pull up a chair

not everyone gets to go back. but i do.
to the window where i watched the night. watched the morning come. watched the storms thrash the trees.
to the window, in the room, where i grew up.
i can, if i want to, retrace my finger along the ledge. flop down on the same twin bed, still covered with the same patchwork quilt, the one i studied as i lay awake in the morning, picking which swatch i would want to see unfurled in yards and bolts of calico.
i can, if i want to, stare up into the same old oaks, the same old sky, and the linden that split in half, one stormy night when it nearly fell on my room, fell on me, tossing like the trees.
i can if i want to, fall asleep there again, count stars, pick out mercury, hovering, over by the weather vane, not far out the window.
i can because i still have a key to the house. because my mama still lives there, wouldn’t think of moving. wouldn’t think of leaving behind the garden she has planted, tended, defended, arranged and re-arranged as if the garden was her living room, i’m telling you. she moves peonies and iris and ostrich ferns the way some folks haul a couch across the rug, re-hang a picture.
sometimes, when we are there for sunday supper, or for hotdogs after the fourth of july parade, i climb the stairs when no one’s around. i go back. i check on things out my window.
i might flop down on my bed, being careful, always, not to muss the quilt. i am old enough now to know those quilts are art, a fact that mostly escaped me when i was little, when i might have been harsh on the teeny-tiny stitches that, except for me, have withstood 100-some-odd years.
the curtains no longer are the ones i loved when i was little. those were swiss. white on white. french knots and chain stitches. vines and blossoms and little buds, climbing up the sheer white cotton. i thought it exotic, i really did, that my curtains came from switzerland. the swiss know lace, i remember being told. i think that made me puff my chest, just a little, knowing i was a girl who had swiss curtains hanging at my windows.
oh, i had two. two windows. one looked east, into the trees and the old orphanage next door, where hippies or roosters, or both, would cause a mighty ruckus, from dawn ’til deep into the night. and one looked south, beyond the rooster, this one metal, black-painted metal, who spun with the wind, over to the woods and the willows of the green pond, where i tiptoed out on logs, stirred a stick through the green slime, watched it whirl, make ripples, tried to catch a frog.
i loved the green pond.
between my windows and the pond, i was pretty much destined to be a dreamer.
of all the frames of all the reels of my growing up, those would be the ones where i am all alone, becoming. as the one girl in a house of boys, on a winding dead-end street populated–no, ruled–mostly by boys on sting ray bikes, i would say the refuge and the possibility offered by those two places, the window, the pond’s edge, were most essential.
a girl–and a boy, too–needs a place where it can be just you and your dreams. children, if they’re lucky, seem to have a knack for sniffing out a dreaming place.
i cannot imagine a growing up without dreaming. i don’t think, in all the existential equations, you can really do your growing, if you don’t do your dreaming.
it’s why my window calls me. still. it’s why i often tiptoe up my mother’s wooden stairs. cock my head. look out. see if all the dreams i birthed there, and some of the stories too, might come spilling back.
those window panes have been the frame for many, many scenes in the unspooling of my life. some dreamed, others very real.
it’s the glass that boxed the blurry stars, the ones i saw through tears that would not end, on the night my papa died. but it’s the screen i looked through, too, on the afternoon of my garden wedding. i was up there, dressed just like a bride, and i peeked down on the scene of so many long-ago nights of tag and makeshift camping tents. i saw my old backyard dressed up, gussied just like me, all white and waiting for a wedding.
i brought my newborn baby to that room. held him up to the window. tried to make the leaves soothe his crying. the way they’d so often soothed mine.
it is a tingly blessed thing that that window is still there. is still within my reach. not everyone can go back to the place where all their dreams were launched.
but i can.
and i know that makes me blessed.

can you still go back to your bedroom window? was it the place that birthed your dreams, or was your place beneath the stairs, or beside a creek? did you ache when your bedroom window was sold to someone else? or worse, knocked down by a wrecking ball? a crashing end that comes too often in these demolition days.

