Seasons – Page 5 – Grace Mattern

April 21, 2014

The Train of Memory

Passover is over, the train of memory that carried me into this year’s observance has moved on. Working on the memoir I’m writing has meant living in the present moment (or as close to being present to the present as I can get) while on some level reliving the turbulent years that are at the center of the book. Part of the book’s story is Eric’s illness and death. Eric’s metastatic disease was first diagnosed just before Passover in 2006, and Passover this year was almost exactly the same time as that year. It makes sense that the overlay of date and season, along with significant immersion in my experience of that period of my life, would make this Passover carry an extra weight of memory and grief.

One thing I’ve discovered in working on the memoir is how much of the story of Eric’s illness I was telling David two years later, shortly after we met. Many days in April of 2008 I was writing emails and letters to David, telling him what had been happening on that day two years before — this is the weekend Eric first slept all weekend and hardly ate, this is the day he went back to the doctor and ended up at the hospital, and on and on. I couldn’t help reliving everything and writing it down helped make it easier to carry. Having David to write it to made it easier still.

I’m having another one of those years. Because I’m writing about and reading about remembering each day as if overlaid with that day in 2006, I found myself back on the train of memory. Here is a letter I wrote to David on April 13, 2008:
Eric’s diagnosis came just before Passover, the Jewish calendar is lunar so the dates float across the Roman calendar. Two years ago tonight was the night we were going to host a Seder here with our NH Jewish friends, a Seder tradition dating back to when we first moved to NH. I was so delusional in the face of Eric’s mounting illness I’d shopped for the big Seder the weekend before even while knowing on some level it would never happen. So two years ago Eric was just home from the hospital and we did a little Seder with just the family. Eric told the Passover story, gave a short history on the tradition of the Seder, and Matt told Adrienne later that it had been great to listen to Eric, he’d learned so much, he wished he’d have more Passovers with Eric. Adrienne told Eric Matt had said that, then Eric said to me (so much circular conversation!) “Well, that’s a reason to stay alive for another year. To teach Matt more.” And Eric was dead in three weeks. Yikes. I’ve been crying a lot tonight.

But time is on its constant track, so even as I remember sad times from eight years ago, or remember remembering six years ago, today is today and we had a wonderful Seder last week with some of those same friends.

April 7, 2014

A Good Week

Last week was a good one for so many reasons I want to keep track.

My neighbor’s yard of riotous crocuses started to bloom.
The sun came out and it was above freezing. I can’t overstate how sun-starved everyone I know is at this point. It’s bad enough that there’s so little daylight in Northern New England in the winter (and I was in even northerner NE most of March), but when almost all of that daylight is cloudy and gray and it’s very very cold, people get cranky.
I not only met my Momentum Writing Goals for the week, I exceeded them. And didn’t immediately turn that excess into new, harder to maintain goals. A steady focus is what’s going to get this book I’m so engaged with done and I’m staying with my plan until I know a faster pace can stay as steady.
Three poems were accepted by the Chagrin River Review, a fine online journal I’m delighted to be part of. Four of the five poems I sent out a couple of months ago have now been taken by journals. Time to take another look at that fifth poem.
I was able to run for three miles twice. Nursing a knee injury that’s kept me from running for months has not been easy. Running is my go to stress reduction and standard work out. Even I’ve been getting tired of listening to my knee complaints.
My houseplant that blossoms once a year for one day did its thing. And a beautiful thing it is.

I’m hoping for a repeat good week.

February 19, 2014

Still Snowing

I love snow, and woke to a world full of it this morning, snow piled to the railings on the back deck, a huge white hood covering the grill. Sitting by the wood stove with my cup of coffee, the kindling I’d set on the coals flicked into flame, a burst of light through the glass door. The blush of color ringing the dawn horizon deepened and caught fire also.

All the snow in the past few weeks, the storms and the skiing, and my obsessive checking of weather forecasts, reminds me of so many winters, so many treks through deep snow, so many outdoor adventures reveling in the way a great storm transforms the fields and forests into a cross-country skiing paradise.

In the year after Eric died, I couldn’t bring myself to ski or enjoy winter. Snow storms made me sad. Skiing had been such a part of our lives together, it didn’t feel right to ski without Eric. I spent that first winter watching storms, rather than celebrating them.

