pull up a chair

these might be called the sawdust days–dry and rough and shaved into crumbles.

some nights i fall into bed, thinking, hoping, praying maybe my tossings and turnings, the brackets in between sleep, will clear out my head and my heart and my soul.

but then i wake up in the morning, flop my feet on the floor, feel the twinge up my leg. and the one that toys with my heart. the one that weighs me down.

oh, it’s all sorts of somethings. the news from the box by the side of the bed, the one i ought to change, maybe, to mozart instead of the global markets’ collapse.

then there’s the news that comes folded on paper. the one that’s paid my paycheck all of these years. the one that brought me my truelove, and both of our boys; double bylines, we call them.

that ol’ paper brought me half the friends of my life, if i stopped and started to count. brought me nearly every adventure. brought me to the foot of heroes, known and unknown. brought me dinner tables brimming with stories. brought a skip to my heart.

brought me the nearest thing i ever felt to glory be: the miracle of seeing words typed in the near-dark or the fluorescent glow of the newsroom, tumbled onto the next morning’s headlines, onto the stoops and the bus and the train cars, the glory of feeling pulled–on a broomstick to heaven, so help me–to tell in plain words a life-changing story.

can’t tell you how many times the life that was changed was mine.

these days, though, i seem to be mourning. i’m caught, somehow, between what used to be news and how it works now. not sure if, in all of those pages, there’s a place for what i do best. or, at least what i love most of all.

so it is that i walk through these hours, sometimes aching and oftentimes wincing. i swallow back tears more often than anyone knows.

and i gather up grace, wherever it falls.

i’ve been through these kinds of days before. i’ve learned what it takes. the one sure, holy equation.

i’ve listened long and hard to wise souls all around me, ones who, too, for one reason or another, have tasted the dry crumbly dust in the mouth that comes with most kinds of grieving.

it’s these stretches of days when time ticks, but then loses its place. the tock comes, but not quite when you need it. you’re lost in your head–or is it your heart–as you strain to untangle the knots, see through the haze. time clearly is warped, and so is your sense of the surest way home.

on those kinds of days, when your feet weigh you down, and your insides do too, there’s only one sure cure to propel you into the light.

it’s grace gathering, pure and simple.

and its holiest spark is how it comes cloaked in the plainest of cloth. doesn’t come at you blinking and beeping and flashing bright lights. you just lay down a footstep and find that you’ve entered compartments of grace.

just today it came in cinnamon toast, studded with raisins, slathered with butter and drifted with mounds of cinnamon sugar. that toast shared the plate with a pear, sliced and juicy and waiting. for someone.

my little one, the one who brings me grace by the gallons these days, he was due to bound in the door any minute. i too had just stumbled in, as a matter of fact. day before, i’d plain missed the after-school hour, typing away at my faraway desk.

i could’ve skipped right over the moment, the chance, the grace in the wings. could have mad-dashed back to my desk. back to the work that’s never quite done.

but then, without folderol, without the trill of a drum, those scant few minutes–the ones when the backpack is shed and the stories spill fiercely–they invited me in.

come, come, they whispered. partake. take a moment, lift it up from this everyday altar. break bread. then, while you’re at it, they must have insisted, take it and toast it. lay it out where he’ll see it, where he’ll know in an instant: she was waiting for me. my mama, she knows how to feed me.

and so, grace descended on us, wrapped us, tight in the blanket of side-by-side comfort.

grace is balm for the soul. it feeds us in places that growl out in hunger. it moistens the parts that are parched.

grace is the prayer beads we string in a row. the rosary of life lived at attention. it’s the layer of soul tied to the divine.

and it comes unannounced most every time.

it comes, yes, in cinnamon toast. it comes, too, in the molasses light of october, the way it catches there on the last dying petal of the black-eyed susan i stubbornly keep in the vase on the sill.

it comes in the moon playing peek-a-boo behind the whipped-cream swirls of the clouds in the nightsky, a frolic so wholly delicious you stop on your way to dump out the trash, and next thing you know you’re humming along with all of the stirrings that come from the boughs and the bushes–a rhapsody you wouldn’t have heard, wouldn’t have taken in gulps, but for the something called grace that slowed you and held you. and seeped in through the cracks.

it comes, grace does, like the brush of the great palm of God, there on your brow.

be filled, it urges. take heart, it commands.

the world is more than you know, more than you see. there is, at work every hour, a layer of beauty and truth and infinite wisdom.

its name is grace.

and gather it greedily. it’s there for the hungry, the thirsty, the aching.

it’s there for the ones who believe. and it’s there for the ones who barely remember.

how does grace find you these days? do you find yourself in steep need of that holy tap on the shoulder?

‘round about dinner time the other night, the email slipped in. a note under the door, unnoticed. for a while. but then, i must have tiptoed back, glanced at the flat black box that these days brings me most of my news.

there it was, marked simply, starkly: “sad news.”

oh, no, i gulped, afraid to peek inside.

when i clicked, i read, and heard my heart break too. there’s a little girl in my little one’s second-grade class. her name is alice. and her mama had just died.

now i don’t know alice. and i’ve never met her mama. maybe i’ve seen her here or there, but she’s not someone i would’ve pointed to, said, oh, there’s alice’s lovely blessed mama.

but nonetheless i swallowed back a tear.

the news came home, crept beneath my door. told me once again what i know–what we all know–but what we lose track of when one zany day melds into the next. when what we worry about is getting dinner on the table, and children into bed. when we worry for our jobs. and mutter frazzled sounds when the crayon goes through the wash. or the gas tank’s left on empty, and we’re late for where we’re due.

i read the words and remembered once again that every day, every hour, there is a child, there are children, who lose a holy blessed mama. who, if they’re lucky, kiss her on the cheek as it drains of all its warmth, or don’t let go.

there are children, little ones, who don’t get one more bedtime to squeeze their mama’s hand, to watch her shadow slip from the bedroom, count her footsteps as they fade down the stairs.

that there was–is–a little girl, one born the very year that my little one was born, a year that seems so not-so-long ago, that there is a little girl who is absorbing the wholeness of what it means to lose her mama, well that’s a ghost that haunts me.

i carried the news back into the kitchen, where i’d been stirring. i ladled dinner onto plates. we sat, held hands and prayed. i prayed for alice, of course. i’d asked my little one all about her; he showed me her picture in his yearbook. blonde and sweet and big-eyed. i could barely grasp that never again would her mama see that face.

