{I wrote this just over two years ago and came across it again just now. Sometimes words can come back to haunt you, but sometimes they circle back around just when you need them.}

The bedroom. Four o’clock sunlight reaches through the blinds and slants like cursive across the wall. I could see it if I open my eyes.

I lie there, two fists full of blanket tucked under my chin, holding on to these cotton fibers like they’re the only true thing I know. As though what I need is balled up inside, and if I let go I’ll lose it all for good.

As if I haven’t already.

It doesn’t matter what that thing is, not really, or how recent or far off the afternoon. Every one of us has lain there on that bed, alone. Sure that we should have seen it coming. Or worse, we actually did.

At that thought, I hold tighter to the blanket, as though I’m five and scared of the dark, back before I knew that the people in those other  rooms must have held tight to their own covers. Enough disappointment, enough lost things, for everyone.

And the one thing we all know (even if the thought is just a small stone that rolls about in the bottom of the soul) is that  it’s impossible to see the light at the end of a tunnel if that tunnel is curved. If there’s no straight shot from the entrance to the way out.

So you think, just goes to show you. It was always going to end up this way. Should have known better. How do I go toward something I can’t even see?

But, where’s the choice? So you hold your breath and listen. Open your eyes wide and strain to see in the dark. Feel your way onward by inches, only sure of the last step you took. Pinning every hope on the next step.

And so, forward.

But first, there’s that space under the blanket, and thank god for that. Except sooner or later (sometimes much later) you  realize that you’re no safer there than anywhere else. Turns out, a blanket doesn’t make a very good shield. And when the moment comes -  a meal to prepare, or kids to pick up from school – there’s nothing to do but to fold up that blanket  and put it back on the shelf.

To open your hands and let go of whatever you held on to so tightly. To trust the wind that carries away those wishes, and know that you might not get all the things you hope for, or enough of them, but there is something up ahead, waiting. And that you might just find it framed in the arc of the tunnel exit and bathed in sunlight. All the the good things that drew you forward all along, the other souls, the peace,  the version of you that you can finally let yourself see, the way others have all this time.

And you’ll think just goes to show you…

Even if you can’t finish the sentence, and you’re not sure how soon you’ll be able to. You know the answer is out there. You realize, in the light, that you can believe that much. Or you will, any day now.

You’ll let yourself believe that one day the answer will come to rest like a leaf inside you, next to the stone. And that each of them (at last) will weigh the same as the other.

Like my friend Emily who writes about her own poignant reasons here (go, read, I’ll wait), I won’t be posting a photo of my mother on Facebook this week, as so many of my friends have done in honor of Mother’s Day.

It’s a complicated holiday for me, as it always, ever was. If you don’t know the story of the women who shaped my early years, you can find some essential parts of it here.

As I watched the photos appear, I couldn’t help noting that some of the mothers whose photos my friends and family have posted are of women who were kind to me when I was a child. A favorite aunt, especially so. (To see her face, though she is gone now and I miss her deeply, is a sweet reminder of that.) So even though there’s an ache, an empty room, in my early years where a good enough mother should have been, it’s not altogether unpleasant to watch as others post their photos. A lovely gesture, where it’s deserved.

And there’s this: I’ve been lucky (so very), since my college years, to have someone in my life who has been a wonderful, loving mother and cheerleader to me. She makes up for that early lack, and I’m so grateful for her (and for her husband, who is another father to me).

But if I posted the face of the mother who gave birth to me, or the stepmother who followed soon after, a picture would be just a picture. A face smiling for the camera, a curtain across the stage. The play going on, unseen, behind it.

And a thousand words, not even close to enough.

Yesterday when I heard there was snowfall in the forecast for the night, I looked out the back door at the mess of daffodils against the back fence, worried that the snow would kill the last of them before I was ready for them to go. Then I noticed a patch of purple flowers in front of the daffodils.

And, as I hoped in the moments it took to cross the yard, they were violets.

I remembered writing this –  three years ago, when I still lived in the desert and didn’t know if I would end up living where violets would grow in my own yard. My soul-deep love for violets goes way back.

In our yard there were two patches of violets, neither of them bigger than an area rug in an average sized room. The green carpet of their leaves sent firm stems upward and out, and their blossoms reached just above the heart-shaped leaves.

I sat on my heels as I worked from one side of the violet patch and across to the other side of it, so that I wouldn’t crush the flowers. I tugged and bent each stem until it snapped, and then added it to the growing bunch of violets in my other hand. I left only leaves behind.

