Sharon Charde's Blog, page 3

SUMMER

    So why am I not writing about Ukraine, the threat of nuclear attack, Hershel Walker and his lies, the January 6th commission hearing, my fears around the midterms, the devastation of Ian, how the first frost was such a surprise that I hadn’t covered my dahlias?

     Because, though I am no Pollyanna, to which you all can attest, I want to focus on something less intense, to calm myself as another winter approaches and the world seems to be drowning in outrage and lunacy. 

     In the immediate aftermath of my son’s death when I was mired in grief, a friend who’d also lost a child counseled me to feel free to allow myself some distraction from all that sorrow, that it was absolutely necessary for survival.

     She was unquestionably right, though it was hard to see her logic through my tears.

     So, in the midst of this politically fraught universe, I’m going to write about summer, a time when I feel gloriously unbound, ridiculously happy, more of the self I long to be. One of my writing teachers once said that the best time to write about a season is when you’re not in the throes of it—the felt contrast makes the featured one all the more explicit.

     See me at the beach with my father when I was just a year old, already loving the water and sun, as he did. My mother laid me outside in my carriage every day, a minute on each side, she told me, as the pediatrician had mandated.  

     I got an early start on summer love, a tan June baby, the sun shining my skin, blonding my hair, wearing as few clothes as possible. And here I am, eighty years later, still enraptured with warmth and minimal dress, though my hair is now gray, and skin speckled with spots from all that sun-minus-sunscreen.

     Living in Connecticut, as I have all my life, has gifted me with ample opportunities to spend time at the beach. Many of my high school friends had summer places on the shoreline which we visited often. I spent the days before my wedding at the beach—for a tan instead of the makeup I never wore. My mother often rented a place on the water when my children were young, and those seaside houses somehow lightened the difficulties that beset my family of origin’s troubled relationships. The beach was the place my husband and I went on our honeymoon, where we would head for our rare getaways, always refreshed by the sand and the sea. 

     And then there was Block Island. Two years after Geoff died, not knowing what else to give my husband for his late May birthday, I thought, a weekend there might just be the right gift. We’d gone there too when the kids were young, to a simple cottage in Minister’s Lots, close to Crescent Beach. We walked down the beach to see our old rental, then back towards town for a seafood lunch. I gathered stones, we smiled for the first time in months. When it began to rain, we laughingly pulled garbage bags over our clothes and cycled out to Rodman’s Hollow to see the old barn we’d glimpsed advertised in a realtor’s window.

     We wanted to hang on to that happiness.

     We’d always dreamed of buying an old barn and fixing it up. Here it was, in the most gorgeous, austere setting imaginable. And did it need fixing. How could we do this? Crazy with youth, hope and the need for release from our grief, we took out a huge mortgage and enlisted all our friends, Geoff’s, and Matthew’s friends, to help.

     And come and help they did. We strapped on toolbelts, stripped off the roof and siding shingles, snapped blue chalk lines, hammered on new ones redolent of cedar, a blaring boombox perched on the roof’s peak.  We sandblasted white paint off the venerable stone foundation, hacked through bunches of ancient wires, sawed pine for trim and sills, stained the cement floor downstairs bronze, ordered appliances that might or might not make it over on the ferry.

     With plywood sides on the pickup truck, I could load it with debris from “the pile” each day, drive it to the dump, come back for more.

     And always, the sea. We could see it from all the big windows we installed to take full advantage of the spectacular views.  Most days I managed a walk through the hollow down to Black Rocks beach, sat and listened to the waves crash, wondered when this sorrow would ever leave me, if it ever would. But the company and support of all those friends carried us through those crazy, shining years and continues to, even though we sold the barn a long time ago.

     We hadn’t realized we were rebuilding our lives.

     Summer heals. I love the need for fewer clothes, the ease of pulling on a pair of shorts, a tank top, flip flops, in readiness for the day ahead. I love the long days replete with light, the invitation to be outside all the time. My husband’s garden bursts with tomatoes, lettuce, eggplant, broccoli; mine with roses, angelonia, cleome, Russian sage, and peonies. All the windows are open, breezes blow winter from the rooms of our home.

     How not to walk outside and feel joy in being alive, especially now as the realization that my years are numbered is always with me. I recently heard a “dharma talk” (Buddhist for sermon, or lecture) about the necessity of keeping joy in our lives, how it offers us the cushions of safety and kindness. If we keep our minds inclined towards joy and happiness, the dharma teachers said, we could loosen our grip on perfectionist tendencies. Our minds will feel settled and free from torment.

     Just what I needed to hear and continue to need to hear. Yes, being witness to the horrors of the world is of primary importance, but I know perhaps more deeply now than ever, being of “a certain age,” that I require the ballast of joy that summer brings me, enough of it to sustain me through the long New England winters, the uncertainty of whatever lies ahead.

     Still, I don’t want summer to end. Though it must and it will, as all things do.

     But I haven’t put my shorts away yet.

