No ordinary summer

In my dream the little league was playing down the street from my house as they do every summer. In this small Midwestern town, it’s like Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury’s memoir of a childhood summer in early 20th century (white) America. Barefoot kids ride their bikes with fishing poles attached to their backs; cheers erupt at all hours from the high school stadium; the marching band practices every morning, doing their maneuvers in and out of the school parking lots.

Not this summer.

But in my dream the little league played to a noisy crowd, little kids were running around, parents talking, some yelling. One of my former students, Reed, now a grown young woman, slid into third base. A dispute began over whether she was safe or not. (Why Reed? I don’t know, I often dream of my favorite students.)

I saw it all through a grainy lens and underneath it was a sense that something was terribly wrong. A man stood near me talking, and I found myself staring at his mouth and the spittle coming out of it with every word. Then I remembered and stepped back from him. I had forgotten, as I do sometimes for a few minutes when fully awake, that this was no ordinary summer. I’d left my mask at home.

As I stepped back a loud, rusty Ford diesel pick-up drove by blaring the famous song DILLIGAF (look it up, it’s not pretty), flying US and blue striped flags, with TRUMP in block letters on the back windshield. Bradbury’s idyllic American summer turned nightmare.

Eckhart Tolle, my mother Marjorie, (98 years old) and a different lethal virus

My mother is safe at home with my brother in Mississippi, I am safe at home in Wisconsin. I had to cancel my last trip to go see her in March because of the virus. It was to be a little family reunion.

A couple of days ago I asked her some questions about her siblings, ten of whom have died, she has one living brother. She said to me, Thank God you’re still here.

At first I was taken aback, then we both laughed. I said, Yeah, I’m glad I’m still here, too.

Of course I am glad that I’m still here, for her sake and my own. I’m glad she’s still here as well for both our sakes. I started to think about how when she was a girl, sickness, epidemics, illness and death were part of everyday life. Her young brother in law died from inhaling cotton dust at the mill where he worked. She had a sister with spinal meningitis, a brother with polio, and a little sister, Elizabeth, who died before age two of whooping cough, another horrible disease that attacks the lungs and depletes the victim of oxygen. My mother is not a woman who cries often, but one time I do remember when recounting Elizabeth’s death, she said, crying, That baby died alone. They wouldn’t let us go see her.

Maybe there was a quarantine situation with whooping cough, or maybe because they were poor and had no voice, Charity Hospital in New Orleans would not let the family be with the dying baby girl. My grandmother, who had given birth to her ninth child only days or weeks earlier, would not enter the room where they laid out the tiny coffin, preferring to remember Elizabeth alive and well.

In a recent video, Eckhart Tolle said that we are all infected with a lethal virus: TIME. It will kill us eventually if nothing else does first. He said that in other times and cultures DEATH was and is a constant companion, but we in the modern world tend to be afraid to even say the word, especially in reference to ourselves.

So when my mother reminds me that I am still here, it makes me pause and consider. I am grateful that I was given this time here, by whatever creative power in the universe. I hope to embrace it not as something I was entitled to, but as a gift I humbly accept and celebrate until my time runs out.

The cardinal sings because it must

The cardinal sings because it must  

The cardinal sings because it must

April, after all,

Despite wild winds and

As snow smothers what green the earth had begun to reveal  

The cardinal sings

It is his job and duty

To secure a place in the ritual

To enliven this time and place when we have lost track  

The cardinal sings

For love and life

For a partner to share and do what

Spring instructs while the world weeps and moans for its dead  

The cardinal sings

From the highest branch the earth allows

Sings us back to our selves

Helps us carry our hearts, day to day, in weary and chapped hands

The Rites of Spring

It’s Spring in Wisconsin, but today we had 20 mph winds and a 25 degree wind chill with snow showers. A day like today fits the mood: unpredictable, biting and indiscriminate. Two days ago the sun shone and the temperature reached the high 60’s. It was sparkly, crystal-clear, warm.

