, ordinary life can reassert its importance.  Until you turn on the radio, or try to shop for something innocent, like cotton balls.  Then you realize: it has already begun.

Pa rum pa pum pum.


But the Thanksgiving guests have just left.  I don’t even have the sheets back on the beds. 
It doesn’t matter.  It is December. . .

Even if you put your foot down and give goats instead of cologne, Christmas has its own momentum.  Even if you put up a few subtle white lights instead of a yard full of electrified plastic, Christmas takes over.  Money leaks out of your wallet.  There is an irresistible urge to have and to go to parties and eat tiny food.  Even to break out platters of tiny food for gatherings of people you see every day, those people redecorated in red hats with furry balls on the end.  

If you are a believer, now is the time to get disgusted at all the crass commercialism, Jesus is the reason for the season.  And if you are a nonbeliever. . .well Christmas takes over anyway.

Here's a secret: we kind of enjoy being overrun, no matter how many donations we make to worthy causes, no matter how many oranges we put in stockings.  Despite the train wreck we make of the notion of abundance, there is something liberating about the whole hog scattershot that the season seems to endorse.  Spend!  Eat! Put a bow on the dog!

As much as we complain, and declare ourselves above it all, there is something in us that unlocks at this time of the year that doesn’t have permission any other time.  We arrive at the shores of the New Year spent, exhausted, buffeted by the repeated waves of holiday demands. Budgets and diets blown.
Making nice with relatives we don’t normally see, those members of the family whose job it is to help us realize we're doing pretty well by comparison, pretty well indeed.

And then there are those opportunities to intersect with lives we didn’t know existed, people with whom we share ancestry we know not when, maybe as far back as when humans were invented, people whose potentially whacky personalities we don’t have to be exposed to, people who just desperately need us to help them to have a meal, or to make a living with that goat.

Yes, its crazy, these holidays.  Norman Rockwell expectations; Debbie Downer reality: boredom, fatigue, too much dessert, too little exercise, too much Uncle So and So, too little sleep.  But maybe down the middle is something that stretches us a little on both ends.  Maybe when we slowly come back to the center, which is what January is for, our vision is a little wider, our heart, if also our pants, just a little big bigger.

October. . .

There is a fullness happening.  Is it just my new vitamins taking hold?  Or is it the October light - the way it envelops you in its arms and dances you around the room? May I have this dance? 

Is it both?  Is it more? Is it something else entirely?

We have prevailed against the relentless heat, through no skill of our own. The slow tipping of the globe stepped in, refereed.  Just in the nick of time, those bullying temperatures were sent packing, and are now searing off a more Southern part of the world.

The windows are open during the day now; we can breathe the sweet air.  Outside can now breathe us, in and out. The light breathes us, in and out. 

Maybe that is what I was feeling yesterday, as I dug my trowel through the dark soil, adding compost to the cold frames, preparing to sprinkle in the tiny seeds of autumn:  kale and chicory, deer-tongue lettuce, mache and claytonia, arugula and spinach.  Lifting my head from its fragrance - there is no perfume like that of healthy ground - the light greeted me, delighted. As did secret potatoes, those that evaded my searching hands when I harvested from these same boxes in late Spring.  

Survivor tomatoes, their flavor concentrated by an over- abundance of sun and lack of rain, their skins toughened, their color a deeper, richer red, these came back to the kitchen too, along with a couple of rogue red peppers, undiscovered and past their prime, their skins wrinkled as an old woman’s.  They too will have an special intensity.  I thanked them all for hanging on, for waiting for me.  

It all waits for me, generous as a lover: the light, the birdsong, the soil. . .it all waits for me to lift my head ever so slightly, to just notice, may I have this dance? 

Good Morning. . .

It feels as though there is some juice for writing this morning.  The well has been dry: so many changes.  Perhaps you too are a creature of habit;  someone who settles comfortably into a time to go to bed, a time to rise, a breakfast.  Scaffolding.  Touchstones of predictability.  Then along comes a wave, of houseguests, of illness, of travel, of construction, of loved ones dangling on a precipice, and the scaffolding breaks, too much pressure, too much torque.

Lost sleep, unconscious eating, lack of exercise, arched emotions.  This goes on too long and the laundry piles up, along with their sisters, the dishes.  Bills arrive and don’t get into the right pile and then fester, fomenting trouble, unseen, in the dark.

Ah, the dark.  The quiet.  The winter.  The silence.

I am remembering an organic chemistry class.  Making aspirin.  Watching tiny particles emerge out of a liquid when we added a catalyst.  Is this what happens?  Form emerging from the source?  All of these events, bodies, thoughts, emotions, bills, laundry, dishes. . .they all emerge from the one source and we are, no I am captivated.  I am seduced.  I am spinning spinning spinning as my attention is captured by this no this no this.

This morning, for the first time in a long time, I am up at my early hour, without an immediate task.  There are not houseguests for whom I want to make a special breakfast; there are not workpeople arriving in a matter of hours who need decisions made now. There are dishes to be done, there is laundry in the dryer, wrinkling.  There are bills that have wandered. But somehow, because it is so dark, because no one else wants this time, I can feel space opening.  There is room to breathe more deeply.  An anchor begins to form.

It sounds so odd to say that I thirst for space, for darkness, for unfettered time as if for water while crossing a desert.  But it is true. It is more than odd, it can be irritating in a world where each moment is personally commercialized as a tweet. The expectation is that one’s moment is branded and broadcasted.  And it could be rightfully said that a blog is just a longer version of the same thing.  Perhaps.

The point of this one, to the extent that I know, is to use the blunt instrument of words to tease out connection.  To have and share a felt connection.  With what?  Life, Source, Ground of Being. dare we say God? No, as the word is too frightening, too misused, bantered about by desperate politicians claiming to be on the right team, God as their coach, and only their coach in a competitive game.

Way down deep, here, in the dark, the silence, there is no competition, no game.  One can rest here. I can rest here.  And when I can show up, I can send postcards out, like this one, into the daytime world.  And I can read them, as reminders, when once again, in the heat of the sun, it is all swirling, dust motes in the light.

Chickens. . .

Outside this window, the chickens sit silent in a big cooler, covered in ice fetched from the bin outside Cheeseman's store.  When I went in to pay yesterday afternoon, on the way to Mary's farm, Tony had been "fryin' all day," the young cashier told me, when I said how good it smelled in there.  "Tony is a good fryer," said her taller, thinner, clearly pregnant friend, also behind the worn wooden counter, a curiously absent look in her eyes.

Yesterday morning, those chickens were out in the sunshine running and pecking for food, unaware that this was The Day.  The day that by afternoon would find them upside down in the cone in the temporary tent, their heads chopped off, then feet, then swirled around in the plucker before their insides left them and they were plunged into a cool bath.

I get a stab of remorse when my hand trowel accidentally cuts through an earthworm, prematurely ending a little earthworm career.  But I know if chickens born to be food can lead a charmed life, these chickens did.  Their feed was specially ground for them, organic, no GMOs.  They hung out on the Chicken Riviera, North Carolina branch, in their moveable house, granted all manner of tasty morsels in the fields the beef cows had just helped fertilize.

