The Last Bit

Our Penske truck loomed outside our house, parked illegally on the street by our red front gate.  Its back end gaped open.  I wasn't sure that we'd fill it, and I certainly wasn't sure we'd fill it in time.  We had to move everything that remained out of the house, which was, despite our sale and numerous ruthless clean-outs, still significant.  Then we had to clean--after moving into a series of dirty houses, I was determined to leave the house sparkling.  And we were a day behind schedule.  Our hotels were booked from Chicago to Montana, and there was no going back.

It was hot.  If you live east, close your eyes and remember July.  Got it?  Feel the sweat trickling down your back?

Martin was at the U, anxiously twiddling his thumbs while an IT guy wiped his computer clean, and I had snuck out to eat lunch down-town with friends.  Lunches with friends had become funny things of late.  Back when all looked clear for the next twenty years or so (our kids would go to school together, possibly but not probably fall in love, and we'd grow old in the long Pennsylvania summers), we'd chat easily about the endless details that sharing daily life affords.  But now, with the house in a constant state of upheaval and an impending move in the air, easy chat, though we tried for it, felt like a sailboat perched in denial on a rolling, stormy sea.  On board we were still toasting each other and eating finger food but we knew the storm, and the tossing overboard, and the ending-up-on-different-islands, was imminent.

All the same our lunch was good and we browsed through the Artisan's Shop afterward, just as if there was nothing pressing to do--no empty moving van, no house to empty and clean.

By three o'clock, the moving truck still looked mostly empty.  The reality of staying up most, if not all, of the night, seemed closer and closer when, around four o'clock, our community began trickling in the door in earnest.  Soon the house was full to bursting with people moving furniture, brandishing brooms and huffing down stairs with boxes.  And before you knew it, seven o'clock rolled around and there was only detritus left behind, a few wisps of us in the corners of echoing rooms, empty mantels and cupboards and drawers.

We sat on the floor in the kitchen and popped the cork from some champagne I'd been saving since my birthday, and then we filled plastic cups and stared at each other.  I raised my cup and bungled a toast:  "To the best friends a person could have," I said, and we drank up.  The children I'd known since they were in strollers, one since birth, tore around the empty rooms in the tricycle and little car I'd left out until the last minute.

Martin raised his cup:  "When we first moved here," he began (oh!  An articulate toast!  Bully for him), "Next to the coal mine, when the black dust covered our windowsills, I said, 'We'll give it one or two years, tops, and then we'll be out of here.'  But soon that year turned into a plan to stay for twenty years, and we were happy about it.  We have all of you to thank for that.  Of course now our plans have changed again, but we love you all and thank you for being part of our lives."

At this point I whipped out the tequila and we finished that off--but there wasn't that much left after all--and I began to feel the reality of what was happening sink in just a bit.  That's what happens when you sit down at the end of a day--you can go, go, go, but then when you stop, what's real is still waiting for you.  And what was really waiting for us now was goodbyes.

Sally had asked us to cry just once before we left, and it turns out that wasn't hard at all.  But as grief can so easily slip into sentimentality, let me skip to the next morning, on our way out of town.

Perched high on the seat of that Penske truck, we surveyed the mess the raccoon had left in front of our house.  We'd just watched the garbage collectors take the twelve or so enormous bags of garbage that stretched from one fence post to the next but they had not deigned to scoop up the disgusting trail of raccoon leftovers. 

We never had caught the raccoon--I called him Rocky--who intermittently disturbed our garbage and whom, one day, I'd seen meandering thorough the garden, apparently shooting the breeze with our well-fed groundhog.  We'd generally opted for a "live-and-let-live" philosophy with the considerable wildlife that kept Wazoo buzzing along, and now Rocky Raccoon had enjoyed the last laugh.

By this time, too much crying had rendered a splitting headache, so every time I bent over to pick up another used, chewed bathroom item, my head felt as if it were going to explode.  But finally the front lawn was clean and Martin turned the key and the Penske shuddered to life.  We pulled away from our curb and left town far behind, sped past the sheep grazing on the hill bisected by a new gas pipeline, looped through the densely forested roads up to a ridge, past familiar farms.  Finally the road spat us onto the Interstate and we were well and truly on our way west.

I shared a generous squirt of hand sanitizer with Martin.  We rubbed our palms hard to free ourselves from raccoon and garbage.  "Somehow that seemed appropriate," I reflected.  Our last act in our beloved, imperfect home had been cleaning up biohazard trash from our front yard.  It wasn't a stylish exit, but it was perfect for us, an act of service to the critters who will live on in our garden long after we settled somewhere else far away. 

And we aren't stylish people, either--we live as fully as we can, love people with as much energy as we can muster, and collect in the warmth and comfort grace and love brings to us.  In the end, we were filled with thanksgiving, more than we could express fully to those who deserved it, and who could have asked for more than that?

And so the miles fell behind us and the tight hills of Pennsylvania unwound into plains, and the plains broke into buttes.  Four days and thousands of miles later, a scrabbly desert burst into mountains.  But that's another story.

Here's what I wrote, hunkered down at the kitchen table on the day of the big sale--the grand shave of all our worldly possessions--on a shopping list pad, in between totalling purchases.  I was feeling under the weather (think of the book The Red Tent; that's where I should have been hunkered with a cup of herbal and a good book) and Martin was stationed outside, so it was just me, mighty I, in charge inside.  The main floor of the house (except the kitchen where the 'check-out' was), the porch, and the sizable driveway overflowed with everything from furniture to books to our Ford truck.  And it got busy, busy, busy.  We'd advertised in the paper and posted signs all over town.  In hopes of bringing in more earnest buyers, I'd posted adverts for an ESTATE SALE, GOOD PRICES. . .but Martin informed me that you can't have an estate sale unless someone has died.  Our particular endeavor, he said, was a MOVING SALE.  But it was too late.  So outside I'd thumbtacked a huge sign reading, MOVING/ESTATE SALE (NOBODY DIED).  Before we'd drunk our first cup of tea early in the morning, the first buyers had pushed by our barrier and were asking about prices.

Here's my constantly interrupted write-up, spanning about eight hours:
*     *      *     *
There's a big sale going on and I am in the kitchen wishing I were elsewhere.  How strange to have your house filled with people buying your things!  I have--count them--six signs in the kitchen telling people nothing in here is for sale and yet a few people keep wandering in, asking--yes!--if anything is for sale.  SIGNS, people, SIGNS.  Martin, bless him, is outside working the crowd.  A lady just told me it's supposed to rain this afternoon, so she, and I, hope that our stuff is sold by then.  Otherwise there will be a lot of soggy books.  I wish Martin and I could communicate by mental telepathy.  He just came through on a mission with a phone to his ear.  Martin says MADNESS OUTSIDE so I am very glad that I am inside--albeit alone--after all.

9:42.  Much of the less expensive furniture has been hauled off at a bit of a discount.  It's better not to think of how much one paid, originally, for items.  It's certainly best to get thing gone as fast as possible. . . .I just had this absolutely absurd urge to keep a black cat candle holder for Halloween.  Maybe I'll nab it and--I DID nab it--and take it out this October and WONDER why I saved it from being sold!  It was hand-made in India, after all.  I will pay myself a dollar for it. 

Someone just bought the giraffe book-end and the jade good luck charm that our foreign-exchange student from Hong Kong gave us.  All the mattresses [our guestroom beds which we gave away] are gone now.  The queen got taken by two fellows, one very tall one in a sleeveless T-shirt with luxurious, long, curly hair--"Y'uns leaving Greene County?"  he said, and addressed me as "Miss" which I thought was quite nice and archaic, really. 

Quarter after ten and I am very warm but the house is just a big lighter.  I just gave away three books to a rather nervous young Elementary Education major who had a lovely smile after she began talking.  IKEA bookshelf is gone!  Someone sat on the twin leather chairs and seemed to like them but decided not to buy.  The camping mats are gone to a hunter-looking fellow who seemed a little doubtful about the rock-bottom price (how could I go any cheaper?)  For a minute, all is quiet. 

10:32.  An older lady with a cane just picked up the mop [almost new with a big new bottle of cleaner--I wasn't selling anything nasty, promise] and put it down again.  10:42.  A woman loved the big white mirror from Texas but decided against it.  I had high hopes because she looked like a hippie.  Microwave cart and bookshelf, gone!  Drying rack is gone.

