I am feeling particular grateful lately for the absence of pain, for moments of grace, for friends and family and love and joy. So I’m making stuff. That image above is the first piece of mail art I’ve ever made, or mailed. I sent it to my friend Suzi, a fellow student in my collage class who inspires me every week with her persistence, her creativity, her freedom. It’s a bit literal for me, something I tend to avoid, but I thought Suzi would like it, and it’s a powerful theme for our class, for her recent art exhibit with our teacher, and, let’s face it, for pretty much every woman I know. So if being on the nose makes me a hack, so be it.  I made another piece tonight to send to a friend who’s in a hard place. I realized that as much as like making stuff for me, I don’t know what to do with it when it’s done. Making something to release into the wild is much, much more fun. I think there might be a project brewing. Stay tuned.

I don’t usually have much interaction with the anthroposophist (Rudolf Steiner devotées) communities which abound in this area. I like the people, usually, very much, but the dogma is too heavy for me. Camphill is a Steiner project that cares for developmentally disabled adults in a village setting, where they live and work side by side with normally-abled adults and their families. Its presence here (about 10 miles from my house) means that we often see the residents out and about, which I think is a great thing for my kids, and for me. (In California, I now realize, I almost never saw disabled adults, and rarely children. Where were they?)

Anyway, the people at Camphill tend an herb garden and make wonderful teas (really, tisanes) with lyrical names like Douceur de Fete (one of my favorites.) They also make the prosaically named Tea for Colds, which seems to actually help. So, with my head stuffed and snotty with a cold, I made myself a cuppa just now, using my newest (non-local) fave acqusition, my Tea Stick. (Pricey, but genius. If you drink loose leaf tea, get one.) And I poured the nearly-boiling water into my favorite new mug (one thing you may not know about me is that for years now, I’ve been searching for the perfect mug. It’s more challenging than you might think, but I think the search is over.) My mug was made by a potter/friend down the road who gave it to me in exchange for using my home as a location for a photo shoot for her new website. So my soothing tea was in my perfect mug, which soothes the palm of my hand in addition to holding my medicinal tea, and I thought: this is all from right.here. If I had a younger horse (and, let it be said, was a better rider) I could get to both of them in an afternoon. And that thought just made me so happy that I live in this random, odd, lovely place.

Meanwhile, last night I made a discovery that also has everything to do with where I live and what I do here, and it also made me shiver with quiet joy.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite contemporary poets, but I only recently discovered this work of hers. To make it even better, I found it on a work of art made by my teachers and friends Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzy Banks Baum. If you live near me, check out their collaborate mail art show, Femail, at the Berkshire Art Kitchen.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patcha few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorwayinto thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak

~ Mary Oliver

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus

What is it in the universe that’s sending so many words of wisdom my way lately?

Maybe I’m just paying attention. It’s a good time to be observant, at least here in my corner of the world, which is blessed with white snow covering the scars on the ground, blue skies that range from palest aqua to intense, nearly purple depth, bare trees that reach up up up like so many finely wrought sculptures. The beauty here, as it almost always does, stuns the eye and the mind, and especially this week, when we’re all wrung out by powerless sympathy with the too-traumatized people of Haiti, it provokes intense attention and gratitude.

I wrote a post a while back on The Sister Project about the tradition of the commonplace book. Also known by the insanely evocative Latin phrase silva rerum, meaning ‘a forest of things’, these are journals of bits of found wisdom, collections of quotes and sayings and our reactions to them. We do this now, of course, whether in our Moleskines or our Facebook pages or our blogs, but the naming of the practice is all but lost, and I think that’s a shame. How do you keep track of the words you discover that move or provoke you? Can you share some of them with me, here, or over at The Sister Project?

Don’t move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move any more. Take a look at one place on earth, one circle of people, one realm of beings over time. ~Gary Snyder

That’s more than I can say about most of the last 30 days preceding. The last month has, in a word, sucked. Between the H’s terrifying accident, and its aftermath, both physical and emotional, I am completely spent. I used nanowrimo as intensive therapy, escaping into my fictional world every.single.day, even if I didn’t commit any new words to my draft. It was an amazing outlet, and exhilarating to prove to myself that I could actually write a piece of fiction–something I literally haven’t done, save fragments, since high school.

This month, I’ve got a new immersion project, which I’ll reveal at some point, and I am, as a wise friend counseled, just trying to get through the month.

