SHOULD, OR OUGHT TO?

Having turned seventy, I began this blog: Thoughtsafterseventy.com, as a platform for examining how life might evolve as a septuagenarian.  Without feeling much different, I am now an octogenarian, so let’s see what changed after that 80th celebration.  More things are shedding from my life’s work.  It occurs to me that with time I still manage to fill easily, I am less driven by things I SHOULD do.  You know, those obligations that affirm we are good people, still contributing in a positive way to the world in whose cart we are riding. 

Eager to write a blog about SHOULD, I recalled a favorite poem by Robert Frost  —The Runaway.  The poem describes a scene where the poet happens across a field surrounded by a stone wall.  In the field, a young colt races anxiously.  No parent horse is within view.  The poet muses that the colt is not having a good time of it but is afraid of snow that has begun to fall heavily.  I planned to quote the last line where I recalled the poet saying “Someone should come and take him in.”  However, when I looked up the poem, it ends: “ Whoever it is that leaves him out so late, / when other creatures have gone to stall and bin, / ought to be told to come and take him in.”  Frost did not write should; he wrote ought to.

I have been using should, for obligation; whereas, ought is what I meant.  Should, I learned from Merriam Webster, is used in auxiliary function to express condition and means predictable such as clouds indicate that it should rain.  Granted, Mr. Webster allows that should may also be used for obligation. Yet ought to is clearly the phrase for duty.

                  At eighty years, there are fewer things I ought to do.  Decades ago there were many oughts having to do with a work life of lesson plans and paper grading. With fewer remaining years, there are more choices.  Ought I attend church?  Answer an email?  Make a lunch date? Clean the basement? As those oughts emerge now, I find myself asking, “But do I want to?”  If I don’t want the task, it feels easier to let it go.  The food in the basement freezer, therefore, should be just fine – or not.  Care comes more frequently to mind. For what do I feel care?  I care about the public library, and so I continue to donate this year.  In past years, I donated to some causes for which I had less care, but ought to drove me reluctantly to take out the checkbook. 

                  According to actuarial estimates by a health insurance company, I should live into my 90’s, perhaps even to 100.  Do I want to?  And under what conditions do I want to proceed through the next one or two decades?  I like taking moments to savor those years, to shape a caring life less directed by custom and perceived obligations. It feels liberating to cut those obligatory ropes. I am going for pleasure.

What gives me pleasure? Yesterday, we attended a celebratory showing of a young friend’s film she created for her graduation project from NYU where she had majored in film.  We usually go to our Hood Canal cottage on weekends, but my delight in celebrating with Natalie was a happier choice. Auditing classes at the university also brings me closer to young adults.  Both my husband and I are often smiling, noticing toddlers on the ferry.  I have taken to complimenting dog walkers in the neighborhood on how handsome or well-groomed their pets are.  It is as if young life everywhere lifts my spirits.

                  This Sunday morning in May there are flower and vegetable beds ready for seeds.  The thick grass needs mowing.  Hummingbirds compete in a whir of activity around the red feeder half-full of sugar water.  It is rather cold and raining.  Charcoal clouds hang over the yard.  Rainwater on the deck reflects the lilac bush hanging low with moisture.  I may remain in bed, admiring the morning light on rain-polished leaves.  The weather forecast predicts there should be warm sunny days by Tuesday, then, perhaps, my day for planting.  

COLLECTING PHRASES

                  Speaking with my older brother last week, he offered me, “Father winds the clock.”  The phrase set him thinking, and since his sharing it with me, the phrase is following me around like a dust mote that could be brushed off my shoulder if I would take the time.  Then last weekend when my grandson was visiting from college for spring break, we got to discussing movies.  I opined that I liked mysteries, more or less, sometimes less “more” than other times depending on the plot.  He laughed at more or less, took out his cell phone and wrote down the phrase in his Notes app.  In that app are hundreds of phrases that have intrigued him and for which he may someday find use, such as in naming a film script he is writing.

                  Words and phrases invade me like the body snatchers, a rather gruesome analogy, because they aren’t all creepy.  However, they are possessive of my conscious moments. Take Father winds the clock. I suspect Jim liked that as I do because it got him to thinking of the various roles we assume in a domestic household, roles that somewhat define character.  Few people have wind-up clocks anymore, a shame, because time is a patron saint of our lives.  To have to wind a clock keeps us mindful of the days ticking by.  In the phrase my brother loves, it also defines the role of a parent in a family, in this case a rather patriarchal role.  Father gains importance because of his role in winding the clock.  The clock becomes a symbol of Father’s purpose as caregiver, keeper of time.  In my 80th year, the phrase also triggers my image of a father dying and the clock silenced lacking his precise movement of the hands.  What a profound silence such death is.  For a moment, Time Stops.

