motherlove | pull up a chair

May 12, 2023

this is what mothering looks like. . .

a few years ago, maybe many years ago, i wrote something of a proclamation on mothering, the verb. in my feisty little voice, i argued — as vehemently as a girl taught to be polite could argue –– that, gosh darn it, mothering was not an art that belonged exclusively to those who happen to have pushed a wee squawker from her womb, nor only to those who’ve clutched babies to her bosom, anatomically-aligned attachments. i argued that we should be honoring not simply the noun — those who are mothers — but the verb — those who mother.

it’s an all-inclusive distinction, one i tried to describe thusly:

yes, every last someone who has stroked a brow, wiped a tear, dabbed chocolate off a little cheek, fluffed a pillow, tucked in the covers, whispered bedtime prayers, set an extra place at the table, stretched a meatloaf, picked the peas out of the pasta salad, kissed a bloody knee, kept a retching belly from falling in the toilet bowl.

yes, every pair of arms that’s lifted a dead-weight child in the pool, played red rover till the cows came home, bent half-over to push a kid on training wheels around and round the block, turned the pages of good night moon so many times you find yourself chanting good night to the mittens when no one’s in the room.

you get the point.

i believe it as firmly as i believe anything. and in fact, in the many hours i’ve spent curled in my window seat in recent days, i found myself with nose in a book that argues — again, vehemently yet politely — that we are missing out on a whole lot of God if we think of God only as a white-bearded fellow perched on a throne with a sword and a scepter, a God as king, imperial ruler and judge, as wielder of power, and slayer of sinners. (for the record, that has never been my image of God, and i admit to images, being of the simple kind who need pictures to go along with my favorite passages. and the picture i saw is a tender God, one with arms that reach, and a palm that cradles, or presses against the small of my back. and as i’ve grown and deepened into the mystery, i now sense God without image at all. i sense God in the shiver that runs up my spine when i encounter the beautiful or the unbearably tender, and i find God in the interplay — the ineffable force — that animates hearts and draws us — any of us, all of us — into each other.)

the book i’ve been reading — She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, by Elizabeth A. Johnson , a brave and brilliant theologian who happens to be a roman catholic nun –– says this:

“God is that on which you lean your heart, that on which your heart depends, ‘that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself,’ in Martin Luther’s memorable phrase.”

the truth is, it’s all mystery, and we reach for metaphor so our little minds can find something to seize. how do you put words to the inexplicable, the unknowable? you simply know what you know.

but in considering a God imbued with the feminine, a God more mother-like, a God, as johnson writes, of “gentleness and compassion, unconditional love, reverence and care for the weak, sensitivity, a desire not to dominate but to be an intimate companion and friend,” i scan the landscape of my recent days, and i spell out this litany of what mothering — the verb that belongs to all who employ tender loving empathies and unending expression of gentle kindness — looks like:

mothering is the knock at the door on a rainy morning, not long after dawn, and the friend who is standing there with a handful of field-plucked flowers and a soggy brown bag of parsley and spinach and ramps, foods she grabbed from the farmer’s market, knowing from her own daughter’s deadly cancer that these are the foods that should fuel me. and she knew without asking how very much i wished i could get to the market, though i couldn’t quite yet.

mothering is my beloved husband who, every morning, makes certain the feeder is filled with seed and the bird bath fully watered, for he knows the joy i absorb watching the birds flit hither and yon. mothering is the pizza he drove into the city to fetch because it oozes the things i love — spinach and mushrooms and cheese and a heavenly red sauce –– and he is intent on fattening me my way. mothering is the rod stewart and kim carnes tapes he played all morning long to try to convince me the rasp in my so-called voice (paralyzed vocal cord caused by the surgery) was a sexy addition to life here on the homefront.

mothering is the friends who don’t back down, who don’t shy away, who know without asking just when to barge in, and when to stay quiet. and who keep coming back, week after week, willing to walk at a snail’s pace, or pick up a vacuum and suck up the kitchen-floor crumbs that are driving me batty.

mothering is my aunt who tucked a tiny enamel cross in an envelope and scribbled these words on a note card: “hope i’m helping you carry your cross!” and then wrote that as soon as her daughter could drive her up here from cincinnati, she wanted to sit side-by-side under an apple tree “to make your ‘hurts’ hurt less.”

mothering is the courage to go the distance, even when the distance is wholly uncharted and fraught with shadows and plenty of bumps. and what you need more than anything is a friend who won’t cower and run for the hills.

mothering is the way some listen for the fears tucked in an otherwise straightforward sentence, and who don’t shush those hauntings away, but make room for it all, the light, the darkness, the liminal.

mothering is the text message that comes out of nowhere and makes you laugh till the slits in your side tell you to stop. because laughter is always, always, a curative. and it can carry you for hours, the echo of its joy refusing to fade.

mothering is this holy earth unfurling its tight buds and its blossoms into frothy meringues of cumulus white and lavender blue. mothering is the dawn that reminds me again and again that the light will shatter the night. mothering is the papa bird who tucks the seed into mama’s beak, an iteration of kissing i’ll not soon forget.

mothering is without gender, independent of obstetrical status. mothering, quite frankly, is simply another name for “love as you would be loved.”

mothering, quite simply, is what God does.

blessed mothering to all of you who mother and mother and mother –– even if you don’t realize…

birthday blessings to one of the wise women among us, our beloved lamcal, who fetched me from the darkness last night, and plunked me into a circle of pure and undeniable love, even when i wasn’t sure i was up for an outing. she’d sensed it might do my soul wonders, despite my bodily wobbles and squeaks, and she was oh so very very right on the money. i sat last night in a circle of holy holy pilgrims, who poured out their hearts and their blessings. and sent me forth. happy birthday, wise one….

lest you miss it, here’s the week’s query: tell a story of a time you were so deeply mothered — perhaps by an unlikely motherer — you’ve never forgotten.

and i’m leaving you this. because it’s glorious:

Go Deeper than Love

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.

~ D.H. Lawrence ~

p.s. even though the picture above is overt mothering with a literal mother cradling her literal baby (moi and my firstborn, the law professor) i had to reach for it today, because that tenderness, that love, is the very thing fueling me right now, as i reach out of these past upturned weeks and set my sights fervently, fiercely, on doing everything i can to keep on loving my boys –– and all of this life –– with every ounce of tender lovingness i can squeeze out of me…..so help me, MotherGod….

equal time for equal mothering: this is saying goodbye one college drop off and that’s the kid who graduates next week. my miracle baby. . .

