From the sidelines

The day dawns so innocently.  The old-fashioned bearded irises continue to bloom; the walnut trees to leaf out, the spinach to bolt.  It all goes on, as if the weather hadn’t royally misbehaved for three days now.  We’ve had not just thunderstorms but strong thunderstorms, with hail and tornadoes threatening and pure indiscriminate destruction across a wide swath of the South. It kept a friend awake all night in Durham, North Carolina , on the lookout.  Entire communities in Alabama and Mississippi were upended.  Here, other than some fast, fierce thunder and lightening, the predictions were the worst part.  And yet this morning, with a slight breeze carrying the scent of newly opened tulip poplars, the morning sun just breaking the treetops, this day has amnesia, no memory, no regrets, no humility.  It just reappears, freshfaced at breakfast, as though we hadn’t been to the police station in the middle of the night.

We have to move on, astonished and grateful.  By the end of the day, we will forget our determination to buy extra batteries, check the generator, dusty and unused in the barn.  Once again, in a long tradition of once agains, what is known as disaster preparedness will start falling down the list.  

Yet anyone with their eyes open knows that climate change, whatever its multiple causes, is real, that these disruptions have just begun, that their intensity will increase.  It has to, because we are not learning. Just as those batteries go unbought, so it is our nature to ignore any disaster that does not call our name.  The drought in California, the rising seas throughout the world, the melting ice at the Poles, all somewhere else for right now.  Yes, my dear friend got no sleep last night, two hours away, but I slept just fine. My irises are still standing on their long vulnerable stalks.

And this blindness, this tendency to cognitive laziness, is not because I haven’t been through it.  When Hurricane Irene came through Raleigh, my neighbor’s roof was blown off.  Giant oaks came down in our yard.  Another neighbor fell from the horizontal trunk of one of them, chainsaw in hand, fell down right next to the cooler.  No power for days. Floods in nearby towns.  Everything stopped.  Everything was altered.  So I cannot claim ignorance. And explain this:  I was in Girl Scouts all the way to Camp Counselor, when it was my turn to spread the Gospel:  Be prepared.

I know that we need to get the generator serviced, that we need to decide where in our house we would go. We need to get all our important documents to the safety deposit box. We need canned food available in the cellar.  I know all this.   

It is just the beginning of tornado season. . .evidently. . .although I forget, and I get it mixed up with hurricane season which is at the other end of the year.  

And then there is my Mama, in the hospital in Greensboro, a week today.  It is Thursday.  She was supposed to go home Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday.  Her surgery for a broken hip last Friday night went well.  Supposedly.  But now. . .well there is the breathing, and the heart rate, and the fluid.  So on we go.  My sister is taking my place today.  It is a day of rest from being on the front lines.  No wonder I think about the battery supply.  And yet don’t want to do anything about it.  

It is just the tiniest bit unAmerican to be vulnerable.  Willingly vulnerable, to sit at my mother’s bedside without an agenda.  Each time I visit, I walk in like a sherpa.  I carry with me my laptop. In the side pocket of the carry case is at least one magazine, sometimes a book.  In my other bag are supplies:  water, kombucha, nuts, granola, my morning and evening meds in case I have to spend the night.  I carry all this up the elevator to the sixth floor and down the long hall.  And then I walk in the door and there is my sweet Mama in the bed.

I enter a different time zone,  a parallel universe, that doesn’t include spaces for reading magazines. Time follows the pace of my mother’s mood, her stories, her need for a bedpan or a sip of water.  Finding the nurse, a chance meeting with a doctor, getting her from bed to chair in that huge contraption so she can sit up and look out the window.  The centrifugal force of the Universe has narrowed to its center:  6N, Room 17 at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, Greensboro, NC.  

Today is a respite.  My dear sister is going instead.  So maybe I will go get those batteries, and go to the bank with the documents, and maybe ask my sweet husband to take care of the generator this weekend.  And maybe Mama will get to go home in the next few days, and our tiny specks of lives will re-enter the swirling mass with fewer exclamation points.  Maybe we will carry a little more awareness with us, a little more presence, a little more gratitude.  Just maybe. . .

