The View From Here

There are some days you can’t see from where you were standing three months ago.

On our plates last night were the first harvested tender leaves of kale and chard from the garden, softened a bit by steam and wrapped spring roll-style around a tasty melange of shredded cabbage, tiny carrot pieces, onion, seasoned TVP, and chunks of plant-based protein all stir-fried with sesame oil, minced garlic and ginger, and crowned with a Korean BBQ-spiced peanut sauce. Oh, and brown rice and charred red bell peppers found their way inside those rolls too. Spilling out the ends like just-popped British Christmas crackers, the filling made it to its final destination without fork or spoon. I’m sure we’re more cautious about eating with our fingers these days, but my hands were CDC-inspection clean so I risked it. Food that good ought to be eaten with reckless abandon for all the work it took to get it to the table.

Back in March, those gorgeous dark green leaves were but an idea buried within a hopeful tiny seed sunk into a rather chilly soil-and-compost mix, side dressed with our imaginations and dog-eared pages of reliable cook books. I’ve always leaned toward a life guided by preparedness—before Field of Dreams gave us the brilliantly quotable “If you build it, they will come” line—because I want to be ready for what could happen, and give myself the best possible chance for success. That works well mostly when the combined elements of any plan are within my control, or at least responsive to my influence. But it rained and rained and rained this spring, pushing our spring planting goals well into the end of April and creating a small muddy moat around the most viable of our raised beds. All the seedlings would need to stay put for a couple more weeks, and they grew impatiently leggy in their confining pots. We distracted them with repositioning toward the gray light of day, and sang to them only the most hopeful and positive of songs. Kale and chard spring rolls in June weren’t anywhere on the horizon; we didn’t even know such a meal was possible. But we kept true to the plan to at least have a garden.

Winter-into-spring tests the depths of our trust and optimism that the ground will indeed dry out enough to put the potatoes in or walk the field line without plunging one foot into the soggy and camouflaged front door of a groundhog’s den, pulling off one’s boot in an attempt to keep walking (sending a few well-rehearsed oaths into the air, hoping said groundhog understands what we’ve come to call “barn words”). No matter what the setback, the disappointment, the unmet expectation, we push aside the strongest of our doubts and send all our hope into the very heart of a seed, aligning our dreams with its tiny power to use what’s given to it—a dark blanket of dirt, water, warmth and eventual light—and become something so spectacularly huge by comparison, it makes the wise and observant person sit down in silence and awe. That’s why I sing to our garden at sunset. There’s just no other appropriate response to such well-designed magic.

Three months ago, I figured I’d have come down with the Virus before spring was over, and I didn’t let my imagination go much past that point. On this particular day in June, I’m fine. In fact, I’ve been fine every day this month and the three months before that, save for the requisite anxiety and edgy-ness that any global pandemic will bring. The remedy is to not saturate myself with news and speculation-based op-eds. So far that approach, and keeping up with well-established wellness routines (fistfuls of the right supplements, fresh air, exercise, gratitude for at least five things every day, laughing at Carol Burnett Show blooper reels) have kept me on the kinder side of this whole ordeal. Masks and physical distancing seal the deal and are not negotiable. And while I probably entertain too many thoughts and imaginings of where we’ll all be by October, I work hard to limit such mental meanderings, letting my eyes rest on the freshly-cleared ridge by the house, or watch as some hidden vacuum within the vintage camper-style birdhouse seems to suck the wrens inside just as the kittens swipe their paws from a precarious perch on the branch above.

It’s been a hard and sometimes breathless dance, balancing our current horrors and heartbreaks with those sweet present moments that are innocently detached and free of worry. I feel guilty for taking a break while others sweat on, and then I remember that my shoulder will be to the wheel soon, and the respite I give myself is yet another healthy strategy to keep my core values in play. What matters deeply to us requires the effort to sustain it. Perhaps your mileage is different, but I’ve not yet found a way to enjoy the good stuff without working for it.

There’s one raised garden bed that’s struggling. The tomato plants look hearty enough, but the zucchini and okra look pale and resigned. I suspect the soil isn’t giving them the nutrients they need, and consider gently transplanting them into a better mix. When I close my eyes, I see them thriving, putting another sublime meal on our plates in August. What do they need today, to get them to that future?

Indeed. Where do we want to be in three weeks or two years? And what will get us there?

Hmmm…imagine.

Unmasked

A little after 3:20pm ET on Saturday, May 30, United States astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley rocketed themselves away from our roiling planet, heading toward the International Space Station with an ETA of 10:29.m. ET, Sunday, May 31.

If I weren’t so claustrophobic, I’d envy them.