i carried the news with me as i climbed the stairs to tuck my boy in bed. but then, somewhere in the brushing of his baby teeth, and the inside-out pajamas that took some untwisting to set things right, i lost track.

i put my little one to bed, with prayers and kiss and tucking in of sheets. then, i walked downstairs and set about making his peanut-butter-extra-jelly (hold the grape, double the strawberry-peach preserves) for the next day’s lunch. i’d be gone at work by the time he woke, so i grabbed a pen and did what i’ve done a hundred thousand times: i penned a little love note and tucked it in his lunch bag.

that’s when i felt my heart twist and tug, and wince at once.

i thought of little alice, whose mama wouldn’t write another note. i wanted with all my heart to pack a lunch for alice and stuff it fat with love notes. i wanted to sit by her bedside and be her mama, whenever she needed one. whenever she cried out. i wanted to waft into the room and be the mama she cried out for.

i sometimes wish i could sop up all the hurt that makes this world so deeply broken.

instead i started to tick off the many moments in my little one’s life that no one else might notice if i were gone. but the moments when he alone would feel the gaping hole, the absence, would feel the skip of his mama’s heartbeat.

love notes tucked in lunches, i realized, are only the start.

there is the way we say our prayers. the way we always start and end, and wind around the middle in a particular order, with a particular rhythm and a certain sing-song way we end it every time.

there’s the way i rub the lotion on his cheeks, in little circles, ears to nose, each morning, and oh-so-gently tug the brush–the pink brush by the way, the only one whose bristles do the job–through his ringlet curls.

there’s the way he likes his cereal, a way he needn’t ever tell me, because i’m the one who’s almost always there to pour it out. and i would know–as would he–how upside-down it would start the day if the raisin bran was on the bottom and the cheerios, dumped on top. because, well, that’s not the way it’s ever done.

mothers and children–and all of those whose lives are intertwined–flow seamlessly through much of time. except of course for the fits and starts and assorted flare-ups in, say, the target check-out line, when we lose our place and our footing (and a good teaspoon of patience, too) and must shake it off and find our groove again.

but often, and surely when it counts, we begin and end each other’s thoughts and whims, with barely an instruction. it is love, mostly, that fills in all the blanks. we so know each other’s hearts, we’ve memorized the lines unspoken.

it all began, i’m certain, when i first brought my little one to my breast. and there began between the two of us a poetry, a rhythm and a rhyme that would be unbroken through the years. he would know, before words ever came to him, that in my arms he rocked a certain way. and in the sounds from my throat a soothing came that came from nowhere else.

i ache for all the children, all around the world, who wake up today, go to sleep tonight, without the mama they have come to count on.

i ache, deeply, for alice, who came back to school today, and who i’m told spoke not a word all day.

i wish, i pray, that in our deepest heartbeat we could pump out double-time for the children among us who cry themselves to sleep. for the children whose dreams are shattered and their daytimes too.

i pray with all my might that the Great God of Unending Arms, and Hand That Won’t Let Go, embraces all those children, sweeps away their ache, brushes back their tears.

i pray with all my might that the Great God of Laughter fills their hearts and throats again.

and in the meantime, i wish with all my might that i could pen a love note and tuck it there in alice’s lunch bag.

just the way i do for the little one who is mine, so deeply sweetly mine.

are you sometimes struck by news that brushes close to home? does it jostle you from complacency, remind you just how many little moments we forget are so priceless? what are the little things your loved ones would miss, if you slipped away from their everyday? please say a prayer for alice, and her fourth-grade brother. and everyone who loves them, the children now without a mother….
p.s. sorry this is late again. that ol’ new job barely gives me time to breathe, let alone tap out a meander. but i’ll be damned if i give up the one chance to let my fingers unspool what flows from my heart.

i hung them one by one.

once, a long time ago in my old, old apartment, they hung on the wall above the place where i sometimes typed late at night. i collected them, one by one, on a long slow criss-crossing of the city and the country, stopping always at all the poor spots. (and by that i mean poor as in: farmer’s wife boiled up a pot of potato skins and called it supper; babies carrying babies down the dirt-pocked lane, no shirts on their backs against the noonday sun; old man hunkered down beside his garbage can, burning trash for so-called heat on a cold winter’s night on the streets below the city.)

all my grown-up years, and long before that, i’ve been drawn to stories and people and places that might not otherwise make it to the map. except i couldn’t keep away. time and again, i went looking, in soup kitchens and out to reservations. in tenements where the halls were pitch black and, excuse me, smelled like pee. in rooms so loosely laced together the wind blew through, flickered a candle’s flame. to the maw of a cardboard box that, night after night, was home to a fellow who went by the name of dirtman.

each time i stopped, stayed long enough to soak up the story, i carried home, always, a black-and-white, an image in my mind, but one on glossy paper, too.

they were, each 8-by-11, or 11-by-14, the raw stuff of why i did what i did. why i boarded planes, all alone. why i drove to corners of the city where a smart girl–a safe girl–would not go alone.

back then, i burned the flame and believed with all my heart. it was a holy calling, i was certain, to tell the tales in words that wouldn’t dim. not inside my head, for certain, and maybe not even in the newspaper that one day would yellow, some day would surely flake.

it was my inspiration wall, the hodge-podge of pictures whispering to me, every time i passed: this is why you do what you do.

do not let them be forgotten. do not let their stories fade away. do not turn your back. do not, do not.

every time i moved, i packed them up, and found another wall. i need no prize. no medal or honor.

i have my wall, that’s all i need.

in this old house, they’d not found a wall. even though i tried. instead of hanging them, one by one, they lay dusty on a shelf downstairs.

turns out, i think i found a wall.

you see, the place i work, well, they called me back to the big tall tower. told me just the other week that my 15 years at home is over now. since my firstborn was a baby, i’ve worked right here, where i could hear my boys, no matter what i typed, no matter who i talked to on the telephone. there were times it got messy. babies cried and fussed, no matter who was on the line. dinner burned while i typed one last sentence. it got to be, that’s just the way it was. i only knew how to be a mother who worked right from the nest. i forgot how to be a writer in a room of so-called grownups.

but now, not only home will be my writer’s roost. at least one day of my three-day work week, i now need to take a train. a spare cubicle now sits, my name pasted onto paper, hung on the half-wall that now is mine.

