Another treasure from the Aline Hopkins Leftovers was a marine blue silk drawstring bag, about the size of a lunch sack.  My awesome Vintage Whisperer Super Power registered a date for the bag between 1920 to 1930.  (How do I know?  I just do.) Crispy yet soft, the folds of its balloon shape had a pleasant weight, and I thought there might be something interesting inside.  I longed to peek, but refrained, coveting the joy of discovery.  It seemed like a special sort of place you would tuck an intimate secret – like the camisole you wore under your bridal dress, or half finished quilt blocks for the baby who never came.

When I drew apart the gathered fabric, a puff of white mildew edged the casing where the strings had drawn tightly against each other like lips pursed into a kiss, waiting indefinitely to be reciprocated.  Inside, something special indeed, but decipherable only to Aline – a mixed up tangle of threads and floss, enmeshed so thoroughly it had taken on the aspect of a heart.  A beautiful thing, so useless for whatever purpose Aline might have saved it.  So useful for me, now.

One thing that happened while I was helping Pammy out is I remembered how unfair the world is and how adults are such jerks.

For example, Max and Cas have been careening around on bikes at the park across the street from their house since the day they brought the bikes home 4 years ago.   The park is a part of them, as much as Mommy’s car, or Daddy’s coat.  They’ve spilled a little blood along the paved paths, pedaling maniacally, braking demonically – but all in good fun, you know.

Well, the fun is over.  The Disc (Frisbee) Golfer’s have moved in, and their permitted territory is vast.  From the basketball court to the far reaches of the gentle slope that meets the jogging thru-way at least a block away, every hopped, skipped and biked pathway is in danger of being strafed by flying plastic discs (hmmm….I almost wrote, “dicks” and that’s not Freudian, sister.).

“Why can’t we ride there?” Max asked, and then Caspian, “Yeah, why?”  Punctuation and syntax cannot do justice to the plaintive anger in their voices.  “We’re not going to leave!”  they said.  Pammy shrugged.  “You gotta do what you gotta do,” she told them.  Pammy has never been one to back down from fighting injustice.  One by one, the golfers – most of them in need of a bath – approached to educate my sister on the hazards, and to persuade the boys to take their bikes elsewhere.  As they pointed and gestured, though, it became obvious – there is nowhere left at the park to ride safely.

The boys are justifiably angry.  It may not be the first experience they have had with injustice, but it certainly is one of the most public.  This is not a minimal loss – some one has stolen their backyard, but there is no way to get it back.  Max and Cas rode defiantly for a few more minutes, but the discs whizzing by were just too dangerous.  Pammy put on her “I mean business” voice, and I joined in.  Pretty soon we were out of harms way, mesmerized by a gopher digging out his burrow close to the edge of the bike path.  “I think the cracks in the ground are because the gopher dug out underneath here and it’s going to collapse,”  Max said.  “Hmmm,”  I said, “that’s an interesting idea.”

Without another word, Max crouched down and began pulling up clumps of grass, digging away with his small, determined fingers, looking for evidence of his hypothesis.

To make something – to say something – eventually you will have to unfold into a vulnerable spot.  I think I remember once upon a time, I decided that opening to people and to life, beyond the promised limits of safety, was the bravest way to encounter love and myself.   I believed whole-heartedly that my bravery would be rewarded with experiences and connections that were true, and deep, and real.  Today, I feel like saying, “I am sick of being vulnerable.”  I don’t want to unfold one last crease, even to show myself what is hidden and waiting to be seen and loved.

While I was doing dishes in my sister’s kitchen in Walnut Creek, CA, I thought the light through the trees in the park across the street was really beautiful.  A blogger I follow wrote last week about seeing her own sister, and she said everything perfectly.    Click through the link.  You will love the photograph, and the image she creates of what it meant for them to be together.

When I ask myself, “What would be comforting?  What can I give myself?”  I freeze, like the kid who gets called on in class when she hasn’t done her homework.

When I ask myself, “What would be comforting for my friend?  What can I give her?” I open, like a cascade of anticipation like Christmas morning.

Maybe this is the entire point of the exercise – to discover where the tight spots are, and to become my own Dorothy, adding oil to the rusty hinges of my heart, where they froze in mid-sentence, too many years ago.

Aline’s handkerchiefs came out of the dryer wrapped around each other like origami formed and twisted by unconscious will.  I love such gestures, made outside of intention – for example, the way a coat lurches haphazardly on its hanger when hung hurriedly, or how receipts pile up on the kitchen counter into towering archives.  To me these works are perfect mirrors of the life we do not realize we are living, as we go about doing something else, something deliberate and IMPORTANT.

