The World Begins and Stops at the Edge of My Bed

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We are enjoying a glorious Indian summer, with warm afternoons, blue skies, and turning leaves.

But mornings there is a slight chill in the air – just enough to warrant a blanket for sleeping. I wake early – a side benefit of the switch in daylight savings. The cat hears me get up and scratches at the door.

Husband stirs and I slip back under the covers to nuzzle. In the room above our heads, steps of son the younger. They move down the stairs, and into our bed. He too slips under the covers. I pull the blanket up over his shoulder and rest my hand on it.

Husband strokes my ear with his nose. The cat joins us on the bed, settling in the space between my son’s back and my belly. He lies across my arm, a warm weight.

The breathing of son, husband, and cat slows. Husband’s fingers twitch within my palm, then lie heavy.

In the sound of their respiration, I feel the universe expand, then contract.

Post-Hurricane World

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Storm winds visited us recently. At four a.m. I woke to darkness within and an odd pressure without. Moving to the front of the house, I watch and listen as trees bend in half, windows rattle and walls shake. My bare feet step in the cold water of a small puddle. Wind has pushed rain under the door. I push back with a large towel. Husband and the children, in the newer part of the house, slumber on. I too climb under the duvet and huddle, waiting for the storm to pass.

The winds eventually die away; the rain remains a steady drizzle. Tree limbs litter our yard, lay across power lines in the alley. Rain has flooded our street, and my car. We don slickers and walk the neighborhood. Many streets are blocked. Here an ancient tree has shattered. There a tall cedar, a warrior in its prime, has fallen. I bend over to touch it, pay my respects. When I leave, I take a branch fragment with me, cones still green.

Everywhere we look, we see downed trees. On the corner four streets away, we see a roof line cloven in two, people packing their car to seek shelter elsewhere. Could have been worse, we all say to each other.

In the rain, we clear our yard, and yards adjacent. We stack limbs and branches, rake up loose pieces, sweep the road of leaves and pine needles. Then we lay down our rakes and walk some more.

It will take time to survey the full extent of the damage. For now, we walk and as we walk, sometimes our hands bump.

Clearing out the Underbrush

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This weekend husband and I worked in the yard. Wild trees had grown up in the lobelia. Morning glory had killed a flowering bush. The gardenias had died a mysterious death after a neighbor did work on the fence. Plants grown familiar through repeated weedings choked the rose bushes and the black-eyed susans.

I sat on the front sidewalk and pulled out the runners of St. Augustine that blanketed what used to be mulched flower bed. I reach my fingers in between the stems of the four o-clocks to single out the stalks of wild grass. Husband wields a shovel, digs deep to uproot what does not belong.

We work in separate parts of the yard, a fence, and more, between us. He flops on the grass, his face red under his hat. I pause, scissors in one hand, a rose cane in the other. A reluctant gardener, I still cannot bear to see him wilt. “Do you need me to get you water?”

“No, I have some,” he says. And if later anger makes my hands shake, when I go outside again there is a sense of openness, of space cleared of what kept new things from growing.

The possibility of a new landscape.

Water and Sky

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Labor Day has come and gone and with its passing, so too the heat of the summer has eased. Mornings now are cooler – the heat holding off until 10 a.m. or later.

The children and I went to Brazos Bend State Park. The heat started early that day and we took refuge in the Nature Center, where we petted a week-old baby alligator. We walked around a lagoon with its coterie of ducks and the occasional egret. We hid from the afternoon heat in a nearby gas station, where we ate french fries and ice cream.

By the late afternoon, the heat was more forgiving and the breeze had picked up. We walked to the far side of the lake and sat on a bluff, on the narrow end of the water, where the reflection of trees lined both sides of the lake and the far end. As we sat, the noise of the cicadas rose and reached a crescendo. A bass jumped once, twice, and kept on going. Son the younger counted seven circles of ripples. A magical number. The number of intuition meets the symbol of fearlessness and freedom of movement.

Later that night we peered through telescopes at Saturn. A night of the new moon, the sky was deep and endless.

The Wind Lifts Both Prayers and Tones

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Yesterday I passed by one of my favorite houses. It used to be a grocery store, back in the 1930’s. Today an artist has made it his own. The double doors are turquoise. A child’s red tricycle is sculpture.

I noticed that the tree had been trimmed, allowing me to walk down the sidewalk without ducking. As I passed the house, I stopped. Strung between two branches was a light line. Hanging from the line were five unusual prayer flags. Roughly four inches square of heavyweight raw silk, the flags bore haikus or other messages. “Be the peace you wish to see,” said the central flag. Each flag was partnered with a small Tibetan-style bell, the size of my thumbnail.

Just inches above, a third branch thrust a pair of pinecones and a clutch of long needles in my direction.

Rinsed

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This morning I woke to the sound of rain. All day long the soft patter and heavy, gray clouds cocooned the house. The children slept late.

