pull up a chair

ohhhhh, i said to no one in particular, as the parade of red spots made itself most apparent, marching boldly down my thigh. now i get it. now i know why, all week, i was having visions of my bed. with me very much flung upon it.
it appears that i’ve been shingled. by now, up and down my whole entire leg, the one that’s walking rather stiffly, as if it were a peg and i was pirate peet.
it had started days before. i’d been in a blur all week. but, until now, there’d been no spots, no way, no how, to connect the dots.
when i awoke on saturday i thought there was something burning on my thigh. first it tingled, then it stung. then it started moving. not one to mess around with mamby-pamby dramas, i went straight for melodrama. i am good at melodrama. been at it all my life.
i decided before the sun was high that i had a little traveling blood clot, oh yes i did. (feel free to click me off at any time if you, rare thing, have no hypochondriacal tendencies; but if you too make mountains out of molehills, read along, misery does love company.)
i kid you not, by the time i tiptoed up to bed, my left thigh burning deep within, i kissed my children extra hard, whispered words that i would want them always to remember.
as i cast myself upon the sheets, every bit tallulah bankhead, i swiped my brow, i uttered this: “this might be it. good night.”
my sweet beloved mate, he humors me, and plays along, groaning only sometimes. when i awoke on sunday, he rolled over, remarked, chipper as all get out, “well, well, look who did not die.”
close call, said i, as i rolled right out of bed. achy. limping like old rhymes-with-tart.
i made my way through sunday, stumbled through all of monday.
by now, i tell you, i had all but given up the ghost. i was feeling crummier than crummy, my thigh, my middle, all felt as if on fire. but there were no red dots, nothing to connect. so i just decided i was weary. worn out from month of may.
and then at last on wednesday, when either disc had slipped and sciatic nerve was making like a lightning strike, or i was going nuts, the little dots at last popped out. phew and phew and phew.
it was, it is, a blazing case of shingles.
praise the lord for neighbors down the block who took the med-school route. my beloved doctor friend, a mother of five when not diagnosing spots, came running to the rescue, made a real live house call, she surely did. took one look. consulted anatomic chart. pronounced it time to get the super meds.
next morning my back-up doctor called, the one who’s not yet realized how convenient it would be to move into the ‘hood. she told me many things, but the one i liked the best was this: dave letterman, one of my nighttime heroes, or at least he was, last time i bothered to turn on the tube, was off the air for three whole weeks with shingles on his face.
youch. i doubt my little dots will keep me from anywhere. certainly not from here, since they’re not on my typing fingers. not yet anyway. if there comes a loud silence from the chair, just know that i am upstairs trying to make these dots somehow disconnect.
but while i’m here, as long as i am typing, what of the human mind that zigs and zags on its way to making sense? how often in our lives, before we see the truth for what it is, do we read all sorts of plots into what’s not truly there?
what a treasure it would be if we could simply let the story line of life unfold as is, without mucking up the works, making melodrama where there are only dots. waiting for the wisdom that will connect them, dot to dot to whole clear picture.

do you sometimes draw lines from A to G to R before returning simply to letter B? does your head go wild places as you wait for what’s unfolding? and by the way, anyone have a shingles tale to tell. my doctor told me everyone’s got one. i had none ’til now. and i’ve just told you mine, so now it’s your turn…signed, spots…

oh, deary me, in my spotted-ness i nearly forgot to say: the most blessed of birthday wishes to the magnificent and uber-wise jan oh jan. tomorrow is her day. but today is of course the launch pad. for the richness she brings to all of life, and to the table, we hold her up. in highest honor. with much love. may we grow to be as wise as you someday….