12 Comments

March 3, 2023

a mother’s heart finds its place in a canyon of moving boxes

dispatch from 20009: in which canyons of boxes in every room are ours to conquer, moi and the one i birthed first. . .

i write to you this dawn from the singular place on the planet i wanted to be this week, a point on the map now highlighted in illuminating shades of radiant. a kid i love is a professor now, and i am here where, in my book, a mother belongs: by his side, tearing open his boxes, tallying the lost and found, turning a blueprint of rooms into a place called home.

i’ve planted the kid in five points on the map since the day he left home for college, and each one for its season became a place i peered in on, checking the weather, counting the miles, watching police reports. his dot became mine by extension.

i’ve spent years now considering places called amherst and new haven, portland, manhattan, and now the nation’s capital, specifically adams morgan, a neighborhood where RBG graces the banners that waft from the light poles, with the words “live your truth.”

the kid has decidedly hopscotched across the country over the course of the last decade. but his itinerant days might be over, as a tenure-track post prompts me to think i’d better get used to the latest in zip codes. and, anyway, unpacking boxes, finding places on shelves, has become my sub-specialty. it’s a task i take on with all the love in the world. i don’t think i’ll ever extinguish the place in my heart that tells me my number one job on the planet is to soften the blows, trod the circuitous path, keep stretching my arms clear across the landscape, and always, always find space and time for side-splitting giggles and tears when they spill from both of our eyes.

the kid is 29 but nowhere in the manual i was handed in the delivery room can i find a line telling me there’s a time when the mothering stops. mothering over the decades is a three-dimensional wonder: it deepens and widens, is layered with strata of life’s most wrenching and glorious moments. just last night as we were giggling and whispering our way to sleep––me on un-sheeted bed (we’re working our way from kitchen to bedroom), him on inflatable mattress––i told him how even though i see the professorial glasses he wears these days and feel the heft of his six-foot-three pillar of flesh and bone when he wraps his arms around me, i also see plenty often a flashing picture show of his life at various points along his continuum: i see––clear as clear could be––the wet and squirmy little thing placed in my outstretched arms the very first time; i see the six-month-old who let out a belly laugh for the very first time; i see the toddler who looked up from the kitchen table one breakfast and asked, as if it was the most ordinary of questions for a three- or four-year-old, “mommy, what is facetious?” meaning what does it mean, this very long word not normally found in preschool vocabulary. and, yes, i see the kindergartener who set up a lecture hall in our living room, with a circle of stuffed-animal pupils, a chalkboard and easel, and 26 spongy alphabet letters. the professor wore suspenders and tie and bare feet, and instructed his class on the fine points of D, O, and Q.

it’s a curious thing, this mothering the grown human being. there are those, i’ve been told, who believe a mother’s role is to step into the distant background, loosen the grip on the ups and the downs of those you’ve loved every day of their lives. i’m not among them, though i can go––and i have––whole weeks without more than a short burst of texting. i find it only gets richer and richer, the closest i know to “love as you would be loved.” mothering to me is a spectacular testing ground: day after day, i re-define and refine the extraordinary intricacies of loving, of where to position myself in the tableau of his life, how much of the weight to bear, and when to stand silent and when to come running.

what i know, after a lifetime of fumbles, of occasional hits and plenty of misses, is this: the width of my brain has only grown wider over the years, as each of my boys carry me into realms i’d otherwise never explore. and my heart and my soul, they’ve at once defied the laws of physics, both deepening and rising to depths and heights i’d never ever imagined. and so, as long as i’m needed and able, i shall tear away the endless strips of packing tape till my fingers are raw and my boy has a place to call home, his very own faraway home. six hundred miles from mine.

since i’ve been busy unpacking this week, i’ve not had much chance to gather up a commonplace-y bouquet. but i did find this, from the late great bard, leonard cohen, on sainthood:

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.”
Leonard Cohen

“achieved a remote human possibility. . . ” contemplate that for a while….

in book news: it seems hard copies of The Book of Nature have been plopping onto front stoops all over these united states, and heavenly folk, especially friends of the chair, have been sending along snaps, each of which makes my heart do a little bit of a gallop. it’s still a couple weeks till the official pub date––the vernal equinox, march 21; bring on the springtime, bring on the book!––so these early sneak-peek arrivals are both surprise and delight. and i am hoping to set that book soaring with a grand circle of chairs, as night falls on that first day of spring. see here for more details, should you be so inclined. (we’re gathering on march 21 at 7 p.m. central time, via zoom, one of the rare silver linings to emerge from our years in pandemic––or at least i count it as a silver lining, bringing me poets and thinkers from all across the globe.)

before i get back to uprooting books from their boxes, here’s the question (to ponder or drop us your thoughts): of all the mothers you’ve known or watched from some distance or close proximity, what are/were the defining qualities that allowed you to see and see clearly just what it means to love in the deepest mothering way? (and, remember, mothering for me is a verb not tied to any particular gender or state of procreativity, but rather to any and all who love with a tender loving attention and care, and the undying prayer that in some way they might both lighten another’s load and magnify the wonder of being alive…)

19 Comments

December 30, 2022

packin’ it in. . .

at one point yesterday afternoon, five of six burners were occupied on the carrier ship of a cookstove that occupies this kitchen: one boiled a vat of water for soon-to-be-roiling pastas; one simmered the beginnings of roux; one held a pot of tomatoes and basil and a chunk of parmesan cheese; one simmered chunks of apple and pear and cranberry into a compote; and one awaited the tea kettle’s whistlings.

even the cutting boards had taken assigned seats: one for the stinky onions and garlic; another for apples and pears.

we were packin’ it in.

stuffing as many favorites onto the stove, into one afternoon, into one ultra-condensed week of days jam-packed together. four of us––aka, all of us––are home this week. bedsheets are tossed in two of the rooms, the floors seem to be serving as closets and drawers. why unpack when you’ll soon be packing again, heading back out the door, into the air, and home to those faraway places?

packing it in seems as apt a way to live a life as any i can imagine. squeeze in as much as you can. (as long as those super-thick times are bracketed with spells of the monastic quiet that seems my most natural habitat.)

when it comes to loving, i’ll attach lavish every time. i don’t think an hour’s gone by this week––or maybe in my whole motherly lifetime––when i didn’t deep-down marvel at the miracle that two human beings were born to me. born from me, as a matter of fact. a feat i somehow never ever thought my wobbly old body would be able to do. i’d never put quite enough faith in my physical capacities. finish lines felt far beyond my reach; i wasn’t one to get where i needed to go by sinew and bone. and, besides, i’d mucked it up plenty along the way.

and so, the sound of their newborn cries in two dimly-lit delivery rooms is a sound that lifted me out of my body. it’s never faded.

