Can You Hear Me Now?

Copper, the feline matriarch of our household, circles my feet as I move into the Downward Dog pose. My four-legged yoga coach for going on five years now, she checks my form and balance before settling herself right where my palms need to be on the floor and assumes a pose of her own, Cat Must Groom Herself NOW, showing off a flexibility I can’t even dream of.

Such a scene is, more or less, how I start my days. The sun is still just a good idea and on its way to slowly pushing the dark canopy of stars aside, the house sits a quiet and protective shell around us and everything we’ve collected so far, and except for that one floorboard in the bedroom near the hutch that protests my weight as I step about in the darkness to gather my socks (peeled off and flung out from under the covers hours ago), not a sound pierces the air I’m breathing. Yet another moment I’d like to suspend in time, on the same list as holding Patrick’s hand after dinner and savoring the last sips of a most excellent and rich Argentinian Malbec.

It’s been a rather loud and raucous week (yes, that includes the first presidential debate).

At work, most if not all of our meetings are virtual as we continue to hunker down in our respective offices (some of them doubling as our bedrooms where we sleep). In my work office, I raise my voice and face the computer monitor on my desk, speaking into the screen, though I know the mic is actually located on the laptop anchored to a docking station just off to the right of my desk set-up. I wonder how that sounds to those listening? Like I’m tense or angry or forcefully trying to make my point, persuade them out of their own ideas? Not my intention at all, but I feel as if I’m throwing my full body weight into these discussions and when they’re done, sometimes I need a short walk outside just to shift the energy into a calmer place.

When I do go out in public, mostly for medical or must-be-done-in-person business transactions, I feel like I’m yelling through two layers of cotton, as if that will help me convey more accurately the intended message, and I’ve noticed that I’m forming the shape of the words on my lips more deliberately, even though no one can see the effort. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard to tell someone I’d like those test results emailed to me, or I don’t need a car wash today, just the oil changed, thank you. Pre-pandemic, I’m sure communication was challenging at times, but these past several months, it’s become a real workout. I so want to be understood, to be heard, to have my words and messages land as I hope they will—clearly, kindly, with a good heart behind them. That’s easier without the mask and a six-foot canyon between us, where tone and facial expressions can drop off the ledges and disappear into a craggy maw of misunderstanding. But my concern for the health of my fellow humans is still more important than my interpersonal communicative convenience, so I plod along, masked and far away, wondering if my eyes, eyebrows and forehead can bear the added weight of conveying those meaning-defining nonverbal cues.

Remember when we used to be able to whisper? When we could be that close? When meetings we attended gave us full access to the information we needed and our clarifying questions were minimal? When our throats weren’t dry from breathing in lint and shouting, and we knew what each other’s teeth looked like? (Diastemas, coffee-stained enamel and all. What a perfect time to have braces and not be self-conscious about smiling). This has been technology’s finest hour in so many ways—giving us video chats and helping us sharpen our texting game. But when the internet connection decides to go on vacation in the middle of an online training, or our physician’s audio cuts out during our telehealth appointment just as she’s outlining a treatment plan, we’re reminded that even the intricate wizardry of a motherboard has its limitations. Turning up the volume isn’t going to add anything helpful here, except perhaps draining the pressure valve on some pent-up frustration.

As a species, we’re normally a noisy bunch, and sound-mapping studies before and after pandemic-related lockdowns revealed the impact of not going about our loud business day after day. Birdsong and other natural sounds landed more distinctly on our ears, as global transportation’s relentless hum shrank to almost nothing. It fed both our hunger for silence and stillness and our anxiety about those same aspects of the human enterprise; some of us still navigate the tension between them. If that feels and sounds like your current situation, I encourage you to take a few steps back and let yourselves remember that we’re all still new to How You Carry On During A Global Pandemic. The playbook for all of this is being written as we’re living through it. Perhaps the silence is the gift that offers a chance to hear what we’ve been missing (which may be nothing at all, and that’s not a bad thing), and the stillness an opportunity to give our frantic, ever-cycling minds a healing pause. Unsettling, I know, but good medicine nonetheless.

Someday, dear friends, we will get to stand closer together like we used to, our smiles (laced with braces and diastemas and coffee-tinted teeth) in full view and our entire faces working those nonverbals for all they’re worth. We’ll get to add touch to our conversations, throw our heads back to get the most of an unmasked guffaw in response to a brilliantly-landed punch line, and not look over our shoulders at a cautionary medical finger saying “not yet, it’s not safe”. We will emerge on the other side of this, wiser for having wrapped our arms willingly around the gift of a temporary near-soundless existence, slowing our steps to a more attentive pace.