Mary is nearly eighty.  She and her daughter Sarah have run their 350-acre farm for decades with the kind of pure intentions that are finally catching on.  They believe in raw milk, Jesus Christ and the government minding its own damn business.  When her late husband took to drink long ago, five-foot-two-inch Mary climbed up into the cab of a big rig and started driving for hire.  She saved the farm and here they are.

Sarah was married, once, but that didn't work out too well either, so when her house on the fifty acres across the road burned down, she moved in with Mama, temporarily at first, then time just moved on.  She supplements the farm income with an administrative job. "I come home from work, and I go to work," Sarah said yesterday, putting more chickens on the scale, smiling a little bit, Mary sitting on the stool.

Besides the chickens for eggs and meat and the beef cows, there are Jerseys for milking and occasionally pigs in the woods rooting around for acorns. Everything pays its way, has to.  That's when those of us privileged enough to be on the list get the call.  The chickens were up to eating 85 pounds a food a day, Sarah said, "be here Saturday between 3 and 5."

Everything but the chickens ends up in the little market building, equipped with second-hand refrigerators and freezers, hand-made signs taped to the fronts as to what's where, and exclamatory warnings about not fully closing the doors. It's all run by the honor system, with a ticket book and a cashbox, wide open.

Money has never disappeared, as far as I know, although being fans of the Old Testament, neither Mary nor Sarah has much faith in man or beast.  Jesus's job, in the family theology, is neither to help us realize how fabulous we are and how deserving of gold faucets, nor to help us realize the inner light that is an inherent part of each of our fellow creatures.  No, Jesus came here, under duress, against his better judgment, and suffered disproportionately, just so each of us could have the tiniest chance of dragging ourselves out of the Devil-ridden gutter.

I can't really explain how the honor system fits in here, except that when I show up each season to pick up those plump birds, beautiful in a Dead Chicken kind of way, I feel privileged to be a small part of it all.  The amount of work, the dedication is nothing short of astounding.  Over the years, sitting on their porch with watery coffee and egg-and-cream rich cake, I've heard the stories:  rain and cold and darkness and obstinate cows; emergency vet visits, broken fencing and water mains.

It seems impossible, but the big news is that they've just installed air conditioning in the house, an old cabin.  The first time.  Ever.  Here in the Piedmont, where 100-plus degree and high humidity summer days are just another in a long list of just-the-way-it-is.  Probably only because Jane had a stroke this past year and is "not worth nuthin' " she told me, when I called her in May to wish her Happy Birthday, the first I'd heard of the stroke.  Last year, with her surprise chocolate birthday cake already packed, I got a call canceling my visit because I was taking too long and she needed to bush hog the back field before it started to rain.

That I can write a check to help support these two women feels like dues. That I get chickens too - well that's just good fortune.

There she is. . .

I saw her yesterday, in Trader Joe's.  How could you not:  tall, perhaps six two, even before those elegant black heels, clearly new, no nicks, no spots. Pencil jeans on her lanky frame; a simple white spaghetti strap tank, her dark hair falling straight below her shoulders.  Olive, carefully tended skin - doe-eyed, I suppose, although those eyes were kept cast down, as if in protection.
We tried not to stare, or at least I did, sort of, but it was difficult.  Perhaps that is why she was armed with her mother, or I assume it was her mother, a stockier, shorter version of the olive skin and dark hair and not-from-around-here air, beautifully bejeweled and dressed more carefully than the rest of us.
Perhaps she was already twenty, but I doubt it.  In any case she had enough  time, enough experience as a catalyst for The Gaze that she was already resigned.  You could see it in her body: I know.  I can't help it.  Look all you want.  But be gentle.  
She moved languidly down one aisle and then another. Would pick up a box of cereal, a package of sausage, a bag of nuts, and simply stand there, staring at it for awhile, before putting it back.  No smile, no word to the mother, standing close, no reaction, one way or another.  Could she not eat it; was she fantasizing pleasure?
No matter where she appeared, the air seemed charged with our efforts: hers not to be conspicuous, the rest of us trying not to make her so, and failing, one by one, sneaking another glance, men and women alike, all of us keyed up somehow,  holding our breath.
How will she survive it, this beauty?  I hope there is a land where she can break a nail, work in her garden, get pregnant without worrying about stretching that perfect belly.  I wish her peanut butter and jelly and hearty laughter and messy, satisfying love.  Perhaps when the wrinkles begin to appear, and I hope that she will let them, she can celebrate off camera. I hope that we will grant her permission. . .

Saying Goodbye

My mother called yesterday, to say goodbye.  The Big One.  The Big Goodbye.  Or that was how it seemed.  That seemed to be the air between her sentences.  Oddly, she was laughing.  But then the vast majority of the time, when on the phone, my 88-year-old mother is laughing.  She is happy, or appears to be, when on the phone with me.  It’s not me, because she can’t hear half of what I say.  Sometimes I suspect that she is happy from a decision that happy mothers aren’t as bothersome, that when their lives have steadily collapsed into the recliner in the living room, when there are only so many questions that can be asked to keep the person on the other end of the telephone line, that happy sounds will extend the contact, if only just a little.  Only just a little is worth it.

Either that, or it is the combination of pain medications, antidepressants, sleeping pills, and the remainder of the complex chemical soup that is her bloodstream now.  The bloodstream that keeps pumping through her oh-so-temporary form, the one that gave rise to mine.

My mother called to say that if she blew away (ha ha), she just wanted me to know she loved me, that she had been thinking about me the whole day before.  It turned out that was the day she was watching the news about Joplin, or what used to be Joplin, Missouri before the tornadoes twisted it into rubble.  It seems that Greeneville, Tennessee, a little town at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, which doesn’t get tornadoes, has been getting tornadoes recently and one was predicted for yesterday.

The one before showed up despite the astonishment of these quiet people, unaccustomed to excitement of any kind, and roared its way through a small settlement in the county.  It touched down in one of those places named after its creek to which we, growing up in town, felt slightly superior, for no discernible reason.  I suppose the fact that “we had”  the county courthouse was reason enough.  They all came to us, the rest of them out there.  We in town had the official answers, the main banks, CPA’s like my Dad, and now. . .the WalMart.

It showed up and roared through, despite the fact that tornadoes don’t happen in this part of the world.  Buildings were flattened anyway, trailers destroyed.  Yesterday, they were predicted again, the day after Joplin, Missouri disappeared.  The same week that the neighbor across the street died when she wasn’t supposed to.

Mrs. Lowery wasn’t supposed to die because people who are fixtures in your life aren’t supposed to just up and disappear.  I am not sure that I ever had a real conversation with her.  And in the 52 years that my mother has lived across the street from Mrs. Lowery, they only had the one.  That was when Mrs. Lowery showed up on the front porch, and asked my mother to make a phone call for her.  This was kind of like answering the door and finding Jesus there, somebody you kept meaning to go see, to have a closer relationship with, but kept falling into simple comfort, knowing that they are there, and having that be enough.

