Ada Speaks

Such a string of dizzyingly beautiful days, all in a row, have graced the end of May. It's the perfect time for me to get back into running in a big way. So much has been going on. I'm feeling pulled in many directions. When I feel like that I have to take a few hours each day for my body and spirit. It's always more than worth the time. Saving oneself, always worth it. :) What's that they say about the oxygen mask? You put yours on first,  and then help your kids with theirs. It's not a selfish thing. It's how it's done. 

I never know where I'm headed until faced with the decision at the T intersection at the end of the driveway, then at the end of the township road. Regular route or long run? If a long run, to the old farmstead or down Dean's Fork? Off to visit the grasshopper sparrow, the red-spotted newt pond, the bluebird trail or the Waxler Church? How about all of them? There are destinations, and decisions must be made. 

As always, my hardy companion leads the way. He deeply appreciates the long runs, the new places, and he'll take the lead instead of lagging behind. Dogs get bored with routine, too! 

I feel incredibly blessed to have so many different possible outcomes to a morning's jog, all reachable on foot. It pains me to think of the years I did not explore my little patch, the years I wore a rut in the same 45-minute hike around our land. And yet I got a book (Letters from Eden) out of that, and that route I called The Loop seemed incredibly rich to me then, tied as I was to nap and meal schedules for the kids when they were little. My mind and horizons have expanded some since those infant and toddler days. I now have a 7-mile radius that I explore, which is still a fairly modest home range for a large omnivore.

How lucky I am to have this vista to contemplate! The hill's bowl acts as a perfect amphitheater for birdsong. By the time I reach here, only 1.3 miles from home, I'm usually up into the 50's on my bird species count. It's a game I play. I let the birdsong pull me along. I know where I can "get" each species, and I wait to hear them call or sing. It may seem silly, but as a result of this little game, I have an incredibly detailed mental picture of exactly what species breed where in this landscape. I usually beat 60 in May, and may hit 72 before the day is over. Huzzah!

 I think one could do this almost anywhere, map a series of runs or walking routes. My home in Appalachian Ohio just happens to be a place where the routes are painfully beautiful, especially in May. 

A golden--backed snipe fly, Chrysopilus thoracicus. It's always a good omen for me. They're my little F-16's, bejeweled fighter planes. Predatory on other insects. Often found coupling on sunny mornings on the ground or low leaves. Luucky.  He's got a scary monster shadow, this one. 

I stop to inhale the grapey aroma of Mr. Funk's irises, and remember that it is high peony time, and I have some peonies to visit at the Waxler cemetery. Old peonies, maybe special ones.

The first thing I find is some iris that have been discarded, probably from graves, off to the side. Oh, how sad. They're lovely. But probably too weedy and too much work for whomever maintains the cemetery to bother with. Lifting iris every year to get the weeds out of them is a huge drag. Which is why the only iris I currently grow are the slim dark blue Siberians.  I'll think about adopting a few of these waifs. I like plants with history.

The Stauch peony is out, and it's just like my heirloom from Dean's Fork.

A shell-pink outer ring of petals, and a rose-scented white pouf in the middle. Mmmm.

No need to come get an eye off that one. I've got two at home.

The Bruny peony isn't out yet. I can't wait to see what it will be. Probably like the medium pinks I have at home. But you never know.

And then there's Peter Gruber's peony. Might be the same as the Bruny peony. But again...the mystery pulls me along. They're not out yet. I'll have to come back. Darn.  

I remember I need to visit Ada Hune, my friend, forever 14. I tell her her rose is leafing out, despite the horrible winter it endured. I tell her about the indigo bunting that's singing nearby, whose mate probably built last year's nest that's peeking over the left corner of her stone. I kneel to shoot a photo and go on exploring without looking at it.

And Ada sends me a sign. Once again, I don't see it until I get home and upload the photos. Five pink orbs that I definitely did not perceive as I looked steadily at her headstone. The granite is dull. It's not reflective at all. The lights are simply there, dancing on its surface, perhaps for only my iPhone to see. Lucy from Minnesota looked at this and says Ada may be sending me a sign that she and her family are with me as Phoebe prepares to leave.  It's one interpretation, and I trust Lucy, but I can't be sure what it means. Maybe she's just telling me the Peter Gruber peony will be pink.

 There is something very special going on at Waxler Church Cemetery with me and Ada Hune. Why I am privileged to behold this phenomenon I don't understand. Maybe it's because I stopped to talk with her in the first place. I never have the hubris to expect it. Like the song of a grasshopper sparrow in an unexpected place, it happens or it doesn't, and I'm thankful either way.

