Lucky Charm

My daughter is visiting for the weekend, and we browse the shops in my neighborhood. The place where she likes to get custard. The thrift store with the colorful glassware. The feminist gift shop that sells build-your-own charm necklaces. 

Let’s make a necklace, my daughter says.  

No, I think. It’s a reflex from an old self. The one who worries about money, the one who pooh-poohs silly trinkets. All week I’ve been on edge, crossing my fingers for friends in North Carolina who are cleaning up after a hurricane. Another hurricane that just barreled past an aunt who lives in Florida. And how did I end up so lucky, a beautiful fall day in Ohio, a daughter who wants to pal around with me and make a silly necklace?  

Yes, I say, and we spend a ridiculous amount of time pawing through the various charms. Mostly this is me. I forgot to bring my reading glasses, and I can’t see what I’m pawing through. A dog’s face or is that a mouse? Some kind of plant? A feather? 

My daughter laughs. It’s weed, Mom.  

Oh. Ha. Okay. When it’s time to pay, the clerk says I’ve won a chance to roll the dice to win up to fifty percent off my purchase. She hands me a beachball-sized die. I roll it on the floor and it lands on a picture of a cat. The clerk cheers. A cat is the fifty percent off symbol. I am over-the-top excited about my win, posing for pictures, holding the dice, grinning next to my daughter, the two of us festooned in our matching half-price necklaces.

Later, we gorge ourselves on custard and binge-watch a trainwreck of a reality TV show. The stars on the show keep talking about how they feel, but for some reason they pronounce it “fill.” The word echoes in my head, the heartbreak of it, the absurdity. How they fill. How I do. 

Why is it one person's turn for tragedy, another's turn for joy? And what a thin line separates the two. A senseless shift in the weather. A roll of a die. 

Transplanted

I have one goal today. Move the peony plant that’s slowly being strangled by the raspberry bush in the corner of the backyard. Peonies, if you don't know them, are big, brightly-colored flowers that bloom in spring. This one needs more room, more light. I’d meant to move it last fall and never got around to it, and here we are again. But this time I'm making the effort. 

The shovel is out, the new sunny spot scoped out, but I keep getting distracted. Weeds that need to be pulled. A mass of prickly raspberry branches to pick through. I’m listening to a podcast called Family Secrets. Each week the interviewer introduces the program by saying it's about "the lies we tell each other; the lies we tell ourselves." And then she asks, "Do you have a family secret you'd like to share?" 

I laugh as I lope around with my shovel. Oh lady, you wouldn’t believe how many I'd like to share. Here is half of one. I am 12 years old, 13, 14, and I am practically living at my best friend's house. The word practically might be the wrong word. But what is the word for spend every weekend with her family. Follow them along to church. Go on vacation with them. Have a place in their bathroom to put my toothbrush. 

After school I take the bus home with my friend and spend the afternoons with her, praying praying praying as dinnertime looms closer that her mom will invite me to eat with them, a cruel voice in my head whispering, They don’t really want you here. You’re overstaying your welcome. But each night here comes the lovely mother, poking her head into my friend's bedroom, saying, Should I set a place for you tonight, Jody? 

And no hint at all that I am a burden. In my memory she is always wearing an apron. When she hugs me, I can almost pretend that I am one of her daughters. Do the people who save our lives know that they have saved us? 

I wish I had told this person. I meant to but never got around to it and now here we are, too late. But not too late to move this damn peony. My gardening book warns me not to bury it too deep, be careful with the roots. 

I don't. I do. 

A Toast to an Apocalyptic World

There was a story in the newspaper this morning that made me cry. A group of friends in the 1970’s gathering together to eat a fancy breakfast in front of the reflecting pool in Washington DC to bring some joy to a friend who’d just been diagnosed with cancer. A photographer snapped a picture and it appeared in the newspaper, but no one ever knew the story behind it. The photographer’s daughter found the picture after he died, tracked the original friends down, and they recreated the photo, but now, all of them older and with missing people, empty chairs. 

I don’t know why the story made me cry. The beauty in the original photo, the young people dressed up and clinking glasses across the table. The waiters with their serving trays. The pool shimmering in the background. All of the lovely ways people come through for each other. 

Sometimes we forget this. I forget this. 

The news is terrible and it’s always terrible. I’m driving home from work under a gray, menacing sky, the hurricane that touched down nearly one thousand miles away tearing the branches off the trees in my neighborhood. While I sleep, people I know have been flooded out of their homes. Another storm is gathering strength and heading our way. 

