The Bones of a Thing

At the northwest corner of the walking path parallel the woods, past the Hill and beneath a stand of young sycamore saplings, what’s left of a possum is scattered and pressed into the cool clay soil, the work of some mystical arboreal curator who tends to the living and the dead with equal measure while we sleep. But for a wooden frame and some glass, I could be passing a museum of natural history’s exhibit entitled “Not That High on the Food Chain” or “Late Night Coyote Snack”. One of the creature’s mandibles, incisors perfectly intact, offers a ghostly half-smile and I sift through memories of all the encounters I’ve ever had with a living possum who might have been protecting her newborn babes, that snarling face frozen in defiance and indecision. Sections of lumbar vertebrae here, a radius there, the remaining missing bits carried deeper into the thicket of blackberry brambles by a predator who wanted to eat its meal in peace—I can only imagine what unfolded for both of them as one life was sustained by another (unwillingly perhaps, but how do I know? I wasn’t there at the time and mustn’t assume anything about how such arrangements are made). This pause on my morning walk moved silently from observation to tender memorial service. A whispered “Mitakuye Oyasin” reminds me that I'm not the only one here and someday, my bones too will rest somewhere in the cool clay soil. I hope it’s not a violent end to a life I’ve cherished on this side of gratitude. Having meant that as a prayer and not simply a meandering musing, I send it out and upward to the canopy above, resuming my walk with fresh humility and more than a side eye to the Grand Scheme of Things in whose circle I continue to dance my days.

There’s so much I really don’t know, or ever will.

I live most of the time in wonder and curiosity, hungrily filling my plate with the knowledge of others who spend their days watching and making notes (I know there’s more to it than that, and am certain that such work can be tedious or painstaking, even boring at times. But I daydream about it anyway). I do my own informal research, noticing how this year it seems the sycamores are shedding their bark in greater volume than I recall from past seasons as I step over the curling gray pieces in the short feathery grass of the walking paths. Their now-smooth trunks and branches are a pale celery color and somehow, they look stronger for it, less burdened. Stretching out of their old skin like tall snakes, they push themselves upward into a still-summer blue sky. I join them impulsively for a moment, raising my own arms as far above my head as I can. It does feel good (though my own skin remains intact, which I consider a good and helpful thing for now).

Until scientist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen accidentally discovered a way to view the bones of a thing while testing cathode rays in 1895 (leading to what we now know as the x-ray machine), we humans had to content ourselves with wondering about the inner supporting structures of a life form, or disassemble a once-living thing to get a closer look at how it all fits together. I’m like more than a few folks in wanting to know what goes on inside a being, how it stands upright or crawls sleekly through the wet grass, soundlessly and with such grace. What gives its flesh a place to hang, how does the architecture know when it’s time to get a move on and what sets it all in marvelous motion? It fascinates me in those last minutes of my lunch hour and I image-search the internet for a visual to satisfy my curiosity for a while. Then it’s back to work, to an aspect of my job that is equally fascinating, and privileged, truly—I get to interview people who want to become volunteer members of the hospice team. It’s no small ambition. The respectfully curious questions I ask help me get to a different set of “bones”—the structure of someone’s beliefs and perspectives, the rich soil of their most precious values, from which everything else springs forth, the nexus point on which all their decisions pivot. In an hour’s time I hear stories that give evidence to a life framed and enriched by giving, a gentle insistence that they be allowed to keep a promise to a dying parent, a clear vision of a future filled with patients of their own as they put their shoulders to the hard wheel of medical school. They tell me much more than I’d ever be allowed to ask, and I hold their answers in sacred trust, fully aware of the gift I’ve just received.

Some people’s values are as loud and clear as a trumpet, others ask that we watch carefully for the slightest nuanced clue before drawing an incomplete conclusion. And some don’t tell us at all until after they’re gone, having lead by example if we were paying attention. All this from what’s left of a possum beneath the watchful rustling leaves of a few young sycamores…

There’s so much I really don’t know.

Or ever will.