out of the corner of my eye, while i was typing at my keyboard, i saw the little legs come running up the walk. i heard the banging on the door. and then the wail. “mama,” he let loose, and then, like that, the tears.
the sobs began to heave. the baby finger, exhibit no. 1, held up, displayed, for me to catch a fleeting glance of the body part in question. the one that oozed with blood. the one that shook, in that way that something shakes when there is something rather out of place.
in one fell swoop he was in the door and flailed upon the floor. i groped, trying to get a closer look at the sorry little finger. hmm. i wondered, while i dashed to get a paper towel. and then cold water. and ice. the squishy little mama-saver they call the boo-boo bag.
i wiped his tears. i smoothed away the sweaty curls. i kept at the bleeding finger. tried hard to get a chance to diagnose. to see if underneath, there might be something broken.
the babysitter filled in the blanks in the story that was coming in between the sobs. something about a scooter. and a fall. smack dab, full force, on that baby finger.
never mind the not-so-breaking story i’d been tracking in the other room. never mind the sentence i left hanging, in the middle of a verb.
this very thing–the pains, the wails, the broken skin–is the reason long ago i decided i could only work from home.
i am lucky. i am blessed.
i say that not in hollow nod to those who have no choice. i feel the struggle of the woman just across the street, a single mama, who leaves the house at half past six, in her nurse’s whites, and pulls back to the curb, wiped out, at nearly 4, her gaggle of three already waiting and very much insisting on a piece of her.
it remains, in many circles, the pachyderm in the room that is tiptoed all around, in tentative baby steps. where a mama works, at home or not at home. whether she works, for pay or not for pay.
it is among the most private choices that a mama ever makes.
yet there’ve been trees felled and ink spilled by the tanker, in the national froth, still frothing, about what is right and what is wrong, in the domestic ring and the box the mama checks when asked the simple, “occupation?”
if it was true concern for women and children, if it was the personal pole-vaulted into the political, as means to put in place the underpinning of public policy that would ensure women the right to earn a decent living without worrying that their babies were left to God-knows-what or whom, or maybe even slipped a passport to rich and solid care, i wouldn’t mind the noise. i’d welcome it. but too often it is finger jabbing behind the mama’s back.
i suppose the only way to get at the nettling point is to, first, put down all the fingers, the pointing, jabbing fingers. and simply say out loud that there is no point in all the frothing.
it’s no one else’s business, is it? so why is it that how we choose to run our very personal lives becomes the fodder for so much political and playground debate?
i only know that in my house, long, long ago, when this equation rumbled to the surface, i had a baby boy who nursed and would not take a bottle. try leaving a babe like that home with sitter. see how far you get before a carrier pigeon is sent out to fetch you. for that was in the day when there was no such thing, at least in my price range, as a cell phone slipped lightly in your purse.
i made a choice that wasn’t cheap.
i gave up plenty over the years. i am no longer a player, not much of a player, anyway, at the newspaper i’ve called my home for the last quarter century. i have stood at fancy newsroom shindigs, and watched up-and-comers pass me by. because i was no longer someone who could get them where they wanted to go. i was only a mama who wrote stories, far from where they set their sights.
i have accidentally dropped a disposable diaper on a conference table, thinking the slim object i was pulling from my backpack was a reporter’s notebook. ooops. i watched the editor running that meeting roll his eyes. i heard him once tell me i knew nothing, i worked outside the tower. and that’s a quote.
but i did not give up the chance to be there when my boys bounded in the door from a bumpy day at school. and i did not give up the chance to wiggle loose the tooth that met with some resistance when it sunk into the hard-core apple. and i did not give up the chance to be the lap that sopped the tears when my little one came running in, his pinkie finger bleeding, swollen.
had it been dangling, the way i thought for a minute there it was, i would have been the one who grabbed the keys, played the ambulance driver.
i wouldn’t want it any other way.
i want the remedies the day demands to be the ones i minister right here at home.
it is delicate conversation, the heart throb of where a mama does the work she needs to do. it shouldn’t be debate.

no matter where or what you do in the course of every day, whether you mother, or work with mothers, i imagine you’ve given this some thought. i invite you to be polite, to listen in, to carry on a kitchen-table discourse on the ups, the downs, the sideways of the question: where and how for you is it best to ply the remedies that truly stir your heart? be they ones that heal the world, or the pinkie bleeding right before your eyes? i know, too, that what’s right at one point in our lives, might shift and change. it is a sad thing to me that women of my generation had so few models to look to, to learn from. and now, i ‘m told, women getting out of college look at us, the ones who’ve squirmed and wiggled, tried to do it all, and decided that we pretty much messed it up. they are choosing to get out of college, get married, start having babies. wham bam. wasn’t that the way it was half a century ago?

ha. in a million years i would not tiptoe up the stairs, climb into bed, pull up the covers and check out. not while the sun was shining, anyway.
i barely muster the whatever-it-takes to do that when the moon is out. when the night is all around. when lullabies are wafting in through open windows.
i am not wired to seek retreat. not in the middle of the act.
but, oh, how i long some days for a pillow under head, for some excuse, pure and simple, to call time out. to shout, “this mother’s done. she is wholly spent. she seeks retreat. do not attempt to find. not ’til dinner time. when she’ll be back, foisting chops onto your plate. worry not, she’s no deserter. she just needs a little break.”
i don’t know about you, but lately, the days are dragging. the overdrive is wearing down my gear shaft. i seek something deep and full of sustenance.
yesterday i launched full-scale refueling program. i called a friend. i cried. i went outside, hoisted hose. watered thirsty plants. imagined my own roots gulping what they needed. i lay on grass, watched puffy clouds scuttle by. put myself to bed at least an hour earlier than usual. heard the sound of the little one calling for his papa, calling for a drink. but i rolled over, went to where my aching tired parts would find their solace. i dreamt so deep i cannot tell you where that was.
i awoke, still achy, but not quite so very much.
it is time, my friends, to admit that there are spells when the demands of every day might make you feel as if you are under water.
the month of may, we’ve mentioned, is a tad on the over-scheduled side. but i am coming to think that it just might suffer from the famed seasonal affective disorder.
it is, sometimes, plain old sad. the leavings are piling higher by the hour. so, too, the hard goodbyes.
as one of the wisest teachers i ever knew once told me, when the subject was a young child’s birthday, every change of year brings with it as much longing for what’s being left behind as it brings joy for what is coming. do not miss the sadness, she counseled, behind the blowing out of candles.
so too, it seems, with end of school year. which in this little house this may is, you’ve heard before, end of kindergarten, the year that teaches you all you need to know (a much-passed-about book once told me so). and end of all of grammar school.
egad, i can see like yesterday that little pink-cheeked boy trotting off to limestone university castle, brand-new, bright-red backpack strapped around his shoulders. one day, in the door of kindergarten, now, whole lifetimes later, a wise man-child walking out another.
do not underestimate, a wise friend told me, the power of the 8th-grade graduation. you might think for a week or two that it’s just that you are busy. or tired. but suddenly, she said, it will dawn on you that moving onto high school exacts a heavy psychic toll.
perhaps it’s that, in part. perhaps it’s just the unrelenting daily grind. or holding down two jobs, one i do for love, the other for which i’m paid. and on top of those, the motherlode of jobs that come with being the mother.
whatever is the cause, the end result is this: i’m bushed.
and i know i’m not alone. which is why i say so here.
we can all be perfectly adept at getting along just fine for most of every year. but within each calendar, there are days and weeks where the climb is uphill all the way. and the air gets thinner with every lifting, falling foot.
it is, i am coming to believe, only deeply human to honor the fatigue. to admit that there are times when pillow, tears or time-out will not pump up the flattened tire.
it is times like this, i think, when you reach across the table, take the hand of a very tired friend, squeeze tight, and pray with all your might for a blessed wind to carry you until the load grows lighter once again.
which, i think, is what i just did.

