The rabbit wasn't large – bigger than a bunny, but not full grown. It sat among the palmetto scrubs and wiregrass along the edge of the road. Jake and I noticed it at the same time.
Jake is Adam's dog, a thick-muscled golden Lab with a serious face. He is smart, one of those dogs with whom you tend to carry on a conversation and half expect to get an answer back. He was my only companion that afternoon. We'd been up the road a mile or so and were headed home when the rabbit showed up.
In a matter of seconds Jake had left the road, leapt over the ditch and hit the ground running on the overgrown timber trail that runs parallel to the road. "Jake!" I called out sharply. "Jake!" His long yellow legs kept galloping toward the white puff of tail that bounced ahead of him.
The rabbit had a head start and, moving surprisingly quickly on short stumpy legs, disappeared into the brush – sort of a reverse magician's trick. Jake came up short, his nose quivering just above the ground at the hole into which the rabbit had dived.
"Jake!"
He lifted his head and quizzically tilted it toward me and the road. "Leave that rabbit alone!"
One more look at the hole. One more look at me. A soft – I promise you – sigh and then retreat. He jumped back over the ditch and trotted back up to me. "Good boy, Jake. Good boy."
To be honest, I was more than a little surprised that Jake abandoned his pursuit of the rabbit. He is, after all, a dog and dogs chase rabbits. It is instinctual and, as we often tell ourselves in defense of actions of which we are regretful but for which we have no explanation, you can't fight instinct.
Except that, apparently, based upon what I'd just seen, you can.
In that moment Jake, who isn't supposed to have a moral code, made a choice. Instead of responding to the adrenaline that made his heart race, that made his fur stand up, that sent him running madly after something that wasn't anywhere close to a physical match for him, he responded instead to my voice.
Jake knows me. I feed him when he wanders down to my house. I offer him a big bowl of water after we've been walking. I scruff his ears and talk to him in that strange voice we humans reserve for babies and animals. I love Jake. And he loves me back.
And so he comes when I call.
A triumph of love over instinct.
I thought about all that as Jake and I walked on down the big hill and back up the rise toward home and I realized that Jake's choice was the one that we are asked to make every day, many times a day.
We are asked to respond to all sorts of stimuli, everything from the car that brakes suddenly in front of us to the telephone call that brings bad news. We are asked to respond and we always have to choose. Instinct or love.
Sometimes the response is instantaneous, without conscious deliberation, but most of the time – in a world where "fight or flight" is not a literal confrontation – there is plenty of time to consider the ramifications of choice. And in that time, the moments or days or years that flow by between stimuli and response, we get to decide whether we will respond out of self-preservation or self-sacrifice.
Instinct or love. Jake understands that. I hope I do.
Copyright 2008
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Map Making
Ancient maps often labeled uncharted, unexplored regions with the simple phrase, "Where Dragons Lie."
Last night, needing to think, needing to mull over, chew on, process the events of the last few days, I sat on the deck and watched the light fade. The sun had vanished beneath the horizon and the sky was washed in the pale chic pastels of a Pottery Barn nursery. There was a breeze coming from the east and the windcatcher, a pendulum hanging from the center of the wind chimes, whirled like a dervish in a tight spiral. The high-pitched bell song echoed out into the branch, a small stone making ripples in a small pond.
Where Dragons Lie.
I had just watched, at the suggestion of a friend, a science fiction television show in which a planet was discovered on which life could be maintained only inside a dome. The air and water quality outside had been so contaminated by centuries of industrial growth that life could not be maintained there; the people living in the dome, however, were content. Outside the dome, the area beyond which their maps had been drawn, was of no consequence to them. But, unknown to them, the dome was shrinking.
Where Dragons Lie.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see a jagged streak of heat lightning, bright orange like a hazmat suit. A mockingbird glided through the carport and came to rest on the deck rail, stayed long enough to make sure that I knew he was ignoring me and flew away. I noticed that the lavender I had grown from seed was a little taller, that the zinnias were healthy, that one of the hummingbird feeders would need more food soon.
The crickets and frogs began singing and I realized that I'd not done much thinking, mulling or chewing. Realized that as the day had wound down around me, gotten slower, gotten cooler, gotten quieter that so had my thoughts. And in the quietness I realized that the answer to my dilemma lay at the edges of the map.
We are the cartographers of our own lives. We are handed a compass, a quill and a few sheets of parchment and told to, "Go."
For much of my life I carried mine around in a field jacket and spent my time navigating by the maps that other had made. I picked up those maps at school and at church, at Girl Scouts and summer camp. I tore them out of books and magazines. I picked up several pockets full from my family. And, for the most part, I had a pretty good time. I saw lots of tourist attractions, read lots of historical markers, had my picture made in front of a lot of monuments.
But one day, while stuffing yet another ticket stub into my pocket, I found the compass. Lying in the palm of my hand, its needle quivered and so did my heart. With no hesitation, I threw away the others' maps and set out.
I could have stayed. I could have continued building my dome, making it self-sufficient, brain-washing myself into believing that the curve above my head was real sky, but eventually the dome would have started shrinking and so would I.
Some people are born running toward the edge, ready to explore and excavate. Most of us aren't. Most of us believe in dragons.
I felt a bug bite of some kind and knew it was time to go inside. One more glance around the night landscape. One more deep breath of midsummer air. One more sigh of gratitude for the compass that pointed the way to where dragons lie.
Copyright 2008
Last night, needing to think, needing to mull over, chew on, process the events of the last few days, I sat on the deck and watched the light fade. The sun had vanished beneath the horizon and the sky was washed in the pale chic pastels of a Pottery Barn nursery. There was a breeze coming from the east and the windcatcher, a pendulum hanging from the center of the wind chimes, whirled like a dervish in a tight spiral. The high-pitched bell song echoed out into the branch, a small stone making ripples in a small pond.
Where Dragons Lie.
I had just watched, at the suggestion of a friend, a science fiction television show in which a planet was discovered on which life could be maintained only inside a dome. The air and water quality outside had been so contaminated by centuries of industrial growth that life could not be maintained there; the people living in the dome, however, were content. Outside the dome, the area beyond which their maps had been drawn, was of no consequence to them. But, unknown to them, the dome was shrinking.
Where Dragons Lie.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see a jagged streak of heat lightning, bright orange like a hazmat suit. A mockingbird glided through the carport and came to rest on the deck rail, stayed long enough to make sure that I knew he was ignoring me and flew away. I noticed that the lavender I had grown from seed was a little taller, that the zinnias were healthy, that one of the hummingbird feeders would need more food soon.
The crickets and frogs began singing and I realized that I'd not done much thinking, mulling or chewing. Realized that as the day had wound down around me, gotten slower, gotten cooler, gotten quieter that so had my thoughts. And in the quietness I realized that the answer to my dilemma lay at the edges of the map.
We are the cartographers of our own lives. We are handed a compass, a quill and a few sheets of parchment and told to, "Go."
For much of my life I carried mine around in a field jacket and spent my time navigating by the maps that other had made. I picked up those maps at school and at church, at Girl Scouts and summer camp. I tore them out of books and magazines. I picked up several pockets full from my family. And, for the most part, I had a pretty good time. I saw lots of tourist attractions, read lots of historical markers, had my picture made in front of a lot of monuments.
But one day, while stuffing yet another ticket stub into my pocket, I found the compass. Lying in the palm of my hand, its needle quivered and so did my heart. With no hesitation, I threw away the others' maps and set out.
I could have stayed. I could have continued building my dome, making it self-sufficient, brain-washing myself into believing that the curve above my head was real sky, but eventually the dome would have started shrinking and so would I.
Some people are born running toward the edge, ready to explore and excavate. Most of us aren't. Most of us believe in dragons.
I felt a bug bite of some kind and knew it was time to go inside. One more glance around the night landscape. One more deep breath of midsummer air. One more sigh of gratitude for the compass that pointed the way to where dragons lie.
Copyright 2008
Monday, June 09, 2008
Layers of Blue
The water wasn't just one color of blue. It was every color of blue. It was the whole blue section of the original Crayola 64 – periwinkle and aquamarine, cornflower and blue green, green blue and turquoise blue.
And it was clear. So clear that I could see sandbars floating just beneath the surface as far as a hundred yards away. Tiny underwater islands that made me think of Atlantis.
The sensation of water on both sides of the road was unsettling and I turned my head from side to side trying to imagine how you measure the tides in such a place. The top was down and I could feel the midday sun radiating through the skin on my arms and legs. The wind snatched at my hair, tugging at random strands as though to lift me straight into the sky like a reverse image Rapunzel.
And then came the bridge. Seven miles long. Flat and straight and narrow, a seam down the middle of the channel that connects the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Strait. The crayon-colored water was under our feet now, under the levitating asphalt held just out of its reach by concrete pillars. From any direction the view was the same – water stretching to the horizon and melting into sky. Layers and layers of blue.
I'd not really expected this sensual assault. The road trip to Key West was a means to an end: There, at the literal end of the continental United States, I would see my Kate for the first time in a year. I was eager and anxious and wound as tight as Dick's hatband.
Somewhere around Big Pine Key, I think, I gave in. Stopped trying to download like digital photos every image that fell on my retinas. Relaxed my shoulders and let the light and warmth swallow me up. By the time the tires hit the bridge, time didn't matter.
I spent four days in Key West. Kate was a generous and indulgent tour guide. She took me to the Hemingway House and the Robert Frost Cottage. She let me take her picture inside the Butterfly Conservatory and at the "southernmost point" monument. She took me to Mallory Square to see the sunset and ignored my obvious amazement at all the things I saw on Duval Street.
When the time for goodbyes came, I squeezed her tight, reminded her of my love and watched her drive off in the car she'd bought without any help to the job she'd gotten without any help. And I didn't cry.
I was so proud of myself.
Later, several weeks later, this morning as a matter of fact, I finally grasped what my heart had been trying to teach my head. And it wasn't, as I might have guessed, that the journey itself is at least as important as the destination.
The point of all that endless blue water and the indelible image it left on my memory was this: The magic of the journey is directly proportional to the pilgrim's passion for the destination.
I had packed my bags and loaded the car with only one end in mind: Kate, my Kate. A year's holidays had come and gone without her presence. Four times the seasons at Sandhill had changed without her seeing them. Hundreds of sunsets had followed sunrises without her opening the back door and heading to the refrigerator for a Capri Sun.
It was hunger I felt, hunger for the light of her smile, the lilt of her voice, the feel of her half-hug. It was hunger that drove me seven hundred miles. It was hunger that rubbed me sandpaper-raw and opened my eyes to the lessons and the loveliness of the road.
Copyright 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Homemade
Add two cups sugar to two cups fresh blackberries. Stir over medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool.
So I did. I stood at the stove, stirring and stirring and stirring, watching the bumpy black berries soften and burst, coloring the sugar the shade of a deep bruise. As the juice ran and turned the sugar into syrup the stirring got smoother and a little monotonous.
It is highly likely that I could have left the jam for a moment or two – to answer the phone or move wet clothes from the washer to the dryer or check the score of the Braves game – without making any difference in the finished product, but there was something about the directness and simplicity of the instructions that called me to diligence. I would, as directed, stir for 15 to 20 minutes.
The rhythm of the stirring and the observation of the near-alchemy that was taking place before my eyes coaxed me into thinking about a lot of things. I thought about how much easier it would have been to simply buy blackberry jam (a thought I quickly dismissed by remembering the difference between Mama's creamed corn and that produced by the Green Giant).
I thought about the array of scratches all over my arms and legs resulting from my blackberry foraging. I thought about how accomplished I would feel once the jam had been spooned into the tiny Ball jars with the fruit-embellished lids. And I thought about the friends and family with whom I would share.
I watched my wrist rotate with the turn of the spatula, watched the tornado-like swirling in the bottom of the pot, watched the liquid slosh up in broad waves like purple ric-rac. And, staring into the soon-to-be jam, the thoughts turned to images.
I saw Mama standing at the counter slicing up cucumbers that would become pickles. I heard the whistle and jingle of the pressure cooker and the rip of corn shucks being stripped from their ears. I smelled the greenness of beans just snapped. I felt under my thumbnails the tenderness of an afternoon's pea-shelling.
