Getting There

A few years ago, in a pebble-textured blue sketchbook I bought at the local indie bookstore, I practiced using a new set of colored pencils. I drew simple images, like daffodils on a rolling green hill, abstract angles and curves framed in rainbow dots that quickly wore the newly-sharpened tips of said pencils down to nubbins. A few turns on the pencil sharpener I inherited, the one that Dad had mounted on the wall near the door of his downstairs workshop at the family home, and I was back at it, shading in the distinct outlines of a tulip’s red petals and alternating between yellow and black for the bee making its way across the page.

Somewhere, though, my attention span (never really long to begin with) turned in another direction and I began to write, in short phrases and appropriate single words, the story of my journey from fear to compassion for the people who had made life difficult for me. It took the shape of a spiral. Hard to read (you have to keep turning the book in a circle and it made me nauseous after a few go-arounds) but no other physical arrangement of the words would have captured such an important and necessary outpouring. In the center of it all, I had glued a small circular piece of mirror that needs no further explanation.

I was rearranging the shelves in my studio a few months ago when I found this book—hadn’t gone looking for it—and sat for a moment in silent respect for the depth and breadth of these two pages. My fingers traced the edges of the tiny mirror and smudged it a bit as I recalled the years of abuse and bullying at the hands of a family member, the men who raped me, the therapists who reassured and released me from their guidance when the time was right, the husband who saved my life—literally—twice, and the days when sweet peace wasn’t just within reach but sat comfortably in my lap, no plans to go anywhere. None of these experiences moved in a one-way linear direction. My feet have doubled back on lessons I needed to learn more than once (usually in front of a couple of people), carrying me forward into healing and heartache in equal measure. And isn’t that how it goes? Just when you think you’ve got something sorted out, a sudden yank of the rug beneath your feet and there you are, staring upward from your vantage point on the floor, humbled and blank slate once again. Rinse and repeat say life’s instructions on the back of the bottle. I get up, towel off and head into my day. Like Dad used to say, “self-revelation is not for the squeamish.”

Neither saint nor victim, I considered what the spaces in between the carefully selected words and phrases held in their invisible silence. What choices had I made that moved me from “shame” and “righteous anger” to “sympathy for the enemy” and “necessary separation”? I recall a stretch of indifference that gave me a break from all the work of trying to understand the mind of a bully, the logic of an abuser. I came to understand denial as a valuable coping skill until I found my more confident feet and could stand sure-footed once again. And in an undefined, unchronicled moment, I introduced myself to the practice of compassion and forgiveness, finding a path to liberation and release. Some days it’s easier to get there than others, but I keep trying. I have forgiven the one who intimidated and controlled with fear and fists, the ones who took violently without asking, wondering what their lives must have been like to select, from all the tools in their toolkits, the most hurtful and abhorrent options. Even on my worst days I can still do better than that.

Two pages of graphite and a circle of mirror can certainly pack in a lot.

The story isn’t finished yet, and I don’t mean just because I’m still alive and typing these words. It’s good and healthy to look over your shoulder now and then to see where you’ve been before strapping on the backpack and heading into the next leg of the trip. I think about the current State of Affairs, with so much distance between us and our better selves right now, who we were created to become and what we’ve settled for as a human species. I wonder what my own personal experience of compassion and forgiveness could look like on a larger scale, if such a thing is even possible. The folks up the road with their “***k Biden” signs and Putin orchestrating chaos and horror more than five thousand miles from my spot here on the couch…how can I possibly touch that in any meaningful way? I don’t have an answer for that yet but compassion says to keep looking for it, so I do.

I have no idea what shape that part of the story will take, but one thing’s for sure—I’m gonna need a few more blank books and a heck of a lot more pencils.

In Good Company

I have exactly twenty-two dish towels.

I only know this because today is all about the kitchen. I’ll be in it for several hours, restocking a few of our granola flavors for the market and in the flurry of gathering all the necessary supplies, I couldn’t resist a bit of tidying up. I opened the drawer of the Hoosier-style hutch where they live (alongside a stack of handmade cloth napkins) and touched each one, counting as I went.

Of these twenty-two dish towels, I purchased only five; the rest were given to me by dear friends and sisters or inherited from my mom when the family home was sorted and emptied of its tangible memories. We use each and every one of them at some point in the calendar’s unfolding. Small as our house is, the kitchen is rather roomy, second only in square footage to the living room, and there are strategic places to hang these towels after wiping down the long countertop and antique wooden kitchen table. Our stove can hold three of them from its oven door handle, as long as they’re folded lengthwise in thirds. So far, the kittens have resisted the temptation of playing with these dangling soft toys, distracted instead by food and each other’s tails. A damp one (towel, not kitten) drapes nicely over the stand mixer to the right of the sink to dry.

