J.B.I.C.

There are some things you do simply because it’s possible to do them:

Driving home from work barefoot.

Standing on the front lawn in a downpour, getting completely drenched, then toweling off and calling it the day’s shower.

Eating peanut butter right from the jar (spoon optional).

Buying a bouquet of pink and white alstroemeria blooms at the grocery store and randomly handing them out to strangers in the parking lot on your way back to your car.

Writing limericks.

Picking your nose at a four-way stop.

Opening an Argentinian Malbec and a Cabernet for dinner, when it’s just you and the cats.

These are rarely, if ever, items deliberately included on anyone’s to-do list. They tend toward the impulsive, the indulgent, or the “I deserve this because it’s been a hard day” reasoning—yep, even the nose-picking one—and I’ve yet to see them as accomplishments on anyone’s resume (though how fun would that be for a hiring manager in the right company? I’d certainly given that applicant at least a second look, and kudos for taking the risk).

On the continuum of what we do simply because we have the ability, I realize that not all activities are noble or decent or in any stretch of reasoning redemptive. There are too many that spring up from our less-than-laudable side and leave misery and a lot of mopping up in their tumultuous wakes. Freedom and choice are rich with possibility and fraught with dangers we often can’t see until we’ve made a choice (without that one key bit of additional information) and then we find ourselves facing more complicated and knottier decisions. By the time I get to that point, I’ve got my apology rehearsed. Driving home from work barefoot seems innocent enough until one is pulled over for having no brake lights. If, on mad impulse, one happened to fling one’s sandals into the back seat with Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend” blaring from the speakers, one knows it will be more difficult to retrieve said sandals if the kind but serious officer asks one to step out of the car (driving barefoot is legal in all fifty states, but not recommended. Just so you know).

There are lots of reasons NOT to do something just because I can.

But even with the risk of choosing unwisely, I still land on the side of impulsive indulgence most days. It is possible to overthink the easiest of options that life’s experience buffet lays out before us, or to second-guess your best intentions. The purity of an idea is to be respected and considered: “Let’s buy some gift cards and leave them on the windshields of cars parked outside the hospital’s emergency room”. If I stopped too long to wonder if I’d get corralled by the hospital security’s patrol car or winced at the expense, I’d probably talk myself out of it, and the good souls to whom those cars belong wouldn’t get to experience the gift of surprise (or even relief that dinner has now been taken care of for them). I believe in the inherent goodness of people. We tend toward decency far more often than malicious intent, no matter what the headlines tell us. I trust in the uncounted acts of thoughtfulness that never appear above or below the fold.

Back when I was a campus minister in a local parochial high school, I was offered the chance to chaperone a student immersion trip to Spain. With every six students who signed up, an adult got to go for free (those were the days, huh?). All expenses paid—airline tickets, transportation, lodging. An easy “yes”, right? Well, I’d never flown before, was committed to being claustrophobic, and didn’t even want to think about all that open water beneath the belly of the plane for seven and a half hours. I told the Spanish teacher I’d get back to him. It took me a week to figure this one out. I confided everything in a close friend and mentor, who kindly let me finish my back-and-forth position before blurting out (just as kindly, but…clearly) “Liz, some decisions in life are easy. This is one of them—GO!! Right. Ok. Got it. Three days later, I’m 35,000 feet above all that water with just enough Dramamine to keep me pleasantly in my seat and a pocket full of souvenir money (most of which landed in the till of a guitar craftsman in Granada the night before our return to the States. Oh my…Sting’s “Fragile” never sounded more beautiful than when I plucked its haunting melody from those nylon strings). One more day of thinking it through and I’d have missed learning where the phrase “Holy Toledo” comes from and seeing all those feral cats outside the Alhambra, alongside being chased by street vendors trying to sell me hand-crocheted table cloths. Those memories are mine now, all because I decided to do something that was possible.

I understand that not all of our options are as romantic, or subsidized. We still have to do the dishes, dust the furniture and driver responsibly. But when a ground-soaking downpour presents itself on a sleep-in Saturday morning, and one has nowhere to go, getting drenched and splashing in the muddy puddles near the trucks parked by the front deck is quite possibly the best decision one will make that day (having a dry towel handy was a slightly less-impulsive thought that tagged along with the “go out and get drenched” one. I grabbed one from the laundry room and felt rather clever). Plus, it counts as the day’s shower.

Just because I can.

