Peach Sap

Sunday afternoon I was sitting gratefully under the shade of a pecan tree, whose leaves are shaped like a peach tree’s leaves, in my estimation. We grew up with an old peach tree in our yard, but I think trees prefer to be called “mature,” instead of old. Our peach tree was perfectly situated behind the old carriage house, which had a low slanted roof from the back grading up toward the front of the building, which my parents used for lawnmower, tiller and large garden tool storage and a workshop for my Uncle Tom when he would visit in the summer. I could pretty easily get myself up into that peach tree and climb its super sticky branches onto the back roof of the carriage house. The tree’s branches were just tall enough to offer my tiny self and her book a modicum of shade over the just-right-sized spot on that scalding carriage house roof. The downside to being up there was, of course, the sap stuck to my fingers, which then smeared from page to every turned page.

There was also the day I discovered our cat’s — it was either Cupcake’s or Twinkie’s — collar wedged up in that peach tree, which he’d promptly gone and configured himself out of the moment Mom brought him back from a very embarrassing (for him) trip to the Vet. Being butt-less in the wilds of outdoor cat living was an ego-blow he had to face head-on, no collar to announce his coming. He may have lost the fight that landed him at the vet and cost him both his tail and his derriere, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to walk around with his head held in place for him. I am pretty sure the day I discovered and delivered that missing cone to my mother was the last time she ever paid for any pet’s veterinary needs again. We were always a menagerie; there were just too many of us not to be.

In the sixth grade our classroom moved outside for a week — it was called Camp Greentop — and (thank you, Google, I just learned that) from 1957 through 1996, every student in Frederick County, Maryland, “enjoyed the opportunity to make a national park their school.” Another fun fact just learned by me 30+ years after attending Camp Greentop is that it was the second of three camps designed and built in the Catoctin Mountains, with the third camp of that 1930’s construction era being Camp David. My time at that camp as an excessively skinny prepubescent girl predisposed to climbing sappy trees to enjoy quality alone time with her books (and none of her seven siblings), was both enlightening and embarrassing.

We went on actual nature hikes for class, looking at and learning every type of leaf associated with every type of tree that our precious slice of the Catoctin Mountain showcased. We were shepherded late at night onto a large open field, most certainly with a fairy ring in its center, for a class of star-gazing, learning and looking for the constellations visible on a late starry night in May. We scoured the woods for flowers and poison ivy, touching and picking none of them. Also I peed my pants during one of our day hikes because I was a new 12-year-old who didn’t know who to tell or who to ask or where there might be a tree behind which I could — no, I could not — hold it. And, no, I didn’t, couldn’t, tell anyone. I relocated myself to last in line and raced my way back to my cabin as soon as I was back in camp, surreptitiously swapping my under and outerwear before my high school senior counselor found me for mess hall responsibilities.

It turns out that I was in the stingingly painful throes of my first ever bladder infection, but I didn’t know that until I got home at the end of my week at Camp Greentop, bringing with me my wonder and my shame, racing to the laundry room to put my under and outerwear into the washer, an extra scoop of soap to be extra sure no one would know. I wanted to climb up the peach tree with my book du jour, get covered up in sap and sticky fingers, surrounded by leaves I now knew were: deciduous. Instead, our 60-year-old babysitter sent me with her husband to see our family doctor, also a man. So my longing to climb up the peach tree and pry loose my embarrassment to leave it behind was never realized. I got spotted immediately by our old babysitter, who was probably just matronly and mature and understood things I couldn’t see or say. Mrs. Perry was perfectly-situated to ask me where there might be a tree behind which I might be hiding. Cupcake or Twinkie, whichever brother it was who got his butt bit off in that late-night fight — turns out that he and I aren’t cone wearers after all.

Bees and Birds

Bumblebees spend their days banging into my window and into each other — it must be something to tumble through life because you’re just so happy to be in it — you touch everything in your flight path, albeit frenetic to the outside observer.

The mama hummingbird outside our kitchen window splits her time between nest sitting and food sourcing for the babies she’s sitting on top of. We keep a pair of binoculars on the counter next to the sink for 24-hour surveillance of the life flitting back and forth in front of us. The nest she built gets just as many views from us as she does; its craftsmanship at a mastery level my knitting only dreams of attaining in this lifetime of needles clicking. Curt’s Aunt Carol recently told me, casually of course, that I’d have to knit faster if I ever hoped to finish anything. She’s right, of course, but I do have a track record now of beginning projects being completed, begging the beginning of something new, which is where Aunt Carol was sitting next to me — at another beginning.

