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Life Management

Bricks in a Curve, Tamarind, and a Velveteen Couch

By

Dear—

I woke early this morning, to welcome a mason who is taking apart (and hopefully putting back together) my front stair, which is a lovely but complicated brick arrangement with a slate top that is so heavy it took three men to lift it. As you might imagine, the pounding I am just now listening to is not quite conducive to writing to you.

But this week I am trying to remember my own advice about writing with the ingredients at hand. A crumbling step, new bricks stacked in a curve waiting to be placed and mortared, strawberry plants I tried to keep from underfoot (but am not confident will survive the day’s work), and a life that feels like it has no space: these are what I have at hand.

Last night I sat right where I am sitting now, on the muted brass-colored velveteen couch, which conjures up wishes about having my own velveteen rabbit worn with love, but the couch is not all too comfortable. My older daughter wrote a poem about it, in fact, that begins “I love my couch! It’s like a wall.”

Sitting here with my younger daughter last night, on the velveteen couch, we had just listened to a draft podcast of my couch-poem daughter talking to the people at WNDYR about work and legacies and so forth. We were mildly amused that a young woman who illustrated a bedrock story of women and freedom had told the interviewers she wanted to leave the next generation with these skills: cooking and sewing. You could almost, almost hear the interviewer fall off her chair. This was not an answer anyone probably expected from a “Gen Z guest.”

I have to admit I hadn’t expected that answer either, Dear. And I also thought all the podcast listeners would suspect I had spent my days simply schooling my daughters in domesticity. How quaint, I could just hear them thinking, in a world where legacy is supposed to be about saving the world with the next big tech solution.

Outside, the pounding has tuned itself to a more fine sound of chiseling, though I’ll tell you it isn’t any less distracting, as it goes. Saving a woman’s step is no easy job. And it’s not a quiet endeavor, either.

On the wood and glass table beside me is my morning tea. A ceylon from Sri Lanka that is so strong I can’t drink it after noontime. I learned this the hard way several nights ago, as I lay awake into the wee hours, wondering what my legacy would be. I told someone recently, and maybe this will surprise you, that even though I have “tech skills” I could put to use for financial gain, I just really want to cook for the people I love and bring beautiful work to light. That is all.

Before I sat on the couch with my younger daughter last night, I had cooked an evening meal of either Lebanese or Persian or Moroccan lentils and rice (we aren’t sure, as the cookbook is a fusion of the three). I am embarking on something I’m calling Morocco in May, and food is one of the centers of the experience. The rice was actually supposed to be bulgar, but I had none on hand. And, besides, my older daughter has recently decided to try going wheat-free. The recipe called for three red onions that I later decided must have been for sweetness. I had used up my last red onion the previous night, so two shallots and a yellow onion had to stand in. Next time, if red onions are scarce, I’ll add a half teaspoon of sugar to strike a better balance. I did happen to have tamarind paste in a jar. Tamarind, I rediscovered, is smoky sour (thus the need for a balancing sweetness). Since I actually had a bit of this molasses-black substance, I used it instead of lemon, which was the alternative for a kitchen that might not have a legacy of spices and colorful ingredients from around the world.

I’ve been thinking that whenever I have traveled, there are two things I look for: beautiful buildings and beautiful food. My younger daughter looks for beautiful clothing. She has always had a fascination with designing it and has recently taken to teaching herself to sew lavish or eclectic creations using fabrics and notions she gathers from the most surprising places. Etsy is her favorite haunt. As is the old trunk up in the attic. Poshmark and Depop are a close third. One day, for a Gish challenge, she made a pair of patchwork overalls from a dress I wore years and years ago, plus pieces of old jeans, and antique lace that was my grandmother’s. My girl looks lovely in the self-fashioned outfit. It’s adorable and totally unique.

At the door, there has just been knocking. The men outside want to power up a machine they are using to cut the bricks. As I told you, fixing a woman’s step is no easy job. Mine? Even less so. The stair height, if it is to fit with the other two, requires one line of bricks to be cut in half. Who knew that brick-cutting was a thing? I did not.

My ceylon is half gone now. The rest is in need of reheating. A lone cardamom waits at the bottom of the teacup. Did you know you can use a cardamom several times over and it will still give quite the burst of flavor and fragrance to your tea? It will.

