The Company

The Company

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We are all shapes and sizes. All ages, too. Some of us are in high school. A couple of us don’t even have kids in high school anymore.

But for one hour every Wednesday, we are one. Slapping, flapping, bouncing, turning. We are the beginning tappers at Ballet Nova.

It dawned on me tonight, driving home from class, that we are a company. OK, we’re not Alvin Ailey or the New York City Ballet. Fame and fortune have so far eluded us. But we are a group, a troupe. We “work together to perform dances as a spectacle or entertainment.”

The spectacle is what we’re making of ourselves and the entertainment is how much we laugh when we can’t execute a perfect buffalo. We look nothing like this picture, but we have fun just the same.

Yeah, I’d say we’re a company. Earnest, ragtag, trying hard. But a company just the same.

(Photo from “A Chorus Line” Timeout.com)

They’re Back!

They’re Back!

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“I don’t like hummingbirds,” said Celia as we finished up dinner on the deck a couple nights ago. “They look like big bees.”

And they do. In fact, it often takes me a moment to figure out which one I’m seeing — a big bee or a  tiny bird.

For the last few weeks we’ve had plenty of both as the wood bees (their fat bottoms wiggling into holes in the pergola so they can chew it to pieces) and the hummingbirds (back from southern climes) flit around the house.

Hummingbirds winter in Central America, I learn, and often return to the same feeder on the same day. They gorge themselves on insects beforehand, often doubling their body weight (which still isn’t much, of course) for the 500-mile (18- to 22-hour) flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

So this little bird and its ruby-throated mate are world travelers, intrepid souls that whir and wing their way thousands of miles in pursuit of nectar and insects.

With knowledge comes admiration.

The Grass is Shining

The Grass is Shining

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Because it’s new. Because it’s well-watered. Because it’s May. These are some reasons why the grass is shining.

I’m not really sure, you see. It may just be the way I look at it, the way the wind bends the spears. The angle of the sun, the time of day, planetary alignment.

But I walk around, examine it from all sides. It’s shining no matter where I stand.

I don’t remember it shining like this other years. But it was a long winter, a long spring. The grass was biding its time. We all were. But now it’s summer and the grass is shining.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

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What you remember is the precision, even in death: straight lines, markers in rows. Such even rows that it’s hard to tell if there are hundreds of graves or thousands. Of course there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands when you add them all up.  The final resting place of those who served.

There are 131 national veteran’s cemeteries in this country and many more state and local ones. My dad lies in the Camp Nelson National Cemetery, only miles from the Kentucky River. It has a history of its own — a civil war camp where the wounded were treated and African American soldiers enlisted.

It’s a sunny, placid place with a roll to the land and a few big trees along the borders. I visited in April, got a better view of what I couldn’t quite take in before. It’s proper and dignified, the grounds meticulously maintained.

It’s amazing the pull the place has on me now. I wish I was there today.



(This photograph is of Arlington.)

Anniversary

Anniversary

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This day, the curve of its numbers, its 2 and its 4, the late Mayness of it, all of its features and character will always and only mean one thing to me: my parents’ wedding day.

This is the first day in 62 years they have not celebrated it together. Here’s what I wrote about them two years ago, on their 60th wedding anniversary:

What started 60 years ago was not just a marriage; it was a family, a way
of life. It was jumping in an old Chevy and driving across the country.
Finally running away to California to start all over again — then
realizing that Kentucky was where they wanted to be all along. … There has always been a certain jauntiness, a sense that you didn’t have
to be what circumstances dictated. Dreaming was encouraged. …

And in fact, they kept on dreaming, right to the end of Dad’s life.

Catching My Breath

Catching My Breath

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So begins a long holiday weekend, last hurrah of the school year and opening salvo of summer. It is a delicious morning. Scrumptious. Meant to be eaten with a spoon. Or no, with a fork, slowly. Not slurped or inhaled but consumed mindfully.

On a go-to-office morning I would be encased in glass and masonry by now, shut off from the elements. All head, no heart. But today I’m at home, windows open, air flowing through the house. Birds outside, birds inside. Music everywhere.

Time for a long exhale. Very long. Then another, and another. The long winter is over. Time to catch my breath.

Bartholdi Fountain

Bartholdi Fountain

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A noontime walk in the city yesterday took me to Bartholdi Fountain. It didn’t look like this, of course. It was daylight and water droplets sparkled in the sun. Peonies hung their heads in the park. Creamy roses and colorful columbines competed for attention.

The bounty of bloom was an artless companion to the fountain, which is elegant, classical. Created by Frederic Bartholdi before he made the Statue of Liberty, it was first displayed at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 and later sold to the U.S. Congress for $6,000, half the asking price.

I learned these facts today on Wikipedia. But yesterday, when I was walking, what struck me most was the energy of the scene. The water shooting, gushing, cascading. Nearby office workers strolling, checking their phones, rocking in the chairs that offer prime viewing spots (and maybe a little fountain spray). And taking in all of this at my own pace, which is a bit of a whirl, especially when I’m trying to walk halfway down the mall and back.

The Bartholdi Fountain made me want to sit down and rock for a while. Maybe I’ll do that next time.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

The Child in Spring

The Child in Spring

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“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”      —  George Eliot

I often think of these words, especially this time of year. In mid-May, childhood runs rampant. Kids frolic at the bus stop, forgo homework to dash outside the minute they get home from school. After dinner they ride bikes and scooters around the cul-de-sac. The end of the school year dangles tantalizingly in the future. It won’t be long now.

I caught this excitement the other day on a walk through the neighborhood. I inhaled it in the aroma of cut grass, felt it in the sun on my face. So many memories as I amble. Not even memories, but deeper than that. Sensory impressions. A whiff of juniper. The musty odor of a storm drain.

We forget how close to the ground we were in those days, how the earth rose up to meet us then with all its sounds and scents. But because it did, I can stroll through the world now with my middle-aged self — and the whole world comes alive again.

A Fluff Piece

A Fluff Piece

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For the last few days cottonwood fluff has been floating through the air. I think I know the source, a tree that’s half a block or so away. But every year at this time when the wind is right and the air is clear, I see its progeny.

So light, so fragile, yet tenacious enough to go the distance, it lodges itself in driveway cracks, leaf piles and sometimes even on the ground. It’s hard not to see it as wishes spun from the spring air, spores of hope.

I read about the tree, learn that it’s a type of poplar that does well in stressed soil. It became the official state tree of Kansas in 1937, the state legislature dubbing it “the pioneer of the prairie.”

Funny then to see it cast its seeds out onto the tidy, mulched lawns of suburbia. Perhaps we are the final frontier.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Grow Up

Grow Up

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Trees do it. Flowers do it. Even exasperating toddlers do it. But at this time of year it’s hard not to be thrilled by the sheer verticality of the green and growing world.

The climbing rose is a case in point. It grows up and out. Or over and out, depending upon how you look at it. And you’ll have to take my word for it, because this picture doesn’t capture it.

The point is, the branches grow out so the roses can grow up. Such is the power of the sun, of the life force.