All posts filed under: Life

Always so surprising.

The geese were flying without moving: a portent or just the end of a long week?

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I watched a lopsided arrow of nine geese hover above a leafless oak. The massive oak was far larger, more truly there than the tiny clapboard church it grew near. I could see the willows on the far side of the intersection, their fronds fluttered nearly horizontal in dense gusts of wind. In the Mini’s speakers, Rihanna and Eminem sang about being friends with the monster under the bed. An old man wandered in the graveyard across from the church. The light turned green and the Mini and I accelerated away. That was Friday. I thought about the geese, the trees, the old man while the WideEyedHousehold cleared and mulched leaves on Saturday. They all wandered around in my head while we did the Fall housecleaning on Sunday. Here it is Monday, and I’m busy at the desk, those geese still hovering in that mental space just above my eyes. What did I miss about that moment? What was I supposed to see that I did not? I want to go back to campus and …

The snow shovel crept to the front of the garage.

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Five months ago the bright yellow snow shovel lurked in the back of the garage, giggling and biding its time. It was creepy and irritating. Today the show shovel made its move to the front of the garage. It rests on the snow thrower. The WideEyedSpouse and I excavated the snow thrower from under a heap of empty plant pots and landscaping tools in the back corner. It now lives in a prime position in the front so that when, not if, the snows come I can just crack open the carriage door and drag that wretched, growling, exhaust belching machine out into the winter calm. I like to stand for a moment in the quiet hiss of a million flakes landing and wallow in the low skies and monochromatic peace of the snows before I crank up the 2-stoke. After that it’s all shock and awe and far flung snow masses and the crunchy rip of dog toys grinding through the blades and fwoop, out the chute into the neighbor’s yard. There’s no serenity …

The world’s slowest rotating restaurant.

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I slurped my left-over broccoli soup dinner, “Huh?” I replied to the WideEyedSpouse. “It’s like we’re on the world’s slowest rotating restaurant,” the Spouse repeated. I gazed at him, thinking maybe those Left Hand Milk Stout Nitros were hitting him a little hard. They could rotate a room I guess. The Spouse had been thinking about the fact that we live on this spinning ball in the middle of an awesome hugeness and that gravity is the only reason we aren’t flung off. After dinner, he stood in the driveway while the dogs had an evening yard romp and stared at the stars. “If you look long enough, you can see that they are moving and that we are moving.” I don’t know what happened to the Spouse that he had a moment of awareness of the vastiness. Maybe it was triggered by our camping trip to the wilds a week or so ago. The night sky was huge, the Milky Way looked like mist flowing off the mountains around us. A couple of satellites …

18 years together | 4,100 miles apart

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“It’s disgustingly hot and humid,” the WideEyedSpouse tells me. I can hear the barest hint of dogs panting in the background of the call. “Huh,” I tuck my cold feet under me and look out the wide window into a chill, gloomy, rainy fall afternoon. “I’m putting the a/c unit back in the window,” he says and I shiver. Yesterday was our 18th wedding anniversary and we were almost as far away from each other as we can be while remaining in the U.S. We weren’t the farthest apart we’ve ever been on an anniversary. That was in 1998 when I was living in a Eureka BombShelter tent on the north shore of Attu Island and he was in Madison, Wisconsin. The WideEyedSpouse celebrated our anniversary by walking the dogs in the park. As their gift to him, Hamish and Miss Tibbit produced a record setting 11 dookies in one day between the two of them. “Congratulations Boss!” they might have been thinking, “Many happy years to come!” I celebrated by huddling at my makeshift …

Wisdom from the Past

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The notepad lurked deep in a c. 1980 box of desk cleanings. The box itself was nearly flattened under the weight of two chairs, several broken boxes of broken toys, boat cabin cushions, a walker, an empty roll-away bed frame and some lumber. I’d like to believe that the notepad’s message so profoundly impacted the owner of the desk who packed up it, that they valued the notepad even though it was torn and ringed from the residue of multiple sweatingly cold drinks. I’m afraid, though, that the simple truth is that the notepad was packed into the box willy-nilly with the rest of the desk top junk – one hand holding the sweating drink high, the other sweeping across the desk top and over the box. It doesn’t matter. The message is what is important, and we should be thankful this wisdom was preserved.