as if my achy, tired self much mattered….yesterday afternoon, as i sat down to sink my teeth into a sandwich, i found myself staring at the front page of the chicago tribune. there, a photo of a beautiful iraqi teenage girl. i started to read, and barely kept from crumbling. the girl, dragged in a headlock into a circle of angry men, was beaten to death. gruesomely. for the sin of loving the wrong man. whole thing caught in cell phone images. i wept. i weep still. for a world that beats its women. i ask you to pray for her soul, the hearts of those who loved her, women and men. and for those whose stories we do not know, but which would leave us more than broken if we did. my silly load is nothing compared to these. God have mercy.

please, share your load….

look elsewhere, friends, if it is a recipe for fricassee of cicada you are after. you’ll not find ways to sizzle crunchy bugs in bath of butter. not here, i tell you.
not even if, if i understand correctly, they are best when just emerging from their rip-van-winkle slumber and shedding their standard-issue nymph skins, all naked milky-white there upon on the tree trunks, tasting rather like cold, canned asparagus.
now i like asparagus. even in a can. one of the rare few vegetables that can slither out of a can and still be considered chic enough to serve on ladies’ luncheon plates.
but i’ll not have at the poor emergent masses. will not spear them with my fork, the little darlings who do not bite, the red-eyed, orange-legged, technicolor visions that, at twilight this very night, shall be arriving without their suitcases.
who thinks to pack when going under for 17 winters, 17 summers, and all those springs and falls besides?
there is hubbub in all the land, it seems. everyone is gaga, getting armed for the invasion. i doubt there is a speck of netting left in any store. i have christo visions of vast acres wrapped in tutu netting.
but not at my house. not here where since my manchild was a wee one he has learned the fine art of shooshing out the fly. not smashing the fly. not splatting the fly. merely opening a window, and escorting the little fellow out.
i cannot quite so proudly boast of child no. 2. he is more the hunter than the gatherer. he is known to flick a worm, to poke the bug that thinks to land in his vicinity. i have my work cut out for me still.
but for tonight, i say, grab the picnic blanket, stretch out on the lawn, take in the epic, once-a-generation show.
because i grew up in an age of drive-in movies where black-and-white crawling insects, with bugged-out eyes, and flailing antennae, would be blown up big, so big you could make out the outlines from the other side of the cornfield, i have in my head a sort of 1950s sci-fi image of all the planet quaking, drum-beat drumming, as the earth lets loose and vast armies of cicada come up from the underground.
i see my whole backyard awash in exoskeletons. i hear the nights, the days, thick with cicada calls. that rubbing, thrubbing that, i’m told, will sound almost as if the bugs are chanting, “pharoah, pharoah.” (i’ll be ear to ground, i tell you, to see if i can make that out.)
in fact, before i did a tad of reading, i thought this morning would be that way. i thought i was waking up to a land of uninterrupted cicada, unbroken plain of newly emerging ruby-eyeballed critter.
but, dang, i went out to fetch the milk, and not a single bugger did i eyeball.
alas, we must wait still longer. tonight at sunset, perhaps, the underground alarm will rouse them from their mighty nap, and en masse, they will roust about, make for higher parts, begin their final march to death.
for really, truly, this is it. the closing chapter for what the bug people, the entomologists, refer to as brood X, of the order magicicada.
when the little nymphlets crawled into the ground, way back in 1990, back when lech walesa got the vote in poland’s planet-shaking presidential count and the two germanies agreed to come together, the life that lay before the ’cadas was plotted out as this: sleep. sleep. sleep. emerge. mate. die.
in six short weeks, it will all be over. their lives, recorded nowhere really, duly ended. by the time the fireworks of independence day burst into the sky, brood X, class of ’007: mere history.
this is, though, a rather booming crescendo to their humdrum lives. they sleep in silence, occasionally rolling over to nibble on a tree root. they slither out without much sound, an astounding fact considering that there are some 1.5 million of the little critters per acre, people. you would think that, even tippy-toeing, that many feets would make a rumble.
ah, but then, once they shed their nymph robes, take on the sleek black sheath of adult cicadahood, the rumble will begin.
they do not go quiet unto death.
they wake the neighbors, darn it. they keep the babies up and squawking.
if you were pre-programmed to sleep, to wake, to mate, to die with your entire population, you too, might make a hearty noise.
so let the noise begin, i say. let the backyards rumble.
the boy cicadas will shake their tymbals, that is the noisemaker on their bellies. if a girl is keen for how he shakes, she’ll flick a wing, let him in on her affection. sort of like winking from the far end of the bar in some smoky den on rush street, i suppose.
off they’ll flit. but once they fornicate (yes, that’s the scientific word), he’ll keel over. kaput, the end. he’s dead.
she, though, gets to carry on a little longer. she will bear her eggs, some 600 if you’re counting. and she will make a little slit in your branch (that’s where the netting might come in, if you are into cicada prohibitions). she will drop her load. and when she’s done, done carrying on the species, she, too, will succumb. she too will keel.
the little baby cicadas, now orphaned, will crawl back underground, will go to sleep, perhaps in teeny tiny tears. before they lull to sleep, one of ’em will have to think to set the alarm. turn the hands of the big cicada clock to 2024.
when once again, i will do all i can to keep the hungry paws of all the poachers off whoever it is who emerges from my lawn.