“As my legacy, I would give people communication and mediation skills,” says my younger daughter. “Empathy, too.” She and I then remember the first (and only, to date) interview she had with a woman who did not seem to think she’d be capable of handling a big crowd of rowdy kids at a local theater group. “You’re quiet and gentle. I think she underestimated you,” I say. “I think she underestimated what kids need,” my daughter returns. Then she shares a story of being with a child who told her some secret sadness on the side, at the end of a busy day at the school where she once volunteered. At some point, amidst all this talk of skills and interviews and legacy, my daughter tells me, “I loved that food tonight, Mommy.”

I loved it too. The depth and heart of it. The mix of flavors. The gentle collision of history with my unique kitchen. The way it has given my daughter something she wants to bring to this velveteen couch.

Outside, the pounding has stopped. There’s a knock at the door. Rain has begun to fall. I can see that the step is put together afresh, but now it is wrapped in plastic. So I cannot, as yet, see the total result.

And now I am thinking of you, Dear—. I don’t know what you need, but if I could, I would cook and sew it for you. If you needed me to build you a stair, I might need to learn a new trick or two. A curve of bricks, the depth of tamarind, a little velveteen, I would use whatever I could to give you space for your sadness or your joy. And remember, when you’re ready, I’ve got cardamom for you, too.

As always,

L.L.

Wineberries, Journalists, and Jasmine Tea

By

Dear—,

It’s been a while, I know, and you are patient with me.

This morning I have made you a little dew pot of jasmine tea. I am not sure why this tiny periwinkle pot is called with such a fanciful name, but I like it so. Have you ever held a teapot that fits perfectly in your two hands? This one does. And its smoothness makes you feel that all is well with the world, and always shall be.

I had forgotten about the consolation of wineberries. And of making a date with myself. Until yesterday.

Do you have children? I do. And they are no longer young, but they are not yet old. In the way, I mean, of somehow looking at you and understanding you have feelings too. Well, sometimes they do, very much. But sometimes they very much don’t. Yesterday was one of those days.

I went on a date by myself, because the wineberries are in fruit. Wineberries, I told a friend recently, when I wrote a little note one lazy Sunday afternoon, could save the world.

Yesterday I had also read this article I really liked, about a woman who mostly gave up being a journalist to mostly be a farmer. Apparently this is a thing now. To exchange our bottled-up indoor, techie existences for the solace of earth.

I’m not giving up my indoor existence anytime soon, but I do (mostly) have a healthy outdoor existence as well. Especially when the berries come.

Starting in late spring, it’s red currants. As the days grow warmer, they give over to blueberries and bush cherries. And then I’ve got my hands full (rather literally) for weeks on end. Just when my hands seem to be approaching idleness, the wineberries come, too. And, if I remember to go find them, I cannot empty the world of their abundance. There are simply more than anyone could ever need. More than the birds and the deer and, if there were bears here, more than the bears could eat, too. Wineberries, like I said, could save the world.

The article I liked, about the journalist farmer woman, had this phrase in it about wrestling food from the earth. I believe that’s what she’s doing. It’s what many farmers have set out to do, in growing exactly what people want when they want it. This I understand. And I depend on it.

But wineberries need no wrestling.

There is an Adirondack chair here on the side porch with me. I am putting my feet on its seat. My jasmine tea, in fine china rimmed with navy and gold is on one arm of the chair. A small white bowl (not fine china—perhaps stoneware?) is on the other arm, and it is filled with wineberries. Chilled. Yesterday, when I picked them, they were warm beneath my fingertips. So very warm. And the day itself was almost unbearably hot, except that there is a special consolation to walking through endless fields and beneath the cool of trees, in search of the best set of bushes with the biggest, sweetest berries, minus the poison ivy that sometimes likes to grow beside this edible treasure.

Wineberries look like jewels. Red, and almost lighted from within. Like fire opals. Or those glowing emeralds that people used to think were animated with a god at their heart. And no matter what has gotten you down on any given day, wineberries will cheer you with their jeweled sweetness. They simply will.

The other thing I read yesterday was a poem I decided not to acquire for Every Day Poems, because I thought that even though the poet had a good point about language being a chalice for grief, I also thought that her idea about nature being indifferent meant this: she was looking at Gerber daisies on a day when maybe it would have been best to seek the consolation of wineberries. And, if the wineberries were past season, or not yet in season, she would have felt instinctively that nature itself was a little sad, with those red arcs of wineberry canes, all thorns and prickles, not currently giving their gift to the world.

