pull up a chair

every once in a while, you hear a story, ‘bout some super nanny, just shy of mary poppins maybe, maybe one who doles out only three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar with every lump of medicine.

regardless of the nitty-gritty, you hear these tales of someone loving and kind and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious who, well, arrives on the doorstep not long after the stork makes its deposit, and then never really leaves.

that extraordinary someone puts up with it all: the babies who howl through dinner time, the little boys who can’t possibly watch enough trains go up and down the tracks (and so they sit trackside watching and whoo-whoo-ing and clapping crazily for hours on end).

why, they are there to teach little ones how to throw a baseball, tie a shoe, and the difference between a butterfly and a moth. out on their daily rounds, the little one and the keepers of the children might make whole flocks of friends. they might come to know the crossing guard by name, and the lady at the bakery who always picks out the oatmeal cookie with the fattest raisins.

these someones seem to have something for every passage, from secret potions to cure a diaper rash to how to make the letter “a” not look as if it’s whirling down a drain, spiraling off the page. even how to execute a K-turn, when it’s t-t-time to teach driving 101.

in my house there is that someone. and curiously, uncannily, she is the same someone who plied these tricks on me, when i was the one with diaper rash, or wouldn’t eat my peas. or crashed the old ford wagon into a bush.
i broke her in, i’m sure she’d tell you. and so did my four brothers.

we must have exercised her like a race horse. thrown every trick in the book in her direction. turned her, unwittingly, into the super-est nanny money could not buy.

she is my lifeboat, my salvation, and my answer-gram, to boot.

yup, she’s my mama. and she’s grammy to my boys.

of late, though, she’s upped her standing here in ways i’d never ever imagined, or dreamed. nor wished for.

you see, i’ve been expunged from my house, more or less. hauled back to the mothership of my old newspaper. told to sit and type where all the other grownups type.

and so, for the first time since birthing children, i am now the absent mother.

i’m not there two days a week when my boys bound in the door (the other workdays i race home in time to beat the schoolbus).

i’m not there when the dishwasher goes kerpluey and makes like a raging waterfall.

and, nope, i’m not there when the one in high school–the one who plays a double bass so big it won’t fit in one of our old cars, not unless you remove the lid (of the car, i mean, not the double bass)–i’m not there when he calls and coyly mentions that he needs a ride home from school at the precise hour that his little brother is being visited by a teacher who has him plucking up and down the ivories.

and this poor supernanny–who is getting darn near 80, for crying out loud–smoothly takes it all in stride. tells the big one to wait. mops up the flood. and when the little one gets to middle C, points him toward the bass-retrieving-mobile.

(she does though ring me on the workphone, drop her voice to a whisper and ask, furtively: “where’s the scotch?”
hmm. note to self: remember to pick up a fifth of scotch for the sitter.)

it’s not merely that she covers the basics. oh, no. we seem to have selected nanny-plus, the premium model.

in just the last few weeks, a stint in which she signed up without a whimper for two not one dinners-per-week, including grocery shopping, she has miraculously nudged our resident picky eater to down these heretofore-untouched morsels: lamb patties, hamburgers, why even mashed potatoes, a form of spud that had never crossed his little lips.

and, by jove, he likes ‘em all.

this nanny should be cloned.

she has melted my heart a time or two when she reported in that she’d picked up child A from point A to deliver to point B, and thought to pack, why, cookies and ice-cold water, so the little dear could sup in leisure and not be forced to gulp and swipe—or go without, had it been not-so-strategic mommy in the driver’s seat.

but that’s not all: this nanny package we seem to have won in the state lottery, why she’s been spotted in recent months teaching grown boys how to iron clothes. imagine that. i walked out the door to work, and came home to a child now fully equipped to zap my wrinkles–or at least the ones on my pants. whether she can prod him to keep up such skills remains, of course, to be seen.

if anyone can whip this house in shape, it seems to be the one who’s stepped in in my stead.

heck, i’ve come home to find my garden rearranged; the lovely big-leafed hosta that suffered regular beatings from wild basketballs–the hosta i’ve been intending to move for, oh, the last five years–she up and popped it from the earth, plopped it down in just the right shady spot.

she even sorts the mail. empties the recycling.

there is nowhere on the planet the brand of love she pours: all-encompassing, all the time. she is clearly heaven sent, and heaven-bound, i guarantee.

she told me once, in a whisper, that when my papa died she’d turned her life to God. her every breath, then on, would be in the service of others. we seem to be among the winners.

there are, in so many houses around the world, souls who keep the walls from falling down. who keep the kiddies scrub-faced, and the mommies from exploding.

at my house, it’s my mama. and with all my heart and soul, and all my achy bones, and my head that pounds some days, i thank her. upside down and sideways. through and through. and then some more. times two, doubled. to the nth power.

my only question now: can she fit us in on the days when i am home? i do need help. clearly.

