In my book, it's a great day ifwe get out for a walk. One of the nice things about living where we do is that when it comes to walking we have lots of options. Do we want a treed trail by the creek (perfect for a gray, wet day)? Do we need a walk in the open up the gulch (Sun!)? Do we want a climb and a vista (any weather will do)? Each of these walks works on me in a different way, but not one fails as a mood lifter. So, here's a few snaps from some recent walks. Enjoy. I did.
Walk #1
Walk #2
We found a fort!!
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Corin snapped this picture the other day. I love its simple lines and single palate. There is something about its spareness that I find restful without being dreary. Its wonderful really, this view he captured. It is our stairwell, a place I am always charging through - hauling heaps of laundry down, running up to retrieve socks for the boys, dashing down to answer the door/phone/child's tears. It took my son sharing his view for me to see the space in a new frame, to see its arching quietness and cathedral-like rise. Its been there all along, but thanks to Corin, I now know to pause and look up.
Things in these parts have been well. We All Hallows Eve'd it with the neighborhood, meeting friends from the Northside at the new Kettlehouse before everyone started their door-to-door rounds. Tim and the boys carved pumpkins while I put the last touches on Corin's costume (Vincent Vampire Bat from the Zoo Phonics program his kindergarten uses - at least that's what the five dollars of felt, glue, thread, and wire was meant to approximate). The boys had a great time, coming home red-nosed from the cold and bright-eyed with the haul.
Corin's pumpkin
Seth: a big helper
Vincent Vampire Bat and Fooball Guy
One more picture from Corin to finish off the post. Some days this is what I look for, just that bit of blue sky that makes all the difference.
With a temperature drop forecast for overnight, this evening found all four residents of 706 Howell in our boulevard with mixing bowls and bread baskets, pulling in the last of the garden. Tonight, the counter is elbow deep in romas and early girls. I think out of sheer necessity of finding the coffee pot, I'll be putting up tomatoes in the next few days. I clipped the rest of the basil, that massive green tumbleweed in the kitchen corner. We found several toddler-sized zucchini hiding under broad leaves. These are now hiding in our neighbors' cars. Corin and Tim were delighted with unloading these on our unsuspecting friends and I'm happy to have my load lessened by two. There are already enough green monsters lounging on the counter.
Bowl of Greens
Boys and Beets
Not one...
But two.
Tonight, we turned on our heat for the first time this season. Around the kitchen, this year's mouse keeps scurrying in and out of view, but never toward the trap (which has caught only Seth so far). When the clouds lifted this afternoon, I could see snow up Pattee Canyon. It seems, all the seasonal markers are in place. Autumn I salute you.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Let me just say there are days when what I need is this:
What am I supposed to be seeing? you might be asking. Nothing. Just unbroken, unpunctuated, roll of grass on a hillside, a simple tawny arc against blue sky. Some days this is what I set off to the hills looking for. For me, the uncluttered view seems to reduce life to its elemental components: earth, sky. And still these are more than can be taken in.
When I was fifteen my Grandmother Joss died. She died with all her family standing around, singing the hymns my sister plinked out on the upright. The cancer took her quickly at the end. She was bedridden for just a few days, and we sat vigil only the last night. At least, this is the way I remember it, if memories from half a life away can be trusted. These days I am reminded of my Grandma Joss because my friend Ruth, with whom my grandma shared a birthday, is seemingly nearing her end after more than 100 years of living. In the past few weeks, Ruth has lost her limited mobility and taken irretrievably to her bed. She is visited now by visions of her parents and her siblings, all of whom have passed on. She reaches for things only she can see. Tonight, while I sat with her, she stretched out her arm and motioned toward something in the air. "Has anyone fed John and Fred?" she asked. I leaned closer to her. "Who's that?" I asked. "They weren't taken," Ruth added and, though she said it weakly, whatever she could see seemed to give her some satisfaction.
While Ruth slept, I perused the literature the hospice agency had left on her kitchen table. "Vision-like experiences are real to your loved one and are common in the transition from life to death. Most often these visions are comforting." I do not remember Grandma Joss reaching for unseeable things, but watching Ruth do so is stirring and not, as I would have expected, unsettling. Something seems very close, very real, to her. She reaches toward it, grasping. Perhaps she is seeing through a crack in that final door.