There are days when I really feel all will not be well with the world. And days when my own little world most definitely feels tilted and turned. So there is this: when the wineberries are in fruit, I must remember them. These treasures that grow in sun or shade, with no wrestling required. (Though, Dear—, you must take care for the thorns. They do ask of you care.)

So whatever you are facing today, Dear—, whatever kind of day you are having, I wish you wineberries, maybe even graced with morning dew. They are the best consolation. Or, they can be simply a gift to crown your day, if your day is already going well. And, if you’ve never had a wineberry, I wish you a future where you will.

As always,

L.L.

On Questions, Moss, and Domino Towns

By

Dear—,

Let me say, this is what happens when you tell your older daughter you are “going bookless.” She is 21 now, and she gets the verbal joke, and she gives you a sweetly wry smile. She also eyes you with a look on her face that is part fascination (“What in the world is my mother up to now?”) and part doubt (“How long will this last? How will if affect you and me? What happens now that we won’t be bonding through the shared identity of ‘avid reader’? Is the world falling out from under our feet?”).

This is only the beginning of the questions, because you yourself now have them, too. Some of these mirror your daughter’s: questions of timing and identity and loss. But some are more along the lines of, well, moss.

Before you decided to go bookless, you had planned to pick up Kimmerer’s thoughts on the subject. If they were anywhere near as good as Braiding Sweetgrass, you knew you’d be in for a lyrical treat, not to mention some delightful learning about this soft volunteer that has taken up residence between the bricks on your front steps, as well as outside the curve of your little herb garden, just next to the shells you’ve collected from various ocean- and riversides over various years.

Will going bookless mean going mossless? You do not want that. But you also decided to swear off reading for a while, so here you are, wondering what will happen next.

Your other daughter has questions, too. Do audiobooks count? Can you keep listening to Harry Potter, which you are only halfway through? She invokes the weight of promises and says that regardless of whether an audiobook counts as “reading,” you might need to keep listening, come the day when you start driving her to college again on an almost daily basis and are alone in the car on the way back, which is the perfect time to re-invite Harry to your world. This is only weeks away, and you don’t know yet. Do audiobooks count? Will you keep your promise to her? What happens when promises collide? Technically, you’ve promised no one you’ll go bookless, but your own soul has asked for it, at least until your own soul stops asking for it. Conundrum. Already.

On Sunday, you declared it your official Day 1, even though you stopped reading in December. It felt like a New Year’s thing to do. It felt like a challenge. Or maybe an invitation. You love a good chance to become something unexpected, to test the limits of your comfort without careening down mountains or jumping out of airplanes. Identity runs deep. It might look like nothing to the outside world for you to go bookless. But books are who you are. They are what you do. They are how you start revolutions.

And they can give you the secrets of moss.

But now it is Sunday, and you don’t have Kimmerer, and you don’t know how long until you can rely on her, and you suddenly realize how books have inserted themselves between you and the world. Plato (Socrates?) was right. In some significant way, you lost something when you began to rely on the book, above all, to touch your world.

On Day 2, you played dominoes with your daughters. You never played dominoes before, but you’d given them for Christmas, and you couldn’t read books, and you weren’t (yet) in the mood to play the piano (you started this on Day 1, because you had so much bookless time on your hands), so you emptied the dominoes box and learned how to do more than topple and stack these black-dotted ivory bricks.

After you finished playing dominoes, you made a domino town with them, because the other thing you did on Sunday was begin to sketch, starting with moss you plucked from near the herb garden, and now you wanted to sketch the dominoes and it seemed whimsical to organize them into a town in order to do so. Just like on Sunday, when you drew moss together, your older daughter went off on Day 2 to get her sketch book, and, in silence, you drew dominoes. She drew the box. You drew the town, including the little moss “tree” you made when you put a few stems into a Tabasco sauce cap on Sunday.

Sunday is when the other questions started: the ones about moss. It looks, remarkably, like seaweed. Are the two forms of vegetation related? You wondered. And, when the few little leaves on the—What are they called? Stalks? Spindles? Stems?—began, almost immediately, to shrivel, you placed their ends in the miniature Tabasco sauce cap and sprinkled the tiny greens with water. You got to watch the leaves literally move, as they revived themselves by drinking from the cap.

