That’s pretty much what I felt these flowers were doing when I saw them.
What a timely reminder.
Special thanks to Carol Varsalona for the invitation to create image poems for her Nature Nurtures gallery, in honor of National Poetry month.
Today, a golden shovel poem: taking a line from another poem or work and crafting a new poem with the last word of each line comprising the original.
Mine is taken from a verse of Scripture in honor of its promises, spring, and the healers across the world on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis.
Prayer for the Nations
In newness the
tender leaves
of promise, of
restoration, of the
dogwood tree
uniformly were
donning white robes for
their works of mercy, the
bringers of healing,
bringers of comfort, of
life, as ministers of the
prayer for the nations.
*******
Revelation 22:2: “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
In addition to its Christian symbolism, the dogwood represents strength and durability; it is able to endure adverse conditions.
Photo: Sunlight and dogwoods. Duane Tate. CC BY
Just some fleeting impressions while sweeping my porch … the beauty of the day in such stark contrast to what’s happening in the world …
While sweeping the porch this April day
there’s children at distant play
laughing, falling
voices calling
lawnmowers mowing
cool breeze blowing
flowers quivering
trees shivering
sun shining
life divining.
Joyous birdsong
like nothing’s wrong
as if only rebirth
sweeps the Earth
not humanity hurled
netherworld.
A spring reception
of such deception.
Beautiful day, you’re almost cruel
playing such an April fool.
If you were here with me you could see these pansies quivering despite the brightness of the morning. The name of this colorful, dark-eyed flower comes from French penser, “to think.” Pansies symbolize contemplation and remembrance.
Today I write with a group of friends for Spiritual Journey Thursday.
The word restore has been on my mind these days. More or less as a question: When will society, the economy, the country, the health of the globe be restored to pre-COVID-19 conditions? And what will that restoration look like? How changed or different will everything be?
I think on this a lot, as is there is a lot of time to think.
Naturally a well-known line from the Psalms also comes to mind: He restores my soul. It speaks of peace and confidence, of a daily trust. I watch the news, the frenzy of those in the medical profession, pleading on behalf of us all; the government having to count the cost of a shut-down economy as weighed against the life and well-being of its citizens; and everyone worried about having enough resources for coping. They’re all waging a mighty battle against an insatiable, tenacious, invisible pathogen.
While the rest of us watch from a distance, sheltered. Protected. Trusting that the decisions made for us will preserve us, restore us.
We wait in the stillness.
It brings the preceding line of Psalm 23 to mind: He leads me beside still waters.
I could make an analogy of a stormy, violent sea for the government, the medical field, and the stock market, in contrast to the majority of us waiting at home, by the still waters … but a story resurfaced in my memory instead.
Long ago, when I was about seven, I attended a church service where an older girl was baptized. She was perhaps twelve or so, a sweet and affectionate girl well-known and loved by the congregation. It was an exciting morning for the church … except that as this girl entered the baptistry, she was sobbing.
“I can’t do it,” she bawled. ” I can’t …”
Abject terror.
Even as a seven-year-old, I knew she’d chosen to be baptized. She’d walked the aisle some weeks before and professed her faith. I knew the pastor made new members, including children, attend a series of classes to understand the tenets of the faith and the ordnance of baptism. I didn’t understand it all myself, not yet, but I knew this girl, garbed in a white robe, hovering at the steps leading down into the water, crying, wanted to act on her faith. I’d never seen anyone react this way to being baptized: Why’s she so scared?
I look back now and wonder: Was she simply afraid of water? Had she never gone swimming in a pool, as I had?
The water wasn’t deep. It wasn’t cold; it was heated to be comfortably warm. It wasn’t waves crashing on the shore, no dangerous undertow, just clear, still water.
Our pastor, a humble, middle-aged man, a former Navy pilot in WWII and a Bible scholar, stood in his own robe of white at the center of the baptistry. He reached out his hand: “It’s all right, Dear Heart. See, I’m here. It’s safe. You know I’m going to hold onto you.” When she stayed rooted to the steps, clinging to the hidden rail, our pastor waded over, put his arm around her, and led her into the pool.
