I used to imagine that my three sisters and I were living a real-life, Nebraska version of Little Women (except in our version, Beth lives to love and hang-out with her sisters for perpetuity). The March girls/the Welch girls . . . Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth/Shannon, Timaree, Erin and Kael . . . different place and different time, but sisters nonetheless.

As my father was dying this summer, my sisters and I were blessed to have shared his last days with my mother and countless visitors who came to sit, bedside, recounting their favorite memories, the lessons he taught them, those that made them who they were today.  My sisters and I tag-teamed, we used the gifts we had, gifts born from an exquisite blend of our mother and father. We stayed until we had to rejoin our own families for a time, leaving our parents in the watchful care of another sister–or two.

My sister Erin’s efficiency and expertise at nursing rivals seasoned RNs. While my father was in the hospital, Erin listened and took notes as  the doctors and nurses spoke or delivered care. She served as a conduit of information, delivered hourly updates through text messages,  and anchored us all in a semblance of order when our world was chaotically spinning out of control. And when my father came home with hospice care, it was Erin who stood, shoulder to shoulder with the nurses, watching how they changed sheets, cleaned his wounds, administered medications. I looked on in sore amazement, for I could not imagine how she had become so brave, so competent. One afternoon when she left to return home for a few days, leaving me as the sole sister, I could only think of the moment when my mother left after the birth of my first child. As my mom pulled away, I stood with my head pressed to the window and cried, Don’t leave me. I can’t do this by myself. As Erin drove off, my hands turned cold, and it was all I could do not to run after her car, to beg her to stay for one more day until I could learn from the master.

My sister, Timaree, can plan and multi-task with the pros. Like my mother, she can see out for days and weeks to come, anticipating what needs to be done. Even though I am the oldest sister, as children, I learned early that Timaree was the one to speak to sales clerks, to make phone calls, to lead. Content to follow, I stood behind her as she shouldered her way through conflicts and situations that scared me spitless. Timaree ran our high school’s student council. Timaree choreographed our cheerleading and dance routines. Timaree led with a clarity and confidence that left me breathless. And, if the truth be told, envious. Author Louise Gluck writes that Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. I was the church mouse who watched from her shadow, grateful–oh so grateful–to have this dancer’s shadow to rest in. So it did not surprise me that Timaree organized the meal after my father’s memorial service, and she weeded my parents’ backyard.

My youngest sister Kael and I shared more time together in the weeks that led to my father’s death. We sat in hospital waiting rooms together, ate supper in the hospital Subway (undoubtedly, the staff there knew our orders by heart), and later, spent days and nights in my parents’ home. Anyone who has met Kael is immediately drawn in by her hospitality. Everything about her says Come in. Stay awhile. She is the hostess with the mostest, able to greet and comfort those who came to our home with coffee cakes, casseroles, and tears. For the days I spent with her, she was my confidante. The one to whom I could voice my fears and grief. The one to whom I could unabashedly laugh and cry without fear of judgment. Daily, she comforted others, and as she did, I felt strangely warmed in a peace that truly passes all understanding.

Together we were better. I don’t think the March sisters have anything on my sisters. I have seen the power of their gifts and felt the grace of their presence, and I cannot imagine a life without my sisters.

They have given me stories that have delighted students in three states. Ask any of my students if they recall the turtle story, and I’d bet that they could retell it in glorious detail.

When my sister, Timaree, and I were 5 and 7, we begged my mom to let us get two small painted turtles at the local dimestore. In a moment of certain weakness, my mom consented, and we came home with two turtles–one red, one blue–a plastic turtle bowl with a fake palm tree, and a box of turtle food. Life was good. Until the day my turtle disappeared.

Convinced that Timaree was playing a trick on me, I marched down the stairs and into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my visiting Grammie was drinking her tea. I confronted her, adamant that she return my turtle to the bowl before he dried out and died. What happened next lives on in infamy.

Behind me, three-year-old Erin entered the kitchen. Grammie shrieked, throwing her toast skyward. My mom gasped. And I turned to see one tiny, green turtle foot dangling from Erin’s bottom lip. I screamed. Erin screamed, and her mouth stretched and gaped, revealing her tonsils–and my turtle who lay prone, lifeless across her tongue.

You killed him! You ate my turtle! Gagging, Grammie turned away. My mom stepped away from the sink and demanded, Spit it out. Here in my hand, right now. And there it was: a motionless, blue-shelled turtle in my mom’s palm.

Later, my dad said that Erin’s system must have been lacking something to make her want to eat a turtle. Too young for sarcasm, I believed him and told Timaree to stand guard over the remaining turtle, lest he meet a similar fate.

My sisters and I donned high heels that my Aunt Susie had worn in the Miss America pageant and strolled the sidewalk leading to our house like a grand runway. We judged each other on how well we walked in high heels, in how elegantly we could turn, throwing our heads around in beauty pageant splendor. Our little girl feet stuffed into the pointy toes of high heels, we clomped our way into imagined glory.

