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November 22, 2015

Sadness Moving — Reflections

When I write about grief and sadness my blog gets a lot of hits. Same when I write about my travels. What’s the connection? What if I wrote about both at once?

Thursday I went to Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts, meeting up with my youngest sister Meg and her husband John and Chris’s Jon. Family disappears so I’m hanging on.

Wednesday night I went to Portland to hear Ry Cooder and Ricky Skaggs play such accomplished music, accompanied on piano by Buck White (85 years old!) and his daughters singing exquisite harmony, I remembered how to be happy.

I’m hunting art. Moving. Years ago a friend from my work life spent a weekend here. She came to NH to do a half marthon with me so I would think she’d have known what she was in for. But a day in to our visit, before all our mutual friends showed up as running support and talking-drinking-eating buddies, she watched me move around the kitchen as she sat at the table.

“You really can’t sit still can you?”

“Nope.”

For years she made a joke of the fact that 4 miles into the half marathon I abandoned her and moved off ahead. I couldn’t run that slowly. It hurt.

If I could slow down I would.

If all my reflections on life created an infinite pattern, I doubt it would be as beautiful as “Endlessly Repeating Twentieth-Century Modernism” by Joshiah McElheny. His piece at the MFA is stunning and brilliant, a perfect, mirrored box of glass objects that reflect into an unending distance as each object holds its own jeweled reflections.

Now I’m wearing some of Chris’s jewelry along with her shoes and socks and jacket and jeans.

I’m not planning to go anywhere for a while.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

November 6, 2015

Applesauce

I pick apples, out of the trees, with a ladder now because the lower fruit is long gone, and off the ground, which is a treacherous carpet of drops that roll under my feet like ball bearings.

I fill an old woven reed basket my youngest sister Meg gave me years ago, a foot and a half across with a sturdy wooden handle and more than enough room to hold a sauce batch worth of apples. This basket has held vegetables and fruit from my yard for decades. Lucky me.

I think about staying home for more than a few days in a row, or a week even, and I think I want to, but then don’t. But when I am home for more than a day or two I find myself gathering apples and running them through the corer-peeler-slicer gadget that Melia brought home the weekend of Chris’s service and I’ve kept since. With an apple loaded on the pronged shaft, I turn the crank and magic happens — the apple comes out the other side of ingeniously arranged blades peeled, cored and sliced into thin rings. The peel makes one long, looping coil. I could dry the strings of peel, I could make jewelry or braided snacks.

I don’t. I make sauce. The slices go into my biggest pot then sit over a low flame for hours. The apples release their juice and then puff up into mushy versions of themselves before collapsing into a blendable pulp. Northern Spy, Cortland, Macoun, Yellow Delicious — the different combinations create different flavors and levels of sweetness. David and I taste the batches, like tasting wine. “This sauce isn’t quite as complex as the last.” “Yeah, it’s a little more flat.” It’s all delicious.

I wondered, when I came home in mid-September, how I was going to transition back into my own life, my own pace and schedule. Applesauce never crossed my mind as the path that would lead me back, but I should have suspected, given how much of the little free time I had this summer I spent freezing local fruit — strawberries, peaches, blueberries.

As I clamp the peeler-corer-slicer to the counter with its vacuum base, I feel like I’m securing myself, grounded, my feet on my kitchen floor, looking out the windows at the now brown oak leaves that keep falling. There are ten quarts of applesauce in the freezer and always at least a pint in the refrigerator. Tomorrow I’ll probably make more.

Then go away again.

October 12, 2015

Parents Always

One of the first things David and I agreed on when we met was “the kids come first.” Falling in love in your 50s and 60s is complicated for many reasons, and how a new relationship will play out for your children can be one of the trickiest. Luckily for us, it has worked out well — our kids get along with each other and with each of us.

Good thing, because no matter how old your children, you’re still their parent. Maybe even more so when one parent has died. That fact and the glorious foliage this morning got me thinking about this poem I wrote at least 20 years ago.

