by

The Yellow Jacket in Sequim

deckSitting here on my deck in Sequim, Washington. Birds calling. Wind rustling the trees. In the distance, the sound of children playing. I feel like I am at summer camp.

I’m stepping outside my writing shed to write this morning. It’s more of writing shedish right now. I’ve cordoned off a section of the workshop building in the property we have leased for our initial entry into Sequim.

Outside the writing shedish

Outside the writing shedish

A yellow jacket that had managed to find its way into the building flung itself over and over into the window I sit in front of, seeking a way out. I had left the door open to my writing shedish, but the yellow jacket did not seem to find it—or even seek it out. I suspect it was fixated on its exit strategy—a closed window that offered a false promise.

Lesson learned from yellow jacket: when our efforts are foiled, look for other possibilities.

We have been here a little over a week now. I don’t know whether it’s the air, the spirit of the Northwest, the decision we made to change, or a combination of all of the above, but last Sunday, as we drove along Sequim Bay, it hit me: possibilities. They have grown exponentially since we landed here.

It’s a clean slate. We brought lots of boxes, but left behind baggage we no longer needed—the ghosts of people we loved, whose lives ended before we could fix what was left unfinished. Unfinished for us.

That’s the thing with life. It’s finite. But relationships are infinite. They continue in us. It’s up to us to make of them what we will—take what is ours and leave what was theirs to those who have finished living. Not an easy thing to do. Some love is unrequited for eternity for us. It’s the imperfection in the tapestry that lets life through.

Perhaps that is maturity. Accepting the love that was expressed, mourning for that that can never be.

I started this blog to change my story, to find the story that was mine, not one that was given to me. Our move to Sequim is the blank page in the story I am discovering.

Our front yard

Our front yard

We are leasing for nine months. It feels like a vacation home. Or more, a retreat. For me, a writing retreat. Instead of searching for community, my task is my writing.

Beans and Meatballs and the Pink Stuff is my current project. It’s a personal narrative about me and three women who had an impact on me: my mother, Sally Binford, and Jeanette Harris. All were born in the first quarter of the twentieth century: Jeanette, three years before women had the right to vote; my mother and Sally entered the world when that right was four years old.

All of us, in some way, were taught that, like the yellow jacket, the window we saw out of was our only possibility.

I’ll know more of what to say about that as the story unfolds.

by

When Life Gives You Lemons

Be grateful. Be very grateful.

lemon tree 1The first night we moved to our home in Livermore, I asked Tom if he would mind getting me a lemon. He looked perplexed. Did I really want him to go to the store to get just one lemon? And then it dawned on him what I meant—would he please pick one from the tree in our front yard.

I remember seeing an old movie, it might have been a silent one, where a hand reached out of a window to pick an orange hanging from the tree right next to the house. California. A paradise where oranges were in such abundance, you didn’t have to wait until Christmas to receive one in your stocking. All you had to do was reach out your window and one would jump into your hand.

That’s what that moment, the first night in Livermore, felt like to me.

It has been quite a journey, my return to Livermore. For Tom as well, I think. A paradise and a hell. The best and worst things in my life happened to me here—when I was a child, and then again when I returned.

I’ve asked myself, why? Why were there such extreme experiences and why did I return here?

On the surface it was family matters that drew us back. Tom’s dad and my mother were nearing the end of their lives. We came to care for them and ended up bearing witness to the waning of their lives.

There were many other losses we experienced while living here. Our cat Rug, Dominic’s wife. Doug’s wife. George. Marge. Ed.

There were triumphs. Tom’s commissions to write orchestral pieces. Fourth Street Studio and the Saturday Salons. Publishing five anthologies of the writing from people who came to the Salons. Productions of spoken words. Tom and I returned to acting. I directed my first two plays.

And then there were the painful obstacles. An arts community that was driven by the fear that there was not enough to go around—not enough talent, not enough acclaim, not enough enough. It created a competitive environment that was not based on striving for excellence, but rather battling over who would be in control, who would be the anointer.