I woke up this morning before the sun did, with the kind of sick stomach feeling only anxiety can create. Peppermints and ginger, my usual go-to remedies when I feel like this, were useless, like tossing bricks into the Grand Canyon. I curled up under the blankets and waited for the first shreds of dawn to pull me into a walk through the fields and back to the woods where the mockingbirds and goldfinches were noisily commuting from one treetop to another, completely unaware that Nashville’s historic courthouse was set aflame last night. I put the tube of mints in the back pocket of my jeans just in case.

I realize every single word I write, every description in this post and others, comes from a comfortable seat of privilege. I have a safe place to take my fears, a job and health insurance and food in the fridge and cats I can afford to feed and a rich nurturing marriage with a really good and decent person. I have running water and soap to wash my hands each time I use the bathroom or handle raw chicken. I’m thriving on the other side of a few hardships that are the stuff of other people’s worst imaginings, and that others have experienced but didn’t survive. I know I have a lot more to learn, more than a handful of unexamined biases to unpack and heal, a much deeper level of humility to carve out within me. In this current written moment, with images of vehicles on fire and the pain on brothers’ and sisters’ faces (from point-blank mace and lifetimes of not being seen or heard at all) still indelible in my mind, I am praying desperately for this awareness to nudge me, or rocket me, beyond what I think I know into what I need to know. I am willing to be uncomfortable. I already am.

If I was the one who spoke the words “could things get any worse??” out loud a week ago, I deeply apologize.

A week ago, I was sewing face masks, wishing everyone would embrace the compassionate act of wearing one and reflecting on how an 8” x 4” piece of fabric covering half of our faces still had the ability to reveal so much about who we are as individuals trying to be community during a pandemic. Our shrouded mouths still speak volumes and our eyes now carry the additional weight of formerly full-faced messages conveying our character, our values, our fears and our longings. We’re new to most of this, the logistics and external mechanics, that is. We’re having to repeat ourselves across a 6’ space, talking through cotton and plexiglass to make a simple bank deposit or mail a letter. It’s awkward and we don’t like it. We want to be good at it in an instant, or better still, return to the days of unfettered access to conversations and the smiles of strangers. But that’s gone for now, and we’re grieving it across a continuum of grace and ferociousness, much like other losses in our lives.

Tomorrow, George Floyd will have been preventably and needlessly dead for a week. The good people of Minneapolis and Columbus and Philadelphia will walk past the bordered-up storefronts in their respective neighborhoods, crunching remnants of glass and livelihoods beneath their shoes and sandals. They’ll maintain their resolve to rebuild and restart their businesses and somehow keep moving forward into a pandemic that still hasn’t been contained or managed, and a justice paradigm still entrenched and intentionally skewed to favor only a few of us. Parents will struggle to find the words to explain to their eight-year-olds what’s going on. Some of us will venture out timidly to pick up milk and bananas, others will unknowingly infect the ones around them but remain asymptomatic. We’ll poke around in our broken routines for shards of the familiar, and try to mosaic them back together into something less familiar but workable, perhaps even slightly redemptive.

Back in March as COVID began to take up residence in our lungs and our psyches, I asked a few friends “who do you think we’ll be as a society when this is all over?”, but now, the question is “who are we becoming as all this continues?”, with the follow-up query “what is this showing us about who we’ve been all along?” insistently tagging along like all important questions do. There may not be precise answers to these but can we at least start the discussion in an attempt to find them, to land on a better path than the one we’re currently on?

Behind whatever mask we’re wearing, I know the face of love exists somewhere.

Please find it, dear fellow humans.

Please…

A Reason to Live

At 7:30 this morning, I made a batch of pumpkin donut holes that turned out like crap. I followed the recipe precisely but they still turned out gummy and almost tasteless. They aren’t even good enough to lure a raccoon into the live trap under the maple tree outside the kitchen window. I won’t be offended if the chicken turns her beak up at the one I tossed off the front porch. She’ll eat worms and grubs and bury her little face in the crumbly soil for a tick or two, but even she has a “never-gonna” list. I respect that.

The donut recipe was not on my long weekend’s long list of What I Am Going To Accomplish Before I Go Back To Work On Tuesday, drafted on my lunch hour last Thursday, and modified (read “inflated”) as Friday became Sunday afternoon became Monday at 3:00a.m. when it was too hot to sleep. In no particular order, here are the other non-donut tasks I set for myself to usher in the unofficial start to summer:

Clean out the studio.

Sort and downsize all the fabric in the primitive chippy yellow-painted cabinet on wheels in the corner of the room.

Move Aunt Louise’s armless and ornately carved oak chair (also on casters) from in front of the primitive chippy yellow-painted cabinet to the upstairs guestroom.

Make 60 face masks.

Bake six mini chocolate brownie bundt cakes.