sign up here if you too want to join the save-the-cicada brigade. they really aren’t much nuisance, just a little crunching underfoot, a little noisy maybe. put up an umbrella if you must. but do not, whatever you do, wave a fry pan in my presence. let me know how you weigh in on the awesome sucking cicada.
stay tuned in case i change my mind…
oh, one last thing: the little darlings carry quite a load of mercury, it seems. so before you bite, consider that.

on another subject altogether: over on the bottomless cup, there is a newly poured essay from the mother of ben byer, the brave hero who lives with ALS, and who wrote and produced the award-winning documentary “indestructible.” check it out. you won’t regret.

the hands belong to henry. henry is my farmer. well, he wouldn’t probably think in quite such possessive terms, but i do.

henry’s hands, the way i see it, are sacred tools. and they do sacred work. he is all about the business of putting life into loamy, yeasty-smelling soils. soils that teem with life.

and from that teeming soil, henry grows mounds and heaps and bushel baskets full to spilling. henry coaxes life from life and puts it back again.

just this past saturday, at the first of the farmers markets of the season, henry rolled up his truck from congerville, smack dab in the belly button of illinois, where his 10 acres are nestled between kinder creek and walnut creek on what he calls The Land, and he hauled out tender baby leaves that taste of the earth, and roots too, that seemed mighty happy to see the light.

there was mesclun, and spinach, of course. and ruffly lettuces and lamb’s quarters and arugula and asparagus, in stalks so green and sturdy you wanted to eat ’em raw, right then and there before they saw a drop of steaming water.

and, because henry is no ordinary organic farmer, there were shiso leaves, and asian flat-leaved chives. and french breakfast radishes, and just plain red ones too.

there was rhubarb by the crate and tender baby beets, and hardy sweet potatoes that, like wine, henry said, got finer over winter.

with every freeze and thaw, the gnarly, nubby roots–jerusalem artichoke and burdock, to name but two–who spent the winter underground, took in what the earth around them had to offer. and it offered plenty.

henry knows and honors all the earth: the soil, the seeds, the wind, the rain. it is all of the circle that is henry’s life. it can become all of ours, too, if we pay attention. if we rinse the dirt off henry’s sweet potatoes, put them in our pots, in our tummies. if we commit them to our very souls.

i’ve known for weeks that henry was out early in the morning, tending to the alchemy of seeds and sprouts. tending, too, to the fields, the rich black canvas for his farmer art. he plowed those fields, churned winter cover back into the earth, where it, in turn–it is all about the turn, ecclesiastes’ turn, in farming–would feed the summer crops.

all the while, he was keeping close eye on warm fronts and sudden frosts. when it came time, time to clear the greenhouse of his headstart on growing things, he would be deep in transplant, tucking tens of thousands of sprouted things deep into the earth.

while we were waiting, waiting for the saturday when henry’s tents would once again be raised, the bushel baskets turned, their earthy prizes spilling onto tables.

i talked to henry early saturday, i asked him about his sacred work.

“it is sacred,” he began, cradling a clutch of beets, “but if you say that, it kind of ruins it right there. it’s at such a level, it just is.

“as soon as you start to describe it, you start to lose it. it sounds pretentious or silly. when really it is sacred. sacred is getting dirty, getting wet, getting hot, getting cold, producing food.

“i work with life and death every day. life means death to another organism. harvesting a crop is death. decaying matter is death, but it gives life. it is a sacred thing. there is a sacred balance between life and death.”

i stood there feeling mighty blessed that the man who grows my food thinks these thoughts while working in the fields.

henry let on that it was weed season now, meaning he is on the prowl, clearing out the things that shouldn’t be, to make room for those that should. he’s out the door at half past four, these days. back in at 8. and that’s night we’re talkin’, people. 15 plus hours, and getting longer by the day.

“it’s not hard at all,” said henry. “what i do, i match my life to the cycle of nature. nature does the hard work. it pulls me along. the sun actually pulls me out of bed. the longest day of the year i’ll be up at 4:15.

“you don’t feel tired at all,” he insists, and you get the sense he really means it, you get the sense henry never says what he doesn’t exactly mean.

“whereas in winter, i’d feel dead because there’s no light. in winter i get home at 5 o’clock, eat dinner, think about going to bed. i look at the clock, 8 o’clock. i think, ‘man, i wouldn’t even be coming in from the fields yet.’”

henry is in the fields from february ’til almost christmas. his hands, earth-stained, hard with purpose, are the tools that i’d been thinking most about.

i asked him if he ever blessed his hands; told him i’d been offering up a prayer or two for those blessed tools.
he gave a little chuckle, turned his wrists to give his hands a better look.

said: “i always liked my hands. i must say. they’re my best tools. i like to watch ‘em move.

“they work so well. they do whatever you want, pretty much, without you thinking about it. they harvest, they weed, they get cold, in the bone-cold autumn, they get so cold they won’t work the zipper to go to the bathroom. that’s the one time they don’t work. they’re game, they’re completely game, but they just won’t work, can’t make it happen.”

henry gave his fingers a little wiggle.

