Inspiration – Page 2 – Mary's Room With a View

The Truth of Consequence

Unknown-1

Truth or Consequences is not only a desert location in New Mexico, it was also a popular game show that bridged radio to television years from 1940 to the early 1980’s. The object of the game was to discern which guests told the truth about some life experience. Guess right and the consequences were a win. Guess wrong and you were a loser. Seems right in line with our polarized either/or world; however, I want to depart from those extremes and think about the truth OF consequences.

Here I am at our Quilcene cottage in late August harvest time . The romaine in my garden lines up like a green battalion of soldiers. In parallel lines — arugula, carrots and beets. All are ready to eat NOW, but we can’t consume it all, and neighbors graciously accept only enough for a salad or two. As you sow, so shall you reap. Did I over-sow? With minimal reading of seed packets, I should have planted sequentially, a few seeds each subsequent week, and prepared for a staged harvest (consequences). About a dozen years ago, I bought a small one-gallon size fig tree and planted it in the middle of our little orchard where a pear tree had failed. Yesterday we drove up and down East Quilcene Road with buckets of figs for neighbors we hoped would accept some. Luckily, Scott and Susan have a food drier and accepted the load. How could I ever have imagined that little potted fig would produce so many? Neighbor Raj calls figs “the fruit of the gods.” Funny that we live at the foot of Mt. Olympus, because our fig harvest this year could supply a bacchanalia for every god from wood nymph to Zeus. Some consequences we should/could have foreseen. Others resulted without possible foresight.

Similarly, What goes around comes around. That expression is a first cousin to the sowing maxim. It connotes consequences like just deserts. Parents admonish children that their actions, if ill considered, could ricochet, causing them harm. Punch the neighbor child, and that kid may grow up taller and stronger and seek revenge. We relish such consequences when we root for an underdog. There is always a dog in there somewhere, and it may grow up to bite back. These are the consequences of justice. Such ironic justice explains the popularity of mysteries. it is satisfying to see the criminal in irons, even more so if, as Hamlet plots revenge on Claudius, the miscreant is “hoisted by his own petard.”

Although not always anticipated, consequences can be as pleasant and circumstantial as tying a child’s shoe prevents stumbling. May I assume that you too want the consequences of your choices to be favorable? Last week I stood in line to check out groceries at the local Safeway. I chose the shortest line, only one customer ahead of me. You can see what comes next. Murphy’s Law: the adjacent check-out line with four customers moved faster than mine. Ahead of me was a man of my age (elderly) in a large, motorized wheelchair. His shopping cart brimmed with purchases he handed, as best he could, one-by-one to the clerk. As he sought his food coupons to pay for his purchases, I watched as one-by-one some of his items were set aside to be returned to shelves. My heart hurt. He could not afford to buy the chicken, the slices of ham, primarily the more expensive groceries. I could buy these for him, but I also didn’t want to insult the man with an offer that might look like charity. Nonetheless, I knew the consequences for me if I failed to speak. “Excuse me, sir. I see you don’t have enough money with you today to cover everything. Would you please let me pay?”

He smiled and accepted: “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for paying it forward.”

I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, but his gracious acceptance drew me into community with him.

“I try to pay it forward too,” he continued. “I served in the military, and that was me paying it forward.” As I walked home laden with my own groceries, they felt lighter, the way happiness diminishes weight.

This past week the Democrats held their national convention. This coming week the Republicans will nominate their choices. There isn’t a voter in this country who should fail to think of the consequences of voting. Whether in local or national elections there will be consequences, and that is the TRUTH with which we will live.

Social Distance

All crises add to our common lexicon, and soon we use novel phrases with a shared understanding, even when those idioms are seemingly contradictory. Example? Social Distance. The very nature of sociability is closeness. In my years between the 1940’s and 1980’s, meeting a friend involved a warm handshake and smile. That evolved to hugging, polite kisses (as the French do), even between people I barely know. Attend a museum opening of a new exhibition and prepare to be kissed by men who probably no longer enjoy kissing me any more than I welcome their whiskered greeting. Being social demands intimacy

In this year of Coronavirus, the social thing to do is to stay away — one from another –and preferably six-feet apart while wearing a mask. This past Friday evening we made a reservation at Finnriver Cidery where we met friends to make up a fewer-that-five table. After washing our hands at the soap pump – local, home-brewed soap –our invitation was checked off at the entrance by a friendly masked host who ushered us to our sanitized table.

