pull up a chair

it is not long after dawn when the pairs of our feet, one headed north, one south, finally come to rest on the same square of cement sidewalk and pivot, turned at last in the same direction.
we are walking somewhere. we know not where. it doesn’t matter. what matters is that in the whirl and tug and pull of our too-many-things-in-too-few-hours lives, we have carved, and i mean taken power tools and jackhammered, one single uninterrupted hour.
children have been left sleeping in their beds at one house. sadly, at the other, children are already deep into the day. they are left with bleary-eyed father, who is left to fend for cheerios and missing puzzle pieces and answers to complicated questions at this hour shortly after dawn.
not every sunday does it happen. sometimes the too-many-things spills even into the sacred firstlight of early sunday. how dare it. but it does.
the curious thing i notice while out at this most early hour is that by no means are we out alone.
there were pairs of feet paired all over town. pairs on sidewalks, pairs on sandy beach. often, all four shoes were what the shoe folk still refer to quaintly as ladies’ sizes.
sunday morning sole pounding must be the latterday variation on once-upon-a-time’s pillow-propped breakfast in bed. mama’s morning off, complete with perspiration, at least here in the leafy town where i now lace my deeply-cushioned nikes.
another thing i couldn’t help but note: all the ladies towering from those quaintly-sized shoes were so deeply engaged in conversation there was little notice paid to cracks and bumps in sidewalks. i seemed to see quite a bit of stumbling as they talked, the ladies. but no one ever fell. there was always, in the walking heart-to-heart, an elbow or a hand to catch the almost-falling.
it is, in many pairs, as if the pounding of the pavement draws them deep into their own cocoon. i know we were.
we start off, from the minute our toes turn and point the same direction, in the middle of a story that must be told. we diverge and fork so many times someone listening might need a chart. to trace the tributaries of conversation from the mother flow that courses, winds and bends, carries us down muddy waters for the one blessed hour we have claimed as ours and ours alone.
my walking friend, like nearly all my friends, is brilliant. she happens to be particularly good at listening, and listening with intent. she is a master of bringing all meandering streams back to the one from which they trickled, or deluged over the banks. depending on the topic.
in that short sweet hour of our whole-body pounding–soles pound, bones pound, heart pounds–we engage, against the drumbeat of our feet, in ancient and exquisite art of taking turns with words. we listen and we tell our stories. up curbs, across alleys, looking both ways for cars.
it is so much more than walking. the walking merely punctuates the stories. the walking is the sound of hearts in sync.
i have walked with friends for years and years, though now this is my only regularly-scheduled walk. maybe it’s just me, and the friends with whom i walk, but i don’t think so. there is something about stepping forward as you talk that propels the conversation deep and deeper.
over the years my walking talks have covered many, many things: marriages that have caved in on themselves, surgeries probing for ills we prayed weren’t there, the injustices of too much housework ill-distributed among the labor force of a single dwelling, struggles with children who cannot find their way.
not always it is to the bone. sometimes it is the everyday gristle that ties us into too-tight knots. sometimes, just for an hour, we need to spit it out, to have the feet beside us, pick up the pace, slow as needed. we need to know that someone outside the pounding we hear inside our heads is catching the same rhythm.
it is a sorry thing that in the monday-through-saturday treadmill of our lives there is no room on the ever-rolling, going-nowhere, rubber beltway to sidle up to another pair of harried soles. we are, too often, mostly left alone to muddle through, to clock our miles, hold our breath, to wait to tell our stories.
and so, midway through a mighty long week, we pick up the phone. we dial. we ask, without introduction: we walkin’ sunday?
we pray to God the answer is affirmative.
perambulation, no doubt, works best in pairs.

blessed friends, do you have someone who walks in step with you? if not, how in this harried world, do you carve time for telling stories back and forth?

p.s. and yes it’s monday. the lazy susan, restocked over the weekend, is spinning new….

