Silence, after and before

 It's silent in my backyard, relatively speaking. There's the sound of a plane overhead. A car turns out of the alley to the north, and another drives past my yard and turns into the alley. There's the sound of traffic a block away, and more city noise further in the distance. No dogs, no people walking past. It's gone dark in the time I've been out here with my Oktoberfest beer, finishing a crossword puzzle before looking at the empty white space in a new blog post. 

It's silent—noticeably silent after a noisy afternoon of music: Vaughan William's Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis stretched and held, pushed forward and held back, shaping silence into human need and yearning. (Listen here.) The main event that followed was a Bach cantata (BWV 119)  with many, many four-trumpet fanfares lavishing praise on the people of Leipzig and their new town council. (Program notes here.) One has to admire the great man, who kept all this pompous flatter just this side of winking humor without tipping over from sincerity into satire. There were plenty of big finishes and more high As than I can remember in the hymn settings. (It is nice when the choir director smiles at the soprano section as we hold one of these high notes for a full measure or more. I know he's smiling to be encouraging because he thinks it will help the tuning,  but I do hope some percentage of the pleased look was genuine pleasure.) 

After that smashing late-afternoon hour and a half, the evening quiet and even the chill in the air are welcome. What is God speaking now?

A book I read recently spoke of all music beginning in silence. It was historical fiction about J. S. Bach and his family ("The Great Passion" by James Runcie), told through the voice of a student soloist in the choir. The remark about silence was attributed to Bach, who in this novel has to speak in sermons rather than melody and counterpoint. It seems like I read this remark somewhere else as well. I've fallen into a habit of reading two or three books at once, and sometimes the characters and/or the philosophy melt from one into the other. 

Does all music begin in silence? What does that mean? 

I guess there has to be silence before the music begins. I guess there has to be silence waiting to be broken by a tune or a fanfare. I guess silence — absence — calls, at least to some of us, for a statement. It's asking to be filled or pushed aside. Or we are compelled to separate ourselves from the silence and be noticed, heard. We need to be making something where there was nothing before. Like God at creation. Like a third-grade boy who can't sit still. Or me, who has opened up an empty white page in the blogging browser window not sure if she has anything to say.

When the music is over, the order imposed on the sound is let go, the ears stop ringing and the trumpeters and sopranos and the rest of the musicians go home to dinner and a nice glass of beer or whisky. 

Music ends in silence, though we are, most certainly, changed. As surely as God spoke, let there be light.

St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig where BWV 119 was first performed. 

  

Coexistence

There is a black cat who lives in my neighborhood. I don't think it's a stray or someone's outdoor cat. I think it may be feral. It's not sleek and shiny. Its hair stands on end. It looks healthy enough but is definitely not overfed.

I see it sometimes early in the morning settled into one of the cushioned patio chairs when I come outside to drink my coffee. It looks at me steadily, calmly, for a few moments before slowly abandoning the comfortable spot. It doesn't startle and run off. It just cedes the territory, eyebrow arched, letting me know it will be back. While I don't see the cat often, some mornings I do see a bit of fur left behind in the chair. I assume it's there more often than I see it, early in the morning or during the night. 

One morning, recently, as I sat outside with my coffee and my notebook, I heard a sudden rustle behind me. I turned quickly enough to see the black cat dive into the weeds along the fence, through a hidden corridor under the greenery. It swooshed down the twenty-foot patio and suddenly reappeared at the other end with a little leg hanging down out of its mouth.

My jaw dropped. I held very still. The cat stood still for a moment as well, looking for a way out of the yard. The prey in its mouth posed a brief spatial puzzle. Which way to fit through? Under the gate? Around? And then it was gone. I could not see in what direction it went to tear up its prey and eat its breakfast. 

What did the cat catch? A very tiny baby bunny, perhaps, that had wandered from the nest? More likely a rat. Though I've never seen one around the exterior (or interior) of my house, the local paper tells me they're probably there in the alley. Whatever it was, I think it was too big to be a mere mouse. 