But just this week a neighbor dropped off a bag of freshly picked pears. Another neighbor gave us a jar of honey. The woman we always buy homemade rosemary bread from at the farmers market threw in a couple of bonus rolls, “just because.” Two friends invited me out for dinner. Another friend who visited us recently sent us a gift card for the gourmet ice cream shop up the street, and honestly, it’s like she sent us a million dollars. This ice cream! I could eat a scoop every day for the rest of my life. 

Last Sunday I wrote about the unrelenting heat, the drought, a dead deer rotting on the sidewalk. Today, I sit at my desk looking out at the rain, a squirrel hopping across the backyard, the fall flowers along the fence coming into bloom. I don’t know what I am trying to say. 

I want to set a fancy table and gather all of my loved ones close. I want to freeze the moment as we clink our glasses, cherish the world we are given.  

Neighborhood Drama

It’s fall, but the summer keeps going. 

Ninety-five-degree day after 95-degree day, the garden barely holding on, browning, burning. I’m worried about the toad in the crunchy oregano patch, the birds listlessly flitting around the powerlines. Does everyone have enough water? Last week something died in our neighbors’ backyard. The smell was so bad it was hard to be outside without pulling your shirt up over your nose. 

Later in the week, there was a deer carcass rotting on the side of the road. I think it was the mother of fawn triplets. We’d often see the family roaming around the neighborhood, munching on what’s left of everyone’s hostas. Now I can add Orphaned Fawn Triplets to my list of things to feel vaguely uneasy about. 

On the neighborhood social media page everyone takes a side. What to do about the deer, the plants, the weather, the city, the country, the world. Meanwhile, there’s a mystery unfolding outside the apartment complex up the street. (This is me, spinning out stories on my walks with the dog, but hear me out.)   

Scene: A suburban lawn. A strip of sunflowers eight or nine feet high overlooking the sidewalk. A metal bowl filled with water, set out for dogs. 

A middle-aged woman saunters by with a dog and thinks, How nice.  

Next day: The water bowl's missing. In its place is a sign in angry marker: “F OFF TO WHOEVER STOLE THE WATER BOWL”

Well, that escalated quickly, thinks the middle-aged woman. She ponders buying a new bowl, leaving it in front of the sign, a reminder that not everyone’s a thief and our dogs appreciate the gift of water on another sweltering day. But she forgets about it. There’s dead deer and orphaned fawn triplets to worry about. 

Flash forward several days. Now there’s a large cement block with a water bowl screwed into it. A new sign: GOOD LUCK STEALING THIS, ASSHOLE!

The End.

But I have so many questions. Who lives in the apartment building? Who planted the sunflowers? Who stole the water bowl? DID someone steal the water bowl? Is the person who planted the sunflowers the same person who has such strong feelings about missing water bowls? 

The dog drinks the water, and we continue around the block. The deer carcass is gone, finally picked up by the city. And in our front yard, the fawn triplets. They munch my dying plants, seemingly unfazed, silent witnesses to our strange burning world.  

 

So Many Stars

Every morning my job is to make the coffee. Here’s how to make the coffee: push the ON button. The trick is it takes an hour for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew. (This is an enormous coffeemaker. It makes 60 cups of coffee. So I have to get down there early.) 

Down there is the dining hall. Where I am is a kids’ camp somewhere in Maine. My son and daughter-in-law are hosting a big party over Labor Day weekend. They’ve invited all of their family and friends and organized what basically amounts to a Camp for Adults. We’re assigned cabins and bunks. There’s a daily schedule with activities. Hikes. Swimming. Meals in the dining hall. A sign up sheet for volunteer help. 

My big contribution: Push the coffee button. I’m supposed to do it by 5:30 am. Day one, I’m forty-five minutes late. A miscommunication with alarms. When I realize it, I’m tearing out of my sleeping bag and half running down the dirt road toward the dining hall. No big deal, Mom, my son tells me later. Turns out my son-in-law had beat me to it on the button-pushing, and anyway, the rest of the cabins didn’t wake up and get moving until after seven. Whew. 

Day two, I’m a pro. A quick walk under the trees in the growing light, past the lake, the docks jutting out onto the water for the kids. I am having flashbacks to Girl Scout summer camp. I only went twice. One week when I was eleven, a week when I was twelve. But the two weeks take up an outsized space in my memory. For example, I still remember the lyrics to the songs we sang around the campfire. The names of the girls in my cabin and the camp counselors. The recipe for a dessert we were taught to make called Peach Yum Yums. 