Early morning I drop off the car and walk back home. On the way, I find a stand of phlox, white petals set with a ring of purple. I stoop to inhale their fragrance. The odor reminds me of my grandmother, of the stem or two of phlox, sometimes white, sometimes lavender, that graced her summer breakfast table.

Storm warnings keep me home all day. I float through this day that has no schedule. A gift of time.

Late afternoon, I step outside, into a street cooled by the downpour. The air smells of mint, freshly washed.

The Herald

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When I pulled up in front of my house last week, a heron waited in my driveway. I had never seen one on my street before, let alone one on the ground.

I drove past my house cautiously. The heron did not move. I parked on the other side of my house and walked back to my gate. As I approached, the heron moved away slowly, stilts picking delicately through the grass. I opened the gate and then closed it behind me. The heron merely walked to the far side of my yard. Only when I climbed the steps to my porch, did it take flight.

Google tells me that the heron was considered a messenger from Athena. For Christians the heron was a symbol of contemplation. For Native Americans the heron totem reflects the need for self-determination, the following of one’s own, unique path. The Chinese consider the heron and the crow to be symbols of the yin and yang, the unity of opposites.

When I come out of the house later that afternoon, a crow stands watch over the yard across the street.

Quartet

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This morning I went walking early – at that hour when, although light, the crickets still sing and birds fly low.

At a corner, I cross the street to stand where the spray of an in-ground sprinkler system will reach me. Four small black cylinders, inches off the earth, direct streams of water in long arcs that sweep the lawn in slow motion.

Like soldiers, hollow black square posts surround the house. An unfinished fence.

I wait near the street, where large, damp rocks separate grass from gravel. The water takes its time in arriving.

The far nozzle splatters first on a tree, then on one of the fence posts. In reply, the nozzle nearest me does likewise. The other two nozzles have only posts with which to make their music. The cadence is such that some nozzles are still replying while others have begun their next phrase.

The sound of the water hitting the posts is soft at first, increases in volume, then fades away. It is the sound of brushing metal, as if keys were being made in the next room.

The water reaches me finally. A few drops, then a rush, then a parting pat-pat.

As I walk away, the sound follows.

Sound and Spirit

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Earlier this week, not far from my house, I discovered what I call a trumpet tree. Its height slightly exceeded my own and the flowers, pale pink trumpets that hung bell -down, were each the size of my hand. They did not have much of an odor but the fragility of their color – the hint of pink that heralds the dawn – and the sheer number of trumpets covering the tree, held me for several moments.

Farther down the block, I started to walk past a telephone pole but movement at the top drew my gaze upward. A long and leafless double strand of vine climbed to the top of the pole where it exploded, a wild welter of green leaf and orange trumpet flower, like the ivy crowns of the Maenads. But although a breeze lifted leaves and then allowed them gently to settle, this was not the movement that had caught my eye. I waited. One, then two hummingbirds made an appearance. Their wings ablur, their beaks needle-sharp.

Continuing down the street I spied a bird cage hidden near the trunk of a large bush. Its wire frame was rusted from exposure to the elements; the inhabitants, two small ceramic birds, refugees no doubt from some yard sale, seemed no worse the wear from sun and rain. In the same garden, a tree limb had been painted the blue of the robes of the Virgin Mary and planted in the side yard. Each of the many branches held a cobalt blue bottle.

The bottle tree is a familiar Southern feature. It is said that the bottle tree originated in Africa, where it was believed that evil spirits would be first attracted by the light glinting off glass, then trapped in the bottles.

In my yard too, there is a bottle tree. In addition to bottles that once held water, also cobalt blue, there are bottles the color of the shallows of the Mediterranean Sea, bottles that once held gin, Sapphire Bombay. The fence behind my bottle tree is painted blue, ocher, and brown, its inspiration taken from the painted houses of the Basotho in South Africa.

Basotho women in South Africa and Lesotho paint their prayers. Brilliant splashes of color and striking geometric designs decorate the outside walls of their homes. When the rain washes away the color, it is said, it means their prayers have been successful.

So it is that what at first appears to be mere whimsy may hold a deeper meaning, the line between the sacred and the profane determined by the maker’s intent.

A Flash of Scarlet

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This morning I was scarcely out of the house before a blur of red caught my eye. Turning, I saw a cardinal perched on the limb overhanging my neighbor’s sidewalk. I walked cautiously to the driveway. Blue jays are common on my street; cardinals are rare.

As I tried to get a better view of him, the bird tipped his head from side to side, trying perhaps to get a better view of me. It did not take him long to reach a decision.

He jumped from twig to branch before taking flight and disappearing from view. As I continued down the street on my walk, I thought about the bird. About its movements, quick and bright. About the color of its wings and breast, that of a gerber daisy rather than a rose. About how that flash of carmine had snapped me into the present, and about how the day, already underway to judge by the heat instead of the hour, had begun well.

It is not often that we begin the day truly awake.