Maybe if they were too big, we wouldn’t be able to fly at all. That’s what I tell myself as I celebrate the small magic moments of each day.
On my phone, I replaced my friend’s icon that was simply her initials, with a picture of my first bird woman. I can’t say why exactly. It just felt right. I’ve had it that way for months, but I only told her yesterday. When I showed her the picture, she beamed. “You have no way of knowing this,” she said, “but ever since I was a little girl I imagined that I had bird friends that would follow me around and speak to me.”
This is the magic I cling to. It weighs nothing, and even more, lifts me higher.
Being allowed to use the can opener was almost as freeing as learning to ride my bicycle. I went to great lengths to enjoy my five minute lunch alone in Hugo’s summer field behind our house on VanDyke Road. Perhaps it was the responsibility I displayed with my two-wheeler that gave my mother the assurance I could handle the responsibility of staying home alone. She taught me to tear off the label from the Campbell’s can of chicken noodle soup before I brought it anywhere near the burner. I poured the noodles into the pan. Then turned it on — I was only allowed to use the lowest temperature (You have more time than money she would tell me. No need to burn the house down.) I warmed it to luke, then poured it into the styrofoam thermos I had painted in stripes. I Tupperwared a stack of crackers. Filled another thermos of ice water. Put them all in my corduroy book bag that my mother had sewn for me. Placed that into the wicker basket of my bike. Kissed good-bye my dolls and stuffed animals as if going off to war. Then rode the five minute trail along Hugo’s field. Sat down in the smallest clearing just off the edge. Emptied the book bag. Made it into a tablecloth. Drank my soup. Drank my water. Relished in being my summer self. It was only a moment, but it was beautiful.
Here in France, I learned to bake the worshiped bread. Normally I do it in the afternoon. Freeze it for our toast each morning. But once in a while, I have the desire to start the day with fresh break. That means making the special recipe before bed. Getting up early. Then finishing the kneed, the roll and the baking. Washing the dishes while it bakes. Our house becomes a boulangerie. My fingers dance on the crust, as I cut the pieces. The butter melts without urging. Even the honey and jam feel special. It is only for this breakfast. There will be additional bread, but only this one moment, eating in the waft of this happy morning.
Some might say it wouldn’t be worth it. But then they wouldn’t have can-openered their way to magic. I guess that’s for all of us to decide. Me, I hope I will try to make the most of each moment. What else do we have?
Before I had finished the page in my sketchbook, it had become an Emily Dickinson poem. “In the name of the Bee,” — a poem that had been passed around between my mother, my ninth grade English teacher, my friend David, two books on my shelf, and the path that I walk daily.
It was another Emily who asked,
“EMILY: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” STAGE MANAGER: “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.”
– Thornton Wilder, “Our Town”
Wanting to get to “some,” and realizing my limits for sainthood, I try to walk in the poem each day.
I said once, on the days that I can’t create something beautiful, at least give me the wisdom to see it. Yesterday was busied with a trip to Marseille. We had an appointment at the Hopital Conception. We were greeted at the entry with a poster of Rimbaud, the French poet. While others sat in the waiting room. I sat in the poetry. I looked around to see if others were held in the syntax, hoping, wishing, they could feel my Emily within their Rimbaud. That maybe we could all live together in the magic of the word, maybe not “every, every minute,” but for this moment, the magic of this collective poem.
My grandma’s basement was filled with preserves. I was too young to see all the work. We were all shooshed outside when the knives were brought out. When the pots began to boil. The sweet scent of nature’s sugar wafted through the open farmhouse windows and curled under our noses, leading us round and round the house like we were cartoon characters being led by the mystique of color and magic. It was only after the sticky aprons were washed, after the jars had cooled, after they were stacked in a row on basement shelves, that I got to touch them. All those fruitful colors. I gently ran my hand across the glassed blend of oranges and reds and yellows. I thought maybe the colors would enter through my fingertips and up my arms, directly into my heart, and all that magic beyond the apron would enter into me.
It did.