Away from me, the lawn mower droned and sputtered as my father made wide turns around the perimeter of the hill next to the house. I had time. But soon, he would head to this part of the yard that was sheltered by trees. The grass grew in thick patches in a few spots, but was spare across the rest of the yard in front of the house and along one side, defeated by the rocky Missouri soil and the shade of sassafras and oak trees.

Around me, the air held the hum and static of bees and mosquitoes and gnats. Sunlight reached down like an ellipsis. Tentative, mild, filtered by the leaves, leaving enough shade for the violets to grow.

I worked quickly, first picking clean the patch at the edge of the yard, nearest the approaching mower, then moving on to the other patch near the red-handled water pump. I wanted them all. To leave even one or two blossoms to be mowed down and spit out of the side of the mower, ground into nothing, seemed unbearable to me.

It was a ritual, this. A mission of mercy and salvation for the violets. And for me, a small and declarative act of preservation.

If no one collected the violets, they were lost, their loveliness destroyed in less than a minute. I couldn’t stand it. (It wasn’t until years later that I found out that many people consider them to be weeds, a nuisance to be eliminated from their yards.)

We lived out in the country, on two acres that shouldered another two or so acres where my step-grandparents lived. Altogether, four acres of grass and garden and dozens and dozens of trees, all of it open to us. We had a tree house, for hiding. For climbing, an oak tree at the bottom of the hill next to the garden. I liked to climb that tree to the very top and wedge my feet into the crooks of skinny branches. Fearless, I would hold on tight as the tree swayed back and forth. From there, I could see far, to the main road and across the fields that bordered our property. All the way to the dairy farm. If we were expecting company, I could watch the main road and still have time to climb down and run inside the house to report the impending arrival. It was a good tree, and – as far as I know – it still stands.

All of this is to say that there were good things. Wholesome, rough (in the best way), elemental things that shaped me. Hours spent outside, where I was nearly as likely to trap and observe a spider as I am to kill one today. A tire swing for daydreaming or for making myself dizzy. The smell of soil. A clear view of an oncoming thunderstorm to the west. Coyotes that would run past, yelping and playing, in the middle of the night. And patches of violets, bold and unrepentant as they turned their nodding heads upward to the sky, accepting, inviting themselves to the world, saturated in their own vivid color.

Though I suppose four acres isn’t that much to tend to compared with, well, anything bigger, there was always a lot of work to do. I don’t bemoan all of it, and our share of it (my sister’s and mine) is a story for another time. Let’s just say it’s unexpected that I still long for a piece of soil for a garden, a place to grow zinnias and sweet peas, tomatoes and green onions, strawberries and raspberries (nothing tastes better than a raspberry plucked warm and eaten right off the cane). Not a big garden, mind you, just enough to supply the makings of a green salad or a fruit salad. Maybe some herbs.

In the fall, there were leaves to rake and collect and to haul on tarps down to the garden for mulch. In the summer, we all worked to cut and stack wood to burn in the winter. After a storm, we picked up the blown-down branches that littered the whole property.

And, there was the mowing. Ahead of that, there was work to get the yard ready for mowing.

A few times a year, my sister and I had the job of picking rock out of the yard, so that the mower blades wouldn’t hit the rock and throw it in every direction or dull the blade. This job, I hated. That Missouri rock, I hated. My back ached and my legs hurt. We filled wheelbarrows with the rocks and dumped them in a growing pile back in a wooded area. It was an exercise in futility, though, because after a few deep soaking rains, another crop would emerge, ripe for picking.

Sometimes, I would find a rock that appeared small, but when I tugged at it, I would discover that the part under my fingers was just the crest of much larger stone embedded in the ground. It was a challenge to remove those rocks, but it was one part of the job that I liked. Sometimes it would take all of a season, and patience, to remove one of them. And then, finally, enough soil would wash away, or the rocks around it would shift, and – if I used some leverage – the rock would give up and come out of the ground. In its place, over time, the soil would wash back in, soft and porous. I still might twist my ankle in the hole left behind, if I wasn’t careful, but I wouldn’t trip over that rock again, or have to exert another ounce of effort to remove it.

It’s a lifelong task, removing the stones in our way. Digging at the ones that are rooted and large, until at last they pull clear. But there’s satisfaction in that effort, maybe more so than in a wheelbarrow full of small rocks. It’s a necessary effort, if the alternative is to stumble over the same ones, season after season, cursing as we fall. How much better to be free of them.

That lesson is clear now, though it only became so in writing it, just now, as though I’ve carried the small pebble of it in my pocket all these years. That bit of truth could only have come from that yard, full of rocks.

