Category: Seasons

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Blizzard

IMG_1176I couldn’t ski the winter after Eric died.  He had once said about me, “Grace would choose cross-country skiing above everything except her children,” and he’d been right.  Though I had started as a downhill skier (I cut insignias and racing numbers out of sticky cloth for my father’s sail making business as a young teen, 5 cents a number, saving to buy myself inexpensive downhill skis and skiing lessons at the ridiculously small, but still skiable, Blue Hill Ski Area outside Boston) from the first time I cross-country skied I was in love.

My parents gave me wooden Bona skis for Christmas in 1977.  Eric and I were living with friends in Williamstown, MA, and there was an abundance of snow and hills.  I went out into the sloping fields across the street from our house one afternoon and came home and told Eric he needed to buy skis.  He did, though he’d never done any kind of skiing before, and gamely followed me up and down hills, learning to snowplow, learning to turn, learning to glide.  That was the beginning of almost 30 years of skiing together.  When I was first faced with skiing without him, I just couldn’t do it.

Then the next winter came, and I realized that not skiing, because Eric couldn’t ski, wasn’t doing anyone any good, least of all me.  “Get over yourself and get out there,” I said to myself, and I did.

When the grand dump of snow blew in to New Hampshire at the end of last week I was delighted.  The idea of a blizzard, as long as people could be safe and warm and dry, was exciting.  Waking up Saturday to continued snow and drifts up to my hips all I could think about was getting out skiing.  Which made me think about Eric.  “Active with glide,” was how Eric described his favorite outdoor activities — skiing, kayaking, biking, swimming.

I was in touch with Adrienne and Sam Saturday morning, both of them wanting to ski as much as me, but too far away to join me.  And my sister, who loves to ski but can’t manage it right now due to health challenges, had told me to ski for her.  So I had a whole pack skiing in my head this past weekend, gliding along for the ride.

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Above Tree Line

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“I’d like to get above tree line once a month,” David said, when I asked him if he had any New Year’s intentions.  I didn’t want to talk about resolutions — too resolute.  Being intentional about making sure we do things that make us happy is another thing altogether.

Hiking up to an open ridge makes both of us happy, so we began making plans earlier this week for a hike up the Crawford Path in the White Mountains to Mt. Pierce today.  We emailed some hiking buddies, got an enthusiastic response, and ended up with 10 people hoping to hike with us.  The weather forecast wasn’t promising, but David and I were willing to do the hike in almost any conditions, short of downpours.

Then the forecast worsened, by 8:00 last night it was raining, and the other hikers started to bail out of the hiking plan.  By the time we went to bed last night, we were down to 5 of us planning to hike.  We got up early this morning and checked a high summit forecast, and looked at the radar.  No rain anywhere in New England and a chance for some breaks in the clouds this afternoon.  So we drank coffee and started packing up to go.  Another set of hikers dropped out via email, and I called the friends who live up north as we drove into the mountains.  They also took a pass, but David and I kept driving.

By the time we got to the trailhead, I knew we’d made the right choice.  Clouds were lifting all around us, and we could see the range to the south of us.  The trail was well-packed powder, making hiking effortless with just microspikes on our boots.  “No rocks, no roots, no bugs,” David and I said to each other, the winter hiking refrain.  As we climbed the snow on the trees thickened, draping the spruce, and the sun began to break through the clouds.

When we got above tree line, the southern slopes of the Presidential range swept off to the north, occasionally threaded with a piece of cloud.  From the summit of Mt. Pierce, we could see the tops of the mountains to our south, dark peaks in a sea of clouds.  With unusually warm and still weather, we were able to take a lunch break on the summit, then walk a bit further up the ridge, just to enjoy the view.

Above tree line for January: done!

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Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse

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As soon as we walked into the Chanukah party a family friend was having at Sammy’s Roumanian we knew we were in for  a good time, and not only because it was our first chance this holiday season to all be together — Adrienne, Sam, Matt, Emilio, David and I. Told to expect something along the lines of the cheesiest Bar Mitzvah we could imagine,  we weren’t disappointed.

We’d walked through the sketchy neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and down the steps to the crowded basement dining room, graffiti scrawled across the sign above the door.  The walls were plastered with photos and business cards, old news clippings and posters.  The ceiling was low, and in one corner, practically on top of the tables, a man at a keyboard was enticing everyone to get up in between the tightly packed tables and dance the Horah, circling the room.

“Who’s a Jew?” he shouted and everyone cheered.  “Who’s happy?” he shouted again and again everyone cheered.  “You’re a bunch of liars.  There aren’t any happy Jews!  Okay, okay, should we sign a Christmas song for the goys?”  More cheers.  He started playing the keyboard and singing, “Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jesus was a Jew.”  Everyone laughed. He looked at a couple sitting at the table right in front of him and nodded at the man.  “I recognize you from last year.  You’ve gained weight.”  More laughter.

