Her table is always carefully set. She’s lived solo and eaten meals by herself for decades now, and (I’m pretty sure) never failed to lay down the mat, fold a napkin, and sit down properly, even for lunch. I, on the other hand, stand at the kitchen counter and chow. A nibbler and grazer–I’m a moving muncher, a vertical eater, hold the place mat. Lunch might be cereal (handfuls out of the box, not even poured in a bowl), cheese and crackers on a napkin (or semi-clean dish towel), and an apple, all eaten while sashaying around the kitchen, doing five other things at once.

My mom grew up in a household notorious for its food. My grandmother could fry a chicken, or a peach pie, or a salmon croquet, better than anyone. She was the iron skillet chef, long before Food had its own network and beefy celebs. My mother knew better than to try to compete. She perfected her own sophisticated tastes. Beef bourguignon, sole meuniere, killer collards and roasted chicken with carrots and celery that made the whole house smell heavenly. 

There are many ways to be nourished. I loved the irony: as mom got home from the hospital post-feeding tube procedure, her friends marched in carrying armfuls of food — chicken-spinach lasagne, chicken pot pie, a hefty pound cake glazed like a lemon ice storm. We enjoyed it together, savoring every bite by slow, difficult bite. As the muscles that chew, sip, chug and swallow go on strike, we’ll lean more on more on the slim tube that bypasses taste buds, knows no texture, no color, no sweet juice running down your chin. I have a feeling she’ll still set the table in prep for pouring the fortified creme brulee-looking formula down the tube. Her appetite for elegance demands it.

Stephanie

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From our room in Florence, one year ago, we saw the looming Duomo catch moonlight on its breast, the Palazzo Vecchio rim and ruffle the sky, and the entire Piazza della Signoria spread its ancient carpet of stones beneath us.  Directly below our window, just at the Loggia with its staggering audience of statuary, is the scene of spilled blood and the awakening of Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s Room with a View.  I wanted to be awakened, too.

I was sure we had the best view in town – three high arched windows curtained in gold damask – though I didn’t mean to.  I meant to book a room on a quiet square some blocks away – one that came recommended by a friend.  But when we arrived at that inn, the receptionist’s blank face turned us away, her hands whisking us toward the heart of the city.  I had inadvertently reserved an inn by a very similar name.  The room with a view was a happy surprise.

For six out of seven days it rained.  The museums crammed with treasures we consumed, of course, as well as the mellow earthy fare each night.  But the thing I remember most about that week is the view from my window:  that dark field of wet stones, and popping up across it, bright stemmed flowers of every color:  twirling pinwheels of sheer yellow, tangy orange, red, green, lilac.  Yes, umbrellas purchased from the clever hawkers at every corner looked like spring tulips sprouting over the stems of black boots and trench coats.  Locals blossomed in single stems or pairs; but Japanese tourists en mass were whole bouquets of umbrellas moving in a loosely tossed jumble from site to soggy site.

Art is everywhere.  Museums are nice but not necessary.  All one needs is a window as high and wide as possible through which to view the world.  Even on the dreariest days, gray chilled to the ground, puddled in loss, color rises up.  It appears from every corner, serendipitous, silent, free; awakening those who will to see.

Susan

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No. It is not enough to despise the world.

It is not enough to live one’s life as though

Riches and power were nothings. They are not,

But to grasp the world, to grasp and feel it grow

Great in one’s grasp is likewise not enough.

      The secret is to grasp it, and let it go.

                      ~~ “Secret” by Wang Wei, translated by Graeme Wilson

(discovered in An Almanac for the Soul, by the Iona Center)

Stephanie

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Xemana’s grandfather has been perfecting landscapes in this country for thirty years.  She loves to dance when he comes home at dusk, and to crawl on his lap after dinner and play with his large, strong hands.  They live in the same house; along with her father and her mother, Norma, who works in mine.

Norma began to bring reports each week of Antonio’s falls, his strange weakness, his quietness growing quieter still.  After a lifetime of vigorous long hours of work six days a week, he suddenly couldn’t pick up a bag of fertilizer. He had back surgery, but his back didn’t improve.   Each week, I listened to stories that sounded alarmingly familiar.  Late in his decline, just weeks after I had been stung with my father’s diagnosis, Norma came to my house and showed me a post-it note from his doctor with three long words on it.  They meant nothing to her.  Until I carefully underlined the first letters of each word.  A.L.S.  Like my father.  Then she looked up at me, her face registering each letter like a door closing shut.  We are sisters now, daughters of A.L.S.