It’s gently surprising, in a comforting sort of way, how their presence cheers me. Laundry days are that much brighter for their presence among the line-dried pile waiting to be folded, because I remember the occasion that brought them into our home, the women friends who carefully selected each one before wrapping them up and handing them over as a thank you present for that evening’s dinner invitation. They sport mostly bunnies and bees, chickens and sunflowers in various designs from vintage to contemporary, and the holiday collection…well, those rich blue, burgundy and gold colors make a humble space look extraordinary any day of the year (I’m not a stickler for seasonal decorating; the ones with winter scenes of deer and snow-covered trees are as welcome in August as in the weeks leading up to Christmas). Function and decoration are the dish towel’s two-handed contribution to our daily rhythm and if you asked, I could tell the story behind each one.

What catches me today, though, are the feelings of warmth and appreciation for the women who gave them to me. When I hang the one Jen gave me that reads “Find the place that fills your heart and nurtures your soul, settle in and you’re home!“, I think of her baking prowess and creativity for her girls’ birthday cakes and how many other love-filled meals we’ve eaten at their table. My sister, Peggy, found a set that perfectly captures the vibe of our house in wintertime—a simple red clapboard house embroidered near the hem while snow falls softly around it, represented as a postage stamp. Peggy is all about hospitality and one glance at these towels puts me right in her generous presence. Jackie and I used to haunt antique stores together, so the ones that look like old feed sacks must have caught her eye at the Amish hardware store up north where she lives. The black outline of a rabbit rests atop a slogan for flour against a primitive tan background and it charms me every time I see it. My sister, Jane, brought us whimsical bees stitched on the border of a cream-colored towel whose texture is honeycombed. I know she wouldn’t mind that this towel has been loved through more than a few pasta dinners, as evidenced by the slight pinkish tinge to one of the bee’s wings after I hastily dabbed some tomato sauce splatters from the stovetop. We keep using it because we like bees and we love Jane. Patrick’s late aunt Gracie hand-embroidered sweet begonias on a set that she gave him at her ninetieth birthday party. Those will never see pasta sauce, I can assure you, but they do come out when the kitchen is all clean and begging for those bright yellows and greens as a finishing touch.

Of course, none of them match, not in theme or colors, and that’s the beauty of such a collection. Our days are an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of events and moods that would quickly outstrip the blandness of a monochromatic stack of pure functionality. We dress our kitchen accordingly, randomly and with memories that keep bringing us joy, wash after wash. But today, even more wonderful than all that, I will get to bake with Jen and Peggy and Jackie and Jane just a hand’s reach away, cheering me on as I measure, chop and stir, and Aunt Gracie overseeing it all in unblemished splendor.

I am surrounded by women who know what our kitchen means to me and it feels good.

Seven Deer

The hammock spinners are back.

On a warmer than usual morning last week, the sun rose over their gossamer village, silken cups of arachnid architecture slung and hanging motionless from the dried tips of last year’s goldenrod stalks, the ones the winds couldn’t smack down. Thin cottony tufts of fog (known to us as the breath of God) move imperceptibly across the field, shape-shifting their way into the soft golden light of this fresh day. I move among them in silence, caught in a web of wonder.

Making my way to the southeast corner of the land on a diagonal path smoothed by Patrick’s skill on the mower, I headed toward the site where we buried what was left of the goat barn that burned to the ground one humid July while we slept. We call this spot '“the Grave” and it lies exactly opposite another memorial to the land’s pain, “the Wound”, in the far northwest corner some seventeen acres away. The previous owners leased this acreage to a local farmer who had cobbled together a patchwork of fields from different neighbors, growing the usual corn and soybeans on alternating annual rotations. We met him that spring we arrived on the land, shook his hand to continue the lease and got about planning our land blessing ceremony, not realizing he would cut down several mature trees along the property line so he and his farming equipment could access our field from the neighboring one. We discovered the damage during the land blessing and ended the arrangement the next day. It was a hard lesson in city-kid assumptions about rural handshakes and leased acreage, and a reminder that not everyone lives by the creed to ask permission before taking something. In the twenty-three years since, no trees have grown in that spot.

Somehow, though, between these two points of reckoning, a thriving and vibrant bowl of life has emerged and carries on; we get to traverse its expanse as often as we choose. The field is turning to woods one season and one section at a time as thick stands of rapidly maturing sycamore saplings fill in where the corn used to grow. Mockingbirds have made their secret nests in the uppermost branches of the black walnuts and blue beech and beneath their leafy canopies, the walking paths are a spongy carpet of moss I could easily nap on top of without a care (the minute the paths are dry, I promise). How does Spring still surprise us with its familiar newness each year? In January’s dark and bleak embrace, we wonder if we’ll ever see a hummingbird again and now here they are, buzzing us as we walk from the front deck to our car, demanding to know when the feeders will be refilled. Can the fireflies be far behind?