This little bit of excitement made me think some more about something that had happened the previous week in my backyard. I had come down the back stairs in the morning and found a dead mouse at the bottom. It seemed an unlikely place for a mouse to expire, but there it was, laid on its side, attracting flies.

I'm no stranger to dead mice. There are always boxes of Deacon mouse bait in the dark corners of my attic. The little critters occasionally die right out in the open, instead of just passing away in the walls and stinking for a day or two. I don't like having to pick them up and take them to the garbage. Back in the days when a husband and sons lived in this house, I was not ashamed to be squeamish and rely on them to pick up dead mice. But now that's my job. I got a trowel from the garage and a plastic grocery bag from the house and used the one to flick the mouse remains into the other. I walked quickly to the garbage can, dropped it in, and was glad to be done. 

But now I wonder. I've heard stories from cat owners of their indoor pets leaving them trophies at the bottom of the stairs in the early morning hours — the mice they've killed in service of their masters. Did that black cat leave that mouse for me, in tribute to my ownership of the backyard? Or maybe, as an acknowledgement of our shared reign? Is this cat truly feral, or is it remembering some old relationship with a human who cared about it?

Just a few days ago I again saw the cat, this time in my herb garden. It snuck around the oregano and crouched expectantly on top of the chives. I couldn't quite see it, but I heard the pounce into the sage.  Did it catch anything? I don't know. 

Treasuring summer, even in the heat

Garden ornament by Sue at FaithInClay.com 

It's gonna be a hot one.

The eggplant I brought home from the farmers' market a little while ago is warm and radiating heat on the kitchen counter. That dark purple skin absorbed plenty of energy just this morning, lying in the sun on the farmer's table in the asphalt parking lot that hosts the market. I bought corn and tomatoes, a single large beet, a bell pepper, and a quart of blueberries. The local peaches I look forward to all summer are ripening in a basket at the back of the counter, and there are glads, standing tall in a vase -- not in the living room or dining room, but right at the entrance to the kitchen where Eliza and I will see them whenever we come into the house.

This is summer. A season of family vacations, swimming in lakes, playing in the backyard, hanging laundry out to dry at Grandma's house. Summer theater, summer concerts, mosquitoes, and baseball. Memories of my dad painting the house with Grandpa helping in those weeks between summer school and the start of the fall term. We kids arranged the sliced tomatoes and bologna sandwiches for lunch and later watched as Daddy cracked open a beer at 3:30 in the afternoon, before cleaning up for the day. The cold bottle sweated and dripped in the outdoor air, just as we did. 

The heat did not seem so malevolent then. Meteorological data shows it's worse now, and we know now that heat creates deadly risk, especially for people who are old and on the margins. That was probably true in 1965, too, but like pollution and everything having to do with humankind's abuse of nature, so much worse now.

When it's very cold and when it's very hot, I often think of the people who lived on this land a century or two ago. How did they do it? How did they experience the weather's life-threatening extremes? This morning as I came outside to get the car out of the garage, I thought of Aunt Eller, my character in a production of "Oklahoma!" fifteen summers ago. Aunt Eller's appearance onstage starts the show, and it was my favorite thing to do — to walk out on stage, gaze into the lights and see a summer morning rolling in from the east, the sky growing bluer by the minute. She was anticipating the heat and the work of the day and then shared that picture with Curly singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning." I don't know what the audience saw looking back at us, but it sure was beautiful from where I sat. 

Aunt Eller had sweat rolling down her back within the hour, part of belonging to the land her family farmed. And that land, of course, originally belonged to indigenous people who had themselves belonged to it for millennia. 

I just finished reading "The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science," by Andrea Wulf. Humboldt lived from 1769-1859. He was a polymath, a man of wide-ranging knowledge, not just of science, but also of poetry, classics and politics, He wrote numerous books, some detailing botanical and zoological discoveries from his exploration of South America, others more sweeping views of Nature and the Cosmos. He was widely read and widely celebrated in the 19th century, an important influence on Darwin and later, John Muir. Unlike the cataloguers and classifiers of this and that species who preceded him, he saw the natural world as a unity, one organism, and wrote about the interdependency of plants, animals, climate and geography decades before Ernst Haeckel, a German scientist who'd read his Humboldt, coined the term Ökologie, from the Greek oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation."