Until then, morning yoga with a learned feline coach is just one coping strategy.

What’s yours?

Another Trip Around the Sun

Along the banks of the creek, at the foot of the Old Man sycamore tree, the wild asters open their tiny white faces to the east for a fleeting glimpse of the morning sun. Not even two hours past sunrise, they’ll spend the rest of the day in cool shade and dappled sunlight until the last winds of autumn strip the overhead branches bare. I love how they are not a bit bothered or preoccupied by headlines, deadlines, or the ticking of a timepiece. They simply push past the soil’s crumbly top layer, wedge themselves between the sawgrass and the ironweed and unfold their petals without fanfare. I register the tiniest shred of envy in my heart and then let it go. Who knows what they must long for sometimes from my own existence? Chocolate, perhaps, or the ability to embroider?

It’s my birthday (on a Saturday too—how’s that for luck?), and I’ve parked myself on a blanket down in the meadow with a full and grand view of the slope up to the house. I’m sitting in the lap of All Things Sacred, encircled in a leafy embrace and deeply aware that to unwrap this gift, I need only open my eyes. As I sift through twenty years of Naked Acres images collected with those same eyes, I try to remember what this exact spot looked like when Patrick and I first stood here. I distinctly recall watching in silent mouth-open awe as two red tailed hawks circled over our heads against a backdrop of an ice-blue late March sky. In a smooth but quick flash, they suddenly locked talons and spiraled downward in some unseen column of love and air, their spring courtship a clear sign that we would get to unfold our young marriage into this space, gathering our shared stories beneath the ever-changing and always-perfect skies.

I cannot guess how old that Old Man sycamore is, but can tell you that Patrick and I could not clasp hands and fully encircle him. A round and rusty cast iron fence post, from the previous residents’ dairy farming days decades ago, looks as if it’s sinking slowly into the bark at the base of this tree’s magnificent trunk, a strange sort of vertical quicksand illusion. Bits of razor wire hold fast to the cold metal, barnacle-like and crusty, and a coiling vine of determined poison ivy snakes up the length of the post on its way to a branch that hangs over the creek. It all looks excruciatingly painful and yet, there’s a feeling of patient acceptance; this Grandfather has withstood worse and kept on growing. A metaphor of grieving moves across my thoughts’ path and comes to rest: tempting as it is to cut that fence post out from the thick bark in that massive trunk, such a thing would be more harm than help. Best to leave it be. Old Man has made this post part of himself and moved on. So it is with the losses that leave their mark on us. We grow around the hurt and bring it with us on the journey.

Will trees ever stop teaching us? Oh, I hope not.

The cricketsong is nonstop now, in classic symphonic end-of-summer fashion, the soundtrack of leaves falling in random showers and wind-swirls. It will be cold and silent all too soon, so in spite of my tinnitus, I welcome the continuous rhythmic scratchety music of these invisible relatives and send up another bucketload of thanks for the surgeon who fixed my otosclerosis back at the turn of the century. Most certainly a gift that has kept on giving, loud and unmistakably wonderful. I took Friday off, an early present to myself, and spent the morning clearing path through the woods between the fasting site and the trail up the Hill. Lopers in hand and under the tender supervision of a patient tree frog who watched my every move, I cut back thickets of tenacious multiflora rose vines, collected fallen black walnut and sassafras branches and broke them across my knee, and pulled Virginia creeper vines from the trunks of young saplings with my gloved hands. I lost all sense of time and sank into the woods like a fairy creature. It was simply splendid.

That I even get to keep marking this day, year after year, is not a casual occasion for me. I’ve had my share of knife’s-edge moments, and for reasons known and unknown, have been given the privilege of twenty-four more hours over and over and over until I land on this birth anniversary again, looking over my shoulder at a pile of miracles and peering into the mist of a mysterious future not promised to me or anyone else. When I do the math and add up the sunrises, the winters-into-springs and even the trips to the grocery store for Fuji apples, I’m stunned down to my socks at the sheer unrelenting abundance of the life I’ve been given to live.

In the shelter of an Old Man’s leafy and knowing arms, a canopy of history filtering the sun that woke me up this morning, I sit in silent mouth-open awe once more, buckled up for what this next trip will bring. If that sun keeps coming up, I’m gladly and gratefully along for the ride.