Today, I drove all four of us to the kids’ school. The H and I had breakfast, then went to the market and I dropped him in Great Barrington while I went to see my shrink (how badly did I need that appointment today? Oh, badly.) I picked him up, and drove him an hour to catch the train to NYC where he has a meeting tomorrow morning. I drove back to the kids’ school (an hour and five minutes) to pick them up to take them to get their flu shots. I drove them to the pediatrician (20 minutes.) We drove back to school, so Dido could finish his day. The Babe and I went for lunch (for me) at 3 p.m., and then to her ballet class. We drove back to school, and then home. Let’s not even discuss my carbon footprint, shall we?

I am quite relaxed, actually about all this; my biggest dilemma is how to manage the animals: the dog can’t stay home alone all day, so she’s going to need to ride along with us most mornings; I will hike her (good for us both) and then leave her with the H at his office while I go about my day. The horses have to be fed and turned out in the morning, every morning, so I now have to do that before taking everyone to school, rather than my prior routine of doing it after they leave. But there’s no way for me to get up early enough (5:30? not happening) to do stalls before school, too. As a result, over the last few days, the kids and I have gotten into an evening routine. Dido does his homework, then we all go down to the barn together. They, who have steadfastly resisted much barn work for the last eight months, have suddenly gotten with the program (fear of maternal meltdown perhaps? though that’s never had an impact before, really) and have started helping, a lot, with cleaning stalls, feeding, watering and stocking the paddock with hay and water for morning. By the end of the half hour “shift”, they’re done working and are just running and playing by the barn while I finish the last details, but that’s lovely, too; then we go back up to the house for dinner. Between that and the time change, they’ve been falling into bed at 7:30, and mostly are asleep by 8, which is, no exaggeration, bliss.

Last weekend, maple on fire

Technically speaking, I practice only half of animal husbandry. I do not raise animals from birth; my hens aren’t broody and even if they were, we eat their eggs; we’re not breeding horses or cats or dogs (though we do have a lovely yearling warmblood, Hal, living here now, thanks to our friend Katherine, who’s training him); the only reproduction going on here is wild and unintentional.  But we do spend a whole lot of our time caring for animals of all kinds: Dacos, and the horse who boards with him; three barn cats; a house cat, the three remaining chickens, our dog…you get the idea. It’s an investment of time, energy and no small amount of emotion.

On the weekend, we try to do barn chores as a family, a welcome change for me, since most weekdays, I do them alone. I have a pretty good rhythm now, at least when the H is in town (as he’s not, this week) of making my tea in the morning and then heading off to the barn as soon as he and the kids leave at 7:30. Even if I tarry, I like to have all the chores down there done by 9, so I can get to work early enough to feel like I have a lovely expanse of time in front of me. Saturday, miraculously, the adults in the house slept in, until after 9 a.m. (I literally cannot remember the last time that happened) and so I didn’t get to the barn until late,10 or so. Our plan was to groom both horses, clean their stalls, and then take turns riding Dacos. But when I haltered him and led him out of his stall, Dacos couldn’t put weight on his right rear leg. This was the first time in the ten months we’ve had our beautiful gelding that he’s come up lame, and it was a shock.

Instead of calling the vet, I called Katherine, our resident (practically–five of her horses are here, so I see her morning and night, most days) equine expert. Cold water, analgesic, stall rest, waiting were the components of her prescription, and so began the first test of my own fortitude for the equine project I’ve undertaken this year. Shoveling shit is hard work, but not taxing. Ditto tossing hay, hauling buckets of water, spreading clean bedding and picking hooves. Worrying about the health and future of an 1100 pound beautiful beast is a greater challenge. Two days into this program of rest and rehab, the leg is improving: still swollen, still warm to the touch, but neither symptom as severe as Saturday, and the leg can now bear some weight. If it’s not better in a couple more days, we’ll have to call the vet.

Dacos is a gentle, patient horse. He has quirks: he has never learned to be tied, meaning that when you saddle or groom him, he simply stands,  untethered. This is not something anyone would recommend, but he does it, and has never surprised us with a dash or snort or kick; he just stands, watches, waits and cooperates. He likes, under saddle, to pretend to spook, to see how his rider will react (best not to, and then, whether reassured or disappointed, he calms and readjusts.) But mostly, he’s just interested in us. He bends down to sniff and nuzzle the children, puts his cheek next to mine and gives a soft exhale of grassy breath, takes treats from our hands with his lips instead of his teeth, watches us as we clean or lead or feed him. He let me blanket him in his stall in the dark last night without so much as a start. He’s sweet, and we are all four of us holding our breath a bit to see where this injury will lead.