From there, it was probably inevitable that you’d go searching for a magnifying glass, but you could not find one. A jaunt to the basement produced, instead, the microscope that you and your daughter used to use to explore the world together while you were home educating her so long ago. This was further than you’d meant to go. Now you were looking through special glass, at jeweled kingdoms. You were peering inside walls you hadn’t expected to peer into. You and your daughter did this together, and you sketched together (hers the more colorful and beautiful), and you laughed together.

I wanted to tell you, Dear—, this is what happens when you tell your daughter you are going bookless. And then you do. And the world comes to you. I am not recommending you do what I’ve done. But, if you take a break from books, say, for a week, I wish you the world, rich as a page beneath your fingers.

As always,

L.L.

P.S.: I promise I will share some of my Bookless sketches and other photos with you in my newsletter. Then you can join the journey with me, to domino towns with Tabasco moss trees.

Almonds, Pizza Dough, and the Cessation of Reading

By

Dear—,

I am going to stop reading.

I tried this out in December. Books I’d put on hold at the library, then stocked here for the holidays, went back today, unread. I am going to make a thing of not reading, because of the almonds.

Once, I almost died from almonds. Okay, that’s a little dramatic. I could breathe. But my hands swelled so much that I had to take off rings to save my fingers.

Another once: Very distinctly, a few years back, the thought came into my head—”Reading will save your life.” In some (dramatic) ways it probably has.

Today, I made pizza dough, which I have not done in a long, long time. It was something to do with Sandra’s Together post, about cooking. But it was also something to do with my walk, on which I thought about the almonds and how good they were until they weren’t good.

Reading is good. It is so good that I ask us to emphasize it at Tweetspeak. A lot.

But reading has become almonds for me, in its way. What happened with the almonds was this: I was enjoying, immensely, a stint with raw food “cooking” and there were all these delicious recipes for almond dips. I made them and ate them. And ate them. And ate them.

Then, one day, I was suddenly removing rings to save my fingers. For three years after that, I went without a single almond, until I got brave and began to introduce them little by little back into my life.

For the better part of this year, I’ve been trying to figure why I am so overwhelmed. There are, doubtless, multiple reasons, but it has suddenly occurred to me that reading is one of those reasons. After all, I start revolutions out of my reading notebook, and revolutions are costly endeavors, even if they are inspiring and fun.

It’s more than that, though. Reading fills my mind with ideas upon ideas upon ideas.

I recently put all my ideas and to-do’s onto a condensed list, categorized by home, business, etc. The condensed list filled eight pages. Each item on the list has its own set of associated ideas and to-do’s. Almonds! (I can almost feel the ideas and to-do’s cutting off my mind’s circulation.)

Then there’s the pizza dough. So many delicious things sit by unexperienced when my life is filled to the brim with ideas and no time to process them or bring them to life. I just don’t have the energy for putting my hands to things. But I also don’t have the energy to live inside my own head with all those unprocessed ideas and to-do’s. So there I am: no pizza dough days and not much progress on my ideas and to-do’s, either.

Throughout December, I did not read any books (except, which surprised me, a book I’d been needing to edit and hadn’t been able to approach yet). I did read poetry. And I will continue to do that, because poems are more like experiences and less like idea-generators. I will probably follow along with the Tweetspeak book club titles, too. Of course I will read the posts at Tweetspeak and participate in the community commenting. I might not read much email. I might not read articles, whether online or in magazines I have at home. I can’t say how long this will last, though I have a vision for a somewhat alternate life for the coming year.

One of our 2019 themes at Tweetspeak is going to be the Renaissance, as in the time period, but also as in being a “renaissance person.”

Books, oddly, keep me out of the loop from other parts of life—it’s not just that I don’t clean out my cabinets (I did this over the holidays, in lieu of reading!); I also don’t do other things, the way a good renaissance woman (or man) would. Music, writing, art, math, sport, and such, sit by unexperienced, along with that pizza dough I’ve been telling you about. (It was delicious, by the way.)

Now, when Megan asks for our reading lists each month, I am not going to have much to say, unless she allows comments such as, “For the past few weeks, I read the world through my fingertips: pizza dough, mosses on my walks, pastels on paper, piano keys and flute.”

Is this its own kind of revolution? Maybe. Though I don’t feel the need to plan it out or make it happen or create even one associated to-do list.

