Home Again, Home Again

The first thing that struck me was the aroma. The combined fragrances of the old house were the triggers that unleashed a flood of memory. The dam broke around ten years of time gone and memories burnished. Ten years since I walked through the door on the first day of ownership, seven years since I left it to embark on a quixotic quest for a happiness that was never quite attained. Time folded in on itself. Dizziness overtook me. To exist in the Then and the Now is a peculiar experience. I stepped fully through the door. The aroma intensified. Lightheaded, misty-eyed, I was home again.

Gossamer Threads of Cast Iron

A book, a skillet, and a hungry belly were the elements of a personal chemistry uniting in an emotional solution inside my head, the wondrous precipitate of which was to realize the sheer quantity of history held in my possession. The cornbread was fresh out of the oven. Black cast iron skillet gripped in one mitt-clad hand, wire rack held in the other, I flipped the bread over and on to the rack. Perfect. Balance had been achieved and honored. The unctuous sheen of glossy black metal unmarred by stuck bits of cornmeal testified to things right and proper, transfixing me on the spot in the kitchen. Something deep, something ancestral spoke.

Dinnertime had come around as it usually did. It beckoned to me to put down the book* I was reading and head into the kitchen. Hunger took precedence over a fascinating look at food and the people who raise and harvest it in modern-day Appalachia. The "mountain south" was not exactly on my mind as I puttered about, assembling good eats via practice, sense memory, and prized artifacts of the kitchen. Yet its presence hovered about. It wore like a light mantle spread across my shoulders, full of comfort and guidance. The touch was in charge of my hands, though that was in no guise very clear. My back brain was working on it all the while.

I did not grow up in the mountains of Appalachia. But my mama's mama (G-maw) and her people did. G-maw was born in West Virginia, close to western Maryland. She was of the mountains, of a holler. Her extended family, as well as my maternal grandfather, had deep roots clustered in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. G-maw was a teenager when the Great Depression hit. That in combination with mountain life could not have been easy. It certainly was educational in that it taught her survival skills and granted a kind of wisdom that serves one well in life when making the best of what you have in hand. G-maw carried that experience to her new home in southeastern Virginia where she took up with my grandfather and began to raise a family.

Some of this was on my mind as I read that book. The language used and the descriptions of places, people, and food occasionally jolted me with the shock of the familiar. I recalled mountain topography from the occasional visits in my youth to relatives in West Virginia. The hollers, the switchback roads, the great green womb of trees hunkering by the roadside. Summer evening in a place not awash in light pollution or noise. The notion of snacking on saltines adorned with thick slices of bologna. That last one jumped from the book's pages to gob smack me, as I recognized it right away. As a youth, I ate more than my share. As an adult, the habit faded into memory. What the book did was to bring it back in full force. G-maw used to eat that stuff, and so did my family. I learned it as a tradition even though it was not taught as such.

Growing up in southeastern Virginia near the ocean is literally hundreds of miles from the mountains. Figuratively speaking, the soils of each were (and still are) two homesteads looking at one another over a river of time. With the exception of college (five years in the Blue Ridge Mountains) and a stint in the Midwest (five years near Kansas City, Missouri) all of my life has been spent in easy driving distance of the coast. My rhythms of life, speech, and eating habits all suffused with the coastal South, even when I tried for many years to downplay or hide my roots. I did not know as a young adult that to practice that sort of self-deception plants the seeds of anxiety and doubt. Seeds that will bloom later. Yes, they will. They catch up to you.

That time was a constant search. A longing I could not explain or fulfill no matter how many questions I asked. On the one hand I was pursuing the American dream mandate of job-marriage-2.5 kids-and a minivan. On the other I was losing sight of where I came from, and by extension, where I wanted to be. Eventually I was at loggerheads with myself. I lacked the insight to find the peace of mind or sense of ease in my own skin that I so desperately wanted. Anxiety, emotional numbness, and a serious digestion related health problem forced me into a corner. My search for escape routes led me smack into the middle of food, eating, and truly learning how to cook. And not just cook for survival, but to cook for some peace of mind.

