Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 10

Myths of Badger, Part I

There’s an old nursery rhyme by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that my mother often told to me:

There was a little girl who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead

And when she was good she was very, very good,

And when she was bad she was horrid.

I am never certain if my childhood memories are actual memories or myths told so often by my parents that I have come to "remember" them. But surely some of them are real memories. My parents weren't there for everything. They certainly weren't down the basement with Johnny and Martha and me, pouring over horror comics, or under the blanket in the backyard of the parsonage, playing doctor. I think we were playing doctor. Whatever it was that we were at under the blankets, I really only remember that it seemed quite naughty. So this is where I start to begin to remember who I was, when and where, and how it all began.


Long ago, in the 1940’s, I lived in a little town of 300 or so Norwegians near the center of Iowa. My father owned the corner store, which was directly across the street in one direction from the Texaco station and in the other direction from the elevators of the farming co-op and the railroad tracks. Kitty corner was a bar/railroad station. Down the street past the railroad station was a little white two-room schoolhouse, with a big swing set and a box elder tree in the back, and in the opposite corner of town was a playfield with a baseball diamond. My dad taught me how to ride a bicycle on that field.

There was, of course, a white Lutheran church with a pretty steeple, a post office which also served as Central for the telephone service, and a building with a meeting hall of some sort upstairs, which I only remember because I went with my parents to see a traveling theatre group perform The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Which I wouldn't remember at all but for the man who suffered a grand mal seizure and fell flat on his back like a log. People gathered around babbling concern about whether or not he would swallow his tongue. I must have been 4 or 5. These things stick with you.

The Corner Store was a two-story brick building with the store below and our family apartment above. There was a cold locker in the back, where people brought in their beeves and pigs to be butchered (I think they did, anyway, because we had a butcher). And I remember that we had a butcher because once a year, he went to an annual buffalo hunt and I can remember being taken back to the cold locker to see the buffalo carcass hung up in there, sans head, which might have been somewhere else being stuffed.

I remember my dad getting shipments of dates in barrels and little me hanging over the barrel rim, when nobody was looking, fishing for dates.

The Post Mistress and Telephone Central was a woman named Pearl. I have a vague memory of her having black hair and a sharp disapproving face and a general resemblance to Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t remember this specific incident, because my crime was probably a common occurrence with me, but the story goes that Pearl called my mother in high dudgeon one day because her daughter was playing in the street, naked, in a mud puddle. As I recall (or, as the story is told), my mother was more "put out" with Pearl than with me. Lutheran mothers didn't get angry. They got "put out."

I remember running with the other children toward the railroad tracks when the train went by yelling at the man in the caboose to blow the whistle, and he often did. I remember Main Street outside our house piled up with snow. And I remember going, for realz, over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house on the farm, the Home Place, for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And in a few weeks, I'll remember some more. To be cont …

Ghost Cats

I had just turned into a sleeping position when the cat jumped up on the bed.

I could feel the soft impact, feel each paw as it explored the duvet for its own perfect place to lie, and then the solid sense of a cat settling down to sleep beside me.

I don’t have a cat.

I did, at one time, have five cats, but slowly their number was whittled down until my last cat died in bed with me one New Year’s Eve a few years back.

But I don’t think it’s the ghosts of those cats that come to curl up on my bed. Or if it is, it is just one of several visitors I’ve had over the years. Even when I had cats, I would sometimes feel the presence of one turning ‘round at the foot of my bed, making a nest for itself in the comforter, but when I would turn to welcome it, there was nothing there.

Even now, when I know there can be no cat on my bed, I very often raise my head and look, just to be certain. Kind of like the feeling you can sometimes get, looking in the bathroom mirror, that there is someone behind you, and even though you are a grown woman of a certain age, you still feel the need to check for vampires.

I’ve had a few run-ins with panic attacks and other nervous ailments (how 19th century of me, right?) over the years, and have finally gotten them under control with a little pill called Escitalopram. But it hasn’t done away with the ghost cats. They don’t bother me – not nearly as much as the sudden need to check for vampires – but I am curious.