Midsummer: Peacock Splendor and Bug Repellent

I’m thinking about asking the good folks at Avon to change the name of their insect repellent from “Skin-so-Soft” to “Skin-so-Tasty”, just to be on the same page as the mosquitoes and biting flies that followed me around the field this morning. I was a two-legged walking marinade for them and have the welts to prove it (no photographs, please. Some of you are eating). But the wild blackberry vines gotta be trimmed so Patrick can mow the paths this afternoon without coming back to the house striped in scratches, so…into the woods I go, smelling delicious to a thousand hungry, buzzing relatives. And here I thought I was pretty high on the food chain. Perspective, my dears. Perspective.

Meanwhile, under the bed in the upstairs guestroom I came across a stash of more than five hundred peacock feathers, shed and collected one at a time over seven years when we had a modest family strutting about the acreage, catching us off-guard with their regal beauty. It’s nearly August, and I lean toward wistfulness as the summer turns this corner without that gorgeous flock entertaining us and leaving their plumage behind on the grass like so many beautiful toys at an upscale daycare center. Sparky was our first, left behind by the land’s previous owners, with the real estate agent trying to figure out how to catch him and take him back to his own farm. He gave up as we moved forward to signing the closing paperwork and yes, we wrote Sparky into the contract, taking out a 30-year mortgage on 41.1 acres and a peacock (when real estate agents gather for conventions and conferences, I’ll bet this was one of the “strange but true” stories swapped over cocktails after the day’s breakout sessions).

Sparky roosted in the old dairy barn built at the sloping end of the driveway, perching serenely on the apex of the roof, pointing his tiny crowned head south and crying out at sunset in plaintive hope for a mate. The first time we heard it, we thought a frightened child had somehow become trapped in one of the rusty milking stanchions and ran toward the sound like heroes on their way to a rescue. Over time, Patrick learned to mimic the sound just close enough to set Sparky off in broad daylight, much to the startled delight of visitors and family. The two of them would call back and forth until someone ran out of vocal energy or the laying flock would charge ‘round to corner of their coop to see what the commotion was all about. For weeks, Sparky called out in vain, no one answering his audible personal ad except Patrick, and so turned his attention to those chickens (a bird is a bird, after all) who paid him no never-mind as he splendidly shook out and arranged his glorious feathers into a majestic half-circle fan of iridescent attractiveness. Oh, they’d look up with their beady little eyes and consider the spectacle for a moment, then resume their aimless ground-pecking, leaving Sparky deflated and lonely still. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?

But perseverance paid off and one day, a lovely peahen (I named her Claire) came strolling down the driveway looking for the lovelorn vocalist who’d lured her away from who knows what nearby farm with his irresistible siren call. She sized him up, looked about at his land dowry and settled herself in, scouting out her options for ground nesting real estate. She ended up choosing the spot right below the bathroom window, overgrown with lamb’s-quarter, velvetleaf and pokeweed (I suspect she thought the berries would add a touch of decorative whimsy), having already laid her decoy clutch of eggs several yards away in the overgrowth behind the old potting shed to distract any predators from the real deal. We only discovered this ground nest when Patrick was busy with the weed whip, coming dangerously close to decapitating her as she roosted among the stalks. She didn’t budge, even as the snapping plastic string felled the greenery above her head. Patrick jumped backwards when we saw her there, her eye calm and steady, his respect for the protective maternal instinct deepened in an instant. She stayed there until four of the little ones hatched. We didn’t see them until they were old enough to walk safely beneath her sheltering wings and one of them poked its head out of her plumage one afternoon as she walked slowly across the grass below the silver maple on the ridge. We gave her a wide berth as our faces hurt from smiling so wide.