in case you’re not here in town, you might not know, but the newspaper where i’ve worked for the last 26 years, it’s not the same. it’s, um, bright and bold. some say it makes them dizzy. all i can say is, well, please don’t give up.

and since i’m now tucked away in the little square far away from where i’d rather be, and since i’m rather at a loss over the lack of room these days for storytelling, it dawned on me quite suddenly that, more than ever, my wall needs to rise again.

i was down in the basement just this morning, dusting off the stacks of pictures, each one tucked in a clear plastic frame. it’s nothing fancy, nor should it be.

but it speaks volumes to me, and it might just whisper to someone who wanders by. it reminds me, and maybe a passerby, that there’s only one good reason to get out of bed with a notebook and a pen in hand:

there are stories to be told, and places on the map that mustn’t be overlooked. do not forget the forgotten. do not turn away from the ones with nowhere else to turn.

it is inspiration i unearthed. and a holy flame i won’t blow out.

the darkness threatens, but my black-and-whites will light my way.

so help me, God.

how do you pin up inspiration in your house, or in your life? what is it that stokes your flame, and reminds you, day after day, just why it is you’re here on earth?
p.s. sorry this meander is rather late today. along with a new place to type, there’s a whole lot more typing jammed in every day. and while i’m struggling to adjust, my whole world feels topsy-turvy,

on a good day, the end begins by the time the little hand kisses the 9.

all’s done, on a good day, that needs to be done.

that’s the sweet hour when the sigh of my soul finally escapes. when the fat puffy cloud over my house, if my house was the star of a comic book, or a strip in the funny papers, that’s when the letters, emphatically strung into a word in the comic-book cloud hovering over my house, would spell out, quite bluntly, a short simple PHEW!

that’s the sound of my deep inner someone hanging it up, when at last the long mighty march through the day is a wrap, packed up on a shelf, over and out. al dente, as long as we’re at it.

the little one, on a good day, would be upstairs in his bed (at least till the first or second or third question pops in his head, and he tiptoes down, slithers ‘round corners, makes like a mouse and scares the behoozies outa me and the page i’m now ripping from fright). the dishes, they’d be tucked on the rack, their smeared little bits drying, waiting for rushes of hot sudsy water.

my long list, on a good day, is, by 9 in the nighttime, as X’d and checked and crossed off as it ever will be.

till the morning comes, and it all begins all over again.

on a good day.

on a not-so-good day, a day like the ones that’ve been strung together of late, knots on a rope dangling there in the seas, while the ship tosses and the winds whip and the lightning cracks through the black of the sky, on a not-so-good day, the end’s nowhere in sight.

might not be, even at the bewitchingest hour, when the little hand bangs into the 10, when the news squawks from the box, when all good children belong in their beds, and dreams should be well underway by that two-digit hour.

these days, though, seems the only way to get it all done, all the things that simply must be attended to, muscled, corralled into order, is to stretch the day. let it leak into the night. let one day ooze into another. pay no mind to midnight, you late-night marauder.

then, maybe, by the time your head flops on the pillow, by the time your bones groan as they stretch east to west, north to south, on a plane as flat as kansas when the wheat’s been mowed, maybe you’ll have just a wee slip of a sense that your day inched close to edge, to the place where what needed to be done, finally was. or at least came close enough to let you fall into slumber, relatively guilt-rinsed.

that’s the sort of day it was today.

my list was long, and i started early, and still i did not get to where i needed to be. the light high on the hill still shines, and i’m miles away.

been that way, day after day of late.

new job, plus a few assorted oddities, making me feel like a cook in the kitchen with pots and pans being tossed at my head. orders barked. someone wants toast. hold the butter. but the bread wasn’t stocked on the shelf. so you head out to the store, and on the way home, you fall in a puddle. bread’s all soggy, so you head back again. by then, customer’s mad, stormed out. so when you serve up the toast, at last, all un-buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, the table, it’s empty. ‘cept for a crumpled-up napkin, and not a penny in change.

that’s what it feels like.

so all the things that i love, the ones that bring me pure joy–catching up on the day with my boys after school, feeding the birds, plucking the heads off my blooms once they’re fallen–all those things, i barely can do any more. oh, i do ‘em all right. but condensed, hurried, panting for breath.

this world is like that too, too much, and too often besides. i think, every day, of the legions of mamas who never do have the chance to go slow. who, day after day, rush and hurry and juggle and spin on their heels.

i worry. ‘bout a world that mostly doesn’t slow down. ‘bout the buzzes and beeps and the phones that would ring all through the night if not for the holy blessed button that clicks it all off.

i worry about a world that has no more time to sit and to pore over the news of the day. has no time to wait for the schoolbus. or to be at the door when the backpacks come tumbling in.

i worry ‘bout little hands left to cut apples all on their own. and stories that don’t get told, and worries bottled inside till the nighttime comes, and then mama’s still working, so please rush up to bed now, it’s late. you need your sleep, and i need to keep working. so goes the refrain.

i worry when 9 ‘clock comes, and then 10, and still it’s not over.

a soul can’t go for hours and hours on vapors and promise.

a soul, and the heart that goes with it, needs down time. the blessed interlude between full-throttle day, and restless tossing and turning.

when the day runs out of hours, so too does the light that burns deep inside.

i’ve not got the answer. only the questions.

what kindles the light, when the day runs out of its hours? where comes the poetry, when all we can hear is the panting of a day, a day racing toward a finish that never quite comes?

soon as it’s still, i’ll listen for answers. i know they come, soon as it’s quiet.

dear people, i had every intention, really i did, of telling a fine story, one i collected for work but couldn’t quite tell. i’ll try, one of these days here, to unspool it. but in the meantime, tell me, do you have day after day that runs out of hours? where do you find your solace, your stillness? i found mine, at least for a few hours, in synagogue just yesterday. these are the days of awe, and awe is just what i need, what i hunger for….how ‘bout you?

some nights, at the end of some long days, at the end of long stretches of days when the light’s grown dim, gone dark almost, i find myself pulled, like the tide, to the window.

and there she is, mama moon. swollen. certain. shining down and out and pinning shadow to the landscape, the nightscape.

her moonbeams, spilled milk on lakes and woods and even windowsills, turn the nighttime inside out.

i make out things i might otherwise have missed. the glint of gutter where the copper bends, butts up against another sheaf of earth-mined metal, long and narrow, disappearing into darkness.

i might catch the dew, or whatever is the night mist settled on a leaf. i might catch a wisp of cloud, in fine relief against the blue-black of night once it’s cloaked the heavens’ dome.

but mostly, when by day the world is feeling shaky, tipsy-topsy, i look out to find the moon, and there she is, anchor in the murky choppy waters, where she’s been all my nights, so far, and all the world’s as well.

oh, sure she goes up and down in size, like i used to do too. only not with such illumination. mine was done in darkness.

some nights she can barely squeeze out a little wedge of light. but others, like last night, when i needed her, she’s robust, full-waisted. for a moon, she was downright zaftig.

when i first looked up, as i began to pull the shade, so my little one might catch the bedtime drift, i stopped, hard and sudden. called to him to come, check out this moon.

