leaves of grass

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

—Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass

treasures (i wish my son could know)

dragonflies. wildflowers. butterflies. bees. a bunch of neighbors from whom we can borrow an egg or two or three. cote de rhone and gigondas. blazing sunsets overlooking snaking rivers and salt marshes. homemade mini pizzas hot from a wood fired oven. friendships young and old, near and far, dear and informal. seeing a new friend smile when i call his name as he pedals down the road. clouds lit up and laced with silver and gold. starlit skies provoking awe and wonder. dipping toes and fingers into shallow waters. nostalgia. jumping off of bridges into brackish inlets. dancing with reckless abandon. dancing at all. david byrne. steely dan. kate bush. blonde readhead. the low spark of high heeled boys. cocktail hour. bicycle rides. the thumping sound and feeling of running on a wooded trail. visiting our friends' vacation rental. teenagers. floating docks. water dogs. loons parting a rippled pond. wind mixing up leaves and limbs. tiny pine cones clinging to waterlogged boughs. watching our pooch, smellie, swim. michael's fluffy homemade pasta noodles. getting a tiny little buzz. beauty. stories. hopes. memories of yesterday. dreams of tomorrow. possibility.

From our friend's deck in Georgetown, Maine.

success

To laugh often and love much;

To win the respect of intelligent persons 

and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To give of one's self;

To leave the world a bit better,

whether by a healthy child,

a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;

To have played and laughed with enthusiasm

and sung with exultation;

To know even one life has breathed easier

because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.

 

—Bessie Anderson Stanley 

forget-me-nots and cardinals

Crouching, I toss mulch across the beds in swaths of brownish-red. I take care not to cover the baby growth, like seedlings, of what will next year be clouds of tiny blue and white and pink flowers. Twenty-plus years ago, Mom and I scattered my dad's ashes north of San Francisco, the city in which he was born, in a glen shaded by moss-covered trees and a creek running through the hollow, its banks massed with the same flowers. I asked my mom what kind of flowers they were. She told me they were forget-me-nots.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a couple of forget-me-nots sprouting in my neighbor Woody's yard aside his house in the soft earth near where a few years ago I had planted a couple of azaleas for him. He and my dad were similar in some ways—cleaning engines, mowing lawns, keeping things in order.

As I pulled my garden cart beside the burning bush, peering into its center I met the eye of a female cardinal, her orange beak glowing like an ember amongst a forest of green. There she sat as she did this morning and the evening before and the morning before that, her tail a stiff orange pencil poised on the edge of her nest. I saw myself in her, sitting and watching the world go by from her solitary perch. Going nowhere. Intent on her commitment. Captive. Waiting for something—anything—to disrupt or threaten the object of her vigil.

wanderings

Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No one to see. Awake at night fretting. Has the moon always shone through that singular window, or have the trees thinned as they've gotten older?

Days drag. Monotony seats itself and stays. In the meantime, patience wanes. Adult becomes child. Child becomes fiend. Words hurt, even as they come forth from the throat and pass the lips, and like the sharp slap of a hand, they sting. Infinity is marching in circles. While time expands, space compresses. Still, there's too little room for minds and feet to wander aimlessly or with purpose.

As if overnight, bodies weather. That shock of grey, that spray of flecks, that crepey skin. What matters? Things feel so unchanged, and yet alien. Is happiness so fleeting, despair something to cling to like wrapping arms around a tree when bodies are off limits? Which bark serves us—smooth, so that we don't feel too much, or rugged, to remind us we are not alone in bearing scars and hardships?

Mouths hunger even when the gut doesn't. Food—or its refusal—is a steadfast companion for stress and worry. At times there's no filling that inner pit. At others, emptiness and abstinence quench.

A face unseen for mere days looks akin to one that's been missing for ages. Under a cap, mask at her chin, is she familiar or somehow foreign? And who is inside this body? Someone new? Or the same ole tired one, perhaps emerging from a long facade of optimism. Are we coming undone, or being remade?