in birthing both of them, volumes and volumes were birthed in me. i began to redefine love. and loving. i was filling in blanks, inserting my own particulars, and reaching toward the surest truth i’d ever been told: love as you would be loved. it was sacred instruction made flesh.

and all these years now––decades now––i’ve been stumbling, and bumping into walls, and trying and trying to do just that. my boys have become my paradigm for loving. my living-breathing exercise in empathy. i might try too hard sometimes. but i’d rather err in that direction than in not quite enough. not enough can feel achingly empty.

and so, here at the brink of a newborn year, another chance at trying again, it’s not a bad time to consider the ways we choose to live our days: will we pack it in? lavish a little bit of love? or as much as we can muster? will we put up with the jumble, and the noise, because it means we might squeeze in a few bits of truth, the truth that rises up from the deepest residue of the heart and the soul? will we pay close attention? will we savor our one more chance to live the love we all pray for? to be the love we imagine, we believe in?

my prayer for the new year is ancient and infinite: dear Holy Breath, that i may love as i would be loved. again and again and again. in ways never noticed, and in ways certain and strong. amen.

how will you live your days?

(the sweet boy above had promised he’d send along a photo of the jam-packed cookstove, with all its burblings and gurglings, since i was far too busy stirring to snap one, but as of friday morning press time, said photo hadn’t yet appeared, so we’re running with the one frame i managed to snap, in all its blurry glories. tis the famed mac ‘n’ cheese i’ve been making for 28 years.

p.s. long as i’m here, might as well pass along the mac ‘n’ cheese that has my boys crowding the cookstove….

mama mac ‘n’ cheese

Provenance: Gourmet magazine, May 1995, pages 200 -201; the issue that just happened to be lying on my kitchen table the day I sat down to plot the festivities for my firstborn’s second birthday.

Yield: Serves 8 children.

3 Tbsp. unsalted butter

3 ½ Tbsp. all-purpose flour

½ tsp. paprika

3 C. milk

1 tsp. salt

¾ pound wagon-wheel pasta (rotelle)

10 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, shredded coarse (about 2 ¾ C.)

1 C. coarse fresh bread crumbs

* Preheat oven to 375-degrees Fahrenheit and butter a 2-quart shallow baking dish (the broader the crust, the better).

* In a 6-quart kettle bring 5 quarts salted water to a boil for cooking pasta.

* In a heavy saucepan melt butter over moderately low heat and stir in flour and paprika. Cook roux, whisking, 3 minutes and whisk in milk and salt. Bring sauce to a boil, whisking, and simmer, whisking occasionally, 3 minutes. Remove pan from heat.

* Stir pasta into kettle of boiling water and boil, stirring occasionally, until al dente. Drain pasta in a colander and in a large bowl stir together pasta, sauce and 2 cups Cheddar cheese. Transfer mixture to prepared dish. Macaroni and cheese may be prepared up to this point 1 day ahead and chilled, covered tightly (an indispensable trick, when confronting a serious to-do list for a day of birthday jollity).

* In a small bowl, toss remaining ¾ cup Cheddar with bread crumbs and sprinkle over pasta mixture {Note: My boys insist you go heavy on the extra cheese here, it makes it better, and my boys are ones who like their cheese to supersede their bread crumbs}.

* Bake macaroni and cheese in middle of oven 25 to 30 minutes, or until golden and bubbling. Let stand 10 minutes before serving. At last: Dig in.

may all of our 2023s be blessed. . .

12 Comments

May 6, 2022

empty nest

once the adrenaline died down, more fire-hydrant surge than all-out combat, once i paused my pounding on the window, realized how close i’d come to thrusting my fist right through the glass, shattering and bleeding sure to pre-empt the rescue i’d attempted, once i took a breath, my first impulse was to think maybe i’d jinxed it.

it must be my fault for letting out their secret. maybe i shouldn’t have extolled the wonders of the nest right before my eyes.

here’s what happened: mama and i were, as we’d been for weeks, co-existing peacefully, she on her side of the glass, blanketing her babies in her downy feathers, me tap-tapping away here on the word-churn machine. it was late saturday afternoon, just one short day and a half after i’d spun the tale of how mama cardinal and i were expectantly working toward our deadlines: mine, a book in the making; hers, a clutch of eggs.

she’d been on the nest 15 days and counting. i delighted at the way she punctuated our shared workspace –– seemingly out of the blue –– by belting out an abbreviated string of song, as if she’d suddenly been overcome by the jubilance of nesting. any day now, i would have heard the wee peep-peep-peeps of nestlings, seen the blur of pointy beaks thrusting skyward for an airdrop of worm.

but then, at nearly six o’clock that fateful evening, without so much as a peep of warning, in those final hours of what eliot so rightly termed “the cruellest month,” there suddenly arose from the bushes such squawking as i’ve never heard. i turned and saw furiously flapping wings — mama and papa both, each on separate branches of the ordinary evergreen that for two weeks now had been the nursery for their nest, the closest i had ever come to northern cardinal observation deck, a broodling in the works. while the two of them squawked and flapped, i noticed the third player in this late-breaking drama. it was furry, brown, and little. its stripe down the back gave it away: a chipmunk. a very hungry and extremely nasty chipmunk, if you don’t mind my editorializing. i leapt into life-guard mode, pounded hard as i could pound from my side of the glass. gave a holler to my own mother, ensconced in her armchair in the other room. as if she could help me here in dire land. at first my pounding seemed to confound the furry one, he turned down the branch, as if in exit. but then, he must have had a second thought, for up he turned, and scampered head-first into the nest. oh, dear god, such horror i’ve not witnessed. this was full-tilt assault. this was nature at its cruelest. and i stood witness. after plumbing the hollow of the nest, the hungry varmint turned and ran. i couldn’t swear to what i saw, but it would not be wrong to think i saw him clutching something in his mouth.

poor mama sat there flapping. her squawks slowing but not quieting. she circled the branch a few lonely times and then resumed her post. we both tried to catch our breath. i tried to convince myself that all was not lost, perhaps the casualty count was one and only one. and, besides, mama stood her post straight through to nightfall, never once lifting her belly from what she surely must be guarding with her life. only then, when darkness eclipsed my keeping watch, did i surrender too; turned off my desk lamp, whispered benediction, and tiptoed off, unsure of what the dark would bring.

alas, when dawn came, i threw off my blankets and hurried down the stairs. no mama. i’d thought i heard a muffled squawk not too too long after dark. i now presume the furry thing returned, finished the deed. the dastardly, dastardly deed.

and so, the nest is empty. quite literally as i have just now hauled a step ladder out the door and, clinging for dear life, i climbed and pulled back branches, and indeed there is not a sign of life. just the artistry of their construction, right down to the shiny cellophane they might have thought to employ as something of a rain guard, what with all the rainy weeks of april.

