retreating figure

I seem to have taken a vow of silence.

Though if I have, it is from that unknowing part of the self that does what it wants without telling anyone about it.  This part that almost always gets its way.

It’s not just being busy.  More like a reluctance to be overheard.

But this morning I found myself thinking of this imaginary space.  Curious about it.  So I opened the door to look in.  The space is still here.  An empty room, a little dusty, shafts of cold winter light.

I am not ready to come back, but I think of you who have met with me here with fondness.

For you who have asked –

– The adoption process crawls on.  Instructive and affirming to us as a couple, as a family, regardless of whatever final decision

– Middlest, who hoped for a spot on a college running team, is gaining strength again, has quit her wheelchair, quit her crutches, though she is quickly tired. Tonight she goes to her Bicycle and Pedestrian Commission meeting.  I wonder if she will have anything to say about cars and soft-bodied humans trying to use the same roads.

– And Statisics?  Having finally submitted to it, I find it so far mostly comforting — and bland.  Which is just what I needed this term.  Something like a nice egg custard.  Not so much about the inner workings of the universe and the fingerprint of God as it is about different ways to display countable evidence.  Limited but useful and contained.

coming to the F.E.A.S.T

What is a F.E.A.S.T.?

“It’s a meeting,” I told Fritz.  “I think I ought to go.  But it’s all day.  If it’s not worth it, I’ll slip out at 11 and come meet you at YoungSon’s basketball game.”

I stayed to the very end.

I would say I am a connoisseur of meetings, except I feel more like a serial victim.  It was a series of economic development meetings last summer that convinced me that there was no Future Cycle for me here in this town:

At that meeting this summer I’d cried out, no longer able to contain myself, “But what if some of us have come here or stayed here precisely because it wasn’t like the teeming suburbs over the hill?” And the affable expert economist had shaken his head kindly and pointed out the need to move on into the usual path of economic progress.  “We need jobs first.”

Surely he was right.

Other attendees then suggested that what our town needed most was a Costco.  Or maybe a really big billboard.

“I’d like a place where I can buy local produce,” I’d said when they had asked me last summer to add to our vision of the future of our town.

“Well, and I’d like a Big & Tall shop — if we’re putting in a wish list,” had put in a local business owner, laughing and patting his tie.

“We could get a Trader Joe’s if we had more foot traffic,” had said another, adjusting her stylish glasses with well-manicured fingers.

I’m sure they were right.  What did I know?

Only that I don’t want to live in that kind of town.  And I left that meeting last summer, like I leave most meetings, feeling like my mouth was full of dust.

But this today was not most meetings.  This was a F.E.A.S.T. — Food Education Agriculture Solutions Together.

A feast of ideas in fact.

All the players of my long obsession — with local food and fighting hunger and making a town fit to live in — all sitting down in the same room — the Food Bank, the organic buying club, local farmers, school lunch ladies, county extension gurus, community education.  And talk that didn’t sound like just empty talk and official policy and self-justification.  Passion in the place of boosterism.  Talk that led directly into reachable action, concrete plans, and some of my own dreams (I think) taking on physical form.

And in the middle of it all, a feast of a lunch cooked by a local catering company — parents of my own children’s schoolmates — from wheat, apples, chicken, hazelnuts, potatoes, beets, and cabbage (that last in a fantastic gingery kimchee) all donated by the farmers sitting there across the table.

This is the town I want to be living in.

I’m shaking the dust off those dreams of Small Town Revival from last summer:

1 . . . Public Green

2 . . . Old-Fashioned Roses & Community Spirit

3 . . . A Morning’s Ride Away

4 . . . The Town Itself

5 . . . The Heart of the Matter

6 . . . Eating Local

7. . .   Backyard Bounty

7.5 . . .  . . . and Chickens

Maybe there is room for my kind of future here, after all.

Lovely how midwinter’s harvest turns out sweeter than the summer’s.

