How It Was

I spent my childhood

in love with home—

with the gold-emerald grasses that knelt under my feet

and stood again after I passed,

with the spring flowers in my mother’s garden,

violets, lily of the valley, daffodils,

their breath sweet, their faces washed in sunshine,

and later, the fairy roses that climbed the fence

and hobnobbed with the first cut hay;

with the rough rocks that lined the banks

of the small brook that cut a path

through barbed and tangled berry bushes,

ripe with bee-spun fruit;

with the bent branches of an old apple tree

I climbed on, pretending I was astride a unicorn;

with the dirt road that, once tarred over,

led me past neighboring farmland, past deep woods

where I would prowl, looking for signs of bear

or wild Indians, half Indian myself, walking toe first

through the crackling underbrush;

with the staccato tap of rain on leaves

the warm, green-brown scent of wet earth

and great equinoctial storms

that presaged the change of seasons;

with my small, cross-legged self,

small among the cornstalks,

watching a chipmunk forage for kernels,

and once, a stately antlered buck watching me;

with the drift and spin of painted leaves,

touched by the brush of frost

and the tented webs that glimmered

red and blue and glittering silver on September lawns;

with the first snowflakes whispering on a chill wind

with knee-deep drifts, and sleds,

and green Christmas mittens, up-turned collars

and scratchy scarves, snowpants that swished,

galoshes with frozen buckles that finally yielded

to small, determined fingers;

with March winds that rattled the old wooden shutters,

blew snow that piled in small drifts

on the window sills and etched icy ferns on the panes;

with the return of robins, blue eggs huddled in a nest

I could spy on from the upstairs window,

finding great comfort in the way

the parent birds looked after their young

until, at last, the babies flew.

Because of Them

Mother's Day is coming up. I wrote this years ago when I was a newspaper columnist. It's all still true today!

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Brendan, my first-born, arrived on father’s Day – an appropriate gift. He was a tiny, pink, frowning replica of his father. His head was covered with a thatch of golden curls and his blue eyes had the intensity of a summer sky. He would gaze at me so long and questioningly as he nursed that I would have to look away or cry. I loved him wildly. I still do.

He was an inquisitive child, and a happy one until the first day of school. I opened the front door at mid-morning to find him crying on the doorstep. He had walked the mile home from school at recess. His teacher called in a panic when she couldn’t find him. As I walked him back to school, he solemnly explained to me, “Six hours is far too long for a      child my age to be away from his mother.” No kidding.

When he was seven, I put him on the bus to Boston with a chum from school. They were going to visit the friend’s grandfather and Bren was beside himself with excitement. I was beside myself with worry. In his suitcase I packed Sammy Sock, his favorite toy, thinking that it would help him be less homesick if he had something familiar with him. When he came home two days later, he confided that he had been having a wonderful time until he opened his suitcase to get his pajamas. Seeing Sammy made him so homesick he couldn’t sleep. It was an important lesson – never presume your child feels the way you do.

As Bren grew, he seemed to stretch. Always thin, he soon towered over me like a young sapling. I remember a day I was scolding him over some trivial thing. He looked down fondly on my upturned frown and said, “What did you say, Shorty?”

Incensed, I dragged a chair over and stood on it, forcing him to look up at me. The absurdity of it struck us both at the same time and we collapsed in a giggling heap.

My second son was born a year and a day after his brother. For the first two days of his lfe he was known as Baby because his dad and I couldn’t agree on a name. Finally in desperation I began reading aloud from What to Name Your Baby. When I got to Kenneth, I looked down at baby. He looked back and gave me a ghost of a smile. I didn’t care what we called him as long as I got to keep him. I loved him wildly. I still do.

Ken was a rugged little boy with a mop of yellow curls and a mischievous grin. He liked to move fast and climb high. When he was two I went into the kitchen one morning to find him sitting Buddha-like on top of the refrigerator. When he was five, a neighbor called in a dither because she’d seen him climbing among the branches of a huge pine in her front yard. I strolled over to fetch him.

“Hi Mom,” he called from his hiding place twenty feet up.

When he was old enough to get his driver’s license his standard excuse for a speeding ticket was, “But my car just goes too fast.”

Jennifer was born two months after Ken’s first birthday. Her hair was as soft as swan’s down, her eyes the color of violets. Her brothers adored her. I loved her wildly. I still do.