We rode stick horses in packs around the neighborhood, we transformed wooden crates that my dad gifted to us into circus elephants and stallions. We organized neighborhood missions–elaborately planned and mapped on large pieces of newsprint over Kool-Aid and graham crackers in the McDaniel boys’ garage. Never mind that we didn’t really intend to carry out these missions. It was all in the planning, the Kool-Aid mustaches, and the furtive glances at the two cutest boys we had ever seen. It was all about sisters together.

The girls across the street told us that we should never roller skate over a section of sidewalk that had buckled, creating a kind of ramp that sent up momentarily airborne. They claimed that fires from the pit of hell had erupted, breaking the cement and creating a hole straight to damnation. They warned us that one false step, and the Devil would get us. And so, my sisters and I skated right up to this spot, exited the sidewalk and inched our skates through the grass and around the hole, and resumed skating. For years, we were bound in a shared conviction that we could escape hell if only we skated and biked with caution.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, like most siblings, we often annoyed each other, took advantage of each other, even tortured each other. We borrowed clothes that we didn’t return and that ended up in heaps in our closets on the very day that our sister had to have them. We offered to pay a younger sister to retrieve our Barbies from the basement (because it was the basement and it was scary), and later reneged on our promises. Because we never had any money, and after all, this was the role of an older sister and the lot of a younger sister. We haggled and re-haggled over who got to use the car. Around the supper table, we disagreed, argued our views, and sometimes left the room in disgust.

Still, we marveled at each other’s words and deeds, at the choices that, secretly, we could never see ourselves making but that were perfect for our sister. A thrift-store aficionado, Kael put together outfits that often took our collective breath away. We whispered to each other and to our mother, She is NOT going to wear that to school, is she? But when she did, and when her classmates not only accepted her attire but emulated it, our fears were silenced. When Erin took a job as a Girl Scout camp counselor in Pennsylvania (clear across the country! in another state!), I admired her courage and conviction. And when she came home, every inch of her body ravaged by weeks of mosquito bites, I could honestly admit that I could never have done what she did. When Timaree sang in our college swing choir, she never failed to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I longed to open my own mouth and hear the clear soprano voice of my sister burst forth. And I longed to dance with the ease and innate grace that she did. When she sang and danced, time stopped for me.

In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison describes the interactions between sisters as sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be. Oh yes, I’ll take me some sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings from the sisters I am blessed to know as friends. Double-size my portion, please. No triple-size it. You don’t have to count calories when it comes to sister-size portions.

As shining and splendid as sisterhood is in childhood, it is that much and more in adulthood. In her New York Times Notable Book, The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss writes:

You know how it is between sisters in their middle age? that old old friendship, how loose-fitting it is? the comfort and safety in it? how you can let silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? how you can let words out of your mouth without wariness or precision because you know your sister will listen to what’s worthwhile and let the rest fall out of her ears into the air? how you can be surly, unreasonable, stupid, in the certainty of her grace?

What could really be better than loose-fitting friendship between sisters, like a much-loved pair of sweat pants (because jeans, with all their zippers and buttons, are unforgiving for those with middle-aged apple shapes)? What could be more satisfying than letting silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? In real-life, where we must be eloquent and articulate, filling the space between others with something reasonable and meaningful, the silence between sisters is a gift of inestimable worth. Who but a sister can let the worthwhile stuff sink in and let the stupid stuff simply blow away like the insignificant chaff it is?

And where else can you rest in the certainty of grace but in the presence of your sisters?

So here’s to my sisters who have made and who continue to make me a better human being. We are better together, and for this, I could not be more grateful.

For years when my son, Quinn, was a boy, I drove with the raucous sounds of battling from the backseat. Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Transformers, action figures come-to-life in the hands of a little boy. For years my backseat was strewn with the casualties of battles won and lost, fought and refought during those 11 miles to school and back. And for years, under every sofa cushion, every end table and bed, there were homemade creatures carefully constructed of computer paper, folded sharply into killing points, and stapled excessively to withstand active combat. Such is the life with a little boy. Such is the life.

One day, after having failed to draw my students into Macbeth’s world, I grabbed a handful of Power Rangers from the backseat, smuggled them into the high school in my book bag, and reenacted the death of Banquo and his son for every class. I knew the sounds to make to enhance the performance; I’d been hearing them for years. And never mind that the Power Rangers were not dressed appropriately. They filled the bill quite nicely, and even today, students proclaim that this was one of the best days ever. At least it was one of the most weirdly unique. But such is the life of a mother of little boys who learns to use what speaks to other little boys (and girls).

Today, my little boy has a man-sized body, but his heart still beats boy. Last summer as I was cleaning his bedroom (because boys do NOT clean), I found a paper creature, points intact, under his bed. Had this survived the years between boyhood and college? Had he, perhaps, made this recently, secretly battling in the depths of his basement bedroom? Or had he stashed it there, unwilling to part with this vestige of boyhood, of kingdom-saving battles that were neither escapes from real life or foolish fantasies but life itself?

