Auguring Good

Auguring Good

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I don’t want to write about politics all week, but it’s difficult to think about much else these days. I’m also trying not to read too much into omens and symbols, though I do anyway. Sometimes I think I was born into the wrong time or culture, because I do more than my share of knocking on wood. 

Yesterday, hoping that my candidate will prevail, I took comfort in the fact that the climbing rose is still producing lovely, creamy pink flowers — even this first week of November. 

And so, although I have already featured the climbing rose in recent posts, I feature it again today. The bloom of a rose, the scent of a rose, speaks of renewal and beauty and augurs many good things. Surely we all need those now.

The Fray

The Fray

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My self-imposed blackout lasted until about 6 p.m. yesterday. Forgoing media allowed me to be a little more productive and a little less anxious than I would have been otherwise. But then the floodgates were open, and I learned the razor-thin wire on which we walk, each side convinced that “there be dragons” on the other. 

In my saner moments, when I can step back from the fray, I continue wondering how we got to this place, this divided place. I’ve been reading and thinking about it for four years. But these musings are in the head, not the heart. And it’s my heart now that is pitter-pattering, as are millions of other hearts across this great land of ours. 

On Tuesday I stuck an American flag out by the mailbox, and it has flown there since. It seemed one way to reassert the position I’m trying so hard now to believe — that there is still more that unites us than divides us. 

The Blackout

The Blackout

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I’ve been awake for hours and have seen only the barest shred of news, an update that appeared unbidden on my phone screen about the vote tally in Arizona. I’m trying to see how long I can hold out without looking at a news or social media site, without turning on the television or picking up the newspaper, which lies forlornly out by the forsythia bush. 

It’s not that I don’t want to know the current tallies. I’m as curious as the next person, I imagine. But I also know that once I look, the truth (whatever it is right now, even if inconclusive) will be with me — and I won’t be able to ignore it or wish it away.

So I’ve drifted through the day in my own bubble, writing in my journal and on this screen, exercising on the elliptical and stretching on the floor, making and sipping a cup of tea, tidying up. 

I know I can’t keep up this blackout forever. Curiosity will get the better of me and I’ll peak at some sites, learn some totals. But until then, I’m enjoying my own little news-free zone. It’s calm and cozy in here. 

Reclaim the Morning

Reclaim the Morning

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I thought I would write about voting on November 3, 2020, an election day long awaited, long feared. But I figure I’ll have plenty to say about the election tomorrow. 

What strikes me as words-worthy today is the morning, is finding it again in the wreckage of Eastern Daylight Time, discovering its glimmering, shimmering self among the ruins of the warmth and the tattered leaves of autumn. 

Fall-back has given some of us an extra hour to clean the closets and others a welcome roll back to sleep early Sunday morning. 

But for me, it’s been a way to reclaim the morning, regaining what I lost in my quest for more sleep, which are these precious golden hours before the day begins. I’ve been missing those — and now, at least for a few days, I have them again. 

Birth Stories

Birth Stories

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Ever since becoming a grandmother I’ve meant to find the journals where I described the births of each of my daughters. I was put off by the digging it would take me to find them.

But yesterday I had a few moments, so I looked in the most logical first place — a drawer in a dressing table where I keep some of my old (now well-filled) blank books. And there, right on top, was the journal describing Celia’s arrival — what I’d done that day (Christmas shop) and how it felt (scary!) to look up at the hospital sign from a distance, counting contractions while sitting in a rush-hour traffic jam.

Beneath that journal was the one with the pages for Claire’s arrival. The heat of those summer days came alive again for me, as did the rosebud mouth and cute little nose of my second-born. 

And finally, there was the journal that described Suzanne’s birth. I labored longer with my first, of course, and the nurses were marvelous, especially one whose name had escaped me — until yesterday. 

It’s not as if I’d forgotten the moments when each of these precious babes was put into my arms, and many of the details were there, too. But to relive the excitement in my own voice brought me back to those days in a way no photograph could — and made me glad that even in that early, new mother exhaustion, I chose writing over napping, that I picked up my pen, grabbed my blank books and wrote the birth stories.

Blue Moon Halloween

Blue Moon Halloween

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Last evening’s moonlight made striped shadows of newly bare trunks and lit the backyard with its wan glow. 

