The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...: November 2015

Saturday, November 28, 2015

he looks like I feel

Woody looked a little worn out after all the guests left yesterday.

We had a very busy Thanksgiving weekend. Actually, it started about two weeks ago with my typical over-booking of social events all of which involved much cleaning, cooking, and stashing big piles of stuff in odd places. I will never find it all again.

My sink is full of dirty dishes and the refrigerator is full of food that needs to be dealt with in some way. We had left-overs last night (yeah, that waffle thing was only moderately successful) but that might be enough turkey for a while. I'm subbing for two days this week so I can take it for lunch. The rest might go into soup.

The two tables in the kitchen are both full of clean dishes that have to go back into the cupboards and closets.

Sigh.

I think I learn this lesson every year. I overdo it for Thanksgiving, then take it easier for Christmas. I am going to start by not scheduling so much. No to the Nutcracker. No to Small Business Saturday. No to the art opening. No to this and that.

On a sweeter and gentler note, my mom was here for the weekend. She came on Wednesday and stayed until Friday. It was wonderful to celebrate Thanksgiving with her again after many years. Thanks for coming, Mom.

Sunday, November 08, 2015

things I did today

I have had to leave the house before 8 am more often than not in the last two weeks. I don't know who makes such a mess in our house when we're gone...troops of gnomes with bad intentions?...but they do.

Today I spent a lot of time sorting and putting away. I cleaned the back porch so we can use it for Thanksgiving. It is such a good place to put stuff. I organized my clothes closet. I took the fan and my rain boots to the basement. I put away all the Halloween stuff. I painted the edge of the new front door that got dinged up with installation. I filled all the bird feeders. And...as long as I had the paint out...I painted the back porch.

You don't know what a big deal this is. It is a job that needed doing since we moved into this house in 1997. It's one of those multi-step project at which I suck. It needed to involve finding a curtain rod. (check) It needed to involve finding curtain hardware. (check) It involved moving a lot of stuff out of that room. (check) I am quite proud of myself if you can't tell.

On the days when I don't brag about how much I have accomplished, I have pretty much been a waddlesome sloth and accomplished squat. Ah, well. Life is so much more than to-do lists.

Friday, November 06, 2015

looking back and then ahead

I mentioned to Regis last night that the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis had gone unnoticed, a good sign, I thought. This morning, lying in bed looking at my iPad, it popped up as a Facebook memory. A link to my blog.

I'll go back and read it again later but reading it gives me chills. It was such a dark time and I really don't know how I made it through. I spent a lot of time sleeping, not from physical pain or physical fatigue I don't think, but to escape. I tell friends that I spent a lot of time in my blanket fort.

I know there are worse things and I know many people go through exactly what I did with far more penache and aplomb. They didn't sit around weeping into their wine glass until 5 am. But it's hard to be prepared for shit like that...you don't sit down and think rationally about how you are feeling and behaving. At least I didn't... I remember swinging wildly from a super hero sort of take on it (think Rocky) to planning my own funeral. It was crazy.

Three years later, I can look back and truly say that while cancer was not a blessing, it afforded me many opportunities. Thank you, wise Eve Ensler for those words. I have met many kind and wonderful people, medical care givers, friends who also went through the BC battle, others who just offered friendship and support.

In a couple weeks, I'll have my last three-month check-up. I will graduate to every six months. After a few years of that, I'll go to yearly check-ups. Because I am part of a clinical trial, they will follow me for the rest of my life. Good to know.

Going forward, I don't take anything for granted. In some ways cancer planted the seeds of dread but in other ways it made me so grateful for every day. Every sunset. Every delicious meal. Every good friend. Gratitude is getting a leg up on dread for now.

Life is so good.

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Winter Grace

by Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over; your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Permission Granted

by David Allen Sullivan

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides.

"Permission Granted" by David Allen Sullivan,

from Strong-Armed Angels.

Gratitude by Barbara Crooker

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war

grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,

or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of

for twenty or thirty miserable years—

And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man

with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times

have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines

through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves

as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree

that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:

cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,

and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,

so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,

Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world

sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s

sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,

the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,

finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,

know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing

on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,

flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.

And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands

in gratitude, bend to the sky.

From Line Dance (Word Press, 2008).

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Do Not Expect That If Your Book Falls Open

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

"Riveted" by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace: Poems 1997-2002

I Was Always Leaving by Jean Nordhaus

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself

Barbara Crooker

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.