Walking

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!!

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.

September going, Frost coming

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.

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.

Reading Aloud to Ruth

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.

In Memory

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 Idyll

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.