But first, this message. . .

So it is one of those days, in which you should feel differently than you do; but you don’t.  And you should be getting things done, but you aren’t.  You should feel differently because the dogwoods and the azaleas are in bloom; because you planted grapevines yesterday and because the first lonely scout asparagus is coming up.  You should feel better than you do because you have talked with both your son and your mother today, and they are doing well, you have fetched precious raw milk for your family and two others and had to drive through those flowering dogwoods and azaleas to get there.

But instead, someone, unknowingly, has reminded you of a poison center in your past and you have spent days working on questions about it, as this person is doing an analysis of the organization where this event took place.  And while you were working on answering the questions about these events some 25 years ago, this week, only a few days ago, a neighbor (your age) was stabbed several times and killed by her nephew. And then you realize that this is the same extended family where a young man took out a contract on his pregnant girlfriend and he is now serving two sentences for two murders.

And you ask yourself, why am I disturbed by composted memories when there is a family next door with two murderers and three murders to deal with? And you wonder, briefly, in the cavernous vacancy of their grief, would a casserole help?

But back to your troubles: while you were searching through 25-year-old memories, both of the queens died in your new beehives, and a beloved grandfather of beloved neighbors also died.  But the dogwoods and azaleas are still blooming.

And it is EasterTime.  Time of renewal and hopefulness.  And still, you feel the way you do.  Because that poison center, as much as you have worked on detoxing it, still bleeds.  And someone has poked it, again, and it still bleeds its toxins.  You have prayed and prayed some more.  You have been to therapy.  You have lit candles and more candles, and had fits and then prayed.

Eventually, you will move on.  You know that.  

You are on a diet so you can’t make yourself feel better like you sometimes do, and you are on a diet because of the number of times you have made yourself feel better that way.

Eventually, you will move on.

Meanwhile, the dogwoods and azaleas bloom. 

And it is time to make a casserole.

That Mama. . .

Right now, right this minute, I am going to pretend that I have been communicating with you all along, since last July, and that there isn't all this inertia to push past.  Because there is a lot to tell, a lot that has backed up, waiting. . .

In all that time, we have cleaned out my mother’s house in Tennessee - bless all whose houses are cleaned out by other people, and all those other people who clean out their relative’s houses - and moved her to Greensboro.  The move was precipitated by a startling discovery - that she wasn’t getting bathed regularly in her assisted living holding tank in Tennessee.  It was only after getting her here that we discovered she was on four times the dosage of Ativan that is recommended, putting her into a constant sleep state.  This while they parked her in the lobby.   

To our shame, we discovered all this, slowly, after moving her to Greensboro to a place that respects their residents, as well as truly cares for them. Greensboro is an hour and change for me and an equal distance for my sister, and now we happily visit with her once a week instead of a reluctant once per several months.  She was surly and difficult and whiney and full of what sounded like conspiracy theories in this other place.  We didn’t know. 

She was throwing food in the dining room, called the staff the police and the director The Commandant.  We didn’t know.

We didn’t know that they had her drugged.  We didn’t know that the staff was yelling at her, and not bathing her even though she was in Depends that she couldn’t change by herself.  That she was sitting in a wheelchair all day, put into bed at 7 p.m. and that they weren’t coming to help her get to the bathroom at night, so she was in a metal hospital bed with a thin rubber mattress and had to stay there until morning.  We didn't believe her when she tried to tell us all this, in a hushed frightened tone. 

“Why is she in a hospital bed?” asked the new young doctor on his first visit to her room in Greensboro.  We hadn’t thought about it.  Suddenly, it was clear she didn’t need to be, so here came a new Sleep Number bed, with beautiful bedding instead of thin worn institutional blankets. Suddenly she wasn’t incontinent since the staff responded to her call button and came to help her.  

