A Mother's Prayer
A Mother's Prayer
for Katie
Forms change form yet light remains.
In the vast dome of robin's blue
Above my somber head,
In that abundant ocean of light,
vibrant clouds that float like fresh milk
I will see you. There.
When darkness enfolds
After shadows dissolve
Sparks of gold appear.
In that shimmering presence,
year after decade after century,
I will see you. There.
In the countless prickly needles of our lanky pines,
In the infinite white shells of Pontchartrain,
In the tender blades of grass that daddy tends
and the precious creatures that crawl
beneath my feet or sing in dark forests,
I will see you. There.
Forms change form yet light remains.
You, Divine Light, have joined the sky and stars,
the sea and wood,
the swirl of endless life and love
that was,
In the beginning,
is now,
and ever shall be.
Amen.
I see you. There.
From "Marjorie" : Hanging Clothes
The sun warmed her bare legs as its rays just began to touch the water of the bayou. The porch was very high, twenty or thirty feet, or was it fifty? It made her dizzy to look down, but the railing felt solid at her waist. Sometimes there were ducks, or little fish that made the water shimmer and vibrate across the surface of the bayou. Little waves lapped at the sides of the fishing boat.
The warmth climbed up her body and the sky began to take on the deep blue color of summer. A sudden urge began deep inside her body. It hadn’t started with a thought as in normal urges where your mind decides something and your body follows. Instead, it was the other way around. The body trying to get the mind to remember. She lifted both arms above her head reaching high, stretching and swaying a little. The stretch felt good. So did the sun on her arms and chest.
‘Mama?’ Her son’s worried voice. ‘What are you doing?’
She had to make an effort with the interruption to stay there in that place. To keep going back as though something had been lost, a key in the dirt, and you walk over the spot slowly, slowly searching every inch.
‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep okay? It’s early.’
She lowered her arms. ‘I’m enjoying the sun.’ Her mind finally caught up with her body’s memory and she saw the lines against the blue, felt the grass tickling her feet, smelled the china ball trees and the dark humidity of New Orleans. The sheets taut, swaying in the wind, the clothespins lined up straight like toy soldiers.
He said, ‘I made some eggs. I’ll bring them out here.’
She sat down a white rocker near the railing where she was still in the sun. ‘Oh, thank you. You treat me like a queen.’
The urge remained in her belly like a child waiting to burst out of the door to run to their daddy. That joy. She had loved hanging clothes.
From "Marjorie, stories from my mother"
She poured out her coffee in two cups, and filled both of them with hot milk from the stove making sure two, three times that the burner was off. She brought one cup at a time to the table and set them on the plastic-coated Christmas placemat. It was uneven from all the little bits of paper she stored underneath it. She moved the cups and fumbled with the papers, smoothing them out before putting her cups back on Santa’s beard. She pressed the remote carefully, sometimes she turned everything off and had to call for her son to turn it back on.
That video was on again. They kept showing it over and over again of the man dying with another man’s knee on his neck. It was not a TV show, it was real. She didn’t understand it. Policemen? And everyone watching it, filming it, unable to stop it?
She pressed a button and another show came on with two policemen pushing a man up against a car. She pressed the button again and again until a well-dressed and made-up woman was trying to sell fake pearls. “This silicon-based compound has the sheen and polish of real cultured pearls. Look at this setting. Only 19.99.”
She put down the remote and pulled out a piece of paper from under the placemat. She called this table her desk and these were her important papers.
The paper had been torn off the end of an envelope. It read, 2020-1922 = 98. 98? 1922 was right. That was the year she was born. Was it 2020? But she was 88, wasn’t she? Not 98? That’s almost a hundred? She looked at the paper again. She erased the 98 and wrote in 88. That was it. She’d subtracted wrong the first time.
Eckhart Tolle, my mother Marjorie, (98 years old) and a different lethal virus
My mother is safe at home with my brother in Mississippi, I am safe at home in Wisconsin. I had to cancel my last trip to go see her in March because of the virus. It was to be a little family reunion.
