Nettled

Today is the day I am picking the stinging nettles and eating them. 

I am writing this now, so you can hold me to it. Although, already, I can feel myself slipping. The truth is I am afraid of the stinging nettles. I can’t remember what I was thinking planting them. Something I read in one of my herb books about how they’re chock full of nutrients? And after a cold dreary winter they’re often the first shoot of green in the garden? And something something about medicinal tea and helping with arthritis? Or the kidneys? I can’t remember. 

Three years ago, four, I bought an adorable nettles seedling at the farmers market and planted it in a pot in the back of the herb garden, but I haven’t touched it since. Except one time, I did brush against it, briefly, on my way toward something else, and it was like I was shot with a stun gun. Not that I have ever been shot with a stun gun, but I can imagine. 

I steered clear after that, but then, a couple of years ago, I actually ate a nettle salad at a farm my husband and I visited with our son and daughter-in-law way up in up-up-up state New York. The nettle salad was tasty, and I gushed about it to the farmer-host. But also, I had to ask the guy, How did you pick these without feeling like you were being shot with a stun gun?

I can’t remember what he said. Okay, I looked it up. You’re supposed to wear heavy gloves. You dunk the nettles in boiling water for one to two minutes. You immediately plunge them in ice cold water. Supposedly, this removes the sting. 

(nettles)

I am really going to do this now. 

But first, I am going to fortify myself with a second cup of coffee. While I’m drinking it, I want to tell you a story about how the other day a stranger came to the door wanting to give me a magazine. The magazine had something to do with aviation. I have seen this magazine before, stuffed inside my Little Free Library. Every few months, a new issue. I’d let it sit out there and after a while, I’d toss it in the recycle bin. How many pilots live in this neighborhood, is what I was thinking. 

Anyway, as it turns out, it isn’t a magazine for airline pilots. It’s a magazine for pilots of model airplanes. What the guy wanted to tell me was that he subscribed to the magazine and he loved it and he wanted to pass his joy on to other potential model aviation enthusiasts, so he’d been putting it in my Little Free Library and whenever he checked, the old issues had been snapped up. 

He was so excited, he wrote to the magazine, and they featured my little free library. Here, he said, and he gave me a copy to thank me for being a part of our neighborhood’s fledgling model aviation community. 

Did you tell him? My husband said, after I relayed the conversation. Meaning, did I tell the guy that there likely wasn’t another model aviation enthusiast in the neighborhood. It was just me, recycling the magazines without a glance. 

Oh my God no, I said, and a wave of guilt due to my callous disregard for other people’s passions crashed over me. 

I did it. 

I donned a long sleeve shirt and went outside with the gloves, and I glovingly grabbed the nettles. 

I dunked them in the boiling water for two minutes. I plunged them in ice cold water. My husband tossed them into our seafood gumbo dinner bowl, and we ate them.  

They were tasty, and now that I am chock full of nutrients, here’s something else I promise to do: The next time my neighbor leaves a copy of Model Aviation in my Little Free Library, I’ll leave it there. 

 

This Spring

A few nights ago, the dog was sick and I let her outside. She didn’t come back in, so I went out to look for her. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was in my bathrobe and roaming around the backyard until I found her. She was lying on her side in the grass. It was raining. She hates the rain. This is it, I thought. But it wasn’t it. 

I took her to the vet the next day, and after paying approximately ten million dollars, she was better. I sat with her on the couch and she did this thing where she lowers her head and pushes it against me and I kiss her ears and tell her I love her. Then she curled up next to me, and I read the book I was reading. 

The book is about two sisters who stop speaking to each other at the funeral of a third sister. The disagreement has something to do with a cake. For the rest of the book the sisters continue to not speak to each other. Each chapter is a story about a different family member, the sisters’ children and grandchildren. Story after story, and you know a little bit about everyone in the family, and you forget what happened at the beginning. Why did the sisters stop speaking to each other?  

I was savoring this book. The writing was lovely and funny and smart. I loved all of the people, even as annoying and ridiculous as they sometimes were. When I got to the end, I went back to the beginning and read the first chapter again—the funeral, the cake. 

I remembered why the sisters stopped speaking to each other, and I understood. Some things are unforgiveable, and even if you could forgive them, how do you forget? 

I took the dog for a slow walk where I let her sniff to her heart’s content while I searched for signs of trouble. Her back legs wobbling? Her poops a little smushier than normal? But there was nothing. It was like that terrible night in the rain had never happened. 

Except it did happen. 