Martin says to stay firm on prices but I just want to get rid of everything and see it all go to good homes.  Otherwise, we'll just end up giving it away anyhow.  A man with a prosthetic leg walked in--"Just lookin'!"  Wonder if he'll find anything that interests him?  How about some doilies? Four wine glasses?  An antique shabby chic mirror?  He found the poker chip set--still almost new--I bought Martin some years back.  Turns out that we don't play poker all that much and you don't need to ante up for Scrabble.

I have been smiling and being pleasant to beat the band.  Martin, by his account, is a total stickler and does not back down on prices.  I cannot say the same for myself.  The old woman who bought the mop--her husband held it at arm's length and said, "Don't we have these all over the place?"  Mops?  How many mops does she have?

I think we should slash down everything by half and move it out of here.  A lovely woman just poked her head in and told me her daughter used to live in Seattle but now she's in New Orleans.  It's so hot today, I can just imagine what it's like in New Orleans.  Just let the drop-leaf desk go for ten dollars under.  Sold the small antique table, some lamps, a couple of pretty plates.

The amoire--the beast--must go!!!  An older woman just walked in with a wad of chewing tobacco in her cheek.  Martin is "trolling" as he calls it.  How much is the bike trailer?  What is the Pack 'n Play?  Lots of stuff still for sale, Martin is telling a man, but no corner stands, which is what the guy's looking for.  Somebody wants to trade our truck for his motorcycle.  "I don't do motorcycles," Martin told them.  I'm getting reading to just pack this stuff up and take it to Goodwill.  Two more folks coming up the front stairs.  11:55.  Boredom sets in.  At some point I'll have to eat.

People are comforted by chatting about the weather.  "It's a hot one," a woman just said, no exclamation mark, just flat.  That last stair to the front porch is a real doozy.  An older woman just struggled up it and into our living room where she collapsed on our front porch.  Sold the mirror to a young couple for half the price.  He said he's going to hang it over the couch and I warned him repeatedly to anchor it--it's huge--so it won't brain anyone.  He's a former boxer and looks rather tough so hopefully he really knows how to anchor.

4:07.  Not much left.  The amoire is still there.  It will never leave apparently and we will have it in our driveway forever.  Lots of looking from a family of ten from Arizona who has bought the notoriously huge but beautiful historical home on Sherman Avenue and High Street with the stained glass window.  Wow, Martin is so great at chatting with strangers.  I am tapped out at the moment.  Just sitting here, having my period and watching the house empty out. . .too bad the family from Arizona is squeezed into a tiny apartment in West Virginia--is that legal?--while they wait for the house.  Oh, man, I could really use a cool shower.  At some point we will have to shut down but for now, here I sit, hiding. . .again, and counting the money.  We made over a thousand dollars!

*    *   *   *
We ended up finally selling the amoire for a song to a single mom with two kids who offered to take anything else we wanted to give them.  The daughter followed me around, asking "Can I have that?  What about that?"  as I unstrung the curtains and piled things for them in the corner of the driveway.  The family settled down on the furniture there and the mom smoked and waited for a brother and his pick-up but I couldn't make any more small talk.

At last, I shut our front door and locked it.  The house echoed.  It's amazing how you can lighten yourself in one day, let go of a thousand things that you held onto for almost a decade.  And nobody misses any of it, bar Bea who noticed her little telephone has mysteriously disappeared.  I promise myself never to accumulate like that again.  Freedom is a more wonderful thing and the getting-rid-of process is such hard work.

The day after the sale, a couple of people dropped by to check out a few remaining pieces on the porch.  As I spoke with them about my antique banker's table where I'd done years of writing, I realized I was seeing only half of each their faces.  I couldn't really tell what they looked like, because I could view either their noses and eyes or their mouths and chins.  Then my vision completely dissolved into waves--a classic migraine, which I used to suffer through frequently in high school but now only get during periods of extreme stress, like the time I fell down the stairs when I was pregnant.  I lay down with my eyes tightly shut, turned on the air conditioning, and tried to forget where I was.  Four days later, we would truck out our remaining belongings and head west--and we would still be surprised by how much we had kept.

The money from the sale went to new bikes when we reached Washington.  And the truck?  Our beloved old Ford stayed "in the family," so to speak--Tonya and John bump around the ridge with it, and their girls have found "Ole Bessie's" wide bed a perfect perch from which to swing from the barn rafters.

One big farm house packed to the gills
+ one moving van
+ small house at destination
(X astronomical gas prices)
=one huge moving sale

This was an equation even I, math-challenged as I am, could figure out.  Martin and I gave ourselves one week to fly back to Pennsylvania and (sans kids) unleash a fury of fixing, cleaning, selling, and packing on our big old Dutch Colonial.

When we walked in the doors, our home smelled the same, of herbs and sleep and rich old wood.  The stairs wound up to the second floor as they always had, and at the top, the childrens' beds were made, ready for their travel-weary bodies to slip between the sheets.  But they weren't with us, and Martin and I gazed at our house--everything clean, everything in its place--and thought of the work that lay before us.  We gazed up at our ceilings where the electrician had rewired the house in our absence, and big holes in the plaster gaped back at us.

The very next day we dismantled the childrens' rooms.  Then we plunged onto the rest of the house.  That week felt like a dream, punctuated by sweet breaks with friends, a last dinner at our favorite sushi restaurant and a midnight trip to Walmart to collect packing boxes.  I realized that the west had already made me soft; the massive, dirty trucks that have clogged the county's streets since the gas boom and the poverty that marks the hilly, green county that we grew to love so well shocked me again.  The houses of my friends and our garden, nearing the peak of summer color, spoke of home but didn't quite feel like home.

Early in the week Sally dropped into our house, a mess of cardboard boxes and plaster dust, and before she left she said, "I want to see you people cry just once before you leave."

Of course we'd grieved plenty by this time, but as a veteran mover--I've moved sixteen or more times now--I know you can't pack up a house and cry at the same time.  You have to be able to see the teacup you're wrapping, damn it.  You pack like crazy and then you leave yourself a little space to let the transition sink in before you jump into the next world--a couple hours at the end to say goodbye, goodbye to the house and your friends and all the goodness that has surrounded you like a choir of voices.  But the packing and the moving is hard work and you have to be wiry and go back to your peasant roots and show a little sisu, as my muscular Finnish ancestors would say.

My parents call this in-between space--and so I've come to think of it--"the wood between the worlds."  You Narnia buffs, you know what I'm describing; in The Magician's Nephew, Digory and Polly slip the evil uncle's rings on their fingers and find themselves splashing up through a shallow pond into a forest.  The world--which has a series of ponds, or pools, is comforting in a way--it makes you a bit sleepy and complacent, but there's a feeling of discomfort, too, as if you're not quite anywhere specific, but in a waiting place.  You're neither here or there but somewhere else all together.  Digory and Polly must plunge into another pool to access the next world, full of adventures (frightening or pleasant). 

I have been in dozens of woods between worlds, and the feeling is one of waiting, caught up in suspense between one reality and the next.  It always feels as if I'm dreaming (almost jetlagged) and if I have to wait too long in the wood between, I begin to feel lost and frustrated.  So I take a breath, grope toward the next pool, hold my nose, and plunge in.

In our wood between the worlds, we had to cut all our belongings in half or more.   We'd done much of that already; we'd excised about 2/3 of our books, clothes, toys, and miscellany.  The furniture had to be rooted through, our beloved old pick-up sold, and our house still felt as if it were at capacity.  Ah, sigh.  I began to think it would be a relief if the house burned to the ground.  We'd book a flight back and arrive completely unencumbered.

And that was a pretty good rule of thumb, in the end.  If the house burned down, what would we miss?  The answer was, not much.  We tried to marry that somewhat reckless rule with the check of practicality (don't burn the mattresses; they are too expensive to replace), and then we began pricing the house.  Soon the entire first floor, the porch, and the driveway were jammed with things we no longer wanted.  Too much stuff had become a price to pay for freedom, for the wind at our backs and our feet shaken free of the wretched dust (the untimely, sad end to a job) that still clung to our feet. 

Now we only needed to sell it all, and that I dreaded more than anything, not because I didn't want to see it go, but because selling my own stuff makes me skin-crawlingly uncomfortable.  (Once we listed a couch on Freecycle and when a family came to pick it up, I made the children hide with me under a table so we wouldn't have to face them.  There was nothing wrong with the couch; it was a great giveaway.)  I just have a paralyzing sort of embarrassment about passing on my stuff.  Maybe it was growing up in developing countries.  Maybe I feel guilty about owning things.  Whatever it is, it made me hate the upcoming sale--which was necessary for our resettlement elsewhere--with a vengeance. 