i bolted out of bed, knowing a boy i love, the first one i pushed onto this planet, was being dropped in the woods far, far away. all at once i felt propelled to cover all my bases. my prayer bases, that is.
drop to knees. check.
go to church. check.
light candle. check.
build altar. as directed.
and thus began the gathering. the two bird eggs i collected this bird birthing season, the robin’s blue, the sparrow’s spotted (which looks, deliciously, like one you might find filled with malted milk powder should you find it in your easter basket). the leafy nest to hold them. a sprig of pine from in the woods. a curl of bark, as well.
then i wandered to my garden, clippers at the ready. i snipped the finest soft pink roses, and a little stem of yarrow. long ago, i learned, any self-respecting altar is always blessed with snippings from the garden.
once again, i built my prayer tableau. there on the little shelf, beside all my books, in the little room that is my own. my writing room. my breathing room. the room i tiptoe into, close the door, retreat.
i put in a call, yes i did, to the grownup depositing the camper in the woods. asked him to please bring home some bits of woods to add to my collection. the grownup i called has lived with me now for nearly 16 years, so he hardly groans when he gets such calls. he just scrounges on the ground, comes home with pockets filled.
i of course did not wait for his return. i had that altar up and ready before the backpack, far away, was off the camper’s back. before he’d settled in the dingy cabin that will hold him ’til he makes the crossing, before he goes deeper into the woods, onto an island, amid an archipelago, where no car, no lights, no running water will rustle the surroundings. except for tromping feet and teenage boys–egad–the sanctuary is undisturbed.
now, of course, you know by now that the camper for whom i altar (that there would be an alteration: a noun used as a verb; henceforth, the building of an altar) is my firstborn child, the one i call the manchild for the razor that is calling his name, though he refuses to put it to his upper lip, preferring the ratty fuzz that grows there. but, despite all tonsorial evidence otherwise, he remains my baby boy. at least in spirit. and when one’s baby is dropped in the woods, one gets to seeking coverage.
divine coverage, of course. round-the-clock, 24/7, all-nite-diner coverage.
you do not leave these things to chance, you do not. certainly not when said manchild not so many months ago was in the woods, when he encountered a chipmunk, that set him swerving on his mountain bike, that hit a rock or maybe just a hole, and set him flying, headfirst over the handlebars, and landing on his face, which cracked back his neck, which left him with a fractured vertebrae that, by the grace of God, did not leave him unable to move his arms, his legs. (though, trust me, we brushed close enough to that nightmare, less than a fraction of a millimeter away, that a piece of me will never ever take for granted the wiggling even of his toes.)
perhaps there was some of that, just a shadow of the knowing that the boy and the woods had had a brief and not-so-distant encounter that had left him with a broken neck, and his mother with a forever sense of how, in an instant, a whole life script can be rewritten.
perhaps that was the thing that had me building me my altar. or perhaps, it was just that i am a believer in not doing all the lifting on my own.
when it counts, where it matters, i knock loudly on heaven’s door. anybody home, i yell, peering through the cracks. it’s me, and i’ve come to ask a favor.
i let loose like this, tell whoever might be listening: i’ve got this camper, you see, a true angel in the making, and he is going off, 60 pounds slung over his shoulders. it’s the tree roots i worry about him tripping over. landing splat. and then i hear something about some bears. heck, i thought mosquitoes might be pesty. but then i heard talk of bears. never mind the gnats, when you’ve got a hungry furry thing big enough to swallow your whole backpack. oh, geez, i forgot to whisper in his ear, steer clear of bears, please.
so, listen, if you’re home, in there, you behind celestial gates, would you mind keeping your eye on that long line of campers? mine’s the curly-haired one, looks like a mop, all boingy and sticking out. but there is a whole string of boys i love marching with him. and i’d really appreciate you making sure all is well, stays well.
that’s pretty much the story as i unspooled it. the way i talk to God. i spell it out. be specific. leave little to interpretation.
then i take it up a notch. make sure that ol’ petition is not lost in all the airwaves bouncing around the globe, some en route to heaven, but plenty just to cell phones. i think the air is getting crowded, what with all the wireless connections.
so you see, i’ve built this little altar. i believe in these things. if you build it, the saints and angels will come, will surround the ones you love. will keep them safe from bears and trippy tree roots.
it is, i’m certain, a vestige of being a girl who grew up with a mama who had little altars in windows everywhere. my mama is the may altar queen. only she doesn’t stop at may. she goes year-round. my mama has altars in february. my mama knows prayer like nobody’s business.
and so, once again, i am my mother’s daughter. i grew up believing that prayer, like the soundest allstate policy you could afford, covered you. kept you safe from bears and bad guys. and so i pray.
i am old enough, been banged around enough, to know that sometimes there are cracks in the policy. sometimes the bears get through. so do the bad guys.
but who really knows that popping a vitamin pill gets the calcium where it belongs? have you ever seen it land where it’s supposed to? seen it knock on your leg bone, slide in, settle down?
well, i have seen prayer make miracles. i’ve got one sleeping upstairs in an old, old bed, for starters.
but i also know, despite the outcome, even when the end result is not the one i asked for, along the way, prayer fills me with a calm that can only be divine.
little old me cannot take on the world, or just the woods. but me, backed up by prayer, and my woodsy altar, my altar that looks like someone took a hike and emptied her pocket there on the ledge, we can bring on a miracle: i can be the mama of a boy in the deepest woods, and i can be not afraid.
that, my friends, is a miracle of the highest order.

do you have prayer insurance? do you light candles? build altars? do you put your worries in the hands of someone, something far sturdier than you? have you ever felt a prayer be answered? a load lifted that you could never have carried all on your own? do tell….

and by the way, i started something new on the lazy susan. a little thing. an everyday poetry dept. it is a place for language, heard in the course of the everyday, that sets you over the moon. a phrase. an expression. a way of putting something. we are collecting, starting now. if you hear something wonderful, let me know. we will tuck it in the everyday poetry dept.

one other thing, would you mind keeping my blessed beloved bec and david in your prayers today? they are saying goodbye to dou, bec’s cat of 13 years. dou walked in off the street at a lowpoint in both their lives, bec’s and dou’s. they found each other, loved each other all these years. saying goodbye to a dear and precious friend is achingly hard. especially when the purring goes away.
my love to them this tough tough day.

