On the Way Somewhere…

Missing from this lovely spot of ours is silence. The drone of traffic from I-95 just blocks away, is constant. The decibel level rises or falls according to the time of day, the time of year and the shifting winds. This is the sound of thousands of people moving through life on an American highway.

Yesterday, a steamy but sunny Saturday morning, the steady hum of cars, trucks and motorcycles exploded into the horrific sound of an accident. No fender bender – the explosion woke us and the wail of sirens continued for hours. Running an errand at 2:00 – at least 6 hours after the accident, I saw the strangely-bent trailer of a truck being hauled away. Injuries must have been dreadful and perhaps, someone died.  This thought lingered with us all day as we worked around the house and then blissfully went floating on the Long Island Sound in our kayak.  Who were the people whose lives took an unexpected, terrible detour this morning?  It could have been anybody.  Alert to life’s fragility, we move through the day into night, grieving for these strangers passing so close to our home but glad to still be here with limbs intact. Relieved it was not us.

PS: According to the local paper, the accident was triggered by a naked man yelling he was Jesus. (No one died.)

More Books

One of the greatest perks about working in a bookstore are the books.  Free books (Advanced Reader’s Copies –  ARCs – from the publisher), borrowed books (hard cover with a dust jacket), and discounted books (a generous employee discount). I get lots of books.  Currently I am finishing up a borrowed book: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman – a memoir of the author’s stint in Danbury prison.  Any glimpse behind the frightening walls of a woman’s prison piques my interest but this author’s experience is particularly fascinating because she is like me.  An educated, (we’re talking Smith college) white, proverbial good girl who did some stupid things in her early twenties. She’s smart, funny, insightful.  We all think we’d never be behind bars but it could happen to anyone. (Martha?)  I’m fascinated with our capacity to adjust and create a new normal, to survive what we imagine to be impossible, to make lemonade out of lemons. You get the drift. While the author writes an honest portrait of her own challenges she also gives us a glimpse at the lives of many of her fellow inmates. These are prisoners from the shameful ‘war on drugs’, prisoners of domestic violence, prisoners of addiction. While ‘what they did’ may be the voyeuristic question that lingers, it’s the getting through the days, the weeks, the months, the years that drives these women and this story. There has to be a better way than the insanity of our prison system. Beautifully done.

So what next?  The piles of books around the house are getting crazy. My arc pile has Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes, The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, Solar by Ian McEwan, The Swimming Pool by Holly Lecraw.  I picked these up because I either love the author (McEwan) the subject fascinates me (war experience, polygamy???) or because something in a review piqued my interest.  That’s why I bought Happy Now by Katherine Shonk – a novel about a woman whose husband committed suicide (research) but haven’t gotten beyond the first few pages.

Another recent purchase is  I’m Not Mad, I Just Hate You!: A New Understanding of Mother-Daughter Conflict – Surviving and Thriving During Your Daughter’s Teenage Years by Roni Cohen-Sandler – a local, smart shrink who specializes in the subject.  She was in the store for a talk when M was still a toddler and I remember that I liked what she said so many years ago so picked this up when I felt overwhelmed by a rare difficult spell with M. Things are peachy again so I’ve yet to open it.  I’m sure I’ll be reading it one of these days.

I also purchased Patricia Lanza’s Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! which reads like a television infomercial. But it does work and is a great way to recycle newspapers and all that compost-able kitchen waste. This book I keep around like a cookbook – to dive into when I need it for adjustments and advice on individual crops.

So with only a few pages to go on the book I’m reading now, what next?  I might have to borrow the last Stieg Larson The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – although I try to borrow less popular books so that if I love them, I can plug them. In any case, I’m spoiled for choice.  Now to find the time…

Food

Cilantro, mint, sage, spring onions, strawberries. The harvest begins!  Yesterday made a carrot, apple, ginger, mint salad with a yogurt, honey, lemon juice dressing. Roasted red pepper dip by blending cream cheese, cilantro and a touch of cayenne to give it even more of an edge. Strawberries are big and bountiful – the challenge is to get to them before the slugs and birds. Spring onions – fatter and more substantial than a scallion – are already forming scapes. I wonder if they can be eaten like garlic scapes?  Yesterday’s harvest was sliced thin and cooked in a skillet until they were crunchy bits – perfect to toss on top of the chicken cooked in a soy-ginger marinade with a preserved lemon thrown in for good measure.  A few leaves of sage as garnish for this crazy flavor combo.  After weeks of no inspiration, I am excited by cooking again.

