Stomach Flu

A nasty stomach virus ripped through our home this week, upending routines, temporarily transforming relationships, humbling each of us by reminding us how vulnerable we are, not only in our bodies, but in our illusion of control over our lives. The fiercely private and independent teenager, for a few miserable hours, is reduced almost to her helpless infant self, weak, utterly dependent on and grateful for the care of her usually unbearable parents. Those who cannot attend school, but most mornings resent rising in darkness, want nothing more than to board the early bus and go; those fortunate healthy ones who can attend school, who unfailingly want to be present and engaged at a desk among peers, long to stay home and bear witness to the mortification of the flesh. All who have not yet been brought down wonder if and when their turn will come, if that twinge of headache or fleeting off taste in the mouth marks the onset of the ordeal.

I, mother and caretaker, am left—loads of laundry, wholesale applications of disinfectant, and many urgent fetchings and carryings later—mourning the fleeting glimpse of a earlier bond, an unconscious and unmediated acknowledgement of the terrifying interdependence and overwhelming love between parent and child.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

Pepper

I sew on the button eyes and Pepper sparks to life. She looks at me with silent anticipation. She knows her purpose. Whom will she comfort in the days ahead?

When I give Pepper an honest once-over, I notice her legs are too skinny and her torso bulges in all the wrong places. She’s not exactly symmetrical. Nonetheless, she is comfortable in her own skin. She is ready to serve, to love, to listen. I admire her centeredness even though her head isn’t on straight.

I can learn from Pepper, the sock monkey, a gift for my 2-year-old niece. Pepper doesn’t let her imperfections interfere. She goes on being herself –squeezable and one-of-a-kind.

Steph W, for the Poplar Grove Muse

If You Haven't Got Anything Nice To Say...Say What's On Your Mind Anyway

I’m a little hard pressed today to say much since I’m in one of those skin crawling, anxious/irritable moods. If I were three, I’d be whining or I might stomp around. My throat would ache. I might break something that isn’t mine just because I feel like it. Or shave off my eyebrows. Probably best to put myself into a self-imposed time- out until I snap out of it. A week ago I was in a nice juicy flow, feeling generally strong and calm and grateful for everyone and everything in my life. Today I want to break glass. Maybe it’s Menopause (sung to the commercial jingle tune of Maybe It’s Maybelline).

My irritation is partly barometric. In Bloomington, Indiana, they called off school last Friday in response to warnings that the storm of the century would slam in to us. It missed— barely brushing us with its frosty fingers. A couple of inches fell twelve hours later than predicted. But the whole town stopped for a day. Waiting. And so things were put off. We lost our good sense to get our work done. Hours were lost to television weather reports, walks across the room to see if anything was freezing on the car windows. Getting up. Sitting down again. And by the time it did start to stick, it was time to venture forth to a show I didn’t have tickets for. I did NOT want to mobilize.

But venture forth I did. Not without some low pressure anxiety on my part and gentle prodding and an offer to drive from my friend, Carol. She felt optimistic and fearless about going out in a wintery mess. My impulse was to continue to sit. To wait. To wave a feeble flag for nothingness and not-doingness. I’m ashamed of this, given that I truly wasn’t engrossed in any other meaningful activity in my house-bound state and given what I might have missed and the fact that my husband and some very good friends were IN the show… but it’s the truth.

The show, (Woody Guthrie’s, American Song), made me momentarily happy. Thank you Carol. Thank you cast and crew. I watched family and friends pick guitars,play and sing songs most of us have known most of our lives. Masses of folk showed up in spite of the weather. I felt the triumph of the community arriving for one another snowfall- be- damned. And inside the warm space of the music hall (ok, a church) I forgot that I’d spent the better part of the day completely disengaged from my self and others.

Maybe my tooth-grinding irritation is a purely self-indulgent perseveration on my own shame. I ask people so often to show up, to engage, to sing along even when they think everyone in the room is listening and they're sure they can’t sing. I've exposed my own resistance to being out in the world, my failure to walk my own talk. I’m showing my ass; exposing my limitations when it comes to showing up –particularly where crowds are concerned. It’s always been big work for me. Tiring. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve got issues with the "being seen" part. A big narcissistic piece of me still wants to hide behind my Mother’s skirts because I’m sure you’re all looking at me and I can’t really take it. Another part of me knows, on the cusp of my next changes and nearly 50, it’s not one bit about me. But old neuroses die hard.