He held her for a moment. We heard him whisper: “Are you ready?”
Loud sobs, but a nod of her little head.
He raised his hand heavenward:
“I baptize you, little sister, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit …”
Whoosh.
She went under and just as quickly, he raised her back up.
“I DID IT!” she shouted, hair plastered to her head, wet face shining. “I DID IT!”
If ever there was a vision of radiant joy, that’s it.
The entire congregation wept, even seven-year-old me.
The tears return even now, remembering.
He leads me beside still waters. Sometimes through still waters. When we cannot see the bottom. When we’d really rather not descend into them, when we don’t want to get wet at all, when we fear not so much immersion but submersion: How long will we be under? Can we last?
He restores my soul. It is a matter of trust that, somehow, all will be well, that we will be raised back up, we will be led safely through.
For now, we wait in the stillness like water lilies … which, in the Tamil poetic tradition, happens to symbolize the grief of separation.
On the placid surface
rest the blooms
in waters still.
Their unseen roots
anchor them
to the earth
far below.
And so we float
suspended
separate
waiting
enduring
this strange baptism
yet anchored
to one another
by unseen roots
while time stands still.
Today, in my mind, in my heart, the word restore echoes over and over and over like a prayer.
Photo: Water lilies on a pond at Powhatan State Park. Virginia State Parks. CC BY
*******
Thank you, Donna for hosting April’s Spiritual Journey Thursday.
The wind
under the eaves
is moaning
droning.
The ghost
of March
not knowing
April is here.
Flaunting
haunting
as if it would
as if it could
reach in
and pull me
from
safety.
It groans
it moans
it finds
no entry.
It cannot touch
not now
not ever
the stillness
within.
Today concludes the thirty-one-day Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. Today I cross the finish line with many fellow Slicers, having written a post each day.
But the writing doesn’t end here.
Nor does the challenge …
That’s the thing. Now, more than ever before in our lives, is a time to write.
The photo above is of a pocket notebook a friend and mentor gave as a parting gift to all who attended her retirement celebration years ago. Her love of writing and advocacy for teachers as writers inspires me to this day. She also passed the torch of facilitating district writing workshop training to me … until this year, when it is no longer offered. But I carry the notebook with me everywhere I go, just to remind me …
Teachers, students, families, friends, citizens of the world, all … today I offer the same to you, in the ongoing composition of life: Write bravely.
*******
write your stories
share your glories
write bravely
write for healing
name the feeling
write bravely
write all your rages
fill all your pages
write bravely
write through your tears
conquer your fears
write bravely
write of the past
save it at last
write bravely
write of your sorrows
and your tomorrows
write bravely
write them for you
and for me, too
write bravely
write bravely
write bravely
Seems like a couple of weeks into stay-at-home orders and physical separation is an ideal time for some puppy therapy.
So I brought you a tiny puppy to hold awhile. In your heart, anyway, if not in your hands.
You’ll want to know the story, I suspect …
Last December, my son and I went to pick up his new puppy.
We wanted a mini dachshund, as we had one for sixteen years, from the time my boy was four until he was almost twenty-one. Dachshunds love to snuggle. They’re full of affection and whimsy. And mischief … and stubbornness … but their devotion outweighs all else.
When we got to the breeders, as paperwork was being completed, I noticed a movement under some blankets in one of the kennels.
“Oh, something’s in there!” I remarked. “It looked empty except for the blankets.”
“Yes,” said the breeder-lady. “A mother and her baby. She only had one, born yesterday.”
And then the lady did the unthinkable.
She reached under the blankets, scooped the newborn out, and placed it in my hands.
I could hardly breathe.
Tiny. So fragile. So beautifully formed, utterly perfect in every way. The sheen of its gorgeous coat, solid chocolate. Teeny little ears. Nails so miniscule they could barely be seen … awe isn’t adequate for the suspended moment of wonder at this bit of life in my hands.
The puppy’s mother, a long-haired red dapple, hovered at my feet, her big brown eyes fixed on me as I held her baby.
