Oh, the Possibilities

It’s 5:20am, 32 degrees outside and the top step of the front deck is coated in a thin crust of snow. With the heating pad’s setting on “2” and the closest soft throw tucked snugly ‘round my lap and legs, I’m ensconced in my place on the recliner couch as I look into the last inky blackness of the night framed by the living room windows. Xena is all smoothed and settled into her mousy dreams to my right and Tink, the newest addition to our clowder, makes a vertical leap from the footrest, ricochets off the blanket chest-turned-coffee table into the antique platform rocker near the entrance to the kitchen, connecting hard with the carved curved arm of the chair before sticking the landing. A six-week-old kitten has turned our home into her own private pinball machine. One more toppled lamp and its broken compact florescent light bulb scattered at our bare feet, and it’ll be Game Over.

When it’s just light enough to the east, I’ll layer up and walk the paths like I do, finish up the last of the fall planting (garlic, the rest of the heirloom tulip bulbs from my uncle and three Russian sage plants still showing some promise, even this late in the season) and tuck in again, this time sitting at the work table in my studio, stitching glass beads and chips of lapis lazuli semi-precious stone to a piece of soft wall art I started at the beginning of lockdown. Time will slow down or stop completely, and I’ll be lost in that sweet spot of untethered Imagination, letting my mind wander through the landscape of possibility. It begins with “What if…?”

What if…one day, on the morning walk, I just sat on the left side of the curb-gleaned dark pine green antique wicker loveseat that I hauled home in June, nestled just off the walking path into a thicket of blackberry stalks across from that bend in the creek, and stayed there for most of the day?

What if…I didn’t talk myself out of asking someone for help?

What if…that last hedgeapple hanging from the very top of the osage orange tree on the ridge didn’t fall, even in the strongest gale-force winds, all winter?

What if…the Black Strawberry tomato seeds I saved on a piece of paper towel in August actually sprouted and grew stems and leaves and bore fruit next July?

What if…the Downton Abbey series had never ended?

What if…I actually slept straight through the night?

What if…the gentleman who stopped by our booth at the market two weeks before the midterm elections and monologued for thirty minutes about his own stance had asked me how I felt about things…and then listened?

What if…Patrick had followed through on his bottle rocket desire to become a chimney sweep in the late 90’s?

What if…I knew how to operate a chainsaw?

What if…that laughing crow who is always hanging out in the meadow lands on my shoulder this morning with her satiny ebony wings and accompanies me on the rest of the walk, down to the coop to let the chickens out, back up the slope to the ridge to fill the suet feeders and out to the potting shed to gather up the garden tools I’ll need this afternoon?

What if…the leftovers from last night’s dinner of huckleberry barbecue-sauced chicken breasts just kept replenishing themselves in the darkness of the fridge while we slept?

What if…we could join our favorite film or television show as one of the characters but retain our own identity and selves throughout?

What if…our haircuts never grew out?

What if…we could tell our stories honestly and be given acknowledgement that they’re still being written?

What if…Tink just stayed little?

What if…snow fell thick and fast, as large flakes that filled our cupped hands and didn’t melt on contact?

What if…we really did put things back where we found them, closed what we opened, washed what we dirtied, finished what we started?

What if…mystery was simply allowed to be mystery, far from the prying and prodding fingers of “I must figure this out”?

What if…I let people into my life as it is, didn’t feel the need to tidy it all up first?

What if…I didn’t argue with myself about what “wasted time” really is?

What if…there were no clocks at all?

What if…uncertainty and imperfections were valued more than their opposites?

What if…Sting finally wrote back?

I’m going to need more beads, I think…

Seeking Shelter

A pale autumn sun sipped at the night’s last stars and while my back was turned, swallowed the moon’s sideways smile in one soundless gulp as I made my way back to the woods. On the other side of a marathon market weekend (three events in two days—a lot for us), I welcome the softer start to my morning and the chance to get reacquainted with something other than parchment-lined baking pans and the aroma of cinnamon. No matter how bone-tired I am, or how challenging the elements, I never regret the decision to walk the land.

It’s a color carnival out there this year and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Each tree is vivid and unstoppable. Everyone’s talking about it at work, posting views from their front windows and driveway aprons on every social media site within hand’s reach, displaying an ombre of oranges and reds, deep rich mustards and translucent saffrons from the silver maple out back, edged in a crimson bleed. Somebody get Crayola on the phone—they might wanna update their deluxe box of sixty-fours, or at least dedicate a collection to the season.

I like how nature seems to have arranged for the trees to shed their leaves on some sort of rotation schedule—the sycamores first, all crispy brown caramel and milk chocolate, then silver and red maples taking their time dropping a leaf here, five there. The black walnuts shimmer their golden dresses down to the ground the minute a good breeze comes through, and I watch the kittens jump to catch them in the driveway, unable to resist all that twisting movement and sideways fluttering. And the sweet gums with their calicoed tunics, one tree sporting a deep beet-red collar at the top of its canopy while the rest of its leaves move from orange to yellow to pale celery. If rainbows were trees…(much gratitude to friends Deb and Mike for sharing about 50 young saplings from their place one day after Thanksgiving, getting them all tucked into our waiting landscape. The butternut squash soup and homemade bread we shared wasn’t nearly enough of a thank you).