And there I was, 10 years old and not-so-quietly stewing over what I saw as an imposition on my summer. Sitting under a tree in a folding aluminum lawn chair, balancing in my lap a blue plastic hospital pan, running my fingers through shell after shell of peas and listening to Mama and Grannie and an assemblage of aunts and cousins talk about people whose names I did not recognize, but who, I was assured, were kin to me.
I wanted to be inside, stretched out on my bed with the window fan blowing straight into my face, a Nancy Drew book in my hands. It was in that world, the world of daring adventures and unsolved mysteries, that I belonged. Not in the one where ordinary people did ordinary things. Shelling peas and picking off peanuts would not get me closer to the exotic life that I was certain was meant to be mine.
The timer on the stove went off and ended my reverie. The 15 minutes was up. I turned off the stove and moved the pot to another burner for the last step of the process: Cool.
Remembering the frustration of those sweltering summer days, it occurred to me that making my self has been a little like making blackberry jam. At ten, I was a combination of wildness and sweetness and life would have to do quite a bit of heating and stirring before the two things melded into something that was worth sharing, something that would keep.
So, I think I've come to turns with the idea that I'm never going to catch a nefarious criminal on a dude ranch or discover a hidden staircase, receive a mysterious letter or find a message in a hollow oak. That's just as well. I don't think Nancy Drew ever had time to make blackberry jam.
Copyright 2008
So I did. I stood at the stove, stirring and stirring and stirring, watching the bumpy black berries soften and burst, coloring the sugar the shade of a deep bruise. As the juice ran and turned the sugar into syrup the stirring got smoother and a little monotonous.
It is highly likely that I could have left the jam for a moment or two – to answer the phone or move wet clothes from the washer to the dryer or check the score of the Braves game – without making any difference in the finished product, but there was something about the directness and simplicity of the instructions that called me to diligence. I would, as directed, stir for 15 to 20 minutes.
The rhythm of the stirring and the observation of the near-alchemy that was taking place before my eyes coaxed me into thinking about a lot of things. I thought about how much easier it would have been to simply buy blackberry jam (a thought I quickly dismissed by remembering the difference between Mama's creamed corn and that produced by the Green Giant).
I thought about the array of scratches all over my arms and legs resulting from my blackberry foraging. I thought about how accomplished I would feel once the jam had been spooned into the tiny Ball jars with the fruit-embellished lids. And I thought about the friends and family with whom I would share.
I watched my wrist rotate with the turn of the spatula, watched the tornado-like swirling in the bottom of the pot, watched the liquid slosh up in broad waves like purple ric-rac. And, staring into the soon-to-be jam, the thoughts turned to images.
I saw Mama standing at the counter slicing up cucumbers that would become pickles. I heard the whistle and jingle of the pressure cooker and the rip of corn shucks being stripped from their ears. I smelled the greenness of beans just snapped. I felt under my thumbnails the tenderness of an afternoon's pea-shelling.
And there I was, 10 years old and not-so-quietly stewing over what I saw as an imposition on my summer. Sitting under a tree in a folding aluminum lawn chair, balancing in my lap a blue plastic hospital pan, running my fingers through shell after shell of peas and listening to Mama and Grannie and an assemblage of aunts and cousins talk about people whose names I did not recognize, but who, I was assured, were kin to me.
I wanted to be inside, stretched out on my bed with the window fan blowing straight into my face, a Nancy Drew book in my hands. It was in that world, the world of daring adventures and unsolved mysteries, that I belonged. Not in the one where ordinary people did ordinary things. Shelling peas and picking off peanuts would not get me closer to the exotic life that I was certain was meant to be mine.
The timer on the stove went off and ended my reverie. The 15 minutes was up. I turned off the stove and moved the pot to another burner for the last step of the process: Cool.
Remembering the frustration of those sweltering summer days, it occurred to me that making my self has been a little like making blackberry jam. At ten, I was a combination of wildness and sweetness and life would have to do quite a bit of heating and stirring before the two things melded into something that was worth sharing, something that would keep.
So, I think I've come to turns with the idea that I'm never going to catch a nefarious criminal on a dude ranch or discover a hidden staircase, receive a mysterious letter or find a message in a hollow oak. That's just as well. I don't think Nancy Drew ever had time to make blackberry jam.
Copyright 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Knowing Enough
Collin is 6 years old. He has eyes like malted milk balls – round and chocolate brown. He picked up a book from the library table and, following the instructions of the librarian to "Go over there and let that lady read you your book," walked the few steps to where I was sitting and sat down beside me.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Collin," he answered. "She wrote it right here in the front of my book." He pointed to the perfectly printed name his teacher had written under the RIF stamp on the inside front cover of "The Dinosaur Who Lived In My Backyard."
He then volunteered his last name and when I, thinking I might know his parents, asked their names, he squinted those luminous eyes, stared off into the distance for a moment and said, "My dad's name is Daddy. And my mom's name is Mama."
Well, of course.
Collin told me he was in kindergarten. I had to smile. Is there anything more winsome than a kindergartener? Anything more gripping than the openness of that face, the generosity of that smile?
The day of Adam's kindergarten orientation, he and I left his mom in the classroom talking to the teacher. We had taken only a few steps down the hall when he stopped, still holding my hand, and said, "Kap, I don't think I know enough to go to kindergarten."
My heart clutched. I want to grab him up and run all the way back to the farm, to secret him away from all the hard and unexplainable things that I knew he would have to endure once he embarked on this existence outside the security of his family's arms.
I've always thought it most noble and courageous and, well, mature of me that I didn't. Instead, I told him, "Oh, I think you do. All you need to know to go to kindergarten is your name and your teacher's name and how to get to your classroom."
The blue eyes, fixated on my face, were tentative, unsure.
"So," I offered, "what is your name?"
"Adam Bradley."
"And what is your teacher's name?"
"Miss Akins."
"Good. Now let's go out to the front where I'll drop you off in the morning and you can show me how to get back to your room."
We started at the sidewalk where the carpool lines formed, walked down the long breezeway to the kindergarten wing, took a left and followed the circular hallway to the room where the door was decorated with a cartoon alligator.
He pointed.
"Yes!" I practically screamed. "You did it! See? I knew that you knew enough to go to kindergarten."
Relief showed itself in the slightest upward curve of the corners of his mouth, what – for the usually taciturn Adam – amounted to a smile.
It is not an easy thing to be an adult who loves, who adores a child. It is not easy to watch while he marches off to a place you've never been or to listen while she talks about people you've never met. It is not easy to acknowledge, even in the smallest way, the separateness of this being whose breath seems to be your own.
Collin, if he's anything like my Adam, will probably have little to say about his field trip when he is asked about his day by parents who soak up each word like intravenous nourishment. Two weeks from now he will not remember the name of his book or that a lady read it to him. But I will remember enough for both of us.
As the teacher called the children to line up to leave, I stood and patted Collin on the shoulder. "It was nice to meet you," I told him.
He smiled. And then, tossing the words over his shoulder as though they were birdseed, not gold doubloons, he said, "Maybe I will see you again."
I hope so, Collin. I hope so.
Copyright 2008.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Collin," he answered. "She wrote it right here in the front of my book." He pointed to the perfectly printed name his teacher had written under the RIF stamp on the inside front cover of "The Dinosaur Who Lived In My Backyard."
He then volunteered his last name and when I, thinking I might know his parents, asked their names, he squinted those luminous eyes, stared off into the distance for a moment and said, "My dad's name is Daddy. And my mom's name is Mama."
Well, of course.
Collin told me he was in kindergarten. I had to smile. Is there anything more winsome than a kindergartener? Anything more gripping than the openness of that face, the generosity of that smile?
The day of Adam's kindergarten orientation, he and I left his mom in the classroom talking to the teacher. We had taken only a few steps down the hall when he stopped, still holding my hand, and said, "Kap, I don't think I know enough to go to kindergarten."
My heart clutched. I want to grab him up and run all the way back to the farm, to secret him away from all the hard and unexplainable things that I knew he would have to endure once he embarked on this existence outside the security of his family's arms.
I've always thought it most noble and courageous and, well, mature of me that I didn't. Instead, I told him, "Oh, I think you do. All you need to know to go to kindergarten is your name and your teacher's name and how to get to your classroom."
The blue eyes, fixated on my face, were tentative, unsure.
"So," I offered, "what is your name?"
"Adam Bradley."
"And what is your teacher's name?"
"Miss Akins."
"Good. Now let's go out to the front where I'll drop you off in the morning and you can show me how to get back to your room."
We started at the sidewalk where the carpool lines formed, walked down the long breezeway to the kindergarten wing, took a left and followed the circular hallway to the room where the door was decorated with a cartoon alligator.
He pointed.
"Yes!" I practically screamed. "You did it! See? I knew that you knew enough to go to kindergarten."
Relief showed itself in the slightest upward curve of the corners of his mouth, what – for the usually taciturn Adam – amounted to a smile.
It is not an easy thing to be an adult who loves, who adores a child. It is not easy to watch while he marches off to a place you've never been or to listen while she talks about people you've never met. It is not easy to acknowledge, even in the smallest way, the separateness of this being whose breath seems to be your own.
Collin, if he's anything like my Adam, will probably have little to say about his field trip when he is asked about his day by parents who soak up each word like intravenous nourishment. Two weeks from now he will not remember the name of his book or that a lady read it to him. But I will remember enough for both of us.
As the teacher called the children to line up to leave, I stood and patted Collin on the shoulder. "It was nice to meet you," I told him.
He smiled. And then, tossing the words over his shoulder as though they were birdseed, not gold doubloons, he said, "Maybe I will see you again."
I hope so, Collin. I hope so.
Copyright 2008.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Storytelling
I am standing on the loggia, two stories tall with a domed stone roof. The wide marble steps lead down to a fountain that sprays millions of water-drop mirrors into the warm spring afternoon. Black wrought-iron street lights and gnarly gray oaks, a hundred years old at least, line the driveway and beds of just-bloomed pansies splotch the wide green lawn.
A person can have more than one home and I have left one to come to another. I have left Sandhill to come to Wesleyan.
It has been thirty years since I accepted my real sheepskin diploma and carefully moved the purple and white tassel to the other side of my mortar board. Thirty years since I said goodbye to this place, but, being a good daughter, I have punctuated that thirty years with frequent visits and careful attention. I look around and it is as if I never left.
Soon I am roused from my reverie by the screeching and hugging and touching of arriving classmates. I am so glad to be the first one here. So glad to do the welcoming.
There are huge smiles that look absolutely no different from the ones I remember except for the tiny lines that form at the corners of their eyes, lines that look nothing like crows' feet and everything like sunbursts.
Each of these women has moved her own personal heaven and earth to be here, to be in what is – to us at least – a sacred place, a cathedral of red brick and arched doorways and marble columns. A place where we sang the hymns and recited the creeds and fulfilled the prophecies that said, "This is who you will be."
On Saturday night, after all the formal events – the board elections and award presentations and campus tours – we gather at the home of one of our classmates. The backyard is lit with candlelight that softens the edges of everything, including our aging faces. A handful of us gather around a table to catch up, to exchange stories.
One of the Janets tells us how she made her way back to the love of her life 30 years after meeting him for the first time, how she inherited his daughter as her own and how, yes, she did think she would burst with pride as, just that morning, she had helped induct that daughter into the Wesleyan Alumnae Association. We are all beaming. Starbursts are at the corners of our eyes again.
And it is at that moment that I understand. Understand that we come back home for the stories. We come back to tell our own and to hear those of our sisters. Because it is in the telling and in the hearing that each of us learns this great truth: There is only one story – the story of birth and growth, of struggle and loss, of transformation and redemption.
In a few hours I, we will be headed to our other homes. I, we will pick up where we left off, open the book at the bookmark and begin again. I take one last look at the sweet sweet faces of the girls I have watched become women and this is what I think: They knew me at 17 and now, at three times that, it becomes clear that they still do.
It is a rare comfort in a world we treat as though it were disposable to come across something that remains, that persists, that stays. Within the arms of my alma mater, my "nourishing mother," I have found such a thing. It is the truth of story and the authentic life that results from its telling.
Copyright 2008
A person can have more than one home and I have left one to come to another. I have left Sandhill to come to Wesleyan.
