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The Woods

I don’t feel my age (just north of fifty) except when it comes time to visit the stable of doctors now assigned to me. Check-ups have gotten more complicated over the last 10 years or so, especially since a slight bout with breast cancer in 2004. Few of us seem to be able to dodge that diagnosis for long anymore thanks to all the intense screening we submit to. And once in this lousy club, regular, thorough scanning means check-ups that were once uneventful are now fraught with anxiety about what might be found this time.

For instance, yesterday I had a mammogram, bone density and ultra-sound.  Tomorrow I will get the news – hopefully a home-free card for one more year. Or maybe it will be a call-back — for another squishing in the machine or worse, a needle biopsy. I hate those. Hate it all – but try to breathe deeply in these waiting days, savoring the preciousness of thinking I am perfectly fine rather than drown in dread.  But the thing about accumulating years is the increased vulnerability to illness, sadness, tragedy. Once in this part of the forest, we never really get to be ‘out of the woods’ again. I try to focus on patches of light through the trees.

PS: All clear!

Stories to Tell

For ten years now, I have been a board member of a group that works to give little libraries to children who might otherwise not own a single book. The goal is to give at least 10 books over as many months to a child participating in some kind of literacy program. Hopefully, they will develop a life-time love of reading. First Book Fairfield County has provided about 10,000 books a year to children living in financially challenged communities that border the wealthiest towns in this county.

Our group of volunteers has worked together for years. We get together once a month or so for about an hour to review grants, award them or to organize our next fundraiser. We are fond of each other and share a passion for getting books to kids. We also share an easy, warm rapport. But I recently discovered, there’s plenty we probably don’t know about each other.

Last night we held a wine tasting at a beautiful space at Bridgeport University with a view of the Long Island Sound to knock your socks off.  While moving glasses and spreading table cloths, one of my fellow board members and I gabbed about our high school juniors and their college search process. He is a fantastic mortgage guy, warm and generous and funny. He grew up around here, and I always presumed, had spent his life in these suburbs working conservative banking jobs to provide a good life for his family.  The usual story. But I was wrong.

“I told my son, he can go anywhere he wants — and he says he wants to go to Sacred Heart and live at home! As soon as I turned 18, I was on a ship to Africa,” he said.

“Really? Where in Africa did you go?” I asked, always curious to hear about people’s world travels.

“Dakar.”

“Why Senegal?” I asked.

“I’m a tap dancer and I went to meet up with a cruise ship. You didn’t know I was a dancer?” He looked at me incredulously. But how would I have known he was tap dancer? He’d never shared this information, turns out, with any of our group – but I quickly did and we all looked at our friend with new eyes.

An award winning tap-dancer, he worked on cruise ships, traveling all over the world. He was once in a movie with Sandra Bullock. But the best part of the story was:

“I met my wife on that first cruise. I was 18 and she was 16 and lived in California. But we wrote letters for 2 years before we saw each other again – and now we’ve been married for 20.”

With a look of love he glanced over into the corner where his beautiful, vivacious blond wife laughed with friends.

“A tap dancer!” I kept repeating – retrieving my jaw from the carpet. I watched my friend move throughout the night, his grace, his ease, his adoration for his wife and it all made sense. Knowing just that little bit about his adventures has lent a richer dimension to my perception of him. And now, I wonder what amazing stories you have to tell?

We Would Be Haunted


This morning I finished a memoir by an American woman who met and fell in love with her husband in Sarajevo during the war, prematurely gave birth to her longed-for baby in a beautiful European location, and struggled unsuccessfully to sustain a marriage to a tortured soul with an addiction problem. No, not my memoir, The Things We Cannot Change (still agent-shopping) – Janine di Giovanni‘s just published, Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption. 

Reading her compelling story was sometimes eerie – as if some Balkan spell had been cast over us who, by choice, lived through those dark days in Bosnia. So much struggle and sadness in our lives, so many unhappy endings where there once seemed such promise – bright love out of the bleakness of war. And yet, of course we would be haunted: what were we thinking?

Janine di Giovanni’s time in Bosnia and mine overlapped although my experience was very different. She is much braver than me and as a journalist, hers was a very clear and admirable mission. As an international civil servant with an administrative job, I lived a comparatively cocooned and frustrated existence. Traveling from New York to be part of a very cloudy ‘Mission’ – I harbored the short-lived illusion, I might be serving the cause of peace.  My war experiences do not compare to her powerful accounts. But as women in love – with love, adventure, romance, our respective babies, our men – it was like reading my own story. And for the battle against addiction, there is no armor.

