I am thinking of the Beatle's song: "It's getting better every day...." As I write this. It did help me at least (not so sure about you readers out there in the blogosphere), when I wrote last week and as I worked through Wed-Friday, I felt myself slowly turning (although not steadily) toward the Light. One thing I started last week was an almost daily write in response to the "poetic asides" prompts at Writer's Digest's blog. I will share what I wrote here as my weekend blog entry:
11/9 Prompt "slow down"
I wake in the dark,
even the birds are still silent.
But my mind begins to rush--
a torrent of things to do.
I try to breath deeply,
slowing down the speed,
imagining a rhythm of waves
moving me forward
but not toward the rapids.
Instead, the waters carry me
carefully around grey boulders,
gently through barriers of broken logs.
I arrive slowly and safely to the shore,
and I get up for the day.
11/12 prompt "forget what they say":
At twelve years old, they told me to smile more,
not be so serious.
I tried and still do.
Back then, I sang down the locker-lined hallway,
mimicking Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.
But later that year,
Kennedy was shot, then Martin, later Bobby.
Not much to smile about for years.
And now,
Mom has died,
Dad stands on his seasoned legs
but bends with his walker.
My young neighbor
passes by my window,
runnning with her jaunty dog.
And I smile without laughter,
waking before dawn,
trying to squeeze as much of life from the day
as I can.
Last night,
after brown rice and egg drop soup,
we came out of the restaurant
and my husband's pointer finger
froze at a ninety-degree angle.
"Look at this," he said,
placing his hand on the steering wheel.
That finger,
rigid as a rock
sent me into a spasm of laughter--
the ludicrous image of a crooked finger
pushing against a wheel.
11/15 prompt: "just when you thought it was safe"
Almost seven months
since the ladder fell,
twisting my ankle and breaking it
into three pieces.
"Lucky it wasn't worse," the EMT guy said,
which my doctor repeated as did
several others.
And I am grateful it wasn't worse.
Because I am almost healed.
"Up to 90% now," my physical therapist coaches.
I can do most of what I want to do--
walk, bake, drive a car.
I can't dance yet, but I can roll on my stomach and do yoga,
both feet flat against the rug.
And yet, my anxiety lingers--
about the missing 10%,
about annual medical tests,
about aging, in general.
I don't want to imagine too much safety--
a little danger, hazard, risk
creates a little drama.
So I make it up.
Like a batch of brownies from a box,
I don't have to start from scratch.
Worry and anxiety is in my DNA,
ingredients amply supplied by Mom and Dad
and generations before.
Worry about his future got my grandfater to take a boat
from Italy to New York.
Anxiety about another year's harvest
got my grandad out to the barn on mornings so cold
ice formed on his eyelashes.
But my life is sheltered from these challenges,
so I make up my own.
Everyday I can read a newstory to feed
my fretting and worry--and I do.
Because just when I think it's safe--
a ladder will fall.
11/16 prompt "stacking"
In the pantry,
instead of organizing the
boxes of cereal and crackers,
the jars of jam,
the bags of nuts and rice--
I stack them on top of each other
so it looks like a skyline
when I open the pantry door,.
Sometimes, like today,
an item
falls.
Today, it was strawberry jam.
And I had "strawberry fields, forever" sticking
to the brown concrete floor.
11/18 prompt "lost and found"
For ten months my son was lost to us,
wandering, somewhere in our desert city,
marching to his own quest.
We got through it, somehow,
past the sleepless nights and long days.
Even when the Twin Towers fell, he was still gone.
And I wondered, "Where are you?
Do you want me to hold your hand
as we sit together and mourn?"
Now, he is halfway home again,
and I weigh what was lost, what was found.
The balance of both is not equal.
11/19 prompt "a poem with a hole in it"
I have to keep my eyes open when I walk,
looking for holes hidden under fallen branches
or in the broken asphalt next to the car,
as I step out.
It's tricky walking with a healed broken ankle.
All those tiny bones taken for granted everyday.
They do work only the mind can imagine
but mostly doesn't.
They pivot and balance in millimeters
keeping me from falling down.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
grief arrives before dawn
Sometime I have struggled to stay away from this blog becoming a place for me to reveal the darker side of my reflections. But since August, I have been going through another phase of grieving and despair about more than personal issues have crept in, usually arriving during the darkest part of the night, after about five hours of sleep but well before I want to awake.
This morning, after Mark got up and returned to sleep, I awoke with the now familiar flutter in my stomach and mild feeling of panic. I seem to have to work through all of my affirmations, memories of Naples and Napa, California, Florence and Rome, Italy, letting more recent memories cascade forward--of last night's community conversation in Marana, of yesterday's reading Chapter Two of The Sorcer's Stone with 5th graders at Pueblo Gardens, of Kevin and Nicole working me through my steps at Physcial Therapy, all those thoughts as I try to breath slowly, reduce the fluctuations in my metabolism and then I come to grief.
