Forever in my heart

I glanced down at the kitchen floor while cooking dinner tonight, at the colorful Free Trade runner that protects the wood from spills and wear and tear. Against the bright blue and green I saw a butterfly, a black and yellow butterfly, spread flat on the plastic threads, flat like it would be if pinned to a collection wall. It was perfect, beautiful, a sharp and startling contrast everything around it. 

How did it get into my kitchen? Why was it flat on the floor? Had it flown in through the back door and I hadn't noticed? Had it hatched from a caterpillar hidden somewhere in the fuzz under my kitchen cabinets? I thought about these things for less time than it takes to form words around them and then snatched a cubical Rubbermaid container from the dish drying rack with its red lid. I bent down, touched the plastic box to the floor, tipped it up and used the lid to urge the butterfly inside.  It went in easily and I held the lid over the top. The butterfly struggled a bit inside as I rushed to the back door, went down the steps, took off the lid and tossed the butterfly toward the meadow of Queen Anne's lace that used to be the grass in my backyard. It flew away and I returned to the kitchen, back to the task of pulling together a quick dinner for Eliza and me. 

The proverbial "set it free" moment. 

Twenty minutes later, when I took my plate of lemon chicken and healthy vegetables out to the patio table, podcast going on the phone tucked under my arm, the beer opened while cooking in my other hand, I thought ... Kris?

I have friends who've asked if I had "sightings" or "signs" or times when I felt my son's presence in the days and weeks and now years after his death. He died three years ago tomorrow, on July 24, 2017, after a brave and refining battle with ALS. It was a losing battle, of course, because that's what ALS is, and thus, perhaps, one should not call it a battle, because it's not fair and how hard you fight doesn't determine the victor. It doesn't even determine the meaning of the outcome. The point for Kris as he lived and died with ALS was grace. Grace was what he discovered and trusted in and told the rest of us all about -- God's grace. And what we saw, even in the battle, even in the obscenity of the disease, the awfulness of his fate -- what we saw was God's grace merging with what Kris called "Gronk's grace" — Kris Grahnke's grace. Something transformative. Something that transforms our lives into gratitude and reverence and awe at a world made by, made for, made of God's redeeming love. 

Butterflies are symbols of resurrection, symbols of Easter, of new life and beauty and freedom. I am more sad than liberated, more mournful than lifted up, as I think about the delicate wings of the butterfly I tossed into the wilds of my backyard earlier this evening. The son I love so much is three years gone. Three years without a phone call, three years without a hug, three years without someone who shared certain family jokes with me, who loved his siblings almost as fiercely as I do, who had planned for his own family and a new generation of good times when he married his wife, Michelle. 

He is free, living eternally with God, and what I know and can envision of that is dim. But Kris is, somehow, still here in surprises: the butterfly restored to the outdoors, the way I thought of him this afternoon and how much he and I enjoyed his sister's malapropisms, how he could imitate and understand her better than anyone. He's here in the approval that his friends bestowed on his younger brother's Instagram photo of himself and his girlfriend of the last year, two people who seem happy and well-suited for one another. He's here in the encouragement I've taken from his blog in the darker moments of this pandemic. He's here -- once it seemed in a startling tumble of books and papers at a certain moment not long after he died. He's here in the old snapshots I find of him and his friends in third grade clambering over each other on the playground. He's here in my heart. Always.

Island poem 2020

My toes surf the wet grass above the beach.

The wind brushes past my ears, my cheeks and temples.

Overhead the birds talk 

With purpose. 

They claim their territory, warn of predators, 

Call for partners, guard their fledglings.

Checking, always checking.

Chirping, chirruping 

To one another —

Where to fly, where to watch, 

where to find fish this morning. 

This one more morning 

Of one more summer’s life. 

The leaves on the quaking aspen (yes—that’s its name!)

Glitter in the breeze.  

A chorus of pines at water’s edge stands tall to sing to the opposite shore. 

The lonely cedar on the hill 

bent by the past, leans east

toward that far shore.  

Oh where are you?  

Over the lake the gulls rise on the updrafts,

screech insistently to one another. 

Har-eee, har-eee. 

Here, here. 

I came outside early yesterday with my iced coffee and my morning book (non-fiction in the morning, novels in the evening, that's my rule) -- I came outside, sat down at the patio table, looked up at the sky and said, "Oh, wow."