PLAYING CATCH

The boy at the bus stop
tries to break his record of ten
leaves caught falling
from the maple,

leaves yellow as butter
cupping foggy morning light.

Not only leaves stir in the fog;
crows rattle branches, muzzle loaders
pock the morning with shots,
bus doors yawn open and shut,

children leave, come home,
leave again.

September 27, 2015

Lee Krasner, The Seasons, 1957 — *Portion of The Seasons, Lee Krasner, 1957, Whitney Museum of American Art

A steady clack comes out of the bedroom where the plastic pull knob on the cord for the blinds taps the sill, pulsing in the wind through the window opened to get air into the house.

Sunshine glints off the screens in the four large windows in my study, screens that will come out in the next few weeks.

There was a frost while we were away, nasturtiums drooping on themselves, the basil brown and wilted. Was it last night?

Cows still graze the pasture across the street, framed by a branch of the old maple sprouting yellow, orange and red.

When I got home this morning I opened my journal to write about our last few days — all the places and family we’ve visited, the historic First Parish in Concord (this is the congregation Emerson and the Alcotts were part of, where Thoreau’s memorial was held) to meet with the minister who’ll be involved in the memorial service for Chris, the astonishing America Is Hard To Find exhibit at the equally astonishing new building now housing the Whitney Museum, watching Ava clap her gold moccasins together and laugh, fitting the pieces of a table-top-size Spiderman together with Emilio, last night in a Rodeway Inn off the traffic circle in Greenfield, MA, a former Howard Johnson’s with a glass shelf of spectacular crystal rocks behind the check-in desk that the clerk said no one knows the history of, this morning’s drive in pre-dawn darkness into the hills to the west and then east again into autumn smoke rising from rivers and dew — and instead I drew a map, with the buildings and skylines and houses we’ve visited, lines with arrows tracing our route, and then connecting the words when I began to write with language.

Is art hard to find or hard to find the time for?

For the first time since the beginning of July, I’m home with no immediate plans to be anywhere else overnight. What will I find the time for?

* From Whitney exhibit description of the painting above: This monumental painting offered Krasner an outlet during a time of deep personal sorrow. The year before, her husband, fellow artist Jackson Pollock, had died in a car accident. In the wake of this sudden loss, Krasner remarked about The Seasons, “the question came up whether one would continue painting at all, and I guess this was my answer.”

September 10, 2015

Today

This is the day my grandson started kindergarten

This is the day the latest heat wave ended.

This is the day I tried to pick enough apples off my Golden Delicious tree so the branch that’s draped all the way to the ground can lift again. A large branch has already broken off the tree, too much apple weight. I didn’t succeed.

This is the day I discovered the garden spider is gone, an egg sack left dangling from a bar of the wrought iron trellis the nasturiums climb.

This is the third day my sister hasn’t eaten or taken liquids.

This is the day my grandson started kindergarten.

August 17, 2015

Tidy

I was being tidy yesterday. Actually, I was looking up, once again, the varieties of my apple trees. I wrote it down in my gardening log years ago, and have looked it up several times in the last few years, as the run of laden trees continues. Wanting to compare the taste of the types, I needed to look up what’s what yet again.

David’s blood pressure machine has been sitting on the bottom shelf of a small table in the kitchen for the last year, the cord to the cuff looping over the folder with my gardening log sheets. As I reached for the folder, holding up the loop and balancing the device so it wouldn’t fall off the back of the shelf, I decided to make room for it in the drawer at the top of the table. One problem — that drawer hasn’t been cleaned out for decades.

There were old maps and menus in the drawer, five dreidels, small plastic bags of metal and rubber parts to long ago gadgets, screws and nuts and a four inch antique nail, a hand forged wedge of steel too beautiful to throw away with the rest of the mess.

And a plastic bag with an unusual assortment. Two banister supports, some screws and a few washers, a bit of old bead twine and three green clay beads. I remember the beads were made by Eric’s first wife, Rene, at least 45 years ago. I don’t know why they were in the bag.