Maybe if we hadn’t heard the gunshot, all those years ago, when Sonny, the middle of the five children, (Phyllis, Patsy, Sonny, Gary, Kathy)  hadn’t had absolutely enough of the abuse. He’d finally had enough at the same time he’d finally gotten hold of the gun.  And right over there, in that front yard, right out our kitchen windows, he’d shot and killed his father.  Maybe if we hadn’t heard it, maybe if it hadn’t happened, coffee could have been shared in one kitchen or another. 

But in which kitchen could it happen?  Our kitchen, where my father came home from his board meetings at the bank, or his Presbytery meetings at the church, where the six of us ate dinner in silence so Dad  could watch Walter Cronkite? Or their kitchen, familiar to Phyllis and Patsy, around whom I somehow felt wary.  Somehow I smelled it on them: they knew things, I wasn’t ever sure what things, but it seemed not quite right.. Kathy was my sister’s age, seven years my junior. And she said out loud, one summer when the two of them were seven, Tough titty, said the kitty, but the milk’s still good.  

She said “titty”, out loud.  It was the first time I’d heard anybody say that word, out loud.  I was fourteen.  She was seven. She came across the street, from her yard to ours, and said titty out loud, big as you please.

Their Dad worked at Pet Milk, and wore a soft cotton uniform, and brought home the discarded cardboard cartons of ice cream mix, a rich mixture to which the milk was later added, and sometimes we would get to help clean them out with our spoons. Why would you shoot a man who would bring home giant cartons of ice cream and stay outside with you, in the yard, with his own spoon?

We didn’t talk about it, of course.  We would no more talk about it, as a family, then we would say “titty”, or “pregnant”.  (Jesus’s mother was “with child.”)

The mother of all those Lowery’s was a gardener and was frequently in that front yard, quietly tending her irises on the bank. In fact, I watched her, during one of my recent visits to my mother, I watched her work her way slowly, from one flowering plant to another, leaning on a cane.  That same front yard, where the shot still echoes. That same yard, always with too many cats, the cats that are never fixed, the ones that come over and wait under my mother’s birdfeeders.

My mother called me last week about Mrs. Lowery and her astonishing demise.  I didn’t know her very well.  I should have invited her over more often, at least once. I don’t know my neighbors, any of them really.  

My Mom’s caretaker, Saint Sonya, was downstairs doing laundry while Mom was on the phone with me.  There was a doctor visit scheduled for later, about the time the tornado was predicted.  Thank goodness the neighbor’s funeral was last week.  That family, with all their mysteries, is now in the next phase of their collective lives. Just in case we are next, my Mom called, to say goodbye.

Returning. . .

I was trying to remember how many years I've made this bread, this oatmeal bread.  The first time was in Wake Forest, in that kitchen full of light, that kitchen we moved into in the mid 1980's, after living in an Airstream camper for two years while renovating.  My dear sister had given me Beard on Bread, a bible at the time by the late, renowned James Beard. I found within it a recipe that sounded intriguing, one of the author's favorites.

I have made modifications over the years, reducing salt, using honey instead of molasses, some whole grain flours.  It has became our "house bread", made over and over in the big yellow glass bowl that was my mother's until my dad modernized her kitchen.  It is a recipe I come back to when I need to get my hands in the dough, when I've been too long away from the gentle rhythms of kneading, of rising, of slow and steady progression to maturity.

My version has the loaves in the refrigerator overnight.  This morning, while the song sparrow does her roosterish chore as she does each morning at 5:30, announcing the day, these cold loaves slowly warm up on the counter.  They will go in the oven when they have quietly become 62 degrees, up from their 34-degree bed.

I noticed when I took them out earlier that their tops looked a little caved-in.  I know why, after all these years.  It is because yesterday, when I was making them, I was careless, and I let the yeast work, more than once, expanding the dough more times than this formula can handle.  I had to stir it down, more than once, forcing it to do its work more than once, because I was too distracted to follow its lead. Those of you who are bread bakers will know what I mean.

But even if you are not a bread baker, you will know what it means when one fights the natural rhythms of something living. And yeast is living, especially when encouraged with honey and flour and a warm kitchen.

There will be bread.  It will taste wonderful, as usual.  But the texture will be different, looser, and there may well be a space between the body of the loaf and the top crust, unusual.  It will work out, differently though, then if I had been paying attention, if I had been more respectful.

Yesterday was the same day I finally planted the seed potatoes that had been growing sprouts in the dark cellar.  It was past time, way past time.  I'm almost embarrassed to tell you about it.  The long shoots just keep growing when it is past time, seeking the light.  This is supposed to happen underground, within the deep rich earth that will give rise to more potatoes, new potatoes.  They aren't supposed to have to wind through air, searching.

I planted them anyway, though it is long past time.  We have had an unusually long, cool Spring, and perhaps it will all work out.  Perhaps there will be more potatoes.  I don't know.

While I was in the garden, overgrown for lack of tending, I picked strawberries and ate emergent pea pods off the pea vines, making their wild way up the trellis.  Or trying to.  Those of you who have grown peas know that they have these sweet tendrils that reach out from the vine to find something to hold onto.  If the gardener isn't paying attention, if she's off somewhere with her red suitcase, instead of helping them find a support, they will wind onto each other, dragging the whole shebang to the ground, a mass of vines and confusion.  I unwound what I could, removed the broken pieces, and apologized to them, silently.  Even though there was no one listening, it just seems wiser to keep it to yourself when you are apologizing to pea plants.

I've been away, you see.  Since we've talked, I've either been away, or changing sheets for houseguests.  As much as I love it, and I do, if I do it too long, too continuously, my roots begin to dry up.  If I water too shallowly, for too long, I start moving to the surface for my nourishment, and I'm increasingly vulnerable to fluctuating conditions: enough water, too much, enough sun, too much.  There isn't the steadiness, the consonant rhythm, the reserve that comes from quiet, consistent tending.

I'm getting back to that.  Slowly.  I can feel it.  I'll let go of this imperfect bread, taking it today to it's intended recipient.  The potatoes will not be as prolific as they would have been, had they had a more loving start.  The peas will be fine, although perhaps not as photo-ready as they would have been in tended columns.

Meanwhile, thanks for waiting.  Thanks for your patience.  It's good to be (almost) back. . .

Here we all are. . .

There are moments when the fabric of your Universe tears, and you stand, open-mouthed, disbelieving.  The moment before, you were skimming along with your list in hand, measuring your day, one checkmark at a time.  Then suddenly - no, with sharper edges than suddenly - there is a hole, gaping, yawning open, speaking in its own indecipherable language.  Nothing is as it was.

I came around the corner, my own street, that same curve I have come around many many times, still fastening my seatbelt. I was on my way to a meeting, a planning meeting actually, planning for the future.  Of course, that is what one does, one plans for the future.  Something different, to the left:  a car teetering on the fence, upside down.  A body in the soft pasture grass, another man standing, rubbing his head.  Two other cars had already stopped. A man on his cell phone, another administering to the man on the ground.  I had no cell phone, nor medical expertise. I drove on, eerily, warily, listening intently for the sound of emergency vehicles.