And today, as my grandson, Griffin, makes the 50 yard trek from his house to ours, he rarely comes empty-handed. A tractor, an action figure, an engine or four-wheeler, he comes bearing the treasures of boyhood. Sometimes we play with them, and other times it’s enough that they have made the trip and rest snuggly in his pockets. Just in case a boy needs his stuff.

These days, he yanks his coat off, dropping it where it falls, and says, Can we get the monsters out? The monsters are the action figures that have survived Quinn’s childhood and have been stowed in a Rubbermaid container in the closet, just waiting for the next little boy who will battle again. Dinosaur-like creatures, one surviving Ninja Turtle, three Power Ranger evil creatures, a kangaroo-looking ninja master of sorts, and random pieces of Transformers lie before us with shiny promise. What guy to choose? What battles to fight? 

And when the battle noises begin, I feel strangely at home once more, comforted by the growls and gasps, the staccato strikes of weaponed arms on the floor–or furniture–and the melodramatic sighs of death and defeat. In those moments, I am transported to my son’s childhood, when his life spread gloriously before him–and after me.

But my boys are not all boasting and battling. Beneath their warrior exteriors lie hearts that often take my breath away. When Quinn was 7 or 8, we spotted a dead doe on the shoulder of the road as we pulled from our drive onto the highway. The battle noises stopped. And then he said, Someone should do something about that. I glanced in the rear view mirror to see that his hands were strangely folded in his lap, his eyes colored with concern. I think you should call the governor, Mom. This just isn’t right–that poor deer. It’s dead, and you should do something. 

When I explained that the governor really couldn’t do anything about deer that had been accidentally killed on our highway, that the driver didn’t intend to hurt the deer, and that we would, undoubtedly, see more dead deer on our drives to and from school, his stoicism unnerved me. There were no more Power Ranger battles that day, and we rode in silence the remaining 10 miles. Pulling up to his school, he shouldered his backpack–along with his heavy heart–and made his way across the parking lot to join his classmates who had lined up by the school door. I watched him carry this weight and felt my own heart break for the death and loss he would continue to shoulder with age.

Last week, I bumped into my daughter, son-in-law, Gracyn, and Griffin in the grocery store. If you could bottle the gleeful reactions of my grandchildren upon seeing me, I would buy it. Lots of it. Gracyn immediately asked if she could ride home with me. This was dangerous business–taking one without the other. Her mother consented, and we made a quick, quiet get-away before Griffin could really take stock of what was happening. About 20 minutes after we had unloaded the groceries and were preparing to make homemade slime, my daughter called.

Griffin was beside himself. First he asked if Sissy would come back to life, convinced that her disappearance meant death. Later, as they buckled him into his carseat, his anguish mounted and he cried, My Gracyn is lost in there! We are leaving her! Having moved from death to loss, his grief was palpable. His Gracyn was gone. My daughter called, on speaker, so that Griffin could hear his sister’s voice. Not convinced, I said Bring him over when you get back, so he can see that she’s o.k. and hanging out with Grandma. 

Ten minutes later, he burst into the front door, leaving it open while he kicked wildly at his boots to remove them. One arm freed from his coat, the other still constrained, he stomped up the steps, made his way to the kitchen and looked. There was his Gracyn, seated at the island in the throes of making homemade slime, her hands in blue goo and the surfaces around littered with empty glue bottles, a shaving cream can, a box of food coloring, and assorted measuring cups. See, I’m here, Buddy. I’m not lost, Gracyn reassured him as she plunged her fingers in and out of the slime. Worry drained from his 3-year face, and he turned his attention to other matters, like who got to squirt the next dose of shaving cream into the bowl.

As my boy prepares to leave and begin a new life in a new community as the teacher and coach he has trained to be, there are too many moments when I mourn the passing time, my toyless backseat, and the stapler-I-can-always find-now. Yesterday in my entry way, my son’s size 12 Nike tennis shoes sat beside my grandson’s toddler boots. Boy shoes. Wonderful boy shoes with all their mud and stink and scuffs. Oh, that there would always be boy shoes that litter my entry way!

In The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein writes: . . .and she loved a little boy very very much—even more than she loved herself. How I love these boys, how their battling and balling, their boisterous days and poignant moments have blessed my life.

They will leave, these boys, having grown into fine men. And I will take heart in the knowledge that, as Neil Postman writes, they are living messages we send to a time we will not see. [The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982]

Indeed, Quinn and Griffin will take grand living messages into this world and a world I will never see. But I’m keeping some boyhood with me in a Rubbermaid container on the shelf in my closet. And from time to time, I may take it down, open it up, and listen to the battle sounds of boyhood, released from captivity, once again

Photography compliments of Collyn Ware, wonderful mother of Griffin and sister to Quinn

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truthfully, if someone were to ask me what I am currently reading, I may not be able to tell them. In this season of retirement and many, many books, I empathize with Emerson who cannot remember the books he’s read any more than the meals he’s eaten. Even so, they have made me. 