But most surprising was the human tooth, a broken molar. Who put a tooth in this random bag? Whose tooth is it? Eric’s? On the assumption it is, I’m going to put it with the baby teeth of Adrienne and Sam that I still have in a box on my bureau. Is that weird?

I found the log sheet with the varieties of apples. The trees were planted in 1992, thin sticks now over fifteen feet tall and so full they shade the north side of the yard and one of my garden beds. This year the trees have enough fruit to feed us all winter if we had the ambition to store it. Working west to east, Northern Spy, Cortland, Macoun, Golden Delicious, Baldwin. Nourishing Courtship Makes Good Babies.

Ah, babies. . . .

11811284_10155942955950014_7002740704902994795_n — Baby Emilio and Baby Ava

July 18, 2015

A Beginning

The rain on the porch roof makes a new sound. We’ve had gutters installed and now instead of a curtain of drops dripping off the edge of the porch there’s a metallic ping and rush of water flowing down the drain in the corner. The view out to the yard is clear, coreopsis still blooming, silver-sheened balls of globe thistle getting ready to pop out their tiny purple flowers, uneven and unruly grass, rudbeckia blazing yellow in clumps from the garden to the line of yew bushes, the burn pile for this fall getting lost in the tall weeds and wildflowers of the field. Summer.

Which this week means a house filling up with children and grandchildren and friends. Sam arrived after we’d all gone to bed last night and we woke up to an assortment of Tennessee hats arranged on a counter in the kitchen. There are dog food bowls and leashes and a crate lined with blankets and a chair full of dog toys. Extra shoes and wallets and car keys, laptops on every table. A stuffed refrigerator that will empty and get stuffed again and empty and get stuffed again and empty and get stuffed and empty.

But I don’t want to go there yet, to the empty. Right now we’re at the beginning of a week of family gathering and everything is full and messy and rich. Empty is later.

October 27, 2014

The View From Here and Now

My study is a room with a view, full of light. Three big windows face south and one faces west, all looking over pastures and the remains of a dairy farm, with the mountains of Epsom as a backdrop. When Eric was alive, this was his favorite room, with the TV in the corner and his stylish Danish recliner positioned for a view out the windows or at the television screen. When Eric was dying this is where we put a bed for him to spend his last weeks. That was partly because of the television so he could watch Red Sox games or his favorite movies, but it was also because this was, essentially, his room.

It remained his room for years after he died. No one spent much time here during those years. A new, large, flat screen TV had been installed in the family room, part of the finished upstairs of the barn, and the “tower room” as we called it then, the second story of the tower we built to connect the upstairs of the house with the rooms over the barn, served as a passage between rooms, not as a place anyone hung out. There was still too much sorrow in the room, too much weighted memory.

Six years ago, when I first started to think about moving my study in to this room, my friend Marsie was over for a visit. I brought her upstairs to show her how I might change the room in to a study and she stood by the western window for a few moments. “There’s still a lot of Eric’s energy here, but Eric is getting ready for this to become your room,” she said. “Talk to him about it and the energy will clear.”

Even though I’m not sure what I believe about how the energy of loved ones who’ve died manifests in this world, Marsie’s advice made sense to me. I spent time in the tower room, thinking about Eric and all the changes in my life since he’d died. I let him know I was going to transform the room, and six months later I did.

Now I have a glorious study with a view of trees snapping in a brisk wind and a hillside of russet and ochre oaks. As I sit at my desk, I’m less than a foot from where Eric died. He sits here with me and I sit here by myself. I look out the windows and then look at the fall of sunlight in to the room. I’m grateful and warm and reminded not to take any moment of this day for granted. I’m here now.

October 9, 2014

Yom Kippur #9

Life has been full of dailiness since my return home from our European travels. There was mail to sort, arriving in piles for days after we got back — hardly a personal piece in any of it — plants to water, laundry, shopping and cooking, driving to visit all the family we’d missed, spending time with friends we’d missed, watching the trees turn and turn again to bare, meetings to attend, dump runs, doing dishes, running and recovering from running.

