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.

Two hours of editing is nothing.  Two hours of writing is even less.  Sometimes I feel as if I could write for about twelve hours straight.  For about twelve months straight.  But, alas, and hallelujah too, school is almost over and soon my beautiful girls will be home with me.  All day.

Right now I have, at the most, five minutes to scribble a blog post.  Let me begin with Rilke's line, or the imperfect remembered version:  "Though we strain against the deadening grip of daily necessity, we sense this mystery: all life is being lived. . ."

This morning, robin's song.  Sunlight caught by curtain.  A yellow butterfly among the climbing rose, just now bursting with deep pink blooms.  Blue paths in a cloudy sky, the passing roar of cars outside, the hum of a lawnmower.  All life is being lived, a million lives just outside in the garden, and so many more in widening circles from this one point, where Martin and I sit and record more unfolding life, the life of characters--fourth grade Maple Mullihan who must try to find her talent, must find the key to the locked door that leads to the extraordinary.  Across from me, Martin ignites word after word on a blank white page, tending the many tiny flames that make a poem.

And now my minutes are up, and I must go and make myself presentable for the world, shake off the cloak that quiet writing wraps me in, put on my company face.  Two hours, such a very short time.

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.

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.

These moments, sun and tightly budded lilacs, the peach tree blossom waxing to new leaf, crabapple flowers and white-tipped bird wings, these moments I am filled. Roar of the heater, running water, song of chickadee and sparrow.

Ooof. A flesh-colored spider just scrambled over the screen of my netbook, reminding me I am not alone. A black fly, iridescent wings, a woman walking by the house, arm extended, pulled by a dog I can't see. I am never quite alone, and I like it that way--flash of light on passing car, windows of houses, the fly, bulwarked by screen, buzzing in protest. Silence pregnant with the small sounds of a thousand lives if I listen closely enough, the creak of floorboard, the shadows of birds.

This morning Martin and I sat in the sun room and read from Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours. Whether you are religious or not, new traditions unfolding in spring are wonderful, and this is one of ours. We read ancient prayers that seem as if they are being spoken to us newly, written and sung by people vulnerable to injustice, some of whom were fleeing for their lives. While Martin and I are certainly not in such desperate straits, we feel freshly acquainted with injustice. So often we have been protected from these things with wall upon wall of privilege and safety so that a month ago, when our lives stretched out simply and easily before us, these prayers would have seemed flatter and less interesting. But now they are springtime for us.

Today, like millions of people the world round, Martin and I prayed for our daily bread. As Martin reflected afterward, we weren't asking for weekly bread, a couple of extra loaves in the freezer or a whole storehouse just in case. Just enough for today. Enough to fill us. And then tomorrow we'll ask for more. What is the poem I love? Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come buy, and eat.

This is the sort of morning that fits me like a glove: cool, overcast, perfect for short-sleeve weeding. It's a Nairobi morning, and in my garden this morning, birdsong with black dirt under my fingernails and worm-squirm and distant laughter of children, I could almost smell bread baking at Adam's Arcade.

Adam's Arcade was a short walk away from our first home in Nairobi. We lived in the second-story flat of a large house belonging to an older couple who were on home-leave in the US. Since it would take almost a year for our shipment to arrive from America (due to extensive testing of my mother's dangerous bottle of McCormick Poppyseeds), the flat with its lovely old furniture, dusty puzzles, and enormous, screenless windows was perfect. An elderly British woman lived downstairs in a flowery apartment and she and my mother took tea on a regular basis. There was a large, sunny courtyard where I once took a sketchbook and toiled with my pencils over a sketch of a bicycle wheel. There was a pool but I never remember swimming in it, and there must have been a high gate with a night guard sitting in a little hut.

That was the house in the spreading trees where my mother caught a baboon on our dining room table, eating calmly from the fruit bowl. Baboons are not trustworthy, polite creatures and my mother chased his rubbery bottom all the way down the hallway and back out the window.

Nairobi was younger then. Friends tell me that it takes an hour or more just to drive across the city now. I haven't been back in fifteen years but my memories are as clear as if I left just a month ago. Mostly I remember colors and smells, the sound of my own voice as I opened a window, struck by the beauty of the city--thorny trees, bougainvillea climbing over thick hedges, the jangle of music and the distant roar of downtown traffic. I suppose it was dusty and loud and rather unsafe (almost everyone we knew had been robbed in one way or another), but it was the place of my childhood, and beyond that, it was objectively beautiful in many ways. Why is our culture so monochromatic? In Nairobi, color, color everywhere, on tin cups and matatus and clothes and up walls and in the market.