                  Even time stops is one of those haunting phrases, particularly because it is antithetical to the truth.  Time never stops, regardless of any person or device marking its movement.  Never was I more aware of time’s progression than when my own father died.  The following day, I was running the track above the basketball court at the Washington Athletic Club.  Below me, a group of young men dribbled a basketball up and down the court.  Outside the open window, I heard traffic on 6th Avenue as people commuted to morning jobs.  Both activities felt like blasphemy.  How could the world march on when my father was no longer in that world?  Ironic, for with that very thought, I was running laps on that track.  Time does not stop.

                  What phrases are tucked in your pockets?  Do they astound you, arriving when you weren’t expecting, or are they phrases that remain with you for decades?  Perhaps they are the axioms of parenting:  Think before you speak, The early bird gets the worm.  Once you have become a parent, you polish those phrases off and pass them on to your offspring. If you have a wordsmith child, you may hear back, “But I am not a bird, and I don’t eat worms.”  As to thinking before speaking, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?  Oops there goes another one.  I like hearing new parenting phrases emerge, one in particular: Use your words. I didn’t have that phrase when I was raising my daughter, so when there were angry gestures, I resorted to physical responses, sometimes almost as physical as her tantrums.   Use your words suggests that the anger may be justified, but there is a more reasonable way to express it.  That said, my daughter was quite vociferous, and her words could have the force of a kick in the shin.

                  Some phrases are place specific.  Your familiarity with a locale goes along with your familiarity of place-specific phrases.  My friend Kristin, sent me a blog by David B. Williams in which he shares the linguistic history of words and phrases particular to Seattle.*  I was eager to add my own to his research (Montlake Cut, CHOP, Pill Hill, The C.D.)  My little collection reveals the years I have lived on Capitol Hill.

                  If you are a visual person, phrase collecting evokes many colorful images, and if you allow yourself time to visualize them, there is a chuckle for many are outrageous metaphors: sick as a dog, down in the dumps, high as a kite. Is an ill dog any more under the weather than your choking cat?  Who first imagined an intoxicated person as being high, and then up in the sky, making loops in the wind?  Down in the dumps makes perfect sense if you have ever held your nose while driving by a city landfill.

                  I look forward to the day when an imaginative linguist can find substitutes for empty phrases, especially phrases used when we really want to communicate feeling.  Our thoughts and prayers go with you is one of the most vacuous.  There is another school shooting, and the politicians bring out that phrase when grieving families want their children back.  I try to imagine those politicians on their knees that night saying their prayers and speaking the names of those lost. Yet, I also have sat with pen in hand, an open card before me, truly hoping to offer comfort when there has been a loss.  What comes to mind?  That same phrase, when I long for fresh phrases. 

_______________________________________________

AWE

                                                                         

                                              It is not as important to know as to feel.

                                                                            Rachel Carson

                  We enjoy an annual two weeks on the island of Maui, same time of year, same location, even familiar faces on the beach. I have given up fantasies of climbing Mt. Everest or photographing penguins at the South Pole.  Kahana Sunset, on the north shore of Maui, is my vacation destination.

                  Mornings, before the sun is too hot, I set out for a long walk along the Honoapiilani Road –north one day, south the other. Some mornings I am kept company by an audible book, and this, trip against a backdrop of crashing waves, I am listening to The Power of Wonder by Monica C. Parker.  In the book, she sites social scientists and medical experts to define Wonder and then argues how living with Wonder one’s life is not only enriched but extended. Having recently passed my 80th birthday, I can’t think of a better time of life to visit what space I have for Wonder.  Is there anything new under the sun?  Does a Taylor Swift concert make me drop my jaw in amazement?  I had a Presley, then Beetles youth – Elvis held my hand when I was thirteen.  I have “been there / done that.”  Nonetheless I too want to experience Wonder and foster the habits that might refresh Awe, if not in something brand new, then in experiences renewed. 

                  Wonder, awe, surprise, amazement are often used interchangeably, but what they have in common is a felt experience not expected, an experience that stops our quotidian existence to express, “Whoa. What’s That?”  It is a pause that can be minute or monumental, a comma or stanza break in our narrative. Here are my Awe-some moments of recent Maui days.  There is that beautiful sunset – every day so far. Coming from cold, rainy Seattle, how can I not Wonder at such beauty?  Looking up from my beach book this morning, I spot a companion — a slender arched gecko poised as a sculpture on the tree trunk beside me. It surprised me, and I tingled with glee as I pulled out my cell phone to capture its pose. 

