When it snows, he stands atthe back door or wanders around the house to each window in turn and watches the weather like a lover. O farm boy, I waited years for you to look at me that way. Now we’re old enough to stop waiting for random looks or touches or words, so I find myself watching you watching the weather, and we wait together to discover whatever the sky might bring. ~Patricia Traxler “Weather Man”
My farm boy does still look at me that way, wondering if today will bring frost, a wind storm, maybe fog or mist, a scorcher, or a deluge.
I reassure him as best I can, because he knows me so well in our many years together:
today, like most other days, I predict I will be partly cloudy with a chance of showers, and as always, occasional sun breaks.
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One life, George learns, touches so many other lives. Far from a failure, his life was the glue that held together his family, his business, and his community. In the end, George embraces life, and the people of Bedford Falls gather around him in love, donating the money to restore the Building and Loan that had helped them to achieve their own simple dreams of freedom, independence, and dignity.
George Bailey neither does that which feels good nor asserts his own narrow vision of himself and his role in society. He accepts the responsibility that is placed upon his shoulders and allows himself to be shaped and defined by the needs of others around him. Rather than change the world to suit his own self-centered desires, he changes himself to adapt to the true calling that is upon him.
George Bailey does more than delay gratification. He embraces his true and essential identity and purpose and is strengthened to perform the work for which he was created. ~Louis Markos “Christmas With Capra: Classic Films for Our Troubled Times”
“ZuZu’s Petals” ~Lessons from “It’s a Wonderful Life”~
Our children had to be convinced Watching black and white holiday movies Was worthwhile~ This old tale and its characters Caught them up right away From steadfast George Bailey to evil Mr. Potter- They resonate in our hearts.
What surprised me most Was our sons’ response to Donna Reed’s Mary: ~how can we find one like her? (and they both did!) Her loyalty and love unequaled, Never wavering…
I want to be like her for you. When things go sour I won’t forget what brought us together In the first place. I’m warmth in the middle-of-the-night storm When you need shelter. I’m ZuZu’s petals in your pocket When you are trying to find your way back home.
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Every now and then, I forget to turn off the lights in the barn. I usually notice just before I go to bed, when the farm’s boundaries seem to have drawn in close. That light makes the barn seem farther away than it is — a distance I’m going to have to travel before I sleep. The weather makes no difference. Neither does the time of year.
Usually, after turning out that forgotten barn light, I sit on the edge of the tractor bucket for a few minutes and let my eyes adjust to the night outside. City people always notice the darkness here, but it’s never very dark if you wait till your eyes owl out a little….I’m always glad to have to walk down to the barn in the night, and I always forget that it makes me glad. I heave on my coat, stomp into my barn boots and trudge down toward the barn light, muttering at myself. But then I sit in the dark, and I remember this gladness, and I walk back up to the gleaming house, listening for the horses. ~Verlyn Klinkenborg from A Light in the Barn
I sometimes forget to turn the lights off in the barn. If I try to finish chores in too big a rush before it gets dark before 5 PM, I might leave the barn too distracted, assuming the illumination inside is from the setting sun, not light bulbs.
Later, after dinner, I look out my kitchen window to see the barn is still lit up. The horses won’t rest easy (and I won’t either) until I shut off the lights above them. So I throw on my barn jacket, put on my boots and head down to the barn again, all a-mutter.
Then I remember I am glad for this moment. I like owls flying almost noiselessly overhead, the dogs sticking close at my side, horses chewing hay and blowing sweet breath, barn cats circling for a late night treat.
Then my favorite thing is walking back up from the barn at night and looking at the lights in our house, knowing my life and love happens there, though each of our children and their families now live elsewhere in gleaming houses of their own. Dan and I have adjusted to a “just two again” life together, hoping we can stay on the farm as many years as God grants us.
It is our home, it is work, it is light, it is love. If all it takes is a walk from a darkened barn to remind me of this, I’ll leave the lights on in the barn at night more often.
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I’ve fallen many times: the usual stumbles over secret schoolgirl crushes, head-over-heels for teen heartthrobs. I loved them all.
I’ve fallen so many times: tripped down the aisle over husband, daughter, son. Madly and deeply, I love them all.
I’ve fallen again and again: new friends, a mentor, a muse, numerous books, a few authors, four dear pups and a stranger, or two. I loved them all.
I’ve fallen farther, fallen faster, now captivated, I tumble— enthralled with my grandchildren. I love them each, ever and all. ~Jane Attanucci, “Falling” from First Mud
Six grandchildren in less than seven years brings a bounty of baby hugs and snuggles.
With each one, I fall farther and faster than ever before.