Still and all, I hesitate to mention them to my doctor. For one thing, I don’t think I want to get rid of them. For another, I’m a little nervous about bringing it up.

Doctor: “Is there anything else, Barbara?”

Me: “What do you know about ghost cats?”

I’m not really ready for that conversation.

The Long Goodbye

I went to the Soup Party on Saturday Night. I’ve been going to this Christmas season kick-off party for years now, and generally I show up with a steaming pot of lentil soup with Polish kielbasa. Generally, I’m dressed to the nines – well, maybe the sevens. My one seasonal holiday outfit – green velveteen pants and pullover with a festive trim. This year I went in gray sweat pants, my “Winter is Coming” tee, and the festive touch of a red corduroy shirt from L.L. Bean. It had been a long day, but I had to go.

It was my last Soup Party.

I’m leaving Seattle, after 31.5 years, at the end of May 2017. The Soup Party was my first goodbye.

Joan’s caroling party will be the next one, then Christmas Eve at St. Mark’s. On New Year’s Eve, I’ll go back to St. Mark’s to walk the labyrinth and then come back home to begin the yearly viewing of Lord of the Rings.

So much for tradition.

The first week of January, I’ll give my landlord notice and begin making lists. I have 5 months to pack up this house, decide what to bring, what to leave, what to give away. The OCD organizer in me is looking forward to it.

The friend is not looking forward to saying goodbye.

Happy Halloween

The last day of autumn. The beginning of winter.

Almost nothing I say irritates my daughter so much as my insistence that November 1 is actually the first day of winter. But I’m not the first or the only one to believe so.

The first clue is the traditional name given to the date our calendars say is the first day of winter – December 21st – Midwinter.

Then there’s the Celtic definition of Samhain – our Halloween: Samhain (pronounced SAH-win) is a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the "darker half" of the year. Traditionally, it is celebrated from 31 October to 1 November, as the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. This is about halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

Lastly, buried within that definition, is a hint of the scientific proof: halfway between.

At the autumnal equinox, September 21, the sun has come to a point of equilibrium between light and dark – the height of autumn, I would call it. From here on out, night begins to overtake day, culminating at Midwinter, December 21st, when we are blessed with the longest night of the year.

Somewhere between these two – equilibrium and dark’s one-night rule - autumn reaches its full intensity and then begins to shed its glory and fades away. By Thanksgiving, the trees are bare, the earth is hard and the skies are gray.

That time between is Samhain, Halloween. When the veil between light and dark, life and death, is thin. Light and life have still enough power to hold back the darkness of death and we are free to flirt with it, to dip our toes into the inevitability of what is to come, to prepare.

So, light your lanterns to scare away darkness. Put on your disguises so that death will not recognize you. Fill your bags with sweet, bright treats, to see you through the dying days.

Winter is here.

Help!

Atheist though I am, there are times when I look to the heavens and mouth the word “Help!”

What I have trouble doing, however, is saying that to any actual human person.

Which helps me understand the appeal of religion. There are some things you can’t quite bring yourself to confess to another human, but sometimes you just need to talk.

I don’t know if it’s the way I was raised or the books I read, but I have to go through a series of mental gymnastics in order to justify asking anybody else for assistance.

Do I really need help with this?
Why?
Is there any way I can do it all myself?
Is there any way I can fix it without fucking it up?
Am I absolutely certain that I’m not just being a slacker?
Am I absolutely certain that whoever I ask will not think I’m just a slacker?
Am I sick enough?
Am I hurt enough?
Will it make more trouble for somebody else if I try to do it alone and fuck it up?
If I ask for help, will whoever I ask be happy to help or will they feel suckered into it?

In the back of my head, I always feel like I’m probably subconsciously suckering somebody else into it. That what my dad always thought, anyway.