Thank You, Island School

I just like you so much, dear Island School.  You are exactly what a public school should be everywhere.

Adjusting, of course, for the where — since you probably would say (if you could say) that  the place is the point of a place-based education.

I think YoungSon must like you, too.  Since hanging out with you all day, he’s suddenly ambitious about math.  He reads more than ever.  He hasn’t complained once this year about coming to spend the day with you.  He even tells people how actually pretty great you are and wants to take family visitors to come see you.

“Though I need to wear warmer boots next time,” he said after your last field trip measuring temperature, turbidity, recording colors, shapes, sounds and smells, mapping the area, taking a pencil rubbing of identified leaves, then netting a rough dozen of baby fish, dragonfly larva, mini shrimp, snail, paddle beetles.

What curious kid wouldn’t like a school so cool as you?

I like it that there was hot cocoa and cupcakes from the owners of the pond under observation that day.  And that they were the grandparents of one of the boys in the class.

I like it that all your boys and girls are becoming old hands at collecting the data and handling the equipment. I like how your students are so earnest explaining to me the importance of their data.  I like that they send their numbers to the big university where scientists can use it.

I like how wonderful your hot lunch smells each morning and the native habitat planted right out the front door.  I like the friendly lady at the open front desk and all the ways of saying hello in different languages on the wall above.  I like your hand painted 3D mural with the giant flowers and ceramic tile mosaic birds and insects.

I like the artwork taped up along all the walls.

I like the mix of kids from urban Portland to farm and riverside.

I like the changing message on the whiteboard outside one of the classrooms:

Good morning!

I hope you had a fantastic weekend!  I went to a salmon festival and saw dancers from the Warm Springs tribe perform — it was incredible.

Please come in and

(1) Turn in your homework (purple bin)

(2) Finish your sheet from the plank house and store it in your green folder.

(3) Get out your NUMBER CORNER book.

We’re going to have a great day!

I’m glad you’re here!

I like you so much, Island School.  I’m glad you’re here, too.

Thank You, Songs I Cannot Sing

I am grateful to you, Songs I Cannot Sing, Songs I Cannot Play, Songs I Cannot Lead.

First, that the world of music (which I love) is not limited only to what I can do.  What a sad-sounding world that would be.  I am glad you exist, that there are arias and cantatas I can only listen to with tears running down my face.

Second, and this has been the harder part, that I have been required over and over the past few years to sing anyway, play anyway, lead anyway.  That the Songs I Cannot have been the Songs I Still Have To Anyway.

“They sound so good,” I said to our choir’s accompanist this evening, a little sadly.

“So do we,” she said staunchly.

“I know,” and our tiny, scrabbled together choir hadn’t sounded too bad – though we had only one teenage tenor and our bass . . . well, our bass is my dear Fritz and I am simply glad he is willing to learn new things.

All five or six of our spirit-is-willing choir had dispersed after practicing the simple harmonies in the hymnbook to “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”  and now the pianist and I could hear from elsewhere in the building the soaring beauty of the other congregation’s choir practice.  It was beautiful.  Like angels singing.

O hark!

We share our building with two other wards — one congregation that takes in everyone who lives in the town south of us and then two congregations in our town.  We are the south and east sides of town, the other ward is the north and west sides. Unfortunately, the luck of the map has drawn what seems an unfair amount of phenomenal musical talent to the other congregation — while we have had to make do with a children’s pianist who had to learn how to play on the job and even now blanks out and stops playing when she gets nervous (uh, that would be me) and a choir leader who can’t quite sing the harmony line even when that’s all the accompanist is playing and often gets lost in the middle of the beat (uh, that would also be me).

I am willing, but not entirely able.

But I love music.  I love singing.  I come from a family of fine singers and good musicians. Pianists, organists, choir directors, soloists.  It has been such a shame to me to know how badly I am mangling a fine piece of music, but not to know how to get myself to do it any different.