“Why is she on all this Ativan?” We didn’t know that either.  Cautiously, he said, with steel undertone, “some institutions do this to keep their patients from being too much trouble.” We didn’t know.

Last week, as I sat across from her in a Sports Bar in Greensboro, trying to keep up with her analysis of the University of Tennessee football season, I was thinking instead of how beautiful she is.  She had her glass of wine and some bar food, while I sipped my tea.  

Pay attention, softly played in my head, pay close attention.

Life in the Faster Lane

I am having trouble finding my feet right now.  Maybe this is how surfers feel, as though there is a wave of energy underneath and the work is to do what needs doing to ride the ride.  We are just home from San Francisco, with all the shaking up that travel bestows, still aglow with the invigoration of time with Eamon and girlfriend Archana.  New restaurants, walks on the Embarcadero where the America's Cup is being staged, drives through wine country and the redwood forests and just the "its all possible" feeling that San Francisco emanates.  Try it, just try it and see what happens.

The kitchen garden at The French Laundry:

Perhaps that explains why after five years of roasting coffee, and after many years of developing recipes and baking for custom clients, and a couple of years at Farmer's Markets, I stopped the day after we got back at one of my favorite on-farm locations, The Bradford Store on Highway 73.  If you haven't been there, well, it is the quintessential country store, established in 1912, with a modern edge.  To the soft wooden floors and the creaky screen door, add organic produce grown in the surrounding fields.  Local cheeses, and meats, my friend Kelly's bread baked fresh that morning. . .its a dream, really.  (www.thebradfordstore.com)  The picture on the website does not do it justice.  Picture it surrounded by a cottage garden, a cabin selling antiques across the way, and behind it, a blacksmith shop and place to get organic supplies for the garden.

Anyway, while we were in California, a big storm blew out our Apple router, so no internet connection, a critical communication feature at our house.  This meant a trip to the Apple Store which took us right by The Bradford Store, and I needed to check with Kelly anyway because the coop to which we both belong was delivering that week.  While we were there, for some reason, perhaps only because it was time, or because I had been to San Francisco and "anything seemed possible", I asked Kim Bradford if she was still interested in a trial run of Briarpatch coffee.  She and a local farmer were busy unloading some beautiful ears of corn, but she looked up and quickly said yes.  We had talked about this a couple of years ago when we were both selling at the Huntersville Farmer's Market, but until now, I haven't felt well enough physically to make the commitment (hooray for getting one's thyroid function where it needs to be - another subject entirely.)

I don't know if you have ever done this, but it was as if my mouth flew open of its own accord.  I'm a planner, I mean a real planner.  I am never happier than when charting with a ruler and colored pens, making all manner of lists.  I don't always follow these plans, you understand, but that isn't entirely the point.  The making of the plans is where the real enjoyment lies.  Well anyway, my mouth flew open and asked the question, and there was no plan.  

None.  I had not done an inventory of the green coffee supply.  I have been hand labeling the bags.  I had not thought about marketing, as I've had all the business I wanted through word of mouth.  Suddenly, only after initiating all this, did the realization dawn:  Oops, I've got some catching up to do.

So, to make a week of focused activity short: despite years of disdaining same, Briarpatch Bakery and Beans now has a facebook page:  www.facebook.com/BriarpatchBakeryAndBeans, through which I've already gotten all manner of encouragement.  Thanks to Archana there is a website in the making.  I'm working on a new design for the bags. . .

God willin' and the creek don't rise, The Bradford Store will have Briarpatch Coffee tomorrow. . .all supportive incantations appreciated!

P.S.  Meanwhile, Mama has new hearing aids, and despite the fact that "the Queen" (Mom parlance for the director) showed up at her door with a a delegation of fellow residents to let her know she had hurt their feelings ("couldn't have been that bad," Mom said, "some of them were smiling, a little"), she seems to be doing better.  She did refer to her current digs as "the hell hole," but only a few times and that is an improvement.

Update. . .

