pull up a chair

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?

all my life, my toes’ve wanted to curl up and hide. they are not proud, long wigglers, the sort you see when you flip through the slick glossy magazines, the slicks you might not subscribe to but might maybe flip through as you sit at the doctor’s, waiting your turn to get poked, prodded and measured. to see if, perhaps, you’ve grown any which way–up, down, or sideways–since same time last year.

no, indeedy. my toes are decidedly the sort you would not find in a tight shot in some hollywood movie, where the lens pans the bedsheets, starting down at the wiggly pigglies.

nope, not the toes you would find playing peek-a-boo with the dare-me-to straps of some high-steppin’ manolo blahniks.

in fact, my l’il baby toe pretty much has gotten along curled half in a ball, her sweet little end part (you can’t quite call it a toenail since it’s mostly not there; there’s no room for polish, not even a speck) cowering there under her next-door toe.

(note to self: be sure to ask for a discount, the eight-toe cut-rate, next time at the pedicure palace. note no. 2, this one to you, dear read-along reader: i only get pedicures when my newspaper pays, or i find i’m the bride. thus, the rare recent spell in the vibrating chair. but that’s tiptoeing ahead in this bare-footed epic.)

so help me, last thing i ever thought is some man with a really long lens would come to my house, bang on my door, tell me to take off my socks and my shoes and go stand in the mud.

but, dang, that’s what happened today.

i stood like a stork. he shuttered away. clickclickclickclick.

folks driving by, must really have wondered. (hmm, i just realized, more likely than not they musta figured right off he was a scientist zeroing in on the emerald ash borer or some other tree bug. highly unlikely they wasted a thought thinkin’ my shriveled ol’ toes could be in the cross-hairs of quite such a ruckus. so much for wowing the neighbors.)

ain’t easy, i tell you, bein’ a foot model. there i was ankle-deep in the weeds, mosquitoes flittin’ all over, thinking, most likely, “hey, here’s a sucker, all right. we bite, she wiggles. but, darn thing, she won’t barely budge. just stands there, making like the post of a mail box, only minus the letters.”

that would be me, two denim posts, spilled out to bare naked feets. slathered with mud, for effect.

it was real mud, all right. nothing faux about that. but the whole standing there thing. that was really all just for show, for the picture. for my odd little feets’ short season of fame.

fame, you ask? re-reading the word. thinking surely you must’ve read wrong. mais, non. it’s the relative truth.

here, let me explain: come the week after next, i bare my toes, in no little way. whole spread of a news page, as a matter of fact. my feets quite big enough, thank you, for you to set down your coffee, right there where the little one curls.

i figgered you might like a warning. might wanna hold off the paper that morn, till after you wolf down your eggs, or guzzle your OJ.

so here is the warning: week after sunday, beware of my bare naked toes, all smothered in mud on a page in the news. not hidden inside, but right out in front. on the cover, in fact, of the gardeny section. no namby-pamby, half-footsie under the table, not here anyway. this is bold, skin-struttin’ stuff.

the backstory behind the fame of my feets is basically, straight-forwardly, this: it’s just that i noticed that this here sunshiney season, the one when what grows in the garden calls out your name, well, it’s pretty much the time of the year when really–if you’re inclined toward the garden at all–you’d do best to wear gloves and at least little anklets, whenever you step out of the beds.

this time of the year, it’s one of two things: mud season, or, the dehydrated version, the season of dirt.

if you, like me, can’t stay out of the dirt, well then, you know what i mean: you can’t for the life of you leave the garden behind. it sticks and it clings, in streaked epidermis. gives you away, in great hard-to-ditch globs, for the mudcake you are.

the cringe comes in moments like this: you reach for your wallet to pay for your groceries, and all of a sudden, you notice your arm. looks like maybe you just came from the spa. uh, huh. that’s what you hope the cashier is thinking. that maybe you just had a mud bath. some rare siberian mud, slathered from head to your toe, only the timer went off, and the slatherer missed a few spots, when hosing you down. so you up and you left, still slightly streaked.

only what really happened was this: you got carried away. one weed led to another. and next thing you knew, you, once again, looked like a mud puddle with legs.

remember dear pigpen? the mess who was charlie brown’s friend? the one who, wherever he walked, poofed up fat little clouds of pure uncensored dirt?

well, yes. ‘tis the season, and, as often happens when a wee little thought takes a trip through my brain, i wound up spinning a yarn for my dayjob.

told tales of all sorts of folks with frankenstein shoes, caked with inches of mud. smelling a tad like manure. going all sorts of places–the hair-dye parlor, the grocery, even the diner. not noticing, till they saw all the stares, that they, once again, had succumbed to the filth that is the plight of the everyday gardener.

and so, in that odd-round-about way that is the life of a muck-raking scribe, i got the note in the mail from my boss: would you please bare your toes to the world? show off your mud paws? just stand in the dirt, and make like the mess that you are?

except for the bug bites, ‘twas all rather painless.

and now i know how it feels to get (somewhat) paid to stand there and twiddle my toes.

and here’s the biggest relief: when the man with the lens yelled to take it all off, i had to only obey from the ankles on down. and only to prove that a happy gardener is a muddy one, too.

now i know what you’re thinking. what in tarnation does all this have to do with my life? well, maybe not much. maybe you are pristine in your pruning of weeds. maybe you don’t make like a piglet and roll in the mud. or maybe you too have tales of how you, like me, and my friend with the frankenstein mudboots, forget and forget that what we do in the garden, sticks like ooze to our hide-and-seek parts. what, pray tell, are the tricks up your cuffs or your sleeves, to stay clean as a whistle when plucking the weeds, or simply picking the posies of summer?