But how about you, Dear—, is there something that has become almonds in your life? If so, I wish for you the wisdom to discern that and put it aside… if that’s what you want to do, if only for a while. Almonds are good, sure, (I had some roasted ones today), but so is pizza dough, homemade. And I do so want that for you.

As always,

L.L.

 

Pumpkin Blooms, The Leaf on the Glass, and the Most Delightful Toy Store

By

Dear—,

I am writing to you again from the retreat center perched on the edge of the Hudson River. On the glass, between me and the empty courtyard, is a single leaf that is tipping and tilting in the wind. I’m not sure how it’s attached there. Possibly by the slenderest thread of an industrious spider who wanted a little red roof above her spinning.

From where I sit, I cannot see the river. The river which, if I had to choose something to signify the most contented pulse of my life, is running on under a silver sky, past towns and bridges, out, eventually, past New York City, and to the Atlantic.

Beside me, there are the funniest little pumpkin-gourds, made of paper, I think, sporting autumn blooms—silk nasturtium, eucalyptus, golden rod, and something that resembles a Gerber daisy.

Do you ever feel tired, Dear—? As if you are that leaf, red with hope, but only attached to the glass by the slenderest thread? Sometimes, these days, this is how I feel.

Today, I saw a quote from Henry David Thoreau, from Walden Pond. “I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side,” said he. And I asked myself, what is it my feet wear a path to that is as life-giving as that pond? I am not sure.

Last week, I made my way downtown with my girls and we had tea at a little place we’d never been to before. Tea and scones. The scones were sugared, the big crystally kind of sugar, and very buttery. One had blueberries. Another had pumpkin seeds, dried cranberries, and the tiniest chocolate chips. There was a woman at a circular table, meeting with artists and writers, the whole time we were there. I was happy it was she who was meeting with artists and writers, not me. I was happy to simply be drinking Paris tea, which I’d taught the barista to decaf (just dip the bag in for 30 seconds, discard the water, then steep for the requisite five). I was happy to be with my girls.

When we left the tea place, I was ready to simply go home, but my 19-year-old begged: “Let’s take a walk.”

Always, these days, I have too many cares. I told her no. But she persisted. “Okay, just to the end of the block,” I said.

We passed a plumbing store. All the fanciest tubs and sinks and showerheads. Beautiful. But somehow, these too just made me tired, thinking on renovations and change. A few stores down and my girl suddenly exclaimed, “A toy store!”

And so it was.

Inside were the most beautiful toys I have ever seen. Wooden toys. Colorful puzzles. A unicorn notebook (which I went back and bought a few days later). My girl bought herself a stuffed animal. Frivolous? It was so soft. So needless. We took the newly-named “Rosie” home.

I ask myself, what is it, besides my many cares, that I want my feet to wear a path to each day, each week, each year? I don’t have answers. But I am thinking about the most delightful toy store, about the river, about my girls, the leaf on the glass, and the pumpkin blooms. And I am wishing, for you, Dear—something delightful today. And answers if you need them. Or, just a question to begin you on your way.

As always,

L.L.

Oolong Pearl, Waterfall Baths, and Pools of Peace

By

Dear——,

It is a singular strangeness when a writer cannot write. I’ve been feeling singular (or strange) all summer. It’s not that I’ve written nothing at all. But there’s a lack of significant momentum. So I go nowhere, again and again. Yesterday I decided that is okay.

And, last week, I decided to coach myself. Beginning with emptying. Once, to a friend on Facebook, I called this process “making pools of peace” and she told me this image inspired her (enough to begin creating her own).

I’ve been considering my absolute love of water lately. I’ve been considering the need for pools of peace. There is the bath, and that is worth something. In fact, if I were more ambitious (or more willing to write about bath time), I would even propose a book to a publisher out there somewhere. I would travel the world to experience peace in tubs like the one I recently saw in a glitzy travel magazine. It overlooked Lake Luzerne, from the privacy of a hotel room perched high above that body of water. The window over the tub was from edge to ceiling—a full view of exquisite blue and mountains and serene clouds. The tub was square and large and reminded me of a Roman bath, except it was private (the way I like my baths to be), and it had its very own waterfall, which I thought might be worth traveling the world for (and writing a book about, along with many other baths I might find here and there and everywhere).

