In The Deep Mid Winter

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, 
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
                                            Wendell Berry


Winter Solstice is here, or more accurately, was here yesterday.  I love this dark time of the year - the late light in the morning comes with a sky that stays deep, and the early dark in the evening comes like a mother's hand closing the eyes of a sleepy baby.  Tucked in.  Held close.  Sparkles from Christmas lights or maybe even stars if the night is clear.  Permission to snuggle in, have another cup of tea.  Go to bed early and let the cat sleep on your feet. Eat another chocolate.  Decide to spend an hour or so with favorite poetry instead of making another batch of holiday cookies.  Weep for our own sorrows and for the sorrows of the world, then sing for the light that is surely coming.

We had a few friends over last night to eat comfort food and drink egg nog. A small and cozy group that had me marveling at the blessings of friends I would not have imagined a year and a half ago. 

Then, in our former life, Dwight and I celebrated Winter Solstice with a dinner that we planned for all year.  We cooked for days, anticipated our guests with the rituals of beautiful

table settings and prayers, and lit up the darkness with the joy of shared lives.  We all dressed up for the evening, wine flowed freely, and a hundred candles lit our home, taking us all into the darkness and then out again with lively conversation, laughter, and true affection.

Such an evening is not replicable in our DC life.  Instead we have the chaotic happiness of small children, paper plates and potluck, and the it-still-seems-impossible joy of friends who already feel like we knew them when.  This on top of a Christmas dinner at the home of other friends who have welcomed us as though we were long gone family.  It is good.

So last night I lined an empty large can with tea lights and invited everyone to write, on a small piece of paper, something that was part of this year that they wanted to bid farewell.  I don't know what everyone else wrote, but I said goodbye to three things:  my father, my orthopedic devices, and my fear of doing things on my own in a strange land.  We placed these slips of paper into the fire and watched them burn, and while we watched them I lit a sage stick and swirled us all in its smoky blessing.

A new land.  A new ritual.  Another way to heal what is past and welcome what is coming.

The Beagle is Beyond Me

In my defense, let me begin by saying that I am an animal lover.

My animal cred includes raising and releasing dozens of songbirds, keeping pets of every group of vertebrates in my preschool classroom, learning to wrangle pygmy goats, cleaning

the pens of pot bellied pigs, caring for a hamster through her surgery, postponing a weekend vacation by several hours to take a rat to the vet, rearranging my life and house to accommodate a blind cat in her last year of life, spending weeks nursing a car-struck kitty back to health, scrambling to find veterinary care for a squirrel with a broken leg and a young barn owl who was dehydrated, and even risking real injury to rescue a northern harrier with a broken wing. A dog has never been a live-in companion before now, but I enjoy dogs and am eager to know my friends' canine companions. I am an animal girl.


Full disclosure: I do swat mosquitoes and flies, and see to it that the stinkbugs that find their way into our house meet a swift but merciful end.  Spiders I capture and take outside whenever possible, although I have been known to leave them in the corners because they help catch the stinkbugs (this is life in the mid-Atlantic).

But the beagle.  The beagle is beyond me.

Beautiful Girl!

Emily and Aric brought Atucker into their home as a little puppy not long after they got married, and we first met her when they brought her out on the airplane for their first visit back to California after they got married, Christmas of 2007.  Our Granddog!  We welcomed her, we fawned over her, we bought her holiday gifts and made sure she had everything she needed, and we even locked our 17 year old cat in the laundry room for a few days to give the puppy free run of the house and yard.  She was - and is - a beautiful creature, just as she was - and is - an unmannerly beast.  But I could forgive that in a puppy.  She was so little, after all!  Puppies jump on people, right?  Puppies steal food from the table and bark at nothing, bay at everything and piddle on the floor.  Right?

We had many visits with Atucker as guests in Em and Aric's home before we moved out to DC.  Special treats were in our bags for her, we took her on walks, loved her up, and began to wonder when she would get over some of those puppy behaviors.

Friends, she hasn't gotten over them. Listing all of her transgressions seems unkind (and would take volumes).  Just know that each day comes with some standard situations that run the gamut from annoying to crazymaking.  Okay, I will tell you this one:  every time anyone comes to the door we are treated to Atucker's loud barking, baying, and snarling.  This includes the mailman, the UPS man, neighbors and friends, and imaginary guests who

aren't really there.  She responds to no one - no one at all - who attempts to quiet her, and must be dragged away, howling and snapping, by the collar if we want to open the door to someone.

I try to keep positive, and think about the good she brings to the household.  She is the definition of patience and kindness with the children, which is a big mark in the plus column for her.  And, one day when someone that looked a little sketchy came to the door, I actually appreciated her threatening noises. And . . . well . . . that's probably it.

