Category Archives: Soul Care

Ice Storm Strata

31 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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Ice pelts my window.

It calls me to relive memories of that earlier ice storm, which paralyzed our city and sent the National Guard with chain saws to our front yard.  I am haunted by the remains of those once beautiful trees.  But no matter; the trees were blocking traffic and what was dead had to be removed to allow life to return to the neighborhood.

But even now I see those decapitated trees.  We were lucky a tree did not hit our house; two weeks earlier, I had hired an arborist to remove a weak Siberian Elm from the back yard, whose wide network of limbs covered the back west of our home and the east half of our neighbor’s.  The healthier Siberian Elm in the front did not survive.

Last year’s ice storm, mild by comparison, woke me from a deep sleep.  Hearing the ice made me edgy.  And now this most recent ice storm, the one of two days ago, has converged to rest on top of two years of ice-storm memories.  Is there no disaster relief?  How many stratum will eventually build up before I can shake the memories surrounding that first devastating ice storm – the one of December 9, 2007?

I recall the date with ease.  It is not ancient history, after all.  But even if it were, I fear time will not lessen its grip over me.  Last year’s tossing and turning, as ice slammed against our rooftop, forced me from a warm bed to release sleep-robbing thoughts on paper. “Stop your whining,” I told them then.  And for a while, they grew still.

But the thoughts follow in the wake of every ice storm.  They are relentless.  There is nothing to fear, I tell myself.  Compared to many in the neighborhood, our losses were minor two years ago — no heat and power for three days and one old Elm tree gone forever — if we survived once, we can survive again.

But I wonder now, as I wondered then, whether the brevity of our suffering was a rare sort of grace given to those in mourning.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Two days before the 2007 storm hit, we laid my mother’s body to rest.  And because the ice storm followed mom’s death so closely, I fear I may forever associate one with the other.   Will I always wake up at night when I hear ice hitting the rooftop?  Will I always recall that moment of dark fancy – while living in our unlit cold home during the 2007 storm – when I wondered whether slinging around ice was mom’s way of venting anger from the grave, in the same way she infrequently resorted to slinging around a pot or pan, or slamming a door or drawer to vent her anger at life?

Mom was not angry about dying.  She had told my sister – a few months before her stroke, with no forecast of death close in hand – that she was ready to die.  If others of us weren’t as ready, then surely the inevitably of death’s appearance could make us so.

But making ready is not always easy.  When storms are coming, people prepare to live life amidst destruction, buying batteries and water and ready-to-eat food.  When the storm is death, we each prepare in our own ways.  My way involved tears.  Lots of tears.  I cried for an entire week, praying for a miracle, blubbering by my mother’s deathbed, until I finally told her the day before she died, that it was okay it she needed ‘to go.’

Swifter than any could have imagined, Mom died.  My maternal side of the family tree was gone.  The strong oak that I could never imagine being without, the tree I liked to lean upon to gather strength, was felled by death.  When the hospital called, we couldn’t get there fast enough.  We went anyway.  She died on a Wednesday night and an hour later we gathered by her bedside to whisper our final goodbyes.  We buried her two days later.  It was a cold Friday afternoon.

After six weeks of hope and one week of grief, all within the confines of an ICU room, I was ready to get on with the business of living.  But nature had other ideas.  That life-stopping ice storm came, and I was robbed of all mind-numbing distractions.  No television.  No books to read in an unlit house.  I was left alone to grieve in the dark and cold.

And so the memories come with every ice storm; the grief spigot opens to invite me to chip away at the remains of grief.  Yet, with tender mercy, it also invites me to remember Mom’s life and the way she absolutely loved to look out her window on falling snow.  And so last Thursday, in honor of Mom, I stopped life to look out my window.  And it was beautiful.  Then standing still, I listened.  The ice no longer sounded like pots and pans banging.  Instead, I heard hundreds of little bugs crashing into my windshield.

Someday, I think, the ice will become itself again.

MAGIcal thinKING

26 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Good Reads, Soul Care, Writing

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Last night in class, I was asked the question that always makes me squeamish: “Are you a writer?“

When I get this, I hedge with words like ‘wannabe’ or ‘trying to be’ or ‘someday, I hope’.  But before I could grow my hedge, my questioner — a perceptive and articulate soon-to-be-spiritual director — went on to explain her reason for asking; members of the church she pastors suggested she begin writing the stories she tells so well.  But it was what came next, said with a nervous chuckle — maybe not these exact words, but something akin to them — that caught my attention:  “Who am I to think that I can write?”

Well, okay then.  My friend and I share common ground, since members of the Texas church I use to attend did the same thing to me.  And once it started, it didn’t stop.  It wasn’t the same people as much as it was a similar message  that I heard over and over, like a baton handed from one runner to the next.  And then, that same haunting question I once volleyed back — “Who am I…?”

So last night, I did my friend a favor by cutting to the chase.  “Yes.”  “I write… but not for money.”