It has been thirty years since I accepted my real sheepskin diploma and carefully moved the purple and white tassel to the other side of my mortar board. Thirty years since I said goodbye to this place, but, being a good daughter, I have punctuated that thirty years with frequent visits and careful attention. I look around and it is as if I never left.
Soon I am roused from my reverie by the screeching and hugging and touching of arriving classmates. I am so glad to be the first one here. So glad to do the welcoming.
There are huge smiles that look absolutely no different from the ones I remember except for the tiny lines that form at the corners of their eyes, lines that look nothing like crows' feet and everything like sunbursts.
Each of these women has moved her own personal heaven and earth to be here, to be in what is – to us at least – a sacred place, a cathedral of red brick and arched doorways and marble columns. A place where we sang the hymns and recited the creeds and fulfilled the prophecies that said, "This is who you will be."
On Saturday night, after all the formal events – the board elections and award presentations and campus tours – we gather at the home of one of our classmates. The backyard is lit with candlelight that softens the edges of everything, including our aging faces. A handful of us gather around a table to catch up, to exchange stories.
One of the Janets tells us how she made her way back to the love of her life 30 years after meeting him for the first time, how she inherited his daughter as her own and how, yes, she did think she would burst with pride as, just that morning, she had helped induct that daughter into the Wesleyan Alumnae Association. We are all beaming. Starbursts are at the corners of our eyes again.
And it is at that moment that I understand. Understand that we come back home for the stories. We come back to tell our own and to hear those of our sisters. Because it is in the telling and in the hearing that each of us learns this great truth: There is only one story – the story of birth and growth, of struggle and loss, of transformation and redemption.
In a few hours I, we will be headed to our other homes. I, we will pick up where we left off, open the book at the bookmark and begin again. I take one last look at the sweet sweet faces of the girls I have watched become women and this is what I think: They knew me at 17 and now, at three times that, it becomes clear that they still do.
It is a rare comfort in a world we treat as though it were disposable to come across something that remains, that persists, that stays. Within the arms of my alma mater, my "nourishing mother," I have found such a thing. It is the truth of story and the authentic life that results from its telling.
Copyright 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Self-Defense
One day last week, during one of the more temperate – though brief – moments in what has been a rather schizophrenic weather pattern, I went out on the deck to read. There were probably ten or twelve different bird calls echoing in the branch and the wind chimes were tink-tink-tinking from the lowest limb of the chinaberry tree.
The sound that drowned them all out, the sound that with its nearness and potential for danger demanded attention was the drone of a single bumblebee. I had hardly settled back on the chaise when the little demon appeared out of the waxy green branches of the lygustrum bush at the corner of the house and came to hover about six inches from the tip of my nose.
Making the quick decision that immobility might translate into invisibility, I held my breath and stared at the fat little insect whose wings were nothing more than a silver blur against the blue sky. Fortunately for me, I was soon determined to be a non-pollen-producing organism and the bee buzzed away.
There were a couple more fly-by's, but for the most part we ignored each other, each of us intent on gathering its own form of nectar.
I don't have any specific memory of learning the childhood rules of insects, but at some point someone must have told me that, first, if you don't bother the bee, the bee won't bother you and, second, if the bee does sting you he will immediately die. I accepted as truth those statements as every child accepts as truth the pronouncements of bigger people.
It was quite a coincidence – if there is such a thing – that, just a few days after my nod-and-bob cocktail party encounter with the bee, I had my folkloric knowledge both confirmed and refuted as good science. The regular old south Georgia bumblebee is, as I had learned, an exclusively defensive stinger, but the "one sting and then death" proposition applies only to its cousin the honeybee.
"They attack when threatened, but only as a last defense," the author of my book wrote. "With the injection, their stinger and venom sac are ripped from their body and they die."
Given my propensity for seeing everything as metaphor, I was immediately struck by the "only as a last defense" part and felt my heart swelling for the little critters, both the honeybees and we people who behave in the very same way.
Except that – Let's be honest here. –, we people tend to leave off that last subordinate clause. We just attack when threatened. Your ability to make it to the meeting in time is jeopardized by the car merging into traffic, so you blow your horn, maybe even give your middle finger a little exercise. The customer service representative on the other end of the telephone line doesn't seem to want to help me, so I start using what I hope are intimidating lawyer words. The first grader's Crayon pack is missing the yellow one she wants, so she breaks the red one in two.
It's sad. There is really very little that threatens the 21st century American. Nearly all of us have plenty of food. There are no bands of guerrillas haunting our subdivisions. Most of the diseases that killed our great-grandparents have been eradicated or held in check by medicine. Yet we behave as though we are hapless honeybees.
Sadder still is all that is ripped from our souls when we recklessly respond. Dignity, peace of mind, clarity of conscience – attributes that require patient cultivation, character traits that take years to develop and only seconds to destroy. Virtues without which the nobility of the human spirit will die.
Honeybees don't know that something dies when they try to defend themselves. But we're smarter. Shouldn't we?
Copyright 2008
The sound that drowned them all out, the sound that with its nearness and potential for danger demanded attention was the drone of a single bumblebee. I had hardly settled back on the chaise when the little demon appeared out of the waxy green branches of the lygustrum bush at the corner of the house and came to hover about six inches from the tip of my nose.
Making the quick decision that immobility might translate into invisibility, I held my breath and stared at the fat little insect whose wings were nothing more than a silver blur against the blue sky. Fortunately for me, I was soon determined to be a non-pollen-producing organism and the bee buzzed away.
There were a couple more fly-by's, but for the most part we ignored each other, each of us intent on gathering its own form of nectar.
I don't have any specific memory of learning the childhood rules of insects, but at some point someone must have told me that, first, if you don't bother the bee, the bee won't bother you and, second, if the bee does sting you he will immediately die. I accepted as truth those statements as every child accepts as truth the pronouncements of bigger people.
It was quite a coincidence – if there is such a thing – that, just a few days after my nod-and-bob cocktail party encounter with the bee, I had my folkloric knowledge both confirmed and refuted as good science. The regular old south Georgia bumblebee is, as I had learned, an exclusively defensive stinger, but the "one sting and then death" proposition applies only to its cousin the honeybee.
"They attack when threatened, but only as a last defense," the author of my book wrote. "With the injection, their stinger and venom sac are ripped from their body and they die."
Given my propensity for seeing everything as metaphor, I was immediately struck by the "only as a last defense" part and felt my heart swelling for the little critters, both the honeybees and we people who behave in the very same way.
Except that – Let's be honest here. –, we people tend to leave off that last subordinate clause. We just attack when threatened. Your ability to make it to the meeting in time is jeopardized by the car merging into traffic, so you blow your horn, maybe even give your middle finger a little exercise. The customer service representative on the other end of the telephone line doesn't seem to want to help me, so I start using what I hope are intimidating lawyer words. The first grader's Crayon pack is missing the yellow one she wants, so she breaks the red one in two.
It's sad. There is really very little that threatens the 21st century American. Nearly all of us have plenty of food. There are no bands of guerrillas haunting our subdivisions. Most of the diseases that killed our great-grandparents have been eradicated or held in check by medicine. Yet we behave as though we are hapless honeybees.
Sadder still is all that is ripped from our souls when we recklessly respond. Dignity, peace of mind, clarity of conscience – attributes that require patient cultivation, character traits that take years to develop and only seconds to destroy. Virtues without which the nobility of the human spirit will die.
Honeybees don't know that something dies when they try to defend themselves. But we're smarter. Shouldn't we?
Copyright 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
Sew Simple
Mama didn't teach me to cook. Whatever I know of following recipes, cleaning up as you go and seasoning to taste, I learned from other sources.
What she did teach me was to stitch a hem so delicate as to be invisible and so strong as to be unravelable, to set in a sleeve with no puckers and lay out a pattern with no waste of fabric. She taught me how to figure yardage, how to match thread, how to make a dart, a pleat and a tuck and how to put on a waistband.
By the time I took home ec in the eighth grade I was earning spending money by helping Mama who, as we used to say, took in sewing. I steam-pressed the seams and put in the hems of the dresses and coats and blouses she made for the ladies who, for some reason I could not fathom at the time, preferred homemade clothes to the ones hanging in the windows at Henry's and Tilli's and Belk.
I was, then, most resentful of Miss Williams's requirement that I use tracing paper to mark seam lines. Any idiot, it seemed to me, ought to be able to hold the fabric against the seam guide and stitch a straight line. I also couldn't understand why she would want me to make an apron when, heaven's to Betsy, I'd mastered that three years before in fifth grade 4-H.
I eventually won that battle and while everyone else was trying to figure out how to make their apron gathers uniform, I was obnoxiously trimming the facing on the neck of my dress and imagining how cool it was that my project was actually going to see use whereas my classmates' would most likely end up stuffed into their bottom dresser drawers.
Infinitely more satisfying, however, than being able to say, "I made it myself," is being able – as result of what my mother taught me – to recognize quality workmanship, an ability that transfers far beyond the walls of a clothing store and into more intangible endeavors. Unrolling a piece of fabric from a bolt and crushing a corner of it to test its hand is a good metaphor for determining the sincerity of a relationship. Matching plaids is akin to finding the right job or neighborhood or mate.
Even the terminology of sewing teaches lessons: Selvage and bias conjure up vivid images of the contrast between flexibility and rigidity. Seam allowance and presser foot and tension knob speak to the necessity, not just the unavoidability, of structure and rules.
All of which may be why no one learns to sew anymore. It requires time. It requires discipline. It requires stillness, quietness and concentration, all of which are commodities in short supply in a world where we drink instant coffee, send instant messages and long to be instant winners.
It's been a long time since I laid out my last pattern, pinned my last seam or threaded my last bobbin, but sometimes when I need to be reminded of the all I learned watching Mama hunched over a Singer sewing machine, its own peculiar song caught by the breeze through the open window and suffused into the summer night, I find my way to a store that still has an aisle marked notions. I take a deep breath and run my fingers over the rainbow of Coats and Clark spools, spin the button rack, flip through a few pages of the Simplicity pattern book and, in no longer than it takes to thread a needle, I am myself again.
Mama didn't teach me to cook, but what she did teach me was so much more important than that.
Copyright 2008
What she did teach me was to stitch a hem so delicate as to be invisible and so strong as to be unravelable, to set in a sleeve with no puckers and lay out a pattern with no waste of fabric. She taught me how to figure yardage, how to match thread, how to make a dart, a pleat and a tuck and how to put on a waistband.
By the time I took home ec in the eighth grade I was earning spending money by helping Mama who, as we used to say, took in sewing. I steam-pressed the seams and put in the hems of the dresses and coats and blouses she made for the ladies who, for some reason I could not fathom at the time, preferred homemade clothes to the ones hanging in the windows at Henry's and Tilli's and Belk.
I was, then, most resentful of Miss Williams's requirement that I use tracing paper to mark seam lines. Any idiot, it seemed to me, ought to be able to hold the fabric against the seam guide and stitch a straight line. I also couldn't understand why she would want me to make an apron when, heaven's to Betsy, I'd mastered that three years before in fifth grade 4-H.
I eventually won that battle and while everyone else was trying to figure out how to make their apron gathers uniform, I was obnoxiously trimming the facing on the neck of my dress and imagining how cool it was that my project was actually going to see use whereas my classmates' would most likely end up stuffed into their bottom dresser drawers.
Infinitely more satisfying, however, than being able to say, "I made it myself," is being able – as result of what my mother taught me – to recognize quality workmanship, an ability that transfers far beyond the walls of a clothing store and into more intangible endeavors. Unrolling a piece of fabric from a bolt and crushing a corner of it to test its hand is a good metaphor for determining the sincerity of a relationship. Matching plaids is akin to finding the right job or neighborhood or mate.
Even the terminology of sewing teaches lessons: Selvage and bias conjure up vivid images of the contrast between flexibility and rigidity. Seam allowance and presser foot and tension knob speak to the necessity, not just the unavoidability, of structure and rules.
All of which may be why no one learns to sew anymore. It requires time. It requires discipline. It requires stillness, quietness and concentration, all of which are commodities in short supply in a world where we drink instant coffee, send instant messages and long to be instant winners.