My chest tightens and I cry silently under the bedcovers. I cry for Mom, who died last August but who began to leave us a couple of years before. I seem to be retracing her final behaviors with my own: focusing on my physical changes, leaning on my husband for attention, nudging my son for emotional contact. I see her in me and somehow feel reconnected. But it's a false impression because, after a year now, I know she is really gone, except in memory. And, in August, this year, I thought I was going to lose Dad to breast cancer and that episode through me into Alice's rabbit hole where I still go in the dark of night, needing to wake early to reassure myself I am still here. Dad hangs on, living somewhere between euphoria of chowing down on fries with a McDonald's McRib sandwich, preceded by his morning walks and the suggestion of suicide he makes between sandwich bites to end his life by not taking his prescriptive pills. I listen to his meandering between these emotions and just hang on for the ride, as long as it lasts, knowing I will drop into the abyss when he dies.
And I grief for the loss of my relationship with my sister. Never an easy one, even when we played together on long midwestern winter days in the chilly basement/playroom of our house on McClure. Adulthood brought more bumpiness and estrangement, briefly rebraided through our early days of shared motherhood. Then torn apart again twelve years ago when she was hospitalized. As she struggled to regain an equilibrium of control through medications and other choices I can only guess at, our gap widened. It was partly due, I think, to our different responses to mom's dementia and to the challenges we each faced as our child/children grew into adulthood. Now, through a bumbling step I made on this blog, the fragile thread of sisterhood seems broken. We do not speak. She has not responded to my last email. The holidays beckon and we are apart.
My mother's brother died two weeks ago. Mom loved him very much. He was the only person I knew that she let call her by her given name, Jessie. At some point in her young adulthood she dropped that name and became Carolyn, her middle name. I don't know that story and I wish I did because I bet it cost her some pain with her mother. But she did it, became a working gal during the war, smoked cigarettes on the rooftop of Woolworth's, and went to dances at the YMCA where she met my dad.
As I grew up, there were many times I wish she had left my dad and taken me away from his anger and fierce love. I know now he grew up in an alcoholic home and suffered physical and emotional abuse which he passed on to me. My sister didn't get the physical hits but she suffered as a bystander and paid/pays her own price. I thought, for these past twelve years or so, that I had bypassed the compulsive behaviors that crippled my dad (and his family), that my sister adapted to and lived her way. Even though I came to acknowledge, following my son's spiral into unhealthy adolescent behaviors, that I had learned enabling from my mom, learned how to control and try to fix others' problems, and, in my head, recognized my own "stinkin' thinkin'" as a compuslive disease, somehow, I kept the deeper parts of the disease in a manageable place.
But in April, when unexpectedly, a ladder fell on me, dislocating and shattering my ankle, something else snapped. Right before the accident, I had gone through my third year of repeat/more imaging for my annual mammogram. I have lost a good friend to breast cancer during those three years and know two more diagnosed with it. Each year for the past three, I felt the sword of Damacles hang over me. Then, when I thought this year I had dodged it again, the ladder fell. And among my feeling of shock (which I did physically experience as well as mentally and emotionally), I also felt relief that here was something real, not anticipated or feared, remembered and hidde; here there was a real injury I had to pay attention to. So for almost seven months now, that has been my focus: healing my ankle. It delayed, I think, a normal pattern of grief for my mom. It diverted me from getting too involved in my son's circuituous life and tugged me away from other places where I could have slipped into too much helping.
But, as I have recovered and healed from the accident, I have slipped back into old patterns: too much involvement in "fixing" my community, too much worry about Dad, too much fear about aging (mine and my sister's--will we, like mom, have minor strokes, be misdiagnosed, face dementia with increasing isolation and confusion). And so, here I am today: waking up at 4 a.m., trying to use self-talk and memory, succumbing and surrending as the light breaks, to grief and tears, stretching my ankles and standing up, coming to the safe space of the written word and putting it down. Somehow, like writers before me, and after, I hope, the order of one word coming after another is similar to the rhythm of ankle recovery I have learned at PT: how walking is not about going in a straight line but zigzaging, back and forth, up and across and down. This is how we walk, how we live, how we grow. And we do, often, regain balance, find our center, heal and lean forward, into the dawn.
