Reality

I cup the morning in my hands -

the sun rising on the back of the rooster’s blare,

the grass growing straight out to the barn

where a black cat explores the known world.

 

I hold the whispery sound of wings overhead

and the silly dither of earthbound hens.

Crow feathers slip through my fingers.

Red leaves, and orange,

green leaves and yellow crowd my fingertips.

Wisps of soft air float free.

 

My hands hold the smells of wood smoke

and damp earth, of dried grasses

and fallen leaves. I bury my nose

and inhale the universe as it turns,

 

loosening summer, setting autumn free,

welcoming winter. All this is here

in my cupped hands, holding one morning,

holding them all.

Pure Pleasure

 

I sit and watch the finches at the feeder thinking first that I am glad I thought to replenish the seed, then notice the sheer beauty of the birds themselves, the soft blush of red on their breasts, the way their feathers make black and brown patterns on their backs, the small perfectness of them, and as I watch, the noticing falls away and I am left with something so much larger than a wee feathered finch, a recognition of what Eckhart Tolle calls “naturally arising moments of pure pleasure.”

 

The sun backlights the yellow leaves on a maple. You can get lost in that light, let it shower down over your shoulders, fill your eyes, wash you with color until you are the yellow leaf and the sunbeam and the very air you breathe.

 

You can nestle your hands deep in the fur of a dog, gaze into its eyes until you fall in, lose all your senses except how your fingers feel, and your palms, until you are the dog and the hands and the otherness and sameness at once. 

 

If you lie on your back in a meadow and stare at the sky you can fly, rising up from yourself and floating down to yourself simultaneously. You become sky and earth until the sheer weighted weightlessness feels like home. 

 

Naturally arising moments of pure pleasure can be sought but I like them best when they descend without warning, when my hands are deep in the hot sudsy dishwater and my mind has wandered away from itself and into a place where soap bubbles are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, or when I’m holding a sleeping child and the weight makes my arms tremble but my mind stills itself like the sleeping babe and we breathe in tandem, sharing waking and sleeping dreams.

 

HOPE

Expecting to be settled as I aged and relaxed into retirement, I have been, instead, shuttling from one place to another, boxing up my belongings, depositing them in a storage unit, and moving three times in the past two years. I am temporarily occupying a 150-year-old farmhouse, that, in an odd twist, was once inhabited by a distant ancestor of whom I knew nothing until moving here and delving into the house’s history. The house is furnished so my personal bits remain in storage until I can find a more permanent home. It is a place where I can rest and recoup. I have fallen in love with the solitude, though I am not altogether alone.  

A mourning dove, sleek and slender with a long, narrow tail and feathers that appear painted on has built a rather tall, messy nest just under the roof line of the side porch. Untidy bits of twig, twine, and feathers droop over the edge of the capital that tops a supporting pillar. The bird squashes herself into the nest, her tail protruding from one side while her head ducks at an uncomfortable angle opposite. She watches me with one dark liquid eye as I climb the steps, broom in hand, to sweep the porch floor. Occasionally she flies to the rooftop of the small shed at the edge of the property or sits on a branch of the apple tree in the front yard. Most often I see her perched on the telephone wire that runs past the front of the house where she converses with friends who also cling to the wires and speak in low, plaintive tones. 

 There are other birds in the yard—robins, catbirds, cardinals, wrens, and a variety of finches—some of which will soon fly south as the days shorten and cool down. Blue jays and crows make most of the noise in the mornings now, the dove adding her mournful coo to the sunrise salute. They scatter when I open the door to the front porch to see and feel what the day is like. Mornings are cooler than they were a month ago, though on sunny days the daytime hours between ten a.m. and three in the afternoon are pleasantly warm. Crickets still chirp in the grass and the rabbits, so shy in the bright sunshine, hop out from the underbrush as I take my evening walk. 

There are numerous shade trees about the house, but I need walk just down the road to find open meadows that roll their green carpets to the edge of the woods. Deer feed there, and I know there are raccoons and most likely foxes about. There are bears, too, though I haven’t seen one, just a large pile of scat under an apple tree in a nearby orchard. I have no garden space of my own, so I’ve purchased a share in a local farm. Every week I choose from bins piled high with beets and carrots, spinach and chard and kale, sweet corn and tomatoes, filling a basket with produce and a canning jar with flowers I cut myself from their vast gardens. I am content to live in this quiet poem of a life for a while, teaching myself anew about patience, perseverance, and hope.

Ponderings

 

I came into this world naked and helpless, bearing the genetic structure composed of elements that stretch back to the origin of our species. I'm a chaotically organized crapshoot of characteristics from my ancestors that got molded and modified by nature and nurture. Depending on the capacity of my brain and my physical structure (which, by the way, I did not choose any more than I chose the geographical location of my birth), I learned how to identify and navigate my surroundings. I am no more nor less important than any living thing around me. I am naturally different as well as simultaneously the same. And my purpose is simply to perpetuate life itself. I make up the rest as I go along. Life on this planet may be just one way in an unending number of ways to exist. Thinking these things helps to keep me sane in a seemingly insane world.

 Dinner Disasters

 

Dinnertime is usually pretty tame at our house. One of us cooks, all of us eat, and we take turns cleaning up. Occasionally a magnificent effort will produce ooohs of appreciation but on the whole, mealtime is pleasant and uneventful. There are times, however, when things get out of hand and dinner gets (literally) turned upside down. Take Saturday night, for example. My sister, Jeanne, came for supper. She brought a roasted chicken and some fresh fruit for a compote. While I scrubbed and wedged some potatoes, she spread a rich crumble over the fruit and the two dishes went into the oven to bake.