A Meadow's Reassurance

My eyes are awash with goldenrod glow as I look out the bathroom window and across the eastern field. It’s a gently waving sea of nonstop saffron-topped stalks, fluffy and ethereal, beckoning more than a quick glance. Not to be left out, the sun lifts its face over the tall cornstalk horizon, filtering through a row of volunteer sycamores and sending gilded sliding board beams downward, every silken spider-spun strand backlit by this morning crescendo. An ode to Yellow if ever I saw one. Each drop of dew hangs perfect and patient, knowing their fate in the hours to come, giving themselves over to it anyway.

For going on three and a half weeks now, I’ve been walking every morning because I don’t want to miss this first performance on the land’s perpetual stage. There’s something soul-filling, starting one’s day in the company of trees and light. When my feet reach the meadow, after stepping carefully atop the moss and late-summer clover on the paths to the north, a mixed grove of black walnut, cherry and more sycamores soar past my head and I receive their presence with an appropriate sense of smallness. It’s funny—we still call this stretch of land “the meadow”, though it no longer meets the criteria for such a classification. When we arrived, it did. Trees lined the creek but they were youthful saplings then, still figuring out their future, and the open expanse of grass and wildflowers compelled me to add more gossamer dresses and skirts to my wardrobe, just so I could traipse through on an early summer afternoon, plucking wild raspberries from their thorny stems (in slow-motion, of course; don’t want to be snagging cuffs or sleeves). Yes, we really do live like this.

Now, the “meadow” is well-established as another section of woods on the land, with the vein of a creek pulsing through it. We maintain the open space as best we can, and allow for a bit of thicket-creep along the banks so the birds and rabbits can hunker down when the thunder and rains move through. But where did the time go these past twenty years? As I walked this morning, I grew wistful remembering the early weeks of this year’s summer, with the 10’ canopy set up just on the other side of the mulberry stand off the front deck, and how we sat in its shade for hours, reading or sewing or just talking about whatever mattered most that particular day. During my two-week vacation in late June, I took my lunch there, while the kittens competed for my attention or napped at my feet. I worked on a bee-themed embroidery project beneath that canopy, and sat in uncomfortable “what’s next?” contemplation and fervent prayer when the protests began. In July, a six-day string of thunderstorms and wind prodded us to put the canopy and chairs away; we simply moved our outdoor living to the deck, huddled beneath the narrow overhang where only a slight misting of rain would reach us and dampen our shirtsleeves. It’s just water, it’ll dry soon enough.

When I would visit my dad at the nursing home where he spent his final years, I wondered what his fellow residents remembered about their lives, what they missed or what made them feel wistful in light of their current circumstance. If I were in such a place right now, today, with my mind firing on most pistons most days, I think I’d go mad within the week, and hope that should my life’s events turn in such a direction, I’ll be pleasantly confused as we take that final trip down the gravel driveway, across the bridge and past the buckeyes. We all have our worst imaginings; this is one of mine. I quickly reassure myself that it’s Sunday, early morning, I’m healthy and upright in the meadow-turned-woods, and I can still feed myself.

In fact, and to my surprise, the longer I stood beneath a rickety stand of older mulberries at a middle spot in the meadow, the more I felt safe and happy as I recalled the earlier days of summer. I stretched out full length on the soft bed of those memories, feeling content as the wistfulness evaporated, not a trace of melancholy left behind. My immediate future held a bowl of steaming cooked oats with fresh apple chunks and a generous spoonful of peanut butter, finished off with a drizzle of my friend Jonna’s honey (traded for a couple bags of granola. I got the better end of that deal; I owe her another bag or two). The rest of the walk ends on a lighter note, and I send up buckets of gratitude that my memories of The Canopied Summer of 2020 are vivid and intact. Perhaps as I keep collecting the days and years ahead of me, I’ll choose gratitude for what was over regret for what is, whatever that “is” might be. So far in my life, even in the middle of a worst imagining made real, there has always been something to be thankful for, some crack in the dark mortar of despair that can’t hold back the light determined to break through.

How can a simple morning walk yield such a rich harvest of meandering thoughts?

Um…I think that’s what walks are for.

And the sun still shines over the goldenrod to the east, a symphony of reassuring yellow and spiderweb strands. Life is good, no matter what.

