Blog Posts

A Pandemic Marsh Walk

10/1/2020

At the tail end of summer, the view from my favorite seat deep in the marsh has changed. There is a seasonal ebb and flow to all the natural areas that I like to visit—shorelines and forests and dunes and prairies—that makes them prettier or more stirring at some times than at others. Sitting in the middle of the marsh in August just hasn’t been something I do. Until now. It’s the pandemic year.

Absolutely everything has gone topsy turvy, so why not this? So I sit on a rough wooden bench, staring at the matted roots of cattails that stand seven feet tall around me like a living cage, and I ponder the changes that have come in all sorts of ways.

The Black River Marsh is a magical place. I know of several hiking paths that run beside it, some of which take me through hushed forests where tall hardwoods spread their branches like cathedral arches, and green and gold reflections glitter on still waters like bits of stained glass.

These places leave me spellbound and grateful when I visit. As the seasons change, the woods and fields are changeable tapestries. White trilliums and purple wood violets give way to blossoming trees, and then to fields of white daisies and yellow coneflowers and Black-Eyed Susans and bright orange Devil’s Paintbrush. Mid-summer, fields of Milkweed in full bloom are covered with clouds of Monarch Butterflies as they flit and court and lay their pearl-shaped eggs on the fuzzy underside of the leaves that the caterpillars will begin to eat as soon as they hatch, starting the dance all over again.

But there is a panorama to be savored right here as well, and my favorite seat at this feast is at the far end of a boardwalk into the watery heart of the marsh.

The boardwalk runs in a loop from a parking lot that’s open just a few months a year. When the lot is closed, it’s a least a quarter mile to hike in. Hence, I had never visited the boardwalk in, say, late March, before this year. But I have more stamina than I used to, and so walking the extra distance doesn’t dissuade me like it once did.

In Spring, from this spot, the contours of the Black River as it bends and flows are clear and wide. The skies are endless. I am surrounded by water on three sides, and the highest things to be seen, rising above the collapsed cattails and marsh grasses, are the mounded homes of muskrats. These are crowned by nesting geese who regard visitors with suspicious glares.

In Spring, I can see ducks and geese swim, and take off, and land in the river. I’ve watched a Green Heron perch on a branch just above the water line, poised like an arrow, moving only by tiny degrees, until there was a sudden, spear-like motion and his beak broke the water, withdrawing with a wriggling silver fish.

The marsh is alive with Red-Winged Blackbirds, brashly claiming the high ground of the few cattails from last year not flattened by wind and rain and snow. As warmer weather sets in, the chittering of Marsh Wrens sounds like a symphony of rusty oil cans. The wrens flit from reed to reed, perching sideways. They are tiny things with upturned tails and inquisitive eyes and an industriousness that makes me feel like a slacker.

And there is the primordial clacking of Sandhill Cranes, elegant, tall birds in colors of smoke and ash and rust. They glide overhead on graceful wings and legs that trail like long, twigs. In flight, they resemble prehistoric cave paintings brought to life. At sunset, the sky can seem like a furnace in shades of crimson and pink and silver. It is breathtaking.

But as they days get longer and hotter, little by little the marsh plants stake their claim. Cattails and grasses and plants with leaves shaped like arrowheads surge upwards. And it becomes harder and harder to see the river itself.

By mid-August I have long since quit visiting the boardwalk and gone to other hiking trails with better views. Until this year. So much is different!

And so I find myself returning again and again, binoculars in hand, smelling like bug spray from head to toe, a hat on my head to protect the newest color experiment of my “pandemic hair” from the sun.

This time I strolled along the boardwalk and viewed a landscape that was tall and green as far as the eye could see. A small inlet where I had once watched a mother Wood Duck and her clutch of ducklings paddle from open water into the reeds was now covered with a solid coat of chartreuse green—duckweed--from end to end. The Red-Winged Blackbirds with their red epaulets no longer stood out like sentinels amid the jungle of profusion.

The wrens were quite muted, the oil can symphony dimmed. And yet…

A big part of my approach to watching nature is pretty much that if you just sit still for a few minutes, something will show up. And so I took my usual seat in the heart of the marsh, closest to the river, and sat down.

If there was a breeze, I couldn’t feel it since the cattails formed a wall around me. If there was a river, I couldn’t see it, even if I stood on my tiptoes. Heat from the sun soaked into my shoulders and the back of my neck.

But there were small rustlings around me in the tall, shadowy stalks. Dark shapes moved in darker shadows, the contours of small birds appearing only in fragments as they moved among the greenery.

There was the splash of a tiny footfall, and then another, in the shallow water nearby. Seen up close, the individual tiny green leaves of duckweed floated and moved on the water’s surface like confetti. It was mesmerizing.

After a few minutes, I finally started back for the car. I stopped here and there to admire the white arrowhead flowers, already past their prime and battered by the previous night’s rain but still lovely.

A quartet of half-grown Marsh Wrens flitted and hopped from the bent grasses on one side of the boardwalk to the other, as funny a set of siblings with their chirps and lurches as the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” They stuck together and called to each other with single notes. After they had all crossed, I could not see them in the tangle of plants, but I could chart their progress by the quivers in the grasses and their tweets to each other.

Then I heard munching sounds below my left ankle, and looked down. There were ripples in the water, as though something had just ducked for cover. A muskrat perhaps? I had seen them in river during the spring.

Now if I was somehow “keeping score,” well I hadn’t seen a single person during my entire visit, and I had actually SEEN very little in the way of birds or animals while I was there.

But I still felt not alone at all. And in this strange pandemic time, that was much more than enough.

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On Art and Aging and New Stuff...

6/19/2020

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"I’m going to be teaching a fiber arts class at the art center in a few months,” my friend Patty Aker said last summer. “You should get on the list to sign up! And it’s FREE!”

I had absolutely no idea what I’d be getting into. But I adore Patty and I love the word “free.”

At the moment we were chatting and being jostled in a former furniture factory repurposed as an art gallery, during a yearly fundraiser that combines getting original art on 8 x 10 canvases with the frenzied stampede of traders on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange. “Art as a contact sport” is how I often describe it. I look forward all year to both donating my photographs and picking up a few canvases for myself and birthday presents. It’s raucous, sweaty (end of July), colorful and convivial. And I was having a good night because I’d scored two of Patty’s lovely painted silk scarves in the annual melee.

And so I took Patty’s suggestion and tracked down Xoe Fiss, the lovely young lady from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and gave her my card. Months later, I stepped into an entirely new universe.

First, a word about Patty’s art. To say that she paints on silk is to offer that Michelangelo liked to sculpt. Her silk panels and banners and scarves are ethereal washes of color and designs, both natural and abstract. Just as I’ve never stood looking up at a statue by Michelangelo and puzzled “how did he ever get that nostril just right?” I’ve only stared and gaped at Patty’s creations with the same sense of wonder.

