Planting the Garden

I need to write on my Blog because I haven’t visited it since March. I have been preparing a goodbye sermon to tell in my church the first Sunday of June. It took up all of the things I wanted to tell about. But last night I saw a new thing to tell. It was the sweet boy-man making his garden in the garden plot that I have worked for 30 years. As I watched out the kitchen window he was all curled down on his knees the way very little children squat, tapping out seeds, slowly, pausing now and then to look up. When he had emptied that packet he got up, grabbed his pitchfork and began tearing up the soil in a bed near by. He appeared to have completed that task quickly and moved on to a new area that required spreading loam. I had been preparing my dinner when I first looked out, so I returned to that task briefly before looking for him again. He was up on the tractor he’d driven through the woods to the edge of the garden. He’d obviously brought a load of loam or manure to spread on the garden and was in the process of dumping it. It seemed seconds later he was flipping soil in a new spot with his pitchfork. Dusk was beginning to move in. It was his intense busyness that caught me. This boy- man now owns my house. His parents bought it for him. When I leave in July, he will move in. He has displayed no impatience about my living here until then. It is an arrangement his parents and I have made. But when I suggested he might want to use the garden since I would not be planting it this year, his joy about owning his own home became apparent. It was as if every enthusiastic fling of dirt off his shovel was announcing his preparation for a harvest I know he will share with his neighbors. There was something so little boy about the way he went about the task and also what he was planting: a bunch of pansies, a little lettuce, some cat nips in one bed. Next to it was squash and pumpkins.
Letting go is a profoundly moving experience.

A Snowy Sunday

It’s a snowy Sunday afternoon and I am a little grumpy because I can’t think of what to write for my blog but I want the company of people responding to what I think. There is a funny combination of shy and arrogant that doesn’t let inner life out and yet wants to be known. I think being older and also living alone increases ones experience of inner life. It is amazing the way your thinking never shuts up. When I went to school and taught I spent a lot of time thinking about the kids and what we would do and what would work for them, so my inner comments on life were not near as prominent as they are now. Now there is so much less need for anyone to hear what I perceive. So I tell it all to me. Lately I am thinking “enough already”. Self-doubt usually hides anxiety about something. Ah, yes, in 5 months I am moving. David sent pictures of the house. I love the one that shows it through the trees. Maureen Dowd wrote a useful article recently telling about how it is day two that matters once day one has been successfully launched. It’s day two that I am pondering lately because I know that no matter how carefully one thinks of every detail, life itself will introduce a new wrinkle. I am not much a lover of change. It takes me so long and slow to get in that once I am there I want to sty a long time.

Echoes

Just as I was looking at my driveway and wondering if I could risk ice skating down it in order to walk, a friend called to say she could be there in an hour if I was free to get out into the fresh air with her. As she was getting out of her car a while later I was caught as always, by what a beautiful looking woman she is. I call her a grown up gifted kid. She is a dancer and a potter and a scientist, as well as an educator and creator of learning experiences for children in her summer camp setting. Best of all, for an afternoon walk, we start a conversation as if we had never left off the one we were in three months before. Like many of the friendships I have treasured over the thirty years I have lived here, I knew her first as a parent of her two children. They spent third and fourth grades in my classroom.

She asked me about what I was finding in the file drawers that I am sorting in preparation for moving. I found a manuscript , hand written, of a song by Sibelius. My mother played the piano for the conducting class of Antonia Brico. Mother and Antonia had a deep relationship and I can only surmise that Antonia gave the song to mother as a gift. Brico, herself, had a long and abiding relationship with Jan Sibelius. In a Christmas letter of 1937 she describes her visit with him and her thrilling concert conducting his 2nd symphony in Finland. I showed the manuscript to the second hand booksellers who were evaluating my books and they immediately initiated a correspondence with the Sibelius library in Finland. No, the song was not written in Sibelius’ hand but it was written in the hand of his son-in-law. Yes, the song was published but the version I had was slightly different. They would be very interested in receiving a copy for their library. The booksellers sent a copy and are looking to find an interested party for the original. The best part of this story was when the booksellers, both musicians, played the song on my little harmonium and we all sang it. I had not even thought of finding out what it sounded like before they had proposed to play it. It is a beautiful song, and it sounds like him. There is something very mystical about echoing the life of my mother in this way. It is hearing and feeling the echo of a time I lived as a ten year old when Antonia Brico was my Tanta and I was taken into the musical world my mother occupied. I keep wondering when and why Antonia gave the song to mother. The song is called A Hymn To Thais.

