it beckons. the moon, no matter, will seek you out. it has no agenda but to light your way. it has no preconceived notion, no prejudice. it is out there for all, for anyone who looks up. it offers stability to this good earth’s axis, regularity to the tide, illumination to the inky sky.
the moon’s romantic presence is the stuff of wishes and the pronouncement of love all the way to it and back. its moonline will find you, wherever you roam. always, always, it appears to light a path directly to you. each of us must be equally as important, then, for the moon shines for and to each of us. a gleaming line, luminous, brilliantly reaching to us. reminding us that no matter, on this big beautiful earth, we are all under the same dark sky, the same unlimited galaxy of stars, the same moon. we are closer to each other than we think and we all have even – at very least – these few things in common. how reassuring to know that we all, despite where we are, stand on different ground but gaze at the very same moon.
were the divine-in-all-the-universe to have a living room and be gazing out the window, i suspect the divine-in-all-the-universe would say, “i see the full moon out my window and in it, you.”
it doesn’t matter that they aren’t now attached to doors. a display of doorknobs, all lined up at an antique shoppe, beg you to wonder what doors they opened. what old house was it that had all its doorknobs changed? are the doors still there? these knobs removed; knobs that likely welcomed sticky toddler fingers, trembling arthritic hands, dutifully, solidly a part of history. what new hardware has replaced these knobs that had countless hands turning, opening, passing through?
the joy of having an old house is just that – the history of what has gone before you. how many times was this closet door opened? how many people passed through the front door? how many times did someone come home and walk in, close the back door and sigh?
we cannot think of doorknobs without thinking of doors. we have 22 doors in our old house, a few less than when we bought it, and not counting cabinetry. we have extra doors in the basement. beautiful solid six panel doors, some sporting their knobs, some knob-naked.
i think about the rooms of this home that they all have led to, these doors, the conversations that took place in those rooms. the babies, the plans, the family elders. the hugs and cherished moments, the arguments, the worry, the celebrations, each room a time capsule of lives lived in this very place. doors in, doors out. how much did a hand hesitate to open or close the door?
the metaphor is obvious – doorknobs and doors. the old and wise adage – “when one door closes, another opens.” the words sometimes seem like hollow reassurance. and i look up the adage and realize that there is more to this and is quoted by alexander graham bell, “when one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
the patina of the knobs shows wear. hands, hands, grasping and turning, opening. each door an invitation to the next moment, whatever that moment might be. choosing a door, choosing to walk in. standing. waiting. hesitating. we often wonder about the doors. maybe paralyzed with indecision, with grief, with confusion, we often pine after a door. we are often blind.
those doorknobs. if only they could speak. the stories they could tell, the lessons we could learn.
“i shall pass this way but once. any good that i can do, any kindness i can show to any human being, let me do it now, let me not defer nor neglect, for i shall not pass this way again.” (etienne de grellet)
this saying is tucked into my wallet. it hangs in our kitchen. it was my sweet momma’s favorite and she lived by it like a mantra. she did not procrastinate kindness until it was convenient; she lived it.
we pass the deer tracks at bristol woods. often we are first after the deer. i wonder what they are like as they pass each other, as their paths converge and diverge.
we were watching out the window. a balmy 35 degree chicago late afternoon and we were waiting for The Boy to get home from work. the bus went by touting an ad for one of the universities. “you be you,” it read.
i personally cannot think of two people more dedicated to being themselves than my children so this post is in honor of their fierce ‘being you-ness’. it is celebrating their ever-continuing search for who that is and their ability to both stand in and walk through the fire of growth. it is lifting up their spirits of adventure and knowledge of what’s important. it is acknowledging that they often walk outside what would be comfortable or secure for others, confident that they are finding their way in the space beyond the edges. it is reveling in their zeal. i am infinitely proud of them. my beloved children.
i’m sure the tree held on for dear life. perched among the big boulders on the shore of lake michigan, these trees have held on through many a storm, waves crashing past them, wind howling. only this time it was too much. it didn’t have a chance.
we could hear the lake from our house. the winter storm was raging and the intermittent crashes and booms were clearly devastation-in-the-making. when we drove big red over to see, it was astounding. the wind, the waves, ice had torn up and thrown entire chunks of sidewalk. boulders were thrown twenty feet. waves pelted the gazebo that sat back from the lake’s edge. trees were uprooted, glazed in thick shrouds of ice. the storm came and the storm left and the lakefront was forever changed.
in the littlehouse on island we watched the shoreline fade – many feet – over the course of a few months. waves from the south pounded the shore, eating away at earth and trees, demolishing the new dock. what it looked like when we first lived there is not what it looks like now, merely six months later. it is forever changed.