But today I'm thinking of Adam's Arcade, which we loved for its awkward concrete playground and difficult slide only manageable by squatting and sliding on the soles of your shoes. The bakery smelled different than any bakery I've sniffed since; it was a warm mixture, I suppose, of french bread and samosas and mandazi, mingling with the dust and exhaust of Nairobi. I don't remember many of its offerings beyond the chocolate croissants, which my mother asked for in a French accent since our Canadian friend, who worked for the embassy or the consulate or something important, had once mocked us for sounding American and uncouth. "A loaf of bread and three cwaasant," we ordered, and that's how we still pronounce them today, much to the vigorous mockery of Americans (like my husband), who chide us for being ridiculous.

Today the morning is a grey umbrella, and the air swims with birdsong and spring and the voices of my children on the porch. And I too, just for a few minutes, am a child, lifting my nose to find a rather mediocre bakery I once loved and anticipated as a world-class treat. Sometimes, just before sleeping, I find a place like that deep inside, and I long to stay in that cool place above worry and adulthood just long enough to slip into a dream, and soemtimes, if I'm lucky, I do.

*
For a vision of loveliness, as my mother says, see my friend Sal's photos (plus I got a little mention :) at her blog: Sally's Blog

It doesn't feel like March.

70 to 80 degree weather, warm nights, and our world is gaudy with color--crabapples the color of pink lemonade, Bradford pears in lacy pompoms, magnolias opening their saucer blooms to a robin's egg sky, bedecked daffodils (Happy late Daffodil Day, by the way), and the forsythia going absolutely lemon-wild. Some of you will remember that I thought "Forsythia" would be a gorgeous middle name for Bea, who was born almost at this time four years ago, but she took "Fern" instead, much more sensible but not as fraptious.

I do love forsythia, even though they are only truly glorious for a week. I don't understand why people dismiss something because its beauty is short-lived; you'd have to pooh-pooh the butterfly, and that's just the beginning.

I can only think that we as middle-class consumers look for the most enduring bang for our buck, so to plant a row of forsythia, which can grow quite gangly and only blooms yellow for about 1/52.18 of the year, seems like a meaningless extravagance.

And I suppose too, that in the same attitude of economy, you could dismiss a whole cornucopia of magnificence, but as Babette's Feast or simply being in love teaches us, we often find grace only when we allow ourselves to embrace extravagance.

I remember someone telling me once that they found themselves holding back active friendship from a dying person, because of the energy expenditure and the output of love that would only end in loss. It's a cliche--"'tis better to have loved. . ." but it's true that it's always better to exhaust myself loving well, though it opens me to pain.

It would be easy to take what has happened to us in the past three weeks--a horrible, dark thing of injustice--and throw it over our last seven years here. But that would be like throwing a cloak over our garden, snuffing out every lovely flower blossom, sorrowing over the whole thing because the end was disappointing. I refuse to do it. As I told an about-to-graduate student the other day, we won't let this ruin things for us; we'll celebrate every good thing that has happened and leave knowing that this was, indeed, a good place, where we came to love better and where we were loved well.

At the grocery store today, waiting at the deli, I chatted with a woman who, like many people I've talked with lately, shook her head warily over the amazing days we've been having, warning that it will only end badly with a freak snow storm or a summer of swarmy mosquitoes. It's beautiful now, sure, but in a couple months? Pestilence!

Meanwhile? Meanwhile, I'm enjoying every minute, gobbling this feast of beauty while it lasts, and I won't stop until I have to.

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.

This is a reflection I wrote for our Mennonite church about giving, and, by jove, it seemed so appropriate I thought I'd paste it here.


Right away I think of this story: my first truly sacrificial gift, and how it was given in ignorance that ripened into bitter regret.

I was about six, old enough to know how rare and wonderful a silver dollar was. My granddad gave these gleaming discs to us on our birthdays, and they were precious things. My sister never spent hers’, and I once bribed her out of one, but that’s a different story.

We were at our grandparent’s church—a place of plush carpet and gleaming wooden pews softened by long red cushions. When the offering was taken, I fumbled in my pockets for a quarter—then, as now, I felt a compunction to place something in the offering, even if it was from a panicky impulse not to be embarrassed in front of the solemn offering men in their suits, looking like Mafia envoys. As the velvet plum-colored pouch, split in half by slick walnut handles, passed me, I slipped in a quarter—a small offering, perhaps, even for a child like me who received allowances, but enough to get by, I thought, much better than a dime, say, or a handful of pennies, pathetic as they slide from the palm. In any case, I’d be guilt-free at least until communion, when my mother would cry and I’d struggle to come up with a list of sins to confess silently to God so I’d not drink unbearable punishment on myself. At least offering was over with.

