10 Beautiful Things (2)

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Kim

(Read HERE about how these lists began.)

1. The garden swing with the roof that shelters from rain
2. Organic Chai Rooibos Tea from the Co-op
3. Lavender fabric softener
4. Almond milk lattes (I think this will make every list.)
5. The way the cats come and go
6. How the neighbour who hated our cats has softened and I no longer fear for their lives
7. Quiet kayak paddles out into the bay
8. Bike rides to see the sheep
9. Baby goats born last week at Andrea’s
10.That the ants seem to be tapering off

What is Here

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Kim

***

All I can do is name what is here:

The hydrangeas blooming like torches in the yard.

The way the clouds shift quickly over the sun.

Bleeding Hearts coming up randomly in my lawn.

The way I’ve let the grass grow too long.

The glimmering heads of seals out in the bay.

Sea lions barking somewhere beyond that.

The air full of the smell of lilacs and nettles and new Poplar leaves.

How the falling seed pods from the Maple tree sound like light rain.

Time. Hours in the day. This space inside me that has been so needed for so long.

We Have Ants

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Kim

Er, yeah. We have ants.

Which aren’t nearly as bad as mice, but still.

At first I was trying to be a compassionate and non-violent sort of person, and I scooped each ant up with a piece of paper and shooed it outside. But then I realized that would become a part-time job if I kept it up.

The ants seem to be increasing in number by the day. This morning, I saw a line of four ants, walking from my writing room into the kitchen, and for a brief moment, I thought of that song my brother Wes and I used to sing on long, boring car rides—The ants go marching four by four, hurrah, hurrah—before I crushed them as hard as I could under my shoe.

I was looking up natural remedies for getting rid of ants and came across THIS GUY who go a tattoo of ants crawling around his eye. I’m fairly sure he’s going to regret that.

Easter Sunday

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Kim

***

I wake later than normal, sun streaming in through the windows.

The house is quiet—the girls with C for the holidays. There’s a little lump of sadness inside my throat, but it disappears quickly.

I boil the kettle, wander into the yard, pick daffodils for the kitchen table. They’re blooming everywhere—not just in my yard, but in the ditches along the road too.

The whole sky is blue. Not one cloud.

I make tea, go out onto the deck and call the cat, sit on the garden swing, watch birds peck at the bird feeders. The cat comes, jumps up onto my lap.

I think about how to spend the day. I could put my seedlings in the ground—we’re likely past the last frost here. I could go for a long hike or read my new book in the field across the road.

I think about going to church. It’s probably all those years and years of going to church on Easter. It’s ingrained. My good friend Christine, whose family moved here last fall too, told me they’re going to go to the two o’clock mass at the catholic church.

That sounds nice. I’m thinking stained glass, church bells, organ music. I make breakfast, find myself humming an old hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, a song I first heard at my grandmother’s Baptist Church when I was a kid.

I write for a bit in the swing, consider wandering down to the beach to check on a sea lion whose bark sounds very close to shore. I move some of the seedlings around on the windowsills. It’s nearly two o’clock so I google the catholic church to get directions and discover that it’s a tiny shack of a building. No room for a pipe organ in there.

I look outside. The sun is streaming through the trees. The tide is low and the water is shining. Which begs the question: Why on earth would I go and sit in a shack with a bunch of strangers listening to someone talk about God when I could be out there?

It suddenly reminds me of the woman down on Shingle Spit Road who has a flower stand. The other day I drove by and noticed she was selling daffodils for $6 while all around the island, they’re blooming free and wild.

I decide not to go. Instead, I walk over to the piano, try to remember the chords to that old hymn I’ve been humming, sing it for a while. Such a good, old song. The words are like a small poem. Then I pack myself an avocado sandwich and a thermos of water, put my running shoes on, find my car keys and head to my favorite hiking trail. With the sunlight splitting through the fir trees above the beach and the way it shines on the surface of the tide pools, I could swear it looks exactly like stained glass.

The Sadness of Ornamental Cherry Blossoms

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Kim

In the evening, just as I’m about to go to bed, I decide to check my email. You should never do this. At least I shouldn’t. Because often, checking my email leads to going on Facebook to check messages that haven’t yet reached my inbox, and sometimes there is one or two, and I read those, and then something makes me click on the beautiful photograph of the girl on a horse washed in sunlight, just so I can check for one teeny second if they’re giving away free Photoshop actions, which they are not, but then I click the arrow and scroll through to the next photo—a girl with balloons in a field, and the clouds behind her look almost bruised, and just as I’m thinking that I should really get myself a better camera, the little chat light will beep, and I will sigh and remember that I’ve been meaning to turn the chat option off, because although I like the people who chat with me, if it’s before bed, I don’t like chatting, no matter who it is. But I’ll chat with them for a bit anyway, and then I’ll say I’m off to bed and they’ll say nighty-night and then I’ll look up at the clock on the stove and realize that a whole 40 minutes has just been gouged out of my life and I’m not feeling nearly as relaxed as I was before. So I’ll make tea and read for a while, and tell myself NOT to check email before bed.

This is what happened last night, except when I got to the part about facebook chat, I saw that it was an old, dear friend named E and all she said was Did you hear about Danielle Heigh?

No, I typed. Is she okay?

I braced myself for the answer, because right then I remembered that last summer, I’d heard that she – a sweet friend I’d spent a good part of my early teens with – had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

She passed away last week, E said. She left a husband and three kids. The whole thing is very very sad.

E and I chatted for a while about it, and then we said goodnight, and I went to bed, batting away sadness.

At 6 am, Ryn called me in a small, scared voice from her room at the end of the hall. I got up and stumbled through the darkness, clicked on the bathroom light-switch, poked my head in her doorway. Everything okay?

I had the scariest nightmare ever, she said. Come and lay with me.

I went and laid down next to her, wrapped my arms around her ribs.

What was the bad dream about? I mumbled into her shoulder.

I dreamed the government had hired bad people and they were killing all the mothers, she said.

I squeezed her tight, said Oh, that sounds horrible. It was just a bad dream. But really, I was thinking: Danielle Heigh. Her kids. Her husband.

I held Ryn until she fell back to sleep, and then I went back to bed.

I woke at 7 with a headache, popped some aspirin, got the girls off to the bus and went back to bed again.

It’s afternoon now, and I look out at the fingers of rock stretching into the bay. The screen door swings in the wind. The clouds look almost bruised. The sun keeps coming out, but it doesn’t stay. Even the cat won’t stay, keeps climbing off my lap. There are daffodils opening in the yard, and a few bright purple crocuses. Blossoms on the Ornamental Cherry tree. But all I can think about are those bruised clouds. It reminded me of a line in a poem by Matt Rader: But the children do not know . . . just how sad/ Beauty is on the last day of spring with instruments/ And young players making music between the rafters.

I’ve been reading a lot of Pema Chodron lately. She teaches something called Maitri, a prayer-like stance where you move toward the painful emotions instead of away from them. You let yourself feel them, and then you make a wish for peace and love for that person or situation. May they be well. May they be comforted.

I hate the way sorrow comes like this and interrupts everything. I had plans today—writing, reading, studying, a project finished up. Instead, half-way through the afternoon, the headache has subsided but I’m still wading through sadness. I know myself well enough now to know that it’s useless to fight it. Instead I’ll take a slow walk down to the beach. Drink too many cups of tea. Let myself feel the sorrow of this loss and walk around, wishing: May her family be well. May they be comforted. May no child ever lose their mother again.