An Amazon Driver Pulls Into a Cemetery...

A gentle rumble of thunder broke loose from an approaching band of storms, setting off on its own to see the world, and the skies have been silent since. I had just closed the heavy wooden door to the old goat barn, sliding it smoothly on its overhanging track after finishing an impulsive and random bit of pre-breakfast yard work that took me from trimming trees and moving cars to weeding around the raised beds and adding another pillowy layer of straw mulch to the thirsty Chinese cabbage. The rain we’re getting today is a welcome relief to gardens and fields of every size and scale. I could hear our farm neighbors exhaling into the humid air as I shed my boots in the mud room and stepped into the kitchen to heat some water for my morning tea.

The farmers’ market yesterday was a soaked and low-key affair, with a smaller crowd of sturdy, good-natured patrons in all manner and style of rain boots strolling through the puddles, giving the tops of their carrot and onion bundles a free rinse between visits to vendors’ stalls. We were busier than we expected to be in such conditions and grateful as always, setting our sights on the naps that awaited both of us once the truck was unloaded back home. We didn’t come close to selling out like the previous weeks, but didn’t mind too much. The advantage to coming home with product is being halfway packed for next weekend’s market. We’re “glass half full” people ‘round here.

The intermittent showers and customer traffic gave us time for some rare people-watching, imagining the stories that bookended their Saturday morning market pilgrimage. It was a real-time creative writing assignment—remember those from middle school, where you were given a photo and you had to fill in the backstory? Let me assure you, we had no interest in being critical or snarky with our observations. Quite the opposite. We gave our curiosity a workout, combining it with a good dose of amnesty and leeway for the hidden elements of the lives that crossed in front of and occasionally stopped at our stall. Sheltered from the pelting rain, we had a front row seat to a sliver of humanity going about their days’ to-do lists.

Umbrellas were everywhere (children in tow employed them with varying degrees of skill and satisfaction. Suffice to say, quite a few parents would be toweling off their youngsters when they got back home) and dogs on leashes shook out their fur at regular intervals. Tattoo art alone was reason enough to pull up a chair and make a day of it, but the market ends at noon and the village leaders are quite clear that vendors need to be but a memory by 1:00p.m. So we made good use of the four hours given us. What about the two young women sporting dreadlocks and thin leather bracelets, pulling a small red canvas-sided wagon across the wet parking lot? Holding hands, they browsed the all-natural dog biscuit stand and plucked two bags from the table to add to their collection of garlic, honey, cinnamon sugar donuts and a tall plastic container of pickles. What will they have for lunch? How long have they been together? Maybe the market is a fun early morning date? Such questions we would probably not ask them if they stopped for a sample of our Cranberry Orange Pecan granola, but we’d leave the door wide and respectfully open just in case. Curiosity without respect nudges the shallows of voyeurism; that’s simply not our vibe. We kept a eye out for one of the market’s regular patrons, a young man with his pet boa draped over his shoulders, pushing his toddler daughter in her stroller.

When customers do linger at our booth, trying more than one of the samples we keep in quaint mason jars topped with repurposed parmesan cheese shaker lids (they fit perfectly), we exchange pleasant bits of information, learn about their allergies and dietary preferences and confirm that we do indeed make every batch in our humble farm kitchen, rendering air fresheners and scented wax melts obsolete. They smile and sometimes laugh, select the flavors they liked best and promise to return. Many of them do, volunteering descriptions of how the Strawberry Vanilla they bought last week ended up as the topping for a midweek berry crisp or decorated their morning’s smoothie bowl in a sweet arc just around the edge. To be included even infinitesimally in a tiny slice of their day’s nourishment is a privilege that hums beneath our busy hands when we bake up the next batch. They could just have easily come back, purchased their next bag and then walked away.

