What Comes Around, Goes Around, But Don't Worry About the Dizzy, Baby (That's just you taking shape.)

We rode a train today in two circles.  I asked Nora where we'd end up, if we could ask the conductor to drop us off in France, and she replied (so factually minded) that we would be returned to the same place we had begun.  Then she set her face forward (brave girl ready to do it all again and again only to arrive as she had left, resigned, determined) and despite this, enjoyed the cool breath that moved across her sweaty forehead when I wanted to take her up and tell her to never return to the same place she started without having been changed, without doing something good and crazy and healthy on the journey.   She knew this already.

The conductor would pull the whistle rope, and I matched the note with arms up in the air riding a completely horizontal roller-coaster:  WOOOOOOOOWOOOOOOOOOOOO.  I could see from the way Nora wanted to laugh but didn't that she was on the edge of being embarrassed.  But I refused to let it pass: the chance to yell WOOOOOOOOOOOOO.  In the tunnel, the conductor turned around and yelled, "Ready?"  Yes, I was.  And we screamed through the tunnel.  Twice around we went, and just as Nora had promised, we were returned to the place we started but better, released, loud and cool.

Tales from the Sickbed

Someone Needs to Go Back to School

Nora loves to type random letters on my keyboard and then have me read them to her.  For example:
aiopwpeoinbknps.  She delights in the sounds, all garbled and silly.  So do I.

After a few minutes of this, I start typing sentences for her to read:

I love Nora.

Nora loves cats.

Nora loves stars.

Nora loves dogs.

Nora loves blue.

She did fine up until this last one.  "Nora loves...b....Nora loves....bue..."  Suddenly a look of recognition.  "NORA LOVES BOOBS!"

This is what happens when you miss almost two weeks of school.


So, this is Friday night, eh?

I know I've been sick, but it's Friday.  I'm pretty sure if I wipe the rim of my wine glass with a Clorox disinfecting wipe, I'm in the clear.


Maybe It's A Little Too Soon to Try Jumping on the Bed, Nora

There's a look of panic on her face.  I grab her around the waist and rush her out toward the bathroom.  "Stop, Mom.  Stop."  I put her down.  "It's okay.  I just threw up a little in my mouth, but I swallowed it.  That's the easiest way to take care of throwing up."


We rest.  We mend.  We eat a little.  We mend.  We are loved from near and far.  We mend.  Prayers go up.  We mend.  We laugh.  We mend.

Mercy Seed

If you know the snow seed, plant the fence around the spare note, the pick up note, left behind that grows into a farmhouse in the middle of the white space, five lines grouped on the sheet of paper.  She holds a girl, six, in the single bed her mother bought after she moved out, when she lived in the basement room of an unknown house because she needed to be loved gentle and right.  Her granddaughter falls asleep, and her daughter plants the kiss on the nose that's still growing.

This is not meant to romanticize a life lived for real.  But it is the same kind of thing you find in a shoebox made into a Valentine mailbox. 

Hands

Lined maps of all that has passed across the outstretched vista.  You see it was not your future written there but the lines of your past traced deep to reveal your work and your love, canyons carved by the waters of life's precipitation and participation.  How you allowed yourself to be moved, to be changed, is recorded there in the fissures.  And all that was held heavy, that cut deep, can be released, so you might hold them out now, holy palimpsests awaiting the arrival of your own difficult and beautiful maps, the two finally folded together as you walk the rest of the way Home in prayer.

Refresh Me

Morning:  The space is both barn and ark, the ceiling high and made of wood slats stained dark.   Nora sits quiet beside me as the woman in front speaks of advent, the coming, and explains the candles and tree, the banner that will rotate for the next three weeks until it reveals the arrival of Light in the dark world.  Every Wednesday, I join the kindergarten class for chapel.  I'm the tallest one in the group by far.  Later, I join the folks at Concordia for communion.  I leave my coat on because I'm uncomfortable with my body lately, a winter pattern.  I make a note of it, this desire to hibernate in large pieces of fabric, to hide and burrow.  I sit down and close my eyes.  The people around me are singing hymn 349.  I keep my eyes closed and ask to be refreshed.

