The Flame Tree

Norway: highs in the low 60s.

We wake up at 11am the children and I, or sometimes 10:30 or even noon, still groggy with jetlag and maybe simply wiped out from a year of New York City noise, buses, subways, rushing, dressing, smiling, worshiping, running, bill paying, forgetting, agonizing, snacking, homeworking, cat caring, doorman hello-ing and the rest. The oddest part of waking up after 12 hours of sleep here is that I feel no remorse. No frustration about how I should be up at 6am out picking berries or building troll huts in the woods. When you are with a five- and a seven-year-old all day every day, in a pure quiet uninterrupted setting, that sort of ambition seems to fall away. You simply become.

The only sound as I write is the birds outside and the scratch scratch scratch of the children's coloring markers.

We have three weeks before Papa and BestePapa join the women here (my sister-in-law and mother-in-law come and go). The forecast shows many days of little suns being cruelly shoved aside by dark, rainy clouds. The highs are in the low 60s. Wetsuits for the sprinkler and the lake are de rigueur.

20 minutes of writing before I walk in Central Park

Many years ago, I was out in a remote part of a remote country in Africa working with a well-known non-government organization. There were five refugee camps scattered south from our compound, and the NGO did health-related work in the camps. But I rarely left the compound because I was doing desk work. 

On Sundays several of us took a long walk out behind the compound for a couple of miles across the savannah. During the week I often went out for shorter walks into the small neighboring villages. One Sunday, no one was around and I went out for a walk into the savannah by myself. I realized as I left that I had forgotten my radio somewhere---which we were required to carry at all times-----but foolishly I brushed it off thinking I would just go a short distance.

I was walking in the baking sun and thinking about Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera, how she followed him so kindly everywhere as he chased butterflies. I wondered if they had ever come to Africa because as I walked many little butterflies were fluttering around me.

Then, a series of unfortunate events happened. Three men who I had passed earlier on the path showed up again. I was accosted, they were drunk I now realized. I also realized that I had walked quite far from the road. I knew I was in danger. Soon more men began to arrive.

To this day I am amazed: a self-defense course I had taken five year earlier came back to me, and I carried out the steps by instinct. I was able to intimidate the men----there were more than I care to remember by now----and establish the fact that nothing was going to happen here, and march them, and me, back to the road. A kind but timid teacher also showed up and helped too. Bless that man, he was an angel. When we got back to the road, the village joined into the melee (word spreads fast on a slow day in rural Africa). It was sickening in a different way, a mob-oriented way. But at least I was not isolated and I was getting closer to the compound. Then, miraculously, a truck from the NGO pulled up, and I climbed in, shaking but unharmed.

The other day I was reading some of Nabokov's early letters to Vera in The New Yorker and maybe that's why this incident returned to my thoughts this morning. I was taking a shower when I thought of it. I was in New York City, my husband and children were around, we were off to a ballet class soon. What if that day turned out differently? I wondered. Who or where would I be today? The same life, with darker secrets? Visibly wounded, physically or emotionally? Or maybe, not here at all. 

I am so often in agony over my failures. What is the use of that?

when the streets were washed with drinking water

It felt like Paris on those early summer mornings, one beautiful city masking itself as another. The air was cool and fresh and smelled like trees, there was no blaring light or noise yet, the streets were silent and still. A man with a newspaper walked past to buy croissants in a cafe. One stray, late-night taxi delivered its last passenger. Life felt simple, unstrained, as if some small amount of change in your pocket could buy breakfast.

Along the streets, the doormen, dressed in uniform, washed the sidewalks with water. The streets were not dirty, this was not a neglected neighborhood. No garbage, no debris, hardly a misplaced leaf off a potted geranium accumulated during the night. Even the dogs were careful with their business. But the doormen washed the streets, as part of their job no doubt.  Sometimes, as a favor, a man would rinse a resident's car with water too. The water came out of a hose; it came out easily when a knob was turned, and the water flowed across the sidewalks or against the cars, slipped down into the gutter and continued in rivulets along the gutter---having washed the sidewalks---into a drain that led to a river.

This water that washed the streets and cars, though it was clean and pure and fit for consumption, wasn't often used to drink. The people preferred different, imported water instead. The plastic bottles that contained the imported water were shipped into the city, just like lemons, oranges, basil, kiwis, coffees, olives, many kinds of fish and other delicacies. Many wonderful things were delivered to the city---exotic things that were, eventually, taken for granted, rarely graced, and sometimes even discarded.

The bottles of water delivered to the city were delivered in boxes that were heavy to move into the trucks from the bottling factory, heavy to carry over the highways and bridges and through the streets. It required a lot of petrol to move the heavy trucks. The boxes were heavy for the men to lug into the stores, and heavy to carry out of the store to the car, to the house, and into the kitchen. It required a lot of energy, those bottles of water. Meanwhile water----clean, pure drinking water-----came out of the hoses to wash the sidewalks and ran down the gutters to the rivers.