In the end, I made it through by writing a running narrative on a shopping list pad while two hundred people or so tromped through our house.  I'll include the best bits in the next post.  

Thanks for rehashing it with me.  Soon we can all move west.

So, to pick up from yesterday. . .

We began to think about leaving.  How do I begin to describe the mixture of emotions that accompanied our choice to pack up one year early?  Elation, grief, a dogged determination to work hard and quickly, dread, hope. . . .

The worst part was telling our community.  I thought we'd wait for a few days until details began to settle more quickly but I couldn't stand it.  I'm a terrible secret-keeper generally--secrets (unless they're pleasant ones, delicious to hide away until a joyful revealing) crush me like a cider press, work me like gears, until I yield them up.  And so the day after we reached home, Sally came over and I felt as if I would crack in two if I didn't tell her and get it over with. 

You must understand that Sally and I have seen each other every day for the past five or six years.  Beatrix reminds me if I forget ("I want to go to Will's--her best buddy ever--house!") but there's not much chance I could forget a constant source of sanity, irreverent humor, and tender compassion that comes in the form of my friend Sal.  She kept my life in order, reminding me of forms that were due, snack times I promised to provide and would have missed, children I forgot to pick up at preschool, and she told me the truth when it needed telling.  One especially kid and cleaning and monotonous morning I doubled over on her floor in tears: Surely there's more to life than this!  I cried. . .she consoled me and then she sent me downstairs to run on her treadmill, which did me a world of good. 

We were not of the mall-crawl moms.  We did the occasional lap around our local Walmart in the winter when all was dreary and there was no other place to go, but our days subsisted of cups of tea and library trips and watching her son, Will, dress in Bea's pink pjs and Bea dress in Will's cars pjs.  Dressing in each other's pjs was an especially highlight for our kids and they usually got busy doing just that the moment they stepped over the other's threshold.

When I was gone on the west coast during our dear friend, Nancy's passing, Sally sat with Nancy every day, rubbing her back and keeping up a flow of cheer that I wished I had been there to help provide.  I'll never forget how she told me that she was there for both of us, and when I arrived home, too late to say goodbye to Nancy in person, we cried and laughed and ate and then we cleaned Nancy's room together.  We cleaned each other's kitchens, cooked together, huffed up hills, red-faced and cursing, to try to lose a little winter weight.  She drove me on endless interviews through the winding roads of Greene County and I believe I probably owe her about a thousand dollars in gas.  She was my companion through the crazy, bizarre, hilarious, and trying young-children days.  Our families knew each other in the daily sort of way families used to and I have yet to meet more generous, sacrificial people.  We made it together until our children were in preschool, and for that I am grateful.

But I was the luckiest of all women, for I had other dear friends, too, who bound me up day after day and filled my life with the peculiar scents of their personalities and. . .also somewhat irreverent humor (there's a link here--you can't make it through parenthood without somewhat wicked friends).  Tonya is a bad-ass farm girl who butchers her own chickens and smacks rabid possums upside the head with flashlights.  She lives up on a ridge in Greene County and manages a passel of chickens, two cats, two daughters, endless laundry (of course she hangs it all up to dry on a quarter-mile laundry line), a rotating schedule of canning and preserving and freezing, an enormous garden, a part-time P.A. career, and punctual thank-you notes and social events.  She also home-schools and hunts. 

I spent one lovely evening with her up in a tree blind.  I was there to record the experience (the sound of a stream, the autumn colors, the smell of leaves) and she was there to blow the brains out a doe.  That evening, I left her crashing into the dense undergrowth in her orange vest, a rifle under her arm.  I am not joshing you.   Tonya's from good, work-til-you-bleed Mennonite stock and her house and yard is always neat as a pin.  You would think all of this would equal a totally crazed, secretly bitter woman, but it doesn't.  I love spending time with Tonya.  She's ruthlessly honest about herself and her life.  I am about to scream, she will tell me on the phone.  Do you think it's too early for Kahlua?  Needless to say one of my favorite things to do with Tonya (and her dear husband John) is drink and eat late into the evening until I almost feel sick but mostly feel blissful and sated.

Then there's Michelle, a ravishing beauty who, on her first visit to our house, sat down fully clothed on our homemade slip-in-slide and scooted down our hill to the bottom.  When I first met her at a University picnic, a fly-accompanied affair where I usually smile at people until my jaw aches, I felt that instant draw that I will occasionally feel with a potential dear friend.  My mother describes the feeling as souls leaping toward each other.  I dropped off a bouquet of herbs at her house and we--and our families--were wonderful friends from then on.  It was with them that we fixed homemade truck balls to the back of Sally and her husband, Kevin's car, and it was with her that I heard the most revolting stories of her PA experience.  I oft liked to ask her: What is the grossest thing you did today?  I liked affirming my choice never to dabble in any of the medical professions.  She took Sal and me to New York City, showing us how to move with alacrity through the subway and sharing a steaming cup of hot chocolate spiked with cayenne.  The only time she left us in that metropolis was to duck into a disappointingly-well-lit palm reader's to do a little research about how palm reading is done.  Sal and I stood outside, shivering and watching.  Maybe there's more of an art to it generally, but mostly it was a useless counseling session where Michelle was informed she'd be happy for the rest of her life.  And so I hope she will be.

There was Nancy's precious family; her children who I'd promised Nancy I'd love and care for, most specifically, her daughter Catherine, who spent much of her time at our house and had become a fourth daughter to me, bound up in my heart with my love for Nancy and my trust that I had been in the right place at the right time to wrap up Catherine in tenderness.  I couldn't understand why the non-tenure had happened, why we were being moved on from a place that seemed, for all purposes, like a place we were needed.

 And there were more good women and men and children who wove our lives up into a fabulously diverse, wonderful rope of goodness that kept us truly safe.

So that morning I sat with Sally on the porch as our kids ran from inside the house down the stairs and back again with brimming cups of water (they were making a pond or something) and I said, "I have news and I don't know how to tell you."

Her face immediately fell.  "Just tell me," she said.

"We're leaving a year early," I said, and then we both started crying.  "Are you angry with me?"  I asked.

"Of course I'm not," she said, and then we sobbed for a while.

I told Tonya on the phone and she was surprisingly calm, but then she told me later that's what PAs are trained for, and that she'd scrapped her work for the afternoon and sat on her porch, watching the sky.

Michelle looked me straight it the eye.  "Why?"  she asked, and I explained,  and nobody slept well for a while, especially because others we loved received notice, too.  It seemed that with one fell swoop our lovely, beautiful community had been mangled.

But, as I so often told Martin, big powerful people can only take so much away from you.  They can make you move and shake up your world but they can't change what's deeply true about you--and here, buckle up for a Disney moment--they can't take away your love for one another.  Our community poured more generously than ever into our preparations to leave.  From the time our house went on the market, it was under contract in two weeks.  Care for our children (my family in Washington) was already in place, so we made two trips across the US, one with the children and then another--just Martin and me--with our very pared-down possessions in tow.

I have a few favorite memories of leaving.  One is the night that Martin was gone doing a two-week job in Kentucky right before our first house-showing.  Our friends turned up just in time and we worked on our massive yard for hours, cleaning, trimming, mowing, tidying and tying up trash while our children played.  Then when twilight finally began settling in, just before the fireflies began to prick the darkness that collects down at the Black Walnut tree, we all sat in the yard and drank wine together.  Michelle's husband, Noah, said, "This is a beautiful piece of land.  I'd jump at it if I were looking to buy."

"It's like a park," I agreed.  "Maybe we'll stay here forever."  And then I laughed--a good belly laugh, not a thin, bitter laugh--because we weren't staying forever.  Our move had been decided, and for those of us who were staying behind. . .well, nobody stays anywhere forever, do they?

And that's what it is when you really love a group of people.  Grief turns easily to work and work together yields laughter, and joy, too.  And you take that with you wherever you go.

It strikes me that perhaps I should give a brief overview of the events of the past few months.  In many ways, it seems as if magic has dropped us in this little red house, trimmed in wisteria, just a walk away from the water.  On clear days the Olympics, framed by cedars, rise dark above the bright glimmer of Poulsbo's harbor. . .but that is for later.

Here, on this page, at least for a while, I am still at Wazoo Farm, though that beloved, rambling, hard-won old house and yard belongs now to two young women, who, on their free time, have been refinishing the floors and doing who-knows-what. . .there was always another job, or two, or six, waiting.  So let me back up: it's early-June, and a hot early-June it is, too.