What is this? I didn't plant it.

So here I sit in my backyard looking, thanks to my recent exposure to Humboldt, with the eye of an amateur scientist as well as an habitual poet. It's not ninety degrees — yet, not quite time to go inside and seek relief in the air conditioning—so I'm trying to treasure the details, the smallest plants and insects that make up my world. The plants and weeds that surround the patio are all very green because there's been plenty of rain. The decades-old grapes growing on the fence continue to flourish and fascinate preschoolers walking by with their parents. The purple flowers left on the sage plant are still attracting bees while the bowl that held my fruit and yogurt attracts flies, who also like to land on my bare legs. 

This suburban street is a long way from the second-growth state park forests that were the back-to-nature destinations of my childhood. And in 2022, I am far more aware of the threat that out-of-balance human beings pose to the organism that is planet earth. But there are pale butterflies fluttering across the patio and birds chirping as they settle in for a less-active afternoon in the heat. Even the bird poop on the chair I'm not sitting in is part of creation, part of the creator's worked-out vision of unity. 

Praise be!

(Also, praise be that Congress is actually about to pass climate change legislation!)

Attachments

I watch myself weed books from my shelves. Sehr komisch, I think. Very funny. 

It is my belief that I should hang on to no more books than I have shelves to keep them on. And by shelves to keep them on, I don't mean stacked on the washstand next to my bed or stacked on top of and under the library table in the living room. Definitely not on the ironing board. 

I do not have room for more book shelves. Yet new books are being published all the time. Local independent bookstores need my support. And yes, I do use the public library. 

So last week it was time to weed, to make some decisions about all those books on the shelves. I began with the books closest to the back door, the ones on the shelves that rest on brackets hooked into supports that I screwed into the studs 30-odd years ago during Kris's nap. Surprisingly, they've held up, despite occasional landslides.

Two of these shelves hold fiction, horizontally stacked, a mix of read-a-long-time-ago, want-to-read-someday, ought-to-read-someday, given-to-me-by-a-friend, and picked-up-for-free-or-for-cheap. When I need something to read, like when I've finished a book at 10 p.m. and need something to fall asleep with, I look here. And then go look somewhere else. Clearly some of these books can and must go. 

I stand on the kitchen step stool and pick up a book from the shelf. What is this? Where did it come from? What sort of intellectual pretension or passing fancy made me think I would read it? Is it diverting historical fiction, or the predictable kind I have no patience with? Sherwood Anderson—really? I read the first chapter of that little piece of Americana a couple years ago on vacation and could not make myself read more. Time to get rid of it. Jonathan Franzen's "Crossroads"? That big book stays on the shelf for now, if only so that I can continue to congratulate myself for getting through it. 

I notice that after a dozen or so books I'm completely confused. Why do I return some to the shelves? Why do I  drop others into the brown paper bag on the floor--the bag that will surely split when I take it out the back door? 

There is no logic here, no rational basis for holding on to some books and not to others. It's comical, quizzical, completely subjective. Are there hidden rules for keeping or discarding books? Why am I so attached to some and so finished with others? I seldom get rid of gifts from friends and family. Books that opened my mind about something tend to stay on the shelf. (I may need to pry open that crack again someday.) Books I dearly want others to read stay, too. But the ones I give up on? A crooked smile is often the only reason I've got.

Kept on the shelf: a Faulkner (seriously, I ought to read some Faulkner); "Hamlet" (recently reread, but I dumped the book of criticism I read alongside it); "Cloud Cuckoo Land" (well-woven story, bright shiny book from last Christmas); an Elena Ferrente novel (50 cent purchase, likely to be engrossing). 