We were always going places in those days! If we lived in the south, we drove north. If we lived in the north, we drove south. People in cities drove to the coast for the weekend, people on the coast commuted into the city to work. We drove around so much we hardly got to know our neighbors. But if we didn't visit people or see places, it was feared that we would miss something, I think, or be bored for a day, or die unfulfilled.

Soon there were so many cars driving north and south that the roads became blocked and everyone had to slow down to avoid running over each other. The trucks carrying the bottled water were in the way; the basil trucks and orange trucks and lemon trucks---they were all in the way too. Sitting in traffic to go somewhere, the big trucks would have gorgeous, huge images of a green peaceful farm, and one would dream of entering the image and leaving the traffic jam.

So the traffic slowed to 15mph sometimes for nine hours straight, creeping along from city to city. Ridiculous! we said. I could walk faster than this!

So why didn't you?

What?

Walk?

Walk? Places were too far, the air too hot was so many cars. It was too impossible. But I know that people did like to walk, when given the chance. In the city where they washed the streets with drinking water, the park was closed to cars at night, and what happened every evening was a sight to behold. Hundreds of people emerged from the streets and the places and the everywhere, to walk. They ran, and biked, and roller-bladed as well. They went alone or in groups, with friends, and in teams. They encouraged each other along, they respected each other's privacy. They respected the proper lanes. They smiled at each other. The courtesy was old-fashioned, not what you’d find on the highways in those days.

There they were, so many people! The young and the old; the overweight, and the fit; the brokers; the actors; the pregnant; the deaf; the marathoners; and the lines of speed skaters wishing by like helmeted swans continually pushing off the water. Thousands of miles ere covered in one evening by thousands of feet, in one park. The sound of the runners feet against the road and the bikers wheels were the only sound now in that usually roaring city. An occasional conversation or word was spoken among the passing. The breath of runners IN! out... IN! out... coming up from behind was like the sound of a heart beating, no doubt exactly like the sound of a heart beating in an ancient desert a thousand years ago. 

Monday Morning Moment in New York

Another grey, rainy, cold day. People are beginning to look bleak. But New Yorkers of course persevere, and my son and I stood waiting at the bus stop for the public bus this morning. A school bus had picked up some children and was idling on the curb beside us, perhaps ahead of schedule. I hadn't paid it much mind (though I had wondered how our bus was going to pull in...), when it started to slowly pull away and a man walked up to it and tapped on its door. He barked, "driver!" to get the driver's attention and then gestured for the driver to stop.

He was not a very appealing man. He was sane and harmless, someone who makes it to work and pays taxes and makes the world what it is. He was fine. But he was not someone I would be naturally drawn to in a room of many. His black pants were pulled up efficiently. His white shirt tucked in, and brief case well worn---everything about him suggested nothing warm, colorful or witty. His hair was thin, neatly cut; his lips were thin and spiteful. He had a boil by his ear that was not disgusting but did confirm my assumptions about him. There was something furious in his neat appearance. There was no pleasure in his house. He did not dwell in generosity, and here, in middle-age, it was beginning to show. He probably lectured his wife on money. He was often annoyed with people.

He stepped away from the school bus door and walked along the bus to the fourth or fifth window. When he rapped on it---with one finger, hard----the four boys sitting in the bus pulled back as if hit by a sudden wind. He rapped again and mouthed something to one of the boys.

Had the boy forgotten his lunch? The man was determined to get a message across, he mouthed some words again. I wondered if he had come to finish an argument that had started earlier that morning. Perhaps the man had returned to the bus to have the final word with his son. He mouthed some words again, but his mouth moved too fast for anyone to understand. He was keeping the children waiting, I thought, and the traffic behind the bus, and all the parents and children down the avenue too. One selfish act has repercussions---did he get that?----slightly disrupting the morning schedule of many.

Abandoning his attempts to communicate, finally the man pointed to his eye. He mouthed, "I!". He pointed to his heart, "Love!". He pointed to the boy who was sitting in the dark bus, "You!" He lifted up his hand to signal his departure, picked up his brief case and turned to walk down Second Ave. to work.  

Painting by Heather Galler, Saltbox House Landscape (click for more)

 

Thinking about the end of the world while walking around the Central Park reservoir last night

I take the path from the 67th Street entrance north the road through Central Park that leads to the reservoir. The road passes the Boat House and a man playing his ode to the day on bagpipes in the Boat House parking lot. The road I take passes trees and couples teaching their babies to walk under the trees. It passes behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A man throws a ball to his little dog. Not many people are passing. Rain water is dripping off the leaves of the trees and the bushes. The blossoming trees smell amazing. It's quiet because it just rained and will rain again soon, and it always raining. But at least the grass is long and lush.

I walked and thought about the end of the world. I made a list of what my last thoughts might be if today truly is the end of the world. I wondered if, in the intensity of the world ending, my mind would offer up memories that I couldn't conjure up myself now. I gave myself that possibility. I thought of the warmth and weight of my newborn just placed on my chest; the reflection of a drifting seagull on the stone house window on a grey sky in November; a friend, dying of a cancer, lifting a water bottle to spray a small plant on her hospital bed table; the smell of the grey Chevrolet, of the first German Shepherd, of the brackish ocean. Of course all the lovers would come crashing in, every one. High fives, what fun, thanks for the good times guys---see you in heaven. Then some jokes about that. 