She was enchanting – a butterfly child who sang to herself every morning while waiting to be lifted from her crib. One Christmas, my mother came to spend the holiday with us. She brought a miniature Christmas tree trimmed with blinking lights for the kids’ room. Before going to bed she plugged the cord into the socket. She woke to find Jennifer sitting on the foot of her bed, watching the lights blink on and off, on and off.  “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it nice?” piped Jen. We still say that when entranced by some unexpected beauty.

Jen loved being center stage. “Watch me dance!” she  cried at age seven., pirouetting around the dance studio. “Watch me twirl!” she sang at twelve, throwing her baton high in the air. “Watch me do cartwheels!” she yelled from center field during half time. “Hear me sing!” she crooned, standing in from of a microphone at her high school graduation. Where did this extrovert come from, I wondered.

Cassie, the caboose baby, was as sturdy as Jen was elfin. She had the same golden hair and wide blue eyes as her siblings, and a deep, throaty chuckle. The day she was born, my father stood over her examining her fingers and toes. “Look,” he said, “at her perfect little fingernails, her perfect little feet. Every time, it’s a miracle.” I loved her wildly. I still do.

“Don’t see me Mommy,” was her favorite admonition growing up. She was an intensely private and self-reliant child. “Born old,” people said of her and it was true. She seemed to possess some ancient wisdom that gave her an enviable self-assurance. When she was thirteen, I put her on an airplane flight from Vermont to California where she was to meet my sister. From there they would fly down under, spending the summer backpacking through Australia and New Zealand. I got dizzy every time I imagined the soles of her feet meeting mine from the other side of the earth. “Dear Mom,” one bloodstained letter began. “I can write now that my cuts are almost healed…” Of the two of us, she was (and is) the one with admirable aplomb.

Because of them my life is enriched beyond measure. I loved them wildly. I still do.

Re-Take

My dad would have been 103 years old today, his birth-day. I still miss him! I know I've posted this before but it seems a good tribute to a man I dearly loved.

My first memory of my father is a visual one. I am a toddler and I am sitting on the floor behind the brown chair in the living room. Before me are two polished black shoes and two very long legs clad in khaki. Those long legs would often make a bridge between Dad’s favorite green chair and its matching hassock and we children would try to crawl under him without being caught. It was a favorite after-dinner game.

Dad raised chickens for a living. In the army he’d been responsible for training the carrier pigeons that flew messages from platoon to platoon. His peacetime job involved several hundred chickens, a brooder house, a long hen run, and a slaughter shed where he killed and dressed the birds for market. The farm was lost first to a flood that left hundreds of carcasses across the yard and garden. Dad restocked, only to learn the chickens were diseased and this second setback cost him the farm.

The years that followed were difficult. There were four children to feed and a mountain of debt. For a while, Dad worked the night shift at a lime kiln. By day, we children had to be very quiet so as not to waken him while he slept away the sunny morning hours. We spent a lot of time in the abandoned chicken houses, running races down the long hen run or roller-skating on the cement floor of the brooder house. On weekends and sometimes after school, Dad took my brother and me hunting. We ate whatever was in season—rabbit, duck, partridge, grouse, venison. He loved to fish as well as hunt and fishing season often found us knee deep in some cold stream, angling for a few trout for dinner. We never went hungry.

In the 1950s, Dad went to work for the Post Office as a rural route carrier. Before the law was passed that would not allow a mailman to carry passengers in his car, we sometimes rode with him, helping to deliver phone books or shovel snow from mailboxes. Dad was good at his job. He liked people and never passed up a chance to be helpful, often delivering messages and meals to shut-ins. The people on his route paid him in kind. Every Christmas, he would come home with dozens of gifts from grateful patrons.

Dad wasn’t much of a gardener, preferring ball games and evenings with his friends to digging in the dirt. Still, every spring he worked with my mother to plant tomatoes and peas, squash and cucumbers, and long rows of string beans. Sometimes he and I would take the big dishpan, fill it with bright green pea pods, then sit together under the maple tree to shell them for dinner. We would hunt for morels in May, gathering hands full to sauté in garlic and butter. He knew where every stalk of wild asparagus grew.

We owned an old push mower and summer evenings would find him cutting the lawns. I loved to follow along behind him, watching the grass fly from the whirring, clattering blades. When the chores were done, he and my mother would play baseball with us on the front lawn. Using trees and doorsteps for bases, we hit and ran, yelling and laughing until it was too dark to see the ball.

Years after marrying and moving away, and years after my father died, I moved back to the old family homestead. I worked in the garden, remembering those long ago days when Dad and I planted vegetables together. I followed in his footsteps as I mowed the lawn or searched for wild asparagus along the roadsides. Often just at dusk, when the fireflies began to twinkle and the last of the light was fading, I thought I could hear him calling me to come in. His presence was just a memory but it is a memory that pervades the very fiber of my being.