As often happens in the natural course of things, only two of the four hatchlings made it to adulthood—one male, one female. Sparky kept his distance as they grew and eventually took to rearing the young boy (Blue) while Claire kept close to the girl (her name escapes me at the moment but I’m sure it was cute). Blue grew fast and strong as Sparky taught him how to employ his fan to catch what’s-her-name’s eye (with varying degrees of success). We’d often find father and son circling each other in a dizzying game of male dominance while Claire and her daughter browsed alongside the chickens in contented indifference. That indifference must’ve grown some pretty deep roots over the summer because come late August that year, both mother and daughter disappeared into the meadow and didn’t resurface. We never found a feather, a carcass, anything to indicate they’d met an violent end. They just left. I envisioned them picking their way across the neighbor’s soybean field, all their little peahen belongings tied carefully in red handkerchiefs on the end of long walking sticks, chatting about this and that as they set out for their next adventure. Sparky and Blue may have spent a few days looking for them but kept at their circling rituals until Sparky eventually got too old to play. We found him next to the old dairy barn late one summer evening, his feathered body fully intact directly below the spot where he’d perched years ago, calling out for company. Blue took to hanging out near the chicken coop, opening his fan every evening for the girls’ entertainment, like a long-running Las Vegas act. When we finally found his remains behind the old goat barn a few years later, we accepted the end of our exotic peafowl-rearing days. A year later, we started raising Boer goats for meat, but that’s another story.

I remember vividly those hot and sunny afternoons, walking an easy lap from the house down to the barns and the chicken coops, stooping to pick up the long and colorful plumes that Sparky and Blue had shed, marveling at the way the light would catch the golds and coppers buried among the green and deep teal strands, making the feather’s eye even more distinct. I don’t remember being harassed by biting flies or no-see-ums or mosquitoes (though I’m sure they were out there, hungry and searching). Just fantastic color and midsummer contentment. Funny what our minds sort out and focus on…

Five hundred feathers later, I’m perched on the apex of my memories, hearing the echoes of a sky-piercing love call and happy that I had a front row seat to one of the sweetest love stories a flock of birds could offer up.

Looking forward to you, August. And thanks for the flashback.

Forgetting

Someone dear to me is watching her mother disappear into Alzheimer’s one excruciating piece at a time. We reconnected briefly last week after several months and I could hear it in her voice—the mix of hollow fatigue and grateful determination to be that calm landing place, the privilege of blurring the line between daughter and caregiver and bearing the weight of that unusual, awkward role-switching. I kept listening, pushing aside the hard memories of the front seat I had for my father’s similar descent. It needed to be all about her. Nothing else mattered but listening and validating, seeing her and listening more. I nodded as her voice cracked and handed over my heart to her in silent solidarity. There are no words anywhere that would make this better, not even one inch.

I’m humbled and encouraged by her raw honesty, how she’s naming and claiming the emotions that threaten to engulf her and take her far away from her husband and children who also feel her nurturing touch in their lives. Her children are watching and learning. I imagine them remembering as adults the view they currently have of their mother tending to the impossible and showing them what love looks like in that moment.

On my walk this morning, I saw a young buck and a doe on the path parallel to the thick dark green woods. We stopped and considered each other, myriad options for what would happen next. The buck’s velvety rack caught a glint of sunrise while the doe took to browsing for a split second, her eye still trained on me and my two walking sticks. I gave my best imitation of a chuffing sort of snort, like they do when they meet up with their own kind, and the buck immediately leapt into the wall of sheltering trees, swallowed up by their mystery. I didn’t hear his hooves hit the ground or break any fallen branches. He just…disappeared. The doe raised her head, looked at me and then in the direction of her companion and, without panic, moved gracefully to join him. I continued my steps, wondering if I’d even seen them at all.

It wasn’t until I got to the path through the open field-becoming-young-woods that I realized I’d forgotten all about the load of heavy throw rugs I’d tossed in the washer before heading out, and how I’d set up my breakfast things so they’d be ready when I returned. I’d forgotten completely that I even lived in a house, that it and the cars and the cats probably still existed while I was out adding images of this cherished and unimaginably beautiful place to my bank of precious and impermanent memories. To leave sizeable chunks of our daily routines and commitments behind and trust that they’ll be there when we need to call them up again and move on with our lives…the word “gift” doesn’t even come close.

Alzheimer’s takes away what we take for granted—the ability to not be frantically focused on the data streaming at us, trying to sift through it for anything reassuringly familiar, the ease of setting aside even the most important projects and people in our lives to be immersed in the present moment. Some who struggle with dementia eventually cross over into that place of “pleasantly confused” but getting there can be brutal, leaving those of us watching and caring on the sidelines shredded in anticipatory terror that one day, there too we shall walk. It’s all we can do not to look, or run, away.