How many days has this shirt been worn, this exact path been trod, these same backroads been traveled along? Wear the garment inside out and it's altogether different—raw-edged as if neglected, or perhaps well loved. Meander the path and roads in the opposite direction and stumble upon an unseen landscape. So many missed vistas to discover.

Forgiveness. For ourselves. For others. It is possible, even easy, like bending a sapling nearly in half without a break or splinter. Inside, we're that tender. If anything, the sheath may give way, revealing a heart rarely seen, like a moon held between branches, or a wooded path roamed in the opposite direction.

Photo by Michael Kolster

looking glass

Emerging from the foreground is a blue-and-white-striped duvet folded neatly and laid upon an ivory coverlet. On the other side of the glass, to the left, sits my eighty-seven-year-old buddy, Woody. The reflection of the outside world is too vivid to see him reclined in the shadows, but he's there. Behind my figure is the house in which Mike lives, my ninety-seven-year-old widower-friend whom I haven't seen in several days and whose voicemail is full when I call.

It's nearly five o'clock. Michael just got home after a day of printing the photographs he took while in Paris, Hawaii and Lisbon Falls, Maine, which is just up the river a spell. It feels weird that travel isn't really possible or advisable now. Smellie is somewhere in Woody's yard, her leash trailing behind her as she trees squirrels.

The way we connect in this crazy coronavirus time is strange—by phone, by FaceTime, through bandana masks, from across the street, and from the opposite sides of storm windows.

Before I literally look in on Woody, I ask him, in the manner of my late father, if he is decent. He chuckles. I walk around the back of his house to his den. Though I can barely see him through the glare, we joke on the phone about how strange it might look to the neighbors to see a woman peering into his home through a side window. I told him that for me to do so seems completely normal. Through the glass, we tease and laugh. I wish I could hug him like I used to. Maybe in warmer weather we'll again be sitting on his front porch together sipping bourbon and ginger ale, watching passersby, discussing birds and neighbors and politics, even if from a safe distance. I hope so.

Later, Michael and I speak with our buddies on FaceTime, first Jim, then Matty. Jim makes me laugh until I nearly wet my pants. Clever little devil, and with a face as earnest as any young fellow. He told us so. I wish Jim and San Francisco weren't three-thousand miles away from us. And I miss Matty's frequent visits, along with dozens of others. Because of the coronavirus, everything is so beyond what we've come to understand as normal.

I've been making an effort to see one or two loved ones' faces and or hear their voices on the phone every day or so. For me, these quarantine times require it in order to get through without too much despair seeping into the long hours. The news cycle and state of things and The Unhinged One are crazy, fascinating and outlandish, like looking at an image and not really knowing or understanding what you're seeing and what might be hidden in the shadows. And yet, the rest of the world and its people are so beautiful.

musings

a stink bug perches on the bristles of my toothbrush. i know more about ventilators than i should. this morning's coffee tastes luxuriously of earth. as i run through the forest, pileated woodpeckers hammer and cackle from above. nearly every surface in this house is covered in dust. some things never give up. i've got an ache in the ball of my foot. on the underside of smellie's ear there's a mat that feels exactly like felt. it's astounding what some people call leadership. one tablespoon of butter has as much saturated fat as half a cup of vanilla ice cream or a large bag of potato chips. the campus is silent. students' bicycles rest on flat tires. matching cuts on my middle fingers throb, but only when i focus on them. the full moon works its gravity on seizures. charlotte, a little girl a lot like calvin whom i never met but loved just died from probable complications of the coronavirus. her mother was my mentor and is my hero. the morning sun shines in sideways, its light refracting through glass like opals or rain or the way trees blur through windows of a speeding car. my wedding ring clinks like a wind chime against my mug. steel cut oats get stuck in my teeth. the chair i write from groans and squeaks. pride gets in the way of apology. i imagine the hand that painted each brushstroke of face and landscape. reflections are everywhere and everything.