Which is why when recently I needed to do a major clean-up of my back yard, I began the process alone, walking around the yard and making a list. However, I hadn’t gone more than about 10 yards when I tripped over a brick and fell on the patio, smack on top of my recently surgeried right breast. I didn’t break anything but it did hurt like fucking hell. That’s when I remembered that my dear friend Marisande had already offered to help. I’d already said don’t be silly, I can handle this. Now I had the distinct feeling that

(a) even though I wasn’t badly hurt, the possibilities out here were rife for more accidents and

(b) it had to be done in two weeks (reasons), and if I did it all myself it would take until April. 2018. Maybe.

I called Marisande.

That dear woman came over a few days later and totally organized my yard project, hauling stuff here and there in her little red wagon, putting the storage sheds in order, separating the keepers from the dumpsters, and, best of all, making a list of things that needed to be done.

I ventured outside a time or two looking for stuff I could do to help, but was told to never-you-mind, don’t get in the way. I did ask her, a bit plaintively, if she was having fun. Marisande smiled at me and said, “Sadly, Barb, I love doing this.”

I left her alone.

She must have worked at least 15 or twenty hours over the next few days, and when she wasn’t here, I was able to consult the list and find things that I could work on that would actually be helpful. She wouldn’t take a dime – she was paying it forward, she said. I said good, because I was no longer physically capable of doing strenuous yard work.

“Right behind you, there,” she told me. Which is true. About 10 years younger. So an old woman in her 70’s gets a woman in her 60’s to help in the garden. I did hire a couple of boys to do some pruning – never feel guilty when I pay somebody.

But I still have to figure out some way to repay Marisande. I think I might have hit on something, but it’ll have to wait a bit.

I should feel more guilty when I look at the yard these days, but to tell you the truth, I don’t. I just feel immensely grateful.

Thank you, Marisande. From the bottom of my heart. You're an answer to an unbeliever's prayer.

Cancer! So Annoyed!

I’m not a big noticer – I live too much in my head – but one evening when I was idly scratching at what I assume was a spider bite on my right breast, I noticed something. A small lump. Not just a nodule, that felt like any number of other nodules. A lump, with a little length, a little width, and the definite feel of “something there.”

Well, there was something there. “A bad actor,” as one doctor put it, after my diagnostic mammogram. We set up an appointment for a needle biopsy. It was positive. I had cancer.

I hadn’t expected this. There's no cancer in my family. I had had panic attacks that seemed to mimic heart attacks. I had a chronic cough all last winter that came with a catch in my throat. Had everything checked out. I was fine. The one thing I let slide was a yearly mammogram – kept meaning to (I’m not quite a fool) but somehow other things came up and nothing hurt. Until that spider bite.

Right away, my life filled up with appointments. I will do almost anything to avoid leaving the house – finishing third novel, reading a Kissinger biography, watching Mr. Robot. Things to do, no place to – well, damn – people doctors to see.

Then – right in the middle of all the hoop-la – tooth infection, root canal. Appointments, doctors, etc.

All so very annoying.

The good news, I discovered, is that this cancer is actually no big deal. At least that’s the impression I’m getting. I’ve had the lumpectomy. Will soon see (appointments, doctors) a radiation therapist and an oncologist for pills, but aside from the continued annoyance of having to leave the house on an all-too-frequent level, I should be fine. When I posted my condition on Facebook, the first thing I noticed was that everybody else or everybody else’s friends and relatives have had the same thing. Nobody’s dead yet.

Except: Bill and Mary and Lisa and Caroline. Mary was the only one who died of breast cancer, but hers had appeared and metastasized years ago in a much more aggressive form than mine. Bill and Lisa were terminal when they were diagnosed. Brain cancer. Metastasized. “How are you?” I asked Bill on the phone once, before I could recall the words. “I have a headache,” he said. And Lisa, who told me, “I don’t want to leave the party, Barbara.” Caroline calling me one morning. “How ya doin’?” I ask. “I suck,” she says. “I have cancer.” It was ovarian. A year or so later, she called and left a message for me on a Monday. I delayed returning her call. She died on Wednesday.

I tell my doctors I ask only to live long enough for the season finale of Game of Thrones. I’ve already given up on living long enough to read the last volume of A Song of Ice and Fire. I know not to demand too much of the universe.