The ledge at the office where we smoked cigarettes those first weeks in Uganda; one glance when I knew. The Chick. My brothers. Snow. A mountain in Maine. The smell of the church. I listed more as I walked and the memories flooded in---wonderful things---wonderful things by my side for the glorious instant before obliteration. 

Or will I think this----- Oh God, I am 43 years old, and I've only just started my life. 

20 minutes of writing before I pick up my daughter off the school bus

It is 2:25 on a Wednesday, we have just tipped and are on the downward slide to weekend. Weekends make no difference for a mother's working schedule, if anything they are more work, but psychologically something does shift. Somewhere, on Friday evening, someone is having cocktails on the deck overlooking the sea. Somewhere. 

It is pouring rain. In 35 minutes I will leave to pick my daughter off the school bus on First Ave. There are three other mothers who wait with me at the stop, and we chat. One is Italian, one is Irish, one is Japanese and I am American (and the loudest). We still all don't know each other's names or the names of each other's children. It's not much of a small town.

My daughter will get off the bus and hug me and say immediately, "Did you bring a snack?" When I insert a cracker into her mouth it's sort of like feeding the sheep and goats at the Central Park Zoo. They will eat a much as you insert into their mouth, this I'm quite sure. It's a long walk over to First Ave and every day I think: Wouldn't it be nice if I had a Real Job and then I could send someone over to pick up my daughter? But then, walking back together, my daughter talks and talks and talks and talks and though I sometimes don't hear a word she says, I know that I am there. 

I am a housewife on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This morning I bought a replacement sponge for our mop. I had a conversation with the man---who was well-dressed and articulate---about the best sponges and mops. he had opinions (I didn't). On my way home, I had a conversation with the doorman who has been here 48 years, about some of the characters he has known in the building. He has some stories, he says, because there are some real charactahs.... And I believe him. 

Later I had a conversation with the owner of the french cafe on 68th. She is French--looks like a young Meryl Streep. I hadn't seen her since her trip to France---she was glowing, renewed. She said it was 75 degrees every day, and sunny. Like summer! she said in her beautiful French accent. So it is depressing, we agreed, to return here (where I'm wearing the same boots that I wore in January).

Then I went here and there and my father called to say he had received a letter, addressed to me and written in 1982. This is weird because my boarding school recently wrote to me saying the same. What does it mean? What does it all mean?

On the way home I bought two hot dogs with my husband and we ate them by the Whitney Museum. Whoever wants the best hot dog form the nicest hot dog vendor in New York City go to Madison and 74th or whatever cross-street the Whitney is. These vendors----I know----can be real assholes, but this guy is sincerely kind and funny. Sometimes lines of children dressed in school uniforms pass by and say Hi Alex! Hi Alex! And older ladies too always lifting their delicate hands to wave. I often buy lunch from him on my way down Madison Avenue and every time I declare to myself there is no better lunch IN THE WORLD than a New York hotdog and a Diet Pepsi. 

As we ate, my husband told a joke about the IMF guy (you can imagine how the UN people are talking!). Then he said, "Imagine: the Whitney is going to be the MET soon," because the MET has announced its decision to use the building when the Whitney moves downtown in 5 years or so. But I won't be here when that happens, I thought to myself, so I don't have to care. "I'm not crazy about the Whitney anyway," I said. "Too cutting-edge for me." Which is a way to contain the pain of change and separation, I suppose. (I'm actually a member of the Whitney and I love it because, I just do.)

When I returned home it hadn't started to rain yet and George told me about his wife's cousin who got really old and they had to put her away, but O yah then the relatives (his voice hushing) starting coming around, you see. Because she had some coins, that one...

Well what can ya do? he said. What can you do.

Old Man House and Love

A few weeks ago I returned to New York City from my parents house with a van load of things including: seven glass jars, nine terra cotta jugs, a box filled with seaglass, a wooden Pegasus carved by my sculptor great-grandfather, an etching of my great-grandmother done by the same, a crate of letters written to me from 1969 to 1998 (when email obliterated the art), a twentieth-century Italian bureau, the family Bible, and a 16-year-old cat named Chicken. 

These were the random items that I hauled out of the deep waters of my past---excavated out of the old house where we grew up and my parents have lived for 40 years. We packed them into the rented van early on a beautiful crisp sunny morning. I said goodbye to my parents. Though I will see them in a few weeks, I will never see them at this house again, because I will never see this house again. I waved goodbye to them as I pulled out of the driveway, as I have waved goodbye so many hundreds of times before-----for school mornings, for sleepovers and ski trips, for boarding school, college, graduate school. As I left for California, Central America, New York City and Africa. I waved goodbye to attend a day of second grade with the same combination of dismay and excitement as 25 years later I waved goodbye with my new baby girl, going to Kenya to start another, new life. But this goodbye was the most significant, as it was the last one from this driveway and this house and as I drove away---- I will not lie---- the pain was tremendous. 