Yet within the same patch of yard, the violets grew. For a few weeks every spring, they bloomed and I picked them. When I had collected them all, I carried them inside where I would lay them out on the counter, sort them into bunches and put them into an array of jelly jar glasses. I would deliver these simple bouquets throughout the house, leaving them on dressers and windowsills, end tables and desks. It made me happy, all of it, beginning to end. It was a job I loved. A duty, as I saw it, but with a beautiful reward that lasted for days.

Years, even. If you asked me right now, that’s what I’d say.

Violets and stones, from the same small piece of ground. If there are miracles in nature, that one is among them.

The violets blooming in the shade. And the stones, holding them up.

photo credit: boxercab on flickr

With a bit of effort, I nudge open the windows. It’s one of those days in February when the air feels more warm than cold, when the same 50 degrees that feels chilly in September feels downright tropical two thirds of the way into a long winter.

The sills hold tight to their seal the way a woman pulls her collar close around her throat against the wind. It’s the first time I’m opening most of the windows in our new house. Once or twice, the dining room window – the one that looks out over the backyard – was raised so that I could mediate an argument over snowballs and who threw them too hard and whether it was fair. Play is rarely just play, you know.

I open at least one window in every room and feel the house start to breathe. A breeze, the sigh of a spring not so far off, pirouettes through the rooms, and I am giddy with it. Especially as both kids have been sick for days, I’m eager to scrub the air clean of coughing and fever. Of all the closed up, housebound days of winter.

On the windowsill in the upstairs bathroom, I find a ladybug. It’s good luck, they say, and I fall for it without reserve. Who can afford to turn down a good omen? If you’re as lucky as that, well, I don’t think we’ve met.

It inches to the top of the window and I coax it into my palm. Then I push open the window and open wide my hand. The ladybug lifts off into the breeze and becomes part of the warm day that’s a promise more than anything. Spring isn’t here yet, but it will be.

Later, when the sun drops below the tops of the pines across the road, I close up the house against the chill of nightfall. After dark, I go outside to look at the moon. The wind has picked up and, like a broom, pushes moon-bright clouds across the shine of the moon and stars. As February days go, this one has put on its very best dress.

Later still, when we’ve all gone to bed, the cold wind hurls itself around the corners of the house, strong enough that the windows wince with the force of it. The day’s warm breeze has stepped aside. Winter still very much with us.

But then so is the scent of spring, closed up here in these rooms, as much a winter provision as the food staples in the cupboards or the snow shovel on the back porch.

And the ladybug? Who knows. Maybe tucked back safe again under a log until spring. Or blown far and wide, perhaps, to another windowsill where someone else who needs to believe in promise and good luck and spring will fall for it, just as I did.

As I always will.

photo credit: chesbayprogram, flickr

So life still has a few surprises. A few months ago, we thought we were moving back to Arizona. We were all ready for that, except that the things that needed to happen first didn’t. Which doesn’t mean I’m not happy with the way things turned out, because (oh, yes) I am.

Instead: We’re settling in to a new place just across the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Where it’s lovely and quiet. Near the water, but rural and quiet. Where it’s dark enough at night that stars crowd the sky. And it’s quiet. (Did I mention that it’s quiet?)

Except for the occasional car. And the geese. We hear them before we see them fly over – a few or hundreds at a time. I love the sound and the sight. Fields full of them as they pick clean what’s left of the corn flattened by the harvest. This, a second harvest.

They must be on their way to somewhere, or maybe they haven’t made up their minds. There’s lots of winter left.

As for us, we love it here.

It scares me to say that, even as I can’t help myself, even as I think it a dozen times a day. Even as I unpack the last of the boxes and see my beloved things (my books!) for the first time in two years. Or longer. Even as I hang pictures on the walls and feel what must be contentment rise up inside me. Even as I watch my children fill this space with their personalities, with their stuff and their fun and their bickering. Even as I watch them become at ease here, and they start to believe that they are home. Yes, as happy as that all is, it’s scary, too.

Because what if it all goes away? What if I can’t hold on to this, for myself? For my children?

I’ve learned that fear. To wait, as I do, for the other shoe to drop. To reach out for something and not feel surprised when it’s yanked away just as I’m about to grab hold. Worse, though, is that my children have learned that, too. So many times when we were about to move somewhere, the plans were changed. The decision, out of my hands and certainly out of theirs.

For years, I’ve been looking for a place to land. The place, the one we would never want to leave. A place where we could stay through enough seasons that memories would have time to take root. (There must be people who like to move, who like the change, but I am not one of them.) I studied real estate listings, and when I came across a house I loved, I could build a whole life around it in my head. In that way, I imagined dozens of different lives. I could see how it would go, how it would all look.

