Yom Kippur Afternoon

For five years — 2010 to 2014 — I did a blog post on or about Yom Kippur. I missed last year, I missed all of the High Holy Days last year. On Rosh Hashanah I was in Massachusetts with Chris, in her last days, and didn’t even consider leaving to go services in NH. Yom Kippur was less than a week after Chris died and I wasn’t yet able to face so many people I know asking how I was. Would I lie and say fine, or be honest and tell them my sister had just died and it had been a long, difficult summer, helping to take care of her and watching as another loved one disappeared into the fog of cancer? Rather than answer that question, I stayed home.

Now I’m fasting and ruminating, my usual Yom Kippur afternoon. Last week at Rosh Hashanah services I felt Eric sitting by my side. I kept seeing the sports jacket he always wore to the Temple, because he would ask what he should wear and I’d suggest the brown jacket with black and tan threads woven into a tiny check design. My favorite. When I got home I took out the jacket — one on the few pieces of Eric’s clothing I’ve saved — and hung it in my study. I can see it now, facing me as I sit at my desk.

Since attending Kol Nidre services last night, and through this morning’s service, I’ve been thinking about forgiveness, contrition, sin, wrongdoing, right action, justice and peace and regret, which is what we’re meant to consider on this solemn day.

The Rabbi’s sermon last night was about regret, and how people more often regret something they didn’t do, a risk they didn’t take, a goal they didn’t fully commit to, a hand they didn’t reach out, a letter they didn’t write. I remember how often Eric said, in the last weeks of his life, as he faced his death, “I have no regrets. But I’m having so much fun living, I’m not ready to be done.”

I’m certainly not ready to be done either, but I can’t say I have no regrets. Like most people, my greatest regrets are about things I didn’t do — a card I didn’t send, a story I haven’t dared to write, a call I didn’t make. I’ve also judged people according to my version of the narrative we share, not challenging myself to see the world from their eyes. It can be too easy for me to think I’m the one who has it right.

Yom Kippur is about being honest with ourselves, digging deep and admitting to the ways we’ve not been our best selves, then using that knowledge, not to be ashamed or give ourselves a hard time, but to do better.

I can do better. Eric’s jacket helps me see that.

July 5, 2016

Youth

As we moved in to summer I started crying, the light letting the sad memories in — how sick Chris was on the 4th of July last year, being in Humarock without Chris and thinking about what it’s like for her widower and sons to have that hole in their traditional family beach time, what it’s like for my parents. But our family time in Humarock was also sweet, lots of family still gathered in a beautiful spot.

I don’t mind the crying. It’s been balanced with the joy of having youth around me. Yesterday I sent Adrienne a chat and asked her to snap the kids for me through the day, happy enough just to see Emilio and Ava but knowing there was the bonus of two more children there over the weekend, adorable child video riches. And I got to share those videos with the youngsters here, Melia and Mackenzie and a crew of their friends, of course not as young as the grandkids but still much younger than me, in lives that are still expanding and reaching out and full of energy and hope.

Not that I don’t reach out still, but more and more I’m content with what I know I love best. Home, family, close friends, garden, time at my desk to write. It’s not only me. This is a researched phenomenon. As people age, they more and more value time with a closer circle of people and experiences. We’ve learned what we like and know there’s limited time left to enjoy it. We get more careful about how to spend our time when there’s less of it to spend.

Being with our kids and grandkids is top of the list, always. I realized this weekend David and I never mediate when we’re with our kids in spite of being regular mediators otherwise. We don’t need it.

So my sad weekend was also a great weekend. I love a full house, the crowd in the kitchen, the meals with multiple palates contributing to the taste, the conversations and laughing at stories, coffee and toast on the deck in morning sun, cocktails and beer on the porch in the evening. Now I have a line full of laundry, flags of the pleasure being with loved ones brings, soaking up the energy of youth

How lucky we are.

May 30, 2016

Shehechiyanu Again, Which Is the Point

The cows are back in the pasture, the pond is warm enough to swim, laundry goes out on the clothesline rather than in the dryer, I wake to birdsong and light already in the sky, the back deck is a private enclave enclosed by leafy trees, the woods are full of blossoms, there are pots of flowers on the porch and the screen door is up in the kitchen. All the pleasures of the new season to be enjoyed again.

I’ve written about Shehechiyanu before, the Jewish blessing giving thanks for being alive to complete another year’s cycle, coming around again to a festival or holiday or favored event — the first outdoor swim of the season, the peonies first open blossom, the cows crowding the corner of the field across the street on their first day out.

I thought I’d posted the poem I wrote many years ago imagining the blessing for the cows. If I did post this before, the WordPress search function doesn’t think so. Here it is.

Shehechiyanu

The cows are back
in the pasture, random
black and white a foreign
light in the field of green

tipped with a sheen
of moisture from rain
that fell last night
steadying the grass

in its surge of growth
sufficient to allow
the cows’ return
to fresh fodder.