In the grand scheme of things, we’re barely on the sidelines of anyone else’s stories but our own, and that’s on our best days. Most of the time our fellow humans get up, shower, dress and manage their lives’ details without any help or acknowledgement from us. They make their choices and mistakes away from our watchful and sometimes regrettably judgmental eyes, pick themselves up off the floor and carry the lesson forward. I often imagine the film clips that cleverly speed up the scene at a subway station, making travelers stream through the turnstiles like so much vertical water, each life a film unto itself. In my moments of pause, I wish them well and a life of ease, cheer on their triumphs with both hands in the air, hoping that perhaps they’re doing the same in the quiet corners of their hearts for all of us too. Presuming good intention about those who people the concentric circles of our lives is a lovely way to frame one’s existence. When practiced with some intention and regularity, it keeps the corners of one’s heart free from the dust and debris of bitterness or envy and makes those anxious moments in freeway traffic kinder (maybe the driver who cut it a little too close or didn’t use their turn signal is speeding to the bedside of an ailing friend. Of course they can move ahead of me). There’s far too much missing information in that brief encounter for me to draw conclusions about someone’s character and etch them in unforgiving stone for all eternity.

Whenever I have the chance, I take time to get to know someone, if they let me. Even a little bit. After forty years of interviewing volunteer applicants, I’ve got the mechanics of asking questions rock solid in my skill set. But it’s my curiosity that takes the lead in those conversations, and I willingly follow where folks lead me. When circumstance doesn’t allow for those protracted and dare I say sacred encounters, I do my best to fill in the gap with a charitable imagination. Like the other day, when I was driving home from work…

My commute takes me on a hilly two-lane ride cutting through farm fields and woods that hug the road and one intersection in a township that boasts a “mall” on one of the corners (it’s actually a quick-stop with two gas pumps and a modest deli counter but if the good people of Fredonia want to call it a mall, who am I to say otherwise? I’m just a visitor, passing through. I did stop once for a bag of white cheddar popcorn, back in the pre-pandemic days of eating food on the go that required licking one’s fingers. Sigh…I miss those days).

On that particular day, I was following an Amazon delivery van moving rather “not from around here” slowly when he turned into the gravel entrance of a small cemetery at the top of a hill and inched forward, looking left and right as if for the address listed on his next stop. I had so many questions rush to the front of my mind in an instant but with a string of cars behind me, couldn’t gather anymore clues without inciting a two-lane country road riot so I continued onward, curiosity unsatisfied. In the absence of facts, I let my imagination unspool across myriad possibilities, any of which would make a good story for a writer more skilled in fiction than I am. Do cemeteries have addresses? Could the package he needed to deliver have borne a fountain-pen inscribed destination that simply read “Alfred Bates, 1904 - 1975, Ninth Row on the Left, Third Stone From the Right”, like a letter from Hogwarts? How to explain that incomplete delivery to his boss back at the hub? I wish I’d given into the impulse to turn in behind him, follow him to the back row fringed in the oldest of cottonwoods. But, alas, the moment escaped me in a nod to good sense and I’ll never know what he was doing there or who, lying in repose beneath the grass, might have ordered a new set of soft bamboo sheets (sorry, that’s where my mind landed when I wondered what residents of a cemetery might need from This World, being all horizontal like they they are). Or maybe he just pulled in for a late lunch, his own bag of white cheddar popcorn waiting patiently on the seat next to him.

It goes without saying that I’ll be on the lookout for that van, or any Amazon van, when I go to work tomorrow morning. That’s one story I’d be willing to chase down.

The Little Stuff (that ain't little at all)

Before I head out to the garden to find where we planted the onions, let me just savor a few things:

A completely raccoon-free night, as evidenced by all the potted plants on the porch and the bird feeders, hummingbird ones included, just as we left them at dusk last night.

Kittens, full of breakfast and now napping somewhere out of my line of sight, litter boxes cleaned, and dishes done.

Wiping my own breakfast crumbs from my mouth with a sweet aqua paisley cloth napkin I made last week, the fabric a gift from Patrick when he landed safely at home after his two-week Sundance odyssey.

The relentlessly cheerful trill of a house wren flitting from one low silver maple branch to another, clearly excited about something and everything.

My feet on the walking paths this morning for the first time in weeks, feeling familiar and brand new in one. Touching the grooved bark of the faithful black walnut who lives just feet off the trail, forehead pressed into its rough skin, I emptied my soul of its gratitude.

Watching as the male orioles let their female counterparts have first dibs at the tiny glass cup filled with raspberry jelly.

Knowing that Patrick will wake up soon and we’ll get to be together, vertically for the daylight hours, peacefully horizontal when the skies are dark and starlit over our heads.