Let Me Count the Ways

Love is like wind - you don't see it but you see its effects. I am reading to the Bean at nap time when she suddenly leans over the railing of her bed and hugs my head. I look up at her from my seat on the floor and her eyes are warm and sparkling and so moved by the winds of love that I nearly weep.

Tiny baby Lili stares at me as she drinks from her bottle and when I smile at her, she smiles back, her eyes lighting up as though someone has flipped a switch. Milk dribbles down both sides of her mouth but she doesn't care. We're in love with each other and that's better than milk.

I pull into their drive each week for my stint as Nini-in-charge and my son-in-law drops what he's doing to hurry out and help lug in my bags and boxes. My daughter waits at the door for a hug and a kiss. They make breakfast for me, fetch my special tea mug, make me feel as though I am the most special guest they've ever entertained.

The phone rings and it's my grandson wanting to Skype or my granddaughter wanting to tell me about her swim team or my son wanting to say he loves me or my daughter-in-law catching me up on family news. When I'm at their house I'm the center of attention. It's like being Queen For a Week and love sweeps through the rooms like a zephyr.

Every week there's the phone call from my distant daughter. Her laughter and mine get tangled in the phone lines until I'm sure everyone talking at the same time we are can hear it. She and her husband are professionals at picking out just the right cards for any occasion - I've saved them and whenever I feel blue I haul the box out and read through them. It's like opening a window so that love can blow through.

My oldest son in Oregon leaves "love you, Mom" messages in my email, on FaceBook, on the answering machine. He often tells me how he sends messages to me on the wind, knowing the jet stream will carry them eastward. When I feel a breeze on my cheek, I know it's him, thinking of me.

The mail arrives and there's a card or a letter with a "little something" tucked inside. My sisters never fail to anticipate my running short at the end of each month. I never do, of course, because of their thoughtfulness.

The winds of love are mighty, and they are always blowing.



photo borrowed from http://stock-clip.com/

Back in a Bit

I'm off to see the Beanlet, that wonderful Beanlet of mine

She's a clever little Beanlet, we'll have a wonderful time...

Because, because because, because,

Because of the wonderful things we does.

In Praise of May

Green spreads around me in rippling waves. The trees are fully leafed, singing emerald songs to the sky-blue sky. The morning air has warmed under the bountiful hand of the sun until by late afternoon it shimmers. I tie the sleeves of my sweater around my waist and set off across the fields. Violets are suddenly thick underfoot and I kneel to drink in their sweet scent. The fragrance reminds me of home and my mother’s garden where every spring the violets and lily of the valley bloomed among the burgeoning stems and stalks of day lily, peony, and phlox. 

I strip off my shoes, and socks and wiggle my bare toes in the meadow grass. There is no one to see me and so I throw my arms wide and twirl until I am dizzy—earth and sky and earth and sky and earth and sky—before I must stop or fall.

I stretch out in the soft, still-new grass and think that green smells like fresh air and sunshine and newly growing things. I look up into the sky and let my eyes look beyond the blue, beyond the known, into the vast emptiness that is not really empty but inhabited by the unknown, and I fall in love with it all—the sky, the earth, the fields, the woods, the flowers—just the way I did when I first discovered the world as a small child.

How much do you love?

When my granddaughter was just a little tot (pictured here) she used to call me on the phone. We'd talk about her day and what she had done and what she was thinking. Before we hung up, she would repeat a ritual she'd started at the end of the very first phone call.

"Memere, I love you as much as... " Here she paused and I pictured her casting about for something with which to compare her love for me. "I love you as much as all the sofa pillows on all the sofas in the whole world," she ended triumphantly.

I was charmed. Imagine! Not to be outdone, I told her, "Well, I love you as much as all the leaves on all the trees in the whole universe."

There was a little silence. Then, "I love you as much as all the clouds in the whole universe."

"And I love you as much as all the grains of sand on every beach in the whole world."

She sighed. "Memere, I love YOU infinity times infinity," and with that, she hung up.

Infinity was a pretty big concept for a four year old. Now that she's almost eight, her conversations run the gamut of school activities to friendships to what makes her cry, and better, what makes her laugh. She especially enjoys teaching her Memere things and searches for ways to surprise me. But her goodbyes are still presaged with "I love you as much as..."

Tonight it was, "I love you as much as all the raindrops that ever fell and ever will fall." Imagine loving and being loved like that. We should all try it.