Afternoon:  The wind blows my earrings around, so I take them out and shove them down into the pocket of my jeans.  The route I take from my office and into the woods is as direct as possible, a slight turn around the art building and a few yards across the track.  I make a note of the way others engage motion:  one man walks in circles with his hood pulled up, the other runs.  I realize I'm not a "track" person.  I keep walking up and over the rise and down a steep hill until I reach the trail.  Supposedly there have been mountain lion sightings, so I stick to the concrete part.  Mountain lions hate concrete.  That's a fact.  I keep my eyes open and ask to be refreshed.

Early Evening:  Nora and I finish her birthday poster, she eats, and then it's straight to the bath.  Hair is washed and braided, fingernails clipped, lotion rubbed into little feet, stories of snow bears and kissing frogs are read, and she is refreshed.

Late Evening:  I stretch and move this body, unwrap the fabric, and after thirty minutes, I can feel oxygen in the blood stream again.  

"You are here with me.  You have been here."

This bright kitchen on the evening of Thanksgiving fills with root smells:  turnip.  And the voluptuous butternut squash.  The onion slices quickly tossed in and spread across the glass baking dish.  Olive oil, sea salt.  Mix with bare hands and rub the oil in after you run water across, the skin glossy.  Waterproof.  Nora sleeps safe and happy after cousin play.

Would you believe me if I told you everything is beautiful?  You would?  I knew you would.

These moments happen all the time.  I hold my hands open.  Thank you.

"I think about this world...And I cry a lot.  But I'm in this kitchen.  Everything is beautiful."

So here I am in a little farmhouse in Nebraska after God put me in a safe and growing place, and I worked through my past as I worked through the garden.  I was scared and I was pretty sure that I'd messed up so badly that I'd never recover, like I'd be singing the Single Mama blues forever working too hard for not much and making ends meet by tying together what came my way from the local second hand store, from what my sister passed down to me, and from I was able to grow from a $1.29 packet of seed picked up at Walmart.  And I prayed the fabric of this life would hold strong, so we could pull it up to our chins at night, Nora and I in the double bed my great aunt had passed down to me after her death and whose Rodale's Garden Problem Solver became my regular reading though I never would have believed it.

And then Pastor J. showed up and we talked a lot of honest stuff across the scarred kitchen table, and Nora was three, and she started preschool, and I met so many beautiful women, and we laughed and we sang and we loved, and we still do even while we're negotiating the changes that come when women are mothers and women and wives and wishers.  Then  I got hired full time at the University after 80 other applicants passed through, and I could not believe it.   I payed bills.  All of them.

And all this time my mom and my stepdad were loving me and holding me strong and encouraging me, and I bought some boots for kicking around the shit that haunted me and the new ideas that also haunted me.  And I wrote to friends and I wrote to the world and I sang on my dad's Martin in the kitchen sitting on the counter with my bare feet propped up, just cover tunes because I was still looking for my own voice, and when it was too hot, I'd drink a beer or some sun tea, and when it was too cold, I'd close the door to my bedroom, turn the heat down and crank up the space heater as Nora and I hunkered down.  The landscape turned from green miles to the white of some alien landscape, the little brick house they built for Ila sitting around us like Fort Farm, and we were under attack not from anything I could address directly like a broken well pump or a dead farm cat in the shed, but from the pain of already sealed choices I'd made for myself and for my daughter, who lives with my decisions as children must.  

1.  The light that travels between us doesn't know how far it's come.  In this instance, inexhaustible torch, lampposts along the route, stars connected dot-to-dot, the holes in fabric stitched together.  Whatever you have, children, that has made you fall in love, marvel at it.  Gift.  GIFT.

2.  And as I take this inventory, the places too dangerous to record surface, the places that make the story "clean" struggle to represent something nicer than I am sometimes--the places that were up late at night reading, thinking like she did:  eat.  pray.  love.  Do it or die.  Do it or die.

3.  Dad calls.  We talk about George Harrison and agree he was always looking for God: from the abundance of the heart, the mouth will speak.

Smoke

1.  I suppose it's like this:  never let me assume I know the whole story:  the cut up parts, the ones that smashed the matching coffee mugs on the kitchen floor or cut up the dress worn to prom, dumped fragmented and stolen in the trash, or the one who took the stack of oil paintings done when she lived above the bar and went to high school and wrote her own excuses and lit them on fire, the paintings and excuses, in the big oil drums outside where her family burned trash, the black smoke rising like a signal above Silt Mesa.  The wedding dress tasted bitter.  Even so, divorced people have empathy.