we didn’t know it, her little brood. we thought everyone’s home movies had pans of tree tops, flashes of scarlet tanager in between the frames of children waddling, waving, being silly for the camera.
coulda fooled us. didn’t every mother teach her hatchlings to hush when an oriole was in the yard? to rush out and scatter halves of oranges, the winged things’ sweet reward for populating her old oaks.
doesn’t everyone get daily, heck, hourly if warranted, phone calls with the up-to-the-minute news of the baby screech owls whose mama pirated the wood duck house, high up in the trees, and taught her babies to fly, right over my mama’s head?
when you grew up with my mama, you took these things for granted. you had no clue how much you’d learned, how much she’d taught you about the world of God’s creation while other children were merely trying to memorize the capitals of algeria, and bolivia, and, perhaps, the republic of congo.
it came slowly to my attention one day sitting in the newsroom, when an extremely intelligent friend of mine, a friend who grew up in queens, was wondering what the red bird was, not the one with the orange belly, she said, but the one that was red all over.
you mean the cardinal? i asked, as if she’d asked which letter followed C.
but you didn’t even look that up in a book, she cried, unnecessarily impressed.
well, no. but my mama is the original mother nature. or at least my original mother nature, my very own earth mama. and some things, you just absorb.
indeed, i and my four fraternal nestlings, each one of us has tales to tell about growing up assuming dinner conversations, even tense ones, would regularly be interrupted for the latest sighting of a flash of scarlet or orange or indigo.
or making the fifteenth round-trip to the nature preserve, far-enough away, little chipmunk bumping along in the back in some towel-cushioned box, because my mother didn’t like what the chipmunks were doing to her poppies, so she moved them, the chipmunks not the poppies, one by one.
my brother david remembers the parish priest pointing to my mother and calling her a pantheist, one who finds God everywhere. hmm. my brother, then and even now, couldn’t tell if the old priest meant that as damnation or salvation. sometimes you just can’t tell with these people of the cloth.
but far as i could tell, the padre could only mean it kindly. for my mother’s reverence for the divine in every romping squirrel, unfurling maiden fern, hopping jenny wren is, well, the very definition of divine.
her whole life, or all the parts i know, is a narrative with nature snapshots glued on every crucial page. the who-what-where is often faded, but the 3-by-5s of heaven here on earth are bright and clear and lasting.
i still remember the hush in her voice, the goosebumps on my spine, when she called, in the aching hollow days just after my father died, to tell me she now knew, because of a hawk, that my father was safe and well, and very much at peace.
seems she’d been out walking dickens, our beloved golden retriever, near a woods, and the hawk, out of nowhere, came swooping from the clouds, nearly brushed her head, circled tightly, and then went on.
as my mother told it, serenely, other-worldly, it was word from my father: she needn’t worry, needn’t be afraid. he was safe, the hawk was saying, she could carry on.
and so, of course, she did.
just days before my first was born, a days-old fawn somehow made it to my mother’s garden and curled up inside a window well, where all day long it waited, as its mama was off chomping leaves and grasses, most likely someone’s garden.
the mama deer, smart lady, knew in that way that nature does, that my mama was safe harbor, and the little fawn would be duly watched all day.
again, my mama took it as a sign that all would be well in my delivery room. and it was.
i will admit that when i was young ( a long, long time ago), i didn’t always love that i had mother nature for a mama. all the other girls had moms who took them out to lunch in malls and shopped for clothes in pink, i swear.
i had a mother wearing mud-splotched wellies and knee-worn jeans. her accessory of choice was the binoculars she roped around her neck. she was panning the heavens for shockingly-painted feathers, while the mothers of my friends were poring over racks of what was new for spring.
but now i am old enough to remember how she took me in the woods as a little, little girl, and taught me sacred awe for the trillium, a rare, endangered three-petaled woodland beauty that returns each spring to those who tiptoe deep enough into the underbrush to discover it once again.
and i am old enough to ask her every question i can think of, knowing, always knowing, there will be an answer. and probably a follow-up phone call, after she has gone to the library or the 1966 world book that leans beside the binoculars or the webster’s unabridged, and looked it up.
i am old enough to know that i must ask it now, before it’s too late. before i’ll be left to go alone to the library or the world book or the webster’s, aching for the answer lady who has taught me most of what i know about the world of God’s creation.

what odd-duck, yet still amazing, gifts has your mother given you?

the cry was more blast-from-mountaintop-when-avalanche-is-coming than just your usual first-thing-in-the-morning, ho-hum, here-comes-another-day.

it was fervent and it was piercing. it would have waken the deeply dead.

“mom! come here! i need you!”

bounding the stairs, out of breath, swinging ’round the doorway, seeing beatific child, bolt upright in his bedded throne, i would have been confounded. but the next words out of his mouth were these: “look! three hundred rainbows.”

indeed, indeed.

scattered, seeds of wonder, tiny splotches of rainbow, cast upon the wall, the lampshade, the pile of blocks, the pillow case, his right foot, the bookshelf, the alphabet rug, his left cheek, the one so round that even from behind you can see him smiling.

a room wholly quivering with rainbows. a room that looked as if someone pried a can of rainbows and poured them every single everywhere.

then this: “mama, look, rainbow jumped on to my foot.”

so began the game of can-you-catch-the-rainbow.

the rainbows that dance on walls, leap from lampshade to cheek to top of foot, come courtesy of a big fat prism, one the size of a teardrop should goliath ever start to cry, that hangs in my little one’s eastern window, the one that catches the first slant of sunbeam shortly after dawn and pours its magic on the scene once the shade is snapped and furled.

that’s when the rainbow circus comes rolling in the room.