“it’s a cross,” he said.

“sure is,” i answered back, not blinking, not at all, at the shafts of light that reached out, right and left, up and down, from that moon in the middle.

far as i recall, i’ve never seen quite such a moon-cross. never saw before clear channels, bright channels, distinct lines of moonglow, pouring out like that. east and west and north and south, points on a compass lighting up the would-be dark.

hmm, i thought, maybe mama moon knows. maybe she knows we need all the light we can get down here. maybe she’s shut her eyes and she’s squeezing with all her might, bearing down to bust out every molecule of light she’s absorbed from what the day’s wasted.

maybe she knows these hours are dark, darker than we’ve seen in a long long while.

coast to coast and ’round the globe, there’s trouble. and tumult. and even close to home, it’s hard to find a place where the light pours in.

oh there’s wall street, of course. and waking up to news, squawking there from the box beside your bed, news that makes you shudder before your toes get to the cold, hard slabs of oak.

and there’s all the stories and the film clips zipping through the wires. there’s the worries clogging up the computer. there’s tales so odd you consider retreating to your closet floor. where you might stay curled for weeks to come, afraid to death to wake up the morning of november 5 and find the world’s gone stark raving mad.

you meet with friends, out of work and broken-hearted and barely able to swallow the chunks of bread you brought along.

you hear tales of young mamas who’ve been told, just now, that they’ve got weeks or months to live. and you can’t do a damn thing to stop the clock, to bring them, or their children, the time they need. oh, Lord, the time they need.

and in your own home, your own kitchen, you sit and soak up the worries of a boy who feels alone. a boy who aches to find a friend. and you’re just the mama, and short of calling every single kid you ever knew or liked, saying, hey, please, call my kid and ask him maybe to hang out, there is nothing you can do.

so all day, you hold it in. so full your heart, your chest, you think any minute now your ribs might bust. you might start cryin’ and never stop.

but then the night comes. the world goes dark. except for the moon. that one fine orb of light that won’t go out. after all these eons, and all these long long mondays and tuesdays, it still turns on. like a good swiss clock.

count on it.

there she is.

right out the window, where you need her. so close you swear you could twist the latch, heave the frame, and grab a fistful.

she’s what you need. a nightly dose of pure illumination. she’s there to draw you out, and in, both ways at once.

she’s there to remind you, night after night, she shines on all the ones you love, no matter how scattered across this old spinning globe. she is the one whole blanket that holds you, each and every one.

she’s the priestess of the night. drawing out your prayers. pulling you to your knees, if that’s the way you whisper benedictions.

the moon, i think, is God’s unfailing way of sticking close behind. God’s way of reminding, no matter how dark the day, the night light’s always on.

might not always be so bright. but she’s out there. just look up. and count on mama moon to guide you through till dawn.

when one of these mornings, the sun might truly rise.

people, are these days weighing heavy on your heart? what gets you through? where does your light come in?

at the 17-year mark in a marriage that has every reason to go on for a long, long time, my beloved looked to me the other eve, and murmured, “darling, whatever would enchant you for our impending anniversaire?”

hmm, you say you smell a fish? you careful reader, you. that doesn’t ring quite right? you mutter to yourself.

why, yes, perhaps it is a bold-faced fib. let’s re-roll that scene, clean up the dialogue, veer it closer to the truth. cinema verite, you know….

truth be told, he never once has called me darling. not in the 9 million years since i first laid eyes on his tall and tortoise-rimmed self. and no, not a chance, he is not the sort to volley verbal morsels along the lines of “enchant,” in any form.

more likely, he said, hey, is there something you want for our anniversary? (which in and of itself is not an oft-tossed question in this house, but that’s another story. and i will, despite my inclinations, stick to the tale at hand here. thusly, i’ll pick up right where i once again interrupted my sorry self…ahem, then…)

to which i batted my baby-blue-green-with-a-speck-of- yellows, and replied, “oh, mon sweet, could i please, please, please have a compost bin?”

sadly, pathetically, that whole last line is true. right down to the mon sweet. especially the bit about the compost gizmo.

lest he or you let out a gasp, fear not; i followed right up with this romantic retort: “how fitting to make gold of garbage.”

he might have taken umbrage there, i might have seen him bristle. but i wasted not a heartbeat in clarifying my point (er, digging myself out from the big black hole of unintended trouble i so often stumble into): “i mean, how metaphoric to take what life throws at you, and turn it into that which makes your deepest earthly essence bloom and bulge and burst with, um, life most everlasting.”

since this was not the first time in our many, many years that i left the man wholly muddled, he followed up with the only thing left to wonder: “what’ll it cost me?”

as i grabbed the keys and bounded out the door, i planted a big splashy kiss right on his grizzled cheek.

no more questions asked.

i was off to muck around in the big wide world of compost. i had much to learn, as i’d been longing for a long, long time for a heap o’ weeds and dried-up leaves to call my own. to watch it crawl with worms and creepy multi-legged beings, who’d chew through last night’s scraps and, over time, turn each and every one into just the sustenance my beds were hungry for.

why, i could think of no more life-affirming feat than to feed my plate scrapings to the lilac and the climbing rose, to watch the pure essential elements of life–carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and a splash of H2O–do their decomposing dance, and then, voila, to fill the bellies of the blooms with their God-given outa-the-park potential.

how fine if we could learn to live a life of always making what we need from what is thrown upon the heap we call our day-to-day existence.

as i shopped, and poked around the quaint black sphere they call the internet, i wound up talking to a fine gardener up in vermont. she ticked off a list of things worth not forgetting–ever; and not merely on the topic of chemical breakdown-cum-fertilizer.

she told me not to expect perfection off the bat. it’s a learning thing, she counseled, what’s important here is that you are coming to understand the cycle of life and afterlife.