Recognizing how far I’ve moved from that place of paralyzed grief, I remembered this poem from The Truth About Death, which I wrote just about exactly 8 years ago. Eric would be happy knowing I’m back to celebrating explosions of snow like the storm that rode through New Hampshire yesterday. He would have loved this winter. Let it snow.

Valentine’s Day

The first real storm washes out the little color
in the landscape, the barn and shed and silo
weathered to the gray of a cut snow bank.
Sparrows peck in the perennial bed, tall stems
and seed heads clustered through snow. Small storms
of snow blow up off the roof of the hay shed,
sweep past. We would ski at midnight to catch
the pure snow before the storm slipped over to sleet.
So much happens every day, I need a wagon to hold
the hole. Last night I lay on the kitchen floor,
where our cat slept for her last year, her old body
bony, weightless. I noticed the narrow maple
floor boards running under the hutch, thinking
the world is flat even as I know it is round.

January 21, 2014

Small Stone #21

The exposed skin on my face aches and stings and my fingers are numb. The trees look brittle and the branches I pass as I ski snap and break. Another storm moving up the coast bruises the southern sky a deep purple, dark beneath the sun’s low ball of hazy light. The woods are a different world than yesterday, when it was 20 degrees warmer, the snow was soft and wet, the sky blue between passing clouds, trees tossing off clumps of slush from the storm on Saturday. But Flat Meadow Brook is still open and I stop to listen to the tumble of water running, the music of motion through a landscape descending back into winter.

December 22, 2013

Day 14: The Next Season

Gratuitous Mimi Pride Photo Having Nothing To Do With the Blog Post

12:11 p.m. Winter solstice, the moment of the shift. Earlier today, as David and I drove to yoga class, the sun was a huge ball of fuzz in a cloudy sky, a ring of blurred light much bigger than itself. Then the day sank into a gray dimness. Now the sun is out again, snow is dripping from the roof and I’m on the porch as I write, fingers bare on the keyboard. A bit of spring on a day that will soon be dark again.

Can I celebrate the darkness? That was the focus today in yoga class, to find the impulse inside for what is coming next, what is going to grow, how the stillness of this season, when so much of nature has quieted, can let us go deep enough to find what needs to emerge.

Mostly I feel like I endure the growing darkness and steel myself to get through the days of diminishing light, reaching towards this point, when the earth’s orbit starts to tilt us closer to the sun again. But I know there are many more months of darkness to come, and that this is just the beginning of a season, even if the light is changing.

So I’m going to focus on making darkness my ally. Cultivating a capacity for stillness is completely new for me. Sitting still, concentrating on my breath, and listening to a teacher talk about finding balance in my mind, body and spirit is something I always thought I wanted to do, but never thought I would actually do. Now I am.

Wherever embrace of the darkness and a focus on inner impulses leads me, I’m ready. Tomorrow night when we gather with friends to celebrate the solstice, lighting candles and making wishes for the coming year, I’m going to welcome the darkness, rather than try to race through it. Slow down, breathe, listen, and let what needs to emerge come to the surface. I’ll say hello, most likely write about whatever it is, and move through it. Namaste.

December 21, 2013

Day 13: Attention

The day started gray and stayed that way. But it didn’t matter to me. I was inside, in a beautiful building, working with a group of very smart women and one man, making plans to make a difference. The discussion was energizing, exciting, challenging and expansive. By the time the meeting was over and I started my drive home, it was almost dark. Or dark already, but not night. Just dark, rain starting, low clouds, dimness everywhere.

Now it’s black dark, night, no moon light coming through the thick clouds. The house is so quiet it’s humming.

“I promise to be as present as possible in each moment,” I said to David when we had our wedding ceremony on Thanksgiving. “I promise to cultivate an attitude of gratitude and celebration for whatever is right in our lives.”