G-maw passed away while I was a college student. Some years later I received the gift of some cast iron skillets that had belonged to her. I knew little about cooking well then so I had no idea of the magnitude of this gift. Those skillets followed me to my first apartment out of college, my first new house, an apartment and a house as a divorced bachelor, through changes in relationships and geography, to ultimately reside in the kitchen of my apartment not far from the Chesapeake Bay. In all those years, I learned a few things. including respect for that cast iron. The skillets were faithful and true, devoted as dogs tend to be towards those who love them. They helped keep me alive.

They spoke to me, those skillets. For years I did not understand what they were telling me because I balked at giving credence to spirits. To my mind that would have been akin to surrendering to the demons of depression, self-loathing, and melancholy that periodically seized hold of my imagination. The difference lay in the tone and quality of the voices competing for attention. What the skillets were imparting was delivered at a steady, quiet pace. Respectful and attentive, never overbearing or toxic. It was the voice of history, of my family guiding me along a path I was not fully aware of taking.

This is where cornbread stepped back in that evening just last week. I was making it in the very skillet my grandmother had used to make fried fish and hushpuppies for me and her, when I was a kid, washed down with iced tea spiked with lemon. My recent reading in that book about mountain food and people pushed to the fore memories of my time with G-maw. A lush scent of crackling crust and toasted corn filled my kitchen to trigger a thunderclap realization of my ancestry. 

I am more a child of the lowland and the sea than I am of the timberline and the holler, this is true. But the mountains are in my blood, evidenced by DNA and ingrained habits as a human being. I make cornbread in that skillet because that is what my grandmother made in it. The action made sense to me like water makes sense to a fish: you can be surrounded by something that gives you life and be oblivious to it and its inherent sacredness. You know it by its absence. To come back to it is to know comfort and connection. In the instant I flipped that cornbread out of the skillet I dove back into that matrix. I felt my grandmother's hands on mine, saw her smile from somewhere up in mountains much closer than I imagined. I was home, knowing that my heart beats in two places connected by gossamer threads of humble cast iron, well-seasoned by history and love.

---

*Victuals, by Ronni Lundy

Addendum to the Road Not Taken (Ghosts)

The road was embraced with melancholy and longing, getting back to another version of home. Freshly scrubbed sky of Virginia blue tinging everything in sight under the watery sun. A split between heart and head throbbed heavily under a breastbone shielding lungs that struggled to draw enough air. Leaving, arriving, restless.

I picked the bigger road partly because it was faster. More impersonal. I could find a place of branded anonymity in which to eat. A place to be in the crowd but not of the crowd. In short, I could avoid interaction without being alone.

Craving company to fight off the loneliness but lacking energy to be a good companion: this will be my doom.

Saltwater flows in my veins alongside the blood. Riverine tides with estuary ebb and flow pull on my heart wherever I go. Yet that in part prompted me to avoid the scenic route. It ran too close to the water. Earlier that morning, I had shivered awake from unsettling dreams of the ocean and the night. Whimpering turning into a sharp intake of breath.

I had fallen or was pushed from a ship, the bulk of which I spied receding in the distance. The blood-tinged orange sun was nearly down. Stars were coming out and cool wind ruffled the water. I trod water while contemplating a death by drowning.

I knew for certain, under that deep indigo sky, that the ship was not coming back. My unsettled mind swore it heard laughter floating over the water. It saddened me to no end that this laughter might be the last human sound I ever heard. A hard scrubbing in a hot shower eradicated the uneasiness.

I pushed some breakfast down on a jittery stomach. It refused to hold still. Sheer willpower kept it in place, which braced me for the drive. Lunch would be somewhere on the road for sure.

So it was that the car brought me to the decision point. Highway or byway? My heart already knew the answer. My head had abdicated responsibility a long time ago. It was to be the highway, and not only for the reasons set forth earlier in this ramble.

A bigger, more poignant reason was I just could not bear the thought that the quieter scenic road would bring to my eyes a lone boat on a river, or a solitary duck winging through a November sky filled with the whispers of all the losses I endured in the past year. Those avatars of loneliness would have broken me down in tears, and I did not want to besmirch with such emissions a landscape so beholden to my heart. 

