We were just young women. Fresh out of college. Out in the world of our first jobs. My friend and I had a standing joke — “I know we’re friends, because you could receive flowers at work, and I’d be like actually happy for you.” We’d laugh, but it wasn’t that far from the truth. We’d see other women get flowers for the occasional holiday or birthday, and we’d roll our eyes and give the half smile and nod. Maybe we were just too young. Or maybe it was because those same people worried about if we took five extra minutes for lunch, or laughed a little too long in the hallway. It seemed to be a culture of if you get something, that takes something away from me.
I suppose it was maturing, or working on my own, but I did seem to grow out of it. Thankfully. I rarely give it a thought now — this who has what. Probably because in those extra long laughs, the loves around me, around me still, I know I have everything.
Walking through the park yesterday, I stumbled upon two different weddings. They were taking photos beside the lake, within all the greenery, amid the wild flowers and under the yellow sun. My first thought was, what a lovely day for them. They were all smiling, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I didn’t know any of these people, but I laughed out loud when I thought, “I’m like actually happy for you.”
It’s a good reminder to myself. I hope I’m always doing, but I’m not sure. And shouldn’t we be? Happy for each other? All of us? Not just on special days, but every day.
I hope this day brings you something special. Flowers even! And if I see you, mid-bloom, I’ll be smiling.
It was one of the first things I learned in college. Of course I was nervous. I wanted to do well. There was so much to learn. I had been given good advice from the Jefferson Senior High career counselor. It was simple, but most extraordinary things are — “Start with what you love,” she told me. I added a creative writing course to my schedule of the first U of M semester.
I’m not sure why I was shocked when the professor asked us to read aloud our first assignment. I had been reading aloud with my mother since the first grade. I knew the power of words sounded out, not just for definition, but for MEANING! It’s probably not a surprise that mine was a personal story. So the breaks in my voice were real. One student asked, after I caught my breath, after I gathered in all those words that danced from my heart’s page into the air, after I nervously stared at the paper in hand, “Is it supposed to be that personal?” The professor said the words I still live by today, “It can never be too personal.”
And it wasn’t, isn’t, just for writing. Nor painting. It enhances my whole life. Yesterday when I went on my first walk, just hours after arriving in Minnesota, it felt like the green and flowered path was created just for me. Not in a selfish way, but pure gratitude. Two new statues were added to the park, both birds…c’mon now… how could not believe?
And I could see it on their faces, the others that were truly feeling the same. The woman gathered under the weeping willow. Those paddling boats in the water. Walking hand in hand on the path. They didn’t have to say anything. Their smiles said it all. Passing each other, we’d smile, not just to be cordial, but an act that said, “Can you believe this is all for us?!!!” And the extra nod said, “Yes.”
Every moment is personal. Perhaps in this knowledge, we tread a little lighter and we smile a little brighter. Led by the green. Taught within the bloom.
When I first began writing as a little girl, I guess I was in search of home. “Houses, houses, houses red, in it is a pretty bed,” I wrote for Mr. Iverson’s music class. Chalk in hand after he told me that I could place my poem on the blackboard, I proudly finished my six year old first publication, “Houses, houses, houses green, in it is a pretty scene.”
From then on, I wrote about home. I painted houses. I painted windows. Doors. It occurs to me, in an airplane above France, it’s been a long since I’ve painted any of that. I smile, because, I suppose I found it…I had been carrying it with me all along.
It’s the same with almost everything. We think we will find it out there. So busy trying to discover the place, find the answers, seek the inspiration. Looking for the who, the what will fix it all, save us. There is no there there.
At the moment, shoulder to shoulder, knees against seat, it would be easy to feel trapped. Or I could be a bird. After all, I’m actually flying. Imagine that. No room to paint wings on paper, but my heart is scattering images of everywhere I’ve been. Everywhere I’m going. And I am free. I am home. I have come to fly!
We don’t wear gowns in France for visits to the doctor. The windows where modesty must fly out, are left wide open. I keep a mental pile of these things I would have thought to be traumatic, just as a reminder — not unlike the sticky note above my mom’s phone that read, “What haven’t you survived?”
Yesterday, to check my lymph nodes, the doctor asked me to place my hands on her shoulders. She in turn put her hands on mine. Then just under my arms. I’m not sure anyone else heard the music, but I could have been back in Junior High at the gymnasium dance, swaying arms-length apart from last night’s worry of “would he ask me to dance.”
And that’s how we save ourselves, I suppose. Our brains our wired to come running, sticky notes in hand. Some as proof of what we’ve survived. Others just to make us laugh.
Is that why I love the color yellow? Because all of my original thoughts that come dancing on the original yellow pad? Or maybe that’s just another thought to distract me and remind me of all the love around me. I don’t know, but I still hear the music. So I raise my arms on shoulders, in the air, and I keep on dancing.
It’s no spoiler to tell you that men are different from women. I’ve been exposing Dominique to that beautiful truth for many years now.
When she sat at our kitchen table yesterday, an ordinary Tuesday, she began to cry. “I’m just so tired,” she said. For me, completely understandable. Now, men will often look at us like we’re on fire, and something must done. And it makes me laugh, because maybe they’re not so far from the truth after all, it’s just that we are built to put out our own fires, with the gentle flow of tears. Oh, those beautiful drops are always at the ready. With no need for alarms or sirens, they know when it’s time. I can hear them, mid eye-lid, “Are we going? Is it time? I’m ready, let’s go. Here we go.” And down the tears come.
