The Gratitudes

In the swirl of unthinkable events this past week I found myself gripped by fear and unable to move, physically lethargic and emotionally paralyzed for a couple of days. I know I am not alone, even thought I did not begin experience these events directly.
 
I think a lot has been piling up, all working toward an undesirable result, this paralysis. There was my dad's death and now trying to be a support to my mom, which feels something like being on a gerbil wheel most of the time. The State Department deaths in Afghanistan came next and then wham-bam! Boston and Texas.

It was more than two days before I realized I had been here before. Of course we all were here before with the 9/11 attacks. Some of us who are old enough remember when our president was killed. More recently in 2011 I was "there" when the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was under attack with my cherished daughter inside it. At that time, all I knew was that I had to get to a pond and paddle my kayak. I had a false start. Drove all the way to Curtis Pond without the paddle, but I knew I had to go back to get it. 

That day, as I hit the water with certainly vigorous and maybe maniacal strokes, I was grateful first for instantaneous communication and a daughter who thoughtfully let us all know before we even woke up to the news that she was sheltering in place in a hard building (of course, I wanted to hear from her every 15 minutes that this was still the case). I went on from there to feel gratitude for the U.S. troops defending the Embassy, for all their training and professionalism. To friends who hugged me in my initial panic. For my beloved kayak. I even felt gratitude for the opportunity to be reminded about what was important in life. By the time I paddled back to the put-in, I had a list of ten things I was grateful for. I was breathing again. Still very concerned (no cell at Curtis Pond meant I had to wait until I got closer to home to check my email and Google for the status of the attack, which went on for upwards of 20 hours). Still upset but not paralyzed. My stomach was not totally tied in knots anymore, even though my adrenalin was still running high.

My memories of the Kabul attack came back to me finally about two days after Boston and before Texas. And with them came this conclusion. The only way out of fear and paralysis is through gratitude and love. Very easy to say and know intellectually. Very hard to start moving in that direction from a fetal position while sobbing. At first, I just had to force it, something of a Goodnight Moon approach--kind of mechanical and not necessarily related to the events, per se. I had to acknowledge my gratitude for the books in my room, my comfortable bed, the way the sunshine was coming into my safe house, my family and friends -- the usual but no less valued litany -- before I could move on in a way that let the fear dissipate.

Only then could I feel wholeheartedly grateful for emergency responders and brave bystanders,  determined law enforcement officers, a cooperative public who responded to the request for leads. I could be grateful for the state of trauma medicine in this country (in no small part thanks to wars we shouldn't have been in), to the runners who kept running past the finish line right to the hospitals to give blood. I could be grateful for the restraint shown by our president and the governor of Massachusetts as they promised a just resolution (as opposed to "We'll get those guys."). And for the love and courage of ordinary Bostonians and others who remember, care for, and support those who were injured and the loved ones of those killed. And I remain grateful for instantaneous communication worldwide.

With my extended litany, my muscles slowly began to lose tension. I felt my heart opening again. I was not crying all the time. I could feel the golden light of love (like a teardrop at your heart's center, said a Buddhist nun recently) expand and send warmth and love throughout me and from me to the world. Powerful stuff. The gratitudes will get us through.

The Grief Thing

Grief caused by the death of loved ones is new to me. I am lucky that way. My "little" brother Bill died about two and a half years ago just shy of 61 and my dad died just six weeks ago at 92. The other day was my dear grandmother's birthday. "Ma" died in 1979 and this would have been her 112th birthday.

These losses all seem to be blending together. Maybe that's making the most recent one easier. I don't know. But I find I am crying more about the fact that I can't share something with my brother. I am half mad at him for not being here now in the wake of my Dad's death. On the other hand, I am glad my mom can imagine the two of them playing golf together at the Pebble Beach of  the Great Beyond.

At least I can talk to Ma about it on her birthday. Named Lillian (as in Easter Lily) for the fact that she was born a week after Easter in 1901, her birthday is always an occasion for remembering her and checking in with her. Of the many things I appreciated about Ma, I loved that she took things as they came. She was not a big control freak that I could see. She could do whatever she set her mind to and she was always full of good cheer. She definitely fit into the pro-Laughing Camp in the family. She avoided conflict and took great pride in whatever she did, including sewing some pretty amazing wool Easter coats for me and my sister or decorating a basket cake for a bake sale. She was big on Jackson & Perkins roses, but what I remember the most about her gardens was the patch of Lily of the Valley next to her back door.

Her first memory, probably from about age 5, was of standing on a chair, a big dish towel tied around her like an apron, washing dishes. Her young mother, already widowed thanks to an influenza epidemic, was trying to support Lillian and her little brother by cooking at lumber and other work camps. Ma always claimed to love washing dishes. I think she really meant it and I can guess that there may have been happy memories of being near her mother associated with it.

