Tag Archives: eclipse

Eclipse day ramble

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Noon eclipse day. Stock on. Bird bought after blood draw. How steady I am cutting the onion, the potatoes! I find the joint between thigh and breast easily as my heart is light, my knife sharp.

I walk the dog and I am not alone. Newton is a construction site and still I am grateful. My shirt is white, my heart intact, my teeth stay in my head. I am walking the dog in beauty, finding the joint in beauty. Picking up the catalpa pods that fell last fall, I am feeling useful if a bit stiff. The ends of the green beans get swept into the stock pot, but one rogue bean entire tries to hide in my apron pocket. My apron is triangular, drapey and in it I look like a small circus tent with feet.

And yet I am grateful. How one sunny warm day will change everything. Two nights ago, furnace on the blink (I told you so, dear husband), two heating pads fired up on full, I curl under blankets and wonder will I ever be warm again and then this day. This day, when the moon will pass between us and the sun — spooky, amazing, and rare. We won’t get totality, because I like my miracles to be convenient, but soon we will be in the presence of a kind of magic anyway, a magic that informs us that we are not the boss.

What a relief to not be the boss!

Do you have a high powered charging cable? Some days that’s all that matters. Today walking the dog three steps behind my husband (because: my hip. because: he doesn’t take instruction well), I feel how thoroughly I am like my mother! Today she inhabits me in my gray button down shirt, white sneakers, short hair — Mom in her relaxed Florida phase.

Will I get a relaxed phase? One where I stop giving a shit what other people think? One where it is permissible to exhale exhale exhale knowing the Nazis are crawling back under their rocks? A phase when some important things have been finished and I’m ready to do other things —things possibly important and possibly not?

The dog sinks to the floor in an exhale. There’s a lesson in that. One about surrender.

Gravity waves are a thing — did you know? And did you know that they are hard to study because no one can predict when they will appear with one notable exception. They are always present during eclipses.

So at 2:15 or so I’ll sit on the front lawn and don my glasses, and open up everything of who I am but effortlessly, like the dog sinking to the floor with a sigh. Is that even possible? The world will go slightly dark and we will be changed momentarily by gravity waves.

Meanwhile the chicken stock boils and there will be risotto with three kinds of mushrooms tomorrow, which is another testament to my mother who never prepared risotto but was an excellent cook.

This body. This day. A braid of: my mother, my own gladness, the relief at not being the boss, the smell of chicken stock on the stove. A short yelp of hallelujah is in order.

Tease, Ta Da, and Eclipse

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First the tease.
IMG_1285Just when I thought there might be little left to say about the Charleston quilt blocks, I spent some time with this panel. It was stitched by Kristin McNamara Freeman, of Montana. I can’t wait to share it with you this week.

  Now — the first of two Ta-Da’s. One of the ‘undone’ from the “last September post” is now done!
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It’s one of two “LA Circle” quilts — inspired by sunny, warm visits to my brother in California, where I also picked up one of the key fabrics (a burnt velvet of pink and black).  

   I went for fairly uniform sizes and was pleased to discover that they’re pretty close.
IMG_2442ALSO:  I found the book by Stephanie Camp on resistance by enslaved southern women (whose opportunities to move about their confined geographies were more limited than the men’s, thus changing the nature of their rebellions). It turns out, I had in fact read the entire book. TA-DA!IMG_2412Meanwhile, the garden is as dry as a bone. It feels like it hasn’t rained all summer.
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For some reason, it felt like the eclipse last night signaled the real end of summer. We stepped out to look a few times.Our attention was episodic, rather than sustained or worshipful (as it might have been).

But being out on the curb in the moist night air was something, and hearing crickets striking their chorus prompted me to say to K, “I feel like we just stepped into another life.”

He said, “I know.”

As a child, this was common — smelling the earth, hearing the insects and marking the change in seasons by them. I am too much inside.  Last week I had dinner with C — a friend from eighth grade! I used to walk across the cornfields that separated our developments at all times of day and night and In the summer, we rode our bikes to the pool way on the other side of town — things I’d never have let my boys do at the same ages.

(In fact, when I read the novel “The Lovely Bones” a few years ago, I pictured the crimes taking place in that cornfield  —  a kind of retroactive terror?)

C. laughed about my stay-at-home life. She has never married or had children and the contrast yawned between us. “Back then, you really pushed the edges,” she said. I laughed. But I wonder too: “how did I get here?” and “do I belong?” Meanwhile, I continue with the writing and let it take me places, which is an adventure of a kind, for sure.