I was always on the other side of this competition. Or rather, I was outside of it, never giving it credence, plugging along doing my work, producing events, publishing anthologies without waiting to be anointed.

I was surprised at the viciousness of the response to my successes. It became enervating, being the outsider. I sought community. It tweaked all my childish, festering wounds—all based on the question, why aren’t I acceptable? What’s wrong with me?

The big lesson for me in all of this was that being acceptable was not my story. My story is about being authentic. A writer’s voice, after all, must be authentic if she is to rise to Faulkner’s challenge issued in his Nobel prize speech: create from the materials of the human spirit, that which did not exist before.

We were told in our Hospice volunteer training that our job was to bear witness. We weren’t there to help, heal, cure, cheer up, or fix. We were there to bear witness to a life.

I like that: bearing witness.

I think that might be why I was called to return to a place that holds such extreme experiences for me. It was the opportunity to bear witness to my own life. To see the story I thought I was supposed to be living, and find the one that was mine. To begin to live that story.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade the adage goes. But there is so much more you can do with lemons. Lemon meringue pie. Lemon sorbet. Lemon curd, Lemon juice in your salad dressing. Lemon juice squeezed over your fish, pork roast, roasted chicken. Lemon and honey and fresh ginger in hot water to soothe a sore throat. Lemon peel twisted, the oil from its rind circling the rim of the martini glass. Lemon zest added to—well to just about anything.

Life gives you the lemons. You get to decide what to do with them.

The trunk of Gene’s lemon tree is gnarly, the gnarl that comes with age. Lumps and bumps formed to heal wounds. A rod inserted to hold split halves together. Lemons dangling like ornaments from its branches and hidden like Easter eggs amidst the foliage on the ground.

Gene’s final words, spoken in the middle of the night, were to his hospital roommate. Words that seemed to come from an incoherent state but were in fact articulate. Words from a man who endured terrible disappointments, but whose heart never gave out.

“I’ve had a good life,” he said. “But I’m ready to leave. I think I’ll get in my car and get out of here.”

Of course it was he who planted that lemon tree. It’s his legacy. A gift that bears fruit year after year and reminds us that we can make of the fruit what we want.

That’s what I learned when I returned to my Livermore. Life gives us lemons. An abundance of them. And that’s a good thing.

An abundance of friends came to our farewell party, staying for our final howellelujha chorus, our howls reminding us that we are a pack of the heart. Tom and I felt well-loved. Felt we had made a difference—and I think that’s what we want in life—to feel like we make a difference.

Gene’s lemon tree stays behind. Bearing fruit. Bearing witness. Gene’s legacy. His gift to our world.

If life gives you lemons, be grateful. Be very grateful.lemons sun

Note: Our house has sold. This is the last post that I will write in my Writing Shed, the place that inspired the name for my blog. I will take this next week off. Next time I blog it will be from my new home, my next writing shed in the great Northwest.

by

Weaving Our Fate

DSCN0251By acting on our creative opportunities, we take our fate back into our own hands. Such is the meaning of the Spider (High Priestess) card in the Animal Wise Tarot deck.

Fate. I usually resist that concept. One is fated for something. Has no choice in the matter.

Acting on creative opportunities to take fate back into my own hands puts a different slant on it.

Michelangelo said that he saw the statue when he picked out marble from the quarry. Then he would get to work releasing it from the marble.

My journey for a good many years was to find the innocence lost in my childhood—to restore it. I entered innocently into friendships, partnerships, jobs, with the assumption that my best interest was central to any agreements that formed the basis of the relationships. That is, I thought that my best interest was at the heart of the other party’s motivations.

I was stuck in the helplessness of childhood. That brand of innocence is actually a bit on the narcissistic side.