we aren’t big sitcom-watchers. but we are earth-show-watchers. it’s astounding to see how our good earth is mutating – through no fault of its own. profound. fires destroying ecosystems, displacing and killing wildlife, changing the horizon forever. glacial ice melting, challenging the arctic. earthquakes and tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis. toxic air forcing the use of face masks, and even of oxygen, the prevention of carbon dioxide in an environment less protected by photosynthesis and more consumed by greenhouse gas emission.
i have lived a couple blocks from the shore of lake michigan now for thirty years. the storms in the last ten years have been fierce. each one erodes the coastline a little more. walking along the water’s edge the-day-after made it all feel apocalyptic, these changes. ‘less is more’ the saying goes. then it alludes that more is even more, perhaps too much.
the tree held on for dear life. and lost. are we holding on for dear life? how are we long-term helping our good earth? how are we long-term hindering it? do we have a chance?
the old planters peanuts can sits on top of our dresser. it is a decor mismatch, so it is not there for its color or what it offers as an artistic statement. it is there because it was my sweet poppo’s. he kept it in the third drawer down of his dresser. in it he would place cash, his money clip, odds and ends from his pockets. “look in the peanut can,” he’d say, if you needed a couple dollars. it was one of the treasures i kept from their house, the peanut can that had made its way from long island to various houses in florida. it brings my dad close and every time i look at it sitting atop our dresser, i feel like we had a little conversation, my daddy and i.
you already know we have a penchant for boxes. not the cardboard kind, but most definitely the wooden kind and the metal kind. old wooden boxes, seemingly value-less, of greater value to me than anyone, things my dad used in the garage, things in which my sweet momma kept her paper clips. each a bitty visit from them. we have old apple crates, old brewery lidded boxes, boxes with slide lids, boxes with hinged covers and hooks to secure them, tiny boxes and big boxes. and old vintage suitcases. all special boxes – places to keep the most precious and the most visually-mundane-but-emotion-permeated items. a place for rocks or stones we couldn’t place-label anymore, a place for my mom’s wooden clothespins, a place for ticket stubs or notes or feathers or cards, a place for colored pencils, ink pens and nibs, rubber bands, a place for our nespresso pods. it’s not likely we need any more boxes, wooden or metal.
but there it was. the somewhat battered green metal carpenter’s chest. its personality taunted us from the floor of the antique shoppe we were trolling with jen and brad. i went back twice to look at it, to touch it. we noted that jen and i touch things when we see them; brad and david stand back and admire them. different processes. venus. mars. “don’t you have to touchhhh it,” we ask? but i digress. anyway, we, david and i, are not big helpers-of-the-retail-world, rarely shopping for new ‘stuff’. but this chest? it was different. it was old. and it was green.
the road from here to there is oft not straight. the way the crow flies is irrelevant. “the only way there is through,” joan told me quite some time ago. we were talking about grief. i had lost my sweet momma and it felt brutal; at any age the loss of a parent is profound. i was talking to joan about it – about getting to the other side of the grief. and she told me that the only way there was through it. a winding trail it was, with switchbacks and no guardrails.
that has happened for me with each encounter with grief. there is nothing easy about it, nothing straight. the grief of loss, the grief of instability, the grief of anxiety, the grief of fear, the grief of insecurity, the grief of aging, the grief of failure, the grief of change, in all its rampant forms.
and yet, out hiking, winding trails are my preference. a hike that takes me past hidden-treasure-vistas, a hike where i cannot see the end from the beginning, a hike that surprises at each turn. these winding trails are gifts in the woods, in the mountains, in between red rock formations high in elevation. there is much to see, much to learn about. they are journeys of not-knowing. they are journeys of wonder, of revelation.
we are not crows; no flightpath in our lives will be straight, no endpoint clear in our sight, no one thing all the way from here to there, no vector traveled without veering a bit off-course. even reverse-threading our lives will not reveal a straight path; instead it will reveal a vast horizon of ping-ponging and circuitous route-making. we will most definitely wind around, through decisions and opportunities, missed marks and challenges at the goal line, defining and re-defining. living.
which winds me back to joan’s wise words of years ago, which i can still hear her saying. the only way from here to there is through. winding trail and all.
conked out. it’s the end of the workday, the end of playtime, the end of the evening, the end of the month, the end of the year and they are conked out. so are we. with toys strewn about, they collapse on the floor, a wary eye on each other every so often, just making sure. but mostly, sleepy, eyes closed, soft sighs.
we feel the same way. conked out. it has been a year. tomorrow we’ll search for some sage to burn on the first day of the new year, smudging room by room, letting the snuffed flame’s gentle smoke chase out the negative and allow new light in.
