trillium will be upon my arm in her honor

my great grandmother, dummer, spent her summers presiding over the screened porch at the farm.  i remember her so vividly.  her stockinged feet.  the way her feet fit in her pumps.  her shape as she walked, in the shade of the sugar maples, her cane finding secure footing amongst the pebbles, and stones of the gravel driveway.
in her wicker throne she stopped her game of solitaire to marvel at the blue of the august sky.  my father always quotes her: "this is a vermont day you would want to bottle."  she said lots of things on that porch that people remember. she was a calm, shuffling spirit.
her bedroom was on the back corner of the house.  it looked over the vegetable garden and the northeast field.  in her closet on the bottom shelf on the right hand side was a blue cardboard box. inside a tea set perfectly nestled in styrofoam.
dummer had picker uppers.  long wooden tongs with felted grips, she used to pick things from the floor.  dummer watched thunderstorms from the porch, she played spite and malice.  she pronounced that when pepper, her beloved overweight cat, died he should be stuffed and used as an ottoman.
dummer instilled in me a fear of earwigs.  i am not a frightened individual.  i am not weary of much.  but earwigs send chills down my spine.  ever so often they appear in the drain, or under the mop head in the cellar and i think of my great grandmother.  as i sat at her feet on the porch, she explained that earwigs loved dark, damp space.  she continued about their inability to go backwards.  which she deduced meant they would enter my ear and furrow through my brain, laying eggs as they went.  of course as i have grown i know that this is not true.  but it is true in that she said it was, and i believed her, and despite rationale and scientific knowledge, i, to this day am not thrilled within any proximity of earwigs.
most noteworthy of dummers influence is her requirement of story telling.  i had the blessing of running free amongst acres of wilderness and fields when i was a child.  i would go into the day and find respite in the cool of the porch for lunch.  the porch being dummers domain, i would sit at her side and we would talk, she would teach me of the creatures we saw through the screens, play cards and general young girl, great grandmother activities.  i often would inform her of what had transpired in the fields and woods during my day.  she would respond curtly that i was simply reporting facts.  she was much more interested in the story of what had happened.  she encouraged me to embellish and exaggerate the goings on of my empire, and to rely upon the interaction of my imagination and the natural world i engaged with.  for this reason i give her credit for the writer that i aspire to be.
dummer passed away when i was in fourth grade.  i will always remember hearing the news of her death in the bathroom of the theatre i was performing in that evening.  the thrill of the stage deflated as i understood the immensity of my families loss.  her strength and grace are carried on in her daughters and granddaughters, my aunts and grandmother.  thank you dummer.  i love you and miss you.

brimming

following my nose through the weekend.  a trip to the library resulted in many many books on my shelf.  a promise of a crate of poetry delivered to my door via, two dear friends.  i let frustrations get the best of me and i learned, again, that honesty means taking a big gulp of air and saying what is weighing on your heart.  

my curiosity has been peaked by a trip to the historical society and stories are brewing in my creative mind.  very exciting.  i have made a commitment to myself, to have fun adventures in loud music.  i am realizing that i am my own best tool to manifest.  so... here i go. on this adventure of making what i want a reality.  very empowering.  i will refrain from allowing this space to become full of self help drivel, but the excitement and journey will be here in my own vague description and voice.  

my brain is full, my heart is sinking and i should go run in the rain.

i have been making lists.  listening to the rain.  writing words in lines.  stacking them upon each other.  the rain accelerates, the drops become louder inviting me to wash my soul, cleanse my wounds, catch a cold.  my skin is itching for the beat of the silver water to fall.  so different from the lulling bob of the ocean, or the lapping chlorine of a pool.  this water is falling.  swallowing me in its descent.
 i am so very fucking alive.  i am thinking about myself.  my slow collision with destiny and the admonishments of my great grandmother.  "never expect to be anything but ordinary."  

composting tea bags

there is a simple beauty in the knot that ties the string to a teabag.  i remember staples fixing the string to the bag when i was younger.  the staple deterred my mother and her gardner friends from composting teabags for fear of a staple under the finger nail years after the bag had decomposed and the tea had become soil.

and now...no staple. compost for all.  and yet i am in a space where i cannot have a garden, i do not compost and it hurts my soul.

my mother sent me an acrostic

"Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breath or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished."  Ray Bradbury

One of my favorite authors, quoted in an acrostic that my mother sent to me in the mail.  Such a lovely thought.  So apropos at this time when I wake early to sit with my tea and my thoughts.  Of course my cats, my dear boys, wind through my legs under the desk their tails twitching, as I brave the task of pen to paper.   