This morning, after Mark got up and returned to sleep, I awoke with the now familiar flutter in my stomach and mild feeling of panic. I seem to have to work through all of my affirmations, memories of Naples and Napa, California, Florence and Rome, Italy, letting more recent memories cascade forward--of last night's community conversation in Marana, of yesterday's reading Chapter Two of The Sorcer's Stone with 5th graders at Pueblo Gardens, of Kevin and Nicole working me through my steps at Physcial Therapy, all those thoughts as I try to breath slowly, reduce the fluctuations in my metabolism and then I come to grief.
My chest tightens and I cry silently under the bedcovers. I cry for Mom, who died last August but who began to leave us a couple of years before. I seem to be retracing her final behaviors with my own: focusing on my physical changes, leaning on my husband for attention, nudging my son for emotional contact. I see her in me and somehow feel reconnected. But it's a false impression because, after a year now, I know she is really gone, except in memory. And, in August, this year, I thought I was going to lose Dad to breast cancer and that episode through me into Alice's rabbit hole where I still go in the dark of night, needing to wake early to reassure myself I am still here. Dad hangs on, living somewhere between euphoria of chowing down on fries with a McDonald's McRib sandwich, preceded by his morning walks and the suggestion of suicide he makes between sandwich bites to end his life by not taking his prescriptive pills. I listen to his meandering between these emotions and just hang on for the ride, as long as it lasts, knowing I will drop into the abyss when he dies.
And I grief for the loss of my relationship with my sister. Never an easy one, even when we played together on long midwestern winter days in the chilly basement/playroom of our house on McClure. Adulthood brought more bumpiness and estrangement, briefly rebraided through our early days of shared motherhood. Then torn apart again twelve years ago when she was hospitalized. As she struggled to regain an equilibrium of control through medications and other choices I can only guess at, our gap widened. It was partly due, I think, to our different responses to mom's dementia and to the challenges we each faced as our child/children grew into adulthood. Now, through a bumbling step I made on this blog, the fragile thread of sisterhood seems broken. We do not speak. She has not responded to my last email. The holidays beckon and we are apart.
My mother's brother died two weeks ago. Mom loved him very much. He was the only person I knew that she let call her by her given name, Jessie. At some point in her young adulthood she dropped that name and became Carolyn, her middle name. I don't know that story and I wish I did because I bet it cost her some pain with her mother. But she did it, became a working gal during the war, smoked cigarettes on the rooftop of Woolworth's, and went to dances at the YMCA where she met my dad.
As I grew up, there were many times I wish she had left my dad and taken me away from his anger and fierce love. I know now he grew up in an alcoholic home and suffered physical and emotional abuse which he passed on to me. My sister didn't get the physical hits but she suffered as a bystander and paid/pays her own price. I thought, for these past twelve years or so, that I had bypassed the compulsive behaviors that crippled my dad (and his family), that my sister adapted to and lived her way. Even though I came to acknowledge, following my son's spiral into unhealthy adolescent behaviors, that I had learned enabling from my mom, learned how to control and try to fix others' problems, and, in my head, recognized my own "stinkin' thinkin'" as a compuslive disease, somehow, I kept the deeper parts of the disease in a manageable place.
But in April, when unexpectedly, a ladder fell on me, dislocating and shattering my ankle, something else snapped. Right before the accident, I had gone through my third year of repeat/more imaging for my annual mammogram. I have lost a good friend to breast cancer during those three years and know two more diagnosed with it. Each year for the past three, I felt the sword of Damacles hang over me. Then, when I thought this year I had dodged it again, the ladder fell. And among my feeling of shock (which I did physically experience as well as mentally and emotionally), I also felt relief that here was something real, not anticipated or feared, remembered and hidde; here there was a real injury I had to pay attention to. So for almost seven months now, that has been my focus: healing my ankle. It delayed, I think, a normal pattern of grief for my mom. It diverted me from getting too involved in my son's circuituous life and tugged me away from other places where I could have slipped into too much helping.
But, as I have recovered and healed from the accident, I have slipped back into old patterns: too much involvement in "fixing" my community, too much worry about Dad, too much fear about aging (mine and my sister's--will we, like mom, have minor strokes, be misdiagnosed, face dementia with increasing isolation and confusion). And so, here I am today: waking up at 4 a.m., trying to use self-talk and memory, succumbing and surrending as the light breaks, to grief and tears, stretching my ankles and standing up, coming to the safe space of the written word and putting it down. Somehow, like writers before me, and after, I hope, the order of one word coming after another is similar to the rhythm of ankle recovery I have learned at PT: how walking is not about going in a straight line but zigzaging, back and forth, up and across and down. This is how we walk, how we live, how we grow. And we do, often, regain balance, find our center, heal and lean forward, into the dawn.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
sunny day
Even though I do not like my new and somewhat unpredictable normal of waking up before the sun rises, it seems, as I do, I fill up the day with activities now that I am more active again. I have to keep reminding myself to slow down to watch the butterflies scatter around the blowing branches as mulberry leaves fall, or gaze at the shimmer of the hummingbird's wings as it catches the early morning light. It's gotten chilly at night in the desert and so, twice this week, I wore gloves and my red stocking cap as I stretched my walk from twenty to thirty minutes. The taste of hot chocolate in the afternoon on the two days that Mark had off this week was a treat although, sitting at Borders one of those days, the background music of Christmas Carols was intruding on my mind as I enjoy these days before Thanksgiving.
