Tag: time

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?

To Every Season

Something about autumn – my pining for summer has (mostly) faded and changing leaves, temperature and wardrobe triggers a vague hankering. I too, think about changing. Oh, only abstractly.  My daughter is a junior in high school so I’m not going anywhere yet and savor these last sure two years of her at home. But then… I have begun to think: what next?

I would also be a bit of a fool were I not to ponder this question.  With the business in such a state of flux, who knows how much longer I will have my lovely gig at the bookstore? I should think of alternatives. And I like to.  ‘Alternative’ is a way of being that I embrace – that’s the direction I’d head. This long spell of diligently working 40 plus hours a week, maintaining the mortgage, the life – the stability my daughter craves and loves, has had plenty of joys – and is hopefully not quite over yet. But still healthy, strong and with my wits about me, it’s not terrible for me to imagine doing other things to bring in the bucks. I remind myself not worry too much about the reading-gadget wars and online shopping closing down this era in my life — and have started reading up on raising Alpacas…

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.

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.

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.

Vacation’s Over

I like my job at the bookstore. People envy my position and it is enviable. But 13 days of vacation have been heaven and I wish I could continue to live like this. Time away in the Catskills doing whatever the hell I wanted (writing for 8 hours a day) was of course, delicious, but so were my days at home. Usually I started with some time with the garden, watering, pulling weeds, picking lettuce and the odd red cherry tomato. Many cups of tea were made between writing or reading on the front porch.  Chores were a pleasure – lots of time to hang the laundry (yes, I do that). Everything – leisurely.  

Being home when Molly comes home from camp, being there to feed and water her, even to drive her where she wanted to go, was sweet. Even she said so. And Tetley of course, loves having me around 24/7 — and what handsome company for me, don’t you think?  Other than going to the store to buy provisions, I barely ventured away from this almost quarter-acre corner.  Happy to putter, read, write, cook, garden, write and read some more between the front porch, the back deck, the table by the window, the couch and these past sweltering days, the air conditioned bedroom. Maybe a pause to wash the kitchen floor or at least some dishes.  The other day we kayaked, going just as far as a sandbar about half a mile from shore. We jumped out of the boat and floated in the gentle waves of the incoming tide, listening to the sea grass, as a tern swept back and forth and back again, finally dive-bombing the water with a little splash.

Farewell vacation.

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. 

 

 

Studio 70 Artists’ Retreat 2011

For the third year in a row, I am back in the Catskills with my “Studio 70 Sisters” for our own mini-artist’s retreat.  Studio 70 refers to the place where we all met as art students of Mike Skop when we were all in our 20s. Many years have passed but we all still remember how to give each other time and space — lessons Mike taught well on so many levels.

Right now I am sitting by the window in a patch of morning sun. With eyes closed, one might think it is raining, the rushing river across the way is so loud.

Yesterday, the four or us caught up on the year, gabbing on the porch, while making and eating dinner, drinking wine. We agreed this is one of our favorite things about this time: our dinners.  Last night’s meal was a salad of greens I picked from my garden before leaving Connecticut, and CSA farm cucumbers and onions, garlicky dressing and feta cheese. Diane sauteed Portabella mushrooms Cathy spotted at the farm stand down the road.

This morning, the house is quiet, each of us doing exactly what we want to be doing. (and that may include thinking about what to make for dinner!)

Bliss.

 

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