Between Time

The grandfather clock is sounding ten 2-note bongs. My ear plucks the sound through my general mental chatter and I note the time. I wouldn’t have to. When I don’t want to hear it, I don’t. That’s one of the beauteous developments that come from living with wind-up clocks.

It is speculated by mathematicians and physicists that time is the fourth dimension of what could conceivably be as many as eleven aspects or permutations of reality. I have no trouble imagining time as a stretchy toy in one metaphoric hand of God. God’s imagined hands, however many there are, may play with time but God’s heart is always personal love now, an incomprehensible aspect of reality more real than real to me though often mysteriously invisible in time, or for a time.

Now the second clock, the one that really was my grandfather’s, the clock where Dad over-painted the gold because Mom thought it looked trashy, is striking 10. I note that too. I have a sense now of what time it is. It’s tenish.

It is quite possible to keep both clocks accurate but you’d have to fine tune them often, making minute adjustments to the pendulum, lengthening or shortening it in it’s arc thus slowing or speeding up the bites of time eaten by that particular clock. I tired of this fussiness many years ago and have settled for lining both clocks up with Eastern Standard once a week or whenever I really need accuracy, like New Year’s Eve, when I’m trying to coral my rowdy friends into a unified display that will at least marginally accompany the shotgun blasts and fireworks of my neighbors. When you want co-ordination, accurate timing is mandatory. When you just want to be at work on time the fast clock will let you know you might want to think about getting in the car. No hurry. The second one hasn’t even bonged yet.

If you are vacuuming or daydreaming during the first one, chances are you’ll catch the second. If you’re napping and don’t want to sleep past the hour, the first one will awaken you and the second one will inform you while you lie there remembering your dreams. Or you can take a cat nap between the first and second one and feel you’ve lost nothing.

I like that my time is independent of batteries, cables, radio waves, computer chips and electricity. My clocks need only me, their winder, to notice when they’re sounding tired and give them an invigorating rewind. I like the relationship.

In this house you always know about what time it is regardless of power outages. And I appreciate the fact that neither clock is absolutely accurate, reminding me always that I’m on my time, for better or worse.

Contrast that with the $9.99 digital wrist watch I bought last year from Wal-Mart. The directions were microscopic, complex and inaccurate. I spent a year of my life trying to form a relationship with that watch and ended up murdering it when my part of the world shifted to daylight savings time this spring. I gave two hours of my life that I will never get back again, plus the one we all lost to ‘springing forward,’ attempting to make the appropriate adjustment to my timepiece. I put it on the work bench and smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. Damn its unlabeled button one, button two, button three. I hammered it into primordial dust, into cosmic soup, and with any luck at all, into another dimension where I will never never never have to go. I was very far away from love in my heart at that time.

Mary / Martha

I’ve got an empty plate today; a bite or two of leftovers but nothing that adds up to a meal. I’m awaiting divine magnification of my supply. I’m looking through the scraps for meaning. I’m avoiding personal industry. It’s Sunday, after all.

The lushest year with all the rain, the longest day, yesterday, so much need for accomplishment, so little interest I feel in moving my body. I keep finding myself staring into the layers of clouds. If I gaze into them deeply enough, a switch will be flipped inside me and all the bits will come together with meaning. The tension in my chest will subside, or so it feels.

On the Mary/Martha scale of how we attend to life, I’ve always tipped a bit toward the Mary side. As I’ve grown older, in spite of all the obvious need for activity, I place increased weight on the Mary way. What I wish I could do is hire a flotilla of Martha’s. Then all would be perfect. My plate would be full in every way.

The raccoon stole my heavy glass pie plate from the front porch. It’s the cat’s dish and the raccoon checks it twice a day for leftovers. Yesterday morning I discovered it all the way across the lawn by the edge of the hill and I perceived her intention. Bemused, but not forward thinking, I simply brought it back to its accustomed station. I should have siliconed it to the concrete. Today it’s gone.

I picture her sly, intrepid, mothering little body dragging that dish home to her babies, putting it in place, staring at it expectantly from time to time, waiting for the magic. I imagine her disgust and disappointment when it remained stolidly empty. She was set to have a dreamy risk-free summer playing with the kids, getting out of the business of nursing, everybody snacking when they felt like it. It was a stellar plan but she was operating on a flawed premise.

I may well be also. I gather flowers from the overgrown garden where they’ve burst magnificently above the pigweed in spite of my total neglect. I place them on the kitchen table where I can feast on them tomorrow when it will be Monday; a long solstice Monday where I’ll have to get back to the business of business and content my Maryish heart, my raccoon heart, with brief glimpses of beauty while I forage for food.

How Do You Know When It’s Time To Quit?

It took me 12 years to make this quilt. The plan for it clarified before me like road in a fog, just enough vision for the next moment or two. The embroidered grid flowed stitch at time from light to dark, intensity to pallor. The plan I was setting up for myself seemed overwhelming but I just kept going. I wanted to see the finished product.