Those were promises to myself too, to appreciate what is and what I can imagine, to savor both reality and possibility. To feel this darkness around me, on this last, longest night before the tide of light shifts, and to let all the activity and generative thinking of the day seep away into a sweet sleepiness, a knowledge of a day well-spent, attended to and experienced, an awareness of how energy shifts from balance to swing to balance, the sun at the equinox moving to the sun at solstice, equal and short, equal and long, tracking back into place which is every place, because how the earth orbits and tilts and rotates is all the same, over and over, and delivers the marvels of sunrise and sunset and Orion appearing out the bathroom window on winter nights, an old companion, riding the night sky in the dark season, keeping the same course, keeping his arrow straight.

December 17, 2013December 17, 2013

Day 9: Back to the Body

Slice open the globe of night and inside is 1:00 a.m., sitting in the halo of the kitchen table lights, the line of glass shades reflected in the mirrors of window around me. I saw a big moon out the east windows after dinner, imagining the glow that would fill the fields all night, snow reflections of a softer light, the night brilliance I used to play in when I was younger. A full moon after a snow storm meant late night skiing, long shadows trailing us, pockets of darkness in the wrinkles of land we crossed unfolding into light as we skied into them.

Now I fall asleep just after we’ve cleaned up from dinner, the early rising and long day tugging me into bed. But tonight that didn’t last, the long dark – less than a week before it starts to transform – felt like a weight on me when I awoke. I got up into the stillness of a house that’s been full of extra people for weeks, everyone asleep right now, the boots piled by the door finally drying, snow mud streaking the tiles.

David and I fall asleep spooned around each other. “Big spoon or little spoon?” our kids ask about people they know, couples mostly, or pairs of people. In their relationship, who is the big spoon, who is little? Or who is the hugger, who the huggee?

Does that matter, as long as the bodies fit together? “You always come back to the body,” my friend Mimi said to me once decades ago, in a poetry workshop. Once again I’d brought a poem that had some body awareness in it. I’m in my body so fully so much of each day, I wasn’t surprised by what she said, but it wasn’t something I’d noticed in my own poems. Then I wrote this:

Back to the Body

A sickle of moon
on the slice of brook
through bare oaks –
cup of sky
cup of water
our bodies cupped together
when I return to bed.

Now the moon has traveled halfway across the sky, into the western windows and the yard is silver, the far horizons of trees and silo all visible, flecks of ice in the snow sparking. It’s almost as bright as some recent days have been.

December 14, 2013

Day 6: Jam on Toast

I got out of bed in the dark and went to the kitchen, brewed a cup of coffee, and sat at the table, reading, writing, watching the day begin to leak some gray into the black of the windows. By the time I stood up to get ready to run, sun was lighting a corner of the kitchen. Two hours, from black to gold. What happens in those morning hours? Somehow they seem unaccountable, an awakening that exists outside of time, a stillness that follows me out of sleep until I’m pulled into what has to be done, or what I think I have to do.

David and I often talk during these early hours, I skim the newspaper, do the Jumble, edit poems, put up a blog post, make lists, look at Facebook, read other blogs. But it feels foggy and unproductive. I get up from the table to start my day, not crediting all of the day that’s already happened, all I’ve already done.

I remember talking to a woman years ago who did training for judges, and one of the things she stressed to them was that they needed to matter to themselves. “It’s okay to sit down and eat some toast with jam in the morning,” she would tell them. “You can listen to the birds, you can relax. You deserve to start your day nourishing yourself.” She wanted them to understand they had worth beyond their roles as judges, that they counted as individual human beings who might want an extra five minutes in the morning to eat breakfast, and that was okay.

Now that I have time many mornings to relax into the day I struggle with feeling like that’s legitimate. Does paying attention to the movement of light help make it more acceptable?

I think it might, because I’ve given myself this job of paying attention, of noticing. Today the sun has come and gone, disappearing in snow showers, then making a hazy circle in the clouds, now hitting me right in the eyes, through my study windows, brightening my desk, shadows of my lamp and pens and letter-opener sharp on the wall, a rose heart where the light is filtered by the red glass of the lamp base.

That rose heart can be my jam on toast.

December 8, 2013

A New Look and A Return

A number of writer friends have been admonishing me for well over a year to change my photo on this blog. Yes, it was an okay photo for my book, because after all The Truth About Death is just that and why wouldn’t I look grim on the back cover? But this blog is about all of life, not just the sad passages, and surely I could find a better photo of who I am as a whole self. One friend snapped some shots of me with her mini iPad the last time our writing group was gathered, figuring anything was better than what I had.

