I know this time of year can get rather noisy. And I know the part I play in that.
Last year, when I felt utterly bombarded with the LAST CHANCEs and HURRYs of the season, I wrote to y’all with a pause: a moment to sigh, to hear nothing but the softness, the kindness of quiet. I think it’s something I ought to do this time every year. The cost of moving through life at the pace I often must is high, and I’m tired. I imagine you might be too.
I wrote chapters this year I imagined might be nice in a book Sent them around wrapped in a proposal for a little while. That didn’t go anywhere, not yet at least. Still, I think it’s some of my favorite writing to date. A collection of essays written to my son. I wrote it with the hope it would help him to breathe, to slow down, to know me, to know himself. I wonder if it might offer some of that to you as well, in its own way.
If you’d like, take a breath. Take a moment. Read only what of this you want to read. Take what resonates with you, leave the rest. Go about your day feeling, I hope, just a little more rooted. Someway. Somewhere.
And however you find yourself, may today be gentle to you.
ON DISTRACTION
I wish I could give you your great-grandmother’s house.
I wish to take you there, to show it to you. I mean by more than driving past, pointing at the place where the old climbing tree used to bloom shocking pink. Saying, that is where your great-grandmother took those pictures of me, young and barefoot, feeling brave and tall in its branches. I mean by more than pulling into the semi-circle drive, knocking at the blue door, greeting the stranger who lives there now with a smile and an awkward request. More even than being invited inside and seeing, if they’re still there, the old brick floors your great-grandfather laid with his hands.
I wish to give you the thousands of memories, the hunger that goes with them, being, as they were, so full of delicious color—brown butter hardwood, raspberry blankets, a red delicious range, a summer squash sofa, spinach and berry garden, sweet potato and cardamom, an asparagus swing by a blue moon pool.
I wish to give you its oasis. Outside the kitchen window, that hefty maple your great-grandfather planted some fifty years ago has stood guard for vine-laden plots with their birdfeeders and squirrel-feeders, stone footpaths in rust red, full-bloomed flowers in pink and gold. Even in the suburbs of Chicago, it’s been a diligent shelter for wildlife, the backyard visited daily by foxes and ducks, by cardinals and rabbits. By eager chipmunks with their pregnant cheeks. By a proud hawk that often bathes in the shimmering, cool waters we too played in freely when the weather was right.
I wish to give you its old keeper, vibrant and funny and warm, generous, creative. We ate fruit straight from the bush, our mulberry-stained bodies received with delight as we brought in bowlfuls to share. We sat together in the kitchen, table covered in foil, pressing crayons into smooth stones she had warmed in the old red AGA. We watched with pride as the wax melted, colors dancing, kissing, melding in that wonderful heat before cooling into a permanent sunset.
I wish to give you the gifts that house gave me every time I opened its blue door: a slow life, one rich with memory, easy to feel, to cherish. Full of kindness, occasionally surprise, friendly with boredom.
I wish, I wish.
***
There is beauty like this everywhere, I know.
Across the street from the house where we live, an extraordinary sugar maple towers over all the other trees. Yellow in the fall, it seems a sun. Next door, Willy plants his flowers, his tomatoes, his collard greens, tends to them with patience and learned hands. I sit by our bay window and sigh as the rain falls, the leaves fall, the snow falls, the night falls. We have lights strung across the porch, steady constellations as change glides through. This is our home.
But as I write this, even surrounded as I am by all this goodness, my mind drifts elsewhere: to screens and messages, to blue light news, to lunch, to floors, to fury. I muddle through my afternoons, pulled by currents of outrage and anxiety, of boredom, the growing incapacity to cope with it. This, I suppose, is the deluge of distraction. I am clinging to the riverbank, grasping for life at roots and branches of nostalgia, chronophobia, ambiguous loss, dread. Also hope.
Distraction used to mean something else to me. It sat somewhere else in my body. Whether this change is due to evolving technologies or simply growing older, I can’t be sure. But I remember.
Prior to my (mis)diagnosis at fifteen, my so-called “attention deficiency” felt only like play, like passion. Distraction was busy hands and pencil dust, sketching crystal S’s in the margins of my math, drawing dreams from encyclopedias of pocket monsters and magic. Distraction was my doorway to wonder. I was pulled from my daily doing as though by gravity, finding myself instead orbiting a world kissed by imagination. There, in its clouds, shapes of stories I wanted to tell. There, on the breeze, the sound of songs I wanted to write. There, in the woods, something wild, liberated, whispering rumors and secrets, insisting there was something hidden somewhere close. Something that would meet my many longings. Has the landscape changed, or have I?
***
I fear we’ve become tired of slow-growing things. I fear we’ve lost our sight for incremental change, our taste for its sweetness. The tree inside each one of us for so long goes untended. It might spend a season yielding fruit we never notice, never eat. We do not hear the birds in its branches. We cannot. We are too repulsed by the silence their singing requires.
But then I think of you, your full-bodied attention as we walked the path today along the wooded lakefront. Your cheeks were flushed with cold, with joy, your eyes glistening and proud, your beaming mouth full of unselfconscious effort when you pointed to the trees, squealed cheehs!
And I think of me, so easily present then as well. For the length of that long walk, I could not take my eyes off you.
Praise, praise, praise that sap-sticky life
Look at your life, green thicket around you.
look at it, strewn across the floor,
listen, crunching underfoot,
noisy with birdsong,
feel it, sap-covered and
sticky as a life should be.
Going out and back will show you this:
there is no way to walk the same path twice,
not if you are watchful, if your
eyes, your ears, your heart are wide with
love or something like it.
So fill your senses with pleasure, with
surprise, with thanks.
Tire them out. Go ahead!
There is only so much can be adored today,
so drink what you can of that cool water.
Let your belly be full.
Praise the daylily now, for tomorrow it dies.
Praise the heron today as she flies overhead.
Praise the deer as she dips in the pond.
You may never see that again, and
oh, is it marvelous.
Praise, praise, praise that
sap-sticky life of yours,
changing and messy and too-short,
too short to see it all, too short to not bless it
with every wow you have to give.