There’s nothing wrong with intentional, but I couldn’t have made this lovely sculpture on purpose.  I wouldn’t have dared.  It would be too bold to imagine that all the handkerchiefs needed was each other.  Forces required by many spells to manifest their magic – water, heat, time and stirring –  freed their spirit.  And I am free, too, simply to say, “Oh, aren’t they sort of lovely, just like they are?”

At some point, maybe I just have to let go of the idea that after things go wrong, they get better.  For example, as soon as I paid off my car loan (last Tuesday), my philosopher mechanics discovered my power steering pump was seeping (last Saturday).  We can repair the pump, but too much fixing is a losing game on a car which has accumulated 100,000 miles in 3 years (over 187K last oil change).  So now I can add car shopping to my list of things I can’t avoid doing.  It is a First-World problem to be sure, but even a month or two without the car payment would have helped me bounce back from my rent increase, and my student loan payment being raised (federal law requires it to be large enough to actually pay it off during the term of the loan – imagine that?)

I know it is boring to read about my dollars and cents, and why would anyone but me care?  But you know, this is really the day to day of my life lately.  A little window seems to open somewhere, but it slams down on my fingers when I try to climb out.  The karmic boomerangs seem to have come so swiftly in the past year or so, I am starting to question why I keep standing up, only to get clocked in the head by the rotating blade.

It’s only fair, though, to question the other side of the coin as well.  What if these events are gnawing away at nothing but my fantasy of how things are supposed to work out?  What if the irritants and anxieties are only flowing along with the largeness of life that I am part of?  What if nothing works out, but everything goes along as it is?  Where am I then?

The Japanese Maple has been here quite a bit longer than Peet’s Coffee.  Its star shaped leaves harmonize so softly with water meandering through a twisted, old branch  – rustle, trickle, rustle, trickle – that their duet is almost imperceptible.   Pedestrians can easily stroll the covered sidewalk of this old-school strip mall (circa 1970 or earlier),  past Beauty Salon and Hair Cuts and Dean’s Shoe Repair, without noticing the sound of a stream in the background or a gentle green rattle overhead.

As the wind moves the maple leaves, their shadows twinkle on the concrete, multiplying the effect of starlight.  The water shines as it runs it’s looping course through the crevices of the log.  Barely discernible against the grey and brown wood, sparrows twitch their feathers in the water’s cooling surface, pecking for gnats and pebbles just below.

Hopping through the sparking shadows, the sparrows are in charge here.  Nothing bad has ever happened to them in their enchanted 100 square foot forest, where humans spill crumbs not merely daily but hourly, and the shady ground beneath the ferns and impatiens yields all sorts of crawling morsels.  They hunt unchallenged among the stainless steel legs of patio chairs and tables, then disappear back to their watering hole for another dip in the stream.

A ruffian sparrow lands on the steel tension fence line a few feet away,  twisting his head to size me up.  His feathers, the color of wood and concrete, begin to rise, inflating his form until he is as round as a rock.  After a moment, he shakes, deflating back to his proper shape.  Completely at ease, he descends from the fence into the shadows at my feet, looking for something worth eating.  Finding nothing there to interest him, he moves onward to more promising ground.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

A week or so before the sunflowers bloomed, friend Liz and I drove out to check on them.  It was Sunday around 6:30 – kind of late for two old ladies like us.  The sky hung with thick, fast moving clouds, black and rainy one minute, stark sunshiny the next.  “Do you still want to go?”  Liz said when I called her.  “I guess,”  I said.  “You never know.  It might clear up.”  “Ok.  I’ll meet you there.”

The rain came in bursts, the way it does in the summer, as I drove the county road that follows the no-mans land where Madison has yet to conquer the dwindling farm fields and small, muddy lakes.  The towering clouds kept moving, and the distance between them grew wider, with more and more sun bursts as well.  When we climbed the hill, Liz and I saw we were too early for sunflowers.  Their green blossom heads still curled under, asleep at the top their rapidly growing stalks, not a glimmer of yellow in sight.  The Queen Anne’s Lace following the edge of the field, though, sparkled with the prisms of countless raindrops captured in their flowers.  We walked down the path, facing the sun, surrounded by diamonds of sunshine and white.

There was nothing to say.  We knew what it meant.  Things had cleared up, after all.

Summer is skibbling away.
All her tiny green grasshoppers hide like seeds on the ground,
invisible until they leap forward
or land on your arm,
and you can’t help but wonder
how they got here
and where they will arrive to finally –
probably the gullet of that bird
so prettily singing to others:
“Stay out of my field, leave the tender
grasshoppers I am keeping for myself
and my kin.  These right here
belong to me until winter’s sun
is rising, and I have moved on.”