                  On my walk, white wings flew into sight – a graceful egret lit on an adjacent shrub.  it paced as gracefully as a back-home heron walks on tidal flats.  I stopped walking to examine its movement.  A wave-like thing itself, the bird seemed to flick forward then back, its body undulating in grace.  Until it stopped, a sudden arrest, its beak thrust into the hedge and returned erect again, a small gecko its flailing victim.  Yes, everything must eat.  Nonetheless, I had two awesome sightings in a day, and one ate the other!

                  I returned to questioning the values of Wonder.  Do we need new experiences to awake us to wonder, and is that the value of travel so we can see the flora and fauna of places unlike home?  Surely those summer sunsets over the snow-peaked Olympics are as beautiful.  From my Hood Canal home I have watched eagles swoop down to Quilcene Bay to fetch a flashing salmon as large as the eagle itself before bringing the meal to a stick-built nest high on top of a Douglas fir.   

                  Monica Parker argues that we must be open to Wonder, for Awe doesn’t fall on closed senses.  When we take adventures we open the doors, we expect surprise.  We pay for surprise.  I wish I could share one of my most memorable photos taken about forty years ago.  The second day of a European trip, we are in Amsterdam with our daughter, then a teenager, who did not want to go with us.  She begged to stay at home so she would not miss out on a few weeks’ summer fun with friends. In the photo, our daughter slumps on a museum bench, legs wide, elbows on knees, cheeks buried in her clenched fists.  Behind her looms the original Van Gogh Sunflowers. She had closed the wonder door.  To be fair, as an adult mom she organized yearly vacations on this continent and beyond so her children, now in their twenties, seek out the wonders of art, music, and travel.

                  Even at eighty, open to learning goes on.  I am among a generation that is making popular neologisms such as Lifelong Learners, acknowledging that folks well past their school years are seeking ways to learn.  Wonder is a fundamental requirement for learning.  After being surprised into a Wow moment having watched a whale breach the waters on the horizon, I am eager to learn more about this annual migration.  I can be an autodidact (one of my favorite words),and hurry my walk back to the condo to do an internet search about whales offshore in Maui. I find many up-close photos of whales and their calves along with explanations of the entire migration, so that my next Wonder moment with these magnificent mammals will fill with educated Awe, like getting the whole cake with the frosting.

                  I will go so far to say that Wonder is contagious.  I recall my days teaching high school English.  After many years teaching required novels, it was hard to find something new in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, yet I wanted my students to be engrossed in this pivotal American masterpiece.  Did the fault lie in my inability to ignite my own Wonder year after year?  When I finally adopted  Toni Morrison’s Beloved and taught it to my senior English students, I had more questions than answers.  So much I admired in the book but didn’t completely understand.  The students sensed my questioning engagement.  Teaching that novel was one of the most successful of my career.  I didn’t feel as if I was teaching so much as learning in community with my students. Morrison’s book instilled me with a wonder my students joined.

                  I am barely scratching the surface of Awe and Wonder as I share with you my photos and positive experiences of opening up to the surprising and often unknowable natural world.  Yet today I return to my piece after a conversation with a local Hawaiian who survived the recent, devastating Lahaina fire.  Her condo in a compound of condos was saved.  Her neighbor’s unit was destroyed.  The ravishing fires took lives and homes and streets of one of the most historic towns in the state.  “I never knew fire could move so fast, or snatch one place and not another,” she explained.”  For her it remains a memory of Awe and Wonder.  Just as we were finishing our conversation, the afternoon wind picked up, blowing our hair, making helicopters of dropped leaves around us.  “The wind frightens me,” she said.  “It was windy when the fires started.  I never imagined such wind.”







	


	





	

		
		
WITHOUT
	


	
	
	

		











Walking in January, I praise what is absent.  Usually lined with sweet gum trees — a canopy of broad green leaves in summer, large golden leaves in autumn–in January not a stubborn leaf remains on a tree.   It is as if this part of Capitol Hill did a thorough house cleaning, stripping each tree, but for the brownish gray branches.  They reach outwards and upwards, a tangle of geometric limbs, reminding me of Nature’s architecture.  Each limb seems to have purpose as a balance for another on the other side, or an extension from which thinner branches reach out like tendrils to the sun.  Rather than admire a shower of leaves, I note the rounded burls up the trunk, like moss-covered hats.  Thick moss paints itself between heavy limbs that decided to make their own way from a massive trunk.  On this twenty-seven-degree day, surely insects must snuggle in the soft moss.  Grateful for the absence of leaves, I see high in some trees, baskets of crazily assembled twigs and grasses.  Perhaps they are nests for squirrels cleverly camouflaged in other seasons, but out there now vulnerable to winter’s wind.