But my sister passed the pouch to my father, as it disappeared out of reach down the aisle, I realized what I had done. Oh, no! My silver dollar. Given to me by the warm, old hands of my grey-haired grandfather. Given to me in love and in trust. I’d put it in a pouch with other meaningless coins, and it would be counted and dropped into the church coffers by more men in suits. Nobody would know how precious it was to me—nobody.

I pulled my mother’s ear down to my mouth and whispered, “I gave away my silver dollar. Into the offering!”

She sensed the desperation in my voice, I knew it. Would she help me retrieve it? God didn’t care what denominations the money came in, after all! Couldn’t I just give four quarters, the same amount of money but not the monumental treasure that my Granddad’s silver dollar was? I only got one once a year, and not even that often, since we lived overseas. Granddaddy had to go to the bank especially and exchange regular paper money for the silver dollars he’d place in his grandkid’s palm. Surely God would understand that this gift was too precious?

My mother leaned over in the church-way she had, where she could whisper in our ear without moving her eyes from the front of the church. “Never regret giving anything to God,” my mother whispered back.

What? Why did parents never understand?

I spent the rest of church—the scripture readings, the long sermon, right through the last hymn—in agony over my loss. I pictured how it had happened over and over again. I’d felt in my pockets, yanked out a silver coin, and tossed it in the offering pouch. I saw it disappear down the aisle again and again, and I thought about what my mother had said—never regret, never regret, never regret.

I still think about this moment. I don’t know if the loss of my silver dollar, which was of utmost significance to me at six, was a defining moment in my life, but the memory still defines me today, when I struggle to give away what’s precious. The giving, done in a moment of spirited generosity, perhaps, is not as hard as the trusting—the trusting that the one to whom I give can appreciate the gift enough, will be careful with what I have given—my money, my time, my children, my love.

God will take it all—and in my clearer moments, I realize it was never mine in the first place. I realize that there is no such thing as possession in the Great Story—that all things are entrusted, but not given away for keeps. God is not trustworthy in the way I want God to be. I want to receive a gift and hunker down in my favorite chair, savoring it without fear that a thing I love so much will be taken from me. But there are no such promises, and love rarely makes such promise. I can’t tell my children that their lives will be easy. I wish I could, and believe it, but I can’t.

One thing—no, two at least--that have not been given to me with any conditions. Love and grace. Love and grace—they are the sky, the stars, the ground, the ocean, the very air I breathe. No one can take these from me, and these I can give freely, freely, forever.

It’s the silver dollars I’m still struggling to find in my pockets, and knowing what I give, slip them into the offering basket. Today my silver dollar is my sense of security, control, and my knowledge of the future. Surely something else would do just as well. Surely it can’t be expected of me. Perhaps it’s not quite clear how much it means to me. And yet, I fumble about in the darkness of my pockets, untangle it from my grasping fingers, and let it go.

And as I watch it disappear down the aisle, as I watch other hands dropping coins—gifts that I cannot begin to understand or know—I feel panic, fear, grief—and then a growing sense that all is okay, not perhaps in the particulars, the lists of worries I love to obsess about—but in the large sense. I ask regret to leave me. All will be well. And all will be well. All manner of things will be well.

I found myself heartily upset that Martin has had to spend his spring break in front of a computer screen, looking for jobs. Mostly I've felt this positive energy, even if it's only simmering, through all of it, but the beginning feeling of crisis has waned into a daily reality--one where my dear friend and companion is often glued to a screen, trying to make sense out of the future. I guess since Mom left a couple days ago, this afternoon was waiting for me--an afternoon of sadness, punctuated by a few hot pops of anger. Sometimes it feels rather like a dream I'm waiting to shake myself from.

But now I feel better. We took a crock pot of pork and sauerkraut over to Kevin and Sally's house, drank a bottle of wine, ate well, and then challenged four pints of Ben and Jerrys--and won! (I don't think we quite finished off the ice cream, though we made an impressive dent). And we laughed a lot--the best medicine of all. And they gave us a disc of "Chopped--" seven episodes of culinary competition. I think I can tear Martin away from the applications long enough to watch one before bedtime. Who will survive to the dessert round? I'm getting excited just thinking about it.

There are unbearable sweetnesses that I will miss. Sitting in the sunroom, the windows flung upon to the garden, robins and cardinals hopping about in the paths softened by leaves, a cup of tea warming my hands. The swelling music of the teapot at night mingling with the quiet roar of the heat kicking on; the creak of stairs, known to me in the dark when all the lights have been turned off before bedtime. And of course opening doors to houses that are not ours and seeing welcoming smiles encompassing us and our children, a scrape of a kitchen chair, long mornings of talk and evenings of laughter.

Now that I know there is an end to this chapter in our lives, I am struggling to remain in the sweetness of each moment. Sitting in the sunnroom this afternoon, I remembered what it was like to look at the garden and see years of work unfolding, wondering how tall the quaking aspens--planted our first fall six years ago--would grow and plotting paths and new beds. I found myself longing for that safe, warm feeling of time unfolding gently in front of me.