I watched as I passed car after car on the main road.  How could they not know this had happened? When a thread of the tapestry is pulled so violently, why are we not all instantly aware?

I stopped at the Volunteer Fire Department to make sure they knew.  Yes, another group was on its way, it turned out, but it seemed so slow.  This event, which had happened in an instant, was evidently taking place in a vat of molasses.

I went on to the meeting, a bit shakily.  There we worked on scenarios for seven years out, ten years out, what needed to be done.  At one point, I stopped, told a version of this story, and then other stories were told, of those moments, those cosmic potholes. Then we went on, shaking our heads, planning for this phantom, this future.

The next day,  I got the email.  One of the dearest women in the world had just met with her oncologist.  The cancer is back and has settled in, this time with custom coordinated drapes and bedcovers.  After having both breasts removed and being in remission for fourteen years, this dear dear woman got the news.  She and her dear dear partner got the news:  it is back, it is in her bones.  The Universe rents open.  Please God. . .please.

The week before, a dear dear long-time friend went shopping, a bit bewildered, buying prostheses wrapped in silky camisoles.  Her cancer is back as well, and soon there will be no breast, where her babies suckled, long long ago.

I am just home from a trip over the mountains, a chocolate cake perched precariously, celebrating my tottery mother's 88th birthday, her pile of prescriptions on the kitchen counter.  It was at this same counter that my father stood, Memorial Day weekend, 2003, and then suddenly, was on the floor, his hip broken, which led to the hospital, which led to pneumonia, two more hospitals and the ventilator, and two months later, we were at the church, receiving.

It's fine to sit, early in the morning and meditate and feel suffused with the fullness of life.  It is fine to nod our heads, yes oh yes, this life is temporary, this body is but a temple, we are all animated by the One. Yes oh yes.  All that is true. . .and I honor that.

But right now, right now this minute, I am so pissed off about this temporary shit.  I don't want my dear dear friends to have to go through this again.  I don't want them, or anyone else, to feel the physical pain, the fear, the anguish of it.  I don't want it for them, and if I'm honest, I don't want to feel this either. Right now, right this minute, I mightily protest this temporary shit.  I shake my fists at the gods.  I don't want to lose them. I don't want to lose them.

I just don't want to lose you, any of you. . .any of you.

Those moments. . .

I didn't expect church.  I was already weary, having driven to the mountains early that morning.  I had been sitting all day, in one (lovely, thought-provoking) workshop after another, meeting new people, breaking for meals.  It was now after dinner, in the middle of a tornado-esque storm, lightening splitting the darkness through the window behind him.

The workshop leader had introduced herself.  Heavens, she really had been to prison- twice. She really had been a hard drug user.  When I read her short story, prior to choosing her group to attend, I automatically assumed she was lying, all fiction writers do, and this was particularly good fiction.  But in her story, her description of the dull fear, the interdependence behind those grey walls seemed charged somehow.  I wondered how she had researched it.  It never occurred to me that a successful writer of multiple published novels could also be a convicted junkie.

Wake up, Martha.

Each of the workshops that day followed a format.  The leader would talk for awhile, and then issue a writing prompt, a topic, for a free-write, which meant we all put pen to paper and wrote furiously for about ten minutes. Depending on what came out the end of that pen and how we felt about it, we then had the choice to read, out loud, to a group of strangers: different ages, colors, etcetera, all eager as new puppies.

For this one, the last of the day, our ex-junkie/inmate successful novelist leader asked us to made a list of parts of our personalities that were hidden, for whatever reason, locked up.  The writing prompt was then to choose one of those, and give it voice.  Terrifying.  As I said, one hides these for what seems like good reason, at least mine were/are.

It was then time to read and we went along fine. Some were more moving, more touching than others, some funny, lots of "passes", always testimonial to either the power of the prompt, the power of the response, or the power of hesitation to blow one's cover.

Then we circled around to this older man: soft face, bearded, glasses, the kind you would want as your grandpa, or who would become your favorite uncle.  He began to read, and immediately, his voice broke. When it did, my heart melted. I was newly alert.  As he read, it became clear this was a long, old battle and that he was tired, tired, tired.  He plead with this part of himself to let him "break through;"  the voices that were telling him to pull back, be careful, don't risk it, were rubbing against the grindstone of aging, you don't have that much time left.  Will you leave with your real work undone? 


We all knew, all of us, all ages, all colors, etcetera.  We all knew those voices.  When he finished, there was an audible silence.  We then broke into applause, applause for his courage, for his willingness to speak this voice for all of us, the only time we had been collectively so moved.

I talked with him the next day, outside the Auditorium, thanked him.  He seemed a bit abashed, a bit surprised it had happened. Church is like that, real church.  . .

It occurred to me. . .

. . .when I was out walking this morning, in my pajamas and down vest, that maybe you hadn't had a chance to get outside.  That maybe when you were in the shower, the sun wasn't even up yet, and maybe over cereal, the light was just dawning.

Maybe you didn't get to see the buds just out on the maple. . .

Or the tumescent purple iris. . .

Maybe you missed the morning's kiss on the water. . .

You might have been driving by the time the light held the ferns, teasing them into unfurling. . .

Maybe that which is in your care today kept you from hearing the pear tree, calling your name. . .

So I did it for you.  . .
Thank you for tending the world you are tending.  In return, I offer you this. . .

Farewells. . .

It started two weeks ago, Tuesday the 8th - well not really -  but let's just start there.  I said farewell to my workout appointment, as, walking out of the house, I happened to check email, and read a frantic and apologetic cancellation. That was all right, I would have more time to get ready to leave town that afternoon.

I said farewell to the possibility of leaving town that afternoon, as the car and I, all prepped for a two-day adventure of dinner and meetings, reached the corner.  I said hello to my exclamatory dashboard and then hello to my driveway, still warm from egress. I said hello to the mechanic and hello to everyone I needed to call to cancel and hello to an unexpected evening and morning at home.  I then said farewell to all the appointments for the rest of the week as we said farewell to the farm truck, our back up vehicle, as its fuel line sprung loose on a garbage run.

On Monday the 14th, still vehicleless, I said hello to all the people who were supposed to come to my house on Friday the 18th, for a weekend Art Camp, in an email about who was going to bring what.  Then Tuesday the 15th,  I said farewell to the possibility of help with the cleaning as that person had said hello to extra intensity in her life and I said hello to the extra tasks.  Then, still without car, I said farewell to my husband who was flying away and  hello to all the extra emails and the lovely visits and phone calls that came in on Wednesday, so at the end of the day, I said hello to some increasing anxiety about getting it all done.

On Thursday, I said farewell to the possibility of getting it all done with the care and attention that I normally would exercise, and said farewell to being able to serve freshly roasted coffee and homemade brioche and said hello to the toilet brush and the vacuum and clean sheets on the extra beds.  Thursday night, I said hello to my re-arriving husband and to dinner and to a shrinking list of what absolutely had to be done.