It's been a long time since I laid out my last pattern, pinned my last seam or threaded my last bobbin, but sometimes when I need to be reminded of the all I learned watching Mama hunched over a Singer sewing machine, its own peculiar song caught by the breeze through the open window and suffused into the summer night, I find my way to a store that still has an aisle marked notions. I take a deep breath and run my fingers over the rainbow of Coats and Clark spools, spin the button rack, flip through a few pages of the Simplicity pattern book and, in no longer than it takes to thread a needle, I am myself again.
Mama didn't teach me to cook, but what she did teach me was so much more important than that.
Copyright 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Unburied Treasure
The best gift is one that is unexpected or one that is particularly suited to the recipient. When a single gift is both it makes the heart sing.
This past Sunday I was walking with a friend down the long wide beach on Jekyll Island. There were few others out in the breezy afternoon – a handful of birdwatchers who, when asked what they were hoping to see, replied, "Anything that flies," and a middle-aged couple walking five lean and leggy greyhounds.
The sky was flat and the palest of blues. The tide had ebbed leaving an unusual number of horseshoe crab shells and the usual surfeit of trembling jellyfish scattered across the sand. Cumberland Island, just a few miles south, seemed almost touchable in the clear spring light.
We headed south intending to meet up with Judy, my friend's friend, a transplanted Californian with a specific passion for horses and a general appreciation of all things outdoors. As we walked, we talked of ordinary things – her cats, my dog, road trips we might take one day, the fact that I'd forgotten to put on sunscreen.
We caught up with Judy at the southernmost part of the island where a school of dolphins was churning up the water like an old-fashioned egg beater. Diving and rolling and circling each other like children playing chase, the dolphins moved as a group, with the current, oblivious to their role as entertainers to the people on shore.
"I found something for you," Judy told me and strode up the dunes where she had left the treasure. She came back with a perfect conch shell. Complete. Unbroken. I'd never seen one so unblemished, so whole. At least not outside a shell shop.
Sand clung to the winding spires of the ocean-scarred outside. Inside, the shell was glassy smooth and pink like lip gloss. It filled my hand exactly.
Judy explained that she'd seen just a little of it sticking out of the sand and that, when she started digging and realized how deeply it was buried, she suspected it might be whole. "The further down in the sand it's buried," she told us, "the better chance there is that it's unbroken."
When I got home I put my shell up on the mantel at the foot of some candlesticks. There was a handful of other shells already there – a couple of palm-sized scallops, another conch, all of them half- or quarter-shells only, all of them missing parts of themselves. And I remembered what Judy had said about being buried.
Is it possible that the only way to stay whole is to stay buried? And is staying buried any way to live? The truth is that my conch shell – without any cracks, without any holes, without any absent pieces – was empty. The snail that had lived there had been washed out by the ocean's waves or eaten in somebody's fritter. The container was still beautiful, but the life was gone.
Last week the news was full of the senseless, heartbreaking deaths of two young women – popular college students, good citizens, well-loved daughters. In each case there was a question about what she was doing in a particular place at a particular time. A reasonable question. An unavoidable question. And, ultimately, probably an unanswerable question.
I have another question: Had either of the beautiful co-ed's been somewhere else, would she have been guaranteed another day? Had either spent all her days on a security-camera'ed, razor-wired, soldier-guarded campus would she have been protected from all the evil that resides in the world? Had either stayed buried in the sand she would have been just like my conch shell – beautiful, unbroken and empty.
Life is about opportunity and risk. Life is about the willingness to open the mind and the heart. Life is about being filled with generosity and curiosity and love. Life is not an empty shell.
Copyright 2008
This past Sunday I was walking with a friend down the long wide beach on Jekyll Island. There were few others out in the breezy afternoon – a handful of birdwatchers who, when asked what they were hoping to see, replied, "Anything that flies," and a middle-aged couple walking five lean and leggy greyhounds.
The sky was flat and the palest of blues. The tide had ebbed leaving an unusual number of horseshoe crab shells and the usual surfeit of trembling jellyfish scattered across the sand. Cumberland Island, just a few miles south, seemed almost touchable in the clear spring light.
We headed south intending to meet up with Judy, my friend's friend, a transplanted Californian with a specific passion for horses and a general appreciation of all things outdoors. As we walked, we talked of ordinary things – her cats, my dog, road trips we might take one day, the fact that I'd forgotten to put on sunscreen.
We caught up with Judy at the southernmost part of the island where a school of dolphins was churning up the water like an old-fashioned egg beater. Diving and rolling and circling each other like children playing chase, the dolphins moved as a group, with the current, oblivious to their role as entertainers to the people on shore.
"I found something for you," Judy told me and strode up the dunes where she had left the treasure. She came back with a perfect conch shell. Complete. Unbroken. I'd never seen one so unblemished, so whole. At least not outside a shell shop.
Sand clung to the winding spires of the ocean-scarred outside. Inside, the shell was glassy smooth and pink like lip gloss. It filled my hand exactly.
Judy explained that she'd seen just a little of it sticking out of the sand and that, when she started digging and realized how deeply it was buried, she suspected it might be whole. "The further down in the sand it's buried," she told us, "the better chance there is that it's unbroken."
When I got home I put my shell up on the mantel at the foot of some candlesticks. There was a handful of other shells already there – a couple of palm-sized scallops, another conch, all of them half- or quarter-shells only, all of them missing parts of themselves. And I remembered what Judy had said about being buried.
Is it possible that the only way to stay whole is to stay buried? And is staying buried any way to live? The truth is that my conch shell – without any cracks, without any holes, without any absent pieces – was empty. The snail that had lived there had been washed out by the ocean's waves or eaten in somebody's fritter. The container was still beautiful, but the life was gone.
Last week the news was full of the senseless, heartbreaking deaths of two young women – popular college students, good citizens, well-loved daughters. In each case there was a question about what she was doing in a particular place at a particular time. A reasonable question. An unavoidable question. And, ultimately, probably an unanswerable question.
I have another question: Had either of the beautiful co-ed's been somewhere else, would she have been guaranteed another day? Had either spent all her days on a security-camera'ed, razor-wired, soldier-guarded campus would she have been protected from all the evil that resides in the world? Had either stayed buried in the sand she would have been just like my conch shell – beautiful, unbroken and empty.
Life is about opportunity and risk. Life is about the willingness to open the mind and the heart. Life is about being filled with generosity and curiosity and love. Life is not an empty shell.
Copyright 2008
Thursday, March 06, 2008
"And If That Mockingbird Don't Sing ..."
I have a new friend. A mockingbird has taken to arriving at Sandhill early every morning to perch on the empty shepherd’s crook standing at the edge of the deck. Balanced carefully on the cold curve of iron, beak tilted into the crisp morning air, he looks for all the world like a well-fed vassal surveying his fiefdom. Or better, with his pale gray feathers that end in a long square tail, like a British bridegroom in cutaway and ascot.
He is an attractive bird, but he seems to have frightened away all the wrens, the sparrows, the cardinals and the jays that normally flit and flutter from one bare branch to another, cheeping and chirping and singing the sun up.
Leaning against the sill, staring at the proud bird in his stillness and solitude, it is inevitable that I remember Harper Lee’s Scout Finch and her lawyer daddy whose plain goodness was one of the things that led me to my profession. When Atticus gives Scout an air-rifle it is with the admonition that "it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." Scout takes her confusion about her father’s words to an older neighbor who explains: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
Scout Finch lives in a world stained with hypocrisy and cruelty and selfishness. But she doesn’t know that. Not yet. Not until she sits in a courtroom balcony and watches her father confront, unsuccessfully it turns out, those marauders.
Wandering off into the woods of thought, I pick up the well-worn trail that leads me to my own courtroom balcony, the place where I first found myself wrestling with the intrusion of pain and disillusionment into a previously halcyon world. Things – I learned, we all learn eventually – are not as they should be.
Volcanos and wars erupt. Poverty and rumors spread. Children and dreams die. The best that even the wisest among us can offer is platitude, not explanation. Is it any wonder that a malignant heart so rarely raises us to righteous indignation anymore?
It is still a sin to kill a mockingbird, to harm the harmless, but unless it is our mockingbird in our backyard most of us are too jaded and resigned to care.
But back in the balcony in the Maycomb, Alabama, courthouse, as a defeated Atticus slowly gathers his things and turns to leave the courtroom, Rev. Sykes touches Scout’s shoulder and whispers, "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’."
In that moment, Scout begins to see that the world in which she lives, the one stained with hypocrisy and cruelty and selfishness, is also colored with generosity and loyalty and love. She begins to understand that even as she must shield herself against evil, she must open herself to good.
I’ve noticed that my mockingbird doesn’t sing. He doesn’t chirp and cheep. He doesn’t imitate the songs of his cousins, loudly and repetitively. Not once has he parted his beak, puffed up his throat, expelled his breath and offered a song.
If I measured his worth on Miss Maudie’s scale, I guess I’d be justified in at least shooing, if not shooting, him.
I watch him a while longer, notice the way his wings unfold like a lady’s fan when he loops over to the lowest limb of the chinaberry tree, how the white tips reflect the sunlight like snow, and it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, the greater sin, the transgression worse than killing a mockingbird, might be trying to make him something he isn’t, not loving him for what he is.
Copyright 2008
He is an attractive bird, but he seems to have frightened away all the wrens, the sparrows, the cardinals and the jays that normally flit and flutter from one bare branch to another, cheeping and chirping and singing the sun up.
Leaning against the sill, staring at the proud bird in his stillness and solitude, it is inevitable that I remember Harper Lee’s Scout Finch and her lawyer daddy whose plain goodness was one of the things that led me to my profession. When Atticus gives Scout an air-rifle it is with the admonition that "it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." Scout takes her confusion about her father’s words to an older neighbor who explains: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
Scout Finch lives in a world stained with hypocrisy and cruelty and selfishness. But she doesn’t know that. Not yet. Not until she sits in a courtroom balcony and watches her father confront, unsuccessfully it turns out, those marauders.
Wandering off into the woods of thought, I pick up the well-worn trail that leads me to my own courtroom balcony, the place where I first found myself wrestling with the intrusion of pain and disillusionment into a previously halcyon world. Things – I learned, we all learn eventually – are not as they should be.
Volcanos and wars erupt. Poverty and rumors spread. Children and dreams die. The best that even the wisest among us can offer is platitude, not explanation. Is it any wonder that a malignant heart so rarely raises us to righteous indignation anymore?
It is still a sin to kill a mockingbird, to harm the harmless, but unless it is our mockingbird in our backyard most of us are too jaded and resigned to care.
But back in the balcony in the Maycomb, Alabama, courthouse, as a defeated Atticus slowly gathers his things and turns to leave the courtroom, Rev. Sykes touches Scout’s shoulder and whispers, "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’."
In that moment, Scout begins to see that the world in which she lives, the one stained with hypocrisy and cruelty and selfishness, is also colored with generosity and loyalty and love. She begins to understand that even as she must shield herself against evil, she must open herself to good.
I’ve noticed that my mockingbird doesn’t sing. He doesn’t chirp and cheep. He doesn’t imitate the songs of his cousins, loudly and repetitively. Not once has he parted his beak, puffed up his throat, expelled his breath and offered a song.
If I measured his worth on Miss Maudie’s scale, I guess I’d be justified in at least shooing, if not shooting, him.
I watch him a while longer, notice the way his wings unfold like a lady’s fan when he loops over to the lowest limb of the chinaberry tree, how the white tips reflect the sunlight like snow, and it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, the greater sin, the transgression worse than killing a mockingbird, might be trying to make him something he isn’t, not loving him for what he is.
Copyright 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
First Aid and Instinct
I was reading about water bears the other day. They are microscopic creatures that look like tiny little bears with eight legs; their scientific name, tardigrada, means "slow mover." They can live for up to 50 years and at temperatures as low as -400 degrees Fahrenheit. If the water in which they live dries up, they go into a state of hibernation called cryptobiosis, "hidden life."
It was hard not to make a comparison between the water bears and people. They have eight legs, but move slowly. We have two legs and, most of the time, move too swiftly for our spirits to keep up. We generally live longer, but our range of liveable temperatures is so small that we find it necessary to destroy much of the natural environment to produce fuel for the heating and
cooling of our buildings.
The only thing, it appeared from my reading, that we large mammals with the abilities to reason and elaborately verbally communicate have in common with the invisible water bears is that hidden life.