In the absence of abundance, I look for things to note, as if I were in a museum where the major exhibition is closed, and so I take time to view a few treasures I had ignored on other visits.  Last week, a wooded walk on Hood Canal revealed a giant stuffed bear attached to a tree.   This morning, it is the angle of the sun on my neighbor’s door.  Although the solstice has passed, and each day may be a bit longer, it is as if the sun barely creeps over the horizon, casting long shadows even at 11:00 AM.  Today the light captured my neighbor’s front door where a Christmas wreath still hangs, a deep black-green circle with a velvet red bow.  Shadows from surrounding leafless trees dance around the wreath.










Granted this is a sunny day, uncommon in the Pacific Northwest winter, so sun and shadows grab my attention.  But rain or shine, there is interesting stuff dropped on parking strips and sidewalks.  A gigantic pine tree on the corner drops pinecones as large as ten inches long and three inches wide.  They lie atop a bed of thin dry needles.  Surely they would be a treasure if I imagined a creative use for them.  A friend celebrated Christmas by gathering large cones and stuffing them with suet and peanut butter, then hanging the cones around a park adjacent to her home.  She said her project was her gift to the many birds that winter-over in the woods. 










Walking through Volunteer Park, I note park benches and picnic tables without people enjoying them.  In summer they would be full.  There is something poignant about an empty park bench.  Is it waiting to be occupied?  Does it hold a memory of a couple resting there in June, holding hands, planning their future together?  And the playground, too cold for children today.  Iron poles chill a child’s hands.  I recall those warnings we shared in childhood about not putting your tongue on a frozen iron pole, then daring a kid to do it, but fearing consequences if the child accepts the dare.  The playground also remains in Waiting mode. 





Perhaps it is waiting that defines January.  There is no definitive Christmas on the horizon.  Even spring is far off, so waiting becomes waiting for what?  Yesterday my mailbox had three seed catalogs, each with a colorful cover of abundance:  golden carrots, blushing tomatoes, leafy lettuce.  If I fill out the order sheet, will my garden be ready any sooner? In my backyard,  I walk past raised beds where today skeletons of  tomato and pepper plants droop, bowing in submission to the freeze.  There too, a kind of beauty in the plants without fruit.  





At noon, I took a walk with my grandson to have a good, long visit before he returns to New York after his semester break.  As we walked along Prospect Street, an historic avenue of old Seattle wealth and mature maples, I shared with him my attraction to leafless trees. “Sure, Nana,” he agreed.  I have a leafless tree outside my New York apartment.  I love it in November when the last leaves drop.  Inside, I have more light.”  That’s it!  In a month when daylight only lasts seven or eight hours at best, we can feel as if we are deprived.  Yet a tree’s bare branches let the light shine through.






	


	





	

		
		
WHAT DO I NEED FOR CHRISTMAS?
	


	
	
	

		


Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC




Growing up listening to Sunday sermons, not a year passed without the sermon whose message was, “It is more blessed to give than receive.”  I got it.  Be generous.  There are so many people less fortunate than you. God will smile  upon your giving with grace.





Then one Sunday, Dr Dale Turner’s sermon was “It is As Blessed to Receive as to Give.”  His sermon opened a window to the welcome light of being a gracious receiver.  He reframed that common phrase: “Oh really you shouldn’t have!” when someone brings us a gift. To say someone should not have given a gift diminishes the one making the gift.  Why?  Because in making a gift, the giver has invested thought, perhaps even love.  Expressing joy, gratitude, or surprise in receiving that gift, you are returning a spiritual gift-in-kind. “Your gift matters, and you also matter.”










I am going back here many decades, when living in an apartment house with a central courtyard. One Mother’s Day the young moms were sharing social time in that courtyard when five-year-old Kimmie handed her mother a small African violet.  “Oh darn,” her mom said, “one more plant I need to water.”  I still vividly see Kimmie’s injured look.  Likely with no bad intentions, her mom was being witty for the other moms present but disrespecting her child’s gift.





Christmas morning, we gather around the living room, tree lit, fireplace aglow while our three grandchildren distribute gifts they have purchased or made for us.  When Max brings me his present wrapped creatively in newsprint or finger-painted paper, he seems to hold his breath while I remove abundant cellophane tape and open the package.  After my joyful hug of appreciation, he exhales as if he were swimming underwater until he could experience my reaction.










