Tag Archives: news

Chestnut season, Funerals, Kindness, weddings

Chestnuts

I read this morning it is chestnut season in Tuscany. I concentrated on the beauty of that sentence; there has been nothing but horror to visualize recently. I closed my eyes, saw fat brown nuts, the fingertips of broad leaves curling in the sun, woven baskets, my daughter’s favorite dessert marrons glacé — a feast of candied chestnuts, vanilla, whipped cream — piled on a china plate. A short respite.

To date in 2023: five memorials, a wedding and my niece expecting. I told the bride a few weeks ago she had no idea how bright and hopeful her wedding felt to me. I have already purchased and patterned a multitude of baby gifts months before the shower and due date. How do we find light when the world seems so dark, the bombs so thick, the death so unrelenting, the anger so hot?

I find I am very conscious of being alive.

I have mourned the lives of friends over and over this year, the next chapter feeling close and urgent and more worthy than before. How to spend it?

I would like more time with my family that makes us laugh. Books. Martinis. Published pieces. Walks in new green spaces. To see you all in person, face-to-face, and talk. To share meals and stories and ideas. A chance to practice kindness every day.

I waited an inordinately long time to curbside check a bag at the airport today, then let a woman go ahead of me as she arrived late and in a lather about her flight to LA. I had the time. I had the breath in my body. Letting her line hop just didn’t seem that big of a deal.

She explained she had been in the hospital for a week with her mother and it was hard to leave her. Her two bags turned out to be over-sized, each weighing more than fifty pounds. The baggage handler waived the fee.

Kindness feels good.

Pass it on.

Rock in a garden along the road.
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Breath

The Breath between the Breath.

Today at noon I was stalled at my computer, the book proposal and the submissions going nowhere. Frankly, I felt overwhelmed by the news — the virus, inconceivable despair in Afghanistan, the state of emergency in hospitals AGAIN –and everything felt heartbreaking and confidence breaking. Writing prose seemed a waste of time, or rather time spent on the wrong things. By the middle of the morning, hump day was proving to be a very steep climb. I got up and went to the carwash.

While the car dripped I impulsively looked online for a time slot to access the Bloedel Reserve. I was on the trail ten minutes later, swinging my arms, skirting meandering visitors, craning my neck up at the trees, easing down past the rhododendron groves. Not until the moss woods and past the water lilies did I feel the air filling my chest. Back at the car forty-five minutes later, I peeled off socks, unlaced boots and headed back to my desk; drove bare foot back to Wren Cottage with the windows wide open.

One of my covid take-a-ways: there is really so. much. more. time. in the day than I allowed pre-quarantine; that there is breath between the breath if I relax; that the minutia, the small encounters, count more than I ever realized.

A little story about time and shifting perspective. I am privileged to have the freedom and the means to do this in a beautiful woodland, a roof over my head. How can I change helplessness?

I sat back down recalibrated — donated to an organization working amidst the crisis in Afghanistan, ordered more masks. Filed the essay away for a day. I brought up the news I dislike to listen to both sides of the story. This is what I could do.

Headed to anger and panic this morning, losing ground on making a difference, I took that space between and changed it up. I took that extra breath. I refocused.

And lo and behold, right under my feet, this was happening.

With you, friends.

Autumn Cyclamen, The Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA

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