Truth be told, I often have to fight back the feeling that I’m an imposter in this community arts organization, showing photographs that owe so much to my smart phone for being in focus, while I am surrounded by people who use their hands to actually paint with brushes, and sculpt, and build, and…create!

But hey, I’ve retired! And I like to try new things and meet new people! And so I found myself on a winter Friday afternoon in a large classroom where Patty was teaching us the fundamentals of painting on silk. Looking around the room at the number of students whose hair was as silver as my roots, I realized for the first time that I was in a class specifically geared toward “seniors.” I did the math. Yes, I indeed was in the “senior citizen” column! No matter, I couldn’t stay twenty-five for ever…

As a starting exercise, we were each given pieces of plain white silk stretched taut over circular frames. We dutifully traced outlines on the silk, choosing from various templates, and then drew over those outlines with a thick liquid that quickly hardened. And then it was time to dip our brushes into pots of paint and then transfer the paint to the silk.

Oh, this was IGNITION!! As the brush touched the silk, color flowed from the tip into the fabric and then meandered and bled and combined as though a sinuous, capricious, living thing. For me, the sight was absolutely mesmerizing. So this was how magic happened! I filled in my circular practice piece. I’d picked what I think was the partial outline of some jointed crab legs. If you turned it upside down, it looked more like a Tarantula floating on a sea of blue.

No matter, it was fun! I proudly sent photos of my silk-painted crab/tarantula to my kids. “How old were the kids in the class?” one of them asked, thinking that this had been done by a second-grader. I suddenly felt like Rodney Dangerfield.

By the time the next class rolled around, we had an official—and much larger—assignment to fill out the remaining weeks. Issued much larger swaths of fabric, we were to come up with one or more symbols that were important to us in our lives and then create small silk banners that would eventually be displayed in an art show. We could use paint, beads, felting, embroidery and other decorative tricks to embellish them, but they all had to be somehow significant to our lives.

I stewed on this charge for days, but finally came up with an idea that combined a Hummingbird hovering between some ferocious waves and a clutch of Morning Glories. I turned to the hundreds of templates in class to find an image of a Hummingbird to trace and work from; worked from a famous image in Japanese art for the waves; and drew the flowers from photos I’d taken with a group of local photographers at the nearby and fabulous Christopher Farm and Gardens.

As the Friday classes rolled on, it was fascinating to see what different forms everyone’s images had taken. Given an assignment of making something as simple as a leaf, we all would have created images as far removed and unlike as the planets. It was an awe-inspiring, and energizing and heart-warming and imagination-sparking.

Eventually, we took a short break so that we students could get better acquainted with each other and introduce our works. The ladies who arrived at my table each showed off and explained their projects. There were images of birds, trees, rivers, and references to happy thoughts—friends, family history, strength, community, nature.

And then it was finally my turn. I held up my silk work-in-progress with the bird and the waves and the flowers and explained “well, this basically tells you that Mary really needs therapy!” They laughed. I was serious.

And so I explained the multi-layered and sometimes tortured symbolism in my design. I love to watch birds, and am enchanted by Hummingbirds with their gleaming throat patches and their wings nearly invisible as they beat so swiftly. But on the other hand, it represented the fact that I have only rarely in my life felt as though there was any firm ground beneath my feat. More often, I have felt myself teetering on the edge of disaster, keeping my anxieties to myself with a brave face, and staying just a few wingbeats ahead of a crash coming up from behind. There are reasons for that, I have come to understand more recently. When I was nine, and again when I was sixteen, the world as I knew it vanished overnight—home, school, friends, security, routine…and in one instance, even a shared language. And apparently it has left some residual marks.

The waves in the picture have their own story. Some of my most cherished childhood memories involve going to the shore of Lake Michigan often with my two aunts, eating hotdogs, searching for tiny shells, and wave jumping and body surfing like a carefree little otter. But Lake Michigan has its deadly, dangerous side, and it can resemble those swirling depths of fear and uncertainty that have haunted me for most of my life.

But again on the plus side! I drew my inspiration for my threatening, menacing, reaching waves from the famous 19th century woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who was about seventy years old when he began his legendary project of creating three dozen exquisite woodblock prints of Mount Fuji. Talk about optimism and second acts! I have found his later-in-life example to be incredibly uplifting.

The flowers, I’m happy to report, were just flowers! I try to keep my face to the sun and find the beauty in the road ahead, so there were no deeper meanings to be culled.

The pandemic rolled in just as we finished our classes, putting all thoughts of art shows and mingling somewhere off to the future. But I was grateful and astonished at the opportunity to learn this new thing, and to realize that for all the words I had written over the years—in essays, in short stories, in journals—this was the first time I had ever taken the contents of my subconscious and disgorged them into a picture! It seemed like a pretty important leap!

Opportunity knocked yet again a few weeks ago, this one driven by the pandemic.

It was invitation for a “virtual” art class via ZOOM through the Kohler Arts Center that was geared once again toward seniors and learning. This one involved polymer clay. Was I interested? Is the Pope Catholic? The thought of learning anything new in a group setting, even one where we all participated from our own homes, was irresistible.

Our little group of five was basically the test case for setting up this kind of class in a virtual environment. Since we couldn’t meet at the art center and use the equipment there, we all were gifted a box of supplies for the project. Our instructor, Amy Mester, was actually located in St. Paul, Minnesota, 300 miles away. We would “meet” virtually for two hours a day, for five straight days.

As the day to start the classes approached, my anxiety level ratcheted up a few notches. Polymer clay is a three-dimensional medium. I am entirely a two-dimensional thinker. I write, typing words on a flat keyboard that upload to a flat screen and print on flat paper. Writing by hand has the same result. I take photographs, which are printed up on flat photo paper. Sketching…same thing.

Looking back on all those years of playing with Playdoh when my kids were growing up, I had shown absolutely no gift at all. Mostly I made little Playdoh snakes by rolling the clay between my hands. Occasionally I tried to pinch the Playdoh into an animal shape, but I don’t recall anything being identifiable…or even able to stand up.

So a few days before the classes I started to binge-watch “how to” videos on YouTube to learn how to work with this stuff. I joked that I felt like Keanu Reeves’ character Neo in the first Matrix movie, getting kung-fu programming uploaded straight to his brain. I was ready…I thought!!

Well, the Matrix had better writers and a longer time to write the script!! Amy’s classes and instruction were incredibly stimulating, and we all watched raptly and imitated her with enthusiasm as she chopped, and kneaded, and squished, and rolled out polymer colors into waves of designs. She showed us quite a few of her earlier projects, and we were mesmerized both by her skill and by the possibilities.

Early on, we knew that “birds” were our class theme. Amy modeled an adorable, small, squat fanciful bird she’d created with a core of crumpled aluminum foil covered with “feathers” she’d made by rolling two colors of clay into a jelly roll and then slicing it. It sounded so easy!!