 

Daughter Cassie was setting the table on the porch and I was in the yard when, from the kitchen, we heard a screech followed by a great crash and clattering, and then dead silence. Then came the moan. Uh oh.

 

Cassie and I stood in the kitchen doorway surveying the wreckage. Jeanne was toe deep in fruit slices and potato wedges. Purple juice splattered the floor, the cupboards, the refrigerator, the walls. The three of us looked at each other, horrified.  “I was pulling the oven rack out,” explained Jeanne, “when whoosh! Both pans came flying out of the oven like greased pigs. It was as if they planned it. You know, one dish said to the other, ‘When she opens that door, make a break for it.’ ”

 

This was greeted with more silence. Then one of us giggled. Giggles led to guffaws and finally we were all hooting as we tried to salvage what we could of the food. “You scoop,” said Jeanne, handing me a spatula “and I’ll spoon.” 

 

As an afterthought she said, “I hope your floor is clean.” 

 

“It will be when we’re done,” I told her.

 

This was not the first time I had to scrape dinner off the floor. We spent the next hour picking grit off the potatoes and telling tales of other dinner disasters. “Remember the porch-chops?” Cassie asked, recalling the time I turned a whole pan of pork chops upside down on the porch floor. “The dogs sure loved that dinner.”

 

That reminded me of another pork chop peccadillo. There were ten hungry guests gathered around the table, sniffing appreciatively at the spicy aroma of pork chop pizziole. We heard the oven door open. There was a scraping sound, a grunt, and a tremendous, squishy thud. Investigation showed us what had become of dinner. Pork chops, tomato sauce and cheese lay in a puddle on the floor. Sauce slid down the walls and some of the cheese hung from a doorknob. “Ah,” remarked one of the guests, sizing up the situation. “Pork Chops Linoleum!”

 

 

Reflections

 

Looking out.

Looking in.

There is a window in my bedroom wall that faces west through which, when I am inside looking out, I can see the rise of a mountain, its flanks like bits of blue paint splashed between the trees that grow close to the house. At this time of year, late autumn, the ground is papered brown with fallen leaves and every branch and twig is gilded by the early morning sunlight. Through bare branches I can even glimpse the pond across the road where geese are gathering by the hundreds to plan their journey south. A gray squirrel scampers in the leaves, a cardinal flaunts its jeweled feathers, a chickadee pipes a morning tune. All that I see is natural – birds, water, trees, mountain, sky. I’ve made none of these, own none of them. They frame my day, I move among them. They are what’s outside that window. They don’t come in.

 Ah, but I can go out. I can gaze into my house from the other side of that window and see what the trees, the squirrel, the birds might see if they cared to look in. Should it be a surprise that the first thing I notice in that window is me, looking back at me? There I stand, reflected, surrounded by sunlit trunks, gazing into my own eyes. Only when I change my focus can I see the room I’ve left, the walls beyond reflection, the window in the east wall, my computer where I’ll record all this, the wall of book crowded shelves, the ceramic turkey I’ve forgotten to replace with something more Christmasy. I notice that from the outside my window looks dark, the result of all that’s reflected in the glass while from the inside, the window looks quite clear and bright. I can see out far better than I can see in, but when I step close to the window and shade my eyes with my hands there is my room, my things, what I’ve made and what I own, what I am, really, reflected in those things.

Gathering Memories

Old homestead

                                                     Berry patch (L) and brook (R) behind me

Yesterday I stood in the driveway of my brother's house that sits where a small apple orchard and fruit patch thrived when I was a child. The brook is to one side, West's hill the other and, if I glanced next door I could see the old homestead itself, now looking like someone else's house altogether. My mind's eye and my memory filled in remembered details - the bent old apple trees that looked like horses to my sisters and me to which we attached rope stirrups and reins; the thorny patch of blackberry and raspberry bushes and the stout blueberry bushes; the brook that ran along the edge of our property line before dashing through what we called the tunnel to the other side of the road where it widened into a satisfactory small pond; the giant pine across the street where we kids would crouch for hours building miniature moss and stick houses and roads lined with pine needles where imaginary pioneers lived and traveled through the bear-infested, never-ending pine woods themselves. 

When I was very small, I would pretend I was mere inches tall. Rocks became mountains, moss an impenetrable forest, a runnel of rainwater in a roadside ditch grew into a roaring river. If I sat still long enough and was quiet, the imagined scene became real and I entered the parallel dimension with ease. It would take a sudden loud noise or a tap on the shoulder to bring me back and I always returned reluctantly. By the edges of the brook, beneath the trees of nearby woods or among the cornstalks in the meadow near the house, I would lose myself in play, bothering to go home only when my stomach rumbled loud enough to rouse me or the ringing of the ship's bell on our porch calling us kids home penetrated my awareness. I always kept the house in view, though when I was hunkered down I believed no one from home could see me. For an introverted child, this state of affairs was ideal. 

I am too stiff now to hunker down and too tall to go unnoticed as I walk along the brook's edge. And I am far too big to fit through the culvert and splash into the pond. On all sides the reeds and marsh grasses and bushes have encroached until there's hardly a pond at all. In my memory, my mother is beside me, helping me find a few good-sized stones to toss into the water. "Rocks help clean the water," she'd say, and we'd throw our finds as far as we could, watching the ripples make their way to shore. 

Turning from the brook, I am assailed by another memory. Coming back from a visit to a friend's house one late winter afternoon, I stopped at the brook to listen to the water talk to itself as it splashed through the tunnel. When I looked toward my house, the kitchen light came on. I knew my mother was there, making supper, and I was flooded with such a feeling of contentment and safety that I was near tears. Just the way I am now as I recall that feeling of utter happiness. 

The brook summer 2023.