I told her how writing came to be part of who I am.  I told her it began with a work stint in St. Charles, Illinois, when I was twenty-something  and young in my tax consulting career, that I wrote training curriculum for the now defunct international accounting firm, Arthur Andersen & Co.  And after this, I wrote position papers to help defend  cross-border tax strategies for a publicly traded multi-national company that employed me.  And that now, many years later, I write for the pure magic and fun of it  — sometimes a gardening article, or a prayer meditation for a class I lead   — but most of all, I told her about writing my life in this year-old blog.

People began filing into class, so we never finished our conversation.  But had there been time, I wish I had told my friend this:

“If you ask about writing, try to answer through writing.  Just write. Just write to an answer; don’t waste precious time (like I did) thinking about writing or wondering if you should.  Begin a blog.  Or record your life in a paper journal.  Or maybe both — because paper journals are less confining than words that draw public breath.”

This, for starters, is what I wish I had said.

And then for the main course, I would promise to send her a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s five rules on writing, because they inspire with their truth.  And then I would invite her to ponder Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  And perhaps I would share other  ‘how-to-write’ books, like Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life.”

Then, if willing to be bold (or foolish), this layperson might put tongue-in-cheek or foot-in-mouth and ask her pastor friend if there wasn’t some old fart in the Bible that hadn’t dared to ask the same question of God, in the opening chapters of Exodus — which, when I think on it, is rather ironic, given that our next move, upon asking this question, is often to turn around and run.

“Who am I…?” —  Moses dared to ask God at the burning bush.  You may recall where that question led Moses —  stuck in the desert with a huge mass of whining distant relatives for forty biblical years without ever stepping foot in the promised land.  And then like a Baptist preacher, I would say…, “Friend, I beg you — don’t miss out on the promised land.  Just write.“

And then for dessert, if she were still listening, I would offer my friend evidence of a great writer, — a really, really great writer  —  who at times, asked the same Moses identity question of herself.  In black and white, I hold her admission of doubt in my lap; it’s tucked in her memoir on grief, written soon after the death of her author-husband  John Gregory Dunne.  In her own words,

“I remember one last present from John.  It was my birthday, December 5, 2003.  Snow had begun falling in New York around ten that morning and by evening seven inches had accumulated, with another six due.  I remember snow avalanching off the slate roof at St. James’ church across the street.  A plan to meet Quintana and Gerry at a restaurant was canceled.  Before dinner John sat by the fire in the living room and read to me out loud.  The book from which he read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which he happened to have in the living room because he was rereading it to see how something worked technically.  … The sequence is complicated (this was in fact the sequence John had meant to reread to see how it worked technically), broken by other action and requiring the reader to pick up the undertext in what Leonard Douglas and Grace Strasser-Mendana say to each other.  “Goddamn,” John said to me when he closed the book.  “Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write.  That’s my birthday present to you.”

If Joan Didion experienced doubts about her call to write, then surely all writers do so at one time or another.   And like Joan, even when our writing is nothing like Joan’s, we answer the question the only way we can.  Just write.

But maybe I wouldn’t have said any of these things to my friend.  Who am I, after all?  I’ve no wise words like the MAGI nor can I issue the  commands of a KING.  I’m just a writer who is braver in writing then I am in person.

But there’s no harm in writing her to come check out WordPress.com, is there?   Nor, I think, is there a problem with inviting her to put on her magic thinking cap and just…

Morning Glory

25 Monday Jan 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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The navy sky will soon fade from the sun’s washing of light.

For now it’s dark in Mesta Park.   I sit in my favorite living room chair looking out my dining room window.  The house is quiet, my husband off to work at the smallish former servant’s quarters outback.  The dogs, replete with food, have settled in all around me to sleep.  The candle is lit, bouncing light off the walls, while a prayer-book and Bible wait in my lap.

The words will keep, while watching the blue colors change outside my window will not.  I’ve no popcorn to eat, but I hold a strong cup of coffee to help me wake up with the day.  The curtain of clouds is open today and the promise of color waits for its call.

This morning glow show is one I never grow tired of — navy turns to unwashed denim to washed denim and corals and oranges and pinks mix into the crowded blue — meanwhile the artificial light, that glows through the windows of other houses surrounding me, reduces from stark contrast until lost in the sea of sunshine.

Eventually, my eyes let go of the scene playing on the screen outside my dining room windows.  I turn my head to look out another window, but my eyes get caught by the light playing over my favorite Thomas Kinkade print, one appropriately called, Morning Glory Cottage.

I love everything about this charming little cottage — the blue roof, the fence out front, its name.  And though I cannot detect them with my eye, I know riotous heavenly blue morning glories grow somewhere on the face of that old cottage.  Yellow light glows behind the windows, and I think, how good my cobalt blue glass would look sitting on the window ledge.

Someday, I hope to live in a cozy cottage like this one, when I’m too old to climb the stairs of this lovely old two-story of mine.  Or maybe I’ll downsize to a one-story before then, when I’m ready for a smaller place.  Someday will come all too soon.

For now, morning has broken and its glory surrounds me.  I look out my sanctuary upon the sky in worship.  Only then can I break open the prayer-book to read.