But love asks that we stay. And so we do. We go with the flow of a muddled sentence trying to recapture a tattered story, agreeing that yes, dad, that’s just the way it happened. We answer the same question eleven times as if it were the first time, with sincerity or surprise or whatever will relax a loved one’s furrowed brow and trembling hands. We no longer put out forks and spoons because it really isn’t any big deal to eat with your fingers (that’s why washcloths were created, right)? And we find a quiet place to cry alone when she can’t remember who we are, her eyes wide as she searches our face for clues that never come. For now, it’s enough just to be together because she’s in there somewhere. We’ll stay and wait and keep looking for her.

In the field this morning, I remembered that I could forget. And I’ll remember that for as long as I can, because this morning, someone dear to me is waking up and doing what love asks her to do.

A Creative Pursuit

I no sooner transferred all the tomato, chard, cabbage and marigold starts from their temporary shelves in the studio’s south-facing window and tucked them into the soil of the garden’s raised beds when my bookbinding supplies moved in with all their luggage—paper for signatures, waxed thread, fresh book board and repurposed hard book covers sliced away from their pages (scavenged from thrift stores), PVA glue and a bone folder for getting the edges of those signatures sharply creased. The book press Patrick made for me sits on the floor at my feet, and the guillotine paper cutter has a place of honor (and safety) on one of the folding tables I pirated from our farmers’ market set-up, its arm locked in place. The shelves barely had a minute to enjoy the absence of the weight they’d borne for the previous nine weeks.

The plan was to dismantle the indoor garden nursery and let the studio breathe into its less-cluttered self for a while, giving me a clear view out of that south-facing window from my relaxed spot on the couch (I need only turn my head slightly left to do this, and have a sweetly framed view of the cottonwoods that line the creek on it way to the Licking River). It never happened. I had lunch with my friend, Marilyn a couple of weeks ago, where she shared an apple-walnut candy with me for dessert. It was luscious and I said so, prompting her to find the box they came in, all the way from Washington state (her daughter brought them with her on a recent visit). The front of the box was charming so I offered to make it into a book, like I often do with someone else’s recycling.

It’s not difficult to make a book by hand; it’s just a process with a few moving parts and the need for space to let the steps of the process sprawl and evolve naturally. If I’m going to set up and haul out the supplies to make one book, I might as well make a dozen while I’m there, and the next thing I know it’s a week from last Friday and journals-in-process are still curing or awaiting their sewn signatures or covers are pressing as the glue dries. When I really get going, the process seeps into the living room where stacks of books serve as weights for book covers just glued up. The kittens enjoy leaping from one tottering pile to the next and I sternly shoo them away into another room but it’s no good—there are piles of books-turned-book-presses there too. At least I can close the door to the studio/guestroom and walk away for lunch or a tea break, hoping the kittens find other things to do.

Grateful as I am to be employed and insured, I think I could walk away from all of it just to sit in this space of creative ambition, hand-crafting books and journals and seeing what a Cheez-its box looks like with pages between its front and back pieces (I’m reluctantly gluten-free now, my last Cheez-it purchase a bittersweet memory, so now I’ll have to scrabble through your recycle bins on Thursdays or whenever you’re scheduled to put them out on the curb). To make it even more alluring, the rain this morning has been coming straight down in gentle sheets, letting me keep the windows open for sound and air—a cozy backdrop to the creative pursuits. It’s still morning as I write this, but looks like a cloudy autumn day, early evening. I could also be napping easily (the farmers’ market yesterday was a four-hour marathon of happy customers and dwindling inventory. I think I’ve earned a nap).

But the siren call of bookmaking has become part of me at a deep and cellular level ever since another friend, Evelyn, showed me how it all works. When someone says “forever indebted”, I have a new understanding and appreciation for what that really means. I also have stacks of hand-made books, all sizes and designs, waiting to be claimed by whoever their new owners will be. I give most of them away rather spontaneously and have recently been encouraged to sell them Somewhere. We’ll see. As long as folks keep eating Ghirardelli brownies made from a boxed mix or thrift stores keep selling hard-cover books for almost a nickel and friends hand over the rest of their long-abandoned scrapbooking paper, I’ll be at that table in the studio, rearranging the pieces into something that will press, cure and be wrapped in waxed paper for gifting at a later date.