She writes beautifully – her heart pulsing in each word as she relives her life with Bruno. I vaguely remember him from the Holiday Inn and remember seeing Janine – such a majestic, striking woman. And I remember her friend Ariane, a French journalist who never seemed to leave Sarajevo yet always appeared to be cheerful. I wonder if they would recall the crazy, dashing Englishman, smartly dressed with an ascot tucked into his Barbour, who drove the ICRC around and certainly flirted and flattered them? He never missed an opportunity to leap from the balconies inside the Holiday Inn connected by the climbing lines one of the journalists set up. I think it was Paul who did this – Paul Marchand, the elegant, warm French photographer with a perpetual cigar was one of Neil’s favorite people in Sarajevo. Just this morning, from Janine’s memoir I learned that in 2009, five years after my husband ended his life, Paul also hung himself. So many memories stirred up – and so much sadness. But regret? No. Like Janine, I marvel at my child and cherish the love from those ashes.

Dodging a Bullet

Wednesday, I had my ovaries out. For the record, it was a cinch – thanks to the wonders of laprascopic surgery. Pre-surgery, I searched the web for reassurance and didn’t find much. The information I read made me nervous and I began to doubt my decision. Thus, although hesitant, I decided to write about my experience. Perhaps another woman having her ovaries out prophylactically might be comforted.

I dragged my feet about this for years, convinced to be out with them only after seeing one of my dearest friends go through treatment for ovarian cancer this past year. I spent only a few hours in the hospital, leaving slightly bruised and tender but delightfully loopy. The only a bandage on me was a bandaid on my arm where the IV had been. Ferried home by my fellow, I slept. It was lovely to just to sleep – to have that be what was expected of me. And in these days, post surgery, I continue to surrender to this business of healing.  It is tempting to fall into normal activities and I probably should not have sat on a cold metal bench in the wind watching my daughter play field hockey yesterday. It felt grueling, but they lost, so maybe I was also feeling sympathetic.

I won’t be doing any downward-dogs for a few weeks, nor taking marathon walks with Chris, but I did take Tetley out yesterday (he was very gentlemanly). My refrigerator is so laden with good food from my remarkable neighbor-friends that I don’t really need to cook – but can. I can sleep on my back and either side, comfortably. I’ve barely taken any painkillers. In short, I feel really good.

And lucky. I have a beautiful daughter – and in any case, am too old to have more kids. Because I was on Tamoxifen for 5 years, I will mostly be spared crazy, hormone related reactions. I have great insurance. And so far, the word that I remember from the haze of post-op is ‘benign’. My circumstances are excellent. I am grateful to have crossed this silent killer off my list. Thank you to my dear, now healthy friend: it was her fierce battle with this bitch of a disease that Galvanized me into action.

Season Switch

One afternoon last week a cold wind began to blow and in the course of a few hours, the weather switched from summer heat to an autumn chill. Summer’s final days usually make me melancholy — the end of long hours of light and evenings of warmth. Not this year. I feel done with the heat, ready to drag my sweaters out and stop feeling guilty about neglecting the garden.

Between relentless high temperatures, the groundhog’s appetite, invisible creatures that made skeletons of my chard, and my own neglect, the garden is mostly a mess. I wade through weeds to salvage what veggies remain. A variety of peppers, a handful of cherry tomatoes and an eggplant or two.

Basil is hanging in there. But mostly, it’s a wash-out. One sunflower lays bent in the garden although I planted over a hundred seeds.

In a nod to autumn growing possibilities, I replaced the remains of the hanging petunia with a mum but otherwise, am ready to let it all go.  There are still a few weeks left of my CSA vegetable deliveries. Squash, black kale, potatoes and carrots galore fill the crisper in my very small fridge. I am ready to make soups and other slow cooking meals to fill the house with smells of simmering garlic, onions and herbs.

I retrieved my fuzzy slippers and heavy robe from the back of the closet to bundle up for these morning sessions. This quiet hour of writing is now dark and cold. While I sit, morning light gradually seeps into the room and so the day begins. I am ready.

 

Remembering

A friend from the neighborhood dropped by yesterday evening. She was out for a walk and just stopped in on a whim – it’s that kind of neighborhood. We shared a glass of wine and caught up on life. She and I have been friends for many years. When it was time for her to go, I walked her out through the breezeway to the driveway.

The evening was balmy, the full moon rising bright just above the horizon. We stood admiring it a moment and then she turned to me, motioning to the garage and said, “Whenever I walk by here, I think of him, don’t you?”

The garage is where my husband died. Where I found him.

“No. Not really. I mean, when I go in, yes… but… I can imagine others do. I once ran into one of the policeman who came that morning and he told me he thinks about it every time he drives around here. But no, I don’t.”

From the beginning, I was determined that the awful morning would not define me nor my daughter. I thought briefly about moving away but there would have been no moving away from what happened, only the place. And how could I live here if I remained haunted? There were hundreds of mornings when I relived the day but now, the worst images of more than 7 years ago, are tucked away in the recesses of my mind.

It took time – maybe it was years – but mostly, I no longer remember him in that terrible way. In fact, especially of late, my memories and … psychic sense of him, if you will, are benevolent. There have been moments when I have had a profound sense of him watching over our daughter with me. And that he is at peace.  I have not forgotten, but I have healed and I like to think, he has too. Today, when memory triggers will be rife, I wish the same for the lives hideously shattered on a brilliantly clear morning that began like any other day.