and all of that comes courtesy of beloved aunt becca, who was my little one’s heartsong along with uncle david, but who moved away last summer to maine, far, far away.

becc and my little one had shared a year of wednesdays. becc, an art therapist who worked with inner city kids, who made them believe in themselves, who taught them that they had something to say and someone to listen, was in between jobs for a little while. so she made room on wednesdays for a little guy who loved her.

they did crazy things, those two. she had a canvas bag that she slung over her shoulder and every wednesday she brought it filled with some odd, but interesting, assortment that always led to wonder.

there was the roll of aluminum foil that led to a giggle-filled day of wrapping and unwrapping and re-wrapping each other in shiny silver cocoons and trying to walk like tin soldiers, or lie like jiffy-pop before it puffs.

there were the bits and bits of wood chunks, purple heart and birds-eye maple, ash and cherry, all left over from david’s wood shop, and, armed with tanker trunks of glue, my little one built metropolis upon metropolis, whole civilizations that still stand, proudly, amid his daddy’s shelf of architectural wonders. glue-gobbed purple-heart city hall shoved next to taj mahal.

alas, when it came time to leave, to pack an apartment, stuff it in a truck, and drive it through eight states, becc, always reading hearts, lifted her biggest, fattest prism from her window, wrapped it in tender leaves of tissue, and put it in a box.

she tucked the box, the rainbow catcher, in my little one’s open palms on the very last wednesday she came with that blessed canvas bag.

and, ever since, its rainbows have been the things that wake my baby, that tickle his eyelashes come morning, that color the last few frames of his everynightly dreams.

although, he tells me, not always. “not foggy days. not on a rainy day. if it’s a sunshiney day, i can see my rainbows.”

the morning of the 300 rainbows, i asked my little one if the rainbows made him think of becca and david every time.

he closed his eyes. he nodded. he didn’t say a word, but he looked like he might melt at any second. he looked like he might shed a big goliath tear.

he looked, i’m pretty sure, like a rainbow drained of all its color.

i sat beside his rainbow-spotted foot. i stroked indigo, then violet, the distal end of roy g. biv.

finally my little one spilled his rainbow-colored heart: “i miss them. and i love them. i wish they didn’t go move to maine. that’s why i miss them. so much.”

he laid his hand on a rainbow. held it there for just a little while. then he started bouncing around the bed, chasing rainbows with his bare hand.

that’s what rainbows do. rainbows, no need to say it, are magic, pure and simple.

rainbows are that interplay between light and mineral. the plane where heaven and earth join arms and swing. a doh-si-doh with the divine.

and children, bless them, hear the tune. they play along. they catch the rainbows, chase them, net them, put them in a jar. then, pure logic, they look for little leprechauns, one-inch ones, fitting for their little rainbows.

“there is always a leprechaun at the end of every rainbow, with a pot of gold,” my little one said, matter-of-factly, peeking under the bed. someone told him. or he saw it on some silly show. and when it comes to pots of gold, why not believe?

it is that infusion of the unbelievable as it spills into believable that is so essential, so necessary, it seems, in the lives of little children.

it is wonder, caught in little hands.

i remember, early on, watching floating ships of dust in vast oceans of morning light. my older one, then just beginning to put words to life, made a game of it, pointing, pointing to each speck, assigning each one a name and role: “magic.”

“magic,” he said again and again. i stood in awe of magic. magic i might otherwise have missed.

cooper edens, that great green tiger press illustrator and author whose books you would know the instant you saw one, back in 1980 wrote “caretakers of wonder,” a companion of sorts to “if you’re afraid of the dark, remember the night rainbow” (green tiger press, 1979).

in “caretaker,” where page after page peeks behind the curtain to catch men in a hot air balloon putting up the new stars, where others dab them with a paintbrush to keep them lit and shining, and still others spoon feed the moon strawberries , or safety-pin the sky to the horizon, edens ends the whimsy with this:

“now, while you sleep tonight, imagine what you would like to do to help keep the world magical? for you know that one of these nights your friends are going to tap on your window and invite you to become a caretaker of wonder.”

seems that becca heard the tapping, and she brought rainbow seeds to a heart that loves her, a heart she knew would miss her, a heart that might, just maybe, be filled drop by drop, if each morning it could wake in a field of rainbows and try to net them before a little boy toddled down for toaster waffles.

what would you like to do to be a caretaker of wonder?