In another few weeks we will be picking up our first CSA box of organic vegetables of the season. Always an adventure to open the box.  In the first weeks there will be plenty of greens – beautiful young lettuce, basil, garlic scapes, (pesto!) arugula and much tastier strawberries than ours. Then strange things like fennel and other vegetables I have to look up recipes for.  I have a weakness for cookbooks but in the end, use only three or so regularly.  Deborah Madison’s vegetarian cookbooks are fantastic – full of inspiring recipes using wacky veg.  A new favorite is Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express. Rather than being in recipe format, the book is broken down by season with simple paragraphs giving suggested meals. Most of the ingredients are already in your cupboard and fridge but with Bittman’s guidance everything becomes more interesting. With just a few sentences of inspiration you can throw together simple meals, a catalyst for the kitchen.  That can of beans? Turn it into a burger that even your fussy kid will eat.  For something different try Japanese egg crepes or Peanut Soup. Yum.

Embracing the chaos

I am not an organized person and while I envy this quality in others, it will never be mine.  That’s not to say I am not efficient and responsible: my desk may be a mess at work and at home – but I never miss a deadline and my bills get paid on time.  This is just my style.  And it translates to everything – including the garden.

This morning, dressed in sweatpants and tee-shirt retrieved from the floor, hair flattened on one side and eyes still bleary with sleep, I took the dog out for his quick, morning walk.  I live on a quiet street and rarely meet anyone at this hour. Bordering our not-quite quarter acre,  Hosta, Iris, Day Lilies are growing in abundance.  Looking at this mass of green through my sleepy haze, I recall my autumn vow to separate these plants in the spring: divide the Day Lilies and Hosta plants, give away the Bearded Irises (strange, almost vulgar looking, I think) before they reached full bloom and I could still see space between them.  Too late: they swallow each other up in a green mass and they in turn, are overwhelmed by the hedge that stands now like a wall between our house and the street.  I used to be able to trim this hedge standing in the street – now it is at least 8 feet high and dense.

In another corner of the garden are the once scrawny twigs sent to me by the Arbor Society for a $10 donation.  I did this at least two years in a row – dutifully planting painted twigs only inches long into a corner of the garden where they would not get trampled.  Now we have about 7 trees in the works. They are growing within feet or even inches each other.  I meant to move a few of them this spring while it was still early – before their leaves began to sprout.  We moved two last year – digging around the roots and then wider, deeper yet to get some kind of root ball.  Finally, cursing and bothered, we chopped at the dangling roots and yanked them out – moving them, (not very hopefully) to a spot where they have more room to grow.  Amazingly, they survived the trauma and are still alive and  have grown quite a few feet.  We vowed to get to the others before they got bigger. Too late again.  None of those little trees I stuck in the flower garden for safe keeping and then, forgot about, will leave without a fight. For another year at least, there they will stay.

To add to the garden chaos, I planted two cherry trees in the hope of one day eating fruit from them.  Slightly bigger sticks that probably won’t bear fruit for a decade because I’m too frugal to spring for the $60 it costs to buy a large one from the garden center.  All of these saplings live beneath the massive oak that’s not far from the mulberry tree, so tall the branches lean over the garage. Another oak stands at the end of the drive and a quartet of trunks make up the maple tree shading most of the front lawn.

At this point, we feel overwhelmed by the growth, the weeds reclaiming a patch we cleared two weeks ago, the neighbors annoying forsythia that hangs like a curtain about to come down over our blueberry bushes.  But it’s nature doing its thing and it’s gorgeous and lush and the birds love us.

Balance

The sky is cloudless, the temperature is perfect and  I am torn between being in the dirt  planting vegetable seeds, tomato and jalapeno pepper plants – or writing.  Since I seem to only be able to write in solitude, when R leaves to run an errand, I drop my spade and dash inside to write, and when his car pulls in the driveway, I head back to pull weeds and water plants. And in this way, I find a kind of rhythm.