But, I am going nowhere. Which is, I understand, an actual choice.

So I look into my tea. Another, strangely to me, I just realized, body of water. Maybe this is part of why I love it every single day. The tiniest pool of peace, I can hold right in my hand. Peace with names like silver tips jasmine and oolong pearl, thé à l’opéra and, when I am feeling like a long-ago memory of Harrod’s, earl grey.

What they forget to tell you is that coming by a pool of peace is not always a peaceful process. I discovered this yet again (for I really do know this and have for a long time), when I engaged in my coaching assignment: emptying. I have been creating pools of peace around the house, by emptying corners and misused bookcases and inexplicable proliferations of paper and goodness knows what else across my lovely red oak floors.

My “nesting” daughter cried when she came home and saw the result of my hard and (for me) needful work. A waterfall’s worth of tears. And my shirt and shoulders were bathed with her sorrow over my pools of peace.

Yes, they forget to tell you this: one woman’s peace does not always come easily where another is involved.

Today I have been in my room all morning, looking out at the river, with my jasmine tea in hand. The sky is blue, the mountains bluer. Maybe later I will take a bath. Last night my daughter presented me with two kinds of ice cream she bought with her own money. Little vanilla and chocolate peace offerings. It was something she could do, and so she did it.

For peace comes dropping slow…

That’s William Butler Yeats, whose “Innisfree” I memorized earlier this summer, when my “nesting” daughter had to face a fear that’s been lifelong: the fear of doctors and hospitals. “Tell me the poem, Mommy,” she’d said, as she walked laps and laps around the recovery area after the absolute terror of a delicate surgery had been faced, and peace, slowly, returned to her world.

I will arise and go now…

Laps. Water. Pools. Tea. A morning overlooking blue. Poetry. Emptying. It’s all a-swirl in my mind, but I can feel the promise dropping from the veils of the morning:

And I shall have some peace there…

Dear––, in your own morning space today (which has now given over to afternoon), I wish you pools of peace, a kind of Innisfree, with its nine bean rows and its midnight all a glimmer and its noon a purple glow. Of course I hope that coming by it won’t require a waterfall’s worth of tears. But, if it does, then I wish you tea, as well. Silver tips, jasmine, pearl, or whatever feels most comforting when you hold it in your hands and close (or open) your eyes to the blue or grey outside your window. I hope you feel it—peace—in the deep heart’s core.

As always,

L.L.

On Civil War, Windows, and Underground Parking Garages

By

Dear      ,

This morning I read about the Civil War—and the excavation of the Boston Common to build an underground parking garage. Those two go together because the Common is the site of a monument that remembers a regiment from, yes, the Civil War.

For the past few days I have been thinking about war of a certain kind. The trampling of tenderness. I venture to call this abuse.

When you grow up like I did, under the roof of an abusive person, you learn the signs, but still—it is hard to keep your heart intact. At the window, you watch for his return, and you wonder…today, will my heart survive? You learn, from having put your heart out there and watching someone delight in the steady march and tread over it—this is a critical question, this one about your heart.

When they excavated the Common to build the garage, apparently they propped up the monument. Remembrance was atilt. In the article I read this morning, in which a poem is shared that says, “Their monument sticks like a fishbone/in the city’s throat,” I’m not sure what question the poet was asking in his poem. (All good poems, in my opinion, ask a question in their way.) If it had been my poem, I think I would pose: Can we survive if we forget this?—it hurts our hearts to hate.

I am convinced that there are (at least) three ways people may move into the world when they live through abuse. There are choices, and it’s not clear to me how we make them. It seems that either we ourselves become a trampler, or we learn to keep our hearts hidden (even in what are safer contexts, later on), or we decipher the secret, somehow, of how to keep our hearts intact and share them wisely.

Recently, I guided my daughters through a difficult conversation. In this micro-moment of civil war, there were choices arising every few minutes. Trample? Hide? Truly, they wanted neither, but they were in need of tools to guide them in this vulnerable and delicate tussle of their hearts. Afterwards, they joked that I had performed the service of conflict resolution. It was amusing, to all of us. But it is not how I picture what happened.

When children, then young adults, are not given the tools of communication navigation, especially to guide them through tender moments where their hearts are exposed, they can grow up to be abusers, or elaborate manipulators. I call this heat without light. Apparently, this is possible. To have heat without light. But I don’t mean to get literal on this count. What I do mean is that the heart is always firing, desiring. And, in the absence of knowing how to handle that fire, we get all heat and no light.