I will miss that house because it's a sweet old man of a house. Old, warped and achey, settled into the rocky ground, unfazed by the range of bizarre human behavior and glee that unfolds within it. I will miss that beautiful familiar gentle house, but nothing has been lost----and that's the peculiar, almost vertiginous feeling I'm living with. The house is gone, but there are millions of other houses.

The house is gone but our home remains, because we really do create home within, and create it everyday. My home is our family. And my family is a phone call or an email, a gift of green earrings or black pearls, a drive up to Boston together, a conversation by the kitchen sink, jokes, a snow fort, a movie, a really strong drink when a really strong drink is in order. It's the infinite crackling of the space between us, alive and unpredictable, shifting with every member's move, with every new arrival, with every loss. All of that still remains, and the memories too. So what is there to long for? We are lucky.

"Love conquers all," the priests and the poets keep telling us----and it's an abstraction until you learn that it does actually conquer all, because no one can destroy love, and love can be as simple as you calling your brother. The crackling space can't be cut down, or harassed, intimidated, chased by a car, threatened or yelled at by anyone. They can hang you upside down but the love remains. That must be so annoying for the bad guys. I am beginning to get it now, I really am. 

Gardens & Gardens of Eden (Improvisation #43)

 

The other day I stepped out of Grand Central Station onto Lexington Avenue. It was grey and sloshy. Mid-day people were carrying umbrellas and some of the men were wearing hats. The buildings gleamed silver in the grey light. Everything was a black and white photo from years ago. Swish went the cabs passing by. People were walking quickly with ducked heads. 

I pick up my son in midtown every day, and it is a tedious commute in the middle of the day. I have thus declared the iPod the Greatest Invention of All Time. It will be a tragic day when I am hit by a bus that I didn't hear coming, but I will be oblivious, and if I'm listening to The Stones I won't care what hit me.

I opened the doors on to the avenue and Angel from Montgomery came on, out of nowhere. When did I download this not-Stones song? I don't remember, but here it is. I crossed Lexington and as I crossed the avenue and the first notes of the song, a remarkable and peculiar thing: suddenly, a memory, an absolute moment nothing more, was triggered. It was early summer and it was warm and in P's green SAAB somewhere in Montana, or Wyoming maybe, driving west for the summer---we were all a tiny bit mad from the constant driving west----and this song came on. This perfect little song. The road curved and ascended, after miles and miles of straight monotony. Below the curve were some tract houses. My stomach lifted. We were giddy. The way the car lifted up that hill was lovely----it was dusk and quite beautiful with the sun setting and the orange sky, the expanse, the tract houses below and the lives in the houses so hopeful even from here.

The feeling of suspension in that moment was superb. That solid car lifting feeling, and the friends, and everyone about to be on the west coast. We were moving there, some for the summer; others, having graduated, would stay on. Some of the people stayed on forever and became famous in their fields of film and wine. Others returned east for school or marriage and became activists, wives and farmers. Oh, the music and the sunset. And all the laughing! We were not Jack Karouak or Jimi Hendrix or Hells Angels or the Grateful Dead anything---I mean, it was the 1980s, we knew that---but it was still fun to be American and driving endlessly, heading somewhere and full of ideas.

Well anyway. I've been hanging out in the South of France the last few weeks, cutting an album called Exile on Main Street. I love the rock and roll and all that. I love what they call the raw energy. All night I'm awake and working and smoking cigarettes and thinking and creating and drinking bourbon, but not too much bourbon, and then the sun rises and a few of us take the boat out to Italy for breakfast. We sit at a cafe on the water---croissant, cappuccino, more cigarettes because where this place is, there is no cancer. No need for sleep. There is music and sitting in a bikini and having a coffee and a cigarette and talking about art, music, and happy gossip; there's this lightness in the body and everyone speaks words but there is no pain, no cruelty, no sarcasm, no arguing. There is no laundry. See how the sun reflects on the sea? See how the body floats as it walks, so light---it is not tired, not overfed, not poisoned by stress. Boats drift across the water in the early morning before the tourists are out, and we have been up all night creating work. That feels good. That is Eden.

I really did do it once, you know. Not in France. I stayed up all night for a year or more. I smoked French cigarettes and had one bag that carried my things, and lived suspended in this most heavenly space. I worked all night. I borrowed apartments. I drank and ate so little, food was not necessary. I ate when I felt hunger, there was beautiful fruit in the summer. In the winter I boiled kale. I went to bed after the Mexican men who worked in NYC kitchens had finished their 4am soccer game in the park below my window. Or sometimes I stayed up. It was the best year and yet it ended, like so many things that reach such heights, in quite a crash. Make me an angel, that flies... No, I was not a rock star,

but I am now. 

Wassily Kandinsky The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27), 1912.

Torn

by Mary Oliver

I tore the web
   of a black and yellow spider

        in the brash of weeds

and down she came
    on her surplus of legs

      each of which

touched me and really
    the touch wasn't much

                   but then the way

if a spider can
    she looked at me

            clearly somewhere between

outraged and heartbroken
    made me say "I'm sorry

         to have wrecked your home

your nest your larder"
     to which she said nothing

                  only for an instant

pouched on my wrist
then swung herself off

                     on the thinnest of strings

back into the world.
This pretty, this perilous world. 