“Who was that masked man?” If you are my age, your mind recalls The Lone Ranger on his white stallion riding off into the sunset after rescuing some oppressed homesteader. Now that question is common as we try to recognize people by their squinting eyes peering over a face mask that hides any smile of familiarity. Our friends laugh their muffled chuckles in agreement about efforts to use our eyes more expressively. A wide-eyed greeting, through glasses and above the mask, or a squinty smirk of disapproval for a negative message? Hand dances may come back into fashion.

I agree that the six-foot and masked decrees are the best social expression after all. If we are social, we care about others. We seek what is common among us, and today that is a desire for a healthy community. Let’s forget that the phrase is an oxymoron, and instead value what it means to have a community embrace without touching.

The medium is the message. If the message comes from the governor’s office to mask up and stay apart that is an authoritative and respected message.Perhaps not so, if you don’t happen to like your governor, or the governor belongs to a political party with which you don’t identify. Sad, but true, communicating emergencies connotes urgency depending on who sends out the warning. Hard to think if we get the next big earthquake and warnings come from your unpopular government official so you stay exposed to falling structures. Perhaps the shaking ground will prompt people to safety.

Marketing is everything. The very humor of Finnriver’s sign exhorting us to stay a cow’s distance apart invites compliance. There I was enjoying my veggie pizza and Apple Oak Cider while envisioning a heifer between my friend Kathryn and me.

Humorous signage reminds me of a No Trespassing sign on the barbed wire fence that surrounds a nearby cow pasture in Quilcene: Warning: Don’t cross our Pasture Unless You Can Do it in 6.8 Seconds Our Bull Can Do it in Seven. IMG_0779[1] My imagination is engaged. I can feel a bull’s snorting breath on my derriere. Had I been inclined to take a shortcut through the rancher’s field, I dismiss the notion with a laugh.

Here’s another neologism: The New Normal. Perhaps you have used this one too. It suggests our acceptance of practices molded by the pandemic. It too is contradictory, as what we once considered “normal” is now abnormal. Someone threw in the word “normal” instead of the new “behavior,” because we are all longing for “normality,” a state of being to which we can’t return. With a resigned sigh, we embrace “the new normal,” indicating acceptance. Perhaps “embrace” is the wrong word here. Since March, the only embrace I have allowed myself is for my husband and my cat. I embraced my husband in March and four days later he showed Covid-19 symptoms, because I was unaware I had been exposed. Yep, we needed a cow between us.

CIMG4113

Frog Blog

I thought I had lost my hearing aid while scooting down the hill above the pond where I was weeding . Later, I returned, my eyes focused for little things among the dense ferns. There I noticed a spotted stone that seemed to breathe . A frog, motionless and likely aware of me long before I saw its pulsing, crouching disguise. Unlike the robins and swallows that flutter away when I raise my camera, the frog remained for six shots before I continued edging down the hill, when it leapt away to the still waters below us. Splash!

Six shots. I am back six decades. I am fourteen-years-old, spending a week with a friend on the beach at Onset, by Cape Cod. Marsha walks with boys in her wake, and I am eager for the overflow — one boy in particular, a ringer for James Dean. Summer nights we drive with the guys to cranberry bogs where the boys take.22 gage rifles from the car’s trunk and aim them out toward the bogs where frogs have stilled their songs. Then the guns fire, the shooters gleefully enjoying the sight of frog parts exploding among the cranberries. Easy, fear-frozen targets for reckless teenagers.

I have not met anyone my age who doesn’t carry remorse for acts committed in thoughtless youth. And although I didn’t fire a gun, I witnessed without reprimand. Of all scenes collected in my memory there are few more vivid – the humid, salt-laden air rising with a fragrance amidst violence. My eagerness to blend in where I sensed I did not belong.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, in March, Nature’s early promise of spring comes with frog song from the pond and surrounding woods. Weeks before robins, chickadees and violet-green swallows take up their warbling sopranos, the bass line is sung by frogs caroling for potential mates from misty dawn until dusk.

Is it a coincidence that fairy tales have frogs turning into princes – princes into frogs? Potential for love abounds.