we waited 15 months for someone to move in. at last, it seems, they’ve filled the condo tower. all except for the penthouse, that little hole up at the tippy top of the triangle.
the builders are bewildered. all the other holes, they left unfurnished. but not the penthouse. “a pillow and a recliner for dad,” that’s what they put in there. the builder says so. he was standing there the other morning, beaming. just beaming. he is so proud that he built a birdhouse and they did come, the birds did.
“maybe somebody signed a lease but they’re not moved in,” chirps the other builder, refusing to believe that all his hammering and sawing would be, well, for the birds. that penthouse, he insists, is one fine specimen of three-sided real estate. way he sees it, the birds, if only they’d use their eensy-weensy brains, oughta be takin’ numbers, lining up like little planes, trying to muscle their way into his signature construction.
mind you, this is not some scrawny birdhouse. this mother of all birdhouses measures a full 5-by-4 (and that’s feet, folks, not inches). you don’t even need binoculars to see it. fact is, i’ve seen neighbors walking by, necks twisted nearly 180, gawking. scratching their fool heads. i’ve had folks stop me, is that really a bird house, they wonder?
no, it’s an homage to swiss cheese, i wanna tell them. of course it’s a bird house. what else would you think of putting on the tippy top of the gable of your house?
see the little eggs hanging from underneath? that was the architect’s idea of a joke, an architectural folly, as it were. they get their yucks in funny ways, those architects. (or should i say their “yolks”?)
anyway, i love my birdhouse in the clouds. i couldn’ta cared too much less about how they rejiggered the outside of this old, ill-proportioned house, the one that made my husband, the architecture critic, cringe. but when they came up with the idea for the birdhouse, i got downright giddy.
the architects have a little trick, and, silly them, they think i’ve not caught on. anytime they draw a drawing of our house, they make sure to toss in whole subdivisions of gabled dwellings for the birds. they think i’ll be so distracted tracking flocks of birdish houses i’ll forget to pay attention to whatever else it is they’ve drawn. but i’m no fool. i play along.
truth is, i am a little wingy for the birds.
of course not everyone thought the house of holes was such a bright idea. my mother, ever sensible as you’ve come to know, mentioned just two things as she rolled her eyes: noise, and what the french would call le poop.
so far, neither has been a problem. the birds at my house are polite. matter of fact, i think they rather appreciate their finely-feathered digs. who wouldn’t? it’s warm, it’s safe, it’s high up in the trees—heck, practically in the clouds—and it’s got that bird’s-eye view. and besides, they can listen in on all the rumblings down below, where i sleep soundly.
seems pretty much the folks who’ve moved in are the sparrows, the common house sparrow, a winged thing famous for finding any hole in anything and calling it home sweet home. there’s a teeny tiny hole just above our front door, and don’t you know, the sparrows have moved in. the splattering of grasses and twigs is piling up on the doormat, just in case we need reminding.
now, unless you, like my high-rise birds, have spent your days holed up inside some skyscraping tower and have no clue of the doings of the grassy world, you probably are aware of the fact that this is full-throttle nesting season. yessiree, it is.
which brings us to the part of this meander in which you too can play along.
let’s say, for instance, that you do not have a birdie triangle atop your gable. and that you have little chance of getting one in the next few days. well, that is not to say that you too cannot be a part of something nesty.
yup, it’s time for that ol’ slumber party pastime, the scavenger hunt. gather the kiddies, or gather just your beautiful bountiful self. scrounge around the house.
gather this: clumps of human hair from the hairbrush (or your head; your choice). dog or cat fur, whatever’s lying around. bits of string, cut up into 8- or 9-inch bits. yarn, the more naturally-dyed, the better. raffia.
for the pure joy of it, i love to put out little scraps of fabric. i swear nothing will make your heart skip quite so sweetly as seeing a snippet of your bedroom curtains tucked in mama robin’s nest.
(cotton, by the way, is not the best bit; too water-absorbent, and if mama and papa go off in pursuit of worm, the little hatchlings left behind in soggy cotton could die of cold in the short time they’re without mama or papa’s warm belly resting on their cold bald heads. silk might be quite nice. or, perhaps, a rich brocade.)
now, go grab an onion sack. you know, that little red mesh bag the onions come in. or a golden brown one, if that’s what your store shells out. the color, trust me, doesn’t matter.
take the bag and stuff it with all your nesting offerings. hang it from a bush, a tree, or a nail banged in your fire escape, for cryin’ out loud. if you’re without a bag, fear not, just cast your hairballs to the wind. or, if you wanna be fussy about these things, drape it delicately on the shrubs.
you might post a little sign, if you’re so inspired. something along the lines of this: “free for the pickin’. from our hairy brush to your feathered home.”
do not, as of the latest missive from the audubon society, clean out the lint from your dryer, not if you use those dryer sheets that make your bath towels soft and oh-so-yummy smelling. nasty chemicals lurk in those yummy smells and, over time, they will do in the poor unsuspecting birds.
also, if you really want to muddy things, do this: stir up a little pot of mud—or, here’s a prescription, make a plain old mud puddle–and leave it in your yard. the robins, who line their nest with mud, will love you. they might even land on your window ledge and sing you a special song.
my wonderful bird man, tj, gave me that swell idea.
he says that the birds are born knowing how to nest. says they’ve got the shopping list tucked in their little birdie brains. and believe it or not, he says they remember the nest they were hatched in, and somehow they know to go about building just like their mama and papa did. birds’-nest blueprints buried deep inside. i kinda like that.
right now, says tj, the birds have one and only one burning desire: making baby birds. “their little bodies are bursting with hormones,” he says. “it’s sort of like seasonal puberty.”
and it’s tied, interestingly, to the amount of daylight, not temperature. with every extra minute of sunbeam pouring down, the birds flit here and there, flapping madly in full winged pursuit of that solitary bird preoccupation: the feathered nest that stands between them and those babies, soon arriving in the form of eggs.
the eggs, in the case of sparrows, might already be here. which means the triangle i think of as the avian haute condo, might in fact be an obstetrics wing.
the rest of the birds–the robins, the cardinals, the chickadees, even the red-bellied woodpeckers, won’t be laying eggs ’til at least the end of april, or early may, all the way through july.
but before we get too deep into eggs, we await, any day now, the torrent of returning neo-tropical birds—orioles, tanagers, hummingbirds, cedar waxwings, and all the warblers—all of whom spent the winter sipping little birdie cocktails with pink and orange paper umbrellas down in the jungles and on the beaches of central and south america.
there is much to learn about the care and feeding of the migrant birds. and we will get to all of that.
but first, go grab your hairballs.

