the sweet potato plant is answering the call to fall. it keeps on growing, sending new shoots, vining out. it also is starting to change color. its rainbow hues draw our attention. our sweetly-screaming woke sweet potato.
and i don’t know if your sweet potato is as colorful. is it still all a rich green? are its leaves curling at all? is it spreading or is it slowing down? they are the same, you know, despite their differences. growing across the boundaries of towns and states and countries, they are not separate. sweet potato is – after all – sweet potato.
we saw images of our friends’ grandchildren. growing fast, unfurling, getting more colorful by the day. glorious and diverse – beautiful children with possibility in all the air around them.
i look at those pictures and celebrate my own children. grown, but still growing, still unfurling, still getting more colorful by the day, they are also glorious and diverse and beautiful. the tiny-child – the young adult – after all – tiny children and young adults. the same, despite the differences.
my son is your son, my daughter is your daughter. i want – i insist on – nothing less for them than you want for your own son, your own daughter: freedom to be, to love, to fly, to dance, to create, to express, to work, to be healthy, to explore, to embrace goodness. nothing less.
but, i fear, your tightly-held infatuation with this new administration has warped your perception and – now – you no longer see my son as your son, my daughter as your daughter. you have changed and not in any colorful photosynthetic way. your light has changed; it has become dark. your arms that used to fling around the whole world – excited and believing in certain potential-for-all – those arms have crossed in an attitude of cavalier superiority, a righteous and defensive us-not-them, unrecognizable extremism. and suddenly, i no longer know you.
and i realize that sweet potatoes – around the world – in the end – possibly understand connection more than the rest of us.
here at the end of september – heading rapidly into october – elton john’s “your song” lyrics – “how wonderful life is while you’re in the world” – are relevant to me. we soon will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary and life is truly wonderful for me because david is in it.
so the card at the antique shoppe caught my attention as we passed by it a couple weeks ago.
just as quickly as that charming card caught my attention, so did one hanging on a rack below it: “i tolerate you“.
putting them together – a yin-yang spectrum – they made me laugh aloud and i showed david. because – you know – blissful adoration and barely tolerating someone go hand in hand.
we both had a good laugh then. people in the shoppe stopped and looked at us. we kept laughing.
as we move through the days remaining of our ten married years and into the beginning of our eleventh married year – particularly at this time in our lives – we take heart in this laughter. as victor borge said, “laughter is the closest distance between two people.“
it’s one of the things i love most – laughing together. particularly when i am feeling tolerant of him.
“we are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” (dr. seuss)
there are plenty of trees where we hike. oaks, sycamores, birch, maples, pine, hickory, black walnut…there is quite a list. so it is no surprise that, as we are hiking, there are browned acorns, drying acorn shells and big black walnuts dropped on the trail, scattered everywhere, even dropping on us as we walk.
when i came across this branch, it was the brilliant green of the acorn that got my attention, the too-soon-ness of its place on our trail. i wondered – for a few moments – about what broke this branch that fell. it occurred to me that its natural aging, its natural place in the ecosystem of wildlife and forest had changed; this tree had somehow stress-shed this branch, this acorn.
there’s a lot of too-soon-ness…especially now, i think to myself.
and – a few moments later – i was back pondering the lists in my head…the to-dos, the worries, the problems to sort, the existential questions.
“lists engulf us – creating the illusion that our lives are full.” (plain and simple journal – sue bender)
the lists swirled and i organized them in the spaces of my brain as we walked in the early part of our hike.
but – in the way that being out in the forest, along the river, skirting meadows on a trail does – it all slowed down. and the joy of the trail took over. and, instead of the noise – internally or externally – the quiet serenity held my attention.
and this morning i find myself – once again – grateful for the sheer moment. even in this moment of the throes of a miserable cold, i am grateful for the simplicity of our givens.
“in that tiny space between all the givens is freedom.” (s.b.)
and it nudges me to simplify even more. the space of needing less, of making do, of knowing not a lot really matters.
the acorn is an ancient nordic symbol of life. my sweet momma kept a silver one in her purse and, now, so do i. maybe the acorn on our path was there to remind us.