This spring is a moment in history to reconsider our world view. We are sequestered in our close environments with an invitation and time to consider the smallest and largest of things. We can watch and listen to the way our world is singing our seasons along.

Who else is wearing “unnoticeable” camouflage, aware that to be seen can threaten their existence? How can we value those songs we take for granted, knowing they are not our own, but somewhere around us in the vernal woods and waters that we treasure?

By the way, I found the lost hearing aid when I was dusting behind the couch in the cottage. I don’t regret having searched outdoors. Looking for something small, I found within myself, something large.

SHADOWS

IMG_0423[1] Peter Pan met Wendy when he came to ask her to sew his shadow back in place, having lost it when escaping through a window that closed, separating himself from his other half. Unknown Detaching from our shadows is a fantastical fright, for what is more intimate and yet mysterious than our shadow, our companion from the first sunny days of our lives? We watch it grow with our own growth and with the rise or fall of sunlight behind us.

The lyrics of Me and My Shadow conclude, “Just me and my shadow / Strolling down the avenue /All alone and feeling blue.” It is a sad song, but Peter Pan and I know that shadows keep us from loneliness. What better friend than one who sticks with you all of your days, who goes with you where you want to grow and can be manipulated in a small gesture, simply by turning with the light?

As a child, did you play with your shadow? Chase it? Try hopelessly to escape it? My father taught me to play with shadows, casting bunny ears with his hands on the walls of our playroom. My brother and I competed, trying to stomp on the other’s shadow. IMG_0420[1] Most days, unmindful of my shadow, I am surprised when I notice it lengthening before me on a spring walk. I notice my aging stance. Did my knee always turn in at a funny angle, or is this something new? Communicating with our shadows is a self-indulgent pleasure .

Some sunny days, I look beyond my own shadow to those cast by what exists around me. Any artist values shadows for how they define the artist’s subject, providing depth and definition. Sometimes the shadows share importance with the object, as in some paintings by Norman Lundin. His many compositional brilliances that feature shadows cast across classroom blackboards are equally as important as the object or person who cast them. Our admiring eye finds pleasure in the angles of lines across a flat surface.

Similarly, going to snip a rose to bring inside, I found the shadow of the rose, the pattern of leaves flattened against the driftwood fence behind the roses, as appealing as the bright red rose itself. Not a chance of clipping the shadow for a vase on the dining table.

Spring and fall are tops for shadow appeal, especially mornings or late afternoons. Sun is not yet on top of us. Its angle splashes across streets, magnificent shadows of trees in their early leafing. You could be tempted to run out in the road and try to climb them. IMG_0419[1]

My good friend Jan, who has a scientific understanding, teases me that often I am going off poetically about natural things that have a rational raison d’être. I agree, and would be amiss if I ended without personifying shadows. “Only the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men” were Introductory words to the broadcast radio episodes of The Shadow (1930’s and ‘40s). The Shadow was the hero of a whodunit that drips with ominous associations. So too the superstition around not standing in the shadow cast by a gravestone. I gave some thought to that on a recent walk through Lakeview Cemetery. How tantalizing to stand in the shadow of a massive monument to Seattle’s forefathers, to test whether my body temperature dropped in that shade. No icy fingers reached to pull me inside.

Meanwhile, taking my I-Phone from my pocket, I photograph myself leading with a shadow when riding my bicycle along the end of the bay on a Sunday morning. Can I photograph myself and the bike with our morning shadow preceding us? Who is that cyclist riding the bike? Only the Shadow knows.

Taking Notice

Mondays, before leaving Quilcene Bay to return to Seattle, I take my cottage journal on our morning Kitty Walk.

Pausing at one of the benches on the way I record the date and what happened worth noticing that weekend – the first sighting of violet green swallows investigating the birdhouses, or rototilling our garden and planting the first cool-crop seeds.

Most years, I don’t look back through the journal to see if nature progresses “on schedule.” However, this year seems so out-of-sync, I flipped back a calendar year in search of normalcy. This has been a cool April. I did not plant arugula or potatoes by the end of March, as I did other years. Am I waiting for warmth? If you read the instructions on seed packets, most insist soil temperatures must reach 55 degrees for germination. In the Pacific Northwest, that would be summer expected in spring. I substitute light for heat, counting on the lengthening of daylight to summon growth.

