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The Annual Reports

The Annual Reports

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My desk accessories and headset are in the car. The monitor is parked in the basement, ready to go. I’ll wipe my computer on Friday and take it into the office, too. Then all that remains will be … the annual reports. They were in the car, stationed for return along with the stapler and the tiered folder rack, but I had to bring them back inside because I needed to research a scholarship that began in 1993.

Now that they’re back in the house (and a heavy load they are, too!), I don’t want to let them go. I’ve built a complete set, you see, from 1985 to the present, which ranges from the time when Tom worked for Winrock to the time that I do. It’s a history of the place in a nutshell, a place I first experienced when I moved from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas right after we married and which has enriched my own career and life experiences beyond measure. 

So I asked Tom last night: “Do you think it’s a bad sign that I can’t let go of the annual reports?” He just smiled and said to do whatever I think is right. He can’t really quibble about my packrat tendencies since he’s a primo packrat himself, and he knows this is about more than being a packrat. It’s about loving an organization I’m about to leave. 

I do love Winrock. And yet on Friday I’ll type my last words for them and sign off the network for the last time. Because there’s something I love more, which is the freedom to write what I want when I want. It’s an awesome and a terrifying freedom, but I’ve earned the chance to try it, so I will. 

As for the annual reports, they’re sitting in the hallway. I’m still thinking about them.

A Constant

A Constant

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Morning on the Hunter’s Woods Trail: Mozart in my ears, details in my brain, details I hoped would filter away like a dusting of snow through trampoline mesh. And the rhythm of footfall did clarify the day; it reminded me of what is most important, which is to live fully when and where we are.

I was aided in this by the appearance of wildlife: first, a fox sauntering down the trail ahead of me and then, on the drive home, a wild turkey beside the road, bobbing its head as it fled into the woods.  

The critters pulled me into the present and away from the fact that this is a departure day, which is not nearly as nice as an arrival day. 

But the warmth is finally here, and the day is as perfect in its way as the cold, windy Thursday that brought her here. Both days are required, one for coming, the other for going — with the walks a constant between the two. 

Just Marveilng

Just Marveilng

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You know the days when they come, days that stand out from others not because they’ve been set aside as holidays but because they have not. They’re naturally delicious from beginning to end with no agenda other than spending time with the people you love. 

I just had one of those days. Apart from an hour or two in the morning when I finished up work tasks from yesterday, there was nothing on the calendar but a quick trip to the store. Otherwise, it was a block of time reserved for hanging out and staying in. 

By 11 a.m. the babies and their mamas arrived to spend time with their aunt and sister.  It was loud and chaotic, with gurgles and shrieks from the infants and laughter and conversation from the adults I still call “the girls.” 

Copper, revved by the unaccustomed activity, patrolled the gathering like a shark in the water, looking for plump infant toes to nibble. We managed to contain him, but barely.

Now it’s evening. The babies are at home in bed, their parents are pooped, and we … are just marveling at it all. 

(“Sock letters” welcoming Celia home.)

Reunions Now

Reunions Now

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I haven’t hugged our youngest daughter since August, when she flew back to Seattle. That’s one Thanksgiving, one Christmas, one Easter, several birthdays (including hers) and one new baby in the family ago. It other words, an eternity. 

As I look forward to our reunion today, I think about others taking place across the country, families and friends long separated by work and pandemic restrictions. 

Just yesterday, dear friends from college texted me a picture of their gathering. Was it my imagination, or were their smiles brighter than they would have been had this not been a post-Covid meeting? Doesn’t everything seem a little more significant now? And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t it?

Seeing Mom

Seeing Mom

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I find it interesting that to me the most fascinating character in Ken Burns’ new documentary “Hemingway” is not Papa H himself (though I realize I’ve not read many of his short stories and most of his nonfiction), but Edna O’Brien, an Irish novelist who shines as one of the talking heads Burns uses so beautifully.

O’Brien is calm but intense, and her comments cut to the quick of Hemingway’s novels. In one of her earlier appearances, she takes on detractors who say that Hemingway hated women and wrote adversely about them. 