Before moving to France, I never made bread, nor jams. But I suppose that’s the beauty of magic — it is patient — there for you when you’re ready. Our fruit trees are ripening. I made my first batch of Confiture de pêches (peach jam). The kitchen is summer warm, as Grandma Elsie scoots beneath the open windows, magically dancing, beyond my aproned heart.
I suppose we all hope for it — a little of the magic to rub off. The plaque on the outside wall says the author lived here. I stand in sturdy on the sidewalk, ready to catch any discarded words from a hundred years ago. Words left hanging in the cement’s cracking, perhaps ready, in this moment of my standing, to release themselves. I open my pockets and umbrella my shirt.
I go to museums and restaurants. Vowing to paint this. To make this. I will turn the kitchen table into the coffee shop, and sip slowly, slip gently into the romance of it all. And isn’t that what we’re here for, after all. To enjoy the art of being alive, but also to leave a touch of the magic behind for others to climb upon, to rest upon, to become.
I was lucky. I saw it early. I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen table, and held. The wood had already absorbed them. These Hvezdas. Scents of kolaches and pipe tobacco. Imprints of elbows calculating and cards slapped down in victory. Dice shook. Recipes tweaked. Books of crops and yields gone over and over again. Radio vibrations of Paul Harvey and rain forecasts. Over it hands shook. On it hands folded. And underneath, four angular legs that stuck out too far for a racing toddler, but held strong, this sturdy table, this gathering of life.
I take it with me everywhere. I’m sprinkling it now on this kitchen table where I type the morning words. Reach out your hands, your heart, the magic is falling.
It wasn’t that hard to piece together. I saw the publisher’s clearing house magazines open on the table, and the presents piling up under the tree. I was bursting with knowledge when my mother came to pick me up from Grandma Elsie’s house. “I know the truth about Santa Claus.” I told my mom while putting on my seat belt for the car ride home. “Oh,” she said, not sure of what my truth would be. “I know Grandma orders the presents and puts them under the tree.” My mom smiled, thinking I knew that all grandparents and parents did the same. But somehow she managed to contain her laughter when I pronounced, (not that Santa wasn’t real) but that I knew it was actually Grandma who was the real Santa Claus, for everyone.
I wish I could tell you the depths of my pride. I knew Grandma Elsie was special, but this, this was really something. To think it was my Grandma who brought presents to the entire world. If I had begun to question the existence of an actual Santa Claus — the ability of one person to pull off such a feat, I can tell you that all doubts subsided. Because if anyone could do it, it would be Grandma Elsie.
The roads were already covered in snow. My mom pulled the Chevy Impala into our driveway between the two drifts. I was staring out the picture windows. But for the snow illuminating the winter’s dark, I never would have seen it. But there it was — a streak of red. Santa was running across Van Dyke Road! My mom heard my screams of delight, but came just after the blur. “What?” She said. “I saw Grandma running across the road!”
We never found out who actually donned the suit and ran on our snowy road. So I can’t completely rule out that it wasn’t Grandma Elsie. If you ask me when I stopped believing, I would have to tell you, not yet.
I often wonder if my Grandma knows that I’m here. What my life is like now. But then I saw her yesterday in Marseille. I sat beside her in the magic of Christmas.
I always imagined myself as the number one. Not in the sense of being first, but as the connection to my number two pencil. She never explained it as such, Mrs. Bergstrom, our first grade teacher at Washington Elementary, but I felt it right from the start. It was such a magical connection. When she passed out the number twos they felt like little wands. Little wands that took the words she wrote on the blackboard and put them into our hands. Words that were filtered through our hearts and graphited to the sheets of paper that lay dormant for six years, never to be blank again.
I was sketching in my book the other day with a pencil that I bought from MoMA. In this book, to gain the desired effect of lightness, the actual paper must be erased away. I couldn’t find my eraser. I thought it was probably down in the studio. Being upstairs, I didn’t want to make the trip. I started looking. Holding the pencil in my left hand, I felt it. I had never noticed it before. It was colored in black, this eraser. Indistinguishable from the rest of the pencil, but it was there. It had always been there. I smiled to the heavenly blackboard that I imagine Mrs. Bergstrom still directs. And give thanks for the magic. For making me the number one to my number two. A permanent connection.