Our curiosity that our neighbors (whose house is the backdrop for the hummingbird’s nest) might — or must — wonder if we’re scrutinizing them with our round-the-clock laughter that tumbles and tangles together like two bumblebees on the back porch: the bounce effect of belly laughs only ever begs for more.

We spent the last four days in New York City, bumbling our way through the City That Never Sleeps. We took the stairs underneath 28th and Park and swiped $2.75 each (that’s the current rate to ride the MTA) to get on the 6, which would take us to the 7, which would take us to the B, all of which would take approximately 28 minutes. But this was the wrong 6, heading in the wrong direction, so we exited through the same turnstile we’d just paid $2.75 each to enter. We walked up the stairs to 28th and Park, did the Hokey-Pokey, turned ourselves around, went back underground, swiped another $2.75 each, and stared at the same wrong 6, heading in the wrong direction. Rinse, lather, repeat — back through the turnstile, but this time I asked the MTA attendant sitting in his box for help and when we walked topside to come subterranean and swipe another $2.75 each, I did it with confidence and verve. Start spreading that news. . . I’m looking at the same wrong 6 for the third time! and the MTA guy is looking at us shaking his head waiting for his moment in the subway break room to talk about the two bumpkins from Birmingham who spent $16.50 in a ten-minute swiping spree to figure out how to cross the street NYC-style: by actually physically crossing the street.

Bumbling, tumbling, and laughing our way through life is the lesson we keep learning from the bees and the birds who fill our windows and our hyper-focused lenses with reminders that through the lens of someone else’s window is the funniest and most fun way to be:  just so happy to be in it — you touch everything in your path, albeit frenetic to the outside observer.

What Love Made Me Do

During a recent doomscroll session on Facebook, I pulled myself away and forced a full stop. I had a mission to fulfill.


But first, the doomscrolling — I belong to a private Facebook group made up entirely of women who in some way are separated from the Mormon church. Some are inactive members, others who have openly removed themselves from the church, and still others who are in mixed-faith marriages (with one of them engaged in the church and the other not at all, or participating with limited activity), but all of them on what I would call a faith journey. Confessionally (and by the way, Mormons don’t have formal confession in the way Catholics do, but that adverb specifically seemed the right one for me to choose in this moment), I initially joined this group two years ago to see if I could find clients in my work as a transformational guide. I have never actually solicited anyone — nor do I intend to — but I have stayed on as a witness.


Whenever I pop onto this private page to read what’s been posted, to catch up on the lives of these women spread across the country in their range of communities, life and relationship circumstances and stages of their respective faith journeys, I am no longer surprised by the common and persistent theme of posts and responses to said posts. These women are hurting, and deeply.


Most of the women who post (there are over 9000 members in the group and certainly not all of them are posting, myself being part of the latter percentage) are sharing intimate and vulnerable situations they are personally encountering. All of these situations are heartbreaking for me to read, especially with the pile-on comments that add up to literal volumes of the stories of families abandoning their loved ones, mothers and mothers-in-law belittling, guilt-tripping and blaming their daughters, and entire communities gaslighting, ostracizing and turning their backs on these struggling women.


They are alone and they are seeking support in an online forum, where they’re not alone in their fears and in their experiences. It’s so difficult to read these accounts of mothers not loving their daughters.


My mission, which became evident to me only at the bottom of one-such doomscroll session, was to immediately step away from Facebook and to shut it down completely, and to then open FaceTime and call my own mother.


My mother answered my call with a whispered finger drawn across her lips, warning me not to speak too loudly because she was at work, at her volunteer position with the Mormon church as a researcher and a guide for anyone visiting the Church’s records building in Salt Lake City, Utah.


“Why are you calling me at work?” she whispered before I’d had a chance to make any noise.


“Hi, Mama! You sure look pretty today. I just wanted to tell you that I love you!”


“Well, I love you, too. Now why are you really calling me?”


“No, really! That’s all I wanted to say. I’m just so grateful for how you keep loving me even though I don’t go to church anymore.”


She so matter-of-factly stated: “Well, of course I love you no matter what. You’re my daughter and I love you.”


“Yes, well there are so many women I see hurting because their mothers are choosing to fight against them instead of just loving them, and it makes me so sad for those moms and their daughters, and so grateful for you and for me. I just wanted to be sure you know that.”