Staying present to all this dailiness, in the way I was to the unfolding amazement of traveling in beautiful places, when my only occupation was to see and think and absorb, has been easier than I’d expected.

I’d actually been surprised I was able to be so present during our trip — there was hardly a moment of overthinking about the luxury and privilege of comfortable travel or worry about someone back home. Not that I didn’t think about how lucky I was to have the time and resources to enjoy Europe for weeks, or worry about friends and family back home. But those thoughts didn’t turn into feelings of unworthiness and my worries, mostly, didn’t get in the way. I let myself sink in to the experiences: drinking wine on a leaf-shadowed patio in France, hiking in the Alps, sitting around a breakfast table in a garden in Italy, drinking coffee and chatting with European friends.

Really, what I’m saying is that I haven’t been anxious, the most common reason for me to lose track of my connection to each moment. Was it the magic of travel that kept my anxiety at bay? Meditation? Medication? Whatever the reason, I’m thankful my ability to be present to myself and what’s before me hasn’t shifted, even now that much more of what’s before me is the routine maintenance of life.

This is a long way of explaining why I’m several days behind in my annual Yom Kippur post. Services were lovely — good sermons and outstanding music — and connecting with friends was sweet. As usual I thought a lot about forgiveness and the knot of unforgiven hurt that still comes up for me every year. I thought a lot about Eric — this is Yom Kippur #9 without him — and could picture him beside me through both services. David and I told each other what our intentions were for behaving closer to the ideals we pray about on Yom Kippur.

Now it’s a bright autumn afternoon and I’m enjoying the light gleaming on the leaves of the plants in my study’s tall windows. I know time is passing because otherwise nine years couldn’t have gone by. But I also know there is stillness in the center of time, in the center of everything, and somehow I’m getting better at living in that stillness. Centered. Maybe it’s just a function of slowing down as I get older. No matter. It’s a pleasure to be here.

July 20, 2014

Home Alone

Emilio prepared for saying good-bye to everyone by crying. “I don’t want to go. It’s been too short.” Then he got dressed, ate breakfast, and pitched in to help us all get out of our vacation rental by 10:00, after a late night for all of us.

There were more tears this morning, but not Emilio’s. He’d left with Adrienne and Matt on Friday to go back to Long Island. David and I were lucky — we got to extend our family vacation into the weekend, with Melia and Michael, Mackenzie and Sam all at the house until this morning.

This was our first family vacation with this iteration of family. Our week together at a big, comfortable house on Squam Lake was terrific — fun, sweet, funny, scenic, serious, tasty, refreshing, relaxed and energy packed. There were constant conversations among the family and flow of guests, so many people visiting from so many spokes of the family at one point that a visitor said good-bye to Adrienne as she was going out the door, thinking she was a guest leaving.

There were quiet evenings with only the core nine of us, Emilio asleep and the rest of us reading or talking over a game. There were late nights with a crowd for dinner and numerous stunner sunsets. The World Cup final was streamed on three different computers set on tables facing a semi-circle of chairs. At one point the streaming feed of one computer was 3 seconds behind, creating sequential squealing and groaning across the room, as those watching the on time screens reacted and the rest of the room caught up. Emilio climbed his first mountain (West Rattlesnake) and he and I together picked every accessible ripe blueberry on our corner of the lake, out in the morning to get what had ripened overnight and eat it before the birds.

Now I’m home alone for the first time in 10 days. “Transitions are hard,” I said last night, thinking about how just now would feel, everyone gone, the house only holding David and me today and for many days to come. But as I listened to the kids talk about their own transitions, back to our usual geographically scattered state, I thought maybe I have it easiest. I’m already home.

And actually, I’m not home alone. Long story, but Sam ended up flying back to Tennessee today and will be back up next weekend to get his car. That meant his puppy Quinoa will be here with me for the week, a particularly adorable part of the family left to make the house seem a bit less empty.