I don’t know when the light bulb lit up over my head. It has been there for a while, that light bulb, waiting for the switch to be flipped. I’m not even sure what made me flip the switch. But it was a revelation:

I didn’t need to restore my innocence. I needed to embrace experience.

Experience, not guilt, is the flip side of innocence.

Each one of us is living a story. It might be truly ours, or it might be one we think we are supposed to be living—one given us with such dogma that we think we have no choice but to live it. I think our job is to chip away at the dogma, much as Michelangelo chipped away at the marble slab, so we can release the story we are, not the one we think we are supposed to be. And our story comprises our experience.

My early experience showed me that there is darkness as well as light in the human heart. Maturity has allowed me to see that the darkness of another’s heart wasn’t and isn’t about me, but rather experience stuck in the darkness of shame, humiliation, and refusal to let go of innocence.

Maybe that’s the villain in us—refusing experience, holding onto innocence. The hero in us embraces experience as life, our life, and weaves it into our story.

My fate is my story. The story that is my life, comprising innocence and experience, light and dark, joy and sorrow.

We each have our own life story.

by

Once Upon a Time, I Knitted

Once upon a time I knitted. With emphasis on once.

I was 19. My grandmother knitted up a storm. She always had knitting needles, crochet hooks, or needle and thread in her hands. She hand stitched blouses right up until her death at 99.

So, when I was 19, I decided to knit. To make a scarf for my then boyfriend. This was a brief era when we (whoever “we” were) were trying to get back to the time before household appliances, TV dinners, and other labor-saving devices and products were introduced to make women feel okay about being sent back to housewifery after their “Rosie the Riveter” experience.

My grandmother showed me how to get started, but we never got around to the “casting off” part. I knew how to knit, but not how to stop. So I just stopped. I don’t know when the half-finished (if that) scarf with knitting needles attached disappeared—it just did.

Once upon a time, I almost experienced a tornado.

It was 2009, thirty years after I started my knitting “project.” I was in Iowa City for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. The sirens started wailing on a Sunday evening as I walked to the first meeting for my class. The Mid Westerners strolled casually, while a woman from Seattle and I ran to the door of the first building, only to find it locked.

“The entrance is on the side,” someone said. Seattle woman and I trotted to the side of the building. I don’t know about her, but I was replaying all the disaster movies I had ever seen where those who can’t get in the locked door are doomed to be eaten by the monster, killed by the psycho, or swept away by the tornado.

That didn’t happen. Instead, I spent my first class meeting writing in the belowground floor of the natural sciences building, surrounded by glass-encased images of a giant grasshopper, the torso of an ape, and bird dioramas. An Iowa City resident tracked the oncoming tornado on her smart phone.

For an instant, hot air pressed in with a vise-like grip. A light film of sweat covered me. Then just as suddenly, it released its grip and cool air blew and the light film of sweat cooled me off.

The tornado had touched down a few miles away.

I remembered seeing my Great Aunt Neet’s Blackwell, Oklahoma, house after it got struck by a tornado in 1955. I was five. She was my grandmother’s younger sister. Her husband had grabbed her and their daughter and a mattress, carried them with his will to the bathtub in the inner bathroom and pulled the mattress over them. As the tornado raged above them, my great aunt and her daughter prayed while my great uncle cursed. Apparently that covered all their bases. They survived intact, but I believe their roof ended up miles away.

Knitting was on my mind this past week. Along with the tornado in Oklahoma.

The week before I had gone to Sequim, our new home, to make sure we had an actual home to which our movers could deliver our belongings. On Thursday, I was treated once again to an evening with my friend’s knitting group.

They meet once a week to eat, drink wine, share their lives, and knit. It’s an excuse to get together, so not everyone knits each week. But they do eat, drink wine, and share their lives. Sometimes, they knit at a local restaurant or wine bar. Once they met at the bowling alley. All so they support local establishments. Sometimes, they leave knitted balls to let them know they have been knit-bombed.