When I was a kid--before automatic dishwashers--after the Sunday family dinner Ma would organize the girls (naturally!)  into helping with the dishes. Now washing dishes is a lost art in the developed world. I am not complaining. Believe me, the person who invented the automatic dishwasher ranks right up there in my world view. But imagine the quiet time enjoyed by women who wash dishes. Everyone leaves them alone for fear of being roped into helping. They get to think all the way through a sentence without a child distracting them with a new demand, to integrate their day's experiences before moving on to the next of never-ending tasks.

Today on Ma's birthday, I wish I were back in her kitchen drying the dishes with her. I would ask her so many questions. What was it like growing up without a father? How did she bear the death of her younger son when he was only 29? How did she brace herself to go to the trailer park community center after my grandfather's death and find a card game to join? In so many words, how do I do this grief thing, Ma? I think we would have had a great conversation. Ma would have laughed a lot and she would have told family stories to steer me off the sad stuff (she was a Champ at Laughing in the Face of Adversity).

But it is not just about the answers to questions. Grief right now is lost opportunity for connection. Or, in my case, a stronger connection with people who shaped me, who gave me my bearings. And who left me with a treasure trove of memories to cherish and pass on to the next generation.

Negotiating with the Deer

I am getting ready--weeks ahead of the hostas--for the deer. Last year for the first time in 3 years, they came down the big wooded hill across the road and dined on my hostas, phlox, the tomatoes (!) and virtually anything young and green and full of nourishment. This is old news to many of my friends in Vermont. But I took it personally. Why me? Why now? Hadn't we had a nice relationship before? Why eat my plants just as I am really getting into gardening on this little lot?

The daffodils are just emerging. They are maybe 3" high right now. Usually deer ignore daffodils so I am not in a panic yet. But then I remember they ate the phlox and who would have expected that? I think it is time to take some steps.

Everyone has a sure-fire solution to preventing deer from dining in the yard. They all probably work, at least until the deer get wise. Coyote pee was popular when I lived in West Virginia. The idea is the deer sense a predator and move away. But then it rains and you have to spread the stuff again. And it is expensive. I am going to lean toward the do-it-once-and-hope-it-works kinds of solutions.
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First, fairy lights. I happen to have an abundance of little white lights (it's a long story). I don't begin to use them all on my Christmas trees. So I already have in inventory one weapon in the category of do-it-once. My plan is to skirt the beds with these strings of lights--just lay them on the ground at the edges of the beds. Plug them all together and into the big orange extension cord and then into the outlet on my little front porch. Bingo.

The back-up plan is Irish Spring soap. I have to figure out how to rig this up, but basically a chunk of the strong-smelling soap will hang from a string on a stick next to every possible plant of interest. When it rains, a little soap will wash off but if you have ever used that soap, you know the smell will live on, unlike the fake predator approach. For right now I am not going to get too obsessed about environmental impact.

We'll see what happens. It's not that I don't like the deer. I do sort of like knowing they are close (the neighborhood bear is another story). They are quiet and graceful and always look so startled when I drive down the driveway at night and find them hanging out. But there are limits. When I decided to move toward an edible landscape I also started to get more possessive about the plants. Now it's my food we are talking about.

Maybe this problem will just resolve itself over time. After all, the hosta lilies are not edible to me, so they will probably give way to something that is. Maybe I could move them to a spot where I can enjoy them but also go easy on the deer. After the initial deer repasts last year the hostas did grow back some. I did get to enjoy them eventually, a little. Maybe the deer got bored with them and that's when they moved on to the phlox and tomatoes.

It's just that in the early part of the spring, well, I am simply desperate to see something growing. I might even be open to a dialogue about the schedule. We could negotiate. Maybe the deer
could come by in August when I am starting to get sick of weeding and watering and help me out. I could be a lot more generous then. Heck, they could even have the zucchini by then. But, let's face it, when was zucchini a good bargaining chip? People who never lock their cars in Vermont start locking them in zucchini season for fear a friendly soul will leave some on the back seat.

No, I think I will just go with my two-part strategy. See what happens this year. Try to be chill. Put a big pot of pansies on the porch in the meantime to satisfy that need to see something growing.

Laughing in the Face of Adversity

My Aunt Helen has a gift. Her voice is sunshine. And then she laughs--a deep belly laugh. The kind you cannot fake. The kind that makes you laugh right along. That picks up your spirits right then and there. Cranky types might call her a Pollyanna when she exclaims her pleasure in the most mundane aspects of life--blue skies, a bubble bath, a delicious cooky made by a neighbor. These are the things that those of us in a rush or a rut sometimes fail to appreciate. Now in her mid-90s, Aunt Helen is still looking on the bright side. Like those gag gift birds that bob up no matter how many times they are pushed down into the glass of water, she comes right back.