who knew that the mound of old dead leaves and weeds plucked from they shouldn’t be would lay out for me a lesson so sublimely not only philosophic but theologic too?

and so, i’ve ordered up a bin (or two). carried home my whale harpoon (no big blue on the horizon here; it’s simply that they tell me i’ll be spearing my decaying leaves and table scraps to hurry things along, add a little oxygen to the equation). even have my box of compost fuel at the ready. all i need is the nice mailman to ring the bell and drop the bin on my front stoop.

i’ll take it from there, i promise. i’ve been reading up a storm. know all about the browns and greens (that would be the mix of carbon-stoked old leaves and nitrogen-heavy weeds and bits of freshly mown grass that make up a batch of compost-on-the-make).

in fact, i’ve got the recipe down pat (2 parts dry leaves, 1 part fresh clippings, 1 part food scraps, spread in 4-inch layers, add water as needed, churn, churn, churn. and, presto, you’ve got 100-percent organic goo for your gardens).

any day now, i’ll commence. given the vast family value to be unearthed, i’ll haul my boys out to watch and learn and lend a hand at churning. i will marvel at how i feed my compost heap and it, in turn, decomposes into something pure and black and golden.

as is my style, i’m apt to overdo. i see me late at night, out checking on my compost stew. i imagine how, come winter, i might be tempted to wrap the thing in blankets, in hopes of keeping all those creepy crawly worms from falling into chilly slumber.

and already, i am lusting for the shredder that circumvents the weeks it takes to break down stubborn leaves.
that, though, will have to wait.

until the one i love inquires, “hey, babycakes, what about our 18th?”

now don’t you tell, but you know–because i just told you–i’ve just the thing to celebrate, to mark the speeding up of all that falls apart.

hmm, i wonder if perhaps i’d do better saying not a word when next it’s time to blow out the anniversary candles? or perhaps i’ll simply call it the thing that spits out leaf confetti.

after all these years, i’ve learned a thing or three ‘bout how to ask for what it is i covet.

‘scuse me now, i’m off to wait for mr. mailman and my much-longed-for, deeply-romantic decomposing box.

so many rows to hoe here….do you make black gold out of all your gleanings from the yard and cutting board? what bits and scraps of knowledge would you pass on to a compost novice? do you, like me and my beloved, usually dispatch with the somethings tucked in bow-tied boxes when it comes to ticking off the years, be they of the birthday kind, or since you formed a union? what’s your most hilarious pragmatic-present story, you know the one that made your friends and neighbors squawk, “s/he gave you what?!?!?!??!”

it started out, the story of a sprain. a plain old twisted ankle. only drama here, i thought, was that it happened on a hilly winding road along a godforsaken lake the other eve, not long past dusk, when the murky fingers of the night creep in from the woods, make it hard to see and be seen. and when you’re a boy who’s had a bump or two on trails, you know, learned the hard way, that you don’t go out for runs or rides without a way of calling home.

well, he called home, all right, when he went down, when the ankle curled and caved and came screeching to a halt.

only, silly parents, we didn’t get the calls. and there were 12 of them. kept calling me, he did, but i was on the phone with my dear aunt, and didn’t know the incessant beeping noise was something other than a battery winding down, running out of phone-call juice. and his papa, well, he’s not so attached to that little ringing box we call the cell phone, so he’d left his out in the car.

poor kid rang and rang and rang. no one answered. and the murky light got murkier, near dark. and there he was, miles from home, and not even hobbling, and way up north in michigan, where just the summer before he’d ached so bad in the woods it took months and months for him to heal, to heal in ways that don’t involve just muscles.

at last, after turning down 911’s offer for an ambulance (he thought that a bit much to arrive home a la siren for a simple twisted ankle), he got through.

at last, i’d hung up with dear aunt nanc, and heard my little ringing box do its ring dance.

right away i saw the name, his name. looked out the window, saw the dark. thought, oh geez, please no. please just be calling me to say the moon is swell, i oughta get down to the dock and drink it in.

but no.

no.

i heard the tears, the where-in-the-world-have-you-been, the i-am-hurting-and-it’s-dark, mom, and i’m-2.4-miles-down-a-long-and-winding-road, and i-can’t-walk, mom.

i barely touched each step of the stairs as i bounded down. got to the bottom, said, it’s will, he’s hurt, and as we ran we heard the moans coming up from all of us, all three of us, who’d once before picked that boy up off a trail, when he came to us bloodied and broken and asking if he’d die.

your insides don’t forget those days, and they all come rushing back when it is dark and you have just heard tears on the other end of the line.

the little one, especially, gets sick with worry when it comes to his big brother. couldn’t let go of me in the back seat, as his papa drove, like it was some northwoods speedway, the hilly lakeshore-hugging road, and i stayed on the phone, talking the hurting one through each turn and twist and up and down of that old country road. we’re coming, i kept saying. we’ll be right there. we’re coming ’round the bend.

but that’s not why i’m telling you this story.

i’m telling it because i thought it was a story about a twist, and then it became a story with a twist.

we got the boy home, of course. slapped on some ice, popped some anti-swelling pills, and drove back from the lake early the next dawn, racing home for, of all things, dinner with a dear, dear friend who happens to be an ER doc. he’s the one who told us, get an x-ray, there might be something there.

we got the x-ray monday afternoon. i was right there, looking at the screen, because when it’s a kid, they let the mamas tag along.

right away i thought i saw the crack in question. saw a big egg-shaped spot right where the twist had come–or so i thought. even the x-ray tech standing next to me thought the same.

go sit down, they said, someone will come out with the news. so the nice man came. said it wasn’t fractured, just a bad sprain. call the doctor in the morning.

dodged that bullet, we all thought as the lanky one hobbled home. hmm, i swore i saw a crack. oh, well. that’s why i’m a mama now and not an x-ray guru.

tuesday morn, that ol’ ankle was still throbbing some, and the hobbler was due to school in an hour or so, due to take a tour of the big new halls he transfers to as a sophomore. i called the pediatrician. said i was wondering what about the sprain. what should we do to make walking just a little easier?

and that’s when it took a long, long time for the nurse to come on the line. and when she finally came, she apologized. said she’d needed to grab his chart, talk to the doctor. hmm, thought i, for simple instructions about a sprain?