To answer these criticisms, she reads a passage from Hemingway’s short story “Up in Michigan,” considered scandalous when it was published. The passage occurs near the end of the story, after a sexual encounter that the female character did not want, and O’Brien reads it slowly, the camera panning down to her hands, which gesture slightly as she reads the words with that Irish lilt in her voice. 

I don’t see O’Brien then but my mother, who was roughly O’Brien’s age when she died. I see the same set of the jaw, the same hair, full and of a color not found in nature. The same unbridled truthfulness. 

Mom was a writer, too — though most of her stories were never told. 

(In honor of O’Brien and Mom, a photo of the green fields of County Clare.) 

Grateful Balance

Grateful Balance

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On Saturday, I met my brother and sister for a walk, all three of us fully and gratefully vaccinated. We gathered in a park near the river on a day that seemed ordinary but was a long time coming. 

It was just a walk, a simple walk, but we hadn’t been together without masks on in over a year, have hardly been together at all, so it felt both new and old at the same time. 

It’s a challenge to balance the emotions — being mindful of those who still suffer while celebrating my own return to semi-normalcy — but one I’m happy to undertake. 

(A photo from an earlier walk: I was too much in the moment to take one on Saturday.) 

 

Farewell to the Spinet

Farewell to the Spinet

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When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I’ve heard described as “that great concert hall in the sky.”

I’d been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don’t know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Questions without Answers

Questions without Answers

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It’s easy to forget when caught up in adult life how simple and powerful are the needs of little people. Our almost six-month-old grandson has been in our care several times now and re-entering his world is highly instructive for mine. 

For one thing, I always have questions. Chief among them are ones about his physical needs: is he hungry? is he sleepy? But a close second are questions about his psychological needs: does he feel safe? is he being stimulated? 

Some of these are questions without answers, but it’s important to ask them. For babies … and for grownups, too.

Two for the Road

Two for the Road

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When Mom and I traveled to Europe together many years ago, we bought matching sweaters “just in case” it was chilly. We were immediately glad we did. We donned them the first evening, as we listened to an outdoor concert in a chill June drizzle in London, and wore them often throughout the next six weeks as we toured England, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. 

We slipped ponchos over them when it was raining and slept under them on overnight train trips. They also came in handy as robes and cushions. We wore them so much that we never wanted to see them again when we got home. 

They’ve always been sentimental to me, enough that I stuck them in a suitcase and stored them in the attic for years. And that has preserved them, preserved the memories, too. 

Jammin!

Jammin!

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Every year at Christmastime, Mom made a jam cake. It was a recipe from Dad’s side of the family, and was passed down with great care. Mom copied the recipe over several times, but she saved the old versions. Reading through them, which I did to make sure I was getting the ingredients right, was like an archaeological dig; there was the same fragility to the oldest artifact.

Once I figured out that the “modern version” (which included purple crayon scribbles, proof of its age) was indeed a fair and true copy, I still had to make the cake, which began, as it did for Mom, with an all-out search for jam with seeds. In my case, the search took me 20 miles away, to a Walmart Super Store in Sterling. (I found this highly ironic since Mom never visited a Walmart; she thought the stores were destroying small-town America — and in this case, as with so much else, she was right.) 

Once the jam was purchased and the other ingredients assembled, I proceeded to make the cake. Mom had always made a very big deal of it, as if she was making a four-tier wedding cake. How hard can it be, I wondered. 

Pretty darn hard, it turns out. There is the sheer muscle involved in stirring the thick batter. There’s separating the six eggs, beating the whites till frothy (I was convinced I had botched this part) and pre-mixing certain ingredients (such as vinegar and baking soda) before adding them to the batter. 

By the time I got the cake in the oven, it looked like a small tornado had ripped through the kitchen. But after a tense baking period (I can remember holidays where the jam cake fell — and that was not a pretty sight), the cake emerged more or intact. I couldn’t have been prouder. Now all I had to do … was frost the thing.