After 30 years working with a green card, Antonio had weeks earlier passed his U.S. citizenship test.  After 30 years of sending his paycheck off to support his family in Mexico, he was hopeful, at last, of sending for his wife.  The children were grown; he knew them from his long bus rides home at Christmas, a few summer breaks from his labor.

And now, his wife is here.  She never leaves his sight.  She never leaves the little house they share with Xemana, the life that has shrunk survival-sized.  He cannot take his granddaughter on his knees anymore.  He finds it hard to smile.  He worked a lifetime for a time that will not come.  Xemana dances in his presence.  The household watches, waits, attends.  Norma is carrying a grandson he wants to bless.

Xemana may not remember the lap of her grandfather, the curve of his brown back, his handsome face warmed by the sun.  But the shape of his hands will always hold her heart.  Knowing or not knowing, he will always be the reason for her dancing.

Susan

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Yesterday’s Ash Wednesday service left me somber, tired, and glad that the fire alarm didn’t go off in our 200 year old historic sanctuary. The service culminates with our pastor setting fire to scraps of paper we offer, scribbled with transgressions, sorrows, misdemeanors and the mishmash of “whatever it is we need to leave behind.” For those brief moments of flame and silence (and worrisome smoke), the communion table looked more like a hibachi grill.

We then impose the sign of the cross on our forehead, dipping fingers into the resulting ashes — but I barely made a smudge. I was half-hearted through the whole service, mumbling through the gray hymns.  I’m not ready for the countdown of Lent.  I don’t want to “give anything up.”  Not more than is already being taken, slowly, neuron by neuron, day by day. I want to hold on to things.

Then I stumble on this by Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life. She’s reflecting on the writer’s tendency to horde/save the ripe metaphor, the sleek phrase, the elegant word, for fear if offered, it will be used up, gone for good:

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes,” she writes.

Stephanie

<images in this post, above (Night of Dreams) and to the right (Awaiting Thunder) courtesy of Charleston batik artist Mary Edna Fraser, http://www.maryedna.com&gt;

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In the first year of our courtship, Saint Valentine tripped up our otherwise amorous affair.  I thought you were a feminist and wouldn’t go for any of that, you said, lamely, meaning the scent of lilies opening on my desk or chocolates fed on your fingers.  So that I could inform you that in fact I would go for it all:  revolution and romance, independence and intimacy.   Yes, but for both of us.  Reciprocity, I countered, made it sane.

In the Februarys that followed, we tried to dance in the balance.  Once, I kidnapped you, stole you away to an inn outside town where we walked the chilly rice paddies at dawn and kindled wood fires in our room.  One year, you cooked lobsters and took me dancing in the dining room.  One year, we both made reservations at our favorite Italian hole in the wall without the other knowing:  same time, same place. 

Now fifteen years later, on this feast day of love, far away from you in a land that does not shower itself with rose petals and paper hearts, I want to tell you this:  what I have found in the fire of your heart is more than a revolution, more than romance — though these still burn brightly.  What I have found is love that is real.  Your affection is not merely the bubbly and sweet of holidays; it is the meat and bread I feed upon every day.  The strength with which you love my father, the tenderness with which you care for your own father – this is the table you set before me.  And the presence you bring to our depths — how you lie down with me beside still waters, how you walk with me, yea, through the valley of the shadow of death – this is the cup I drink.  It is overflowing. 

Today, somewhere in India, I will go to a temple of love.  I will anoint my head with oil and give thanks for you.  I will ask for goodness and mercy to walk with us all of the days of our life; that we may dwell in the house of love, real to the ground, forever and ever. 

                                                                                                    Susan

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All week the hint of it hung in the air, or at least on the airwaves. “Snow expected on Friday.” “Winter weather headed this way,” broadcasters claimed.  Yeah right.  DC had been pummeled; Dallas was buried, but snow in Charleston is like sunshine in Seattle. Rare, unlikely, a tease.

Friday was brisk, hovering in the 40s, and slightly gray, and I was brisk and gray with it — skeptical, wearing my less-than-attractive cynicism like an itchy wool scarf around my neck.  When I got a call that school would close an hour early, before it even drizzled, I rolled my eyes.