What a shock it would be for the leaves to all drop at once without warning, no gradual easing into the cold exposed months of winter. This slow and measured transition feels kind and motherly and we receive it as gift for spirits already raw from the abruptness of life’s other harsh about-face moments. But I still stand beneath them all and wonder where summer went. Just six weeks ago, they gave us respite from a stronger and more determined sun as we plucked errant bindweed and thistles from the garden’s raised beds. Now their bare arms and fingers reach for a cooler sky about to go brittle in the span of another six weeks. Good thing I’m romantic about the views that surround me. I’ll try to remember that when I’m schlooping my way through the slush and ice on my way to the coop to see if the girls even want to leave their cozy pine shavings-fluffed bed and peck at the grain scattered in the morning’s snow.

Friends, life has been even heavier lately. In a staffing restructuring at work, I lost my admin and am working with my other teammate to take on the duties left behind, most of which we haven’t touched for four years. She took another position in the company, so we’ll still get to see her, thank goodness, but the gap in our team is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I haven’t been able to shake yet. I’ve taken to fretting again about how Patrick and I will age (it’s an episodic theme that surfaces this time of year as our bodies slow down and we walk reluctantly into the shrinking light of the next two months). The headlines continue to test the elasticity of one’s heart with the brutality of Russia’s war against Ukraine, cholera plaguing the good souls of flood-ravaged Nigeria and just last night, a crowd surge at a Halloween event in Seoul that left over 150 young adults trampled to their deaths. I know I should stop scrolling, and I do, but there are still too many unnecessary empty chairs at tables these days whether I’m reading about them or not.

So I suit up and head outside, walking sticks in hand and beg the trees for just another day of their comforting shelter, understanding that we’ll need to face the bare days of winter together, looking for grace and beauty wherever we can find it. When I wonder if I’m up to the task, Patrick greets me at the end of a workday with a pot of vegetable soup simmering and steaming up the kitchen windows. He smiles and pulls me in for a “how was your day” embrace and I reshape my definitions of shelter and protection, instantly and deeply aware of what I have, resolved not to take it for granted. It’s within my grasp and influence, this posture of humility and also my moral duty. I’ll keep asking “what else can I do?” and quiet my worried heart to hear the answer. Meanwhile, there’s a mulberry in the meadow, still shaking her green branches at us and I wonder what she knows that her ash and cottonwood neighbors don’t. She guards the creek as squirrels run up and down her trunk and across the grass at her feet, saying “not yet, not yet. When I’m ready.” Teachers are everywhere here.

So I’ll keep taking my tires bones out to the woods. I’ll remember the colors across the fields, throwing all my trust into a spring that so far keeps coming back to dress our trees in reassuring garments of hope and growth.

That’s what “what else?” looks like from here.

Alphas, Omegas, and the Stuff in Between

A few weeks ago on a Friday, I met a young man who irons his paper money without explanation or apology. The next morning, I watched a cobweb spinner slowly descend from the kitchen cabinet on a single silken strand and come to rest near a splash of water on the counter, fold its long legs inward like the metal frame of a market canopy and take a drink.

Two unrelated firsts at my age (having just rounded the corner on a milestone birthday easily divisible by ten) giving further evidence that simply waking up is a worthy endeavor and, as my hospice work has taught me, a privilege denied to many. With wonders like these waiting for me in the dawn’s early light, I don’t even use an alarm clock anymore.

I also don’t intentionally pursue such moments; they just cut across my path and I notice them deeply for as long as it takes to gather the data and process it through filters that include humor, curiosity and precious little judgment. I’ll be the first to tell anyone that I’m late to most parties (ask me when I started using Facebook or tapping my feet to One Direction’s music…well past their launch dates, I assure you) and tend toward wonder that masquerades too often as ignorance, but I know the difference and will argue for it when given the chance. A long-winded description of simply being open, but there it is.

So fast forward to last Sunday, when a dear friend from my early adolescence paid us a visit all the way from South Carolina—my first boyfriend at the tender age of thirteen, and we’ve stayed in touch all these decades—and here he is, sitting in an antique chair across from Patrick, my current and last boyfriend, sharing stories about being restaurant managers. It was a relaxed and easy exchange, as if they’d grown up together on the same street and played kickball after school. Without effort, their conversation never wandered into the arena of what else they both had in common (and I was sitting right there, hard to miss) except for a few quick playful comments when Patrick offered a cup of coffee and my friend responded wryly, “should I drink it?” In the two or so hours that followed, I both participated and observed, finding a place to perch in my memories that covered the ground between thirteen and sixty. Playing guitar at all-school masses in the gymnasium, heading off to college and registering a slight twinge of homesickness as my parents’ station wagon disappeared around the corner of the dormitory where they’d dropped me off, navigating other relationships with a good heart and a good dose of naivete, riding my bike to my job at the health food store across town, becoming a preacher, teacher and bookbinder, learning to make scones, raise goats and drive a zero-turn mower. It all fit neatly in between the alpha and omega of these two cherished men in my living room, with so much more waiting to be called up and remembered. Whuff…the richness of one life touched by two more. I can barely wrap my head around it.