question number one: how in the world did the boy who could lose a math book in the wilds of his locker learn to pack like that?
that’s it, up there, his whole existence for the next four weeks, rolled, bundled, tied with those funky little cords we paid too many dollars for, just last night, of course, at the camping store, as they flickered off the lights, reminded us that we’d waited ’til the last possible minute to get this show on the road.
well, okay, so it wasn’t the last possible minute. the old wagon doesn’t pull away from the curb ’til shortly after dawn tomorrow. so we could have gone out today. or tonight. but, thank you, i think we cut it close enough.
it is all, perhaps, part of God’s way of reminding me that with the belly-aching missing of my manchild, the dull sense for the whole month that i’ve left something behind–my wallet? my sunglasses? what is it? oh, yes, yes, it’s my firstborn child, that’s what’s missing–there is at least one note of relief.
relief that for the latter half of july through the middle of august, it will not be my worry when the flashlight can’t be found, the bungee cords have lost their boing, and the hiking boots are not yet broken in.
the boy will survive.
the boy will, some far-off august day, come loping in my arms, a little browner, a little leaner, a whole lot taller if the current rate of return keeps up.
and a whole lot more as if the winds of the woods have filled his lungs, his soul, and set him soaring.
like the glint of eagle i caught in his eye the first time i picked him up from camp–after a mere two weeks that had me groping through each and every single day, not yet knowing if he was a woods boy, or if he, like me long long ago, would be drowning in some homesick hangover that wouldn’t lift ’til he heard the crunch of the wagon wheels grinding up the gravel road to where the campers and their wayward grownups are reunited, or at least sent home in the same car.
yes, the boy will survive. (do you think if i repeat that often enough i might come to believe it? make it be true, somehow?)
yes, he’ll survive despite the bumps and bangs that i’ll not know of. despite the things i won’t be there to fix.
that, i know, is the whole darn point of this exercise.
an exercise for me, most likely, more than him. a little practice session in what it might be like if some day the boy excavates that math book and goes off to college.
a reminder, even, that these children who are laid in our arms, often as they inhale their first deep breath of air, limbs flailing, covered still with birthing slime, they are not ours to keep, but merely to place-hold until they can be wound up, set out on the doorstep, and left to bump and roll on their way through life.
it is a lesson that needs frequent repetition. it must be drummed again and again into certain thick-skulled heads. like mine.
like me who thinks it would be simply grand, at least from where i now sit, if my boys grew up, got jobs, raised families, the whole shebang, right upstairs in the little rooms they call their own. and we will all be a big brady-style family band. we’ll hold hands at dinner, sing kumbaya.
just kidding. i was just reminding myself why it is i need this overnight, month-long camping deal. need to shake the delusions from my head. remind myself the boy is only in my keeping. he is not mine for keeps.
i cannot, despite my inclinations, despite the malaise that will set in as i gulp and wave goodbye at the curb, hold him back.
cannot keep him from throwing on the backpack, and the hiking boots that, as a state street shoe man once termed a pair of whopping size 13s, are now “past noon.”
nope, the boy is going hiking. the boy is headed for the woods.
the boy is ready, willing, itching (and, just think, he hasn’t even met the swarms of lake superior mosquitoes, not yet).
to go back to where all illumination comes only from the sun, the moon, the stars and the wand that’s stuffed with double Ds.
to where there is no noise, only sound. and it surrounds you from the tree tops, from the water’s edge, and if you’re really lucky, from a comet soaring through the heavens.
to where he seems to take in lessons in double time. to where he’s learned, oh yes he has, he told me so, to hear the blessed roar of God rushing through the trees, streaking pink across the sky, or simply fluttering in the butterfly that takes its time to sit beside him, where he won’t be in a hurry to rush away, to miss the ballet of the wings, and whatever song they’re playing to his soul.
it will be a long hard month. and not for the one hiking 12 miles a day, up and down ravines.
ah, but the coming home will be so sweet. and the knowing all the while that he is in the arms of God and God is taking him to where all creation first unfolded.
deep into the place where the dappled sunlight plays, and shadows dance, even with the moon. deep into the place, inside his very being, where life first stirred within him and where all knowledge dwells, in a tender slip, waiting to be discovered.
the souvenirs, i’m certain, will be something. will last a lifetime, too.

okay campers, it’s all about the letting go, is it not? time and again we do the drill. over and over, practice ’til we get it. the ones we love go off. they take in the world. they take in lessons for which we cannot be the teachers. sometimes the curriculum requires hiking boots. sometimes college admission letters.
the brilliant priest who presided over my firstborn’s blessing, along with a rabbi, too, spoke of how it is our task as parents to give roots and wings to those we love. the roots, they sprout at home. the wings come in the woods….
what wisdom have you to share for a campsick mama who will miss her camper? what lessons did you learn the first time you went off, into the world all on your own?

