Month: May 2020

Sidewalk surprise

/ Fran Haley / 27 Comments

Sunny May afternoon. Warm, lazy. Neighborhood moderately quiet but for the occasional baby-like cry of young goats from a pen hidden in a snatch of mixed-woods across the street. They sound like little kids … which is exactly what they ARE …

Absolutely nothing is happening.

I will check the mail.

Again.

Patches of thick, furry moss nestled in the wide brick steps of the porch. Clean fragrance of mulch from the empty beds along the house. Sudden coolness on rounding the corner, where the sun casts the shadow of the house across the sidewalk—

Snake.

Right in front of me, in my immediate path. If I hadn’t been looking down …

Two steps backward.

I am not a fan of snakes.

It’s little. The second of its kind I’ve seen. The first one appeared on this sidewalk months ago, belly-up, dead, when the old boxwoods were pulled out. I needed to know what kind of snake it was, so I researched it: Smooth earth snake. Lives in woodsy debris, usually underground (technical term: “fossorial”). Nonpoisonous. Very shy.

—This one isn’t moving at all. Is it dead, too?

—Do I really want to know?

I do.

Two steps forward, leaning over as far as I dare.

Almost imperceptibly, its sides rhythmically expand and contract.

It is breathing.

I have never seen a snake breathing.

But I don’t usually get close enough to determine such.

I wonder if it is scared of me.

I won’t harm it. This is a living thing, lying here on my sidewalk, breathing rather hard for a snake, I think.

It won’t harm me.

We’re just occupying the same shadow, breathing the same air.

I can see a dark lump through its translucent beige-gray skin, about halfway through its body. Is that part of the snake? Or something it ate?

Then …

I don’t expect anyone to believe this. I’m not completely sure that I do.

I hesitate to say. It sounds crazy.

But…

A little light flickers inside the snake.

Just for a second or two.

A fluid-like glimmering, mid-snake, very near that dark lump.

—Am I dreaming?

I stare, unblinking, not sure I trust my eyes or my brain. Have I ever even heard of such a thing?

And then, one more glimmering of light, faint, in the tail region.

I did see it.

Twice.

Is it just a reflective shimmer of sunlight?

But this snake lies wholly in the shadow of the house; the sun’s not shining on anything close by.

A reflection of something I am wearing, then?

But I am wearing no rings, no glittery flip flops. Only one fine, rose-gold chain on my right arm that I never remove (my son gave it to me), and it’s wholly in the shadow, too. Not catching the sunlight. Not casting it.

Furthermore, the glimmer came from inside the snake. It radiated only within the confines of its motionless body. Not on the sidewalk. Nowhere else.

—A trick of my eyes, then.

But my optometrist has never seen anything amiss with my eyes. Got a fabulous report at my last checkup in December: “No change in your vision. Everything looks great. See you next year!”

A migraine for me begins as a spot of light in my eyes; it grows until I can only see the outer edges of things.

But I don’t get migraines often, and am not getting one now.

Nor, to my knowledge, have I ever had a hallucination.

—I shall need proof, then. A picture.

My phone is in the house.

Stepping backward, I ease to the corner of the house, out of sight of the snake (well, at least until it’s out of my sight. Snakes don’t see well). I make a run for the porch steps, the front door, the bedroom where my phone is charging.

The snake has not moved by the time I return.

I wait for the longest time, phone poised, cued to video, but the glimmering doesn’t come again. I record a few seconds of the snake breathing. Zoomed, of course, from a comfortable distance.

Absolutely nothing is happening.

So I walk way around in the grass, giving the snake a wide berth. Short jaunt down the driveway to the mailbox, retrieving uninteresting, unimportant ephemera.

Back up the driveway to the sidewalk …

—The snake is gone.

Where?

—There in the mulch, just ahead of where it had been.

I try for several minutes more to capture some glowing, any glowing, on video, but the phenomenon is over. Whatever caused it has apparently conspired not to do so again, certainly not for one wishful human.

I do, however, get a bit of video of the snake’s tiny black tongue flickering — from a safe and comfortable distance.

I wonder if any neighbors have spotted me, if they’re wondering what in the heck I am doing, hunched over for so long here in my yard. But there’s nothing really stirring outside except those goats in their secluded pen, a meandering bee, birds in the distance, a random, rusty cock-a-doodle-doo from the rooster who lives up the street, as, in his mind, anything with ears to hear needs reminding he’s king of all times of day, not just the morning.

I have troubled this shy little snake enough. Time to let it be. Live and let live.

