everyday life

this most amazing day

We are on the cusp of spring.  Yet it is going to snow tomorrow.  Work is good.  But it is so busy.  I’m not writing enough.  But I’m finally reading more.  I have some new, sudden question marks hanging around the edges of my awareness.  The weight of my domestic tasks – summer camp health forms, new battery for the car, deposit checks, pack lunches, laundry, write birthday cards – seems to grow and grow.  The childrens’ new Crocs for summer have arrived and they are alarming, heartbreakingly large.  My desk holds a vase of cheerful yellow daffodils, an always-blinking blackberry, and the shell that Whit painted for me for Valentine’s Day.

I went for a run this evening, which was hard, because I am tired, and because my Achilles tendon hurts.  The iron sky spat cold rain/sleet on my face.  I ran down familiar streets, past my parents’ house, along the river I love so well.  And I came home to the smell of Grace and Whit’s dinner, to their animated noise, deep love and endless demands wound together in their pressing, urgent way.

I came upstairs and sat at my desk, looking out the window at the tree I love so much.  All of a sudden its branches are swollen with buds.  The buds are full, reddish, the branches slightly drooped from their new weight of fecundity.  Did this happen overnight?

Moved by a power I cannot name I knelt by the window, my elbows on the windowsill, my hands clasped.  This has happened to me before and I felt the same sensation, of something greater than me filling the room.  It was connected, somehow, to the reminder of the turning seasons outside my window, and it gave me both an overwhelming feeling of comfort and an intense need to express my gratitude.  My head rested against the cold pane of the glass.  I thank you god for this most amazing day ran through my head, over and over again.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Thank you for all of the immense blessings that my life holds.  Thank you for my legs which can still run, for the health and energy of my children, for the steadiness of my husband, for the well-being of my parents and sister, for our financial stability, for this house, which is small and humble but also safe and warm.  For my friends and for poetry and for the food in the fridge and for every single thing I have.  My GOD, I have been so ungrateful, so often.  Thank you.

My breath fogged up the glass and I knelt, still, murmuring more thanks.  I’ve felt so cold lately, and I began to shiver, so I stood up.  And I picked up my blackberry and walked downstairs into the warmth of the kitchen, the chaos of the children, the noise of my life.

I thank you god for this most amazing day (ee cummings)

Two wheels

On Saturday Whit asked to try biking without his training wheels.  He’s a cautious fellow, uninclined to try something new until he’s fairly sure he can do it.  In the past he has been adamantly opposed to trying to bike on two wheels.  So we though we ought to jump on his new interest.  And we did.  Matt unscrewed the training wheels and off we went, two blocks up the street, to our park.

We decided to use the basketball courts because of how flat they are.  Matt stood behind Whit, helping him balance, and breaking into a slow jog, pushing Whit on the bike.  And like millions of parents before him, he let go. And Whit biked away.

He flew.

He biked on his own the very first time he tried.  When he slowed to a halt, disembarking inelegantly by letting the bike clatter to the ground, his face was lit by a huge, radiant smile.  He wanted to try it over and over again.  And so we did.  I stood back, my shadow vivid on the cement basketball court from the sun overhead, and I watched.  My eyes filled with tears.  This, so soon after Grace had pierced my heart with the heartbreakingly familiar I-want-to-be-littler comment.

Finally, we walked home.  Whit wanted to bike down our street to home.  I ran ahead and waited for him in front of our house.  As Matt got him started at the top of the street, I noticed a neighbor walk out onto her front porch on her way to her car.  She paused, watching Matt and Whit.  Her children are probably 5 years older than mine.  Watching her watching us, I thought: this is it.  This is one of those moments.  I had that powerful sense of observing myself even as I lived, that awareness, uncomfortable in its intensity, that I was passing over a threshold.  And then I turned to watch my youngest child pedal towards me down the street on two wheels.  And to hug him, fiercely, blinking back tears, after he made it all the way to me.