Here I am inside now – garden gloves abandoned in the dirt.  I have less than an hour before M is home from school.  A room of my own?  I imagine such a place for myself  and maybe, one day we can transform the crawl space – not quite an attic.   But if I could really disappear for hours on end to a cubby of my own, away from them and our shared life, would I? Certainly, if this was my ‘work’ but not now.  All moments beyond the hours spent at my job are carefully mined and  ultimately, it is the time I spend with these ones I love, that is most precious to me. But were I to win the lottery…

May 1st

Six years later. A Saturday again. How different my life is now.  Today, I am grateful to just feel sadness.

An excerpt from my still-in-progress memoir:

“On the morning of May 1st, I woke early.  It was as crystalline a day as last year  – the air fresh and full of spring smells, the light extraordinary.  Molly was still asleep beside me – we’d watched a movie in bed the night before and I let her stay.  As usual, the dog and cat acted as my alarm clock, looking for food and attention.  I slipped out of bed to attend to them.  I fed the cat, filled the kettle and put the leash on the dog.  There was now a curtain over the door to the garage, but as I passed it, I saw in my mind’s eye, the scene of the previous year.  I continued out, following the dog as he made his way along the weedy area next to the black-topped street.  I breathed deeply, inhaling the earthy smells of the spring morning.  The new leaves of trees were vibrant green and light pouring through to the street created patterns of movement.  How I loved spring!  Maybe today I would go buy flowers for the garden.  That’s something I could do.  I would plant them in a different place than last year.  Too many ugly memories near the other part of the garden.

Back in the house, Molly still slept.  I found some incense I’d bought in Kyoto last summer, dug through the kitchen junk drawer to find a lighter, and went out to the garage.  I spent the year scurrying past the door, quickly getting in and out to retrieve a shovel or rake.  This morning, with the light pouring through the windows, I stood beneath the beam and lit the incense.  I waited there until the thin purple stick turned to white ash, thinking of Ian, forgiving him.  I felt calm and peaceful as I watched the stick turn white and crumble onto the cement floor.

“I hope you’re at peace, Ian.  We’re okay and …we forgive you for what you did.”  It was the closest I had come to praying in a long time.

I wanted to think of him as being at peace.  For a long time I thought of his suicide as vindictive but gradually I was realizing how much pain he must have been in – a pain existing long before I even came into his life.  I used to berate him,

“Look!  You have everything: a beautiful daughter, a supportive wife – we both love you.  You have a house, your own business.  Why isn’t it enough for you?  Why do you keep risking it all for this drug?”

Of course he couldn’t answer. But I imagine now, that none of it was enough because none of it made his pain go away. He was trying to escape what must have been a terrible, deep anguish and Molly and I were collateral damage – it was never really about us – was it?  This pain prevented him from thinking of anything but getting free of it – through drugs and finally, death.  I wanted to understand what the cause was – something in his childhood?  I searched my memory for what he told me about his past but could remember nothing to explain his troubled soul.  On the other hand, I knew he’d been traumatized by his days in the British Army in Northern Ireland and stints in the Angolan other places secret wars were fought.  He refused to tell me more saying it was too horrible to talk about although he made it clear he had killed people – did this haunt him?  In the early days together before he was using drugs again, or at least before I knew about them, he would sometimes wake in a cold sweat worrying he hurt me in his sleep.  I urged him to go to talk to someone to get counseling.

“What is some guy who has sat in an office all of his life going to make of what I have been through?  The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve had to do?  No.  I don’t want to talk to anyone about this stuff.  Especially you.  I don’t want you to know, it’s too terrible.”

And I never pushed him.  I didn’t want to know either.”

April Showers

Today’s rain is welcome.  Yesterday I spent hours potting herbs (parsley, oregano, lemon verbena, basil and more basil) and filling window boxes. As I make my morning tea, a movement outside my kitchen window makes me jump – newly planted red geraniums out of the corner of my eye appear as if someone is looking in at me. It will take some time to get accustomed to their presence.