any questions, class? yes, you in the pink shirt…

and finally, seriously, many more prayers please for my beloved susan and her mother. it was a long night in surgery last night. bless them abundantly.

sometimes it’s just there at the front door. doesn’t knock. barges in. makes its way to the kitchen table.
you are sitting there, staring it in the face. wholly uninvited company. but there it is, and you deal with it, have to deal with it. have to try to figure out which parts to tell which children, and which parts to shield them from.
it’s the news, of course. bad news. especially horrible bad news.
like the news that came seeping in through the cracks yesterday. the news that i first heard crackling across the car radio. the news that some mad man had boldly strolled into a german class and started shooting. and then left behind the carnage and kept on shooting.
thirty-three dead by the time he killed himself. maybe more to come if the ones who are suffering don’t make it.
it’s the kind of news that makes the hairs on your arms stand on end. that makes you sit bolt upright in the driver’s seat. you are pulled and pushed away from the tv screen. you feel compelled to know, to understand. but then you recoil. think, oh my God, what if. try to imagine being a college kid in a classroom, when all of the sudden there’s a gun, and it’s exploding. or being a parent who’s sent your kid off to school there, and the hell of waiting, wondering.
you think about the lives forever scarred because they watched a campus turn into hell. they watched bodies bloodied, and others rolling out of windows. you wonder how the kids who stood there will ever again stand in a crowd and not be scared out of their wits. you wonder, when you finally lay your head on your pillow, how many nights it will be before they can sleep. and what the hell kind of dreams will populate their broken dozing when finally they collapse and close their lids.
but then, too, because it is the world it is, you connect the dots straight to home. you no longer play, “that could never happen here.” that game, friends, is over. out of touch. archaic. quaint.
the insanity of this age is that it could always happen anywhere. and so the horrible story we see unfolding on the screen is the story we pray to God we never see with our own eyes.
it’s no joke that the one refrain you can count on is the neighbors all lined up, shaking heads, tsk-tsking: “i never thought that would happen here. this is just a normal place.”
well, i know at my house, for two years, i’ve been hearing stories about a kid at school obsessed with guns. a kid who does militaristic drills at lunch every day. a kid now proudly telling anyone who’ll listen how he is into witchcraft, worshipping the devil. this kid—i’ve heard him—is smart. and he’s a loner. he scares some kids around him. he scares a kid i know who’s smart enough to pay attention, to listen, and to connect the dots to what he sees in the world around him.
last night, when i picked up a car of eighth graders from school, from fiddling on the roof, i made sure the radio was off. i told them, gently, it had been a bad day in the world. i’d let them find out the details at home. one already knew the whole story. another had just moved from blacksburg, virginia, where it all happened, a year ago. she’d lived down the block from the athletic center. they swapped the details of the story; i said little. i mostly listened. then, when the last one was out of the car, i turned to the wide-eyed one i love and i told him what i knew. he swallowed hard.
while i was cooking, i turned the tv on, to see what more they knew. before the little one came in from playing swords, i turned it off. cryptically, the three big ones of us said a few things back and forth. the little one wanted to know what was wrong. he insisted. we told him someone had hurt some people at a college. he wanted to know if they were teenagers, like a teenager he knows. then he picked up a tortellini.
all day, the backdrop to my tingling spine was why in the world do i not react this way when the news is from iraq? why can we be barraged with daily stories of 25 dead, 22 dead, in a marketplace, in parliament, inside, outside the green zone, and we do not much pause? do not find ourselves secreting away to catch a minute’s update on the glowing screen? why do some deaths give us chills, make us lie awake? and others merely fade into the rhythm of the day?
why does loss of one human life break our heart, wrench us out of sleep, and loss of dozens of others barely register a blip?
that we could be so numb is the thing that truly shakes me. that it takes hell outside a war zone to finally make us look, lift our eyes from the kitchen sink, see the carnage that the world has wrought.