Tonight’s blue moon (the second full moon of the month) will rise on little ghosts and goblins who, instead of ringing doorbells, will grab treat bags from tables placed at the ends of driveways. 

If clouds stay away, moonlight will be their companion. But even if they don’t, these kiddos will see houses more decked out for the season than any year in recent memory. Giant spiders climb ropes that span most of a yard. Skeletons dangle from doorways. And webs spread from hedge to hedge. 

It’s a creepy, crawly little world folks have created for children this year. A fun, faux-frightening one set amidst the very scary real one we are, at least today, trying to ignore.

Plague Lit

Plague Lit

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Call me strange, but for some reason I’ve gravitated to pandemic fiction these last few months. I re-read The Plague by Camus, tried Jose Saramago’s Blindness but only got a third of the way through it, and just finished the historical novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. 

Though The Plague was more profound, Year of Wonders was more enjoyable. I was pulling for Anna, the protagonist, who suffers loss upon loss but emerges the stronger for them. 

I was whisked away to a 17th-century English village (based on a real place), which decided when faced with the Black Death to keep the disease contained within its boundaries. The citizens voluntarily quarantined themselves, suffering much greater loss of life than if they had run at the first sign of illness. 

Knowing that once, long ago, a group of ordinary folk decided to take this step, to give up their own lives to save others, makes this an especially powerful moral message to contemplate. 

Lessons from the Pandemic

Lessons from the Pandemic

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We received word late yesterday that the earliest the U.S.-based employees in my organization (which is most of us) will return to the office is April 1, 2021. By then, it will have been a full year of remote work. 

As it stands now, we are well into our eighth month. Almost long enough to make a baby. In fact, here’s a thought: infants conceived at the beginning of the pandemic will soon be out in the world. The Quarantine Generation. Gen Q?
What else has been gestating? Fear and confusion, to be sure. Divisiveness, absolutely. But also, as many have noted, a renewed closeness with the natural world. 
What I was trying to get at yesterday, but didn’t quite, is that the outside office, my “deck desk,” is not just a bucolic retreat; it’s at the mercy of the elements. I’ve dashed inside to avoid raindrops, wrapped up in a blanket to withstand the cold. And soon, perhaps even today (I’m writing this an evening ahead), I will be forced inside. 
Being more attuned to the natural world is instructive, though; through it, we can better understand what the pandemic is so rudely teaching us: that we are not in charge. That can be ugly, true. But it can also be beautiful. 
The Deck Desk

The Deck Desk

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For the last many months my desk has been a glass-topped table on the deck. It’s where I’ve scattered my notebook and planner, where I’ve carefully placed my laptop and phone after wiping the glass to remove even the tiniest drop of dew. 

It’s a table that gives me a front-row seat on the natural world. Squirrels and chipmunks scamper a few feet away from me, searching for acorns. Cherry tomatoes still cling to the vine. The hanging basket of New Guinea impatiens has thinned and browned, but there are still enough bright flowers to remind me of summer.

Even as the leaves turn from green to yellow — and power tool sounds from lawnmowers to leaf blowers — I sit here still. This is my workplace, my deck desk.

Mind and Body

Mind and Body

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Over the weekend I read an essay about the power of literary analysis in the college classroom — and, because of the unique times in which we live — also not in the college classroom.  Apart from the many excellent points made about education in the humanities — the lessons of the great books have never mattered more, the ability to think and analyze is prized in the workplace — the author, Carlo Rotella, made one that brought a crucial point to mind. 

While teaching via Zoom, Rotella said, he realized how much he uses visual cues in his class, figuring out who he should call on, who’s getting a concept and who is not. I ran this through my own, English-major memory, and sure enough, the same seems true from the student’s point of view. 

What I remember most about college literature classes is not just the ideas that seemed to be exploding in my brain as we discussed The Magic Mountain or The Brothers Karamazov, but the visual impressions my teachers left as well. 

I recall in particular my favorite college professor, Dr. Ferguson, who would curl himself around the podium when he lectured, one knee on the desk, one foot on the floor, while stork-like, he led us through the great books. It’s not that I don’t recall the ideas themselves — I think about them all the time — but until I read this essay I wasn’t aware of how closely they are linked to the physical peculiarities of the professors who introduced them to me. 

This essay triggered a dialogue in my brain, a conversation between the author and me, and the part that I supplied surprised me — as it should, when the “conversations” are deep and good.