                                          ********************

If you haven’t already, please listen to my interview with the wonderful Martha Anne Toll, author of Three Muses, in bookstores now.  https://youtu.be/FJ5ddMZSeKw

I can’t remember if I posted this lovely review of my memoir by Story Circle Organization :  https://www.storycircle.org/book_review/i-am-not-a-juvenile-delinquent-how-poetry-changed-a-group-of-at-risk-young-women/

Get this incredibly important book, No Choice, by another dear friend, Becca Andrews, about the destruction of Roe and what it means for our times: https://www.amazon.com/No-Choice-Destruction-Fundamental-American/dp/1541768396/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2HJLG6IVLR4M7&keywords=no+choice+andrews&qid=1665963009&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjc3IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=No+Choice%2Cstripbooks%2C94&sr=1-1

And I promised this man that I would publicize this link, hopefully none of us will ever need it but you never know: If Family or Friend is Arrested - https://www.omaralawgroup.com/what-to-know-if-family-friend-arrested/

NEIGHBORHOOD

I live on a street where many of the homes are owned by people who do not inhabit them full-time. When the pandemic necessitated escape from the city, many moved into their second homes for those long months.

With a deep need to get out of our houses during that lonely time, we all walked, many with dogs, no matter the weather. Standing carefully apart from my new neighbors, I enjoyed conversations with people I’d never even seen before—day after day, in summer sun and winter cold, we exchanged glimpses of different lives, shared struggles, excitement about first vaccines, hope for release from masks and quarantines, fury over the political gamesmanship in the White House.

The pandemic connected us.

“What great people,” I thought. “I want to get to know them better. I want them to get to know each other, and the full-timers on our street.”

So, the seed of an idea began forming in my mind.

 “Let’s have a block party,” I thought, mentioning it to my husband who thought it a great idea, and another friend who wanted to co-host it with me. We began planning months in advance, making lists, sending out email blasts, imagining what we’d need to supply and what neighbors would need to bring.

I told friends about our plans. One of them responded:

How wonderful that you’re organizing the block party—that’s such a lovely thing to do.  Communities seem a bit frazzled, these days, and to form and nourish them seems extraordinary and a blessing to all who participate.

And that’s what it turned out to be—a blessing. The long tables we’d set out filled quickly with scrumptious summer salads, all manner of desserts and hors oeuvres, and bottles of wine and prosecco crowded the beer and seltzer we’d provided in ice-filled garden buckets. Neighbors in colorful summer clothes streamed into our still-green yard, donned their name tags, and quickly began to mingle, talking, laughing drinking, and eating until dark. Our son, who’s bought the property contiguous to us, came with his wife and one of his three sons to meet all who will soon become neighbors—a special thrill.

“Let’s do it again!” was a nearly universal response, and we surely will.

But meanwhile, the weave of connections continues—we’re having drinks and dinners with each other, sharing walks, waving to each other on the street-- new friends and old now linked by a common bond -- our neighborhood.

It feels great.

I have been reflecting on my friend’s comments about the frazzling of communities these days and the importance of nourishing them, so grateful that we were able to do that, and will continue to.

We need the connectedness neighborhoods can offer, especially in the face of so much disconnectedness in our world today.

And I’ve been thinking about other neighborhoods—the ones I’ve lived in, and how important they’ve been in nurturing me. I grew up on a street where everyone knew each other, a kind of “Leave it to Beaver” neighborhood, in which none of the mothers worked outside the home and all the fathers did. We kids played in each other’s yards and porches, our mothers convened for coffee and canvassing the street for cancer and polio drives, parents gathered for steak and scotch on each other’s backyard terraces. Everyone went to church.

 Our similarities joined us--it was comforting, supportive.

That was true also in the university community I lived in for several years while my husband was a medical resident. Since our husbands were never home, we wives turned to each other for sustenance and companionship. We all had young children, no money, and lots of time. In the warm months, we pulled our lawn chairs together, watching our children interact, shared simple lunches and dinners. In the winter, we were in and out of each other’s small apartments, hosting birthday parties, toddler play dates, drinking lots of coffee. No one ever needed a babysitter—we all took each other’s kids for the rare times we went out.

We were, quite simply, there for each other.

There are other kinds of neighborhoods, too. Emotional neighborhoods. Spiritual neighborhoods. Creative neighborhoods. Every year, I’ve been fortunate enough to get a fellowship for a writing residency, and I’ve thrived in those experiences, surrounded with others who are similarly passionate about writing, art, and music. I’ve just returned from an 8-day mindfulness retreat, immersed in the silent energy of what Buddhists call “sangha,” a likeminded spiritual community. Friendship circles, families, church, summer camp, team sports, yes even political parties, provide what I think of as emotional neighborhoods—a coming together of people who feel similarly about issues and find solace in sharing their views and thoughts. 

I suppose in some way, I’m trying to create a kind of neighborhood with these blog posts. Reaching out with my reflections on topics that might catch your interest, resonate with your experience or feelings, I’m attempting to link you, my readers, together.

“Only connect…live in fragments no longer” (E.M. Forster).

It makes more sense than anything else I can think of right now. 

                                                 ************** 

Please tune in to a conversation I’ll be having with my dear friend Martha Anne Toll about her debut novel, The Three Muses, “an affecting chamber piece with plenty to say about art, trauma, and healing” (Kirkus Reviews), on September 28 at 7:00.                                                                                             -https://www.oblongbooks.com/event/online-martha-ann-toll-three-muses  

I'M EIGHTY

It happened a few weeks ago. Okay, I look the same as I did the last day I was seventy-nine, but I don’t feel the same.

