Memories

I don't know why I remember those baby birds lying twisted and dead upon the cement floor of the garage of the second house I lived in. The front of the garage had a set of tall built-in shelves, more than likely constructed by my father. Likely, too, given his affinity for the color, they were painted grey. Or perhaps white.

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Of Birdsong and Eggplant

I wake to birdsong: a five note trill that bounces up a fifth before repeating.  Sometimes, the bird drops down the scale and and bounces once or twice on a low note.  I rise, intending to learn the name of this bird who so willingly sings outside my window.

The sun is becoming more generous.  The wind is gentle and warm. 

Our seeds arrive in the mailbox bringing a sudden joy to the day.  Squints tears open the bag, begins separating “his” seeds from mine.  “Mom, they sent us eggplant.”  His face is disgusted.


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New Year's Day

My husband and I are surprised to see the crowds at the park this morning.  A group of runners has gathered near the fire pit, stretching and blowing on their fingers.  Someone stands on a picnic bench shouting out directions while another person breaks thin sticks across his knee before feeding them to the fire.  Someone holds a silver banner—Happy New Year!—and ponders where to hang it.

We cross the dam and, for a change, head left and up the hill.  A squirrel nags from his nest at the top of a tree.  Another sits on a branch, teeth scraping against the acorn held in his tiny paws.  Sparrows and chickadees flit among the brush lining the paved path. 

People walk without coats.  Some jog by in shorts.  Couples walk their dogs or talk on cell phones.  Some  smile broadly and wish us good morning.  And some, perhaps weary from the festivities, look tired and grumpy.

And at home, after ten days of being together, we’re a bit grumpy, too.  Our days have lost their definition.  The sharp edges of rules and expectations softened and eventually fell away altogether.  Our routine is lost and we crave it again.  We crave schedules and busyness and to-do lists around which to arrange our lives.

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Day after Christmas

At this hour of the morning, the park is mainly empty except for die-hard joggers in spandex and power walkers out with their dogs.  There is evidence of recent Christmas gifts: a man and his son in matching camouflage outfits; another man with a new camera strapped about his neck; on the path a pretzel bag jammed with napkins and a plastic candy cane that formerly held Hersey kisses wrapped in red and green foil; a man with inline skates and ski poles.

At the highest point in the park, sixty-foot trees reach gloveless fingers into the sky and try to snag billowing clouds as they bluster past.  But clouds cannot be held back by the trees.

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Detachment

I see that the temperature is supposed to go down into the forties tonight.  This morning, I threw open the windows to chase away the heat and the humidity that has hovered in the air since May.  The flies appear to have been listening to the weather forecast: A group of them has taken up residence in the kitchen and I find it fair sport to chase them with a dishtowel.  It’s a battle I often lose.

A couple of days after I lost the War of Tug with Destructo, my eye started flashing—a quick burst of lightning that disappeared immediately.  The flashing began on an inconvenient day: the day of Filibuster’s photo preview: The studio owner greeted us warmly at the door and seated us upon a plush velvet couch before a gigantic movie screen.   She dimmed the lights.

My eye flashed.

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Twenty Minutes More

“How many more minutes to the bottom?”  A woman gripped her daughter’s hand.  The girl’s knee was mildly bloodied, the result, I was certain of a fall against rock.

I looked at my husband.  “Twenty minutes?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, about that.”

By all rights, we, too, should’ve been heading down the mountain at that hour.  At three o’clock in the afternoon, we were pointed in the wrong direction.

People climb Cadillac Mountain for a variety of reasons: Some attack the mountain, seemingly wanting to prove something to themselves or the other climbers, running up as fast as they can, stabbing feet and cleats and ski poles into the face of the mountain.  Others leisure their way up; stopping here and there to snap pictures of Bar Harbor posing prettily amid colorful boats in Frenchman’s Bay.  Some people, clearly ill, stagger and huff and crawl up the mountain, refusing the hand of a sister or a son waiting patiently a few steps ahead, and it’s these people who I hope make it to the top. 

But this day, we hurried up the mountain.

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Fragile

“Do you want some chicken feet for the dog?”  The owner of the farm where we’d rented our cabin nodded at Destructo.  “We’re slaughtering Thursday.” 

“Do you do the butchering yourself?”

He gave a satisfied nod.  “We used to pluck by hand until we were able to make a plucker.” 

Although the farm was hundreds of miles from home, we found we shared a connection: The owner sold wool to a highbrow place near our home; a sterile place whose shoppers, I was sure, wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to the farm and the people and the animals that had produced that wool.  Thus connected, we were invited to gather the eggs from the chickens just outside our cabin; to visit the turkeys and the pigs and the sheep.  We could pet the goats and the horses used to plow the fields.  We were free to milk the cow, provided we got up early enough.  And, of course, the hundred acres were ours to explore.

And we explored with abandon: We passed a hundred-year-old farmhouse and went on to the pigpen where baby durocs no bigger than our—admittedly fat—cat ran round the pen en masse while their mother looked on wearily.  A pasture down, there was another pig, sequestered from a lamb and a couple of horses by a wire fence.  Drying on a wooden fencepost was the horned scalp of a goat.  Here and there, where the rocks would allow, were patches of garden: Scallions and tomatoes and lettuces to the right; Further down the path a bed of peas and green beans, still in season in August.