I have been waiting until I had something to say, but since December and the last blog post, evidently nothing in my world has wanted to become story.  That hasn’t changed, really,  I am just getting a little worn out by the drought, by the lack of communication, the lack of digging down deep for the right word.  So this might be a little choppy as I wiggle down into a groove. I think the camera is down there somewhere, so stay tuned for visual aids. . .

And it isn’t really true that nothing has happened.  The rose-breasted grosbeaks flew through last week, the Paris Fashion Week of birds;  their black and white bodies splashed with a chest blaze of deepest pink.  How is that possible?  True to their couture nature, there are only a few, and they stay only briefly, on their way to more elegant climates.

There were three baby bunnies born under the back deck, and somehow, so far, the hawks have been distracted with other dinners.  Periodically, at dusk or in the early early morning, we will see gradually bigger rabbits under the bird feeders.

A couple of weeks ago, the goldfinches came through in a rush, emptying thistle feeders in a single day, here long enough to change from winter dull to startling yellow.  All three bluebird houses, right now, have parents slithering through the hole to feed little grey furballs of birds-to-be.  And just for our amusement, there is a house sparrow nest in the mouth of a giant metal chicken on the front porch.  

The old-fashioned irises have come and gone, the lavender ones under the maple and the cream and taupe ones in the big garden that break your heart with their scent of a grandmother’s perfume.  The winter kale is reaching to the skies with thick stalks and sweet yellow flowers.  I’m letting that garden go for awhile just for the bees.  The spring kale in the two cold frames is starting to realize the weather is too warm for its liking and I’ll need to finish harvesting in the next few days.  We ended up with continuous kale both because we like it and because I don’t do the kind of meticulous planning that a real farmer would.

I’m always kind of surprised by the garden.  It is always doing something unexpected and it doesn’t wait for me.  It doesn’t wait for me to realize it is time to plant this or harvest that.  It just goes on, independently, growing the seeds that happen to show up, without prejudice.

I could learn from that.  Whatever comes through, in its time, is fine.

I haven’t been so accommodating.  I didn’t want to go to Tennessee when my mother ended up in the hospital recently. I say “ended up” because it still isn’t exactly clear whether she engineered the little sidetrip away from her assisted living home, against which she seems to be constantly rebelling.  She just  turned ninety, and to celebrate the occasion she has started to use the “N” word, and had to be forcibly wheeled out of the dining room because she started yelling. The director pushed Mom in her wheelchair back to her apartment and got her into her recliner.  She had to leave for a moment and when she returned, Mom was sitting in the floor, claiming she had fallen, sitting in a position curiously like someone would be who had scooted herself into the floor.

Mom ended up in the hospital this last time because when her afternoon caregiver arrived on this particular day, Mom was breathing heavily and the caregiver couldn’t get her attention.  They both went to the emergency room, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but at ninety, they admit you anyway.  She was there for a week, with all manner of tests, meals brought to her in bed, a bevy of nurses commenting on her sweet smile.

When my sister Laura and I got there the morning after admission she told us she had gin in her hospital water carafe and that she had been on a ride in a casket.  I don’t know where the gin came from for as far as I know, since my Dad died, my mother has a decided preference for Kendall Jackson Chardonnay.  It was Kendall Jackson they took away from her about a month after she got to assisted living.  Evidently she was coming back from breakfast and drinking and dialing, going through her address book, calling people to come get her.

That may have been when her minister decided to stop coming to see her.  We’re not sure.  All we know is that it is now the assistant minister’s job and her visits seem to have slacked off as well. Anyway, at the close of last week’s Hospital Spa Vacation, the doctor said Mom had the beginnings of both congestive heart failure and “mild dementia.”

“Ha!” said the director of the assisted living place.  “Ha!” said their director of nursing.  “She knows exactly what she is doing.”  I guess the story of the casket ride convinced the doctor, and it couldn’t have helped that Mom’s hearing aids went completely dead, even with new batteries, so all the information she had to comment upon started out in her own head. True for me too sometimes.