The 750 ml bottles of Ketel One vodka came to the table frozen into blocks of ice.  Following large bowls of chicken liver chopped with onions and strips of turnip, the platters of food kept coming out of the kitchen piled high with meat, meat and more meat, then a few potatoes.  The two long tables of our party talked and laughed and ate and shouted over the music and the talk and laughter of all the tables squeezed around us.  The man at the keyboard took a break, then came back and shouted and swore and made fun of more people, and played more music.

The friend who hosted the party said he first found Sammy’s decades ago when he was in graduate school in New York City.  Nothing has changed.  As the night wore on, tables were taken down in the middle of the crowded room and the man at the keyboard started playing dance songs.  More bottles of vodka frozen into blocks of ice came to the tables.  Strangers and friends and family got up and danced.  Then sang and danced some more.  Emilio got passed from Adrienne to Sam to me to Matt, bobbing his head and dancing along with everyone else, long past his bedtime, his eyes frozen into wide circles of fatigue and excitement.  Chanukah had already been over for more than a week, but nobody cared.

The next morning I asked Emilio if he’d enjoyed the party the night before.  He nodded his head.  “Yes,” he said.  “Music!”

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The Gravitational Pull of Work and Haiku Habit II

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Two months ago I recognized how much my consulting jobs have cut into my time and whatever space I was finding in my mind for writing and creative concentration.  I remembered that while I was still working at the Coalition I started the practice of writing a haiku everyday as a way to stay in touch, however briefly, with daily creativity.  Not that my work in the movement to end violence against women hasn’t always had a strong element of creativity, but it’s not the same as writing down the constant scroll of language translating experience in my mind.

Two months later I’m admitting to myself that the gravitational pull of work has landed me back in a place where much of my mental energy is expended helping organizations and projects further their work to address domestic and sexual violence.  It’s not a surprise.  No one is emailing me and calling me asking for the next poem or essay or book.  People are emailing and calling and asking me to do consulting work.  I get paid, I get praised, I get absorbed.

So back to that Haiku Habit idea from two months ago.  I’ve hardly written a haiku since, but today as I got ready to be away traveling for a job, knowing that the first real frost may finally arrive while I’m gone, I decided to let the turn of the season turn me back to at least a small space for poetry in my head every day.  I hope it lasts.

Haiku Habit II

Late garden basket
Last cascade of summer porch
Frost’s chapter opens.

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The Shore

I grew up on the South Shore of Boston, in Scituate, a lovely town on the ocean with an excellent harbor and numerous sandy beaches.  We occasionally went to Cape Cod when I was young (I had an aunt who lived there), and we had family gatherings for several summers on Martha’s Vineyard when I was an adult, but mostly I didn’t go to “the shore” other than to Scituate.  Why go to the ocean when home was the ocean?

When I met David he talked about his family’s tradition of going to “the shore.”  The New Jersey shore?  Like in Atlantic City?  Why would anyone go to the beach in New Jersey?(Yes, I was ridiculously ignorant about where millions of people on the East Coast go to the beach.)

When I first met David’s parents, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they talked lovingly of their home on the shore, telling me I would have to come visit there the next summer.  Which I did and realized for the first time that the New Jersey coast is a long series of barrier islands with beautiful beaches and long bays with wide sweeps of marshland and creeks behind the islands.

David and I are here for a week, along with our kids, in the house his parents bought in the 1960’s.  It’s not fancy, but it’s on the bay side of the island that’s divided between Avalon and Stone Harbor and sits right on the water.  From the deck you look out across “the basin,” an inlet of water from the bay, the bay itself, and then the marshes, with the mainland in the distance.

My first summer here I sat with Betty, David’s mother, one afternoon when the rest of the visiting family was out doing errands or at the beach, three blocks across the island on the ocean side.

“Oh, forget about time,” Betty said that day.  I was talking about an outing from years before, trying to remember how many years.   “Time is out there and I’m here,” Betty said.  “I’ve given up on being fact actual.”  Betty had been suffering from dementia for years when I met her, but could be amazingly lucid and insightful at times.

I was reading Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry.  “Do you do any reading?” I asked Betty, knowing she didn’t.  She sat in a chair most of the time, going through magazines and catalogues and piles of paper, clipping coupons and flipping pages, over and over.

“Oh yes,” Betty said.  “But I have no book now.”

“Here’s what I’m reading,” I said, and picked up my book.  “Want to hear a poem?”  I read her Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”  She laughed in delight.

“Well isn’t that the perfect poem for here,” she said, and I read the last stanza again, with its lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. 

“The water is language,” Betty said.  “If you don’t watch the water here you miss the whole thing.”

I stopped reading and watched the water.

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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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Peonies

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Peonies in the garden, nodding their heavy heads towards the grass as I walk to the house from the car.   A grand bouquet of peonies on my kitchen table and a small globe of peonies aflame with western light on the coffee table, scenting the house, greeting me as I walk from room to room.  Peonies poking through the railings on my porch as I sit here, in late afternoon sun after a long day in the yard and garden.  The birds are quarreling, a cricket is whirring and I am awash in the deliciousness of peonies.