——–

I returned Sunday evening from the longest period I’ve ever spent away from my kids. Don’t think they didn’t notice: When I returned, the Babe was sick, and she stayed home from school on Monday. She did manage to deck herself out in the new dress I brought her, and spend much of the day cuddling a toy now known as Sing-y the Bear. Dido went off to school looking like a one-kid advertisement for prep school education in his new Exeter Lacrosse cap and grey and maroon sweatshirt. By Tuesday, Dido was sick, too, and I took both to the pediatrician. Weds., the Babe had recovered enough to go, kicking and screaming (yes, literally) to school, while Dido stayed home for the longest TV marathon of his young life. Today, Dido is still here, remembering to complain about his earache whenever I look too skeptical that a child in pain could climb, slide, run, explore the woods and pretend to shoot so energetically. Ah. Parenthood.

What was it that took me away, at long, overdue, last from my short people? My 25th high school reunion, which I approached with exactly zero sense of irony or trepidation. I liked high school. I like going back there, and I do it every five years, sometimes even more often, if I can come up with an excuse. My attachment to Exeter is broad and deep, and I think, in some ways, this weekend helped me better understand why.

25 years ago, I was a runner. Not a talented one, not fast, but track and cross country were the two sports at Exeter that allowed anyone who showed up and did the work (of training and competing) to earn a varsity letter. I did, in both, enduring the embarrassment of coming in last or nearly so in nearly every 800 yard race I ran. I held similar standing on the cross country courses. Then, as now, I wanted to have some claim, no matter how tenuous, on an athletic life. I wanted to validate a part of me that I knew would never predominate, but which mattered to me nonetheless.

I am once again trying to be a runner, and this weekend, I brought my running shoes, though in the end, I used them only for a long walk through the woods, along the Exeter river and down old trails with some of my dearest friends in the world. I was exhausted at the end of the weekend as though I had run a race, and exhilarated, too, though my exhilaration manifested first as grief.

I am something of a Pollyanna when it comes to Exeter. (My husband, rather cruelly, I think, has said one more than one occasion that my high school years were the high point of my life. I hope that’s not true, because I am happier at 43 than I ever really was as an adolescent or young adult.) But despite the normal and encompassing teenage angst I suffered from 14 to 18, those years were heady, exhilarating, and sometimes fulfilling in a visceral way that can be hard to replicate in the “real”, adult world, and particularly in life’s middle years.

On campus this weekend, I attended an English class (Great Books: As I Lay Dying, Rabbit, Run ,and A Farewell to Arms) taught by Doug Rogers. Mr. Rogers (keep the cardigan jokes to yourself) taught a senior seminar on Faulkner that I took in 1984. It was one of those life-changing literary experiences for me, but also memorable because that was the sad spring my father died (at 48, too young, from a brain tumor) and Mr. Rogers, along with many of his colleagues, extended untold kindnesses to me in that hard time.

I also attended an assembly, led by a classmate who is now a high-ranking executive at a truly enormous global company. The experience was surreal, not only because I found myself watching soda commercials in the Assembly Hall, but for the memories that flooded me sitting in that august (it really is) space: sitting among the senior class my prep (9th grade) year, because there were too many of us for the 9th grade section; sitting in the balcony on dates at Saturday night movies–I still remember seeing Alien there for the first time; now THAT’s a date movie.

We visited the Grill, the on campus snack shop, strolled to the Bookstore, took that long walk along the river, where some of my favorite memories, of skating up the frozen river with John Torontow, of finding secret hidden spots along the cross country trail, came rolling back.

I cooked dinner that night for the returning Langdell-ites (my dorm mates) at Barbara Jenny’s home in Portsmouth. Back at the Exeter Inn that night, I stayed up as late as I could stand to, talking with the huge crowd of classmates at the bar, finding it impossible to have enough time with everyone I wanted to talk to–which was, really, everyone.