I got to thinking about Aunt Helen's iconic laugh after a recent meditation experience focused on sound. The leader told us, "Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Trust your ears." He played some music on a stringed instrument and then on a flute. He chimed a brass bowl. All very chill. Then there were the people outside in the hallway talking in their "outside voices." Someone coughed. The person next to me was doing noisy yoga breaths. After about ten minutes the leader invited us to comment on the experience. As you might expect, there were many different viewpoints about what meditation is supposed to be, some of them ardently held. We commented on how the various sounds affected us. There was almost universal annoyance at those chatty people outside. Skilled Leader observed that annoying things come up in life. He asked us to think about how we respond to them. I realized that sometimes I can actually laugh at them.

That led me to wonder what would it be like to throw a few laughs into the sound mix for the meditation? Maybe one like Aunt Helen's. Or the infectious kind of laugh that bubbles out of happy toddlers. I think I know what would happen. Some people would be annoyed by one laugh or another, others would be unable to suppress their own laughs in response (which would probably really get to the already annoyed). I think I might be in the latter group.

In my family there are different opinions about laughter. There is the camp that thinks Life is Too Serious to be Laughing all the time. That laughing is just a way of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or overlooking the harsh realities. The other camp thinks Life is Too Serious NOT to be Laughing all the time. They seldom find common ground.

I have been accused of Laughing in the Face of Adversity. This crime, both at the felony and the misdemeanor levels, is also known as not taking something as seriously as someone else wants me to, or just having a more light-hearted take on a situation. Sometimes when this happens I admit I am probably on the verge of hysteria. Like the time my family and I got off a train only to realize that it was not the station where we had parked our car outside Paris. Uh-oh.

Given the two Laughter Camps in the family, some of us thought it was a bigger Uh-oh than others. Our problem-solving assets included the shards of a 65 year old father's high school French, a 13 year old first-year French student (who bore up very well as the family's language lifeline on this trip), and my own spatial/map-reading skills. But these did not kick into gear until I had laughed to the point of tears. It just seemed terribly funny, like a bad movie about clueless Americans in France on vacation, which I suppose we were.Once I got that out of my system, I was able to help figure out where we were and what station we needed to get to. The would-be French speakers had come to the same conclusion going about it in a different way. Moments later we boarded another train. At the next station we found our car and went on our way. To this day when I put myself back on that platform, I start to laugh. And to this day, others who were present remind me We Could Have Been LOST in a Foreign Country.

Okay, I get that not everything is funny. When my mood is sour or I am feeling anxious, it's hard to dig down for a laugh. And yet, laughter sustains me. It can make very minor adversity--a grey day Vermont, for example--much more tolerable. It can help me not take myself so seriously. The late Art Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, laughed in the face of serious adversity. His kidneys were failing and he refused dialysis. He watched funny movies and told jokes, spent months in hospice, then left, went back to his columns, and wrote another book. His kidneys finally got him, but not before he had the last laugh.

I hope if I ever have to face the kind of adversity Buchwald faced that I will be able to laugh. It would definitely qualify as felony level Laughing in the Face of Adversity. In the meantime, I intend to keep practicing at the misdemeanor level just to stay in shape. Aunt Helen would like that.

The Hell with Bucket lists

Being of a certain age I am noticing  a lot of attention to Bucket Lists. These are the "Before I Die" lists of places and experiences we want to see or have before we kick the bucket. We can only joke about this, of course, because it makes us nervous to think about our own death. Bucket Lists are a problem for me.  It's not that I am prepared to give up my aspirations about seeing South Africa. But the whole idea of another Big To-Do List before I die makes me tired. It feels too driven. I have the sense that I need to slice this some other way.

For one thing, it feels like a contest. I tend to shy away from contests. If it is a contest, I am happy for you to win. Go right ahead. Jump out of airplanes or bungee jump into a deep gorge. Through-hike the AT surviving on nuts and berries. Check off Macchu Picchu. Learn to tango. You win.

Most Bucket Lists I have heard about involve going and doing. Lots of planning ahead, creating memories to look back on. Not much about being. Now. Present. Aware of myself in this moment, in this place, in my life. They feel more like the going/doing evidenced in piles of slides I took maybe 30 years ago. Going through them, I was disappointed to find pictures of scenery I could no longer identify with precision. So I culled looking for photos of people I cared about. My daughter at age 8 dressed in a kelly green Izod skirt suit, ready to board a plane with me for our first big international adventure. The other slides--endless ancient temples, big buildings, bucolic countryside views, vineyards in the Mosel Valley--mostly hit the round file. I thought about all the effort, not to mention expense, that had gone into taking and storing and moving those slides for all those years. I felt grateful that at some point around the year 2000 I gave up scrapbooking my life and travels. I love the photos that show my daughter growing up, but I don't need them to remember her proud face after she successfully bargained for a peacock fan in Agra.