Call it hibernation or cryptobiosis or privacy, the reality is that when our water dries up, when the environment in which we have thrived is suddenly and irrevocably changed, it is the nature of men and women to shut down, close up shop, board up the windows and make sure that those around us see the sign on the door that says, in big block letters, "Do not disturb!"
When I was in Girl Scouts part of what we had to learn to earn the First Aid badge was how to treat shock. To be honest, I don't remember much beyond the elevated feet and warm blanket parts. Gratefully, I never had to use that knowledge, but it bothers me a little that the instruction was limited to responding to physical shock.
No one, not the Girl Scouts or my Sunday School teachers or youth group leaders or, later, my psychology professors offered any instruction at all on how to address emotional shock, the feeling of numbness that engulfs you when the world cracks and dissolves into a million tiny shards of glass. The petrification of all thought, the inability to make even the smallest decision.
The truth is that there is no stop-drop-and-roll prescription for that kind of catastrophe. No acronym to remind you of the steps to take to make everything right again. No instructions that, if followed, guarantee a return to normalcy.
Like the water bears, we humans react without thought, with only instinct: We draw ourselves in and wait.
When the water bears are in the dormant state, they are as light as dust particles and a breeze can pick them up, toss them around and deposit them somewhere else. No resistance, no questioning. Yielded to the wind, sailing through the sky, eventually landing in a new place, a place where the water puddles or streams or falls from the clouds in syrupy drops. A place where the hidden life ends and the real life resumes.
Last week as I stood at the altar and received the ashes on my forehead, I was struck, as always, by the fragility of life. We are so vulnerable. Naked we come into the world, naked we leave and, in between, if we are to experience anything of love or joy or contentment, we must remain naked, exposed to the elements, exposed to each other.
There is always the chance that the water will dry up. Drought. Evaporation. The thirst of a passing dog. But when it does, when the unbidden and unwanted change occurs, it is good to remember the water bear who allows himself to become still and quiet and light as air.
It is good to remember that a breath of wind is coming. It will lift you off the dry and empty ground and drop you gently in a pool of water where the hidden life will thaw, where the boards will come off the windows and where the sunshine can trickle in.
Copyright 2008
It was hard not to make a comparison between the water bears and people. They have eight legs, but move slowly. We have two legs and, most of the time, move too swiftly for our spirits to keep up. We generally live longer, but our range of liveable temperatures is so small that we find it necessary to destroy much of the natural environment to produce fuel for the heating and
cooling of our buildings.
The only thing, it appeared from my reading, that we large mammals with the abilities to reason and elaborately verbally communicate have in common with the invisible water bears is that hidden life.
Call it hibernation or cryptobiosis or privacy, the reality is that when our water dries up, when the environment in which we have thrived is suddenly and irrevocably changed, it is the nature of men and women to shut down, close up shop, board up the windows and make sure that those around us see the sign on the door that says, in big block letters, "Do not disturb!"
When I was in Girl Scouts part of what we had to learn to earn the First Aid badge was how to treat shock. To be honest, I don't remember much beyond the elevated feet and warm blanket parts. Gratefully, I never had to use that knowledge, but it bothers me a little that the instruction was limited to responding to physical shock.
No one, not the Girl Scouts or my Sunday School teachers or youth group leaders or, later, my psychology professors offered any instruction at all on how to address emotional shock, the feeling of numbness that engulfs you when the world cracks and dissolves into a million tiny shards of glass. The petrification of all thought, the inability to make even the smallest decision.
The truth is that there is no stop-drop-and-roll prescription for that kind of catastrophe. No acronym to remind you of the steps to take to make everything right again. No instructions that, if followed, guarantee a return to normalcy.
Like the water bears, we humans react without thought, with only instinct: We draw ourselves in and wait.
When the water bears are in the dormant state, they are as light as dust particles and a breeze can pick them up, toss them around and deposit them somewhere else. No resistance, no questioning. Yielded to the wind, sailing through the sky, eventually landing in a new place, a place where the water puddles or streams or falls from the clouds in syrupy drops. A place where the hidden life ends and the real life resumes.
Last week as I stood at the altar and received the ashes on my forehead, I was struck, as always, by the fragility of life. We are so vulnerable. Naked we come into the world, naked we leave and, in between, if we are to experience anything of love or joy or contentment, we must remain naked, exposed to the elements, exposed to each other.
There is always the chance that the water will dry up. Drought. Evaporation. The thirst of a passing dog. But when it does, when the unbidden and unwanted change occurs, it is good to remember the water bear who allows himself to become still and quiet and light as air.
It is good to remember that a breath of wind is coming. It will lift you off the dry and empty ground and drop you gently in a pool of water where the hidden life will thaw, where the boards will come off the windows and where the sunshine can trickle in.
Copyright 2008
Monday, February 04, 2008
Second Chances
Already the days are getting longer. The darkest days of winter are past and the sun is lingering on the horizon like a lover saying a reluctant good-bye.
Yesterday afternoon I got home a little early. After reading the mail and starting a load of laundry, I took my book out to the front porch to absorb the tender luminance of sunset. I read the words, turned the pages, but my thoughts were divided – half of them inside the story, half of them dwelling on the telephone call that had come, a few hours earlier, so unexpectedly.
"Are you by yourself?" Mama had asked in a voice that was clearly struggling against the rise of tears in her throat.
From down the hall came the voices of my co-workers and the high-pitched drone of machines. Telephones were ringing, printers were humming like helicopters about to take off. The sounds of busyness. The sounds of distraction. The sounds of an ordinary day.
Sounds that, with the question mark in my mother's voice, went silent. It was as though the mute button on some previously unknown remote control had been pressed by the finger of God.
The news, of course, was not good. Our dear family friend, a man who grew up with Daddy and whose children grew up with me and Keith, had died. Suddenly. He and his wife had been trying for years to get Mama and Daddy to visit them in Florida. Had teased, cajoled, bribed. Had even pulled me into the fray by getting me to promise to drive them.
But it hadn't happened. The last time we'd tried was in October, but corn had to be cut and a weather change was on the way and when the time came to go, I went by myself.
"Why," Mama had whimpered, "do we put things off?"
I watched the angle of the sun's light change, the shadows across the porch grow sharper. The rocking chair, arcing back in response to my push, forward in response to my letting go, eased my anxious heart into a gentle rhythm. The rush of feelings that had pounded me like the rising tide died down as the flow began its unavoidable and imperceptible turn.
Why do we put things off? Why do we, as Stephen Covey puts it, elevate the urgent over the important?
Regret may well be the most painful of emotions because it is self-inflicted. Grief and anger, joy and excitement, they all spring from points outside the self; regret has only one source. And because we expect more from ourselves than we would ever expect from anyone else, we refuse the only cure, medicine that we easily spoon out to others – a teaspoon of forgiveness, a dose of second chance.
This is what I remember about Mr. John – that he always called Daddy "Cuz," that he never seemed to mind when we played touch football in the front yard and he got all the girls on his team and that he loved to tell stories, a characteristic that on its own was enough to make me love him.
And I remember that the last time I was with him he told me how proud he was of me, something you never get too old to hear.
I have tried to live my life without regret. I've not been completely successful. Fortunately, the people I have failed still love me and because of that I get the opportunity every day to show them how grateful I am for the second chance.
That, as much as the love itself, may well be the greatest gift of all.
Copyright 2008
Yesterday afternoon I got home a little early. After reading the mail and starting a load of laundry, I took my book out to the front porch to absorb the tender luminance of sunset. I read the words, turned the pages, but my thoughts were divided – half of them inside the story, half of them dwelling on the telephone call that had come, a few hours earlier, so unexpectedly.
"Are you by yourself?" Mama had asked in a voice that was clearly struggling against the rise of tears in her throat.
From down the hall came the voices of my co-workers and the high-pitched drone of machines. Telephones were ringing, printers were humming like helicopters about to take off. The sounds of busyness. The sounds of distraction. The sounds of an ordinary day.
Sounds that, with the question mark in my mother's voice, went silent. It was as though the mute button on some previously unknown remote control had been pressed by the finger of God.
The news, of course, was not good. Our dear family friend, a man who grew up with Daddy and whose children grew up with me and Keith, had died. Suddenly. He and his wife had been trying for years to get Mama and Daddy to visit them in Florida. Had teased, cajoled, bribed. Had even pulled me into the fray by getting me to promise to drive them.
But it hadn't happened. The last time we'd tried was in October, but corn had to be cut and a weather change was on the way and when the time came to go, I went by myself.
"Why," Mama had whimpered, "do we put things off?"
I watched the angle of the sun's light change, the shadows across the porch grow sharper. The rocking chair, arcing back in response to my push, forward in response to my letting go, eased my anxious heart into a gentle rhythm. The rush of feelings that had pounded me like the rising tide died down as the flow began its unavoidable and imperceptible turn.
Why do we put things off? Why do we, as Stephen Covey puts it, elevate the urgent over the important?
Regret may well be the most painful of emotions because it is self-inflicted. Grief and anger, joy and excitement, they all spring from points outside the self; regret has only one source. And because we expect more from ourselves than we would ever expect from anyone else, we refuse the only cure, medicine that we easily spoon out to others – a teaspoon of forgiveness, a dose of second chance.
This is what I remember about Mr. John – that he always called Daddy "Cuz," that he never seemed to mind when we played touch football in the front yard and he got all the girls on his team and that he loved to tell stories, a characteristic that on its own was enough to make me love him.
And I remember that the last time I was with him he told me how proud he was of me, something you never get too old to hear.
I have tried to live my life without regret. I've not been completely successful. Fortunately, the people I have failed still love me and because of that I get the opportunity every day to show them how grateful I am for the second chance.
That, as much as the love itself, may well be the greatest gift of all.
Copyright 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Beavers, Oak Trees and Sacred Vows
For years now Daddy has struggled to keep unobstructed the spring that feeds the pond from which he pumps irrigation water. In the course of one night, beavers can build – and have built on several occasions – a formidable dam that nothing will bust loose save several hours of ax-wielding. Every winter he spends an afternoon or two, hunched against the wind, freeing the spring of its obstruction.
Just the other day Mama was relating to some visiting friends this less than bucolic aspect of country living. While listening to the story of how Jake the Wonder Dog swam to the middle of the pond, subdued one of the interloping varmints and then amazingly made the necessary mathematical calculation to determine the shortest route back to land, one of the friends noticed an incredible example of the beavers' handiwork.
At the edge of the pond was an oak tree, as big around as a grown man's thigh, that had been completely eaten through by the resident rodents. What was so remarkable was that the tree had not fallen. It stood suspended in mid-air, levitating directly above the stump from which it had been amputated.
A quick glance confirmed that the law of gravity had not been repealed and that, in fact, the branches of the tree were entwined with those of another tree. The embrace of its neighbor kept it standing.
The reason those friends were visiting was to attend a wedding – their own. In a few short days, they and those who love them had put together the arrangements for a ceremony to be held on the front porch of Sandhill and on Sunday afternoon, as the wind chimes sang and the breeze licked at loose tendrils of hair and the hems of flirty dresses, they held hands and exchanged rings and promised to stay together forever.
"What greater joy," the judge asked the two of them and all of us who listened, " is there for two human souls than to join together to strengthen each other in all their endeavors, to support each other through all sorrow, and to share with each other in all gladness?
"Love is stronger than your conflicts, bigger than life's changes. Love is the miracle always inviting you to learn, to blossom, to expand. It is to love that you must always return.
"You are about to make vows and promises to each other. Today, these vows are beautiful words representing even more beautiful intentions. My prayer for you is that as you live these vows over the years, the meaning of these words will deepen, and the happy times of your life will be twice as joyous, because you'll be sharing them with someone you love. And when life gets tough, it will only be half as hard because there is someone by your side to help carry the burden."
Watching their faces, I couldn't help thinking about that tree, the one the beavers had chewed and gnawed and torn asunder. It had done nothing to invite the attack, nothing to encourage the assault, nothing to threaten its assailant and, yet, it very nearly found itself felled.
Most of the troubles that come our way are not the result of anything wrong we have done, anything important we have failed to do. They are simply the result of living in what the theologians call a fallen world. Bad things happen to good people, beavers cut down trees. What keeps them standing, the people and the trees, is being close enough to allow those nearby to bear some of the load.