When I was sitting with her in the vet’s office, she paced and cried and panted. We don’t always know with an old dog, the vet said. There are things we can try. Tests. Procedures. It’s up to you, she added. 

I knew what she was saying. How far was I willing to go to deny reality. 

All the way, I would’ve told you once, but I am no longer that person. Sometimes bad things happen that aren’t fixable. Sick pets. Families that splinter apart. Still, I paid the approximately ten million dollars and we did the tests and one small procedure. 

Back home and the dog is happy and the trees in our front yard have turned pink, turned white, turned green. The lettuce I planted weeks ago didn’t come up and didn’t come up and didn’t come up, but now suddenly, it's here. I don't know why I doubted it.  

In spring, spring comes. It’s one of the few things I know for sure. But today, that feels like a miracle. 

Seen at the Protests

All the usual signs. No Kings. Love Your Neighbor. Down with Fascism. A person dressed as a poop emoji. A baby with a sign: Adults, Get Your Act Together. A man holding a rainbow flag and carrying a poster: If they come for me in the night, they will come for you in the morning. People banging drums. People laughing. I’d never been at a rally this big in my city. 

Twenty thousand people the local news said this morning. And that’s not counting the rallies in all of the suburbs. In my little neighborhood two thousand people showed up. At noon they marched out of their houses and lined the streets. My husband and I joined them last minute.  

So different from the long-planned trip to the Women's March, 2017, my carefully painted stop sign. The word NO in white letters. Back then I was thinking NO to everything, and now here we are, and I still want to yell No. 

I threw that sign out years ago. But I saved the pink pussy hat. It was knitted by a friend. She pinned a card to one of the pink ears. The card says, “A women’s issue I care about is sexual assault.” Whenever, I think of the hat, the card, the friend, I cry. 

Why bother, someone wrote online. The gist was protests don’t lead to meaningful change, and look at us, years later, all of it for nothing. 

Okay. You be the one to tell that to my friend. 

In between protests I cleared more things out of my house. Lately, I am on a mission to shed stuff. A few weeks ago it was old correspondence. This week it’s bins of every item my kids have ever brought into our home. The bins are like compost piles. Preschool scribbles on the bottom, all the way up to college yearbooks. Why did I save all of it? What was I saving it for? Every night I sat with it strewn around me. Making decisions about what to let go, what to keep. 

Concert programs and school plays. First grade spelling tests and SAT scores. A story about a sad cow. Thirty-nine drawings of our once beloved black and white cat Zelda. A story about a sixteen-hour family car trip which apparently had been sidetracked by my husband who kept wanting to take pictures of covered bridges along the route. (I saved that. It was funny.) 

But I pitched the piano recital programs, the group soccer pics, thirty-eight of the Zelda drawings. It was exhilarating. It was dizzying. I had a stomachache. I was laughing. It was the accumulation of stuff, of years, of childhoods gone forever. It was the scent of baby blankets. The smudges of carrot stains on the baby bibs. A worksheet of the letter S, the messy squiggles of a three-year-old, the preschool teacher's note urging us to have our child practice more at home.  

I kept the things that meant the most. Sent the rest to the recycling bin. Then it was time for the second protest, and I was ready to burst out of the house. Yell NO at random strangers. Tell them it’s okay to let go of some things, but some things are worth saving. 

Tell them we were children, we had children, the children grew up. We went to rallies and we wore pink hats. We made art, we made signs, we practiced our S’s and took pictures of covered bridges. We sang, we wrote, we joined our neighbors, we marched.

We stood in a crowd. We were there. We are here. 

After the Windstorm

The neighborhood boys were riding bikes down the street, and I was in the yard picking up sticks. The other day we had a windstorm. Seventy mile an hour wind gusts. Now it was warm and everywhere, sticks. Also, a house shingle. A small piece of a roof. Someone's garbage lid. The boys on bikes drove by again.

A car beeped, a near miss, but the boys laughed. No one was wearing a helmet. I could worry about this all day. Instead, I bought flowers at the garden center and lettuce seeds and two purple cabbages. Maybe it's too early for planting. Maybe it’s too late. It’s supposed to be 80 degrees today. 

Tomorrow, a wild plunge into the thirties. Weather is all anyone can talk about. Meanwhile there’s a war on and crazy people in charge. I gathered up every stick in the yard. At the funeral I went to last week, the loved ones said, She wanted more time. She was angry about it. But in the end, she made peace. 