On Friday I said farewell to more on that list and hello to my house guests and hello to my sister and to all the groceries she fetched on her way and hello to letting it be as it was, however it was.  I said farewell to the possibility of the two people who couldn't make it and over the weekend, we said hello to a coffee machine malfunctioning, and on a woods walk, I said farewell to my glasses, and only on the third search did I say hello again.

On Saturday, my cross-the-street neighbor said farewell to the 2 p.m. pony party arranged for her four-year-old daughter and many mini friends.  It seems that before coffee the pony was discovered stiff in the barn.  Anticipating a large group of tiny ones expecting pony rides and getting death instead, she frantically arranged burial late morning while getting her hair cut and colored.  She also arranged a replacement pony but he turned out to be terrified of children, so farewell it was to the whole concept.  Luckily, nine baby chicks and the rabbit, as well as the run of the fields, turned out to be entertainment enough, and a good time was had by all.

Then on Monday, the same daughter squatted down and pooped while they were returning (for store credit only) the uneaten dead pony food, so a discreet farewell to her underpants. . .fine with the daughter, who proceeded to celebrate her new freedom by intermittently flashing bystanders as they finished their errands.

I remember months ago saying farewell to the idea of taking a boat to Louisiana to help rescue animals from the oil spill.  My sweet husband gently reminded me that, as upset as I was, as desperately as help was needed, a) we didn't have a boat; b) even if we borrowed one to lend, I didn't know how to drive one. I had a booth at the Farmer's Market, I did know how to bake, so I just put up a sign and the money went to the Red Cross.  Not much, but something, and we all felt a little bit better, for a little while.

I can feel some of the same chasm between my reality, my neighbor's reality, and the realities in Japan, the letting goes required in this neighborhood and the images of those gentle, stunned people,  in shelters, everything they own, irradiated.  Or everything they own, destroyed.  Or family and friends, vanished.

I keep flashing on butterflies, and the theory that when they move their wings, the breeze reverberates throughout the world.  It makes me wonder if, in my world, if I'm able to say my farewells and hellos in peace, if I can watch what arises and departs without too much attachment, without creating a fuss one way or the other, does this spread too?  Is it possible that this helps there be an iota more calm halfway around the globe?  I don't know, but I'm willing to test it. Clearly I have plenty of opportunity, and clearly, across that chasm, there is infinite need.

The Water. . .an Homage to Japan

So how does it happen, I wondered, as I stood under the flow of warm water this morning, my muscles relaxing under its caress, how does it happen that this same water, this same brilliance without which there would be no life as we know it, how does it happen that it turns deadly?

As I absorb yet another village, now rubble, hear the death toll mount, shiver at our folly revealed by precarious pools of radioactive wastes, what do I do with the mysteries?  I watch, from the warmth of my intact home, go to the sink, which is still where I left it, to get a glass of water, which still flows calmly from the tap, as it did last time.

I remember Hurricane Fran, its brief, intense fury.  I remember looking out at our back yard in Wake Forest, NC and seeing a new vista, giant oaks now horizontal. Our neighbor's house, crushed.  Another neighbor's, they still in their bed, their roof in the next county.  The world as we knew it, stopped. No running water, except in the streets.  No electricity. Nearby towns flooded.  Yet that was nothing compared to this, except that it is over there, sort of.

It is over there and isn't.  I've been fortunate enough to have visited Japan, not that long ago.  I remember its intense beauty, its careful use of its scarce land, the sense of ancient wisdoms contained in its architecture, the spare bones of its people. Much of that land, now covered in debris; architectures ancient and modern now piles of used material, many of its people now gone.  How will their ancient wisdoms speak about this unfathomable event?

I remember that during the days and weeks following the hurricane, our whole identity changed.  All former expectations were immediately absurd, even the most mundane ones, that one would bathe regularly for example, or what one would and wouldn't eat.  All of us, as a community, ate what was most thawed, as power wasn't restored for weeks, and not because nuclear reactors were damaged, threatening far worse fates. We bathed rather randomly, as I recall, grateful for the chance.

I remember when my father was in the various hospitals, dying as quickly as we would allow, as we could comprehend his true condition and release his technological supports, one level at a time. I was no longer who I was previously. I was a person whose father was dying, and grounded there, was attempting driving, or ordering a coffee.

Maybe it is from here that I can connect with the Japanese people, their culture dazed by its most recent history, by the history to come.  Maybe it is from what I found to be true, from within hurricanes and death and the eerie quiet afterwards: that is, that stillness follows.  There is collapse into the essentials. From here, releasing my God-given urge to understand, I can be quiet instead, acknowledge both the power and the blessing of the water, send my check and ground my prayers into the silence.

Maybe I can start here. . .

A little pleasure. . .

There are times, when mamas are falling, and computers are crashing, and plans are collapsing and cars are riding the last few miles to the shop on a prayer. . .that pleasure is called for.  Just pleasure, no excuses, no justifications, just pleasure.  Here are some of the ways it shows up at Briarpatch:

A large brioche, ready to be shared. . .maybe with some coffee?

A Moka Kadir expresso blend, roasted for a poet friend. . .maybe a cookie is the right go with. . .

Birthday cookies, created for a 79-year-old whose weakness is Little Debbie's. . .

Now, don't we feel better?

Mama - Part Two

[For Mama of the First Part - See Everything Shifts; the World Narrows below]

My mother is now settling back into what is normal at her house, buffeted with new prescriptions - bronchitis - and a (temporary?) wave of night sitters, in addition to increased help during the day.  All of us who love her are moving back into our lives, resuming abandoned tasks (taxes come to mind), each of us elsewhere.  The too-familiar wave of heightened concern that these health crises generate has begun to - once again - dissipate.  The deeper questions were - once again - put on hold while the acute situation crested with visits and phone calls and unaccustomed rides back and forth to the hospital.  The deeper questions: Is she safe living alone? Can she dispense her own medications any more?  Underneath all this: What is our responsibility - now?


There is part of me that stands back from this scenario, arms crossed, eyes widened, and says, barely containing herself:  Are you crazy?  Of COURSE she can't live on her own anymore.  Of COURSE it isn't safe for her to mix up her own chemical cocktails.  How much more evidence do you need?


Then there is the part of me sitting quietly over on the couch, who says,   So true.  How very true. . .  And maybe we want to think about this as well:  how much of her life energy comes from being in this house where she raised her children, loved her husband, where she has walked down the same hallway for 53  years to make her coffee in the same kitchen, perhaps now a little unsteadily.  What happens if you take this away?  What is left of her sense of herself, of her history, of her value?


There is no question that her physical self would be more reliably tended.  But what about the rest of her?  Not so easy, these questions.

Not so easy.  Meanwhile, with increased attentiveness from family and hired help, we four "children" watch warily from a distance, calling more frequently, letting these questions seep into our bones, wondering if we really have the luxury of doing so, starting when the phone rings in our own homes.

