Rattle

I am echoing inside, today, rattling like a key in a can.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?

******

"Look at that bird up there," I tell a young friend I am trying to distract from her task of pushing Sam off my lap. She stares up into blue.

"It's you," she says. "It's you in the future. Hey, Sam, look, it's your mom in the future up there!"

I swivel my head to take her in. Is it true?

I can't tell if it's vulture or a hawk.

******

I struggle at times with disappointment, sadness, frustration. Are these feelings authentic, or do they spring from my attachment to people, ideas, understandings? If the "understanding" is mine alone, where is the truth under what is standing? Which is an authentic feeling if so many arise from the way I think things ought to be? If I perceive my needs to be met, I am content.

I am a center of perception, a mirror, shiny and round. What is the sound of me in this hollow place?

********

Sam came to me three nights ago and told me his brain was going to burst.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I am me. But Trinidad is also "me." How can that be possible?" He groaned and held his head, falling to the ground.

The echoes are not all mine.

Last night, he told me that he wrote a story at school. It goes something like this:

There was a boy named 'I Don't Know My Name," and he'd just moved to a town called Me. He went to school on the first day and his teacher said, "What's your name?"

"I Don't Know My Name," he said.

"Oh. I'll call you 'George,'" said the teacher.

"But that's not my name! My name is 'I Don't Know My Name!'"

The boy went home and told his mom, "I hate Me."

"What? Don't say you hate yourself," she said.

"I didn't. I said I hate "Me" [the town]."

That is all that Sam had written so far.

And me? This is good enough for today.

What's For Dinner?

Tonight, I wavered between the temptation of "going out" for a burrito or .... I couldn't even imagine. Hungry, tired, I collapsed into a chair announcing that dinner was beyond me.

"That's okay," said Trinidad cheerfully. "I'll cook. You two just rest, and I'll take care of dinner."

Seda swung around and gave me the look only parents can share that says, "Wow, did you notice that we just peaked Mt. Everest? Check...out....this...view!"

I made myself horizontal and offered to write Trinidad a recipe for quinoa. Sam said he would help by making instant pudding (thanks to Trader Joes) for dessert. Wink, wink.

Trinidad picked greens in the garden. I only saw because I couldn't find him when I delivered the recipe. I am under strict instructions to stay out of the kitchen, and by Golly, I'm up to the task.

It's been 30 minutes.

"Boy, I don't get a break!" says Trinidad, running between turning off the timer, stirring the potstickers, and setting the table.

Sam informs him he can take 30 seconds, and Trinidad jumps at the suggestion, chasing his brother around the house with the stirring spoon and swinging at him dramatically with sound affects.

This must be "growing up." This is our household getting old, the tip of the Collier/Krebs iceberg with its wide bottom so far under that I can't consciously recount the stories of my ancestors, each of them struggling with growing old and raising families, each of them wedged wordlessly between past and future in the features of ten and seven year old boys manning the kitchen alone.

I will be fed by this work.

My Teachers

"Did you ever notice that pie isn't very good without whipped cream and whipped cream isn't very good without pie?" said Sam.

"...stars and moons flew past me as I fell," Trinidad told me, wide-eyed after a fall.

Sam's poetry vernacular dictated and scribbled onto a recipe card stuck to the refrigerator last year: "I sneakily hid and ate a piece of chocolate."

"Why did the intestine cross the road?" Sam asked me tonight. I shook my head and shrugged.

His eyes narrowed. "Because he didn't have the guts."

And finally, the paddle ball.

Sam got a cheap version of this classic toy at our local credit union as a "prize" for saving money under duress. He played with it for hours determined to strike it more than four times in a row.

"What if you could play paddleball infinitely?" he asked.

"What if?" I answered.

"That would be impossible," he said.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "What if an alternate universe opened its space and time to you right now and all you did was play and play and play paddleball...infinitely?"

I looked around me at the grocery lists, emails up for response, laundry to fold, and chickens waiting for their daily scraps. "Would it be so different?" I asked. "Sounds a lot like what I do all day."

Sam looked at me hard

and did not disagree.

In Future Memory

"When you die, I am going to write something on a piece of paper and put it on your grave," says Sam.

"What will it say?" I ask.

"You want to know now?"

"Yeah!"

"Oh. Okay. It will say, 'When you die, you fly.'" He smiles.

Crossroads

Yesterday, I lifted the lid off the beehive in order to add a queen separator and third box for honeymaking. Queen Mab and her Dreamy bees barely paid me notice. Their business before them stretched onward and up, the wax pouring from their bellies to form countless cells stacked -- a duplex, a triplex, apartmental compartments from which to hatch, to eat, to raise their young.

These are the words of the bees: build, build, build. What interest have they in a white-veiled minion from another world who puffs smoke at them questioningly before scraping, scraping away their work as it rises to touch the inner cover? She is a Breaker, they think. She does not understand.