Landing on the Moon

Kayaking on the Long Island Sound is great thinking time.  Yesterday, between dreaming about what to make for dinner and paddling into the waves, I decided it is time to write a new book.  Time to step away from the manuscript I’m currently flogging and start another story.  Today, I opened up a blank document (it’s there still, behind this screen) and panicked. How did I ever write all those pages in the first place? I stared at that page waiting for words, then quickly retreated here to this less daunting space.

I did it once, and I will do it again — but at least for now, the emptiness of the screen reflects my mind. Of course I know that what I write now will not be what I end up with. I’ll be editing, revising, trashing and revising again. It is NOT like landing on the moon. The beauty of writing is that I won’t be stuck with “one small step…” — it can be a leap, I just have to take it…

 

Pausing for Death

Yesterday, I caught up with a friend. We gabbed outside her workplace on a busy city street when she stopped mid-story and looking out past me, said, “Bless that person and their family.” A procession of cars moved at the same slow speed, yellow “Funeral” cards on each dashboard. Her eyes filled with tears, the grief of her father’s death only a month ago, still raw.

We watched the motorcade of grievers pass. When an impatient driver scooted across, momentarily breaking the flow, she said, “Now I hate that. You know, in Alabama, even on the highway, everyone stops and waits, even traffic on the other side of the road. That’s just what is done there.”

I’ve been thinking about that image: everyone stopped. Waiting in their cars, people might fiddle with their radio, maybe make a call or, say a prayer and meditate on this passing life.  I think Alabama does it right. A beautiful break in the day-to-day if we are lucky enough not to be in the procession but still hit ‘pause’ for the moments or minutes it takes for a family to follow the body of their loved one to the cemetery and reflect on our own mortality. Just because, as my friend said, that is what one does.  To respectfully pay attention and simply to breathe deeply because we can.

Another Day – Catskills Retreat

I know there is a full moon tonight but I search the horizon from my bedroom window to no avail.  There are more trees than sky around here. Full moon, full day of writing. This evening, I took a break to make dinner.  A pleasure to concoct surrounded by these friends, I improvised a meal of whole wheat pasta with a medley of vegetables — onions, an abundance of smashed garlic, mushrooms, grated carrot, zucchini, summer squash with olive oil, topped with a poached egg, fresh basil and parmesan. It is not as gorgeous to look at as to taste, but here it is.Smooshed up, the poached egg blends together scrumptiously with the vegetables and pasta.

I wrote outside under an apple tree this morning. A few feet away but out of sight, Laura had set up her pastels in the flower garden of hollyhocks and bee balm. On the porch, Diane was also drawing. Later, someone played the piano.

There is a dreamlike quality to these days — immersed in our art, our dreams, our books, the river. We ask each other what day it is and exclaim at how quickly time is passing. We speak with longing and love about our loved ones at home but are absorbed in these precious moments to just – be. We read each other well, knowing when to engage or leave each other alone. We recognize in each other, the thrall of inspiration.

By evening, we are ready to connect, so gather around the kitchen. Someone slices, simmers and serves delicious dinner. Somehow, easily – the dinners get made, the dishes washed, the lights go out, the day ends. We disappear to our rooms for sleep to the constant river sounds, anticipating another day to do — whatever we want.

Retreat – Day Two

Yesterday, I spent almost the entire day in my room writing, popping downstairs every few hours for nourishment from food and friends. Here’s where I am working.The view is of trees and a glimmer of river. There is a road too, but I have selective vision and not too many cars pass by. All day, I sat and worked on changes to my manuscript suggested by my very smart, very generous new friend, author of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch. Working through the pages, my heart fills with the attention she paid.  This is the story of how I learned to write — big-hearted, insightful readers – friends, agents, strangers even, have helped me to shape my tale into a book. I feel like I am almost there.  I imagine myself finished, at my own book event for a change. Someone asks the inevitable question – “how long did it take you to write?” What will I say?

I feel so compelled to keep going that today will probably also be spent at this desk. But my body demands movement so I will force myself to take a walk – perhaps over the river rocks, balancing across the currents. Last year I was mesmerized by the tricky scramble over slippery stones.  But being able to focus all day on writing is a gift. I could stay up here all day and my friends would leave me be. But their presence offers laughter, comfort and inspiration.

When I ventured down yesterday for a cup of tea mid-afternoon, Laura was sorting her pastels out on the porch. “Do you want to listen to something?” she offered, then hooked me up to her ipod.  I sat, eyes closed listening to mystical choral music I may otherwise never have heard. Then I went back to work until the smells of dinner wafted up the stairs.

Dinner last night was by Laura – quinoa patties from my new favorite cookbook Super Natural Cooking Everyday, a magnificent salad by Diane and farm stand corn with sage butter.   Delicious. 

 

 

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