I was sitting in the church pew with my husband and our son, ruminating about the plant I’d brought with me. Long story short, it came, in a roundabout way, from the person who’d died. When I got it, it had two small purple leaves. But then it grew into a full-blown thing with multiple leaves. Once, when I was watering it, a stem broke off.

I stuck it in a glass of water, and next thing I knew, it was a whole other plant growing. I tucked it into a pretty pot where it outgrew the original. Now it was sitting in our car in the church parking lot. The idea was I could give it to the family of the person they lost. As if a plant could make up for anything. 

And why wouldn't she be angry? If you don't watch yourself, you could be angry every second of your life. I swallowed back tears at the funeral. I watched the baby in one of the pews in front of me, her parents exchanging her back and forth, trying to keep her entertained. She was gurgling a smile and looking right at me. 

No, she was looking at me, my husband said. Our son rolled his eyes. After the funeral, I was starting to waffle about the plant. Maybe the loved ones wouldn’t want it. Maybe they wouldn’t know how to care for it, how much water it needs and how it likes to sit in a sunny window. 

Back home, after I picked up the sticks, I planted the flowers and the lettuce seeds and the cabbages, the boys on their bikes speeding up and down the street, not a care in the damn world. 

I'm glad I let the plant go. 

I set it in the sunniest window where the family was gathering and left a note with instructions. The truth is it’s not the kind of plant that’s hard to take care of. 

We are. 

Correspondents

I read a book called The Correspondent, which is about an old crochety lady who writes a lot of letters. The book is told through the letters, and over the course of the story, you get a feel for this person and her life, what she chooses to reveal and what she doesn’t, and somehow at the end of the book you’re crying. Meanwhile, I was shedding my old correspondence. 

I realized while I was doing this that I am an old crochety lady who wrote a lot of letters. I don’t have any of these letters though. What I have are all the letters that people wrote to me. They were overwhelming me in a huge bin, one half of dozens of different conversations taking place, some of them, thirty or forty years ago. These letters moved with me from college, to my first apartment, to one house after another, and now, I find myself with the time and in the right mental space to sort through them. 

The first thing that struck me about these letters is how private and personal they are. Not about me at all, but a fascinating glimpse into the letter writer, a snapshot of what was going on in their lives, almost like little time capsules. 

For example, a high school friend who wrote about his freshmen year in college, describing his roommate and what his classes were like and how he much he loved the new musical group Wham. My high school English teacher who mentioned that he wasn’t sure he wanted to teach anymore. A former student who was struggling to fit in at a new school. 

I immediately wanted to reach out to these people and ask them if they’d like me to return their letters. Which has led to some interesting new correspondence. One of my former students, when I reached out over Facebook messenger, thought I was a scammer. How do I know this is you, she asked, when I mentioned I’d found a stash of her letters. 

I sent her a picture of the stash. Identity confirmed, we caught up. She had no memory of writing to me and asked if I had written to her. I said, I have no idea, but I must have. I realized as we were messaging each other that she wasn’t the teen girl I was picturing, but someone who is almost fifty years old. 

Some of these people I can’t reach out to. They’ve died. Or we’ve completely lost touch, and I wouldn’t begin to know how to track them down. Or, maybe I don’t want to track them down. An ex-boyfriend? Meh. Never mind. Some letters, I confess, I tore up because they were too painful to read, and I know I would never want to revisit them again. Another confession: some letters were kind of boring, and I don’t think the correspondent would care that I tossed them. 

One of my old friends said he wasn’t sure he’d want to see his old letters. He said, Do I really want to remember my eighteen-year-old self? But then he added that he had saved all of my letters. He said, Would you like me to send them to you? 

Sure! I told him. We were having this conversation over email. I wrote, Let’s set up a time to chat! I would love to catch up!

He responded with a long, lovely email, then ended it by admitting that he didn’t really like talking on the phone. This is a person I have known for almost forty years, and I had never known this about him. 

It struck me that we had begun a new correspondence. I wrote him back. 

Springing Forward

Spring forward and half the day is over, and meanwhile, I am still slumming it in my pajamas. The dog hasn’t gone out for her morning pee yet, and I haven’t had my second cup of coffee, and I just saw my husband put something in the microwave that wasn’t food. It was a notebook.

What are you doing? I said. 

Erasing my notes, he said. 

What?

My notes, he said. I erased them. Now I can reuse the notebook. 