turns out, the cardinals never had more than a one in three chance at making it out of the nest. despite their predilection for deeply tucking away their vernal constructions — remnants of a summer past, a bricolage of bits, dried grasses, thread-thin sticks, that cellophane wrapper perhaps from someone’s pack of cigarettes — the northern cardinal ranks near the sorry cellar of the nesting-survival charts, a long tumble down from the ash-throated flycatcher who scores the highest chance of flying from the nest, with seven of ten baby flycatchers flying. only the lowly house sparrow (11 percent chance) and the european starling (16 percent) fare worse than the red birds, and both sparrow and starling are invaders, anyway, non-native species snuck in as unintended cargo on some north america-bound vessel.

it hurt to sit here the first few days, the silence pounding in my ear. the absence of mama’s brown and red tail feathers protruding from the tuft of evergreen in which she so adeptly hid her nest.

and then i started to consider my own empty nest, a consideration that comes, of course, as mothering day approaches. i think as much now about mothering as i ever have. though it consumes fewer hours of my focus, and fewer drives hither and yon, my fascination only deepens. i think often of how rare — how blessed — it is to know so fluently the whole makings of any life, let alone these two i love so dearly. day by day, it seems, the adventures pick up pace. the twists and turns in their narratives expand my own sense of being alive, being witness to lives unfurling each according to his own storyline. from my perch here at the old homestead, where i am reliably on watch and ever present, i follow two young men carving out paths that couldn’t be more different and yet entwine in ways that make me see the shared origins loud and clear and undeniably. the little boy who once could stare at a tv screen for interminably long times, he is carving out a path to be the very voices, the very storytellers, he once listened to. and the one who once set up an easel in the living room, encircled the room with every stuffed critter from his toy box, donned suspenders and necktie, scooped up a clutch of alphabet letters, and commenced a lecture on the fine points of S-U-M and Q, he looks toward a life in lecture halls filled with legal scholars in the making. let the record show it was snoopy who got first crack at his fledgling professorial skills.

my job here — simply loving through and through — will never ever be done. they might not need me (not so often anyway) to rouse them from their slumbers, to ferry them to the school house door, to shiver on their sidelines, but i’ve come to understand that my unique brand of loving means i’ll never find a way to lay aside aside my worries and my sometimes overly rambunctious fears. the phone calls these days are farther in between, the texts often unanswered, but my contemplations and my prayers deepen by the month. i’ve started worrying in a whole new way about this world we’re leaving to their keeping. i once held out hope that they could right our many, many wrongs. but now i wonder if we’re too far gone, this world so broken in so many places.

i look to mama bird, and her now hollowed nest. there is stunned silence out my window. no flicker of a sighting of mama now at it once again. she makes me think hard about the seasons of mothering, how some are full to bursting, and others pulse with a kind of aching, a sorrow for the hours out of reach, a longing for the more tactile days when every flinch and whimper was within our watch. her empty nest makes me think hard about the one i call my own, at once emptier and fuller than i can sometimes truly comprehend.

no wonder mothering never ever loosens its holy grip on me.

may your motherings be ever blessed, in whatever ways you love and hold those you count as your dearest rarest treasures.

13 Comments

May 28, 2021

Portlandia

In which, for the first time in a year, a thousand firsts unfurl. Mostly, wrapping my arms around my firstborn, 1750 miles from where I spend most of my days…

It’s questionable whether sitting tucked in a dawn-lit corner in a faraway hotel, I can tap out too many hieroglyphics on this wee little keyboard, more fitting for the feet of an ant than for my fumbly fingers, but here I am, apparently so jazzed on the joy of watching my boys delight in each other’s company, not so adept at catching a night’s worth of zzzzz’s.

In this sweet swirl of days, so many frames have been packed in my brain, sleep has little room. There was the all-black-clad SWAT team rolling into downtown the night of the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death, when Portland once again exploded in protest with dumpster fires, fireworks hurled into the night, windows smashed, and graffiti strewn on block after block of marble, glass, or brick-walled storefronts. There are the endless miles of homeless camps on the sidewalks, spilling down embankments along the highways (and I mean right up to the shoulder of where cars race by at 70 mph), in the wells of dried-up public fountains, under the Chinese arch just outside this hip hotel outfitted with British soaps and sheets and “ethical organic” coffees to tuck into earthenware mugs inscribed, “99 problems. coffee ain’t one.” And, no, the juxtaposition, the cruel irony, doesn’t escape me. It’s a wrenching mix of utopia and dystopia here, and it seems to beg for answers to questions and conundrums that would vex a troop of MacArthur geniuses. But my firstborn is here for 16 months, and once my superpower shot kicked in and shielded me and all of us from the red-ringed invader, we strapped on our travel packs and made the trek to Stumptown.

Alongside the unsettling, there is wonder aplenty here, too, as the city seems to collect the curious, the kind, and the kooky. While I sip my ethical organic coffee and watch the sun come up, I’ll let my picture roll do the talking.

Portlandia scrapbook, in fittingly kooky order, from Mt. Hood to Voodoo donuts, from first hugs to smelling the roses.

I’ve usually been a most reluctant traveler, a top-of-the-line homebody, one who frets in the days before departure about whether my tomato plants will survive without me, whether the pansies will droop, and in this case whether the wily skunk would move inside while we’re not watching. (Shawn the SkunkTrapper sent a text to let me know he was bringing in the infrared night-vision cameras he was borrowing from one of his fox-trapping jobs; I await word any minute now…)

But here I am, four days in, and relishing every adventure. Maybe in my doddering days, I will finally slay a few of the ghosts who’ve long vexed me. Travel can test us as much as it stretches us, and I’m in for the stretch, buoyed by the boys who animate my every heart beat.

Signing off from PDX. With love, always.

Anyone else out there a natural-born reluctant traveler? And if not, what words of enticement might you offer to those of us who’d do well to take a deep breath and put some miles on our hiking boots?

10 Comments

May 7, 2021

“Your love is a verb.”

the letter was addressed: “Dear Wise Matriarch.”

it was written inside a mother’s day card, the sort that might be plucked from a slot in the greeting card aisle of a corner drug store. if you were lucky enough to get to a drug store. or it might have been all that was left in a heap on a metal cart with rickety wheels that rolled past the cell of the north kern state prison where kerry baxter senior, who is serving 66 years to life in prison, convicted of second-degree murder, spends his days and his nights and his years. he never forgets mother’s day, or her birthday, says his mother, anita wills, who spends her life missing him fiercely, who waits for his every 60-second pre-paid collect phone call, and who has devoted her life to proclaiming and proving his innocence.

here’s what kerry wrote in his mother’s day card:

What God has intended for our mothers to embody, you have personified. I’m humbled by your examples of leadership, time after time. Your energy is a wellspring of endeavors to be carried to their accomplishments for the benefit of we who are in compromising conditions. I can attest firsthand that you have demonstrated how a love that is truly unconditional translates in this physical world. Your love is a verb. How precious you are. Thank you, profoundly, for the many lessons you have and do teach.