“they go places without you telling ‘em to do it. i think that’s why i always wanted to work with my hands.”

he wiggled ’em once more, he bounced the beets. he looked down on his farmer hands. “they sing and they dance.”

indeed they do. they sing, they dance, they feed me through and through.

ahhh, it is a blessed thing to have your very own farmer. i share henry with all of you because, like the bounty he culls from the earth, there’d be no sense in hoarding him or what he harvests. henry is so wise he knocks me speechless. i could listen to him all day. i hope you too know a farmer. tell us about your farmer. i’d love to hear a tale of other hands that sing and dance. especially deep in blessed sacred earth.

the bequeathing usually comes at the end of a muddy shovel. a clump is dug, is offered. it might land, for temporary keeping, in a soggy cardboard box. or get wrapped in wads of newspaper. and then it lumbers home, bumping all the way, in the back of a station wagon. or tucked in the bottom of a suitcase.
don’t think a serious gardener would think twice of, or be bothered by, airport security. certainly not a sentimental gardener.
which, no surprise, would be the box i check when it comes to categorizing those who muck about in mud.
i am, through and through, a sentimental soul. and so is my garden.
i grew up at the earth-stained hands of a hand-me-down gardener. so that’s the surest way i know to garden.
because i’ve watched her, for decades, ferry home orphaned things, discarded things, things that delighted her, or simply reminded her, i know that almost every single long-returning plant, every perennial, in my mother’s garden came from someone else’s.
oh sure, she makes the rounds each spring of the old greenhouse that grows geraniums from seed. and impatiens, too. but except for that single sweep for annuals, the growing things that insist on starting over every year, she does barely any buying for her beds.
instead, she gets her growing things the honest way: she lifts them from other people’s soils. with full blessing, of course.
she has a swath of english ivy you could easily get lost in. plenty of baseballs have. and every single speck of it started out on the hilly slope of the proud cincinnati red-brick where she, long ago, knelt beside her mother, learning how to turn the earth.
that house, once magnificently draped in ivy, is no longer. but the ivy lives on. now 350 miles north of where it once was loosed, its white waxy tendrils shaken of their soils, carried far to where the relocated daughter would sink her roots, would bloom, in a garden not in her mother’s shadow.
my mother’s peonies, which don’t yet grow in my yard but will, so help me, have roots that will make you want to trespass on my grass as soon as they do, and bequeath a peony or three to your very self. (i think they call that stealing).
if you promise not to tell, and try with all your might to resist the peony-poaching temptation, i’ll let you in on a big fat secret: they come from the yard of the old man whose family home was sold a long, long time ago, in memphis, to one mr. e. presley.
yup. the house, now known famously as graceland, was where the man who grew the peonies grew up.
oh, one little thing: he didn’t grow the peonies there. he grew them later, in another century-old house, one on the ravines that jut down into streams that feed into lake michigan, about 20 miles north of chicago, in a place called highland park.
and on and on go the stories of the plants my mother tends in her garden. the ferns from the biochemist who taught me much that i know about God. the lily-of-the-valley from the woodland where i grew up pretending i was a pioneer, making coffee of the wild chicory, berry pies of the honeysuckle fruits that stained my fingers red and my white shorts, too.
all of them, except those presley peonies, darn it, have hopscotched on to my house. they never seem to mind the migration. they settle in, sink roots, stay as long as they are welcome. and they are very welcome.
as would those peonies be, mother dearest. (hmm, i think they call that coveting. yet another garden sin.)
truth is, a garden, being of the earth, is most generous, without you even asking. you take a shovel, you slice the earth, the roots, and it gives forth.
you take, the garden gives. willingly. it asks no pay. other than undying devotion. but even that, it doesn’t demand. only appreciates. mightily.
one plant becomes two. life divides. multiplies. you move it, tuck it, water it. and, poof, the earth just gave you double bounty.
so, too, it gave you story.
to walk through a hand-me-down garden is to walk among those who’ve weeded and hoed and sweated before you. you bend and snip your grandmother’s ivy. you watch the fern unfurl; you think of the man with the booming baritone whose theology rattled you, shook you, and woke you up in your teenage years to its very rooted possibilities.
my mother, who has pedaled down the street, her trowel at the ready to rescue trillium and wild geranium before the bulldozer did them in, shakes her head at those who skip the stories, those whose gardens come bought, not borrowed.
“when you walk around the garden you remember all the people,” she says, as if that’s half the point of planting anything at all. “i think a lot of people now have landscape crews come in.” what’s the point, you hear her thinking.
two points: sometimes a hand-me-down reminds you of another gardener. sometimes it reminds you of another garden.
i know. i handed-down a plant to myself. from my old garden–my first, really–to my new one, the one that’s still becoming mine.
i ached, couldn’t bear to leave that magic garden, that little pocket of solace i had tended for a dozen years. one whose dirt i had sunk my sorrows in during some empty longing years when the one thing i wanted to grow i couldn’t.
i buried grief into those mounds, watered more than once with salty tears.
i pruned and clipped and hoped. i watched my heartache break open into bloom, each and every spring, when all my tender things jostled through the crust of earth, returned, reminded me of the resurrecting promise deep within.
i could not up and leave that little plot. so i took it. or a piece of it, anyway. a blessed fragile beauty, one with sky blue tiny petals, smaller than a fairy’s thimble, that float, it seems, a mist above silver-threaded leaves.
it’s called jack frost brunnera. and i don’t know if in the history of real estate transactions, there had ever been a contract that included what the lawyers call an exclusion—meaning something you won’t sell with the house—for a measly $25 plant.
but i wanted that brunnera. i wanted my every spring to include the magic of the floating mist. so indeed i excluded it. and now it blooms, my totem of my other garden, beneath another woman’s star magnolia, one that came to me with the contract on this old house.
one grows in the dappled shade of the other.
hand-me-down gardens do that. their roots get plenty tangled. they become a patchwork of all your life, a rolling blanket of ever-blooming beauty.
some day, you hope, the tender things you love will bloom in quilt squares in other people’s gardens, in the light and shadow of someone else’s heart.
some day, you hope, someone else will see that floating mist, kneel down, if only for a moment, and drink in the story of the crazy lady who would not leave her plot behind.
she dug up a piece of it. she kept her watch. and then she handed it down and down and down.
the truth of how a garden really grows.