2.  In the basement, we write poems while Laura smokes the cheap cigarettes outside, and I listen to her black eyes and her son who saw it all, so I start smoking, too.  And what we exhale together makes a prayer in the sky about eyes and ashtrays and voice and voice and voice.  Let it rise.

3.  Just the truth.  The whole truth.  Walk a mile walk a mile walk a mile.  Do this until you see the smoke signals above her, spilled ink in the last glass of water.

Then tell her who she is, if you think you can.




...

1.  On campus they have a "no walking on the grass" rule (weird, eh?), which kills me this time of year when the leaves are falling and make a gorgeous sound underneath my boots like opening the wrapping from a birthday present .  I park on campus and Nora and I hold hands while using the crosswalk to get to her school (it's right across the street).  We do her morning work together practicing the muscles that make the letters.  And then I go out and cross, but I don't use the crosswalk when it's just me--and the direction toward my office is east and the sun is breaking the trees apart in red and gold light and the leaves respond under my feet, and I'm surrounded, flaming.  And I'm thankful to start the day on fire because this is what it requires.

2.  Every semester a theme develops in all of my classes.  This semester's theme seems to be this:  You never know exactly who you are.  But don't let that stop you from making important decisions on your own behalf.  Don't stand, deer in headlights style, in front of the difficult maneuvers each day requires and think you'll mess it up if you choose a direction.  Act.  God will work with it.  And this is the process of letting the old self die in order to be born something else.  The leaves open the gift under the path I choose.  I have always loved movement.

3.  I'm so thankful for Prof. R who walks the halls with his coffee pot, too, filled with water from the bathroom.  And he shakes my hand.  Then I run into Pastor J and he makes Rocky style boxing moves when he sees me.  And Farmer Ben reminds me that I'm "the man."  Like the fire in the sky, the people around me lift my hope and this makes it easier, in turn, to choose.

4.  And I choose to open to this movement.  I know you don't get biceps like these staring at the five year old or the rock salt or the dirt or the seeds as light as light.  I'm not bragging.  I'm just saying.

1.  For girls with blonde hair who live and love and fight strong for themselves.  In chapel today, I notice four young women with gold curls on shoulders and think of Nora and Amelia.  I think of my Grandpa Smith saying that a woman's hair is her glory, and I am loving the girls surrounded by golden crowns.  Help them over the hard spots.

2.  I wish we could all rest more.

3.  Everything is going to be okay.

1.  Fourteen juniors and seniors dressed to the nines with resumes and portfolios in hand.  Fourteen professionals from the area who spent two hours of their day doing three mock interviews with each student.  We circle around afterward and laugh about the trick questions:  "How would you fit an elephant into a refrigerator?"  "I'm glad you asked that.  May I demonstrate?"  The student who shows up with his fly duct taped together, a last minute fix to an unexpected problem.  The story of the shoe sent after an interview in order to "get a foot into the door."

They are good people, and I'm wishing them well into future where they will continue to Become and Be under the guiding protection of the Gift Giver.

2.  Laughing with old friends about ending up like Stanley Kunitz, growing old and bent over until eventually I'm simply plowing the garden with my forehead.  And "everything is going to work out just fine" and "can we come visit on Sunday?"

3.  Nora's teacher stopping me to say how much Nora is learning, how she's doing well, making progress.  For the last two weeks, there's been a major change in her:  she is thriving, no longer cries when I leave her, gets dressed in the morning without grumbling (much), and can write her alphabet.


Extras:  And surprise text prayers from friends, my mom's unchanging love of me (tyrant that I was and can still be at times), another friend's brave admission of change and growth and the unknown--the tears in her eyes and the smile that says, "I don't know, but I will anyway."

Threes

To break into it again, to get back Home, to make a note, to speak it out, to say it and be it and become it, to handle it and hand it over, to take it up, to hoist it, to more than manage, to negotiate the sound of it, to pick it up and believe in it and kiss it better and wish it more than well, to write it:

Gifts.

1.  The song found its own notes and whispered to me from the small confine of my heart: you are bigger than this.  And the note spreads into five and the fifth remembers the fingers and the fingers remember the hand and the hand remembers, puts back together, the face it holds.  You are beautiful.  Yes YOU.