“it’s time to celebrate the lives we do have.” (s.b.)
were this monarch to have the tiniest of notebooks and a tinier pencil, i would feel even more kinship with it.
i can imagine that it – perched on the vine-wall that has taken over the fence – is writing gentle poetry, haikus about flying and how sunshine feels on its wings. i can imagine that it – late in the summer, maybe a super-generation butterfly – is pondering the freedom of a bit-longer lifespan, the sky-trip it has booked to mexico as summer ends. it might write of adventures and exploring, of new discoveries, milkweed and other plants it now feeds on.
i wonder if it feels the same way i felt – so many decades ago – sitting in my maple tree, perched against the trunk, writing. it felt like there could be nothing at all wrong in the world, and that, like the monarch’s vibrant colors warning of toxins, my coca-cola it’s-the-real-thing pants and floppy hat would keep away any predators. i wonder if its words flit over sunrises and sunsets, grown-up seagull dreams, innocence and possibility.
we’re sitting in the old gravity chairs we unearthed from up in the rafters of the garage. our feet up, pillows behind our backs, we quietly watch the busy life of our backyard. there’s so much space to just think, to ponder.
the butterfly floats past us, over us, behind us. it lands on the burgeoning vine, the natural privacy screen growing helter-skelter on the fence. it is free to roam. it is free to be.
and then.
i overheard, “he got a monarch.” the butterfly’s vivid orange and black and broad stripes didn’t protect it from the cat prowling for prey next door.
i felt my heart sink. in like manner, my coca-cola pants and dr scholl’s, hard-held value set and a sunrise-sunset horizon full of possibility didn’t protect me either.
“positive cultural change today (as it has always been) is about leveraging your life where you are: by doing small, possible, measurable daily acts of decency, of protest, of advocacy, of collaboration.” (john pavlovitz)
the bumper sticker read: “kindness is an act of defiance.“
in a country with an administration that is leading the way on trying to make people believe that kindness is weakness and wokeness and various other nouns, being kind seems an infinitely easy way to push back.
i have been astounded to see people i know and love spew words of hatred aligning with this administration’s mounting display of cruelty. it would seem that they have plucked kindness and decency out of their hearts. it is my hope that this plucking is not permanent. it is my hope that a vigor – to help people, to collaborate with people, to share rights and freedoms with all, to advocate for those who are in need – will return at some point. but cold hearts become rigid quickly and their version of defiance seems to be complicity with the authoritarian vision.
and so we sit on the deck with dogga and talk about it all. we talk about our own plans. we ponder how we might make a difference, besides writing and writing and writing. we copy lists of things that are needed by local non-profits and organizations aiding people. we sort needs and wants and prioritize as responsibly as we can.
and we wander around the backyard, looking at the phenomenal growth of our herbs, the tropical-like burst from the flowers and the grasses and the sweet potato plants. we are grateful for this tiny place of earth that is ours. even in our own lack and thriftiness, we are grateful for our own abundance. in our own tiny yard, we snip basil for homemade pizza, cilantro for chili, parsley for red pesto, tiny cherry tomatoes and jalapeño peppers.
we cook, we clean out, we give away. we hike, we photograph, we write. we pay attention to little details. we try to find the small, possible, measurable ways to create culture change.
in ways i can explain and can’t explain, i am really dedicated to sephora. a few years back when our daughter was visiting we went to a greenhouse and nursery. she has a green thumb and it was cherished time to walk around with her and chat. she pointed to this plant – an arrowhead – and said she was growing one back at her home. i instantly decided to add it to our sunroom and named it after another adventure we had the days she was here. it is important to me that sephora thrives, just like charlie – a heartleaf philodendron she gifted me previously.
i watch sephora like a hawk…always trying to figure out if she needs more water, less water, more sun, less sun, more fresh air, less draft. we have a complex relationship; i think sephora knows the power she has over me and she wields it abundantly. i comply nevertheless. like i said, dedicated to its survival.
even as sephora’s individual leaves turn yellow from time to time (causing me much angst) i find this plant to be so beautiful – the light from the window causing the leaves to glow and radiantly light the space.
a girlfriend and i were talking about the cleaning-out process in our homes. she has readily cleared out much of what her two daughters had accumulated – but not taken with – in their growing-up years. they both live nearby now – in the next town over – all grown-up – and she sees them and their families regularly every week. my friend no longer has much stuff of their youth; with their proximity, she found it easier to dispose of most of what they no longer wanted, even in recent years giving away all the baby clothes and paraphernalia she had saved for possible reuse. she was surprised to hear i still have so much of all this. she laughed at my difficulty – surely a form of paralysis – in getting rid of everything.
i thought about this a bit, trying to figure out why i am so thready – besides the fact that i was born thready, have always been thready and likely will always be thready.