I suppose that’s one of the tasks of growing older, remembering where we’ve been, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go before we get to What’s Next. I’m up for it, truly, and understand the risk of putting too soft an edge on those times that brought me to my knees. But if I fell down seven, I got up eight and fist-pumped my way to the next lesson a bit smarter (I hope—all evidence to the good, so far). These days, I find myself comfortably going to those mind-attic places, unpacking the dusty boxes and trunks of my life lived so far, and holding the contents to my chest in reverence, gratitude and love. I’m still here. I still get to collect such treasures. I am so, so lucky. It’s the refrain of my days, a soundtrack that never gets old (even as I do). And I’m not ready to start tracking “lasts” yet. Of course, anything I do as the earth rotates could be the last of its kind but I don’t want to sit in that swamp of thoughts just now. It’s rarely helpful and puts rather a damper on the party.

Here’s to the firsts still to come, to the lasts that lie safe in our hearts and all the unheralded moments in between that feed us. What a banquet, my friends. What a feast.

The Reminder

I walk past it most days, though I wasn’t there when it happened.

Just inside the woods that thicken up the north edge of the field, about six yards in, a stand of young black walnut and blue beech saplings holds the body of a much larger fallen ash, suspended four feet above ground. It looks almost staged, an art installation set in place by some invisible human hand.

I first came upon the scene three years ago, the day after a fierce storm flattened what remained of the open field’s goldenrod, thistle and ironweed stalks and left gaping holes in the forest’s canopy, taking out hollowed and vigorous trees alike. I pushed through the brambles and Virginia creeper, approaching it with a respectful curiosity tempered with caution (widow makers like these are everywhere in the woods; perhaps it wasn’t done falling). As I gingerly placed my hand on the grooved bark, I felt the solid heavy length of wood beneath. Wedged snugly in the line of trees that caught it, this gentle giant wasn’t going anywhere. In the morning walks that followed, I tried to find the sheared-off stump and couldn’t, feeding my ever-hungry love of questions that have no answers. The forest had apparently held its own retreat, conducted a trust fall activity for its participants and I got to bear witness to the small group that stayed behind still cradling one of its own. On one particular walk, for no particular reason, I whispered "“hello, Wonder of Physics” as I went by, and this benedictive ritual wove its way into my daily steps, becoming once again prayer and acknowledgement of my place in the scheme of things. Many steps and sunrises later, that whispered greeting has grown into the following: “Hello, Wonder of Physics, Testament to Interdependence, Evidence of Community, Example of Support, Sign of Trust, Thing of Beauty”. I then lower my gaze and ask whatever leaves and wood rot might be listening, “may I be some or all of that for someone today” and keep walking, intent on making that promise stick before my head hits the pillow so many hours later.

Not a bad way to start the day.

Patrick and I live in the belly of a perpetual classroom with endless teachers, some of whom we’ve never met, whose lessons are delivered while we sleep. While our shared existence has no grand and singular Purpose, we are rooted in and pivot from an anchored place of attentiveness as we move through our days. It’s exhilarating and exhausting and sometimes we miss things. But those lessons are always there, on the other side of windows and doors that we try to leave open for as long as the seasons allow. It’s wondrous how the same apple tree on the edge of the meadow has something slightly new to reveal each time I stand beneath her slender branches. When I stop to pat the ring-striped bark of her trunk, I smile and imagine who she’s fed in her lifetime. Who have I fed in my lifetime? No comparison and yet, we’re both doing our best with what we are. Thank you, sister.

I walk on good days and not-so-good days, and I don’t mean the weather (editorial note: the weather is neither, since it doesn’t exist to please us. If we find rain or the endlessness of February uncomfortable, that’s ours to reckon with. The universe isn’t arranged for our convenience). Sometimes, I boot up and step out, all preoccupied and self-absorbed, and the land receives it just as generously as she does my full attention, healing me no matter what I think I need. Troubled thoughts are composted until they become a fresh outlook, a more honest perspective, all of which usually resolves by the time I get back to the house. I feel a slight twinge on the way to work, wishing I hadn’t squandered all my walking time being harsh and judg-y about others (or myself). Maybe I’ll get to try again tomorrow.

When I do get that chance, I slow down on the path as I come to that place of Humility, and now the dead ash’s bark is hanging in strips from the solid wood beneath, on its way to becoming some other being’s home, or breakfast, or day’s work to recycle. It’s still a wonder, still evidence that living things are designed, designed, to support one another and that includes the human community too. Call it luck or burden or both; we are asked to join in and do the best we can. Lessons like these are to be carried forward; this place of majesty, mystery and wonder on the path reminds me to do just that.

Dear reader, whom will you catch in your strong and capable arms today? How will you live up to the Wonder of Physics that you are? Are you willing to be someone’s evidence that community is not just possible but real? And can you claim your own beauty without question, denial or false modesty?

Fellow student of life, I deeply and sincerely hope you’ll consider it.