“that’s from my son. who’s in prison.” says anita looking up from the card, adding that when he was was sentenced in 2003 to 66 years to life that meant “i would never have seen my son as a free man.“ she goes on to say, in a new yorker documentary titled “On Mother’s Day,” that until kerry was sent to prison, family used to come every weekend. “he was our barbecue person. we spent the holidays together, thanksgiving, christmas, birthdays. after he was gone, it seemed like everybody stopped coming. everybody stopped coming after kerry went to jail.” in 2011, when kerry’s own son — anita’s grandson — was murdered, kerry couldn’t go to the funeral, so anita brought new urgencies to her exoneration efforts.

i can’t stop thinking about five words in kerry’s card: “Your love is a verb.”

when love is a verb. isn’t that the point? isn’t that — really — why we live? isn’t that the thing that just might make the difference between taking up oxygen during our stint here — however long that lasts — and bending the arc toward the love we all deep down dream of?

haven’t there been a hundred hundred days when our eyelids fluttered open in the morning and right away the lead ball in our belly pounded hard against the walls of us, and before we wiggled a toe we were washed over in the weight of whatever it was that worried us, and weren’t the worries twice as heavy when they weren’t about us but rather someone we loved, maybe even someone we birthed, or have loved since right after birth, someone whose time on this great blue marble we’ve felt was ours to protect, to guide, to keep from falling into pitfalls, but when they stumbled or bloodied their knees we might have raced to reach out our hand, to be right there to let them know they didn’t need to climb out or up all alone, but that we’d bear as much of the weight, of the pulling from the depths, as we could bear. however much they were willing to let us pull.

isn’t love — unfettered, unconstrained by our own agendas, selfless as selfless can be — isn’t love the thing we’re aiming for? the thing we keep trying to get right? like turning the mothership some days.

don’t we all dream of love the verb? if it’s simply a noun it has no real distinctions, no muscle, no bone. the love that might change things is the love that doesn’t hang out in armchairs (not unless it makes room for someone to snuggle right beside), doesn’t hang out in corners idly hoping its fumes will get the job done.

it’s a verb in its truest form. it’s the verb that picks up the call. at the oddest of hours, and snaps to attention, full attention soon as your ear canal opens. it’s the verb that grabs the car keys and leaps behind the wheel, and drives as many hours or miles as it takes. to get the job done. the job is being there: being there in heart, in the flesh. at the bedside. when the elevator door glides open. when the curtain of the ER cubicle is pulled back. when eyelids flutter open after emergency surgery.

that’s love at full attention. love when it asks the next question. and the hard question. and the hardest question of all.

it’s what i try to think about not just on mother’s day. but every day. love is a verb. and it dies without practice.

i’ve long declared that this day set aside for “mothers” is really a day that should be devoted to “mothering,” another action verb. a synonym for love when it’s a verb. a verb that belongs to no pre-specified quadrant of the population; a verb for all who practice. who day in and day out practice, try to get it right. admit to the fumbles and stumbles, shake the dirt off their knees, get back up and try it again. to mother is to love defiantly, urgently, sometimes as if there’s no tomorrow. to mother is to lavish the golden glorious rule: “love as you would be loved.” whatever it takes. however deep, however hard, however exhausted.

here’s to every someone who puts the verb in “to love.” and especially to those who mother me with all their hearts: to my mama, my mother-in-heart in new jersey, to my best friend who long ago taught me what love can feel like, and to those rare few who let me practice day after day, hour by hour. i love you. happy love-is-a-verb day.

define or describe “your love is a verb” from the person or people who taught you….

here are the two mamas i’m especially loving this day…both have had especially bumpy months and we are loving them dearly….

my mama, with four of her eventual five-person brood. plus her mama.

11 Comments

October 2, 2020

p.s. the wholly unsurprising what-came-next (or, can’t quash a mama’s urge to tuck her chicks beneath her wings. certainly not when one is burning up with fever…)

in which we recount the inevitable rescue mission to pluck sick kid from college dorm, and tuck him home where he belongs….

in last week’s episode, we had a sick sophomore in college who’d been quarantined in an old comfort inn somewhere in the vast ohio countryside, a kid who’d been saved from despair and starvation by the glorious graces of one saint melissa, the college catering director who leapt full throttle into the ministrations of a mama hen intent on plying her charge with saltines and gingerale, chicken zoup and instant rice cups, to highlight but a bit of her extraordinary and voluminous six-bag grocery list.

the tale of woe and mono continues…

round about sunday morning, when the fever teetered still at the almost-104 yard-line, when the great ER-doc friend here in chicago endorsed rescue, when the father of said sick kid was jangling the car keys and lacing up his shoes, it was decided that we were pointing the old red wagon straight toward gambier, ohio, and bringing home our ailing one.

which, of course, is where he belonged. six days of round-the-clock FaceTiming — the digital tether now afforded us in this age of iPhone — is at least five days too long. and as much as we didn’t want to interrupt this already surreal semester, perhaps the only one on campus for the sophomores and freshmen this COVID year, we couldn’t bear the thought of him all alone all through the long and fevered nights, unable to shuffle to the fridge for so much as another water bottle.

halfway to ohio, our beloved long-time pediatrician (officially no longer on the case, but again, one of those angels you don’t let go of) dialed in, and ticked off names of ERs he’d trust along our long drive home, should we need to pull over and check in at any one of them. it was, in fact, that scary.

in one of the dozens of text messages i was pinging to our sweet boy, one in which i wrote how sorry i was for having to scoop him up from college, he wrote back, “I cant wait to come home” and then: “It is a prayer answered”

“You just made me cry” i typed through tears, and added: “Daddy says cavalry is coming”

and i tell you, the minute that sweet sick boy was strapped in the station-wagon seat behind us, nestled against his pillow, within arm’s reach, nothing but two surgical masks between us, my heart slowed to a life-sustaining saunter.