the subject today is that little bit of cloth that comes between you and the flour. and the butter. and the splattered bits of canned tomato that would do in your crisp white chemise.
no, no. not the napkin. though we could put that on the list for consideration down the line.
and speaking of the line, that is not the wash flapping up above, but a bit of a timeline of the aprons i have loved and tied around my middle.
indeed, today we ponder the apron–pockets, strings and all the bits of lore tucked there beneath your hankie and your spoon.
and, yes, i admit it. since i was just a wee little sprout, handed my first hand-pieced patchwork of little squares, stitched together by my great-grandmama, tied on i’m certain with some crumb of ceremony making me feel like a big girl, a true citizen of the kitchen where my grandma was the queen, and i had at least been granted the status of a scullery maid, i have, when in the groove, gone for the apron strings.
now i recognize this is a cloth with a charge. a rag, a shmatte (if you’re inclined toward yiddish), that might make you wince.
there are those who do, and those who don’t. tie on one. i mean, of course, the apron.
so let us dispense with the don’ts.
but let us first consider the history. for this is a kitchen cloth–unlike, say, the dishtowel–that really does carry with it the story of a nation of women finding their place in and outside of the kitchen.
except for the brassiere, it is hard to think of a stitched-together piece of cotton that so represented liberation. although the cotton boll itself certainly makes me shudder.
i haven’t a clue when the first apron was donned, when someone grabbed a towel and tucked it by her tummy.
but i do know that for a whole long stretch there, the apron was not some symbol of oppression. rather it was saving hours at the washboard.
until the industrial age, washing your wardrobe of ginghams and calicos meant a.) bending at the river’s edge, or b.) scrubbing against the corrugated metal washboard, or c.) wringing the darn laundry through the wringer that could take off your arm if you pushed just a little too ambitiously.
and d.) any of the above, made splots of splattered tomato the last thing you wanted on your house frock.
thus, the apron. a washgirl’s best defense.
“there was a time when a woman rose and put on her apron as her most functional piece of clothing. she hardly left her bed, let alone her house, without it,” writes joyce gibson roach, a folklorist.
“early photographs of frontier women bear witness to the one garment common to all–the apron. frontier women wore aprons with pockets. those pockets concealed hankies, leftover cold biscuits and ham, small toys, eyeglasses, roots, plants, and other stuff gathered from the wilderness.”
or a gun, adds maryjane butters, a farmer and writer and hero to farmwomen, real and only wishful, all across america.
in her bible, “maryjane’s ideabook, cookbook, lifebook,” (clarkson potter, 2005) she tells the story of one molly owens, a frontier ranch woman, who made it a point to put on her apron whenever a stranger rode up. the apron, it turned out, had a special pocket in which ol’ molly concealed her gun. butters doesn’t let on if she ever actually had to pull the trigger.
and you thought you were smart, tucking your recipe cards in that there kangaroo pocket.
there is, it seems, a deep appreciation in some circles for the sociology, if not the politics, of the apron.
there is a book, and now a traveling exhibit of photos, text and 200 vintage aprons, titled “apron chronicles: a patchwork of american recollection,” written by ellyn anne geisel, with photographs by kristina loggia, that tell the stories tied to aprons, from the frontier to the holocaust.
i’ve not read the book, but it is, i am certain, one i could cozy up with. i believe in the chronicles of kitchen cloth. heck, i collect stories for a living. even stories from the pantry, where my aprons hang.
my aprons do tell stories, each one. and i have many.
there is the precious little patchwork, flapping on the left, up above. it’s the one i wore as i learned to mix a chocolate cake, roll out my first sugar cookies. it meant, when the apron was on, that i was a big girl. i was in the kitchen, at my mama’s side. i was following instructions, peeling back the mysteries of how to bake and how to be a grown-up.
when i did grow up, became a children’s nurse, we all wore aprons. instead of starched white uniforms that showed every germ and scared the pants off little children, we walked the halls, looking like so many cheery cooks. we tucked syringes and thermometers in our pockets, always had on hand whatever healing thing we needed.
when my grandma died, i was bequeathed her recipe box, her mixing spoons, and, of course, her apron. one of her many aprons, i do believe. she had lacy ones for parties. and frilly ones, too.
but she had a gingham one, a yellow-and-white check with brown cross-stitches up across the gathers, for everyday. it’s the one that takes me back to dear lucille, every time i see it in the drawer, folded, waiting.
and then i’ve got my latest. the one i bought just last summer, to celebrate the end of the building of my farmhouse kitchen. i got it at anthropologie, a store i love for the way it feels like the best of some old garage sale. they are big on vintage there, and so i grabbed a flouncy floral number.
i do believe, i, like the frontierswomen, spend more time thinking about the fashion of my apron than i do the clothes i wear underneath. in either case, not so much.
but then, before we leave this apron drawer, we must discuss the fact that there are many who do without.
i would say the reigning queen of this stripped-down kitchen style would have to be nigella. nigella lawson, of course, the british cooking goddess. the one who slinks around her london pad, wearing silky robe or bosom-hugging–and i mean hugging–three-quarter-sleeve cashmere sweater. (i read, i really did, that each of her cooking sweaters costs somewhere in the $300-to-$500 neighborhood. egad. i would tiptoe, yes i would, ‘round my canned ta-mah-toes, as she would say, if i donned such splendid threads at the cookstove.)
nigella and her decoutage, ample as it is, seem to have spawned a whole network of chesty wanna-be’s. checked in the food network lately? every single cooking dame is cooking at half mast (meaning half the mast is showing). and not a single one is tying on an apron.
so as we swing through the naked double-Os there in the kitchen, i will swing, once again, out of fashion. i will amble, yes i will, to my baking cupboard. i will haul the flour off the shelf, and always the apron with it.
i will tie one on, and make my clouds of brown-milled mess. and i shan’t give a single worry, for i will be duly dressed–for the cutting board and not the bedroom.

do you have an apron chronicle you would like to share? do you cook covered, or bare? tell me, tell me do….don’t leave me flapping on the line, like my life of aprons up above.

p.s. if you poke around the chair today, you will see all sorts of delicious kitchen-table shots. my sweet will, he of camera passion, made art for you and me. and we’ve hung it out for all to see. i do believe you’ll like it. i sure hope so.