ahh, people, do you have tales to tell of the old souls planted in your garden? do you know the joy, the thrill, of carrying home a tender thing, tucking it rather under your wing, watching it make itself at home in your parcel of the planet? plain fact is, the handing down of plants is, for those less inclined toward sentimental musings, just another name for weeding. as i can hear my mother say, she is making room for something else. why hold onto more than anyone really needs?

oh, look, you say. it is a house where they play paint-by-numbers. only, instead of paper, they play with walls.
why slosh paint all over, the way the normal people do? why not toss it just in little splotches?
the checkerboard effect: a dash of argyle here. stockholm down below. oh, look, over there, on the northern end, it’s a blob called scout, for reasons i cannot imagine. a variation of mud. one we all decided looked like something nasty smeared onto the wall.
the little one, not one to curb his words, told us impolitely just what he thought it looked like. the big one giggled. said, i wasn’t going to say so, but he’s right, you know.
which, of course, set me and the household critic back to musing color.
which, of course, set me, the chief supplier of said splotches, back to the little shop where the man sells many colors. so many colors we often get quite cross-eyed. and, eventually, rather color-blind.
who’s to tell the difference between the bluish-gray above and the grayish-blue below? does it really matter? well, yes, when you are married to the architecture critic. it all is scrutinized. it all is deeply thought.
so our house, quite often, looks as though it’s abstract art. looks as though mr. rothko’s been here, aiming opened cans of paint in the direction of our 8 1/2-by-22 plaster canvas.
it is our unique technique for deciding just which way the paint will roll. or, as those architecture people put it: we are eavesdropping on the walls, as they whisper to each other, discerning just who it is they wish to be. what is indeed their truest color? are they feeling blue? or are they deeply gray?
why horse around with little chips of paint, so small they make you squint? why not layer on the paint in splotches magnified, so big you really get the message?
and so it is that the room that once reeked of northwoods cabin, all done up in knotty pine, is now in midst of turning just a tad more uptown, morphing into music chamber where bass and keyboard will be bouncing off the pick-a-color-any-color walls.
and so it is that blue v. gray is once again the subject at the dinner table. no civil war, not here, just deeply-hued domestic debate.
trouble is, we are big on color around here. or at least one of us is.
the other, given his druthers, would paint the walls a minimalist palette. you might have noticed the kitchen walls are white on white on white. you might have gathered that one of us needed much convincing to lock her inner-paintbrush down deep inside where, every white-washed day, it hollers to be freed.
if keeping score, however, (and who would stoop so low?) the pyramid of drippy cans underneath the stairs might suggest that she who’s keen on color is ahead, 9 rooms to 3.
yup. the walls in the house where we live are, variously, schoolbus yellow (it’s not called that, but it might as well be), navy, gray, chinese red (known to the wise-guy architect—the one we pay, not the one we live with—as north shore red, poking not-so-gentle fun at the ubiquity and lack of imagination of those in these here parts who can’t help but ooze their country-club aspirations), and a few splashes of creamy, buttery yellow, besides.
once, not so long ago, in a fit of multi-chromatic fuming, one of the critics around here pooh-poohed someone else around here’s so-called kindergarten taste when it came to coloring on the walls. argued that to walk in here was to stroll through a box of crayola crayons.
harrumph.
at least i didn’t go for the 64-pack.
and so, in attempt to appease the color averse, we are down-hueing the formerly knotty front room. we are ditching sour lemon from surrounding walls. we are going argyle.
or at least that is now the bluish-gray of the western wall. with north, east, and south to follow suit, shortly.
ah, but as long as there are rollers, and painty puddles in which to roll, there stands a chance that we will once again change our mind and change our color.
mark rothko where art thou?

i have long been convinced i might be in a minority in the home-decor-with-hubby dept. (although, truth be told, things here are rather finer for his highly educated eye.) anyone decorate with a mate? anyone have a riotous color war on which to report? anyone else hem and haw over a scant degree of difference in the various hues at hand? go ahead, splash color…