Before leaving Ruth this evening, I sang her a lullaby, sitting on her bed and patting her head as I do my boys' at night when they cannot sleep. When I had slipped from her house, the screen door swinging behind me, I cycled home, grateful for the feel of my legs pumping the pedals, loving the smell of the river as I took the bridge across, aware suddenly of the life I have in my body, the gift of it. When I returned home I hied to my bookshelf and traced my finger through the poetry section looking for a very dog-eared copy of Jane Kenyon's Otherwise. I riffled through the pages looking for her poem Reading Aloud to My Father, knowing there was something in it I needed to read. Finding it, I read as follows:
I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto -- he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him.
But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend.
At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free.
Ruth is pulling free, just as all those years ago, I witnessed my grandma do while we stood around her bed singing "It is Well with My Soul." When my grandma finally passed, I went out to her drive and lay down to watch the bright and silent procession of stars overhead. Something I had seen that night, words could not reach and the house seemed too small and crowded to contain. I needed the limitless Above at that moment. Now, being with Ruth as she sits upon the threshold and catches glimpses from that great elsewhere, I feel I am again bearing witness to that uncontainable and limitless something that happens at the outside limit, the flush margin, of this precious and passing life.
Last week our neighbor from Arlee passed on. For six years we lived next door to her, our houses sitting on opposite sides of the long dusty drive we shared. Many an evening Tim and I sat at her kitchen table swapping stories and parrying jokes with her husband. Once, she beaded me two slim barrettes - sky blue with red triangles. She wrapped them in brown paper and slipped them quietly in my hand. Christine, quiet and giving, cared for people in a way that was almost sly it was so unobtrusive and modest. On Friday evening, as I left the community center in Arlee where Christine lay with an eagle feather fan in her hands, a full moon was rising over the mountains. The night was purple. The moon was white. I thought of this valley that Christine had loved her whole life and how the moon slid above it, hanging just so over the mountains. And I thought what a perfect tribute to her: it rose as she did - quietly, unobtrusively, and so bright.
Summer in Montana is such an idyll. With rivers to float and lakes to paddle and creeks in which to soak, we seem to build our days around which body of water we plan to jump in. The boys are finally old enough to take up Missoula's number one summer recreation: the float. This involves innertubes, some sunblock, and a long, lazy stretch of river. We drop in, float for several hours as the river winds us between tossing cottonwoods and willow brakes. The osprey wing overhead. The swallows dip and dive. In a few hours, when the river has carried us far enough, we get out, pack up the tubes, and get ready to do it all again. Soon.
Our garden is in and making good progress this year. The poppies were a riot of red for a solid month. When they had finally run their course, I immediately began missing them. There are few things so dependably and deeply cheering. Now the Shasta daisies are blooming and the rudbekia is filling in. The bees are heavy in the lavender and Corin just plants himself beside the lavender patch and watches them at work. Tim, the vegetable garden warden, warns me zuchinni are heavily forecasted for later in the week.
The boys and I joined some friends camping last week. We had our cars packed with tents and sleeping bags and swimming gear and sand pails and sleeping mats and marshmallows and tea pots - just the sort of camping I disdained and vowed never to do before I became a parent. It was a great trip. We plucked a few huckleberries, jumped in the lake, made s'mores. When the boys went to sleep, dropping off easily beneath the tent flaps, I sat and watched the sky, the stars bright and blinking between dark-boughed ponderosas.
And so the days drift by. I keep thinking I'm sure to hear R. Frost's oven bird one of these days, calling its mid-summer song ("the question that he frames in all but words/ is what to make of a diminished thing?"). But I guess my answer to summer's impending end is to jump in the creek, float the rivers, pick raspberries, roast marshmallows, take a picnic up a mountainside, kick back in the grass under the blue blue big sky.
Yesterday, on Father's Day, I received several pictures from my grandfather of his father, Carl Johnson. Among them was the picture above: my grandfather as a young boy (between Corin and Seth's present ages from the looks of it) sitting with his parents. I love this picture for many reasons, among them that my grandfather looks very much himself. There is something about him that has held steady all these years, resisting change despite the eight and a half decades that have been added to his life since he and his parents sat, that day, for the photographer.
One of the pleasures of receiving photographs of one's ancestors on a day set aside for honoring fathers is the quiet harmonic this creates between then-time and now-time. It is easy in the course of dailyness to forget we owe our very lives to continuity that extends far beyond us. But here are some pictures that remind me of the story in which I stand.
