New Home Day 4, March 2018

Gray skirts of afternoon trail

wind chimes, curled leaves, and

the rhythmic wooden thump

of cars above the pedestrian walkway.

Beneath the bridge--strange world

of sand, tire swings, and signage placing

the risk entirely on those at play.

Coffee shop festooned with colored lights--

men at the bar discuss anime and Lord of the Rings.

A man with tattoos on his forehead and soft black eyes

offers to buy me a drink.

The Trees

The trees
under this substantive white space,
this back-light of sticky snow-crystal heaps,
are revealed.


Here are no straight lines.
Each trunk and twig embodies
its own slow, sinuous progression.
A flayed stub of dead tree
lays bare this whorling--
its wooden muscles graining
up and around,
like a twist of clay.


Above, scaled bellies of old oaks
and all top-twigs stand
in high relief under
a gray-white hood under
a gray-white sky.
And I, beneath, awed, enveloped,
breathe my tiny breath
so much more loudly
than the forest.

 

Walking

Getting up, I dreamed already
of walking in the woods--
those few miles stashed
in the crooked arm
of Route Six and Torrence.
I had to wait 'till after school
and taking out the dog, and even then,
even walking leaf-incensed paths,
I still felt a'jitter toward myself
and the world.




Three others passed,
one wielding hiking poles and striding
shcrunch, shcrunch as if the trail
were more than a mile, as if she were
an arrow tight for distant heights--
and two gingering along, a man
and a woman who carried a broken shoe.
When next I saw her, both shoes were off.
She went so gently, touching the world
through soft black socks.

Retrospective

1

Each time we drive past
a garden of gray stones,
we hush the music --
mute Sufjan Stevens
or strains of folk:
"Ain't no grave
gonna hold my body
down"--
for a moment we've borrowed
an international friend's tradition.
With us to celebrate
an American Thanksgiving,
he's patient with our questions:
What does he love about his homeland?
The food. The history of centuries
piled one atop another.
Every time someone calls 
something "old" here,
I just laugh.

2


Heavy with our feast,
we take the tonic
of air and earth,
slip under hot wires
and walk the pasture's
uneven ground
to visit a single stone
at the timber's edge
and rediscover
limestone words
in grass and brambles
under the naked trees:
Died Feb 1, 1848.
In a civilization shifty
as a snow globe,
this is old.

3

We were very favorably impressed
with the country (his sister said) and thought 
we had very good soil for cultivation 
but did not think those large prairies
would ever be so thickly settled
as they are now. *

4

Astonishingly, after one hundred and sixty-seven years,
the characters still flourish like careful marks
from an old-fashioned hand. November-numb
fingers trace grooves, follow the circular swirl
embellishing the "A" in "Aged," the leaflet
curve of a grooved numeral, the fine line leading
to a "Y."

Surely such care denotes some kind of love:
the craftsman for his craft,
the loved ones for the remembered,
even our present attention added
to the attention of those others.

5

When I die, says Nouwen,
love continues to be active . . . . **

6

In the city again, I move my things
from one apartment to another.
I survey rooms reduced
of all that made them mine,
all the small enfleshments
of an inner life. Small, empty
stretch of carpet, ceiling, neutral walls:  
my place knows me no more.

7

It is the second week of Advent.
In half-occupied new rooms,
I snuff two candles.
Smoke curls upwards
like calligraphy, smells
like my grandma's water closet,
and, oddly, like incense.

* quoted from History of McDonough County. "Reminiscence of Martitia F. Harris." Published 1878. [Martitia is my great-great-great grandmother.]

** quoted from Henri Nouwen's Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit, "The Pathway of Living and Dying."

And For All This

At the park, spring touches grass, daffodils, people. In the cool evening, two young women sit with a baby beneath a tree. In front of them, two young men throw a football back and forth as the yellow lamps flick to life. The four are making plans of some sort. One offers an objection. The other counters, "That isn't anything. You smoke weed every day." The words aren't angry, only designed to carry across the awakening grass under the tree in the quiet evening air. As one whose sins trail more privately behind her, I'm mildly astonished as I crunch past them on the red chip path.