In a lifetime of falling head over heels for those most precious to me, a loving husband, two sons and a daughter, dear friends and mentors, numerous pups and ponies…
still none could prepare me for this ~
the blessing of loving our children’s children, their smiles and giggles and arms wrapped around us
these have become most cherished each, ever and all.
Though I know well enough To hunt the Lady’s Slipper now Is playing blindman’s-buff, For it was June She put it on And grey with mist the spider’s lace Swings in the autumn wind, Yet through this hill-wood, high and low, I peer in every place; Seeking for what I cannot find I do as I have often done And shall do while I stay beneath the sun. ~Andrew Young “Lady’s Slipper Orchid”
How strange to find you where I did along a path beside a road, your legs in graceful green dancing to music made by wind and woods.
Like ladies from a bygone age, you left your slippers there to air in dappled shade, while you, barefoot, relaxed your stays, let loose your hair.
The treasures of this world might be as simple as an orchid’s bloom; how sad that so much time is spent in filling coffers for the tomb.
If only life could be so fresh and free as you in serenade, we might learn we value most those things found lost in woodland shade. ~Mike Orlock “Lady Slipper Serenade (in 4/4 time)”
My grandmother’s house where my father was born had been torn down. She sold her property on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, Washington to a lumber company – this was the house where all four of her babies were born, where she and my grandfather loved and fought and separated and finally loved again, and where we spent chaotic and memorable Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. After Grandpa died, Grandma took on boarders, trying to afford to remain there on the homesteaded wooded acreage on Similk Bay, fronted by meadows where her Scottish Highland cattle grazed. Her own health was suffering and she reached a point when it was no longer possible to make it work. A deal was struck with the lumber company and she moved to a small apartment for the few years left to her, remaining bruised by leaving her farm.
My father realized what her selling to a lumber company meant and it was a crushing thought. The old growth woods would soon be stumps on the rocky hill above the bay, opening a view to Mt. Baker to the east, to the San Juan Islands to the north, and presenting an opportunity for development into a subdivision. He woke my brother and me early one Saturday in May and told us we were driving the 120 miles to Anacortes. He was on a mission.
As a boy growing up on that land, he had wandered the woods, explored the hill, and helped his dad farm the rocky soil. There was only one thing he felt he needed from that farm and he had decided to take us with him, to trespass where he had been born and raised to bring home a most prized treasure–his beloved lady slippers (Calypso bulbosa) from the woods.
These dainty flowers enjoy a spring display known for its brevity–a week or two at the most–and they tend to bloom in small little clusters in the leafy duff mulch of the deep woods, preferring only a little indirect sunlight part of the day. They are not easy to find unless you know where to look.
My father remembered exactly where to look.
We hauled buckets up the hill along with spades, looking as if we were about to dig for clams at the ocean. Dad led us up a trail into the thickening foliage, until we had to bushwhack our way into the taller trees where the ground was less brush and more hospitable ground cover. He would stop occasionally to get his bearings as things were overgrown. We reached a small clearing and he knew we were near. He went straight to a copse of fir trees standing guard over a garden of lady slippers.
There were almost thirty of them blooming, scattered about in an area the size of my small bedroom. Each orchid-like pink and lavender blossom had a straight backed stem that held it with sturdy confidence. To me, they looked like they could be little shoes for fairies who may have hung them up while they danced about barefoot. To my father, they represented the last redeeming vestiges of his often traumatic childhood, and were about to be trammeled by bulldozers. We set to work gently digging them out of their soft bedding, carefully keeping their bulb-like corms from losing a protective covering of soil and leafy mulch. Carrying them in the buckets back to the car, we felt some vindication that even if the trees were to be lost to the saws, these precious flowers would survive.
When we got home, Dad set to work creating a spot where he felt they could thrive in our own woods. He found a place with the ideal amount of shade and light, with the protection of towering trees and the right depth of undisturbed leaf mulch. We carefully placed the lady slippers in their new home, scattered in a pattern similar to how we found them. Then Dad built a four foot split rail fence in an octagon around them, as a protection from our cattle and a horse who wandered the woods, and as a way to demarcate that something special was contained inside.
The next spring, only six lady slippers bloomed from the original thirty. Dad was disappointed but hoped another year might bring a resurgence as the flowers established themselves in their new home. The following year there were only three. A decade later, my father left our farm and family, not looking back.
Sometime after the divorce, when my mother had to sell the farm, I visited our lady slipper sanctuary in the woods for the last time in the middle of May, seeking what I hoped might still be there, but I knew was no longer. The split rail fence still stood, guarding nothing but old memories. No lady slippers bloomed. There was not a trace they had ever been there. They had given up and disappeared.
