Suddenly Awry: Notes from Love in the Slow Lane

I can’t believe falling in love can be so exhausting but it’s that way for both of us. The difference between zero companions and one companion is like the difference between having one head and two. You are suddenly seeing the world two ways at once and that expansion is taxing; especially if you thought it could not happen to you. . . if you’re closing in on, or just leaving behind, your 70’s.

Gentle inquiries of each other pepper the day; would you prefer this or that? Shall we do (whatever) now or later? Are you hungry or should we go for a walk? Are you busy? Do you have time to hear this? Arggggh! This is so complicated! Help me think! Does the music bother you? I should go home and let you have your (something something) in peace. Oh don’t go. I miss you so.

This all takes emotional fiber and we both wish they sold it at Walmart.

They say living alone requires strength of character and of course it does. You have to be able to withstand the ferocious sense of silence, the isolation that feels not just existential but sometimes real, three dimensional and organic, like maybe you really are the last person on the planet. But you get used to it.

In time people find that aloneness is not as all-encompassing as it seemed at first. There are sounds in the silence and they indicate lives going on. We can investigate and discover that we share space with other life-forms. There is T.V. and there are movies. There are plants and pets; we have the telephone; email; music and books. And, of course, you get out and about.

But a lot of the mitigation to aloneness seems to come from developing a habit of self-talk. I am talking to people in my head. I am talking to myself and answering. I toss off one-liners to the cats, the car, the untrimmed shrubbery. And all of that is easy because it’s all an unimpeded flow of self with no hesitations, no balancing or challenging ideas. It is really me keeping my sense of who I am alive; keeping before myself an image of how the world is with little affirmations, little gestures that tell me where I fit into the scheme of things.

As a couple, self-talk is the first thing to go. Space explodes with points of view and different ideas of what and who we are. Everything peacefully taken for granted yesterday is up for re-examination today. I am not alone. I am loved. But if I’m loved then I’m not exactly who I’ve been thinking I was all these years. And all the little habits that identified me to myself are suddenly awry.

I love you. We are in our 8th, 9th decade of life. We thought we knew our individual terrain. Now I abandon myself to make you laugh. You attend with interest to my habits and pleasures. I want you to be afloat in the appreciation I feel for you and vice-versa. It’s all very, very different from being completely on our own, alone and entrenched and we are, both of us, shaking with exhaustion by evening. Maybe we are really just too old for this, I think.

But then we regard each other, our eyes hold, and there is an ocean of you before me. I am on the shore of you and you go on forever and there is no one else like you. You are bigger and deeper than even you know yourself to be. And maybe I am too. Shipwrecks lie wafting in the fathoms of our years. The surface sparkles in the light of our regard. We are two who have found each other at the end, and for a measure of time, before familiarity has limited our vision, before one of us has to leave, something in us has sense enough to tremble; and trembling, to hang on.

Tap Root

I’m sipping my evening martini, rocking the porch swing with the tips of my sneakers and looking east but I’m picturing what’s happening to the west, on the other side of the house, as the sun shatters in the pines.

All day I worked the azalea bed back there, the fork-tipped trowel thrust as deep as I could get it next to a tap root of thistle or dandelion, levering each one with the right hand, pulling it with the left, bits of dirt flying into my face and down my shirt, holding each dislodged plant in my gaze briefly to heighten the satisfaction of its removal, then flinging it over my shoulder onto the lawn behind me. Like a four year old, enchanted by repetition, my satisfaction builds. There’s another one! And another! Of course in choosing to work on the azalea border I condemned the cutting bed to another week or more of chaos and neglect.

Azaleas bloom before lilies, I reasoned, but it’s the cutting bed I’m picturing as I rock. The deer won’t eat those weeds I ruminate, over-chewing an olive to extract every molecule of flavor. Behind my head I picture their slender legs carrying them down the wood margin in the after-light of dusk, like bride’s maids to the altar in hesitation step, they make straight for the neglected hyacinth, lily and tulip greens, nosing unraked leaf mold out of their way, biting leaves off as close to the ground as they can.

This bothers me less than it should. All day I enjoyed manifesting my desire for a weed-free azalea border and every morning and evening the white-tail manifest desires in munching through my cutting bed. I work hard to see something I’ve only dreamed about take corporal form but I won’t  fence it or protect any of it. Why? I don’t really know. It doesn’t make sense.

I love the wild deer as much as I love having lilies at hand. I guess that’s the reason. And, no, there are not too many deer in my area. I’m surrounded by hunters. And anyway, some lilies always escape the foraging and give me bouquets I’ll bring into the house and enjoy this summer. I’ll cultivate a flower bed but it’s the wild things I root for in my heart as they fend for themselves in the margins they’ve been left.

For all of us there sometimes seems to be an element of common sense missing from the choices we make, and those of us governed more by patterned thinking, if pressed for rationale, sometimes have to scramble to assemble, in after thought, a reason for what we know is right and yet for which we have no ready explanation.

Those who are more logically inclined are not better off. They sometimes have to fib to themselves to make a syllogism work.