Does a cow bless,
once again, far fences
after winter’s pen,
silage and hay,

open air a tickle
in a fold of her teats
just past where her tail
could reach?

March 11, 2016March 11, 2016

The Power of Ten

What is it about the years divisible by ten? All the milestone birthdays are in increments of ten — people especially note turning 30 or 40, 50 or 60. Money rolls out in increments of ten. We celebrate anniversaries of major events in tens — marriages, assassinations, great scientific achievements, disasters. Pretty much everything would be counted in tens if we used the metric system like the rest of the world. Ten means starting again, because that second digit comes in, the need to go back to the first finger to continue keeping track.

I’m thinking about this because in May it will be ten years since Eric died, and right now it’s ten years since Eric began to be really sick, though we didn’t realize yet that he was dying.

Dawn has crept further and further into the night and now I’m waking up many mornings with light already in the sky, after months of being up for hours in the dark. Birdsong comes along with the light, the beginning chatter of birds awakening to the next season, starting to build nests and call to each other to mate and start the whole cycle of birth and death again. The rise in morning birdsong is burned into my psyche as signifying the rise in Eric’s cancer. Birdsong = Impending Death.

Not very spring-like. But there it is, the twittering of purple finches and melodic call of a robin and the chink of red-winged blackbirds. I wrote a poem about it this morning, one of many in a long line of poems about what spring birdsong means to me now (like the first poem in The Truth About Death, which I posted here around this time last year).

But there’s a twist this year. I also made a collage. Does that have anything to do with the tenth anniversary of Eric’s illness and death? Or is it simply the process of aging and getting better at giving myself permission to do things because I want to, because I have an urge to create in a different way, because I care less and less what it means and just want to do it.

I’m signing up for a drawing class. Maybe next I’ll draw the birds.

January 20, 2016

Howl

The wind was gusting over 30 mph when I pulled in to the driveway late yesterday afternoon. Drifted snow, blown off the fields to the west, covered the path to the porch, I had a full car to unload after a long weekend in New York and I was late for a conference call.

I tromped into the house through the snow, sneakers covered in white and leaving wet footprints on the kitchen floor. Earbuds in place and the conference call on mute, I put on my thick down jacket and Winnie-the-Pooh hat that wraps down around my cheeks and chin, pulled on windproof fleece mittens, and shoveled a path to the car as I listened to the meeting. Unloaded. Hurried out to the woodpile before it got dark to throw a day’s worth of wood into the barn because our stock got depleted last week. It was a night for a fire.

Later, dinner done, sitting by the fully throttled wood stove and catching up on email, I realized I’d yet to do my Grind small poem collage for the day. All I could think of was the wind, whipping away any heat the house managed to collect, especially in our bedroom, which faces north-west, directly into the battering gusts. I could feel the house shake and listened to the wind beast trying to break into the house, a constant roar accented with long howls

I sent off a quick, tiny poem to my Grinder group, then went upstairs to make a collage. It was just barely warm enough in my study to work. The images emerged, the words changed, and David and I gave up on the bedroom and slept in one of the beds at the back of the house, under double down comforters, as far from the wind as we could get.

December 28, 2015

A Gift

The waning moon hangs in the sharp morning sky, a pale reminder of its full self in darkness two nights ago, now surrounded by high, wind-thinned clouds and low, dark ones. The wind is cold, coming at my face where it’s bare between my hat and neck warmer. This is winter and it’s my first time out in it.

It’s my first time outside since Friday, a day spent celebrating with family, which included time on the porch of Chris and Jon’s house, bringing back all the mornings I drank my coffee there this summer. Keeping with the family tradition of Christmas at Chris’s, Jon and his boys hosted the family dinner, which was delicious and lovely and sad. I know the hole a loved one leaves lessens over time, or takes up less of the available awareness in any given moment, but this hole is fresh and big. And Adrienne and Matt and the grandkids weren’t there because Adrienne had a stomach bug that sent them straight home after Christmas morning at my parents’ house, meaning they didn’t come back to NH after dinner at Jon’s.

But it was warm and sunny. Porch weather. I’m glad I took advantage, because the stomach bug got me that night, and I barely got out of bed on Saturday and got out of bed but not out of the house yesterday. Two days of illness makes the simple act of waking up with enough energy to walk towards a waning moon feel like a gift.

Which, of course, it is.

December 17, 2015

Day Nine — Inside Out

The day is folding itself back inside. When I got home early this afternoon there was no wind and bright sun, a good combination on my porch. I had lunch at the porch table. The weather may be scary warm, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it.

So I moved my afternoon projects out to the porch, origami sailboats first. As the sun got lower and spent more and more time behind clouds, the reality of December started to chill my fingers. But by then I’d mastered the reverse fold of the two boat designs I was using and I kept going, folding and unfolding and pushing the paper back on itself so a valley fold tucked in to a mountain fold and the inside of the paper made white sails hoisted in a colored boat.