The new owners of the farm surely puzzled over the significance of the small fenced-in area in the middle of our woods. They probably thought it surrounded a graveyard of some sort.
And they would be right – it did.
An embroidery I made for my father after he replanted the lady slippers — on the back I wrote “The miracle of creation recurs each spring in the delicate beauty of the lady slipper – may we ourselves be recreated as well…”
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…to create a happier future for ourselves and others… three simple messages: You are not better or more special than others; you are not alive simply to work; happiness comes from loving and being loved. ~Arthur Brooks “Don’t Avoid Romance”
Most of what happens happens beyond words… You are a language I have learned by heart.
Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us. ~Dana Gioia from “Marriage of Many Years” from 99 Poems
To be amazed by love is not to be blinded but to let the flare of wonder fill you like air filling a sail.
Isn’t this the voice of God at work?
Even his silence breathes life into you, a golden sigh as fresh as Eden. To love someone is not to lose anything, but to gain it in giving it all away. ~Luci Shaw from “Amazed by Love” in Water Lines
We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know… ~Wendell Berry “The Country of Marriage”
Love – of another, and another for us – betters us; it is truly the only way we, who were created by Love, are special. Nothing else in this life really matters, does it?
And it is beyond words to describe, so why try?
Yet, I love Words as well, so I had to try. As we speak the same language, I hope you understand.
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My mother, Elna Schmitz Polis, was born 103 years ago today in the lonely isolation of a Palouse wheat and lentil farm in eastern Washington. She drew her first breath in a two story white house located down a long poplar-lined lane and nestled in a draw between the undulating hills.
She attended a one room school house until 8th grade, located a mile away in the rural countryside, then moved in with her grandmother “in town” in Rosalia to attend high school, seeing her parents only a couple times a month.
It was a childhood which accustomed her to solitude and creative play inside her mind and heart – her only sibling, an older brother, was busy helping their father on the farm. All her life and especially in her later years, she would prefer the quiet of her own thoughts over the bustle of a room full of activities and conversation.
Her childhood was filled with exploration of the rolling hills, the barns and buildings where her father built and repaired farm equipment, and the chilly cellar where the fresh eggs were stored after she reached under cranky hens to gather them. She sat in the cool breeze of the picketed yard, watching the huge windmill turn and creak next to the house. She helped her weary mother feed farm crews who came for harvest time and then settled in the screened porch listening to the adults talk about lentil prices and bushel production. She woke to the mourning dove call in the mornings and heard the coyote yips and howls at night.
She nearly died at the age of 13 from a ruptured appendix, before antibiotics were an option. That near-miss seemed to haunt her life-long, filling her with worry that it was a mistake that she survived that episode at all. Yet she thrived despite the anxiety, and ended up, much to her surprise, living a long life full of family and faith, letting go at age 88 after fracturing a femur, breaking her will to continue to live.
As a young woman, she was ready to leave the wheat farm behind for college, devoting herself to the skills of speech, and the creativity of acting and directing in drama, later teaching rural high school students, including a future Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. She loved words and the power and beauty they wielded.
Marrying my father was a brave and impulsive act, traveling by train to the east coast only a week before he shipped out for almost 3 years to the South Pacific to fight as a Marine in WWII. She must have wondered about the man who returned from war changed and undoubtedly scarred in ways she could not see or touch. They worked it out mostly in silence, as rocky as it must have been at times. Her episode of Graves’ disease, before I was born, must have been agonizing, as her storm of thyroid overactivity resulted in months of sleepless full time panic. Only thyroid removal saved her, but even radical surgeries take their toll. Their marriage never fully recovered.
In their reconciliation after a painful divorce years later, I finally could see the devotion and mutual respect between life companions who had found shared purpose and love.
As a wife and mother, she rediscovered her calling as a steward of the land and a tireless steward of her family, gardening and harvesting fruits, vegetables and us children. When I think of my mother, I most often think of her tending us children in the middle of the night whenever we were ill; her over-vigilance was undoubtedly due to her worry we might die in childhood as she almost did.
She never did stop worrying until the last few months. As she became more dependent on others in her physical decline, she gave up the control she thought she had to maintain through her “worry energy” and became much more accepting about the control the Lord maintains over all we are and will become.
I know from where my shyness comes, my preference for birdsongs rather than radio music, my love of naps, and my tendency to be serious and straight-laced with a twinkle in my eye. This is my German Palouse side–immersing in the quietness of solitude, thrilling to the sight of the spring wheat flowing like a green ocean wave in the breeze and appreciating the warmth of rich soil held in my hands. From that heritage came my mother and it is the legacy she left with me. I am forever grateful for her unconditional love and her willingness to share the sunshine and warmth of her nest whenever we felt the need to fly back home and shelter, overprotected but safe nonetheless, under her wings.