Someone ditched a park bench in the pond right in front of my thinking spot. One green end juts above the water; the rest dips into the murk, like a shipwreck. The water is gray with overcast evening. A gray heron with a white slash on his face waits in the shallows. "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things," I comfort myself. I call my sister. We speak of idealism and control and freedom and love, and Jacob wrestling. The heron, at last, makes his catch. Ripples pen the trees' black shadows into curl lines. Porch lamps reflect between the boles like elven fires.

I walk home in a hint of rain. The landlords have hung lights in colored bottles from the trellis: purple, blue, and green.

Au Sable Light Station

My family spent a week camping together on Michigan's upper peninsula. For three dollars we toured a light house situated a mile-and-a-half hike away from our campsite.  

 The beauty amid the utility of the light tower stirs me. Looking at this picture, I marvel at the striking white walls and beautiful structure of the black spiral staircase. The light through the shapes in the steps reminds me of stained glass windows in a church. The beauty of it fills me with a sense of wonder and worship.

And all this comes with the surrounding beauty of Lake Superior, sand cliffs, wild blueberries, and truly pointed pine trees so unlike the more haphazard shapes of evergreens in Illinois.

Revisiting

Beneath a layered gauze of atmosphere,
the earth this morning rests--a dew draped glory
of living emerald, an orchestra of instruments all alive:
brown thrasher, gold finch, cardinal, wren.

I walk roads all familiar with memories
of small things which made them ours--
rides with Grandma and her last remembered loves:
Grandpa, the clouds, our countryside.

The roadsides wave green grasses, and someone
has cut the willows, the little willows in ditches
Grandpa seldom mowed lest he mangle nests,
Grandpa of wry love of birds . . . and cats.

Leaving the road, water fills my toes
from ankle deep pasture at the timber's edge,
and I recall a tangle of associations: sting of hot wire
across child's belly, a house fire--a playing card--ice cream for supper!

Somewhere here, we rediscovered
a three-year-old's grave, a hundred years gone
but remembered by name by us. The timber
and tall grasses have crept to cover his place again.

Behind the fallen fence, tucked through the trees,
bluebells are snippets, curled remnants of heaven.
A woodpecker sounds his secret creating. A bird
I do not recognize darts from gold to shadow.

Perceptions

I walk, because I've been told exercise and sunlight help, but the sharp air seems to freeze my ears as I reach the park. In the pseudo-silence of urban winter, small noises cut through the tinnitus of a thousand cars siphoning like blood cells into the city a half hour away. My footsteps crack and crunch across snow that has melted then refrozen to blanket the ground like mounds of crushed glass.  Geese fly low, so close I hear the squeaking of their pinions. Are geese happy? I wonder. What must it be like to live only with the urges of instinct, to seek the simple things of life, directed only by wordless need and wordless fulfillment? What blessed stillness must fill them, at times--pulling tender grass under the sun, for instance--free from all self-critique and inner evaluation of motives and performance? As I pass, ice in the center of the pond cracks, invisibly, with a sound like two huge mittened hands clapping, and creaks at the edges like a screen door hinge. I trudge home, shattering moth-wing ledges of ice hemming the sidewalk. They sound brittle, like plastic made vulnerable by the cold.

First Big Snow

The snow's like a big wind--
the kind of creature that floods a world
and doesn't care a fig how long it took
to do your hair this morning.
Everyone's a bit friendlier
in light of the common enemy.
The roads are dark gray gruel;
the sidewalks, intermittently scraped;
the traffic, wet, dirty, and loud
as a mongrel banned from the house
after a mud puddle run.

Only the park whispers a life
of silence--of tree arms stretched
to rest an inch of snow,
of smooth plains hinting of paths,
and lamp posts suggesting the way
to the pond and beyond it, the river--
this tribute to the wild,
this fringe of grass and woods,
this quiet place where snow belongs
to whisper and dance through songs
of brown leaves and wrinkled boles
and hooked burs benevolenced
by white.

Emergence

After 90 degree days, the cool wind surprises me as I step outside my door into the urban semi-darkness. Branches in the street light suggest a hint of gold. Trees seem to tower into the moonlit sky, their silhouettes somehow portentous as the fall-touched wind engulfs heavy summer foliage. Neighbors' windows glow, blue with TVs, yellow with lamps. Two cats watch me from a window sill. I think of the cats I have known, of the essay I would like to write about them, of how I might like to have another some day, of derogatory stereotypes about single women and their cats.