When Time Has Stopped

When time has stopped and will not soon begin,
our labored breath, its burdened rise and fall
records life and life again,
unwilling instruments, ourselves.
We try the walls and find them to be
choices that our hearts have made.
Worlds of promise tease our eyes
as if by wanting we were one with greens and slope,
as easy as the grazers there, or free explorers clothed as children are
in chasing creatures, cloud and sun.
We cannot go, or leave our lives untended,
make our way to some new valley’s home
to sink our hopes in darker soil there.
Owned.
Stilled within.
We wait.


I’ve been hearing this poem in my head lately. I wrote it years ago after my love told me he was moving to a city far away. It was before I knew how to be me without him. I’m not sure why I’ve been thinking about it. When I wrote poetry back then, I wrote it because I had to secure my reality with concrete images. I wrote it to rescue myself. I think I am looking for the place in me that is not that raw vulnerability, and yet is a deep enough place of reality that a poem or a saying would have value if read by another. This blogging idea is presenting an opportunity. Why I am thinking of that poem has to do with preparing myself to leave this house I’ve lived in for thirty years. I’m not going until July, but I am working my grieving all the time. It is a very good move. I’m going to Maine, a place I love ,to be where my daughter and granddaughter are. It’s the right time and place. It’s just that I can’t go there without leaving here.

Say Hello Eileen

Say Hello









In the classroom of third and fourth graders that I taught, we began our day with what we called, “Say Hello. As children came into the room from the bus they chose a partner to play chess with, or a book to read with a friend, or to build a fort in the back room out of the blankets and orange crates that were there for that purpose. During the year I am remembering there were three boys who regularly chose to play hockey with my sheltie Barnaby as one of their teammates. Barnaby had a plastic food dish that served as a puck when turned upside down. One of the three boys teamed up with the dog and the two of them would push the puck toward the goal while the other two tried to intercept. We had worked out acceptable limits to the game. Often they had an audience of other children who had chosen to draw at a table in the back room while they watched the game. Say Hello lasted about a half hour. What I loved about it was that all of us had a chance to find ourselves and become comfortable in our relation to each other and the classroom. Sometimes a restless somebody needed direction or just a conversation with me in order to settle down. I valued that part of our day because it supported the children in their sense of belonging before we ever got into the teacher directed part of our day . I did make one correction to the beginning of our day. I was writing a math lesson as the children entered. I began to notice that most of them had chosen what they would like to do and were talking to their friends but no one had spoken to me.

“Oops,” I said to myself, “this won’t do.” At our morning planning I explained that I felt left out when they didn’t greet me as well as their friends when they came to school. From then on each child came into the classroom with a “ Good morning Eileen”. I love the sound of that in my memory’s review of school days. It became the sound of my connection with each child. I’ve thought if I ever write about those years I might call it “Good Morning Eileen.”

When people ask me how come they let you have the children call you Eileen, I answer, “I never asked them.” When they ask me how come they let you take your dog to school I answer, “ I never asked them.” When anyone, adult or child, came into our classroom, I asked what they would like to be called. I said, “I like to be called Eileen, what do you like to be called?”

A Beginning

This is a beginning that is more than learning how to use my computer. The beginning feels like the beginning of not rejecting a new electronic culture. I am older and we didn’t have computers or microwaves or cell phones or TV while I was growing up. They have all felt like a great clutter that I must try to incorporate into my life, or not incorporate into my life. So I mostly haven’t. I tried a cell phone for a while. I couldn’t find the times when I would want to be so connected by phone to other people. I stopped paying for it. I have happily lived without TV for 25 years. I read instead. And I have never added a microwave to my kitchen. Partly my choices have been because I don’t want to use more resources to run my life than I really need. A lot of my choice making has been to protect my inner life from clutter. Recently, I have had an image of an old curmudgeon who won’t give up her horse and buggy to try out that new fangled automobile. Even though all the preferences I’ve stated are true, I’d like to acquire a happier response to the evolving electronic age. Opening this blog, joining the crowd, telling about what I’m pondering is my starting place.