Getting Ready

Strong southwestern winds from Arizona and Utah made their way across the Kansas plains and rearranged the lawn furniture in the sitting area behind the house yesterday before pushing east to sway the dangling birdfeeders in the suburban yards of Pittsburgh and Vermont. Our cushion-less chairs tipped over, coming to rest in the leavings of last summer’s mulch, waiting for me to right them again. I thanked the sky for a reason to move my limbs and the ground below for holding me fast.

Just yesterday, in a pass around the west side of the house, I saw the tightly-packed leaves of this year’s daffodils standing hopeful and eager to please in their gravel-topped bed below the kitchen window. I swear to you, they hadn’t been up a few hours earlier. Now I’ll keep an eye out for the singular red-streaked yellow parrot tulip that grows on the steep hill above the meadow—she’s in there somewhere, I know. And who turned loose the flocks of wrens and redwing blackbirds and one magnificent pileated woodpecker knocking on the bark of a fallen black walnut down by the bridge? Two days ago, cardinals and tiny black-capped chickadees and laughing crows were the main event, as they have been for the past three months. When the shadow of a blue heron’s wingspan fully stretched out in flight slides across the still-brown grass and the hypnotic cheerful droning of hidden chorus frogs in the creek pulls you forward in a walking trance, you know that winter is getting ready to close the door behind itself (please, don’t slam it…) and leave you to revel wildly in this next season’s affairs. In an unexpected “not to be left out” moment, two of the three indoor Christmas cacti have each produced three blooms. I’m surrounded by the miracles of life.

Spring does this every time, and I chuckle inwardly at my fresh amazement. The crocuses and first bright green tips of wild garlic chives, the sun’s glowing generosity at both ends of the day, the trees along the ridge looking forward to getting dressed soon—all of it surprises me even though I’ve collected nearly sixty of these seasons in my bones (it’s so inspiring that in the middle of writing this reflection, I got up off the couch to make a batch of strawberry coconut almond birthday cake granola, assembled and in the oven in less than 20 minutes. Want some? Message me and we’ll work it out).

After the year we’ve had, individually and in common, this spring feels deeply and forever different from the others. I am wide awake in a technicolor dream (anyone else out there dream in color?) cherishing each view, my eyes stinging with grateful tears that I’m still here and survivor guilt tears that I’m, well, still here while others’ eyes uncomfortably register the empty chair at the table. Late last week, I’d just hung up after scheduling my two vaccine appointments (I don’t need to specify which vaccine now, do I?) and cued up on YouTube The Lion King’s opening “Circle of Life”, a hymn to all things sacred. I didn’t make it past the first refrain before I was sobbing at my home office desk in a face-drenched storm of release and mourning. This too is spring in all it’s glory—cleansing rains to wash away winter’s untended sorrows and repurpose them as life-giving tonic for every new leaf and sprout that calls this place home (It’s probably best that I ration my viewing of the fully vaccinated hug reunions that will flood social media in the weeks to come, if I’m ever to get the garden planted). With the last fragments of winter’s browns and grays as evidence to the contrary, spring, the Great Game-Changer, is about to unfurl its best on us again, and it will catch us happily off-guard. We’ll notice things we hadn’t seen the day before and convince ourselves that magic is real (yes, Hogwarts exists) and find all manner of reasons to be outside more than inside.

My daily walks will bear the weight of a new attentive spirit as I gather for the first time this year fresh images of a sleeping earth waking up to herself. In a sweet mix of new and familiar, she will once again lay at my feet her tender offspring in all forms—the spotted fawns and garlic mustard and morels and blue fragments of a robin’s egg at the base of the mulberry sapling off the front deck. I’ll do what I always do each spring. Drop to my knees, rise to my feet in a standing ovation of one and dance like everyone’s watching.

Listening

Tell me your story.

Who are you?

Where were you born?

Where have you been?

I’m here.

Wide awake and listening on the edge of my seat.

I want to know what you had for breakfast and who gave you the recipe.

Are you an only child?

Who held you when you had your bad dreams? Fell down? Threw up?

When you were seven, did you put cards on the spokes of your bicycle wheels like I did, with clothespins?

What’s some good advice you got? What happened when you followed it?

You have my undivided attention. Here, take it (she says, her cupped hands empty and open and waiting, with infinite room for the details of you).

There’s a tuxedo kitten nestled in the space between my neck and my right shoulder, listening too, patient audience of one and I tell him my secrets and he doesn’t mock me. Nods in all the right places. He’ll take care of whatever you tell him, held safely in his little velvet-padded paws.

Who hears your secrets? Besides you?

What do you tell yourself when you’re unsure? I hope you talk kindly, like you would to someone who means the world to you, your dearest and most trusted reliable friend.

Tell me another story. Your history is safe in my ears. I’ll even watch for what you don’t say, the glances left and right, the gestures and nodding and fidgety fingers and that slow beginning of a smile creeping up on your lips. I’m here for it all, until the house lights come on and folks head for the exit doors. I’ll stay for the credits.