there it is, the very page that long long ago cocked and wiggled its finger at me, lured me into the spell, into the nestled place of a book, where one page is sewn to the next, where what spills out, pulls you in. enchants you. stirs you. sets you to dreaming.

in my case, it never let go.

as a child, i sat and stared at page 53 in a book now so fingered its cover is crumbling. but, there, on the pages the old book flops open to, there’s thumbelina in her tulip petal canoe, sailing across the porcelain pond. lily-of-the-valley spilling onto the banks at her back. forget-me-not, and bleeding heart taking the splashes on the windward rim.

it was tasha tudor’s hands, and her heart, that so finely drew, and thus drew me in. dabbed a whole paint box of watercolors, colors she matched from her garden, colors and petals she knew so intimately, she made it be real.
real, certainly to a 5-year-old girl who wished more than anything that all of her life could be like the ones in the storybook.

in fact, i stared so hard at that petal-rimmed bowl, i imagined that maybe i too could plant me a barleycorn just like the woman on page 52–the page where the words are–who wanted a little child more than anything in the world. and then, when a green shoot shot up, just like it did in the story, i might kiss the tight-wadded bud, and sprout me a thumb-sized little friend.

i’ve never quite stopped believing.

i’ve always known that far, far away, on a farm in vermont, there was a barefooted painter, one whose garden was as lush as her storybook drawings, who held the key to my heart.

she put me under the spell, and the spell’s never broken.

only today, the 18th of june, i let out a sigh, a very sad sigh, when word came that, after 92 years, tasha tudor has died.

tasha tudor, you see, spent the whole of her life painting and drawing and dreaming for children. pages and pages, book after book. from “pumpkin moonshine,” in 1938, to “the secret garden,” in 1962, right up till just weeks before she put down her paints, tidied her garden and died.

tasha tudor, in my book, is a national treasure. i mean, was. now here we are in that odd and awkward transition, in those hours when our words can’t catch up to the truth, when we fumble with tense, passing from present to thuddingly past.

i found out through a note, sent out by her children. must’ve been sent not long after she breathed her last breath. all i know is she was circled by those who most love her. and she was at home, in the hand-built, timeworn, new england farmhouse on the crest of a very steep hill, a place she called corgi cottage.

and when i read through the words, realized a very rare story had ended, i felt the light in the room suddenly dim, just barely enough to notice. but i noticed, all right. the sun seemed to slip from the sky, shadowed by the death of more than a friend, the death of the one who launched legions of dreams.

oh, i never met her, dear tasha tudor, although i did call her my friend.

i’ve grown her seeds, her very own forget-me-nots, and her blue-eyed morning glories. i’ve baked her buttery cookies, and wished i too could roast a turkey there on what she called “a tin kitchen,” some old-fangled contraption, a fine one, tucked in the hearth.

i’ve turned the pages of whole shelves of her books. i’ve read her christmas stories to my own children. i’ve kindled her beeswax candles, the ones she dipped in long rows of vats, the wax melted from all of her hives every fall.

i’ve corresponded with her grandson and granddaughter-in-law. and i’d been tempted to go out to meet her. to sip tea, maybe. to peek in her barns.

but something stopped me.

i dared not. couldn’t bear for the spell to be broken. preferred to imagine her, wrapped in her cloaks and her 19th-century aprons and skirts whose hems swept the stones of her garden’s walk, brushed ever-so-barely against her lupine and foxglove and the great spans of cobalt delphinium.

all my life long, there’s been a tasha.

and now, there is not.

tonight, in this room with walls the color of freshly-churned butter, in this room where the glow of but one lamp is shining, i sit and spread page 53 in my lap.

i can practically hear the wisp of thumbelina’s cat-whisker oars slapping the water. can breathe in the perfume of the shore-hugging lilies-of-the-valley.

i reach out to the bookshelf, where another one of my tudor treasures is her 1979 christmas book, “take joy!”

a dear friend of mine found it some years ago in a used book store, the best place to find a tasha tudor treasure, except for the few i bought straight from her farm in vermont.

the book, 159 pages of christmas stories and poems and carols, tells just how to bake the christmas cake, hang the stockings, and bring in the tree. she tells, too, how to remember the birds at christmastime, how to make them balls of peanut butter and raisins and nuts that are chopped. and how the pet canary gets a chicory salad in a wee flower pot.

she opens the book–and, forever, my heart–with a letter of fra giovanni, who writes: “….the gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet, within our reach, is joy. Take Joy.”

joy was taken today.

but because i believe in the world carved, painted, seeded, and stitched by one tasha tudor, because the spell, even now, hasn’t been broken, i will do what tasha would wish:

i will take joy.

in the maiden voyage of a tulip leaf across a soup bowl, or in the feasting each christmas of all my little bird friends, in the unfurling of a wide-eyed morning glory, or the stirring of her old stand-by, corgi cottage soup.

take joy, always. before it’s taken away.

if you too have been touched by the magic of tasha tudor, born in boston in 1915, author and illustrator of more than 75 children’s books, beginning with her first, “pumpkin moonshine,” in 1938, please inscribe a few words. i’ll send this along to her family, all of whom, i’m certain, are very much aching this moonlit almost-summer’s night.

and, always, take joy…

if you need just a little more tasha, i wrote more of her here, back in the winter of ‘007.

goodnight, sweet tasha, good night.