If you’re wondering what teachers can do, I offer you this — this giving of an intelligence so far from artificial that it can still be held in the palm of my hand.
My mother wasn’t one to swim, but she made sure that I learned. And right along with it she taught me how to take a DIP — how to access the Dream In my Pocket. “You never know when you’re going to need it,” she explained. So before anything ended, we made sure our pockets were filled. Before making a return trip home, a new trip would be planned. After an event, we’d plan our outfits for the next one. And one of the most important, in the last pages of a current book we would add to our “To Be Read” pile.
I finished “Killers of the flower moon” yesterday. Within hours, I went to my TBR. I had purchased these two books about a week ago. I chose Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy,” because he had recently passed. I had only planned on getting this one, but on my way to the counter I saw the book, “The Details,” by Kira Josefsson. I had just listened to a podcast about it on my morning walk, so I grabbed that book too. They both waited patiently by my bed.
I was tired last evening. I had taken my actual first dip in our pool. This summer’s dream was officially out of pocket! The water that may have been splashed onto the lawn was replaced with smiles.
Getting ready for bed, I randomly grabbed the top book, “The Details.” I wasn’t even six pages in, when the magic outshined the lamp clipped onto the pages. The character in the book began talking about her love for reading, specifically for her love of the author Paul Auster. My heart giggled. She went on, her favorite book was “The New York Trilogy.” You just can’t make this stuff up!
I’ve always trusted the readers, and the dreamers. My mother gave me that. Perhaps these pockets were filled from heaven. I don’t know, but I slept in the knowledge that I was still surrounded by magic. And I will take a luxurious dip in all of it, every chance I get!!!
Before there was ever a television series, nestled in the winter corner of my bedroom, book resting on my knees perched to my chest, I looked like every character in the Little House on the Prairie book. I lived in each word. I knew the steps to the house. The barn. I was the girl nestled to a loving Pa. I was the strong and worried Ma. Laura, running, always running. Mary studying. I knew each character in and out. The mean girl at the mercantile. The neighbors a horse ride away. There was no need to mark the page. I read it through. And read it again.
The Washington Elementary School library made it possible for me to read the series a week at a time. The many years captured in these books lasted one winter of mine on Van Dyke Road. My little toes dug deeper into the carpeting as I traveled through each page. Because it wasn’t just my mind wandering. I knew I was there. That, I suppose, is the moment I learned the power, the magic of reading.
Yesterday we visited the three historic structures, including the Surveyor’s House, the Ingalls’ home that Pa built, and the First School of De Smet where Laura and Carrie were students. Maybe it was because of the snow, but I don’t think so…I felt it in my toes — they curled like I was seven again, as I ran to her statue. If you have a moment today, read — to a child in your house, at your library, or the one whose toes still curl beneath you.
There is a reason we call it spelling. The magic of the letters, when put together to form words, can indeed cast a magical spell within and around us.
She stood in front of the class of first graders. Mrs. Bergstrom. Tall and straight. Not with a robe, nor a hat, but she did have a wand. Some might remember it as just a teaching pointer. But not me. As she tapped it against each letter chalked perfectly on the blackboard, white dust — fairy dust I was sure — sprung into the air. We were spelling. And it was magic.
That magic moved from the blackboard to our Big Chief notebooks. Then marched with us single file to the library down the terrazzo halls of Washington Elementary. With each book we moved into neighborhoods. Made friends with dogs. Rode horses with cowboys and bloomed into teenage girls, and boys with paper routes. Everything was possible in the words.
I’d like to think it still is. As I type each morning, I take that magical journey. With each letter I make a path. Sprinkling it with a stroke of Mrs. Bergstrom. Because it’s all beautiful, even the hardest of days — when wanded into the words of “look what we survived,” and “look what we’ve become” — are nothing short of magical! I still believe it. I have to believe it. I hope we all can.
Because she didn’t just give us the happy words. She taught us how to spell. How to make our way through it all. Today, I too will stand straight and tall. And I promise, I will not waste the magic.