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If this comes creased and creased again and soiled as if I’d opened it a thousand times to see if what I’d written here was right, it’s all because I looked too long for you to put in your pocket. Midnight says the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped by nervous fingers. What I wanted this to say was that I want to be so close that when you find it, it is warm from me. ~Ted Kooser “Pocket Poem”
One who has loved is never quite alone, though all the hills declare our solitude. Having known you, I am no more afraid, the essential singleness of blood and bone when dispossessed, comes never in return; one who has loved is never quite alone. ~Jane Tyson Clement “One Who Has Loved” from The Heart’s Necessities
I never have left a poem in your pocket, hoping it would stay warm from me.
Instead, to stave off loneliness every morning I match poems and pictures together here on this page, knowing you’ll see it later. It’s not much but it’s the best I can do.
Hoping they stay warm to the touch, these daily stories about how wonderful life is spill from my fingertips as dawn pours over the eastern hills
Here’s to another good morning with you, my love ~ I tuck this poem into your empty pocket, to keep it close and forever warm today, tomorrow and always.
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In the ordinary weather of summer with storms rumbling from west to east like so many freight trains hauling their cargo of heat and rain, the dogs sprawl on the back steps, panting, insects assemble at every window, and we quarrel again, bombarding each other with small grievances, our tempers flashing on and off in bursts of heat lightning. In the cooler air of morning, we drink our coffee amicably enough and walk down to the sea which seems to tremble with meaning and into which we plunge again and again. The days continue hot. At dusk the shadows are as blue as the lips of the children stained with berries or with the chill of too much swimming. So we move another summer closer to our last summer together— a time as real and implacable as the sea out of which we come walking on wobbly legs as if for the first time, drying ourselves with rough towels, shaking the water out of our blinded eyes. ~Linda Pastan, “The Ordinary Weather of Summer” from Carnival Evening: New and Select Poems 1968-1998
I grew up near Puget Sound and only a couple hours from the Washington Pacific Ocean coastline. Our annual trips to the ocean were early morning clamming harvests, usually returning home by noon to process the bounty we had dug up at the shore. Vacations at the beach were a few days spent in a rented cabin at Birch Bay on Puget Sound (now Salish Sea) or on Camano Island. These were short stays, usually no more than two or three nights but it gave our family a chance to live together in a different way.
It wasn’t easy for a family of five to sleep in a tiny two bedroom cabin with very little privacy – we siblings easily got on each other’s nerves as we teased each other or played hyper-competitive card or board games or futilely tried to distance ourselves from one another. We didn’t understand that these few summers in the 60’s were the last opportunities we would spend time together simply to “play”. Storms were on the horizon, our tempers flared when the weather was hot and humid. We had no awareness time was slipping through our fingers.
How this family time at the beach affected my parents is something I can only guess. Their marriage was on shaky ground ten years prior to their separation and divorce, even though we children were oblivious to it at the time. Whether being forced out of their routine was helpful or made their tensions worse, I don’t know. I do know quarreling children, small living quarters and sweaty temperatures can be a challenging combination.
Something about our current heat wave this week places me back to those hot nights in the beach cabins, unable to fall asleep due to a combination of itchy sweat and the world pressing down on me. The crankiness of those family vacations tends to infect my words and attitudes all these decades later.
Although the literal and figurative storms of those years have long since blown over, I still remember the musty smell of those beach cabins that had seen so many different families come and go over the decades, some thriving while others were wobbly and struggling to stay glued together. To the cabins that housed them, they looked all alike. But they weren’t. Only time would tell how well they weathered the storm.
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Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart,
suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose looming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before. ~Wendell Berry “The Wild Rose”
Due to past harsh winter weather, we have lost a couple of our hybrid rose bushes which were grafted to rootstock when we purchased them. The durable rootstock survives when the bush does not, sending up shoots and branches to thrive and bloom, opening a wild rose blossom with a fresh loveliness all its own, even if it is not the exact color, fragrance or type rose we intended originally. It is still a blessing.
Although Wendell Berry wrote “A Wild Rose” about his wife – about a moment of illumination within a long covenantal marriage – I have experienced “choosing” again “what I chose before” in a renewal of relationship and commitment with God.
I too often settle so thoroughly into routine, oblivious to the privilege of another day of living this life. I am unaware of the miracle of my own beating heart. When the scales do lift from my eyes, I see beauty emerge from the shadows, and I am renewed.
In my own marriage, our relationship has survived over four decades through good and difficult times. Yet we are grafted to a rootstock God who never gives up.
And so we bloom from and for Him – a wild and unforgettable blessing.
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