Lots of us don’t want or enjoy the responsibility of showing up or taking the risks that engagement requires. Our culture sure isn’t picky about what it means to “engage”. Heck, engaging in the questions arising for me as I write this little essay are kicking my butt! I mean, how many of us sit for days in solitude waiting for our lives to take shape and become known to us? How many of us cannot even fathom the worlds we live in because we cannot fathom our own lives? How many of us cannot risk showing this vulnerability to others until life hands us something too big to bear alone. Even then...how many of us do? It’s sad. My guess is there are lots of us. And there are so many more of us for whom circumstances, weather systems, war and forces of nature offer no choice but to engage in the bloody work of survival alongside of others doing the very same thing.

I realize as I write this that the hard times Woody Guthrie’s music gave voice to, Great Depression, Dust Bowl Refugee Reality and the forced communities that sprang up along the railroad tracks, brought people together in unfortunate circumstances -- unintentionally, but necessarily they found ways to share their struggles in their own words. And then more intentionally, no? People’s Movements rise out of dust. They are living things, just as the words and songs and art that come out of them live. Did the songs lead the way or did they follow? All I know is that people have been singing about their hard traveled lives since the first poet songmaker decided to declare her first rose-fingered dawn after a storm, or cry out his loss, chant her gratitude, or trill a tender moment.

Today, the sun is shining and I can smell the earth trying to come back to life underneath the crusty white stuff. I want to embrace that promise of spring, but predictions tell us there’s another bunch of snow coming our way. I’ve got a day full of important meetings tomorrow that might be put off again due to the weather. As my life has become ever-more dependent on things happening on time in the right sequence, and as my already legendary tendency toward control and order has led me down a predictable path, the mere prospect of having to rearrange another day has me on edge. Mini-Me still grumbles knowing full well my struggles are the struggles of privilege. Mini-Me wants an unobstructed way. She wants to get her blasted work done and resents the distractions of being trapped inside a snow globe.

The grump in me recognizes not much good or productive or life-giving emerges from complaining, from laziness or self-imposed paralysis… but I do want to tip my hat to the kind of ordinary “hard travelin’” lots of ordinary folk do. For the sharing we manage on whatever level we manage it. And for the tolerance to accept the woes of our fellow humans along the way with compassion no matter the relative scale of the woe.

The image shown here was drawn from the University of Texas Ransom Center's Sanora Babb manuscript collection and the California Migrant Farm Workers Slide Collection (Discrete Collection 191) in the Photography Collection. The slide collection is comprised of 221 black-and-white 35mm slides in glass mounts, taken by Dorothy Babb, the sister of the American writer Sanora Babb.


Beth for the Poplar Grove Muse 2/8/10

“We move ahead into the vast unknown, metaphor by trembling metaphor.” Thomas Cleary

Lately, I have been thinking about walking to school when I was a child. We lived near the end of a long dead end street and to get to school I had to walk to the top and take a right and walk about three more blocks on some sidewalk which paralleled a busy neighborhood street. At age 5, the walk was interminable, now I could make it in 15 minutes, but at age five it seemed to me to take most of the morning. How my mother could trust that I was getting to school is beyond any memory I have. I suppose there were other kids who guided me and with whom I knew to keep up, but any real memory I have of that long walk is a remembrance of myself alone.

Kids did not get rides from their parents then and there was no bus for us, we were walkers and I had not yet mastered the two wheeled bike that sat patiently in the garage. We had plastic book bags with pink handles. No backpacks like they have now. This slow meandering unremembered walk of my very young youth is something I have been trying to conjure from my past. I was never afraid of the walk, I was only lazy and the thought of those miles in front of me to the school bored me to death. I was not even particularly aware of time. Was I ever late for school? Early? Who were the people that walked with me?