I dutifully took a sheet of aluminum foil and tried to mush it into a usable shape. It was DOA. I brutally sized up my capabilities of becoming a three-dimensional thinker in the space of five days, and caved almost completely. While my classmates were happily applying colorful slices of polymer to forms, bottles, bowls, and branches, I confessed to Amy during our one-on-one instruction time that I planned to try to make something in “bas-relief.” Sort of a compromise between two and three dimensions. Two and a half dimensions, is how I described it. It was all good.

I showed Amy a sketch I had drawn of a Sandhill Crane. Sandhills are some of my favorite birds, with elegant wings in the colors of smoke and ash and rust, and a primordial call that clatters overhead and in the surrounding marshes, reminding the listener that wild nature exists and is glorious. I just pull over to stop and stare every time I see them, and hope that traffic following behind me has the presence of mind to drive around.

And so I began my magnum opus. First I baked a tile in shades of green and blue streaked with white for the background, and then I started to build the bird. Everything along the way was a learning curve! Clay is sticky stuff, and doesn’t always want to detach from a surface or a blade when you want it to. It stretches, it warps, it breaks, it makes you start over.

I made a roll of what I thought would look like feathers when I sliced it, but the slices looked ridiculously like miniature pork chops and so I picked a different theory of making feathers. Once I’d built the bird and shoved it in the oven, I found that some parts burned to different colors and so I had to buy some acrylic paints to fix the damage.

I finally finished my Sandhill Crane days after the final class had finished and emailed Xoe and Amy a photo, a "virtual" show and tell.

Given the realities of the pandemic, will this ever actually get into a little art show of our “senior learning” art projects? Maybe. Did I train my brain to make three-dimensional art? Not exactly…but I’m happy that I learned as much as I did! Would I jump at the chance to take part in something like this again?

OH YES!!

And I hope you will too.

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Pandemic Grace Notes

5/28/2020

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I know, I know…I’m a writer and so I should have been keeping a “pandemic journal.” And while we’re at it, I oughtn’t be guilting myself with the word should…

But we all process stress and creative responses in different ways. And the saturating feeling of dog-paddling my way through this world-wide Covid19 crisis just didn’t trend toward memorializing any moments of growth and self-discovery as they occurred. Or even recognizing that they were happening!

But here we are, roughly three months into a world where we now use the words “quarantine” and “pandemic” and “virus” and “social distance” in hitherto unimagined sentences. And as some restrictions are easing up, the recognition of the moments and changes that passed are starting to emerge. Big ones and little ones. We are nowhere near “before” and “after” in this crisis. That may be years and deaths and a vaccine or two down the road. But just a few things come to mind…

I started hibernating—or quarantining—about a week ahead of the curve, when “coronavirus” was still a relatively new subject on the news, and the medical horrors that it wreaked on the elderly and infirm were still under the radar. I was actually more worried at that time that I might catch the seasonal flu since I hadn’t yet had my flu shot. So in an uncharacteristic abundance of caution, I decided all at once to skip my weekly “Trivia night” at a bar with friends; my twice-weekly Tai Chi classes; and occasional visits to the local YMCA to ride an exercise bike until after I got a flu shot.

I had still been looking forward to doing a monthly “Live Lit” night at a local art gallery with other writers and musicians. But then boom…a week later everything began to close like a set of dominos falling. The local library. Municipal buildings. The YMCA. Bars. Restaurants. Thrift stores (and this was particularly harsh, since perusing thrift shelves and garage sales was not only cheap mental floss, it also supplied my little on-line Etsy shop selling porcelain knickknacks and vintage books).

I didn’t panic. I had been used to solitude, both chosen and involuntary, during periods of my life. “I can do this thing,” I thought, expecting to spend it entirely in isolation with the exception of the dog and the cat. There was a basement still full of jumbled boxes and other things from my last move to work on. The third “Finnigan the Circus Cat” book to finish. A long-held goal of finally learning conversational Spanish to at least crack the book on. A bookcase full of good fiction to delve into. And to fill any remaining cracks of ennui, cat videos on Facebook to keep me laughing. As well as the guy who does the Manitowoc Minute.

In those first few weeks of “safer at home,” Facebook was still full of quarantine jokes, with the oft observation that we were only four weeks from learning everybody’s true hair color. And for some of us this is a serious thing! I’d been going to a salon for color and highlights for at least 15 years, and I would not willingly reveal my shining silver roots without a fight. And so while shopping at six in the morning on Tuesdays during Walmart’s “safe seniors” hour (another pandemic adjustment since I am not a morning person), I picked up a box of color.

I should have read the label before buying. Turns out that it was not suitable for covering a serious amount of grey, something I noticed just a few days after applying it. Undeterred, I Googled until I found another brand reputed to do a better job of coverage and tried it. It worked. I love the shade, and I love not spending the better part of a day driving to and from and sitting in a salon chair for hours. I have a new life plan for my hair color. And while I’m at it, I’ve decided to grow it out at least long enough for a ponytail. “Rapunzel Hair” is my current talking point.

Other changes in routine were not so welcome—deprived of my ability to cuddle on a sofa and read stories to my grandkids, I started making “Grandma Bedtime Story” videos for them so that whenever this nightmare ended, they’d remember that I was the one with the coveted “Grandma” title.

Only a week or two into my “I’m gonna rock this thing solo” bravado, my younger daughter moved in with me in order to safely weather the pandemic. She has a compromised immune system, and so has to be smarter than the average bear in assessing and avoiding risks to her health. And her previous, otherwise near-perfect, living situation included one “essential worker” who did not have the luxury of telecommuting or otherwise avoiding the general public up close and personal. And so my home instantly morphed into a version of Noah’s Ark for both of us. Her at-the-office job continued in a new “Zoom” reality, and I began to carve out different spatial niches for myself as we figured out how to share the small space I have called home for five years.

With my daughter once again under my roof, I started to cook again. I was no stranger to a kitchen—remember that I raised four kids as a soccer mom, and for years that made for a lot of family dinners, cookies, cakes, pot-lucks and big Sunday breakfasts. But once I was divorced and then the nest emptied, the thought of spending a minute at a stove for myself seemed just a giant waste. Left strictly to my own devices, I could exist on a combination of chocolate bars and Soylent Green. In warmer weather, Moose Tracks Frozen Yogurt has been known to stand in for at least two of my three daily meals.

But cooking for somebody else…oh there was spark and joy! My kids have never been shy about complimenting my cooking. And so activity once again sprouted in my kitchen. Instead of bringing home plastic containers of veggie salads and rotisserie chickens from the grocery store, I leafed through my recipe box and began to make things I had once cooked and others I had only thought about.

I made walnut encrusted salmon served with lemon wedges, and salmon with apricot glaze, and breaded chicken breasts rolled in butter and Dijon mustard, served with dipping sauce featuring sesame oil and soy sauce. I made mashed potatoes, and potato salad, and pan-fried potatoes. I baked banana muffins, and then made an apple pie for the first time in at least a decade. And then made another one! And for a person who has long-reasoned that a fruit is really just a vegetable by another name, I cooked steamed broccoli, and seared asparagus, and oven-crisped Brussel sprouts with olive oil and garlic.