We are already making plans to do what we did last year: take Dad to Xmas Eve Church service and dinner and then, the two of us will take off for Sierra Vista's buffet. Instead of staying overnight at a BandB which wasn't all that great last year, we will stay at a hotel, get a hearty breakfast on the 26th and enjoy Bisbee galleries and shops. The Christmas lights will be hanging across the main road in Bisbee and, no doubt, crisp weather will linger between the rocks. Last year there was a dusting of snow on the hills which added some nice texture to the town's landscape.
As for what comes first, Thanksgiving, I am looking forward to seeing my sister-in-law and her family. Since Aron has to work, we'll have a second TDay when he is off and that's the one I actually spend time in the kitchen for. The "first" dinner is partially from Safeway--we've done that for several years now, starting with the last two in Green Valley with Mom and Dad-and with some additional side dishes and dessert, it makes for an easy and agreeable compromise.
Anyway, the main point, I think, of this lovely November holiday should be just to be grateful for bounty of food, family and health. Christmas gets lost in merchandising, merchandising and it's second cousin, Chanukah, gets short shrift even though it's really a secondary Jewish holiday, made more important by the weight of Christmas on Jews whose children also "expect" presents with the Menorah. When Aron was young, we did both and never really had trouble with it. But I suspect he has leaned toward Christmas in his adulthood, less for its spiritual meaning, probably, than the expectation of something special.
Most of the specialness for either Chanukah or Christmas this year will be limited because we are spending our budget in January in Philly for Sasha (my niece's) Bat Mitsvah. New luggage for two of us and a winter coat for Aron has to be purchased and tho we scored some reasonable hotel rates--everything seems tight this year (again--third year when both Mark and I are aware of financial restraint).
But there is no lack of abundance of sunshine today. It's been glorious and tomorrow promises the same. What we lack in political brightness in Arizona may be (?) somewhat compensated for with the brightness of light when the sun shines.
We are already making plans to do what we did last year: take Dad to Xmas Eve Church service and dinner and then, the two of us will take off for Sierra Vista's buffet. Instead of staying overnight at a BandB which wasn't all that great last year, we will stay at a hotel, get a hearty breakfast on the 26th and enjoy Bisbee galleries and shops. The Christmas lights will be hanging across the main road in Bisbee and, no doubt, crisp weather will linger between the rocks. Last year there was a dusting of snow on the hills which added some nice texture to the town's landscape.
As for what comes first, Thanksgiving, I am looking forward to seeing my sister-in-law and her family. Since Aron has to work, we'll have a second TDay when he is off and that's the one I actually spend time in the kitchen for. The "first" dinner is partially from Safeway--we've done that for several years now, starting with the last two in Green Valley with Mom and Dad-and with some additional side dishes and dessert, it makes for an easy and agreeable compromise.
Anyway, the main point, I think, of this lovely November holiday should be just to be grateful for bounty of food, family and health. Christmas gets lost in merchandising, merchandising and it's second cousin, Chanukah, gets short shrift even though it's really a secondary Jewish holiday, made more important by the weight of Christmas on Jews whose children also "expect" presents with the Menorah. When Aron was young, we did both and never really had trouble with it. But I suspect he has leaned toward Christmas in his adulthood, less for its spiritual meaning, probably, than the expectation of something special.
Most of the specialness for either Chanukah or Christmas this year will be limited because we are spending our budget in January in Philly for Sasha (my niece's) Bat Mitsvah. New luggage for two of us and a winter coat for Aron has to be purchased and tho we scored some reasonable hotel rates--everything seems tight this year (again--third year when both Mark and I are aware of financial restraint).
But there is no lack of abundance of sunshine today. It's been glorious and tomorrow promises the same. What we lack in political brightness in Arizona may be (?) somewhat compensated for with the brightness of light when the sun shines.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
dream architecture
Last night we saw the movie, "Inception", and I thought it would stimulate my subconscious to the danger point and stir up bad dreams. I have had several early this week and, on two subsequent nights, I dreamed Mark and I were (unhappily) leasing a two story, modern architecture house, set on a hill and decorated entirely with white, nubby-textured furniture (I hate both). But despite my misgivings, last night I simply (?) slept and don't recall any dreams I had.