Not at all.

It’s big and sobering moment, the awakening that birthday morning. The seventies were good to me, one of the best decades of my life, actually. I felt fit and energetic, published four books and a number of poems, some of which received awards, and was lucky enough to get many fellowships to residencies that gave me precious time to write and reflect. I did a good amount of travel to some pretty exciting places (Tibet, Bhutan) with my husband and avoided Covid (so far). My son and his family were still in Concord, and we saw each other a good bit, which was wonderful.

But eighty. No more “the young old,” but moving towards the “old old,” the age for falls, fragility, and increased physical vulnerability. I know this, but I’m not there in my mind. My mother lived to celebrate her hundredth birthday and my father almost to it. I guess I’ve just assumed I’d make it to that point as well.

But eighty. There is a kind of heaviness in that integer. It brings me pause.

People say, “Age is just a number,” “You? Eighty? No way!” “Eighty is the new sixty,” but clearly, they have not yet reached this age or would feel differently, I suspect.

And I wonder if I would feel differently, too, if the world was not daily lurching from one crisis to another. If politicians and judges in Washington were not trying (and mostly succeeding) to turn the current world into one more like the one in which I was young, where women were chattel, men ruled, children were to be seen and not heard, everyone I knew went to church on Sunday. A stable world, though, in which few challenged much of anything.

If, if, if.

It feels as if bad spirits have been unleashed all across the country. It’s certainly not the one I thought I’d be inhabiting at eighty, in the sixties and seventies when I marched, protested, braided my long brown hair, took off my bra, and devoured “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Susan Faludi, Ms. Magazine.

I thought we’d fought hard to change the idea held by so many, the Catholic church, the general patriarchy, even women themselves, that there was something wrong with simply being a woman.

Certainly, I have worked hard all my professional and personal life to challenge that odious concept. And in the beautiful “Boombox” I received as a birthday gift from my husband and son filled with messages, pictures, and memories from many of you, I was reassured that many responders see me as someone who always stands up for what she believes, no matter what, takes no bs, and has helped many others to learn to do the same.

I think that was my favorite message, even though there were so many more very special ones. I was flush with gratitude and joy as I read through them, regret over mistakes and poor choices banished for that happy day. I forgot Covid, our horrendous political situation, my husband’s unsteady gait, my wrinkles and thinning skin, my son’s relocation to Switzerland, my grandsons leaving for everywhere.

It was a pretty perfect day, my eightieth birthday.

While I am writing this post, notification comes that another of my college classmates has died. A blue and white booklet called “Five Wishes” is on my desk, it will tell people how I want to be treated if I get seriously ill, although my husband and I have thoroughly discussed these things. 

We have our cemetery plots.

But then, last Sunday I had lunch with an astounding woman of ninety-four who is still creative and vibrant. I just finished an excellent novel by Alice Elliot Dark, “Fellowship Point,” about two eighty-year-old women who haven’t stopped living for a moment, whose friendship is rich and vital. I myself continue to write, garden, go to yoga class, walk four miles a day, feel energy and enthusiasm for living, intend to apply for more residency fellowships and hike part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

John Keats, the English poet, wrote about “negative capability,” which he describes it as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and which I have always understood as holding two opposites in one’s hands at the same time.

That concept has been my poetic foundation.

And so, eighty may inherit that conundrum for me—a sober beginning to the last chapter—but a time of relishing the knowledge, experience and yes, acceptance, that age has delivered.

And of continuing to try to face life as though I’m going to live forever-- and die tomorrow.

A good mantra for any age, I think.

                                          *********************

Thanks to so many of you who encouraged me to reach out with “To the Mothers of Uvalde” and send it to a wider audience. Our local paper published it as a guest essay, and today it was published in the Uvalde Leader-News as a guest essay. It makes me so happy to know I’ve been able to reach out to those suffering women.

https://www.uvaldeleadernews.com/articles/embracing-heartbreak-keeps-you-connected-to-lost-child/

I'M EIGHTY!

It happened a few weeks ago. Okay, I look the same as I did the last day I was seventy-nine, but I don’t feel the same.

Not at all.

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It’s big and sobering moment, the awakening that birthday morning. The seventies were good to me, one of the best decades of my life, actually. I felt fit and energetic, published several books and a number of poems, some of which received awards, and was lucky enough to get many fellowships to residencies that gave me precious time to write and reflect. I did a good amount of travel with my husband and avoided Covid (so far). My son and his family were still in Concord, and we saw each other a good bit, which was wonderful.

But eighty. No more “the young old,” but moving towards the “old old,” the age for falls, fragility, and increased physical vulnerability. I know this, but I’m not there in my mind. My mother lived to celebrate her hundredth birthday and my father almost to it. I guess I’ve just assumed I’d make it to that point as well.

But eighty. There is a kind of heaviness in that integer. It brings me pause.

People say, “Age is just a number,” “You? Eighty? No way!” “Eighty is the new sixty,” but clearly, they have not yet reached this age or would feel differently, I suspect.

And I wonder if I would feel differently, too, if the world was not daily lurching from one crisis to another. If politicians and judges in Washington were not trying (and mostly succeeding) to turn the current world into one more like the one in which I was young, where women were chattel, men ruled, children were to be seen and not heard, everyone I knew went to church on Sunday. A stable world, though, in which few challenged much of anything.