Last year, I realized the quilt was complete. I still have border squares which can take some quilting and I’ve done a few, but I consider them optional. If a symbol becomes meaningful to me, I add it, but I do not assume I’ll finish every last square. The next owner may want to do that.

It is the quilt that reminds me that I’ve never been afraid of long term projects. I take comfort in that when I’m tempted to quit on my 8 acres before I’ve been able to finish creating my vision for it.

Overwhelmed. It is easy for me to sink in June beneath the tidal wave of green arching over me. Multiflora Rose, Oriental Bittersweet and Ailanthus want to conquer all other species of plant life on this hill, or so it would appear. Vines spread up, roots writhe both down and laterally under the soil. From above and below, the invasive exotics strike and smother the native plants and altogether with the oak and sassafras, dogwood and cedar, they rise up to block the view from the top.

The quilt was art by addition. Sculpting the view from my porch is a project in subtraction where nature keeps coming in and adding back in what I have purposely deleted. Nothing opposed me in quilting. To my sorrow and confusion, my home project, has put me at loggerheads with nature. No one wins that war. Money and man-power can create an uneasy truce.

I’ve employed guys with chain saws, guys with industrial strength brush killer, guys with hand tools. I’ve gotten estimates from guys with back hoes and bulldozers. I’ve consulted burn specialists. But in the end, it pretty much boils down to what I can do with a pair of loppers and a small battery powered chain saw. My will, moving my tendinitis ridden elbows, my arthritic spine, inspired by a vision.

Is there any virtue in taking on the impossible in service of maintaining one’s home view? If my passion were to feed the hungry or alleviate the pain of advanced illness or if I had some way to offer hope to the economically disenfranchised then yes. But spending oneself for a love affair with one’s home is a more questionable life use of personal resources, to my way of thinking. Yet I can not let go; can not envision myself anywhere else, can not imagine abandoning this project before I can glimpse its completion.

At the top of this blog is a picture taken from the front porch in 1993. At the bottom is the same view today. In the photo to the side is a typical view of the insurgent forces.

From experience I’ve learned that Ailanthus stumps must be painted with full strength brush killer if you want to avoid cutting down the same tree forever. Even so, it can produce whole communities of relatives.

I was warned by a farmer friend of mine to cut down the female Ailanthus that bloomed beside the house 30 years ago. I was young and stupid and I thought its blooms were pretty. He warned me it would take over the property. I think of him as I pluck baby Ailanthus trees from the hedge, the driveway and the ice cube trays.

I was delighted with the Bittersweet when I saw the first berries one long ago autumn. I had no idea I was not looking at American Bittersweet but a species from abroad which could turn a hillside into a wasteland, bringing down oaks. I got distracted for 10 years or so with other concerns and when I next gave Bittersweet my attention, it had formed a killing shroud over every sumac, maple, oak, birch, cedar and sycamore.

A hopeless war insidiously becomes a way of life. After hope of winning has been exhausted there are only acts of principle, small forays against tyranny. The complicity of those with compatible agendas. I wield my nippers because it's the right thing to do. I subtly favor the native species to even the balance of power. I consider the possibility of a companion goat. And I wait to know the moment when it is time for me to surrender the battle to another.

Receptivity Versus Aggression

The perfumes of June on this hillside are staggering, arresting, compelling. Rose and honey are layered in the air and there’s a base note of something very spicy that keeps the mix from cloying. It’s surround-smell. It’s a presence I anticipate and revel in every year. Luca Turin himself could not have created a better perfume than this.

Last night the heat wave broke with a thunder storm. It blew out the electricity so Ray and I dragged the two new 0-gravity lawn chairs onto the covered porch and let our environment embrace us. It was his idea. We sipped champagne, made peace over our last political debate and tried to guess at the content of the air. It was a theatre of the sensual. Lightning illuminated cloud formations. Thunder kept us alert. The temperature dropped.

When hail started jumping in the lawn, he found a nice one and placed it in my hand. Squashed and round it looked like beach glass, flattened and smoothed by the forces through which it had traveled to reach us; it looked like we both feel when we try to talk politics. I ate it. It tasted clean and good.

Adjusting to the lack of light and electricity we heated lasagna on the top of the gas stove and watched The Bucket List on my new laptop. After he left I went back out to the porch wrapped in my old quilt and followed the light show of the receding storm.

From the darkness a raccoon emerged to look for edibles the cats might have left behind. She did not recognize my blanketed shape in the recliner as human and so circled me, pausing six inches from my wrapped feet to check out this dark mountain of me she had not noticed before on her patrols.

My respect for her wildness warred with my pleasure at getting such a very close look. Again I was happy I’ve resisted the urge to get a dog. I was glad that my very dear, very conservative, friend was not there with his belief that all raccoons have rabies and should be shot on sight. This one had babies, not rabies.

The best front porch sitting requires receptivity hard to achieve with a protector beside you. Yet this same protector created our entire evening with his idea of storm watching, his generosity with hail. I swallow the paradox. It tastes clean and good.