My mother always called them tears of tenderness. Because they weren’t there out of anger or sadness, only comfort. The ebb and flow of life’s tide.
So often the things we fear turn out to be gifts. I like thinking that my brain tells my heart, daily, go ahead, set the world on fire, we’ve got you covered.
I see the Sainte Victoire mountain every day. It always catches my breath. On the halfway point of my daily walk I get the best view. I try to drink it in slowly. It is the latte I order extra hot to make it last longer. It is the tentative first sip of familiar and spectacular against my lips. Delicious.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have noticed it. Would I have just gulped it in and moved on? It was Cezanne who led me to it. Painting by painting. Image by image. In books and museums. Telling me again how worthy it was. How beautiful. And I believed it before I stood beneath it. Before I climbed it. Before I painted it.
That’s what we can do for each other. It’s why I love a latte, I suppose. Because of each one shared with my mother, with my friends. Each sip an experience. Of laughter and tears. An extension of a meal. A way to make the afternoon last longer. A gathering of love, sip by sip.
And the thing is, we can do it with everything. When we share what we love. The things we find important. When we show each other the view from our hearts, it can be the familiar turned spectacular. I mean it’s just a rock, a giant rock, this Sainte Victoire. So if we can turn that into a “breath-taker” — just imagine what else love can do!
It’s time to show our hearts. Look at things differently. Open our minds. And just see!!!!
Some would argue that in the song “Feeling Good,” the singer has already found their desired freedom. Others say that they are singing to convince themselves of the possibility. I seem to be, not unlike the dragonfly, somewhere hovering in between.
The birds have their songs. The bees, their honey. So what about that dragonfly? Are we not in the same sky? Under the same sun? Sure we’re not all given the same gifts, the same advantages, but we are given the same day. The same 24 hours to make the most of it. I don’t want to waste my time envying the bird, but celebrating my own flight.
And I don’t always get it right. But on those days, I try to sing even louder —
“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day It’s a new life for me, yeah It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day It’s a new life for me, ooh And I’m feeling good!”
There’s a reason for the chorus. The importance of it. That’s why it’s repeated again and again. So on the days when I make the same mistakes, I sing myself out. Not with shame or worry, but simply a welcoming of the chorus.
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Joan Didion
I remember asking my grandma if she thought it went quickly, this living. She laughed, partially in agreement, but mostly, I think, emitting you wouldn’t even believe it if I told you. I suppose only the tiniest part sinks in. The part that urges us to get closer. Gravitate toward this comfort. This moment.
I saw it happen in real life recently at my French family’s reunion. They hold it each summer on Napoleon’s birthday. It’s basically a sea of cousins now. Mothers and fathers passing. Aunts and uncles too. There was an audible oooh, that eased into aaaah, as she arrived. Perhaps the oldest cousin, coming from the furthest distance. Of course they were happy to see her, but it was more than that. As she held court center veranda, I watched them gather. Women sure, but grown men too. Thick fingered, guarded men gathered. Bent down to get closer, as if still with the knees of youth. The long table was being set. We all, for just a moment, tried to capture the speed of August.
September is winking. I’ve had perhaps my last swim of the summer. You don’t really know it mid lap. But it was a good swim. And I’m grateful. And maybe that’s the only way we slow it down. This gratitude. It catches me. In a moment of happiness.
She came every day and landed, not on, but near the book. She fluffed her feathers as bold as the words she imagined. If she just flapped hard enough, she thought, the cover would flip and her story could begin.
The exact day the store owner noticed her, she couldn’t be sure. She had no watch, no phone, no calendar. Just the angle of the sun. It glinted off the sidewalk’s tree, at the same time each morning and lit the way to the unlocking door of the bookstore. She watched him wheel his stack just under the shade. And she rested eager, now brave enough to be on the cover. One day he smiled at her. She gave her best beak, and he opened the book. Page one.
She returned each day to a new page. Pecked the words. Then nested them home. A month of words. A summer of chapters. Words shared. Stories intertwined. They belonged to each other now. A new story forming.
Of course he had known loss. Everyone does. Perhaps that was the main reason he opened the bookstore. To connect.
In those sunny months of bird and book, everyone began. And began again. We don’t need to be fixed, sometimes we just need a reason to turn the page. And sometimes we need help to do it. We’re all learning.
We were surrounded by it — growth. Hugo’s field rich with grain. The swamps in the North End, ripe with thickened green. Marigolds lining driveways. Lawns under the hum of walked mowers. Discarded school books on abandoned summer shelves. Tennis shoes bursting out at the toes. Yet, it was imagination that surpassed it all on Van Dyke Road.
We were given space. An empty lot sat between our house and Dynda’s. An empty lot to do anything we imagined. What a gift this empty! What drew us to this nothing? Made us race our bikes over gravel and abandon them in the ditch just to be in this open lot? When I type it now, this “lot of possibility”, I have to smile, because I suppose that was it — so much — a lot! — of possibility. Here we had the freedom to imagine our way out of or into any situation. Balls and flashlights. Teams and cans and bases. Forts and races. Worlds away each day, but gently tethered by a mother’s front porch call.
The magic still holds. When Dominique asks me, “What do you want to do today?”— and I can answer, “nothing” — we both smile. And I race toward all things possible, knowing the lot.