Two or three weeks ago, our children performed their annual program for their parents in our main worship meeting.  That wasn’t too bad, I was telling myself, I don’t think the mistakes were all that obvious, while I played the postlude quietly waiting for the congregation to finish filing out so I could make my escape.  And a little redhead from the 7-8 year old class bounced up by my elbow, “Why did you mess up?  Did you know you had messed up?  But why did you?”

There are things I can do better than most people I know.  I could, I guess, have spent my life only doing those.

But I am grateful to you, Songs I Cannot, for teaching me about trying and being willing to try, about failing and being willing to fail, about learning to laugh with tears in my eyes.

Our teenage tenor asked today at practice, “Where am I supposed to sing from?”

I described the vibrating column of air in a pipe organ, how when we sing we become that column of air — and having thus exhausted my musical knowledge, said, “I sing from the place I pray from — whole body like that, all open.”

And he nodded and the choir all together sang with something more beautiful than the notes that actually made it out of our mouths.

Perhaps not an unfitting way to praise a Creator who entered his own creation not as a prince in satin or a great scholar or a powerful temple singer, but to almost all appearances as a wandering carpenter’s son.

Third, that living with you, working with you, returning to you week after week, you Impossible Songs, keeps teaching me how Jesus listening can hear the Songs I Cannot Sing, how even my mistakes can become something harmonious in Him.

Thank You, Long Distances

Today my friend and I walked a half marathon in celebration of you, Long Distances.  We came in last, lapped at the last by a runner who still wanted to win.

We laughed, crossing the finish line.

We were only in it for the miles. Only interested in going your distance.

And for us, it wasn’t really a finish line.  It was a celebration of all your cumulative length of hills and conversations we’ve shared for so many years.  It was, we decided, the opening ceremony to a new training season for even more of you, Long Distances.

We think at spring break we may see how far we can go by foot in six days.  120 miles?  150 miles?  Our respective high school seniors (who have grown up together since kindergarten, with their own long distance shared between them) have signed on to drive ahead, carry our lunches, respond to our first aid, set up tents, explore whatever nearby town, museum and ice cream shops are around before building a fire and warming a can of soup for their blister-footed mothers to hobble into nightly shelter.

And even after all that walking, you weren’t done with me, Long Distances.  Sitting down this evening between my love and I, holding our hands in both your hands, prompting us to talk together of our fears and hopes in that open-eyed, unguarded, face-to-face and heart-to-heart way that has taken us all your twenty-two years’ travel with us to begin to learn.

What would I do without you, Long Distances?

Thank You, Unseasonable Weather

My friends say you are bad news.  They say you will be nothing but trouble for me in the long run.

My friends call you hard names like Global Warming.

They cite scripture and meteorological computer modelling and predict a variety of apocalypses.

But I can’t keep my heart from rising when you shine your warm sunlight like a blessing on my head.

Thank you for holding on to the brilliant leaves as fiercely fondly as I always want to.  Thank you for dancing their warm colors before my eyes for two months longer than you should.

Thank you for the extra days of digging in the garden that you give me.  And the sense of spring you bring to bear on my present autumn.

Thank You, Imaginary Bicycle

Ah, my dear vehicle of the mind and megabyte, I never knew what you were doing for me when I first took you for a spin.

This past month, when asked quickly to email the adoption worker something about our family, where could I turn but to you?

You were just waiting all this time, weren’t you?

When together we went Cherry Picking or batted around reasons why we write or frivoled concerning The Cat Dad, when you heard me out trying to philosophize about the care and keeping of daughters or what it’s like being the mother one, how could I have known that all along you were midwifing me through what was to be part of the labor of another kind of childbirth?

And though I’d almost decided to stay away at least another month, dear Imaginary Bicycle, it seemed remiss of me not to come by and  say thank you.

self-preservation

I have been here before.  The place where the squirrel-mind takes over.

Where nuts must be gathered from beneath the neighbor’s walnut tree, husked, scrubbed and frozen.