Fall and winter in the tidewater holds a bittersweet beauty of its own. One best contemplated without a heavy heart and weary psyche. That Sunday drive would be on the fast road, the anonymous road, where I could eat surrounded by cacophonous isolation and be grateful for a crowd that would help me pull the curtains on the road not taken.

I did not take that road on the return. The usual route back to Maryland, small towns and browning leaves by the rivers crossed in the light of a sun in repose. Ghosts were whispering to me to visit them. I confess that on this trip, I was a coward. There would be no conclave with the undead.

It was no fault of the season. Nor fault of the rivers. I adore fall upon the estuaries. Water has its own magnetism. The pull is strong upon my heart, no matter what time of year. The promise of sunlight on rippled wavelets, geese creating flying V's in the November air, or even the culinary tug of fried oysters in a small town family restaurant, these are all grand things.

But when pewter skies and soul weariness grip the eye and the heart, the barrier between sighs and tears thins too much.

The Loop

Funny old world it is, the ouroboros of my experience coiling around to swallow its tail. Unusually warm first day of fall and I'm heading home with a head full of memories. The second major phase of my life began in this town. Looks like the fourth major phase will start here too. Or is it the end of the third?

A little closer. I was in limbo. Is this now Hell? In the short time back I have driven many times past the church where I was married. The church is still there. The marriage collapsed long ago. Seeing the steeple puts a knot behind my breastbone. I swallow hard and push that memory back down into the cabinets in my head.

I keep driving. Cruising down some streets I used to know. A landscape of new daylight overlaid on old memories. Not much seems changed, with the exception of a massive superblock development that arose on the dilapidated bones of a shopping plaza that had seen better days long before I first laid eyes on it nearly three decades ago. Shiny new chain restaurants and some big box stores squatting on the land. An improvement one could say, if one were so inclined. I’m no fan of corporate soullessness, myself, but in this case it is better than the nothing of before.

It is better by the water. The rivers are different but still themselves. I can see the Chesapeake Bay most days, and a good walk serenaded by seabirds and wavelets is a privilege easy to enjoy. Maritime air is all around. Humidity is too. But I know the tides again. I hear my heart in the lapping of the waves. It is at ease with the water song and thrum of the ocean over the horizon.

The loop is closing. Its arc born in the slow-motion collapse of a life experiment out on the edge of the prairie. Seeds planted but could not hold purchase in a sea of grass. The arc burned its way up and out, finally sensing direction in the chaos, hope in the form of earlier sunrises in salt-tinged air. The path out resolved itself through a lens of tears and fortunate timing.

By such lights I found myself back in the town where I started my life after college. A hard landing brought the shell of me, with its withered heart and fragile bones, back closer in time and space to places the soul never forgot and people it never stopped loving. The prairie fire now just a smudge on the horizon pushed back by the wind of rebirth, with an ocean of truth and salt water stretching out in front of my fourth new life.

The tide flows through veins and heart. Currents of emotion borne on the waves I adore fill me with energy and push back the great gray walls that had threatened encirclement. The arc has bent towards itself. The ends are in view. The loop is closing before the eyes of my soul. Soon the circuit will be complete, and I will be electric in my erstwhile cottage by the sea.

Sunday Meditation #45: Eating the Home of Boyhood

Truth as revealed in a sandwich, found in a place unexpected. Roadside sub shop franchised, branded, and with all the chips from your boyhood. Stickball special they call it but you know it as the sandwich that meant you were home.

Home. Cheese, ham and capocollo with the usual suspects. And funny how it warms you up, maybe even brings a slight tear to the eye, because of that feeling of home. Nostalgia wasn't on the menu, not a condiment, not a cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookie next to the register. No, it was none of those things, and everything.

To find the past you left behind, the days of idle wonder in the summer and stultifying boredom (sometimes) in the school year, the laying on your back in the grass while falling asleep to the drone of airplanes...to find these things and more in between the bites of lettuce and onion, tomato and hot pepper relish, is a minor miracle.

