end of summer

The weather has turned. At least temporarily. It's cool at night and you can almost smell autumn on the horizon. We're frantically writing assignments and plotting out syllabi. I'm finishing article revisions and day dreaming about hosta and fern plantings.

My Dad came for a visit last week. We barely kept up with him. In two long days, he managed to replace a broken window, fill lots of cracks, glaze the basement windows, hang pictures, fix half a dozen doors, install a range hood (we have light!), fix the electrical problem in the kitchen, give me a closet doorknob, fix the shutters, hang curtain rods, bandage my wounds, and probably several other, life-saving things that I'm somehow forgetting.

We also had a good hike, and even down a lung, he kept us moving. It seems so terribly hollow to say that I feel grateful for visits like this one. But I feel grateful for visits like this one. It's been eight months of worry and sorrow, and so visits like this one feel nothing less than blessed.

We bought summer treats at the farmer's market, like the exclusively grass-fed meat that he can't find in Michigan and lots of tomatoes. Last night I made tomato preserves with our leftovers. I'm sure that I overcooked it, but it was my first foray into canning (another Dad lesson), and now I know what not to do.
I'm thinking about buying a bushel of tomatoes on Friday and canning them whole...Ah summer, ah tomatoes.

a quick check in

I had my doubts. I worried that he'd wake up on a ventilator. I worried that his lung would collapse. I worried that he'd be in so much pain that he wouldn't be able to sleep for weeks. But when we walked into his room the next day and he had already picked out his meals for the next twelve hours, scribbling them in his jagged hand on a brown paper towel, I was immediately at ease. We all were. I mean any man who can muster real enthusiasm over hospital green beans and tomato soup is well on his way to recovery. At least I hope so.

gardens in the sky

One night last month I was tossing and turning, trying to coax my anxiety into sleep. Like sleepless people everywhere, I tried to conjure some tranquil surrounds, some balmy beachside or some wooded glen. I often, though, trade these prosaic locales for my own imagined spaces. I like to picture fertile backyard gardens, the kind in which all of the tomatoes are staked and the carrot tops line up just so. In my mind’s eye, I see raspberries growing with the stubborn persistence that they’ve shown during my whole life in Michigan. The berries I’ve always imagined planting would be transplants from my Dad’s patch, ones that he’s raised up for four decades and before that, grew up in his parents’ garden. They’re berries with a past and I’ve always imagined that I’d have them as well.

Whenever I think about this garden, I think of my Dad coming to Kentucky–or wherever it is that J and I settle–and helping me till the soil and plant the rows. My Dad is good at things like planting vegetables and training vines up an arbor. He’s good at other things too, things that call for coordination between hand and eye, between muscle and memory, between space and certainty. Lately, I’d been thinking that he’d be good at making dollhouses and wooden toys for his grandchild and the grandchildren who will arrive sooner or later. I’d had planned to offer up this idea over Christmas, to suggest that we start building them together. After all, he’s spent his whole life rebuilding people’s bones, their internal architecture, all with hand and eye and muscle and memory.

But now it seems that it’s time for him to care for himself with that same tenacity. On Friday we learned that he is very, very sick, and so I’m not sure what this space will become over the next several months. I don’t know how much I’ll feel like making and doing. How much I’ll feel like writing and thinking here. Or how much my own life will change as I watch and wait, nurse and fret. I’m headed home soon and I suspect we’ll just take it moment by moment.

I suspect that the sunsets will begin to feel more vivid and taste of meals together more rich.

the cool down

Serious runners take a couple extra laps after each race. It’s part of a recovery process that reregulates one’s natural rhythms. It lowers your heart-rate and protects your muscles. I’ve been a runner for more than a decade, but never really subscribed to this logic. I also resisted the whole pre-run stretching fad until I was about 32 and had already wrecked a knee and faced the end of my afternoon gallops through the woods. Until then, I just slipped on my asics and went long and hard until I collapsed in a heap at my doorstep. But warming up and cooling down, I’m starting to accept, are essential.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten days: cooling down. For the last five or six months, I’ve been sprinting to get through it all--a book project, a major conference, a wedding, an article, job materials, teaching, a long distance relationship turned marriage--and in the last eight weeks, I’ve been doing it at such a pace that I was just starting to crumble. So when I finished (!) my institutional history on Monday and sent it to the printer, I turned off that part of my brain and have slowed to a crawl in the cool Kentucky sun.