My favorite scene in the movie was when the new "architect", played by Ellen Page (she seemed stuck in somberness in this movie and her plain features didn't light up with even one smile)--anyway, she collapsed the city of Paris in on itself to fold into a three dimensional (or was it four) cityscape. Then she and the main character, played by Leonardo di Caprio--who continues to dominate every scene he is in no matter who plays opposite him although Kate Winslett, in Revolutionary Road, is the best foil he has--anyway, she and Leondaro's character walk up and around the streets of Paris.
If you have been to Paris, as I was 8 years ago, it's not too hard of a stretch to imagine the multi-dimensional stroll along the streets, in the alleys, along the Seine. The medieval quality of its urban architecture, blended with Hausmann's 18th century boulevards and recent architectural changes create a kind of mash-up that fits into the maze-like structure (as the movie suggests) that makes up our dream architecture.
The idea of elements that fight for the subconscious to maintain some kind of equilibrium and control vs. those who would extract our thoughts or plant them (i.e. inception) is also intriguing, although I would suggest female dreams might be demonstrate less violent conflicts than those depicted in the movie from the male brain (and to satisfy ticket-buyers). I suspect, in my brain, my subconscious protectors are like big mountain lions, ready to pounce to protect my sanity--at least, I hope they are in my dreams, doing their job.
Because the outside world right now could use some redesign of its external architecture. Driven by fear the world is pulling its fabric apart and there seem to be mighty few of us trying to keep the fabric woven together. As in T.S. Eliot's poem, the center will not hold (or something close to that--I am not quoting him here but using the poem as a reference for making my point). We need some protectors to take on the role of protecting us from our waking insanities. Maybe that's why, right now, I am dreaming about homes more often, even ones I don't like. Interestingly, as I write this, I realize I had those house dreams I describe here, on pre-election and election nights. Maybe my subconscious was creating the house, barely hanging on a hill, as a symbol of how I felt about our country, the world, teetering on the edge of destruction. It's a connection to consider, I suppose.
But for the rest of this day, I will take solace in this: the creative minds that make up stories, generate quality movies, write poems and plays, cascade song lyrics--these are my heroes: they continue to create order and meaning out of chaos; they believe, as this movie states, that we can architect our dreams.
My favorite scene in the movie was when the new "architect", played by Ellen Page (she seemed stuck in somberness in this movie and her plain features didn't light up with even one smile)--anyway, she collapsed the city of Paris in on itself to fold into a three dimensional (or was it four) cityscape. Then she and the main character, played by Leonardo di Caprio--who continues to dominate every scene he is in no matter who plays opposite him although Kate Winslett, in Revolutionary Road, is the best foil he has--anyway, she and Leondaro's character walk up and around the streets of Paris.
If you have been to Paris, as I was 8 years ago, it's not too hard of a stretch to imagine the multi-dimensional stroll along the streets, in the alleys, along the Seine. The medieval quality of its urban architecture, blended with Hausmann's 18th century boulevards and recent architectural changes create a kind of mash-up that fits into the maze-like structure (as the movie suggests) that makes up our dream architecture.
The idea of elements that fight for the subconscious to maintain some kind of equilibrium and control vs. those who would extract our thoughts or plant them (i.e. inception) is also intriguing, although I would suggest female dreams might be demonstrate less violent conflicts than those depicted in the movie from the male brain (and to satisfy ticket-buyers). I suspect, in my brain, my subconscious protectors are like big mountain lions, ready to pounce to protect my sanity--at least, I hope they are in my dreams, doing their job.
Because the outside world right now could use some redesign of its external architecture. Driven by fear the world is pulling its fabric apart and there seem to be mighty few of us trying to keep the fabric woven together. As in T.S. Eliot's poem, the center will not hold (or something close to that--I am not quoting him here but using the poem as a reference for making my point). We need some protectors to take on the role of protecting us from our waking insanities. Maybe that's why, right now, I am dreaming about homes more often, even ones I don't like. Interestingly, as I write this, I realize I had those house dreams I describe here, on pre-election and election nights. Maybe my subconscious was creating the house, barely hanging on a hill, as a symbol of how I felt about our country, the world, teetering on the edge of destruction. It's a connection to consider, I suppose.
But for the rest of this day, I will take solace in this: the creative minds that make up stories, generate quality movies, write poems and plays, cascade song lyrics--these are my heroes: they continue to create order and meaning out of chaos; they believe, as this movie states, that we can architect our dreams.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
golden aspen
Yesterday I called a "time out" from worrying, stress, thoughts of mortality and politics. We drove to Mt. Lemmon to see the golden aspen which fluttered in the sunlight on the road to the UA Observatory. On the way, in Bear Canyon, we savored "jambon et fromage" on a freshly baked (from Ghini's bakery)french roll. Butterflies danced around the scrub oak and pine and two small girls scrambled up the granite boulders. I watched them go.