the pine was tall and proud. full of grace, really. its boughs reached wide. brushed against the screens of the summer porch i love. tucked that room right in its branches. made it feel just like a cabin in the woods. like you’d been invited in, to something blessed.
the boughs, like the arms of all good trees, were generous, full of heart and full of possibility. birds hopped there. played there. a mama robin just last spring unwisely built her nest there, down too low, where one by one, pulled from the mama’s keeping by some wild thing that didn’t care, the naked little baby birds were flung to the forest floor. i found one each morning, five mornings in a row last may, a slow parade of death.
i’ve never moved the nest, left it undisturbed, a grassy shrine to the birds that would not be. to the mama, too, who tried so very, very hard. and finally flew away, broken-hearted i am certain.
that tree, besides its solitary virtues, is part and parcel, one-fifth, actually, of a grove. a sacred little swatch of earth i call, “the magic place.” i have said since the day i first came upon it, since it stopped me in my tracks, it’s the reason we bought this house. it’s a place where light comes through in shafts in the morning, and then, later in the day, it’s dappled.
it’s as holy a place as any i can think of, and i can walk there in the time it takes to shut the door behind me, lope 20 steps down an old brick path, and be lost in pines. just far enough to be a place to escape to, near enough to get there any time.
well, that tree i love, that tall green spruce, was scalped the other day. the whole west side, the side that hugged the screens, a good third of the way up–shaved clear.
it happened in no time flat. i was out there, just minutes before, the other morning, talking to the guys putting up a new roof on the old garage and its better half, the tacked-on, screened-in porch we call the summer house.
the thing’s been leaking buckets. with every rain, it was getting worse.
long as we’re at it–you might know how these things go–we figured we’d do a little tucking and lifting. a modest facelift for the saggy room i love so much. it is, i swear, the last item on the re-do list, a list we knew was long when we bought the place, already nearly five years ago.
bit by bit, we’ve been nudging this old shell a little closer to our vision of where we want to spend the whole rest of our lives. this house, i hope, will be the place from which i draw my last deep breath.
but about the tree. no one said a word about it being in the way. and i sure didn’t notice. i thought anyone with eyes would see the beauty of the tree was the way it hugged the porch.
apparently, i was wrong.
so wrong.
when i heard some hollering just 20 minutes later, one builder calling to the other, asking what bush the crazy lady wanted saved, i wandered back out. to make sure they didn’t botch the bush, a whole other bush that had been my only worry.
and that’s when my heart stopped and my eyes fell on a mound of branches piled halfway up the screens, some four feet of piled branches, i tell you.
i could not comprehend. i looked right, looked into the heart of the magic place, where three humongous pines are full of naked branches on the bottom, but i won’t cut them because i love the way they interlace, make it feel just like a room for trolls in the middle of a forest.
those trees weren’t touched. so i looked up, the only other place to look. and that’s when i saw. branch after branch, 28 in all, sawed off. lying in a heap.
i stood there gulping. eyes filling fast with tears. i was utterly bewildered and bereft. no one had ever said a word about cutting, or about those blessed branches being in the way.
but the builders, standing on the roof, they must have seen my broken heart. one shouted: “hey, if we’re gonna build your dream cottage in the woods, we’ve got to clear the branches.”
i’ve been crying ever since. the tree has too.
oh, not in the way of some concrete underpass that they say is stamped with an outline of the blessed virgin mary, and she is weeping and the true believers or the just plain curious line up for hours, bring their folding chairs, stop the flow of traffic what with all their dabbing fingers to the seeping wall, proving to themselves that this is real this time, that the underpass is crying.
no. not like that. but the stumps from where the branches were, they are dripping tears. it’s sap, of course, the sticky blood of trees that courses through its veins. and it is dripping from its wounds. looks for all the world like tears. far as i can tell that tree is crying.
but then i am a true believer.
it’s been a few days now. once i took in the damage, i could barely look. it hurt too much. i cannot stand to see the gash. it is the most lopsided old spruce i’ve ever seen.
at least, along the path, on the east side, the branches still fall with grace. they brush up against you when you wiggle through. on one side you can still pretend you’re in a forest. but on the other…
“it’s so empty,” as my nine-year-old across-the-street neighbor put it.
it’s bare, all right. it’s naked. the summer porch is fully exposed and filled with eastern light. no more dappling.
i admit i take these things too hard. i cannot stand to watch a tree, any tree anywhere, come down. i run for cover. and not because i’m scared of falling limbs or mighty trunks.
no, because to me a tree is a holy sacred contract with the future and the past. that tree does not belong to me, or you, or any of us. that tree is of the earth, and it’s reaching for the heavens. it’s our part of the deal to stay out of the way. to let it be.
i met a woman, a fine woman down on her farm, just a few weeks back. she’s a woman who turned to farming after her oldest son, a marine in iraq, was killed. she is plowing through her grief and resurrecting beauty.
as we walked her farm, she pointed up to a 100-year-old hackberry, growing in a field of golden rod and grasses.
“i lost half that hackberry,” she told me. “that’s an inspiration to me.”
half the tree, a half that held a rope swing, a half her firstborn used to climb, came down in an ice storm last november. the half that stands, though, is a beacon to the farmer woman.
“even when half of you dies, you still can live. you still can be. the birds can still come sing in your branches.”
trees are like that. trees tell stories. trees stand where they are, and life fills their limbs. trees are witness to what came before we did, and will probably be around long after we’re not.
trees rise, full of hope, and harbor to our dreams.
when a tree, or a part of tree, comes down, something dies. and not just old wood with soft green needles or scissor-cut leaves.
i don’t yet know how i’ll ever fill the hole, from where the branches spilled. don’t yet know where the dappled light will come.
for now, i only have a half a tree that’s crying. and i’ve yet to stop the tears.

do you have a tree you lost? or just a big old limb you loved? do you feel hardwired to the growing things around you? do you feel the pain when one is hurt or felled or lost? is there a tree that might still grow somewhere, but you’re the one who’s gone, moved on? does this not suddenly make you want to grab shel silverstein’s “the giving tree,” from the shelf, and go sit under a branch somewhere and read it once again?

psst. don’t tell. i am hardly suffering.
by odd accident of circumstances–namely a road trip with daddy, a road trip to akron, ohio, of all places (tire city, i love you)–i am, for the first time in, ahem–this is pathetic, i know, i know–probably a good 10 years, home alone.
i mean all day, all night, all by myself.
no, really, i just checked. tiptoed around to all the beds. not a one was occupied. not even the lumpy old cat is curled up on someone’s pillow. he’s out terrorizing the neighborhood.
it’s just me. me alone, sunup to sundown.
how do you spell hallelujah loudly?
oh, excuse me. i was getting giddy. which is what happens when you are occupying an existence of which you have only dreamt.
you know those days when fists are clenched on the wheel, and you are driving madly from a to b to z, and someone in the back seat is whimpering, and the list of things to do is getting longer not shorter, like some bad dream where you cannot get to where you need to be, like you are stuck on an escalator to nowhere, and you are wishing like anything the whole world would go away and leave you all alone.
well, holy hallelujah, it appears it did. leave me alone, i mean.
the last time i remember being more or less home alone was nearly seven years ago for maybe four or five days, the morning after i found out that i was mysteriously, suddenly pregnant at nearly 44. (okay, so it wasn’t totally mysterious, but given my track record in the reproduction department it was a big fat “huh?”)
that certainly didn’t count as home alone, not technically, and not psychologically, i assure you.
but this time, there are no mysterious underpinnings to the aloneness. there is no mystery at all, other than what took so long for this to happen.
oh, yeah, what happened is that mysterious pregnancy turned into a little boy who is only just now old enough to trot along with his papa and his big brother, and we don’t need to worry about an extra pair of hands in the back seat keeping him amused while the papa courses through america, via high-speed interstate.
so here i am indulging in that sacred meditative state called the only one who is interrupting my thoughts is me, with another thought, coming in on another runway.
for a soul hardwired for solitude in ample doses, you might imagine this has been one long dry spell. an arid season for my very essence, indeed.
it’s why, perhaps, i sleep so little. i stay up late to be alone. i wake up early to snatch another dose. it might not be good for the portions of the brain that crave non-REM, but you do what you have to, don’t you?
there are those of us who simply need a little calm, a little quiet to plug back in. we disconnect to reconnect. we wall off our selves. we build cocoons. we curl up in a psychic ball and listen for our wings to sprout.
then we’re up and running. taking on the world with everything we’ve got.
but we only get what we’ve got the pull-in, plug-in way. we guard our all-alone time. we are downright stingy, sometimes.
it’s not that we don’t like all-day-all-night company. it’s not that we don’t appreciate a diner with a neon “open” sign flashing through the wee, wee hours.
it’s just that we cannot be a place that slings its hash, pours its bottomless pots o’ joe, round-the-clock, 24-7.
we are human souls. we need rhythms. we need yin with yang. reflection on the underside of giving.
it’s why some folks garden. and others swim. i have done my share of both.
to catch the solitary buzz of being on your knees in dirt, entranced by caterpillar climbing on the poppy. or watching how the delphinium turns its head toward sunbeam.
or diving in the dappled light as it hits the blue bottom of the pool. hearing nothing but the sound of your own palm, pulling back the water. listening to some inner story unspool as you flip and turn and glide, again, through chilly waters.
i do believe that we were made not to drink in noise around the clock. not to have some wires in our ears, even as we wend our way through the grocery aisles.
i believe, perhaps, that God gave us legs so we could go off, and find our solitude. and our solace.
and then, always, we return. but what we’ve discovered, off in the woods, off in our thoughts, is that bit of self, that bit of who we are, that we can only know if we are hushed. if we are listening.
we cannot listen to the sacred whispers in the middle of a crowd. we need air to breathe, to fill our lungs. we need alone–a noun, a state of being–to fill our souls.
at least i do.
and as i listen to the sound of just a clock ticking, and my own wiggling in this chair, i am breathing in a something so essential, so pure, i am quite certain it is the breath of God, filling every blessed chamber of my being.

