Monthly Archives: May 2016

Seeking Creatures

Easter and Mother’s Day have come and gone along with the tulips, which the deer ate a few nights ago; and the sounds of lawn mowers and birdsong are revving up for the season. The summer holidays are a heartbeat away. I am ready.

The barbecue is prepped, and the glorious sun that has graced recent days has gone down, bringing with it a light chill, and will rise again, with the promise of those summer days ahead.  Squeeze has been playing on my iTunes lately, taking me back, back, back to those sometimes reckless and always hopeful eighties.  My younger of two stepdaughters, dwelling upstairs as much as possible and guarding her desperately needed privacy –– I get it; I remember –– is as elusive as the rabbit poking around the neighborhood lately, which I’ve named Hazel.

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We –– my neighbor and husband and I –– think Hazel is an escaped or lost pet.  (We put out the word that she is here, but thus far, no one has come for her.)  She has the coloring of an appaloosa and kohl-rimmed eyes, giving her an exotic, Cleopatra look; and when I call to her, she sometimes comes.  We don’t have any pets.  And for some reason, I have fallen in love with Hazel.

Just the thought of it, someone’s beloved pet now roaming our back yards like a freed captive or a fearful, lost creature, touches me.  As an adoptee who once packed her paper bag suit case and sat on the front steps waiting for the adoption people to drive by and pick me up, as a woman who has never given birth to my own children but is now the stepmom to two loving girls, and as half of a petless and deeply happy couple, I find myself craving the unconditional love of an animal.  Maybe it’s a version of spring fever; and if so, Hazel’s arrival was timely.

My neighbor texted me earlier today that Hazel was poking about her yard; and when I came home this evening, she was in our back yard, just behind where I backed in my car.  I got out, and she stayed.  This was progress, the staying.   I talked to her in an embarrassingly singsong voice –– embarrassing, but she seemed to like it.  She hung around for a bit, noshing on grass while I talked to her like an overeager stepmom.  I wondered, as I wonder at other times, if she liked the singsong or was just being nice.  Regardless, I was grateful.  And overly optimistic or not, I had faith in her comfort with me just then.  I mean, think of it:  I had come home and there she was, and there she stayed for a little while, as comfort-seeking creatures will do.  There we were.

With the window boxes filled and overflowing with black soil and tender plants, the scent of simmering stock and heady herbs fills the house.  This is the precipice of the jubilant June days ahead.  The sun has now gone down for today, but this is the beginning of it all, the long days of light that promise a forever and disappear before you know it.

We’ll keep an eye out for Hazel, welcoming her when she wants to share herself with us, and trying to provide the security a lost pet needs, knowing that her owner may show up at any time.  The trees’ canopy will fill out with green, the plants will grow and stepdaughters will continue to discover and share splinters of their discoveries with us.  Through it all, life’s cycle, we will plant and reap, love and weep, grow, change, care and dare to live.

Blowing off the Dust

It is thick, this layer of dust on my mostly abandoned blog, with seasons and changes, days and years…gone without written proof that the moments that peppered them existed at all.  Or that I did.  Why I let that happen has surprised me in some widening splinter of recognition every day.  Summer splendor and winter weariness, year to year, mostly gone –– little pen to paper in that private world of a journal or public view of a blog, started and then left to dangle.  Shouldn’t that be a writer’s milk?  When I think of all the experiences not documented, feelings not recorded, I feel a kind of recurring death; a killing of moments let to pass, of thoughts and feelings, actions and words let to slip through my fingers like grains of Cape Cod sand, forever washed away with the changing tides.

Can we ever recapture them?  I don’t think so, but we can learn anew. FullSizeRender

When I was younger and thought life as I’d always known it would continue to be there for me until the day I was finally ready to attend, I let plenty slide.  My family, the house I grew up in, the books I first came to love, that pink and white quilt on my childhood bed.  And then one day, it was too late.  And now they are long gone, irretrievable, their memories shapeshifting with every passing hour.  What was it Mom said when I wrote that first short story?  How many fish had Dad and I caught that July Saturday at Onesquethaw Creek?  What was it about Anne Frank and Jem and Scout that had invited me into their difficult worlds with such befriending ease?  Young adult pain and mistakes, college lit class discoveries that catapulted me into the land of the curious and restless, early trips abroad…gone, gone, gone.

I wish I’d written it all down…and every day since those earliest of days, from high school graduation and boyfriends to post-school friends who tried to help me save my own life.  From college courage to a first husband’s honest and kind yearning, with which I’d tried to braid my own.  The long stream of workdays and dreaming nights until a rupture from which extrication was frightening and sweeping and eyeopening.  Followed by a fresh and lifesaving beginning with my new husband, which still takes my breath away.  And yet most of it has escaped the trailing thread of ink that would have told me how it truly was for me at the time.  Now all I have is my superimposed and ever changing memories of days gone by.  Will I ever really know?  I doubt it, but what I do have is the first page of my new book of old and now me.