So I took that as motivation to get some real head shots done. Which turned out to be easy when shortly after the iPad photo session I met a colleague of Adrienne’s, a talented photographer who was happy to snap a bunch of shots when I met her. So thank you, Michelle Frantino, for the new look.

I’ve been admonishing myself about updating the overall look of the blog. I’ve recently been redecorating my house, taking down paintings and prints and photographs I hung decades ago and putting up new pieces of art. I’ve replaced light fixtures, rearranged furniture, and greatly reduced the cluttery stuff that accumulates on counters and sills and shelves like the dust all those tchotchkes collect. My blog needs the same kind of attention, a bit of which I’ve started. (Like the house redecorating, this is a process, not a once-and-done task.)

But one thing I’m repeating. I’ve already written about my project last year of writing 300 – 400 words every day for the two weeks leading up to the winter solstice. I’m doing it again, Two Weeks to the Turn II. This year I’m going to put up at least some of each day’s writing on this blog, every day. In the midst of the gathering darkness, and the frenzy of celebrating designed to push back against that very darkness, I’m going to find at least some time every day to focus on writing and try to find something worthwhile to share. Here is a tiny bit from today, and it’s not even original. It’s what one of my writer friends suggested was my real topic when I read a selection from last year’s Two Weeks to the Turn at our last group meeting.

The question is, how do David and I make happiness in the face of all the loss and heartache that brought us together?

I’ll be working on some answers.

November 11, 2013

The Metaphor of New Glasses

Getting accustomed to progressive lens glasses, that correct for both up close and distant vision, isn’t easy. If your eyes have been used to no correction, or just reading glasses, it takes a bit for the eye-brain coordination to come back into sync once you change what you’re looking through. Which is why I’ve been putting off getting progressive lens for years, making do with reading glasses, even though my mid-distance vision has been deteriorating, and it’s meant taking my reading glasses off and on constantly. Which has meant spending a good part of every day walking around the house, looking for my glasses. I lost them for an entire day two weeks ago, finally finding them when they tumbled out of my pajama tee-shirt when I put it back on to go to bed that night.

I made the leap to new glasses last week, and I’m still adjusting. The young man who helped me pick out frames at the optical shop, and who talked to me about managing the transition, told me, “You really have to look at what you want to see.” Meaning, in order to bring something into focus through the right part of the lens, you need to point your face right at the object and look.

What a metaphor. Looking to see.

David and I have been negotiating yet another unexpected left turn in our lives. We’d been talking about how nice it was to go for months and months without one of those phone calls that turns everything upside down. Then last weekend, another one of those phone calls came. Navigating a tough week with new glasses has been both disorienting and good timing. Disorienting because the world has literally looked different; good timing because I’ve had to pay attention to how I’m looking at things.

So this morning as I was running I was thinking about how I’ve been looking at things figuratively, reminding myself to remember all that is right in my life. I was also really looking at the seasonal shifts in the landscape, particularly noticing the winterberry bushes so full of red this time of year, when most of the color in the landscape has dropped away.

I’ve been reading through essays I wrote a few years ago, looking for pieces that seem worth editing. Paying attention to winterberries, seeing these flashes of brilliance in a dull season, is something I’ve been doing for years. Two years ago I did a blog post about these red berries, and included a poem that features them from The Truth About Death. And here is what I had to say about noticing winterberries six years ago, again in the context of struggling to stay focused on what endures in life, what continues despite difficulty and loss.

I give up trying to keep track. So much happens every day, and at first when Eric got sick and died so quickly I felt compelled to write down all that was happening, so he could catch up when he got back. So I could catch up. But it got to be much too much. There were all the details of death, the event, the paperwork, the telling people over and over, Eric is dead. There were red berries on a bush along a river with sun on them, lit inside and out. The unrelenting urgency of life just wouldn’t go away, all of creation and destruction churning along in its usual pattern, water moving downhill over and over.

Life is as urgent as ever, and if I remember to look directly at it, it comes into focus.