Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 97

Sacred Spaces

English: Leaves of Utah mountain trees changing color during autumn. Deutsch: Die Farbe der Blätter ändert während des Herbstes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have my places–places I go to be quiet and still. Although they are public spaces, one and all, I consider them mine, and I make a concerted effort to preserve them that way by visiting them when everyone else is busy with other things. A bluff overlooking a valley of sycamore and cedar, maple and walnut. Rocky streambeds lined with towering walls laid down like layers of a cake, filled scraggly with vines and roots and rock scraps stuck in to make it all come out even.

I come here in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, early in the morning, on days when everyone else is at work or school or thinks it’s too uncomfortable to be outside. I’ve seen these places gush after a rain and wondered at the power that uproots a sixty-foot tree and runs it into the embankment on a bend. I’ve sat besides playful waters trickling between rains. But today is the first time I’ve been here in a drought.

I used to be dissatisfied if my fall ramblings didn’t yield spectacular color, but along with making peace with my birthday, I’m learning to be happy with the less-than-perfect in other places. Today I’m aware of the life in these trees in a way I never am among the brilliant red maples and prim and proper planted crabapples and stinky pears people are so fond of inside city limits. Here, in the muted colors of nature, I can almost see the tree-spirits of pagan yesteryear–can almost hear them whispering. The trees look sickly yellow and mangy, but I can still sit above them and experience the wind with all my senses, as I watch it dance and twirl from one part of the woods to the next. I can still descend to the creek bed and follow the progress of the dancing breeze up the valley–a whisper, a joyful song falling again into stillness. The trees still respond, the babies waving with uncontrolled freedom, the older, more sedate adults bowing and swaying in the breezes. They’re suffering this year, but they’re still my trees, and I love them.

Rock Tower (Photo credit: AlyssssylA)

The creek is dry, all its remaining water confined to a single pool at the big bend, and even that murky and stagnant. Above and below, I can sit among wave patterns sculpted into rock, brush away the dried moss on the downstream faces. Scraggly weeds have grown up in every crevasse, and someone–or many someones–have built rock towers every little bit along its length. I debate building one myself, but that’s not why I come. I get here so rarely these days, and what I need most of all is the quiet and stillness, not another task to complete.

Perhaps, after all, it is when people and places are farthest from their best that we see most clearly their importance to us. As the breeze whispers up the valley again and washes over me only to move on, I know I love this place more now than I ever have.

Night Terrors, 2.0

Small scream (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the dead of night, something wakes me, I don’t know what, and I don’t have time to trace auditory memory backward to find out, because my husband is sitting bolt upright in bed, screaming. Not yelling, not screaming at–screaming. At virtually the same instant, a child starts screaming, too, the two of them screaming across pitch blackness like Gerti and E.T., only a lot louder.

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“Stop it, Christian, it’s Nicholas!” I shout, flinging the covers off and jumping out of bed. I can hear him doing likewise on the other side, but he doesn’t stop screaming. Both of us bend down and paw our way across the room, looking for the screamer at waist level, but we can’t find him. And Christian is still screaming.

I’m sure the whole thing takes longer to read than it actually lasted, ten seconds at most. I hear the telltale echo of Nicholas’ scream, and I realize he’s in our bathroom. “Stop it, Christian, it’s just Nicholas!” I yell again, but neither of them stops. At the moment my outstretched arms connect with tiny pajama-clad body, Christian (still screaming) flips the light on, flooding the bathroom with 300 watts of eye-piercing brightness. “I’ve got him!” I shout over the din, and flip the light off. “DON’T!” he roars, and immediately flips it back on. Giving up, I scoop Nicholas up and soothe, “It’s okay, honey, I’ve got you,” hoping if I can calm down Nicholas, Christian will follow suit before the din wakes Michael up.

It works. Quiet restored at last, I lie down with a wonderfully cuddly little boy body stretched out over me, trembling with terror. I hold him tight, murmuring comfort. Christian is frantically searching the bathroom. It transpires that he was awakened by a noise that sounded like electricity arcing, but which turned out to be a small foot kicking a plastic hammer across the tile floor.

By now, of course, Michael is crying, and Julianna is awake too. (Alex remained passed out through the whole episode.) Somehow we manage to calm everyone back down and return to bed. It is 2:35 a.m. At 4:30, Christian and I are both still awake, he trying to conquer paranoia, me doing my usual can’t-sleep-once-my-brain-gets fully-in-gear.

In the morning, no one remembers but us.

Sunday Snippets, already?

Man, the weeks are flying by. Ready to hang out with all the Catholic bloggers over at RAnn’s place?