Mom's 88th birthday is April 25th, not so far from now.  I wouldn't have known this life without her.  I haven't known this life without her.  My father's leaving eight years ago was an earthquake, sudden, cataclysmic.  My mother, as is more appropriate to her personality and role is going more slowly, taking her time, and ours.  My father was always in our lives in short dramatic bursts.  We leaned back into my mother, assumed my mother, absorbed my mother, grounded ourselves through her, slowly, organically, automatically.  In some ways, we still do.  As her roots into this world of form continue to dissolve, we feel a bit lost, unmoored.  Or at least, I do.

How do we navigate these unknown waters?  I don't know. Perhaps we begin by holding her hand, and each other's and listening a little more deeply, expanding into the question.

Everything shifts; the world narrows

I had been cooking something else for this blogpost, something abstract about the blogging scene in general, in and around the commercialism of private life, the gradual blurring of private and public that we are witnessing as virtual voyeurism becomes de rigeur.  (Here's the link to the article that started all this musing: www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27armstrong-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine).

But that was before the phone calls.  The two on Sunday night, four hours apart, to let me know my mother had fallen, once, then again.  Each time, gratefully, she was OK.  Each time, gratefully, the blessed neighbor was home and came over to help her get up. As these occasions initiate, there was a flurry of calls and emails involving my mother, her sainted caretaker, and my mother's four children: two men, two women.  We all live at least four hours from my mother; we all love her beyond words. We have all been dreading the day when the "what if" conversation we have repeatedly attempted would materialize as our necessary decision, a decision bound to be against her will.

We all tried to believe the superficial story, to start with:  yes, she had fallen, but she was fine really, nothing was broken. Yes, she has fallen before, in fact often, but nothing has ever broken. It will be fine. But then each of us began to absorb the rest of it.  About the chest congestion that started last Friday, about the Delsym that she added to her list of powerful prescriptions (hydrocodone, Wellbutrin, sleeping meds, etcetera) every four hours instead of twelve.  About the furnace fan that broke at 2:30 in the morning (thank goodness the caretaker decided to spend the night and could take care of it).

Her doctor, who prescribed an antibiotic on Monday, but nothing for the congestion, is the same one who didn't catch my father's congestion eight years ago, the congestion that developed into pneumonia in the hospital when he broke his hip, the pneumonia that killed him. We sibs are wary of pneumonia, wary of this doctor, this doctor to whom my mother has been loyal for decades, as she has been loyal to her house, the house she raised us in, the house she doesn't want to leave.

There are so many of us now, this community of adults who only a few decades ago would have had our parents close, in the same house, in the same neighborhood, certainly in the same town.  And we prepared for that, as many of you know: renovating space in this house to my mother's specifications, handicapped accessible, and then she refused to come, begged to be allowed to stay where she is.  I grew to have compassion for her refusal to pull up roots.

This morning as I sit here, startled each time the phone rings, wondering if I should be packing, I am struck by the sense of my mother's recent life as a cascade, the consequences of one event bearing down upon the next, growing weightier and more intransigent with each eruption, each lava flow, settling in, cooling into stone. I know that prayer can move mountains. I know that stone is sacred too.

I am aware that being healed doesn't mean the same as being cured.  I am aware that all this is but a pinprick of light in the Great Mystery, that my mind is not equipped to understand but a tiny angle, but that surrender, somehow opens it all up. And my surrendering parts are all mixed up with my fearful parts, that are all mixed up with my Pollyanna parts. And all of them want my mother to not be afraid, and not to suffer, and to be back like she was thirty years ago, laughing and walking so freely.

...And, I just received an update.  Mom and Sonja with whom we are all so blessed, her caretaker, are headed to the hospital. . .And, another phone call.  Mom refuses to go, has gone back to bed. . .

An aside, perhaps;  My laptop got congestion about the same time Mom did, is operating as if molasses had been poured into its works.  I am working on this on the desktop, the computer we bought for her, with the big screen, when she was coming here to be with us.

Everything has slowed. . .we are waiting. . .

Woods Walk. . .

In learning to use this camera, I am finding that the world, the natural world in particular, is revealing itself in all manner of new ways.  Revelation, evidently, requires one to see differently than before, to be willing to lie on one's belly, to look closely and touch with both eyes and skin, to smell and taste and risk new visions.

We took a walk in the woods this past weekend.  I now automatically take the camera.  Its technical abilities expand my own and allow the sharing. This planet's natural world is Paradise.  We humans bump around in the midst of astounding wonders which, for the most part, we do not witness.  I risk sounding like a babbling idiot, or worse, the teacher, but if I'm willing to see just a little more carefully. . .there is the swirl of bark, the mosaic of the turtle shell, the light reflecting off the creek, or streaming through the big maple in the back, furry with new growth:

It seems to me that we humans are the tiniest bit addicted to an expanded view of our intelligence.  To keep this illusion requires a lot of effort, for to look around even the slightest will bring you to your knees. Humans have been having this love affair with the mind for quite some time now, convinced that slicing up reality into smaller and smaller bits is the only way to get to the truth.  It seemed to work for awhile, but now we are down to GMO's and nanotechnology, and it seems we have forgotten our way back home.  GMO corn, soybeans and now alfalfa are not working as well as homemade bread crumbs to mark the trail.  

We're going to have to find our own way, which I suppose was always the case, each of us, holding hands, maybe walking in the woods.

The boys send their love. . .

FGO's

I'm in the middle of another FGO - friggin' growth opportunity - the kind of screw-up that makes you imagine that  Kettle Salt and Pepper Chips are medicine, and the whole bag is prescribed.  And multiple dark chocolates filled with caramel, maybe even with a little salt on top of those as well. . .

What couldn't possibly help is keeping up with my exercise routine, or making sure I take those vitamins while I worry about this, or going to bed early, or watching a funny movie, or drinking lots of water or taking a nap.  Surely none of those things would help. . .

In the Really Fortunate Department, I have some honest friends, the kind you call when you need to hear the Bare Bottomed Truth, the kind of truth that makes you want to la la la la la la la put your fingers in your ears. And they are the best kind, these friends, the kind that, even if you have been here before, in this particular nasty corner with all the same grunge, and the darkness and that smell (you know the one- don't pretend you don't), they gently point out your return visit with a bit of elegance, a bit of compassion.  Because maybe they have been there too, in their version of this corner, or maybe their nasty corner is decorated slightly differently, but they recognize the smell.

I can get so lonely in an FGO, primarily because in the midst of one, my focus gets pretty narrowed down, and if I don't watch it, and call one of these friends, that focus brings in The Jury.  My jury is composed of puckery-faced ugly people (P-FUG's) with superb memories.  They remember every transgression of my long, long life.  If questioned carefully, I'll bet their lists would go back before my birth, the vindictive ways I kicked my poor mother.  And some of them believe in past lives.  So you can imagine.

These friends, not the P-FUG's but the dear long-suffering people I call are focused on something else, which is beyond my view from Cage FGO.  They remember, these sainted ones, that maybe I haven't spent my whole life doing things that, as Anne Lamott would say, would make Jesus want to drink straight gin out of the cat dish.  That there was that time when I shared my crackers in second grade.  And that maybe I am being ever so slightly overdramatic.  Maybe this FGO isn't quite as big to anybody else as it appears to me, that in fact, if I didn't keep calling them to talk about it, they wouldn't think about it -  at all -  or even know about it - at all.