your thoughts? how did the news come barreling into your house? did you find yourself groping to tell the children in your life what the hell had happened, once again?

because we were the last plane out of laguardia and 400 other flights were canceled, because rainfall was being sized in feet, not inches, yesterday, because the mayor and the governor of new york were going on the air telling folks to stock up on cans of beans and bottled water, i decidedly did not think i was getting home.
did not think that we alone had reason to be climbing into cab, driving on fairly empty roadways through pounding rain, checking bags, getting seat assignments.
everywhere around us, the system was caving in under the weight of what someone called the worst storm to pound the eastern seaboard in 25 years. but, blithely, our own personal conveyor belt kept rolling right along.
even a last-minute squawk from the pilot, the kind you hear in your ear when you, like your nosey husband, tune in religiously to what’s happening up in the cabin, even the last minute “alpha-alpha” (whatever that is, it was not a good thing) that made us pull over to the curb (if runways have such things) and seemed to stir the ambulances and fire trucks to pull in ranks along the plane’s left flank, even that did not keep us from lifting off and bumping our way home.
i, the whole time, kept my focus fixed on getting those keys in the door.
and while i bumped along i found myself walking in my mind through my every room, opening doors, hearing sounds, seeing light come in at certain angles.
i have, i realized, memorized my house.
i know it in the dark, i know it with my eyes closed, i know it in a plane, 1000 miles away, 100,000 feet up in the air.
i know just the board that creeks under letters D and J and P on the alphabet rug in my little one’s room. i know which board at the top of the stairs in the middle of the night will broadcast my tiptoeing up to bed, way too late.
i know which drawer needs an extra tug and then a wiggle if i really want to spritz my old rive gauche. i know that the bathtub takes forever to drain, and how to jerk the metal whatchamahoojie to make the dirty water shlurp away a little, little faster. i know which light switches switch to nothing and which turn on lights that seem to have a mind all their own.
it is uncanny the intimacy between self and plank and wire, the way the house seeps into the swirl of your fingertips. or, really, the way we swirl into the woodgrain of our house.
i know every bush and tree, every growing thing–if not each sorry blade of grass–here on the fraction of an acre that has my name on all its papers, the ones that make you rumbly when you sign.
i know the shadow cast by light through every window, where it falls upon the floor and how it moves with every hour. i know my house enough to know when a new wrinkle of sunlight is spilling through the glass.
i know the sound of my house breathing. it does not belch, like the place i was this weekend. it hisses, soft like grasses in the wind. and i would notice if it ever lost its breath. i would run to blow fresh air into its lungs.
i am caretaker of my house; my house, in kind, takes care of me.
as long as there’ve been cave dwellers , and perhaps some creature even before who rustled leaves in a circle that felt soft and safe, certainly safer than without, there’s been some little knot inside the human soul that drives it to build, to know, a harbor against the cold and winds and unrelenting sunlight.
and not just humans. my cat, i know, finds little places. a box under a desk in a corner of the basement, a box i filled with little clothes to give away, a box he worked his way in.
this is the season of the sparrows and the robins all collecting bits, picking sticks, carrying them off to places that they perhaps will memorize too. that they will know, when in they fly some afternoon, and see a stick disturbed.
it is a fact of life that i have come to count on: my house breathes and i breathe with it. even when i’m gone it keeps on breathing.
which is why, when i get home, i walk through every room. i run my hand on things i’ve missed. i wind the clock. i listen to its old familiar tick and tock.
i remember once when my older one was very little, just shy of one, and we’d been gone for the better part of two weeks. as we walked in the door, at last, and put him on the floor, he started crawling madly, like a hungry mouse to all the cheese he’d stashed around the house. he crawled from place to place to place; he’d touch a thing, put it to his mouth–the cheese, perhaps–and then move on. surveying all he knew, making certain it was where he needed it to be.
i remember watching. i knew just exactly how he felt. when you come home, you let out the breath that you’ve been holding, and you inhale a new fresh breath. you are breathing once again, in rhythm with your house.
the house you know by heart.

what little quirks do you know and love about your house? what is it like for you when you turn the key, swing wide the door, and step back inside your house that has been breathing, waiting?