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Things You Need

To get to the creek at my parents’ farm, leave the house by the back door.  Stop to admire my mother’s giant pots of herbs and other plants on the wooden deck before heading down the stairs and onto the brick walk.  To your left, you’ll see a perennial bed of, if I remember correctly, white and purple flowers.  And to your right, another smaller bed with shrubs and hosta and a gas lamp permanently lit to welcome visitors.

The gravel driveway will crunch beneath your shoes—and cut bare feet if you’re not careful.  Walk past the garage towards the barn.  To the right, another long and narrow perennial bed.  To the left, the remains of the pasture fence: a small length of wooden sections of posts and rails representing years of farm labor and lessons.  Tall pines on either side of the drive will escort you past the barn to your left.  And to your right, you’ll see the syrup shed, where my father spends late winters turning gallons of sap into the maple syrup that I use to sweeten peaches and strawberries and be reminded of home.  Know that into the concrete floor of that very shed, my children carved their initials with a thick nail. 

But we must go on.

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Simple Treasures

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We lived at the top of a small hill in our second house, the first house I can remember without benefit of photographs.   Our drive was concrete—perfect for hopscotch and biking and jumping rope—and sloped down over a ditch that occasionally filled with rainwater and snowmelt.  A galvanized steel pipe ran beneath the drive and drained into that ditch.  And when it wasn’t too wet, that pipe was the perfect place to hide treasures.  My sisters and I could lie on our sides and stretch an arm about a foot in and our treasures—generally the few Matchbox cars we owned—would be safe.  Eventually we moved, leaving behind forgotten treasures.  I’ve often wondered what I would find there, were I to go back. 

Growing up, I remember a bank that belonged to my mother.  It was an iron treasure chest—brown—with an image of a pirate on one side and a skull and cross bones on the other and a slot in the lid for coins.  The chest was hinged and I loved to fold back the curved lid to run my fingers through the pennies contained within, pretending that it was real treasure; real gold.

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With Peaches...

With peaches, it’s easy to get carried away.

Noon and it’s already ninety degrees.  The exhausted air seems unable to support itself.  Here and there, it will appear to wrinkle under the weight of all that heat.  A tree will ripple and I’ll catch myself blinking, staring, testing my vision, or perhaps my sanity.

Across the street, the neighbors' Yorkshire terrier is wearing a tiny red jacket with black straps and silver buckles, languishing beneath the shade of a sweet gum tree. 

And if that dog dreams, surely he is dreaming of growing—growing so big, he bursts out of his little red jacket with black straps and silver buckles—growing so huge, he can exact revenge, rounding up his owners, dressing them in red woolen coats with black and silver buttons and setting them upon the front stoop.

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Competition Over Blueberries

As soon as we hit the blueberry patch, the kids disperse:  Filibuster stealthily cases the entire patch until she finds the best row from which she picks only the choicest berries.  V disappears, watching people between branches, planning film scenes in her head, disdaining the people around her for their very humanity in the same way she so often distains herself.  And Squints?  When he finds a really good bush, he’ll shout out for the entire world to hear, “Mom! Dad! Come look at these berries! They’re amazing!”  But I won’t respond to his summons, not immediately.  Because I feel it’s my duty to pick a bush clean.  Even if there are other berries down the row that are perhaps a bit plumper, I can’t move on until I’ve gotten  all possible berries from the bush.  My husband stays beside me.  He claims it’s because I’m an expert, that he needs my guidance, but I think that he just wants to protect me from those dangerous blueberry-throwing men sometimes seen at this particular patch.  He picks slowly (he calls it deliberately), enjoying the nature that surrounds him.  We’ll pick in silence, listening to the birds and the conversations that float by as people head out to stake their own claims.

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Flirting Over Blueberries

When the first blueberry hit me, I assumed it had fallen from the branches.  It was a good crop that year.  The berries were as big as my thumb and so blue they were nearly black; all I had to do was run a hand along the branch and the berries would practically leap into my container with a rain of satisfactory little thumps that grew fainter as the container became full.  The branches were heavy with berries. The ground was littered with berries.  It was no wonder that one would land upon my head. 

The second berry hit me squarely in the back with uncommon velocity, as if the berry hadn’t fallen off the bush, but rather been shot from it. 

Or…had it been thrown?

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Hard Labor

So on Tuesday, my husband and I lassoed Squints and V into helping us with our yearly service at our community garden.  For the second year in a row, Filibuster escaped the event, as she had to go to work. 

We pulled in and parked.  In the distance, we heard the tractor in one of the fields.  D, one-half of the farm partnership, met us at the barn, wearing sandals and a floppy hat.  She was deeply tanned and, I could tell, deeply happy with her circumstance, despite the long hours and the backbreaking work her job required.

We heard a car on the gravel drive.  D nodded.  “There’s the rest of the work party.”  A man walked up eagerly, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.  “They’re coming.”  His wife and daughters approached at a more leisurely pace, as if not so sure about the whole thing.  The daughters had long, thin, tanned legs and were carefully made up for the occasion.

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After the Storm

It’s not yet May and already some of my dandelions have gone to seed.  Maple trees are sprouting in my perennial bed.  Uncertainty hangs thick in the air as we wait for the predicted thunderstorm.  I cut away a handful of lilacs and dogwood blossoms before the wind can snatch them away and dash them to the sidewalk.  I want to preserve the spring; to hold onto the scent of lilacs through an open window. 

The storm comes and goes in a rush and my lilacs have survived and I have just enough time for a walk before dark.

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