So, we’re all pretty silly. No matter. It’s no matter at all. I toast the tap root in us, so difficult to dislodge whatever it is I mean by that, and I toast endeavors illogical yet deeply enjoyed; to the wild and to the tame.

Nothing that Feels Like Work: An Easter Meditation

Like a lot of working people, I am tired today. It’s Easter Sunday and I want not to have to contain myself, gather myself up and thrust myself into activity, but to be a receptor, a receiver of the ‘big good’ that surrounds me.

I could have driven today to Annapolis to spend time with my mother, who may not have many more Easters. I could have gone to church. I could have made a dinner here and invited my grandson and daughter. I don’t see enough of them. I could have accepted the offer of friends to share a meal with them. I could have worked on one of the projects I’m invested in. I had to choose. I could only have one of these options.

I chose to do nothing that felt like work; to stand in place and enjoy the sun.

I’m stuck with a fragment in my head.

“Why look ye for the living among the dead? Christ is risen, He is risen, Christ is risen from the dead.”

It was Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church, Severna Park, Maryland, Easter 1971, and I sang in the choir. It’s one of the things I did while waiting for my husband to come home from Vietnam. Our daughter was not yet two years old. We had a composer-choir director in that church, whom we called Billy, and I do not remember his last name. He may have written this song that I’ve remembered.

What astounds me, Billy, is that while I was sitting in bed this morning singing this melody, which goes from haunting to joyous, my daughter called me. She opened the conversation by singing the exact same part of the song that I was warbling in my solitary space. It felt like some spiritual genetic echo. I must have been singing this song on Easter since 1971 for her to have known and made it her own. And now it links us to each other and to Billy and who knows?

Morning light rakes everything in its path right now, on my chosen day of rest, on the anniversary day, as the story goes, that a man named Jesus, dead and buried, disappeared from his tomb and two angels kept watch to tell where he had gone. That’s the story anyway.

My hand and pen throw shadow between themselves and the rest of me. This moment is vivid and feels potent. Believing the whole day stretches before me unadulterated by obligation I let myself pool into it. I let myself feel. I allow my senses to go seeping into the day to take in what I'm able.

I’m staying home alone today. This is my choice. It may not be the best choice but it is the choice I make. It’s definitive. It will make this day different from whatever else the day might have been.

The cold earth begins to steam in the Easter sun and I too quicken at the surface and in my imagination. I feel a part of the day and a part of all I observe. In the deeper, more remote recesses of my spirit there may be some imperative warming toward fruitfulness but I can’t identify it.

An unsolicited thought goes by. What, or how, does a leaf ‘feel’ when unfurling? Rather, how do I feel imagining this event?

If I sit among the oaks today, while playing hooky from the 'shoulds,' might I sense moisture slipping through root membranes, sap being drawn upward from the hidden places under soil, feel it pulled upward throughout a single, individual body trunk and sent in a fractal rush to feed its thousand fisted leaves? Might I not know something about leaves being pushed into irretrievable exposure?

Nature in rebirth mode both pushes and pulls until the commitment to be here and not there, is made. In being pushed and pulled into planetary exposure, to some time in the sun, to our work, to letting go, to falling, to spilling, to being taken back from whence we came there is no real choice. What might it feel like to slip out of this world and into yet another that has been prepared for us and where we are welcomed with joy as we have been here? What, if any, are our choices along the way?

As humans we can notice or not, be grateful or not, be here or be there, love or love not, believe or believe not. That’s all we’ve got for our time in the sun. That’s free will, right?

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I’ve finished the mowing in slow motion and am sitting on the porch swing again. Mowing isn’t work for me, I reasoned. It’s a form of rest. Blossoms of cherry are darting to and fro like bees and I review again a choice I made on a specific day a long time ago.

I cast my lot in believing that That which was creating everything, once upon a time, enlisted as human to draw our most specific individual one-of-a-kind selves into a conscious good eternity; to show the way to a place we could not go on our own terms or by our own endeavors. In other words, we could not get there alone. Hard to see. Hard to believe.

I decided to accept that an unimaginable quantum Love threw Itself, is still throwing Itself, in front of the cosmic bus to rescue us from the very limitations It gave us; to reveal something to us that is beyond our grasp. Love wants us to understand something of how it works and that we are wanted as participants. Love yearns to connect.

Whatever else they are, (history, myth, veiled knowledge, genetic memory, word of God) our stories are sign-posts pointing toward what can not be described by the rational human brain.

Who understands sacrificial love? And why would there be a self-limiting and a self-giving aspect to God, I wondered? Why would God take on human suffering?

Why would God not?

We were made and are being made. The eternal in the temporal can only be glimpsed when one pierces the other. It takes an event, at a point in time, to mark the place where a choice made is a difference begun.

A bus careening, a crowd or a political power out of control, a scene of horror at Golgotha, have a finite power that our eyes are made to see as total. But sometimes something happens and we sense a real transcendent power coming from an invisible porthole from a place beyond our comprehension which, having entered the story, changes the story. It always happens on a particular day. And on no day are we built to be nonchalant about encountering angels in an empty tomb. Even the believers couldn't believe.