the holiest part of the night — the part i will never forget — was speeding through the countryside, as the sun dropped low and the stars turned on, and the holiest of jewish holy days, yom kippur, the day of atonement, commenced. in all my husband’s six-plus decades he has never been behind the wheel on yom kippur, a day of reverent prayer and fasting. but ferrying a sick kid to safety suspends the rules — at least the rule about not driving, and so we drove unfettered. and because it’s the year of COVID and all is already upside down, and because we live in the iPhone age and you can dial in from wherever you are, i zoomed into our synagogue’s Kol Nidre service, and the minor-key chords of the cello filled the wagon — and my soul — as the highway rose and dipped, and the field of stars felt so close i might have rolled down the window and grabbed one. i can’t remember feeling so wrapped in heaven’s prayer shawl.

monday morning, as i tiptoed past my sweet boy’s bedroom door, a room all but untouched since summer’s end, a room that’s echoed silence all these weeks, i heard the stuffed-up gurgle of his breathing, and declared it the most soothing sound i could imagine. it’s hard-wiring, i suppose: a mama is best suited to hear in real time her child’s strains, especially when they’re the ones of any sort of struggle. long-distance, sometimes, feels impossible, and wholly against our mama grain.

before the morning ended, we’d checked in to our local emergency room, where they plied the kid with more IVs and megadoses of tylenol. once again, COVID negative, thank god. it’s mono, off the charts.

so here we are, at the end of week two, with another trip to the doctor this morning, and no end in sight (though i know the cure will come, a knowing i do not take for granted).

all i truly know is that i can’t imagine not being the one to be sliding batches of bread pudding in the oven, the sweet scent of cinnamon and eggs and milk — the original nursery-maid’s confection and cure-all — trailing up the stairs and round the bend. nor being the one who’s keeping track of when he’s swallowing which of the five prescriptions now lined up like amber-bottled soldiers on the kitchen counter. nor the one who’s but a few feet away, peeking at his laptop, as he delights in the latest episode of “the british baking show” (his sure-to-soothe show of choice) during the rare few hours when he’s not sound asleep.

there are numbered truths in life, and one of them is that sick, sick kids belong by their mama’s side. or maybe i’ve got that backwards. maybe it’s that mamas belong by the side of their sick, sick kids.

it’s inevitable. it’s imperative. and it’s most certainly a blessing.

just a simple tale, today, of what happened next. and a short consideration of the blessings of proximity when those we love are in some degree of distress. what makes you feel soothed when you are ailing, body or soul?

22 Comments

September 25, 2020

the angel always comes. often in the darkness.

this angel story begins with a stuffy nose on a sunday evening, five days ago. the nose belongs to my second-born, the one tucked away at college in the age of COVID (on a campus where — wisely, prudently — no one — well, no interlopers, bystanders, or pesky parents — is allowed in or out).

a stuffy nose is barely bothersome, and no one — save for your mother — might notice it. i, though, am said mother. so i noticed it. and mentioned it — in an otherwise matter-of-fact sunday evening phone call. the stuffed-up one all but brushed it off, said he might go to bed a little early. that was about the drama of it. zilch.

next morning, though, the phone rang. early. before 7. which in college time is middle of the night. he’d taken his temp three times, he reported, and it was hovering around 101. to whiz forward in this angel tale, we’ll skip straight to the part where he called midday that day to say the college doctor had stuffed a swab down his throat, taken a COVID test, and was promptly dispatching him to quarantine, at the old comfort inn hotel the college has taken over for the year, for the sequestering of sick kids, COVID kids, to be precise.

until my stuffy-nosed sophomore was proven otherwise, he was stamped, “pending” for COVID. he had one hour to pack two plastic bins with whatever he might need for the next two weeks, and soon found himself in a room with two queen-size beds overlooking an empty parking lot. in the middle of rural ohio.

the stuffy nose was getting out of hand. it was doing fever tricks, making it climb straight up the mercury hill (in the old days, when i went to nursing school, mercury — that slippery silver element — was the thermo-register of choice). the stuffy nose was swelling up his eyes, and making dark circles all around.

by tuesday evening, when the fever crossed the line at 103-point-something, the stuffed-up one called the front desk, and talked to the football coach in charge (yes, two assistant football coaches — sweethearts! — keep watch over the comfort inn, which i now lovingly refer to as “the covid inn.”) the football coach made some calls, and suddenly an ambulance becomes the focus of this too-long-winded tale.

yes, it was decided that an emergency room was on the docket and to get there, an ambulance was called. the mount vernon fire department ambulance. egad. hearing the wail of a siren, coursing through small-town streets, heading straight to where your kid is cowering under the covers, shaking with chills and fever, is a sound you do not want to hear. it’s a sound you won’t forget. especially as it comes closer and closer to the phone on the other end of the line, the line you are clinging to, trying to squeeze yourself through via the itty-bitty invisible wires you’re sure connect you.

since we’re trying to get to the part of the story where the angel comes in, we can boil down the ER part to simply this: they started an IV, zapped him through the x-ray machine, drew lots of tubes of blood, gave him a giant dose of ibuprofen, and declared him a ripe and ready case of mono, as in mononucleosis, an infectious disease that comes in two flavors mostly — mild and wicked. looks like we’re in for wicked.

by 2 in the morning, he was delivered back to the comfort inn, where he slid under the sheets and tried mightily to sleep. the fever though was having none of it. and for the next two days, it teeter-tottered, climbing to the very edge of 104.

we’re almost at the angel part:

all the while, during his days locked in room 229, the college was sending over trays of food from the dining hall a few miles away. (this comfort inn is in the next town over, so the commitment to feeding any far-flung sick kids — ours was the only one in the whole hotel — suddenly entailed a car and driver.) problem was, buffalo chicken sandwiches and breakfast sausage don’t work so well with fever and swollen glands swelling to the size of apricots on either side of your neck.

in trying to zip this story along here, i skipped over the part where the dean of students had called us at home as the ambulance was whisking our fevered child to the county hospital. she was heavenly, and she certainly is among the angels of the week. (there are several; i’m singling out only one for the long-distance-mama’s gold-medal-of-the-week.) early the morning after the ambulance ride, i sent my new friend the dean a little note, and asked if maybe the dining hall could send over those mama staples, the things you always pulled from the pantry when a little one was sick: saltines and gingerale. and maybe a little packet of honey to boot. (ice chips and honey somehow became our cure du jour in this old house.)

well — cue the drum roll — when our sweet fevered boy finally awoke from his long and awful night, he stumbled toward the door of room 229, opened it just a crack, and lo and behold there on the table where they always left his tray, he found not one, not two, not three — but six! — bags of groceries, custom-fit for a fevered kid. it was filled with a veritable wish list of things you might try when you can barely swallow or lift the spoon. there were soups and teas and saltines! and gingerale and 7UP, to boot. there was a teddy-bear squeeze bottle of honey, and cups of instant oatmeal and rice and ramen noodles. someone, some holy blessed someone, had up and left the dining hall, driven 5.7 miles to the kroger super-store, strolled every single aisle, all but filling a cart.