Doing what I could on this morning’s walk to free up and disentangle some young sycamore and ash saplings from the thorny vines chewing their way up their tender limbs. It didn’t look like much but as I walked away, I could have sworn I heard someone exhale in relief.

Needing the thin fleece blanket draped across my lap. In July.

Looking back on a nearly sold-out market day yesterday, looking forward to the prep that awaits me in the kitchen this afternoon, chopping pecans, zesting oranges, measuring out salt and oats.

The troubling dreams from last night, now evaporated with the morning’s dew.

Inspecting the garden’s progress with Patrick, noting significant improvement after last week’s glorious soaking rain quenched the thirst of pretty much everything we planted, including our first go at ground cherries.

The look and feel of jacketless navy-blue linen book cover that will soon become a travel journal after a bit of stitching and some PVA glue.

Having the presence of mind to purchase not one but two sets of popsicle molds two years ago during lockdown, now tucked into the freezer fully employed and filled with a blueberry-nectarine-yogurt smoothie blend.

Feeling not a speck of guilt as the chocolate from a salted caramel melts in my mouth hours before lunch.

The pure joy of well-sharpened pruners doing their work in my hands.

All the grapevines waiting to be cut and twisted into garden art.

Eyes and hearts that read these words. You put my heart in a constant state of thankfulness and savoring.

Friends, this is an exercise I recommend highly. So, be off with you, into your rich and full days, to sit among all that delights you. If it’s a little hard to locate at the moment, buried under weeds of despair and grief, I send you comfort and confidence that you’ll find each other eventually.

(Now…where did we plant those onions?)

What I Did on My Summer Vacation...Sort of

I think I did this vacation all wrong.

While Patrick took good care of the People at Sundance, some 1500 miles away, I tended to all things land-connected here at home, releasing the chickens into their feathery pecking day each morning and tucking them in at dusk while gleaming pairs of raccoon eyes peered out from the thicket hoping for a chance at a robust meal. Thankfully, the wire-wrapped coop continued to do its job for the fourteen days I was on my own, letting me focus on a few landscaping projects of the heavy-lifting variety.

Here’s how it went for the first few days: I’d get up before the sun had even nudged the horizon and wheel the garden cart to the half-acre plot behind the house, toting a shovel, rake, lopers and trimmers to tame the thistle and quack grass creeping hungrily toward the raised beds. In my mind, the plan was to frame this area in a wooden pallet border, leaving a couple of gaps for easy entry gates and then reinforce it with rolls of welded metal fencing to slow down the midnight marauders who like nothing better than to dig up our sweet Cherokee Purple and Atomic Grape tomato plants, still too young to even sport a blossom. Before Patrick left, I scrounged successfully for the majority of the pallets I’d need, hitting the mother lode with one supplier who is willing to trade pallets for granola. And she’s kind to boot—don’t you just love people sometimes?

One pallet, one t-post at a time, the garden wall grew and if you squinted a bit, it looked mostly straight. I wasn’t going for a photo shoot finish, just something modestly functional that maybe we’d paint one of these days, or years. Something whimsical, like sunflowers from the ‘60s or a mural depicting a tree going through the four seasons (I’ll keep you posted). As I hoisted the heavy post driver over my head to thread it onto the tall tip of a post, I spoke aloud my promise to Patrick: no injuries, no trips to the ER. Only once, in a weary moment, one of the handles of the post driver bumped into my cheek as I lifted it up and off of the freshly-placed post. Thanks to chaos theory, physics and possibly some garden muses on full alert, my face sported no bruise that would need explaining when I got back to work.

Before you get all impressed, it’s important to note that I paused each day’s progress around 8:00am., roughly three hours into it, and spent way too much time after that scrolling through the day’s news and purposeless videos, wandering the house missing Patrick, and wondering what to make for dinner. On one particularly hot and humid Wednesday, I sat as motionless as I could on the couch, feeling regret and self-care approval in equal measure. Getting up to draw the curtains and finally turn on the window AC unit was a big deal that day.