In the car, I listen to a book on Audible. At night when my husband is sleeping–or trying to sleep–I read on my back-lit Kindle. And for all the other times, there are glorious books in print. On the floor beside my bed, on the bookshelf headboard, and blocking my view and reach to my alarm clock are stacks of books. Books arrive via Amazon too often to admit. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry–it’s all good. No, it’s all great.

One of my unspoken talents is that I am above average when it comes to vicarious living. My mom relates that I teared up within a few measures of the opening theme song to the television program Lassie. I anticipated the danger that Timmy would find himself in and the worry that would line the faces of his mother and father. Often, I mouthed the words of television characters, wholly unconscious of the fact that I had left my world and entered another. I cringed at the theme song for I Love Lucy. Intended to be funny, sitcoms threw me into fits of anxiety. Don’t do it, don’t say it, don’t do it, I would mutter under my breath. Immersed in these worlds, my muscles contracted and knotted for 30 agonizing minutes. Yes, I would say that my vicarious living is Oscar-worthy.

 Not only do I live vicariously through the characters in the books I read or listen to, I live vicariously through the imagined lives of their authors. In J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, his protagonist, Holden Caulfield says:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Like Holden, the intimacy I feel with the authors of great books makes me want to just call them up. Just to say how wonderful their works are, how these works have made me. Just to hear the voice of those who have birthed such marvelous characters and plots. For weeks after I finished Hillbilly Elegy, I searched for ways to directly contact J. D. Vance. I felt compelled to communicate with him, for his book profoundly moved me, and I genuinely wanted him to know. After reading Lilac Girls, I yearned to call Martha Hall Kelly. We would be friends, I just knew it. Around my kitchen table and over many cups of coffee, we would talk books–those we had read and loved and those we had yet to read.

Driving to and from town (and more times than I admit, sitting in my driveway), I listened to Camron Wright’s The Orphan Keeper and lived through 7-year-old Chellamuthu’s life as he was kidnapped from his small Indian village and then sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. Later adopted by American parents and growing up in Colorado, he longs to find his Indian family, to return to the home he can barely remember. When he is finally able to travel to India to search, I spent agonizing minutes as the car idled in parking lots or in my driveway, convinced that this next chapter would bring an end to his search and answers to his prayers. Ezra Pound writes that Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. In the hours I listened to Chellamuthu’s story, I was intensely alive. In the moments before sleep, I could hear the Indian reader’s voice, a fourth dimension to Wright’s character development. The Orphan Keeper was a ball of light in my hand, a brilliant narrative orb that illuminated the places and people of another world.

My life, like most, is a relatively insulated one. I’ve been blessed to travel some, but the majority of my life has been spent in the Midwest, at home and at work. Generally speaking, my trials have been personal ones, particular to my life and circumstances. And from my insulated, singular perspective, I often fall prey to the kind of self-indulgence that blinds one to the world at large. And then I read a great book that humbles and silences me. American author James Baldwin wrote:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

When you realize that your heartbreak has lived and breathed in 17th century Spain, in the dusty streets of Kabul, through the blizzards of the Nebraskan frontier, through the foot-binding rituals of China, through the poverty of Appalachia or Southern India, through the helplessness of Nazi-occupied France and the sacrifices of the French Resistance, with invisible men and women, with mothers and fathers whose dreams for their children cling to faint breaths of hope, then you know that your loss has connected you with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. Then you turn the last page of that book with reverence, for you feel the weight of each sacred and universal word.

I can still remember the fervor with which I talked books to my high school students. As I was reading a good book, I recounted scenes, shared characters, and read passages of perfectly-crafted dialogue or setting. I sold books with an unabashed passion. I lost myself in this selling and retelling, and occasionally found my students losing themselves as well. Truthfully, there were too many days during which I read when I should have been cooking supper or walking into school. Once, I actually walked into a parked car in the faculty parking lot. It was a particularly good chapter, and I really believed that I could walk and read at the same time.

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green writes:

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

This is it me exactly. I become filled with this weird evangelical zeal, convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. I babble, I foam at the mouth, I sigh and sing. If only the world would read this book and be healed.

These days, I don’t drive and wave to friends and family who pass by. I’m too busy listening to a good book. Hey, I’ve grown, though. I can now do two things at the same time: drive and listen. But don’t ask me to drive, listen, and wave. Three things at the same time are entirely too much for a reading retiree like me.

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

from “A Blessing”, James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems

This is a season for blossoming, literal and metaphorical. Lilacs are budding, tulips have braved the uncertainty of March and burst forth in all their perennial splendor, and beneath the rotting leaves of last autumn, there are tiny green sprouts waiting for just the right sun.