At Bear Wallow, where the red maples were aflame and the yellow elm showered leaves on the path, we found a tree trunk that others had sculpted with branches, twigs and leaves. It formed an altar to autumn in the woods. I stretched out my calves on the path's incline a bit and learned how much the physical therapy of the past months has gradually prepared me (or not) for the real world texture of a mountain path, strewn with small rocks and swelling tree roots. Mostly, I navigated the territory with care and caution and the ooccasional leaning on my husband's "firm but flexible" right arm. It was a new way of walking.
At the top, we couldn't take the path to the meadows because of the steepness but I found two late-blooming daisies amidst the frost-burnt ferns. I gathered fallen aspen leaves, pine cones and branches to nestle among my store bought flowers when I later returned home. It was a very good trip to the mountain.
I would like to say that the experience lightened my load for today, but it wouldn't be true. Again, my morning was stirred by physical responses I cannot control and don't yet understand. I had trouble focusing on the newspaper and took a long shower to still my bouncing brain. I am not ready for the work week and, if I could, would lose myself for a few more days in a good book (I actually have two I am enjoying), music and planting fall flowers. I cannot completely escape from the work challenges--or natural life challenges, it seems--and I have not yet found my psychological balance.
So, just for now, I will rekindle the feelings of golden aspen: the sight of light pouring through the thin, soft texture of yellow, the sloughing sounds of the trees as they bent to the westward gusts of wind. They did not break but they did alter their upright stance in order to remain grounded. I think I need to follow their example this week, as best as I can.
At Bear Wallow, where the red maples were aflame and the yellow elm showered leaves on the path, we found a tree trunk that others had sculpted with branches, twigs and leaves. It formed an altar to autumn in the woods. I stretched out my calves on the path's incline a bit and learned how much the physical therapy of the past months has gradually prepared me (or not) for the real world texture of a mountain path, strewn with small rocks and swelling tree roots. Mostly, I navigated the territory with care and caution and the ooccasional leaning on my husband's "firm but flexible" right arm. It was a new way of walking.
At the top, we couldn't take the path to the meadows because of the steepness but I found two late-blooming daisies amidst the frost-burnt ferns. I gathered fallen aspen leaves, pine cones and branches to nestle among my store bought flowers when I later returned home. It was a very good trip to the mountain.
I would like to say that the experience lightened my load for today, but it wouldn't be true. Again, my morning was stirred by physical responses I cannot control and don't yet understand. I had trouble focusing on the newspaper and took a long shower to still my bouncing brain. I am not ready for the work week and, if I could, would lose myself for a few more days in a good book (I actually have two I am enjoying), music and planting fall flowers. I cannot completely escape from the work challenges--or natural life challenges, it seems--and I have not yet found my psychological balance.
So, just for now, I will rekindle the feelings of golden aspen: the sight of light pouring through the thin, soft texture of yellow, the sloughing sounds of the trees as they bent to the westward gusts of wind. They did not break but they did alter their upright stance in order to remain grounded. I think I need to follow their example this week, as best as I can.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
banana bread
My husband, who has been out of town on a consulting job, has expressed the need for me to show him I love him. So today, I took those black bananas, soft as jello, and mashed them in a cup, added crispy walnuts and dark raisins, eggs, butter, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and soda, and made banana bread. It's cooling on the rack as I write and the wonderful smell of it fills the rooms and expands my lungs without the added weight of calories to my stomach. That, unfortunately, will come soon enough, when I flip over the bread, release it from the pan and cut into the browned crust for that tender taste of quick bread, made from scratch. It's my first baking experience since April/ankle accident and I guess it marks another milestone, just in time for the holiday baking season to commence.
I read a great story (newsletter@americanpublicmedia.org)today about the woman who championed the celebration of Thanksgiving as a holiday (1836) and wrote the poem, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." She, Sarah Josepha Hale, wrote about Thanksgiving as part of a novel that protested slavery, pre-Civil War by about 40 years. I had no prior knowledge of this story and I am trying to spread the word about it.
Sometimes my grandmother would also serve banana bread at the Thanksgiving table. We always had white butterfly dinner rolls and, of course, other carbohydrates filled the table as entrees and desserts. It pales, though, in comparison to the description Sarah Hale details in the excerpt on the web and reminds me that the harvest time was the end of the growing season and the preparation for hibernating for the winter. Not so for us desert dwellers: this is just the beginning of our favorite time of the year--seven to eight months (if we are lucky) of energizing coolness, sunshine and monsoon winters which spread the soil for spring's desert blooms.