                     *

Dear Meghan---back into the world--- Love Emilie.

Blog Action Day: Water

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. This year's topic is water.

*

Several years ago, my husband and I lived in a little cottage in Kampala, Uganda. It was very lush there. Behind the cottage, a small yard descended steeply to a dirt road. It was filled with wild garden----frangipani, jasmine, birds of paradise, bottle brush, agapantha and magnolia trees competed with the bougainvillea vines that seemed to grow inches a day, winding their way up anything that didn't move swiftly. The basil I planted grew so gargantuan that one day it just slumped over and died, like a drunkard whose liver finally gives in. The rains, when they came, were Biblical. I lay awake at night with a racing heart, thinking for sure the cottage would soon detach from its foundation and float down the hill. I lay awake thinking of the Ugandans who lived across the valley in shacks that perched precariously on hills stripped of all trees. 

I worked for an aid organization at the time and sometimes I would travel to Gulu, in northern Uganda, where the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) had been creating havoc for 15 years (and continue to). Leaving behind the tropical shores of Lake Victoria, the landscape turned brown and dry and flat. But it was still Africa, with wild weeds and shrubby trees taking advantage of every crack in the hard-packed soil.

One day we drove out to Pabbo, a refugee camp an hour from Gulu, where about 26,000 Ugandans had fled the LRA's violence. We toured the dusty camp, asked questions, looked at wells, took notes, met officials, waited, looked at clinics, met more people, waited some more. There were long lines at the wells, but at least there were wells. Outside the refugee camp, most people sent their daughters to the water source, often a long and arduous trip that made girls very prone to attack and assault.

As always, a group of children followed us around the camp. As always, they were quiet, giggling, half-dressed in rags, curious and bored. One had a kite made from a shredded plastic bag tied on a stick which made him a scholar and a prince among the others. It was a grey day, and though no one was crying or dragging or having mental breakdowns, there was a sort of fatigue that hung over our group, and the camp, and the day, and the war. 

Toward the end of the day, colleagues were finishing business while M. and I waited, leaning against the Land Rover. The children stood around us and stared. If we raised our eyebrows or waved a little, they giggled in unison for three seconds, then immediately returned to their flat, inquisitive stares. Soon M. and I stopped thinking about them. 

I reached into the Land Rover to get a bottle of water. Still chatting, or maybe not, I opened the bottle and---reflexively----I started to tip the bottle. M.'s hand out shot out and his voice almost coughed No! I smiled back to suggest What do you mean? while the bottle tipped and I splashed a thimble full of water into the palm of my hand, to splash my hands and face a little. 

But before he could reply, the children exploded. Before the water hit my palm, they broke their stillness, their quiet, and flashed into action. Water! Precious water just falling, like that! Free and easy water! They scurried beneath me, they reached up for the drops, they fell to the ground to become nothing, no higher than rodents, no higher than that. 

Helen Frankenthaler, Aerie (2009)

Saturday Evening, Moment

Walking home from the library, just before dinner. O yay! Autumn is finally in the air! Six months of laying low waiting for the heat to break, now, here I am, back in my element. All of Madison is people in furry vests and expensive sunglasses. Mercedes, BMWs. What should I make for dinner? Is left-over pizza ok, I think so. I was thinking such things when I came upon a peculiar crowd on 75th and Madison. They were looking up, and I braced myself for the worst. There wasn't the horror or stand-back-please of a place of recent tragedy, but maybe someone balancing on the museum's ledge? What are we waiting for, I whispered to a crowdsman, for when there is a crowd----restrained, cordial, letting the traffic pass and in delightful conversation----I am one to join it. 

"A walker," the man said. "Someone is going to walk down the wall."

This is why I love New York. Because on the way home from the library, thinking about not much and expecting not much either, you come upon a crowd waiting for a man to walk down a wall.

We waited ten minutes and then it happened, and it was beautiful. It was stunning and tearful and beautiful. As he turned over the ledge (held by supporting ropes), he seemed to elongate. He grew longer and longer and then he began to walk. His arms swung slowly by his side. He took tentative steps. He is an artist; he is a dancer, this was a piece for the Whitney Museum. He wasn't a stunt guy or a tightrope walker. He walked like he was taking the first steps on the moon. He walked like he had been in a terrible accident and, after years of rehabilitation was walking again. He walked and he walked and the world turned sideways and the trees were going to poke his nose and the sidewalks went up to the sky and everything fell out of the windows of the sideways buildings and the rivers drained rushing into the bay and the ocean--- and then he reached the bottom of the wall. The crowd applauded and hooted and laughed "amazing!" together. Many people took his picture---he was handed sunflowers, and kissed by a woman----and the crowd began to disperse, and I continued down Madison, and now it's children crying for dinner again.

The Test

It was dark when I woke up the other morning. With the unusual, prolonged heat and humidity through September, I hadn't felt the autumn yet, and so the darkness was reassuring. I made coffee. I stood there in a daze and so it took my breath away to turn and see the sky suddenly white, like seeing a presence that has quietly entered the room. Broad jagged strokes of red cloud spread above the skyscrapers. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning... But I didn't feel nervous, or tired or achey, and I loved the density of peace in the house, with everyone  asleep and together. 

