The Way of Things

It’s spring.  The ground phlox blooms pink over granite ledge, the blossoms from one round of rhododendrons drop while another readies to pop.  We’ve greened up nicely, but amidst my gardening chores this weekend, I discovered repercussions from The Great Tree Tragedy of Winter, 2013.  Although we’ve finally cleaned up the area where a massive oak demolished our shed, sheared off the tops of five pines and irrevocably altered the appearance of our yard, the tree that caused the mess is having a final say.

  

Our new shed rests a few feet back from the footprint of the old one.  The fat leafed Hostas that used to sit by the door of the old building now sit too far out.  While deciding where to move them, we noticed seedlings.   Amidst the wood chips left over from stump grinding, in between the stone steps and crevices that populate our yard, tiny oaks have burst forth from the bumper crop of acorns the old tree spewed when it crashed to the earth. I spend an hour on my knees yanking the little guys up on Sunday, before realizing eliminating them will be a long-term project.

 

Even more than the damage caused by the tree itself, this burgeoning yield communicates the ultimate authority of nature.   Oh sure.  We notice when she comes at us with wind and snow, rain, hurricanes and tornadoes. Newscasters are quick to sensationalize those big ticket events, the ones that bully us with strength and ferocity.   A few months later in our side yard though, Mother Nature demonstrates a more subtle power.

As I sat yanking sprouts up by the roots, it became clear to me how inconsequential my place is on this earth.  I’m a hiccup really, even less. We’ve lived in our home 21 years.  But were we to turn our backs, in less than half that time the yard we’ve tilled, planted and edged would return to brush and trees.  The acorns deposited across our half-acre have the potential to contour the landscape long after I’ve become nothing more than compost.  So what if I pull this crop up?  There will always be more.  Year after year, oaks, maples, pines and ash will disperse a gazillion more seeds which will in turn, become trees.  At some point, the invasive pricker-vines I dig up each spring will have their way.  The poison ivy that seeds itself in my gardens will drown out the perennials I tend to with love. Bittersweet vines will become an impenetrable tangle.

  

As I sat in the shade of two oak saplings we’ve “allowed” to grow over the last few years gazing out over an area now populated with baby oaks, I understood the temporary and inconsequential nature of our presence here.  We call it “our” house, and “our” yard.  But really, it’s on loan to us from a relatively benevolent Mother Nature.  Once in a while, she feels the need to deliver a blatant reminder that she’s in charge.  Most of the time though, she humors us by letting us garden and mulch and shape the land, full well knowing in the end, she’ll take her earth back and form it how she pleases.   

It's all in the Message

My cell phone jammed this morning.  Not such a big deal, except our land line has been going in and out since before the weekend.  The repairman isn't due until tomorrow, so I sent a text to our daughter on Friday.  "If you need us, call the cells, home phone broken." But, on our way to church this morning I went to turn down the volume on my cell, and the thing was frozen.  Suddenly, I was a great big ball of fuss.  "No one can reach us now (forgetting my husband's cell).  What if Meggie needs us?  What about the repair folks, they are going to check in on this number."   

The simple solution was to take out the battery and put it back in, which my husband did.  As soon as it powered up again, I found what I knew would be there, why I made such a stink to begin with.  There, waiting for me was a text from my daughter who is away at school.  "Happy Mothers' Day Mom.  Make sure Dad makes you breakfast in bed.  I love you." 

It's the only thing I needed today.

I posted this essay last Mother's Day.  It's so wonderful, I thought a repeat is in order.  Blessings to all mothers today, and every day.

Essay on Motherhood

By Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, 'Remember-When- Mom-Did Hall of Fame.' The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pick up. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, 'What did you get wrong?'. (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get onto the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were. 

Happy Mother's Day!

Ocular Spring

(Thanks to MCC for the inspiration.)

 
The windows are dirty.

But still, low in the sky,

a silver-sun cleans the edges,

the world sprayed with Windex,

polished hard with a soft cloth.

Out in the garden,

emerging stalks etch blue air,

like the first time

you don a pair of glasses, 

the new prescription

cuts a sharp line,

green leaves outlined

in fine-point ink.

Later in the car, 

you lumber down 

winter-pocked roads

where strobes flick and flash. 

Light

hits air,

hits trees

hits air.

You wish the visor hung lower,

for a baseball cap,

anything to block 

the brash blaze of horizon glare,

before trees leaf out and

tint the bleach with shade.

You squint

as back-light marries

a white magnolia

branches hanging heavy,

the way limbs do

during a wet spring snow.

