Who to give my change to?

There was the injured vet, (that's what his sign said) a clear plastic jug that once held candy, a top of a milk crate, which he stood behind while smoking. The woman with diabetes (it said so on her cardboard sign) crocheting hats in exchange for change. The two men, their incense smoking the air, who ask me every time that I pass, "Dollar to send poor kids to camp?" or "Dollar to feed a hungry child, just need $100 then I can go home." One tells me how pretty my smile is or how much he likes my hat. Another man, no front teeth, with a voice like port, strumming his guitar. Whatever he sings sounds blue. The young hobos, usually with dogs (Feed my dog! their signs say) dred locks, filthy calves, barefeet. The man that stands at in the middle of the median, unemployed (his sign says) needs money for food, and by the way, god bless.

First Summer's Day

On the first day of summer, I rise early and stretch towards the sun. Red looks at me from the floor raising one eyebrow and then another as if to say, "Are you done yet?" She is anxious for her walk. But I take the time to reach and bend, to bring summer into my bones and muscles, the deep joints of the hips, under the shoulder blades.

We take the trail by the river, not too many bugs, but lots of other dogs and their people. We all look goofy in our own way, the dogs with lathering tongues and lopsided grins, the people with floppy hats, mis-matched socks, glasses fogged with sweat. Red cries when another dog approaches even the old ones that limp along still happy to be a dog outside in the sun. She tolerates puppies who can't help but jump and nip at her red ears.

It is a good morning to drink hot sweet tea on the front steps, read the paper, take a nap.

It smells so fragrant, the day after a night of rain, the air rich with chamomile, pitch pine, unfolding ferns.

A good day to read a poem or two, Mary Oliver, to watch the dog sleep in the sun, wave at the young child next door drawing with chalk on the driveway.

There is time for more tea, writing in my journal (not the computer), talking on the phone with an old friend.

And late in the evening, when the peepers start to peep, the red wing black birds cease their chatter, the cattails rattle in the wind, a swim in the cool dark lake.

Keep That Barn Door Closed!

Today they teach puberty to the fifth graders at E's school.

The teachers are groovy, hip, feminist, so I am hoping it will be an improvement over what we got back in the early seventies.

Back in the day (of course you remember) the boys and girls were shuttled, separately, into the auditorium for a film. I suppose that the film shown to the boys was different than the film showed to the girls but am not certain. Teachers taped a sheet of paper over the windows to the auditorium so you couldn't peak. No Peaking!

I knew all about menstruation and where babies came from (thanks to my buddy D.P. who told me all about it one spring afternoon when I was five. "That can't be possible!!" was my startled reaction.) Still, the film was confusing. Moving through that old black and white, the girl and her lipsticked mother (or was it a nurse) hugged and then fumbled around with the menstruation apparatus of the day: a tangle of belts and buckles that secured a thick pad between the thighs. How would I manage such manipulations in the small girl's bathroom stall?

Then there was the "ovulation" animation; a sketchy drawing of the fallopian tubes with the wilting flowers on top. Was that INSIDE MY BODY!!! We watched as the tiny egg made its way into the flower and then down, down to the waiting V-shaped chamber below (way down below..). "There the egg waits in the ready for the millions of sperm swimming up to penetrated its delicate membrane," the announcer with that Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Voice said with inflection.

That's why grandma always told you to "Keep those legs shut!" Wouldn't want any loose sperm getting inside unbeknown to me!. And then what???

The Lake and the Lotus

One night this winter, the water on the pond froze, diamond hard and clear. There wasn't any snow so the ice was smooth, hardly a bump or ripple along the surface. "Its like heaven," a woman whose face I recognized told me as she slung her skates over her shoulder.

E and I went that afternoon and all the days after until the snow fell. It was like a dream come true; my dream, that is, to skate on the canals of Amsterdam in winter. We could skate forever, never hitting a board, surrounded by the beaver dams and winter bare trees.

