Category: Light

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Darkness and Light and Sweetness

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Last Sunday evening Adrienne, Matt, Melia, Emilio and I went to the Rise of the Jack O’ Lanterns at Old Westbury Gardens, near where Adrienne and Matt live.  The advertised 5,000 or more hand carved Jack O’Lanterns were not disappointing.  Rather, they were a visual delight, glowing in long rows along the dark path, many with intricate paintings and carvings of flowers, trees, butterflies and celebrities.  Emilio was very excited to see Kermit and Frankenstein.  “Kermit, again?”

But the best part of the evening was when we were leaving.  As we walked to the car we passed a large pedestal with an eagle sculpture on top and pointed it out to Emilio.  Looking back at it Emilio said, “Bye-bye, Eagle.”  Then as we drove out of the Gardens, settled back in his car seat, Emilio said, “Bye-bye, Jack O’ Lanterns.  Bye-bye, Pumpkins.” No tantrum about leaving, no fussing and whining.  Just a sweet moment of Emilio letting life pass along on its swift track, ready for whatever was next.

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As Good As It Gets

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Yesterday was a perfect summer day.  David and I have been mostly engaged in activities that use our upper bodies since our return from that 13-day-lower-body-workout-test of walking close to 200 miles in 13 days.  We’ve been swimming and kayaking, not only because it was time to give our legs a rest, but also because it was so hot in the week after we returned home there was little energy left in me after doing whatever needed doing in the garden each day except for something cooling.

Yesterday we woke up in Scituate, Massachusetts, where I grew up, in the house where I grew up.  My sister Jeanne and her husband John were visiting from Virginia, and my sister Meg and her husband John (my three brothers-in-law are all named John or Jon; at one point early in our relationship David said to me, “Okay, I guess I need to change my name.”) live in the next town and offered to take us all sailing yesterday morning.

We met on the dock at the Yacht Club, where I spent my summers from the age of 9 until I was old enough to be working and giving sailing lessons, rather than taking them.  A school of small fish were “kippering” around the dock, flashing in the clear sunshine, the brightest, driest, coolest summer day we’ve had for weeks.  Outside Scituate Harbor we could see a line of small, silver-white clouds sitting low along the horizon in every direction, like a ring of good weather goddesses.  There wasn’t much wind, so we headed back into the harbor, out of the chop on the ocean, and “ghosted” around among the thickly moored boats of every type and size.

After lunch on the Club deck overlooking the brilliant day unfolding over the harbor, David and I took the kayaks out and headed into the inner harbor, slipped under a causeway bridge, and paddled through the marshes behind Peggoty Beach.  We watched a cormorant surface two feet in front of our boats and swallow the small fish in its beak.  We wound through the marsh grasses, birds flitting into holes of the steep mud banks as they rose out of the water in the lowering tide.

As we made our way back to the small harbor beach where we’d put in the kayaks, I stopped to watch the mass of boats lightly lifting and rocking in the water, the line of houses on the shore holding steady, the low clouds still sitting like beacons of good fortune on the horizon.

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The Angle of Light

How is the memory of traumatic events triggered?  I’m thinking about this again, because it’s the time of year when Eric began to feel the back pain and other symptoms that we would later learn was metastatic ocular melanoma.  I remember him saying to me, in February of 2006, “I feel like I have the flu or something most of the time.”  We both agreed he was probably just tired from working too much.

Then one morning in early March when we went out for our morning run, he tapped himself on the chest and said, “I think I pulled a muscle here swimming yesterday, because it hurts.”  I remember thinking, “No one pulls muscles in their chest,” but I let the thought slide by.   Then he started to have back pain, and as it got worse and worse through March, and he had less appetite and energy, I let any thoughts about what could be going on other than a strained back and too much work also slip by.  Eric and I both knew if the ocular melanoma he’d been treated for 3 years before metastasized there would be no treatment available.  That would be it.

And that was it.  By the beginning of April Eric was still getting himself to work every day, but sleeping through much of the weekends and hardly eating.  By the beginning of the second week of April, I insisted Eric go back to his doctor (he’d had a check up just weeks before and everything had seemed fine, other than his back pain) to see if something more than a sprained back was going on.  Eric finally had the blood work he’d been postponing since his doctor’s appointment, and he got an immediate call to come back and get admitted to the hospital.  His liver and kidney functions and calcium levels were all off.  Way off.  Within 24 hours we had results from all the scans and knew his body and bones were full of tumors.  He died on May 7.