Watching the wine vinegar and the olive oil drip off the bun, running down the heel of your hand you can give thanks that you aren't truly weeping in the fluorescent glare of the sandwich shop. Seeing yourself in the window glass under that dead-making light is a bit of a shock. So much older now. Unknown if you are much wiser.

What you do know as you wash down the last bite of the sandwich with gulps of unsweetened tea is that you were a young lad once. A young lad who only needed a favorite sandwich and a book to know he was home. He is there, you see. In the glass looking back at you and wondering who that fellow is, so near and so far from home.

Magpie Tales 233: Crossing Waters

Yell Sound, Shetland, 2014, by R.A.D. Stainforth via Magpie Tales

Straps dig in the back
Shift the pack while stomach drops

Thrum of engines, bass in the gut

Gulls wheel and cry tears, 

like those of Ma and Da

when home is left behind

Along the Ice Front

Ranger had been told that life on the Sangre Fría de Cristo range was brutal, cold and short. So far, he had witnessed brutality aplenty and the cold never left his bones. But he was still alive, after all these years. A small miracle in light of the graves he had dug.

"Two out of three is bad," he muttered into the icy wind. It never seemed to quit. By the standards of Nuevo A Coruña, a cold, blustery slice of hell itself, the wind was rather slack. He checked the thermal settings on his enviro-suit. The idiot lights glowed a faint green, but the color engendered mistrust. His feet and hands were starting to go numb, despite the suit insisting that the heat was normal.

Ranger doubted it. In the two days since the fall the suit had been performing erratically. One minute he would suddenly be roasting, the next it felt like the sweat was freezing in seconds on his burned skin. His meager repair kit had stabilized it somewhat, but the parts were running out. There were no replacements.

He craned his neck forward to sip from the hydration tube poking up from the suit collar. The water, laced with electrolytes and a mild stimulant, seemed to his tongue to taste faintly of piss. It always made him uneasy. He knew the suit recycled everything so efficiently that he must be imagining things. Good thing the stimulants were chemically rigged to not increase urine output, Ranger recalled. No way could he handle the thought of having to change out the filters more than he did now.

Not that it mattered much. The scout ship was near complete ruin. The team, dead, except for Ranger and the Alférez. The rest scattered somewhere in the rocks and ice, swallowed up by chasms and the bellies of the things in the chasms. Ranger checked himself again. He was alive, but the Alférez, only nominally so. 

The body moved and muttered but its eyes were now frozen orbs of a nacreous blue-white. Ranger could see them through the slightly cracked lenses of the suit binoculars. See them, that is, when he could bring himself to look. The Alférez had fallen down the scree, shouting gibberish and swatting at something no one else could see

Ranger sighed. He rubbed his hands hard on his thighs in an effort to bring some warmth back into his fingers. He was years away from home and the thought of it made his heart ache so sharply he tasted iron on his tongue. Years. He had been gone for years, searching for minerals and life forms the Directorate had deemed important. Yet he had never found the thing to quiet the loneliness in his core.

Glancing up at the sky, he saw that the sun was about to set. In his reverie he had failed to account for the lateness of the day. He was exposed there on the butte overlooking the plain below. He forced himself to stand, gathering up his survey gear. The gear was filling up, Ranger noted with a pang, but he held little hope he would survive long enough to get it safely into the Datanet.

The slug thrower leaned against a lichen-coated boulder. Ranger hesitated, knowing he was nearly out of ammunition. The weight would slow him down, burning up precious calories, but without it he was truly defenseless. He looked out into the blue twilight congealing down below the mountain range. There were shadows stirring down there, shadows that could swallow him in the blink of an eye if he let them. he picked up the gun.

Ranger sighed, strapping on his gear before setting off up the rough trail that led to the only shelter he could find in the wasteland. At a small rise, he turned to get one last glance at the Alférez. The gun was raised in a half-salute, then he froze. Something was hunched over the body of his friend. It appeared to be eating.

Ranger swallowed hard. He turned and ran, calories be damned. The cave was not far away. It would keep him alive until tomorrow, at least. Tomorrow after sunrise he would awake, cold and alone, but for the last time. Tomorrow Ranger was going to find his way home.