Walking that tiny stretch of neighborhood street became a constant in my youth. On warm summer evenings in high school, I slipped through the front door of my parents tiny ranch house to walk up and down, up and down the street, even at midnight. I was restless and full of ideas. I would walk and dream and write stories in my head to the beat of my own sneakered feet. I was oblivious to all but cars coming, when I would dodge bright headlights and make myself invisible while their owners passed, in a hurry to get home after late nights at the bars. I was not scared or unhappy, I was simply restless and wanted to move. I needed to fuel my late night imagination with cool air and stars. I wrote stories in my head. Vivid detailed fantasies of other lives I might lead or other people I might become.

Walking has been both myth and metaphor for me through the years. In college, on the shores of lake Michigan, I would come home after a night in the library, drop my backpack and begin to walk. Listening for the sounds of the lake reaching up over the rocky shore. Sorting through my day.

Walking for me in those earliest of years was never about physical exercise. It has been both flight and fantasy. It never occurred to me that I could walk for good health. It almost seemed to me that when I walked I was nobody, but that that was good. I could disappear from the folds of the earth for a few minutes. Capturing myself from above. Black stars, cool nights, and more than a thousand ideas to fuel me. I am sure the things that fueled me were about love. I had a hard time settling down to understand anything unless I was in the throes of unreciprocated love. When I had that excitement to hold onto, I walked and dreamed. It seemed love made me weightless and timeless and drifted with me through campus, lifted me up beyond the cold winds. These walks are the closest I have ever come to a lifelong dream of projecting myself out of body. The gift to look at myself from some astral plane—wings of angels tied to my back. I want an other’s perspective.

I have also been lucky to spend my professional career working on various college campuses. It is here near ivy covered walls and tree lined walk ways of Florida, Vermont and Indiana that I have felt most at home. Walking from one place to the next as I go from meeting to lunch to symposium. Enjoying the feel of swimming with youth as they make their ways through these beginnings of their adult life. I dream still. Not about love but about other things I love. My child, faraway places, a problem I am solving, how to fly, what to listen to if I should become invisible, who has the keys to the grail and how do I find it? Here, somewhere hidden in the brick and mortar of these holy places are my dreams. I enjoy especially coming to the campus after hours. When everyone has gone in and the place is silent. I am bothered by people who have created the boogeyman in places like this. Worries about dark spots and strangers. I am sorry they have to be out there and ruin our chances to experience the mysterious thrill of walking alone in these silent places: enjoying the ghosts that hang out between the stairwells and bronze plaques. Making us worry and install blue lights.

But still I walk to bring me comfort: stepping on cracks, greeting dogs, counting stairs, walking balanced on thin curbs, kicking the can, running my stick through a fence, watching for lost trinkets, enjoying the burst of buds in the spring and the green leaves of summer and the mantle of reds and oranges in the fall, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming...

Twinkle

In the dark and cold of January, I grow more reluctant each year to take down the Christmas tree. Our household long ago yielded to an artificial tree, since we travel most years; theoretically, we could leave it up all year, and we joke about doing it. Mid-month, however, I begin to feel somewhat foolish about leaving it in place, even as I mourn taking it down.

I love the pristine white glow of the lit tree in a dark room, having learned this reverence for light in northern darkness from my own mother, who learned it from hers, whose long-ago mother no doubt brought this love for light from even more northerly Europe. My older daughter and I bask in its halo of light for a few stolen moments each morning before she fades into the bleak chill for an early bus. My husband and I meet in the pool of light before turning in for bed.

Last week, the balance between clinging to the glow and embracing practicality tipped, and I took down the tree. Over the years, I have learned that the tasks of both putting up and dismantling the tree really fall to me, and have come to appreciate both phases of the task as an occasion for mindful meditation: unwinding the lights I bought at 14, which miraculously still work, I honor my small act of preparing for imagined future celebrations; wrapping and unwrapping each ornament made or purchased or gifted, I recall the grade school friend who made a clumsy heart pendant from salt dough, the family friend, now dead, who celebrated the birth of my youngest with a millennium globe, the kindergartner who glued her small photo to a shiny bell. I ponder how spectacular a tree filled with lights must have appeared centuries ago when humans first created this ritual.

It’s all packed away now, and this morning my child and I sat together, companionable in shadows, awaiting the incremental return of light into our days.