What do you remember? What are you trying to just…forget, but it won’t leave you alone?

I know. I know.

Do you like raisins? Are you more of a banana person?

I’m an apple gal myself. That crunch and those juices I lick off my fingers are good anytime. Sometimes I have two in one day.

When was the last time you laughed out loud? What made you do that? Dad had a great laugh. Mom too. She’d smile wide and show all her teeth and throw her head back. Seeing your parents laugh is a great gift.

I saw a fox’s den today in the patch of woods down by the creek. The entrance looked freshly pawed. It’s too close to the chicken coops so we’re going to watch extra carefully these next few weeks as winter hands over the keys to spring. I’ll keep you posted.

But getting back to you…

How are you? Really?

No harm.

No judgement.

No foul.

No fire.

Acceptance. Attention. Regard. The most respectful curiosity. And all the time in the world.

You know, you don’t have to tell me anything. But if you change your mind, I’ll be here.

The Season of "Almost There"

Olive oil and cat litter kick off this week’s grocery list, followed by onions, lens wipes, broccoli, organic milk and shoe laces. We also think we need tortilla chips, tuna and a good Argentinian Malbec, so better make room in the back seat for a three-bag curbside pick up order. Patrick will ask if I added coffee ice cream and I’ll say no, not this time, have a clementine instead, and he’ll grunt something unintelligible but clearly from a place of displeasure, and I’ll probably relent. People need coffee ice cream. I looked it up.

On the breakfast plate this morning (a green one with the word “blessed” on it, one of a three-piece set with other encouraging words—”thankful”, “grateful”—pressed in the pre-glazed clay, a long-ago birthday gift from my dear late friend Jeannie) is the dinner I missed last night because a tension headache wouldn’t let me go. While I slept it off in the upstairs guestroom, Patrick aroma-fied the house with his spiced and slow-cooked pork belly specialty, pot of brown rice on the side. Waking up to the lingering scents of fennel and cardamom, I took the leftovers in a different direction as morning fare, skipping the rice and adding a couple of scrambled eggs, then sliding a generous handful of those thin cantina-style tortilla chips under the whole enterprise. Topped with the fresh shreds of that illegally sharp white cheddar cheese I love too much for my own good, I was face down in it as the fog shifted through the trees on the ridge. It’s a view I recommend highly, no matter what meal you’re eating in our home.

The plate is already washed and propped up on its edge in the drainer.

I had fully intended to walk this morning, for the first time in just over a month, but the chilly rain and my own hunger kept me tethered more comfortably to home. I may reverse that decision sooner than later because that fog is just beckoning, begging to surround me in its tiny water droplet mystery. I’m not adverse to getting wet or muddy (and there’s plenty of that waiting in the fields, I can assure you), but for now, writing and editing a manuscript and eyeing the stack of five-inch square fabric samples stacked neatly on the sewing table in the studio will hold my attention through and past the lunch hour. Sundays here are great—filled with promise and spontaneity and random bursts of energy to complete half-finished projects (mostly of the artistic kind) before responsibility pulls us reluctantly off the warm mattress tomorrow morning and shoves us into the steady paycheck life. I hope you hear the gratitude for employment in there somewhere. It’s those daily paid work schedules that keep the lights on, the space heaters humming and our respective studios filled with the tools and supplies we obey in the pursuit of creativity. We see our tiny artists’ colony of two as our true vocation, with office and transportation-based work on the side, subsidizing it all.

There’s a restless and edgy feeling lately that I can’t shake, and I know it’s because spring is whispering on the horizon. The creek has once again rearranged its banks and the front deck is an island surrounded by a mud bog; the no-shoes-inside rule is about to go into full effect, with glaring looks from the Lady of the House flung at anyone who says they forgot. It’s the end of winter, the season of a teasing “not yet” in the face of our longed-for itch to put in the spring potatoes, rebuild the enclosed chicken run and pull down the last of the sinewy grapevine ropes while we can still see them hanging slack and thawed out in the arms of the black walnuts along the path to the woods. Winter’s main chore is shoveling snow, and I love doing that while it’s still dark outside, but I think I’ve come to the end of my starry-eyed wonder for it. As much as I silently criticize anyone who doesn’t Love All Seasons All the Time, I find myself in near-full collusion with their sentiments and eventually join them. Kindness and empathy demand a more understanding inner posture, and I think the Creator is tolerant of our weary outlook at this point in the calendar year. I’ll try to be more like that.

From the front deck, I can hear the turbulent creek waters pushing their way past the Old Man Sycamore with his dangling tire swing and over the fallen blue beech trunks connecting the swollen banks. Squirrels and kittens alike traverse these smooth bark-stripped natural bridges in playful pursuit of one another, managing just fine in the drizzly rain. I think I’m that much closer to putting on my taller wellies and venturing at least as far as the corner where the woods meet the field. I thought I heard a red-winged blackbird near the bridge. If she can be out there, so can I.

The writing and fabric scraps can wait. What’s going on out there comes from a sacred place of numbered days.

Another choice I won’t regret.

Incremental Progress

“There’s more to life than increasing its speed.”