Each fall, when relatives ask what we would like for Christmas, we say, “We don’t need a thing,” and that is true.  I imagine one more kitchen device I have no room to store, and I beg off with “Let’s just send consumables this year.”  I make raspberry jam to send and await my sister-in-law’s Ukrainian cookies.  One step from there is “Let’s just do cards this year.”  Both sides agree.  Then a week before Christmas, a beautifully wrapped box arrives from my brother and sister-in-law with a card that reads. “a gift for the cook.”





I feel bad, because I had sent only jars of homemade strawberry jam.  What happened to our agreement for only consumables? To relieve my feelings of remorse, I head for the computer, go online and order something in return, hoping it will arrive before Christmas. I look for something I think my sister-in-law will enjoy and may not already own.  I am happy when I think I found a good gift.  It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to conclude that my actions may be less about a gift for my sister-in-law than a way to relieve the guilt I feel for sending only jam.  Surely it was her opportunity to give that matters– a pleasure for her that I might receive with gratitude.










After all, what is a gift but a way to connect?  Each year, my husband makes a beautiful art card, a watercolor scene.  I pair it with a poem.  We have lived so long that our card list is quite long.  I joke that the only way one can get off our mailing list is to die.  Now at eighty-years-old, I feel the ironic twist.  The list is shrinking. Many of those  to whom we send the cards do not mail holiday cards.  Surely we enjoy the cards we receive, but our receiving cards does not affect our sending the cards out.  We devote a whole day to the mailing, and as each name emerges, we have a minute to think about those people, bringing back memories that might not have emerged had we not sat there sending out our little gift.  Who is giving this present?  Who is receiving the gift?

	


	





	

		
		
TOOLS
	


	
	
	

		











            Hanging on a leather strip from a nail on the greenhouse wall is a hand spade, its handle wood, its blade a fierce copper designed to uproot the most determined weed. Rewarding my passion for gardening, my brother gave it to me for my birthday.  The spade is a more sophisticated tool than I would have purchased for myself, and so I wrote him a thank-you poem, which he, in turn fashioned on a wood slab to hang alongside his gift. How often tools bring us together.










             In a tidily organized drawer in the garage, my husband stores his father’s tools: a skill hand drill, several wood planes and specialty hand saws.  His father was a finished carpenter whose tools have long since been improved on by technology.  Nevertheless, my husband stores those tools with the same reverence he has for any memento of his father’s life.





His dad’s lessons endure in the storage shed adjacent to the greenhouse where my husband has affixed wooden pegs in measured spaces one from the other to line up all sorts of gardening implements: hedge clippers, shovels, rakes, each in its place.  When my sister-in-law visited and spied what her brother had organized, she laughed out loud at the reincarnation of their father’s devotion to his tools.  Like father, like son, you might conclude, but surely no different than my daily use of a small cutting board once belonging to my mom.  Why have I not replaced it with a larger one?  You know why.










            Tools are extensions of ourselves – the paintbrush to Monet, the baton to Leonard Bernstein.  Tools can be the measurement of our lives.  The artist, Jacob Lawrence, was not a builder, but his paintings and prints are full of tools — tools, hanging, tools overflowing in drawers.  We are fortunate to own a self-portrait Lawrence drew of himself in the later years of his life.  In the portrait, he sits before an open window in his Seattle studio surrounded by tools.  In his hand he holds a plumb line up to the window while looking over his shoulder at Harlem from which he came.  A plumb line is an essential tool for a builder because it works with gravity to assure things are aligned.  Is Jacob Lawrence reflecting on the journey of his life, looking back to see if his course has been true?  As a symbol of measurement, the plumb line occurs more than once in the Bible.  In the book of Amos, the Lord explains his judgement to Amos: “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel: I will spare them no longer.” (Amos 7: 7-8)










            Although we most often think of tools as creative instruments, the Smithsonian Institute has an exhibition of Civil War weapons it calls The Tools of War.   The Bible has much to say about those tools as well.  In Micah 4:3, it is written, “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  Even as I copy this quotation, my mind moves to the Middle East and to Ukraine.  What more can I say that is not already in our hearts?  Here is a photo of a sculpture in the garden of the United Nations, a work of art by Yevgeny Vuchetich, a 1959 gift of the Soviet Union to the United Nations.  The title is: Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares. Surely ironic today.





            The poet, Robert Frost, was always ready to see cruel ironies: 





 Objection to Being Stepped on:





At the end of the row 
I stepped on the toe 
Of an unemployed hoe. 
It rose in offense 
And struck me a blow 
In the seat of my sense. 
It wasn’t to blame 
But I called it a name. 
And I must say it dealt 
Me a blow that I felt 
Like a malice prepense. 
You may call me a fool, 
But was there a rule 
The weapon should be 
Turned into a tool? 
And what do we see? 
The first tool I step on 
Turned into a weapon.