our holy blessed angel’s name is melissa. and as she wrote to me later in a note:

I have a 10 year old son. I cannot fathom him being away from me in a “normal” world let alone in this crazy world we are currently living in. For [T] to be so far away and going through such a terrible time must be excruciating. My heart hurts for you and I wish we could do more! I’m sure it is a constant worry and this is something we can do to take a little of that burden from you. We will do whatever we can to help ease your stress and give [T] a little TLC.

her words — her heart — make me cry, even now, two days later. she lived the holy heart of it all, of every holy book and ancient text ever inscribed. she literally slipped herself into the holy act of “what would make ME feel better if I was far from home, burning with a fever, all alone and stuck in a hotel a few miles from all my friends?” the very words i made sure to write, and sent straight up her chain of command, straight to the desk of the college president, so he’d hear firsthand just what a bunch of saints he was shepherding.

so that’s the story, and here’s the holiness: even in a world where every day the headlines tear us apart, and leave us gasping for breath, even in — especially in — those spells of darkness that surely come, right when you’re teetering at the precipice, worried sick and feeling more helpless than in a long long while, the universe always makes room for an angel to squeeze in, to slip in through the cracks. to bring bucketfuls of light. to adorn us with the blessed healing touch. the simple act of reaching beyond the borders of our sorry selves. of going the extra mile. of loving as we would be loved.

melissa, the director of catering at kenyon college, a mom whose job it is to feed the fancy folk and fuel the everyday special occasions, she slipped herself into my scared shoes this week, and she doled out love and saltines in an act of kindness and goodness and through-and-through heaven-ness now seared into our hearts.

angels always seem to come. this world is filled with them, though most often they go about their business without so much as a wink or a nod — and certainly not with trumpet blasts.

but if not for the angels, those messengers of real-live, in-the-flesh blessings, we’d all be piled in the dust. exhausted, hopeless, worried out of our wits.

as i type, my sweet boy is finally asleep. the COVID test finally came back: negative. and today he leaves the quarantine hotel, and gets a ride — via campus security — back to his little cottage in the woods, aka his dorm away from home. if needed, we’ll motor down and bring him home, where i can be like melissa, and ply my boy with whatever his sweet and blessed hurting heart desires.

who are the angels in your week this week?

and, dear melissa, to whom i just might send this, a hundred thousand thank yous till the end of time…..bless you, bless your heart. signed, the mom whose shoes you filled this week.

41 Comments

July 24, 2020

of plastic shields and impenetrable helmets: an improbable american summer

*new york times* photo of portland street protest, braced and armed with umbrella shields, this summer’s symbol of resistance

mothers reach for what they need. mothers reach for amulets and gear, paraphernalia and patron saints, to protect their children. it’s an impulse as ancient as time. and will go on till the end of time. of that i am certain.

a mother’s wiring drives me, has driven me now for the better part of 28 years, ever since the doctor told me, incontrovertibly, with the swishing heartsounds of the sonogram echoing wall-to-wall across the darkened tiny room — nine months after the heartache of losing our first — that a life stirred within.

ever since, my first and last impulse, above all, is to keep him safe. to shield life and limb, and cranium too, from incoming assault, be it playground invective, asphalt bike path, high-speed hardball, or any of the fully-pictured atrocities that have played — and replayed — in my too-colorful head.

it is dystopian, at least, that this summer i’ve found myself clicking “buy” on a two-pack of plastic shields, the better to keep the red-ringed virus at bay when a boy i love is flying hither and yon, criss-crossing america at altitudes of 35,000 feet. tuesday night, he dons it for the second time, as he flies from JFK to PDX, that’s new york to portland, oregon, about as long a flight as the american continent offers.

and PDX is where the impenetrable helmet comes in. ever since i started reading reports of unidentified federal forces cruising portland’s downtown streets, driving unmarked vehicles, plucking protestors from sidewalks, stuffing them in vans, without word of miranda rights or where or why on earth they were taking them (leaving some to fear to god they were literally being kidnapped by bands of who knows who), i started thinking about helmets. about what my firstborn might put on his not insignificant head to keep it from getting bashed with the wrong end of a police baton, or any other unidentified thrashing implement.

mind you, it’s not that i worry my firstborn will soon be leaping into the late-night protest. it’s that he’ll be walking to and fro to work. to and from a federal courthouse, as it so happens (though not the one at the epicenter of all the melee; his is the other federal courthouse, two blocks north and west). and in this american summer, in a city besieged by federal forces wielding tear gas canisters and “less-than-lethal” (thank god for modifiers here) weapons, a mother starts considering the selling points and perqs of various impenetrable protective head gear.

which is utterly dystopian, improbable in any other summer than the one that is the america of 2020, a year decidedly not clear-focused. and it makes me think of the litany of mothers who through time have had to send off sons and daughters, who’ve awaited letters, answered the ominous knock at the door, as my own grandmother did, when her son was killed in a midnight ambush on iwo jima. it makes me think of the south side chicago mothers who cannot count on the windows of their minivans to shield the incoming bullets, the ones killing toddlers — even babies; a five-month-old shot just last week in old town — strapped in car seats.

there are mothers weeping across america, across this globe, and the tears seem endless, are endless. will the weeping and the wailing ever, ever end? do we stand a chance to finally stanch the sorrow?

mothers shouldn’t have to plot the surest bullet-free path to school. nor which playlot might prove lethal. children shouldn’t have to spend their summers behind closed curtains, in the corner of a room farthest from the picture window, where crossfire could soar in. mothers shouldn’t have to lay awake nights imagining the phone call, calculating how long it would take to race to the ICU bedside. mothers shouldn’t have to hear the click of the coffin closing.

this is no easy summer in america.

short of searching the internet for plastic shields and bash-proof helmets, we’ve got work to do here in the land of the brave and the free.

america is crying. are we listening? are we doing what we must?

and those my friends are the questions, the imperative questions: are we listening? are we doing what we must?