Our dinner routine also involves settling in to comfy chairs and watching TV in the evenings. And so we watched the entire series of Harry Potter movie in sequence, as well as Kill Bill 1 & 2. She introduced me to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and we watched it breathlessly through to the cliffhanger third season end. We’re now making our way through five seasons of Ally McBeal. Having shared Casablanca and the Laurence Olivier version of Wuthering Heights with her during previous visits, at some point I will introduce her to Gilda and possibly The Maltese Falcon. Dragonwyck, with a young Vincent Price, is still a wild card.

Despite our general conviviality, my daughter and I still struggled at first to accommodate ourselves to our small shared space without our usual outlets—in the early stages of “safer at home,” there was no going to art museums to stroll or lunch in fancy surroundings; no coffee shops open for sitting and reading and surfing the web; no public flower gardens to browse; no stores open for recreational shopping or browsing. And so by necessity we expanded our understanding and exploration of the natural areas within driving distance.

We already knew and had often hiked in the cathedral-like state parks within arm’s reach that provided magnificent horizons and beaches, quiet forest paths and lush marshes ringing with the primordial calls of Sandhill Cranes. But when even those closed to the public for several weeks, we ferreted out even more windows into nature that we had not explored. Places with magical names like Pigeon River, and Willow Creek, and Black River. The deepest forest recesses of a private nature preserve that still allowed hiking access. A meandering trail along a marshy river that glittered in the morning sunlight. A sidewalk along the shore by a hotel temporarily shuttered by the coronavirus, which led to another serene beach access.

The “safer at home” restrictions have largely been loosened and removed, and once again bars are open and businesses work on just how many ways they can keep their patrons safe and healthy in the face of “mask or no mask” societal divisions and passions.

I don’t see my pandemic approach, or that of my daughter, changing much, however. I still plan to shop at six on the morning once a week, when the store smells of disinfectant and the aisles are nearly empty. I’ve given up on the idea of trying to sew my own masks, but have several that I’ve purchased and will continue to wear them when out and about with other people. While I will miss my weekly Trivia game at a crowded bar that provided a burst of sublime silliness and hysterical laughter like clockwork, I can’t imagine being comfortable sitting elbow to elbow around a crowded table and sharing a platter of nachos breathed on by a half dozen people any time soon.

But my world has still expanded in unexpected ways, and I am thankful. I like my new hair!! I can’t and won’t un-see the lovely natural areas my daughter and I have discovered and explored to maintain our respective sanities. I like the fact that I can now bake salmon with walnuts and think “hey, that was easy”! And I love the extra time that I have gotten to spend with my daughter as an unforeseen result of this global tragedy.

Do I wish that this pandemic had never visited itself upon the world? Of course. But I also know that along the way, in my own small universe, there have been moments of grace worth noting.

And for those, I am eternally grateful.

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Turning a "kitty corner"

4/27/2020

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There’s an old saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Folks say that all the time, as proof of the argument that past a certain age, people and animals don’t change. Well, that’s the thing with old sayings. Sometimes they’re true, sometimes they’re not…and sometimes they’re true until they get turned on their heads.

Meet Mookah, a striped Tabby cat with a famously prickly disposition, who has just demonstrated to myself, the dog, and herself as well, that it is never too late to make a change for the better.

As cats go, Mookah is thirteen years old and therefore “getting up in years.” I suppose you could say that she and I (rapidly approaching Medicare eligibility) and Lucky, my ten year old dog, are all in the same boat. We have long-standing habits, routines, and ways of doing things. Mookah has lived most of her life proving her reputation as being difficult, unfriendly, aloof, standoffish, prickly, thoroughly hostile to other cats, and generally very tightly wound.

You get the picture. She is also beautiful, with feral grey and brown and cream stripes, gorgeous green eyes, and a delicate, elegant figure. But her looks were never what anybody took away from a casual encounter. Bloody scratches, perhaps, or maybe a tooth mark if she took exception to how long you tentatively stroked her forehead in an effort to make friends.

Technically, Mookah has been my younger daughter’s cat since she was a wee kitten rescued from a shelter. However, as has been true with a few other family felines, there have been times that Mookah has moved into my house as a temporary arrangement.

The transitions have never been smooth or easy. Ferocious cat fights were common, and blood was occasionally spilled. She caused so much disruption while my house was for sale a few years ago that I finally “rehomed” her to a perky college student who was quite happy to pamper Mookah and worship her as an “only cat.”

The large empty nest eventually sold, and I moved to my present, smaller digs. And then, a year after I had weepily handed Mookah over to her new owner and driven away with tears streaming down my face, the college student reached out to me in a panic. She had moved to a new apartment, and only after moving discovered that her landlord would not allow a cat on the premises. Could I possibly take Mookah back?

What’s a “cat grandmother” to do? I said “yes,” of course. However, she was not going to be an “only cat” at my house. Not only was there another cat on board—Smokey who was friendlier, cuddlier, more relaxed, constantly seeking physical contact and thoroughly adapted to lap sitting and tummy rubs—I still had my large dog, Lucky.

If I had thought that navigating several pet egos and tamping down bloodshed was difficult in a five-bedroom house with two floors, it was only going to get harder in a tiny duplex!!

The prevailing New World Order required that the house was effectively partitioned into two zones, with Lucky appointing himself as the “cat police” to enforce compliance. Smokey got the living room and my bedroom, where he curled up beside my pillow every night and purred. Mookah got the smaller bedroom where my daughter stayed when she was in town, and the small den at the back of the house.

Lucky kept a constant eye on the living room, enforcing the new rules. Mookah dared not take a step into the living room without being greeted at the doorway by a large canine staring her down as if to say “you shall not pass!”

Lucky is part Border Collie, by the way. He may not have a flock of sheep to boss around, but “herding cats” became second nature to him.

And so the uneasy peace was maintained, even though I occasionally woke to the sound of brief but furious fighting down the hall between gentle Smokey and Mookah, the hellion.

And then, unexpectedly, my beloved Smokey took ill and then died. I was bereft, shattered, in deep mourning for the loss of this pet who—while I had juggled crushing physical and emotional stress due to family emergencies—had embodied affection, love, patience, and serenity. It just wasn’t fair, I thought. Why couldn’t it have been Mookah who was taken instead?

Weeks passed, then months, and now it has been a year. I continued all the traditional ways I could think of and had long been doing to “make friends” with this prickly feline, and none seemed to be working. Despite the gourmet treats, the bursts of lavender-scented pheromone “calming” spray, the fluffy blankets and flannel on the bed to make her comfortable, she seemed as emotionally distant and guarded and selectively unfriendly as ever.

And Lucky, ever vigilant, continued his duties of keeping her confined to “her” half of the house, and barred her from the living room even though peace no longer demanded it. We lived very separate lives.