For the first time, I understood the mindfulness of knitting. I understood that where I see a ball of yarn (or is it a skein?), those who knit see how it can be transformed—into a blanket, booties, a sweater, or a scarf. That was the missing piece for me—the transformation of yarn into three dimensions.

And underneath the transformation of yarn, was the knitting of relationships. Plans were made to form a work party to tend the yard of a woman who was absent because her husband was in the hospital. Compliments passed around for the homemade soup served by the hostess, the asparagus grown and fresh picked by a retired corporate executive, the rhubarb-blueberry crumble made from fresh-picked rhubarb. And so on.

It’s what I have come to refer to as “womaning up”—embracing what I thought of as things of the home—and transforming them into a three-dimensional world. Creating community. Being free of destructive female competition.

My grandmother never really freed herself from that competition. In part because she excelled at those things of the home. She made sure she did. But, because it was a competition, it left no room for things outside the home—like being concerned for those outside one’s extended family.

So for years, I thought I had to eschew things of the home.

Those teachers in Oklahoma who threw themselves on top of their students to protect them—they womaned up. As did those teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I said in an earlier post that I think it’s time to woman up. I think that womaning up—fusing things of the home with things outside of the home—holds the promise for our future as a nation, as a world.

Perhaps, in my new home, I will learn how to transform balls (or is it skeins?) of yarn into a scarf.

by

Let Go Before You Think You Should

Those were the words of instruction on the Chucker package. A chucker is a long, bent piece of plastic with a claw on the end. It is designed for people like me who throw like a—well who can’t throw a ball more than 3 feet, but have a dog who’s fast and likes to run after the ball.

The first time I used it, the ball, instead of sailing gracefully down the dog park, landed one foot in front of me. Tessa (our dog) was not amused.

So I read the instructions. Something about winding up, lifting your arm straight, and then with a flick of the wrist the ball will sail down the dog park. The hint was: Let go before you think you should.

Well, of course. Let go before you think you should.

Letting go is actually pretty easy, I’ve learned. The difficulty is in discovering what it is I need to let go of.

Today, it has something to do with my Writing Shed. The actual shed. The place that became a place of refuge for me. A place where I wrote.

In about five weeks, I will be leaving it behind, turning it over to the new owners to do with it what they want.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to write without my Writing Shed.

It’s early in the morning. The birds have just started awakening, calling out to each other, perhaps battle cries as much as joyous greetings to the new day. A chicken bluck, bluck, blucks.

The arms of the butterfly bush flutter in the soft breeze at the edge of my Writing Shed. butterfly bushI planted the bush in honor of Ed, my high school teacher and mentor, who died nine months after we moved to Livermore. To the right of my Shed, a cat plays next to a pond—a fountain I bought shortly after Rug died. cat fountainRug, our bunny-soft-furred cat who was killed by a car three weeks before Ed died. And, of course, this is the shed that Gene built—Gene, my father-in-law. The man who called Tom Sweet Man when he was a little boy. Gene died three months after Rug and Ed.

My Writing Shed is a big part of the tapestry I wove while I was here in Livermore—the hometown I returned to.

As we prepare to leave, friends around us are experiencing major life events. One friend lost his brother to a grueling struggle with Parkinsons. Another learned he was going to be a father. This last weekend we attended the wedding of a friend who was widowed ten years ago, his heart mended by the grace of love.

We also learned that a writer who attended our salons had died suddenly of a massive heart attack. His widow thanked us all for listening to his words. I was grateful for the salons. Grateful that a writer had the opportunity to be heard.

I guess life really is a series of letting go, of knowing when a piece of the tapestry is complete—imperfection and all.

Writing this, I realize that I take my Writing Shed with me. It is a part of my tapestry. But, I don’t know what’s next, other than that we are moving to the North West in a few weeks. That is both exhilarating and scary.

Let go before you think you should.

Okay.