So now when the days get longer and bird song accelerates and pussy willows start to break out, I remember how all of that was happening as Eric first began to get sick.  I start to relive the days, sometimes remembering exactly what was happening on this same day, now six years ago, and it’s not easy.  The second year after Eric’s death I was talking to one of my brothers-in-law about the power of the memories as the anniversary of Eric’s death approached.

“I think some of it may have to do with the angle of the light from the sun hitting your eyes,” he said.  “It triggers the memories and brings you back to that time.”  So here I am, six years later, watching the angle of light shift as the sun gets higher in the sky each day. Today I got a card from my Temple that a couple just made a donation in Eric’s memory.  I love knowing that others are remembering him too.

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More Moon

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As we walked up the old wood’s road towards the beaver pond, a stream of warm air came up over us.  “Where did that come from?” Alison said and she and I backed up and tried walking into that spot again, to see if we could figure out where the warmth was coming from.  We couldn’t, but as we made our way along the new trail to the pond, the full moon through thin clouds lighting our way, more warm winds blew over us.  It felt like spring washing in.

The mild night grew brighter and brighter, as the moon got above the clouds.  At the beaver pond the moon was high above the trees and the Neville Peak ridge to our east, reflecting off the soft ice.  John identified Mars sitting to the left of the moon and we sat and walked around and chatted and delighted in being outdoors on a warm night, in a bowl of silver light.

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Burgers on Ice

What do you do with hot charcoal from a grill after cooking burgers to eat while you skate and walk around on a frozen lake on a full moon night?  All of us on Pleasant Lake tonight agreed we shouldn’t dump the charcoal in one place on the ice, where it would melt through in spring and make a mess on the lake bottom.  What if we spread it out across the ice?  We scooped a few coals from the grill onto the ice, and Peter swept them away with his hockey stick.  Each chunk flared up into a small firework of flames, breaking into a spray of light in the wind, sparkles scattering across our line of vision. What a great show!  Over and over, we tipped a few more chunks of charcoal on the ice, and Peter sent them on a flaring journey into the muted night.  Then the grill was empty, the orange light of the coals flickering out fast in the wind and cold, the lake shining silver in the moon.

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Yesterday’s Haiku

I like the idea of being a day behind.  As I wrote two months ago, one of my hopes for the coming season of ascending light (it was at a solstice gathering) was to change my relationship with time.  Having always been focused on getting things done (and mostly on some deadline of some sort), and having managed anxiety by making sure I’m always very, very busy, I’m working on letting what comes to me, at least in my creative pursuits, come to me, and making sure I have enough open time for the surprises of the muse to get through.

So getting yesterday’s haiku up on my blog today is fine.

Low winter sun draws
Spruce shadow a spruce again
Barren season bared.

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Three Stones

The last small stone I threw into the River of Stones was on Tuesday.  It’s been a trying week, with many anxious moments, navigating some bumps in Eric’s mother’s recovery.  A friend reminded me yesterday that facing a serious health issue with Eric’s mother triggers the trauma of Eric’s death, so the intensity of reaction makes sense.  And that’s on top of how much I love her and am just not ready to lose her yet.

So the three stones I have to offer today are all underlined by simple gratitude — that Eric’s mother is recovering, that I have the privileged position in my life right now to be going on vacation in Paris, and that I’m able to take a moment each day and fully appreciate something.  Which I have done every day, I just haven’t gotten to the writing-it-down step.

Wednesday evening the sunset lit the western horizon, which is lined with a small mountain, tall white pines, a silo, open field, and then more trees in the distance, with a pale silver.

Yesterday I was up and out to a meeting at dawn, and watched the light, then color, come into the day.

This morning, as I drove down the road to go for a ski, a cardinal flitted past the car, flashing red on a bright, white morning.

My next small stone will most likely be from Paris.  A bientôt!

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Ice Stone

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Morning pond croaking
Deep throated ice language
Sun dissolves in clouds.