Unclaimed apples must be claimed.

Sacks of onions, heavy in their red mesh, must be hung in the garage.

Sweet Meat squashes pale blue – striped Delicata, brilliant Turkish Turbans – all piled on their wire racks in a dry cool closet with good air circulation.

I want everything safely gathered in this year.

Early this week I was seized with a need to find more peaches.

I’d already bottled my two boxes of Elbertas, soft and rosy orbs brought in on the Fruit Truck two weeks ago.  Once done up in clean glass bottles, they looked a paltry kind of sunshine, not nearly enough for the winter ahead.

It’s a month or more past the usual season, but someone had said they’d gotten peaches on the island this past weekend.

And so, in that window between ferrying Young to his school and getting myself to my own, I set out to find them.

I know my way to all the farms, because I’ve been here before in this place.  Though it’s been awhile.

Not just this physical place, this island, this farm where the wide, low peach trees I once picked from  — when my daughters still had to reach up to hold my hand — are already empty for the year.

A flatbed trailer now blocks the road to the peach orchard.  On it, gourds jumble beneath the peach trees’ point-tipped leaves.

click to see in greater detail

I have come back to an inner place, also.  Where the ambition to fill every empty jar seems sensible and within reach.

Maybe it is the economy. Or the uncertain and unsettled state of the nations.

Or the lingering summer that has extended the season long enough for me to wake up to second and third thoughts, with time to get everyone off to school, even myself — time to get medical trips caught up on for Grandma, time to clean out the downstairs pantry closet with its shelves and shelves of empty glass bottles.

“We don’t usually have peaches so late,” said Farmer Don — which is what he calls himself, and why not? — slicing an O’Henry open to give me a taste at my third stop.  “But these are from Yakima Valley.  And they have a good taste.  Slip skin, freestone.  The skin’s a little ugly but you peel that anyway.”

I went off to my class with three 26 lb. boxes of fruit in the back.

And the next morning awoke before dawn to a kitchen I’d laid out the night before — thick rag-towels on the counters, a bucket to catch the skins and pits, big black boiler filled with water, teakettle the same, a pan for the hot sugar syrup, a pan for blanching the peaches, a tub of water for cooling the peaches back down.

It was like coming home.  Coming home to a part of myself I’d thought I didn’t need anymore.

Maybe it is just that I have a kitchen again after a year or more without. Maybe it’s just I had underestimated my domestic powers until they were curtailed.

But now my powers are restored:  with extra pull-out cutting boards everywhere and the end of an echoing hallway recast as a much-needed pantry. (Thank you, my darling Fritz.)

I will not consider that the providence of my current season may be a desire to preserve also what was sweet and nourishing to me about my years at home with young children.  My years householding, home-steadying.

See, I am resisting the symbolism.

I am not saying how I’m standing not at the end of my years of raising children, but near it.  I haven’t said that I’ve crossed over into an unincorporated wild space between Mommyville and the town of What Comes After — though if I have, all I can say is, it’s not so bad here.

 (Someone please take this message back to the Emma J who mourned here before. 

 Let her know, the sun shines up ahead.  Even the rain is exciting. 

Tell her there is no need after all to make a franchise of her grief and set up stations for sorrow at each child’s departure.  That what she was grieving was the change, which is not at all the same as loss.)

I am standing in a new place, which is also an old familiar place.  A new day, which is not a stranger to other days I’ve chosen to build my life up from.

A day I begin standing at the counter, slipping the skin from blanched peaches, settling the halves into their bottles.

A day I end pouring hot sweetened syrup over the tightly packed fruit, easing air bubbles out with a long thin plastic spatula.

Waiting for one batch of seven full bottles to come out of their boiling-water bath so that the next seven can go in.

Until the last batch.

When I stand, in a quiet kitchen, eyeing the empty boxes, the pans of cooling water, the last steam from the big black pot, the serried bottles of summer sweetness.

Preserving it all.