In past years, when I had this much time stretched out before me and no one to share it with, I rolled out grandiose plans that included the Wild and Never-Tried, like taking myself out to lunch in a more upscale restaurant, throwing a couple of sleeping bags in the back of the truck and driving out to one of the best places in the field to star-gaze all night and keeping the sink free of dishes (I’m ok to set the bar low on that one—there’s nothing quite like waking up on vacation to a clean kitchen). With Patrick safely tucked away on the reservation, miles away and out of sight, I’d schedule much-needed home improvement projects like extending the front deck and adding new steps, remodeling the kitchen and painting the bathroom. I missed him of course, but also knew he’d never approve of the way I’d approach these secret plans. The year of the kitchen remodel, I needed to prep the area for the contractors while he was still here, so he did see the refrigerator and the tea hutch in the living room but had no idea where the rest of that project was heading. One year I changed the locks on the doors and he came home early (around 1:00a.m.) unable to get in until he’d tossed a few pebbles at the upstairs bedroom window, startling me out of a sound slumber. Sigh…those were the days…

But this year, I felt rudderless and set adrift on a sea of no motivation save for those pallets and a loosely shaped image of clearing the ridge above the meadow. A reality had come home to roost—I was no longer thirty-something with energy to spare, able to set my hands and shoulders to multiple heavy lifting tasks for hours and need only a quick tuna salad sandwich before heading out to finish hand-weeding the 20’ x 60’ garden rows down by the creek. Three hours in the pre-dawn cool of the day is my limit now and somewhere in the past twenty-three years I acquired a cell phone, which hasn’t helped matters. What held fast to my heart, though, for the duration of this vacation was a weighty glimpse of what life might be like without my man, an uncomfortable mix of retirement and widow practice. I sat on the curb-gleaned wooden platform glider looking into the mouth of the meadow and an empty future. I couldn’t shake it for days.

To be fair, I could also claim pandemic and world news fatigue as backdrop to this year’s vacation malaise (it’s been an especially rough couple of weeks if you support the moral direction of the left). One particular day’s headline gave me enough rage to obliterate a tough thicket of ruthless brambles beneath a grove of mulberry saplings. Sweaty and spent, I dumped the last load of thorny sticks from the garden cart and strode back to the house, a new sense of purpose in hand. I looked over my shoulder at tidy pallet garden enclosure and knew that difficult things were indeed possible. Not the two-week vacation take-away I’d imagined, but I’ll take it nonetheless.

I did make it to our local farmers’ market one Saturday (the one down the road where our granola made its debut; not the one where we sell now) and savored the moseying pace of it all. I saw a couple of familiar vendors and visited with them a while, buying the most excellent blueberry cookies I really shouldn’t eat (but did anyway—I’m gluten-free now; another story for another time) and a wonderfully whimsical nesting star from the talented fiber artist who spins wool from her own carefully tended flocks. Filled with airy bits of dyed wool, it now hangs from a shepherd’s hook on the ridge and the house wrens pluck wisps from to soften their stick-pokey homes. It was good to connect, to be on the other side of the table, buying instead of selling and catching up on the local news. Back at the farm, I’d have a go at taming the shaggy lawn under a brilliantly blue sky and do some impulsive baking after I’d washed stray bits of grass from my hands. For reasons I don’t need to understand, all that helped me feel better, and bonus—I still had a week of vacation to go.

I don’t know what I was expecting from this long two-week stretch of time all to myself and I wonder if, on some random Thursday back at the office, I’ll have pangs of regrets for squandering too much of it. Best not to dwell on that now—there’s a bird feeder and raccoon party going on outside and a few more areas beneath the trees that need to be cleared. I’ll keep my orbit a bit wider around that nesting star so I don’t disturb the wren’s busy agenda. From my view on the deck, I could watch them for hours.

And when I get back to the office, I’ll do what I always do that first day on the job after a vacation—submit a request for the next one.

Powerless

A steel-hard rain tap danced furiously on the window ledges while strobe lightning backlit the clouds in an electrified dome over our heads. Straightline winds bent the limbs of the young mulberry stand parallel to the ground, stripping the looser berries from their branches and throwing them in the grass for the overnight possums and our feet to find later, once the skies were emptied of all this drama. It’s not really summer until you’ve walked barefoot from the deck to the car, staining your feet a spectacular and nearly indelible bruise-y purple. Thank goodness for dark blue washcloths in the bath.