I worry about the fact that I am not working. Always. I am always worried either because I'm not working for money, or not working on writing, or not working at something that I should be working on like reading history, or learning how to fly a helicopter, or being a better person. Is this something I inherited from my Puritan ancestors with their wooden chairs and cruel punishments and fear of God? Well I don't know, but for one precious morning I wasn't worried about working. I was making breakfast, I was dressing reticent children, I was shooing them out the door, and then I was finding a way to get through the day.

Nothing was wrong. I knew that. I knew it in my heart. But I didn't have much to do until the doctor's at 2pm, so I went out to buy an appointment book. I walked down Park Avenue and wondered if there was a time when people did this, went out to buy an appointment book, those simple times when technology had much less of a hold on our lives, and when you went to the doctor for a cough, you either you got better or you died. A friend called while I was at the shop and we had a reassuring conversation about nothing. I remembered on the way home to get my phone fixed. I remembered, as I was walking, to breathe. You have to just breathe. You know nothing is wrong---they probably call back something like 60 percent of the women---some ridiculous number like that. But still, it's better to breathe, and not think about it.

I walked home up Fifth Avenue. The sun came through the trees and speckled the sidewalk. Doormen were washing the sidewalk in front of their buildings. The morning was sunny and fresh and the smell of damp cement reminded me of childhood swimming pools. A few weeks ago, the children and I would go to the park on those hot, hot days and they jumped through the sprinklers. That was so nice, I thought, and I knew it was nice at the time too. But now maybe such days are over. This is possible, I warned myself, and I actually felt a moment of peace with that.

I had two more hours. It was a sunny day and all the people in New York were going here and there. And I will tell you this: time was not moving. I wasn't exactly worried, but you see, I have children and they are still so young. And also if, just if, there is something---and all that---how foolish I will feel for wasting my previous life with all these silly, petty concerns that I am always harboring. "I know, I know," I would say to my friends. "I used to be upset about work, and now there's this..."

I took the bus but the traffic was horrible on Madison so I got out to walk and now, after waiting all day, I would be late. They kept me waiting in the waiting room. They kept me waiting in the dressing room. They kept me waiting before and after the scans (there was something about the technician's sigh that I did not like.) (Although, I reasoned, it was about 3 o'clock, the time of day for sighing.) (And a professional, certainly, would not sigh if she saw something wrong...) (Or maybe it was very bad, and she knew the doctor would dread this one...) With every moment that passed my hope withered, my vision narrowed, my stomach clenched, my mind reeled. You see I knew I was fine but... Well, what if the doctor had something difficult to tell me and he was putting it off, pretending to be busy in his office? 

Finally he called me into his office, and there I entered a NASA command center. I felt privileged, suddenly, to be here. I felt I was part of a highly-intelligent team. It was dark and warm and the room seemed to hum. In front of us, two large screens each projected an orb of beautiful, abstract, white, cloudy constellations and stars and planets and there, along the edge, something like the Milky Way. Four smaller screens to the left depicted blue distant murky swamps, and I remembered the unbelievable first wonder of seeing the sonograms of my babies. It was peaceful in the dark room with the reassuring doctor who pointed to the renditions of outer space, and explained why he had been concerned, and why, of course, it was all fine now. But I was hardly listening. I couldn't take my eyes off the infinite beauty. The infinite, glorious universe---all contained in the scan of a woman's breast. It was all there: God's wonder; Gods inter-connectedness of life; life.

 Above image: Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)  September Wind and Rain, 1949

"Joy has been leaking out of our life. We have let the new Puritans take over, spreading a layer of foreboding across the land until even ignorant small children rarely laugh anymore. Pain has become nobler than pleasure; work, however foolish or futile, nobler than play; and denying ourselves even the most harmless delights marks the suitably somber outlook on life."

Barbara Holland (1933-2010).

Image: Craigie Aitchison, The Tree (1968)

Whistling past the grave yard

 

The other day, on our way to Kristiansand, we stopped in a little town off the main route to look for a spot for a picnic. It was a sunny day. We had some bread and grapes and coffee in a thermos and apples and salami. We drove through the little town and turned a bend and there we came upon an old church settled into itself with the dignity, resignation, and peace characteristic of buildings that have harbored generations. There was a strip of grass along the parking lot behind the church, which rose to a stone wall which bordered the church graveyard. There was plenty of shade under the tall birch trees. The light came through the leaves of the birches and speckled the dirt parking lot. 

We got out of the car, took in the scene, adjusted to the stillness and sat down to eat. M. poured the coffee. It felt, in the tiniest way, like a safari in Africa. It felt nothing like a road trip in America. "This is not an American road trip," I had thought to myself as we puttered down the major highway going 50mph in a SAAB. (Where speed traps are frequent, and fines are impressive and inflexible, no one---not one law-abiding citizen----speeds). It is a bit like traveling in a dream, the yearning to run impeded by a weight in your legs that is hell. 