Monday I wrote about farming. I didn’t get it all right, and on Friday I had to qualify what I wrote, but I’m going ahead and sharing because some of what I wrote in there is important. IMNSHO.

Tuesday I talked about Julianna going to kindergarten–probably the best post all week. Wednesday was a worrying-about-the-world post.

Finally–a fiction prompt, have you ever wondered, at a wedding, when the preacher says “speak now or forever hold your peace,” if anyone ever does?

Fiction Friday: Speak Now

English: Bride, wedding photography (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At every wedding I’ve ever attended, when the minister gets to the part where he says, “Speak now or forever hold your peace,” I’ve always wondered if anyone ever does.

I never thought I’d be the one.

I stand here, my insides liquefying in the battle between what I have to do and what is socially acceptable. The minister stands there framed by the candlesticks, with his finger on the open page, his mouth half open as he stares at me. He looks shellshocked.

I guess that answers my question.

As the silence lengthens, heads swivel. The mother of the bride, perfectly coordinated in scarlet lipstick and silk. The lady with the peacock feather hat. A couple of little boys, resting their chins on their hands as they watch me with bright-eyed interest. The bride turns, recognition dawning on her face a split second before panic, and her eyes sweep the assembled. I can see the dollar signs in her eyes.

And then He turns. Meets my gaze. In the spark that flashes between us lives a history we never acknowledged till this moment, from his dad’s library where played hide and seek, to the tingle when our fingers touched last week over a workplace toast.

I summon all my vaunted self-possession to banish the quaver in my voice, and when I speak, my voice echoes in the awkward silence:

“Don’t do it.”

*

I would like to have played with my last 17 words and done something more with this, but as I have appointments looming and kids shouting in my ear, it’ll have to do for today. How’s that for pounding out a piece of flash fiction in fifteen minutes? Here’s the inspiration for this particular Write On Edge fiction prompt:

 

7 Quick Takes From Inside The Zoo

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Field of Corn (Photo credit: jdog90)

First off, I need to issue a qualification to a post from earlier this week. Since I wrote A Farm Story, I’ve learned that I overstated the severity of the situation–first, because the fields they haven’t harvested yet remain unknown, and second, because this week they used a “grain vac” on three loads of corn and it cleared out most of the mold, and they were able to sell the grain after all. So yes, thirty bushels to the acre is a wretched yield, but not a total loss. And they think the August rains rescued the soybeans. So there’s another lesson on the nature of farming: things can turn around in a heartbeat.

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Michael has taken to shouting and “singing” with his siblings in the car. It’s very cute. At his best, he is very giggly, but he gives his daddy a poker face. Smile on–smile off. (Head-smack.)

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I routinely (read that “daily”) have people tell me how Alex and Nicholas are dead ringers for each other. But here’s a perfect illustration of the difference between them. Yesterday Nicholas met me at the preschool door, bouncing with excitement to show me the play-doh apple-face project he had made. “But that one says T—,” I said. “It doesn’t say ‘Nicholas.’” The upshot of ten minutes’ running around the school was that we couldn’t find his project, and had to leave without it. My heart was breaking on his behalf. “Honey, we’ll talk to Mrs. P and bring it home on Tuesday,” I said, and braced for the onslaught of wailing and tears I’ve grown accustomed to when Alex’s fondest hopes are bitterly disappointed. But Nicholas? Nicholas looked up at me with calm eyes and took my hand, and we walked out the door. Times like these, I understand his teacher telling me, “Nick is the most well-adjusted, easygoing guy I’ve ever met!”

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Tomato (Tamatar) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More evidence that I’m mellowing as a mom: my baby food book says babies can’t have tomato until a year old, and I have stuck faithfully to that, not letting the kids have pasta sauce until their birthday. But as I’ve been buying baby food lately, I’ve noticed that there’s tomato paste in virtually every combination jar, and in fact the stage 3 offers spaghetti and meatballs. So this week I shrugged and cut up some meatballs, cooked in the tomato-y-est of tomato sauces and let him go to town. He’s not as mad about it as the other kids, but it certainly didn’t seem to harm him. And then there’s the honey thing. You know, honey is dangerous for their little digestive systems. Well, you can’t control everything. Julianna left a piece of toast with honey lying around while we were scrambling to get out of the house yesterday morning, and Michael found it. Oh, well.