But this place, this is it. The life I see here looks peaceful.  Settled. Rooted. The nearby town is all charm and history. The next closest town meets all our routine shopping needs and has a lovely historic downtown, too. There’s enough to keep us entertained, but with enough stillness and beauty that we can find our own ways to do that for ourselves. There’s a jar on the kitchen counter for loose change – I’m calling that our Kayak Fund. We’re going to want one, with all the water.

We can make a good, honest life here.

It won’t be easy. Life is always messier than a postcard. There are practical concerns that keep me awake some nights, but that would be true anywhere. But it’s all possible. Good things are possible. If I’m hard-wired with a certain amount of fear, I’m also an optimist through and through.

Any instinct I ever had to move on has settled, like a sky full of geese coming to rest in a field. But I’ll leave them to their migration, to their wind and wings and wandering.

I want these roots.

Silver bowls sit beside each place at the table. They are old – that much I know. Monogrammed, too, and I somehow divine that they’re meant for soup. A detail that makes no sense, but then what do I know about old, fine things? Edith Wharton, I am not.

Nothing on the table matches anything else. It’s a collection of lovely things that have little more than their beauty in common. For this, I love the setting all the more.

photo credit: BlakJakDavy, flickr.com

I wasn’t invited to this party; I know that much, too. I showed up at the house of an old friend in the window of time just before company arrives, when the last little things get done. The flowers, over there. Count the chairs. Enough? Turn off the flame under the soup. Uncork the wine.

It doesn’t bother me that my name isn’t on the guest list. I’m welcome in the house for now, and for now it’s enough. I am left to wander through a home that’s old and lived-in and comfortable. One room is lined with bookshelves, the room that explains my friend more than any other.

I leave before the party starts.

(A dream, is all. In life, I would have called first, of course. I like to think I would have made the guest list.)

*****

My dreams lately are of things that feel out of my reach, and I awake to a sense that I’ve missed something, as though I’ve come within a breath’s space of a kiss (you know the feeling).

I could guess at the reasons for them: All of the pretty things laid out on a table? Well, those are my things still packed in boxes. The dinner party could mean that I miss my friends. Or that, as wrong as I may be to think this is how it is, I see their settled lives cleave time in steady, familiar patterns and wish for the same.

The other dreams are a grab bag of people, places, things. My hand falls to my side when I cannot touch what’s in front of me.

*****

I’ve made the call to the school. My youngest, with her sick tummy, will stay home for the day. She wears her misery on every part of her physical self. Her bedhead curls tumble and frizz about her face. Her shirt doesn’t match the pajama bottoms that ride high on her ankles (when did she grow?). Pale skin, paler still against a red pout. As much as she still can, she fits herself onto my lap. Her feet are almost as big as mine now and her legs stretch out across the sofa.

It occurs to me that no one taught me this, how to comfort and snuggle a sick child. I don’t have a single memory of being held this way. All I can think is: some of us know how to do this and some of us don’t. It suddenly feels like an enormous, small thing. (You know the feeling.)

There should be a place for this on a résumé, don’t you think?

She pulls my gray sweatshirt from where I left it on the sofa. “Is this yours?” she asks.

I say yes.

She tugs it over her head until she’s inside it. It’s big on me, but on her, it’s a tent. Sleeves and hem fall past her knees. If I hadn’t already forgiven her every slammed door or stuck-out tongue or I hate you, the sight of her would have absolved her of it all.

She wears it all day.

To this day, I belong. What I can reach is mine. What is mine is enough and it fills me.

And yet. Yet. I know know know myself. And I know that, on another day not so far off, or in my unquiet sleep, I will still (always, ever?) find myself reaching.

If you asked what I think about happiness, I would have to say that it’s never been my natural default setting. That’s probably true for most of us, though I can only speak for myself and say that my hard-wiring and experiences have made it hard to cross the room from shadow to light and to stay there.

Life has its moments of happiness and reaches of time that stand out, overall, as good times, and I’m all for increasing the number and lifespan of those. (Also, I’m fascinated with Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project.)  But happiness is not a constant state that I’ve ever sought to achieve. I need to experience and examine all the shades of things, opaque against light, the middle grays. What’s bright is brighter against what’s dark.

But today was flush with happy moments, and I noticed them all.