Origami is full of reverse folds, and you have to learn to trust that what looks backwards is going to turn into what you want. It’s not intuitive and I mess around until I can make it work, then do it again, and again. Training my fingers to ignore my brain telling me it’s wrong.

Now the day is doing the same thing. The sun is long gone below the horizon and it’s cold. It’s black out my windows, as it is when I get up in the morning, as it is for two thirds of the cycle that makes a day. This is the fold that shoves the pocket back in to the dark. Tomorrow it will turn inside out again. The pocket will be empty, but it will be open and the light will last until the next fold, whether I know how to make it or not.

December 11, 2015

Day Three — Warm December

The cows are clustered around the hay rack in the pasture across the street, a low moan rising out of the one lying off by itself. A few are eating. A calf lies in the curve of a large cow’s body, both heads erect, wet noses glistening, breath steaming.

I can see all this so clearly because I’m outside, on the porch, low sun on my lap, almost hot. I’ve written about this before, there’s a poem in my book titled “Warm December,” another poem was written right here, warm when it should have been cold.

The Porch

This is where I come together, my feet
in white wool socks, the grass still patched
with green, open, a winter with no winter,
the warmest ever. Other people are scared
but I don’t care. Birds fly across the porch
under the grooved wooden ceiling, above
the railings. Small white pines are coming up
in the bit of pasture beyond the barbed wire
fence of the old calving pen where it doesn’t
get bush-hogged in August, the nature of nature.

That was eight years ago. The pattern continues. World leaders are in Paris trying to at least keep worse from happening, but this is going to be the warmest year ever, again. I think the world has always been this dire, the future, the violence, the inexplicable horrors that humans do to each other, or one does to another. We just know more about it, we know the full scope, information coming from everywhere all the time so our heads fill and fill with one tragedy and then the next, a massacre, a disaster, push notifications that ping my phone so I pick it up and read about the latest horrible thing.

I could shut off those notifications.

Last night poet friends gathered here and we ate and chatted and then all read what we’d written in response to a prompt David had come up with – Plagues We Have Known.We always have a prompt to write a poem for the Yogurt Poets holiday party, though past prompts have been gratitude, tradition, grace. Plagues was a whole new direction.

“What wonderful nerds are we?” said Hope as Kay talked about exploring the etymology of “plague.” Nancy had written 14 lines to each of the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians by God, Hope had written one line for each. David had used the metaphor of cell phones as progenitors of infection, a coming epidemic. Mary was happy to have been able to write anything. I was happy to listen to what everyone had written. A group of creative souls who write for an audience as small as the dozen of us, as small as themselves, because we love the beauty of poetry.

Now the calf has moved to lie against the back of the cow who was moaning earlier. The world is hazy with moisture and inappropriate heat.

December 9, 2015

Day One — Wilderness

Wilderness sits at the back of my mind. Before dawn I’m at the kitchen table, sending out the emails that make me think I’m on track. What is the track? If I get to a spot on a trail where I can’t see the path and can’t find the next blaze, I go back to the last marking I saw and look until I find the next. That keeps me oriented, but does it keep me going where I should?

Are there “shoulds” in life? There are intentions and desires and choices, but each decision of what to do next, who to call, how long to sit at my desk, which load of laundry to start, what color paper to use as I fold a series of four-pointed stars, which wool sweater to wear to stay warm in the cold house, comes from too many associations to sort through.

None of this has to happen. The laundry gets done because I want clean clothes not because I should do it. Or maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe my choices are so laden with expectations of what is right and what needs to be done that I can’t feel the “shoulds” under the doing.

I want to get to the wilderness. There are poems there and a new desk in my study for colored paper and collected images, another draft of my memoir that I’ve dared to pare down to the rawest memories, origami sailboats that float at the end of invisible thread, stories I didn’t know I could tell, a walk on another continent, dreams of Eric, a baby resting her head on my chest as she sucks her thumb and reaches the other hand up to my neck, scratching with her tiny fingers, feeling for hair, for an earring, for skin.

November 30, 2015

Ice Skim

Yesterday there was a glass-thin layer of ice across a leaf-packed tub of water on the disc golf course David and I walked with Sam as he somehow got discs to angle around corners and find open lines through trees. The sun was bright but winter felt close by.

This morning I ran by small ponds skimmed with ice. Now the sun is setting behind the silo in the old farmyard, at least 45 degrees down the horizon from where the last light disappears behind trees in June. Darkness takes up more and more of every day.

But the pasture across the street still has a sheen of green, grass not yet entirely done for the season, though not enough for the cows to eat. They romp and bellow as they come to the hay trough that’s parked in front of our house, right under my study windows. A daily show I never get tired of. Like watching a fire or moving water, having animals live across the street, in clear view, is calming.

Almost exactly three weeks from now the sun will begin to travel back up the horizon. It’s a relief to be that close to the light cycle turning around yet again. It will continue to get colder, the ice will thicken and eventually hold and hopefully bear weight for skating or skiing.

But there will be more light. And cows.