I think, maybe, that that is as good definition of marriage as anything I've ever heard: two people standing close enough to each other to share the load.
Copyright 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
Auld Lang Syne
It is midnight. I walk outside onto the deck and lift my chin toward the sky full of stars. Like loose diamonds tossed across a navy blue velvet cloth in some colossal jewelry store, they take my breath away.
And when I finally release it, a tiny puff of silver floats away from my open mouth into the chilly darkness and dissolves like cotton candy.
New Year's Eve is generally pretty quiet in the country. More than once the clock has ticked (or, more accurately, the LED display has changed) moving Sandhill and the world into a new year without any notice at all. Not by me, not by the dogs, certainly not by the owl who lives in the branch behind the house or the deer whose Valentine-shaped hoofprints edge the dirt road like lace. We country creatures tend to have ended our days long before the countdown begins in Times Square.
This year, though, I have made it a point to stay awake, to be conscious and thinking upon the arrival of the leap year, election year, Olympic year. I have lit lots of candles, understanding something of the uncertainty of the ancient peoples who kept a fire burning through the darkest night of the year, and have given myself over to the kind of rambling contemplation that generally leads me to the surprising conclusion that I've not been paying nearly enough attention to my life.
I try to focus on this moment. I feel the dryer-warmth pass from the towels I am folding into the palms of my hands. I breathe in the scent of almond as I rub lotion into those same hands, dry and red from all the sink-washing of the "good dishes." I stop and stare at the Christmas tree, the ornaments round and reflective, the lights a stark contrast to the darkness that has quickly covered the day.
In Wales, the winter solstice is called "the point of roughness," an idea that brings to mind the fingertips of a safe-cracker or a reader of Braille. Inflicted tenderness.
Not a particularly attractive idea in a society where easy and painless are what people want in everything from plastic surgery to divorce. To intentionally court sensitivity seems to be the height of ingratitude for the various products and mechanisms and therapies we have devised to make life easier. Which leads one to the question, "Is that what life is supposed to be? Easy?"
I am sitting at my desk now. On the edge is a wicker tray I've filled with totems, objects that remind me of where I've been, who was there with me, what I learned. A piece of red coral, a seashell, a cast iron acorn that holds a key, a framed notecard that reads, "It will all be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."
Right outside the window, the owl swoops close enough to rustle the too-long branches on the shrubbery and opens his mouth to the long mournful cry I have grown to love.
Time passes. Two hours until midnight. One hour until midnight. Thirty minutes. Five minutes. Ten seconds.
"Five ... four ... three ..." the voice on the radio whispers into the microphone on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. "Two ... one ... Happy New Year."
It is midnight. I walk outside onto the deck and lift my chin toward the sky full of stars. I hold myself tightly against the chill. A new year. I take a deep breath and raise a glass to whatever is out there. Easy or not.
Copyright 2008
And when I finally release it, a tiny puff of silver floats away from my open mouth into the chilly darkness and dissolves like cotton candy.
New Year's Eve is generally pretty quiet in the country. More than once the clock has ticked (or, more accurately, the LED display has changed) moving Sandhill and the world into a new year without any notice at all. Not by me, not by the dogs, certainly not by the owl who lives in the branch behind the house or the deer whose Valentine-shaped hoofprints edge the dirt road like lace. We country creatures tend to have ended our days long before the countdown begins in Times Square.
This year, though, I have made it a point to stay awake, to be conscious and thinking upon the arrival of the leap year, election year, Olympic year. I have lit lots of candles, understanding something of the uncertainty of the ancient peoples who kept a fire burning through the darkest night of the year, and have given myself over to the kind of rambling contemplation that generally leads me to the surprising conclusion that I've not been paying nearly enough attention to my life.
I try to focus on this moment. I feel the dryer-warmth pass from the towels I am folding into the palms of my hands. I breathe in the scent of almond as I rub lotion into those same hands, dry and red from all the sink-washing of the "good dishes." I stop and stare at the Christmas tree, the ornaments round and reflective, the lights a stark contrast to the darkness that has quickly covered the day.
In Wales, the winter solstice is called "the point of roughness," an idea that brings to mind the fingertips of a safe-cracker or a reader of Braille. Inflicted tenderness.
Not a particularly attractive idea in a society where easy and painless are what people want in everything from plastic surgery to divorce. To intentionally court sensitivity seems to be the height of ingratitude for the various products and mechanisms and therapies we have devised to make life easier. Which leads one to the question, "Is that what life is supposed to be? Easy?"
I am sitting at my desk now. On the edge is a wicker tray I've filled with totems, objects that remind me of where I've been, who was there with me, what I learned. A piece of red coral, a seashell, a cast iron acorn that holds a key, a framed notecard that reads, "It will all be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."
Right outside the window, the owl swoops close enough to rustle the too-long branches on the shrubbery and opens his mouth to the long mournful cry I have grown to love.
Time passes. Two hours until midnight. One hour until midnight. Thirty minutes. Five minutes. Ten seconds.
"Five ... four ... three ..." the voice on the radio whispers into the microphone on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. "Two ... one ... Happy New Year."
It is midnight. I walk outside onto the deck and lift my chin toward the sky full of stars. I hold myself tightly against the chill. A new year. I take a deep breath and raise a glass to whatever is out there. Easy or not.
Copyright 2008
Monday, December 24, 2007
How Christmas Feels
I don't really mind 80-degree weather in December. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I prefer it. I can sit on the deck and read the Sunday paper. I can take the dogs rambling wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I can get out of bed without gritting my teeth in preparation for the feel of cold tile on my bare feet.
The problem with 80-degree weather in December, however, is – as everyone was sighing last week – "It just doesn't feel like Christmas."
It was looking like Christmas, of course. Wreaths with red velvet bows. Twinkling lights. Holly and poinsettias. The ubiquitous Christmas sweater.
So it was that into the contradiction between sight and sense that I woke up last Saturday to the sound of rain hitting the windows like bird shot. On Sunday it was the wind that greeted my awakening. On Monday it was the silence of hard cold.
I stood at the door and looked outside at the frost wrapped over the landscape – in some places shiny and slick like aluminum foil, in others clear and wavy like Saran wrap. The whole world was white and pale gray and silver. Pulling my overcoat and gloves from the hall closet before rushing outside to warm up the car, I thought, "Now it feels like Christmas."
The funny thing is, of course, that most of the Christmases I've known have been nothing like iconic Currier and Ives prints. Only once can I remember snow anywhere near December 25 on the calendar. Old photographs of me and Keith and our cousins playing outside with our Christmas toys show us in nothing warmer than a sweatshirt and plenty of them show us with bare arms.
The difference between romance and reality isn't limited to weather issues. There's that whole magazine- and Food Network-encouraged delusion of the formal meal where the family dons its nicest clothes and gathers around a table set with Grandmother's china and silver and everyone comments on the deliciousness of the roasted brussels sprouts.
Does anyone arrive on the doorstep holding an armload of beautifully wrapped gifts none of which has a smooshed bow?
I think it would be lovely to have that kind of Christmas – elegant, unhurried, and draped in pristine snow – , but the truth is that I would have no place in such a Christmas. I am neither elegant nor unhurried (though I am working on being both by the time I reach my dotage). My place is in a Christmas where people shaped by a life that isn't always easy, hasn't always been fair and has forced on them grief they feel ill-prepared to carry pause long enough to realize that what matters isn't how Christmas looks, but how it feels.
And how should it feel? How did Mary and Joseph feel? How did George Washington and his army, crossing the Delaware River, feel? How did the World War I soldiers who sang with their enemies on the battlefields of Flanders during the Christmas Truce of 1914 feel? How did the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to orbit the moon and the first to spend Christmas in space, feel? We can only imagine, but I think they may have all felt similar things. Fear. Anticipation. Uncertainty. Awe. Because whatever happened next, whatever the results of the next few hours or days, the world would be changed forever.
Christmas changed the world forever. May we embrace that feeling and go out and do the same.
Copyright 2007
The problem with 80-degree weather in December, however, is – as everyone was sighing last week – "It just doesn't feel like Christmas."
It was looking like Christmas, of course. Wreaths with red velvet bows. Twinkling lights. Holly and poinsettias. The ubiquitous Christmas sweater.
So it was that into the contradiction between sight and sense that I woke up last Saturday to the sound of rain hitting the windows like bird shot. On Sunday it was the wind that greeted my awakening. On Monday it was the silence of hard cold.
I stood at the door and looked outside at the frost wrapped over the landscape – in some places shiny and slick like aluminum foil, in others clear and wavy like Saran wrap. The whole world was white and pale gray and silver. Pulling my overcoat and gloves from the hall closet before rushing outside to warm up the car, I thought, "Now it feels like Christmas."
The funny thing is, of course, that most of the Christmases I've known have been nothing like iconic Currier and Ives prints. Only once can I remember snow anywhere near December 25 on the calendar. Old photographs of me and Keith and our cousins playing outside with our Christmas toys show us in nothing warmer than a sweatshirt and plenty of them show us with bare arms.
The difference between romance and reality isn't limited to weather issues. There's that whole magazine- and Food Network-encouraged delusion of the formal meal where the family dons its nicest clothes and gathers around a table set with Grandmother's china and silver and everyone comments on the deliciousness of the roasted brussels sprouts.
Does anyone arrive on the doorstep holding an armload of beautifully wrapped gifts none of which has a smooshed bow?
I think it would be lovely to have that kind of Christmas – elegant, unhurried, and draped in pristine snow – , but the truth is that I would have no place in such a Christmas. I am neither elegant nor unhurried (though I am working on being both by the time I reach my dotage). My place is in a Christmas where people shaped by a life that isn't always easy, hasn't always been fair and has forced on them grief they feel ill-prepared to carry pause long enough to realize that what matters isn't how Christmas looks, but how it feels.
And how should it feel? How did Mary and Joseph feel? How did George Washington and his army, crossing the Delaware River, feel? How did the World War I soldiers who sang with their enemies on the battlefields of Flanders during the Christmas Truce of 1914 feel? How did the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to orbit the moon and the first to spend Christmas in space, feel? We can only imagine, but I think they may have all felt similar things. Fear. Anticipation. Uncertainty. Awe. Because whatever happened next, whatever the results of the next few hours or days, the world would be changed forever.
Christmas changed the world forever. May we embrace that feeling and go out and do the same.
Copyright 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
Sight and Sound
When I asked Daddy to plant a chinaberry tree in the yard at Sandhill, he looked at me, not for the first time, as though I’d lost my mind.
"What in the world do you want with a chinaberry tree? That’s the aggravatingest thing I’ve ever seen."
I explained to him that there is something quintessentially southern about a chinaberry tree, that it reminds me of old farmsteads and bare feet and Sunday afternoons. I tried to get him to understand that I didn’t care that the fallen berries tend to sprout into saplings almost overnight and that they stain anything with which they come in contact. I did my best to convince him that it was a good idea and, eventually, I got my tree.
In the summer, the delicate branches bloom first with long languid leaves and then hard green berries that droop from their stems with disproportionate weight and always remind me of a pawn shop sign. As the season fades, the berries themselves fade to gold and dry up light and leathery into miniature versions of deflated volleyballs.
In late fall, the berries fall to the ground and the leaves get blown away and the tree stands naked with its skinny arms stretched toward the clouds as though entreating some divine intercession to cover its embarrassment.
That’s what I noticed the other morning when I stepped out on the deck to check the temperature. Silhouetted against the dull early morning sky, the tree looked small and vulnerable and not the least best reminiscent of her summer self dancing in the warm breeze.
Behind her was the harrowed-over corn field and beyond that the dried out remnants of kudzu vine wrapped around the trees at the edge of the pond. The world was still and empty and colorless.
Just as I was about to go back in, I heard geese honking. From far away, probably across somebody’s else farm, they were flying and calling to each other in voices faint, but exquisitely clear and I realized that in the near-empty landscape of winter I could hear other things more clearly, too. Wind chimes and the call of a loon. Dogs barking and the blast of a shotgun. The scurry of an unidentified small animal through the underbrush.