Real Time

A strong and steady downpour is the soundtrack to this morning’s kitchen work—I’m peeling a dozen freshly hardboiled eggs while they’re still warm (a pleasure, truly, as the shells slide right off), and if the sun keeps coming up for eleven more days, at least breakfast-on-the-go will be taken care of, without the morning rush hassle of trying to peel them cold and still get out the door on time. The windows are open as the rain comes down in sheets but the wind doesn’t blow the slightest bit sideways. And yet I can feel the air moving about. What meteorological magic is this? I need no answer to that question. It is enough to acknowledge and appreciate my current circumstance.

Some minutes later, the storm spent and the air a bit more clear, I watch as a solitary monarch butterfly flits about in the trees on the ridge and comes to rest on the leaf of a black walnut sapling, the only leaf not caught up in the thermal that’s causing the others on the same branch to flap about madly. More magic, more acknowledgement. And, as always, more gratitude for the random gift of right place, right time.

Whenever I notice what’s going on around me in any particular moment, which is most of the time, I don’t regret the time not spent ruminating about what might happen, what’s just around the corner that I can’t see, and the pile of work to the left of my keyboard back at the office. Oh, I do wonder at times what winter will be like, especially this year (in 2020, cue the Game of Thrones music, right?), but when my head goes to that future place and my feet are still touching grass and a flight of dragonflies darts about in the airspace above me, any thought of a future snowstorm that buries the trucks up to their axels fades away in that split second of imagining, and I wriggle my toes a bit deeper into the soft clover dampened by the downpour that just stopped a few minutes ago. As someone who spent most of her childhood and formative adult years managing all sorts of anxiety, I’m cherishing this hard-won peace. I worked at it, breathed through it and let it wash over me time and again until it was indistinguishable from my own skin. “Liz, you’re so calm. Such an earth mother”. That may be true, and I hope it is. But there is a long road over my shoulder that brought me here and enough lingering restlessness below the surface to remind me that Once and For All is a myth.

Yesterday, I walked the land with the day’s only egg tucked safely into the pocket of my shorts. If that doesn’t keep your spine straight and all sensory systems on full alert, I’m not sure what will. Seventeen or so acres later, as I concluded my steps making the final steep ascent up the slope to the house, the egg was still intact and my mind was filled with those recent images of tree branches reaching out to one another across the paths, on their way to a slow arboreal embrace. I had carefully ducked and dodged HUGE but nearly invisible spider webs stretched across the space in front of me, leaving the tiny architects to their now-passive hunting, and put my dew-soaked walking shoes on the porch to dry in the rising sun. Patrick and I had talked the night before about a few errands we wanted to run. A glimpse at the weather forecast showed mostly sun and late afternoon clouds, but a dinner menu was nowhere in sight. We made it up as we went along—the best kind of days, right? The ones with no agenda. We came home with a backseat full of mums and other autumn-hardy flowers to add to the landscape, after some time spent on the makeshift potting table just outside the back door (two long metal car ramps resting atop a pair of sawhorses). If I’d asked myself that morning what I wanted to accomplish by day’s end, I’m not sure it would have included burgundy, tangerine and pale blue pansies repotted into old metal colanders and tiny air plants resting boho-like on the kitchen windowsill. I’d have been content to see the sink empty and the drainer full, floors swept and the bed made. Now for the next few mornings I can gaze upon the lasting surprise of spontaneous flowers. To-do lists are sometimes overrated.

Please don’t let me villainize the virtues of planning ahead, though. That’s not what this is about or how I feel at all. Had we not sat down together twenty-four years ago with more than an Idea of where we wanted to be by this time in our shared lives, Naked Acres wouldn’t be part of our story. We talked into many wee hours and wrote down on bits of paper large and small what we envisioned for ourselves, trying not to be knocked off track by the unanticipated turn of events (episodes of financial precariousness, shifts in family members’ health—you know, the stuff of life). Eight steps forward, six back was the rhythm of our journey toward the land caretaker role, and whatever compelled us to keep moving forward, we’re deeply grateful for it, because here we are now, standing humble and awe-struck by the life that surrounds us. Of course we have another Idea of how our dotage will play out as the grass continues to grow and we become less able to start the mower. My gut tells me that’s a long way off, but my gut never registered the possibility of a pandemic either. I lean on my intuition both lightly and responsibly, and keep that pen and paper handy for the next round of “what do we do if…?” discussions.

For now, it’s reassuring to know that we can balance the sometimes teetering see-saw of what might come with what currently is.

That, plus eleven hardboiled eggs in the fridge, peeled and ready to eat, will do just fine.