Although recent sunny days have been lovely, I am glad  to stay inside, read papers and do indoor spring cleaning tasks. Every room in the house is filled with the scent of lilacs – the result of trimming almost 3 feet off the top of an overgrown bush. This was one of those jobs I have meant to do each year and never gotten to – until now.  The blossoms were out of reach of my nose so it was time. According to a Google of ‘Pruning lilacs’ one should wait until the flowers have finished blooming. But wanting their evocative fragrance in these rooms, we took the lobbers to the branches and now the shrub looks sad – all chopped up. Fingers crossed it hasn’t been traumatized too much and next year’s blooms will be glorious.

We’ve done a lot of that around here this year – hacking away at old growth, chopping butterfly bushes practically to the ground. What were awful looking stubs only a few weeks ago are sprouting green. It works. Of course, all summer we will have to look at the bald limbs of the lilac and trust we have done the right thing for the future. There are so many ways this applies to my life: in a mundane way, cleaning out closets, throwing out, giving away, making SPACE!  But in psychic ways too. I will try and examine thoughts and habits so long ingrained in my life they might just be stunting growth and try and be brave enough to make uncomfortable changes for a healthier future. A good exercise for the seasons.

How to Start

“Whatever the story is about, it is something that is of interest to human beings because it amplifies some aspect of what it means to be living.” I lifted this sentence off of a website for writers (were I more adept at this, I’d provide the link here – one day!) and simple as it is, I find it a helpful beacon as I swim around trying to re-start my book.

Beginnings: how can I hook you, reader? What is my story? Why did I write it? What do I want the reader to take away from it?  Why am I so stumped on these questions when they are so fundamental and I have hundreds of pages of ‘book’?Are the answers in what I have written already? Or are they still to be answered? My brilliant sister gently guides me with these questions. For weeks I have been juggling different parts of already written chapters — to start here? or here? cutting and pasting in the hope that the new combination will make my story sing.  But it doesn’t yet. Not yet.

What began as an exorcism of anger and grief became a hopeful testimony of love and determination that my daughter’s life be better than mine, and that my life, be better than before.  And it is.  I could leave it at that, but after working in the book business for more than a decade, I might as well shoot for those dusty shelves myself.  And perhaps one day my tale will serve as someone else’s beacon of light.

Slow Down Spring!

Forsythia is fading fast and daffodils are already shriveling. Last week’s days of summer temperatures seems to have fast forwarded us. I wanted to get into the weather car speeding us towards summer and put on the brakes.  Too fast!  The heat itself doesn’t bother me although I haven’t yet managed to do the seasonal clothes change thing (and I prefer this direction!) and so, spend such days, a little overheated. Much happier to be hot than cold, I never complain.  I feel like it slows me down to a more leisurely pace.

Still feeling behind in terms of the garden although I managed to plant some rainbow chard, kale, lettuce and peas last week.  The next morning, looked out the window to see a squirrel digging up the chard seeds – munching away as he looked around.  No wonder entire plantings from last year never even surfaced from the soil to be eaten by the groundhog.  Crazily, year after year, I plant again although I know this lumbering creature will climb the wall or dig a tunnel right into our little plot and devour what I plant.  Eyeing some seedlings at a garden store last week of red leaf lettuce and other beautiful leaves, I thought – a ready meal for the groundhog, and left them there.  I try and plant things he doesn’t want. Or just a lot of what he does so we get some too. We have onions and leeks and a big bag of lettuce seeds this year.  We will do battle again. And he’ll probably get the soybeans (love edamame!) before me, but I remain an optimist.

Day of Light

I  do not have the clarity that religion offers, but in my own way, discover spiritual moments, although – never in a church. Easter Sunday, we work out in the garden. R is tying up branches both fallen in recent storms and trimmed by us. Wearing gloves against the thorns, I prune the rambling rose bush and pull the dead wood out of the hydrangea plants. There is a woody vine that since last summer has laid claim to a stone wall.  I push my sheers beneath the dirt, snip out the roots, yank and cut. I know I did not go deep enough and suspect it will be back again within a few months when I get lazy and turn my attention to other parts of the garden.  But for now, it is enough.  Cleaning out the dead or undesirable branches and plants, clearing the way for new life.  Filling my lungs with scented spring air I am grateful for the day. That feels like a prayer to me.

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