I’ve often wondered at the reasoning behind the early Christian fathers’ decision to place Christmas in this darkest, coldest part of the year. The carol calls it "the bleak midwinter." It is said that they simply wanted to piggyback on or, even better, eclipse the existing pagan celebrations that already existed, celebrations rooted in the fear that with each setting of the sun there was the possibility that it might not ever reappear.
Whatever the reason, it occurs to me that maybe one of the reasons we are called to celebrate the birth of the Christ child in the time of hibernation is that we hear better in the darkness. Without the distraction of spring’s heady scents and summer’s fresh tastes and autumn’s riotous colors, we are left with only the sounds.
The gasp of a young girl at the sight of an angel and the angel’s whisper, "Fear not." The scuffling of pilgrims down rocky roads and the harried voices of the census takers in the tiny Palestinian towns. The whimpering of sheep, the lowing of cattle. And the first breathy cries of a newborn.
It is easy to see the stars out in the country. I can stand in my front yard, tilt my head back and feel all my self-importance drain away. At this time of year, in the bleak midwinter, I can hear them, too. They are singing. And their song is a familiar one, the very first Christmas carol – "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."
Copyright 2007
"What in the world do you want with a chinaberry tree? That’s the aggravatingest thing I’ve ever seen."
I explained to him that there is something quintessentially southern about a chinaberry tree, that it reminds me of old farmsteads and bare feet and Sunday afternoons. I tried to get him to understand that I didn’t care that the fallen berries tend to sprout into saplings almost overnight and that they stain anything with which they come in contact. I did my best to convince him that it was a good idea and, eventually, I got my tree.
In the summer, the delicate branches bloom first with long languid leaves and then hard green berries that droop from their stems with disproportionate weight and always remind me of a pawn shop sign. As the season fades, the berries themselves fade to gold and dry up light and leathery into miniature versions of deflated volleyballs.
In late fall, the berries fall to the ground and the leaves get blown away and the tree stands naked with its skinny arms stretched toward the clouds as though entreating some divine intercession to cover its embarrassment.
That’s what I noticed the other morning when I stepped out on the deck to check the temperature. Silhouetted against the dull early morning sky, the tree looked small and vulnerable and not the least best reminiscent of her summer self dancing in the warm breeze.
Behind her was the harrowed-over corn field and beyond that the dried out remnants of kudzu vine wrapped around the trees at the edge of the pond. The world was still and empty and colorless.
Just as I was about to go back in, I heard geese honking. From far away, probably across somebody’s else farm, they were flying and calling to each other in voices faint, but exquisitely clear and I realized that in the near-empty landscape of winter I could hear other things more clearly, too. Wind chimes and the call of a loon. Dogs barking and the blast of a shotgun. The scurry of an unidentified small animal through the underbrush.
I’ve often wondered at the reasoning behind the early Christian fathers’ decision to place Christmas in this darkest, coldest part of the year. The carol calls it "the bleak midwinter." It is said that they simply wanted to piggyback on or, even better, eclipse the existing pagan celebrations that already existed, celebrations rooted in the fear that with each setting of the sun there was the possibility that it might not ever reappear.
Whatever the reason, it occurs to me that maybe one of the reasons we are called to celebrate the birth of the Christ child in the time of hibernation is that we hear better in the darkness. Without the distraction of spring’s heady scents and summer’s fresh tastes and autumn’s riotous colors, we are left with only the sounds.
The gasp of a young girl at the sight of an angel and the angel’s whisper, "Fear not." The scuffling of pilgrims down rocky roads and the harried voices of the census takers in the tiny Palestinian towns. The whimpering of sheep, the lowing of cattle. And the first breathy cries of a newborn.
It is easy to see the stars out in the country. I can stand in my front yard, tilt my head back and feel all my self-importance drain away. At this time of year, in the bleak midwinter, I can hear them, too. They are singing. And their song is a familiar one, the very first Christmas carol – "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."
Copyright 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
Who We Are
A few months ago Tamar has hit by a truck. Her hip was dislocated and it took the sweet and gifted folks at Saint Buddy's Hospital for Well-Beloved Animals two separate surgeries to get her pieced back together. Since then, she has been on restriction. She is not allowed to roam free and takes walks only while clipped to a long, but still confining leash. She spends the majority of her days lounging on the deck.
This, I would like to make clear, was not my idea. Mama, who in a rather imperial, but nonetheless understandable way has assumed full custody of Tamar, decided that she could not bear to consider the possibility of her getting hit again and Tamar has become more or less a house dog.
The other afternoon, however, Mama, Daddy and I were standing outside chatting when a truck drove by and there was Tamar tearing across the front yard in pursuit. Daddy yelled for her to stop, but to no avail. Paradoxically fortunately, her injury and subsequent surgeries have left Tamar with a slight limp and her speed has been reduced significantly. The truck was past her long before there was any chance of a physical encounter.
She turned back toward us and obediently trotted back to the steps of the deck where she waited to be reincarcerated.
It didn’t take long to discover that she’d managed to push open one of the gates that had not been completely locked and had, thus, made her escape.
Mama, all aflutter, reprimanded the still panting dog while Daddy shook his head and mumbled, "Getting hit didn’t make a bit of difference to that dog. She’s still gonna chase a truck if she gets a chance." And he is right. She will. It is who she is.
We’ll never know, I suppose, why Tamar feels this untamable compulsion to throw herself into the path of large and noisy objects. Maybe she is being protective and thinks she is chasing away evil. Maybe she is competitive and thinks she has been invited to test herself. Maybe she just likes the way it feels when her heart is beating fast and her legs are pumping.
We’ll never know and it doesn’t really matter. Tamar is a dog who loves to chase trucks and it is one of the characteristics, along with her insatiable need to lick and her staccato bark, that make her Tamar.
Just another example of the similarities among animals, including the ones of us who have proportionally large brains and reasoning skills. No one of us can ever really know why anyone else is the way she is. We deceive ourselves when we assert otherwise and we disparage our relationships when we insist on trying.
"It is a fool playing God who pretends to understand everything that passes in another’s heart," I read somewhere a long time ago and I’ve had to remind myself of that truth often as I have navigated the unpredictable and often uncharted waters of life.
Wanting to understand, pretending I do – it is such a waste of time. Better I should invest my minutes and hours and days in appreciating the uniqueness of each soul who, momentarily or permanently, imprints my heart.
One more thing about Tamar: She was completely nonplused by the effect that her brief breakout had on her humans. She just walked back over to her favorite spot, sat down, looked up and – I promise you – smiled.
Copyright 2007
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Clear Reflection
There are few people outside my family who have known me all my life, but Paulette is one of them.
I was born in October; she was born the next May. Together with our parents and siblings we spent the vacations of our childhood wandering all over the state, and occasionally over the edges into the adjoining ones, visiting state parks and what we called tourist attractions. Our fathers worked for the same company. We bunked in the same cabins at church camp.
Mama has lots of photographs of us. In nearly every one we have our arms around each other’s shoulders and our faces turned straight toward the camera – sweetly guileless, totally innocent and proudly uninhibited. Happy children.
When we were teenagers, her dad accepted a promotion and a transfer that whisked them out of our daily lives to far-away Mississippi. I rode with them on the trip to scout out houses and it was a great adventure, the farthest west I had ever been. Still is.
The summer after my freshman year in college, there was another trek across the deepest part of the deep south so that I could be one of her bridesmaids. But before I could don my pale blue dotted-Swiss dress and wide-brimmed white hat, we had to climb through the church’s bathroom window because somebody forgot the key. There is, much to our horror at the time and to our delight today, photographic evidence of breaking and entering.
After that hot June afternoon we rarely saw each other. We wore matching yellow dresses when her sister got married a few years later and visited briefly at her grandmother’s 80th birthday party, but beyond that the only contact we had was the occasional Christmas card. While I finished college and law school and came home, she settled in Louisiana, reared two boys and helped her husband start several businesses.
Somewhere along the line they bought a place in Florida, on the Gulf side, and a few months ago, when her parents were visiting mine and as we laughed and reminisced, I found myself responding to a invitation to meet them there by saying, "Just tell me when." So it was that last week I found myself heading west on I-10 to Destin.
One of the great blessings of my life is that I have a lot of friends. Mama likes to tell people that if I decided to make a cross-country car trip I could stay gone a couple of months and never have to stay in a hotel. She is probably right. The last time I counted, I’d stayed overnight in over 60 of my friends’ homes.
You learn a lot of things by doing that, the main one being that the level of psychic comfort you feel while staying in someone else’s home is directly proportional to the depth of your relationship. Let it be said, then, that from the moment I stepped into the house at Destin I felt as comfortable as if I’d been at Sandhill.
I had a lovely couple of days with Paulette’s parents before she joined us on Friday night. Saturday morning she and I, along with her 3-year-old granddaughter Macy, took a walk along the sugar-sand beach. The late-autumn sun was sharply angled across the clear clear water that gives the Emerald Coast its name and, despite the calendar having just turned to November, children played in the water while their parents stretched out in deck chairs, dozing in the sunshine.
Watching Macy chasing and being chased by the waves out of the corners of our eyes, we strolled along the water’s edge and talked. Talked in tones that were slow and easy and cathartic. Talked about things and people from our shared past and from our separate presents. Talked about ourselves, where we had been and who we had become.
That afternoon we said good-bye and promised to get together again soon.
The photos I took on my trip, once developed, will show us, as before, with our arms around each other’s shoulders. The faces, though, will be different. No longer guileless or innocent or uninhibited. No longer the smooth faces of children, but the sculpted faces of women. Women who understand that – in the midst of a world that doesn’t always reward that which is authentic – one can always find a clear reflection, an undistorted image of who she is in the mirror of a friend.
Copyright 2007
I was born in October; she was born the next May. Together with our parents and siblings we spent the vacations of our childhood wandering all over the state, and occasionally over the edges into the adjoining ones, visiting state parks and what we called tourist attractions. Our fathers worked for the same company. We bunked in the same cabins at church camp.
Mama has lots of photographs of us. In nearly every one we have our arms around each other’s shoulders and our faces turned straight toward the camera – sweetly guileless, totally innocent and proudly uninhibited. Happy children.
When we were teenagers, her dad accepted a promotion and a transfer that whisked them out of our daily lives to far-away Mississippi. I rode with them on the trip to scout out houses and it was a great adventure, the farthest west I had ever been. Still is.
The summer after my freshman year in college, there was another trek across the deepest part of the deep south so that I could be one of her bridesmaids. But before I could don my pale blue dotted-Swiss dress and wide-brimmed white hat, we had to climb through the church’s bathroom window because somebody forgot the key. There is, much to our horror at the time and to our delight today, photographic evidence of breaking and entering.
After that hot June afternoon we rarely saw each other. We wore matching yellow dresses when her sister got married a few years later and visited briefly at her grandmother’s 80th birthday party, but beyond that the only contact we had was the occasional Christmas card. While I finished college and law school and came home, she settled in Louisiana, reared two boys and helped her husband start several businesses.
Somewhere along the line they bought a place in Florida, on the Gulf side, and a few months ago, when her parents were visiting mine and as we laughed and reminisced, I found myself responding to a invitation to meet them there by saying, "Just tell me when." So it was that last week I found myself heading west on I-10 to Destin.
One of the great blessings of my life is that I have a lot of friends. Mama likes to tell people that if I decided to make a cross-country car trip I could stay gone a couple of months and never have to stay in a hotel. She is probably right. The last time I counted, I’d stayed overnight in over 60 of my friends’ homes.
You learn a lot of things by doing that, the main one being that the level of psychic comfort you feel while staying in someone else’s home is directly proportional to the depth of your relationship. Let it be said, then, that from the moment I stepped into the house at Destin I felt as comfortable as if I’d been at Sandhill.
I had a lovely couple of days with Paulette’s parents before she joined us on Friday night. Saturday morning she and I, along with her 3-year-old granddaughter Macy, took a walk along the sugar-sand beach. The late-autumn sun was sharply angled across the clear clear water that gives the Emerald Coast its name and, despite the calendar having just turned to November, children played in the water while their parents stretched out in deck chairs, dozing in the sunshine.
Watching Macy chasing and being chased by the waves out of the corners of our eyes, we strolled along the water’s edge and talked. Talked in tones that were slow and easy and cathartic. Talked about things and people from our shared past and from our separate presents. Talked about ourselves, where we had been and who we had become.
