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.  

 

Vacation Mode

This beach is like every beach and I immediately love it. The expanse of ocean. The sand. What’s different are the perfectly smooth black stones. They’re everywhere. I want to take all of them, but I limit myself to two. It’s only the first day of vacation. I should pace myself. 

It’s the same at dinner. The restaurant is known for its blueberry pie, but I pass on it. I can’t eat a piece of blueberry pie! I just ate a lobster roll! My husband is flipping through the guidebook, and we’re both overwhelmed by all the things to see and do. We’re still in travel mode, the packing and cleaning, the last-minute odds and ends you have to take care of before you go out of town, such as water the houseplants and buy dogfood, and speaking of the dog, will she be okay with the dog sitter?  

Also, I’m still stuck at the airport where the woman in front of us in the security line got flagged because she didn’t have an ID with her. She seemed genuinely confused that she needed one. Do you have anything with your name on it, the security guard asked. A credit card? A medication bottle? No, the woman said. See, her traveling companion pointed out to her. I told you! 

I was half laughing as my husband and I were waved past them. Feeling smug, I took off my shoes and belt like a pro, expertly set up my basket with my carry-on bag and laptop. Two minutes later, I was flagged by security for walking through the scanner with my cell phone in my back pocket. Someone had to pat me down. She was really nice about it.

I promise I will never judge anyone ever again. 

Back on the beach with the smooth black stones, it is warm and you can smell the ocean. My husband and I walk along the shore for a few minutes. We have a whole plan in our heads of how this week will go, the hotels picked out, the little towns we’ll stop in along the way. But I already know we’ll veer off the plan. A few days in and fully in vacation mode, we’ll take a third stone. I’ll eat the blueberry pie. 

To Do

My husband is out of town for the week, and I make a list of things to do. I want to be productive while he’s gone. Grow something, is one of the things on the list. Cook something. Throw something out. I check the items off dutifully. Pick the tomatoes that are finally ripening in the garden and turn them into a spaghetti sauce. Pull out the spent cucumber vine. (That counts as throwing out, I decide.) 

I add more things to do. Paint the kitchen trim and finish reading the book I’m reading for my book club. Write every day for at least one hour. Clean the house. I am a Crossing-Items-Off-My-List machine, powering through the week like an Olympian sprinting across the finish line, arms raised and barely out of breath. 

What else can I grow, clean, cook, paint, read, write? Wait, am I running from something? The quiet house, my strange, random thoughts in the middle of the night, the dog draped over my feet. One night the power flickers. The fan clicks on, the doorbell rings (this is a thing with our doorbell, the ding-dong after a power outage. It’s funny during the day, but a little scary at three o’clock in the morning.) 

The dog sleeps through it, but I stay up for a while, wide awake and squinting at the ceiling, relieved that I am no longer afraid of the dark. The old me would’ve tripped down the stairs to check the front door, done a frantic whirl around the house to test all of the locks. It is a gift to lie in bed alone and know that you are safe. 

End of the week and there are more things to do. (There are always more things to do.) Instead, I spend hours writing this post. Mostly, I am staring out the window at the squirrels running across the powerlines, how the sky darkens, and one white moth flutters over the yellow flowers along the fence. 

The other day when I was out there pulling weeds, I lifted a stone and found a dead toad, its body shriveled up and stiff, but before I dropped the stone back over it, a fluid-like substance squirted out of its rear end, and as I watched, the body inflated and the toad came back to life. I am not lying. It blinked at me and hopped away. 

I immediately looked this up online and learned that some toads go into a kind of hibernation during droughts to conserve energy. Cool. But now, I'm worried that I’ve interrupted this process and must add another item to my list: Leave water for the freshly rehydrated toad. 

This morning, I set a dish out. A gift for the toad, a gift for me. We have done enough for today. 

Quiet Walk

I used to listen to music or audiobooks or a podcast (interviews with authors and artists on NPR or Pod Save America or Behind the Bastards, which alternately make me laugh and get my blood boiling. SO many bastards you wouldn't believe it), but lately I’ve been walking alone with my thoughts, 

letting the dog do her sniffs while my mind wanders, trying to think of the next line in the book I’ve been trying to write for two years or the topic for today's blog post 

Five Good Books I read in the past few weeks (Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Consent, Grief Is for People, Between Two Kingdoms, and Idaho.) 