I watched a couple in an old convertible come down an on-ramp up ahead. We puttered along. I watched the driver accelerate along the on-ramp and then---where traditionally one would hit the gas and leap into the traffic on the highway----the car slowed back down to join the giddy line of 45mph. The couple in the convertible were well-dressed and poised, like film stars from the 1950s taking a drive down the California coast. It was the way they slowed down to join the highway that made them suddenly seem like Barbie and Ken in a weird doll movie.

Anyway. There was a RV parked by the church, and behind the RV there were some young men laughing and hanging out. We couldn't see them but M. said, "What kind of guys hang out in a church parking lot?" I didn't know but there is much in this country that I have yet to learn. We didn't think anything more of it.

Another car pulled in, more film stars from the 50s, the man in a tuxedo and the woman with her hair up and glittery earrings. They were studying directions, I assumed, the way she was looking down reading something. But then they parked and got out. She was wearing a long, aqua blue evening gown. They each took out a pack of cigarettes and began to smoke. They were having a cigarette break on the way to somewhere, in order to not smell like smoke upon arrival. She was wearing cheap black sandals and he had on cheap black shoes too, and I have recently been informed that first impressions are often based on the shoes you are wearing, so know that, because it definitely had an effect on my impression of the movie starlet.

"What a strange church parking lot this is," I said. And everyone agreed.

A man boarded the RV. He sat in the driver's seat and watched us through the side window. I assumed he was the man who tended the graveyard. But why he would drive to work in a RV, I couldn't fathom. And why, I wondered, was he looking at us?

"Maybe he's Schmidt and he's dilly dally-ing now that his wife is dead," M. said. He did have a distant expression, in the way that an older man might not be able reach his sadness. But then, perhaps, over the years a grave-digger's face might take on a permanent shape of longing, out of respect for the dead.

We continued to eat and watch Schmitt sit in his RV and the girl in the aqua-blue evening gown smoke her cigarette, when another car pulled up and out came a woman in a bunad. A bunad is a traditional Norwegian dress, still worn for special occasions such as christenings or ... weddings. 

"Really, you think so?" M. said. "It's kind of an usual time for a wedding."

"A Saturday afternoon in July? I don't think it's so radical." Our wedding was on a Tuesday in Kampala, in a lawyer's office during M's lunch break, so I guess anything else seems weird to us. It was not a glamorous affair (M. returned to work and I went out to lunch with a friend) but I've never had a moment's regret, which surprises me. I am surprised by the fact that I do not want what I am supposed to want.

Maybe I'll feel regret on my deathbed. For that and for all the things I should have done that I never did; all the things I should have said that I never said... Well, I can always say that I've had lunch at Tanum kirke, and also that we read the gravestones of the colonels and lieutenants and their wives and virgin sisters, and that one gravestone had my name Emilie on it, from one hundred years ago. How unusual to have that french name way back then in this land of Knuts and Ingrids; I'm curious about her story.

And I can always say that we all piled back into the car, and argued about the best way back to the main road, and I accelerated ever so slightly on the on-ramp then slowed down again to join the line of Norwegians heading south for the weekend.

The painting above, entitled Barnedap i Tanum kirke, is by Harriet Backer (Norway 1845-1932). It was painted in 1892.

Summer in Norway

 

All day today it was wind, wind, wind. I love it. The field of grain out this window is indigo-green and the shadows sweep across the field in the wind and the gentle hills are like swelling ocean waves. The trees in the woods along the field bend and sway, and the leaves flutter. 

That was Monday. 

By now the wind had subsided----it is approaching midnight, with the light still hovering----and it is quiet but for the footsteps upstairs. Bestepapa has come in from working in the barn. 

That was Tuesday.

Let me see where this goes. 

It's Wednesday now. Lost shoes; long walks; a bottle of vermouth on the windowsill so rustic and French-seeming in this otherwise Northern clime. 'Nor', 'Way,'" M. said yesterday in the car. "The north way!" And no one argued. "Let's take this moment," I said at lunch by the fountain when we arrived in DrØbok (I was wearing two sweaters and admiring the Norwegian ease with rubber boots. The rain was not too heavy, and the wind hadn't yet picked up, so a picnic in town was not so outlandish.) "Let us take this moment to thank Daddy for being Norwegian. 

"Papa," I turned to my love. "Thank you for not being from southern Italy. Thank you for not being Tuscan, say, or from boring old South of France." A light rain pelted upon us. The children squinted up at me, the mist dripped from their rain hats. Their little expressions had that What's happened to Mama? look.

"Ha. Ha," he said and I laughed too. I joke, but I love it. I love the gorgeous days and I love the cold, rainy days. ("I could live here," I tell M. "Say that after living through the month of January," he replies.) The way the wheat responds in an almost-chilling path when a fox runs through the field. The way the endless days pass without a trace of judgement. The gentle lilt of the Norwegian language, the generations coming through, the open front door. I bless each day here. 

Anyway, you have to, don't you think? You never know when life might pull it all right out from under you, in one way or another. Why is it the thing we want the most in life so often eludes us? It is God's way of showing us something, but I have yet to learn why.