In any season we hear advice to slow down, pause, notice life unfolding. But like a stern mother whose advice wasn’t heeded, Mother Nature and the Coronavirus have forced us to narrow the circumference of our activity, making time for noticing. In these weeks, the media has elevated poetry to the popularity of rock music. Poets are known to take notice. Forced to touch each other only through cyberspace, we email to our friends, poems, words of wisdom, images of sunrises and blossoms.

I am fortunate to have a wooded acre and a small vegetable garden to notice in my forced slowness. Others within small, city apartments may have only a potted violet on a windowsill to watch nature unfold. For the first time, their meditation may center on the endearing way their child butters a slice of bread.

This day, April 25, 2020, I photograph one of many ferns unfurling. How otherworldly their serpentine fronds. For weeks I have passed tight-fisted knuckles in their hearts, for in late winter I had pruned last year’s large, browning fronds. Regardless of my watching, they uncurl in their own time; but I also have last April’s memory of supple green ferns spreading across the hill. Almost May 1^st, I am comforted, looking forward to where their funny, twisting dance is going.

Planting in the Year of a Pandemic

Last April, arugula greened

in fine lines, while spinach and lettuce

followed in their own leafy time.

Make a record of planting

so next year

if frost grips the soil

and black earth stares blankly back

in a year of illness,

you can look back

and say I had seeded by now.

Open the packets of promise.

If you have forgotten

the earth at fifty-five degrees,

imagine then the light

beckoning longer days,

the sun pushing gently against dusk.

In the garden soil

make a clean V in the shape

of geese migrating over the bay,

then mound the chilled dirt

like a dike in Amsterdam.

Drop each seed a safe distance

from the one beside it.

Cover them with one inch

of humus you enriched

with compost from summer grass.

Pat the seeded earth

with your own warm hands.

Kitty Walk

Now when the world shouts, “Stop!” we are slowing to notice life at a measured, appreciative pace. May all of your senses awaken your day with observation and gratitude.

CIMG4661

Weekend mornings here at our Quilcene cottage, we begin with the Kitty Walk. Allan makes us each a steaming latte in tall covered mugs. From underneath the cottage, he fetches a red plastic bucket he has filled with bird seed, stuffs a couple of dried ears of corn in his breast pocket and returns to the front door where he whistles for me and our two cats to follow. A dozen years ago, the cats would skitter after him almost tripping him up in their eager escape. Today, Willow doesn’t budge from her bed by the wood stove. Homer reluctantly lumbers along to the whistle, with a heavily furred sigh, “Ok, if we really have to do this again.”

Up the trails softened by aromatic cedar chips, we walk the circumference of our three wooded acres, stopping at each of six benches my brother built for us as scenic rests. Allan reaches for a vine maple limb with a chain to which he screws on a cob of corn. Walking on, he scatters seeds on fallen logs that line the trail, tucking more seeds and peanuts in the cavities of trees. IMG_0278[1] Some trees are decaying remains of towering firs, in their slow death, still useful for persistent woodpeckers. Stellar’s jays drop from limbs above, then hop along behind us snatching peanuts in defiance of Homer who long ago gave up terrorizing the hungry birds, choosing instead to pounce between us on a bench where he nestles against the warm coffee mugs. Today, we have passed our first trillium sticking up like a green finger from the middle of our trail. IMG_0282[1] We have touched the pliant leaves of wild plums.

The first bench is by the stream that tumbles like a toccata into the pond below. We reminisce about the creation of our arboretum, a restoration of once-forested land devastated by previous owners who clear-cut the site for building, then sold off the property for being too hot, lacking shade. Sitting on this first bench, we reimagine how we transplanted 20 – 40-foot Douglas Firs from across the road, built a stream and pond, planted vegetation and fruit trees, made room for a sun-lit vegetable garden.

IMG_0283[1]

The coffee is cooling as we climb the ladder to a treehouse, our next stop. Only a three-foot shake covering suggests a “house,” Although we billed the project as a treehouse for our grandchildren, all along my husband envisioned an elevated station for hanging bird feeders, a panorama for spotting flickers hammering on the birches. About thirty feet above the treehouse, a nest of eagles is new, but the tall fir was long a roosting point for them to oversee the bay below — the migrating ducks, the salmon run spring and fall. We hug Homer closely when we hear the eagle’s piercing cry mid-swoop to fetch whatever the eagle feels like fetching.