As I watched my granddaughter at dance class last week, I witnessed another season of blossoming. No longer a child, she took her place in the line of 7-8 year old girls and danced. What I saw both delighted and pained me, though. A child would dance with abandon, all arms and legs, strands of hair pasted across a damp face, and eyes, like bright fish, darting wildly about the room. A child would not see the eyes upon her. A child would sing with the recorded music, losing herself in the familiar melody, safe among a cozy clutch of little girls.

But Gracyn is no longer a child. As the music began, I watched her begin to move. Small, subtle movements as she were a marionette whose strings were held much too tightly by the puppeteer. The arc of her movements restrained, she fixed her eyes ahead, casting furtive looks to the girls beside her now and then. The clipped rhythms of her classmates’ tap shoes echoed throughout the room, but hers were muted taps, the uncertain taps of adolescence that would soon descend upon her. When a classmate flapped with too much vigor sending one shoe arcing over her head and across the room, girls giggled. But she did not. I could almost hear her thoughts: Is it o.k. to laugh? What if she is embarrassed? What if this were me? What if this happens in the recital? What if. . .? 

Standing against the wall, I wanted to scoop her in my arms and say, throw your arms to the sky, laugh with your eyes, tap loudly enough to wake the dead. I wanted her to dance like we did when she was little, collapsing in a sweaty mess of glee. More than anything, I wanted to postpone the inevitable self-consciousness that would soon overcome her as she moved into adolescence.

Before I was a mother, I was moved by Ann Sexton’s poem, “Pain for a Daughter.” In this poem, she writes of her daughter’s obsessive love for horses, a love that drives her to the neighbor’s stable to care for their flaming horses and the swan-whipped thoroughbred. When a horse steps on her foot one day, she limps home, the tips of her toes ripped off like pieces of leather. In the final stanza, Sexton writes:

Blind with fear, she sits on the toilet,

her foot balanced over the washbasin

her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,

performing the rites of the cleansing.

She bites on a towel, sucked in breath,

sucked in and arched against the pain,

her eyes glancing off me where

I stand at the door, eyes locked

on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,

and then she cries. . .

Oh my God, help me!

Where a child would have cried Mama!

Where a child would have believed Mama!

she bit the towel and called on God

and I saw her life stretch out. . .

I saw her torn in childbirth,

and I saw her, in that moment,

in her own death and I knew that she

knew.

For a moment as I watched my granddaughter dance, her eyes locked on the wall in front of her, I felt as if I were looking into the eyes of a stranger. Like Sexton, I saw her life stretch out into adolescence and beyond. I saw the pain of first love and loss, the pain of self-doubt, the pain of childbirth and the ferocious, all-consuming love for a child. And I knew that she knew. Oh the brutality of such blossoming! In its tender beauty lie the thorns of adulthood.

Lately, I have watched how Gracyn cares for her brother. When she asked to have a sleepover at my house–precious time alone with grandma–she included Griffin. As they walk from their house to mine, she walks alongside him like a caretaker, urging him to stay the course and not become distracted by unusual pine cones or sticks that might be used as weapons. When he correctly identifies a letter of the alphabet, she looks on with a seasoned pride and says, Good job, Buddy! There is so much life beyond her life, and she is seeing it, feeling it,and knowing that it is her responsibility to affirm it. She is blossoming.

And when she feels the pain of another, I see her mother at about the same age. It was an unusually warm spring day, and the neighborhood kids were playing in the backyard as I cleaned the flower beds and prepared them for new mulch. Suddenly, my daughter was beside me, looking up intently as she said, What’s wrong, Mom? Are you o.k.? I said nothing, stunned momentarily, for I had no idea what had prompted her to ask. Until she said, You were making that face. And then I understood: the sun in my eyes, I was squinting and scowling as I raked and worked my trowel in the dirt. I’m fine, I reassured her, I just forgot my sunglasses, and I have to squint to keep my eyes open. She looked up at me dubiously, scanning my face for signs of distress, and then finding none, ran off to join her sisters and her friends. Such a small moment, but a blossoming, indeed. I saw her life stretch out before her and knew that she knew. 

And yet, there is joy in the blossoming and blushing. The little girl who would once stick a feather in her hair becomes a young lady who prefers dangling earrings. Full skirts and ruffles give way to printed leggings and tunics. And frenzied romps on the trampoline with your brother? Well, they only give way to more ladylike jumping when a friend is around.

But when she and her brother are alone, she is all arms and legs, all shrieks and giggles. In these moments, if she would step out of her body, she would surely break into blossom.

You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring. Are there more beautiful words for these March days? In spite of the occasional gray, the nagging reminder that death is just down the street, green is the color that washes the landscape in seasonal covenant. Green whispers I’m here. Look closely into the brown pout, through winter’s brittle pain and ragged peskyness. There you will see me in buds and blooms-that-promise-to-be.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes:

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. 