The Garden of Regret and Promise (Sunday Meditation #31)

The plane leaps skyward, metallic Pegasus galloping into the midnight blue. The mind's eye rolls movies of trees uprooted, ripped from the sod with the sound of torn silk. The earth gives ground grudgingly. Woody fibers snap and ping as the strings of my heart break one by one. My old roots ran not as deep as I thought, my new roots scarce have entered the earth. 

The plane vibrates while I weep silently into my fist. Granular tears do not reach my eyes. I'll not give my fellow travelers a show, or reasons to conjecture on my state of mind. 

Viscid heartbeat in my ears above the hiss of air in the cabin. My hydroponic soul feels elation and regret in equal measure. I am weightless in the nutrient broth of the present, dreaming of love like rich loam, dark and fertile. Loam I leave behind and loam I race toward. What will spring from these fields I have cleared? This is unknown to me. My heart has hopes and fears for them both, and mastery over neither. 

The sky is black outside the windows. The ground below I cannot discern. It is the heavens in reverse, stellar velvet strewn with tiny yellow diamonds. My roots slip further from the humus embrace of fields I tend. I pray, as the poet Virgil implored farmers to do, that my summers will be wet and my winters clear. I till the soil patiently, waiting for roots to grow and with them, love.

---
From field notes written in transit, April 7th, 2013.

Reveries of the Ring

Sunday, May 5th, 8:12 PM. More Tales from the Belly of the Beast.

Memories in the shape of a open loop caught me off guard there in the deli aisle. There they were, lying in their refrigerated splendor, decked out in casings colored a brilliant shade of red. I speak of ring bologna, friends, a humble cured meat that roots me firmly in my childhood.

You do know of the ring bologna, do you not? Show of hands?

I'll understand if you have not. Ring bologna is definitely an old school culinary creation that has usually---in my experience---been far overshadowed by the plethora of prepackaged, presliced lunch meats that most markets carry. I will confess that as a kid I probably ate more than my fair share of such things. Convenience and a narrow food focus saw to that particular fixation. But in many ways, that is over now.

I still like cold cuts, but I do not eat them like I did when I was a child. My tastes have changed. These days a good salad or a bowl of pot beans are just as likely to be found in my lunch bag. This is a shift that I'm sure is good for me on many levels. While I do make a pilgrimage to the deli counter now and then, I have drifted away from a lot of that stuff.

Which makes my encounter with ring bologna on this lazy Sunday afternoon all the more intriguing. I was meandering in search of queso fresco and cotija cheese---my personal frijoles de olla do not seem complete without one or the other---and not really in the mind of meat. I was pushing the cart with purpose, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw them.

I slowed for a better look, confirming my initial impression. Almost obscured by the packages of who knows what hanging above was a humble stack of bright red loops there on the shelf. I stopped to look closer; it was indeed a cluster of ring bologna. My nerd brain took over, noting that technically they were open toroids, cylindrical shapes formed by rotating a closed curve about an axis not intersecting or contained in the curve...

...I told my nerd brain to shut up. This was the grocery store, not a topology lab. I nearly walked away from the case at that point, but something made me pick up one of the rings. When I did so, a flood of memories came to me. My maternal grandmother's kitchen. A plate of neatly sliced coins of bologna laying on the crazed ceramic surface, accompanied by a stack of saltines and a generous dab of mustard. G-maw squeezing lemon into her tea while I sat munching in contentment, making little sandwiches by placing a coin between two crackers.

The memories moved forward in time, summer days when she would come to visit and bring a ring bologna with her and leave it in our fridge. Me in my hormonally induced ravenousness ransacking the same refrigerator in search of protein and calories. Later still, finding a care package waiting for me in my college dorm mail room. G-maw occasionally sent them along with crackers and some sweets, soup and the now famous ring bologna. She would pack it in dry ice to help keep it cool.

To me, those packages represented an anchor. They were something that kept me from always having to rely on the dodgy dining hall for snacks and late-night sustenance, especially when my funds for such things were slim at best. My roommates would look askance at me, cocking the eyebrow and teasing me for having gotten "baloney" in the mail. I smiled, nodded, and did not bother to explain what they missing.