6 Comments

November 29, 2019

more and more, the thanks multiply. and deepen.

the somewhat happy ending to our thanksgiving tale of suspense

i was bent into something of a crouch, flexing all the muscle my not-so-muscular biceps could muster, dodging the oncoming hot winds of 325 degrees, attempting to haul the big bird from the oven, when the phone rang.

it was my firstborn, far far away in new york city. and he wasn’t calling to ask how the turkey was looking. he was trying to catch his breath. he was scared, on highest alert. something was awry with his heart, and he was crouching in the mudroom of the brownstone where he’d just partaken of feasting. usually there’s a doctor in the house at my sister-in-law’s thanksgiving table, but not this year. of course. so i played long-distance nurse. forgot all about turkey and ovens and the kitchen disasters that might have been triggered by the sudden ring of the phone. we counted the number of beats of his heart, minute by minute. the number was high. very high.

in the swirl of that moment, and the many long moments thereafter, all is suspended. nothing else matters. it all boils down to the only thing that ever matters: are the ones i love safe? is anyone i love about to be swallowed whole by forces i can’t keep at bay? when he was just two or three months old, i remember telling a man who came to fix a broken sink that i now knew what it was to love someone so much you’d leap in front of a car or a train or any large object barreling toward him. in an instant. without pausing to think. because that’s what love does. that’s what love means — or this kind of love, anyway. i still remember the way the fix-it man looked at me. i still remember how deeply i meant what i said, how each of those words had never before carried such truth.

twenty-six years later, i still mean it. only the labyrinth has gotten more intricate, and the forces are ones i can’t always stop.

my sweet boy this morning is fine. he’s riding the train back to law school. and will soon be back to his hours and hours of writing. but in the wake of a terrible fright, i’m reminded again how fragile this all is. how perishable. how necessary to cherish. to count our blessings, over and over and over again. to savor each and every moment, each someone we love. before it evaporates.

apt lesson in the wake of the annual pause for the deepest of thanks.

this whole week, with the college kid filling the house with his joys and his whimsy, with a phalanx of shoes piled by the door, and the basement filled till the wee wee hours with kids who’ve not seen each other since long-ago summer, my old heart has been humming its happy tune. this morning that tune is richer than ever, backed by the shimmering truth that all of this is underpinned by improbability, all of this is here for the ephemeral moment.

and we’re wise to press to our heart each of those blessings. while they’re here. while we can.

here’s a litany of gratitude i wrote a few years ago, one that ran on the op-ed page of the chicago tribune back on thanksgiving, 2014:

By Barbara Mahany

In this season when we gather roots from the earth, and fowl from the field, when the slant of the sun drops lower and the light turns molasses, here is the challenge: Be attentive to wonder and wisdom. Stitch the day with blessing. Bow head and whisper, “Thank you.”

In the liminal landscape between asleep and awake, thank you, holy one, for heart still beating, for breath, for first thought, the one that tickles us into consciousness.

Thank you for bed, and blanket. Thank you for the one I love who lies beside me, whose breathing I know by heart.

Thank you for the dawn itself, for the stillest hour when all that moves is the barest breeze that rustles leaves, and far off, the stirrings of the lake that never cease.

Thank you for this old house, with arthritic floorboards that creak at just the same juncture, with just the same footfall. Thank you for whiny old cat there at the door. Thank you for coffee beans and hissing pot, and the old chipped mug that fits snug in my palms.

Dear maker of all that’s blessed, thank you for the sound of those footsteps clomping onto the floorboards above, and the certitude that — so far this day — all is well.

Thank you for the porridge I stir at the cookstove, the alchemy of cooking for those we fuel for the day.

Thank you for clementines, and sugary cinnamon. Thank you for butter, slathered and melted. Thank you for school bus drivers who wait.

Thank you, blanketer of wonder, for the quiet stitched into the morning’s hours, the quiet so thick I can drink in the tick and the tock of a grandfather’s clock. And the squawk of the blue jay, and the chatter of sparrows.

Thank you for work to be done. Thank you for dishes piled in the sink, whose scrubbing and rinsing gives me a moment to think, to ponder the day.

Thank you for wisdom, the sort that comes in unexpected flashes, when only you know you’ve found it as you feel your heart go thumpety-thump, or feel the goose bumps sprout up and down unsuspecting flesh.

Thank you for all that’s poetry — wisdom-steeped or just plain beautiful, breathtaking. And thank you for gospel of any brand — be it birthed from holy child, everyday saint or even the so-called kook who stands on the street corner, proclaiming through a megaphone.

Thank you, yes, for telephones, for that rare sound of a voice that nestles against the tenderest heart. That, within the first breath of the very first syllable, brings comfort, collapses miles and aloneness.

I might be among the few who salute the cloudy skies of November on my long list of thanks. Ah, but those angora gray skies, they comfort me, harbor me. I’ll take the somnolence, the introspection of a gray day any day. So thank you for cloudy and gray.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how thankful I am for hearts that continue to tick, day in and day out, despite the trials we toss their way, as we worry and fret, then, without notice, shriek in deep joy and excitement. Poor ol’ heart, the one that landed in me anyway, it might not have realized it was signed on for a roller coaster ride of such seismic proportion.

Speaking of ticking, thank you for the schoolhouse clock that does just that, minute by minute, hour upon hour, heartbeat against the wall.

Thank you, too, for windows. And for the flutterings and flashes just beyond the glass, as clouds of gentle creatures take off and land, from sky to limb and back again — each time, lifting just a little bit of my soul.

Thank you for doors, the ones that let in unexpected someones, someones we love. And keep out the wind and the cold.

Thank you for fires that roar and logs that crackle. Thank you for the one that’s turning the so-called sleeping room, across from the kitchen, into a chamber of flickering gold. Thank you for the two lumps under blankets, snoozing by the fire.

Thank you for the dinner hour, and the blessing of slow-simmering stew. Thank you for the bounty of greens from your earth, and spices from pods and seeds and stamens.

Thank you for the trees and the gnarly limbs, and the hummingbird now buried deep in my garden.

Thank you for candlelight. And the lights of your making: moonlight and sunlight and dappled radiance scattered like seed across the landscape. Thank you for twinkling stars and streaking ones, too — chalk marks etched across the slate of the night sky.

Thank you for the blankets we tuck under the chin of our sleeping child.

Thank you for the child. For the breathtaking chance to infuse all that’s good in this world. Thank you for lessons taught while holding a hand, or wiping a tear. Thank you for bandages that quell the hurt, and words that do the same. Thank you for everyone who lifts up our child, the teachers who inspire, the coaches who are kind. And the lady down the block who never fails to plant a fat wet kiss on that child’s pink cheek.

Thank you for the year drawing to a close, and this pause to nod our heads and whisper gratitude. Thank you for crunching leaves, and tumbling snowflakes.

Thank you for love in all its iterations. For birth, and death, and all that animates the interstitial hours. Thank you for those who walk beside us, who put a hand to the small of our back, or reach out to carry us across the bottomless abyss.

Thank you for all of this. And more. So, so much more.

if you happen by the chair today, or any day ever, feel free to add to the litany of thanks, and make this a communal — and rousing — chorus of gratitude.

and know that among the dearest treasures of my life are those of you who find your way to this old table and chairs. bless you. xoxo love, b.

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Tag: motherlove