A couple of days ago I asked her some questions about her siblings, ten of whom have died, she has one living brother. She said to me, Thank God you’re still here.
At first I was taken aback, then we both laughed. I said, Yeah, I’m glad I’m still here, too.
Of course I am glad that I’m still here, for her sake and my own. I’m glad she’s still here as well for both our sakes. I started to think about how when she was a girl, sickness, epidemics, illness and death were part of everyday life. Her young brother in law died from inhaling cotton dust at the mill where he worked. She had a sister with spinal meningitis, a brother with polio, and a little sister, Elizabeth, who died before age two of whooping cough, another horrible disease that attacks the lungs and depletes the victim of oxygen. My mother is not a woman who cries often, but one time I do remember when recounting Elizabeth’s death, she said, crying, That baby died alone. They wouldn’t let us go see her.
Maybe there was a quarantine situation with whooping cough, or maybe because they were poor and had no voice, Charity Hospital in New Orleans would not let the family be with the dying baby girl. My grandmother, who had given birth to her ninth child only days or weeks earlier, would not enter the room where they laid out the tiny coffin, preferring to remember Elizabeth alive and well.
In a recent video, Eckhart Tolle said that we are all infected with a lethal virus: TIME. It will kill us eventually if nothing else does first. He said that in other times and cultures DEATH was and is a constant companion, but we in the modern world tend to be afraid to even say the word, especially in reference to ourselves.
So when my mother reminds me that I am still here, it makes me pause and consider. I am grateful that I was given this time here, by whatever creative power in the universe. I hope to embrace it not as something I was entitled to, but as a gift I humbly accept and celebrate until my time runs out.
The cardinal sings because it must
The cardinal sings because it must
The cardinal sings because it must
April, after all,
Despite wild winds and
As snow smothers what green the earth had begun to reveal
The cardinal sings
It is his job and duty
To secure a place in the ritual
To enliven this time and place when we have lost track
The cardinal sings
For love and life
For a partner to share and do what
Spring instructs while the world weeps and moans for its dead
The cardinal sings
From the highest branch the earth allows
Sings us back to our selves
Helps us carry our hearts, day to day, in weary and chapped hands
Solace in Nature #2:
Today on my walk I realized that since the snow melted all the spaces that were off limits, and which will be again with overgrowth in summer, are now open to me for exploring. Wide stretches of prairie fields, hills, stands of birch and pine. The photo was taken a block away from my house. I feel lucky to be here.
Solace in Nature#1
When I first moved to Amery five years ago I woke to strange noises on early spring mornings. After two years when out on a walk I discovered their source. Sandhill cranes make a guttural barking sound when flying and at other times. They nest at the school down the block. Yesterday I heard my first of the year. Today when I heard it, I look up to find it soaring above my head. This is what will keep me sane right now.
Dancing Shadows
February 25, 2020
Waiting somewhere in the idling truck, a parking lot, just sitting, not doing anything at all, not looking at my phone or filing my nails, or listening to the radio, just sitting, waiting. I notice on the wall of the building, a nondescript blank beige stucco wall, shadows moving. It is cold and windy, the American flag above the building billows at full length, straight out, showing the full force of high-knot winds. Against the building the shadows dance. They are the shadows of trees except that in February the branches are bare and have their own peculiar shadows, traces and lines, intricate patterns. These lively shadows on the wall are not bare branches and I turn to find their source, but all I see are tall leafless cottonwoods, still as night. Yet there they are, the puppet-like shadows, of what I’m not sure but they draw me in, as though into another reality and “I” disappear. For only a few moments. I enter into the dance of the shadows, leave the truck, the parking lot, my husband, my world, behind. Empty. Part of a whole I don’t understand. An extraordinary moment in an otherwise unextraordinary day. My husband leaves the paint store and rejoins me waiting in the truck, sets his paint on the back seat, and we go on with the mundane tasks of shopping and eating and talking that make up the little moments of our lives, leaving the shadows behind to continue dancing whether I see them or see only the memory of them. Later in the day, I will recall the shadows, and reenter that state of emptiness, that otherworldly dance. It is a peaceful place to be.