The funny thing is I hated camping. An accumulation of crappy and occasionally traumatic experiences on so many ill-fated family camping trips. But Girl Scout camp, I loved. It suddenly occurs to me that it wasn’t camping that bothered me. Night at the Adult Camp, we have a bonfire and toast marshmallows for s’mores. The sun has just gone down and it’s hard to believe how many stars there really are in the sky. All this time and every night. Family and friends around me, I have never felt so comfortable in my life. 

Last morning off to push the coffee button, I walk slowly down the road, past the lake. I am not afraid of the dark anymore, and I am making progress on my fear of the woods. If everyone wasn’t still sleeping, I would belt out the happy song that is playing in my head. 

 

Trail Thoughts

Hiking, and I can’t take my eyes off the ground. This is supposed to be a birding walk, but I am having a hard time listening for birds. I am watching my feet. 

The tree roots, the loose stones, a mucky area on the path. The other day I was on a different hike and the trail turned straight up. You had to climb over rocks, crawling in places, to reach the top. My husband and I were laughing. This was listed in the guidebook as "moderate" in its degree of difficulty. What’s the hard trail? we wondered.

Listen, the birder guide says. Do you hear the loon? She describes it as a scream. You might think you’re caught in a slasher movie, but no, it’s a loon. Someone in our group points out a bird, far away across the lake. I can’t see it. What I see is on the ground, mushrooms. Perfectly mushroom-shaped and bright orange. Now that I’ve found one, I'm finding them all over the place. The entire woods is suddenly filled with orange mushrooms.

The other trail, the one that went straight up, reached a peak. When we finally made it to the top, the view was mountains, lakes, trees. Someone had erected a cross on the ledge. A stone marker said that in 1864 a twelve-year-old girl fell to her death when the wind blew her hat off and she leapt to snatch it back. I was sad thinking about this girl. A hat. Who cares? But I have done dumber things in my life and I have definitely taken stupider risks.  

Back on the birding trail, we are talking about the mushrooms, how most of their growth is underground. This is like my ferns. I tell the birding group the story about how I tried to move all of my ferns from an open area in my yard, where they were continually burning up under the sun, over to a shadier place. It was a lot of work and it ended up being for nothing because all of the ferns I moved died, and later, new ones sprouted in the original sunny patch and predictably got scorched.   

There is a lesson in this story. Dig deeper. 

In my old life I trampled the mushrooms. I wouldn’t even have seen them. In this one, I pause to take a picture. Beyond the trees someone screams. It’s the loon. But what I hear is a girl reaching for a wind tossed hat. This time she catches it. 

Gratitude

Up on the summit it was cool and breezy. From there you could see the little town where we were staying on this vacation, the harbor, the island that we walked out to during low tide. Now, the path was gone, underwater, and a sailboat glided by over the same place where we'd picked stones. I was looking for heart shaped stones and I found them everywhere. 

Who lives in the big houses overlooking the harbor? How do you get to be one of those people? This was the conversation we were having as we were looking for stones. We continued the conversation as we drove up to the summit. 

The point you kept coming back to was why can’t WE be one of those people? Lucky, you meant. On the summit we walked along the ledge. A stranger offered to take our picture. The light is so nice behind you both, he said. I looked at the picture on my phone later. He was right.  

The next day we rode e-bikes along trails through the woods. We coasted past a pond splotched with lily pads. Around a bend, an old stone bridge. More ponds. More stone bridges. Had we ever visited a place so quiet, so still? We ate lunch in a picnic area and watched the other tourists coming in. The young families. The older couples like us. And some much older. See, that can be us, you said. And I could picture it, the two of us roaming around in our retirement through National Parks.  

Biking back, we got lost, looping around the wrong way and having to loop back. The road signs made no sense. And then your tire went flat. We had to abandon the bikes and take a bus back to the visitor center, but we felt lucky. There was a bus. There was a visitor center. 

This is another conversation we had: how can we be grateful for what we have? Well, we’re on vacation, was number one on the list. We were walking along a shoreline and watching our shadows flicker in the water. I used to feel unlucky. And then I grew up and felt like the luckiest person in the world, but there would be a kernel of fear lurking, a What if it all went away and I was back where I started. Wait, you said, look. 

We stopped by the water’s edge and took a picture.