What to do with fiction read long ago? There are two or three books each from Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley, Alice McDermott, Louise Erdrich -- books I collected and read as they were published, some of them decades ago. Many of these went into the bag for the library book sale.

There was a pile of novels by Sue Miller, and I happened to flip open the cover of one, wondering about the copyright date. Inside, on the fly leaf, I found an inscription, because the book had been a Mother's Day gift to me in 1990. The message, written by my husband in my three-year-old son's voice. It began "To the ultimate Good Mother," a reference to Miller's previous book—the one that led me to mention this title to Lon. It went on, "Me and my baby sister/brother [I was pregnant at the time] know you really like to read lots and lots. So we got you this book because we want you to be happy on Mother's Day and all the time, not just a couple while."

"A couple while." I'd forgotten how Kris said that as a preschooler. 

The inscription. Lon gave me many books through the years. I should look for more of these. 

Both Lon and Kris are gone now — Lon died in 2006, Kris in 2017, five years ago this month. 

The book was titled "Family Pictures." 

I kept it. 

Fiber management

I now own a loom. Not one big as a pantry, like you'd see at Colonial Williamsburg. Not even a floor loom like you'd see in a college art department. Just a tabletop loom, with a weaving width of 15 inches. Bigger than a toy, it has all the working parts of larger looms — warp beam, fabric beam, beater, reed. harnesses, heddles. The central frame that holds the harnesses (four of them) is called a castle, a term which is easy to remember because of the way it stands above all the activity of the moving parts below. 

It's all very pretty; the wood is beautiful. I bought it secondhand from someone whose deceased wife was a weaver.  I kinda know what to do with it. I took a two-day class last fall and made a small sample of plain weave, rib and twill on this type of loom. There are more classes in my future. I've bought the book that teachers recommend and yesterday morning reviewed the section on warping the loom, step one in any project. 

Warping means putting on the thread or yarn that runs lengthwise in the cloth. It's a process where a beginner relies on the experience of teachers, not because the basic concept is complicated, but because you're working with maybe 240 pieces of yarn, each one 4-6 feet long. You can imagine what a sorry mess you'd have on your hands without a method for measuring and moving, anchoring and finally threading each end through the slots of the reed and the holes in the heddles. You do all of this with care and thoughtfulness, checking frequently for twists and mis-counting. Mistakes can be fixed, but it's easier not to have to.  

I am itching to put a warp on my loom, but unsure if I any of the yarns I already have will make a good first project. Unfortunately I am never averse to ordering more yarn, especially if that's what's needed to assure a successful project. I shopped online last night at three large yarn and weaving suppliers and ended up completely frustrated. I found a beautiful cherry-red yarn at my favorite vendor's site, but the warping pegs I wanted to buy were out of stock. The vendor with two kinds of warping pegs to choose from, both in stock, did not have yarn that inspired me. And when I found both yarn and pegs at the third vendor's site, I could not place the order because I already had an account that I couldn't log into. 

After a brief respite on Twitter, I picked up my knitting.

I spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon on another fiber project: reclaiming yarn from moths and mothballs. Last fall I was gifted with several tubs full of yarn left after a house sale. Some of it -- 29 balls of Koigu (nice stuff) -- smells nauseatingly of mothballs. I spent a couple hours unwinding the balls back into skeins that I could hang in the sun. Brought them in overnight, thinking the smell was gone. Stuck my nose in them this morning -- they're back out on the patio. Tomorrow, maybe, they'll get a soaking in vinegar and more sun.

Deliberate tasks, determined reclaiming of old stuff. Two days into retirement and I remind me of my grandmother. And yes, she'll laugh and approve when I finally end up tossing that yarn in the garbage. I'll feel younger and more extravagant when the new yarn -- yes, the website worked for me today -- arrives in the mail later this week. 

Good morning world

There's a heat advisory today from the National Weather Service. The weather app on my phone says 99 degrees by mid-afternoon. It's 7am and I'm sitting outside. It's not hot yet, but it's oppressively humid and the ground is wet after a big storm last night. More little bugs than usual are floating around my chair. I'll be scratching the mosquito bites later. 