Our street is noisy on most mornings of the school year with the chatter of children waiting for the school bus to take them to the schools half a block away from my front door. Even on the coldest days they are out climbing snow banks, dancing to keep warm. I watch them from my writing desk, they and the stream of yellow buses going by, shadows of kids in all the windows, keep me company.

Now, the street is silent. Schools are closed, the sign outside the high school reads: Warriors, we hope to see you soon! The streets in town, as everywhere, are very quiet but for an occasional walker, bicycle, or passing car.

Yet one creature that seems immune to the pall of dread over everything is the certain breed of young man they grow here in the upper Midwest who, on those summery days like the one earlier this week, try to make as much noise as possible. They have abandoned their snowmobiles and roar by at odd moments, breaking the silence, in their ATV’s or souped-up testosterone-detailed diesel pick-ups. The guttural explosions of these vehicles replace the more familiar groan of the school buses and chatter of the children.

These boys remind me of the male pigeons who can also be seen this time of year strutting their stuff, both obscene and silly at once, for the females. What comes to mind for me when one of these vehicles blasts down the otherwise empty street, one of the many empty streets of town, by empty stores and restaurants and schools, is a weird vision: an abandoned state fairgrounds or amusement park on a sunny summer day, no visitors, no one running the rides or making cotton candy, no smells of hundreds of hand-held food items. Or maybe there would be one ride going, the tilt-a-whirl, let’s say, without any passengers. Then out of nowhere comes a twenty-something in a T-shirt, barreling through Food Avenue in his truck with an air of reckless pride and showmanship. No one to notice him.

It’s not that I begrudge them their fun, although the noise they make grates on me. It’s that their Spring ritual is playing out in what feels like the movie set for a ghastly horror film. Jack Gilbert says that we are meant to go on with life even with all the suffering around us all the time. That it is disrespectful of the sufferer for us not to engage with the world. I tended to agree with him before this, but now, I’m finding the suffering almost too much to bear.

My mother, Marjorie, 98, enjoying an orange, blissfully unaware of the fear

When I called my mother yesterday, she was eating an orange.

Last time you called I think I was eating an orange, too, wasn’ t I? I love oranges, you don’t love oranges?

She loves to asks questions in the negative. Then she always asks about the weather. Hers is always great, no complaints.

I talk about the virus, about New York.

I don’t peel them, either, she says. Do you peel them? A lot of people peel them, but I don’t. I love to suck out all the juice.

I’ve watched my mother eat oranges all my life. She cuts them into wedges and settles in with her teeth and lips, slurping quietly, working the teeth into the flesh.

I mention that I cannot teach anymore, because of the virus, I’m teaching over the computer. She doesn’t understand the word online.

She says, But you’re not in New York. Why can’t you teach anymore?

Then I realize that another shift has occurred in her ability to engage with the world, the world as I know it, anyway. Once an avid follower of TV news, I believe she is no longer able to hear it well enough, or follow it well enough, or perhaps, she is wise enough to choose not to do either of those things.

She has remained for me a steady and constant companion in life, if from a distance, never failing to ask about each of my children, about the weather, my job, my husband. She continues to ask, but this time, when I answer, she is reluctant to follow up, to add to the train of the conversation.

i, meanwhile, have a son in New York City, who, the hospital has more or less admitted without administering the test, has contracted the virus. My daughter lives in San Francisco. My stepson and his friends here have mild to severe cases. I am worried. I am scared.

I hear a slight slurping sound, Mmmmm. Do you peel them? I don’t peel them.

I realize that she is blissfully unaware of this threat, the magnitude, the scope of it. Or again, that she has chosen not to let it in, not to worry, at this point, who was one to worry and pray much and often, especially over us, her children, her grandchildren.

Do you eat the white stuff? I like to scrape the white part off with my teeth. I like it. I don’t know if it’s good for you or not. Do you think it’s bad?