A birthday, blessings

I woke this morning just before dawn. It was a liquid almost-day dark with just the   few lighted  windows of my fellow early risers. But slowly, as my eyes adjusted, planes and edges were revealed in white: new snow. The bed was warm. M. had arrived home safely sometime in the night, though the flight had been delayed. He caught a cab from Newark.

The children were still asleep. The girl wasn't coughing; the boy hadn't moved beds all night. He will get a prize, I thought to myself. A lucky prize. 

We had breakfast together. Mangoes, coffee, toast. Before the elevator doors closed, everyone said I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! to each other. 

All morning, I did the work I love. I wrote a few letters. I filled out a few forms. I watched the grey sky turn the brilliant snow to puddles, then to nothing. 

When someone called and said, What will you do for your birthday? I wondered for a moment and said, What I do every day, only this time with gratitude.

After the poem Otherwise, by Jane Kenyon

Expat, living at home

I lived abroad for seven years and though there were some bleak periods during that time, in general I felt quite complete. Yes, complete. That is the word. The moment I touched down in Nairobi (perhaps it could have been anywhere... anywhere else), I felt complete and at peace and, after years of imbalance and irritation, I was ready to begin my life. 

There is something I've been curious about for many years now---perhaps since the exhilaration I felt at age 14 when I first boarded a flight to France alone. Why, for some, this restless need to stay aloft, to seek perpetual motion? To stay beyond predictability, beyond place? Why am I most at peace in the world the moment the flight takes off the tarmac? And why does the feeling of living as an alien in a foreign land so appeal to me? They say No, no you can't escape yourself. But you can, you really can.  

By quirky weird fate, we---my American self, my Norwegian husband, and our children with their Kikuyu accents----were moved to New York, of all places. You know this by now, I guess. And so here I am, at home! With my people and my church and my schools, my language and my food. The heart reaches out to embrace it all!

And then, immediately, the heart restricts. Don't go there, it says. Don't get too close. Don't commit! And whatever you do, don't fall in love with it. Because, whether it's five months or five years from now, you will someday leave it. This is not yours. So don't fall in love with it, or the pain will be too great.

And so, this is how we live. 

Image (currently at the MET): Thomas Cole, (American, 1801–1848). View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow(detail), 1836.

Tues morning

And so we enter this next room: winter, real winter. The harsh and endless stretch of dirty snow and bent heads walking into wind; not the glittery and festive weeks of joy in December. 

I look down on top of a tree that reaches up from behind the townhouses across the street. The morning sun hits the very tips of the branches; the tips are a burgundy color. The tree's branches are illuminated and reaching up on a mundane Tuesday morning, like a dancer in agony for her lover, an angel in repose, etc. etc. All around those arms reaching high are buildings, windows, chimneys, vents, brick, glass, fans, satellites, ladders, fences on rooftops, an awning fluttering in the severe wind, water towers----a landscape of human genius and audacity that I marvel at every day. 

Look! It's only the end of the paragraph and the whole wonder of that glowing tree is gone. The sun shifted, the branches and those burgundy fingers don't glow. And it's back to washing dishes for me.

The Flame Tree Branches Out

Dear Readers, 

I've recently started to collaborate on a new blog with an artist.  The artist does the art; and I do the writing. I will still be writing here in my occasional way, but please meander sometime over to Little Shoes that Rhyme:

www.littleshoesthatrhyme.typepad.com

It's not Johnny Cash reading the entire New Testament or anything (which I recently downloaded and am amazed by), but who knows it might help get you through the day.

*

(Click here and search for Johnny Cash Reading the New Testament)

A mid-afternoon memory

When we lived in Kenya, we lived in a cottage. The front door of the cottage, two French doors actually, opened directly into the living room. There was no entry way or place for shoes. When visiting or arriving people opened the French doors, they said Hello!?? to find us, or Hi! if we were sitting right there or, if the person was Bradley---who often drove our car and did the complicated Kenyan errands like paying the electric bill and finding peanut butter hours before an intercontinental flight----he would knock twice politely then step in and start chatting.

One afternoon, the baby, who was really a baby then, fell asleep while I was nursing him in the living room, and I didn't want to wake him so I didn't move. I just sat there on the couch looking out the window as he slept, thinking: This is really boring and slightly tedious but someday, when this baby is going off to college or getting married or being a solider and marching off to war, when I am weeping for this grown brave man, I will remember this moment and yearn for it. 

So I continued to sit there. Then I remembered that Bradley was to return soon, and he would knock and walk in, and wake the baby! Without upsetting the baby, I reached for my phone, and texted with my one free hand to Bradley to approach quietly when he returned because the baby was asleep. 

A while later, still sitting there on the couch with the sleeping baby and the view out the window and the afternoon in Africa, I heard a peculiar sound in the front drive. The gravel crunching, but otherwise silence. I couldn't turn my head enough to see----I couldn't quite turn my head enough, but I felt something approaching my vision, I couldn't turn my head enough---- until into view came the creeping car, its engine off its gears in neutral, being pushed into the driveway, every so silently, by Bradley.