The food itself, I know, would be on many nutritional "bad" lists these days. The usual suspects: sodium, nitrates, saturated fat. But back then, it was food for kings, I thought. It kept me from going hungry, it reminded me of home, and people who loved me. I figured out years later that my G-maw had probably eaten a lot of this very stuff when she was a kid, and in her younger days. She did not come from money, and things like ring bologna were relatively cheap and "rib-sticking". To her, it just made sense.

I felt a little dizzy, swaying there at the edge of the refrigerated case. All those memories crowding their way to the forefront of my mind. The package felt cool and slightly yielding in my hand. All my dietary concerns clamoring for me to put it down, convinced that it was something I did not need. I hesitated, then slowly moved to put the bologna back on the shelf. Halfway there, I stopped.

It was true that I had no critical need for the stuff. But need and want are two different creatures. I scanned the package again, vision overlaid by the ghost of my grandmother in her kitchen, talking to me of everything and nothing. Saltines and savor on my tongue, that I could almost taste in their piquancy. I turned and put the package in my cart. The diet would survive this diversion.

Maybe it is true that you can't go home again, but the heart knows that sometimes the tongue can taste it and the belly can be filled, when we dine in the house of memories.

Magpie Tales 148: Through the Front

photo by Andy Magee, via Magpie Tales

Worrying about the drive,
you play a zero-sum game
Turn your attention front and center
to gaze the rain-slick track you ride

Low radio murmur is no sin
Songs offer their own warm company
to those bursting through the front,
Wheels like pigeons wayfinding home

---

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a very different creation from that of my first impulse. That first impulse was a story, not blank verse, and it involved elements that, in the light of recent tragic events, were too visceral and dark. I owe a debt of thanks to Tess Kincaid, whose Magpie Tale I read before I wrote my own, but after I had that first inspiration. Because of that poem, because of 'dreich', because of rain, I made something from light. Thanks be to quantam entanglements and thank you, Ms. Kincaid.

Magpie Tales 147: Tara Cognita

Image from The MetaPicture via Magpie Tales

Sailed the seas of her

roaming over black rogue waves

pounding the fearful ego

 

A bittersweet joke

Lost on Mare timoris,

compass in the heart

Bed, a safe harbor

Her breath, waves lapping the strand

soft hips, map to home

Magpie Tales 139: Broken Bread

Midnight Snack, 1984, by Curtis Wilson Cost via Magpie Tales

Gunnar set his ruck down next to the worn alloy post holding up the gate. It didn't look much different than when he had left. Gunnar shook his head, reckoning the eighty-three years local time he had been gone was a drop in the bucket for a metal that was supposed to last for centuries. The gates, though dulled by time, were in good shape. Gunnar knew his brother Hallvard was many things, and lazy was not one of them.

"Hallvard's up, I hope," the worn soldier muttered. His eyes misted briefly, picturing Hallvard at the worn petrowood table in the kitchen. More likely than not, there was a block of fragrant gammel ost and a huge loaf of brown bread laying there, chunks missing where the hungry farmer had taken what they jokingly called the "Midnight Sun" to fill his belly. Gammel ost in this case a name, remembered across the gulf of the galaxy and a home soil left behind in the dim past. Gunnar chuckled, mouth watering at the thought of the cheese he hadn't tasted in decades. The taste of home.

His stomach lurched. Decades. Hallvard was certain to be an old man now. The clinics in the city were the best tech that had survived the Passage, but Hallvard was stubborn. Gunnar imagined his brother hadn't set foot in a clinic for a bad tooth, much less than the gene tweaks that would have kept him alive and unworn all these years. Still, the light was on, and that was a good sign. The soldier shifted his weight to his better leg, leaning down to pick up the dusty ruck. A dull gleam of circuitry limned his forearm, shining through the ballistic fabric of his tunic. It reminded him of the cost he had paid to get back, and how good that cheese would taste on a slice.

Gunnar glanced at the hologram clock hovering just inside his right eye. It was a minute after midnight. He stepped forward, pushing the gate open with barely a whisper, striding down the gravel path towards home and broken bread.