The obvious pick for #1.: Meeting Veronica in Occoquan, Virginia for a stroll through town,  a yummy lunch and – best of all – a long chat. She’s gorgeous, interesting, talented and funny – all in such generous measure that you won’t even hold a grudge over her to-die-for curls.

2. Pretty river towns. They get you with all their history and charm, quaint houses and shops. I fall for it every time.

3. The rain. There’s this: I love rainy days, but usually prefer to watch from inside, where it’s warm and I’m folded into a sweater or an afghan. But I didn’t mind walking in the drizzle today – though, admittedly, that may be a tribute to the fantastic company.

4. On the way to meet my daughter at the bus, I crossed a vast bed of yellow leaves. Some lay face down as the rain fell on their pale backs. Moons. But the rest were face up, small suns against the gloom of all that weather, as though they had captured all the day’s light just so they could give it back.

5. This label in one of the shops: “Wood tasting spoon.” Mmm, this one’s maple. What did you get? Told you she was funny.

6. Laughing when we realized that we didn’t even go raunchy with #5. Until we did. Really laughed.

7. Looking back and realizing that I didn’t take photos of any of it. I think, at times, taking pictures can distract from the experience of a moment. Not always, but sometimes. I almost got out my camera when I passed the park with the white gazebo set against a fire of leaves. But then I thought, no. I just stood and took it all in. The pretty gazebo. The pear tree with its dark trunk and branches wet with rain under a parachute of yellow leaves. The river in the background. No photos, but I recorded what I saw – you can be sure of that – and it will stay with me.

8. Wait. I did take one photo, at the Blue Arbor Cafe (Try the BLT.). These may be my favorite bathroom signs.

]]> http://aroadwithaview.com/2010/11/16/happiness-and-a-day-with-rain/feed/ 11 http://aroadwithaview.com/2010/11/14/the-lazarus-post/ http://aroadwithaview.com/2010/11/14/the-lazarus-post/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:48:02 +0000 Jennifer http://aroadwithaview.com/?p=3924

For fun this weekend, I broke  my blog (making it disappear is no parlor trick and is about as frightening as it sounds), but thanks to the wonderful support staff at my web host, Site5,* it came back to life and everything is up and running again. And they’re all on my list of people to whom I would donate a kidney (though probably not Ray LaMontagne tickets).

So please forgive the duplicate posts that probably showed up in your reader when I reposted the most recent couple of entries that missed the butterfly net when the content was restored. That, and losing the comments on the last couple of posts (I have them in email, so they’re not a complete loss) is a small price to pay when it could have been a lot worse.

Whew.

*Full disclosure: That Site5 link is an affiliate link, so if you click through and end up signing up with them for hosting, my sister and I receive a small referral fee which we would use to pay our hosting fees. Oh, and they didn’t ask me to give them props – I just think they’re great.

I love the idea of handwritten posts, mostly for the purity of pen to paper and no backspace key. (If you go to flickr and do a search, there are lots of them.)

These are just some lines I scribbled on a napkin at Panera this morning. There’s nothing to them, really, just a seed of something that blew past when I picked up my son from school yesterday and noticed a tree in front of his school. They’re a snapshot, if anything.

Because I scribbled, I’ll type it out for you here.

The wind startled the leaves from their branches and I thought of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. That day, I was on my way to the museum and you, you were headed toward somewhere you had to go alone.

The wind cleared the branches and I knew the shape of them at last.

(It’s autumn. It’s November. I get this way. You?)

photo credit: Nicolas Karim

Friday night. I clutch my driving directions in one hand and refer to them in the glow of my car’s interior light. 16th Street to Florida, right on R, take 23rd at the roundabout, and so on. I’m on my way to meet friends in Arlington and decided to take surface streets rather than looping around the city.

I make my way on narrow side streets with cars parked on both sides, past charming row houses with pretty front stoops.

It’s my first timing driving a car in DC – I’ve taken the Metro countless times and been the passenger when someone else was driving, but it’s my first time navigating on my own. I have a sense that I’m probably in Georgetown, but when I turn on to M Street, I know it for sure.

It’s immediately familiar, though much has changed. Which is how it so often is when you go away and come back.

I’d have to ask my best friend since college how long it’s been (15 years? Longer?) since we spent long, aimless days shopping in that part of the city. She lived in Maryland for years and when I would visit, we seemed to end up there.

Walking and shopping. Seeing three movies in a day. Trying on oversized sweaters or finding funky candlesticks at Urban Outfitters. Checking out guys. Talking about where we thought our lives would go next.

Not looking at a map. Figuring out where we were as we went along. Doubling back to get our bearings if we had to.

Not knowing then that it would always, ever, be so.