Our treehouse pause lasts a good while. Allan fills the feeders and teases the jays to come closer as he lines peanuts precariously on the railings. Homer makes that twitching sound cats make when birds are nearby. The hummingbird thrills around the red disk. The only other sounds may be high cedar wind wisps or the distant gurgling of the creek. I take my journal from my jacket and write. Today I begin this blog.

Those mugs are drained of coffee as we step down the ladder. Sometimes Homer rides Allan’s shoulder, for the cat’s weight makes a downward climb cumbersome. Then we are off down the trail to the sandy beach. This bench affords a western panorama of Olympic foothills. The sun illumines snowpack or new spring green. Along this lower trail, I kneel to clear off fallen leaves that cover two crosses made of stones, one with the name Celeste, the other Toulouse, grave sites of our first two felines whose companionship named our routine the Kitty Walk.

Circling back up the hill, purpled with periwinkle, we return to where the creek has emptied into our pond. A bench above the pond allows a wide-open view of lily pads in summer, but this March morning a few drops from hovering trees shed last night’s rain. The drips entertain me with their concentric circles interrupting a blue, reflected sky. Homer takes his sweet time to leap between us, then impatiently hops down toward the vegetable garden.

We cross the driveway through the woods above the cottage, on our last trail through a wooded plot we acquired years ago — a steep, heavily treed site whose massive trunks remind us of our smallness in the woods. More chipped trail, some narrow stairs built into the bank, then on to shoreline again before pushing open a driftwood gate that returns us to the front of our cottage. Homer does not follow us through the gate, but pushes himself between a capacious gap between two of the driftwood planks behind a line of rose bushes. He has caught up. He meows to let us know it is time for Allan to hang up the red bucket and climb the stairs back to the cottage kitchen for breakfast. Both man and cat have been anticipating the aroma of bacon.

WE’RE ALL MAD HERE

Unknown

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.

(Alice in Wonderland)

If Lewis Carroll were alive and residing in Seattle today, he would find the perfect atmosphere for writing Alice in Wonderland: anxiety circles around where we are going and how we will get there, wherever there is.

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” (Red Queen: Through the Looking Class.)

First, there is the upcoming Washington State Democratic primary on Tuesday, although our ballots arrived in the mail almost two weeks ago. In a city that is as Blue as any city can be, this primary looms as an important destination. Voting early left people struggling to discern, among six contenders, which best fit the ideal liberal candidate to beat Donald Trump in November. Those who suspected on March 7^th there might be fewer candidates from which to select, held their ballots close to the chest until the race fell to two: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. These voters are basking in the wisdom of their patience. The early voters feel the disappointment of wasting their vote, like eating dessert too soon, while still being passionate about the entree.

Then the Corona Virus. Seattle prides itself for so much: the home of Microsoft and Amazon, stunning national parks, an abundance of green landscapes resulting from weeks of rain. This past week, the Vice President described Seattle as the tip of the spear in the Corona Virus, for having more cases and, sadly, more deaths, than any other city in the country. Seattleites are used to dealing with affluence, rapid growth and tourists. They are not accustomed to germs. The University of Washington has suspended live classes for the next few weeks, and called home all students from their studies abroad. So too have other schools, public and private, are closing for at least two weeks. From our cottage two hours west of my Seattle church, I attended first-time online church services this morning. Prayer is necessary now, but not in a common location where many church members are over sixty-years-old, the population vulnerable to the Corona Virus.

Yesterday on NPR, the talk-show host interviewed a local mental health professional about the anxiety shrouding our Seattle citizens. What can we do to lessen that anxiety? “For one thing,” the therapist said, “ we can all stop listening so often to the media.” Yes, that is all well and good, but one is also advised to stay tuned for alerts and closures. Yep, straight out of Alice in Wonderland. But the therapist had a useful antidote to anxiety: calm, single-focused meditation. “ Take time to notice something slow-moving such as a fallen leaf drifting downstream.” With her advice in mind, I focused here on our wooded property by Quilcene bay. Join me in looking closely at moss:

Lying thick upon a fallen log

its green promise of alive

soft as the morning fog

that moistens, that invites

you to touch what is close

was always there inching along

while you were running through the woods.

Today’s close-up is moss

beside unfolding ferns,

a talisman to tuck

in your breast pocket

while the sun scorches

the fog away

opening up another day.