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Speaking of scrambling: here is a typical T/Th these days: Alex leaves with Daddy at 7:15, I leave to take the kids to school at 8:10. Drive to Nicholas’ school. Drive Julianna to school. Come home, give Michael a nap. Get Michael up, have lunch, go pick up Nicholas. Come home, give boys naps. Get boys up, bully Nicholas into the car, go pick up Alex. Come home and teach lessons, running out in the middle to get Julianna off the bus. T/Th were supposed to be my nirvana work days, with only one child at home. Not quite working out that way.

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In fact, it’s becoming clear to me that the busy-ness is here to stay. With four kids and a body starting to cause me problems, I will always be running someone to some appointment. We’ve let Alex overreach on activities temporarily–he’s doing a theater presentation for the next few Saturdays, on top of Cub Scouts and piano. Cross-reference that with Julianna having adaptive swim lessons (which she really needs–it’s limiting to have three children who need close supervision at the pool) and our own lesson and choir schedule, and you have a mess. Last night we had four kid-related extra-curriculars. This is nuts. It’s unsustainable.

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Fiction prompt (short–250 words this week) up, too. Have you ever gone to a wedding and wondered if anyone ever does “speak now or forever hold your peace”?

Have a great weekend!

What If?

A New Day Brings New Opportunity (Photo credit: w4nd3rl0st (InspiredinDesMoines))

I think it started the day I hurt my knee.

I wasn’t doing anything to deserve injury. I was just coming around the corner to go upstairs after a voice lesson when my left knee popped and went out from under me. For six weeks, doctor and PT notwithstanding, it hasn’t been right. In combination with an ankle weak after an early-summer sprain, I am not in good physical shape. My weight is creeping back upward because I can’t exercise properly, my back is tight, and in general, it’s an unpleasant taste of the waning years of life, all the more disconcerting because I didn’t expect it to start this early. I’m only 38, for crying out loud.

My new vulnerability casts a different tint on the world. There’s so much that’s beautiful about life and love and relationship, but there’s so much ugliness, too. As I try to sort through the bile being spewed in the political process, to separate the genuine from the rhetoric and the rhetoric from the slant imposed by whoever’s telling me about it, the only rational conclusion I can draw is that there’s no one truly worthy in the whole process. And that makes me wonder: What if our government collapses under the weight of its own debt, lack of integrity, and dearth of political will to change? What if the environmental scenarios are right? What if all the saving my husband and I do, what if all the plans we are laying so carefully for our future and that of our children, come to nothing because of forces wholly outside our control?

I try to insert reason into the voice of gloom. Doomsday scenarios have been around as long as there have been people to preach them, after all, and we’re all still here, limping along as best we can. And I’m always fussing about how none of that other stuff is really important, anyway, that what really matters is family and relationship, and living in love. If one day the entire world  falls apart, we have a big back yard to grow vegetables in. We’re not going to die. But that’s not much comfort.

This morning, I took my exercise walk (because I can’t run on my knee) in the dark. The sky was spangled silver, a sight that never, ever fails to insert a sliver of awe into my outlook. And as I walked, my face turned upward, checking the ground every few seconds to keep from injuring myself further, some half-forgotten insight, heard who knows when, came to mind: that human beings were made to look up, not to get our sights stuck on the things of earth, because let’s face it, at any given moment, life on earth is only a hairs breadth away from disaster. If we fix our joy and fulfillment on anything of earth, we’ll spend our whole life in fear of losing it.

I raise my eyes toward the mountains.

From whence shall come my help?

My help comes from the LORD,

the maker of heaven and earth.

(Ps.121, NAB)

 

Miss Pooey Goes To Kindergarten

The first Friday of kindergarten, Julianna brought home a progress report. In typical kindergarten fashion, it was a list of attributes the kids need to have to be successful students–following directions, self-control, and so on. There are no grades in kindergarten, only +, √, and -. I got quite a shock when I saw her page filled with “-” and a smattering of √s. Not a + on the page anywhere.

Now, I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that I have been a straight-A student my whole life, a meticulous rule follower. Alex is the same way. So to see a report like this was quite a shock to my system.

Who was she being measured against? What were they trying to communicate? Was she not living up to the standard of a typically-developing kindergartener (in other words, this was par for the course), or was she not living up to what is reasonable to expect for her? Does it matter? After all, if we want her in a regular classroom, we have to expect her to be held to the higher standard–and that’s what we want, right?

Such are the agonies of a parent of a child with special needs.

I didn’t realize it, but I have always taken kindergarten more seriously than preschool. When we needed to go somewhere, I just pulled Julianna out of preschool. We didn’t know all that much about the daily routine–we weren’t able to have a conversation with her about what she did all day, or what they talked about–but that was okay. Preschool was really about intensive therapy.