I turn around and see some cornsilk yellow iris, also discarded in the back lot. I see a photo there.

 It's as if the tableaux wait for me, for the perfect day, the perfect light, and reveal themselves. My spirit, kept wide open to the thrust of grace. Nothing in my head but the beauty, flowing over and around me. It's a peace that goes beyond describing. It has nothing to do with anything, but it is essential for me to imbibe, so I can keep going with all I have to handle. The oxygen mask, descending mysteriously from above. 

I don't know how I would survive without all this useless and utterly essential beauty.

I still haven't cut that piece of white landscape fabric. It's part of the composition now. I'm starting to like it.

On the way home I climb the high hill where the grasshopper sparrow has been singing for more than a week now. And he's singing still. I look down on The Three Graces dancing far below, and know that, at least for me, it doesn't get any better than this. A grasshopper sparrow,  a hilltop, three graceful trees, those ranks of clouds, marching away into forever. My home is way out there, where the horizon goes white.

But my home is here, too, in these places that sustain me.

Seeing With New Eyes

Sunny day. Meeting two bluebirds who know us. That's about as good as it gets here in winter. Chet and I forge on. I can tell it's going to be an epic run. It already has been.

This landscape sets me free. We climb atop what I call Butterflyweed Hill and look back up the road toward home. I like getting different perspectives on this land I think I know. What does it look like from there? What about from there?  Let's see. I like living in a place where nobody seems to mind my doing that. If they asked, I'd tell them I was working. This is my work, noticing what's here, appreciating it, sharing it. It's just that it isn't a paying job in the conventional sense.

They've all seen me dozens of times, and know I'm harmless. Most people probably think I'm nuts, being out in all kinds of weather with my little dog. There's that crazy lady who jogs, climbs hills, looks around, takes pictures. Wonder what she does with all those pictures?

Nuffin'. 

We pass a car which turns out to be a 1968 Chevelle (Chevy Malibu with a different trim package). I learn all this from my friends Paul and Dirk, and confirm it with a look at the nameplate on the back. Truth told, I just like its lines, and the way the rust works with the white and the colors of the field around. It reminds me of an impala, not a Chevy Impala, but the African animal, with its rust to white countershading.

We move on, and the next person we meet is Coco. 

She is a perfect lady. She's the dog I told you about, who was abandoned on our county road. Mr. G. took her in and she's had three litters and made him $3,000 by his account. But he says he wouldn't take a million dollars for her. She is a wonderful dog. Also a member of the No Collar Club, I see. She lives on a busy county road where the cars fly, and she's got the sense to avoid them.  That right there tells you a lot about her.

Chet behaves himself around her, which speaks volumes about her manners and dignity.  An intact female, and he doesn't even get fresh with her. Go figure. She commands respect.

His shaved patch from the run-in with the German shepherd shines, and I wonder if he barged into her and surprised her on one of his conquests, if Coco would bite him, too. These are the chances we take when we live our lives and run the roads. We could sit home, growing plumper by the day, but we choose to move instead, to vary our view as we grow plumper by the day anyway. In a flurry of weirdness on Chet's birthday post, the one where he gets beat up by a German shepherd, one commenter wrote that she felt "very sorry for Chet," having a careless owner like me. Well, please don't waste any time feeling very sorry for this dog. He lives a fully interactive life as an athlete who gets to explore and run miles every day over new terrain. He is not a piece of inert animal furniture, leashed, fenced, overfed and cosseted like so many house pets.  Every day he has a choice as to whether to accompany me, and he gives me two paws up.

I love him for that. I wonder what I would do if I had a dog who could say no to a good run. And then I remember that we make our dogs who they are, and I feel better.

Done with Chet, Coco comes over to get some kisses on her sweet fuzzy nose from me.  I like Chet's pugnacious little bunnyface shadow, cast on Coco's satiny mocha-latte flank. Her skin slides all around on her ample frame, quite a contrast to tight-muscled, tight-coupled, drumlike little Chet.

We are in a hurry to get to the Waxler Church before the morning rays of sun get too high. I cannot wait to see it on a sunny day. I've never been there on a sunny day.

Ohhh. Even better than I'd dreamt. I'm so glad I've hurried and gotten here by 8 AM. The bounce light from the ground warmly illuminating the belfry, the sun coming through its windows, the way the skylight blues its shadowed side. Wow. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. This church calls me, all its people call to me across the miles. I find myself wondering how it looks in every light regime, and wanting to be there for each one. 