WAVES

Here on Kahana Beach, I have had two weeks to think about waves. The screen doors to our sleeping room remain open for the cooling trade winds, so the constant crashing waves soothe us to sleep, a welcome diversion from Seattle’s mid-city traffic. But there are similarities. Whereas the all-night movement of vehicles on our city street, coincidentally called East Aloha, is occasionally interrupted by an emergency siren, so too the predictable waves periodically burst upon the rocks like a bass drum upstaging a symphony. We are not startled into wakefulness, although an accompanying tropical storm, slamming its arrival against the screen, will shake us so we slide the glass door shut and turn off the ceiling fan.

Daytime, the waves froth over the lava rocks, hiding the most jagged peaks. In their rush to slam against the sea wall, they carry turtles along for the ride. (In the lower middle of the photo you may spot a turtle’s shell) Sea turtles feed on the greenery on rocks along the shore, so succumbing to slamming against the boulders is like an encouraging push forward to feasting. Huge shells, some the size of a dinner table, ride just below the water’s surface. Whether the flippers help the turtle to navigate at this point is unclear. Rather they seem to give in to the waves’ force, all decision-making left to momentum. There must be a lesson for us there, something about trusting what carries us ahead.

Does one wave differ even slightly from another? Why do I admire the pearly opalescence of some waves while others roll over in a blue-green sameness? How is it that the sea before me may depict a calm plane for miles out, then spot itself with wavelets where there are no rocks to be seen for crashing? Had a whale passed by? Was there a sandbar too far out for my imagination?

Those are five sequential questions for which I have no definitive answer. So much for Oceanography 101. No mind. Poetic connections to the waves complement what science offers. The string of curling waves evokes images of peppermint ribbon candy. When the wave hits the rocky coastline, it splashes high and frothy as thrilling fireworks, then recedes leaving a damp memory on the stones.

Currently, I am reading Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, a story that is an accumulation of soliloquies from siblings who, unique in temperament, are together an amalgamation of consciousness. It is as if Woolf wants us to see one identity made up of separate souls. How appropriate, then, to call her work, The Waves. Looking out now at wave after wave approaching, then receding to the ocean, I can follow one just so far before it is consumed by its neighbor and they become one wave.

Most of our planet is surfaced by the sea, yet until we are slammed by a tsunami, we look landward. The waves reflect our own inspiration, they inhale and exhale, a lub/dub of each heartbeat. Perhaps that is what makes the sound so comforting. It asks for familiarity, for identifying with its life force. All it takes is one venture in for a swim to trust those inhales and exhales. Gingerly, I walk across the sand, my feet sinking its prints until the place where the water has washed up, erasing sandcastles and the presence of swimmers before me. I take cautious steps forward, letting the wavelets tease me, toes-first. Step, sink a little, step again. As the waves surge to my knees I look out, guessing where the next large wave will rise. Will it break on top of me, sucking me helplessly under, grinding my face to the sand? Or do I wait until the breaking point and dive within its incoming belly, emerging only when the wave has receded for the next roller behind it. I dive. How successful I feel emerging up through the wave that took me, then I swim in a parallel line to the beach, far enough out to spot the fish, but close enough to see the shore where I want to return.

Alas, returning to shore requires more tact than knowing when to interrupt a conversation. I focus on the shore where I will land; my back must be to the waves. I have to allow a wave to ride me inland. I need to have my feet within inches of the sand so I can set them firmly for a fierce run up the beach before a kindred wave chases the one that carried me in, and thus sucks me back to the deep or splays my body across the sand. I have experienced both scenarios.

We have been coming to this small Maui resort for two weeks every February for over twenty years. IMG_0155 (1) On each visit, we note how the waves have chewed up more of the beach and/or the retaining wall that keeps the condos high and dry. The beach was once long enough for an invigorating walk at low tide toward a cave in the far rocks, a place I led my small grandchildren where we imagined pirates storing chests of gold doubloons, then hurried back before an incoming tide flooded the crevices in the rock. No tide is low enough to allow that walk today. Nearby, huge tractors work to restore a wall that had shored up the property of a wealthy landowner, his estate now several feet closer to sinking into the sea. Once long, the beach now is but a patch of sand. From half a world away and in eighty-degree heat, melting ice caps deliver messages in the rising seas.

