In the cracks around kindness.
Thaw, on this New Year’s Day, hovering near freezing, my neighbor’s yard under her great pines exposed to soggy grass, the fields on the hillside across the village bare as late April.
I pull on my coat and boots and stand on my porch. The tree branches are festooned with droplets. Cold will press in again this week.
Wednesday morning, holiday, my scrawled list penciled on a post-it on my kitchen table, waiting. I perch on the covered sand bucket and sip the coffee, my hands wrapped around the mug. My memory wanders back to the Maine coast where we spread my mother’s ashes last June. My mother loved domestic spaces. She would have been enchanted by the colored lights my kids strung over my barn, along the porch roof over my head. Likewise, in my house, she would have admired our tree with the red star topper, the room illuminated with tiny lights. Nearly housebound with cancer recovery, my household has been blessed with gifts of candles, savory meals, foil-wrapped chocolates, fragrant rose oil from Bulgaria. All this, too, would have intrigued my mother.
My mother loved the wild, too, for much of her life quick to pack up the car and head for the open road.
In Maine, we parked near the shore. The sweetness of rugosa roses buoyed along the breeze’s brine. In the curving, layered landscape of rock and the rhythmic crashing pound of the ocean like the planet’s beating heat, we returned her remains to the immense wild, the mysterious territory where she had, after all, emerged from.
A crossing over.
This second memory, too. Later that summer, visiting my old father in New Mexico, my young woman daughter and her friend fried eggs and buttered toast for breakfast. In their strappy sundresses, they sat at the round oak table, sipping coffee. The friend had never visited New Mexico; her eyes gleamed. My father gave them his credit card and told them to eat lunch in downtown Santa Fe, in the courtyard which had been a family compound, 200 years and more ago. Later, the girls returned with leftover enchiladas and stories of flowering trumpet vines and singing birds. We must go into the beautiful mountains.
Yesterday, this daughter walked me around the high school, the beginnings of my strength returning. In the hidden back, a path leads into the woods. She held my hand, admonished, “Not yet.”
On this misty, rainy New Year’s morning, a prayer to cultivate patience and mercy for these interwoven journeys…
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go…