However, apparently I have nothing to fear but fear itself. And I have remained somehow blissfully unafraid. Not a panic attack to be had anywhere. I blame the anti-depressants. I still think I could die at any minute from something I hadn’t seen coming, but I can’t get myself to worry about it.

But I do find it annoying. A dear friend who means quite well began to tell me about a wonderful book she had heard about on Book TV – some guy writing about all the marvelous advances they’ve made in treating cancers. I finally had to tell her that I just wasn’t interested. Having cancer doesn’t mean that I now have an abiding interest in the subject. To tell you the truth, cancer just bores the hell out of me. Yes, it killed some dear friends of mine, but that doesn’t mean that it warrants my rapt attention. If anything, it richly deserves my utter disinterest. Cancer wasn’t nearly the most interesting thing about my friends. I hope it’s not the most interesting thing about me.

It's just sort of wasting my precious time. And that’s all I want to say about it. Stuff to write, books to read, and Fear the Walking Dead just returned. Fuck you, cancer.

Pets'n'Me: A Short History

I’ve had a checkered history with pets. As a child, I was into dogs. What child doesn’t beg for a puppy? I got a puppy. A shiny little cocker spaniel named Taffy. We were inseparable until I was in junior high. Into the woods, across the fields and creeks, through back yards and alleyways and clambering down into the newly dug holes for new houses – Taffy and I went everywhere together except when I climbed trees, and then she waited for me at the bottom. I still remember the day my dad told me that Taffy had gone “to live on a farm.” By that time, I was more into boys than Taffy. Still feel a little guilty about that one.

At some point between adolescence and young womanhood, I read
The Sword in the Stone
and fell in love with an owl named Archimedes. Which has to be the only reason that, when I moved into my first decent apartment in Chicago, I bought a parakeet and named it Archimedes. I knew nothing of birds – was even a bit afraid of them and their sudden flapping – a pigeon had flown against my back as a child and stuck there, flailing against my sides with its wings. I think Archimedes sensed my fear. Perhaps that was why he refused to come out of the cage and sit on my hand, or my shoulder, or behave in any way that I imagined Archimedes would do. As for teaching him to say anything, not to mention anything wise, well … I gave up after a while and settled for changing his poop papers (something Merlin didn’t have to do), and seeing him fed and watered. And then I killed him.

I didn’t mean to kill him. We (I was married by this time) were going to my parents’ house for Christmas. I left Archimedes with lots of food and water for the weekend. Then I gathered up the bags and suitcases, turned the heat way down, locked the door and left. It’s always something, isn’t it? He froze to death. Still feel a little guilty about that one.

When I met my second husband, he had a black lab mix named Orphia. Orphia was a lovely dog. She was to my son Chris (who came with me into that marriage) what Taffy had been to me. There were many times when the only way I could spot my son when he played outdoors was that black dog sitting sentinel. There were many adventures with Orphia, and we loved her dearly, but she ended badly as well. There came a time after the divorce when neither of us could properly care for her and rather than put her down, I left her in an unreliable home. Still feel a little guilty about that one, too.

You might as well include Gimli, the cat, in this menagerie. Gimli was a sterling animal – my husband got him in the divorce. I’ve written about Buddy the Asshole Pony in this space some time back. There were also rabbits and chickens and goats and pigs, but we’re outside the pet category now. Except perhaps for Ophelia, the pig. Neither of us could take her in the divorce, so we had her butchered and ate her. I don’t feel guilty about that. There were no good homes waiting for Ophelia.

I became a cat lady when I moved to Seattle. First there was “Not My Cat,” the cat who lived on sufferance in my apartment complex, but hung out at my house. Not My Cat was a black cat who always ran to meet me when he heard my ankle bracelet bells coming down the alleyway – a couple of alleycats we were. Not My Cat was the first cat I had put down. Returning from a trip, I found him sick and mewling on the doorstep and took him to the vet. He was suffering from feline leukemia (who knew there was feline leukemia?), and I held him while he was put to sleep. I cried my eyes out for him, but not from guilt.