and that’s when she told me that they’d found something not on the leg bone in question, but on the other one. don’t freak out, she told me, but it was one of those words that ends in “oma.” most likely, she told me, it was benign. but we needed to see an orthopedic surgeon right away. and we needed to go straight downtown, not muck around near home.

all signs, in my head, start spinning toward that slot on the dial i’d rather skip over. this is starting to feel, i thought, like a phone call i can’t believe i’m having.

turns out we’re going to see the surgeon they call the “lumps and bumps doc,” the one they lured, the nurses told me proudly, from sloane-kettering in new york, the one i happen to know is mostly a cancer center. and since i used to be a cancer nurse, these are words that start to trespass into territory that’s not where i, the mother, want to be.

since he’s a doc who sees kids only once a week, they are squeezing us right in. but it won’t be for a week, and it will be the first day of school for my second grader, the one who already is asking me if i might stay nearby till lunchtime the first few days, since he already feels so homesick.

so, already, i am feeling torn. but of course, i go with the one going to see the lumps and bumps doc. and the little one rides with his papa in his papa’s new car, which somehow seems to have distracted him–for now–from the fact that i won’t be there, waving at the schoolhouse door.

but all of that, i tell you, is preamble. preamble for the tidal wave of thought that tumbled over me, all day yesterday; still now.

there is every chance in the world that this will all turn out to be a blip, that the doc will take a look and say, let’s watch it. oh, sure he might say, let’s operate. but i will get to that when we get there.

for now i am consumed with how suddenly we find out that what we take for granted is really all a flimsy curtain cascading there before the box with all the switches and the levers.

i am thinking how the halls of hospitals are filled with lovely people who’d been going about the business of their humdrum lives when, suddenly, they were tapped on the shoulder, told that fever in your little boy, it’s leukemia. that tumbly toddler who can’t keep from falling down, it’s a tumor in her brain. your father who you thought was driving home from the movie rental store, well, he got hit; he won’t be coming home.

and so, knowing all of that, feeling that much closer to the far side of the line between the lucky ones and the not so, i will spend this long week ahead looking down at my tall one’s leg. i will pray and pray some more. i will scan his face for signs of wan and ashen color. i will offer up my leg, and both arms too if it will help, just so he gets the all-clear sign.

i think of all the hours in our lives when we are holding our breath, between inhale and exhale, thrust into that netherworld where suddenly everything is more vividly colored.

where we notice the wind, taste the bite of the coffee, behold the grace of a butterfly wing gliding onto the basil that grows just beyond the kitchen sill.

where every unfettered hour feels like a swing on the trapeze. where we understand, finally, thuddingly, that just making a dumb old grocery list–with nothing else to clutter our thoughts–is pure mercy, unfiltered.

it is these days and weeks of breath-holding that put the bas relief into our lives. without the undulation and shadow, it’s all washed-out and blindingly white.

the breath-holding, of course, comes in a zillion forms–waiting for the phone call from the boss, sitting outside the x-ray department, clicking on the computer to see if the email from the college, the boyfriend, the madwoman, has come.

it is the interstitial hours, i believe, that sharpen who we are in the midst of lives we start to take for granted.

it is in the not-breathing when the sharp outlines come, and the blurriness fades away. when we look and see not just a boy who leaves his room a mess more often than i care to discover, but an almost-man whose brilliance, whose sheer force of belief in how he’ll change this world, better it, gives me hope, and, more importantly, faith.

this breath-holding, maybe, is every bit as essential as the breathing.

we would be numb to all the days of making beds and pouring coffee into mugs, of shuffling papers on our desks, and clocking miles on the track, if not for the occasional lapses into holy fear.

when it all comes clear. when we see how close the bullet grazes our heads. when we wake up from our stupor and tingle down our spine at all the ways the spinner falls in our favor.

and yes, mostly, more often than we deserve maybe, at the end of these protracted hours, the great rush of hallelujah, how-narrowly-we-escaped comes. we kiss the ground. we thank the skies, the leaves, the blades of grass. we pay attention to the clouds that day. taste the succulent tomato. douse it all in extra olive oil. what the heck.

we fill our lungs. feel the sweet soft air soak into crevices and dark places that had gone without sustenance for the days of our worry.

we return to living. and, if we’re smart, we carry with us the knowledge that at any minute the nurse can get on the line and tell us there is something growing where it shouldn’t be. and it’s the leg bone of a boy we love, we birthed, at stake here.

it is a recipe of fractions and milliseconds and happenstance, this thing called life.

and if, in between our breathing, we can take in the blessed holy miracle of the ones we love, the rustling of the leaves, or birdsong in the dawn, well then we are making art of the filling of our lungs.

forgive me if i got dark there. blame it on my irish. or on the simple fact that i am old enough and wise enough to understand the roulette of the everyday. my hope, and my intent, was to raise up these hours of fear and examine how it is that they weave what matters most into our very being. have you had chapters of breath-holding? and were you able, in any way, to hold onto a piece of that to make you pay attention to the colors all around?

turned out last week while i was away was another week of breath-holding for all of us at the newspaper where i still happen to work. some 80 souls got phone calls that their time was up; i didn’t get the call, not this this time. for those 80 i send up prayer after prayer. these are breathholding times indeed, and may each of you find your colors once the fog and tears are cleared. we will carry on, those of us still newspapering, and try our damnedest to make you proud for what you started, and did so blessed well.

well, actually i don’t. don’t wanna leave, that is. given my eenie-meenie-minie-moe, i’d stay put from now till forever.

i am, hands down, the original homebody. give me a week at home with nothing to do but pull weeds, turn pages, putz around in the kitchen. give me my ol’ comfy pillow, the stairs with the creaks i know by heart. give me the washer, even, the one i know how to set just so, so it doesn’t wiggle and clang like some sort of jalopy on an old bumpy road.

oh, lord, just the thought of it all. the peace and the quiet. the hours and hours to tackle this ol’ house and the interminable infinite to-do list. i tingle at the thought.

but it’s a thought, an enticement, that will have to keep dangling in front of me, for it’s not mine now. not any time in the near or the distant future even. it’s only a wish, pure and simple.

dispatch the boys. stay home alone.

grab the smelling salts, i feel a faint coming on.

oh, well. not this time around…

for now, i am considering packing. will toss the minimum amount of clothes in a bag. grab a few boxes of cereal off the shelf, and head up to where the air is even clearer and the ol’ lake will lull me to sleep for the next few nights.

it’s the house on the lake i grew up mucking about most summers. swam across the lake once. got a sailboat stuck in the muck at the bottom, one other time. gorged on my aunt nancy’s cherry cobbler. played spoons with all of my cousins, and my grandma lucille, who showed her fierce side when the spoons and the cards came out.