do you crave alone? is it essential to your wholeness? when did you first discover your deep hunger for time alone? do you remember? how, now, do you carve out a sacred place and time to be still, to hush the world around you, so you too can feel the warm soft blowing in of God’s own breath?

p.s. lazily, the lazy susan was restocked over the weekend. filled with bird bits, and cobblers, and cool, minty ice waters. and terra, too. always terra. our blessed farm writer. take a spin. you’ll be refreshed.

no one said flying was easy. somehow, though, it hurts to watch, it hurts to see a little guy make a bumpy landing.
problem is, no one saw the descent, so no one knew if the finely-feathered baby bird had fallen from the nest, or merely missed the runway.
and that is where this story begins.
but before i do, let me back up, just a little.
all day, all week, i had been playing mrs. kravitz, the nosey-body with binoculars from back in the nose-twitching glory days of “bewitched,” trying my darnedest to get a peek at the noisy little fellows up in the nest, up in the hole just above the very door we go in and out all day.
every once in a while i’d see two beaks, and just the barest bit of chin–if a bird might be said to have a chin–poking from the nest, the nest i call the peep hole for the incessant peeping that goes on in there.
and once i’d seen the teeny-tiny beaks, i, like every hungry critter on the planet, wanted more. so, out came the step ladder. not high enough. out came the tippy toes on the tippy top of the step ladder. still not high enough.
dang, i felt defeated. i would have to do, for now, with just the littlest bit of beaks.
but then last night rolled around.
i was out back. my boys were headed out for swimming.
it was the little one, towel wrapped under arm, idly waiting for the swimmers who were not so in a hurry, not so anxious to try out their new-found floating skills as he was, who leaned against the glass, looked down, and there, saw the little bird not where the bird, or the boy, expected the bird to be.
apparently, mama bird did not either. she was squawking up a holy terror. perched up there on serviceberry, waking up the sleeping neighbors, had they dared to try to sleep through mama sparrow’s feather-raising racket.
it’s at this point in the story that i am called to the scene. it’s either that i once was a nurse and thus i will ever be inclined to heal the hurting, or maybe it’s just that i’m the mom around here, and when something’s wrong, you call the mom. (see below)
either way, i got the call. the manchild was the one who did the calling. loudly. pushed back the screen door, broke the quiet of the summer’s eve with a three-syllable “mo-o-omm!” and then the news: “a bird fell out of the nest, it’s on the ground, we need you. hurry. now. ”
and so i dropped the garden tool i’d been flinging, i loped in full-throttle lope. in fact, i’d say i ran.
as i came upon the scene, my brain did one of those unscramblings that tries to line up all the scattered pieces. the little one–my little one, not the baby bird, at least not that i could tell–was in tears and shaking. his towel he clutched as if a life saver. “he lost a leg. he lost a leg,” he kept repeating. “he only has one leg.”
i crouched down close, after first turning to the poor dear squawking mama and promising her i would be gentle. would she please give me permission? lucky thing i didn’t refuse to treat until she’d signed consent. that seems to be the way of medicine these days.
but here, we were operating out of something akin to tending wounded knees of our very own. this here was family.
after all, after all these months of watching, this little clutch of birds felt very much ours. they’d picked our door. they’d allowed us into the sacred building of a nest, and a whole next sparrow generation; we were not about to let a flying lesson go bad here, right on our front stoop, which you see is rather a poopy stoop these days.
(i actually have been out there scrubbing, but if you dined on whole cicadas–which to a baby bird must be like chowing down a whole darn cow–you too might be messy, in the poopy stoop department.)
indeed, the baby bird was shaking. and i was pretty sure it had two swell legs, it’s just that all those scrambled feathers were in the way of one. the little thing did not look hurt, just shaken. just a little what-the-heck-just-happened.
my first thought was to lift the little guy back into the nest. but my second thought, as always in a crunch, nature or otherwise: “call mom.” (see above)
and so i dialed the original mother nature, who calmly, coolly, said, “oh no,” to the nest idea.
“does it have its feathers?” she inquired.
“fully feathered,” i reported back.
well, then, she counseled, lift it to the grass, or just beneath a bush, where it will be safe, and where the mama will come to tend it. or else, nature will take its course.
egad. not that. not some dismal denouement to this once-expectant winged tale. that heartbreak i could not take. i am a die-hard believer in the never-ending fairy tale. i want life to work out every time. please, God.
so, like that, unwilling to stand back and watch this “nature take its course” brutal turn, i leapt the stairs, taking two steps at a time. i plunged my arm into the depths of the medicine cupboard, the one where still i keep my nursing supplies and various leftovers from emergency room visits.
i groped around. at last i found the box of latex gloves, perhaps the single most important item in that closet. i seem to get into all sorts of messes that call for those stretchy goo-protecting gloves.
gloves on, i was ready. mama bird, by now, was going nuts. poor thing would need a lozenge in the morning.
once again, i cooed and tried to calm the baby. and then, the most amazing thing, i had a bird, a blessed feathered thing, right there in my hand. but i moved it to the bush. in this case, the bird in the bush was better than the one in the hand.
although, i have to say, i did get a shiver down my spine as i felt that little thing against my palm. i will not forget the teeny tiny scratch of baby birdie feet against my skin, er, my latex-shielded skin.
and i did feel engaged in something holy, lifting the poor, chest-pounding little creature from its crash site to a softer, shady harbor.
the very second i put it down, on the soft cool earth, beneath an evergreen bough, it hopped. it hopped right up onto a rock, where it just sat. we watched each other. i had no clue what would happen next. my boys were barring the doors, keeping the ferocious hunter cat from anywhere near. i prayed a little prayer that all would be well, then i did what my mama said, i left it to the whims of nature. all would be well, or all would not be. i had to let it go.
the drama at a pause, the boys went off swimming, the baby bird cowered, and i tried to go back to my task, the one out back.
but then i had second thoughts. i was going to put that bird where it belonged, back in the nest. so i hauled back out my ladder. i got another pair of gloves. then i peeked under the bush. no bird. no squawking. and i knew the cat was duly locked inside.
that was when the hope fluttered in. that was when i knew the bird had not fallen. it had indeed been in the middle of a flying lesson when it missed its little mark.
heck, the hole is little. if i were just learning to spread my wings, to fly, i too might miss that teeny tiny peep hole.
fast forward to this morning: i’ve been watching. baby bird is out there as i type. he or she, let’s just say it, is taking baby flights. with mama and papa coaching from a branch just above or just below, the blessed little thing is making short flaps from honey locust to serviceberry and back again.
i stood there nearly in tears. my baby bird survived. my baby bird is flying.
that i should be a witness to this marvel of growing up leaves me tingling here this morning.
it’s like that, isn’t it? we try, we fall, we make it back to our feet. and then, at last, it’s easy. we wing our way from branch to branch. we catch the breeze; we’re flying.
i do believe God opened a little sacred window, let me in, let me marvel. the baby bird might have caught its breath, but i believe mine was just swept away.
Godspeed, baby bird.