The Long View, in Both Directions

We haven’t had popcorn in a while. We used to buy it from a neighbor, Joe, down the road years ago, who sold it to raise money for the Boy Scouts. He’d drive his white Toyota pick-up to the Duke station four miles away, and keep a box of the two-pound bags in the back seat just in case you stopped to get gas at the same time he did and the conversation turned to snacks. Joe’s sales pitch was all smiling and gentle; not at all high-pressure, but who could turn down popcorn from an 90-something year-old man who barely cleared 4’ 11” on a tape measure and kept a small spiral notebook in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt where he’d written today’s date and calculated the number of days until his next birthday. He’d whip out that notebook a few minutes after the usual “hello’s” and “how are ya’s?”, using the stubby point of a yellow golf pencil to show you the math. After a sharing some stories from a recent meeting he chaired for the local historical society, we’d be on our way, minus a few dollar bills but a two-pound bag of popcorn now in the backseat of our Toyota truck.

Joe died in 2016, eighty days shy of his 99th birthday, according to the penciled-in math. We’ve bought popcorn since then at the local bulk store and it pops up just fine, but it’s missing something. Some months after his memorial service, we attended an auction on his farm, touching pieces of the life he shared for 63 years with his beloved Bea, all sorted and displayed in banker’s box lids on rows of folding tables set up on the lawn. Four years later, we continue to be custodians of an impressive rock collection he and Bea gathered on their many travels, and are honored to have the license plates from that white Toyota truck that read “Old Joe”.

I’m not sure why that memory rose to the surface today, but being caught in the swirling current of relentless uncertainty these days, it’s natural (and necessary) to page through the snapshots of a pleasanter time and sit in their soothing company for a while. It doesn’t make the pandemic go away, or help the good people of Beirut recover their footing after last week’s horrific explosion, and it isn’t supposed to. I know that. But it pulls me back from the edge of an abyss too deep to comprehend and helps my news-battered heart catch its breath for a few minutes. There’s important work to do, to be sure, and we’ll set ourselves to it heart and soul and sinew, but I suspect I’m not the only person on the planet right now who’s longing for a break from the accumulated weight of the last five months. I want to be here in the next five, and pausing ever so often is not optional. It’s required if you’re in it for the Long Haul.

I find myself wondering lately about the collective resilience of the human species. How much can we bear? So far, I’d say a LOT. We’re still here, still plugging away, and though not always ringing the bell when it comes to our best values in action, we’re trying. As I pull quackgrass from the edges of the onion patch in the garden, dodging the tender poison ivy shoots in between, I feel like I’m doing what I can to keep despair a few acres away. These onions, and the beets and tomatoes and zucchini we picked a few minutes ago will feed Patrick and me at some point in the near future, and we’ll feel glad for growing them ourselves. We’ll drop off a bag of kale and tomatoes to family, happy that they love them as much as we do. Patrick’s out in his workshop now, building another raised bed that will hold our late summer garden’s transplants of more kale, more mixed greens, and perhaps a late second crop of beets, if the sun keeps coming up between now and then. Acting as if we’ll get the gift of that many more sunrises is insurance against everything else we can’t control. From here, we’re trying to see the harvest, still well-hidden beneath the soil and today’s bleak headlines.

So far, it seems to be working, this dance between the soft edges of pleasant memories and a fierce hope toward a future whose face is indistinct but trying to smile. Fear still creeps in and wants to take up residence in our souls, but we refuse delivery most days. We speak words of encouragement and reassurance to anyone who needs them, and keep it real when an angry rant is the only thing that will make us feel better. Looking over our shoulders at all that we’ve shouldered up to this point fortifies us and even makes us laugh. That’s good Medicine.

One of the cottonwoods by the creek has already started shedding its leaves, and I check the calendar to make sure it’s still summer. It makes me think of the time Dad was visiting our first August here, and we showed him where the osage orange trees grew on the slope just at mouth of the meadow. He swore by the brain-looking green fruits as a deterrent to cockroaches, and we promised he could come back in late September to pick to his heart’s content. He showed up that day, pockets stuffed full of plastic grocery bags, with Mom spotting the larger ones on the ground. The trees are growing heavy now with this year’s crop, and it’s impossible to look up into those branches and not see the grin on his face as he filled each and every one of those bags.

Somewhere in the space between what we remember and what we can only imagine… is a shower after a hot day trimming back tomato vines, dinner that includes something we planted and watched grow and then plucked from the ground when it was ready, the cool thin grass beneath a grove of young mulberry saplings, and the comfort of holding Patrick’s hand.

We live in this space every minute of every day, noticing, watching..

Hoping.

By Invitation Only

“Shield your eyes”.