With special thanks to Kathleen Nolan, who reminded me of this poem:

To a Daughter Leaving Home
(Linda Pastan)

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

I want to be your little girl

Saturday morning dawned clear and cold.  I took Grace and Whit out to breakfast at our favorite diner while Matt slept in.  Later, we went to meet some friends to walk around the reservoir in our town.  Our friends have a five year old son and an 18 month old daughter.  Slowly, we circled the reservoir.  The big kids on bikes and so were our friends, with their toddler in a bike seat.  Matt and I walked.  The children biked out ahead of us, that raveling red string unfurling towards the horizon, stretching, as it does, but never breaking.  It was windy and we all walked hunched over, hands jammed into pockets.  I looked up, almost desperately, at the branches against the crystal clear sky, looking for buds.

Eventually my friend’s daughter, C, got cold in the bike seat so we took her out to walk.  As she wandered along the path, crouching to investigate every small dried leaf or blade of new grass, we joked about how toddlers are the ultimate in people who Stop and Smell the Flowers.  Everybody else got cold, waiting for C to amble along, so I picked her up, surprised by how light she was in my arms, and held her against my hip as I walked, talking to my friend, who walked her bike beside me.

Suddenly I noticed Grace biking urgently back towards me, and when she got close I saw that her cheeks were wet with tears.  “What, Gracie?” I asked, wondering if she’d fallen.  She was crying so hard it was hard for her to get the words out, and she gestured me over so we could speak privately.  I leaned down so that I could hear her, my forehead clunking into the chilly plastic of her helmet.

“Mummy,” she wiped ineffectually at her tears with her mitten, “I want to be your little girl.”

“Oh, Grace!” Instinctively I knelt, still cradling C against my side, and wrapped my other arm around Grace.  I hugged her and then pulled back, looking right into her eyes.  “Grace.  You will always be my little girl.”

“But I’m not as little as she is,” Grace nodded towards C, who was watching all of this with interest.

“I know, Grace.  But it doesn’t matter how big you get.  You will always be my little girl.  You will always be my first baby.”

Appeased, she biked away, and I stood up and resumed walking, but now it was my cheeks that were wet.

Where does this come from?  Whit, too, has broken down, sharing through sobs how own sadness at time’s passage.  Do they pick this up from my talking about it?  The thing is, I don’t actually do that in front of them.  More likely, I suspect, sensitivity about time throbs in their bloodstreams as surely as it does in mine.  I feel so ambivalent about this; what a weight they carry, and it’s all because of me.  I don’t think very much about whether I’d rather be wired differently, because I know I can’t change my leaning toward melancholy or my skinlessness, can’t escape my sometimes-exquisitely painful awareness of life’s beauty and loss.  But I don’t like reminders like this one from Grace, of the high costs of having a mother who is more shadow than sun, whose gaze is often through tears, who loves and hurts in equal, fierce measure.

Oh, I worry about them.  I want what all parents want, in unison, and with the force of a tide: I want them to be happy.  I want joy and ease and as much wonder as they can bear.  And then maybe more.  I hope the sheer basic fact of my being their mother has not precluded this already for them.

The meaning of the sky

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature – Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s no secret that I ache to believe in God.  The truth is I ache to believe in something.  What’s also true is that slowly, with almost infinitessimal steps, I’m finding myself doing so, in my own way: beginning to trust in the vast design, to believe that I can let go, to trust.

I see this shaky but growing belief, most of all, in the sky.  I recently paged through my zillions of photographs and realized how awfully many I take of the sky.  I simply adore the sky and am often moved to photograph it.  Though, of course, no photograph can capture the sky.  The assortment of clouds, the searing gorgeousness of a clear cornflower blue sky, the subtle depths of a vista of changing grays.  I take pictures looking up at the sky, mostly, and once in a while I take a picture out of an airplane window looking down at it.