I tried to express some of that feeling to Martin, because it made me feel as if I was succumbing to an easy smallness. Martin looked over the rim of his teacup and said, "It's funny, what's happened to me since I found out we'd be leaving. I began to look at all this, and realize it for what it was--a stopping place for us, not a permanent place."

Tonight in my inbox I received a message that should have gone to spam, from the Highlights Foundation. I didn't open it but the subject line caught me: "In revision lies the story." Our lives are constantly being revised, in small ways or large, whether we welcome the changes or not. I don't ever want to find myself in a place where I refuse revision--then I will be looking at that blank, horrible wall that means I have welcomed mediocrity. But I am astonished at the big revisions that life has thrown at me, and most of them I have not sought.

Thankfully, with each revision there is much grace--more than the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. There are unexpected rainstorms of mercy, and they often soak me when I am feeling most barren.

So though I have counted multiple, hitherto-unseen white hairs on Martin's head in the last two weeks (not a joke), I am trying to both dwell in the sweetness of each moment here while keeping my hands open. I just want to be ready to walk through the next door, weary and a little travelworn, but with my fingers ready to receive what is next.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the solace of our dear family--my mother who took care of our kids while Martin and I went to a conference for a few days, and then helped me clean out some of the darkest, dingiest places in my house--and our dear friends who have practically bombarded us with their generosity. I keep saying, "Yes, yes, please!" I think it's my duty and my pleasure, at this point in our lives, to take all the grace handed to me without dithering.

I also enjoyed, quite unexpectedly, learning of a petition site for Martin--just look up Martin by his first and last name and add "petition." I don't know who set it up, and Martin won't look at it--he's trying to keep out of the fray as much as possible--but I found it a lovely experience, to read notes from people who have known and loved him. I don't read it with any anger, just with a deep appreciation of our time here, the students Martin knew, many of whom who have sat in around our table and shared their lives with us. We are so grateful.

I'm sitting in our sunroom, which is warm as an oven, listening to my mother reading Curious George to Bea and her friend, Ethan. That is a true act of love--this particular Curious George book goes on and on, a series of incidents loosely connected by careless disasters. . .hmm. Sounds familiar.

It's been an exhausting few days here. I have been forcing myself to eat regularly, even when my stomach feels as though it's been shaken. I don't even know what to write here. Details have unfolded which are bewildering, shocking, and deeply troubling. Those of you whom we know well here, please don't hide your anger or sadness when you are with us. It helps us to live vicariously through you as we continue to try to live through this with grace.

In the middle of all of it, I feel protected, as if each of you who love us have built thick walls of love around us. Like Ethan or Bea inside of their tent this morning that I built for them out of chairs and blankets, I sit inside of this shady, precious place, and I am so grateful.

I wish I could write more, I wish I could explain more. Maybe someday, hopefully soon.

In the meanwhile, we've had some good belly laughs. Some things are humorous, especially when we can step back and look at things objectively. Some things are too sad to laugh at, but we're trying to find a way. On Saturday night, we attended a magic show at the University. During the amazing finale, the magician asked for a volunteer. Martin sprung up on the stage with a jaunty step.

The magician shouted, "For my next trip, sir, I will need to borrow your career."

Martin obliged.

The magician held it up--a heavy thing with carefully sanded sides--for the audience. "Look carefully at it from every angle," the magician said. "From the top! The sides! The bottom!" We gazed at it. It was a beautiful thing.

Then the magician whisked his cape over it. "Presto!" he shouted, and there was a puff of smoke. The audience gave an audible gasp. It was gone--disappeared into thin air. Slight of hand, the magician bowed and Martin descended the stage. Nobody knew why it had disappeared. Nobody knew how or when.

Surprisingly, Martin seemed intact, even though he'd lost this wonderful thing--he sighed deeply as he came back to his seat. "Well, I guess this isn't the place for me any more," he said. The audience was done, too. They stood up and left with us, and we all went out for a drink and to wonder about how the trick had been executed.

And over the next few days, we learned about the trick that made the thing disappear into thin air, and it wasn't such a great mysterious magic after all. And Martin walked back to the stage and found it where it had dropped to the floor, and it was better, smoother, and more beautiful for its fumbled fall--and he put it under his arm and we left again, to walk on to a good place.

It was supposed to be funny but now it just seems tragic, especially after I talked to Martin this afternoon, and heard his voice--exhausted, wearied, drained. I keep thinking things will get easier, and they will. When I think of how fast our lives have changed, I feel dizzy and nauseous. I'll keep returning to the tent to sit for a while, to center myself before walking back out into the fray.