It was that deep, that blue, that -- I don't know -- that over-it-all.

Today, awake too early and once again outside with my iced coffee and my morning book, I'm listening to birds. A noisy chorus is going on,with a cardinal soloing over the top. A goldfinch is sitting on the far fence. This early in the day I can hear traffic sounds in the distance -- a far-off mash-up of sound, that I don't notice in the afternoon. The expressway is more than a mile away -- am I hearing all the cars and trucks between here and there? The sunlight is making occasional appearances, so that the maple leaves overhead are dark green and light green, the bits and pieces of contrast you might be confounded by in a large jigsaw puzzle. Early morning walkers and runners pass by, solitary. (Funny how when I get out of bed I am never struck by the impulse to go for a walk.) A squirrel stands up and pounds her white furry chest not six feet from my chair.

June 9, 2020. There will be storms this afternoon, with high winds according to the weather alerts on my phone.

And what else will the day bring? Floods of words, torrents of words, in emails, news feeds, social media. Solos from those with a platform, like the cardinal on the electrical wire a few minutes ago. Mostly a roar in which no one thing stands out for its beauty or clarity or depth. Chest-beating, like my friend the squirrel. Push and pull, light and dark, no firm truth. Humanity's self-consciousness at loose flooding the world.

I might rather be the squirrel who just now leaped across the grass in one, two, three, symmetric arches, gentle feed leaping from the ground, now threading under the weeds and reappearing with a rustle near the fence. Uncomplicated, with a consciousness all her own, as mysterious to me as the depth of blue in the sky.

Two Poems
Spring 2020



It’s warm for early March and drizzling.
Inside the coffee shop the barista
Presides, pulls the shots and clatters cups
across the counter.
Customers find their corners, stare at their phones.

Sisters share the brocade sofa,
And recite their news to one another
In the shelter of a tall potted plant.
“She doesn’t.”
“It’s only.”
“Who knows?”

Spring is far away.





My house, my house, my aging house.
Popping, peeling paint,
windows rotting lightly through the years.
It stands. It shelters,
Leans a little less than square.

Weeds grow tall, forsythia wild
Around the basketball hoop
Straight and sturdy in the yard.
Where are the boys who dribbled,
Turned, and shot from the court below,
Bouncing their angry edges hard
against the fiberglass backboard?

My house, my house, my aging house.
Herbs tumble over the dirt
New shoots green on last year’s woody stems.
Ancient chives and tarragon sweet.
Sage for blessing, thyme for spice.

My hand brushes the lavender,
Whose ancient fragrance
Guards my woolens from moths,
My senses from sleeplessness.

The spider web

This morning's gift: a tiny spider web in my backyard.

It is an eight-sided world all to itself, maybe three and a half inches across. It is a single plane that bends and curves in the wind. A long single strand of spider silk connects each vertex to a leaf or stem in the wilderness of the 50-year-old grape vine next to the patio.

I am lucky to be sitting here, at exactly the hour, exactly the right angle of the sun, to see the web glitter. The camera on my phone can't see it, and I may not have seen it either were it not for the breeze that gives it motion to refract the light this way and that. The strands that weave from radius to radius are packed close together. They'll snare some mighty tiny bugs for
 the worker who built this glittery trap.

I brought my knitting outside with me this morning, along with my coffee, thinking to redo the unsatisfactory work I ripped out last night. The openwork lace, the bright pink yarn, the shiny chrome needles look like materials for Jack's giant above the clouds compared to the delicate craft and threads used by this tiny arachnid.

From Wikipedia: 
Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all orders of organisms.

How does she do it? How does she warp her loom among the leaves? How long does it take to spin and stick together so many tiny threads? I noticed the beginnings of this work yesterday, but I didn't pay close enough attention to answer these technical questions. Robins and rabbits are much larger targets for observation these days in my weedy, wormy yard. I'm glad I walked only on the fence side of the patio table yesterday, however unintentional this was. Walking around the other way, brushing between the table and the grape leaves, would have destroyed this web before it was so perfectly. Mistress spider would have taken her business elsewhere, begun again, just another day in the chanciness of nature. But I would have missed this morning's moment of magic.