finally, it’s monday. the lazy susan twirls afresh. take a twirl.

hmm, you might be saying to yourself, that thing up there, the one with little beacon and big fat needle, i swear, you say, it looks just like a machine that sews.
but why? you ask, you smarty pants.
what in heaven’s name, you wonder, does mr. singer’s old invention have to do with getting out the door?
well, everything. when, at 9 o’clock at night, after supremely long, long day, you decide it’s really time to give some thought to the plane you are catching in the morning.
and when, as you finally tear through drawers, stack together all the clothes you need for one of those twice-a-year truly dapper must-be-theres, you notice that either someone cut the cuffs off your little one’s dapper pants or his legs have stretched by four inches since last he wore the now-three-quarter-length, not-so-dapper pants.
so, no fool, you, you move onto plan b, which is where the machine above comes in. you insist little mr. long legs try on the only other pair that’s anywhere near his ankles and you notice, because you see the spaceship underpants peeking out from where a seam should be, that they’re split right up the bottom.
now keep in mind that you are not the queen of sewing needles. in fact somewhere in your medical records is the trip to the emergency room with the needle and lovely salmon-colored thread dangling from the very middle of your pointer finger.
but there you are, in the dark and chilly basement, glasses sliding down your nose, pins pricking your every other finger, hoping to high heaven you can make this work.
or else, you’re sunk.
you will be the only one on the upper east side of manhattan, for mercy’s sake, who lets her little boy go off to synagogue with spaceship underpants making rare, and remarkable, appearance beneath hand-me-down brooks brothers navy blazer.
the chic who populate manhattan will surely spin you ’round and point you back to the farmland where they think that you belong.
oy, as boy no. 1 likes to say.
now once upon a time, you might remember, going out of town meant tossing clothes and brush in bag and locking up the door. that was once upon a time. this is now. this is your rather complicated life. this is your life with people who depend on you to think—and pack—what they might need to wear.
and then they wail when you try to argue that a light saber is a.) not really the accessory for penny loafers and white oxford, and b.) probably going to get you bumped when you try to pass the nice policeman who thinks that mouthwash, for crying out loud, makes for lethal carry-on.
the wailing will not end, so you pull out your biggest gun: go ask daddy.
apparently, daddy already demurred. daddy said to go ask you.
back and forth all night, the poor progeny of indecisive parents could bounce and bounce and bounce.
had i had the camera in the dim light of where the suitcases are dumped, mouths wide open, you would see that somewhere amid the bounce, bounce, bouncing one of the indecisives did decide: a flag it seems was waved, decidedly a white one.
for, right beside the little loafers, there is packed, of course, the doggone saber. “i’ll tell ’em it fights the bad guys on the plane,” the little warrior offered.
swell, you say to self, as you shuffle off to pour your goopy potions into eensy-weensy bottles the plane police get such a kick from.
as i aim and spill, i’ll spare you all the sturm und drang about the nasty storm that’s on its way. the one the weather people bawked about all day yesterday, with flashing warnings, and dire forecasts of 70-mile-an-hour winds. the one we fear might make for a long, long night on the friendly cots of laguardia.
did i mention that i now routinely fly with a guy who would rather have a root canal than have his body lifted off the ground, even if it’s seatbelted into a metal bird that no longer stocks so much as a single salty peanut for all the flapping?
ah, the joys of going away.
i forge on. quite confident that, once there, light saber, unholey pants, husband hooked to 100-percent pure oxygen, it should all be rather grand.
i love going out of town. especially when, before i board the plane, i have to haul out the sewing machine i keep on hand for just such pre-flight emergencies.
oh, and as i wind this up, i now get report from talking head at open door that the suitcase we used to use to carry hanging things, well it broke a while back, could not be fixed, and, oops, we forgot to get a new one.
hmmm, long as i’m on a sewing roll, wonder if i could run that broken thing through the trusty machine now waiting, taunting, down below?
or else, i’ll be wearing all my clothes—chic black suit on top of jeans on top of striped pajamas–as i carry on my light saber.

raise your hand if you too love the calm, the cool, of getting out of town…any strange departure tales you care to tell? in the meantime, beware of little boys bearing sabers. and see you monday, when i’m back with stormy tales.