(Saw that on a sheet of Hello Kitty stickers the other day, found tucked away in the second right-hand drawer of my late father-in-law’s old desk. It’s like author Richard Bach wrote, in “Illusions”: you quote the truth where you find it.)

Behind me, on the other side of the living room wall that gives us privacy in the bathroom and propriety for folks sitting on the couch, the rising winter sun bathes the sky in an ombré of soft pinks and blues, a stop-you-in-your-tracks morning moment that blurs other options around the edges. Stand at the window and gaze. Watch the unmarked snow as that orange-turning-golden yellow sun sets random flakes to glittering as far as your eyes will track it (you can let the cats out in a minute, coffee can wait). I’m looking out across a unicorn’s playground and if I linger a few minutes more, a herd of them will step out of the woods, shaking their magnificent heads as they prance about. Of course they’ll leave no hoofprints. They’re unicorns.

Not bad for deciding to look through the frost on one’s bathroom window instead of tidying the throws on the chairs or putting away last night’s dinner dishes.

What I just witnessed unfolded imperceptibly and clearly, a gradual tumbling forth of elements in their proper places. Without the ability to glance behind the Grand Curtain of this morning’s natural show, I can only presume and wonder about the staging directions. Timing, for the lifting of our main Star, is everything. At some point, night will become a memory, replaced by light and emerging colors and all that is possible in the first second of a new day. Seconds become moments and objects once shrouded in darkness now show their distinct features—gray-brown limbs of volunteer sycamores standing in a perfect row between our field and the neighbor’s, their bare canopies looking for all the world like the lungs that they truly are. The stiff dried stalks of late summer’s goldenrod are sparkly and wand-like, transformed and reimagined by the snow-dust on their seed heads and the snow blanket at their buried feet. The scene is a painting entitled “Waiting”, or “Patience”.

Much as I love and respect each of the seasons that kiss this land, it also occurs to me that that same sun is rising over the beaches of Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia, shining its first light on the wet backs of a school of breaching dolphins and the gentle top points of a whelk protruding from the packed sand. The good people of Savannah are maybe putting on jackets to venture out for their morning coffee and cinnamon rolls while it takes me a full thirteen minutes to put on long underwear, jeans, two sweatshirts, a quilted flannel jacket and boots with ice trackers just to take the frozen bags of trash from the porch to the car. I’m glad I’m bundled up and am also looking forward to more unencumbered days. I text my sister, Peggy, with articles about collecting shells at Tybee and we half-jokingly begin making plans to be there the minute this pandemic is under control.

From today’s early morning vantage point, I pause to notice how far we’ve come since last March, the slow, small and at times highly-scrutinized steps that took us from there to here. I don’t think we dared imagine this day, this moment from our wobbly perch on the edge of the Unknown last spring. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other, doing the best we could with the information we had at the time. Anxiousness was, perhaps, the undercurrent thrumming of our days, and at times it overtook us, but we pushed it back into its corner, letting gratitude fill the gaps and splash over the sides. Time gives us the gift of perspective. There are some lessons you can only learn from a distance.

Speaking of distance, last Wednesday was Patrick’s first day back to work after an extra-long weekend, compliments of back-to-back winter storms and no school for Presidents’ Day. Well, it was supposed to be his first day back but the car got stuck in the snow right next to the chicken coops. Frustrating, because he’d even done a practice run up and down the driveway the day before, packing down two tire-width trails all the way to the street a quarter mile away. But something must have shifted or drifted in the night and the driveway just wasn’t having it. I suited up (thirteen minutes worth) to help, and we took turns rocking and pushing, forward and reverse, shoveling and slipping, car mats repurposed as traction beneath the tires. The car inched along, shot the mats out from underneath the tires and we just kept at it. Patrick connected with his boss to say he’d miss his first shift and we took a break to get warm back at the house (it was barely 1 degree). To the east, a sunrise was in progress, doing its own incremental work while we grunted and strategized different options. We tried again two hours later, getting the car another twenty feet closer to the bridge, but the undercarriage was no match for the layers of snow and ice beneath; we couldn’t sustain this kind of work down a quarter-mile driveway with a bridge and two hills. A friend recommended another friend’s help, but it wouldn’t arrive until well past the end of Patrick’s second shift. We picked up the shovel and car mats and headed back to the house, stumbling our way through the icy channels and ruts we’d made in the driveway. Eventually, help arrived and the car made it over the bridge, up the first hill and down the next, coming to rest in a facing-outward position. Patrick altered his morning go-to-work exit plan to walk the length of the driveway, backpack and walking stick in hand. He felt sturdy and tough and accomplished, and rightly so. We’d pushed a car thirty feet through packed snow drifts in single-digit temps and didn’t snap at each other once.

Keeping at it is how we got from there to here. One step, one idea, one push at a time. Pick your pause moment. Look over your shoulder to see how far you’ve come. Notice the ruts in the path, the hills, the flat places and the view to the east where the sun always gets the party started.

Feel sturdy. And tough. And accomplished. You’re still here.