i’m not the only one i know who has someone to thank for getting me across the finish line each day. or at least on the days when we’re at wit’s very end. i am blessed that i’ve my mama to be the one who’s here for me and my boys.
feel free to write along, and tell the tales of those you love and couldn’t live without. especially when it comes to those who live inside your home. or maybe in your heart…

the women came the way women often come, filing in in dribs and drabs, once they’d wrapped up the business of their day. obligations out of the way, time now to get down to why we’re really on this planet.

there was among us, one in need. very much so. and we were there, armed with slender wooden sticks and balls of yarn soft as kitten’s fur. and prayer.

oh, yes, skeins of prayer.

these women call themselves “the shawl sisters,” and their task was this: to knit a prayer shawl for a child, a girl of 17, who is off, any day now, to houston where she’ll meet up with a phalanx of oncologists, cancer doctors, who will peer into her liver, and prognosticate the days–and years, God willing–ahead.

she would be wrapped, this girl too young for what had taken hostage her liver, in soft looped stitches. some too tight, some too loose. some missing altogether. but each one noosed and pulled with prayer.

as she lay on hard cold tables, as she leaned against stiff rough hospital sheets, ones washed 10,000 times, she would be cloaked, this child, in the tender labor of tired women who’d do anything to soften the hard blows. insulate the chill. take away the hurt.

the equation was simple, and ancient: women gathered, as they’ve done since there were threads to be pulled through cloth, strands to be woven into squares, crocheted into circles, the geometries of homelife so elemental and everywhere.

cradling sewing baskets and knitting bags, drawn into circles on dusty prairies, or candle-lit cabins–or the well-upholstered dining room in a leafy, tranquil town–women have come to tend the stitches of each other’s lives, to patch together what it is that aims to leave us tattered. or in pieces on the floor.

as the night wore on, as teacups were filled, the cake plate passed, time and tempo were measured in murmured words and click-click-click of wooden needles, slipping through the loops of yarn.

we knit 1, prayed 2. and in between we purled across the rows of our life. the prom dates and all their dramas. the stormy weather just ahead. the recipe for chicken salad.

then at last, late from a meeting, dressed in pointy-toed heels, flush from rushing up the highway, the one among us arrived, the one for whom the knitting started three short months ago.

she came with news: not only need we pray for her second-born, the one who’d soon be wrapped in the shawl, but also her fourth-born, who’d just come home from the hospital himself. a fever, for six nights and six days, that had raised untold fears.

her fourth-born, you see, has leukemia, and a spiking fever is never good.

this mama bears more than any shawl could hold–or so you’d think. until you heard her laugh. until you heard her swear with all her heart that all would be well, dammit.

it had to be.

and then she told us, worst of all, as if all that was preamble, that the need for prayer this night was this: the shocking call that had come at 5 a.m. that morn. a suicide, a cousin, long plagued, had leapt off a bridge, down in tennessee. her beloved aunt, she insisted, was the one who needed prayer.

and so the women dropped their needles, clasped hands and prayed.

it went that way for hours, the seamless intermingling of the prosaic and the prayerful. and so, too, the laughter then the tears.

there is much to pray for, always. but especially so this night, where the women came with petitions, and pieces of a prayer shawl.

it is apt, i realized, that women so often turn to spools of thread, and rolled-up balls of yarn when life seems to be unraveling at the edges. when it seems the strands that hold us together are being tugged at, torn, mercilessly.

“we’re knitting toward the mystery,” said the woman sitting next to me, a beautiful woman, with bare, muscled arms. “the prayerfulness of knitting is a long tradition.”

one by one, stories were told of how knitting had been the occupation of choice at the side of so many death beds.
one woman told how when her husband lay dying he was wrapped first in a jewish prayer shawl, and his tumors went away. and then, months later, she was handed a knitted shawl, knitted by catholic women who’d thought to knit in prayer medallions, and ones of patron saints, and how in desperation she’d flung it ’round her dying husband’s shoulders. she believed, she said, in the power of a prayer shawl. and you knew she meant it.

someone else mentioned that when you are furiously knitting, you need pay some attention, and thus your mind is blocked from thinking all the other things that haunt you in a room where someone’s dying.

but this night, it was all about believing.

why, the yarn was even green, the color of a meadow in the spring, when it’s shaking off the drab of winter, bursting feverishly into life. the earthiest of greens.

and this night, the prayer with every stitch was that the cancer would be nowhere found. vanquished. sent to hell to stay there. the only place where it belonged.

fervently the mama of the shawl child worked those needles. click-click-clicking all the while.

at last, two pieces were complete. no rows, it seemed, were much the same. it was plenty holey here and there. but it was beautiful all right, the handiwork of many hands and hearts.

time to join the ends, the mama declared. her baby’s shawl was nearly ready. all talking lulled while she put her mind to this knitting task–how to make it whole.

and then one knitter in the circle–a doctor, by the way–who’d come with crochet needles, just in case, pulled them from her bag, held them poised. dove in, as if the surgeon.

more clicking followed. breaths were held all around.

and then she held it up, case closed. and the mama flung it round her shoulders. beamed. she’s a believer, this mama.

and she is sure as sure can be that what they’d done, those nights as winter turned to spring and they’d clicked and prayed, and prayed and clicked, what they’d done was knit their way to holy resurrection.