About a year ago when I was contemplating retirement (aka The End of Paid Work) I threw myself on the mercy of a way-too-young psychologist to sort this stuff out. Should I have a Bucket List? How was I going to spend the rest of my life? I had no shortage of ideas. But I was going in circles and my anxiety was growing. After two sessions she said, "Rilla, you have a lot of words (Bingo! Young, but not stupid.)  I would like to see pictures. Bring me pictures of what you hope for, not in the rest of your life, but maybe for the next couple of years."

What a great assignment for me. Get me out of my head, away from words. I went after it with gusto. I put away the item that said "Take a textile tour of India with my sister." I found pictures of women together, mothers and daughters, sweethearts, beaches, baskets, cloth, lush vegetation, people crossing a finish line, a kayaker on a quiet lake, yarn. I found a whole lot of pictures. Suddenly my perspective seemed more fluid, more horizontal. The possibility of mixing and matching became apparent. Within months, I went to Armenia with my sister for ten weeks. Not India, not textiles, not beaches, but extended time with my oldest friend discovering a new place, thrilling to fine music, making new friends. "Go to Armenia with my sister" would never have been on a checklist.

Rather than checking off Victoria Falls, I am looking for a chance to be with my sweet Peter in a place where we can hike, enjoy the arts, maybe even participate in the arts (Lord knows, I love a craft and indigenous art seems the fastest track to that in the world). Where we are not up to speed on the language and need to figure things out on the fly. Where we might even have a chance to speak something other than English, however haltingly. Where we can simply be for awhile. Slightly but tolerably edgy. Just outside our comfort zones. A chance to stretch, to get more acquainted with ourselves.

I feel more comfortable with this approach. I am not in a contest or a race. There are no must-dos or best/right answers for all time. Just embrace life. Live wholeheartedly. Every day. Wherever I am. If I learn to speak Spanish, so much the better.

Gardening-as-Meditation

The snow has melted from what-passes-for-grass in my yard and the annual winter toll on the house and driveway is apparent.It's time to think about taking action, starting with enlarging the front beds again to accommodate more edibles and yes, reduce the amount of area covered by what passes-for-grass. If this sounds contrary to resting open, I invite you to continue.

Getting rid of grass in my already smallish yard became something of an obsession for me last year as I neared retirement. In its first blush I aimed for the grass clumps between the stones in my front walk. Admittedly a tidy-up job, not unlike cleaning out the dresser, this effort led me to discover that the walk was actually two stones wide--half of them had been hidden by untended and out of control grass. Now they are connected by creeping phlox, the winner in a contest with creeping thyme. At least the phlox will be easier to keep cut back than the grass and it adds some contrasting texture.

Once the walkway problems were under control, my obsession led me to the notion that maybe a big swath of grass could go if I created a wide bed on the outside of the walkway, where some pretty sorry looking grass then stood. I envisioned a country-cottage-magazine beautiful path between beds that any visitor would find charming and also from which I could reach and tend to the edible experiments of front yard herbs, squash, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. My ambition exhausted me. Thank Gardener's Supply for my Cape Cod Cutter tool, decorated with a bright yellow ribbon so I could find it easily in the mess I was making.

What I did not intend (as in set out to accomplish), but what I noticed as I wrestled with the unwanted greenery and accompanying weeds, is that my body became intently focused on the physical task. My mind on the other hand was, well, utterly blank. Even if I did have a thought unrelated to my task, I could not hold it for long. I couldn't worry about anything or even ponder great questions because I was just too darned focused on ripping out that grass mat or digging enrichments into the soil.

I had stumbled onto gardening-as-meditation, a chance to free my hyperactive mind and simply tend the earth, the plants. Maybe I just needed a distraction from the scary prospect of retirement. My perspective changed. Time slowed down. I made friends with my plants and my birthday present Arctic Blue Willow tree. Yes, I talked to them, mostly encouraging them and nudging them along their own growth path.

Now the perennials are reemerging. Their juices are flowing and so are mine. I see an even wider bed now, perhaps bordered eventually by low-profile blueberry bushes, and divided unobtrusively by little walkways that will give me access to the center section that is too far to reach from either side. It's time to find the Cape Cod Cutter tool and wash my gardening gloves, get the hose out from under the house and put the snow shovels away.

But nothing is going to happen in a hurry. It is only early April. The hanging baskets won't even appear until close to Mother's Day and there is no way I am planting anything in the ground before mid-May except maybe spinach and lettuces. I can rest open for a while longer, chatting up the huechera and geraniums as they emerge and pondering what yummies I will plant among them.