Trudging up the steps to my porch, wonder and hesitation stir my soul: I will write about this. I think. Or should I? How can one explain the inexplicable? How can one know what is really real? When “I saw it with my own eyes” isn’t exactly enough to drive away doubt? What about logic: Have earth snakes ever been known to glow? Is there a plausible scientific explanation? Bioluminescence is a real thing. In some eels, for example. Fireflies. Glow worms. Perhaps my snake ate one of these larvae—? Might that be the dark lump in its midsection? Perhaps some released phosphorescence traveled through its body, which is just transparent enough to reveal it. Or maybe this is a defense mechanism? A means of survival for a thing that usually lives underground? Did it ingest some compound in the soil that might give off a glow? Or did this snake simply, literally absorb some sunlight?

All I know is that I saw a light glimmering inside a rather translucent little earth snake. Twice. And that I am unaccustomed to seeing random light running along anything in shadows.

Not physically, anyway. Metaphorically I see light in the shadows all the time.

I sit rocking in my new porch chair. My thoughts sway back and forth, rolling over and over and over like paper in the wind … and I realize that my questioning awe is tinged, the tiniest bit, with something like sadness: I am not likely to ever see this again, let alone prove that I saw it. Some things are once-in-a-lifetime occurrences, one-shot-only golden glimpses, like the eagle I saw last spring, sitting huge and majestic by the side of the road. Not that I want to encounter another snake (any more, I am sure, than one wants to encounter me). No. Still not a fan. Not aiming to be a herpetologist. Although I could contact one and ask if earth snakes ever glow … what’s the risk, other than skepticism and dismissiveness?

I just want to know why. That is all. And am having to accept that I likely never will.

That glimmering … if nothing else, it means Aliveness. The little snake is alive. I am alive. For one moment, maybe, the life force acknowledged and honored itself …

For all I know, the snake saw the same glimmer in me.

Maybe.

Cookie commemoration

/ Fran Haley / 24 Comments

Quarantine cookies are a real thing.

Not just the baking of them as a means of COVID-coping productivity, but as an expression of the times.

My daughter-in-law—artist, baker, craftsperson extraordinaire—created these cookies a few weeks ago. She and my son delivered them with my granddaughter via a front porch social-distance visit:

My ebullient four-year-old granddaughter belly-laughed on presenting these whimsical delights: “TOILET TISSUE COOKIES!!!!!”

“And face masks and soap!” I exclaimed.

“They’re too pretty to eat!” said my husband.

But we did. Every crumb. With joy.

I thought about the joy with which these cookies were infused, how ingesting them was an antidote to the virus zeitgeist. What you put into a thing is what you get out of it …

Yesterday my son and his family made another delivery:

“Ooooohhhhh,” my husband and I breathed in unison.

As we admired the astonishing artistry, I noted a shift in the cookie symbolism: Not just physical survival, as in the previous batch, but spiritual (coffee counts as both, right?). The fleur-de-lis, emblem of our daughter-in-law’s Louisiana roots, long associated with Christianity and the church, an icon from antiquity for royalty and protection. Choosing to believe, as the stages of isolation drag on, that the uncertain future can, and will, be beautiful. “Unbridled hope for tomorrow” … such trust. Such zest for life.

And a pencil.

Truth is, we write our tomorrows by our choices today … and nothing represents spiritual survival to me more than writing.

I call it: “The pencil is mine.”

“I want this one,” said my husband, picking up the fleur-de-lis. How he misses going to church, being with the flock he pastors. A shepherd pining for restoration, preservation.

We share the consumption of hope.

Every sweet crumb of it.

The rocker

/ Fran Haley / 7 Comments

First, the light.

More of it each day. Driving the darkness away with its gentle appearing, rousing bright-eyed birds earlier and earlier, which respond in uninhibited chirps, songs, chatter. New day new day new day day day …

It’s a beautiful time to be alive. To be reborn. To mark having been born.

“What do you want for your birthday?” asked my husband.

“New rocking chairs.”

I’d been thinking on it.

The old chairs on the front porch are cracked, broken, portions held in place with wood glue. Time for them to go. Time for new ones. I want to sit outside in the light, in the breeze, even though it remains oddly chilly, to hear the birds, to see Papa Finch alight on the roof. I hear him before I see him; I wonder what his loud twitter means but I always answer, “Hi Finch!” Then there he is, tiny brown creature with his chest faintly dusted red, sitting high above the garage against the cloudless blue sky, looking directly at me. The porch is part of his domain. Sometimes from inside the house I hear his loud chirp; looking through the window, I find him sitting on the white porch rail. I suspect he’s eyeing the front door wreath for his bride’s nest. Although I took the wreath down for the winter, I’d left the old nest from last year attached. With the coming of March, and with great care, I put the faded, bird-loved wreath back in hopes that the nest would be reused. It hasn’t. So I removed it to make way for new.

Like my rocking chairs.