Patrick’s voice came through the rich darkness that enveloped our bedroom. I pulled the navy blue sheet up past my forehead and waited for the glare of the overhead light to come through, though I didn’t know why. Wasp in the sheets? He’d have been a bit more, um, colorful with his words had that been the case. But when I heard the familiar fallumph of eight little paws landing on the uncarpeted floor from about bed-height, and the grating of the doorknob connecting with its doorframe hardware after that, I filled in the rest of the story while Patrick finished ushering the kittens downstairs and out the front door. Apparently, they’d snuck upstairs and climbed in with us, ensconced themselves in the lap of supreme luxury while we dozed unawares. Bed-sharing with the felines doesn’t happen in our house. They know it, and must have felt like they’d pulled off the ultimate midnight indulgence.

We’re outnumbered, four to two, by these soft-footed and cunning additions to the family, and still scratch our heads as to how such a circumstance came to pass, given that neither of us had pets growing up or any urgent affinity for cats in particular. When we bought the farm, we barely imagined a humble flock of chickens, and that took some coaxing from a friend wanting to cull his own Golden Comets, along with ample reassurance that they would not claw at our bare legs in the summer when we arrived at the coop with a scoop of grain to scatter. Eventually our city/suburban-bred ignorance gave way to informed sensibility, and within two years, we needed a larger basket to collect the daily bounty as we added Americaunas, Buckeyes, Silver Laced Wyandottes and Austrolorps to our collection.

There were barn cats on the property when we first moved in, and they’d pretty much expanded their definition of “barn” by finding their way into the crawl space beneath the house through a dug-out gap in the foundation’s cinder blocks. But once we claimed this little tottering bungalow as our own, they slowly retreated back to the barns and the meadow and eventually all points west. We were cat-free for two months until a friend asked if we’d be interested in “watching” her tuxedo female, Sunshine, for the summer.

(Important historical context: in the early days, as our city friends and acquaintances learned we’d acquired some land, we found ourselves on the receiving end of a steady stream of “will you take my _________?”, or “I caught the groundhog that was burrowing under my house. Can I release him at your place?” requests that took us well into autumn that first year. People we barely knew would ask to “come out and see the place, bring the kids?”, and in our snarkier moods, we were tempted to reciprocate, asking if we could come over to their house to watch the game on their big screen tv or take a long dip in their hot tub. We declined them all, and gently took hold of the teachable moments each ask presented. This was our home, not a nature preserve, wildlife rescue operation, chicken petting zoo or KOA campground. Relationship defined the possibility of an invitation, not simply the novelty of contrast between our respective living arrangements. Over time, such requests disappeared like the original barn cats).

And speaking of cats, back to our friend and what sounded like a temporary offer of summer Sunshine. She was a dear little thing, and we wanted to be helpful, so agreed to take in a four-legged housemate. On the day of the handoff, as our friend headed back down the long gravel driveway and across the bridge, the words “oh, by the way, she’s pregnant” rang through the air and sealed our fate for the next eighteen years. That was the last time we saw our friend, and Sunshine delivered three separate litters that summer. The first two met untimely ends at the hungry mouths of whatever predators found them in the middle of the night. The last batch of three were born wisely under the rotting floor of the potting shed out back, and I’d probably not have noticed if, at two weeks, they hadn’t poked their tiny heads out from where the floor met the bottom plank of wood on the north-facing wall of the shed. Sunshine tended to them for another week and then disappeared, and who could blame her? Enough of this Fertile Crescent, she probably muttered to herself, and for all we knew, made the long trip back to Coshocton some 55 miles away.

The result of our innocence and hospitality was the tuxedo runt of her last litter, named Scout after the character in To Kill A Mockingbird. He had us charmed and captivated for seventeen years until cancer claimed him. He was the last one with bedroom sleeping privileges, and now rests his bones beneath the shade of the mulberry sapling that grows up through center of the an old dead apple tree trunk situated seven feet from the front porch.

In our twenty years here, stray dogs have crisscrossed the fields looking for permanent residence, but we’re just not dog people (friends, believe me, we’ve tried), and the local no-kill shelter insisted they’d find homes with plenty of room to rabbit-chase their little hearts out. The night we found a Rottweiler and a golden Labrador parked comfortably on the welcome mat, we put the shelter warden’s phone number on speed dial. She’d come and collect another seven dogs in as many years before the traffic across the land settled down.

We’ve grown to understand that such events are literally part of the landscape that has welcomed us. Wild lives and not-so-wild ones live as they do side by side, feeding off of each other and pulling our curiosity onto the porch in the middle of the night, straining our ears to follow unknown sounds making their way across the sky or through the creek bed. We’ve humbly found our place among them, wondering if our shared desire to move so far from a sidewalk-and-postage-stamp-lawn existence was really the RSVP to a much bigger Invitation. I’m glad we accepted, eyes wide open and unshielded for the last twenty years.

May we please stay at least another twenty?