If, if, if.

It feels as if bad spirits have been unleashed all across the country. It’s certainly not the one I thought I’d be inhabiting at eighty, in the sixties and seventies when I marched, protested, braided my long brown hair, took off my bra, and devoured “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Susan Faludi, Ms. Magazine.

I thought we’d fought hard to change the idea held by so many, the Catholic church, the general patriarchy, even women themselves, that there was something wrong with simply being a woman.

Certainly, I have worked hard all my professional and personal life to challenge that odious concept. And in the beautiful “Boombox” I received as a birthday gift from my husband and son filled with messages, pictures, and memories from many of you, I was reassured that many responders see me as someone who always stands up for what she believes, no matter what, takes no bs, and has helped many others to learn to do the same.

I think that was my favorite message, even though there were so many more very special ones. I was flush with gratitude and joy as I read through them, regret over mistakes and poor choices banished for that happy day. I forgot Covid, our horrendous political situation, my husband’s unsteady gait, my wrinkles and thinning skin, my son’s relocation to Switzerland, my grandsons leaving for everywhere.

It was a pretty perfect day, my eightieth birthday.

While I am writing this post, notification comes that another of my college classmates has died. A blue and white booklet called “Five Wishes” is on my desk, it will tell people how I want to be treated if I get seriously ill, although my husband and I have thoroughly discussed these things.

We have our cemetery plots.

But then, last Sunday I had lunch with an astounding woman of ninety-four who is still creative and vibrant. I just finished an excellent novel by Alice Elliot Dark, “Fellowship Point,” about two eighty-year-old women who haven’t stopped living for a moment, whose friendship is rich and vital. I myself continue to write, garden, go to yoga class, walk four miles a day, feel energy and enthusiasm for living, intend to apply for more residency fellowships and hike part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

John Keats, the English poet, wrote about “negative capability,” which he describes it as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and which I have always understood as holding two opposites in one’s hands at the same time.

That concept has been my poetic foundation.

And so, eighty may inherit that conundrum for me—a sober beginning to the last chapter—but a time of relishing the knowledge, experience and yes, acceptance, that age has delivered.

And of continuing to try to face life as though I’m going to live forever-- and die tomorrow.

A good mantra for any age, I think.

                                            *********************

 Thanks to so many of you who encouraged me to reach out with “To the Mothers of Uvalde” and send it to a wider audience. Our local paper published it as a guest essay, and today it was published in the Uvalde Leader-News as a guest essay. It makes me so happy to know I’ve been able to reach out to those suffering women.

https://www.uvaldeleadernews.com/articles/embracing-heartbreak-keeps-you-connected-to-lost-child/

MOTHERS of UVALDE

I am surrounded with beauty, here at the beach. Birds trill, hydrangeas are beginning to bloom as peonies and rhododendrons surrender their brilliant petals, sand and sea are everywhere, and our small cottage allows a simplicity of living that is not possible at home.  

It’s pretty wonderful, and I am grateful for the respite.

But it’s impossible to get away from the news. And as I have written here many times, I choose not to, as I believe it’s crucial that I/we bear witness to the travesties and injustices in this unsettled world, even if we can do nothing about them.

The horrific shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde has already been obscured by the January 6 hearings, the frightening drop in the stock market, the Russian capture of most of the Donbas and all the other bad news that crowds my inbox.

But it has not been eclipsed in my mind. Despite the peace and beauty of my vacation surroundings—maybe even because of them--I feel intensely the throbbing bite at my soul these monstrous mass killings produce.

Because I know what it is to lose a child.

As do the mothers of Stoneman Douglas, Sandy Hook, Columbine. Buffalo, Pulse, Ukraine, and yes, even Russia—they are mothers after all—how I imagine we are all thinking of you, Uvalde mothers--feeling with you, anguishing with you over the loss of our children.

Our lives have changed in ways we never could have imagined.

Some of us have long known these changes. Uvalde mothers, raw and stunned with sudden agony, you are just discovering how this assault on your existence will characterize your coming days, weeks and months. You will soon find out who your real friends are. Some will back away from you, and you will be surprised. Your naked emotion is too hard for them to handle, it touches off reactions in them they are too frightened to touch.

Some of them will say appalling things to you, like “Only the good die young,” “God needed another angel,” “Well, at least you have another child,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “There are no accidents,” “I know how you feel,” and my personal favorite of all these dreadful cliches, “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Really? 

Yet we go on, somehow, limping into a future empty of our child. Our lives, so ruthlessly sliced into “before” and “after,” become too hard for others to comprehend.

 Grief gets into our bloodstream, a partner for life.

 Some imagine that we will return to the selves we were before the loss of our child and relate to us in that way. Friends chatter about their children and grandchildren, showing us pictures on their phones, speaking of the graduations, proms, birthdays and weddings our dead child will never have. We attend some of these events, celebrating with friends and relatives with quiet anguish an ever-present undercurrent in our hearts.

 Somehow, some day, dear mothers of Uvalde, you will learn to carry your grief in a way that doesn’t crush you daily. You will struggle to find the tool that will allow you to do that. It might be a garden, a scholarship fund in memory of your child, a crusade for gun rights, a community of fellow grievers, the comfort of religion or a renewed spiritual life, volunteering for a cause, starting again in a new home or area of the state or country.