And then, during yet another of Mookah’s furtive, cautious attempts to expand her boundaries and enter the living room, I caught Lucky’s attention and motioned him with a stern look to stay just where he was. Mookah cautiously walked in a few feet more. Lucky looked from the cat back to me, and once again I told him not to move.

He sank to the floor reluctantly as Mookah tentatively crossed the room entirely and found a hiding place behind an overstuffed chair.

“Good boy!!” I told Lucky. And at last, unexpectedly, a truce had been born. Again and again in the coming days, Mookah would walk more confidently into the living room, and again and again I praised Lucky to the hilt for staying put instead of springing into “cat police” mode. It is our “new normal.”

This has been nothing short of transformational for us all.

Mookah now strides through the living room with confidence, arching and stretching on the large “cat tree” that had gone unused since Smokey’s passing. No longer threatened and challenged by Lucky’s constant vigilance, she spends hours curled up on the edge of the sofa, basking in the afternoon sunlight as it pours through the large window and regarding a world of birds, squirrels and other critters she had not been able to view before this.

Curled up in a warm ball on my daughter’s bed, she unfurls herself when I enter the room and presents her tummy for some scratching. Instead of swatting away my hand in irritation and causing me to reach for the antibiotic ointment if I scratch her ears too long, she now leans into the caress and purrs.

As for Lucky, well, it seems you can teach an old dog a new trick!

And as for me, I am awash in wonderment at both the change in Mookah’s temperament and what an intangible, small change it took to accomplish it.

A little patience, a little personal space, a little kindness. A magical lesson that makes me think that no matter what our age, there are still “new tricks” to be learned, if you just keep your mind and heart wide open.

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Ghosts in the Pasture

4/15/2020

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I wrote this essay some years ago, a few months after I'd lost my last horse. It's about putting the horribly painful things in the past behind you, finding peace, and moving forward. I was thinking about it as I drove around this morning, during this time of dreadful news and few good choices, and I realized that at some point, this will also finally be behind us, and we can look forward once more.

The weeds in the unused paddock grew five feet high and more, and I parted them gingerly with my hands as I walked across sandy soil to the pasture fence. There had been no equine hooves churning the ground impatiently this summer, prancing and pounding it to bare dirt as I approached for the morning turn-out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a phantasmagorical forest of lacy and slender foliage sprang gracefully from the windswept soil, a tall, swaying barricade to be traversed before yielding the keys to memory.

I hadn’t started with this goal in mind. All I set out to accomplish was three quick turns around the edge of the property at a brisk walk for some exercise. Drenching rains and pressure cooker temps had combined recently to hatch a vicious crop of mosquitoes, and venturing outside had become like armed warfare. The bugs were winning, the humans cowering behind screens and air conditioners and aerosol cans of smelly insect repellant. But the weather had turned unseasonably cold again, and the chilly morning air and a stiff wind had temporarily parted the veil of bloodsucking pests. Time to press the advantage, and make the most of a walk in the woods before it turned warm and tropic again.

I walked happily up and down the hills and along the flats, down a path overhung in places with evergreen branches and through a field of grass shot through with morning glories and milkweed. My route took me alongside the pasture where the horses had grazed for two decades. Brush had grown up along the fence line over the past few years, making the posts and woven wire nearly invisible.

I basked in the sunlight as I walked, the wind clean and cool on my face. Not much occupied my mind but the sights and smells around me—a handful of wild mushrooms here, a discarded turkey feather there, pine cones and dead branches, a sumac leaf prematurely turning blood red in a field of green, heralding the inevitable end of summer—and the occasional thought of what new perennial or two I’d like to buy next for the flower beds.

But I slowed as I reached the wooden paddock fence at the end of my last lap, and stopped to look in. It was empty. The last of the horses had died the winter before. The steel water tanks lay tipped forlornly on their sides where they had rested for nearly a year, and the paddock felt strangely silent. No snorts of recognition, no hoofbeats thudding, no hearty knocks and scraping sounds as feed buckets clattered on their hooks while the two horses dove in to their twice-daily race to the bottom. It was always a competition, where the fastest eater then tried to get seconds by shouldering aside the slower gastronome.

I had never seen it like this, and I unlatched the gate. Tall grass had sprung up undisturbed around the base, and it took some tugging to dislodge. The wood had weathered to a splintered, silvery grey from years of use. I left it standing open. No need to bolt it behind me anymore, the casualness going against the grain of thirty odd years of habit in owning horses and cutting off their escape. (Most of the time…) I passed the two-sided shed in the corner of the paddock where they had weathered countless rain and snow storms, and took cover from the blazing sun on the summers’ hottest days. It felt like a ghost town.

The new forest of weeds finally behind me, I struggled a bit with the heavy gate to the pasture itself. It stood in a break between lines of tall evergreens. I stepped through, into the sunlight and three acres of pasture. The grass, ungrazed and untrampled, was deeper and more lush than I had ever seen it before. The clover had long since stopped flowering, but a field of Queen Anne’s lace spread across the middle. There was still a bare groove in the dirt approaching the paddock, worn by two decades of answering the call to the evening feeding at a trot or a gallop. New saplings sprang up at random, with no one left to chew them down.

I walked entirely to the far end of the pasture, something I had rarely done when Hoki and Babe were still alive. Then, my priority was usually to call them in for a feeding or a rendezvous with the veterinarian or the farrier. Vaccinations, hoof trims, examinations for various troubles, there was always a faint air of urgency and impatience to calling them back to closed quarters. This time, I had the twin luxuries of time and reverie. A flock of two dozen cedar waxwings flitted from branch to branch in a dead tree as I passed underneath. I looked for the flock of wild turkeys that had often frequented the pasture, but didn't see or hear them.

Memories came back as I walked, picturesque snapshots from the past. The hard times were forgotten, nailed shut and buried. No thoughts of blizzards, rain storms, colic, middle of the night trips to freezing barns, heartbreaks and desperate measures. The only images that surfaced this day were short, and fragmented, and beautiful. Babe, the palomino, looking like an equine pin-up in a field of flowers, ears pitched forward and brown eyes wide and alert. Hoki, the buckskin, trotting gamely along on arthritic legs to answer the dinner bell, his gait the sign of an old man, but his dappled coat gold and beautiful and, until his last year, still youthful. Babe, wheeling and prancing playfully, or rolling freely in the dirt to scratch her back. Hoki, dense but utterly devoted to his female companion, master of his one-horse “herd.” I finally turned back, feeling very lucky.

As I reached the paddock again, I stopped to check out the emergency fence repairs I had made a couple of years earlier. I still have the cordless drill I bought that same day, and the confidence I gained from having to use it. The boards I sawed and drilled and fastened still looked new. But the twine scaffolding I left hanging from one had disappeared, no doubt nesting material for some bird or mouse in the neighborhood. The pasture gate swung shut more easily this time, and I fastened it one last time out of habit. It would keep no one in or out anymore.

Then I made my way across the sand and back through the ghostly weeds, tugged the second gate firmly into place, shot the bolt home…and closed the gate on the past.