Then daughter Caroline brought home a tiny ball of orange fluff that she named Razzmatazz. Razz grew into a big beautiful muff of orange and cream fur. He was the first of what became a clowder of five: Elvis, Mamacita, Simba, and Yoda + Razz. There was a year when I signed all my Christmas cards “Barbara and the Pussycats.” I took them all to the vet for all of their shots – including the feline leukemia vaccine. Elvis was left with me by a friend who moved to Guam; Elvis later moved in with an old couple down the street. It’s possible my house was getting too crowded for him. Mamacita was left by a friend of Caroline’s who was going to come back for her and didn’t. She gave birth to Yoda, who we took to get spayed but got him neutered instead. Simba arrived when other friends of Caroline’s had to leave town - he escaped when we moved to this house and didn’t find his way home again. The others died more or less in my arms, and are buried or scattered under the magnolia tree in the backyard. I have no residual guilt from any of them.

There had been no dog in my life since Orphia, and I hadn’t missed one. They don’t go with apartment living in the city. They need training, they need walking, they need this, they need that. I had enough needs of my own and others in my life that needed fulfillment. Dogs were out.

But my daughter, Caroline, had always wanted a dog. When she moved out of the house, she got one, a pit bull, that lived up to all of my nightmares of owning a dog in the city. Eventually, she had to turn him back. Next up was a darling little pooch she named Stella. I fell in love with Stella too, but Stella didn’t live with me. Caroline’s boyfriend got Stella in the breakup – we still see her now and again, but it’s not really the same. When Caroline and her current partner, Greg, got Scout, they were also living away from home. Well, in their thirties, not surprising. But eventually, all things come ‘round again.

Caroline and Greg went into business together, making jam and selling it at farmers’ markets around Seattle. To make this possible, they moved in with me. So did Scout.

Scout is a rescue dog, found on the highway somewhere in California, a herding dog mix. She's compelled to nip at your heels, if she doesn’t know you very well. She barks like a banshee when people who don’t live here come to the door. I realize you probably don’t think of barking banshees, but I’m going for a sense of volume and screaming sense of urgency here. But she took to me, right away. Let me continue to live in peace in my own house. And accepted my housebuddy, Jose, when he joined us. So she knows who’s in her herd and who isn’t.

She barks at loud noises – including laughter and excited talking. We call her the fun police. I take her for her evening walks, when she seems to accept any and all other humans, but if they have dogs, it’s a different story. Remember the barking banshee description. It’s not so bad when the other dogs bark back, but kind of embarrassing when they don’t. It’s like your kid having a melt-down in the supermarket.

But as long as there are no other interruptions, Scout pulls me along at twice the pace I would ordinarily go, which I figure is good for me. Nose to the ground, investigating this clump of grass and that group of ferns – I’ve come to call it the Monster Hunt. “Where’s the monster, Scout?” I ask, as we hustle along. “That’s not a monster, that’s a dog,” when she spots one of her own. It’s a nice thing. We have a good time.

The best part of it is, I still don’t have a dog. She’s not my responsibility. I don’t pay the vet bills or buy bags of food or cartons of Frontline. I don’t wash her down when she rolls in the mud. She’s my grandpuppy, and I can pet her and spoil her and slip her treats her mother doesn’t want her to have, but when push comes to shove, she’s not my dog. And because of that, she’s one of the best pets I’ve ever had.

Gay Inspiration

I have little to say about the Orlando massacre aside from the horror and grief that we all feel at such a useless (and is there ever a useful?) loss of life. Aside from a couple of gay friends, one now living far away and the other long dead of AIDS, and some lesbian neighbors of mine, I do not have much interaction with that community in particular. As a matter of fact, I’m on record as having been a little miffed off when the issue of gay marriage popped up on Ohio’s state ballot the year that I hoped we could rout George W.

My reason for not being entirely on the bandwagon for gay marriage was simply this: You want to get married? Why? I’ve been married twice. I don’t even have the excuse that either one was a bad experience. It’s just that marriage and I did not get along. I could only be the loving, supporting wife for so long and then I had to get out of there. It was all on me. The thought of never getting married again was a liberating one. I thought gay rights was all about liberation.