As most of you know, in a series of most unfortunate, rather awful events that had nothing to do with his excellent work or much-loved reputation, Martin did not receive tenure, and this signalled to us the beginning of an end.  As some of his beloved colleagues began to lose their jobs as well, we realized that the University was taking a road we could never, ever walk (at this point, the decision had been made for us anyway, so in a way, that was a great relief).  It became harder and harder to live in a town where we had invested everything with feeling that our departure, and the sale of our house, and all the work that leaving such a life would entail (mentally and physically) was imminent.  Indeed it hung over us like a great heavy cloud.

We also realized that Martin's "sabbatical" year, for which we'd been tentatively planning, was suddenly upon us: a full year, at full pay, without any teaching obligations.  We'd talked of travel and spending time near family; now there was no promise of work at the other end--so why not have the adventure we'd been dreaming of?

We came to all these conclusions, at the same time, silently and independently, on a hike in the mountains of West Virginia.  The weather had been utterly sweltering and our lovely old home had no air-conditioning. Every time I looked out the window at our garden I despised it and all the work it entailed; it was so longer ours, it seemed, but we were still responsible for readying it--and the whole house--for someone else.  We'd planned, of course, on pouring the next twenty years into it; now we had a year. 

Our house was bursting with house guests, one of whom was in a life-changing crisis.  A woman had verbally abused us on our front doorstep and threatened us and the police had awakened us one morning at one o'clock.  (That's a whole story unto itself).  We hadn't spent any quality time with our children in goodness knows how long and we felt unbraided and unravelled.  So we escaped.  We packed our car and drove up into the mountains and stayed in a little forest-service cabin, our first family vacation in what seemed like years.  I hadn't been able to do any work so I planned to pack my laptop and squeeze in some good writing time, but Martin was adamant: no technology.  No computer.  No phone.  Only a few games, our swimming suits, and groceries. 

The first evening, after unpacking, Martin took the girls down to the swimming pool.  The evening was cool and I searched around under the maples and oaks for kindling.  Then I built a fire, sat back, and stared at the flames.  Inside I felt a great knot, one that I'd felt looping and tightening in February, when Martin received his letter, finally beginning to loosen.  I hadn't known it was there.  I fixed a simple dinner in the tiny kitchen; I made the beds in the two rooms.  Everything smelt of wood and woodsmoke.  There was no noise.  The girls came home, happy and flushed, and soon we were eating together around the chunky, awkward wooden table.  We played a game and drank hot chocolate.  That night I read a book silently with Martin in front of the fire. 

I realized I hadn't spent such a simple, wonderful evening with my family in many months.  Our house, our schedules, our hearts and minds--they had been full and frantic, so good and blessed, a basket always overflowing, that this evening felt almost ascetic, as if we'd walked out of a bizarre and fabulous and noisy carnival into a monk's cell.

The next morning we hiked together.  The day was overcast, the path sylvan and full of wonder.  We meandered around deep seas of green moss and gnarled, old roots that tumbled and twisted over each other.  Here and there we found smooth, grey rocks balanced on top of each other in piles, and it seemed to us that other-worldly creatures, not hikers, had stacked them there.  A wooden bridge curved over a clear sandy bank, crisscrossed by a clear stream. At the turning-about point, an impossibly large boulder balanced on a tiny rock.  Then, at the very end of our hike, we found a thousand piles of zen rocks, all balanced perfectly.  We stacked our own.  Martin and both knew--independently--exactly what we must do.

On the way back to our cabin, I looked at Martin.  "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"  I said in a low voice.  I didn't want the children to hear.

"I think I am," he said.

Sure enough, on the way home as the children slept, we began to plan our departure.  It would be a quick, easy escape from all the heartbreak but it would be a tearing wrench to leave our community, whom we loved as our own family, behind.  But the more we spoke, the more we realized that a flight northwest, thousands of miles away and without a long term job waiting for us, was an inexorable reality.   For our family, for ourselves, for reasons we couldn't even articulate.  We'd been planning to spend our lives invested in one place; we'd been released from those plans; we felt God's loving but insistent boot in our rears and felt the wind from an open door.  Take as little as you can and leave as fast as you can.  Go.  You're released from all this goodness and heartache; there is new good waiting for you.  Go.

Today, in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, I peeled and chopped tiny yellow apples, a crop the girls and I had piled into Bea's bike basket days before at our nearby communal orchard.  I added peaches that were so ripe the skin slipped easily under a hot stream of water, and I broke them into a pot with my fingers.  The girls scooped up a pile of windfalls from our own apple tree and I added them, too, still hard and green.  As the sauce simmered and filled the house with a familiar heady scent, I thought of long mornings in Pennsylvania, a bushel of apples between my feet, bent over the peeler as I chatted with Nancy Thompson and we sipped tea.  I thought of winding through roads swept with yellow leaves with my friend Tonya (or Sonya, as she appeared in my columns), on our way to the local apple and peach orchard. 

I think, too, of a brilliant day when the sky was the color of my daughter's eyes, swinging myself up into an apple tree not far from town as Sally (or Sal, as she appeared in my columns) snapped photos of our children.

Our little house smelled wonderful and as my sister and brother-in-law, my cousin, my nieces and nephews and my own family spilled in the door from the chilly outdoors, I relished sharing it with them.  This process--harvesting, cooking slowly, eating together--the smelling and the stirring, the sugaring and the spicing--all of it recorded my belonging in a new place.

Tonight, stepping out of a hot shower, I looked in the mirror and read much of my life on my body: a series of maps that trace my daughters' first growth as they stretched and pushed from inside my belly.  I suddenly realized that each day in my life never feels truly finished unless I've processed it somehow, and as a writer, I do that by recording, by mapping.  When life is busy, I write the stories in my mind in a quiet moment, but that feels incomplete.  Settling myself here, then, must mean that I have to return to this place to find these words and share them with you. 

Writers often advise their students to let a life-changing experience stew for a while.  Walk around it slowly, smell it, taste it, let the flavors mingle.  Then offer it up.  I've waited for a few months now.  We're well and truly moved, but so much of my soul lingers behind.  How will I center myself in this new place?  Write, write, write.  It's time.  Thanks for waiting.

"Wazoo Goes West" will wait as I find a way to leave "Notes From. . ." behind.  Bodily, I left it some time ago, but the recording must still be done.  I'll try for as long as I can stand it and then I'll move on.

This afternoon I balanced two cups of tea and two gingersnaps on a little tray and managed to carry them, without spilling, to the red adirondacks under the birch trees.  The birch trees!  Queenly trees with fluttering skirts and sunlight dancing in each leaf.  Or perhaps they're more like dancers with streamered tambourines.  We are in love with them.  We planted them six years ago and today we sat in their shade and drank our tea and talked about what is most important in our lives.

And it's not the trees, or the house, or the programs and classes Martin developed over the last seven years.  And it's not our work, either, though we love it, and it's not our poems or stories or our small successes.  What is most important for us are the people we love and transform by our love--and the people by whom we have been transformed. We pour ourselves and our work and our energy into people.  The rest is important, but by contrast, the rest is temporal; it can blow away in one mighty gust of wind. And much of it has.  Martin came home from cleaning out his office disconcerted and sad.  I think it surprised him, how depressing it was.  All his beautiful programs, the ones he envisioned and worked so hard for--the literary magazine, the open mics, the reading series, each class sculpted and labored over.  And for what?  he asked.

But the birch trees spoke to us with their music:  It's not the programs themselves that matter; programs are for people.  Programs inevitably disappear.  But the impact they have on people, the ways they change those who experienced and participated--that is the lasting thing.

If we've been taught anything by all of this, one lesson driven home directly and mercilessly would be: very little is ours.  I keep rehearsing it.  I knew it, or thought I knew it.  Now I know it even more.  We are given gifts, we love them, we do our best with them, but they are not ultimately ours.  Not even our writing really belongs to us; we are stewards of a poem, or a story, but we walk alongside them; we do not possess them, and by trying to possess any of it, we ruin all of it.  I guess that rule goes for just about everything I can think of, including people--friends, spouses, children, parents.  We must perpetually let go if we want to find the core of what really matters, if we want to hold tightly to what makes life real and miraculous and lasting. 

We did some haiku with a bunch of fourth graders today, and that was healing: experience a moment; love it; let it go.  Also healing was the fact that every haiku master we came across loved talking about bird droppings.  Bird ---t in sake and on rice cakes.  One haiku basically read:  the happier the sparrow, the more he s---s all over you. (Insert appropriate word--not for young audiences).  So when one fourth grader wrote about a seagull pooping on his potato chips at the beach, we said, Ah, welcome to the fold, young poet.