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The Werewolf's Queen

4/5/2020

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This essay about Lucky took home a Silver Award for "creative non-fiction" in the 2021 Royal Palm Literary Awards!

The young man at my front door with a clipboard and a name tag from a cable TV company rang the doorbell and then stepped back from the front stoop. From within came the sound of ferocious barking, and I struggled to squeeze between the edge of the recliner and the bristling black hackles of my dog, Lucky, to get outside and slam the door behind me.

The barking continued, unabated, despite my repeated admonitions to the door that all was well.

“What kind of dog have you got?” the young man asked, respectfully cautious.

“Werewolf,” I deadpanned.

His eyes widened. “Really?”

Sometimes I just can’t help myself. Although Lucky puts on one heck of a show.

The “werewolf” at my house will be ten years old this summer. In dog years that’s somewhere around seventy, and there are a few more grey whiskers on his chin than in his salad days. But other than the greys, there is no sign of him stepping down from his self-appointed duties.

I brought Lucky home as a puppy, to my spacious house in the country. My youngest son, who had begged me to get a puppy instead of an older dog, went back to college the next day. I was “home alone” with Lucky from then on, an experience akin to being a single mother of an infant with no partner or larger support system.

Housebreaking was mercifully quick, and the relationship we forged over time put me at the epicenter of Lucky’s universe, as leader and pack and flock. Part Border Collie, part who-knows-what, Lucky came with centuries of breeding telling him to protect his herd at all costs.

He was certainly built for the task, with a deep chest and long legs, and an intelligent face that includes golden brown eyes accomplished at “the Border Collie stare.” He is shaped like a medium-sized wolf, and has the size and stamina of one too. Coal black except for a white slash down his chest and white tiptoes, he is like reverse lightning when he moves—darkly explosive and turbocharged.

He does not make friends easily, but neither does he miss a thing going on around him. He likes to cuddle, too, all seventy pounds of him, and tries to be a lap dog as often as he can. His sharp elbows as he “army crawls” his way a few inches further into my lap can be deadly.

Like a Knight of yore, Lucky has three imperatives that guide him every waking moment—defend the Realm; guard the Castle; protect the Queen.

When I first brought Lucky home, I had a pretty good-sized realm by any measure. The house where I had lived for three decades and raised my four children sat on nearly fifteen country acres of bucolic woods and fields. The house was surrounded on all sides by flower gardens bursting with roses and coneflowers, peonies and butterfly bushes, snapdragons and phlox and coral bells.

Set back behind a line of trees and nearly a city block removed from the two-lane road that provided a street address, it was the perfect place for a high-energy dog to spend his days romping outdoors. Lucky divided his time between walking the land with me, chasing deer and wild turkeys, and feasting on the occasional rabbit. Yes, Lucky was also really fast.

Visitors at the front door, other than my boyfriend and occasionally my grown children stopping in, were scarce. Mail was dropped off in a mailbox where the driveway met the road. Trash pickup and newspaper delivery were accomplished there as well. With the exception of having to bark at the occasional evangelizer who drove up to deliver religious pamphlets, Lucky’s guard duties were fairly light.

Life is never static, however, and things changed up a lot when we moved four years later to the Midwestern city where I worked. While I had originally planned to buy a house of my own, staking out a new realm and castle and cheerfully planting more roses and coreopsis and delphiniums, the clock was working against me and so I played the cards I was dealt.

We rented a small side-by-side duplex.

The duplex was in a quiet neighborhood with friendly folks and quiet streets, and had a large yard that wraps around three sides. The yard was unfenced, which meant that Lucky would have to adjust to being on a leash and I would have to walk him several times a day to answer nature’s calls … and to get both of us some exercise.

Although it was a struggle at first, Lucky has recalibrated his duties and his horizons accordingly. While he has learned to remain calm (mostly) in the face of every squirrel and rabbit that crosses our path, he still senses that threats to safety and good order are legion.

He views the mail carrier who parks his truck nearby and dares to approach the mailbox mounted beside the front door as a Centurion might have eyed the Visigoths as they marched on Rome. UPS delivery trucks, with their cumbersome and uniform brown shapes, are similarly suspect and cause him to raise hackles and growl when he sees them lumber down the street two blocks away. And woe betide the FedEx driver who rings the doorbell before dropping off a package. Lucky is always on the job.

My realm, alas, has been vastly reduced. Where I once had big skies and fiery sunsets and tall grasses tossing and fluttering like silk in the wind, I have a corner lot with an abundance of violets and dandelions. Where I had flower gardens full of radiant colors, I have a small boxwood hedge and four flower pots on the stoop holding geraniums in summer. My living space has been cut by a third, and there is no central air. I’m still selling off excess furniture.

And yet I have Lucky at my side, or prancing a few steps ahead. He has mastered the difficult transition, redefined and embraced his new guard duties in the urban jungle, and keeps a vigilant eye on me at all times.

And as we step through the door for one of our innumerable walks and I scan the horizon for any dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, and small children he may perceive as a threat, I am reminded that in Lucky’s golden brown eyes, I still have a realm in need of defending. I still have a castle that needs guarding.

And yes, with my erstwhile werewolf companion and protector beside me, I am indeed still a Queen.

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FREE e-books through March 18

3/14/2020

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We are all going to have to find ways to stay amused and keep our spirits up during these times of pandemic and "social distancing" and 24/7 worrying and trying very hard to stay healthy and upbeat in close quarters.

So download my "When the Shoe Fits" essay collection and both of my "Finnigan the Circus Cat" books for free from Amazon's Kindle store through March 18. Savor the essays for yourself (love, chocolate, romance, gardening, shoes, motherhood and more) and read the Finnigan books with your kids (I guarantee they will make you laugh too!!).

I read my way through childhood, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to read (and write) my way through this as well...as long as the chocolate holds out.

Enjoy!! And share!!

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The Volcano Diaries

3/3/2020

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I wrote this essay a decade ago for the MORE.com website, but alas MORE is "no more"!! I still remember what an adventure it was to travel with my youngest son right before he started college, and so I'm sharing it here!

“You can always turn back!”

This was not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about trekking up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the two-and-a-half mile hike in the national park brochure was “strenuous.”

Gulp.

But then, I really hadn’t been looking for encouragement. I’d been looking for validation...or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.

My younger son and I were on a week-long “mom and me” vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignancy because he is the last of the brood, and his departure for college means that my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We had stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we met at Yosemite a couple of days earlier when I volunteered to take their picture.

I had only planned out the first three days of the trip, figuring that we would make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves get carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I had gone to Ireland when I was twenty-two with a backpack stocked with “instant breakfast” packets, a bicycle that required reassembly once I landed, and phone numbers for some of my Irish cousins.

This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliency of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.

My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel. We picked this place on a recommendation two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the wooden bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme of random adventure here? We were certainly making memories!

One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, in fact, at that very motel. “Mom,” he said, bursting into the room during a phone call to his sweetheart back home, “I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?”