Well, that seems impossible.  But because I love them, and they love me, warts and all, I'm going with their assessment.  I'm going to have some more potato chips and then take a nap. . .

Brioche. . .a love affair. . .

Brioche dough is the sumptuous queen of bread-making, unapologetically resplendent with eggs and butter.  And the beauty of it is that it accepts all manner of cohorts:  dried fruits, chocolate, lovely cinnamon, nutmeg and other fragrant spices.  And if you cut back on the bit of sugar, you can add savory fillings as well: cheeses, meats, sundried tomatoes and herbs.

Bread-making in general is a means of connecting, any bread baker will say so.  Making bread is to be involved.  And there's no happier kitchen than one with the aroma of freshly baked bread. . .

Here's where we start:

This particular dough was aged in the refrigerator, a new experiment.  The rich color comes from the eggs and the butter.  What's not to like?

Gently forming. . .

Dough divided, a three-ounce portion gently flattened, ready to receive a filling of cinnamon caramel slices. . .

Gently formed, ready for a restful rise

. . .washed with egg and cream, ready to rise for a bit before going into the oven. . .

And here we are:

The children. . .the one in the middle is studded with blue cheese.  It is surrounded with siblings with dark chocolate, some have dried cherries, some with a cinnamon, brown sugar filling. . .

Emergence

As with the garlic, planted last October, there is emergence, slow re-engagement.  I’m beginning to move into pieces of my basic routine again, trailing used Kleenex.  The essential core of the cold has dissipated, leaving in its wake drippy congestion and a luxurious fatigue, drawing me under from time to time.

The quiet is magical, when I let it be.  There is a wave-like sense of time and space that comes only from having disengaged from the “regular” world for a while.  I am temporarily unhinged from my internal overseer and his demands of proper productivity and attendant schedule.  It is not the time to increase muscle mass; I’m not guilty that I’m not at the gym.  My brain power is diminished; urgency around decisions fades away. The winter garden is slowed to self-sufficiency, and besides that, we have no critical eye for the winter garden.  And my live-in partner is out of town.

Without an external scaffolding of engagement and commitment, time itself seems to shift.  It seems to open and expand somehow, softening. Despite the quiet, or perhaps because of it, there is a vitality here, a nourishment. I can rest here, for the moment, perhaps  heal within it, and through osmosis, come back with some of the silence.

From Mary Oliver:

Sunrise


You can
die for it - 
an idea,
or the world. People


have done so,
brilliantly,
letting 
their small bodies be bound


to the stake, 
creating
an unforgettable fury of light. But


this morning
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought


of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun


blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?


What is the name 
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us?  Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

From: New and Selected Poems, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992),  pp. 125-6.

A Note from Down Under

A cloudy, uncharacteristically warm January Sunday, already in the 40’s, or so I imagine because the bird bath isn’t frozen, as I look from the kitchen window, and there is no discernible frost on the ground.  It is much later than I am usually here, 8:45, but this cold has me on its own schedule, as it bears down with its burden of mucus and lethargy. 
This affliction and I are on our fourth day, the third of confinement.  It has been awhile since I’ve been felled by an upper respiratory revolt, and I’m trying to succumb gracefully.  But even though I have had a witness (John is home this weekend) I have found myself only belatedly realizing, “oh, it’s 3 p.m. and I haven’t showered”, or “this is the same sweatshirt I had on yesterday and its none too clean.”  There’s something about being ill that cancels the good grooming part of my brain.
In fact, it cancels the time-keeping part of my brain as well.  Yesterday, as I lay on the couch under a blanket drifting in and out of cooking shows  (I slept almost entirely through Todd English’s trip to the Andes), I had the growing sense that this was now my life, that I had never been/done anything else, and would never be/do anything else, and once a sharp panic dissipated, a sneezing fit took over, and I just fell back into that stream.  It was fine.  Nothing else was possible. Such is the power of snot.
Such is the power of the body, the dense weightiness of it, with its waves of urgencies, advancing and receding.  We are its servants, in many ways, as it must be fed, emptied, bandaged, washed, soothed with caresses. Sometimes it must be medicated, and for me, that is always confusing, as I was raised by a mother now on 17 prescriptions who, in my formative years, drank raw egg and wheat germ milkshakes, a la’ Adelle Davis. 
Plus, as an eldest child with Leo rising, I would rather do “it” myself.  I have this innate sense that the body, not just my body, but the body can and wants to heal itself, if furnished with the proper pile of ingredients, that the body is in fact already hard wired with all manner of self-correcting mechanisms.  That the job of my thinking/mental self is to listen to all these symptoms and discern what needs to be added:  orange juice?  warm humidity?  sleep?
But it turns out that sometimes what needs to be added is the voice of somebody who has access to a prescription pad.  I’m not there yet, not this time, but I’m just saying. . .if these ears don’t clear up. . .well maybe. . .

It's January 27th. . .

. . .my late father’s birthday.  At 4 a.m.,  the Greeneville Tennessee LifeLine called to tell me that my 87-year-old mother had fallen. She is all right, they said.

All right, except that eight years ago, my then 80-year-old father had the gall to pre-decease her, leaving her in that bedroom alone, that bedroom where she fell, in the dark, last night.

My father was meticulous about his diet, exercised religiously at the YMCA, and played golf with his other semi-retired buddies whenever his work, church and community service allowed.  Reaching for the telephone, he fell - just the once - and broke a hip, went to the hospital and two agonizing months later, died of pneumonia.

My dear mother eats whatever she pleases, although she knows she shouldn’t; does not exercise, although she knows she should, and will quickly admit to both, to keep you from bringing it up. She has fallen countless times.  Her bones have been described as “paper thin”.  Her much thinner sister is recovering from her second hip fracture in as many years, having fallen, to my knowledge, just those two times.

Is there a moral to this story?  Should one eat fig newtons for breakfast and then stay in one’s chair? Was the relentless discipline worth it, to my father, who may still be astonished that his congenitally more indulgent wife lives on and on. Perhaps the moral, if there is one, is that try as we might to draw straight lines on top of this unruly life, the terrain is too bumpy. The rather pitiful results will not offer the ultimate reassurance we seek. We cannot get from here to there via a straight line.  That second point, the one required at the other end of our inflexible ruler, is always fuzzy.  Even if you are sitting right now with the bottle of pills and a giant glass of water, or the loaded pistol, or are reading this standing on bridge railing, that second point is a crap shoot.  The capsules are not strong enough, the pistol just misses the critical spot, a giant bird catches you by your shirt collar. . .its never a sure thing.  Miracles happen.  And on the other side of the scale, so do accidents. This is one of the issues I have with dogged insistence on "the bright side."

Life ain’t logical, despite our desperate efforts to make it so.  And it seems to me too enormously creative to be predictable.  It is my experience that a grateful attitude will get you much further in this life and I would far rather spend time with someone who sees the glass as half full.  And I am quickly exhausted in the company of Debbie Downer, especially when I am the one in the role.  But to claim that “its simply a flesh wound” when the stumps of all your limbs are bleeding makes sense only on Monty Python. 