We need surprises these days. The shock and horror of the world’s ongoing wars and violence parade in front of our sickened faces each day and it’s impossible to look away as our sisters and brothers live through nightmares in their waking hours. If we really are all in this together and for the longest of long hauls, we need a season like spring to distract us even for a moment with her raucous avian symphonies, riots of color and warm reassuring breaths from the south that give us renewed strength for whatever will come. We cannot survive without beauty, spontaneity and moments of wonder. We rightfully hunger for spring’s generosity and kindness because we need to remember our own and then fling it in all directions.

I think that’s why I prefer to walk in the morning, just as the sky is shredding the darkness with shards of new light. I hold dawn’s hand and we step into what’s possible, what’s spread out at our feet to pick up and offer to someone else. I chase ideas through the woods, listen for new and returning winged relatives tapping holes into dead trunks and wonder what will be asked of me today. It’s anyone’s guess and I plan to show up for it, like those deer did last week…

There were seven of them and they were just ten feet away on the other side of the bathroom window’s wavy glass pane, browsing for new grass among the dead ironweed sticks. I saw them from the upstairs east-facing window first before racing down to get a better look, hoping not to startle them (need to do more research about a deer’s eyesight, how they register motion, what’s their peripheral vision like—all that stuff) as I went about my morning ablutions. Even more graceful and elegant up close, they slowly picked their way from one patch to the next, lifting their magnificent heads now and then when they heard or saw something I couldn’t see at all. A young buck was among them, seemed to be leading them farther south with his velvety antlers when it happened. I moved just one step closer to the window and all seven heads raised up, fourteen eyes on the movement they saw through the glass. As one, the herd leapt high, white tails pointing upward in near-perfect formation until their hooves found the path to the Grave, leaving me once again silent in wonder. Within minutes, I was dressed with walking sticks in hand and out the back mud room door to follow them, or at least find where those hooves met the soft chocolate earth.

Spring…it never gets old.

A Cautious Spring Unfolding

The avian air traffic over the meadow has increased delightfully and exponentially in the past week. I know that birds returning to the area are not tethered to the calendar like we are, but they did arrive exactly on the day of the spring equinox, leaving us to wonder which of them had the planner cued up as they made their way from anyplace south of the Ohio River. The soundtrack of my morning walks is now a rich symphony of robinsong, finch calls and woodpeckers who take their role in the percussion section rather seriously. In the swampier areas that line the footpaths by the woods, the spring peepers’ high-pitched chorus slides easily over and around the cardinal’s insistence that warmer days are coming, adding a literal and poetic spring to my step as I move from the field into the creek-blessed meadow. When I arrive back at the house, I’m soaked with the music of all things living, grateful for the season tickets and front row seats we’ve been given (and the mockingbirds aren’t even in the mix yet. Oh my heart…).

Getting to know this land (and she getting to know us) has been a sustained and evolving dance through eighty-nine seasons so far where the somewhat predictable is interrupted by the occasional “what the heck was that ?!”, in the form of a mid-February lightning sky show or a late June derecho that yanked once-sturdy cottonwoods from their sentry positions along the creekbanks and plastered the west side of our house with leaves on its way across the eastern field. Over the years, we’ve tilled and planted, built barns and placed lawn furniture at strategic spots along the walking paths in case we need to sit down in the middle of a morning’s mosey to contemplate the delicate emergence of spring beauties or estimate how many batches of garlic mustard pesto we’ll make between May and July. In the usual lopsided shape of the human-and-natural-world relationship, our side is clearly marked by humble deference (what human can stop a straight line wind with her hand? I mean really…) while Hers is all showy abundance and mystery and a gentle tolerance of our absent-minded and distracted tendencies. I have no intention of trying to balance the scales. Such folly is best left aside and in its place, deep wordless respect, the kind that leaves one’s mouth agape while starting upward into the inky black space above. That, and a promise to return the garden tools to the shed is about all we can offer most days. She seems to understand, or else what was last night’s grand sunset all about?

This morning, she’s dressed in browns and grays, with tiny pearls of early spring snow gadding about in a stiff north wind. A handful of robins march in stop-and-start fits across the just-greening grass, stopping to turn a hidden ear to what might be crawling beneath (at least, that’s what it looks like from the bathroom window) while the green tips of those family heirloom tulips my uncle gave me last fall stand bravely in a line as if guarding the living room windows. Should I wrap them in little tulip plant scarves to ride out this week’s colder temps, or leave them to it and trust, once again, that they have what they need, no help from me? It’s so hard not to intervene.

Inside, the space heater hums warmly with two of the kittens jockeying for the best spot in front of it while Patrick reads next to me on the couch. Breakfast dishes are done, and we’ve committed to a walk later, no matter what the predictions say about where the thermometer’s red line is going to land before it’s time to tuck in the chickens for the night. At day’s end, we’ll lay our heads on the pillowed reassurance of a tulip bulb’s intuition, keeping hope alive for the season that’s only just beginning.