I know I am getting older (as if creaking knees and right ankle, sore back, greying hair, mood and sleep swings don't provide enough proof)because the days, weeks and months are passing so quickly. I want this season to sloooooow down. Since tomorrow is/would have been my mom's birthday and, for me, is packed with "to do" tasks, Tuesday will mark my rememberance of her with a visit to the Tucson Botanical Garden. I will find a shady spot and read some poems or maybe bring along one of her many diaries and read an excerpt on one of her birthdays. Two years ago, her last with us, we had Lucky Wishbone chicken and she devoured fried onion rings, two at a time. I had baked cupcakes with caramel icing and Donna brought ice cream so we feasted on the patio in autumnal good humor.
Many things have changed since then and that is how life keeps us alert: nothing escapes the rule of impermanence. But I can always count on the smell of banana bread to bring me warm memories that fill my soul.
I read a great story (newsletter@americanpublicmedia.org)today about the woman who championed the celebration of Thanksgiving as a holiday (1836) and wrote the poem, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." She, Sarah Josepha Hale, wrote about Thanksgiving as part of a novel that protested slavery, pre-Civil War by about 40 years. I had no prior knowledge of this story and I am trying to spread the word about it.
Sometimes my grandmother would also serve banana bread at the Thanksgiving table. We always had white butterfly dinner rolls and, of course, other carbohydrates filled the table as entrees and desserts. It pales, though, in comparison to the description Sarah Hale details in the excerpt on the web and reminds me that the harvest time was the end of the growing season and the preparation for hibernating for the winter. Not so for us desert dwellers: this is just the beginning of our favorite time of the year--seven to eight months (if we are lucky) of energizing coolness, sunshine and monsoon winters which spread the soil for spring's desert blooms.
I know I am getting older (as if creaking knees and right ankle, sore back, greying hair, mood and sleep swings don't provide enough proof)because the days, weeks and months are passing so quickly. I want this season to sloooooow down. Since tomorrow is/would have been my mom's birthday and, for me, is packed with "to do" tasks, Tuesday will mark my rememberance of her with a visit to the Tucson Botanical Garden. I will find a shady spot and read some poems or maybe bring along one of her many diaries and read an excerpt on one of her birthdays. Two years ago, her last with us, we had Lucky Wishbone chicken and she devoured fried onion rings, two at a time. I had baked cupcakes with caramel icing and Donna brought ice cream so we feasted on the patio in autumnal good humor.
Many things have changed since then and that is how life keeps us alert: nothing escapes the rule of impermanence. But I can always count on the smell of banana bread to bring me warm memories that fill my soul.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
finding my stride
This week I met a milestone with returning to walk the Rillito path for a mile in 20 minutes. I really enjoyed the cooler temperature and the sights (an eagle on a low mesquite branch, toddlers carrying stuffed animals and joggers with dogs in tow) and smells (fresh horse manure and heavily perfumed matrons in glittering t-shirts and sweat pants). I had my stride assessed this week and am trying to focus on posture and keeping my right foot pointing forward and not slightly to the left. This seems to be helping my calf muscles but something in my stride is tweaking my back because it's aching in mid back and pelvic area, both on the right side. I am probably still compensating for some muscle weakness in my legs and asking the back muscles to carry more of the load, so I will need to have Kevin look at me this week and suggest what I need to alter.
Another challenge is weaving my way through Imagine Greater Tucson work tasks, domestic chores, familial obligations and physical therapy appointments (still twice a week). What is getting pushed aside is my regular workouts with swimming, bicycling and weights at the Y and my creative writing. I also feel that I am shortchanging myself on time with my women friends--squeezing in a quick cafe chat and chatch-up before the end of the day or on the weekend. On the plus side, my metabolism changes seem to have stablized and sleep patterns are more back to normal.
Holidays are coming. I pulled out our plastic pumpkin for the front step and switched my fake spring flower assortments for the autumnal cattails, wheat and sunflowers. We bought a butternut squash to cook tomorrow and I enjoy the taste of that vegetable, dotted with brown sugar and butter. Thanksgiving will be at my father-in-law's because Mark's sister and family are coming in from Philly. Aron will be working on TDay and we might do our usual post-TDay home turkey for him and friends. I hope we can take a trip to California over the holidays because Mark has vacation time to use or lose and we didn't see my 97 year old Aunt on her birthday this year. I have a friend in Monterey that, with a car and the time, I would also like to visit, but the January Bat Mitsvah trip for Sasha is costing a small fortune so we'll just see how the dollars stretch. I would rather travel and see family and friends than buy anything although I told Mark today that when I get paid for my IGT work I might want to bring in a housecleaning team to do the nitty-gritty work that I have totally no interest or energy in doing right now.