There were times, when my girls were young, that I did not know how to handle the fire. My heart was hurting, or tired. Maybe I said something meanly off-the-cuff to one of them. On rare occasion, I yelled. Either way, the moment asked of me this: repair. It occurred to me one day that it wasn’t good enough to simply apologize to one girl, had the other been there to witness the treading. On that day, I made a decision: I would always apologize to both girls if they’d both been in the room. Because, this too is true—not only does it hurt our hearts to hate…it hurts our hearts to see others hatefully mistreated. The hearts of two girls were therefore in need of being attended to: the one who had suffered, and the one who had witnessed the suffering.

Though I see no problem with conflict itself (it’s simply an invitation to have a difficult conversation), I believe that civil wars and raging fires—of many kinds—are avoidable. I am not sure they are avoidable when they’re agitated by those who are ahead of us in age and authority, those who aim to generate heat but no light.

Still, I remember those days at the window. And the choices they presented my heart over time—trample, hide, or learn?

Wherever you are today, Dear——, whatever window you are looking through, your heart firing within you, I wish you the power to choose the latter. I, for one, promise to stand beside you—to learn, and invite the light.

As Always,

L.L.

What a Chair Supposes

By

Dear      ,

I wish you were here. The wild roses are in bloom! Yes, a cascade of white blooms has just arrived, maybe as late as yesterday.

And there’s a dark brown Adirondack chair waiting, by the little herb garden. I bought it, because a chair supposes.

It was the catalogs that taught me this. (I’ve somehow got back on their lists and need to get off, but I’ve been reticent now that I understand how I can look at them to find you.)

When you open a catalog like Grandinroad’s, you will see what I mean. These pages create convivial worlds, with chairs. Couches, too. And the arrangement of four plates, or six. A pair of goblets. A table, set out for twelve.

I have given some serious thought to the couches, the plates, some floral rugs, even a fire pit.

But the only thing I have bought was the brown Adirondack chair, and not at Grandinroad, but rather at the local hardware store, where I also asked for a scythe and promised it was not for role playing the grim reaper. (I just like to be quiet when I deal with my landscape. It feels more like a conversation. Though, admittedly, the rather golf-club-like tool I bought in lieu of an absent scythe, is a bit… vigorous! I feel very sporty wielding it to shape the river of violets that have taken over beneath the pear trees, where, with my swing, I am turning them into something more like a lake of violets with edges and inlets. Plus, it makes the fact that I took golf quite long ago, in my college days, feel like it was worth it after all, so many years hence. The teacher of that class, by the way, once owned this house. I wrote a tender poem about him and it inhabits the Winter section in my first poetry book; it pictured him on the blue couch that used to be in this living room, before the room was mine to care for. It was a sad poem, but he was happy I’d come to see him, and I still have the poem, though the couch is long gone.

The reason I settled on the chair (and only the chair), at least for now, is that I know I am a person who would like to simply have good conversation about things that matter, while you drink a cup of jasmine tea I make for you. The little herb garden has flowers this year, which make a very welcoming backdrop for talk and laughter. I thought to put dark pink begonias and white-pink geraniums between the rosemary, sage, and Greek oregano. To the side, beyond the boundaries, I planted lavender and lemon balm. Such a fragrant, lightly-colorful setting.

Here is something I didn’t expect. Sometimes this new chair makes me feel alone. But sometimes, maybe more often than the former effect, it cheers me beyond all reason. After all, a chair supposes. Especially an Adirondack chair. It leans back and says, “Come, have tea with me,” and this makes me think I need to extend an actual invitation. At the thought of this, I picture you there, in the chair. We are happy. We are having meaningful conversation. The currants and the blueberries are looking on, very full. Indeed, the new green pearls of translucent currants are bringing the bushes all the way down to touch the grass, they are so plentiful this spring.

So I’m thinking now that maybe there is something you might want to set out—something that supposes. Two goblets. One chair. A table for eight. I wish that for you today—an Imagination born of simple things you arrange, and then I hope these simple things will encourage you to invite someone (or something) meaningful into your life. Here’s to a cascade of fragrance and fullness—like wild roses, and blueberries clustered above the ferns.

As Always,

L.L.