If you have bleeding stumps, either physically or emotionally, (and who hasn’t been there?) it does no good, it seems to me, to ignore the growing red stain on your white carpet, while from some spiritual altitude, you point out the same color on the fragrant roses in the front yard.  Yes, it is true that it is the same color, and yes, they smell fabulous, but what in the sam hill are you going to do to stop the bleeding? Why don't we start with a quick round of antiseptic and bandages and then we’ll think about composing a psalm to the roses?

Life is both wounds and roses, treadmills and cookies, or mine is, and it is too short and too precious to ignore its fullness and its complexity.  It seems to me that we lose half the juice if we are not willing to admit that there are pieces of it that we don't understand, that don't make sense, that hurt like hell. 

Its not fair that my father should take such good care of his physical body and then - like that - be gone. We all miss him terribly, especially on birthdays and holidays when he would have had a new joke to tell us, laughing more than any of his listeners.

Its probably equally unfair that my dear sweet mother should still bless this planet with her generous and kind spirit, although I'm so grateful that she does.  And my heart hurts for her terror at her helplessness and for the ongoing dilemma around her living situation and her safety. If only her husband were still here. . .

My tiny speck of a mind cannot begin to fathom all the pieces and how they fit together.  Remind me of that when it sounds like I know what I’m talking about, perhaps even now. . .

Meanwhile. . .Happy Birthday Dad. 

Finding the clutch

I'm having one of those scratchy, sticky mornings.  It started yesterday when I began to discover all that I had set aside to have Christmas at my house, travel for New Year's, travel again with family, and then to come home and have a delightful play date with friends.  In order to focus on Christmas and houseguests and travel and more houseguests, I kept tucking away this pile and that, this errand and that one that could wait, temporarily.
Yesterday, as I checked in on check registers and bills, on the supply of dog food and groceries, a giant coffee and baking order also came in, with its own quick deadline.  That order got bigger with a supplemental email a couple of hours ago. At the same time, today and tomorrow hold appointments that were put on hold because of the snow and ice storm (remember that?) and all the travel and the houseguests. This was the week that could hold them, because from way back there, it was empty, unaware of the impending spill.
In the old days, all this would be fine, because it would serve to make me feel more important, busier.  I would wear the stress like a badge.  As I went through my day, I could tell everyone of my schedule.  I could hurry, make several lists.  In the old days, when I really got into it, I would have multiple lists.  And I could both check off and mark a line through each accomplishment, (that's embarrassing to admit!) emerging at the end of the day with a giant feeling of. . .what?  Having made it through, certainly.  Having survived it.  There was an inflated feeling, which is necessarily distant, but I didn't know that.  I mistook it for satisfaction, for happiness even.
Now, the challenge is different.  The challenge is not how much can I get done? It is how present am I to my life, to life itself? The tasks on the list(s) start out the same, although they may shift in priority, and as they do, they may fall off entirely.  But I still need to pay those bills that I put aside, make a bank deposit with checks people wrote for Christmas morning cinnamon rolls, pick up dog food at the vet's, go to the gym for a workout appointment.  Etcetera, and more etcetera.
This is where it gets crunchy, where I need deep breaths and more deep breaths, and just plain time outs.  The good and the bad news is that when I give up, and am willing to just be wherever I am, with whatever I'm doing, whatever it is goes more smoothly, and when I am finished, I have a sense of fulfillment that is far greater than simply crossing it off a list. It is kind of like I breathe into it, maybe even breathe with it. Maybe whatever it is - driving, searching the drug store for Plackers, roasting Costa Rican coffee - has its own rhythm.  Maybe it is about "synching" up - not sure that is the right word, or how to spell it - but it has to do with synchronizing my internal rhythm and the rhythm of the task, working together, breathing together, being present to it.
I don't know.  This is a lifelong re-education, I'm guessing.  Not letting the tasks, or the looming lists of tasks be in charge, not letting the self-created anxiety build and rob me of life itself, the awareness of it, the preciousness of it, of the gift that it is, right now.
Right here. . .right now. . .I'm breathing. . .life is breathing me. . .how remarkable. . .now, to allow this to stay open. . .

Waiting

There are women in several cities who will soon be on the last leg to my house: Davidson, Charlotte, Pinnacle, Concord. I've been looking forward to this for weeks, these women, these friends coming to my house for Art Camp, we are calling it.  None of us are artists, in fact, if you ask us, one by one, in a secluded room, we might each admit that we are a little afraid of "art", of the title, of the doing of it, of getting very close to "it."
That's the point, precisely.  Everybody is bringing food, with which they are comfortable, and wine, with which they are comfortable.  Chocolate is being imported, and multiple cheeses, and soup and salad and homemade breads and decadent cookies.  They are bringing their pillows, for gosh sakes, because they are all spending the night.  Oh, and popcorn, and a special popcorn pot that has served a dear friend's family for decades and has traveled multiple times to the beach when a permutation of this group goes, once or twice a year.
The house is about ready.  Beds are made with clean sheets, toilets are scrubbed.  There is a tablecloth on the kitchen table.  It is in the kitchen that we will spend most of our time, if it turns out like other gatherings.  There are Christmas decorations because it is only close to the end of January, not the actual end of January, and it is only when it gets to be a month late that I start to realize no one else still has Santa propped up in the living room. 
Its hard to be out of town, even overnight.  We've already had three people who couldn't come at the last minute.  One, who has just had surgery, and that on top of the recent promotion has her napping this weekend.  Another's mother was rushed to the hospital last night with shortness of breath, this, the woman into whom a heart stint was installed mere months ago.  And then there is my former Wake Forest neighbor, known for her huge heart, who is home instead of here, helping an abandoned Mama dog and all her many puppies, dumped only yesterday, precipitously, and heartlessly into this woman's front yard.
Life for the other four allows them this visit. For them, it isn't this weekend that the world opens one of its more jagged edges.  It happened to me the first time this playtime was scheduled.  All was arranged.  The menu was collectively derived, clothes were being washed to go into suitcases.  Then we got the call.  A dear dear man, friend and relative, had succumbed to esophageal cancer, after fighting year after year.  The services were the following weekend, the weekend of Art Camp.
So we collect this weekend.  And as I put candles in candle holders, and make sure that all the work spaces in the big room have enough light, as I wait for this glorious group of women to come in the door, one by one, with olives and cheeses and pillows and soup, floorcloths and cardstock and fabric and paint, I am so so grateful that life has opened up this space for us.
It is a space to color outside the lines, because it is too precious not to.  Life is outside the lines, in those spaces where we play when we can, and when it is time to tend to mothers and puppies and tired bodies, that we do that too, hopefully, out of this searing fullness.  And when we have it, we share it.  And when we don't have it, if we are lucky, we have a friend that does.
I didn't used to know this, either how to play, or how vital it is.  I used to think that work was the only holder of merit, that the more difficult something was, the more points it bestowed.  Needless to say, that attitude didn't leave much room for floorcloths and paint and pillows and friends making the time to come and take a risk. . .