Untouched

Right after a good and loud summer storm, two deer are browsing in the eastern field, their smooth tawny fur a distinct exclamation point against the backdrop of lush emerald green that surrounds them. They move inches at a time, slowly, trying this leaf, peeling bark from that young maple sapling, chewing and strolling and thinking about whatever young deer think about an hour before sunset.

The soil beneath their hooves has never been pressed under the weight of my own feet.

Twenty years on forty-one acres, and there are still places we’ve never left our mark. Acres of mysteries and unknowns, the undersides of sassafras and sycamore leaves we haven’t rubbed with our curious fingertips. Stones in the creek, smoothed by the steady flow of its waters, and we don’t know just how smooth they feel. Birds we haven’t met or fed, coyotes we can hear yipping and howling through the meadow when all is dark, but have never seen.

In the first dozen months we settled in, learned the seasons, saw the summer give way to the autumn’s undressing and stood looking up into the bare arms of maples and oaks and buckeyes, we were determined to walk every inch of this land. Under the heading of “get acquainted”, our to-do list grew long and ambitious, but respectfully so. Even with the paperwork from the closing bearing our signatures, and the bank ready to sip at our income for monthly mortgage payments over the next thirty years, we still felt like tourists intruding on a sacred grove where the ancients continued to worship (actually, we were right about that). With city street concrete and suburban lawns the size of a postage stamp as our primary land experience before we moved here, our view was understandably—and forgiveably—narrow, and our expectations naive. One trip down the driveway with the realtor in the late winter of ‘99 blew the doors off that perspective.

But here we are in 2020, and I thought for sure we’d have tramped along the west side of the creek at least a few times by now. Instead, the rich soil there has no memories of our footsteps, grapevines have established themselves in near Tarzan-swinging thickness and strength, and we gaze at its wildness from the east side of the creek banks, standing still as a four-point buck makes his way north toward the black swamp woods for even better cover. I remember one conversation years back, when Patrick and I thought it through out loud to build a bridge across a more narrow section of the creek, all curved and Japanese garden-like, made from cedar or cherry, treated to withstand the elements. The first flood in the meadow later that year left those plans to rest in the dreamiest corners of our minds, and on this Sunday in late July, the creek still runs free of any such overhead interference, save for the essential truck-worthy bridge that lets us leave for work and groceries every week.

It’s good to stop for a few moments and reflect on what else I’ve not explored or touched or seen, not just on the land but in other aspects of my life. I won’t mention it all here, but I assure you it’s a sizable list that grows with every choice I make. And I need to be ok with that. But as I keep taking trips around the sun, I do listen to that inner urging to try something new, not necessarily a bucket list sort of quest, but more from simple human curiosity. Why not take a different way home from the office, turn right onto that gravel road I’ve always passed every other day for the past eleven years, or stop and buy cheddar popcorn at the Fredonia Mall (a sweet but misleading name describing a convenience store/gas station nestled between a couple of cornfields. But they serve deli sandwiches and elbow macaroni salad, which I now know since I stopped in for that popcorn). Life-changing? Depends on your interpretation of that phrase, but I can now say I’ve been there if someone asks.

Admittedly, much of what I haven’t done or touched is the result of convenience trumping quality. It’s easier not to hack my way through the overgrowth on both sides the creek to get to that place where we think the saw-whet owls live and hoot each night toward the end of summer. If I want to stand where the deer stood, all tawny and peaceful, I’d need to make an effort to walk across two acres of uncut and furrowed field, brushing thistle and burrs from my sleeves. I think I’ll just stay here where the grass is cut and watch from a distance. As I say it, I feel unadventurous and coddled. But I can also argue that it’s best to leave all that undisturbed ecosystem alone and unsullied by my two-legged homosapien ways. That feels just as valid and more than a bit noble.

From my place at the edge of the field, I can still imagine what it would be like to brush my open palm along that tawny fur, to see the impressions their hooves made in the soil and where they pulled that tender strip of bark from the young trunk of that maple sapling. Perhaps it’s a matter of knowing my place here, and letting contentment live in gentle balance with my curiosity. Theres still plenty to see and do and touch, even from the comfort and safety of the east side of the creek banks.

Earlier, I felt like I needed to be outside under the canopy we set up on the other side of the mulberry grove just off the front deck. I didn’t overthink it—just took myself out the door and settled into one of the lawn chairs beneath the pole-framed canvas and faced the meadow in all its sunny afternoon glory.

I am currently twelve feet from a goldfinch perched on the limb of a black walnut that sends its shade across the feeders. Her pale yellow feathers are the same color the maple leaves will be sixty days from now.

If anyone asks, I can tell them I saw her.