Kindergarten is a whole new world. This is where she’s actually supposed to be learning academic concepts. This is where she’s actually interacting with typically-developing peers, laying the foundations for whatever life she’s going to live as an adult. Suddenly, the stakes seem so much higher. Suddenly, it bugs me that I don’t know her classmates and she can’t tell me about them–that I don’t know her routines, and she can’t share them.

I went through this with Alex. Sending your child off to school automatically requires the parent to give up some control. The child doesn’t know what you want to know, and you can’t formulate the questions properly to get them to understand. It was very illuminating to go into Alex’s classroom for an hour one morning, and I’m in the baby stage of trying to work out logistics to visit Julianna’s classroom for a peek.

In the meantime, we’re more or less dependent on her teacher, who has been very good about sending us detailed reports. Many of which make us go, “Whaaaa…?” For instance, in the early weeks, when the para was not working directly with her, she would get up and move somewhere else (totally believe that), poke other kids (probably trying to be cute), and pull hair (uh…what?). She was uncooperative in P.E. and adaptive P.E., where there was less structure. Now, Miss Pooey has always been pretty cooperative with non-parental adults, so this caused us some consternation. But we haven’t yet begun enforcing “if…then” consequences with her, because we don’t have the sense that she “gets” it. If we had gotten a report like that on Alex in kindergarten, there would have been repercussions at home: lost movies, etc. But how do we address this with Julianna?

At last I found my entry point. She likes to watch her signing times and “your baby can read” videos from a distance of one inch from the TV screen. We’ve been yelling at her about it for a long time, but I realized suddenly last week that here is an opportunity for immediate consequences. So now, if she goes up to the TV, she loses the privilege. We’ll see if that makes a difference.

I have many other reflections on the experience of sending Julianna to kindergarten, but that’s plenty for one day. This week, she brought home one extra √, and her teacher said the problem behaviors were easing off. So maybe, twenty-five days in to the elementary years, Julianna’s finding her stride. Go get ‘em, girly-girl.

 

A Farm Story

Parched ground (Photo credit: Al Jazeera English)

Growing up on the farm is on a short list of things that define who I am. My memories are filled with gigantic, buttery harvest moons rising through the jagged tips of cornstalks, of leaf piles reduced to pulsing embers that mirrored the night sky, of glittering frosty dawns and mist hanging over the woods, the roar of the grain dryer and the drop in the stomach while jumping off stacked hay bales. My entire childhood is woven with the fabric of the earth.

But there is a darker side that time has edited to make it more palatable. It’s not that I’ve forgotten the tough parts, but like childbirth, you dissociate from the visceral memory of how unpleasant things can be. And children (both as children, and as adults who’ve moved away from home) are insulated, anyway, from their parents’ fear and uncertainty.

This spring was lovely in rural Missouri. Early, but lovely. On Mothers Day, we ate dinner on the deck with my parents. It had been about a week since the last rain, and we were starting to look for another. None of us could imagine that it wouldn’t rain again for three months.

When the heat arrived in June, we shook our heads at how early it was–those 100+ days usually don’t set in until later in July or August. But surely we’d get a thunderstorm out of that blast furnace. It couldn’t last more than a week or two.

But it did. Week after miserable week it went on, and as my lawn crisped, and I watered furiously in the early mornings, I started watching the weather for my parents’ area, too. Every once in a while, a weak attempt at a storm would drift across the area, but only once did it leave more than a scattering of droplets in the forty-mile swath covering our house and all my parents’ fields. “Not even enough to settle the dust,” as my dad would say.

At last the rest of the country figured out this was a big deal. Wells were drying up, rivers were so low that navigation was questionable. When the storms finally came, it was far too late for the corn crop, and possibly too late for some of the soybeans. When my parents sampled their fields, they found ears with passable yields and ears with virtually nothing on them at all. Then there was the concern about a particular mold that thrives in drought conditions and can render the grain unusable. There was no way to tell how things would shake out until harvest began. Uncertainty is more punishing than a coup de grace.

Harvest began early, averaging 30 bushels per acre–not even a quarter of a normal yield, but better than nothing. But the corn was too wet, so they put it in the grain bins to dry, then sent it to the elevators. When the mold numbers finally came back this weekend, they were not good. My parents’ entire corn crop suddenly became completely useless. An entire year’s work and investment, gone. Harvest stopped. My dad, instead of running the combine through the field, instead went in with a mower and a disk to turn it all under.