When we return to Seattle at the end of the week, the weather will not encourage opening windows to hear nature’s noise. Traffic will replace the rhythmic surge of water plunging through my dreams. There I will look out for waves of spring rain, daffodils bending before each in-coming breeze.

The Readiness Is All

“Mrs. Kollar!” a student returning from her freshman year in college greets me, as she confidently bounds into what was our last year’s senior English class. “I have learned so much in my English 101 class at the UW. I found out that ‘between you and I,’ isn’t grammatically correct, because between is a preposition and it needs an objective pronoun.”

These weren’t her exact words, but she and other college returnees excitedly share some “newly discovered” wisdom that I had taught the year they sat in the front row of my senior College Prep English class. They may have recently “learned” that Emily Dickinson was a recluse or Walt Whitman sold verses of Leaves of Grass on street corners in New York. Unknown-1 How excited they are to fill me in on what I failed to teach the year they were in my class. Here I could groan in 3-D cynicism, not to mention disappointment. Instead, I share their joy that their minds are still engaged learning about their English language and literature.

I had not failed in the way I taught any of this knowledge they think they have now heard for the first time. When I taught prepositions or the poems of Dickinson and Whitman, they weren’t ready to take it all in. In college they are ready.

If I taught only one literary work, it would be Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In that play there is more truth and psychology than Freud could later explicate (as if for the first time). Unknown-2 In the final act, Hamlet is about to have a duel with Laertes, a fight that he will likely lose. Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, tries to deter him from the match, because Laertes is by far the better and more practiced swordsman. Hamlet won’t be dissuaded, saying, There’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. ( Hamlet, V, ii, 230-233). Hamlet knows he will likely die, so when he dies is not his concern. What is important is his readiness to die. He is ready. How lucky for Act 5 and for preparing the audience to accept the inevitability.

Well into my retirement, Hamlet’s accepting wisdom echoes. The readiness is all! Am I ready to retire, to slow down my life, to give up running, to see my friends leave the world, to die myself? And how do I make myself ready for what is coming next? This is a big question having to do with acceptance and a volume of self-knowledge. We humans are not quitters. We flail to keep going long after our muscles fail. Young Dylan Thomas exhorts his dying father, “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light / Do not go gentle into this good night.” I wonder if his father was simply ready to go. The readiness was more with the old man than with the son.

There is power in readiness. Children who are not “ready to clean up their room,” or the haughty person who is never dressed and ready when the car has pulled up the drive. On the opposite side, there is humility in readiness. These are the agreements we make with each other to step out of our comfort zone, to try something new. One-two-three- ready . . . set . . . go! and I am leaping off a small ledge to cold waters when my brother encourages me to swim downstream.

So far, I am seeing readiness as positive, something akin to preparedness for everything from earthquakes to college entrance. This week, reading for a UW class I am auditing, I see readiness may also lay the groundwork for evil. It is a Comparative Literature class: The Literature of the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Reading about the German environment prior to Hitler’s rise – the accepted antisemitism, distrust of immigrants (Roma), excessive nationalism, putting The Fatherland first – it is clear that enough of the German populace was ready for Hitler. He was duly elected in a “democratic” republic.

Perhaps readiness may be a power we can wave like a flag against Authority. I guess it depends on who is the Authority. I am ready to plant my sugar snap peas with the first south western breeze in February. The soil turns easily beneath my spade. Earthworms rise to the soil’s surface as if to welcome the peas to join them. I imagine myself crunching on sugar snap peas in April, weeks before my patient neighbor who plants when she hears the spring robins. Inevitably, a freezing March wind, sometimes even a foot of snow, laughs at my readiness. I hear myself reciting from another sacred text: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: . .. God has made everything beautiful in its time. (Ecclesiastes 3, 1 & 11). Yes, a time to plant and a time to sow . . .. Every year I jump the gun when my readiness does not match Mother Nature’s.

Readiness calls in voices other than my own. Perhaps this year I will be ready to listen. There must be a few other teachers out there to prepare me for what I might learn in 2020, even if the subject has been sitting on my lap for the last seventy-six years.

A Need to be Needed

When I retired from the classroom, my heart felt as if had been tossed on the beach at low tide for the seagulls to pick at what remained of me. Although I knew better, I wondered how next year’s class of Senior English students could be adequately prepared for college by another teacher. These feelings demonstrate either humungous hubris or festering fear. What I have since acknowledged is that I need to be needed. Being needed justifies taking up air and soil from a planet with a paucity of resources.