fragments of morning are bridges to my everyday

the breeze from my window is cool.  i feel the change of season on my skin, and relish the warmth of my blankets.  the light of morning leaks through the slats of my window shades and i close my eyes in hopes of warding off the inevitable day.
a list as long as my arm awaits as i put my feet on the floor.  before i have had my tea i pay delinquent parking tickets.  and now after i write this i must go to the hardware store for fluorescent tubes and mop heads.  the glamour of my life is not lost on me.
i will walk across the bridge, and deliver my goods with gratitude and admonishments.  a quick clock in and perhaps i will stop and write in the back room of the chain on the corner.  before i cross the bridge again, to make myself some lunch, beans and rice.  somewhere in there i will fold laundry and empty the cat litter.  amazing how the mundane turns into such a feeling of accomplishment.
i will shower and dress for the evening in black.  only to cross the bridge again, and create calm in the crazy of rich vegetarians dining in a three hundred year old building.  and then in the cool of the almost fall air i will cross the bridge again.  in the waning moonlight the river will sparkle and ducks will float in place as they bob their heads for food.  i will watch from above, wrapped in a scarf, my crossing from pa to nj noted by painted borders.  it is strange how every day i walk a course of history.  what took washington and his fellow revolutionary's hours is less than a fifteen minute commitment.  i think of that cold christmas night often as i saunter in the moonlight, and weave through the tourists and walk my commute.

new jersey=home (?!@%&*%$#^????)

goodmorning, street sweepers and garbage trucks.
i have ordered an herbal tincture for my kitty.  i have paid my over due excise tax and changed the address on my 401 account.
productivity?
or just the first morning after vacation.  i have to work this day.  i would like to buy some peaches and greens.  and toilet paper!
a lovely vacation full of friends, and now i am home, in this foreign state.

marigolds teach lessons

i love to deadhead marigolds.  the satisfying snap of the calyx, the scent that clings to your fingers.  i have to stop myself from deadheading all the marigolds i see in the world.  not only is it a very satisfying practice but it helps the plants to continue flowering.  by removing the dead bloom, you reroute the energy to the new growth.

as i have been wandering through the town i grew up in, i have been thinking about deadheading.  how i have applied the practice to my own life.  cutting off old blooms, friendships, flames, passions, expectations in order to give myself energy for my new endeavors.  

this is not new news, it is growth.  but when confronted with folks who have known you and your family for your entire lifetime, it is not easy to recognize the person you used to be in their eyes.  

even my friends that i roamed the woods with growing up, know so little of me.  as we sit in the cool vermont august air, wine glasses full, our lives unfolding in our conversations, we learn of who we were, and how we remember.   and we laugh.  and giggle and gasp at us.  at our lives. big unwieldy lives that tumble from our hearts and into our hugs, and longings and stories.  and then it is midnight and the wine bottle is empty and our hearts are swelling with the relief of friendship. our faces are are sore from smiling.  

i close the door behind me and walk into the night.  the porch light turns off behind me and i am left in the muted brightness of a waxing moon and the vermont stars.  i watch the sky, the pale line of light where the trees meet over the road to guide me through the black of the forest.  this is where i am from.  my skin is alive here.

somewhere i want to fit in a run

my morning began at four o'clock.  i read for an hour after waking from a very strange dream.  i am almost one hundred pages from the end of my book.  then i fell back to sleep, dreamt even stranger dreams and gave up on the entire endeavor at 8am.
i roused from my nest and packed my bag.  fed the cats, and watered the plants.  i still have to make watermelon feta salad, pay my roommate $5 for water this month, buy three nine volt batteries, buy my ticket to nyc and go to the pool for the afternoon.  i figure i can finish my book at the pool, and paint my toes when i get home from work.  i have a duck egg for breakfast tomorrow morning and one more peach.
then tomorrow i get on a bus before the sun rises and head north.  home.  to vermont on a vacation.

blah blah blah goats

one summer when i was a young grrl growing up in rural southern vermont i was tasked with walking my neighbors goats.  she lived in a big rolling farm house, the paint chipping off the clapboards, the foundation lilting, and a screen door that slapped shut when you entered the kitchen.  the farmhouse sat at a crossroads.  butterfield road, named after my great great grandmother amy iola butterfield, was intersected by the cutoff; a seasonal shortcut.  the farmhouse had two barns, one barn sat at the east end of the house, on the opposite side of butterfield road, it was filled with antique books. catherines husband sold rare and used books to the occasional tourist.  sunlight poured from the windows high up under the eaves, illuminating dust and spiderwebs, and shelves and shelves of hard cover books.  first editions with gold letters down the spine.  he had a telephone behind his desk and i thought it so peculiar and profound to have a phone in a barn.  it was called the bear bookshop.  that was his barn.  catherine's barn was across the front yard, across the cutoff.  it was more ramshackle and less weather proof than the barn full of books.  

i would walk the mile and a half from my house up the dirt road, through the tunnel of trees, to the  greenberg's.  in the kitchen of that farmhouse was a wood cooking stove like the one in the farmhouse i grew up in.  i stood next to it while catherine finished shucking green beans.   then she would lead me to her barn.  it was dark and smelled of decay.  summers light filtered through the walls and ceilings, and the sound of catherine's soft voice cooing to the goats who lived there is my only memory of her speaking.   