Giving the Moon

My daughter has among her books a wonderful volume called Zen Shorts*, which has modern takes on three short stories drawn from Zen Buddhist and Taoist literary tradition. I am quite fond of this book, and is she. In the book is a story called "Uncle Ry and the Moon". Tonight as I settled into a nice post-prandial bliss, some words from Uncle Ry floated up from the well of my mind, as I meditated on grace and gratitude.

"Poor man...All I had to give him was my tattered robe. If only I could have given him this wonderful moon."

Uncle Ry uttered those words as he sat upon that hill, missing his last robe that he gave to a thief in the night, and gazing upon the moon. In my recent adult years I have often felt, metaphorically speaking, like Uncle Ry: not having much to give, but wanting to share the beauty I see with others. That attitude is most assuredly a sea change for my emotional/spiritual/interior life, the one I flounder in far too often.

His words came back to me at the end of a very fine meal, that I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for myself and the good company with whom it was shared. This feeling swept over me, not completely unfamiliar but one that in the past I have struggled to name. Tonight, I realized that it was gratitude. Intense gratitude for having made an offering to some people for whom I care deeply. Gratitude for a warm, dry place to share it. Gratitude for the simple yet sometimes hard to grasp necessity of a human connection.

It has been a peculiar difficulty of mine that I often cannot shake this notion that I am Uncle Ry, a simple man living in a spare cottage with not much to offer in the way of material gifts to friends, thieves or passers-by. Yet in the good graces of love and the warmth of a full belly, I was basking in the silvery light of  our own creation. My gratitude flowed from giving the moon.

--
*Zen Shorts, by Jon J. Muth, a masterful illustrator who also has written/illustrated Zen Ghosts and Zen Ties. Those three volumes are worth having for the watercolors alone, and are perhaps three of my most favorite children's books in my daughter's personal library.

That Which Fills The Cracks In Our Foundations

August 21st, 2011 3:53 pm

"I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering..." sang the Beatles.  In the aftermath of the storms we have been having I need to get on that.  I've rain coming in through the chimney and rain seeping through the walls in the basement and it needs to stop.

But how do I let my mind continue wandering?  It sees the rain coming in and wants to fix it but wants to run, to hide, to not have to deal with disruption yet again.  The disruption never stops, it seems.  Rain makes the flowers grow, but other things grow, too, and if the water freezes in the cracks it will only get worse.  That is, if the damp and the seep don't crumble the foundations first.

I've been inspecting my foundations on a regular basis as of late.  They still hold but there are some cracks to fix and holes to plug.  Problem is, I haven't been able to fight the urge to just pull up a chair and watch the water well up or the cracks widen.  Weariness plays a role, I'm sure.  Sort of like life's version of the old defragmenter screen on some computers I use to use.  You turn the thing on and then sit slackjawed, watching the little boxes blink and shift, not getting any real work done but convincing yourself it is necessary, plus you wouldn't want to miss anything, in those blinking little boxes.

I do know this:  it is time for me to move off center, stop staring at the cracks in the wall and the water seeping through the joints.  I'll have the stem the split, mop up the spill.  Far too often in my past life I've been content to watch the houses slowly slide into the sinkhole, and it is high time that stopped.

It has to.  I have things to do, people to see, and places to go.  Especially home.  I need to go home and fix the leaks, shore up the foundation.  It's around here somewhere, I can feel it, I have touched it...now I have to hold onto it.  This time, I will.

This Tree

We are on the road again, my daughter and I, heading back to my house after an all too short stay at the ancestral homestead.  A hazy Sunday afternoon somewhere in the Middle Peninsula region, with the Rappahannock River whispering to us from beyond the trees and fields to the east.  The trees are in full leaf now.  It is a very different scene from that of the winter, of the Februaries I wish to leave behind.

It was an occasion to celebrate life and a growing of the good green things in our souls, rather than assemble in the woods to mourn the falling of yet another mighty oak.  It was the first time in many years that I had the blessing of being among extended family for the sole purpose of being in one another's company because we could.  I saw some cousins I had not seen in too long, and met the next generation of the family.  Wee Lass was able to meet some kin she had not seen before, and I...well, I had the honor of basking in her glow, while she played in the pool with the other young ones.