i realized that, though some of this is simply my heart-on-my-sleeve personality, it is also a holding-on of sorts. a peril of motherhood.
it would be dreamy – absolutely dreamy – to have my adult children living nearby, merely minutes away. it would be amazing to see them often, though always respectful of their busy lives. we are fortunate and joyous that our son is just one big city away, a couple-hour backroads drive or an hour plus on the train. to be able to jaunt over and see our daughter at any old time would make my heart burst. she has lived far away – with many states in-between us – for over a decade now, so visits require planning and are much more complicated.
i remember when my parents would come visit from florida – or we would go there – it would be an intense time of visiting in the days they were here – or us there – before it was time for them – or us – to leave and a big expanse of time would gap our shared in-real-life moments. i believe it is harder that way – the concentrated-period-of-time visiting instead of bits and pieces of life scattered like seed throughout the calendar.
in moments of looking through my momma’s things after she died, i could see the remnants and relics of me that she had saved. for in her lack of ability to see me as often as she would have wished, she held on with artifacts of our time together. the dots lined up. i completely got it and it became one explanation for the difference in the ability of my friend and me to let-go of stuff.
my holding-on – of the stuff left behind, the trinkets of their growing-up, the mementos of any grown-up visit we have had, wherever they have lived – it is the holding-on of love.
as claire middleton (the sentimental person’s guide to decluttering) points out, “we think that keeping all of those things will let us keep a little of each child who left us.”
my heart skips a beat.
ahhh. to be a thrower-outer, a clean-sweeper.
i’m working on it. i just had my first two sales on the resale site poshmark, which gives me incentive again. the baby and toddler clothes are bundled up and waiting patiently to go to the mission that gives them away to people in the city who need them. the cassettes are in a box, to be sent with payment for recycling. there are things on marketplace and ebay and craig’s list and the goodwill stack is ever-growing.
but nothing, though, stops my my-name-is-kerri-and-i-am-thready momheart from the wistful.
and, as i gaze at sephora’s stunning golden leaf – sunlight shining through it – i hold my beautiful golden daughter close, blow her a kiss, and miss her.
in the middle of the middle of the chaos that is this world right now, the thing that seemed the most real was last night’s pizza.
with a new pair of garden snippers, we went out to the potting stand and snipped off some fresh basil for our homemade pizza. the oven was preheating while we sous-chef-ed. we poured a glass of red wine and reveled in the cool breezes coming in from the back door and windows. we dined al fresco on the deck with plates of pizza, arugula spilling out of salad bowls and dogga at our feet. ohhh, what a day.
when we moved here – 36 years ago – there was no deck in the backyard. there were concrete steps leading up to the back door, a cement sidewalk from the driveway around the back of the house to that set of steps.
the people who lived in this house before us had some – interesting – decor ideas. granted, it was the 80s so that offers its own bit of explanation. they generously offered to teach us how to remove and apply new wood grained contact paper to the kitchen countertops and backsplash – which, i guess, they thought coordinated nicely with the peach colored cabinets. (we declined, removing all semblance of contact paper from the counters and peach from the cupboards.) curtains and valances and priscillas and cafes covered all the windows – and there are a lot of windows in this house. there was brown carpet everywhere but for the orange and green shag in the sunroom. it all felt a bit dark and closed-in, suffocated even more by the rows of hedges literally everywhere outside.
but when i walked in – despite the overabundance of brown – the plethora of double-hungs draped in fabric – doors hanging in door frames serving no purpose but for taking up space – butter yellow shingles with brown (yes, more brown) trim we soon replaced with narrow white vinyl lap siding – a house with few personal touches, a house that desperately needed to breathe – it felt like home.
it still does.
and, despite all the changes this house has gone through, there are still multiple projects that linger on the list – deferred or just dreamy. but it breathes – in and out – and we can feel its heart beat.
it wasn’t long after we moved in that we decided to build a deck out back and my children’s father and grandfather set to that project, designing a smartly shaped L with a deck railing that would protect our small-children-yet-to-be from falling off.