A thought strikes me, buoyant in the moon and wind: I need not worry about the "type" of person I seem to be: the effort to camouflage my home school roots and clueless fashion sense, the fear of seeming a cat-lady spinster, the necessity of propping up a respectable persona, the compulsion to be good enough (or really, better than). The forms of getting up to God are peeling from my soul. My Babel decays. The curtain tears--I stand, in all my unpresentableness, before my Lord, and find His blood sufficient and His gaze tender. There is no type between me and my God.

The buoyancy almost under my feet, the trickle of excitement (instead of too familiar fear) edging my senses, reminds me of a half-forgotten story from childhood. A colt grew wings. They itched as they began to emerge from his shoulders. It was all rather surprising. In my walk, I pause just out of range of the neighbor's sprinkler, watching its rhythm across the lawn, over the sidewalk, and back again. I seize my moment and run, but the ticking declares I will be caught. I hear myself laugh. I have lost months to a darkness, but my shoulders are beginning to itch.

My Field

Space layered on space . . .
each breath a sip
from the horizon--
tilt the sky
over your head
and feel
the stream of time
as you glide through
a slide of stories,
a thousand river ribbons,
a sparkle rain of stars.
You could swim
in a single drop
sloshed from heaven's
blue tea cup.

I let you out here,
in my head I let you out
from the confines
of my judgement.
Here, you are not "problem."
In fact, I do not presume
to call you
anything at all;
here, you  may be you--
as I am I.
we go our separate ways,
tiny feet patting
the earth's firm chest,
wrapped in sunshine,
growing, slowly,
wings.

Saturday walk

Snow falls (finally) over the pond and the trees and the houses beyond the dirty city river. It falls in soft kisses, painting a new grace over February landscapes, turning dried grasses around the pond to an oil paint swatch of burnt umber. "It isn't much," my brother said of that pond, visiting me from the realm of spacious country and not very impressed with this contrived patch of drainage pool wilderness. I thought the same, when I visited my sister who lived here first. And now I, also, find  solace in city park peace. Maybe, since it's all I have, I've begun to see a hidden beauty. Watching the snow fall, I try to relax my shoulders and torso. I am perplexed, just now, and particularly in need of better employment; yet I realize the snow is a gift--a free gift. I could have nothing in the world, and the snow fall would be just as rich for me as anyone else. I'd started out meaning to exercise, to burn calories, but I find myself only ambling now--of course only ambling in the quiet snow and scarcely marked path: forgiven, and for this moment, rich.

Sunset / Moonrise

That which allows a courageous and gentle ending must surely be a wholehearted embrace of the goodness of God woven through all our beginnings--even the one that comes next.

Feelings

Today has been a rare and exquisite kind of day. Though technically winter, this day was stolen from June. I sit typing on the back stoop, at eight at night, barefooted in capris and short sleeves. "78 degrees" states the bank sign across the street. (At least, I think it's 78. I am wearing my glasses, and the prescription is a bit out of date. At any rate, it is definitely 70-something.)

I finally rousted myself out of my hermitage this evening and went for a stroll, ending up at the park. In the bright beginnings of sunset, the park thrilled with human life. Families and peer groups cavorted on the play ground, sand volleyball court, and soccer field. In the midst of softly budding trees, gentle lights, and a few early tulips, I realized the people, too, were beautiful--different colors, different ages, different voices. I stayed a while, then took a final turn around the park to enjoy the little lights glowing yellow against the dusk. A quiet had fallen over the park. People drew together, conversing quietly. "Moma!" a child called from the play equiptment, voicing the draw we feel towards each other as night falls. And yet we lingered there, sipping the last drops of this Sunday evening stolen from summer.

I could almost hear my farmer grandpa voicing his distrust of this weather. I pictured mayhem as tree branches snapped under the weight of snow caught on premature leaves. I wondered, vaguely, if a bare summer would follow all this early flowering--if everything would get frozen. I'm the type who lives with one ear cocked to hear the other shoe begin to drop. This is so that I can perhaps catch it before it causes too much damage. Or else it is so that the damage won't be my fault when it comes because I have done all I could to prevent it. Yes. But the weather, now, that's out of my control. And tonight I am inclined to accept it as a kind of gift. Walking back from the park, I felt young and hopeful and maybe even beautiful. I twirled in the yard and lay down in the grass, looking up, up at a pinprick star that somehow manage to defy the dulling city lights. I felt the desire for a hot dog.