 It might be just the profound struggle to learn, day by day, how to be alive in your strange new world.

 Your heart has been broken; your former life shattered. Respect that absolute new fact.

 Tend your grief carefully as it is part of you now. Stay with it, get to know it, let yourself feel it fully. Try not to push it away, numb yourselves with alcohol or drugs, frantic activity, or all the other things so readily available in our crazy consumer culture.

 You will someday laugh again, though a current of loss and memory will always course beneath that laugh.

 And in time, you will summon the strength to fully love your other children, your spouses, not allow them to drown in your grief.

 And know it’s possible to survive, even though you cannot now imagine how you will do that.

 I have.

ODE TO DEATH

You gave me no time-outs, dear death. No
way to stop being everything but what I 
was to all the edges. No noticing anything
but what was right there, in front, in back,
underneath, on top of me. Restricted to your
greedy snare, I couldn’t move, had no prayer
to pull me out, no god wanted him or he’s
another angel now, to soothe. Only the good
die young left me comfortless, time hasn’t
healed. I can still peel the scab away, feel
your raw wound. Such purity, to feel only
pain. I don’t blame you anymore, you
happen every day to everyone, why not
my son? Death, you’ve offered me a kind
of peace. I’m unable to return to the place
I was before you came. Separated from others
who don’t know you yet, I stand alone. You’re
too sad for me, people say. You give me solitude.
You give me singularity, a kind of dignity I’d
never have if not for you. Death, I’ve paid
your dowry, we’re married now.

(Unhinged, Blue Light Press, 2019, Sharon Charde)

Dearest mothers of Uvalde, I’ll be with you in spirit, a sister in sorrow, as you find your way.

THE SKY IS FALLING

I have read and thought and talked so much about Alito’s draft opinion since it was leaked over a week ago, that my mind is overfull of thoughts and feelings about it.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Yes, first there was white-hot rage, then disbelief, a depth of grief, horror and fear---now a continuous boil of this sickening emotional stew.

I am a woman, not a womb.

I plan to print those words in black on a large white placard, to hold high this Saturday when I and my community gather on our town green to make our voices heard, along with those of the whole country. How good it will feel to gather with others who share my feelings, knowing women all over the states will be joining us.

We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.

The mocking, scornful, paternalistic tone of Alito’s words should have been more shocking than it was. We are used to him and his unfairly appointed cohorts by now, although his draft opinion was even snarkier than usual.

What misogynists these men are, Coney Barrett included (is there a word for a female misogynist?)  

Have any of them ever encountered an eleven-year-old victim of rape by her father or uncle? A teenager raped by a boy she trusted? A married woman by her violent husband? A young women gang-raped at gunpoint?

I doubt it.

But I have. And though I know the damage to their bodies, souls and spirits is catastrophic and irreversible, access to abortion for a baby whose life would be a misery if allowed to live, could lessen that damage for both. Trauma just reproduces itself in succeeding generations without intense intervention, especially hard to come by in these days of too-sparse mental health services.

And where is the social safety net to support these unwanted babies, babies of women forced to carry them to term in a kind of twenty-first century female slavery? It’s the Republicans (and two Democrats) who killed Build Back Better, which included preschool for all, paid leave for new parents, childcare—the things, among many others, that are truly “pro-life.” These babies need the same things wanted children need-- diapers, formula, clothing, secure homes, parents who love them.

Instead, those Republicans are talking about a national abortion ban, even a contraception ban, if they take Congress in the midterms, or the presidency in 2024—a contemporary version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

The United States would become a theocracy—like the Catholic world in which I grew up. Worse really, because I had an out, though I just didn’t know it then, so suppressed in that cult-like society. In the vision Republicans have for the future, the entire country of women would be banned from having an abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

There would be no out, except for an illegal one. The uterus would become a crime scene. Doctors and nurses, women, would become criminals, subject to felony charges.

We haven’t seen anything yet, I fear.

As Maureen Dowd recently said, “it is outrageous that five unelected, unaccountable and relatively unknown political operatives masquerading as impartial jurists can so profoundly alter our lives.”

I could not agree more.

These judges live in elitist privileged bubbles; it is no wonder they have zero concern about the public, of which a majority approves abortion access. Most of them were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. “The modern Republican Party is now about using the power of the government to enforce the beliefs of a radical minority on the majority of Americans,” as Heather Cox Richardson said in Thursday’s  “Letter From an American.”

The disaster is always somewhere else, until it isn’t. 

There will be so much more to say about all this as it unspools; I’m sure I will be writing about it.

So for now I propose a fix: vasectomies for all men.

Problem solved.

                                                                  ********

And if you’d like to listen to a recent interview I did about my memoir, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” here it is (Scroll past the gardening part, or not):

In southern CT, you can listen to the show on the radio Monday nights at 10 on WPKN 89.5 FM.

https://www.writersvoice.net/2022/05/catie-marron-becoming-a-gardener-sharon-charde-i-am-not-a-juvenile-delinquent/

ROOTS

 

When I was growing up, and even into my young adulthood, I was not interested in pursuing information about my ancestry. Of course, I knew that I was born of 2nd generation Polish and Italian parents, but in the 50’s and even longer there was great prejudice against both ethnicities, causing me to feel shame about my heritage. Some areas in West Hartford, CT, a town in which I attended a private Catholic girls’ high school, banned those of Italian background from buying homes there.