“Here, ” I said to my son, “hold it for just a second and we’ll give it back to its mother. She’s anxious.”
I placed the puppy in my son’s hands and took took a picture with my phone. With a fingertip, I stroked its satiny head, just once.
“It’s so beautiful,” whispered my son. Very carefully, he slid the tiny creature back into the breeder-lady’s hands and she deftly returned it to its blanketed kennel.
The mother darted in. She went right to work on her baby, licking away all of our human smell from its fur.
I don’t know why I wanted to cry just then.
Maybe it was the mother’s impeccable care of her one baby. We’d worried her, made extra work for her. The puppy squirmed against its bath but quickly settled back to blissful neonate-sleep.
Perhaps it was the fragility of new life that twisted my heart, its precariousness and preciousness, the struggle of being alive and helpless and dependent. Or the convicting knowledge that the human touch is not always a kind or good thing. Or maybe the pang was simply because life is beautiful and because I love dogs.
“Okay, you’re set,” smiled the breeder-lady, handing us the paperwork. “He’s all yours.”
No, of course not the tiny day-old chocolate puppy. That was just a gift of the moment. The breeders hadn’t yet determined if it was a boy or a girl. I did fantasize about returning in two months to get it, however, and what I’d name it … right now, as I write this post while watching Citizen Kane, I am considering “Rosebud” …
No.
I just felt you might need a moment with the tiniest puppy I ever held.
THIS is what we went for, and what we carried home:
Our Dennis.
He’s like a furry worry stone … while holding him and rubbing him (he now rolls over for belly rubs, his favorite) it’s impossible to feel sad or worried or anything but peace and gladness to be alive.
So I give him to you for a minute, to hold with your eyes. And maybe with your heart. He’ll steal it—trust me.
Just a little puppy therapy for your day.
A friend wanted to know if my family would like some face masks.
She is making them.
She sent us pictures of the fabric—she has bolts of it—for us to choose the prints.
Yesterday she and her husband pulled up in our driveway to drop off the masks. My husband and I went out to meet our friends, offering our thanks only in words, no hand-grasps or hugs … a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing … a few weeks back, we were all sitting around the dining room table here in the house, laughing and telling stories after a lasagna dinner. It seems long ago.
When will we be able to do so comfortably, again?
When I look at these masks, I see all that they represent. Shields in time of trouble. A friend channeling inertia into something productive, a practical means of battling an unseen enemy. Self-care spreading out like a blanket to cover others. Homemade love. Colorful patterns against the dark backdrop of our days.
These masks are artifacts of our times. Symbols of our story as we live it. And nothing connects humanity as much as story.
As I walked out to the driveway to receive these gifts, my grandmother’s voice echoed from across the years:
You won’t believe it, but where these woods are now used to be houses and farms, up and down this little road … when the Spanish flu came, it hit all but a couple of them … twelve people died in one week … Mama made pots of soup and Papa would carry it to their doors. He wouldn’t go in, of course …
Grandma wouldn’t have had living memory of this. When the influenza pandemic began in January 1918, she was only two. But she knew the stories. If my own memory serves me correctly, as I walked the tiny country cemeteries surrounding her homeplace, listening to her narratives of the people resting there—for she knew all their stories, and how they were connected— there was an unexpected commonality.
A death year. 1917.
That was before the Spanish flu.
Grandma nodded. There was a sickness before: They called it hemorrhagic fever. People would bruise and bleed from their noses and ears and eyes … a lot of people who tried to take care of the sick caught it and died, too …
She was hardly more than a baby then, a girl born and raised in a hard place in hard times, but here she stood, by the weather-worn stones under a cloudless blue sky, telling the stories seven decades later.
Because of story, these events are lodged in my memory a hundred years after they happened.