I’ve long accepted the idea, of course, but in the wake of the Orlando massacre, I found myself adding some broader, alternative thinking to my understanding. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the sight of all those folks in the line to give blood. Maybe it was the thousands who showed up to grieve together. Maybe it was listening to the group of doctors who worked on the injured, together with some of the survivors, that inspired me, that set my mind roaming down little side passages. That made me think of gay marriage in a different light. That made me think of it as holding possibilities for all of us. Possibilities for seeing marriage itself in a different light.

Now, I don’t think for a minute that gay people, as people, are any different from any of the rest of us. I discovered long ago, in correspondence with my gay friend who had moved across the country, that lesbian relationships do not, in and of themselves, eliminate any of the usual sturm und drang that are too often part and parcel of any other intimate relationship. But here’s the thing.

Gay relationships do not, to the outside observer, anyway, seem to revolve around the usual boy-girl role models. That is, one is not necessarily perceived to be either the little woman or the man of the house. Gay couples may play these roles out – they have been influenced by similar role models themselves to behave in traditional marital roles – but it doesn’t alter the fact that within gay couples it will not be unusual to see males doing the housework or females earning the living. Actually, in these days of families earning at least two incomes, both sexes may be seen to be doing both jobs, inside and outside of the home. I may be wrong, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that a same sex couple can get away with delegating all the housework and childcare to one of them while both of them also work.

Of course, I see many heterosexual couples striving to accomplish this ideal of shared responsibility, but with a culture-wide expectation that it is the woman who takes care of the house and the children, it is an ideal that too often falls short of hopes and dreams.

Which is where I see the culture of gay marriage having something of an impact. How two people of the same sex work out between them what roles they will play within the relationship and how that works for them might well provide a template for others.

I also may not know what the hell I’m talking about. These were just idle thoughts on a Sunday afternoon. But since gay marriage is now an open part of our future, I can’t help but be curious about what the impact will be on the rest of us. And I like to think that perhaps it will be a positive one. Or maybe I just needed to think a good thought on that awful Sunday afternoon.

Learning to Cook

“I didn’t think life was about learning to cook,” says one of my characters in a recent novel.

“That’s exactly what life is about,” retorts another character.

I didn’t think life was about learning to cook either, and so I was never in the kitchen with my mother often enough to learn the tools of her trade – housewifery. Which meant that, when I married for the first time, I didn’t know squat about housewifery and all that went with it. And since it was still only 1963 or so, I had only Mary Tyler Moore in the Dick Van Dyck show (OMG, she wore pants) or one of Ayn Rand’s heroines for liberated role models. I rarely knew which way to turn. I can’t say that I chose housewifery with an open heart – as a matter of fact, I would be well into my 30’s when my mother’s housecleaning genes kicked in – but I realized fairly soon that if I wanted good things to eat, I’d have to learn to cook. And if I wanted holiday desserts the likes of which only my mother and grandmother knew how to produce, I would have to learn to bake, too.

My first set of cookbooks (being a book person and in love with encyclopedias, this was a no-brainer) was
Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery Complete Set of 12 Hardcover Volumes
. I recommend them to anyone, although they come under the heading of “vintage” now. I don’t, however, recommend trying to cook your way through them alphabetically, although you do learn some lessons. Such as don’t try fixing abalone when (a) you live in the Midwest and (b) you’ve never heard of it before.

But there were plenty of other easy, delicious recipes I discovered, once I decided I didn’t have to make everything. Country Captain (Indian chicken dish with golden raisins), Sweet and Sour Meatballs (a Christmas Eve favorite for years), and Chili Mac, a hot filling stove-top meal almost completely out of cans for cold winter nights. When my second husband and I bought the farm, a good thing in this instance, friends gave me a copy of The New York Times Cookbook, which, with its loose ragged cover still has room on my kitchen bookshelf. It has my mother’s recipe for “Never-Fail Piecrust” hand written on an inside cover and I still pull it out to remind myself of what the hell is included in Herbed Meatloaf.