Photo by Michael Kolster

leaves of grass

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

—Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass

leaves of grass

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

—Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass

unfurling

Witnessing the evolution of a bud becoming a flower is astonishing to me. I ponder how each petal knows exactly when to unfurl and how, opening within days of others of its kind in the garden. Rarely do I see a flower which isn't all-together perfect, unless, of course, it has suffered from drought or some pest gnawing on its flesh. Nature simply seems to know just when and what to do. In my awe of these gorgeous events, I feel a bittersweet regret, knowing what seems true for simple flowers—and for most kids—is not true for my boy. His brain did not unfurl like it was supposed to. Instead, its delicate white matter never fully bloomed, leaving it thin and therefore incapable of transmitting his brain's messages to his body quickly and smoothly and, perhaps in some cases, at all.

Fourteen years later, I still wonder what went wrong.

Did I eat too little, too much? Was my egg decrepit? Did I eat bad cheese? Were my pants too tight? Was it a botched amniocentesis? Was it that sip of beer or that spot of wine or that lump of tuna or cheese? Was it the woman with the cough who we’d sat next to on the plane? Did I get her virus? Did I fly too late? Was I just too old? Was it something in the water? The chlorine? Did I swim too hard, too far?

Alas, I'll never know. Doctors assured me it was nothing I did while pregnant, that it was simply a blip in his brain's development. In my life's mourning, I hold fast to their assertions and to my boy, my sweet and lovely flower of another kind whom I can still hold in my hand and clutch to my heart while watching the slow-motion of his unfurling.

four and a half days in my favorite place

click on any photo to enlarge

first night

muni all the way

castro coffee's  espresso ken

market at castro

room with a view

buena vista beauties

homesick

outrigging it

stocking up

hangin' with my homie

party girls

da boyz and me

alcatraz

pacific paradise

golden gate

baker beach

golden gate park

cherry blossoms

japanese garden

eye candy

pagodas

twin peaks

beauty as far as they eye can see

last supper

love letter #123

Love Letter #123, Drawing by Peter Bruun

love letter #112

Love Letter #112 — Christy to Scott, Drawing by Peter Bruun

love letter #109

Love Letter #109 — Christy to Calvin, Drawing by Peter Bruun

broken flowers

This weekend, I spent time with a friend while she grieved the small and the not-so-small of life—the personal, the political, the theoretical dreads and disappointments we all face as human beings. While weeping, she apologized, describing how she thought her despair was somehow unbecoming. I told her, no, that mourning is one of life's beautiful expressions. Perhaps it was because of the time I'd spent with flowers that morning—the vibrant pinkish rhododendron blossoms fading to antique white with spoiling ruffled golden edges, the tulips held in a glass vase, their stems arching and bowing, their petals relaxed and splayed revealing delicate stamen before surrendering them to the earth, withered and crepey—that made me think that our response to life's tragedies, like a flower's gorgeous death, can be beautiful, too.

Often, I surrender to my deepest sorrow at times unexpected, like when I closed and latched the French doors this afternoon before I realized Calvin's pinkie finger was caught in the hinge. He was silent at first, in his excruciation, then wailed and writhed in so much pain I could not console him. When he finally calmed, I wept, sorry for having hurt him, sorry for all the pain he must suffer on a daily basis—brain, guts, bones—which we can't control, sorry for the gorgeous mess that is our life together. We are like broken flowers, exquisite, flawed, weeping.

As I finished this up, Michael and I heard a tremendous crack and felt the ground shake with a thump. We peered out trying to identify the source. Next door, a gigantic limb from a one-hundred-year-old maple had fallen, taking down power lines with it, having missed grazing our house by twenty feet, and now leaning into a neighboring spruce. The sound of splitting bark and flesh is like no other. The sensation of thousands of pounds of bough pounding earth felt in my heart like the bass at a rave. It is beautiful; it is awful. It is all the glorious stuff of life.

my therapy

Even on rainy days, I venture outside for my therapy, working the earth, moving plants, pruning, sniffing, delighting in the vivid colors that are spring. I am in awe of how plants and trees just innately know what to do and when to flower, and how they seem to withstand the elements with such grace, even in Maine. They are so unlike my boy in many ways.

Today, I took my camera into the garden and had some fun with blooms and brush, raindrops and buds, while my little Calvin was in school trying to learn how to do the most basic of things.

Click on any photo to enlarge.