My father was Grandma’s first child, born during the Great Depression. Flour companies made their sacks with patterns and bright colors so people could make clothes out of them … look at my handmade face masks and tell me they aren’t reminiscent. A second child, my aunt, arrived with the war. Granddaddy moved the family from North Carolina to Virginia; he found work in the shipyard, where production increased to the point of cranking out ships in less than a third of the time it normally took. How can one not compare that to the scramble for mass production of ventilators today …
Grandma said: It was so hot that summer. I was miserable, being pregnant. I’d sit by the upstairs window and watch the iceman delivering blocks of ice to grocers … companies stopped making refrigerators … everything went into the war effort. I just cried. I’d have given anything for some of that ice … then we had ration cards and could only get certain things at certain times … once my sister Jack and her husband pooled their gas ration cards with ours and we all went on a trip to Massachusetts … it was so beautiful and so cool there …
I look at these masks and that is what I see.
The story of overcoming. Of determination. Of resourcefulness in time of scarcity. Of finding a means to be a good neighbor, a good friend, a real and present help in time of need, even if from a safe distance. Sharing so that everyone has enough. Acts of service, gifts of love. Sacrifice.
The story of surviving.
It’s a collective one.
Mourning doves are said to symbolize providence, grace, peace, safety, renewal, and moving forward. Their low-pitched song sounds sad or comforting, depending on the listener. I dedicate this lament to the dove outside my kitchen window, whose plaintive murmur I hear in the dark, just before sunrise.
grim gray morning
grim gray news
grim gray outlook
grim gray blues
time to shelter
time to snooze
time to waken
time to muse
dream to endure
dream to choose
dream to escape
dream . . . a ruse
morning to ponder
morning to lose
morning pours out in
mourning dove coos
*******
Photo: Nesting mourning dove. Katy Tegtmeyer. CC BY
Today I am revising a fun memoir I first wrote as a model for a fifth-grade class. Given the choice of a time in my life when I was happy, sad, angry, afraid or embarrassed, the kids voted for “embarrassed.”
What fun it was to watch them alternately cringing and writhing in their seats—but also laughing.
*******
As soon as the dismissal bell rang, I shot down the hall, through the doors, and to the crosswalk in record time. I could hardly wait to get home from school: My grandma had called that morning to say that my present should arrive in the mail.
I’d been thinking all day about what my present might be. Was it a latch hook kit, or a Mystery Date game? I’d been wanting those forever. Maybe it was those books that I heard some middle-school girls whispering about and which titles I kept mentioning as potential gifts, as I was dying to read them, but so far no one had gotten for me yet. Last year, when I was ten, I still read the Little House books and wished I was Laura to the point that my mother made sunbonnets for me, but of course I’d become too old for that now … most of the time…
I ran the whole way home, slowing only when I got a stitch in my side. At last I reached the steps of my own house. I took them two at a time and barreled through the front door into the living room.
“MOM, I’M HOME! DID MY PRESENT GET HERE?”
“It’s on the coffee table,” said Mom.
Sure enough, a large box wrapped in brown paper sat beckoning from the table. In ten seconds I had the paper off, trying to imagine what fantastic thing Grandma had chosen for me.
I threw the box lid on the floor and yanked away the tissue paper inside.
For a moment, I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing.
Clothes.
I was okay with clothes, but …
This was a shirt with some kind of huge design on it. I picked it up. When the shirt unfurled, the design turned out to be a giant daisy with a bright yellow center and enormous petals covering the entire front.
Ewwwww!
Mom said, “Oh, that’s nice.”
But that was not all. Oh no, that was not all.
Something was glowing at me from inside the box. A color so bright that it was practically blinding, a shade close to a French’s mustard bottle.
Somewhat fearfully, I lifted the glowing yellow thing out of the box.
Shorts.
A bulky pair of shorts that matched the daisy shirt.
Shorts made of thick polyester that would never wrinkle in a million years, an unsympathetic fabric that scratched against my skin.
I detested polyester.
I couldn’t pull my thoughts together. Was Grandma serious? Surely she wasn’t playing a joke on me! Didn’t she understand that I was now eleven, not six?
Mom said, “How cute, a little shorts set. Look—there’s still something in the box.”