Haiku is the only writing assignment in college I ever got assigned a B for.  I was crushed.  I have been intimidated by haiku, probably since then.  Apparently I stink at whittling a moment down to three, spare lines.  That's Martin's cup of tea.  Maybe I'll try it as a sort of spiritual discipline.  Maybe you should.  One freeing tip: what you heard in elementary school, that the lines must be 5 / 7 / 5 syllables--you can forget that tyranny.  What you're looking for are three short, simple lines.

Birch leaf--
coin of sunshine on my shoulder
We drink tea all afternoon.

Oh, I'm still terrible.  This will, perhaps,be a private exercise.  (I just had to slip in the bit about drinking tea.)  I think the fourth graders haikued me right under the table today.

Apparently I've become a weeding weakling.  A season of sitting on my bottom and writing and doing little else has rendered my wrists shaky and my legs jello.  After only thirty minutes of weeding.  Ach!

We were sad to see Maurice Sendak had died.  He would have been pleased to hear Merry, at age three, recite Where the Wild Things Are complete with sound effects.  This morning we sat in the sun room and drank our third cup of tea as Martin read his obituary out loud.  I will read Micky in the Night Kitchen with just a twinge of sadness from now on.

The house smells of baking sweet potatoes.  Yesterday, before rain filled the night with a wonderful, healing song, Martin mowed a path through the garden so now at least I can see the blue haze of speedwell and the white azalea petals among all the weeds.

Martin is packing up hundreds of poetry books and bringing home lamps and rugs and pictures and all that has filled his office for seven years.  It is a mercy that the Fine Arts building is slotted for work this summer due to asbestos, because he is only one of a great crowd packing up their offices and filling the elevator with boxes.  It feels better to be part of a crowd surging outwards than one lone fellow, the one who was not tenured, stumbling down the stairs under a tower of books.  Of course he'll use the elevator.  It just seems sadder to stumble down the stairs.

I am filling the basement with boxes and furniture, as well, for the first of a series of clean-outs that will eventually end with a pod, or a moving van, or the back of the pick-up, if need be.

Merry loves to chat about where we might live next, especially the house we might occupy.  Finally, after a long discussion one morning, I said, "Well, maybe we'll just sell everything and live in our car."

Merry made a face.  "That might be a little too small," she said.

"You can have your own seat," I pressed.  "All to yourself.  Some people live in their cars."

"I don't think they live in a Subaru," she said, "Not a family of five.  Besides," she continued, "Can you imagine what would happen to me at school when my teacher asked me to draw a picture of myself and my house?  It would be me, in front of a blue Subaru!"

Ach.  So scratch the car.  And scratch the almost-acre garden.  What were we thinking?  We're not big garden people, I've decided.  Just enough.  It will become my new mantra.  Just enough, and maybe, some days, a little more.

I just finished writing an e-mail to a friend: The plates of the earth shift; another crack appears.  Then you have to wait for everything to shift back again.  That is what being a parent of three children is like.  But you don't have to be a parent to feel an earthquake, of course.

I see people on porches with their children, planting spring gardens, walking around houses and yards that have been theirs for twenty or more years.  I wonder that they have been allowed to be rooted.  What is the magic formula that gives so many in this town a heritage of being, of family and friends, of land and home?

And then I wonder if that's what I really want.  Deep roots in one place.  But at the expense of what?  Adventure?  Opportunities?  Courage?

And of course I'm speaking for nobody but myself; of course being in one place does not have to limit your life.  But I told Martin that I should have known I wouldn't have been allowed to stay here for twenty years.  The curse, or the blessing, or the fact of existence, is on my head like an invisible crown:  this woman is part of the wandering crowd, heritage of fleet feet, of gathering and walking on.

Nobody in my family has ever lived in one place for over seven years.  Seven years is our family's biblical number.  And after seven years it was ordained that they should take up their children and travel. . .I lived for six in Bangladesh and seven in Kenya; those two periods (and now this one), are the rivers that connect the many tributaries: Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, Iowa, Illinois again, Texas. . . .

It all takes a great amount of energy.  But why was I surprised?  I'm actually breaking a record by soon beginning on my eighth year in Pennsylvania next year; part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Eight years?  Two shy of a decade?  Surely that's more than a child of my heritage can ask for.

In the meanwhile I'm realizing afresh that what I said a year ago is true.  I can simply not get my house clean or my possessions streamlined without moving.  And that's the task I'm pursuing.  When it comes down to it, there are only a few things in my house I really want.  The rest could go up in smoke and I would never miss them.  Martin's Grandmother's quilt, my good Wustof knife, a few photographs.  My pillow, a few books.  And now is my chance.

I wish I could gather my favorite things from the garden, though:  the peonies, just opening, the aspen trees, so beautiful and delicate, the purple-headed alliums.

But they are, by nature, rooted things, and belong where they are.

As I wrote years ago in an erstwhile book: Home is something I carry inside myself.  I can encounter home in the face of a friend, my mother's hands, the smell of a favorite book,  in a peony opening its petals, no matter where I am.  Another mantra.  It remains true, even after endless transitions.

This last Friday, Martin taught his last class ever at Waynesburg University.  Seven years of dedication to his students, to scholarship, to building programs.  Seven years of packed schedules with committee work and envisioning a better place and working long hours to create community.  Seven years of parenting alone when I had to so he could devote himself to his work.  Seven years of students in our home, for dinners and tea and long nights of discussion.

And life goes on.

When he came home, sad and resigned, we strapped Bea in the car and drove to Morgantown, WV for sushimi and miso soup.  We ate with three different sets of people over the weekend, including a lovely, long dinner with a few students.  We wrapped Chinese dumplings and Martin cooked up three different stir fries. We drank lots of tea.  We spent a wonderful afternoon with two beautiful people yesterday in their log cabin, decorated with artwork from over fifty years of world travel.  We sat under huge poplar trees while the girls caught salamanders in a pond.

And life goes on.

Today we prepare Martin's poetry manuscript for half a dozen contests.  We'll lick the envelopes and send them off.  Hoping.

Now this remains: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.

And what can we do but fight to love all of it, to pull people into love, to accept that we too are loved.

There's a kitchen full of breakfast dishes, a floor scattered with blocks, laundry, showers to take, manuscripts to compile and post.  Another day, full of dayliness.  Maybe a miracle or two if I open my eyes a little wider.  Maybe.  Whoever compiled my personality in the dark before I was born must have had themselves a good chuckle:  She'll still be looking for magic when she's thirty-four, when her husband's out of work in a year and she's gained ten extra pounds over the winter. 

Or maybe that was the blessing laid on me at birth.

I'll take the latter today, the invisible train headed for someplace good.  With a flask of tea along, of course. And the whole lot of you for company.

After Martin received his letters informing him that he'd been denied tenure, the journal that he advised, (and the biggest reason his career here ended), was left without a faculty advisor.  But completely without his knowledge, an amazing issue was just released, completely student-produced.  Read it here:  UNDERGROUND MUSE & STONE.

Last evening I sat on the porch swing, looking out over our yard through layers of green: the climbing rose arching against the brick of our porch, then the lilacs, bursting with first purple blooms, then the peach tree's long fish-shaped leaves; behind that the flutter of the quaking aspens, lime green against white bark, and finally across the street, the velvet backdrop of a purple plum. Beatrix played at my feet with a pile of sticks and rocks, building a house. The weather was perfect, all was beautiful, beautiful, and I found myself just able to enjoy it.

In the last few days I've realized that my joy, a pool I've always bathed myself in, managing to find at least a few drops on a dry day, has been running quite low. I didn't know.

And I write this next bit unspecifically, with no identifying details: Our situation has wearied me, the knowledge that one rash decision by a few men--that their decision has ended our lives here--this continues to sap my energy. That the petty cruelty continues (before the 'sheets are even cold' they've listed the position, packed with pretty Christian descriptions of an ideal candidate), tires me. I have forgiven, shrugged off, let go of a need to retaliate, but all the same, my mind is changing, readying myself to leave. When I look at the house I see resale; when I look at the garden I'm filled with the heaviness of what needs to be done before another can begin to love it as we have; when I slip into full enjoyment of our community, an undercurrent of encroaching departure checks me. And in all this, I've tried to cling to the kernels of truth that are stronger than the diminutive evils at play: we love one another, we are loved, a new place waits for us somewhere. To imagine a different life--this is what we must do, all while enjoying every moment here in the fullest way we can. It is a hard task!

This morning I steeled myself again: I will not let small, miserable people rob me of my joy.