Girls with last names like Sullivan, Murphy, O’Connor, and Moran formed the student body of my school; those with Italian and Polish last names were in the minority.

Born with the name Sharon Lee LaMontagna, I was in kindergarten when my father began his long career in the real estate business as Larry LaMont rather than Tony LaMontagna. Suspecting the change concerned masking our long Italian name, I asked him when I was older why he’d made it. He answered that it was “an easier name to remember.”

So, my name was legally changed to Sharon LaMont when I was five years old.

That must have been very confusing for a kindergartner.

I deeply loved my Auntie Rose and Uncle Sal, with whom we shared large Italian Sunday dinners in New Haven for many years, but it’s my Polish grandparents, Albina Nagorski and Frank Pisarek, I want to tell you about here. Because of my daily rage and grief over the war in Ukraine I have thinking much more about my Polish roots, as well as ones I’ve recently learned are in Belarus and L’viv. In fact, it occurs to me that the constant and mounting anguish I feel over this monstrous, cruel war may have its roots in a kinship with these incredibly brave and strong Ukrainians, as I did not know my grandfather was born in L’viv, although it was Austria at that time.

Let me tell you more.

My mother’s mother, Albina Pisarek, figured largely in my life, as my mother and I lived with her during the war while my father worked three jobs in Hartford, she visited us often and we spent a good bit of time at her house in Milford.

Albina was a survivor. I’ve often thought of her as a pioneer woman, who could have ridden one of those covered wagons out west, making do with whatever she had to. Born in Grodno, Poland (now part of Belarus) in the late 1880’s, she came to this country with her parents and three sisters, and settled on a large farm in Milford, CT where my great grandfather practiced herbal medicine.

Albina had four children, the first two severely developmentally disabled. My mother was the cherished blonde youngest, doted on by her father Frank until she was five, when he died at home of a ruptured appendix, having refused hospitalization.

After his death, the family, formerly well-off, was forced to live in reduced circumstances. My grandmother rode the trolley from Milford to Bridgeport, her fur coat covering the work clothes she wore to clean the tenements they owned there, left to her when Frank died. She went to work at Sikorsky Aircraft during the war. She cared for my great grandmother “Bopcha” while renting out rooms to help with expenses, which she did as long as I can remember. I recall her on ladders painting, or wrapping rags around leaky pipes until she was well into her 80’s.

She was a feminist role model, though I didn’t appreciate that then at all.

Nana as we called her, was intensely proud of her Polish heritage and loved to talk about Queen Jadwiga, and much other Polish history she wanted her disinterested granddaughter to absorb. “Sta-leen” I remember her disdainfully spitting out as she spoke of the Russian ruler and his role in the partitioning of Poland, with a similar hatred I imagine the Ukrainians feel today for Putin.

How I wish I could speak with her now, hear more of her stories, swell with the same pride she did of her heritage. How completely enraged she would be at what Russia is doing to Ukraine. How we could share that rage.

My second Cousin Chris, a retired history teacher who knows much more about her ancestry than I do, wrote me recently to tell me about our shared Ukrainian roots. As I said earlier, I had always thought my grandfather Frank was born in Austria, which then became part of Poland.

I should have listened more carefully to Nana’s stories. Or studied my history.

It is complicated. But the important part is this: 19th century Poland was wiped off the map, divvied up between Russian, Prussia (now Germany) and Austria. Present-day Ukraine was under Austrian rule, so our grandparents listed their birthplace as Austria; they resided in Podhajce, very near to what is now L’viv, Ukraine.

Chris called me a few days later to say she’d just discovered we had second cousins living there right now, in L’viv, the “safe” city near the Polish border, that was viciously bombed as Biden spoke to the Polish people last Saturday.

Once again, I had to realign my thinking about who I was and where my roots resided.

Her words explained a lot.

Following closely the news of this catastrophic war, sometimes I am so sickened and shaky I’ve had to walk away from it and practice some deep breathing, or more often, anger management. I’ve always been a voracious consumer of news, and passionate about justice and peace, but this time feels different, more a claimant of my energy, more demanding of finding ways to feel less powerless in its face.

It all had felt amplified, and I hadn’t grasped why.

Until now. It’s personal. It’s tied to my ancestry, my roots, my family, my grandfather Frank, whom I never knew. I’m meeting him, and my other relatives, in the pictures I see in the paper and on television. As Andrew, our guide when we went to Auschwitz years ago, said to me as I cried before a picture of a heap of dead children, “Madame, if your grandmother had not emigrated, you could be here.”

Glory to Ukraine.

 

ANOTHER WORLD

He could be here. I always think that when I arrive at a residency, looking around for a youngish middle-aged man, maybe round glasses and an earring, battered leather jacket and jeans, Geoff’s standard college outfit. I’m guessing it might have been his adult one as well, at least some of the time. He could be a visual artist or sculptor, I think, perhaps a curator or an art historian—maybe a writer, he was so good at that too.

And sometimes I find him---as I did in this session at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I didn’t put it all together at first—that is often the way of these vivid synchronicities.