In the muddy part of spring, I saw that woman again. We remembered each other now that our heads and faces were free from woolen hats and scarfs. Many years ago, we had worked at the same little nature camp in Southern New Hampshire. Every morning just as the sun was rising, she tapped on the side of my cabin. Four knocks would wake me. I'd drag myself out of a warm bed to meet her down at the lake still rising with fog. No way I could have gotten out of bed without her knocking at my door. Without saying a word, we jumped into the water then tied our bathing suits to the dock. Had to swim fast at first to get warm, then more slowly, languorously, through the dark and fog to the other side of the lake. Sharp tailed swallows dipped and twirled above our heads. The water was thick like syrup and filled, in parts, with long stemmed lilies that tickled when we passed. Some had lotus flowers balanced judiciously on floating leafs that released a sweet mossy fragrance.

Camp was still quiet when we returned back to our side of the lake and I felt holy for the whole rest of the day.

Happier at 85

According to a recent NYT article, people get happier as they age. The "sad o meter" rises up until we turn 50 and then starts to decline as we age.

If this is true (and surely there are old people we know who need more love, attention, food), I think I know why.

By 50, every plan you have made since the age of ten has either failed or turned out unimaginably different than you had expected. So, you give up on making plans and instead watch as your life unfolds in all those remarkably surprising and unintended ways.

You have eaten enough mottled and bruised peaches to delight in the perfectly ripe one that melts in your mouth and sends streams of juice down your chin.

You get more excited from the delicacy of the blooming orchid than you ever did from your first husband H (sorry H) and the birds singing, oh, more soothing than any drug.

You have given up on all attempts to look smoother, trimmer, fitter, shinier, sexier, and robust and take great pleasure from the rolls of flesh that hang unembarrassed from limbs that still move with a stubborn grace and harmony. Fed by spoon from the aids in the nursing home you feel the purest gratitude.

You have lost so much already, a son to suicide, a father to alcohol, a friend to depression, that letting go of your last breath doesn't seem so hard.

The Story in My Spine

"The whole story is in the spine." Mary Oliver

The bones of the spine frame a tightly coiled roll of fibers. Alternative layers of fiber spin in different directions. They are spongy so if you twist to the right or the left in just the right way they wring out like a wet towel releasing its catch. Twist back to center and they are flooded with fresh ocean water. Over the years of bending, reaching, scraping by, the vertebra are pulled and pushed, cracked, crunched, loved, and misaligned and, in this way, come to embody the story of your life.

The story of my spine tells of the past, longing, vibrancy, surrender, and as much sorrow as joy (can there really be one without the other?) Stretching laterally towards the rope, my hips facing front, a ferret tickles out from the intercostal muscles of the right ribs. Push up into a back bend with firm hands and feet and a waterfall of tears slides in two directions down to the still pool below. Head to knee in a sitting position, my spine vibrates with the moon. In my final resting, over a bolster or chair, the pine releases her startling scent.

Goodbye Louise Bourgeois

The artist Louise Bourgeois passed away yesterday at the age of 98. I was fortunate to see some of her work last year at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. At one point in her career, she made a series of gigantic spider mama's with long spindly legs and a big sack of babies hanging from the fulcrum where the legs gathered into a head. In other pieces, she created "rooms" from tall pieces of wood hinged together door like with tiny windows to peer into. There she lay objects evocative of female spaces, lace, white gloves, marbled hands, a sewing basket, and then the smear of blood on a wall, a heart, a syringe. In her art, she sought to find the trembling safety of unsafe places, emotions, situations.

There were many many years when she was ignored by the "Art" world, because women weren't taken seriously as anything, let alone artists. But, she pressed on with beautiful sculptures in marble and bronze. "Arch of Hysteria," shows a body flung into a wildly arching back bend, the head severed from the neck (see the NYT obit for this).

Her work evokes in me feelings of wonder, vulnerability, strength, surrender. And a strong desire to embrace things ignored, forgotten, left behind; the beating heart, the spider's egg case, my father's voice.