I had been slipping into an anxiety spiral moments before. It was the war, the old dog, (who, by the way, now that she’s being injected by magic medicine is acting like she’s a puppy, jumping on the furniture and flying down the stairs and tugging me around the block. Which is good. Sort of. I guess? Except, she’s NOT a puppy, and isn’t this going to hurt her in the long run?) did I mention our country is at war? Except it doesn’t feel like we’re at war, although I’m sure it does for the people we’re killing and the families of the servicepeople who have been killed. And I have a weird growth on my scalp that I had to have scraped off. And an old friend died and I didn’t know she was dying. I thought she was sick. I sent her soup. I texted her pictures from a fun trip we went on a million years ago, and she wrote: Oh yeah! What a fun memory! I’ll focus on that for a while to chase away the gloomies. And I thought, at the time, what a funny way to put it, “the gloomies,” and it was so like this lovely person to respond like that, and it made me smile, and then a few days later, she died, and those were the last words I had of hers, and I cried as the dog tugged me around the block, and I was feeling sorry for myself, thinking about how everyone is getting old except my friend. She’s not getting old, and why did this happen to her? But then it’s coming for all of us, and I know that. I know that. 

I could keep going with this spiral. But I stopped because now I was caught up wondering about my husband’s microwaved notebook.  

I have so many questions. You can erase notes from a notebook by microwaving it? You’re doing this so you can reuse the notebook instead of buying another notebook? How many times have you microwaved a notebook? What were the notes? Does microwaving notes work on any kind of notebook or is this a special notebook?

I could go on. I did go on. My husband patiently answered each of my questions, all while flipping through the microwaved, now-empty notebook pages. 

Stay with me for a minute, but I just finished a chapter in the book I’m reading about anxiety where it says that one proven way to counteract anxiety is curiosity. Curiosity is the opposite of anxiety, and here’s why: Anxiety is focused on the future and the past, what you’re afraid might happen, or a rumination over what crappy things have happened. But curiosity is only focused on now. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Any small moment of wondering, What’s that? will do it, interrupt your anxiety and take you down a different path. 

Blah-biddy-blah blah, I was thinking when I read that, until I saw my husband take a notebook out of the microwave. 

For the record, it’s not a special kind of notebook, but it’s a special kind of pen, and he’s been microwaving this notebook for years. I don’t know how I am just now learning this about him. 

I’m still in my robe. 

The dog is still sleeping. I finished my second cup of coffee. I wrote something that chased away the gloomies. I miss my friend. 

One day on the fun trip with my friend

Story Time

The dog had an injection, and like a miracle, she’s her old herself again. Wagging her tail, sniffing happily on walks, bounding around the room with her toys. We had a warm spring-like day, and she sat out on the porch, perched on her pillow like the good old days and barked at the mailman. What’s in this injection? I don’t know. And no idea how long it will last, but meanwhile, I am grateful for it. 

The other day I led the story time at work. The children’s librarian was on vacation, and she asked me to step in. I know what you are imagining. Kids gathered around and here’s me sitting in a chair, placidly reading a picture book to them. But no. This story time is a full-blown production. Music. A slide show. Props. Toys. Bubbles shooting out of the bubble machine. 

It all culminates in a dance party. I was sweating before it even started. It took me a full forty-five minutes to set it all up. I used to do presentations at schools and writing conferences. I spoke in auditoriums to 500 people. But this story time for a small group of two and three-year-olds was on a whole other level. When it was over (in thirty minutes) my watch thought I’d done an aerobic workout. It clocked me as walking 5000 steps. 

I was still a little out of breath when I was cleaning and putting away all the toys. I couldn’t stop singing one of the songs, Stomp Stomp Elephants Stomp. I kept singing it even when my shift was over, and later, when I was home and sacked out on the couch. The dog scampered around me, begging for another walk. 

I took her. It was another weirdly warm day, all the previous snow melted, the birds back, and I swear I saw a flower. The dog trotted ahead of me like a puppy. I was singing another head-banger of song from the story time under my breath, I Know a Chicken. Somehow, I missed this song from when my own kids were little. 

Back then a friend told me “the days are long and the years are short,” and I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. It was so true. The days were never ending. The years flashed past. The kids grew up. We had a puppy. We had an old dog. The world went crazy. The world was always crazy. How do other people do this, make sense of it? 

At the story time there was a little girl who kept toddling up to me while I was rhyming and clapping and chanting and dancing. I was waving a stuffed dog puppet around, and I lowered it, so she could pet it. Instead, she surprised me by pulling it out of my hands and taking off with it, laughing. 

I laughed too. There is no making sense. Another day begins. Another day ends. 

What can we do, but be here, grateful?