conked out. it feels like a repeating theme…a basso ostinato…a foundation upon which we are all arriving at this last-day-of-the-year station. exhaustion seems to be the grounding venn diagram of all those we have spoken with. like lines of the composer john cage: dissonant polyphony, indeterminate chance-filled melodies, questioning, shapeless and yet heading in some vexing conclusive direction. 2019. confusing and atonal with a lack of rests, avant-garde, but in all the wrong ways.
as we approach the last minute of the last day of this year, we sneak a peek at the new year. new beginnings. we sigh. deeply. looking ahead.
i glance at a small sign i have on the wall. it is not without noticing the irony i read a quote from john cage, “begin anywhere.” a good place to go from conked out.
the upnorthgang gathered around the table. the glasses were lined up. multiples of alike wine glasses, aldi winking owl wine at the ready. we had a keyboard for tuning, sharpies in hand and were seriously dedicated to playing christmas songs on wine-filled glassware. jay had seen tuned wine glasses in a catalog, but at $245 a set, we thrifty upnorthgangers knew we could do better. plus, we all could play instruments – guitar, piano, clarinet, trumpet, cello, pipe organ, handbells, ukulele, violin… i mean, we are a talented group of people! hours later, we had composed a new christmas song, which shall remain un-named in this post, and had realized that our songlist would definitely remain short, for indeed we needed at least another octave of wine glasses and, having sipped the excess out of the glasses while tuning, we were out of wine. next up on the musical challenge list? charlie’s pickle jars!
so passing the jingle johns at lincoln park zoo it doesn’t seem so out-of-the-ordinary to hear music emanating from the, er, portapotties. The Boy groaned and begged me to not take a picture, but the wineglassperformingartist in me couldn’t resist.
why not take every opportunity to play some music, i say.
christmas eve. a good reason to sing your heart out. merry!
linda and jim were doing the swedish death cleanse. linda was determined to de-clutter their home of anything that could potentially burden their children one day. once on a mission there is no stopping her, so they were diligent about going through every corner, nook and cranny of their home, eliminating anything that was not needed, anything that hadn’t been used in ages or was just simply extraneous.
now, we all talked about that around the table. with the sun setting on lake michigan and wine in our glasses, our little neighborhood group discussed how hard it is to let go of things, especially things that have some meaning or are mementos of some sort. add to that the fact that many of us were raised by parents who had experienced the great depression and you have people who are pre-destined to keep stuff, repurpose it, re-use it, save it for sometime you might need it, save it for when it comes back into fashion so you don’t have to buy it again, etc etc etc. (that’s definitely my experience and my excuse.)
many times i have entered the basement storage room and gazed at the bins. in years past, we have eliminated most of the boxes and traded them for these bins, throwing out some things, giving away some things, donating items that are useful, so we have made some progress. now there are bins with christmas ornaments, bins with artwork and stories and projects created by The Girl or The Boy, bins of things my sweet momma felt too guilty to give away, bins of sewing paraphernalia, bins of art supplies, bins of old music (for everyone gives the musician they know all the old sheet music they come across in their own basement and then that musician, who feels like it’s a mortal sin to throw music out, is compelled to keep it all in file cabinets or, yes, bins.)
from time to time i get a wild hair and go through a bin or random remaining box or pile in the basement workroom. sometimes i am pretty successful at eliminating clutter. trust me – i have been in peoples’ homes who have been hoarders and just seeing that makes me want to get rid of everything and live in a tiny house (well, one that would fit my piano.)
this winter perhaps we will tackle this once again. one more layer of cleaning out. it is possible. it’s just tough for me to be ruthless. i am too thready to be ruthless. touching memories or seeing them around me is reassuring and fills my heart.
one day in more recent days i went upstairs to look for something in the closet in the hallway. on the top shelf sat these slippers. stored here, they are my sweet momma’s and my poppo’s. they kept them here for when they would visit.
i know that they won’t visit our home again. noticing the slippers stopped me in my pursuit of whatever-it-was-i-was-looking-for. all the moments of having my parents present in my home swirled around me, the finality once again a reality. i struggled with what to do. i took them out of the closet and brought them downstairs to show d.
laying them carefully on the floor, i took this picture so that i could look at it and remember. and then, i placed them in a bag so that someone else – a woman with smaller feet than mine and a man with bigger feet than d’s – could have slippers. slippers with a bank of memories. slippers worn hugging my children as they grew. slippers worn around the christmas tree. slippers worn in the cold winter sitting by the fire or in the summer drinking morning coffee on the deck. slippers that lived here, just waiting for their owners, my beloved parents, to put them on. slippers with big heart. slippers with profoundly good juju.