I’d noticed this elegantly handsome man right away when I’d arrived, but since I’d never landed at his dinner table, the place where more intimate connections happen, I didn’t know his name. Maybe a week after I’d gotten here, he had an open studio in the afternoon, at 4:30, I didn’t go as I usually always do, was having tough going on a poem I’d been working on and felt I needed to stay in my studio and struggle with it.

I saw him at breakfast the next morning and apologized for not coming. People had said his work was astounding and I was hopeful I could still see it. “Come over right after breakfast,” he said, “after that I’ll be taking it down as I leave tomorrow.”

So, I had an intimate, one-on-one experience of seeing this man’s art, the man whose name I now knew was Jeff. For an hour I took in dismembered books, their pages and bindings reassembled into brilliant collages, paper pulp creating paper he’d used to paint daily portraits while here, a whole wall of dedication pages in books he’d scavenged for the projects.

I listened to him describe his process, the forces that drove him to create.

My paintings and installations are constructions that amplify the relationship between time and memory…With this medium, I am interested in preserving the ‘what was’ and in elevating the ‘as is’ to represent what remains present in memory with the passing of time—  

Time and memory. What was, what is. This gentle, talented man, whose name was Jeff.

I told him then of how my son Geoff had been a history of art major spending his junior year abroad in Rome, how he’d fallen fifty feet off the wall by the Tiber, a branch in his hand, the night before his last exam. How I’d started writing poems after he died, trying to transform my anguish into something outside myself

Jeff’s eyes were so kind as he listened. I’m not sure either of us yet fully grasped the connective tissue that bound us and our work together, but we shared a warm hug before I walked back to my studio.

Just before leaving for Virginia, I’d grabbed a manila envelope of sympathy cards and letters from the top of a big basket, untouched in my study at home for the thirty-five years since Geoff’s death.  From his friends, our friends, teachers, family, patients and clients, they now were emotional fire and smoke in the corner of my studio couch. I’d thought I might find the courage to dive into the raw grief of those early days after his death at this residency, perhaps discover inspiration in them for a poem or prose piece.

But I hadn’t touched them yet.

As soon as I got back, I pulled one out. Suddenly, thoughts and feelings began cascading. I grabbed one of my yellow pads, a pen, and started to write.

“Geoff could be Jeff,” I began.

I sifted through more of the cards and letters, looking for phrases that felt especially resonant, totally in the “zone’ now.

He showed me how to draw stars in Mrs. Fritz’s class.

He was so easy to love and always there with his love when we needed him.

Geoff was the kind of student who made teaching easy.

I wrote and wrote.

We were not meant to outlive our children.

My heart reaches out to you at this terrible time.

There are hundreds of us sharing your despair.

I titled the poem After Jeff. Time and memory coalesced in twenty-two lines.

I gave a reading last week, After Jeff towards the end. The room pulsated with silence when I finished. Then people began to speak, later coming up to me with their connected stories and shared tears.

“Geoff is here right now,” I said. “I can feel his presence, how his spirit is reaching out to all of you. Look at the link between Jeff’s art, how it became an amazing framework for my experience—that synchronicity. And with all of you, your responsiveness.  This is one of the reasons I write, to keep that spirit alive.”

My friend Martha calls it cross-pollination.

We are poets, memoirists, novelists, playwrights, composers, visual and mixed media artists here in this softer, kinder  world, a creative tribe daily inspired by each other’s work.

It's going to be hard to come home.

                                            ************************

Here’s some more information about Jeff Wallace and his art: http://www.jeffwallacenyc.com/about-jmw-2

For those of you who will ask to see the poem, I have not included it because I would like to submit it for possible publication and if it’s been published anywhere, even in a blog post, it’s not eligible.

And Junie was thrilled by all the many responses to her poem in my last blog post. Thanks for those.

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

That was a phrase I used in my eulogy for my mother, as a way to describe the space felt by such a loss, and I came across it again in an astoundingly good book I’ve just finished, Lost and Found, by Kathryn Shultz.

It seems like a perfect description of what we are all experiencing right now.

Everywhere we look there is absence. On our calendars, on grocery shelves, in our children’s classrooms, in restaurants and theaters, in the once-familiar texture of our days, in life as it used to be. The relentless disappearance of all we’ve long taken for granted is a fact with which we must reckon daily. We can no longer truly see each other, masked as we are—we struggle with the absence of spontaneity, the lack of joy, the unbalancing of constant uncertainty.  

All those absences have marked my own experience. When I saw the poem of hers Junie’s mother posted on Facebook, I sighed in deep kinship with her feelings. “Locked in a dome…lonely as a bone,” captures such universal experience with her own, a true poet’s gift.

And she was only seven when she wrote those poignant words.

That’s how I’ve been feeling too, Junie, I wanted to say. I miss my friends, having them over for dinner without worrying about where they’ve been, if they’ve been exposed—going out for lunch at The Green Café after my beloved yoga classes at Space---getting on the Metro-North for a trip to the city to see so many I love who live there, go to museums and plays as I used to. I miss my sister, last seen behind a glass-paned door, both of us masked, me freezing in the winter weather. I missed Christmas with my Covid-quarantined son and his family. I miss easy hugs, the lack of hesitancy in giving and receiving them. 