Or 

Things I Love about Working at the Library (Over 2000 people participated in the summer reading program at our small branch, and we're giving away free school supplies, and every Friday Ted brings donuts.)

Or

Notes from the Garden, and how the cucumbers are finally petering out, but now we’re overrun with tomatoes, and look, there’s a random moonflower popping up in the corner, which always makes me think of my father-in-law (he gave me the seeds and I scattered them around without knowing what I was scattering. He told me they were pretty, "purty" was how he pronounced it, and he was right, and every year when they come up, I am surprised and grateful

and 

Speaking of Grateful

the unexpectedly pleasant weather, the sun warming my face, okay, I am getting old and sometimes I am sad or cynical or stressed out or pissed off, but all of this leaks away in the silence that isn't really silence with my sneakers slapping the ground, the cicadas rattling, the kids whooping it up as they ride past on their bikes, the dog prancing along beside me. Listen

remember how I told you she lost her hearing and how sad I was about it--no more coming when I call her to come or wagging her tail when I gush at her what a good girl she is, no more playing with the squeaker toy because she can't hear it anymore so why bother--well, 

I taught her two hand signals! (Come, with my hand curled, and Sit, with my palm faced down.) It only took two days of gesturing and effusive petting and treats, and now she is a pro, an old dog learning new tricks, 

like me. 

Thirty-Four Things about Us

Two kids

Five houses (plus, 

Two apartment rentals, the first with the mattress on cinderblocks, the hand-me-down furniture, the green shag carpet, a scraggly plant) (the house we live in now with the real beds and the furniture you made, the hardwood floors and multiple gardens overtaking the yard)

Two dogs

Two cats

Three fish (two orange, one blue) 

Eleven vehicles (one stolen, but that was before we were married) (three of the cars, generous gifts from loved ones) (I am not counting the kids’ cars.)

Speaking of the kids. They are not kids anymore, but sometimes, when they tilt their heads a certain way, you can see the baby in them, the fat red cheeks, the chattery toddler, the school aged body weighted down by a backpack, the slouch of a teenager, the swing of long hair, the wave goodbye at the airport, the graduation caps, the weddings, the gathering into our family

a second daughter, a second son 

add another dog

Have you been counting? We are up to 30. Okay, I’ll wait while you check the math (Two dogs?—you’re forgetting Handy the greyhound. Three fish?—remember our son had the two orange ones, Goldie and Fishie. Our daughter had the blue.) For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, and we haven’t even gotten to the sickness and health part yet, 

the Three scary hospital stays, the divvying out of pills, the chicken soup, the cups of tea; the bad times (we lived through a global pandemic! and mourned lost family members and put beloved pets to sleep and fought over money, screaming at each other and stalking off to sulk, how stubborn we were and how silly), the good times 

because aren't there so many more that are good? Not only the vacations and celebrations, the school concerts (why do we still own three violas?) the hikes through the woods and walks along beaches, the fancy dinners, 

but also, the everyday meals, hundreds of them, thousands? (the chocolate chip pancakes and the spaghetti sauce, the lunches packed, the hotdogs on the grill), the walks around the block, the long car trips, the nights curled up in front of the TV. 

Thirty-four years ago, could we ever have imagined now? Could we have known how lucky we were at age twenty-two and twenty-three, when we promised to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, 

when we said, I do.

The Other Side

When I take the dog for a walk, she stops to sniff at everything, sometimes yanking me backwards to follow a scent we’ve already passed. Leave it, I say. She can’t hear me anymore so I am basically talking to myself. Today I give up and let her smell to her heart’s content. While she’s smelling, I’m thinking about the book I just read, Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley. It’s a memoir about loss and how to get past it. 

It comes to the conclusion that you can’t get past it. 