2.  I want her to be well.  I send love across the room to her.

Because I haven't written in awhile and I don't know where to begin, let's start with:

The garden is dismantled but for the chard and the fall planting that may yet yield red sail lettuce, spinach, radish and turnip, sweet peas.  The field mice had made a home in the herb bed.  I found the downy milkweed seed gathered into a soft bedding pulled across the hole they dug.   My yanking and pulling woke them, and they jumped out scampering for cover.  The cats immediately went to work, grabbing one and flinging it high in the air.  I ran after the brute yelling, "Leave it alone.  It's just a little thing!" And then I remember that I caught seven of them in traps last month.  And I wonder about context.  The day I bought the mouse traps, I also bought food for Henrietta, Nora's hamster.  And it just seemed silly and uncomfortable in some ways looking down in the grocery cart and seeing small rodent food next to the snapping mouth of the trap.  What is this strange world with all its strange rules?

Release

The kitchen counter is covered:  a large basket of apples gathered from the ground below the tree suffering from lack of rain and cedar rust, still making fruit that will be cooked into applesauce for small mouths and bodies.  Three large boxes of tomatoes picked from the vine of a friend whose garden last year succumbed to chemical drift and deer; this year her garden truly was a victory.  The woman beside me who holds her new son, the one she prayed and prayed to have when she wasn't sure she could.  The woman with new boots raising her sons and her songs and the place where she belongs; she never stops moving toward these riches.

And Nora running into the double doors of her school, blessed going in, blessed coming out.  I marvel at the size of her adult teeth, delighting in the "beaver" stage all kids her age go through.  I'm watching her talk.  This is a new person I'm meeting every morning, and some mornings we argue over putting on clothes and getting to school on time, and some days we just sit next to each other on the couch, my head on her shoulder, her hand twisting a piece of my hair.  Just being.  She's growing into her size, into her self.  And I am moving through the letting go, sometimes gracefully, sometimes still clinging to the way things were when she was my little one.

And I have been meditating hard on the difference between forging ahead and following.  And I am realizing that in order to follow, one must accept both protection and a new, unimagined life.  This is a mystery I'm still trying to understand.  Let go and come to Me.  In return, the gifts of yielding that space will be abundant.  

From one moment to the next, we are being asked to let go even as I watch the summer garden wilt back to the earth and the trees, already dried from lack of rain, release their leaves early so they might move into the death of dormancy to prepare themselves for next season's waters, the limbs already offering their naked entreaty toward the sky.  Let me live again.

Trees

Willingness lives somewhere at the edge of the Wilderness, where she wandered to find the light hidden between the limbs (her own?  the trees?), bare feet and branches snapping as she cut her way through to the center of it.  Terrified, she did it anyway.  Like many women, she owned a pair of boots but she hadn't thought to put them on as she was woken from her dream, called out the door, still half asleep, and walking toward what she couldn't name.  God's voice touching in the trees like a mother calming her child, shhhh...shhhhh.  Trust this.

Seeds

She was not negotiating the days of her life in order to find out more about her life, nor was she truly interested in knowing more about herself through the "work" of self-examination.  The difference would be this:  The seed can not be saved if she digs down into the earth with shaking hands to pull it up, examine it, name its parts while at the same time tearing it lose from the dirt that holds the fragile tail of a shoot inside its mouth, warm and dark and necessary.  Speechless.  A seed pulled this way can't be put back into the earth and expected to recover, to grow.  The vulnerability of such a creature (a life, a person, a child) must not be compromised by our desire to possess it or give it a name smaller than the one it was given in the Beginning.

Instead,  she will leave the seed of herself alone, allow herself to show herself in her own time and in the fruit she produces, what she is, what she dreams possible for herself, what she fears, how she moves, how she is called beyond her fear of the dark wilderness of her past, sustaining herself on the desires of her heart written there for her by God, for what she can know of light and air and love because it is being given to her.   She lifts to receive these blessings.  Let her lift to receive these blessings.

Sometimes I am this brave.  Sometimes I am not.  And this is to be expected.

Sometimes Making Stuff is Hard. Oh, well.

If you wait on the arms, if you hold them still at your side, if you walk down the hall in a straight line with them clasped behind you like a tanglefingered bunny tail.  If.  That's the question. 

How loudly are you allowed to play your music on the second floor of your office building?

Answer:  Always.

From the first floor of the farmhouse, she sits above a pile of basement cast-offs:  the interior of a fish tank with its lights and breathing tubes goldfishless, all the crocheted afghans that can't be cast off after so many hours at the fingers that conceived you and the tangled yarn you slept below.