	


	





	

		
		
COOKIE CONNECTION
	


	
	
	

		






My friend, Shemaiah Gonzalez writes a Substack blog Undaunted Joy wherein she writes about the many blessings of life.  Recently she wrote about the pleasures of food, especially the way that food brings people together in community.  Inviting her readers to reflect on how food connects them with others, I thought of a food memory that transcends a hundred years.





I am steeped in British landscapes and literature, so when our family planned a vacation in Great Britain years ago, the Lake District rose immediately as our desired destination.  Wordsworth, Coleridge, even Beatrix Potter would await me among fields of daffodils overrun with charming bunnies.  The tourist brochures reinforced my imagination illustrating landscapes bathed in sunshine, broken only by a few errant clouds that gave dimension to the sheep-dotted rolling hills between iconic lakes.  Photos and walking maps depicted happy hikers taking the entire route on foot, no doubt stopping on the way at cozy pubs.  We arrived there on an August day that felt like November in Seattle.  Rain fell relentlessly.  I had been unable to persuade my husband and daughter to tour the Lakes on foot, but we passed clumps of tourists who did, easily recognized by their heavy slickers glowing with water, their walking maps encased in plastic folders dripping from chains around their necks.










“There you are,” my husband teased as he spotted one soaked woman emptying her boots by the front door of a pastry shop.  But the pastry shop!  I wanted to stop there, having noticed its sign that read “Authentic English Shortbread.” 





“Stop!” I begged, “Let’s go in and get some,” But my husband was trying to negotiate a roundabout, and so held me off with a promise to return before we left the area the next day. He forgot, and I forgot to remind him as we headed south to Northumberland.  I could only sulk alongside him.  Once in a village near Robin Hood’s woods, my husband entered a bakery and returned with two large cookies, hoping to soothe my spirit. 










“These won’t be the same,” I complained, while reluctantly taking a bite out of the large, rather plain cookie.  And it wasn’t likely the same cookie we missed buying in Windermere.  It was, however, identical in size, weight and flavor to my Grandma Cartwright’s cookie, her only cookie she baked on her wood stove, every summer we visited her modest Wisconsin farm.  The sun came out as I looked up the cobblestone street to other shops in the English village.  I felt as if I had been there a hundred years before.  My ancestors emigrated from England in the 1800’s, and at the moment of that cookie bite, I felt I was, in a way, returning home. Connection!  Perhaps some Italian-American immigrants feel a kindred spirit when they taste a marinara sauce in the Tuscan Hills, or an Irish immigrant visits Dublin and savors stout.  I am not suggesting that cookie recipe was passed down mother-to-daughter for over a hundred years.










I still have my mother’s cookbooks on my kitchen shelf.  There in a scuffed three-ring notebook, my mother hand copied recipes from gelatin salads to tuna casseroles.  I rarely recreate one of those recipes, but I love reading them, all in my mother’s characteristic penmanship.  To see her handwriting is to see her.  Now that recipes are flashed by email, my daughter will not have a favorite dish described in her mother’s script.  But I do, and when I turned to the cookie section, there I found the recipe spotted with drips of what must be molasses.  (Favorite recipes all had splatters of ingredients on the pages).  In the upper right-hand corner, Mom wrote the name of the person who provided recipes –Mrs. Cooper, or Hilda Deck. On this cookie recipe I felt a solid connection with my mother and my grandmother for on the top right-hand corner, I see “Mama.”






	


	





	

		
		
RATS
	


	
	
	

		






Nothing evokes terror quite like RATS – except decaying rats – especially having been trapped, when they decompose beneath the floorboards under your bed.   The foundation of our Quilcene cottage rests on stilts and beams, a short hundred feet from shoreline, so vulnerable to wildlife shinnying up the posts to seek a home in our home.  Mid-August presages winter for all of them, consequently we are accustomed to spotting spiders emerging from kitchen sink drains, or signs of mice who scrounged insulation for nests beneath the range.  Our visiting granddaughter, sleeping upstairs in the loft, alerted us that mice raced through the walls behind her bed during the night: “I live in Brooklyn, Nana, so I know the sound of scampering mice.”










            Allan fetched traps from the garage that he strategically placed in the kitchen, bedrooms, and two out-buildings (garage and studio). The very next day two mice bit the peanut, then bit the dust in the garage.  He set a larger rat trap in the closet by our bed, a small door within the closet opening to access plumbing and, by extension, the underflooring of our cottage set on stilts.  