I wanted to say I do not want to know, and I do not care, this is the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen in my life, but I quietly reached into the box one more time, as the last wisps of my hope withered and died.
In a flat pack of cellophane lay a pair of knee socks.
KNEE SOCKS.
They were white. Each had a daisy on them. One sock bore the words “He loves me” and the other sock was emblazoned with “He loves me not.”
“Now, that’s unique,” Mom commented. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“Mom! I can’t wear this! Can I ask Grandma to exchange it?”
“Absolutely not. Your grandmother took time to pick this out especially for you and to get it in the mail so that you’d have it on your birthday. You will keep it and be thankful.”
“Well, I’m not going to WEAR it!”
My mother’s eyes went dark, flashing like warning signs. She stuck out her chin, reminding me of a hungry bulldog that just had its food snatched away. I even detected a slight growl:
“Oh yes, you WILL wear it. You will wear it tomorrow and we’ll take your picture for Grandma.”
“I’m NOT wearing this to school, Mom! No way!”
The next morning, I trudged slowly, miserably to school in the hideous daisy outfit, socks and all, while Mom watched from the front steps with her arms crossed over her chest. She’d checked my bookbag to be sure I hadn’t snuck a change of clothes in there.
People could probably see me coming for miles, wondering what this unearthly glowing object could be. I kind of hoped I would get run over on the way to school, or that I would magically come down with flu, but my mother would still make me wear this so I might as well get it over with.
The snickering began as soon as I stepped into my fifth-grade classroom. The girls took a quick look at me, looked at each other, and erupted with uncontrollable giggles. The boys just stared, not even bothering to look away.
No one wants to be stared at in this way.
The cutest guy in my class, Allen, finally said, “What in the heck are you wearing?”
Why, oh why wouldn’t the floor just open up and swallow me? I couldn’t even think of a reply.
All day, when I passed by classmates, I heard little comments: “Here comes the flower girl” and “Has she figured out who loves her or loves her not yet?”
As I was getting up to sharpen my pencil, my left sock snagged on the side of the desk. When I snatched my leg free, a long thread pulled out.
Now I had to walk around with a long string dangling from my “He loves me” sock.
I could not endure any more. At lunch, I just wanted to sit by myself in peace. But when my classmate Vincent realized that the cafeteria was serving fried fish, he came around with his brown paper lunch bag, asking the rest of us if wanted ours. Vincent always did this on fish days; he took the greasy bag of collected fish home to his family.
He plopped down on the seat beside me. “Hey, you want your fish?”
“You can have it, Vincent. I’m not hungry.”
“Thanks! What’s the matter with you?”
“Geez, Vincent, isn’t it obvious? You can see what I look like today. Haven’t you heard what everyone’s been saying?”
“Not really,” said Vincent.
He did look a little confused.
“This is the most embarrassing day I’ve ever had! My grandmother sent me this ridiculous daisy outfit for my birthday. I can’t believe she thought this would be a good present. I hate it! I feel stupid.”
Vincent shrugged. “It ain’t that bad.” He took the fish off of my tray and put it in his grease-stained bag. “At least you got a grandma who loves you.”
I stared at him. He was smiling and happy, even though he wore the same brown shirt to school almost every day. He never seemed embarrassed. I thought about his family who’d be eating the unwanted lunches of fifth-graders for supper that night. Funny Vincent, the class clown. He made everybody laugh, including the teachers, even when they tried not to. It all came together in my mind, just then, how Vincent didn’t dwell on himself; he thought about others and tried to make them happy.
That’s what my grandma always did, too.
Tears of shame stung my eyes.
“You’re right, Vincent. She does love me. She’s the best.”
“Anyway, happy birthday!”
None of my other classmates had said that to me.
I had an inspiration:
“Hey, Vincent, do you want half of my cinnamon roll?”
“You kidding me?”
And we sat sharing my cinnamon roll until lunchtime was over, with Vincent making Mmmm! Mmmmm! sounds and me swinging my leg, long string swaying gracefully through the air, daisy and all.
Photo: Macro daisy. Brandon Martin-Anderson. CC BY-SA