So we are all along for the ride it seems.  Us, Mom, the kale, the new birds and bunnies.

It really has been a glorious Spring.  And now that I’ve broken the ice, maybe I can tell you about it more often.

A cardboard sign

What if the body is always on the way to resolution?  What if there really is order at the base of things, barely discernible, under the currents and we aren’t just making up laws to suit our puny human take on things. Or to assuage our trembling fears, that it is, indeed, all for naught? Is this part of the appeal of Christmas?  Of religion in general?

There is a story, onto which we can graft our own sensibilities.  A raft in these tumultuous seas, that calls to us.  A beacon, a star, something true, no matter what disorder washes our way.

I opened the door this early morning, in the dark, to place Coleman’s breakfast on the porch, where he has the least number of steps to the yard afterwards.  My breath froze.  Immediately  I thought of the man who stands at the corner on our way to the Interstate with his cardboard sign.  Ironically, he stands at the edge of a cemetery and behind that a church, and yet no one takes him in, neither cemetery nor church, and we have joked in our nervousness at seeing him day after day that he needs help with his marketing strategy, as the corner he has chosen is one where it is impossible for cars to stop.  Where is he on this frozen night.  I closed the lids on my cold frames to protect the lettuces.  Where is he? I handed him no money, no jacket even though we have a closet of extras.  And it is Christmas.

We will travel across the mountain today, Eamon, John and I will get in our car full of gasoline with the heated seats and we will take with us a big basket of presents:  lotions from a local salon  whose owners pledge sustainability and who serve on the board of the battered women’s shelter; indulgences for my diabetic mother that we’ve been baking for days:  brownies, blondies, cherry brioche, chocolate chocolate cherry scones.  I have cut everything in small pieces to help slow down the sugar rush, and I will tell the nurse that my mother has these.

I don’t want to go, frankly, but I will, and we won’t stay long even though the drive is four hours give or take.  We won’t stay long because it is too hard, and because we will have house guests that will arrive before we get back.  I say it is too hard and then I think of the  man on the corner and I have to say I don’t know what hard is.  My worries this Christmas are getting clean sheets on the beds before people need to sleep on them and embarrassment that I only got lights on the tree and I’ve run out of time.

It always feels as though I am running out of time, that we are running out of time.

Next . . .

We go on because we have to, and because we are breathing rhythmically, in and out, and therein is momentum, that combined with the turning and the rising and the setting. . .we go on.

We pay the bill, prepare the meal, wash the clothing.  We make the phone call; all because there is a "next", a time when the bill will be overdue, when the meal will be digested, the clothing worn and back in the hamper, when the information given over the phone will no longer be needed, will have evaporated.

We call into the next room to someone who is there, for now.  We make a lunch date, write an appointment on the calendar, remember that we forgot something that is now more urgent, all because we assume there is a "next."

And yet, as we do all these things one after another, there is a drag, there is a darkness that stretches to Newtown, Connecticut, to the black hole that began with. . .well, we honestly don't know where or how it began, but its focal point is a young man, was a young man, lost, lost, lost. It is unfathomable to most of us how one can be so lost that the only way home is. . .well, you know.

This lostness has reverberated around the world. And we are pulled by it, mesmerized by it, into deep deep confusion and sorrow.

I can't help but imagine that when Made-In-The-USA missiles fall out of the sky from an airplane driven by a computer and a faceless "operator" thousands of miles away, and they explode into a village, sometimes into a school in a place where we can't pronounce the names of the victims, where they won't be read out loud by the American president, where there won't be banner headlines declaring "Before Their Time," where the deaths won't be the topic on all the American news channels for days and days and days, where the reason won't be assiduously searched out, where people who kill innocents won't be said to need more services, where it won't be said that we finally must ensure that these people no longer have access to such weapons; I can't help but imagine that to those parents, to those families, to those communities, those deaths aren't just as heart and soul-numbingly inexplicable.

So perhaps, for a moment, maybe now, we acknowledge that they matter, all of them.  All of them matter.