That afternoon we said good-bye and promised to get together again soon.
The photos I took on my trip, once developed, will show us, as before, with our arms around each other’s shoulders. The faces, though, will be different. No longer guileless or innocent or uninhibited. No longer the smooth faces of children, but the sculpted faces of women. Women who understand that – in the midst of a world that doesn’t always reward that which is authentic – one can always find a clear reflection, an undistorted image of who she is in the mirror of a friend.
Copyright 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Quick Glance
Point worth noting: At first glance, it is impossible to tell whether the tide is coming in or going out.
I came to this realization last weekend watching the ocean lap at my feet as I sat on a barnacle-crusted rock that, among many others, had been hoisted onto the beach in an effort to slow erosion.
I happened to be sitting there in an effort to forestall a different kind of erosion: four friends and I had come to the island to breath deeply and talk seriously and laugh loudly and now, on Sunday, they had left for home. As soon as the towels finished drying back at the condo, I would do the same, but as long as I sat on the rock, staring at the wide flat ocean, nothing could eat away at the peacefulness and serenity that buds in the human heart when it feels safe.
There were few people on the beach. It was, after all, October. A couple of kayakers paddled in unison in water just deep enough for their paddles. An awkward teenager splashed in the shallow puddles that surrounded the rocks and squealed as the waves wet her rolled-up pants legs. A man on a bicycle made a wide turn and headed back the way he had come.
I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped around them and chin perched atop them, as though I'd been spring-loaded, ready to be flung into the sky and out over the ocean in a long wide arc that ended at the horizon. A seated fetal position, a not-so-subtle manifestation of something gestating, but not yet ready to be birthed.
I stared at the sandbar, covered in water, where the rolling sea first makes white foam. I imagined a spot in the middle of the ocean, miles and miles away from land and people, where the water and salt and air that will become the waves seem motionless, the surface almost like glass. But they are not motionless, the water and salt and air. Gravity –– the magnetic force that through the rotation of the planet and its moon creates the tide, pulling in, pushing out, in a predictable rhythm –– has already begun its work.
Making its imperceptible journey toward land the waves feel the resistance of the ocean floor as the water becomes shallower. They move faster, developing power with their speed, and they begin to fold over themselves, grabbing the hovering air, ready to throw themselves in graceful, leaping curves at the shore, ready to lick at the sand beneath me, beneath the rock.
That's when I wondered, for the first time since I'd walked down to the beach, whether the tide was coming in or going out. And that's when I realized, for the first time ever, that a quick glance won't tell.
A quick glance is pretty much all we give most things. A quick glance at the newspaper, a quick glance at the mail, a quick glance at the price tag. A quick glance in the rear-view mirror before changing lanes. Sometimes a quick glance is enough.
But not always. A quick glance at a child's tear-streaked face is not enough. A quick glance at a sunset that smears the sky with the colors of a neon sign is not enough. A quick glance at one's own heart is not enough.
These are matters that require prolonged gazing, lengthy contemplation, lingering consideration. These are matters the essence of which are revealed only with the investment of deep and sometimes painful examination.
Like the tide, these are matters of mystery and magic. Like the tide, their rhythms are ebb and flow. But like the tide, they can be trusted.
One of the things about the beach that always amazes me is that the constant movement can seem so still, that the noise can seem so quiet. That in that place and in that moment I can seem so still and quiet.
I looked down at the water slapping the rocks beneath me. The tide, I could tell, was coming in.
Copyright 2007
I came to this realization last weekend watching the ocean lap at my feet as I sat on a barnacle-crusted rock that, among many others, had been hoisted onto the beach in an effort to slow erosion.
I happened to be sitting there in an effort to forestall a different kind of erosion: four friends and I had come to the island to breath deeply and talk seriously and laugh loudly and now, on Sunday, they had left for home. As soon as the towels finished drying back at the condo, I would do the same, but as long as I sat on the rock, staring at the wide flat ocean, nothing could eat away at the peacefulness and serenity that buds in the human heart when it feels safe.
There were few people on the beach. It was, after all, October. A couple of kayakers paddled in unison in water just deep enough for their paddles. An awkward teenager splashed in the shallow puddles that surrounded the rocks and squealed as the waves wet her rolled-up pants legs. A man on a bicycle made a wide turn and headed back the way he had come.
I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped around them and chin perched atop them, as though I'd been spring-loaded, ready to be flung into the sky and out over the ocean in a long wide arc that ended at the horizon. A seated fetal position, a not-so-subtle manifestation of something gestating, but not yet ready to be birthed.
I stared at the sandbar, covered in water, where the rolling sea first makes white foam. I imagined a spot in the middle of the ocean, miles and miles away from land and people, where the water and salt and air that will become the waves seem motionless, the surface almost like glass. But they are not motionless, the water and salt and air. Gravity –– the magnetic force that through the rotation of the planet and its moon creates the tide, pulling in, pushing out, in a predictable rhythm –– has already begun its work.
Making its imperceptible journey toward land the waves feel the resistance of the ocean floor as the water becomes shallower. They move faster, developing power with their speed, and they begin to fold over themselves, grabbing the hovering air, ready to throw themselves in graceful, leaping curves at the shore, ready to lick at the sand beneath me, beneath the rock.
That's when I wondered, for the first time since I'd walked down to the beach, whether the tide was coming in or going out. And that's when I realized, for the first time ever, that a quick glance won't tell.
A quick glance is pretty much all we give most things. A quick glance at the newspaper, a quick glance at the mail, a quick glance at the price tag. A quick glance in the rear-view mirror before changing lanes. Sometimes a quick glance is enough.
But not always. A quick glance at a child's tear-streaked face is not enough. A quick glance at a sunset that smears the sky with the colors of a neon sign is not enough. A quick glance at one's own heart is not enough.
These are matters that require prolonged gazing, lengthy contemplation, lingering consideration. These are matters the essence of which are revealed only with the investment of deep and sometimes painful examination.
Like the tide, these are matters of mystery and magic. Like the tide, their rhythms are ebb and flow. But like the tide, they can be trusted.
One of the things about the beach that always amazes me is that the constant movement can seem so still, that the noise can seem so quiet. That in that place and in that moment I can seem so still and quiet.
I looked down at the water slapping the rocks beneath me. The tide, I could tell, was coming in.
Copyright 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Nest Redux
I noticed it, what at first appeared to be a matted, wadded up piece of spider web, as I started down the back steps. It was hanging from the dryer vent moving just slightly in the breeze. As I reached to pull it away I realized that it was a fragment of leaf attached to a thin twig attached to a larger twig stuffed inside the vent, not just dangling on the edge.
I cocked my head for a better look and saw that the vent was completely filled with twigs. It was, in fact, a nest and as I gently scooped it out all I could see was the six loads of clothes I'd dried over the last few days and the conflagration that could have been Sandhill had the nest caught fire.
The nest was about the size of a saucer and only about an inch deep at its center. The outer twigs fell away in my hands with a small poof of dust. Nestled in the hollow at the bottom were four tiny eggs. Tiny like a jelly bean. Tiny like a peanut. Tiny like a pearly button on a baby's christening gown.
Having touched the nest and contaminated it with my humanness, I knew – according to all the nature lore I'd learned as a child and which, admittedly, may or may not be true – that the mother bird, wherever she was, would now abandon the babies-in-process. What was probably closer to scientific actuality is that the eggs were old and the embryos inside were long dead.
Months ago, in spring, I had sat on the deck and watched a little bird, a Carolina wren, dart in and out of the dryer vent. From a distance I'd not seen that she'd been carrying bits and pieces of nest to her new place of abode. I'd thought she was just engaging in the avian version of a real estate showing when what she was really doing was moving in. The mortgage had been signed, the electricity turned on, the change-of-address cards mailed.
Too bad she hadn't talked to the neighbors. I could have told her that central heat, in this case, wasn't such a good idea. That the need for incubation aside, too much of a good thing can be deadly. That there is more to safety than isolation and darkness.
Nestled in my cupped hands, what had been a perfect home – if only for a moment – was now nothing more than a bunch of tender twigs gone brittle in the lingering heat of a lingering summer. The chocolate brown of new shoots had faded to the dull gray of lint. The sap that had made them flexible had dried up like a creek bed in drought.
I stood there staring for a few minutes. Eggs. Usually symbols of new life and beginnings, these four round balls of calcium carbonate contradicted all the myths and fairy tales and traditions. Instead, they had become a metaphor for the result of ignorance, haste, inattention. They had gone from being cradles to coffins.
And as is always the case when I stop to consider the world revolving around me and the fact that it doesn't really revolve around me, I realized how like that little Carolina wren we all are.
We make choices based on limited information and later find ourselves stunned by the unavoidable results of those choices. We elevate comfort over safety and safety over breadth of experience and breadth of experience over loyalty and never even realize that its not elevation we're reaching at all – that this life is not a staircase moving us ever higher, but a Ferris wheel looping us up and down in a never-ending circle.
Something of great importance demanded my attention at that moment, so I laid the nest on the floor of the carport and went inside. That was two days ago. Since then I've been leaving home early, getting home late, suffering with the red eyes and runny nose and hacking cough of allergies and, in general, not paying much attention to anything other than myself.
I have no idea if the nest is still there, if the mother is aware of her dispossession, if the eggs have been desecrated by some night-moving animal. I should know. But I don't.
And that, I have to admit, is as much a metaphor as anything else.
Copyright 2007
I cocked my head for a better look and saw that the vent was completely filled with twigs. It was, in fact, a nest and as I gently scooped it out all I could see was the six loads of clothes I'd dried over the last few days and the conflagration that could have been Sandhill had the nest caught fire.
The nest was about the size of a saucer and only about an inch deep at its center. The outer twigs fell away in my hands with a small poof of dust. Nestled in the hollow at the bottom were four tiny eggs. Tiny like a jelly bean. Tiny like a peanut. Tiny like a pearly button on a baby's christening gown.
Having touched the nest and contaminated it with my humanness, I knew – according to all the nature lore I'd learned as a child and which, admittedly, may or may not be true – that the mother bird, wherever she was, would now abandon the babies-in-process. What was probably closer to scientific actuality is that the eggs were old and the embryos inside were long dead.
Months ago, in spring, I had sat on the deck and watched a little bird, a Carolina wren, dart in and out of the dryer vent. From a distance I'd not seen that she'd been carrying bits and pieces of nest to her new place of abode. I'd thought she was just engaging in the avian version of a real estate showing when what she was really doing was moving in. The mortgage had been signed, the electricity turned on, the change-of-address cards mailed.
Too bad she hadn't talked to the neighbors. I could have told her that central heat, in this case, wasn't such a good idea. That the need for incubation aside, too much of a good thing can be deadly. That there is more to safety than isolation and darkness.
Nestled in my cupped hands, what had been a perfect home – if only for a moment – was now nothing more than a bunch of tender twigs gone brittle in the lingering heat of a lingering summer. The chocolate brown of new shoots had faded to the dull gray of lint. The sap that had made them flexible had dried up like a creek bed in drought.
I stood there staring for a few minutes. Eggs. Usually symbols of new life and beginnings, these four round balls of calcium carbonate contradicted all the myths and fairy tales and traditions. Instead, they had become a metaphor for the result of ignorance, haste, inattention. They had gone from being cradles to coffins.
And as is always the case when I stop to consider the world revolving around me and the fact that it doesn't really revolve around me, I realized how like that little Carolina wren we all are.
We make choices based on limited information and later find ourselves stunned by the unavoidable results of those choices. We elevate comfort over safety and safety over breadth of experience and breadth of experience over loyalty and never even realize that its not elevation we're reaching at all – that this life is not a staircase moving us ever higher, but a Ferris wheel looping us up and down in a never-ending circle.
Something of great importance demanded my attention at that moment, so I laid the nest on the floor of the carport and went inside. That was two days ago. Since then I've been leaving home early, getting home late, suffering with the red eyes and runny nose and hacking cough of allergies and, in general, not paying much attention to anything other than myself.
I have no idea if the nest is still there, if the mother is aware of her dispossession, if the eggs have been desecrated by some night-moving animal. I should know. But I don't.
And that, I have to admit, is as much a metaphor as anything else.
Copyright 2007
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