The antenna lights blink red from seven miles east.  The little girl is sleeping and the mice have all been caught.  Not a creature is stirring for miles but for the pigs out back and the farm cats now curled beneath the burnt rose bush.  I expected them to swell earlier with kitten.  Now with Fall in the night, I noticed today the low swing in the calico belly.  I'll tie a box filled with old blankets to the back porch rail for the winter.  The wind has a tendency to blow these houses around.

I huddle over the keyboard expecting a fire, expecting the fingers to conceive just a small piece of light.

And if they ask for whom you write, tell them you write for writing.  Though this won't be true at all.  

Counting Them

1.  As for kindergarten, Nora did great.  I did laundry.  When I walked into the empty house and saw small patches of the living room carpet showing through the second strata of Barbie paraphernalia, I almost turned around to wait in the truck for the next five hours until it was time to pick Nora up.  Everything was so still.  So quiet.  I was terrified.  Instead of facing the suspicious calm around me, I got to work cleaning and doing laundry.  Maybe tomorrow I'll face the silence.  Nope.  Wait.  I've got meetings all day.  Oh, dang.

2.  The garden is a towering jungle right now.  Those pole beans I rigged up on that cattle panel have exceeded anything you might see in a cartoon rendition of Jack and the Beanstock.  Seriously.  I'm still canning and blanching and freezing.  And on Friday nights, I still throw on my boots and get to work weeding and picking and cursing the lawnmower.

3.  My classes start in a little over a week.  I've been a gardening, falling in love, mamma recluse all summer.  I've enjoyed the falling away of words to describe a life that is so completely Alive.  But I can also hear them whispering something about telling my story in case it helps someone else along the way.  Maybe you too have gardened or fallen in love or been a mother or father.

4.  Part of the deal is that words can't "capture" your life.  When you write about something that's happened to you, you're not describing it.  You're actually adding another layer of complexity (or simplicity) to what you've lived through.  Language isn't a camera.  It's another appendage, another nerve.  It allows you to move and feel even more "about" your life.  I've never had much luck recreating my experience through language.  But I have had some luck in enlarging my life through language.  I suppose it was worth the three easy payments of $19.99 after all.

Kindergarten or How Nora Got Her Groove Back

For five and a half years, I've lived with this blond-headed, comb-protesting, wild fire of a girl--the one with the elevated vocabulary and the desire to raise chickens and dinosaurs.  She's starting kindergarten tomorrow.  I'm not going to get mushy here.

Because this is far from a mushy moment.  She came with injections twice a day for nine months.  She came not breathing at two months old with a monitor around her chest for six months, and she moved through a divorce and skinned knees and dead birds and a working mom, and she would never say to you, "Life has been hard on me" even when I've moaned about it under my breath at the kitchen sink crying lonely or scraping uneaten dinners into the scrap bucket. Because her laughter happens daily and often.  Because she tells me jokes from the back seat of the truck:  "I'd forget my hair if it wasn't attached to my head!" Because she walks on tip toes like the really fast foals and yells and kicks her way through the "no's" I say to her even when it would be more convenient for me if she'd just say, "Yes, ma'am."

But I was never yes-ma'am, and she isn't either.  Though she is loving and polite and generous.  She is not yes-ma'am.  She is Yes.  So as Grandpa always said, "Don't hold back, kid--there ain't no reason." 

As if I could every stop you.  God bless your journey, Nora.  I love you, kiddo.

That was pretty mushy.  Ah well.

Present

My feet ache, the heel tender from meeting the linoleum daily in an attempt to preserve the harvest.  And this is just right.

The blackberries release their juices about twelve minutes into the stirring and once the sugar is added, there will be another 20 minutes until it thickens, so I close my eyes and practice leaning forward on my toes, distributing the weight I usually ask my heel to carry forward and across the entire surface of my size 9 1/2, and there is a sudden lift, a lightening, and I feel as though I've lost 20 pounds.  I lean my arm across the cabinet above the oven, rest my forehead against my arm and close my eyes.  I distribute the weight of my vision across an interior landscape.  The silver ladle dipped into the purpleblack berries moves against the clock.  I rewind.

You were a girl with a red second place ribbon once.  How important is winning to you now?

Not at all.  Closed eyes.  I hear Nora in the living room talking her quiet make-believe into the inanimate forest creatures she loves.

I'm afraid that I sound like I'm complaining.  I'm not.  I'm recording:

Moments that surround me like a gift even when they seem to stretch on forever.  

And this is the mystery of the answer:  "I am that I am."