To act on faith in the absence of real evidence feels potentially silly, possibly the wrong thing to do, so laughable and yet, at the right point in time, it can become the only choice that allows for enlargement and growth. You make it. You do something, you take a step in faith, and then things are different. Or they’re exactly the same and you are different. The point is that something happens.

Like sap rising comes acceptance that we are both loved and needed by love. We cave in, fall down or are drawn up toward the love that made us, through a chaotic whirl of life, into an eternal, and equally unimaginable, good beyond. Or so I decided to believe. It’s just something anyone might do one particular day. A choice, like any other choice. We pick. We change. And we ourselves become a sign pointing toward a larger story.

Should I have visited my mother? I don’t know. I chose to stay home and sing and mow and nap like a baby, trusting that someone would keep me covered; trusting that Mother too was being lifted up. I caught a cold. And sang with my daughter across space and time. Mother was fine. And I had an Easter I will remember.

Mowing for Joy

I completed the first mowing of the season this week, breath held in trepidation. My mowing style involves some tractor abuse, some would say, but I say it’s a matter of faith. I have faith in my tractor. I don’t like to lose my momentum by getting off to carry every downed branch into the woods; move every rock muscled up by thaw. Mostly I just mow over them, hoping for the best, teeth clenched, eyes squinted in empathy and mostly stuff I mow over breaks up. With repeated attacks in April all winter debris will have turned to mulch and gone flying by May. But in the interlude until we’re settled into a seasonal groove I worry about the spindles, the blades, the belts. I worry but I give no quarter.

I have tremendous faith in John Deere. My little 265 is 23 years old and has had a hard life. Several non-Deere salesmen over the years have tried to convince me that my tractor was over the hill.

One guy slyly offered to relieve me of it for $500.

Another salesman explained that I’d be much better off with a Simplicity because they didn’t have so many little parts (meaning parts that could be replaced for under $15.00) but that with Simplicity whole sections were all-of-a-piece (meaning when you needed a tiny repair you’d have to replace about 25% of your tractor.)

Did I really look that stupid? Was it the overalls? Or just my girliness?

Anyway, Johnny and I have been in love for a long time. I do most of the talking but I think maybe he does love me back. What else could 23 years of faithfulness in tough circumstances mean but love? Through thick and through thin, for better or for worse, he’s been there for me. And no matter what aspersions where cast in his direction by low minded people I’ve been staunch; I’ve never given in. I’ve never given up on him.

Once I rolled him but I jumped off in time to avoid death. A friend with a one ton pick-up and a winch hauled him back onto his wheels and patched him up.

Once he needed a short block. Well, who doesn’t. . . eventually?

Together we have experimented with different mowing techniques and how long it takes to execute each one. I will share them with you here in case you’d like to experiment with your own mowing.

There is your basic area mow where you divide the property into units that are then addressed efficiently one at a time. This is one of the speedier techniques and no doubt you are familiar with it but it has the flaw of being ungodly boring.

I’m fond of the perimeter mow because it is possibly the most efficient and you get to see a lot of scenery go by. Basically you start off mowing all areas as one from the far outside. In the beginning it doesn’t seem like you’re getting much done. It’s like saving a penny one week and then doubling your existing amount every week after that. For awhile all you’ve got is small change. Then bonanza! You do end up with some isolated sections that you have to go over your own path to get to, but that’s a good opportunity to look for skips.

Radiator mow is good for square and trapezoidal areas. You just fly down one side, turn back up into it in 10-30 feet and again at the top until you’ve formed a loopy zigzag through the grass. This is surprisingly fun and I never tire of it since it seems to come out slightly differently every time I do it.

There’s the circular mow where you start in the middle of the lawn and turn around like a dog deciding to lie down. You start with this tight little crop circle of fresh clipped grass in the middle of a sea of dandelions and for this reason I enjoy it most in May. For maximum pleasure you don’t turn on the blades until you are in the middle of the field.

There is the X mow but you end up with small awkward shapes spread far apart so it’s neither efficient nor fun and Johnny and I do not recommend it.

One of our favorites is message to god mow where you drive blades-a-fly while spelling out a word in cursive. You need a pretty big lawn or a tractor with a very tight turning radius to do this well and it’s not efficient. But if you count added value for mowing pleasure, and we do, this is by far the most fun. If a small plane happens by you might even get a wing wave. We have.

Finally there is crazy mow which is very inefficient time-wise but can be magically cathartic for those times when nothing in your life makes sense. This is where you just mow, with no pattern or agenda. You fly around trees, make a beeline to the blue bird house where you mow a square with a lot of fussy backing up and switching on and off of blades, you chase squirrels and cats which can be amusing if you’re in the right mood though, of course, you never get near them, maybe you mow backward for ten minutes or so, anything you feel like doing. Afterward you mop up. It looks quite crazy to observers, and if you live in suburbia, this will attract some, but it is the very pinnacle of self expression in mowing. If you’re having a bad day, the grass is up and it’s not raining, try it. It could save you months of psychotherapy.

That’s all the news from the front porch today.