I love how someone has decorated the Booths' stone for Christmas, and I wonder if the little toy trucks were there before. There is so much I notice each time I come here, and wonder how I missed before. 

I find our neighbor Gayle's stone, realizing with a start that the recently turned ground where I stand (and instinctively jump aside) has yet to cover over with grass. The crabgrass covers first, of course, followed by the perennial grass. I should have noticed that. I used to talk with him as he mowed the fields, and I was at his funeral. It was there I first heard a recording of Vince Gill singing "Go Rest High On That Mountain." How had I never heard that song? How had I never seen this fresh-turned earth or Gayle's stone before?

Visiting this quiet churchyard is so much like entering the woods, picking up on things you've never seen or, more correctly, have never noticed.  It's like hearing a beautiful song that everyone else seems to know and love for the very first time, and wondering how it eluded you. 

I walk around in a state of wonder at all I've missed.

Elegy in a Country Graveyard

Apologies to anyone who finds these cemetery posts a little shady and dark. I don't mean them to be. I'm always looking for ways to better appreciate the gift of life, and I find powerful motivation for living well in contemplating the too-short and often tragic lives of others. The route I run every day, weather permitting, leads me to a tiny Methodist cemetery, where a little white clapboard church once stood. I loved that church, loved the phoebes who nested in the foyer, loved its weathered whitewashed siding and its raccoon-soiled pews, and I hated to see it razed and burned down. That's what a township has to do when a building is beyond repair and kids are going there to drink and raise hell and in doing so probably fall through the rotting floor. All that's left of the church is a dip in the hilltop. The scorched tops of the cedars that stood closest to it tell of the fire that consumed its clapboard, its wooden pews, its probably bat-graced belfry. How the two trees lived through it I'll never know. I figured they'd die right away, but they haven't; they just keep right on going. I don't think they're growing any more, but they're alive, and that's something.

I think a lot about Osborn and Adaline Congleton, who lost their son Thomas at age 25, and their first daughter Ida at only six months. Ida B. was born the day after Phoebe, albeit 119 years earlier. Like me, Ida's mother carried her in the heat of summer. I know what that's like, but I can't imagine having to say goodbye to her the next January, when you've barely gotten the chance to know her.

What more defining events could Osborn and Adaline have experienced? How did they go on? Like the twin cedars, scarred by fire, they just did. 

Our Loved Ones Await Us

As Robert Frost, who had a terribly tragic life filled with loss, wrote, 

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

There is nothing quite so clarifying as standing at the grave of a child who never got to grow up and have her own children, a child who never got the chance to delight her parents by becoming a person in her own right. To think of Liam and Phoebe, who but for advances in medicine, might already be done with their lives…well, it’s hard to go on feeling sorry for oneself when you stand by a little obelisk, toppled by frost heaves, and you turn it over, for it’s just light enough to move, and puzzle over the names and dates until it sinks in on you just what happened here on your road in a house long gone, 117 years ago. You look around at the young cutover woods and realize there were farmsteads and houses all along it, and women giving birth in back bedrooms and people falling ill and not getting better, even the sweet young girls and the youngest dearest babies.

Standing at the grave of Catherine and Jane King, who both left their parents at ages 14 and 10 in the second week of January, 1892 (doubtless from influenza), I resolved to make something worthwhile of the day. 

I don't know what happened to Jane, Emma, Delia and Grace Long, but I can only surmise, from the miniature headstone that remembers them, that they died very young. 

 Living in the 20th and now 21st centuries, we have been spared so much, and we simply cannot realize it, cannot carry through the thought of how incredibly blessed we are for more than a few minutes at a time. We fuss and fume about the tiny indignities; the slights and inconsiderations that life heaps on everyone. We let ourselves be consumed by small concerns, and forget to look around at the abundance that surrounds us, to listen to the laughter of our healthy children, to bury our noses in their sweet hair and thank God or grace or modern medicine or whatever combined forces that have worked together to allow us to watch them grow up.

  So I visit this cemetery every morning in clouds and rain and mist, in snow and in rare sunshine, and each morning I choose another stone to contemplate. I piece together a little story and so often it is of parents grieving for their young ones. And when I’ve wiped the tears away I turn back to the gravel road and kick my feet up as high in the air as I can (which is not very high any more, but high enough).  I stretch the live, strong muscles I have been given to use and set off down the road for home, resolved to make something of the day.