            This weekend, we returned not to that trap wrested from its perch but to a smothering stench sifting through our bedroom.  No trap, no rat within reach.  After midnight, donning rubber gloves and aiming a flashlight, Allan plunged through the door opening to the floorboards, and grasped the corpse of an eight-inch rat (sans tail).  Under a full moon, he tossed the rat over the front fence where incoming tides will carry it to rat heaven.





            Despite a sleep deprived night, I awoke today dismissing the stench and considering why I am predisposed to despise rats. Without them, where would medical advances be?  Then the beloved literature of my childhood – Ratty, the most intelligent, compassionate creature in Wind in the Willows? Not to exclude Ratatouille, a Pixar heart stealer.






FF98Y1 ‘WIND IN THE WILLOWS’. /nWater Rat & Sea Rat: drawing by Paul Bransom from 1st edition, 1908, of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows.




            When I served as a child advocate for foster children, nine-year-old Colin was found by CPS surviving under a Seattle bridge.  Having escaped an abusive home, he lived day-to-day on his own wits, both ill and hungry. His anger and fear affected his behavior, so he was transferred from one foster placement to another for four years before the perfect patient and wise couple from NY State invited him to their home. In one foster placement, Colin was allowed a pet.  He chose a rat whom he adored.  On my visits I would find him curled on an overstuffed couch, his arm stretched out so his pet rat could scamper up to nestle by his cheek.  It is no accident that Colin identified with a creature known to be lowly and despised.





            Before breakfast, I put away my rodent reflections to check my email.  I had been sent a blog post from a writer from Mississippi, a writer whose name slumbered in my memory. Rather than immediately read it or delete it, I rested on “Mississippi.”  Why would I read something from a Mississippian who probably has a far-right scree to send?  It is a state whose schools are historically inferior, that bans abortion rights, a state that voted for Donald Trump with 57.8% of the votes in 2016. No rat in my meditation, but I had been invaded with that predisposition to judge.  Luckily, I set it aside, clicked on the blog post and enjoyed an insightful essay about poetry, memoir and location by Beth Ann Fennelly, a poet whose poem I had copied one month for the poetry box.  My request for her permission put me on her mailing list. Her writing felt like a gift.  What a creative start to my day.






	


	





	

		
		
UNHURRIED
	


	
	
	

		











     Thursday mornings, I walk down the east side of Capitol Hill for my 8:00 AM piano lesson with Peter Mack, my teacher and friend, who lives in a Tudor home set amidst a lush garden that backs up on the UW Arboretum.   Walking to Peter’s, I pass a residence hidden behind a thick hedge into which is erected a roughly weathered poster-board with a sign: Please Post Here Poems, Scribbles, or What You Will For Unhurried Passersby.  What little is posted there is brief and weather-worn, suggesting whoever tacked it with the available tacks has long since gone their way.  I learned from Peter that the homeowner is Paul, an elderly (my age) gentleman  long retired.  I could have guessed it from other monuments on his parking strip. Hanging from each of two trees: a rusty lawnmower and a flat-tire bicycle.  Both are clearly out of commission.  The passersby may be hurried, but surely Paul has seized full leisure.










     To a writer, there is something beseechingly abandoned about a blank surface inviting messages. I feel called to post a poem, much as a graffiti artist is summoned by a blank wall.  Now, a one-time inclination has morphed into an obsessive commitment.  For months, every Wednesday evening, in addition to practicing my piano piece for Thursday morning, I also write a poem to post on my way to or from my lesson.  With each posting, I would take down the poem from the prior week and toss it into the recycle bin always sitting on the parking strip.  That is, I did that UNTIL I met Paul walking out of his gate while I was pushing the fourth thumbtack on my new poem.  He thanked me for posting the poems but continued to scold me for taking them down.  That was HIS job. Besides, I sometimes removed them before he had a chance to read them.  Surely this man is unhurried. After his admonition, I left the poems in place until the entire board was wallpapered with poems by Mary Kollar.  Enough!  Today, I removed them all, stacking them like a deck of cards one on top of the other and returned them in one corner with one nail at the bottom of the board.  Only today’s poem remains dead center.










     I have a little contest of wills with Paul.  Who is in a hurry to write, to read, to take down what is posted?  I am the one usually in a hurry, walking crisply up and down the hill, looking straight ahead or a short distance ahead so I don’t fall.  I must have walked beneath that hanging rusted bike and lawnmower for weeks before I noticed them.  Today, I decided to slow down, take longer to get home, enjoy the sun shining warmly on my shoulders – the unhurried passerby.  Up the steep hill home, I stopped for coffee that I sipped on a picnic table outside the Volunteer Park Café.  I wrote in my journal about the puffy haired spaniel leashed to the table where I sat.  I was alone and yet somehow with the other outside patrons and their dogs.





