Category Archives: The Great Outdoors

After the Storm

17 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, The Great Outdoors

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Long after Monday’s flood waters have receded, I’m still droopy.

Maybe it’s because my home-sweet-home is saturated with musty smells coming from a drying basement.  Maybe it’s because I’ve worked with a few contractors who don’t seem to realize that my service calls are NOT everyday usual.  Or maybe my droopiness is just part of who I am, the sort of person that goes a little crazy when encountering waste and ineffectiveness.

After we unexpectedly hosted 4 to 5 inches of sewer water Monday morning, we engaged a remediation company to come dry and sterilize our basement.  Had my husband and I not been in attendance, the company technician would have left before the job was done.   As it was, the young man was forced to snake his hose down the basement stairwell three times — once of his own accord, another when my husband told him to try again, and a third when I sent him back down to the bowels of the house.  Our ‘worker’ reminded me of a young child doing something he didn’t wish to do; and though I can’t say that I blame him, we needed someone who took pride in his work,  someone who cared about the finished result rather than one simply going through the motions of fulfilling a checklist.

Ironically, our heating and air contractor told my husband that he was not too impressed with our remediation technician, that he would have expected a more thorough result.  As it was, Mr. Heat and Air opened up the blower, removed the saturated filter, slapped in a new one and turned on the system.  This time it was me telling my husband that I expected more — I imagined Mr. Heat and Air would have contacted the manufacturer to assess impact of sewage waters on the system — or advise us on unit sterilization.  But instead,  he left us with a new filter and a horrible musty smell coming out of our duct work.

I confess to expecting too much from others; I expect my contractors to care for my home as I do.  And while I’m in the confessional, I admit that I expect too much from myself as well.

I wish I could be more like my rock ‘n roll husband, who is steady as a rock in a crisis and rolls with the punches of everyday life.  Or I wish I could be more like my garden that bounced back quick from Monday’s destructive rainstorm.  But instead I am who I am — more than a little wilted after the storm.

RAIN

14 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, The Great Outdoors

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Billed as the ultimate Beatles tribute band, RAIN is in the midst of a road tour that will end on Broadway in mid-October; last week’s stop was Oklahoma City and my husband and I were lucky enough to catch last night’s final OKC performance.

I hate to gush too much, but RAIN was one of those experiences I won’t soon forget.  When the end arrived, I wasn’t ready for it.  I wanted these “Fab Four” impersonators to keep on playing all those songs I grew up with, with music that effortlessly transported me back to the sixties.

Sitting in that audience — and sometimes standing on my feet dancing to these old familiar tunes — I marveled at my luck at being alive when the Beatles were actually writing and singing their songs themselves.  Did anyone realize how gifted this band from Liverpool really was in real-time?  Or were most like me, realizing the miracle of their music long after the Beatles were no longer together?

For me, the Beatles were simply part of everyday life.  I followed their lives in my Tiger Beat and 16 magazines; I collected their music, and like most teens, I faithfully watched the Beatles cartoon show every Saturday morning.

I went to bed thinking of RAIN and woke this morning to the real deal.  Rain.  Driving.  Torrential.  Flash-flooding.  The street outside our Mesta Park home was a river.

Unfortunately, my son parked his girlfriend Amy’s car in the street.  By the time we realized the street was flooded, the car already was. And though he tried to get it started, it would not.

Sometimes we can’t take in what’s happening in real-time.  We need perspective.  Time.  Distance.  And sometimes, like this morning outside my window, we still can’t take in the reality of this thing called rain.

The Nature of Listening

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Prayer, The Great Outdoors, Writing

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Thunder awakes the night sky.   Heavy raindrops come.  Then the wind.  Last of all, lightening.

I should be asleep right now but I’m glad I’m not.  I’m glad I’m up to listen to this final rainstorm of May.  Yet how long will I listen?  All too soon, the sounds will fade into the background.   I will become immersed in my writing.  In spite of good intentions, I won’t listen.

I confess to being a lazy listener.  It comes from thinking I know what will be said.   My husband was guilty of this crime yesterday morning – I told him I had fed the poodles before coming back to bed at five a.m. – he thought I told him to feed the poodles.  So making like hobbits, the poodles enjoyed second breakfast.

In my online writing class last month, I learned that listening is the most important thing I can do to write well.  In fact, my teacher stressed that listening is more important than writing everyday. Taking her words to heart, I’m trying to listen a little closer to my world these days.

Yesterday afternoon, while walking from our car to the Paseo Art Festival, I enjoyed a frolic of a conversation between a black woman in a wheelchair and her chatty male neighbor.  I needed pen and paper to get the proper nuances of speech down.  So foreign were their expressions and words, it was like listening to a different language.  Just like when I travel abroad, I heard music rather than lyrics.   But even without the actual words, the memory of  their cadence is richer than a hot fudge sundae.

Walking behind the fast-moving power scooter, the woman appeared to have lost her legs.  Maybe that’s what I expected to see. When I caught up with her at the corner visiting a few more neighbors, I saw her legs were intact.  Sort of like my ears, her legs weren’t working as they ought, doing their intended job, though they were there all the same.

It’s still raining, but just barely.  In spite of good intentions, I’ve missed the heart of this quick, not quite summer storm.  But I enjoyed what I heard of it.  I need to tune into life more often.

I need to tune into the source of life more often too.  Of late, listening to God is the hardest work of all.  I don’t want to be still.  I don’t want to think.  I just want to do.  Keep my hands busy so my mind doesn’t have time to think.  And what am I avoiding?  Well, the hard work of grieving of course.

Grieving is the worst sort of listening.  One wakes up to realize that we don’t have forever in this world, that we are strangers speaking a strange tongue in a world that is not ultimately our own.  We wake to find we’ve no more opportunities to hear that much loved voice and the stories it told.  We wake to see we’ve taken for granted our loved one’s life and their presence in our own.

We wake to see that we let too many raindrops slip through our fingers without ever attempting to hold them in our hands.  Our hands are dry rather than wet with failed attempts.  My hands should be wet with failures.  My  hands should be wet with life.

I should be wet behind the ears.  Being wet behind the ears — that is, to take in everything as a young child —  is not necessarily a bad thing, though we speak of it as if it were.  Being wet behind the ears goes hand in wet hand with the nature of listening.