I realize afresh that turning toward joy, when to snap to anger and justice would be so easy, is a choice I must make day by day, moment by moment. When I tell people that we're doing fine, I mean it. On good days I revel in all the goodness that is mine, and I believe it and I am grateful. On other days I look at what is beautiful and have to squint through the smut to see it fully.

Martin and I were talking the other night about the Quaker idea that everyone bears a light within, the light of God's image, the stamp of being fully human and inherently worthwhile. It is this belief that convicted the Quakers that Native Americans must be treated with respect; it is this belief, too, that filled them with the courage to fight slavery.

When I look at certain people, I admit I find it very hard to find their inner light, especially when it seems they have done everything they can to deaden their own light. Of course my eyes are cataracted by my own pettiness--what I want, what I feel I deserve, anger. But I believe in the inner light in everyone and everything; I believe that all that is created contains at least a small pebble of goodness, and probably much more if it is loved. So then, is that what I must do? Is it possible to really see without love? People say that love clouds perspective, but I think, in the case of inner light, that it is the other way around. I think love gives us the eyes to see light burning in another person, and when I am given the task of loving something unlovable, then I must call on courage. Nothing is transformed, least of all my own sight, without love.

The other day I found myself taking care of a baby who was not mine. I was the best candidate to hold him and try to coax him into sleep, but I was tired, overwhelmed by children (also not mine) who were acting badly and whom I could not wait to leave behind with their parents. Someone handed me a bottle filled with bright red punch to feed to the baby, and the idea of feeding a sugary drink to a child repelled me. When I was honest with myself, the baby repelled me as well; his nose was runny, he was rather unattractive (seen by my frustrated, weary eyes at that moment), and he kept reaching up to put his hand in my mouth, as babies do. I saw my own repulsion, and it was horrifying to confront. I asked for eyes of love. I had to. I had no natural maternal feelings or compassion--those were all spent. And I sat in the rocking chair and held the baby and sang "You are my sunshine" and fed him his terrible sugar drink. I noticed the way his jaw trembled when he slipped into sleep, the last sucking instinct, the same one my babies had when I breastfed them. And while my love for this baby was not perfect, while I still feel troubled at my unimaginative coldness, I was given enough love to hold that baby, to act rightly, not to pass him off until he was soundly sleeping. And that was, I suppose, enough, and perhaps all I could receive at that moment.

So today, Kim, call on courage. Joy, love, courage--all three. I'll try.

More news from my parents, this time from my childhood home (see above), where my mother brought me back from the hospital after my birth. I remember so much though I was young. Note the lovely old brick paths--I can almost feel them warm under my bare feet.

One of my favorite memories or stories (when you are a small child they are often the same thing) is about Ebrahim, our old Bengali gardener who kept me out of trouble. My mother sent me this e-mail on Easter, for my birthday: "Here's a pretty gift. We were sitting under a shelter in the yard between what was our house and the guesthouse when a slight figure of a man with white beard and lungi walked up to us. My heart took a turn-it was for all the world Ebrhaim who was coming toward us. Turns out it was his son who insisted that we must come for a meal the next day. And we did, and they laughed and asked about Kimberly. You were born as the baby of the whole project, but as the special charge of Ebrahaim, who followed you devotedly as you went visiting house after house, spreading your joy."

I had just finished editing a poem about Ebrahim the night before, where I thank him for his tenderness with me and wish I could know him now I am grown up, a gardener myself with my own children. There was something so lovely about being remembered by people I have not seen in thirty years--when you grow up overseas, you rarely encounter anyone but your own family who has known you for that long. It made me long to see them again--Ebrahim himself, who died twenty years ago, and all the people who gifted me with their love so early, made me feel precious and worthwhile. I am deeply grateful.

Here's another photo, which took both my sister and I back to this familiar place--the jungle that Heather used to pull me away from, reminding me of snakes and death, the jungle that hung with orchids!--though in my memory the colors are purer and more vibrant.



But here is more of my mother's wonderful e-mail (just a part of the longer story of meetings with people we once knew):

So many memories flooded in as we walked from house to house...here's where the Ragans, etc. lived...here's the nurses' house where we went for tea and gamma globulin shots...here's the road (steep) where Meredith was on his freshly repaired bike, brake shoes installed backwards, went hurtling down the hill, across the main road, tossing him into the rice paddy....here's where the water buffalo went poggle (crazy) and stampeded down the path...remember taking the girls motorbike riding along here... We walked down to Mokamtilla, veering off up the hill where we would take Koolaid and M&M's on Sunday afternoons to picnic and watch the 4:00 o'clock train come by. It was stunningly lovely, walking along the crest of the hill, looking down across rice paddies, a cow here and there, ducks and woman w/her water buffalo, listening to a bird singing his 4-note song again and again.

In one of the houses, a leprosy patient still lives (illegally). She stepped out with her 12 year old daughter. The mother was bald and with only stumps for hands, and cradled her daughter with Down's syndrome so she would have the courage to step out. Meredith took her hands and talked to her until she began to smile; she was lovely. We rounded the corner and encountered Demond, who looked at Meredith in a shocked way and said, "Long Sab!" He had been a watch man while were there. I couldn't believe he remembered.

[My parents visit with people at two houses, and are fed well at both. At one of the homes the electricity goes out and they all sit on a bed and watch a magnificent storm through an open door].

Then on to Ebrahim's son's house, a welcome walk down the main road and across rice paddies to a surprise...a strong, cement house set up high in the middle of the rice paddies, complete with solar power lights. We were so happy to see how well they were living; they talked and laughed as they remembered you girls and we remembered Ebrahim together. They served us a bowl of noodles even before the curry meal arrived, and besides a chicken curry and vegetable curries, a special treat, fried duck eggs. We took pictures together, give them a gift in honor of Ebrahim and he hugged Meredith for a long time and cried. It was a precious visit.

___
After this my parents went on for yet another full meal--"We just couldn't keep up that level of eating," Mom wrote. "We are overwhelmed once again, at the deep hospitality of Bengalis and realize how much we were shaped by the years we lived here. How rich it was and how privileged we were to be here."

Here's another little story I wrote for our Lenten reflections about my parents, who have just left for a two-month working trip to Asia. A recent e-mail confirmed that they have arrived in Bangkok safely.

*

My mother gave away the curtains. She slid them off the rod in our living room, folded them, and pressed them into the hands of our visitor as if it were no big deal. She let them go as if she really didn’t want them, but I knew that wasn’t true.

They were the color of onion skins, with delicate brown embroidery, hundreds of stitches that painted flowers and swirls. I hung them at my mother’s living room window shortly after we moved back from Kenya with very few possessions and little money. Though we’d always believed that we were wealthy (and we certainly had lived where poverty was evident and unforgettable), in Wheaton, a wealthy Chicago suburb, I think we might have been quite poor. We weren’t allowed to say “poor” of course, since an altered setting did not suddenly negate the world’s truth, but with two daughters in college, my parents lived like graduate students. Others climbed the ladder toward financial stability, but I watched as my parents descended it, by choice, rung by rung. They laughed off the idea of ever wanting to “arrive,” while other people their age signed mortgages and bought dream cars. Then, as now, they told us that “arriving” was an illusion, and that whether you ever settled down physically or not, the dream was to move, always journeying, changing, living with the cleansing tension between enough and too much.

But my mother loves beauty, and she filled our lives with certain possessions that made her children understand that life should be marked by sacred spaces and delightful rituals. My parents understood that grace was incarnational, and that spirit meets material and that is good and needed. We had Sunday teas in the familiar Dutch blue and white china; at each new house we buried our noses in favorite books and breathed deeply. Ah, the smell of home. My childhood, covered, surrounded, held by the things that bound me in the love of my family: the photograph of Bengali boats, framed in dark wood; vases of roses, fresh from market; the cedar chest of blankets. The first thing my parents did at each new house was to air our blankets and make our beds, sweet beds that felt like strong ships in the middle of quickly changing seas.

Soon after arriving in America for college, I’d experienced a moment of pure, unadulterated capitalism as I stood in Target. I had a little money. I needed an alarm clock. I realized I could buy one. After eighteen years of incredibly limited purchasing, charity clothes and suitcases from America that contained everything I needed, from toothbrushes to underwear, it was an unbelievable discovery. I could buy what I chose, and then I would have it. I would have it and be able to use it and then, when I made more money, I’d be able to buy more. I looked around my parent’s townhouse and realized that with a little money, I could begin transforming their graduate school look into something a little more elegant. I scoured thrift stores, searched through piles of dross to find the few treasures that would make my parent’s first American home, a small townhouse at the end of a quiet street, beautiful.