I admit that I have been a skeptic lately, holding my breath during these days of what I fear is false spring. Having lived in the Midwest my entire life, I have seen spring come quickly and dissolve just as quickly into more winter . Still, I have given myself to days in which there are truly no problems except where to be happiest. And fortunately for me, I have two little people who live 50 yards from me who are as good as spring itself. After a dozen under-doggies on the tree swing and a few walks around the pond to search for frogs, we can proudly proclaim that green is our color, we are spring people.

Spring is less a noun than a verb, a progressive verb, a becoming thing. In his poem, “Spring is your time is my time is our time,” poet e. e. cummings feels the emerging season:

(all the merry little birds are
flying in the floating in the
very spirits singing in
are winging in the blossoming)

Flying, floating, singing, winging, and blossoming. Spring is, indeed, a splendid becoming thing.

Ranier Maria Rilke writes that when spring arrives, The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. I like this. The lilacs near my front door remember the lyrical words of Whitman and Shelley. The crocus recite their haiku, which unfurl themselves, image by image. And the red and gold finches sing the refrains of their ancestors with softer rhythms and sunny rhymes. When you know the poems by heart, each line spills into the breeze just as it has and just as it will for springs to come.

I admit that I am a sucker for the pasteled aisles of little girls’ Easter hats, M & Ms that sport pinks and yellows and powder blues, Chick Days at the local Tractor Supply Store, and the scent of warm rain. The sky is never as blue as it is in the early days of spring. Not quite cornflower or cobalt, it defies description. And this is quite alright with me, for I am also a sucker for things that defy description.

I can’t say it any better than A. A. Milne:

She turned to the sunlight
    And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
    “Winter is dead.”

from When We Were Very Young

So, take heart. Green is our color. Let’s shake our yellow heads, for we are spring, and winter is dead.

                         In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.                                      

Robert Frost

As much as some universities have valiantly tried to create safe spots to protect students from anything that might offend or disturb them, for those of us out here in the cheap seats of life, there are no such safe spots. We face a daily barrage of threats and doomsday calls. Cliches grow ominously and persistently larger than life:  The end is near; Live today for tomorrow you may die. We are all going to hell in a handbasket. 

In a handbasket? What does that really mean anyway? One theory on the expression’s origin is that it refers to the baskets used to catch the heads of those sentenced to death by guillotine. That conjures up some pretty frightening images, to be sure.

But the threats are not of a religious nature, in spite of the fact that “hell” is often waved frantically about, a wild flag of doom that hangs from a quivering pole of terror. No, the threats are largely political and social in nature, flooding the airwaves and computer screens with a force to be reckoned with.

We’ve had a shift in power, a change in administration, a new sheriff has come to town. The fact that this sheriff lacks the couth and posture of most former sheriffs is cause enough for many to simultaneously fear and rage, to wring their hands and cry, This is bad. This is very, very bad.

Here comes the disclaimer: I have cringed–and continue to cringe–at his unfiltered remarks and tweets, wondering why there can’t be a royal filterer. Someone, anyone, to monitor and curb the flow of communication that often has to be “walked back.” And I, too, pray for healthy restraint and heartfelt reflection.

And here is the second disclaimer: I do not deny nor diminish the genuine fear and anger that exists today. Change of this nature is traumatic for those whose sheriff is no longer in power. This has always been so, and will always be so. When we passionately believe in and support an idea, a person, a vision for the future, anything counter to or less than this is simply awful. And we grieve the loss of what could have–what should have–been.

Still,  for a time, I am willing to suspend my judgment and to quell my fear. For I am old enough to have seen that when pendulums swing far to one side, they invariably swing far to the other. From the structured spelling books of the early-mid 1900s to the invented spelling of the 1980s, from memorizing spelling words, consonant and vowel blends to spelling-as-I-hear it. From house to haws. Before the pendulum of spelling and language instruction had decisively swung far to the left, there were teachers who grabbed their spelling manuals and closeted them away in hidden places, safely secured from administrators who would sweep in to clear their schools of outdated materials and pedagogies.

Although we pay serious lip service to compromise and moderation, in reality, the pendulum rarely rests in the middle of anything for any period of time. We may wish it motionless, but oh how it moves! And when it does, there will be winners and losers–and some who remain stodgily indifferent until something directly affects them.

Both the Beatles and Robert Frost claim that though the pendulum swings as it will, life goes on. Frost even writes that everything he has learned about life can be summed up in these three words. In the midst of such a season of angst and anger, these simple words often sound condescending and trite. A bandaid on a gaping wound, the gangrene beneath festering, spreading, and threatening to destroy the organism.

And when a loved one dies or a family home burns down or one’s world is upturned forever? Tragically, there will be fatalists or pragmatists (or unfeeling idiots) who deliver the words Life goes on as if this truth will minister to the grieving. These are not the folks to suffer with another, for they will busy themselves with their own lives, which do, indeed, percolate with rhythmic regularity. (Until, of course, their world is upturned forever, and they need more than words to set it back on its axis.)