What’s a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out unexpectedly behind us, you wouldn’t believe how fast we beat it back into the room!

While he was outside chatting on the phone, I had been poring over the pamphlets and maps we picked up by the park’s visitor center. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at, I was going to chicken out and insist on a more leisurely walk of half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.

All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina...and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it’s been like that for most of my life.

But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness, she advised. And remember, she said, “you can always turn back.” I didn’t even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.

And so we drove on to the base of the trail that led to Lassen Peak, which topped out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in my son’s backpack. There were snow fields even at the trailhead.

I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn’t even list how far we had traveled. I wasn’t going for glory here, just endurance, and so I simply kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son’s heels to keep from feeling dizzy. I had done the exact same thing a few years before as I navigated “Bright Angel Trail” down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter. Character building takes many forms.

Near the trailhead, we met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and had decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn’t want to wimp out while they were watching. We often overlapped each other’s rest stops along the way. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.

The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were a distant blue under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the surrounding air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.

Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes even Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son’s feet in front of me, occasionally taking his hand to cross the rougher patches.

And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.

Right then and there, my fear of heights nailed me to the side of the mountain.

“Robert, honey,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t take one more step!” Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before—the extra weight, the lack of stamina, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot—it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!

Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn’t going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad to sit on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him a good two hours to get back, which included the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.

As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this vacation, that we would be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photograph a yellow-bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? This was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I would experience.

A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars. I hadn’t thought about that in quite a long time, but I thought about it again that day while I sat on the side of the volcano.

At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. I realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and high and imposing...we had both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.
But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had.

I may not have made it to the top of the mountain as I had hoped...but I still ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.

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Tai Chi Knees

8/6/2019

3 Comments

I have a short list taped to my bathroom mirror, writ large in black magic marker, to remind me of the priorities I set when I retired a year ago—pay more attention to my health, write more, see the grandkids more, and get rid of a lot of STUFF!

It’s been a matter of public record and great personal lamentation that all of those things got swept clean off the table for many months as I dealt with serial family emergencies in 2018. But as the Old Year waned and the New Year waxed, I looked at the beginning of 2019 as a time to restart my engines. So I perused the catalog of the local YMCA and signed up for a twice-weekly Tai Chi class.

This is a bigger deal to me than it would seem. I haven’t made it to a regularly scheduled exercise class in thirty five years. My oldest child is thirty eight. You do the math.

For many, many years, given the random nature of being a soccer mom with four kids, I had given up any hope of ever arriving anywhere at a predetermined time once or twice a week. It seemed that there were always cookies to bake or diapers to change or lessons to drive to or… you get the picture. And so exercise became a solitary pursuit, squeezed in between checkups and field trips and toddlers who didn’t want to put their shoes on quickly.

For years I walked, swam, lifted weights, and rode exercise bikes at random times to keep the body moving. In bad weather I walked the track at the local “Y,” in good weather I indulged in walking around our home in the country. Three laps of hills and flat, woods and fields, added up to roughly two miles.

Then, after I started law school, exercise time was even more sporadic and lacking. But once I started working as a prosecutor in a charming Art Deco building only blocks from Lake Michigan, I picked up the pace of walking again. In good weather I walked along the lake front, and in bad weather, I paced laps in the allegedly haunted realm of the sixth floor of the courthouse. Then plantar fasciitis and a few other health hiccups got the better of me during my fifties, and my middle-aged spread just kept spreading.

I have often fallen short in the self-discipline department, and turning a page into 2019 seemed to be a good time to change things up and connect with a group of people who would be doing the same thing at the same time! Tai Chi had long been on my “to do” list, ever since I had turned my aches and pains over to a massage therapist about three decades ago who happened to also teach Tai Chi.

“Breathe,” he would constantly remind me as he stretched one body part of mine or another in therapeutic fashion. “Yes, Grasshopper,” I would reply, making sport of his enthusiasm. He took it in stride. I always remembered.

And so shortly after the New Year dawned, I found myself in the basement of the local “Y” amid an on-going Tai Chi group. To my delightful surprise, the instructors were a well-known local musician/songwriter and his wife, Jon and Jane Doll, who I recognized from several years of going to art gigs. He’d even composed a song to go with one of my photos as part of an art/wine/music event we’d participated in a year or two earlier. So I was in friendly territory already!

This, however, was not an “introduction to Tai Chi” class I’d landed in. This was a “keep up and learn as you go” event, and I dutifully tried to mimic and follow along. It was harder than I thought! Somewhere along the line and months after I started, Jon mentioned that the sequence of motions that we repeated three times during a class each contained 110 different positions, and required shifting our balance 220 times.

All I knew on that first day, though, was that during my first class ever, my quivering knees gave out after executing the first two “forms,” and I had to sit out the third, simply watching the rest of the class with admiration as they moved in grace and unison. On my way out of the building, my knees were so wobbly that I didn’t dare even try walking down the few steps to the sidewalk, but used the handicap ramp instead. And held on to the railing for balance.

Little by little, class by class, my knees grew stronger and steadier, and my shifts in balance became more natural and more fluid. I could still find myself hopping from one foot to another when my understanding of what position came next proved to be off by a mile. Blessed with a vivid imagination, I attached mental images to every one of the moves which involved, from time to time, repulsing a monkey, spreading wings like a white crane, parting a wild horse’s mane, and carrying a tiger up the mountain.

And a word about that poor tiger!! I’m sure that there is some well-grounded historical or mythological or folklore related reason for all these names, but when I have to navigate between shooting the tiger, boxing him in the ears, and then carrying him up the mountain I’m not sure that I could stitch together a narrative that reasonably covers all three. Mostly I just focus on the mental image of tenderly carrying a wee tiger cub up a mountainside while he purrs in my arms, and try to ignore what we plan to do with him later.

As time and Tai Chi classes went on, I noticed that it wasn’t just my knees that were feeling different and better. I seemed to be bending and stretching with more deliberation as well. My sense of balance, overall, felt subtly improved, and I found myself embracing a newly felt confidence of movement. Hey, it was all GOOD!!

But Tai Chi knees, it appeared, only got me so far. As I drove home after visiting friends in Iowa, I took the road less traveled (but still marked by a small road sign) to The Maquoketa Caves state park, which I’d heard were absolutely magnificent. I found a shady parking space, inspected a large map of the entire cave system, and set off down a large, wide staircase leading to “Dancehall Cave.”

“No problem” navigating the long staircase, I thought. “I’ve got my Tai Chi knees!” And so off I set, after tying my sneakers a bit more tightly, descending step by merry step closer to my destination in the mysterious underground.

The staircase was equipped, at first, with a handrail, always welcome on such an adventure. I stopped to take photos, and was absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of the lush, green scene. Ferns and moss dripped downward like wet silk from dark rock walls. Trees arched overhead like cathedral vaults. Birds swooped diagonally across the incredible depth beyond. I felt like I was standing in a scene of primordial grandeur straight out of Jurassic Park.