I miss life without fear.

So that bone-loneliness I have felt for these Omicron months has pushed me to leave my self-imposed captivity in Northwest Connecticut to come here to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I write this post. Offered a four- week fellowship, I could not refuse, knowing how I needed this creative shelter right now. Comforted by the protocols—masking inside, testing twice upon coming, separation from others for most of the day in this lovely studio I’ve been given—I thankfully acceded to my husband’s offer to drive me down (no plane to worry about).

So, I’ve arrived and settled into my capacious, sunny studio apartment, stacked books, pads, and folders of poems on the table by the big cozy couch. Old friends are here and new ones await meeting. We gather for dinner, and after, around the fireplace, my first night in this weird Covid bardo. The presence of absence, indeed. I’ve been here many times pre-pandemic and never hesitated to join a group, have loved and been fed by the creative tribe and its rich interchanges. 

But I hung back, feeling my way. I don’t want to get Covid, now or ever, though a doctor friend assures me with my boostered status I will not get very ill if I do.  I’ve been so careful it’s become a new habit, this anxiety about mixing with the unknown. I’ll have to edge my way back into risk, balancing the desire for human and creative connection with my need for safety and trust.  

I need to find a way to do that.

Junie, I want to not only “remder ther toch” (sic) but feel it in actuality, as I think you must too. I don’t want what Shultz calls “the avaricious nature of loss” to eat my spirit, to consume my time here. I don’t want Covid to hijack my life any more than it already has.

So, okay, maybe I can look at the piles of empty pads I’ve brought, the unread books I’ve brought, the unmet new friends, the walks not yet taken, and see the presence of absence too, in a more hopeful guise.

Suddenly buoyed by that thought, I think I’ll walk up to the living room and join the group having some wine before dinner.  

Salute!

                                              ***********************

Junie Hermann-Botto has been an avid reader her entire life and began writing as soon as she could hold a pencil. Currently in third grade, Junie found penning her thoughts to be a good way to cope with her big feelings when Covid-imposed social limitations got her down. February 3 was her 9th birthday.

 

 And if you missed my book launch a few weeks ago, here is the recording. It was pretty great!  https://youtu.be/MmTWYnJYx_E

Here’s the link to buy The Glass is Already Broken and all my other books: https://www.oblongbooks.com/search/site/Sharon%20Charde

THE GLASS IS ALREADY BROKEN

I’ve been waiting to write all of you about my new full-length collection of poems, The Glass Is Already Broken, until the publisher got the cover colors corrected. Three books later, that has not happened yet. The cover art by my dear friend Jarrod Beck keeps being reproduced in an orange-y tone rather than the clear yellow of the original; the lettering comes through as dark brown rather than black.

I tell myself that this is a small problem in light of so much else that’s happening right now in the world. That perhaps I should let it go, be happy the book is published at all, after years of trying. Thank you, Blue Light Press, for wanting to put these poems out into the universe.

And I am happy. I love the poems in this book, and I try to embrace the meaning of its title in my life, though sometimes it’s really hard, like now, as I wait for the fourth re-do.

Here's the quote from Ajahn Chah, a famous Thai meditation master, that I used as epigraph and theme of the collection:

     Before saying a word, he motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

So, the glass of my book is already broken. I have to laugh—it’s kind of a perfect irony, isn’t it?

Let me share with you the “blurbs” that grace the back cover:

The Glass Is Already Broken is a stunning collection of poems. Its center of gravity is grief--a weight and mass so dense that one cannot escape the force of its pull. The poems possess exceptional subtlety and lyric grace as they reinterrogate their narrative of loss: each retelling, each reiteration whittled to perfection. From the first poem to the last, Sharon Charde offers us a collection of harrowing, breathtaking elegiac beauty.

—Eric Pankey , author of  Alias, Augury

In The Glass Is Already Broken, a mother navigates the decades-old loss of her son: “I keep trying to feel who I was before you / died. Listen to music I listened to then, Beatles, / The Band, Rolling Stones,” she insists, before admitting "I can’t / put the snake’s skin back around its flesh, / the snow back into the sky.” But what she can do is its own wonder: she shatters open a life centered on marriage and motherhood to reclaim her primal identity underneath. She revisits her choices. These poems grieve but they also reckon, bargain, riddle and joke, lust and croon, with every mode accented by a fine-hewed lineation. Reading these poems, and re-reading them, wrecked me in the best possible way.

—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode

Over 25 years Sharon Charde's poems have considered, meditated upon, re-enacted, imagined and mourned one catastrophic death. Here is the culmination - crystalline, luminous, enraged, triumphant and loving - of that transformative work.

—Honor Moore, author of OUR REVOLUTION 

I am so grateful to these wonderful poet friends who took the time from their lives to read The Glass Is Already Broken and write such deeply appreciated words about it. And grateful too, to the Oblong Bookstore which will again host me for a zoom launch on January 12, when I will be in conversation with the brilliant poet and memoirist Honor Moore at 7:00. It should be a great evening; put it on your calendar now and I will be sending around a reminder closer to the time.

I hope you’ll all get a copy—and maybe some for Christmas gifts too. And find some peace and joy in this holiday season despite all the hard things that are happening in the world.

I send my love.

Sharon