I recently learned that when birds sleep in a row, the two on the outer edges keep one eye open to protect and allow those on the inside to fall asleep. It doesn’t surprise me, I have rested within that protective watch.
There is a big scientific name for it, which I’ve already forgotten, this act of being able to keep “one eye open” while being in a half sleep — we’ve always just called that “pulling an Elsie.” She had to have been doing the same thing — birding her way through every card and dice game played on her kitchen table. Able to sleep while we pondered over our next move, then waking at the exact moment to handily beat us with chirping joy! And I saw her do it everywhere. In the funeral home where she phone-sat. At the grocery store check-out line (she did indeed check out). Even once in the car. But I was never worried. The speed at which she could belly-jiggle herself awake allowed all of us to rest, to play, to run in a carefree summer, to sleep soundly under her watch.
I suppose you could just rule it all as nature. But I know not everyone was blessed with a Grandma Elsie. So I give thanks. And make my way to the outer edges.
You can’t tell me that they’re always trying to get somewhere. Most of the time, it looks like they’re playing in the wind. Dancing even. These birds so elegantly bouncing and bounding above. And why wouldn’t they dance, they already have the song.
She never wore a tutu, nor spandex dresses, but oh how my mother could dance. She would teach me on the carpet of the living room floor. It was slower. But when I had mastered the steps, she’d lead me to the kitchen floor, and I barely felt my stockinged feet touch the linoleum. She’d sing along to the boombox, pull me in and spin me out and I knew I was flying. I asked her if she had dance instructors? No, she said. In school? I asked. No. Did grandma teach you. She laughed (sure it was a bit of a dance maneuvering through all those people in the farm kitchen), but no. Then how did you know you could dance? I asked. I could always hear the song, she said, and pulled me in once again.
And wasn’t that belief? Wasn’t that the true art of living? Just listening for the music. Trusting your feet would follow. Believing, one way or another, you were going to fly!
Working between two screens, sometimes my cursor gets stuck in the opposite one that I want. (Like my brain doesn’t do that all the time.)
It’s so easy to think, “Well, I always did it this way…” Whether I’m talking about different countries, different languages, loves, relationships, even my hairdresser. And I catch myself swiping madly on the wrong screen.
Change is never easy. Neither growth. But both are so necessary. And it doesn’t mean you have to give up everything in the letting go, the moving on…You keep the lightest of things, like joy and hope and love — none of these will ever weigh you down.
Too often I’m unaware. It’s barely more than air, the little birdie that tells me things. But when I’m paying attention, really paying attention, all the truths that move between who I am and who I want to be, chirp seamlessly between my heart and my brain, and I am saved.
To be so filled with life that it has to flush from your very pores. Cheeks ruddy and ever ready. I suppose we all think it will last forever — sure that our feet will keep the deal that youth has made. But maybe it’s the heart that takes over. (Or maybe it led all along.) Maybe it’s the heart that drags us from spring’s mud into summer’s bliss. Maybe it’s the heart that races through grass’s morning dew again and again, and lifts us up from green knees when we fall, ever promising to keep our cheeks flushed through autumn. Through winter.
Every time I paint a face, I feel the colors in my own, flowing through my hands. And the corners of my mouth rise up, smiling, so happy to be a part of youth’s reddening still.
What will you do today, to remain in the race of summer?
After a very confusing day in the library at Washington Elementary, I went home for some much needed clarification from my mother. Hovering between fiction and non-fiction, I asked her if Grandma Dynda, (who lived two lots down on Van Dyke Road) was real. “She’s a real person, of course, but not your real grandma.” So is she fiction or non-fiction? Eyebrows up, and mouth partly open, the words didn’t come, so she just smiled at me. I think we both know we would spent much of our lives hovering in this magical place.
My brain would come to understand most of the difference, but it’s my heart that’s still bouncing around the in-between.
When we first got our cherry tree, and I was searching for a name, (because that’s what I do, name our trees and plants), something worthy and pure and sweet, I hopped the whitewash fence of Mark Twain and found Little Becky Thatcher. In bloom now in the spring of our front yard, she’s as real to me as any written word. As real as any love given two lots down.
It will be a race between us and the magpies when the cherries come. And I like not knowing. Being mid-page. Hovering daily in the smile of this magical place.
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.