Oh how nice to be wrong. How lovely to have my snarky disbelief obliterated by frozen flakes of crystal manna. The snow began around 8 p.m.; by 8:30 our roof was covered. By 9 my nine year old was ecstatic, wet, cold, red-cheeked, wired. She played outside till 11 p.m., challenging our 60+year old neighbor, a staid lawyer by day,  to an all-out  snow ball fight. He’d launch one and holler “Incoming…” like he was 12 again.

I forgot how gorgeous a new snowfall is, how the night sky turns florescent, how branches bow down under weight and beauty. How hallowed it is to walk along silent streets, feeling both frisky and snug.  How amazingly the world transforms. And how fleeting it is, which, too, is its magic.

Our first real snow in 10 years is all but gone now, but I am grateful for this early white valentine. For winter’s surprise gift, a reminder that things can change in the blink of snow-damp eyelash, and we weather it with our boots and gloves, lying down, making angels.

Stephanie

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Today, I’ll board a plane; I’ll rise and arc above the Atlantic; I’ll leave my exhausted thoughts in the jet stream; and with the grace of the skies, twenty-seven hours later, I’ll land gently in Mumbai.  It’s a wide span of in-between – a clock ticking off hours and time change, a foggy film of jet lag, a suspension in stale air – but I’m sure the discombobulation is a recent take on an old, essential rite of pilgrimage.  The crucial limenal state of going and coming.  An airborne, encapsulated day yanks me out of gravity’s field, away from habits of seeing, the usual traffic of thinking; it snips away at all I am lashed to, until I arrive, unknowing, in the dark of another place.  Deposited like an egg on a warm, soggy runway, newly hatching, seeing everything as for the first time.

We are always leaving something; or else nothing new can find the dark space in which to surprise us.  Each time I come to the end of a weaving, taking the scissors to the warp makes me anxious.  But I oblige, over and over cutting the threads I have stroked, counted, mended, wound, warped, divided, woven together again.  Because now, they are complete.  This has become a part of my practice of living:  attend to the end.

In my cramped seat, 30,000 feet above sea, through the long black night, my mind will loop back to what it knows – the projects going forward without me, the phone calls I wished I had made, the emails purring for my attention.  Each time, I will snip those threads that hold me to a place I am no longer, one by one, until I am weightless and free.

One day, when the ending is the last and the night is long and dark, I want to remember how to release those threads I have woven, one by lovely one, and fly away.

Susan

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I try for three mornings a week — if the gods of sleep, weather and will-power oblige. The alarm intrudes into my delicious slumber, but I obey, clumsily dress, brush my teeth, and yawn as I drive downtown in the still-dark, to swim. We’re a motley crew gathered poolside, dipping our toes in the water before fully committing. A silver-haired professor (and world record backstroker), a professional harpist who’s conquered the English Channel, Susan’s husband — a lawyer of mighty wingspan, and a mish-mash of us middle-aged athletes hoping the laps will fend off physical demise.

For me these laps are spiritual exercise, too. A baptism with whiffs of chlorine. My body responds to the repetition, stroke by stroke, kick by kick, a mantra in limb and motion. My mind loosens as my muscles warm; my heart splashes and pumps, just as I too, splash and push forth.

I crave this elemental embrace — just skin, water, breath, motion. That’s all. Life stripped to basics. I guess there’s will, too. Or is it surrender? I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it buoys me and I am grateful, despite lost sleep.  I take a quick rest at the wall between sets, and swim some more. Back and forth, 50 meters, 100, going nowhere really, and everywhere.

Stephanie

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 Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said, “Abba Joseph, as much as I am able, I keep the small rule, I fast, I keep vigil, I pray.  What else should I do?”  Abba Joseph then stood up, and stretched his hands up to the heavens, and said, “Why not be turned into fire?”

 I’ve carried this story from the Desert Fathers around with me for twenty-eight years, rutted in memory, held in the heart’s bank.  It forms a point around which I circle – this fire at the center, this Love, yes, Passion, this leaning into Life. This longing to become the fire that I am, we are, that is.  And now, now, having walked around these words my entire adult life, I am ready, or not ready but willing, to walk into them, to cast my fuel into the fire.  I want to burn, to be of use, to kindle and roar. 

 It starts with one step. 

Do not save me.  I want to spend what is mine, prodigal and true.  I want to spend what I have been given so that, at the end, I am cinder and ash.  And I will have done just this:   lit up the days I have been given. 

What else is there to do?

                                                                                                                          Susan

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