Why am I telling you this story? Because the world removed from the land and from agricultural exposure needs to know what goes on beyond the grocery aisles. From these crops the cattle that become your steaks and burgers are fed. From these crops come the corn starch, the corn chips, the soft drinks and juices and cereals containing high-fructose corn syrup. We can argue the health benefits (or lack thereof) of many of these products, but the fact is they are staples of our lives. You may think it has nothing to do with you, but it does.

Some are convinced that the severity and breadth of this drought can only be attributed to climate change. Others are more cautious. Invoking climate change is not a popular point of view in some circles; most conservatives point to experts who say the whole idea that humans can adversely impact the environment is big-headed nonsense. Well, maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t. Considering what’s happening around us, we can’t afford to dismiss the idea of our own culpability on a knee-jerk reaction. The fallout from this drought will hurt your pocketbook and mine, but that’s just a nuisance. The people who will be most affected are the poorest people, those who can least weather it. Maybe this drought has nothing whatsoever to do with our vehicle and power plant emission. But what could it possibly hurt for each of us to cut back our usage, look humbly at our interactions with the world and rethink our assumptions? To act like the stewards we’re supposed to be, instead of the consumers we’ve become?

Sunday Snippets

Another weekend, and another chance to gather at RAnn’s place for Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival.

My week in peek:

Living Mindfully

A Glimpse Beyond the Veil

The Value of Singletasking

Wonder Woman’s 7 Quick Takes

Wonder Woman’s 7QT

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I’m Wonder Woman. Did you know that? I’ve been outed by my daughter. Christian was reading a comic book the other night and Julianna came over to see what he was looking at. “Who is this?” he asked, indicating the page. Julianna paused, thought a minute, and then smiled and yelled, “Bah-ee!”

Always knew I liked that girl.

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I had a mom moment yesterday. Julianna has the most ridiculous wardrobe any child has ever owned…virtually all of it given to us by family and friends secondhand…but she’s so darned skinny, all the pants fall off. If I put her in 4Ts they’re too short, and if I put her in 5s, they fall down. Literally. Yesterday I went to put on one of the three skorts that actually fit, and realized they were dirty. Sighing, I put on one of the ones that’s too big, along with a too-big T shirt that I tucked in in the hopes that it would provide enough friction to keep the whole thing together.

Not so much. When I picked her up from school yesterday, she was wearing a pair of shorts I’d never seen. Very embarrassing. But what else can I expect from a child who can wear her underwear sideways and not notice? (Sideways, you ask? What do you mean? Why, I mean that she can use a leg hole for her waist. Yeah. She’s that skinny.)

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I’ve been practicing my flute again since school started. I always have to force myself to leave other concerns and go downstairs to do it, but I always enjoy it, and I’m never ready to quit when cranky baby or returning bus calls me away to other tasks. As usual, I’ve tried to bite off too many different things–tone work and finger work and etudes and learning a new piece. Considering I practice 2-3 times a week for  20-30 minutes–in other words, virtually nothing–it’s probably a case of spreading myself too thin. But I’m so rusty after so many years of neglect, I feel like I have to hit every aspect. I am fully aware that the only person who is aware of my rust is me. I haven’t forgotten how to play my flute. But there are quirks that irritate because they shouldn’t be there; things that are hard and shouldn’t be; fingers that don’t want to work together. Thus the finger exercises I’ve never played before, and taking time for scales every single day. I figure over time my fluidity will return. I hope, anyway.

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This reminds me of something my orchestra director in college used to say. “You’re all such young players,” he would tell us. “If you don’t practice for a week, you forget how to play your instruments!” I had tremendous respect for  his man, so I curbed my initial skepticism. I didn’t forget how to play my flute in a week. What was he talking about? But now I understand.

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I also have a knee that’s driving me crazy. A few weeks ago as I was turning the corner to come upstairs after teaching a voice lesson, my knee popped–and it has not been right since. I went to the doctor, I went to the PT, and both of them thought it was minor–the PT couldn’t even find anything wrong. He gave me some stretches and exercises and said come back if you can’t run on it by the weekend. I could, so I didn’t come back. Only now it’s worse. It pops with every stair (and I’m up and down a lot of stairs, usually carrying 22 pounds of Mad Baby).

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This is giving me a tremendous appreciation for my general health. I have always taken for granted being able to be very active, and now I feel like I can’t do anything–run, walk, bicycle, Pilates machine, even making the new flower bed in the back I’m wanting to dig. I made another PT appointment for next week and I just have to pray that my health comes back. I can’t imagine  not being able to be active.

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My Mad Baby is at present yelling and yanking the computer keyboard in and out, causing mayhem with my ability to type. I think it’s time to sign off. Head on over to Grace’s place for today’s 7QTs.