There are things to do, lots of them, but I’m letting my body and my brain begin to recover. The first step was a quick retreat to Florida with J’s family. We spent the weekend snuggling our nephews (and maybe feeling just a bit like the odd ones out without a babe of our own) and visiting with J’s great aunt Bea, a 94 yr. old firecracker who still hits half a dozen card games a week and chauffeurs her friends about because they’ve aged-out of their privileges behind the wheel. We ate fresh seafood, and I got to float in ocean until I shriveled up like a dried apricot. We lay on the hot sand and whispered about how strange a world south Florida can seem.

En route to Florida, I caught up on some long-neglected knitting. This scarf began a year ago and just came off the needles last night. It's entrelac in Noro. I can't remember what the colorway was called. It was supposed to be a gift (both last year and this), but I'm becoming quite certain that I'm not going to be able to part with it. Usually I'm happy to knit and give, but this one--maybe because of it's lengthy residence in the basket by my bed--seems a bit too close to my heart to send off. Is that wrong to admit?

Since getting back to Kentucky, I've tried to restore some balance in my life. I slip out the door in the afternoons for long rambles behind J's house. Right now we're dog sitting and so I've got a lively pooch to trot ahead of me. The autumn woods are ten times more splendid with a dog in tow. Yesterday we came across this little guy:

In the woods I breathe just a little bit better. Actually, a whole lot better. The gravel beneath my shoes and the cascading vermillion leaves settle me. They remind me of my attachments to the earth and my connections to all beings. And off to those woods I now go (after I stretch, of course)...

90

I went to Michigan to do more than meet Lucy, though that was certainly part of the plan. I also went as more than an excuse for some in-flight knitting. This was, in fact, the first of three planned trips to Michigan over the next eight weeks. I love Michigan in the summer and as I get older, I love to be in my hometown. It’s less vexed now than it has been in the past, though one’s ghosts seem never too far distant in one’s childhood haunts. As my mom and I were driving to the airport on Monday, we crested a small hill and I had a long view of 8th street, a charmless avenue that has changed little in the last thirty years. The storefronts, of course, change color, but they remain. Everything is short and squat, gray and beige; it’s a luckless street that traverses the town. As we drove, I felt what I feel so often in Michigan, the layers of the past all stacked atop one another and yet distinct, a palimpsest of the past.



The layers were ever more discernible at one of the events for which I came home. My grandfather turned 90. 90 years old. My family—cousins, and great aunts, friends, and parents—gathered in what felt like nothing but pleasure. Even my father, who often inclines more toward tears than laughter, couldn’t help but laugh as he toasted his father, a man who still plays tennis each week, and whose delight in living a full life seems undiminished after nearly a century. There were three things that I loved about this event:

1. For at least a decade my grandfather has talked about the “young guys” that are his tennis partners. I always—and stupidly—imagined these to be, well, young guys. So as I was chatting with a few octogenarians on Sunday about their tennis game, I asked them where I could find the “young guys.” I was eager to ask them what it was like to play with the decidedly old guys three times a week for more than twenty years. At first they looked confused, then a bit aghast, and then they just started laughing; “We’re the young guys!”

2. During my father’s toast to his father he talked about Grandpa’s working life, a subject about which I know shamefully little. One time about ten years ago I found a packet of letters from my grandparents that were written to my parents during the 1970s, at a time when they were living near Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia. I had remembered—at least I thought I remembered—my grandmother telling me about buying down feathers directly from the geese (this can’t be right) for her pillows in Yugoslavia. In any case, I knew that they had lived in Europe for long stretches of time during the 60s and 70s and I knew that Grandpa was an engineer for Dow Chemical, but I didn’t know much more (and who really knows what engineers do). So when my father started talking about Grandpa opening plastics plants in Europe, I just started giggling. It was like living in The Graduate for a minute. He just kept saying “plastics.” “He brought plastics to Europe.” This cracks me up. Plastics.

3. Cousins! I love, love, love my cousins. I love hanging out with them and whenever we get to see each other, I just end up wishing that I got to see them all of the time. They’re smart and interesting, incredibly funny and definitely a little crazy.



I’m hoping that we can celebrate again at 100.

greetings

As I was walking, err, losing, Lucy in the orchard. J's sister was bringing her first baby, a son, into the world. And as she labored--hard work no doubt--I sat on a plane and knit--easy work--her son a pair of bright lime booties to match his surprise sweater. I wish I could ditch out for a day and take the bus and meet the newest delivery.

Alternatively, I'll wait patiently for J to make his way up here and we can go greet our newest nephew together. Oh joy!