When I wake up in the morning, slowly, I inevitably reach for my phone. I wish I didn't, I vow not to do so the next day, but there it is. A press of my thumb, a touch, scroll and soon I'm reading the morning's news, not that much different from the news the night before. And last night's news was about looting, protest, fires and the angry, hurt, frustrated voices of black Americans who have waited far longer than anyone should have to wait for justice, freedom, prosperity. Does it do any good for me to linger over the details? To tweet, or retweet, or lecture others, mostly like-minded, about the evil I see, the change that needs to happen?

If I am to live mindfully, faithfully, filled with the Spirit, I must weave those things into my living too, be as mindful of the pain around me (and within me) as I am this morning of the wonder and beauty of nature.

The spider spins, needing nothing from me. In God's kingdom, lilies of the field and plain brown sparrows receive the tender care of their Creator and the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. God desires life and love for the created world.

I must invest in that creation.

Green, green, everywhere

Green, green, everywhere.

I have a friend whose favorite color is green. This friend is also someone who appreciates hand-made gifts, so I have knit things for her from green wool -- socks, a scarf. I've made them from hand-dyed yarn whose depths of color add warmth to the sock and invite the eye into the twists and turns of lace in the scarf.

Green is on my mind because this week everything outside looks about 80 percent greener than it did last week, if that's possible in spring. We've had so much rain that living things seem sodden with new growth. Leaves on maples are flourishing. The tips of the branches on the evergreens in front of my house are bright with new needles. The grass in the parkway is green under the haze of dandelions going to seed. The blue-green of the lilac leaves shows off what's left of the clusters of tiny purple flower. Nature's riches turn out, turn over, float on the breeze. My living room window is so crowded with green that it seems less a color than a condition, like water to a fish.

I finished reading "The Overstory" last night, a novel with human characters that is crowded with the voices of trees. So it's not surprising my morning imagination peers into maples and looks for mystery. I listen for voices, but only recognize my own irrelevance.

I'm older than the trees around my house. In the time when I was a child this street was likely lined with elms, lost to disease. The maples that replaced them were flourishing but young when we moved into this house. How much they've grown is evidence of how long I've lived here. The corner maple has to lean out over the street to find its light and keep growing.

No moral here. No wisdom. Just this one life form,  me, in a beige sweater made of plant and animal fiber, contemplating others.

What does your day look like during -- what exactly are we calling this? The springtime of eternal snow days?

I wake up in the morning and try to remember what I was dreaming. But before I can grab a mental screenshot of what will surely help explain me to me, reality steps in.

Oh. This.

I grab my phone and scroll through email. Devotions from Luther Seminary sent shortly after midnight. Junk. Charity appeals. Headlines from the Washington Post -- should I read them?

No.

Another day stretches before me of trying to do meaningful things in a vacuum, without brushing past other humans at less than six feet of separation, avoiding something, scrubbing away something -- a virus -- that I can't even see.

I don't know where it is, I don't know where it is not. I don't know if I'll have symptoms. I don't know if I'll get sick.

My brain is not wired for this. Nor has it evolved over the last six or seven weeks to meet this challenge more effectively. It will take effort to stay in balance again today.

Sunshine helps, and warm socks, and days when you go barefoot in your shoes and remember that summer will come soon. Masked strangers who nod as they walk past my fence with their dogs. A sister who brings chocolate cake and stands at the gate to talk. These things are real, if altered by isolation.

Screens on the other hand -- it takes effort and imagination to see real people and personalities inside the Zoom boxes online on a screen. We have all flattened out over the weeks of isolation. The lags and bumps in wifi are spontaneous, but we are not.

My living room has little piles in each of the places I sit. The book pile, the cookbook pile, the wooly yarn pile rich in blues and greens, browns and golds, the abandoned project pile. It's the way I lived in graduate school, with papers due at the end of the semester: the theatre history text on the floor, with 19th century plays and notes; the script for playwriting in the typewriter on the desk; the seminar project strewn across the bed. It would all be cleaned up, the room restored to order, when finished.

What does your day look like? This post was started yesterday, abandoned because it seemed to be going nowhere, with no appropriate tone or take. The day went downhill from there, and then climbed back up. Today, on a brighter, sunnier morning, my fingers and brain are itching to cast-on caps and shawls,

and words are flowing with less disappointment into my notebook and onto my screen.

I begin again.