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. . .