But the birds are chirping almost continuously, a canopy of invisible sound woven into the bright green of the maple overhead, answered from the darker green of the maple down the street. The cardinal is calling from somewhere behind me. Things are growing: basil in the pot, dill in the ground, grass and weeds and hidden molds that will aggravate my allergies for the rest of the week. It feels like the midwest version of a tropical rain forest. 

I'm lucky to have this view on the world: substantial trees planted in the parkway, land around my house that hosts lush weedy greenery, urban birds for company. It's not the natural world. There's too much concrete. There are cars. But it's enough like it to be comforting and renewing, even as I hear the garbage truck working its way down the alley. 

Good morning world.

From the bulletin board of a perverse Lutheran

On June 30, my last day as a Grace Staff member, I will be cleaning out my office, which lies in a far corner of the building, two flights of stairs above the church library. I’ll be sorting out books and music, cleaning out files both physical and digital, deciding which personal items to take home and which ones to take to the dumpster

I will also take down the ephemera from my bulletin board. Ephemera may not be the right word for the postcards, newspaper clippings and odd bits of this and that on my bulletin board; ephemera means “transitory creations not meant to be retained or preserved.” The things on my bulletin board are there to help me remember things. Some are there for obvious reasons. Others — I am still puzzling about some of them.

There are postcards from places I’ve visited — places that have fueled both curiosity and contentment. There’s a photo I took of the four young women who sang in my Joyful Voices choir: they’re standing up tall, hands clasped in “Sound of Music” singing position and peering into the camera over their glasses, as I so often peered at them from the piano. There’s a comical drawing of J. S. Bach on a postcard from the Bach House in Eisenach, Germany. The scowl on the great man’s face is frightfully serious yet somehow reminds me of all the delight to be found in the great man’s music. There’s a page from a daily calendar with a quote from Ella Fitzgerald: “The only thing better than singing is more singing.” There’s a notecard with Romans 8:38 in calligraphy (“I am persuaded that neither life nor death…”) There are mementos of my children and of shows I’ve directed and a bracelet that came to me from a former colleague who passed away in 2014. She still reminds me to take the time to do it right.

There’s also a column of quotes typed out on plain white paper in my choice of fonts. Not surprisingly, one is about misogyny. Many are about writing:

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” Thomas Jefferson

“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” John Maynard Keynes as quoted by Paul Krugman

“Keep typing until it turns into writing.” David Carr

More pretentiously:

“Tell the truth. Don’t decorate. Remember death.”

I don’t know where this one came from some dozen or more years ago. It seemed like something to try to live into, if only in a modest way as a church communicator.

Several years later I posted another darkish quote, this one a bit of a puzzle:

“I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” Stephen Colbert

It’s from an interview published in GQ, August 15, 2015. Colbert, host of “The Late Show” on CBS, is the youngest of 11 children. His father and the two brothers closest to him in age were killed in a plane crash when he was 10. The statement comes from his attempts to explain how his mother, a devout Catholic, and he himself managed to survive this tragedy.

It is a paradoxical statement and it was stapled to my bulletin board because I wondered how it could possibly be true. It was something I tested in my own life as I watched my son Kris fight the good fight of dying from ALS. Before and after his death in July of 2017, I would stare at this statement and say, no, I’m not there, not there yet.

But maybe I am there now. This is hard to explain. It’s something about the largeness of love, and how that love originates in God and grows as we love others through good times and bad. Something about love living larger and longer than anger. Something centered in a cross.

From my office I can hear the organ played in church — musicians practicing, tuners tuning, organists playing hymns as the congregation sings. From the computer on my desk I’ve sent both death notices and festive Easter and Christmas worship schedules to the people of Grace. I’ve churned out 80 or 90 issues of Grace Notes and many more email newsletters, each one full of details about lives shared, life treasured, as we live and love one another, together in Christ.