soon after – seemingly a minute or two – there was a swing set with a slide and a glider, a fort and a turtle sandbox. five minutes later we added a basketball hoop. eventually, we took down most of the railing. i had all the hedges taken out and planted ornamental grasses, for this house is a graceful-on-the-breeze ornamental grasses kind of house. i added a pond, a focal point – while ever changing the plantings around the perimeter of the yard, dependent mostly on friends who had extra bushes or plants. we laid a stone patio – a place for slow dancing and dinners al fresco. we thoughtfully designed the garden along the new fence in the back. we gently added peonies and built a barnwood potting stand, laying slabs of rock in that corner garden and around the pond to protect our aussie’s circular run around it. we brought breck home from breckenridge and tenderly tended this aspen tree – the only tree either of us have ever purchased – finally finding its preferred home in a small garden in the middle of the backyard. and the sedum cuttings we placed there took, surrounding breck with green serated leaves and yellow flowers.
just the other day we noticed that this very sedum groundcover had somehow planted itself under the deck – in an obviously dark space inhospitably filled with rocks; its tiny volunteering stems were peeking out from underneath. it is growing out – reaching east – and we will not eliminate it from this new place it inhabits. we will do all we can to encourage it, foster its growth, help it soak up sunlight and continue to proliferate along the edges of the deck.
gardens are a constant source of surprises. we find volunteer switchgrasses in places we didn’t expect. there are day lilies in the most challenging of spots. and ferns have tenaciously found their way to places where there is clearly a bit too much sunlight for them. we tend all of these and transplant the fern volunteers into the shadier fern garden out back.
but the surprises are just that – surprises. joyful. they are a tiny nod that we – even in our seemingly infinite non-knowledge of gardening – are doing something right.
i honestly don’t think it has anything to do with providing the right soil or the right nutrients or the right fertilizer or the right amount of sun or the right amount of watering. we are guessing on all of this – with the aid of research we desperately try to apply appropriately.
what it think it has to do with – more – is how much we mindfully love it all – our house, our front yard, our backyard, our deck, our gardens, our patio. surely it all can feel that.
people respond to love and nurture the same way – coming alive, seeking light, growing and changing, thriving, nurturing back.
and i wonder how it is anyone would treat people – members of a community – respectful participants in the weave of the concentric circles of humanity in our towns, our states, our country – any differently than a garden.
why would anyone not wish to foster a nurturing and supportive environment – any community of people – any town, state, country – where all may grow and thrive?
104. in the moments i am writing this post – a couple days ahead of today – my sweet momma would have turned 104.
i wasn’t sure about using this photograph. it isn’t something we stumbled across when we were out and about; instead it is a photograph i took in my studio. but, it is an effort to continue an effort we are making – which, i might add, is a big effort considering the here and now – to list over to presence and gratitude for the other parts of the here and now…the real…the stuff that i simply cannot imagine that the rabid purveyors of cruelty ever notice. for, if one can see the stunning in the falling dusk or feel the heart-stopping of a simple james taylor song or taste the fresh basil in the stockpot of sauce, one cannot also relish the sheer and abject depravity of current events.
my sweet momma – always – her message to me, “live life, my sweet potato.”
and to that i would add – as i stood in the kitchen – his arms wrapped around me, with our birthday dog at our feet – “never, never, never give up.”
there is a visceral response – breathing – i have to seeing the wild horses in the documentary, the dueting voices in the music video. there is a fascination of the munching-munching caterpillars on our dill plant, the finch drinking from our birdbath, the tomato plant’s explosive growth, the jalapeños becoming peppers from tiny blooms. there is an appreciation of the eye-to-eye contact of our amber-eyed aussie, the feel of flipflops on a hot summer day, the wafting scent of basil on the air.
we didn’t go to any celebrations on the fourth. we did not feel that this very moment in time was aligned with commemorating the democracy and freedoms as written into the declaration of independence for these united states. this moment – instead – feels like the antithesis of all of that – the un-uniting of this country, the dismantling of freedoms, the fall of democracy. so we stayed home, away from the carnivals and the parties and the bands and the fireworks (though our neighbor set off fireworks right above our backyard for hours late into the night).
and this morning, while d was picking up the vestiges of those fireworks which, thankfully, did no harm to our home, i watched the caterpillars on the dill. while he brushed away the chalk marks of firecrackers landing on our patio, i watered the herbs. while he made doubly sure there was nothing pyrotechnic-like left that dogga could ingest or could cause him harm, i watched and listened as the birds returned on a refreshingly quiet morning.
we have a list. i mentioned it the other day. it’s simply a list – not far away – of places for us to go, to visit, things to immerse in. to do the best we can, right now.
to the top of the list i am going to add “never, never, never give up.”
because momma was right. live life. it is not unlimited.
reverse threading 