she is counting, as clearly as she counted stitches, on that shawl to keep her child whole and safe from what the cancer aims to do.

may her will be done, Lord, may her will be done.

i was blessed last night, so blessed, to be in this circle. i was entranced by these women so devoted, so devout. i hold up this one most blessed mother, and the women all around who hold up basket loads of heart ache, and don’t much take to stumbling.
have you too marveled at the ways in which women do the holy work of patching whole the world, the world and all the hearts so very often torn and tattered? where would we be without their fervent prayer and the circles that click on late into the night, never giving up where hope might come at the end of the next row?

hours on end, and well past nightfall, these past few days and eves, i’ve been digging in the dirt. the straight-up way, dirt to skin, the way it oughta be. the way of purists, and desperadoes.

count me among the latter.

ripped off the gloves, i did. sunk my fingers deep. as if clinging to the ledge, come to think of it.

even landed me some worms, a good three or four or five, over the course of my dawn-till-dark, bare-skinned diggin’.

hoisted up those worms, dangled them right before my eyes. tried to stare ’em down, see who’d blink first, the worm or me. but, dang, i never did make out where the worm face was exactly. so i simply transported the little fellows on to browner pastures.

they are worms after all.

and, of late, i’ve been feeling wholly sympathetic to the plight of each and every creepy crawly thing.

and i’ve been more than grateful to all that dwells within my garden’s mounds, the things with legs, or simply gangly roots.

it’s been–as the garden always, always is–my last-ditch, sure-thing salvation.

or at least the place that lets me unknot the kinks inside my soul. and the lumps stuffed down my throat. and the raw parts, wherever they are.

as i find myself being pried away from this holy plot that’s mine, this humble chunk of real estate that somewhere bears my name scritch-scratched on a hundred thousand documents (or so it seemed at that signing long ago), i find myself, more than usual, being called to knead through the tsuris the dirty way. the way that demands a shovel and a trowel. and knees so caked with mud they might never come clean again.

the blessed thing i’ve noted this time around, the lesson worth hauling in the house, is that, while all the world around me seems shaken, seems not the same anymore, the garden picks up where it left off.

it is in many ways a narrative ever spiraling, a plot that comes again and again. at once changed but constant.

like a great good book, one you pick up again and again, knowing just the spot on the page where your heart will race, and then the tears will come. because every time you read it, the words are just the same. only the way you read those words–the power and the message–shifts, falls in and out of shadow, spills suddenly into dappled light.

fact is, i find it wholly reassuring that everywhere i step–beneath the pines, in my squishy sodden some-day meadow, just beyond my star magnolia–i find evidence of what has been, returned again.

as if the whole experiment in birth and death and resurrection is headlined with this promise: “to be continued…”

the truth, of course, of any well-loved garden is that its cycle never ends, doesn’t flag. might wilt. might collapse in august heat. but come the spring, come april’s hope, there it bursts in may, the sweet reward for nothing less than not tossing in the trowel.

why, just beyond my kitchen window, the spicy viburnum, the one that makes me swoon at the turn of every april into may, it’s back again, replaying its intoxicating theme, reminding me of the elixir named anticipation.

and right where i planted them, and where i watched them turn to brown and look for all the world like shriveled death, there come the tips of ferns. and then the fronds, furled tight, like newborn’s fists, not yet splayed, reaching out beyond the womb.

no wonder not even hunger calls me in.

i cannot stop, cannot be sated in my quest to take it in.

everywhere i look, there’s proof: faith pays off. believing is a virtue.

why the bleeding heart, dug up and moved in the heat of july, it’s forgiving me. it’s shaken its summer shock. burst forth in tender profusion. all’s well that blooms in my garden.

how is it that the earth remembers? how is it that it gives and gives again?

who deserves such generosity?

i don’t know those answers, but i do know this: we’ve embarked, my garden and me, on a holy blessed journey. i tend with all my heart. i make mistakes galore. but in the spring, it soothes me. it sticks its neck out here and there and everywhere.

it asks little.

rewards abundantly.

teaches plenty.

so i’ve made a vow. i’ll be there for my garden as often as i can be. i’ll miss it when i’m gone. and i’ll always hurry back.

my garden’s the thing that’s saving me right now.

and i intend to pay it back in rapt attention to its glories.

forgive me, as my garden does. the day’s been long again, and the hour’s late. i might need to shift just one more blessed thing in this the latest chapter of my life: my wednesday meanderings might become my friday meanderings.

i think perhaps the chance to meander on my own slow time might be a finer thing. this downtown-first-thing on wednesdays demands one of two things: getting up at 4 to meander. or typing fast as i can in between making dinner, shuffling little legs to bed, and keeping my own eyeballs from falling closed.
i’m not one to shift my rhythms without a moan and groan. but seems the wiser thing to do, to unloose these hours, and make the end of week a holy place and time. stay tuned to see what next week brings…

so here’s my question: what does your garden whisper to you, when you tiptoe by? if not your garden, then what otherworldly living things call out to you, teach you sacred lessons?