We have a very sick eucalyptus tree out back that we have to have cut and hauled away and maybe need to transplant some new euclayptus bushes growing on the north side of the house to the back/East to continue to protect us from summer sun and townhouse neighbors. For the most part in the past ten years, our neighbors have been quiet and good cooks because I smell some mighty tasty scents from time to time in the early mornings. Once we had a neighbor who must have been a concert pianist or serious student of the instrument because s/he would play sonatas in the evening and, for a few moments, I felt Parisienne, recalling the 2002 trip I took with Patsy. Our hotel opened onto a courtyard, and, across it, I could see into the apartments at night. One apartment opened up to a large window with a baby grand piano at the edge of a room and, in the evenings, a resident would play Chopin. Such are the stuff of memories.
My physical therapist says that one of the tricks to recovery is "muscle memory", i.e. retraining the muscles to move in a way they have forgotten during the healing process. I think that works for the heart, also, because I am trying to retrain my heart to accept some familial relationships I would prefer not to be as they are.
My friend, Susan and I saw a strange and powerful movie yesterday: Never Let me Go. It's a film about life and death, illness and the costs, in human terms, of health. I have been thinking about it throughout the day. What will be my completion--a term that the movie uses instead of the word "death." Autumn is the time to contemplate things that pass away. I don't find it a morbid musing but rather, like the season, a musing with shadows and light. Shadows soften the angles and can offer a new way of seeing that sometimes bright light blinds the eye to capture. I think, as I continue to find my stride in the weeks ahead, I will appreciate the shadows and ponder "completion" as a signifier for living.
Another challenge is weaving my way through Imagine Greater Tucson work tasks, domestic chores, familial obligations and physical therapy appointments (still twice a week). What is getting pushed aside is my regular workouts with swimming, bicycling and weights at the Y and my creative writing. I also feel that I am shortchanging myself on time with my women friends--squeezing in a quick cafe chat and chatch-up before the end of the day or on the weekend. On the plus side, my metabolism changes seem to have stablized and sleep patterns are more back to normal.
Holidays are coming. I pulled out our plastic pumpkin for the front step and switched my fake spring flower assortments for the autumnal cattails, wheat and sunflowers. We bought a butternut squash to cook tomorrow and I enjoy the taste of that vegetable, dotted with brown sugar and butter. Thanksgiving will be at my father-in-law's because Mark's sister and family are coming in from Philly. Aron will be working on TDay and we might do our usual post-TDay home turkey for him and friends. I hope we can take a trip to California over the holidays because Mark has vacation time to use or lose and we didn't see my 97 year old Aunt on her birthday this year. I have a friend in Monterey that, with a car and the time, I would also like to visit, but the January Bat Mitsvah trip for Sasha is costing a small fortune so we'll just see how the dollars stretch. I would rather travel and see family and friends than buy anything although I told Mark today that when I get paid for my IGT work I might want to bring in a housecleaning team to do the nitty-gritty work that I have totally no interest or energy in doing right now.
We have a very sick eucalyptus tree out back that we have to have cut and hauled away and maybe need to transplant some new euclayptus bushes growing on the north side of the house to the back/East to continue to protect us from summer sun and townhouse neighbors. For the most part in the past ten years, our neighbors have been quiet and good cooks because I smell some mighty tasty scents from time to time in the early mornings. Once we had a neighbor who must have been a concert pianist or serious student of the instrument because s/he would play sonatas in the evening and, for a few moments, I felt Parisienne, recalling the 2002 trip I took with Patsy. Our hotel opened onto a courtyard, and, across it, I could see into the apartments at night. One apartment opened up to a large window with a baby grand piano at the edge of a room and, in the evenings, a resident would play Chopin. Such are the stuff of memories.
My physical therapist says that one of the tricks to recovery is "muscle memory", i.e. retraining the muscles to move in a way they have forgotten during the healing process. I think that works for the heart, also, because I am trying to retrain my heart to accept some familial relationships I would prefer not to be as they are.
My friend, Susan and I saw a strange and powerful movie yesterday: Never Let me Go. It's a film about life and death, illness and the costs, in human terms, of health. I have been thinking about it throughout the day. What will be my completion--a term that the movie uses instead of the word "death." Autumn is the time to contemplate things that pass away. I don't find it a morbid musing but rather, like the season, a musing with shadows and light. Shadows soften the angles and can offer a new way of seeing that sometimes bright light blinds the eye to capture. I think, as I continue to find my stride in the weeks ahead, I will appreciate the shadows and ponder "completion" as a signifier for living.
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