Put the potatoes and onion sets in the ground just to the south of the cattle panel trellises I installed seven years ago.

Wash all the throw rugs in the house. All of them.

Finish a new blog about the backstories behind select items from my ongoing list of things I’m grateful for, started on February of 2015.

Make sun-blocking curtains for the west-facing living room windows out of old white cotton EMS blankets still miraculously white after retrieving them from the trash bin behind a local volunteer outpost.

Pull all the weeds along the ridge, especially the ones under the bird feeders where the kittens hide with their little faces looking hopefully upward.

Run a load of donations to the Goodwill four miles away.

Pick enough wild garlic mustard to make pesto, and then make pesto.

Clear the weeds in the old chicken run and reinforce the coop in readiness for a new small flock of layers.

You don’t see pumpkin donut holes anywhere on that list, do you? It just kept evolving as the weekend unfolded, and, undaunted, I pushed forward with such high hopes and a dreamy look on my face. It didn’t matter than I’m not thirty anymore (or forty, or fifty, or…well, let’s just stop there, shall we?) and I like sleeping past 5:00a.m. now, or that we still don’t have an outdoor spigot to hook up the garden hose and water the raised beds 60 yards away from the house (picture a series of 5-gallon buckets filled from the tap in the mudroom, then carried to the edges of the garden plot, emptied and refilled oh, maybe three times). I completely trusted that a recipe for baked donuts would equal or exceed in its outcome one requiring a vat of oil and much frying and transferring those little crispy spheres of pumpkin wonderfulness to the paper-toweled plate next to the stove. And then I’d wash the dough and cinnamon sugar from my fingertips and pin the pleats into those 60 face masks. All before lunch.

From the list above, I think I crossed off maybe three items. At this point, it doesn’t matter which ones they are, as the final hours of our long weekend evaporate, and Patrick and I flip a coin to decide who’s going to be chef this evening. I make pretty good oven-baked steak fries, seasoned with rosemary and garlic (the pantry curtains are closed indefinitely on any future donut escapades, thank goodness). We got a lot done, but scratch our heads at what, exactly, and how. Anything unfinished before the sun slips below the cottonwoods to the west will be waiting for us on our next long weekend. Plus all of their farm project friends. It never ends, ever.

Implied somewhere in that to-do list was a “once-and-for-all” clause that keeps getting run over by reality. Perhaps you know how this goes: once I empty that cabinet of all it’s fabric, reorganize it according to color and yardage and put it back in rainbow order, I’ll keep it that way, honest. I believe it with my whole soul, that the beautiful bare brown patch of soil that I just cleared of its weeds for an hour before breakfast will remain clear until sometime in late August. Then my curiosity pulls my attention down the hill to the creek where the old tire swing still dangles from the knob of a branch on the sycamore we affectionately call the “Old Man Tree” (its silhouette just after sundown looks like an old man bowing his head in deference to all at his feet. It’s touching and towering all at once), and I find a salamander or a stone speckled with flecks of quartz, and the weeds laugh behind my back as they regrow everything I just ripped from the ground eight weeks ago. Once-and-for-all is elusive at best, a myth I keep chasing, joined by its twin sisters Someday and Later. I continue to invite them to this party of a life we’re living here at Naked Acres, and they insist they’ll come, but they never do. Six years ago, I promised I wouldn’t buy anymore fabric, but do thrift store cotton shirts count? I was planning to make them into smart-looking throw pillows for the couch, all crisp in their blue-and-white stripes. I did get as far as disassembling them from their sleeves and collars (save the buttons because, well, just in case…) and then a friend showed me how to do bookbinding. Ahh well…we have enough throw pillows anyway. A writer can never have too many handmade journals.

The weekend I planned and the weekend I experienced aren’t miles apart, but neither are they holding hands. Living in an old farmhouse on a land-locked rectangle of paradise has taught us to be more adaptable than I would have thought possible. Our best-laid plans, with or without mice and men, often fall beneath the weight of what’s more important and right in front of us. Heavy rains rearrange the shape of the creek, stalwart trees lay themselves down at the behest of a dry hurricane wind in September, we uncover a neglected set of raised garden beds we built during a long-ago Memorial Day weekend and decide to give them another life. The list changes, the agenda turns an unexpected corner, and—thank God for our curiosity—we turn with it, setting our shoulders to a new wheel of skills promised, harvests hoped for, and recipes untried. The laundry still gets hung on the line and Aunt Louise’s ornately carved oak chair will eventually make it up the stairs to it’s new place in front of the window with a view of the seven rescued arbovitaes we planted back in March (see? “Someday” actually came for those little trees; they sat in pots on the porch for most of the winter).