lord knows i am not the first mama to finally empty the basement, cull through toy chest, sift through little people’s drawers, and send off whole chapters of my life in the back of a delivery truck.
but might we pause to mention that it really hurts, sometimes, to turn the page.
ouch. i’m very much still stinging.
like many things i do in life, i didn’t do this in easy-to-swallow bits. not a box here, a carload there. nope. i filled half a truck, the sort of truck that’s often stuffed with whatever makes a whole apartment tick.
and while i winced with every box, i did not do this all against my will. i was part and parcel of the loading.
it was i myself who lifted up the puppet stage my brothers built one christmas eve, and where many a knight had chased a wolf, and birds burst out of pies.
it was me who hauled up the stairs and out the door the boxes filled with baby clothes and toddler clothes, and the crowning glory, the black-checked baby carrier i wore across my chest, the one we called “the snug.”
i can hardly believe i let it go; i am such a fiend for holding onto things.
especially the snug that made my baby pump his legs whenever he saw it coming. the one i never ever thought i’d get to wear after baby no. 1.
and then the miracle, the leg-pumper who no one thought would be, landed in my oh-so-hungry arms.
hey, wait, i think i’ve got to chase that truck.
oh, lord, i never thought i’d part with half the things i’ve now watched roll away.
the baby stroller first pushed in 1993, on a wobbly walk where one of chicago’s finest leapt from squad car to impart this bit of urban street smarts to parents obviously, despite new italian stroller, inadequately equipped: don’t push the stroller across the alley, the sergeant cautioned, without first stepping out in front to look both ways for cars. to punctuate his well-paved point, he spun a tale of a stroller that got squished, petit enfant inside. advice, ever heeded.
i gave away the whole chronology, the growing of a babe as told through accumulated stuff: the nursing stool, the car seat, the baby monitors, the high chair, the potty seats, the tonka dump trucks, the bed rails, the wooden puzzles, the art table, and, yes, the funny little car that both boys climbed in, got stuck in snow in, and, on hot summer days, doused with garden hose, a drive-under carwash that always made for lots of noise, while boy in bloated diaper scrubbed from bumper to bumper.
for a year or better, that car had been abandoned. these days, my little one has only time for racing scooter, or bike with training wheels.
the car, it seems, along with all the rest, had finally, inarguably, passed its statute of limitations.
and so, i finally surrendered. the chapter, titled birth to 5, has closed. i’ve no business clutching any longer.
it took me years to get here. it took hours of needling from my mother. it’s a sin, she’d tell me, to have too much when some have none. what in the world was i saving it for? she asked a gazillion times.
well, i was clinging for lots of reasons. or, maybe, one or two: i dreamed of passing much of it on to brothers, now far away and still without need for baby carriers or strollers or art tables where little hands will color outside the lines. (psst, don’t tell my mother, and do not let her in the attic, but i’ve got boxes of little tiny clothes and a stack or two of blankets that i am still saving for someone’s someday babies).
as for me and my babies, i’d never thought i’d get a second chance for stroller or snug or car with little wheels, and when i did, i milked it, quite literally, to the final blessed drop.
it was as if, once it all came hurling back to me in the pregnancy that broke the odds, i couldn’t bear to let it go again.
hard-won dreams, i tell you, have a way of nestling deep and solid against the lub-dub of your heart. stingy, maybe, but maybe not so much, not after all the years of banging heaven’s door, pleading for just one more chance to snap on a baby bjorn.
but finally, part cleaning frenzy, part fact that baby 2 is rounding the bend toward six, and large part locked on little children with no chance to sit at little table all their own, or slip a puppet on their hand and tell a mixed-up, wide-eyed story, i did the thing i couldn’t do: i dialed the good souls at a place where i used to rock the babies in the nursery while their mamas tried to find a job, a roof, a life. i gave address, and promised to be home, waiting for the big ol’ truck.
there are lots of ways to mark the growing of your children, the passing of their stages.
there’s the door jamb in our pantry, the one striped with pencil scratches, each one showing which boy, when, had measured what, in ever-rising feet and inches.
there’s the relative ease of getting dressed each morning. boy no. 2, at last, can slip on his own shoes, and actually get left foot in left shoe and not the other way around.
with eight-year lag between the two, we are often slow to inch along, an arithmetic that somewhat dulls the zing, and decelerates the closing of each chapter.
one is toiling to decipher quadratic equations, the other is trying to count to 50 by himself. we’ve not yet put away the abacus.
one might soon start shaving, the other needs help getting toothpaste on his brush. why ditch the stool that gets the spit somewhere near the sink?
i suppose that i should feel a lightened load, what with all the extra room down in the basement. and maybe someday soon i will.
but right now i am thinking of the snug. when no one’s looking i just might sneak into the city, and see if i can spot the mama who clasps it ’round her middle. as she slips her baby’s pumping thighs through those leg holes i could thread, closed eyes, i’ll blow a kiss through cyclone fence, and then, perhaps, i’ll feel much better.
if not, i can always wander home, run my fingers down the door jamb.
or, better yet, grab the one with training wheels, and teach him how to ride.

how do you mark the passing chapters of your lives? when you finally turn a page, does it make you wince? or do you feel freed? and what, of all the treasures you do let slip away, do you decide must stay? it is the things forever tucked away that tell our deepest stories, the archeology of our lives…