The chickens escaped last night at dusk from their makeshift pen. My one, my girl, my Henny Penny crouched dutifully as I approached. She had taken out the front of my garlic bed and found the sandy loam a thrill to scatter, vastly superior to the clayed crabgrass and nettle that I allow her to graze. She lifted her wings and bent her knees as I reached down for her, sure that somehow my fate was inevitably intertwined with her own. One liquid amber eye gazed quietly into mine, unabashed. She believes that this orchestra of feeding, fluffing and laying somehow centers around my peripheral presence. She knows me as the Gatekeeper. This is the mythology of chickens.

Death is all around me this week. People, animals, and even trees I love are dying, inexorably silhouetted at the threshold of another world. I am flooded with emotion -- care for their comfort, love and appreciation for the gift of their presence in my life, sadness to imagine their departure. I question my attachment, the hunger that I feel, the desire to sink myself into another being, seeking attunement. Am I looking to escape?

Walking in the cemetery with the children this afternoon, I find peace in breathing through the inner storm I weather. This is compost, I think. My heart is full of decay -- a celebration of life in the face of letting go. I am heating up, I think, getting up to temperature. This is what it feels like in the middle of the pile. Transition, fruition, life pulsing into form. I am the spiral filled with light, swinging arms outward into darkest space. One in a million.

The boys have stopped by some vinca vines. "Mom! Come here!" they say.

They are watching a gray squirrel. It does not run away, and this is odd. I tie up the dog and come to see.

The tiny squirrel moves back and forth beside them for some time, and finally I reach out to pet its soft silver fur. The squirrel's response is almost immediate. Within minutes, it is hiding beneath our still, squatted forms then dashing out again to look up at us expectantly. It is young, I surmise, too young to have fallen from the nest. How young, not even my iphone will tell me with exactitude.

And that is what one needs when considering what to do with a squirrel sitting on your shoulder. One needs clarity about its age, its circumstance. I had to decide whether or how to detach its path from our own. Then, what peace could be made in whether it was served in that deliberation?

We take the squirrel home. A local wildlife rehab center did not respond to our calls, and we pack it along with us in hopes of reaching them by evening. More internet research points to the likelihood that this little fellow is just on the edge of weaned independence and could, perhaps, be rescued yet by his own mother. We take him back.

Peacemaking again with our emotions -- worry, disappointment, gratitude for the crossing of paths. Then I receive a call from the wildlife rehab worker who assures us that our instincts are correct, the squirrel is probably starving and orphaned.

We meet the volunteer back at the cemetery, find the squirrel where we'd left it (we had to bolt when we first returned it and were followed even so), then we send the tiny shaking creature on its way in seasoned hands.

This is the way of interspecies communion, the unwords of all kinds who, in desperation seek to give and receive.

Attuned, I am, even if the pitch shakes me at such a vibration that I think to lose myself. The world is dying, dying, living all around and here is my honored place at the crossroads.

Such is my mythology.

Good Things By Sam

Mom's

Small dogs

Chickens

Peace

Snow

Hot chocolate

Curiosity

Books

Love

Easter 2010

"Mom! We just got this great idea," Trinidad told me excitedly. "Sam and I are going to make you Easter baskets!"

It was after 10:00 at night on Friday. I smiled and suggested they make a list of what they wanted to do for that the next day. 

"But, there's a problem," Trin told me. "I don't know what to give you. If it was for me, I'd want a soccer ball, some crossword puzzles... but for you? I have no idea. What would you like?"

Delighted by his awareness of my individuality, I thought about it a bit. "I always love what you make me," I said.

He and Sam talked it over. "We'd like to give you something we cook. What do you want -- cookies, pie, cake, what?"

"Well..." I hesitated. I had decided to forego our traditional sweet bread to meet other needs the next day.  "There is something that I would really like, but I don't know if you could actually make it -- that's Easter bread."

"Do you have a recipe?" he asked.

"Yes, but you've never made bread before, and Easter bread is not easy for beginners."

"Oh, no problem," he said, with the confidence of his nine years. "We'll do it!"

The next day, I got a call on my cell phone. "How do you heat the oven to 125 degrees? I can see 175 and 200, but not 125."

"Are you heating the milk?" I asked. He was -- in the oven. He couldn't remember what part of the recipe went into the ceramic bowl, so he asked if he could wait for me to come home to interpret. I was only 20 minutes away.

I explained further where necessary and Trinidad did it all (except the measuring, which Sam took charge of -- that little ring of spoons jingled so attractively). Trin measured, mixed, kneaded, shaped and baked the loaves. The last steps he did without my support. Wow! I was so impressed.

Late Saturday night, Ben told Sam he'd better go to bed so that the Easter Bunny could come down the chimney.

"The Easter bunny will not come down the chimney. She is sitting on the toilet [referring to me]."

We laughed. "I know this because I am old enough to know this," he said proudly. 

"Mom? Will you please make us Easter baskets even when we are teenagers? If we make them for you, too?" Trinidad asked. "Because most kids stop getting them after they're ten."

"You know it, dude," I told him.

Have yourself... a very merry Easter.:)