Yoha, Friends!

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“YOHA “ I read the bold word on the flag. It flapped cheerfully from the porch of one of the grand old homes on the morning dog walk route. “Yoha?” I said to the dogs. I wondered what it meant. The WideEyedHousehold is in a pretty multicultural neighborhood – even a little global what with the proximity of all the colleges and the medical corridor. It could be in any language; it could be English but mean something I am not familiar with. “Yoha.” I tried it out again. I said it all cheery and imagined walking past the house flying the YOHA flag and saying it to the people who lived there. “Yoha, neighbors!” They’d probably wave back at me, happy that someone was greeting them in their language. The dogs and I turned the corner and I took one last look back at the YOHA flag. The yellow and white sailing boat on the flag above the lettering undulated in the breeze. “Must have something to do with the ocean or water,” I …

I am a heat-born invalid.

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The dogs and I visit the sere back lawn a few times a day. When we can’t stand it anymore, we slump back inside through the furnace that is the kitchen, trudge up the stairs and head back into our master bedroom sequester.  The air conditioner is in there. For a week I’ve been running my professional life from my bed surrounded by notes, books, and computers – I am a heat-born invalid. Across the hall my office reaches 86, , 88, 90 degrees as the afternoons progress and the high humidity threatens to reanimate the long dead, road-kill flattened, dried frog hanging on my office wall. A zombie frog. That might be interesting. I would be too hot to run away. Old houses were designed to draw breezes, to vent, to cool themselves in summer. So I’ve been told, so I’ve read. It isn’t true. I think the old timey folks created this mythical cannon to convince themselves that they weren’t miserably sweaty and uncomfortable in their endless layers of wool, cotton, silk. It …

Bees in my garden.

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I knelt along the grassy edge of my garden at about noon on Sunday. The newly blooming lilies scented the air in front of me. Coreopsis Moon Glow danced in a little breeze off to my left. Bees, large and small, hairy bodied and crunchy looking, twirled with the blooms. The lavender, heated in the sun, wafted calm scents toward me from the right. Bees were in the lavender, too. The mystery lilies, planted sight unseen last fall as unassuming bulbs, are waiting to burst open. Daisy, who lives next door except for when she is sleeping on the sunny rocks in my garden, stopped by to learn why I was kneeling in the yard. When winter comes, and I find endlessly creative language to complain about slush, ice, and the grim, damp cold of Buffalo, remind me of the bees in the summer garden.

50 Years of Funk

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It is a little complicated and I heard different versions of the tale floating around over the weekend. One way or another, my WideEyedParents fled south to North Carolina and got married in 1963. They married with little consideration for the impact of a July wedding date on their forthcoming 50th wedding anniversary party. It was warm. Fifty one parents, kids, aunts, uncles, cousins, first cousins once removed, twice removed in all directions, second cousins, fictive kin cousins, grandparents, in-laws, and yet to be born WideEyedFamilyMembers sweltered in the humid July afternoon of rural-ish Virginia over the weekend. We feasted on Jinx’s masterful barbeque from the Pit Stop in Charlottesville. (Just in case Jinx is reading this, we promise, no one put the cole slaw on the pulled pork Memphis style. They were kept strictly separate.) We drank a rootbeer keg dry and made poor showing on the wine and beer. Evidently the kids were thirsty and the adults are too old to properly attend to a keg. We talked and feasted and toasted into …

The snow shovel taunts me.

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The solstice was just a few days ago and I spent most of it among a pinkening crowd on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. Yesterday, back in humid and hot Buffalo, the sun gleamed high and bright and long as I mulched the front garden and putzed in the back. I slumped over my grilled cheese and salad dinner last night all sun roasted and dehydrated. My chair position gives me a command view of the back yard and vegetable garden and I like to gaze out there in the evening light, especially after a day of garden toil. Everything looks so promising at this time of year. I glanced at the garage doors and my eyes snagged on something shining yellow and glowing through the window. It was the snow shovel. It is dangling from a hook in the back of the garage and should be invisible for the summer. It isn’t your turn, I thought at it. I can wait, it told me.