Too Soon

Unlike yesterday’s leaden start, this morning’s light is bright and stunning. From the warmth of my bed, newly made with a winter quilt, I push the curtain aside to see the tree-tops from a nearby wood. Swaying in the wind, still-green leaves shiver on the branches they clung to through yesterday’s freak snow storm. Downstairs, I peered out at the yard, surveying the damage: a large branch down, fallen on our raised bed. It broke off of a tree we’ve discussed taking down so we could have more light for the new veggie patch. Nature has done the work for us. The only ‘line down’ is our laundry line that had been attached to ‘Weepy’ our 10 year old willow tree, now laying across the lawn. Weepy had been struggling these last few years, only a few sad sprouts of live branches, an almost silly spray of green. Clearly dying, it still supported our drying clothes and towels through the seasons, its distance from the house was an easy pull on the line from the porch.

After donning rubber boots, I stepped outside into the slush to retrieve the newspaper. The frigid air smells like winter. Squirrels frantically scramble around and up trees, their cheeks fat with supplies. In the distance I hear a flock of geese protesting as they fly, “Too soon! Too soon!”

Changing Seasons, Stocked Shelves

Foliage-drama is lacking this autumn. Summer droughts and rains, hurricane Irene are all reasons cited for this ‘blah’ fall. Even the usual spectacular reds of my maple tree have yet to appear, the leaves dropping more brown than red. But the flip side is that days are mostly warm and we’ve yet to turn the heat on or even start a blaze in the fireplace and there is still a meal’s worth of swiss chard to harvest from the garden. 

But it’s time to get ready. Today, we will cover the draftiest old windows on this house with plastic.  I’ll retrieve wooly sweaters and corduroy pants from a plastic bin I happily packed away back in May. With far less pleasure, shorts, cotton blouses and flowing skirts (I rarely wear – but somehow, always imagine I might) will get tucked into storage until next spring.

Like the squirrels, I have been hoarding sustenance for the long, dark nights ahead – making piles throughout the house of books to see me through the season.  I picked up Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty from the sale bookshelf at the library (my bus-man’s holiday) because I enjoyed State of Wonder and this ode to her friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy has often caught my eye. I also picked up A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah for $2 – a former best-seller I never read. At work I have snagged a few advanced reader’s copies including Thrity Umrigar’s new The World We Found and a first novel by Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish described as “A stirring and explosive debut novel about an American Muslim family struggling with faith and belonging in the pre-9/11 world.”

Bring on the cold nights and light the fire, I’m ready to read.

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.

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.

Soup’s On

Between work and my daughter’s insane school-sports-social schedule, the week was frenetic and I am still spinning. Tuesday night was exciting at the bookstore as we hosted the launch of the Echook Memoir I app – a digital publication. (It includes a piece by me!) I played host and also participant, mingling with a lovely group of people. Delightful.

A certain amount of busy-ness is usually a good thing for me, forcing me to be productive and energized. But I also like being home so welcome today – Saturday. I am mostly free to clean the mess and chaos of the house and cook my way through a few weeks of vegetables stored in the fridge.

I began last night by salvaging a head of escarole lodged behind some left-overs. A few leaves were just beginning to freeze from being flattened against the back. I cubed up a red onion remaining from a meal I don’t remember, threw in a crazy amount of minced garlic, scrubbed up a few farm carrots and potatoes with olive oil, then added the roughly chopped escarole, stirring until it wilted. Salt, pepper a box of vegetable stock simmered until the potatoes and carrots were tender. A can of white beans added just before we were ready to eat. Molly even had a bowl, although she rejected the bitter green that inspired the dish in the first place. Soup season begins!

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.

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