And when the Beatles sing their bubblegum melody, ob la di, ob lad da, life goes on? As catchy as the tune and lyrics are–certainly a snappy marching song for the likes of the Seven Dwarves–it is all but impossible to sing them as if we believe them. As if they are the words of life.

And in a sense, these are the words of life. It does go on, with or without us. So perhaps the question should be how should life go on?

 When a pendulum swings, this is the ten dollar question. I may not have a clear answer, but like most, I have answers that I believe are better than others. And I am well aware that my answers will contradict, trouble, and even outrage those who hold what they proclaim as better, truer, righter answers. So where does this leave us?

Pendulum swings bring out the best–and worst–of us. They illicit passions that bless and curse others. The excite and inspire some, while they stab others in the heart of all they hold dear.

I certainly don’t proclaim to have all the answers, but I do think that life goes on much better when we all step back and breathe. And while we’re breathing, we can remember how we felt when the pendulum had swung to the side that we didn’t endorse, that we most feared. As we remember our sense of loss and fear, we can sympathize with those who now feel much the same way. And for those who agonize over the current state of affairs? They, too, can remember that others once felt this way and suffered through this season.

It’s rare that universal sympathy of this sort would ever result in name-calling or threats or hell-in-a-handbasket cries. Sympathy more often paves the way for compassionate dialogue, a means of disagreeing humanely. Certainly, life goes on better when we disagree humanely.

We will disagree, and life will go on. It is my fervent prayer that it goes on with a larger dose of sympathy and compassion.

. . .we are each other’s

harvest:

we are each other’s

business:

we are each other’s

magnitude and bond.

from “Paul Robeson” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Godmothers are in the business of harvesting, of making others’ business theirs, of willingly becoming others’ magnitude and bond. Caroline Woolsey Ferriday was just such a godmother. And she made the business of the Ravensbruck rabbits both hers and the world’s.

There are letters in the archives at her family home in Connecticut addressed to Ma Chere Marainne or My Dear Godmother. Subjected to barbaric surgeries and sulfamide experimentation that left survivors horribly scarred and disabled,  female survivors (rabbits) from Ravensbruck looked to American heiress, Caroline Ferriday, as their dear friend, their benefactor, their godmother and savior.

Because the rabbits were Polish Catholics–and not Jews–their stories paled on the dark  stage of Jewish genocide. The post-war world was just beginning to comprehend that 6 million European Jews had been systematically killed, and the stories of 72 Catholic girls went largely unnoticed. That is, until Godmother Caroline Ferriday took up their cause.

Some may say that Ferriday was an unlikely godmother. Born into status and relative wealth, she was an only child who showed an early interest in the plight of others. To the dismay of others who generally viewed acting to be too risque for polite society , she took to the Broadway stage as an actress. Fluent in French, she left the stage to work as a volunteer in the New York French Consulate by the time Hitler had risen to power. Ferriday had a particular heart for French children who had been orphaned by the war. During the war, she worked tirelessly to raise funds and provide clothing and food for them.

After the war, she joined the ADIR, or National Association of Deportees and Internees of the Resistance,  a group founded by females who had served in the French resistance and who had survived German concentration camps. She was moved by the work and stories of ADIR members Jacqueline Péry D’Alincourt, Genevieve de Gaulle, Anise Postel-Vinay, and Germaine Tillon. All four women, political prisoners, had been imprisoned at Ravensbruck. Through her work with the ADIR and through relationships with Ravensbruck survivors, Ferriday learned that some of the special bonds created in the camp were in response to the plight of 72 prisoners referred to as the lapins or rabbits.

In 1958, Godmother Ferriday went to work. She contacted Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, for she had learned of his work with the “Hiroshima Maidens”, a group of several scarred Japanese women brought to the United States for cosmetic surgery. She also met with Polish officials and worked to gain the trust of the Rabbits, so that she might arrange their trip to the U. S. for medical treatment. As a result of her advocacy, Cousins wrote a series of articles about the Rabbits for the Saturday Review, stories that struck deeply into American hearts and resolve for action. In one of these articles, Cousins writes of their trip to Poland:

Caroline Ferriday has an almost magical gift for inspiring confidence. Her first few days in Warsaw were not without their difficulties, but after awhile the project began to move. Then, at the end of the week, we received a cable saying that the Polish authorities were cooperative and gracious and that prospects were excellent.

An almost magical gift. That’s the stuff that many godmothers are made of, and Caroline Ferriday shouldered the mantle of justice with vigor. Unmarried and without children, she devoted herself to her charges, Polish women whose legs and souls were irreparably scarred.

By this time, only 53 Rabbits had survived, but 35 eventually traveled to the U.S. and spent an entire year–from December 1958 to December 1959–receiving medical treatment. Renamed the Ladies, the women were hosted in 12 cities across the country. Cousins wrote that the most remarkable change in the group as a whole . . . was in the emotional and psychological regeneration of the Ladies.