Which has been — always — a preservation of more than fruit.

provide, provide

I live within a community that believes in home-bottled food.  Namely, that it is an unalloyed good, an outward sign of an inner virtue, a mark of those fit to survive.

I am not entirely convinced — having cleaned out a fair share of family pantries full of dusty Mason jars.  Relics to antique summers.  Bottles of grey fruits that survived their bottlers.  Outward signs only of time spent and the passing of same.

There are years I play the grasshopper and do not can a thing.  There are years I only can applesauce — and that only because I have a tree. And sometimes I can only salsa, and only because the peppers are so pretty.

Even in my most provident years, there are some worthy fruits and vegetables that I will never bottle up – i.e. green beans – i.e. pears.  A wonder in their own sphere and in their own season but too much like an over-stayed guest when presented in preserved form.

Most years I am a shame to my bottling neighbors and well-preserved kindred.  Even with my precious smattering of strange jams — rose hip, quince, Japanese plum — it is obvious I am a Ball Book dilettante.

But I do like the devoted attention to the change of seasons when tracking the sequence from apricots, cherries, to peaches, pears, apples.

I like handling the quantities of fruits — fuzzy peaches, bloomy plums, glossy hot peppers.  All those rounded globes of sweetness, all those worlds of varied fragrance.

And it was this community’s pervasive involvement with food in its basic state — the gardens, the fruit trees beside the driveways, the stacks of boxes of Ball jars in the hardware store — this general competence in laying the harvest by  that was one of the things I came here for.

It was to learn to live this way I chose to live here.

Many of my longest friendships here began in the kitchens where I learned to first make applesauce or world’s best salsa.

Many warm September memories I have, many quiet July mornings preserved  by heart now: gathering blueberries, picking peaches, climbing into cherry trees with these friends who were much younger then but just as beautiful as they are now – and our children flickering around the trunks of the trees — so small they once were — calling to us with their ungrown voices.

So I’m putting my bottles of fruit up, lining them up on table and counter like some proud American boast.

But you and I know – I’m only in it for the chance to play with quantities of fruit.  To glut myself with juicy color.  Indulge in the scents of it all, the shapes and weights.  And to do it to public commendation.

And then eat it  all up with a conscious sense of thrifty virtue.

. . . post script to a summer plot

But  — it’s not really the end of summer I’m trying to wrestle down.  I see that, now that I am looking at this angst full-face.

Isn’t it really that I just can’t get myself to pull together the net I’ve been scheming at all summer, the plot I’ve been plotting out to catch at last this Book of Bees that like Emily D’s “will not state its sting.”

Things – plotwise - have been going so swimmingly.

Characters finally standing on their own two feet.

Shouldering their responsibilities.

Falling straight into the traps I lay for them.

Everything has been shaping up so nicely, clicking into place like it belonged that way but now I have to let the final calamities and consequences fall upon my unwitting actors.

And just like I hate ending a good book I’m reading, just like I hate to have summer end, I’m fighting coming to some usual conclusion.

What’s more, I’m afraid I’m in the same position as Jane Bennett –
that I have sufficient virtue amidst my two or three main characters to
make but one good woman out of them all.  And it pains me to think ill (or plot against) any of my characters.

I mean, any more ill than I already have — having started out taking from each of them the things they treasure most.

Isn’t that enough?

I want them all to prosper now — since I’ve already inflicted all my own nightmares on them — but can’t see a way to do it.

And what irks me the most is that the things that really matter to me in this particular writing — not the interpersonal ups and downs but the fascinations that led me to this plot in the first place — the keeping of bees, the making a safe place, the reviving the city — these are all thrust aside continually by the exigencies of plot and interpersonal melodrama.

If my characters can’t prosper quietly and get their hidden agendas and shallow self-considerations out of the way, I think someone ought to lock up them all up, the drama queens,  and let the wider and more important work be accomplished.

So maybe I am in the mood for the frost after all.