Mary for The Poplar Grove Muse

Warrior-Champion

I had a dream recently, the kind of dream that has me writing about it days later. It was an epic, adventure-style dream. My mother and I guided a tiny canoe on a vast ocean. We accompanied my niece on a dangerous journey. We were negotiating with the gods to keep my niece with us. We eventually won, or shall I say, the gods agreed with us.

What I find most interesting is that my dream-self placed my mother and me to each side of my niece. We were in the position of sentinels. While my sister, the niece’s mother, was missing as an active character in the dream, her place was well-known and respected. This dream was about being a champion for my niece.

My job was clear. I was at the front of the canoe, the warrior-champion. I was in a state of high alert, ready to defend and protect my niece. My mother, wise and strong, sat at the back. She steered and counseled.

The translation of this dream is literal for my role. It’s a nice variation of the maiden/mother/crone circle. Not all of us choose to give birth, but all of us can be warrior-champions for our maidens.

I think of my own maidenhood. I recall several warrior-champions and wise counselors, both male and female. I’m grateful my mother realized that a daughter needs these roles, and that she sometimes needs them from others.

In my present life, I’m struck by how WWF(a)C stands as champion for me. It creates the safe spaces I need. I can only imagine how powerful that would be for a young writer, and I’m grateful WWF(a)C has expanded to serve that population.

Here is what I will be writing for a few days: As a child, who were my champions? How did they help me? When were they missing? As an adult, do I still have these in my life? How can I find them when I need them? How can I be these things for myself? How can I best be a warrior-champion for my niece?

Stephanie, for the Poplar Grove Muse

Looking Up

The dogs made more racket than usual this morning. The sun had come up bright against the snow white world outside. They yapped and hollered at the trees in a greater frenzy than I’d heard in a while. Even my big dog, Tucker, not much of a barker any more, joined in with his “Hey”! “Hey There”. I threw on my coat to see what all the excitement was about.

I followed their gaze to a trio of Turkey Vultures perched high atop several next- door trees. The enormous birds did not loom from their perches in the familiar, cartoon-caricature-downward-survey-of-the-ground-image I associate with 1940's black and white Disney shorts. Instead, they faced away from the dogs and me, east to the newly-risen sun. Their wide wings were extended, bent just slightly. The first thing I thought of was a trio of Batmen planning a surprise attack. They were huge. Mannish to me. This spooky suggestion of dark power any way you looked at it, rattled me. Something seemed about to happen, for good or evil, I knew not which. The soundtrack running through my mind was a low throb of synthesized sustain as dogs, squirrels, and other backyard creatures quieted and, I have to say, took cover from or took in what was both impressive and ominous.

I ran around the house to get a view of them from the front. What happened was that the music in my head lightened instantly. George Harrison. “ Why, little darlin’, here comes the sun!”, I said out loud. Guess all creatures great and small manage to find a best vantage point in relation to what warms them. I’m sorry I didn't have a camera, but this image gives you an idea. Imagine bare branches and snow, but the sky was this blue!
I remembered that Turkey Vultures are considered by many to be “lowly” birds given their reliance on carrion and road kill for sustenance; the way they frequent dumps and death grounds. Forget all that. This was sun worship pure and simple. A triumph of light over darkness, life over death. As black as vultures are, the underside of their wing is a pearly grey. Beautiful, really. Of course they must have been freezing. It was 15 degrees outside.

I yelled to as many of my family members as I could, to come take a look. I stopped short of waking my neighbors from their Sunday morning slumbers -- but barely. I went out several times in the succeeding hour and the great birds continued to warm themselves, never moving. The dogs lost interest. Eventually,I had to move on to other pursuits of the day.

You might be able to tell I’m fond of encounters that carry dark and the light all at once. For me, this first-in-my-lifetime view of really big, dark winged birds seeking the sunlight was creepy. And cool. I sure hope they warmed up enough to carry on, find some relatively fresh dead food on the wintry landscape, and make it though another January day. I'm grateful to any creature whose work it is to help clean up. They deserve a sunny morning and a break from their labors.

So it’s the heart of winter. Lot’s of us worry about hitting patches of ice and falling down. Be careful. Just don’t forget to look up from time to time.

Beth for the Poplar Grove Muse