Tomorrow, the light will change. 

A storm that never arrived,

but washed the air anyway,

will have floated out to sea. 

All you’ll have left
of an afternoon
burnished to high-gloss
are words that try —

reminding you, perhaps,

but forever failing to capture

anything close to the essence.

Copyright Liza Carens Salerno, May 2013

IWSG - Month End Performance Review

This is my May post for Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group, which as always features a group of writers helping other writers.  To read more posts, click here.  

When I worked for corporate America, each year before review time, we were required to write goals for the upcoming year.   Early on in the game, my husband taught me a valuable (albeit cynical) lesson.  “Make sure it’s a real goal.  But before you submit it, make sure it’s one you can achieve.  At next review time, you don’t want to have to explain why you didn’t.”

I must have had some of that in my heart when I announced my April writing quest in my last IWSG post. I planned to write 1000 words a day for at least five days a week on my first draft of my WIP,  for the entire month of April.  If I factored in the two week-days left at the end of the month, I’d write 22K by April 30.  Adhering to my husband’s guidelines, that number was a real goal, and achievable.   I could have raised the bar higher, could have gone for 1000 words seven days a week, or 1500 a day five days a week.  But I know myself.  Too much pressure stresses me out.  So I announced my modest proposal here, and went at it.  

Now I've reached review time.  In spite of a few instances when life took away my opportunity to write, and a couple of days when I managed a mere 200 words, my total word count for the month comes to over 26K (just on this project, I didn't include any other writing) which, in corporate parlance, exceeds expectations.  This brings me about 20K away from the end of my first draft.

What does any of this have to do with IWSG?  Well, one of the most difficult things about being a writer is holding ourselves accountable.  It’s so easy to say, “I like to write.”  We can like it all we want, but we can’t be writers unless we write.  No one however, is going to stand over us and watch, no one is going sit us down for a year-end review filled with financial incentives.  No one is going to stop us if we fritter all our time away Googling obscure facts, or writing Facebook or Twitter updates.  Borrowing a phrase I used to use to my staff of corporate recruiters, it's up to us to drive the bus.  It takes digging deep, setting goals and going after them (and in my case broadcasting them here at Middle Passages).  Bottom line, we are all responsible for discovering what works for us and using that tool to move forward. 

No matter how we do it, success is more likely to come when push ourselves beyond our comfortable limits, in other words, when we force ourselves to exceed our own expectations.

P.S.  A hearty thank you to Alex Cavanaugh and his A-Z challenge which triggered my April writing quest as a result of my desire to challenge myself "differently." I am so pleased with the result!

Pollyanna Patrol

I was alone in the office, pin-balling between three lines ringing at once and a listen-to-the-birds-in-the-bushes dead-dog quiet.  It was Friday.  Caught up on the week’s work and counting down until my noon departure, during one of the lulls I didn’t have the where-with-all to start anything new…and the computer sat in front of me.

Over the last few days, I’ve concluded it’s time to wean myself from the detailed discourse filling the local newspapers and on line sites relating to the Marathon tragedy.  It hit home on so many levels and it's still too close.  I recognize I pour over information in an attempt to gain insight as to why someone would choose to perpetrate such an act.  But now, I get I will find nothing definitive, no matter where I look.  There will be supposition of course, and conjecture, and psychologists’ educated hypotheses.  Maybe even a detailed confession will rise to the light of news-media day.  But however much we study or analyze or debate or finger point, we will never know…which in itself becomes overwhelming, a realization of all of the things on which this may have opened the door, horrors I fear we have yet to imagine. 

 

It’s a anxiety-provoking line of thought.

So, rather than hitting my normal news sites, I Googled an old writer acquaintance, with whom I’ve lost touch, whose words always filled and soothed me, but who I worry may not be writing any more.  Relief filtered through when I found her name on the acknowledgement page written for a book called  The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin. 

Hmm…  Happiness, a project? 

 

By the time I left work, I’d read a blurb on Amazon and planned to buy the book, so more on that later perhaps.   At that moment though, the idea resonated.  On an afternoon when spring pushed itself from the dead arms of winter trees, I decided for one hour, to make happiness my project.  On my way to the car, during the drive to the grocery store and on the subsequent ride home, I paid attention to things that made me feel better inside...things like the florescent shirts of the nursery school kids playing tag on the common, and the blooming Bradford Pear trees lining the sidewalks downtown.  Then there were the new cloth awnings that look like teal eye shadow above the windows of the former hardware store, now a renovated bank building.