With each season that arrives on our doorstep, we’ve learned a tiny sliver more about setting our sights without being too attached to them. It’s not about simply being flexible. It’s about a more deeply-set surrender to a rhythm that brings the birds to the feeders when the sun has just crested the eastern horizon, a power that pushes burdock through the clay-rich soil and pulls the creek waters over and around the exposed roots of an osage orange tree. When we signed the mortgage, we agreed to notice these things and tend to them when they needed us.

If we never do anything else but that, we can fall asleep knowing a solid purpose to our lives.

Donuts are optional.

Among Them

During a much-needed break in a work-from-home virtual meeting marathon, I sat eye-level with the mint patch next to the old potting shed and came to the edge of a good cry. Not quite ready to cross that line in that moment, but able at least to acknowledge the need for some kind of release, I eased myself to sit on the ground, barefoot and inhaling that lovely wild spearmint scent, a most welcome balm to soothe my weary spirit. I can cry later. I’m sure I will.

I go there often. Not the mint patch particularly, but the ground in general, and dear readers, she always—ALWAYS—delivers. I know there’s good science behind this, and that’s great. I also know that the herds of bison at Yellowstone roll around on the earth at fairly regular intervals, and it’s not, as a friend once speculated, to brush flies from their curly brown-haired hide or scratch one of those hard-to-reach-with-a-hoof itches. That hide, you should know, is three times thicker than cow hide (already 45mm thick), so near-impossible for them to feel even a horsefly’s bite. There must be other reasons to connect with the ground that way, and I leave that to greater observant spiritual minds than my own. It’s enough for me to know that they do this, and now I don’t feel so strange when the mood strikes me on the privacy of our own land.

For those few minutes on the grassy earth by the mint, though, I was treated to the afternoon agendas of everything going on below our feet and unnoticed most days. Even clocking in at barely 5’2”, I still tower above ant colonies, the elusive 4-leaf clover in a patch of normal ‘threes, spiders not even as big as the tiniest freckle on my left arm, and the barely-there silken strands they stretch from the tip of one grass blade to another, a thin and gossamer tightrope highway they traverse effortlessly every day of their eight-legged little lives.

Down on the ground, and the closer I get to the fragrant soil, the more I appreciate the privilege of where we live, how we live, and the web of life that supports everything else connected to it. I’m sure you knew (but apparently, I needed the reminder) that these little ones beneath us don’t need our help at all. Not for gathering food, laying their eggs, building their homes, moving out of harm’s way when the storms come. None of it. Makes me humble, truly, and also more inclined to walk a bit more carefully through their neighborhoods, and on top of their worlds, though I know I can’t step from the back door to the garden area without doing some damage. Never leaving the house isn’t an option either, so I’m counting on some sort of grace-filled amnesty for us two-leggeds (yet another reason to lose weight). Did you know that ants travel up to one hundred yards for food, and mostly at night? So, from the mint patch that would take them just about to the edge of the old cornfield and maybe in a couple more feet. I’ll get back to you on how they find food in the dark. I know nothing about an ant’s sense of smell. But they’re third-shifters. Finding that out left an impression. That middle-of-the-night trip of mine down the stairs and through the living room to the bathroom suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.

I’ve always had a thing for ants. I would lay flat on my stomach to watch them for minutes-into-hours when I was in my single-digits. They are so organized and efficient. And the way they briefly greeted each other in passing I found, well, civilized. What sort of all-important ant-essential information did they exchange in that split second? Simple food locator data, or the requisite “how’s it going Franklin?” rhetorical pleasantry that fills the hallways of human corporate offices (or used to, back in February)? I didn’t get that close, but being less than 10 years old, my imagination conjured up all manner of friendly Formicidae conversations (thank you Wikipedia for adding that gem to my vocabulary).

But down here in the splendor of our backyard’s grass, I’m meeting all sorts of other creations for the first time. They are colorful and curious, with yellow stripes and spindly legs whose knees look too fragile to be real. How can they amble up and over the leaves of a plantain leaf without making it move? How many eyes does that one have? How old is this one—three weeks? Two days? I push my curiosity to its limit like an urgent prayer sent upward in silent awe. I am taller and bigger than they are and still have so much to learn…

No matter what you believe or how you give yourself over to life’s liturgies, it seems more than fair—and deeply real—to draw the gently profound conclusion that a life lived on ones knees is one of the best classrooms available to our upright species. When we lower ourselves in a good and humble way (not the selling-out sort of posture too often associated with that phrase), entire worlds literally open up at our feet. When we drop the pretense of “highly evolved” and crawl on our bellies to be present among even the smallest of visible relatives, something in us can change for the better.

I hope, dear friends, you won’t wait until your next good almost-cry to let yourself down to the ground for a glimpse of the universe present in a mint patch.