I continued downward, but noticed that the handrail had disappeared. No worries, I thought, my knees and my sense of balance were doing just fine. Then a few steps later I noticed that the stairs were wet, no doubt a result of recent torrential rains combined with deep shade. No worries, I thought, I’d just take them a little slower. And then, a few steps further on, the steps went from being simply wet to covered with slippery mud. And I finally stopped short of the mouth of the cave which beckoned invitingly, and took stock.

The soul searching didn’t take long. Faced with the facts that I was 300 miles from home; absolutely NOBODY knew that I had taken this detour; and that if I slipped and broke an ankle inside one of the caves I wouldn’t get a cell phone signal and would have to pray for a random hiker to summon help, I called it a day. Reluctantly, I turned to make the trek back up to the parking lot, promising myself I would return to the caves again one day with friends along for the adventure.

And discovered, after trudging up just a few stairs, that despite my Tai Chi knees and improved sense of balance, I had no stamina whatsoever. Let’s face it, walking the dog on perfectly flat city sidewalks does not put much of a strain on the heart or the lungs. Huffing and puffing, sweating and sighing loudly, I finally reached the top of the staircase and came to two simple realizations—one, that those stairs would be much easier to mount if I lost twenty pounds, and second, taking Lucky for longer walks wasn’t really going to make much difference.

So nearly thirty years since I took a running step, I’ve invested in a new pair of jogging shoes. Lucky is being pretty game about this new development, although he’s happy about every step we take outside that gets the two of us out of the house. I jogged for a whole forty seconds the other day.

Clearly, this is going to be a long road toward getting into better shape and fighting trim for the next time I want to tackle anything like the Maquoketa Caves. One tiny step at a time, one tiny measure of progress after another.

Pretty much like my Tai Chi classes and the first time I carried that tiger up the mountain.

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Christmas Cookie Magic

12/31/2018

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I haven’t been in the most effusive of holiday sentiments over the past several Christmases, ever since I sold my empty nest with the two living rooms and the five bedrooms and the fireplace and downsized to a space that’s got room for two people in the kitchen and four in the living room…if they’re all standing up.

I haven’t been in Ebeneezer Scrooge territory…quite. But sharing this small space with the large dog and two cats has made for an easy excuse to not put up any traditional Christmas decorations for the past three years.

This was quite a departure from the former life, I’ll have you know, which featured colorful needlepointed stockings hung by the chimney with care and stuffed with chocolate and little gifts, and a nine foot “real” fir tree festooned with glass ornaments and colorful lights and strands of wooden “cranberries” and a plethora of small critters such as birds and raccoons. I don’t know if I could locate those Christmas stockings in a hurry now. I’m pretty sure they’re SOMEWHERE down in the basement, along with all the garland and the ribbons and the big plastic Santa that lights up and the Christmas ornaments I actually embroidered once in an earlier life oh, about a quarter century ago.

No, going into Christmas this year felt pretty much like going into the season every Christmas since I moved. Low key, with a touch of humbug.

And yet…I still was in the chute to bake Christmas cookies. Not because I had anyone else in the house to eat them with (although Lucky, the dog, would need not a second’s thought to wolfing them down if they fell to the floor). But because I knew I would be seeing two of my four grown-up children and the grandkids over the holiday, and wanted to share that link to a more festive, less complicated past. And also, even more, because the other two kids were living half a country away, and I obstinately wanted to give them that taste of the past as well, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.

And so a week before my “got to get it in the mail today” deadline, I pulled out my little mixer and my favorite recipes (usually undisturbed since I literally almost never cook anymore), and began to conjure up the Spirit of Christmas Past.

I began with the easiest recipe, for toffee bars, which is the batch that just needs one bowl, one baking pan and no cookie sheets, and got that out of the way. One batch down, two to go I thought as I snuck toffee bar after toffee bar out of the pan and scarfed down the rich, chocolate, buttery flavor. (I would eventually have to make a second “replacement” pan…)

A couple of days later, the traditional butterballs were on the list. Midway up the line in complexity and the capacity to fill the kitchen counter with powdered sugar, I efficiently lined them up on baking parchment, watched them through the oven window until the tops began to crack, and then quickly dredged them one by one through a bowl of sifted powdered sugar before they stopped steaming.

And then, finally, the cut-out butter cookies beckoned. The ones with the cookie cutters. And the icing. And the sprinkles and candies. The ones that my children decorated like little bloody Christmas Axes during the first Christmas after the divorce.

Now, a word about baking in my life, and baking cookies in particular. It has been something of a “through line” in my life since childhood, harkening back to when I was a little girl and would bake cakes with my Aunt Patsy. Through ups and downs, over years and traumas and stress, the action of pushing ingredients around in a bowl with a hand mixer to create sweet tasting magic has been a touchstone for me. (Read my essay “Cookie Therapy,” it explains A LOT!!)

Baking with my children over the years—making cakes, pies, chocolate chip cookies by the millions, Christmas cookies with sprinkles and sugar—always brought me a quiet sort of rapturous joy. And for them, self-expression in myriad ways. I recall one cookie making adventure that ended in a “flour fight” as the kitchen rang with their laughter. Then, of course, there is the tale of the iconic “Christmas Axe” cookies, which took on a creative life of its own, as the kitchen rang afterward with MY laughter.

And so into the home stretch I trod bravely, following familiar steps of creaming the butter and the sugar, adding the vanilla and almond extract, beating in the egg and then the flour to create a familiar magic. And what magic it WAS. Because as I flitted between counter and refrigerator and table and recipe box, I realized that I was SINGING, and I was DANCING. In my kitchen. All alone but for the dog who stared up at me from his comfy pad beneath the table as if I’d lost my mind but he still loved me.

Granted, I wasn’t singing to a Christmas carol but to the peppy beat of “Hard Candy” by Counting Crows, but still. The nearest thing to it was the scene in “Love, Actually” where Hugh Grant, playing the new British Prime Minister, finds himself suddenly boogeying through No. 10 Downing Street to the strains of the Pointer Sisters. It was nuts. It was thoroughly unexpected. It was GREAT!!

Eventually I quit dancing long enough to roll out the cookie dough and fashion some traditional snowman and gingerbread man shaped cookies and a few T-Rex and turkey cut-outs as well. As I boxed them up and got them ready to mail, I felt like I was putting a piece of my heart in there along with all the sugar and a pair of chocolate Santas.

The mixer and bowls and recipe box and cookie sheets have all been put away by now, but I still marvel at whatever alchemy caused such a spark of exuberance and joy in my heart on that day. I think it was pretty much the cookies, and the synapses they fired linking back to joys of motherhood and Christmas past.

I’m still smiling about it. I’m already thinking that maybe, just maybe, next December I may spring for a very small Christmas tree and break out a few of the old ornaments. And of course, I’ve now got a year to find that one particular cookie cutter that makes Christmas Axes.

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