What has moved me to the edge with her is what she did the other day when Em and I were out with the children.  Here is the story:  we had received a package from my sister and were delighted to open it and find that she had sent us a lovely handmade Christmas treat called peppernuts.  These are a seasonal, ethnic treat that are a lot of effort to make, and my sister is a master.  The gift almost made me cry because it was so thoughtful and so very welcomed.  Knowing that the dog likes to snatch food left near the edge of the table, we put the precious packages in the middle (and it's a wide table) before we left the house.

Evidently Atucker was as excited about the peppernuts as we were because when we got back the packages were on the floor, torn open, all peppernuts consumed, and the table had multiple deep gouges in it where she had scrambled to climb up.

That was last Thursday.  As some great wisdom had arranged it, Em, Aric and little ones were leaving town the next day and Atucker was taken to spend this time with their friends who are dog lovers. This was a very good thing, as I was so sad and angry and completely confused about the value of this animal that it was hard to be in the house with her. 

The question, I realize, is not at its core about the dog.  The question is about how people who love each other and want to live together find a way to work with what seems acceptable for some and intolerable to others. Do we do things your way?  My way?  Can we find another way? There are always tensions in household relationships, things to work out about housework and schedules and decorating how we relate to each other and so forth. But somehow this beast brings out the touchiest part of finding the middle path. She's not, after all, a painting to argue over placement on wall, or a bathroom that needs cleaning, or an impatient remark that needs to be apologized for. She's a part of the family. Like the crazy wife in the attic or the uncle given to alcoholic rages, she is here and must be dealt with.  Emily and Aric love her and find her behavior something they are willing to put up with. Me, not so much.

So on Saturday, after a couple of days to breathe through this, I was in the beauty shop reading People magazine, waiting to get my curls trimmed.  An article about Drew Barrymore caught my eye, probably because she is so cute.  She was talking about some of the best advice she'd been given, and said something like this:  when you really don't know what to do and are banging your head against a wall, just love more. That's all. Just love more.

Well.  That's not new wisdom, but it is a call back to the basics of family life.  Just love more.  I have two more days to figure out what "loving more" looks like before the kids and the dog come home.  Wish me luck. 

Beautiful Me

“I want to grow old without facelifts... I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you.”
― Marilyn Monroe

1974

We have two folding triptychs in our home that are filled with pictures of family.  Included are photos of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, our daughter as a child and as a bride, our own wedding, grandchildren, a few vacation shots, some special moments.  One of these photos is of Dwight and me, our engagement picture, when we were babies of 18 years old.

I’ve been looking at that photo, and other photos of my younger self, lately, and thinking about the idea of beauty.  In my 57 (almost 58) years, I have not thought of myself as a beautiful girl or woman, but have struggled, as many of us have, with a self-image that could not live up to real or imagined ideals.  Complaints have been the common ones:  too fat, bad skin, bland features, and on and on and on.  Here is the thing that I now know, that I couldn’t know when I was younger:  I was beautiful.

Asaka and Kiyoko

This morning I did the children’s story in church and was struck, when looking at the couple dozen children at my feet, at how very beautiful they are.  My own grandchildren, whose every inch of skin I know well, are more lovely than I could put words together to describe.  And yet none of these know their own beauty.  They are young enough to be innocent of that descriptor for themselves.

During the fifteen years I taught classes at CSU Fresno I would sometimes just look at my students, most of whom were young women, marvel at their beauty, knowing that they probably didn’t think of themselves as beautiful.  As I watched them, it seemed to me that each one was something more gorgeous than they could, at that time, realize.  They would see imperfection in the mirror, while those of us heading toward crone-hood would see unveined legs, smooth brows, silky hair, lovely hands.  Beautiful.

Perhaps this extended time of living so entirely in my body has brought all of this to mind.  Perhaps because I still must be mindful of every step, because every step still has a cost in something between discomfort and pain, because my body has been my primary focus in self-definition since my fall down the stairs on August 13, perhaps because of these things I also think of other ways my body defines me.  My hair is mousy and graying.  I bear multiple scars of skin cancer surgery. I am developing the heavy eye lids of my great grandmother, who, I remember from my early childhood, had her eyelids held open with scotch tape (I am not making this up).  The size of everything, from my shoes to my jeans to my bra, is changing.  These are all things that make me think I am not beautiful.

At Kiyoko's Birthday Party, November 2013

But I wonder.  What happens if I live another 30 years, and look back on photographs of myself during my 50s.  Will I, as an octogenarian, think that the 50 something me was beautiful, the way that I, as a fifty-something, think my younger self was beautiful?  What might I be failing to see now that I will see clearly farther on?

And the question becomes this: Does beauty matter? 

Hmmmm.... it used to matter in a different way than it does now.  It used to have more to do with how I thought about my self worth.  Could be that now, at last, it has more to do with enjoying my body for what and how it is, at this point in time?  My body, I know, will continue to change.  And that, I hope, will in some way be beautiful.

I don't know this woman, but I want to be as beautiful as she is