January 7, 2021
The sun has just slipped below the bayou brush. Beneath the oak, the sweetgum, hickory and magnolia trees, I have a very small fire smoking beside me in a circle of gray stones. Because of the smoke, so far, the no-see-ums those pesky gnats, haven’t found my ankles. Oops, spoke too soon.
Poking with a stick, I’m trying to burn up a cardboard box, using twigs and small branches gathered in the neighborhood and along the trails while riding my bike today; I filled the wicker basket on the front of the bike until it was lopsided and overflowing, then wobbled back to camp. Now, get a blanket to wrap up my legs. I need a pair of thicker socks or tall leather boots. This navy blue polyester blanket bought for $2.50 at Walmart is one step up from useless and the plastic crocs I wear on my feet, so easy to slip in and out of, have holes all over them, the no-see-ums can get right on through.
Daydreaming, I like to call it woolgathering, maybe in another life I did follow a cattle drive, wore red leather and carried a whip. Or sailed wildly past Patagonia around Cape Horn, clinging to a icy yardarm. Perhaps I crossed the country with the emigrants or lay hidden in the willows while my family was killed, the wickiup destroyed. Like Ulysses we are part of all we have met. And yet.
And yet, here we are, almost one year out in this pandemic, using our quarantined minds to imagine escape, still apart and meeting on zoom. I, by a smoky campfire in Mississippi for some chance reason, and you, where are you? Where is your heart tonight? Who sits with you in the cold? Oh, may the coals of love warm you and keep the fire in you still aglow. We will meet again, we will hold one another, close, again.
To tough it out, I sign up to camp here in this southern woodsy park for couple of months, self- contained, to write, think, day dream. I read through old travel journals and notes looking for threads to see if I can weave pieces together into some sort of coherent whole. Once I tried writing fiction, that was a flop. If only what went on yesterday at the Capitol were fiction. Made up stories, endless lies propelled such madness, took our breath away. How can we grasp what went on yesterday, the weeks since November 3rd, let alone the last four years and in particular, this whole last year, 2020?
Since I left home October 21st, I’ve been in a protected bubble. All has been smooth, even the three cold nights in a freaky blizzard in Parachute, Colorado, safely off the highway I found warmth. Too many jackets were in my cupboard, it never occurred to me I’d need to wear them all at the same time. It would have been better to have left Washington state earlier in the season, but a friend was dying, I needed to stay; he had been ill with pancreatic cancer for the past year and we’d spent a lot of time together, sharing meals, stories, doing puzzles. He and his wife, good friends for thirty years, asked me to stay, speak at the memorial. I hated to leave her then, but we each must journey out, our grief, the warp and weft of our lives, try to make sense of it as best we can. She said to me on the phone the other day, “Just stay where you are, be safe.”
“I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through,” those words were so hard to say, for her daughter has cancer as well.
We want to dream ourselves far away; that the comforts and fears, kindness and cruelties of our lives will wrap us whole as if in a woolen blanket of soft love, or like downy feathers slip into
our pain and give us ease. This is my life, this is our life, our living that together we can grow and find healing and joy. We have been stretched, let us keep open the doors.
There will always be no-see-ums, they get in even with screens, those tiny gnats that prick and nettle us, itch us in our night’s dark awakening reminding us we are not perfect, not yet whole, we aren’t done yet, still simmering in the smoky juices of hopes and fears and loss we try to make sense of who we are, as individuals, families, community, and yes, as a country. The age old questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? flick by our consciousness like small leathery oak leaves dropping in the dusty breeze, piling up around us, whipped into a carpet of mother nature’s enduring song. I can’t tell you who God is, but I do know Mother Earth. She celebrates every day and we, we must listen to her wisdom.
Leave the Door Open
Be it wide, a crack, a sliver, an abyss,
A canyon, a wash, a gully, or a bowl.
Keep it open.
Let the paper thin breath flow,
You never know.
This is what I want to tell you
You, lying in that hospital bed,
You wired to beats and beeps,
Once red headed, curious,
Lithe, winsome, you angry, sweet one
Taught me the language of salmonberries
And salt, swans and birdsong.
You set the course for fifty years of my life
Here in the wet, by the channel, gray
Smoky days of doubt and winter wonder
I moved sleepwalking through the cedars,
And the grassy marsh.
Annie Dilliard said, With every step I take
I feel the planet’s roundness.
(She was a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.)
At every step I took the water sloshed cold
Into my green rubber boots.
Birds were my refuge and the tiniest buds:
Red elderberry, white osoberry,
Oh, bury my heart
In the pink of spring rhododendron
Until I, a pilgrim, too, woke.
This, I want to say,
Is the recurring enduring story
Love, jealousy, betrayal….
The pillars of opera hold us all
In thrall
From the first beginning.
But you helped me learn to live,
Now I will help you learn to die, so gentle.
And in the meantime,
Welcome back, a sip of soup?
Here, here’s the bowl,
I see the glimmer in your eye.
You’ll get well yet,
And the door? It is still open.
With thanks to editors, Jill Johnson and Megan Rosenfeld who point out that woolgathering is an expression from the book, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
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