Only recently have I explored how and by whom these needs are defined. I suspect that many are defined by a patriarchal tradition: making dinner for my husband, doing laundry etc. – all necessities for myself as well. When I look outside of my own experience to other women’s lives, I see similar patterns of fulfilling needs for others, mostly domestic needs, that make others’ lives comfortable. Does the fulfilling of those needs enrich the “needed” woman? Would she have chosen the tasks without societal expectation?

I reflect on my mother’s life in trying to understand my own. My mother began her typical day setting out sack lunches for her children (if we were still in school), and then making breakfast for all. Soon after, she set off to work as a bank secretary, eventually an “executive secretary” to the manager. Not only did she type his correspondence, she approved loans and managed certain business accounts, jobs that would today earn a title of loan officer, or even vice president, but executive secretary sealed her salary and her prestige. During her lunch hour, she walked across the street to the supermarket to buy groceries for preparing dinner when she got home. After dinner and with dishes put away, she made her “creative time,” either haltingly playing the piano, a treat she afforded herself with biweekly lessons, MV5BMTQ1MTIzOTYwMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM3MzYwMg@@._V1_UX100_CR0,0,100,100_AL_ or she sat before the television watching Murder She Wrote with Angela Lansberry, who had a startling resemblance to Mother. As my mother did her vicarious sleuthing, she did needlework, usually a square of a quilt painstakingly appliqued or cross stitched. She played piano for no one’s pleasure but her own. Her needlework may have ended in a gift or a practical blanket for a bed, but ultimately, she stitched for the beauty of the thing. At the end of her workday, she fulfilled a call to be needed by herself. Did it also fulfill her to know that her family needed her food, her cleanliness, her salary?

Our family chuckled at my mother’s devotion to Murder She Wrote. Having recently read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, I can revisit my mother through Levy’s words: “Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”

I considered calling this piece, After the Chores are Done, for that is when Mother’s needs were addressed. That is also when my needs are addressed. If there are domestic duties ahead of me, no writing happens. My piano stands silently accusing me of skipping another day to practice Chopin, although a lesson looms the next day. I ignore creative pleasures I hesitate to elevate to “need” status, because there are tasks ahead that improve the lives of others. Top on the siren call would be perceived needs from my grandchildren and daughter. My granddaughter, a college senior, emails me a draft of her senior English thesis for editing. Her request leapfrogs to the top of my to-do list, real or imagined. I am flattered to be needed, especially to be needed for something that acknowledges I have a brain, not only a scrub brush.

Her thesis has a reference to Mrs. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf’s To a Lighthouse. Married, and shrouded with the needs of her family, any creative vision Mrs. Ramsey might have is detoured through fulfilling family concerns. She knits socks, never quite finishing them. Juxtaposing Mrs. Ramsey is the unmarried Lily Briscoe who paints and completes a painting, Mrs. Ramsey’s domestic subservience to the needs of others shows a creative vision is impossible. Darning socks short circuits her visionary potential. I am considering that perhaps to be freely creative, a woman must be unshackled from family. On the other hand, an unmarried woman can be satisfied with fulfilling her own needs.

Would my mother’s life have been more creative had she not committed to a family? There is no way to know, but I am hoping she, like me, found enrichment in the creative imagination of thought, even in the sewing of quilts. For me, it would be ironing or kneading bread. For Mrs. Ramsey, as she knit, the narrative voice suggests a certain intelligence, a vision, so to speak. The reader has a sense of her visionary voice, however unfilled it might have been were she to complete a painting or write a novel.

The need to be needed may have hindered my creative life, or motivated it in inspiring me to be the most imaginative teacher I could be. Teaching itself is a creative act. With a filing cabinet stuffed with last year’s lesson plans, I recreated them each year. Although I may have been doing so to fulfill my students’ needs, I equally fulfilled my desire for change — delight in doing something different with certain literature I had taught several times.

For many women, the struggle continues in deciding whether we can live freely within a family structure. Perhaps the face-off of domestic duties and the poet within us creates an energized art that would not exist without the struggle. Deborah Levy quotes Audre Lorde in feeling that tension: “I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers”. (Audre Lorde)