although i am groggy tired here this morning, i wanted you to witness, close as words would let us come together, the miracle of my baby bird. first bumbled up and shaking there on the bluestone step. now, hopping through the trees. all is well. no more squawking. have you ever watched a baby bird learn to fly? have you ever watched one stumble? is it not the most sacred thing to be a student at the school of winged things?

blueberries go on sale today for $1.88 a pint at my grocery store. cantaloupes will be flying off the crates at a mere 99 cents each.
so, like i always do in the juicy months, the summer months, i’ll probably grab a few of each, dump ’em in a bowl, put ’em out for breakfast. think little of it, ’cept how juicy it all looks. you might do the same at your house.
but what if we couldn’t? what if the stores near where we lived didn’t sell fruit? didn’t put it on sale in the juicy months because there was no fruit. they never sold it. on sale, or otherwise.
what if you’re a kid named jerry and you’re 11 and you used to live in a place called cabrini-green, a famous place around chicago, a sad place, because it was full of poor black folks and kids who grew up knowing to dive for cover when the gunshots broke the thick night air, or, worse, you once saw someone stagger in your apartment door, shot in the gut, and you watched him writhe, then die, right there on your front-room floor?
and what if someone decided to do away with cabrini-green, filled the air with promise but then let you–and thousands of others–down, down as a flat old bicycle tire, the kind you’ve never ridden anyway, and instead of letting you stay in the place you knew, the place where you and your mama and your mama’s mama grew up, they dumped you miles away in a place called englewood, a place that ends up being even worse, way worse?
and what if, down in englewood, there are no stores where, even if you wanted, even if you had a taste for blueberries in summer–or even a plain old dumpy apple–you couldn’t get any, not even one?
because the only store you could get to you call “the chip store,” because it sells, well, like 20 kinds of chips. and pop. but no blueberries. and no apples. and not a single banana even. no fruit. none.
but luckily–blessedly–jerry is a friend of my friend mary beth. so is a kid named william, who is 7.
my friend mary beth, who for years and years has been friends with jerry’s aunt and william’s cousin, who actually was a true big sister in ways that would leave you jaw-dropped at her humongous heart and her facile mind, is now pretty much the fruit lady of englewood.
oh, that’s not official. it just is. it’s what she does.
every weekend, my friend mary beth, who lives way north, along the lake, but in uptown, and who works all week in philadelphia, because she’s a nurse and she’s running the cardiology department at children’s hospital of philadelphia, and she’s been flying back and forth between philly and chicago every week for a couple years now, well, she spends half her weekend getting fruit for jerry and william and whoever else is there, is hungry, when she makes her fruit drop.
she gets up on saturday morning, heads out to costco, buys huge cartons of strawberries–you can really get a lot for 5 bucks, she tells me–and as much as she can carry of whatever else looks good. and juicy.
then she drives down to englewood, drives down to where, just a year or so ago, jerry was out running down the sidewalk with a friend, a little friend, a friend who i think was maybe 9, and jerry heard a pop, and then his friend was down. his friend died. right there on the sidewalk. right next to jerry. it was the sixth violent death that jerry had witnessed in one long year of his short sad life.
that’s where mary beth brings the crates of strawberries. and maybe blueberries too, this weekend. maybe she too can get a super deal at costco, when she shows up this saturday, fixing for her fruit run.
my friend mary beth is the sort of soul who has taken my breath away as long as i have known her. and i’ve known her a long, long time now. nearly 30 years. she was the one who hired me, fresh out of nursing school, to work at children’s memorial right here in chicago.
she was the one, back then, who cared about what kind of food inner-city kids were eating. she cared, too, about how families worked, or didn’t work, especially when a kid was really sick. and she cared about a health care system that she saw, way before plenty of others, might not keep working, not much longer anyway, if someone didn’t get in there and start to fix the breaking parts before they flat-out broke.
but mary beth doesn’t just care about what goes on in hospitals. she cares, maybe more deeply than anyone i know, about what goes on in cities, especially parts of the city that already are flat-out broken.
and mary beth, who is the godmother to my firstborn, and here’s a big reason why, doesn’t just sit and talk about how to fix the broken city.
she gets up on saturday morning, week after week, and picks out blueberries and strawberries and peaches and melons, and maybe even a mango–more likely, a whole crate of mangoes–and drives them miles and miles to where the stores don’t sell them.
then she walks in a banged-up apartment, where jerry and william and a whole handful of other folk live, and she lays the boxes packed with fruit on the kitchen table.
because kids, all kids, especially kids who sit and fill their cheeks and their tummies with chips for breakfast and chips all day long, kids not allowed to play outside for fear, for God’s sake, that they too could fall dead to the sidewalk so instead they sit inside with those damn chips and they get what the doctors call obese, all those kids deserve a little taste of summer when it’s summertime.
and i don’t mean a sticky popsicle, though, heck, i hope they get that too.
so i had this kooky idea. not so kooky, really. what if, somehow, we all pitch in?
what if we all, all of us who pull up a chair maybe, what if we build a fund so we can send a message, to mary beth at least, but maybe even to jerry and william?
what if we can say that, damn it, no kid should be robbed of the taste of blueberries and strawberries and melon? not when they’re going on sale today at grocery stores that will never be without mounds and mounds of fruit for kids who might turn up their noses sometimes, say they’re full from too many strawberries.
what if, in some teeny tiny way, we say it’s not right that there’s a jerry, thousands and thousands of jerrys probably, who would not sink their teeth into the sweet, red, seeded flesh of a strawberry, who would not know what it is to have that blood red juice run down and off their chin, were it not for the great good soul of a mary beth who takes the time–and has the heart–to spend her saturdays plucking fruit?