I had forgotten how good that felt.  Back in the day, we used to have these gatherings all the time.  As you may have guessed, I didn't fully get how cool that was when I was right in the middle of it as a boy.

But I know now, yes, I do.  I knew it with each hug given, each kiss on the cheek and every laugh shared.  I felt in in my core as I watched the kids playing in the pool.  I live too much in my own head most of the time, which is really no true home; there in that backyard and for a few precious hours, I was home.

I had the singular gift of holding a four-month old baby, the beautiful daughter of of her equally beautiful mother (a second cousin of mine), and when that baby snuggled her face into my shoulder I felt a circuit trip somewhere in the earth.  The current I could feel flowing through my veins and into my heart.  It was still humming along when we had to leave the next day on our road trip home.

The corn and soybeans are beginning to sprout in the fields.  The crows and the hawks watch over everything, and the trees stand green and proud and harboring deer and rabbits among the undergrowth.  I could see those stands of trees across the green-gold of the planted acres, and it was then I felt another circuit close in the blood of my blood, the laughter in my ears, and the arms across my shoulders.

In the white gold sunshine of the eastern Virginia countryside, I had a revelation. I know how the tree feels to sink its roots deep into the soil from which it sprung.  I know how the tree feels when it becomes aware of the forest, and knows that it is home.

---

It is Memorial Day, and a time conducive to meditation amongst the cookouts and the sales, and the hoopla of modern American life.  I had plenty of time to think while driving home on Sunday, about what we are supposed to remember, and what we seem to actually do.  I've never been one prone to overt displays of patriotism, but neither have I totally lost sight of what this day is about.  Regardless of where we stand on the subject of the wars and aggressions America has initiated or been drawn into, it is certainly true that quite a few have given so much, including their lives, in the service of an ideal that does represent the best of our desires and intentions.  That service, in part, has made it possible for me to live the life that I do, and for me to enjoy being with my family.  For that, I am truly grateful. 

Wild Roses and the Savage Beast

Thursday evening I arrived back at Casa Del Gumbo wrung out like a old dishrag.  I was beat.  I was hungry.  I was ornery.  In short, I was fit company for neither man nor beast.  During my commute I was at a mild simmer, replaying some vexations from the day in the theater of my cranium.  Stress and fatigue had ganged up on me.  

When I stepped through the door I already had a few ideas for what I would post.  All of them were heavy on the angst and Sturm und Drang of the typical metropolitan life as manifested in a nebbishy 40-something with too much time to think and not enough time to do.  I was hoisting a big ol' steaming mug of cynicism topped off with the sprinkles of unfocused dissatisfaction.  I was loaded for bear.

Good thing I looked outside my kitchen window.  The side yard slopes down to a wooden gate to the backyard, and tucked into the corner of the fences is a wild rose bush.  I pruned it earlier this year before it could put on too much new growth, and that must have inspired the bush to make the most of this spring.

It is blossoming, in a manner most enjoyable.  I could see the bush frosted with pink roses.  I immediately went back outside and down to the rosebush.  The fragrance was faint but enticing.  I leaned into a particularly showy flower and drew deep of breath.  Oh, the aroma...the stress, the anxiety, the jaded fog in my head disappeared.  It was...well, see for yourself, courtesy of my phone camera:

Happy Sunday, y'all.

The Quiet

The life, it is not so bad
sitting here in the quiet
of the night breeze

Windows open to faint traffic
Cars slow rush down the street
lulling the body to sleep

Not so bad in the quiet
here on the couch, content,
far away from guns and blood

Homecoming

Old bed, new boyhood,
Worn wood, white plaster above
Dreams of youthful sun

Compass Rose

I'm writing this ahead of time, I'll be on the road later this day.  The Gumbomobile will be loaded up with the essentials and my Wee Lass and we are headed for the Gumbo ancestral lands in southeastern Virginia.  Its a trip I'm looking forward to, for some much needed R & R, and much needed face time with the family.

The compass of the heart ever points to Home.

Spring Poetry Slam #2: Traffic

Surprisingly cool,
traffic sound on wet pavement.
Heart follows the cars.