once upon an innocence, i thought may was just another month. a stretch of days, the ligament, joining april to june.
and then i had a baby. and then that baby turned into a schoolboy. and then, poof, like the wizard with his cloud of smoke and falling stars, i got let in on the big fat lurking secret.
may is nuts. may is crazy. may, people, is madness.
in may, the list of verbs is long: you pant, you spin, you lope. it all gets very blurry.
you bake brownies for the teachers, then you whip up lunch, just in case they’re hungry after eating all the brownies.
you take your seats for recitals. but, oops, first you tear apart the house searching high and low for the gotta-have-it, no-excuses, black regulation belt that is holding in the tails of the blue orchestra shirt, keeping the black orchestra pants from falling to the stage.
did i mention that you sign permission slips, you send in envelopes of cash. you buy the teachers presents, because you love them, and because someone sent out an email demanding double bills–or else.
just this week alone, in the sorry story that is our life, we count: one recital, two concerts, one 8th-grade dance, one high school activities night, one sunday school service project, a baby shower, a bridal shower, soup kitchen, soccer practice, soccer game, t-ball game, bass lesson, carpool at 6:45 in the morning.
oh my. and that is totally not counting the other grownup around here who was in and out of town twice, once by train, once by plane, leaving me to fend for my dizzy whirling self.
ah, but as i can hear my straight-talkin’ sans kiddie friends saying, all together in a mighty chorus, “sorry, sweets, this gig you did sign up for. if you wanted bonbons in may, you shoulda skipped the mating game.”
so true.
it’s just that may sneaks up on you. december you expect. it’s the nationally hectic month. no surprises there.
but until they hand you that little wad at the maternity wing, the one they swaddle in a way that you can never do again, and shoosh you out the exit, well, you are clueless.
and you remain clueless (oh, in so many ways) through all the diaper years. but then somewhere around maybe kindergarten, earlier if your sweet thing is precocious, is signed up for every pottery-spinning, folk-tune-humming, shakespeare-at-the-zoo kiddie class under the blazing sun, you find yourself and your calendar slammed in the merry, merry month of end-of-year recitals, start-of-summer sports, and all-purpose winding-down-the-schooldays.
you could run out of ink, trying to keep your calendar appropriately up to snuff.
so there you are, a kindergarten mama, rubbing your sorry brow, trying to make the pounding go away, when you shift your eyes from right to left, make sure the coast is clear, then you lean in, and you whisper to another someone draped in mama-wear.
psst, you ask, by any chance are you spinning in your sleep? is this not the month of never, ever catching breath?
the one in mama-wear, she laughs. she laughs in the way of someone who is clued in, and who realizes that you are not.
she hands you a wad of tissue. she hands you oxygen tank. she slaps you on the angel blade, that little stub where your wing forgot to sprout.
“buck up, mama,” she says, sending you on your way. “june will be here soon. and then it’s only west nile and dehydration you’ll need to fret about. bug spray and water bottles will nip those in the bud.
“it’s just may you must endure.”

before whirling off the chair, diving deep into the day, anyone have a nanosecond to do some typing here? anyone else caught off-guard by the madness that is may? if it would make you feel better, sort of like stripping off the pantyhose that held you in all day, you too can pound your heart out, and tell us every sorry item on your laundry list of things to do. the one with the most things, will win a little prize: a personalized oxygen tank, with a pink nasal cannula. on your mark, get set, start typing…….

according to the number people, according to those who scribble little lines on charts, make dots, connect them, study the rise and fall of inclines, project into the future, anchor their living, breathing, to what the numbers tell them, today is the day you might think about lifting your trowel from its wintry slumber, shaking off the cobwebs and giving it a little aerobic workout.
today, people, is the official last frost date, the date the gardeners circle on their calendars, the date they know as surely as they know the 25th of december, the 15th of april, and, well, the very day they blow out the candles on their cake.
what it means, though, is all rather iffy.
it means that the middle day of may, a.k.a. today, is, if you dug through centuries of archives, if you played statistician, if you studied air masses and cold fronts, if, if, if, this would be the day on which the scales tip in your favor, and you stand a winning chance, should you grab the trowel and fling some dirt today, that you’ll not wake up some morning hence to find your geraniums shivering in their pity pots, decked out in winter white.
unless of course you bring up the subject at your nearby nursery, where the crusty folk who spend their days slinging 4-inch annuals, packing dirt under their nails, slugging back cans of Coke to keep up with the crush at the cash registers, have a decidedly guarded take on the matter.
“ahh, it might be the last day you’ll get a freeze. but the last frost date, i don’t care what they say, is memorial day. unless you live near the lake where it could go either way. i know plenty o’ years we lost plants memorial day,” barked bob, whose neck, from slinging all day long, was red as the aforementioned geraniums, the ones he was loading off a lopsided red wagon onto the plywood counter, tallying up yet another three-digit tab.
indeed, the date is highly amended. modifiers modifying modifiers.
and, yes, if you gathered all the gardeners in a circle, asked each to tell a tale of the latest date a garden ever froze, you would get as many dates as there are stories.
but statistically speaking, people, today’s the date to lift the trowel. if you live in zone 5 b. if you live close enough to the lake, but not so close that chill winds are likely to blow through your backyard. if your last name starts with the letters a-m.
which points, people, to the folly of all these means and medians, averages and statistical best-hopes.
you can garden by the numbers. or you can garden by heart.
i, being a mamby-pamby girl, i do a little bit of both. i keep an eye, at least, on the numbers, but i go with where the warm winds blow. i often jump the gun.
just yesterday, loading up at the ramshackle little nursery that i think i’ll call my own (i’m fickle, floating from nursery to nursery, deciding which one’s got the best characters, the most color–and i don’t mean in the pots), i heard tell that it was way too soon to have my herbs outside.
well, don’t tell the thyme and basil. they’ve been getting along just fine. added just the right touch to the red sauce i made the other night.
as always, the lesson here extends beyond the garden. you can play it by the numbers. live your life the actuarial way. or you can hunker down in your own personal micro-climate, make the most of the way the rays hit you on your cheek. grab for sweaters when the chill winds blow.
’cause you know, when you’ve been replaying this record for a while, that soon as you pin your dreams on some digits on a gridded page, a storm’ll blow in, knock you flat, and you’ll be left scratchin’ your head.
won’t do the window boxes any good to point to the calendar, claim a penalty on the field.
like all life, you plant with all your heart, you take your chances. you add freeze-dried basil to your salad, if you have to.

