it began ever-so-slowly. but on a day we needed a glow, the glow showed up.
all of a sudden – from our adirondack chairs on the patio – we could see a glow peeking out, growing behind the metal sunflower over in the fern garden in the back corner of our yard.
we are sunseekers – but not in a tanning sort of way. on this day, after many days of humid and overcast, humid and hot, humid and ridiculously hot, here was a day that was significantly less humid. the early evening was starting and we were not sweltering. instead, we were tiki-torch-sitting in the backyard, watching the world turn.
i aimed the camera around the yard – to capture that time – barney and our daylilies, the taller switchgrasses, the birdbath, the pond, the ferns and breck, dogga laying on the deck. a half hour later is when the sun started to sneak between the back of the garage and the fence – the amber of my favorite spotlight fresnel gel – this time backlighting the metal sunflower we brought home from dogga’s birthtown across the state.
the sun is streaming across the quilt right now. it is a glorious early morning and our windows are open. the streaming sun assuages worries we carried into the dawn.
i think about all the times i have spent deliberately watching the sun rise. the fence-climbing into crab meadow beach, the eastern sky over the ocean, the sky over lake michigan, over the mountains, in the utah desert, climbing over redrock. i think about all the times i have spent deliberately watching the sun set. northport harbor, the gulf beaches, over summit county mountain peaks, over the grandest of canyons and the quietest of canyonlands, the answer to the sunset of the eastern sky over the lake, off the dock up-north, looking west from our southport beachhouse, in endless farmlands, on favorite hiking trails, off the coast on-island.
to deliberately watch the sun is to see in-real-life the parameters of a day. to know that – in what feels like an instant – another day will start, another day will end. and on and on it goes.
we recently heard news of the death of someone we knew. it took us both by surprise and saddened us. and it made me fall back into that weird space i always feel when learning someone has died – the wondering space – where i wonder how it is that the world can go on if this person cannot feel it.
i know it does – go on.
and i’ve never really answered the question. it just feels too big – too humbling, too consuming, too heavy, too existential – for me to truly wrap my head around it.
i don’t know…
maybe that’s why i watch the sun rise and the sun set.
we moved the sunflower. it was on the deck for a few years now, rusting behind the aging wooden glider, tucked between the kitchen window and the bedroom window. it greeted us each day we left and came home. it watched over my girl as she house-sat during the summer, a couple ago now, when we were on island. she didn’t know it, but i had asked it to keep her comings and goings safe and each time she left and came back to smile good days upon her. it came home from a cedarburg festival with us, having called us over to ponder its purchase. we walked the length of the festival and talked about the sunflower. then we went back, after more debate than most probably make about purchases, and bought it. about two weeks ago we moved it. now its place is next to barney, surrounded by peonies and wild geranium and daylilies and snow on the mountain. it is happy there.
when you’ve lived somewhere for quite some time there are naturally places that you go that feel better than others. for me, there are places in this town that have immediate warm responses for me, places that have held me, places that are part of my cairns, places where i have dreamed and imagined, places where a community has meant the world to me. there are other places that conjure up memories i would rather forget with visceral responses i can actually feel; i generally stay away from those spots not wanting to relive moments of grief or poor judgement or anger or betrayal or grand disappointment. i have learned, though, that sometimes the best way to process those is to drive past, to acknowledge, to breathe deeply, to maybe weep. in the same way that actual places remind us, mementos from places we hold dear make it into our special boxes or find their way into our home like sticks accumulating in the walking stick vessel in our sitting room or rocks added to the stones around the pond. some mementos are bigger than others, like the sunflower from a gloriously sunny festival-going day in a town we adore browsing or the 5′ long driftwood from a long island beach that graces the mantel or the high mountain aspen branch wrapped in lights in the dining room. and then there’s barney. there’s no escaping this beautiful piano in our backyard, aging with us.
i’ve shared barney’s story before…how he escaped the junk man’s junkyard destination and, for a small price, came here to share life with us. from a basement boiler room to a place of honor near the pond in our tiny yard he sits and invites the company of beautiful plants, munching squirrels and cutie-pie chipmunks. yet he is a memento. and the place he came from is no longer a favorite place. instead, it is a place i now avoid, with emotions that elicit a physical response and a little vibration i can feel in my chest when i think about it. and so how do i avoid attaching these feelings to barney, i have wondered.
my growing-up piano is in our basement. movers moved it there many years ago, before there were walls in the stairwell. i wonder what will become of it if we ever move. it proudly holds art books and a small stereo and sits in david’s painting studio with a couple rocking chairs and his gorgeous old easel. i have thought about ways to repurpose it. and yet, it is so dear that it will, for right now, stay there just as it is, with music in its bench and the little index card on which is carefully printed in eight-year-old font “practice makes perfect”.
there is a piano of size in my studio. it sits at full stick, waiting patiently. i was in there yesterday and it whispered to me, but, for right then, i was consumed with the finishing of putting things away. there is still music to file, organ music still to go back into cabinets. i must decide what to do with the poster that hung on the choir room wall that reads, “if you ask me what i came into this world to do, i will tell you i came to live out loud” or the metal cut-out words “it’s all about music” or the white strands of happy lights that were woven around the blackboard that listed rehearsals and demonstrated strum patterns and had dates of parties for that well-loved community held at our house.
maybe once i decide what to do with all of it – including the emotional wreckage part – i will again sit at my piano. drive past, acknowledge, breathe deeply, weep. my piano is full of empathy i can feel and some day, soon i hope, i will be able to sit and play – in a studio cleaned and inviting with mementos of goodness and intentions of evolution. then i will walk out of the studio and down the hall, through the kitchen and the sunroom and outside onto the deck. and i will sit on the old settee and listen to the pond and the birds and watch the chipmunks scurry across the top of the old piano that shares space with the sunflower and a couple green-eyed metal birds.
in answers that have come with a few months of time, i have found that the piano-ness of barney has overcome the where-it’s-from-ness. the peeling back, the wrinkles, the embrace of its tiny community in our yard…these things have usurped the rest.
instead, barney and the sunflower together greet us upon leaving and greet us upon returning home. together, they both bring joy and reassurance to our backyard and they both smile good days upon us.
reverse threading 