And my mama — who is the actual greatest — looked at me with her beautiful soft smile and said, “I do.”


My mission — to ground into what was, what is, and what will be — is, has been, and always will be — to love out loud, just like my mama continues to do with me.

Taking Up Space

I went for a run two hours after the call came from Curtis that his dad was gone. I covered familiar ground, sticking to the sidewalks through the neighborhood nearest the village library. I just learned (I read every single installment of the library e-newsletter, of course) a water pipe to the fire suppression system burst and released a large volume of water into the library. I have never heard of a fire suppression system, but mostly I am sad when I think about that wonderful building holding my heart on every single page on every single shelf. I don’t know what new and temporary location will hold space for us when we gather as lovers of words while we wait for repairs and replacements to be made. Recovery takes a long time and I’m still mentally preparing for and reminding myself of that truth. A couple of months ago, I gave my spare library card to Curtis for safekeeping because you never know when I might need him to run down the hill or swing by the village on my behalf: my library proxy.

Have you ever noticed how much space we humans take up? That space occupying was all I could feel, see and hear while running my library-adjacent route: the man walking three tethered-to-each-other dogs, the two women pushing double-wide strollers (coffee mugs in-hand, too consumed with their conversation with each other to notice me using the same sidewalk), the jumbo-sized SUVs in the morning school line (stretching endlessly-adjacent to the sidewalk I was running), the distracted drivers with no crosswalk awareness cruising straight through their right and left turns (completely oblivious to my permission-granted blinking light trajectory, swiftly dodging their swift deli meat slicer moves), the overly-cologned man leaving a trail for my nose to unwillingly follow (with the window of his truck cab down all the way), the wailing siren somewhere in the distance (unseen but felt in an instant in my heart — my sharp breath intake, breathe out a silent prayer for peace, for grace, for love), the laughter of a cluster of middle-schoolers making their way through the same crosswalk as me (but in opposite directions). Trapper Keepers took up more space in my backpack than their clever commercials promised, but I had to have one.

We’ve been walking Curt’s dad to his next adventure, Curtis and I, these past few months. Taking up space in his room, where he’s gradually occupied less and less of it: walker-assisted walking, to a fall that rendered him bedridden, to therapy to move that hip, to reassert dominance over a wheelchair, sitting upright with self-propelled mobility, to nursing station hangouts, filling that hallway with his jokes and quick retorts, inciting laughter and delight (both space taker-uppers), and then back to bed, curled up in the fetal position, refusing food and water because they take up too much internal space.

Love (and grief — because grief IS love) takes up space and moves between and among us, filling us all — all at the same time, with no limit to its capacity. It might be the great mediator among us, Love. While we wait for repairs and replacements to be made to our hearts, I remind myself that healing, if there is such a thing to be achieved, takes a long time. I’ve noticed that my dad, who’s been gone three years now, and that Curt’s dad, who’s been gone just eight days, are still tethered to us, taking up a lot of space inside of us, holding our hearts on every single page of this story we’re still living out loud and writing in real time.

Kalanchoe Vibes

I’m sitting at the quaint two-seater table on our back porch, a pot of recently-watered blooming yellow Kalanchoe in front of me, listening to a dozen different bird species greeting the morning (and each other) in full surround sound.

I love this start to our Monday morning and to our week with everything possible in front of us, like an advent calendar whose individual doors are hiding a surprise I can’t see until it’s just the right time.

We spent all of Saturday and Sunday sitting with Curt’s dad as he transitions; Hospice says it will be today. I wonder if there’s a word for this watching and waiting window, like sitting shiva, but before they’re gone. It’s certainly a sacred time of honoring, whether there’s a word for it or not. 

The call just came. He’s gone. Now the birds’ extra-buoyant  chatter makes more sense.

hell with a little heaven in it

“As I Lay Dying”
That’s what I’d call this chapter
His chapter
We’re just reading it
Out loud
As a group
Gathered
Witnesses
Heartbroken
Just go
Finish the chapter
Please
We’ll write the next bit
On your behalf
Grateful
So much material
Exists
With you

Displaced

The bathtub’s water line exceeds its limit,
my body heavy with hot wet,
displaces to overflowing,
my ears full with rhythmic chants,
pound in time to my heart’s beat,
the candles’ lights flicker,
the dark chamber illuminated,
as if in collusion with
the heaviness
my heart
holds,
floats,
flees.