’bout five times a day, we managed to walk to the little general store, the one with the screen door that slapped shut behind you, nipped at your heels if you didn’t hurry. pulled out our nickels and pennies, got some sort of five-and-dime summertime treat. went out in the middle of the lake before dawn, a bucket of minnows and the sunrise, all the company i ever needed.

that was back before i had a house, turned into someone’s mama. that was back when all i had to do was endure the back of the station wagon with four brothers and a headache from the sun shining in. back then, it was pure heaven. now, i’m working hard to convince myself the long drive will be worth it.

oh, it’ll be fine, and the boys all want to go. desperately want to go. to get one last gulp of summer before the school bell rings, and i am left home alone, at last. to while away the days. getting things done. but not the things i’d do if i had a whole week.

and not the things i’ll do this coming week.

that’s how it is sometimes when you’re the mama. you do not what you want. but what everyone else really really wants. you wrap your toothbrush, and toss in your old bathing suit, the one you’ve not worn once all summer long.

you lock up the house, wave goodbye to the garden. kiss the cat on the nose. remind him to be good while you’re gone.

you turn and you whisper a prayer. tell the house, the garden, the cat, you’ll be right back. stay put, stay just as you are, and i’ll be right back to fuss over you, make you feel like you’re the one place in the world i always want to be.

which, as i pack up to leave, is the truest truth i can think of.

see you next week. goin’ north to collect a l’il bit of summer vacation. anyone else out there wish like anything for a whole stretch of days, unencumbered in every which way? anyone else know what it is to want to stay home, and call that the best vacation ever?

it started slow. pit. pat. while we all licked our forks out on the porch with the screens. then, pitpitpit. patpatpat. skies opened, all right, without so much as a telltale creak of the trapdoor. heavens flashed off and on, like angels were making a fuss with their flashlights. checking batteries. sending signals. playing flashlight tag, maybe.

nobody minded. the splash from the rain hitting the leaves in the garden just made for a mist. a midsummer‘s shower, while dining on just-plucked corn and sausages burned on the grill. what’s to mind?

we sat there till finally the drumbeat of rain on the roof slowed to a murmur. then we stacked all the plates and we dashed. last one inside is a dripping wet dishrag.

i lost, but only because i was balancing saucers and stopped to notice some lovely something there in the garden.

just as i slid closed the screen, it started up again. mighty fierce. crashing and banging. and lights flashing so steadily up in the clouds, i started to think maybe there’d been a run on double DD batteries. maybe every angel on high, and even a devil or two, was having at it with lightbeams.

always one to heighten the drama whenever, wherever, it comes, i turned out the lights. every last one. oh, there was protest of course, but i didn’t care. this was a lightshow on high, and i wasn’t missing one blessed kilowatt. oh, no.

and that’s when my big brother, one who’s not around these parts very much, well, he started to teach. he was, in the simplest terms, explaining the lightning, something i’d never quite stopped to try to figure out, ’cept that i knew it scared me, and made me run with my face all scrunched-up and my back arched as i dashed through the pounding-down rain and the puddles, certain at any step i’d get cracked on the backside and make like a lighted-up x-ray.

but back to my brother and his lecture on lightning:

“it’s the same as when you rub your feet on the carpet, then touch the top of your head or a doorknob, and, kabam, there’s a spark. static electricity, that’s all it is. as the cold air rubs against the warm air, there’s friction, then, kapow, lightning.”

that’s pretty much, word for word, how my big brother explained it. he went on and on. talked about how there’s three kinds of lightning: cloud to ground, cloud to cloud, and stuck inside a cloud. talked about positive and negative charges. talked about stability and instability, only he was referring to air.

tried to make me see how easy this was: warm air, down low, wants to float up. bangs into the cold stuff way up high, now on its way down, sinking.

laid out a simple equation. warm + cold = friction. when there’s enough of a buildup, when one side is more charged than the other, the electricity has to go somewhere, he tells me. that’s lightning, he says.

oh, i think, i get it, realizing i will now forever picture cold air in slippers, scuffing against warm air, the rug. when the lightning cracks i will forever picture a big doorknob in the sky, and the clouds yelping, ouch, when they get shocked by the frictional sparks.

“nature is always trying to strike a balance,” my brother goes on. water sloshing in a bowl levels out. a windy day, he tells me, is no more than air from a high-pressure pocket swooping into a low-pressure pocket with plenty of room. a melting ice cube in a tumbler of H2O is simply the frozen water chunk surrendering its chill to the room-temperature tap water it’s swimming in, trying to make all things equal, or at least in the same general temperature neighborhood.

he knows this stuff, inside and out, my big brother does.

he specializes in all things off the ground. he has been, since he was old enough to say, “pairpane,” obsessed with all things aeronautic.

he has flown itty-bitty planes onto itty-bitty spits of land in alaska, turned loopdy-loops over the sides of a mountain in montana, and now teaches folks how to fly super-duper jets out in long beach, california.

and while i don’t care much–never have, never will–for bombers, and my heart doesn’t thump even for bi-winged wonders, i did suddenly find myself enthralled by my sky-seeking brother’s knowledge of weather.

actually, mesmerized would be more accurate a term.

i could have listened for hours. i felt myself being swallowed whole by the topic of ebbs and flows and collisions of air. it’s all about cold and warm, and wet and dry, and up and down, and the simple exchange of ions.

the world, when you stop to pay attention to it, is really rather basic. we can, if we try to, understand vast chapters that seem, well, lightyears beyond our reach.

i think deep down i am a science geek. but the more i know about science, the more it makes me a geek of the God kind. i grow speechless, feel infinitesimally small, when i start to consider the fingers of God–or whatever name you put to the force behind the wind and the tide and the spinning of ol’ mama earth.

i marvel so at the great Brilliance that thought to make the tongue of the butterfly just long enough to reach deep into the throat of the trumpet vine. and what of the seasons that give each and every living thing–even those of us who merely stare out the window–a season to curl up and hibernate, after the long, hot summer?

how heavenly the sense that all the bursting of lights the other night was simply air banging into air of the opposite kind, and exploding in celestial hallelujah. and what about the simple falling of the rain that brings with it not only earth-quenching waters but essential nitrogen to make the roots of my new baby plants grow deep?