Patrick had begun packing for Sundance earlier that day, slowly covering most flat surfaces in the living room and kitchen with groups of themed items (bath/personal care, handcrafted giveaway gifts, clothing for two weeks, food/eating utensils, medicine). It looks like a small garage sale that had moved indoors without the price tags. We’re used to this annual ritual, interrupted only twice in twenty years, confident that it will all eventually migrate out the front door, across that mulberry-shaded deck and into the car. Between here and Indianapolis, whatever he remembers he forgot to pack can probably be found on the shelves of a store on the other side of some distant outerbelt. But last week, when the storm hit, the temperature was sitting stock-still at around 92 degrees, challenging the humble floor fan to reach the humid corners of every room and somehow freshen them a bit. Our collective attention turned to the home base and away from the grassy prairies of Sundance grounds. The downpour left the creek swollen just to the edge of breaking the banks, which meant our sump pump would have its work cut out for it in the next twelve hours. We started filling gallon jugs of water for drinking, bathing and toilet-flushing just in case. All around, a good helping of the kind of drama and distraction that usually accompanies the days leading up to Patrick’s departure. I had just asked if the generator was in working order when, as if on cue, the house went dark and silent.

For the next two days…as the temperature continued to climb and the humidity made the air around us thickly sliceable…

In those first couple of hours, while the lightning stalled over the acreage in a seizure-inducing dance club spectacle, we lay motionless in our airless bedroom, confident that soon, (soon?), the power would click back on and we’d go about our pre-Sundance normal after a good night’s sleep. I was still holding on to that illusion the next morning as I grabbed a gallon jug of water and bent over the side of the bathtub to wash my hair before going to work, thankful for a pixie haircut that is most forgiving in the absence of a hair dryer. I told myself I looked sleek and fashion forward.

At the office, a couple of coworkers who lived in their own versions of “middle of nowhere” were also sporting “sleek and fashion forward” hairstyles; I felt a rush of affection for our shared circumstance and kept the comments to a gentle minimum. But I was in air-conditioned comfort while Patrick slugged it out with the generator back home under a searing sun, no cooling fan to ease his brow. I wondered if he’d sidled up to the lifeless freezer just to feel the cold metal against his skin for a moment. I wouldn’t blame him if he’d opened the door for a flash, just to grab one of the still-solid ice packs and hold it to his forehead. Twenty minutes away, I sent emails and drafted well-earned letters of recommendation for some of our pre-med student volunteers, not even breaking a sweat. We were both where we needed to be but not necessarily where we wanted to be. Misery loves supportive company.

We’ve had power outages before and muscled through them just fine, reminding ourselves that we’re made of pretty stern stuff and can transition to a raw food diet rather easily. One summer when Patrick was out west, a derecho roared through the land and in thirty minutes, had plastered the side of the house with leaves of all sorts, remnants of a half dozen cottonwoods, sycamores and blue beech that now lay quietly on the ground, their trunks snapped in winds the likes of which I’d never known. I went without power for a week that year (2012, I think it was), sleeping on the couch downstairs with the front door open, watching the shadowy shapes of baby raccoons on the other side of the screen, checking to make sure I was ok at 2:30 in the morning. After three days, the freezer and fridge had never been so clean. And empty. It helped to be on vacation, not needing to make myself presentable for anyone who mattered. Blessed line crews restored power to our far-flung little neighborhood at the tail end of the substation’s reach one day before Patrick arrived back home. We celebrated with wonderfully hot spaghetti and meatballs and a lovely Malbec. And yes, the fan turned on the highest setting, with enormous gratitude.

Doing without is the rolling lesson here, folks, and I’m glad for its recurrence in our lives. Shakes us out of our complacency for hours or days at a time, pulls skills out of storage, dusts off our survivor capabilities until we almost start planning for an off-grid existence. Almost. The older we get, the harder it gets, plain and simple. But the refrain “as often as we can, for as long as we can” gets us through to tell our stories for another day. I keep nattering on for an outhouse and an outdoor shower. Maybe this will be the year we get those in place. Until then, there’s plenty of other work and distractions about, tapping me on the shoulder. The weather report for the next several days looks hot but not stormy.

I’ll take it.