     Continuing on up the steep hill, I passed a dense and colorful ribbon of orange California poppies mixed with tall daisies thriving in a narrow strip between sidewalk and property fence.  Two fat bumblebees worked away at the center of an orange flower.  I focused my I-phone camera on their buzzing, while thinking, “Who plants such a bevy of flowers OUTSIDE their backyard fence?  Only someone who wants to share with passersby, not to hoard beauty where only they could see them. “










     My stopping to focus the camera blocked the sidewalk from two young women pushing a stroller with three toddlers inside. “Oh my!” I gasped.  “A three-seater cruiser.”  The women laughed, and a child slid from his seat to hold the woman’s hand. He complained of sticky fingers she explained to him came from the pine tree he had climbed in the park.  I imagined his fingers in mine, having taken my grandson to that same park two decades ago.  Three children, two women and I felt like a spontaneous community.





     Spontaneous Communities:  How often do we create them at bus stops or check-out lines in a grocery store?   It occurs to me that Paul’s sign is not about slowing down so much as connecting with each other.  Easier perhaps, at a slower pace, but possible within an imagined reach.

	


	





	

		
		
FINDING OURSELVES IN TIME
	


	
	
	

		











Shortly after my 70th birthday, I began my infrequent blog — https://thoughtsafterseventy.com or Mary’s Room With a View.   My mind has always brimmed with thoughts, each new one elbowing aside the one before it.  I needed a blog, like a hope chest, to drop them in, and, like a hope chest, with a plan that at some future date I would find those thoughts useful, perhaps for self-knowledge.   That metaphor makes me chuckle: Do any of my readers know what a Hope Chest is/was? Footnote: A Hope Chest serves as storage for a young woman, a place where she places linens, housewares, items she would want when she marries.  The underlying motif stands that all young women live on the hope of a married life in which they play the role of homemaker, so good to be prepared, to look ahead with hope.










Age seventy felt like the summit from which one enjoys a view of life lived.  Having climbed the steep grade of decades, I could look down and around, reflect on my ascent and offer a panorama to readers.  After all, my husband once jokingly told a friend, “I married Mary for her opinions.”  For my looks, my intelligence, even for my apple pies would be more welcomed.  In four weeks, I will reach eighty, an age of Acceptance.  Yes, I am opinionated.










Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her podcast Wiser Than Me, suggests that those of us over seventy should look back to our earliest memories, walking forward with them so we might value our life’s challenges and rewards.  Two crates of daily journals, and I rarely devote an hour for rereading.  Too busy with “what’s next?”  And if I did return my attention to the first two decades, I believe my journal entries would all long for the future:  How long until I’m sixteen so I can drive, seventeen so I can graduate high school, twenty for a university degree, employment, first marriage (a blind loop in the ascent.)  At some plateau, those thoughts started to turn from anticipation to reflection.  At ten the decade to twenty was distant, and oh if I could scramble up to it faster!  But at eighty?  The next decade? 










Why return to those old journals?  Who I was or am cannot be found there alone.  Yesterday evening, I stood in line for a beverage at Finnriver Cidery – a joyful venue bursting with families enjoying music, good food and cider.  Because my husband and I were early investors in the business, we are treated to complimentary ciders.  I gave my name to the young man pouring drinks.  Instantly I was embraced by a middle-aged woman standing behind me.  Quite surprised, I pivoted. Her eyes filled with tears as she held me:  “Mrs. Kollar and Uncle Al…” she exclaimed, her nickname for my husband informing me that this could only be Sherri T, a former student from 1973 when Allan taught art and I taught English at Bothell High School.





 “You were the hardest teacher I ever had,” she said with no tone of admonition.





Yet I found myself apologizing, “I must have been a bitch!”  Yes, there I confessed that and felt ashamed for swearing, while acknowledging that Sherri isn’t the first former student to say how challenged they were in my classes. 





Sherri would have none of my remorse.  “Oh no.  You were wonderful.  I would get my essays back with so many suggestions like moving a sentence from one place to another, or a question, ‘Have you thought about this, Sherri.?’ You wrote those messages to all of the kids, and it must have taken so much time.   When I had my children, I passed on everything I could remember that you taught me.  They all graduated college.  You don’t know how important you and Uncle Al were in my life.”





I broke from her embrace, insisting she remain while I hurried back to the table where I had left my husband.  He followed me back for the surprise reunion:  two rather wrinkled septuagenarians and a middle-aged woman chatting their way back fifty years. 










Eighty years old, and here I stand near the summit. Where can I find me?  Not in a crate of journals, but in the consciousness of all the people with whom I have shared the breath of the world.