no wonder some of us sit with our nose pressed to the rain-splattered panes of glass. there is wonder crashing and booming just beyond the sill.

i, for one, don’t want to miss it. especially now that my big brother made it all make such pure and simple, heaven’s sense.

by any chance did you catch the light show the other night? according to the weather people, who track these things, we here in chicagoland got as many lightning strikes in a few short hours as we usually get in a whole half of the year. oh, goodness. good thing i turned out the lights to take in every last crack and flash. i wonder, do you ever stop to consider the weather? either as wholly explainable science, or truly inexplicable marvel?

just happens today is the day of my true love’s original birth. he rarely happens by here, but in case he does, bless you for being my truly inexplicable marvel. you couldn’t have asked for a simpler birthday formula–blueberries and rice chex for breakfast, burgers on the grill for dinner. it’s one of the pure things we love about you. that, and a few hundred others. xoxox
two days from now my baby boy turns 7. could it really be? seems every other day at the launch of this eighth month is the birthday of someone i much love. happy blessed birthdays to the whole parade of you…

she rang the bell last night for the first time in weeks. but that’s because she’s been gone all summer. putting up walls, pounding down roofs in mexico. trekking canoes practically in canada. cooking for a camp filled with kids from deep in the heart of poverty, kids on holiday far from the inner city, up in the woods way north in michigan’s upper peninsula.

she came because i asked her to. she came because i missed her, missed the moments we steal to bridge the years and the lives that keep us apart sometimes.

she’s 17. i’m three times that, pretty much on the nose, at 51 and change, now that the year’s more than half over. she’ll be going off to college a year from now; i left college a hundred years ago.

she’s not my daughter, i don’t have one of those. but she is my very good friend. and i have loved growing up right beside her, these last five-plus years since we moved here and she was the girl next to next door.

she came to my door last night with a tub filled with cookies. oatmeal-chocolate-chip, two dozen or more. she’d baked them, brought them along because she’s the sort of kid who understands not showing up empty-handed.

she had her backpack slung over her shoulder, and beads wrapping her ankle. and, so she could show me her pictures, she had her dad’s laptop, too. he made her swear on her life she wouldn’t leave it alone for a second, so we hauled it along when we ran out on a quick errand.

but once home, we settled into the room with the screens, the room where the garden grows all around, and the night sounds creep in, louder and louder, till finally, suddenly, you notice it’s quiet. so quiet you could hear a lightning bug blink. or at least you think so.

she showed me her whole summer, my friend did. and we washed it down with lemonade and lemony water, both drinks doused with mint we plucked from the garden on the way into the screened-in room we still call the summer house, but only because the realtors did, and we haven’t quite shaken the label despite its overwrought pretensions, despite the fact that it’s a room with cracks in the concrete floor and a tear in the screen and paint that flakes off the old hutch that holds the flower pots, and the supper when we bring it outside on nights when inside is missing the whole point of summer.

we only started to catch up in the few hours we had, before her dad called, beckoned her and the laptop home.

heck, her whole life had changed, she told me, though she wasn’t sure quite where it happened. might have been in mexico, she thought, where she’s been going for years, because she’s the kind of kid who falls in love with a dream, and won’t let it go, not till every man, woman and child in a poor mountain village has a roof to sleep under, and running water besides.

maybe it was up at the camp where the kids from the inner city couldn’t get over the trees and the more trees.

or maybe, she thought, it was being the only girl on a canoe trip through the boundary waters, where she found out just how far she could keep a canoe up over her head, while not stumbling on rocks and tree roots.

it’s a beautiful thing being friends with a kid who’s not your own. i never worry about the fact that her room can sometimes look like a war zone (and a bloody messy one at that). i’m not there at the end of the day, when she comes home cranky and stressed from saying yes to too many folks who expect that’s what she’ll say, being a girl who always digs deep, never wants to disappoint.

i just get to be her friend. i don’t have to be her mama. with me, she doesn’t have to explain or defend. she can gush with the sort of excitement that makes her cheeks all flushed, and her voice nearly squeal. i don’t have to ask how the heck she’s going to find the money to fly back to mexico for her dear friend’s quincinerra at the end of the summer. i just get to love her for wanting to be there.

in the world i inhabit, one that’s decidedly two parts wishful thinking and one part cockeyed dreamer, people make a point of seeking out friends who share few to no demographics. we aren’t the same age, not even close. we check off different boxes when asked to declare race and/or ethnicity. we aren’t the same occupation. don’t even dwell in the same sort of surroundings.

in my version of heaven on earth, i’m friends with a midwest farmer who bounds down the lane in her old green pickup, and an octogenarian gardener who can’t get down on her knees anymore but has a thing or 10 to teach me. and i count among my nearest and dearest a fancy-pants new yorker who sends me dispatches from the front, there where fifth ave. bumps into the park.

i swap tales with an acupuncturist who learned all about herbs back in china, and i rock in a creaky old chair on the porch of the a.m.e. baptist church, keeping time with my friend the ever-wise preacher.

and on a long summer’s eve, i sip holy waters with a long-legged teen who’s learning the ways of the faraway world.

it’s one thing, i think, to tell the mama of the girl down the block how charming her child is. it’s a whole other thing, maybe, to invite said child to dinner, to venture downtown to the symphony, bumping along side-by-side in the same “el” car.

it’s the difference between a pat on the head, and a real true journey to the core of each other. it is teaching her she’s worth my time, and my heart.

the journey, like all the best, runs two ways. my friend with the long, long legs reminds me there’s a world far beyond my screened-in porch, where children can’t afford no. 2 pencils for school, and their mamas and papas would give anything for a shower at home, even one with unheated water.

she quells the parts of me, too, that worry about the way this planet is wobbling. she makes me breathe easier knowing she’s in line to inherit her piece of it.

she’ll take very good care of what’s handed to her. but that’s only part of why i so love her.

mostly, she is, like any one of my friends, someone who sees and hears and seeks the beautiful. and that’s why, on a long summer’s eve, she and i sat side-by-side in a screened-in room in a slumbering garden, sipping lemon-charged waters, as the off-year cicadas hummed in the darkness their scritch-scratchety lullabyes.

do you find friends far beyond your own personal demographics? do you have a friend far younger or older who teaches you how to see the world, how to sing a new tune, or a trick to planting your petunias?