Saturday included 2 Harkness discussions led by classmates, one on a life in the arts, featuring museum director Stephanie Stebich, chairman of the board of the Academy of American Poets Nicie Johnson Panetta, and filmmaker Roland Tec. The second discussion was on the concept of non sibi, not for oneself, and how we apply it in our lives post-PEA, was led by Uwe Brandes and Katherine Rouleau, who work in the areas of environmental sustainability and healthcare, respectively. The discussion showed our class’ Harkness manners and muscles off well: it was extremely well-attended, and the discussion thorough and thoughtful. I did wish there had been more time to delve into the minority viewpoint on healthcare reform raised by one classmate. I was quiet, I think, in both discussions, and I remember how I felt at the table all those years ago: not afraid to speak, but occasionally too hesitant to expres my views, at least in some classes. I made a mental note to put forth my opinions more. (If some reading this just blew cappucino out of their noses laughing at the idea that I need to be more opinionated–hey, there’s more than one side to me.) I thought both of these discussions were particularly relevant as a counterpoint to Katie Joklik Baynes’ assembly talk–I wish that students might have seen this side of our class’ life paths, too. I also went to a panel of current students, and then gathered with other classmates on the steps of the Academy building to have our class picture taken. Lunch in Wetherell followed, and then Kris Rosbe and Lee Rose Emery and I decided to take a break from the intense and tiring delicious work of reconnecting for a little retail therapy. (So much for non sibi. We bought clothes for our kids at the outlet mall, but still.)

By Saturday night, it felt as though we’d really reached critical mass. New faces had arrived throughout the day, but a few more arrived just for the dinner. Never one to turn down a socializing, social-easing glass of wine, I found myself not wanting to drink. I was exhausted from all the intense thought and feeling, and not wanting to miss anything. Amy Kittenplan Hubbard brought her Exeter scrapbook, tattered but full of memories and incriminating photographs. I was talked into confessing to a Lower year crush. I wished for more and more and more time as classmates on campus only for the evening took their leave.

Back at the Exeter Inn, discussions continued until at least 2 a.m. (that’s when I called it a night.) We sat in the bar, talking to people we knew well and not so well. I wrapped up my night by delivering a semi-epic monologue about my twisted career path. In my defense, Tom Jones set me off by asking a question about where my life had gone since the last time he and I had seen each other, nearly 20 years earlier, in Brooklyn. I was soundly teased for my long discourse, though that’s not why I chose the end of my speechifying to head to bed.

Sunday morning, Kris Rosbe, who was my roommate for the weekend, and I decided to attend the service at Phillips Church for classmates who have died. A small group of us gathered there to hear the inimitable Bobby Thompson ’72, school chaplain, preach and offer us the opportunity to remember. In attendance were David Chipman (with whom I’m so sorry I didn’t get to speak during the reunion), Elyse Packard, Chris Saxman, Trevor Agard, Mike Vaccaro, Julia Logan with her kids, Martin Brinkley with son Sam, Jim Lando and his wife Leigh, Brett Games and Werner Brandes. (If I’ve left anyone out, apologies.)

The service was a highly emotional experience for me. I am completely a-religious, and have been my entire life, but I always enjoyed being at Phillips Church (the few times I actually went!) and appreciate church in general as an opportunity for reflection and introspection, even though I am not a Christian. We all shared memories of the dead, and Thompson’s words, not to mention his stunning leadership in singing my favorite hymn, Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, were beautiful and moving.

Throughout the service, I found myself reflecting on loss, not only of classmates who died much, much too young, but also of youth and of possibility, my own, and others’. I am not a person who spends much time mourning my own long-gone youth. I am decisive, and to be so requires me to dismiss regret much of the time,  to suspend passing judgment on my own decision-making. (That’s not to say I don’t perceive right and wrong decisions, but I try to move on, rather than to dwell.) Anything else just produces hours of self-torture. Even so, revisiting the friendships and values of my teenage self could not possibly have passed without making me wonder about where I am in my life, and where I might have been. And here’s the rub: I have a terrific, comfortable, loved life. My family are all healthy; I live in a beautiful place; I perform work that is fulfilling and meaningful (though I might complain that I don’t have enough time for it, that’s the result of my own choices and I probably would make them all again.) Even with a life that is happy and satisfying, there is a measure of grief at what might have been, at just the sheer passage of time, the separation from loved ones, the lack of time available for the kind of intense study and thought and contemplation that characterized much of my time at Exeter. I am lucky to ever have had it, but when confronted with its memory, I melt. The English class I attended was inspiring (all five alums who went together left thinking that to teach English at Exeter would be a VERY good gig) both for the intelligence on display (impressive) and for the moment: the idea that twelve people might gather to discuss one short passage of one great novel for 50 minutes is so far removed from most of our daily lives as to be laughable–or, instead, cry-able.