As I walked to the car, a curly-haired toddler sang in his stroller as his mother pushed him up a small incline, and on my drive down Pond Street, jonquils bloomed peach and yellow against a granite stone wall.

At the store, a clerk refused to charge me a requisite $.20 for two packs of oyster crackers to go with my clam chowder, and in the parking lot an attendant in a tie-dyed shirt, stacked carriages while singing reggae at the top of his lungs

Such small things really, so I won't bore you with more...other than to tell you I wrote a list, and it was almost two pages long.  As I recorded each item, I marveled that because, in a way, I'd asked them to, every one of these uplifting details resonated.  Oh, sure, I get that on a day when spring isn’t screaming out loud and pointing to itself to make sure we notice, happiness may be more of a project.  And the long-term attainment of such a condition requires more than an hour’s commitment.  I wonder though.  Like the bloggers at the Kindness Project, who bring attention and methods and ideas toward a better state of being, perhaps all we need to entice happiness our way, is to open ourselves up to it—to make the effort to be aware of things that hold potential to make us feel good. 

    

I don’t know about you, but the idea that tuning in might be all it takes hit me like a revelation. One that makes me feel...well, maybe not all the way happy, but definitely full of relief.

Aftermath

This year, home alone and behind on my April writing quest, I vowed not to turn on the TV for Marathon coverage until I’d reached my word count.  I got distracted writing an article afterwards, and then a late blog post.  A few minutes after 3:00, our daughter texted me from her college dorm room.  

                “What’s going on with the Marathon?”

                “I don’t know.  I haven’t turned it on yet.”

                “There were explosions at the finish line.”

You can’t imagine.  Everyone we know goes to, or knows someone who goes to, or runs the Marathon.  I became a woman with mad thumbs.  I was so frazzled, in trying to text my sister, I got my niece instead. 

 

“You guys aren’t in Boston are you?”

“No, we are all safe. 

I texted my brother.  

 “Everyone ok?”

“Yep.”

Another sister, listening to news in Australia, Skyped to confirm we were fine.  A different niece posted on Facebook that though she’d expected to be at the finish line, they’d had a change of plan.  A nephew, downtown but with no phone service, confirmed his safety on FB too. By the time a blanket email arrived from my uncle’s wife in Pennsylvania, checking on all first and second cousins living and in some cases, running around Boston arrived, things hit home. 

This happened.  Here.  To us. 

Each reply-all email announcing safety brought some measure of relief.  But what relief will there be for those who were injured, who face grueling recoveries, for those who lost loved ones on Monday, and more recently, Friday?  And the rest of us? Whole in body but disheartened in spirit?  How do we comprehend the evil that motivated two young men to injure in such a catastrophic way?

I was born in Boston. I spent my first six-weeks in an incubator in one of the hospitals caring for the injured now…the same place where “Suspect #1” was pronounced dead.  As a young adult, I worked downtown and in the Back Bay. For a long time, my social life revolved around the city, and even now, there are few things my husband and I like much more than taking a ferry ride in for a yummy meal in the North End.  Now though, I will never walk from the subway down Boylston Street past the two bomb sites without a twinge.  I’ll never go to my eye doctor's again without eyeballing the Starbucks where, on my regular trips in, I splurge on coffee.  It was front and center in the Boston Globe on Tuesday, a man dressed in a white hazmat suit analyzing evidence on the roof above.

               

While it appears my family was untouched by the physical horror, we watched the mayor of OUR city, the governor of OUR commonwealth, the President of OUR United States offer emotional and inspiring tributes in OUR cathedral.  National news filmed OUR streets.  Yesterday, friends in Newton were on lock down.  My brother couldn’t go to work at his job in Cambridge.  The city streets were void of cars.  This happened. This happened here.  This happened to us. 

A day later, with a total of five people dead and so many more lives shattered, I claw for some understanding of how any child, born with hope and gifts and potential could travel a curving road to an intersection, and choose to take such a profoundly wrong turn.

I could dwell on that. I could.

But I choose not to.  In spite of how it hurts, and in truth with some trepidation as to how to move on, I recognize something.  This didn’t just happen to us.  Or better said, it happened to ALL of us.  To everyone across the country who joined us in our grief, to those who have partnered with us, wrote inspirational messages, changed their Facebook photos to “I heart Boston,” to the sports beacons and headlines featuring loyalty to our city, to everyone who became one with us, to the givers, the helpers, the first responders, to those who put their lives on the line, I hope you know how much it means. 

We are one nation, under God, indivisible.   

Your actions gave proof through the long, heartbreaking night that was this week.  Our flag is still there.