i loved these animals.  i was in awe of their large smooth eyes, the soft waddles under their chins, the way their lips curled as they ate from my hand.  the contrast of their bony spines and round bellies.  they were brown and white, black and grey and kind.  catherine would open the pen and the goats would file out of the barn in a single line.  catherine gave me the switch and filled my pockets with grain.  then i would take the group of gentle creatures out to the end of the crossroad and decide which direction to go.  often i would choose to turn right onto butterfield road.  there was a small school house and large fields and the goats enjoyed the grasses and flowers of those fields.  i would walk barefoot, my feet making little sound on the smooth packed dirt, and the goats would follow or wander.  if a car came by i would herd them to the side and into the field and the nod at the car as it passed.  i don't remember ever using the switch.  they were so gentle and docile.  

one drunken evening many years later as i sat around a fire pit in my back yard i told this story to friends.  they were in awe of the idyllic rural vermont i come from.  they roared and cackled, buckling over with bellies full of laughter at the the innocence of my nine year old self walking down a country road with no shoes, herding goats.  my friend bill yelled out "cat walker walks goats!"  and the fire lit with our guffaws.

the next day as we worked through a busy night at the bar, bill exclaimed: "cat walker walks goats!" a chorus of chuckles from those us there the night before rose amidst the ruckus of the teaming brew pub.  i swore that my first novel would be titled, cat walker goat walker.  and so for years i have laughed at the title of my first book that i have not written.  it has brought two memories together: child hood summer time, and whiskey drunk fire pits.  it makes me smile, cat walker walks goats!

a month ago i got a letter in the mail.  i opened it to find a note from my three year old niece, transcribed to my mother.  it rambles on about tractors and parades, and how much she loves me.  then tucked in a paragraph is the title of this post.  blah blah blah goats.  i burst into sobs of joy.  my niece amidst all the hubbub of her 21st century existence is growing up to be a vermont grrl. it thrilled me.  i hung the letter in my mothers hand on the cork board in front of my desk.  i read it everyday.  

i have no desire to have children.  i think they are a general selfish plague of humanity, but i love my nieces with more heart than i knew i had.  i find their curiosity and command of being human brilliant. and it is the smallest of their actions that i find the joy that allows humanity to procreate.  perhaps it is i who will suffer for not having children.  but i will not.  i think it is wrong to treat the earth as we do and make more children.  there will be a skeleton of this precious world left to them.  and for that i am sorry, because i was raised on an idyllic country road walking goats barefoot and every child should have such peaceful opportunity.   

late in the night i ramble through my heart to find my mind

i felt as though i was going to explode with the excitement of her.  her encouragement and coaxing, her kind words sprinkled between the deepest of her desires.  she rouses in me something i have not shared in a long time.  and so i call her, listen to her trust and then hang up.

i climb on a bus, traverse a city i am only beginning to learn, and trust in her.  this is happening.  fun, easy and alive.  yet this is the beginning and it is easy to talk of trust and ease, confidence and faith.  it is after transgressions and betrayal that the heart turns and has a hard time not being right. i know that i have parts of my heart that i protect fiercely.  i cant open them and share them.  perhaps i never will.   but i would like to think that i am capable of examination.  of listening to my own rhythm and letting go of what keeps me tethered to the past.  forgiveness can crack the stone hurt of divulgences.

so why does my frustration mount as i read of the never ending carnage and defiance; the misunderstanding that is the world news.  i understand stoicism.  but some one has to be the first to give.  that is what trust is.  it scares the shit out of me and i have nothing to prove.  i have no army, no people, no land that i am defending.  if i did then perhaps i would be defiled by a greed to be right and insist upon standing still with out any forgiveness.   but right and wrong are subjective.  they are only perspective and perspective can change, should change.  growth, willingness to be new, is exciting and rewarding. being right is not rewarding.  the smirk of pride only lasts as long as your face can stare at itself in the mirror.  but trust comes with time, honor, and respect.  it comes with the way we make others feel about themselves.  trust is letting someone tell you their story and not gasping at the goriest of their insides.

   

folks die and kill and massacre because we hold onto our egos as protection from letting go in the enormous free fall that is trust and love.  it is somehow scarier to let go, to relinquish, than to stand ground and protect in the face of an army of anger and hatred.  i am scared of the excitement i felt last night.  i am scared of the dreams of my past that haunt me.  i am scared of the calm her voice creates in my heart.  but i am working to forgive those that have trampled my heart.  i wonder if we can work to make the battlefields, the tunnels of hatred and the temples of oppression relics of a time passed.  if we can give something to the future by forgiving.  

because with out forgiveness will we have a future?