But eventually, you learn to live with it. In the book the author’s good friend commits suicide. A few weeks before her apartment had been broken into. The two things have nothing to do with each other, but in her grieving state, they muddle up in her head. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of the burglary, and she’s torn up about her missing jewelry, gifts from her grandmother. She looks for a grief support group for victims of stolen jewelry, but there are no support groups for that. 

Grief isn’t for things, she writes. Grief is for people.

Of course, what she is really struggling with is why her friend killed himself. You are never going to know, I want to tell her. Fifty years ago, my father killed himself. Why? I don’t know. The dog is yanking my arm again, pulling me around a lamp post, halfway into someone’s front yard and back out again, rounding a corner toward the house with the backyard chickens. How extensive is this scent trail? 

Okay, he was suffering from depression. He had a drinking problem and a gambling addiction. He’d recently filed for bankruptcy. His marriage was falling apart. Are these valid reasons? If they are, factor in this: he was thirty-four years old. He was the father of three children under the age of seven. 

I was the seven-year-old. Don’t write about this, says a voice in my head. But I have stopped listening to the voices in my head. 

Here is how you live with it: You just do. 

And after a while you find yourself somewhere on the other side. I wish I could’ve said this to my father. That, and the other side isn’t perfect, but it has its good points. Flowers, for example, and a comical number of cucumbers in the garden. Good books and good friends. People who love you despite all of your weirdness. Dogs. You knew I was coming back to the dog. 

I love how she leads me along, doubles me back, finds an interesting trail for us to follow whenever I let her go.  

Small Talk

The lady in front of us in line at the grocery store is having a love fest with the cashier. While my husband unpacks our cart, I watch the two of them gushing on each other. I love you, the cashier says. I love YOU, the lady says. They hug each other over the grocery bags. You have a good day! YOU have a good day! When the transaction is complete, they’re still saying I love yous. 

I want in on some of this love, I say, and the cashier immediately lights up. You got it! I love you! She tells us it’s her and her husband’s 38th anniversary today. 

That’s great! I say. Happy anniversary! And then we start talking kids and grandkids as she weighs our grapes, wrangles our toilet paper. I can hear my husband chuckling behind me. We recently had a conversation about social interactions, and I know he’s studying this one. 

What happened is it has occurred to him that he's had very little live human contact with people outside our house (me), since March 2020, when he was sent home to work remotely, and now small interactions feel like big ones. So, for example, he will go to the gym, and a stranger will say, Are you using that machine? And my husband will say, No. 

And even that feels like it's a little too much. 

Meanwhile, I’m out every day at the library talking up a storm with pretty much everyone who walks in the door, and this includes six-month-olds. Okay, I have to tell you about this six-month-old. The mom has been coming in with the three-year-old big sister (Daisy) to story-time, first as pregnant person and then as a person hauling around a baby carrier, until it seemed like one second went by, and Boom! there was a baby in her arms while I chatted it up with Daisy, the usual small talk you have with a three-year-old.

Me: Ooh, I bet you’re a good big sister!

Daisy: Yes.

Me: What’s your little sister’s name?

Daisy: Evelyn.

Me: Hi Evelyn!

Evelyn: _____.

This went on for maybe three months, until one day last week Daisy came up to my desk to get her sticker, followed by Mom holding Evelyn, and I said Hi to Evelyn how I always do, but this time Evelyn said Hi back. I almost fell out of my chair. The mom said that Evelyn just learned how to say it, and now she’s practicing on everyone. And she was. The whole time the family was down in the Youth Department, I’d lock eyes with Evelyn wherever she was in the room, and she’d say, Hi and give me a wave. 

Each chirpy Hi was a little charge zinging directly into my heart muscle. A person. A small connection. And who knows, flash forward fifty years and Evelyn will be holding up the line in the grocery store. 

That was weird, don’t you think, my husband says, as we walk out the door, the cashier calling out, It was so nice to talk to you! and me, laughing, saying, It was so nice to talk to YOU!

Oh, yeah, it was most definitely weird. 

But it's the kind of weird that makes you laugh. The kind that reminds you it’s not too late to jump in and how nice it is that there are still so many reasons to love the crazy world.