This is the delight of city life. One can saunter down a block or two and buy a hot dog at eight at night. Then one can swagger back, delightfully individual beside the perpetual flow of cars, eating the hot dog. It was good, but could have used more ketchup. It has been nice to feel so happy and spring-ish today. In addition to being a creature waiting for shoes to drop, I am also a creature of fluctuating feeling. My father said one day, as I drooped into the living room as a teen, "Barn Swallow, when you are happy, you are really happy--and I like to see you happy--but when you are down, you get really down. Maybe you can not let it control you so much." I have told my brother that I wish I could be a deep, still water person--someone whose life goes deep and doesn't fluctuate much on the surface. But I am coming to accept that I am not, and will never be, that. Sometimes I feel deep winter, and sometimes I feel spring, and once in a while perhaps even summer-in-winter. These seasons of feeling can open my eyes to aspects of life I couldn't perceive in different moods, and I like that. On the down side, I tend to distrust the happy moments. It's the shoe thing.

But tonight, feeling happy and lovely--I remembered a thing that I have been learning. The feeling of hope comes and goes. But my hope is not in the feeling, so I may enjoy its presence without fearing its passing. My hope is in the Lord. He loves me, and has seen me through a thousand feelings. He never changes. The surface of my life skips and dances, slows and mopes, but its source is the clean and never ending spring of God's life in me through Christ. I accept the gift of today, I look to God for tomorrow, and maybe, someday, I'll learn to stop listening for that shoe. Anyhow, if we get a big snow storm and all the trees fall down--we'll get a Snow Day. And those are lovely!

January 27, 2011

A vista-less day of blank cloud cover and spits of snow. Yesterday's thaw crackles underfoot. The houses, though dim and boxlike, seem havens from the larger, emptier box of earth in its chill and echoing warehouse. Today is a dormouse day, a time for going down and in, when we find comfort in little, deep things.

City Snow

When we lived in town, my mother didn't care much for snow. I remember driving past embankments grass covered in summer but besmirched in winter with tire-flung slush. The traffic churned white powder into deep gray gunk, and the atmosphere assumed the unhealthy dankness of a cold in the head. When I turned thirteen, we moved to a village of 300 tucked in amongst miles of fields and timber. Suddenly, winter became a thing of peculiar glory--treacherous at times, and sharply beautiful. The sun flamed colored glitterings from individual crystals under the maple in front of our house, and the road beyond it retained a postcard purity even into the afternoon. Fields behind the house offered their own arctic wasteland, a chance for first footsteps onto the moon,an opportunity to tread where no one else had ever pressed his foot. Blue shadows rested beside drifts along the fence line, and the ditches sported wind sculptures like cake frosting or snow white peaks of meringue. On especially cold days, wraith veils of snow snaked across the road like the angel of death in the old Ten Commandments movie. An austere joy thrived in the miles and miles of relentless white.

I live in the city again. This morning, trudging to the post office through uncleared sidewalks next to four lanes of traffic, I noted gray spatters flung far across last night's snow and grimaced as droplets misted my face. My perennial struggle here is identifying myself with my brothers who live packed among human-induced problems in this over crowded part of earth. Never mind my own sins and struggles--I'd rather consider their problems as something alien imposed upon my quiet little country self. But if ankle-deep, sludgy snow is not my native turf, and if this is Christmas time, isn't this sort of walking a kind of privilege? Just think, our God chose to identify himself so completely with us that He became one of us, walking our roads as if they were natural for Him! A reminder of God's chosen closeness to us is worth dirty snow in my shoes.

"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness" (Philippians 2:5-7, NIV).

Thoughts after a rain

This evening I walked home from work in air warm and moist from a thunder shower. Lilacs lavished fragrance on the neighborhood and foggy gray clouds edged a clean blue sky. After the rain, the world felt like dawn or like being forgiven.