Knocking On Doors

Not to keep on about this
Door knocking and
Us opening said door

I hate to think it; let alone say it
But is it possible
You’re wearing out your welcome?

Not that we welcome you
Except when we do
Which of late is the case

House and heart guests can be wearying
Like fish, they say
But please, make yourself at home

We hear you banging
Beating repeatedly, incessantly
Coming heavy-hearted to the entry, or is it the exit? 

Opening to you
Closes us to him
The intersection of breath and death

By the way, we received your hostess gift:
Grief arrived before you
Barely visible beneath all that baggage

Dimentia

Our sweetest Easter
He doesn’t know it’s today
He always knows us.

Lotion on each hand
I gently massage his feet
Hours he will forget.

Who needs Easter eggs
We found joy in front of us
Spending time with him.

Tofu and the Three Ghosts

My immediate future is bringing me a delicious stir-fry for dinner. I started preparations for that future several hours ago when I removed the tofu from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw. I learned the hard way that frozen tofu doesn’t actually unfreeze itself by sitting in the fridge overnight or for 24 hours. Not gonna happen. But counter-sitting for the tiniest amount of time — like an hour or an hour and a half — the package is leaking like a sieve! And do you know what’s so funny is that I wrote leaking as l-E-E-k-i-n-g, because I was also thinking about leeks. I’m often thinking about leeks in my future, full disclosure, although I’m not planning to include leeks in tonight’s stir-fry.

When, about two hours ago, that formerly-frozen tofu showed all the signs of being ready, I liberated it, along with what always seems like a gallon of water, from its sealed package. I own square dinner plates that individually weigh five pounds. No joke. These plates are not messin’ around. I do not own a tofu press, unless you count my homemade press built out of eight dinner plates piled on top of one rectangle of tofu, their combined weight approximately 40 pounds. That tofu will be good and squeezed in my near future.

I sometimes fear looking farther afield than tonight’s supper plans, much like Scrooge when he said,

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead . . . . But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

I can see the perseverance of other plans playing out — my birthday trip to the beach, my weekly conversations with my far-from-me mother, my completing my repeat reading of my favorite Dickens’: David Copperfield, and no matter how much my boyfriend doth protest (he doesn’t at all, actually) our protagonist will not magically become the magician David Copperfield incarnate at the story’s end. Although, wouldn’t that have been a triumphant foretelling of future’s tidings by Master Dickens, himself?

What else might the future bring, unchecked and unchanged as our behaviors and patterns and choices might be right now? The crystal ball’s illuminations are so dreary as to wish me right back to Kansas with a dog of my own to hold and to unsee such tidings. Supper plans, be they stir-frys or salads, mean nothing next to the harrowing pile (not that we would pile them, but imagining them that way isn’t difficult) of bodies, dead at our own doing, our own civil war being fought and waged in the hand-picked and preferential battlefields — in the classrooms of children, in sanctuaries of peace, and even in the produce aisle.

I know I’m future-gazing, but that future has me turned around, looking behind me, remembering a picture taken of my then-five-year-old sitting on her school bus looking at me through the window with the grin of all grins, her moment of ecstasy was that moment. Nothing else compared to that future in which she had arrived, fully-prepared, in complete ownership — and the look of triumph on her face will be one I never forget. I do have the picture, but I don’t need to look at it; that face is forever in my heart and in my head.

Yesterday’s future moment seared in my mind forever: an image of a similarly-aged to my once-little girl, her face looking through the school bus window, tears of sheer terror running down her cheeks, her future forever-changed, no triumph or victory awaits.

So what might the future bring? It took Scrooge three visits from three different specters to understand and to grasp the reality that in order for the future to change, he had to change his right now — his behavior, his choices, his opinions, his rhetoric, his investments and his collaborations.

My future is bringing lots of delicious dinners, for sure, but my future-gazing also has me constantly turning around, looking behind me, around me, avoiding places of public gatherings for any purpose: churches (okay, I don’t go to churches for other reasons, but still. . . ), movie theatres, and concert venues.

My tofu and my heart are leaking today, both of us releasing our water-logged selves of the grief that seems to be the ever-present ghosts of our past 24 years, our present living nightmare, and our future accumulation of more senseless murders. But perhaps the ghost’s visit yesterday will be the one that scares us into a different future and we can all get off this carousel, whose only mounts are intricately-painted forms of PTSD, Terror and Grief, whose patina of money, freedom, thoughts and prayers is worn down to the original surface showing through in broad patches. My future self is done crying and done being dizzy.