truth be told, i was at the nursery back in april. trucks weren’t even unloaded. but i was there, at the ready. i know we’ve got folks here who fling dirt far as california, fair london even, and i do believe you’ve been safe for weeks now. months, in the case of sunny southern california. you probably don’t even have a frost date. but you do have earthquakes. which get in the way of a garden. any oops-i-jumped-the-gun stories to be told? in the garden, or beyond? always we keep an eye to the beyond…..

quiescence, as often happens, was rather abruptly interrupted here the other morning. there i was, blah-blah-blahing on the phone, when suddenly, up above my head, i detected something flapping. it was not a butterfly. not a cicada–not yet anyway.
its wings, whatever it was, were making noise. right in my suddenly perked-up ear.
egad, i yelped, as whatever winged thing it was circled me, took off for parts south and west.
it was a bird, all right. a warbler or a wren. forgive me, i know not all my mousy-gray birds, and certainly not when they are diving for my head.
i thought, oh, how sweet. the birds have all been reading this here blog. one day i was yammering about putting out the smucker’s, the jam of choice should you care to bring on the winged things. the next, i was letting on about how i just can’t bear to bring the outside inside, mentioned how a little sharp-edged therapy was loosening the ties that bind.
and then, poof, the l’il bird brain puts two and two together, decides ol’ mrs. smucker lady needs to spend her morning up close and personal with a frantic feathered thing. the outside, rather fully inside.
fact is, i rather liked, for the while that it was here, having a little pet songbird. only problem was, it seemed a bit, um, rattled by the presence of my roof. and so it did was birdies do when they are rattled: it pooped.
oh yes, oh yes. it pooped and flew and flew some more. it was playing on the stairs. up and down. in and out of the bathroom (not politely putting that room’s function to any proper use, now, thank you).
it darted in our bedroom. checked out the bed, where poor cat, now wide awake, thought perhaps he was dreaming. he drooled, the cat did. but the bird did not. the bird kept darting in and out of rooms.
the oddest thing, as if none of the above is odd enough, i swear this house was sealed. the doors were closed. the windows, shut.
which reminded me of the night the bats came in, another night the house was allegedly, purportedly hermetically sealed.
i was home alone that summer’s night. had just come home from l’hopital, as the french would so poetically say it, with a belly stitched stern to bow.
i was sitting in my bed, when once again, flapping overhead. mon dieu, i might have said, keeping with the french, it is a bat.
but then more flapping.
it was not a bat. it was two. turned out a pair of bats were playing follow-the-leader around my bed, around my head.
soon as i dared to inch out from under the pillow, i called a neighbor. she tiptoed in, a blanket on her head. i tried really hard not to laugh. but she was in the foyer yelping for her life. she has a blood-curdling yelp, i discovered that very night.
and there is something about yelps and stitches ’cross your middle: they don’t do well together. not when you are laughing so hard you think the stitches, and what they keep from coming out, will split right open.
she yelped until my big brave warrior returned from the swimming pool. i yelled out the window, from the confines of my bat-protected room (i had closed the door, in the fastest dash you ever did see, ’specially for a lady holding her stitches to keep from splitting).
brave warrior, clued into the home invaders, did a warrior thing: he hauled in the yelping neighbor’s mate. they geared up for the occasion with bike helmets, soggy towels, and tennis rackets. tiptoed in, headed straight for the computer, leaving me alone upstairs, in stitches. quite literally.
while batman and robin googled “bats, how to chase,” i pressed against the bedroom door, ear held close, listening to the flap-flap-flap of bat wings in the hall.
to cut a side-splitting saga short: the racket-wielding boys, i mean men, opened up a window, and we surmised (you spend the night wondering, i assure you) that out the window the little batties flew.
which is where we return to the story of the little bird who came in for coffee the other morning.
at last, after much hide-and-go-seek, the bird and i found ourselves together in a room. poor thing, beak ajar, chest pounding, it was looking rather harried.
i tried to talk it down. it wasn’t listening. rather, it was flitting back and forth. from bed post to perch of closet door. when at last it banged into the window, my little bulb, the one inside my head, clicked on.
(“duh,” i can hear you saying. don’t think this magic computer does not tell me what you’re saying as you merrily read along.)
anyway, i opened the window, just like the bat boys finally did. tried to shoo. tried to point the way. but the birdie wouldn’t have it. stubborn little bird, he was busy polka-dotting. perhaps, i thought, he is waiting for some smucker’s all his own. served on little toasty points, on a silver tray.
oh, phew, at last, our playtime over, out the birdie flew. i saw him (i just have a hunch it was a boy, don’t ask me why), the little bird, land safely in the arbor vitae.
it was all, of course, rather eye-opening in the early morning. and, of course, the little sleeper child slept through every blessed flap-flap-flap.
while he wrapped up his little zzzzzs, i retraced the birdie’s every flap, wad of tissue with me, wiping as i went.
aha, the point of entry, i discovered. a front window, not far from where the nesting’s going on, it was open a crack and a half.
the little bird, it seems, took that as invitation.
this little tale, promised as a cautionary saga, really has no moral, no overarching point.
but in keeping with my promise i would offer only this: put in your screens, do not delay. you never know who might decide to beak and enter on an otherwise uneventful springtime morning.

it’s monday, people. time for wake-up tales of invasionary nature. anyone have a critter-in-the-crawlspace tale to tell?

and of course, just as once upon a time, monday meant washday, here at the chair it means the lazy susan spins afresh.

finally, hope that all of you who mother (and that would be all of you, in one form or another) had a most lovely mothering day. we sure did here…