Poets, Teachers, Companions, Creatures
The living room windows are framing a sideways snowfall that began with small random flakes not quite knowing which way they wanted to go. Now the flakes are visibly large, slightly more intentional with their flight pattern and there are more of them filling the spaces between the brave and bare branches of the tree line on the ridge. It’s an eclectic and tangled mix of black walnut, silver maple, mulberry and red cedar, all existing side by side more or less peacefully. Together they give us a helpful windbreak from the ambitions of the West, who changes her mind pretty much on the hour in late autumn. Our house was built long before television was even an idea in Philo Farnsworth II’s head, so I’m comfortable imagining that they deliberately placed the windows facing all the entertainment Mother Nature offered. She still does not disappoint.
With three of the four cats settled into their Sunday napping and the warmth of a space heater bringing the room’s temperature to a balmy 62, I’m letting quite a few varied and diverse memories rise unbidden to the surface. Days like this seem to be made for such reminiscing (cats are optional but highly recommended) and one that comes up clear and sharp is from the BP era (Before Pandemic), when commuting to work was the norm. If you timed it just right in our neighborhood, you could whiz past all the homes where the school bus stopped to pluck children from their long gravel driveways. When the weather allowed, parents stood with coffee cups in hand, slipper-shod feet and a hastily gathered jacket draped ‘round their shoulders, their morning hair covered in either a baseball cap or under the hood of said jacket. The bus comes, lights flashing, my fellow drivers and I are obedient to the swing-out stop sign and we watch another young mind clamber onward toward a life of the mind for at least the next six hours. It’s sweet when the child takes one last look at home and parent from the steps of the bus before being swallowed up into a yellow-clad temporary world of assigned seating and friendly chit-chat.
I can’t pinpoint when it started but at one house down the road, the father would transport his young daughter (seven, maybe eight years old?) in a white pick-up truck to the end of their long driveway, open the sunroof and let her stand on the seat to wave at all of us passing by on our way to work. She’d give us a vigorous and enthusiastic full-body wave and some of us would honk, resulting in a delighted jazz hands response until the next car approached in a purposeful blur. I suspect we made each others’ days with this drive-by greeting, and I did my best to time my departure to catch it. After a while it seemed right and fitting to thank her with a note and a handful of ceramic hearts, handmade by one of our hospice volunteers. I bagged them up, signed the note “The Red Tacoma” (what I was driving at the time) and placed them in the mailbox with the envelope addressed to “The Waving Girl”. I wonder if she knows the legend of another Waving Girl who would stand on the banks of the Savannah River in Georgia, performing a similar act of human kindness and connection for the sailors who steered the cargo ships into port? That I even know that story pulls up another trunk of cherished memories, spending the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day on Tybee Island with dear family, wearing shorts and t-shirts while others back home were probably watching snowflakes fall randomly against the gray backdrop of a chilly Ohio winter.
Today’s sneak preview of what we can expect in the months to come has me all tucked into the life of my own mind, and I don’t mind one bit. That necessary pause to consider some of what’s happened between the day I was born and this morning is worth it, no matter what other and more practical projects are tugging at my sleeve. I have lived in the company of people who have encouraged me to write and dream, to work hard, to synthesize bits of information into a new thought and be brave enough to speak it aloud. I’ve seen snapping turtles mating in the gently flowing water of our creek (only once, that second spring after we moved here and haven’t seen it since, so keep the edges of that memory crisp, filled with grateful wonder), heard the yipping calls of young coyotes near where the old goat barn once stood and let autumn’s wooly worms inch their way across the palm of my hand. And sometimes, when I’m walking through the new cut path near Patrick’s fasting site, I can smell without a doubt the scent of cinnamon, like someone baking pie, and a waft of Old Spice aftershave. I don’t need to figure it out; I just inhale and keep walking (not all of my companions here have faces I can see), knowing that I am better for their presence, seen and unseen, in my life.
Who features in your stories? Who taught you lessons you won’t soon forget? What have you seen, dear reader, that made such an impression on you that even a mid-autumn snow squall can’t keep it from rising up all warm and friendly to talk with you a while? Do give them time, these visitors from your past. Maybe you missed something the first go-around and they’re back to fill in the gap. Or maybe they just want to say hello as you drive by.
With or without the snow, it’s time well spent.