I hung my mother’s curtains with love; I believed she loved them. And then, a few weeks later, in one dizzying instant, she gave them away to our visitor, a woman who had recently arrived in America, too, who admired them as they hung at my mother’s window. “They are pretty, aren’t they?” my mother said. “Would you like them?”

My mother grew up below the poverty line. In high school, she cleaned dormitories to buy the material to make herself a dress. In college, she worked three jobs and paid semester by semester. “There are always people who are less well off,” she’d say, and tell me about the family they knew who ate sandwiches made from the fibrous inner skin of banana peels.

So what could I say to my mother when she gave away the curtains?

Recently, on a rainy evening, I stomped into a poetry reading and met one of my students there, a woman from a background of pain and poverty. She was soaked. I thought of my mother. I took off my raincoat, a recent gift, and pressed it into her hands. “Take it,” I said. “Someone gave it to me and you need it.”

I reveled for an instant in the freedom of releasing something to someone who needed it more than I. It felt good. But unlike my mother, astonishing giver extraordinaire, I agonized later over my gesture. Would the student even wear it? It was a really nice raincoat, but she’d said, as I handed it to her, that it wasn’t her color. Would it go to waste? I really needed a raincoat, I thought. Why had I given it away?

But my mother slid the curtains from the rod, beautiful things, and gave them away.

I realize again: how am I called to live? I imagine a rushing river. I kneel down at the bank and dip my hands into the strong current of water, and I keep my hands open, ready to receive what the current brings to me and ready to release it again just as quickly. It is the only way to experience joy, I think, to give away my curtains, and my coat, and all that I would lock away.

Here is another day; a ribbon of blue sky. Six doves pass above my office window. My neighbor's Japanese maple, adolescent in pink, lilacs only a mist of purple, forsythia waning.

A frost caught the newly leafing butterfly bushes and turned them to twisted, dead things. This morning as I cut red tulips and rather tattered daffodils for Sally's mother, who is in the hospital, Sally noted the bushes and said, "Well, they'll survive, but they'll probably be a bit bare where the frost got them, a little less lush than they usually are."

I feel that this is true of our little community now; one frost or another has seized all of us in surprising ways these last nine months. We lost a dear friend, (mother and wife) Nancy; two of us lost our jobs; we've dealt with sickness and uncertainty; another family mourns another dear friend, and now Sally's beloved mother is in the hospital. We're all a bit barer on the outside, stripped to vulnerability even in this wonderful spring.

I hope. I believe. I trust. Such overused words, and so hard to say with my soul. The trend in literature right now--fiction and poetry--is to hide these words, to replace them with perfectly wrought cleverness. Smart and clipped, sarcastic and a little bitter, apparently offhand but squeezed and skinned to a certain ugliness that leaves us all bereft. Sincerity is out. We have become so afraid of sentimentality (and we should abhor it) that we have lost the ability to bear goodness.

But sentimentality is word without flesh or joy or pain, without all that comes with being human: un-incarnated words. We pull it over us when we have lost our courage to articulate. I look for Believe in Nancy's garden, in her roses that have become lithe and green again, that remind me that death is not ending. I watch Sally drive off to see her mother yet again in the hospital, her car cluttered with tea cups and knitting and flowers, and I find Hope. I touch the faces of my children, watch them in sleep, and I see Trust. Words dwell in the bodies and blood of all I love; I collect them, I hold them, they are bird calls and color, they are new every morning.

Here is goodness: sitting on the floor next to Sally this morning, watching our children. Tulip leaves pearled with early morning rain. A hot cup of tea. Toast with jam. The love of a community, strong overlapping webs of meals and words and presence. All the things that current under us, that deepen us, that help us say the words that seem sentimental and facile to others. I hope; I believe; I trust. One hundred thanks that spill from my cup, even in a morning of frost. What was it that John, Nancy's husband, said to me as we stood broken over Nancy's grave? He looked at me with eyes struck through by pain. Behind him, tall-shouldered pines darkened in first nightfall. "We are waiting for the eternal spring," he told me. There were low mountains around us, the leaves of winter at our feet. We stood over the grave mound and the sound of Nancy's daughter's sobbing filled us. We are looking for eternal spring. Let it come. Let us see it.

When I came in late from eating pie (Happy Pi Day!) with some good women tonight, I ran upstairs to say goodnight to the restless girls and noticed Beatrix's neck was sunburned. I hate to celebrate a sunburn, but it is a the mark of one unbelievably gorgeous, summery day, with the daffodils waving like gospel singers and the grass busting out so green it's almost bad taste and the robins taking back the neighborhood. It was THAT sort of March day, the kind of day that makes you want to forget all your troubles and fly off into the lonely white cloud in the azure sky.

Though I did not fly, I did walk quite a bit and sat in the sun and continued with the forever job of tidying the winter-weary yard. I pulled on Martin's thick hide gloves and went at the piles of nasty thorns, trying to wrestle them into big garbage bags (a tricky task). Soon after the buses pulled through the the streets, Roberto, Nancy's middle son, arrived in our driveway on his bike. Roberto, middle-school, big-talker, sweetly handsome young man (originally from Guatemala, with a sweep of dark hair, big, brown eyes, a bit shorter than many of his peers), is a good story-teller and is extraordinarily skilled with wee kids. And my two little girls love him. They've both grown up with him, calling him either "Berto" or "Bobo." One night two-year old Bea prayed for "Uncle Berto," which Merry and Catherine thought was hilarious. Elspeth and Bea love to torture him in a good-natured way, pulling on his legs and slugging him once and a while (this is not encouraged by their mother, by the way.)

This afternoon he somewhat awkwardly hung out with me for a few minutes while I shoved rose branches into a trashcan. He responded politely to my stock questions--How was school today? Do you have testing this week? That means no homework, right? Etc. (How boring I must be, just like the grown-ups I remember from my childhood; I'd answer with a smile, wishing they would ask about something other than school. . .and mostly they never did). After a genial interlude, Roberto disappeared down the hill and the next thing I knew, he was hitting around a plastic baseball with Elspeth. I looked up again and he was pitching to her, slowly and patiently. And then Elspeth gathered some black walnuts from our big tree and began throwing them to Roberto, who knocked them to kingdom come, down our chimney and off our roof.

"Home run!" I heard Elspeth yell, and then to me up the hill, "Mommy! Roberto's GOOD!"

I gazed down at them in the sea of emerald grass, six-year old Elspeth (often a handful) and Roberto (often discouraged by his lack of ease with sports), both middle children, and they seemed to be glowing like suns. I could feel the warmth.

John, Roberto's father, had told me a few days ago that Roberto had come home from playing baseball at a friend's house discouraged and in a bad mood. Today Roberto admitted to me he can't hit a baseball. But he could sure hit those walnuts Elspeth was pitching to him--boy, was he slugging them. And to Elspeth down in the field by our creek, Roberto was Babe Ruth.

It struck me: we all should be so adored. Adoration is wonderful. When we know it from another person we love, adoration transforms us, helps us come closer to understanding who we really are--worthy of celebration. And when we see it in the pure, loving adoration of another, and it moves us to strive to be more generous givers.

"Well, I think I'll just come back tomorrow," Roberto told me a few hours later, after he had hung out in the garden, eating graham crackers distributed by Beatrix, who warned him "not to get a tummyache" and then on the porch with Elspeth as she cut out a paper crown.

"That would be wonderful," I smiled. "You're really good with the kids, Roberto."

He shrugged a little. "It seems like you could use someone to play with them," he said. And as he inched toward the door, he added, "I'll just come over after school."

"You can come over any time," I said.

"I told Elspeth I'd bring my aluminum bat."

I remember what my dear childhood friend told me when she fell in love with the man she will marry this summer. Her eyes were full of a new place, as if she'd just travelled to the most beautiful country she had never known existed. "It feels so good to be loved like that," she said. "I didn't know how good it would be."

We all deserve to be adored, not in a sentimental silly way that clouds our faults and coats us with sugar, but in a real way, a way that strips off our veils and shows us who we really are, and we realize that we are, after all, worthy of being loved sacrificially. Perhaps the adoration that I silently celebrated this afternoon is a glimpse of the eternal, where we will be at last truly joyful without reservation, where we will love without having to draw back, where we will accept the love that has always been waiting for us, that has surrounded us from our birth.