sign up here, people. add your own big ideas. click over to the chair lady page, and you’ll find my email. send an email, and i’ll send details, and we will see if we can build a fresh fruit fund so there won’t be so many jerrys, or so many williams, who go without a single berry the whole year long. especially, the whole summer.

funny, how bright lights in the sky make us look up, make us crane our necks and wonder. funny how, once a year, we flock, whole heaping crowds of us, to the edge of where the lights are coming. we haul wagons and blankets and lots of little children. we come in wheelchairs, with walkers, on crutches. we cannot stand to miss the show.

we set up shop, as if we own a piece of the planet there. the real estate is ours, until the show sizzles to its final smoky end.

and while we’re waiting, everyone is antsy. checking watches, scanning sky. looking for a far-off pop, the first explosion in the sky.

and then, at last, when night has fully fallen, when sky is draped in black, the curtain rises.

announced in pop-pop-pop. and then the colors, poured across the sky. the exploding has begun.

it was at about that moment, after aw-ing one or two last night, that my little one climbed in my lap, said in my ear, “don’t you wish you could be a fireworks?”

without waiting for an answer, his little shoulders lifted, felt as if they might take off. “i do,” he sighed.

and then, just minutes later, after a chemical chrysanthemum had blossomed in the sky, had showered petals made of light over all the crowd–the endless squares of blanket, upturned faces, open ooh-ing mouths and chrysanthemum-painted eyes–he added this: “i’d be a purple one.”

not long after, the pit-a-pat of rain came. and so the show was hurried. it ended, as it always, always does, with a bang, a bang that makes you plug your ears. only, by then, everyone was up and scrambling, dashing, before the final flicker fell, softly, from the sky.

walking home, the big boy who i love, the one who never wished to be a fireworks, far as i know, though, in his own way, wouldn’t mind lighting up the sky, offered the thinking that is his own pyrotechnic explosion, as he sparks his fuse and practices watching big ideas, in many colors, stretch across the whole horizon.

he told me he was thinking of writing an essay called “empty sky.” said he found it odd that we, as a nation, say we’re celebrating freedom, then proceed to all dress up, in lockstep, in the same three colors, eat “pseudo-patriotic foods,” and then, “rather than exercising our freedom, we go to watch destruction.”

what’s left, when all is ended, he mused, when all our policies have set us off in wrong directions, is empty sky.

as the rain kept up its rat-a-tat on our heads, our shoulders, our legs, our shoes, we kept walking, my boy and i.

he unspooled, in pure eloquence, his thoughts that already i have mucked up, just above. by the time we got home he promised me he would write it down. told me he’d take a picture of the pitch black sky to illustrate his essay.

i marveled, as i hung up the soggy blanket, at the blessing that is mine on the day america takes a seat to watch the sky show.

it leaves me nearly gasping, the fact that, at once, i could have one who climbs on laps and wishes he too could dazzle in exploding colors, free-fall from the heavens, take a ride on sky crescendo, while my other is taking in the fireworks and stitching deep political threads into what’s stretched across the dark black canvas.

then i heard the crash, boom, bang. i looked up to where the lights had been. i saw more lights. these from God. or Mother Nature. or whoever is the one who takes cold wind and hot, and bangs them both together like a cymbal in the sky, complete with jagged bolts of light.

i stared, i gasped again. took in the second act of sky show for the night. it gave me goosebumps, the good kind. i watched awhile, all alone. no blankets, ohhs or ahhs.

just a silent kind of awe that this night of sky lights, acts one and two, had sparked so much wonder in so very many colors.

what do you think when you watch the sky ignite? would you like to be a fireworks? or do you see explosions and think deep and stirring thought about how you’d like the world to be? happy fourth.