In particular this winter I have been downright obsessed with the beauty in the way black winter branches net the often steel-gray sky.  I see poetry in the patterns that the bare branches, often ice-slicked, make against the winter sky.  I have dozens and dozens of photographs of different designs like this, and my children have taken to mocking me when I stop, stock-still, in the middle of going somewhere, often in the middle of the street, and fumble for my iPhone.

I’m realizing that my preoccupation with time and its passage informs this close observation of nature and the sky.  The changing quality of light as we move through the seasons speaks of the earth’s ceaseless rotation.  The sky’s meaning is found in its simultaneous permanence and momentary-ness and in the subtle, complex shifts in its light.  There is a tree outside my window, about which I’ve written before, and this winter many mornings I was stunned into a brief moment of silence by the light on its barren branches.  I tried and I tried and I tried to capture it, usually to no avail.

The seasons turn, the light changes, the branches swell with life and then burst into flower and then drop their leaves again.  Just like I like Walden Pond most during the barren months, I am most drawn to winter’s vistas and landscapes.  And it’s winter’s skies that I find the most beautiful.  Somewhere, in those erratic patterns of black against blue, I see … what?  Something.  God.  Something I can believe in, lean into.  I sense the vast design for which this blog is named. 

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

– Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace)

I want to fill them up with poetry

Grace, Whit and I went to Walden today.  Over the years I have been there often, pulled by something beyond me, and I always go in the winter.  I like it empty and quiet.  I like to be the only person (people) there.  I like it when I can feel the spirituality crackling in the air.  I could today.

As we made our way around the pond Grace and Whit took detours to explore the woods and paused to wonder at the fact that the pond is still mostly covered with ice.  It is definitely not warm here yet, even though it is officially spring.  The trees are still defiantly bare, and their black branches net the sky.  Today that sky was gray, with occasional beams of sun breaking through the thick ridges of white-gray clouds.

As we walked I told Grace and Whit about Thoreau, about how he chose to live simply, to focus on the natural world around him.  Our adventure quickly turned into a Notice Things Walk, and each called out when they saw something worth sharing: a peculiar knot on the side of a tree trunk or the pattern of stones leading down to the water that looked like stairs.  When we arrived at the site of Thoreau’s cabin, we saw this sign and a pile of rocks.
As Grace read the lines, so familiar to me, and I felt my chest tighten.  They both had questions about the last line.  We talked about what meant to live a life so full that you felt sure, at the end of it, that you’d truly lived.  I had sunglasses on so neither child could see that my eyes brimmed with tears.  Then they busied themselves building a cairn in the rock pile, as others had done before.
Whit was very curious about the cairns and he moved carefully among the stones, examining the various piles.  I imagined what those who erected these monuments were commemorating: the example of a life thoroughly-lived, the commitment to art, the desire to immerse oneself in nature.
And then we were off again.  The trail wound its way around the pond, a multi-season combination of dead leaves and tenacious patches of snow and ice.  We walked in companionable silence, Whit’s hand in mine.  He announced, apropos of nothing, that when he went to college he still wanted to live at home.  “Why?” Grace piped up from ahead of us.  Whit didn’t answer right away, just squeezed my hand.  “I want to live at college for sure,” she averred confidently as she danced, occasionally skidding in her tractionless Uggs, along the path.

“Well,” Whit said, not looking at me, “Being with Mummy makes me feel safe.  And I want to stay safe.”  I gulped, remembering the time he told me that holding my hand makes him feel like his heart would never break.  I desperately wish I could keep his heart from breaking and keep him safe forever, but I know that neither of those things is in my control.

I gripped Whit’s little fingers and kept walking, breathing the piney Walden air, hearing Thoreau’s words in my head.  Ahead of us Grace’s red and white parka bobbed up and down.  The air was still, the bracing cold of winter mitigated by the promise of spring.  The only sound was our footsteps.

I want to make sure my children know the feeling I get at Walden, the soaring in the chest that speaks of a similar expansion in the spirit.  I want to encourage them to engage with life and to learn what it has to teach.  I want to fill them up with poetry.  Even more, I want to help them see the poem that lives in every day of their lives.