Cinderella and the Pulitzer Prize

At this moment, a Pulitzer-winning poet is stacking some papers on a podium. She's clearing her throat and thanking the person who introduced her. Maybe she's smiling or maybe she's bowing her head for a moment before beginning to read. Whatever she's doing, I'm not there.

Unexpectedly, at the end of today, which has been marked by kids (like all my days are), and significantly, has been full of joy and contentment, I am now feeling a bit like Cinderella left behind at the ball. Martin rushed out the door, cup of tea in hand, to walk to the event, and I finished the dishes and sat down in the disheveled dining room (which I've cleaned up already twice today). As I sank lower in the morass of my own personal misery, I heard my mother's voice telling me to stop being such a baby and empower myself. I could have arranged to go tonight. I don't need to wait for a fairy godmother. I could have hired a babysitter.

But then I argued back: in an age when women are supposed to be empowered, why is it that we have to remind ourselves to BE empowered, when, for many men, that is already assumed? I thought about telling Cinderella: These people don't own you. Shake free of this learned helplessness. Get a microloan. Go out and start your own business, one chicken at a time.

And I told myself: Come on. Nobody's oppressing you. Think ahead and find a babysitter next time. At home instead of at the poetry reading? You have nobody to blame but yourself.

And I told myself (and this is related, believe it or not): Be more disciplined and write your book.

To add a humorous note to my frustration (by making me see myself in a more realistic light) Merry just got frustrated over a bookmark that she decorated (to enter in a contest) that she decorated with the motto: Fly Away With Your Imagination and READ!. She started listing genres on the bookmark: Fantasy, Mystery. . .She wants to add: Realistic Fiction, Fiction, Etc., and draw pictures.

"I just don't think there's enough room on the bookmark." I was pointing out the obvious, a fact that already had her worked up.

"But the judges will think I just picked two random genres," she argued passionately. "They want something more than this. These days. . ." She trailed off as if the world is a hard nut to crack. Then she got that Merry look that warns me she is overwhelmed and about to cry. "I just don't want to talk about this anymore," she said, and filed the bookmark back in her folder.

Already in fourth grade and she's feeling the same roadblocks as I do now. And I have to wonder, how many are from the world, and how many are from our own expectations of what we as women should be accomplishing, even though we accomplish an awful lot?

Just today I had to tell myself to relax and enjoy life. There's nothing you absolutely have to do today, I reminded myself. . .And in the end, I did enough today (not least of all, I drank endless cups of tea to try to cure my stubborn sinus cold), and I wrote my column for the week. . .but even now I'm chastising myself for not writing thirty minutes on my latest project and not planning ahead for the Pulitzer poet. Finally, I can add to my list: Figure a way out for Cinderella. Come up with an economic plan and the right words to make her stand up and leave the fireplace. I can't just leave her waiting around for her fairy godmother. And surely she has better places to go than to a ball.

delivery

I used to order organic flour, raisins, and peanut butter--things like that--from a wholesaler. I've fallen off that wagon now but I still receive e-mails alerting me to deliveries. Nancy used to send out the news but since she fell sick, a guy named Joshua has taken over.

joshua
delivery

This is what I see in my inbox every two weeks or so, and though I never click on the e-mail I'm rather fond of the subject line, especially since it's from Joshua. It makes me think of a Biblical prophet announcing my salvation.

I have some things Joshua could deliver me out of, don't you? I'd like to give him a catalogued list sometime. But then I wonder, as Merry has in the past about perfection, if that is something I really desire. "I mean, you wouldn't have anything to work on anymore," Merry has told me. She's right. If you were practically perfect in every way, what would you possibly find to overcome anymore?

There are so many small things that plague me, but the journey to overcoming them (which is a journey without an end, as far as I can tell), is worthwhile. For instance, even though I've been a writer for many years now, starting a new writing project is still daunting for me. The blinking cursor, the blank page. I feel as if I have to take a deep breath and jump that hurdle every time. And often my shins are all skinned by the end and I have to go back to the beginning and start over again.

Maybe, too, I secretly love my vices just a little bit. Sometimes it feels really good to lose my cool and shout, though afterward I feel as if I've lost something. Again--more than just my temper.

Joshua,today deliver me from the stress of the week into a long, cool happy hour.

Tuck Away Your Watches

One of my biggest problems when I returned to live in the US was time. In my memory, my childhood in Kenya is filled with expanses: expanses of savanna, only stopping at low mountains, dizzying expanses of sky scattered like a road with the brightest stars I have ever seen, moments stretched out like empty rooms full of slanting sunlight.

In Kenya, nothing ever began on time. Time was relational, not rigid. I remember my mother waiting at an intersection as two women chatted leisurely out their windows. You didn't go into any place, whether it was a home or a place of business, without first taking the time to exchange greetings. A handshake, inquiries as to health and family. Chai. Gifts. Meals. A place marked by an appreciation for relationship.

When I returned to college in Chicago, my heart constricted with clocks. I ran to classes and arrived breathless. I began to nurture what would be a life-long bitterness against time and its restraints, against the idea of being late--late to class, late to appointments, late to work. College was marked by intense heartburn, stress that resulted partly from over scheduled days. When I showed up a bit late for a meeting with a professor, she was curt and dismissive.

As an adult, I dream of those empty, unscheduled rooms of my childhood. As a writer, I thrive in spaces that are free from clocks.

My friend Carrie, who is also copastor of our Mennonite/Brethren Peace and Justice church nearby, recently spoke these reflections on time. Ironically, we'd jostled and pushed each other out the door to get to church on time not long before I sat and listened to her words. But sometimes you have to rush a bit to get to a place where you can be quiet and open yourself to being. I am not an advocate for sloth, just a passionate believer in time being surpassed by imagination, relationship, and a longing for open, quiet spaces. Madeline L'Engle discusses Cronos and Kairos. Kairos time, she writes, is the time of creation. We dwell in Kairos when we "lose time" as we create. Here's Carrie's take, just in time for the Advent season:

In Greek there are at least two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is clocks, deadlines, watches, calendars, agendas, planners. Chronos is where the word chonology comes from which gives the illusion of an ordered progression of time. Chronos is ticking of the clock, counting of shopping days until Christmas. . . Chronos makes us angry at our bodies when they don’t heal as fast as we think they should. Chronos makes us anxious about our self worth when our hopes and dreams haven’t been accomplished by the age we thought they would.

And then there is the other word for time: kairos. Kairos is the time when you are lost in the beauty of a piece of music or the reverie of poetry. Kairos is the moment you hold someone in their pain and when you’ve laughed so hard for so long your side hurts. Kairos comes in moments of meditation of watching sleeping children, of falling in love. Kairos means “opportune moment” and is used when referring to a different type of time, a time that doesn’t pass, but a time that is filled. …a time that doesn’t pass, but a time that is filled. A time that doesn’t pass, but a time that is filled. . .

Kairos gives the soul a space to deepen when the body slowly heals. When our minds were set on certain lists of accomplishments that we thought we could control,Kairos presents us space to explore new possibilities . Kairos replaces counting down till Christmas with the patient waiting of Advent. And we can’t control it. No alarm clock will alert us to it. . .

You can find more of Carrie and her husband, Torin's, reflections by visiting their website HERE.

My dad recently left for Sudan. My mother told me he received instructions to bring food with him, since food there is sparse or nonexistent. . .so he took a big bag of trail mix. How long will this last him, I wonder?

Even in his remote location, he has access to e-mail, so he sent my mother a message that there is food though not much and the residents eat very small portions. I think he may lose quite a few pounds preChristmas. (It wouldn't surprise me if he gave away his trail mix--there's a family tradition of this. When she visited a refugee camp in Uganda, my sister boarded a UN plane back home wrapped in a tablecloth after leaving all her clothes behind. My mother has been known to slide curtains off the rod on the spot to gift them to a visitor who admired them. Keep an easy hold on things, my mother always taught us.)

Sudan gives me a bit of perspective; today, when I said, there's nothing for lunch, our refrigerator was full, our freezers packed. Our pantry overflows with cereal, cans, snacks, grains and pasta. We could survive for several months at least and eat heartily every day. What I meant this morning was, there's nothing prepared for lunch, as if making myself a pbj was a hardship. Or boiling noodles, or making soup, or defrosting a chicken.

On a lighter note, my mother just sent me this e-mail:
Your dad has been given a name by a group of Dinka women that is evidently a highly favored black and white bull, and they proceeded to teach him how to dance the bull dance. Sorry I missed that!

Maybe, she wrote in closing, he'll perform it for us this Christmas. Is that something we really want to see? My father, who has little inherent sense of rhythm, performing The Bull Dance?

Absolutely.