Whether I realize it or not, I live a life awash in mercy. Before work today, I tied my head in a purple kerchief and traipsed to the grocery store, patting myself on the back for treading so nonchalantly beside four busy lanes of traffic.On my way back, I took the steep, elbow-like stairs which lead pedestrians up an embankment. At the top, I met a surprisingly open vista. Railroad tracks cleared the landscape and led into a tree lined distance. A dirty patch of ground clumped by uncut grasses broadened the open space on my side of the tracks. The widened vision touched my soul. And coming toward me, clipping over the dirty path, came a little old lady with her hair protected by the clear plastic hood common to grandmas on rainy or windy days. A little band-aide covered a bit of her cheek and her eyes shone as she exclaimed to me, "You use this way, too!"

We congratulated each other for a moment on the fittingness of this route to the grocery store and parted cheerily.

Where I Come From

A Walk

This big black creature straining against the leash, little hindered by the dreaded "Gentle Leader," is Frank. When he lies in the house with his hind legs gathered up beneath him and his head and forepaws turned to the side so that his long torso twists a little, he reminds me of a hound in a great hall. Or a dragon. This saggy beagle-mix with cloudy eyes who seems suddenly to have renewed her youth with the appearance of the leash, is Elly. Elly, being the puppy of my childhood pleadings and protegee of my training (now long forgotten), is my favorite. But I can't help but like Frank. And there is nothing pathetic or temperamental about him.

We make our way through the village--over the craters before the railroad crossing, past the huge garage belonging to a tiny house, by the cheerful Christmas lights adorning a mobile home owned by kind acquaintances. On the other side of the road, a shaggy appaloosa trots toward the fence, peering down at us before moving away. In the next pasture, a group of goats hails us with high voices and eager beards. We curve past the cemetery and two last house before the fields reign on both sides of the road. A wire hums overhead. Below and behind it stand corn stalks, snow smattered with skeletal tops broken and tangled, a remnant left from the cool summer and watery fall.

Finally leaving the oil and chip pavement, we step into the unplowed snow of a low maintenance road. "The Junk Road," we used to call it, when people used its obscurity as cover for pocking it's ditches with undecomposables. Now, through the care of my aunt who looks after much of the property lining the road, the banks retain their dignity, lifting seed heads over clean snow. Freed, the dog's scamper ahead. I clamp my hand over the clasp of a leash to still the rattling of a metal tag.

Quiet and space billow over us. A cardinal shoots through the air, a red arrow, sharp against the white and blue of the fields and the white and gray of the sky. To our left, the land slopes down to the Lamoine River, it's fields relieved here and there with slate traceries of living timber. The land slants up again beyond the river. The big sky holds a little moon, lowdown and pale like a dull coin. Everything feels open and exposed, and so do I, closing my eyes and lifting my face, alone on the strip of road in all that bare space. It is good to know, not just in my mind but also in my senses, that God's eyes can go right through me, down to the snow under my feet. It is good not to be able to hide.

The dogs come back. The gray timber ahead blurs in my reopened vision as my eyes struggle to adjust to the peculiar glare of overcast snow. I wait. Beside me, the dogs wait. I look at Frank. His nostrils flex;his brown eyes search the distance as his young energy holds itself in place. We are three creatures, stilling ourselves and watching, only I watch for more than they. And then they stir themselves--enough of waiting! And I walk again, feeling the jean fabric cold against my legs. A movement catches my eye near the hayfield, and I see a deer run through the clearing. Four more follow the first. They hesitate, their heads turn, and they bound away with long white tails swaying from side to side as their bodies bounce up into the air and down again. Frank seems to have it in his mind to follow them, but I am not worried. He is not very clever about such things, and will lose sight--and therefore interest--in them before any trouble happens.

I leash the dogs again near the end of the Junk Road. Elly seems to want to run, and, since such a rare wish in a 90 year old seems like it ought to be encouraged, I speed my numb legs to accommodate her. In the evening light, the cracks under the ditches' wind-sculpted overhangs of snow appear to be filled with watery arctic shadows. Frank's torso sways from side to side as he walks, in a sinuous motion rather like a snake . . . or a dragon, only snow, not smoke, adorns his amiable nose. Elly walks compactly, straight ahead. As we cross the tracks again with the home place in sight, the moon is no longer a tarnished dime, but a clean stone, white to glowing.

* * *

And so, friend, you've seen a particularly special one of my walks. I'd love to see one of yours!