When I eat my orange later in the day, I am more grateful for it than ever before, its bright color, its surface, both smooth and bumpy, the shock of citrus on my tongue. I allow myself the gift of this moment, to feel and taste and smell and see it in all its beauty and complexity. One moment among the many frightening ones.

And I thank Marjorie for that.

Solace in Nature #2:

Today on my walk I realized that since the snow melted all the spaces that were off limits, and which will be again with overgrowth in summer, are now open to me for exploring. Wide stretches of prairie fields, hills, stands of birch and pine. The photo was taken a block away from my house. I feel lucky to be here.

Solace in Nature#1

When I first moved to Amery five years ago I woke to strange noises on early spring mornings. After two years when out on a walk I discovered their source. Sandhill cranes make a guttural barking sound when flying and at other times. They nest at the school down the block. Yesterday I heard my first of the year. Today when I heard it, I look up to find it soaring above my head. This is what will keep me sane right now.

Dancing Shadows

February 25, 2020

Waiting somewhere in the idling truck, a parking lot, just sitting, not doing anything at all, not looking at my phone or filing my nails, or listening to the radio, just sitting, waiting. I notice on the wall of the building, a nondescript blank beige stucco wall, shadows moving. It is cold and windy, the American flag above the building billows at full length, straight out, showing the full force of high-knot winds. Against the building the shadows dance. They are the shadows of trees except that in February the branches are bare and have their own peculiar shadows, traces and lines, intricate patterns. These lively shadows on the wall are not bare branches and I turn to find their source, but all I see are tall leafless cottonwoods, still as night. Yet there they are, the puppet-like shadows, of what I’m not sure but they draw me in, as though into another reality and “I” disappear. For only a few moments. I enter into the dance of the shadows, leave the truck, the parking lot, my husband, my world, behind. Empty. Part of a whole I don’t understand. An extraordinary moment in an otherwise unextraordinary day. My husband leaves the paint store and rejoins me waiting in the truck, sets his paint on the back seat, and we go on with the mundane tasks of shopping and eating and talking that make up the little moments of our lives, leaving the shadows behind to continue dancing whether I see them or see only the memory of them. Later in the day, I will recall the shadows, and reenter that state of emptiness, that otherworldly dance. It is a peaceful place to be.

My mother says there is a creature under her bed

My mother says there is a creature under her bed. The first time she heard it the sound came from the bathroom. When she went to look, the creature’s head was poking out of the drain in the tub, the eyes glowing. Later that night when she was in bed, it showed up lying on the edge of her curved mahogany headboard. Staring at her. Again the eyes glowing. The first time she mentioned it, my heart stopped. I believed I was losing her, finally, at 98. Then she said it was a salamander. In southern Mississippi, I thought, that’s possible, so I started to breathe normally.

Last night however, when I spoke with her, the creature had changed. Now it was under the bed. She heard it sneeze.

What kind of creature could it be? It’s not clear, whether mammal or reptile, one does not imagine a sneezy salamander so then it becomes something with fur, rodent-like, I imagine, possum-like, or something from an Ursula Le Guin story.

I imagine my mother sitting in her room 1300 miles away, listening for the creature. I know she is safe where she is, physically safe, but there is no way to protect her from the wanderings of her mind. Those that may frighten her. Perhaps she is simply annoyed by the creature, or frustrated because no one else seems to see or hear it.

I tell my son who is 18, and he laughs, and I suppose it is funny, in a way. The next morning after I talk to her, while emptying the dishwasher, I hit my head on the corner cabinet, wham. It was quite painful and I started crying. I felt like a little child, crying from a fall or a bump on the head, and all I could think about as I allowed the tears to come, was how sad I felt that my mother believes there is a creature under her bed.

My oldest son says today, maybe she does she something that we can’t see. Something from another dimension. Another world. Babies and the very old are closer to their Source than we are, so, maybe he’s right. I just hope she isn’t scared.