The co-op movement hit during our farm years, and along with it, vegetarianism. I didn’t go vegetarian, but I did buy The Vegetarian Epicure – Savory Cheese and Onion Pie and Spinach Lasagna with Tomato Wine Sauce.

Then I got another divorce, a college degree, and started running around with bikers and the Grateful Dead. Go figure. It took about ten years before I returned to the kitchen on a regular basis. I still had my old favorite cookbooks that I’d dragged around the country, but now not only did I have a computer, I had Food TV and Ina Garten, The Barefoot Contessa. Brownies, Garden Pasta Salad, Macaroni and Cheese, the best chip dip in the world, Pear Clafouti!

So what is the point of doing an entire essay on cooking, if I’m only going to list favorite cookbooks and recipes? Because, as it turns out, as my alternate self in the novel had discovered, life is indeed about learning to cook. On a broader scale, life is about learning to live, learning a useful skill that will help to mark you as an adult. You may continue to drift through life, you may still refuse to grow up in some pertinent way or other, but learning to cook – learning to sew, to build a bookcase, to fix a carburetor, to balance a checkbook - learning to do some one thing well, that is learning to live. Because paying attention to the instructions, keeping a careful eye on the process, slowly learning where and when to improvise – those skills carry over into everything else that you do. Once you learn to cook – or sew or build or fix – you can learn to do almost anything. You can get a graduate degree or join the Peace Corps or write a novel. You can even feel free not to cook.

I cook very seldom these days. I’m working on my third novel. There are four of us in the house now, and I have found that I require space – counter space and head space – to really cook up something good. As my daughter says, these days my favorite food is something cold and congealed in front of the computer. But that’s okay. I don’t have a husband, my daughter is a professional cook, and nobody expects me to serve them meals. Except at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Then the cookbooks come back out and pies get made and old favorites get to the table one way or another. Come December 26th, I have a refrigerator full of leftovers and I’m free once more to go my own way.

But learning to cook was one of those things that taught me about life, about the minutiae that must be taken into consideration, about knowing when to follow the instructions and when to deviate from them, about patience, about finishing the job.

So when someone says that life isn’t about these small domesticities, I say that’s exactly what life is about. Life is definitely about learning to cook.

Spring Comes On Forever

I found out within the last hour that Sara, a dear friend of mine, is terminally ill and hospice has been called to her home. Her daughter and her husband will be her caretakers, along with the hospice workers.

This came as a shock to me, but when I called a mutual friend, who is also close to her, he told me that he, too, hadn’t been in touch recently. She had been ill, and did not want company, even when I suggested stopping by. I just assumed that when she felt up to it, I would hear from her and in the meantime, my life went on.

I remember the day I met Sara – it was at a rally against the Iraq War. I was helping the promoters by holding up time cards for the speakers, and Sara helped me by keeping the time. We saw each other fairly often after that. She came to all my yearly parties, bringing her party specialty, baked brie. When our mutual friend Caroline died, she was there. Her daughter was Caroline’s caretaker, and Sara and I, with other friends, kept the wake beside her body for most of the day until the death certificate could be issued and the funeral home could take her from us. Those of us there, that day, have maintained a closeness over the ensuing years that grew out of sharing that experience.

I think of Bilbo’s song, I sit beside the fire, and the line that reads when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.

This year, as the magnolia in my backyard begins to open its buds and the buds on the bluebells beneath it swell close to popping, I am grateful that she is likely to survive long enough to see another Seattle spring. There really isn’t anything quite like a Seattle spring.

But I also think of the title of a novel by Bess Streeter Aldrich,
Spring Came On Forever (Bison Book S)
, a novel in which the heroine suffers cruel losses, and yet at the end of her life she is able to look at her world with love. Sara is one of those people who, even in her own pain and loss, keeps looking at her world with love.

In the letter that her friend sent out this morning, she tells us:

Cards expressing your concern are much appreciated, as well as your prayers, which Sara wants, not only for herself and her family, but for people throughout the world who are suffering unexpected tragedy.

This news counts as an unexpected tragedy in my life. And yet, as I look out the window, spring keeps coming on. The thought of Sara reminds me of that.