My dad: this is the last picture that was taken of the two of us before his subdural hematoma two summers ago. Thankfully his was a complete recovery, but this picture still chills me as it captures us hiking-tired, happy in the sunshine, and unaware of how close we'd come to losing him in the next six weeks. We stand atop Cathedral Ledges, a favorite family hike (taking the Boulder Loop Trail, of course, and finishing by wetting our feet in the river that runs along the Kancamagus). Never one to miss the vista, my dad enjoyed, that day and always, the getting there and the coming back. In this he is not unlike a famous New Hampshirite who once wrote:
Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better. I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
It seems that shortly after our hike, my father would climb a paper-white trunk toward heaven, till the top dipped and set him back down. And how grateful I am for that "coming back."
My paternal grandparents, Howard and Florence Joss: This is a picture I took of them, having paused the film of their wedding day in 1936 and applying my shutter to the screen. I love their smiles, my grandmother is radiant as she was her whole life, my grandfather looks entirely happy and proud. Grandfather Joss died when I was in third grade and I remember little of him beyond the tremendous jars of pennies he collected, the way he called my grandmother "Doll," the warmth with which he joked with us children.
This seems an appropriate Father's Day photo. Taken last month in Pennsylvania, Tim and his dad confer about bait while the boys await their turn to fish. And below is the sweet little sunny who obliged to be caught (posed for a picture and released).
And a final Father's Day shot. Taken several years ago when Corin was not quite three and Seth was a baby. Tim, wonderful father, strolls with his sons. The ridge ahead is filled with light and shadow, like all life. Carrying one, a hand on the head of the other, Tim walks, drawing them along, up the path.
Kwaheri - is swahili for goodbye, or literally for joy. My cousin Than, who has been doing grad school in Missoula for the past two years (and spending a great deal of prime studying time at my kitchen counter streaming Manchester United games and drinking highly sweetened chai), moved from Missoula today to return to Kenya. He has been a regular part of life at 706 Howell over these past two years, a sometimes soap-employee, a master at the grill, a great uncle to the boys and a willing wrestler with them, a cheerful pusher of the jogging stroller on our runs. When next I'm hiking with the kids and have to carry both boys downhill, I will miss my walking companion and fellow pack horse - just as I will tomorrow when I set out only one mug for midday chai.
So, Than, if you read this, all joy to you, kwaheri. You'll be missed. The kettle is on. Rooney just scored for ManU. We'll see you soon, Mungu akipenda.
Missoula is a happily situated town, the beauty of which seems to present itself when one gets a bit above it. Tim and I took the boys hiking up Mt. Sentinel last weekend. The trail leaves from the University and in a series of steep switchbacks climbs toward a huge concrete "M" - the city's most obvious landmark (could there be a more literal use of the term?) - fixed to the mountain's side.
Mount Sentinel is the far eastern boundary of the Missoula Valley and the town spreads out, ambling west, below the pitch of the mountain. The view from there is a good one and the boys had a great time picking out parts of their known world - the airport in the distance, the bridge over the train tracks near our house, the park they like to frequent, and the river winding the length of the valley. It is good somehow to see our world from above, to see how expansive the land and how nestled the town, to see the valley bend away in the far west where our vision cannot follow.
My boys on the M
Missoula's north hills are tinged yellow with arrowleaf balsamroot, a bright, silver-leafed member of the sunflower family. It grows in squat clumps all over the hills and is in full and glorious bloom on south facing slopes. Today I took a run and saw the lupine are soon to follow. At this time of year I can't keep away from the hills. I tell Tim I'm going to take a short run, I'll be back soon, but then I find myself veering toward the hills expectantly. Next week, when whole hillsides are full with deep blue spires of lupine blooming aside bright and broad arrowleaf balsamroot, when the meadowlarks are singing, and the rain is pulling across the far end of the valley in dark squalls, I might just have to sit down and give the rest of the day up for loss (or gain).
In other news - Tim invested a hefty sum in the Flowbee last year. You may remember the flowbee commercials from the mid 80s. This special "As seen on TV" item is a hair cutting system that requires the use of your vacuum. I was skeptical, but now after having more than made our money back by not spending on numerous children's haircuts (and several adult ones as well), I have converted to the Flowbee way of life. Thursday night was hair cutting night at this house - the boys all got fresh dos as did Than. So there's my product testimonial - if you have squirmy kids and a good vacuum, make the investment.