When my granddaughter visits now, it’s only on the front steps for a while, until the coronavirus social distancing expires. She comes with eyes full of spring light, as blue as the sky above my finch, who never fails to join our gathering and to add his voice to the conversation.

“That’s a loud bird!” says my granddaughter, age four.

“He is. Look, there he is, on the roof. Hi, Finch!”

And in these bright little moments, I revel in the poetry of life, that this bird (I wonder if he was one of the previous hatchlings from my wreath? ) should be a mainstay. Especially as my granddaughter’s name is Scout. Yes, from To Kill a Mockingbird. Whose last name was … Finch.

I want sturdy chairs on the porch, for resting. As a place to quiet my mind with the greenness of the grass in the yard and over where the path leads round the pond through greener trees. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul … To share with my granddaughter as she grows, to have coffee with my husband who almost didn’t live to see another spring. To celebrate living, being, enduring. To converse with generations of finches who’ve chosen to make my home theirs. To know, as evening falls, and I must go in, that I savored the gifts of that day to their fullest, their deepest.

My husband bought the chairs.

“We’ll put the old ones on the back deck,” he told me.

I wanted to say Why, they’re held together with glue, they’ll last maybe three days out there with no shelter, let’s just throw them away. But I didn’t. He wants to keep them, for some reason …

Truth is, the old chairs look kind of nice on the back deck by the flowerpots. For ever how long they last out there.

It was the rocker nearest the kitchen that made me realize.

Thump thump. Thump thump.

Dennis the dachshund woke from his sleep in a patch of sun-stripes at the back door. Ears perked.

“What is that?” I asked him from my chair at the kitchen table, where I was typing on the laptop.

Rising, looking through the window.

The rocker, rocking all by itself.

Thump thump. Thump thump.

The other rocker opposite sat motionless.

The wind, I thought.

Second thought: Why this rocker and not the other?

Third thought: Is the wind — or something — IN that chair?

It reminded me that I’ve always wanted to write a collection of ghost stories. An incongruous thought on such a bright, gold-green day.

Then.

How have I missed it?

For all the weeks—months—of the wind’s extended gusting and moaning under the eaves, unlike I’ve ever heard it before, I failed to notice it had stopped. All through the COVID crisis it’s been a grieved entity, swirling around my house in desperation, haunting my spirit with its voice, agitating the tall pines.

It’s still here, as my rocking chair can attest. But subdued.

Perhaps the wind has decided to sit a spell and rest. Perhaps the rocker was an invitation.

I am not sure we are friendly, yet, the wind and I, but I will offer it hospitality as long as it’s a benevolent guest. Is it taking up residence here, like the finches?

Perhaps I will take my coffee out there one afternoon and ask—begging the wind’s pardon, of course—why it cried so long and so hard.

But as I have no wish to stir anything up, maybe I’ll just let the wind rock to its heart’s content, in peace.

Picture of empathy

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is the hallmark of every exceptional teacher to understand and share the feelings of students, remembering what it’s like to be in their shoes, being able to discern factors of student life beyond “school.” For any adult, empathy is remembering what it is like to be a child. In good times and bad. For the writer, empathy is invaluable to character development … and for taking a walk in the shoes of anything and everything, real or unreal, alive or not. Empathy is more than taking on the guise of another; it is the ability to be the other in a given situation. It is a transformative force, one of humanity’s greatest facets, vital to our coexistence.

But not solely a human attribute.

Since his cardiac arrest and heart surgeries last year my husband has battled a new thing. His blood pressure is typically high and it’s been a challenge for his doctors to get his prescription cocktail just right. His pressure is currently well-managed, to the point of being a little low; occasionally when he rises from a sitting position he becomes light-headed. This is something for which I have much empathy, my own blood pressure being characteristically low. It’s called orthostatic or postural hypotension. Once, as a teenager, I got up from the living room floor where I was sprawled in front of the television to answer a knock on the front door—thankfully the neighbor caught me as my knees buckled and the tingling world went solid gray.

So the other evening when my husband got up from his chair just to grab the kitchen counter, muttering, “I’m dizzy,” I knew exactly what it was like.

“Sit down! Now!” I told him.

He did. He leaned over in the floor and rested his head on his arms.

That’s when Dennis, our 6-month-old dachshund, rushed over, considered the situation, and promptly keeled over in the floor beside my husband.

“That,” I laughed, “is about the most empathetic thing I’ve ever seen.”

And once his light-headedness was past I made my husband restage it so I could take pictures.

Poor sweet hilarious Dennis.

I can’t say for sure how much he understood, but he certainly shared the experience of another. Took a bit of the suffering on. Kind of like If you’re going through this, then I am, too.

If only our species could be as consistently perceptive, responsive, and willing.