The best godmothers are healers of bodies and souls. Caroline Ferriday was a godmother extraordinaire. She opened her Connecticut home and her heart to the Ladies, who, in turn, opened their hearts and forged a bond that crossed social and national boundaries.

Soon after the Ladies toured the U.S. and even visited Congress, publicity and public support resulted in the German Embassy’s pledge to pay for the medical costs of 30 of the 35 who had traveled to America. In addition, they reported that the [German] Federal Government was thoroughly and urgently examining possibilities of further relief.

The world needs more godmothers. Not the plump, petticoated Disney type, but the nearly six foot tall Caroline Ferriday type. The humble type who, upon her death, would will the medals she had received, the Cross of Lorraine and the French Legion of Honor, to her Polish Ladies. Yes, the world needs more godmothers and godfathers, godsisters and godbrothers who will champion the interests of those whom the world has not seen.

Ultimately, godmothers know that the business of others, the bond we forge with them is the business and bond that Jesus speaks about in Matthew 12:46-50.

While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him.  Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”

 He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus’s words here are clear enough but oh so difficult to live. Our lives are filled with enough responsibilities and duties, peopled with enough family and co-workers to look beyond immediate boundaries. To godparent others, to consider them our mother and father, our sister and brother? To harvest in new fields where the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few? To champion and care for our own rabbits?

In the historical novel, Lilac Girls, Martha Hall Kelly creates a romance between Caroline Ferriday and Paul Rodierre, a French actor she first meets in New York and later nurses back to health after his imprisonment in a concentration camp. She weaves their romance between Caroline’s unfailing devotion to her work at the French Consulate and, after the war, to her commitment to the ADIR and the Polish Ladies. For the purposes of historical fiction, I suppose she intends this romance to give depth to a character who could appear to be one-dimensionally too good to be true, a character whose sole foundation appears to be service to others. The real Caroline had no romance with a famous French actor that spanned decades and continents. For most of her life, she did, indeed, set her sites on helping others. Perhaps she was one-dimensional, but what a wonderful single dimension this was! In the end, she was as good as she appeared to be, and she made the world a better place for many.

There will be rabbits, but thankfully, there will also be godmothers. So let’s hear it for Caroline Ferriday and all the godmothers to follow. We will always need them to mend and to love the wounded.

Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

In 1939, Ravensbruck, a concentration camp built to house women enemies of the Reich, opened about 50 miles north of Berlin. Most of its residents were Polish, and 72 of these young Polish women became known as “rabbits.” Used in gruesome medical experiments that rival the worst experiments conducted by the infamous Dr. Mengele, the rabbits who survived were left horribly scarred and disabled, some destined to “hop” for much of their lives.

One of the Ravensbruck “rabbits” after surgery

Each rabbit suffered six separate surgeries under the direct supervision of Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Chief Surgeon in the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police and personal physician to Heinrich Himmler, and Dr. Herta Oberheueser, the only female doctor convicted in the Nuremberg Medical Trials. Doctors made incisions in the rabbits’ legs to break bones, sever tendons, and insert contaminated materials–rusty nails, glass, splinters–so that the Nazis could research new treatments for battlefield wounds. Without pain medication, rabbits lay in casts for weeks in crowded and secret hospital wards. Their infections resulted in high fevers, dehydration, and for some, death. All the while, Dr. Oberheueser studied her rabbits and recorded her findings to her Furher.

Dr. Herta Oberheueser

Sarah Helm’s nonfictional works,  Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women and If This Is A Woman, as well as Martha Hall Kelly’s historical fiction, Lilac Girls, offer intimate views of the rabbits’ struggle to survive and the physicians who gave themselves to Nazi ideology. Both stories are equally tragic, equally horrific in distinctly different ways.

For the Nazis, the rabbits were little more than experimental opportunities. Hitler himself was invested in this experimentation because a friend died from battlefield wounds that he believed were treated incorrectly. Karl Gebhardt sought to redeem and defend his surgical treatment of contaminated war wounds in the face of new antibiotic treatments of such injuries. And Herta Oberheueser, a young, promising surgeon before the war, welcomed surgical opportunities to advance her career. There will always be rabbits to justify research, to defend practices, to promote careers, to explore solutions and onto which we can pin our hopes, our principles, and onto which we might take out our rage and helplessness.

For the Ravensbruck prisoners, the rabbits were their protecorates, their precious children and their unflagging belief that something good might come from something so very, very bad. As the Allied troops began to win the war in Europe and the inevitability of loss grew imminent, the Nazis were determined to kill all the surviving rabbits, leaving no evidence of the surgical atrocities committed. Still, the prisoners hid them, traded numbers with them during daily attendance, gave them extra rations of food, and encouraged them to live so that, one day, they might be living testaments to the horrors of Ravensbruck. There will always be rabbits to protect, to provide for, to encourage, and onto which we can pin our hopes, our principles, and truthfully, our courage and love.

Even today, there will be rabbits and their doctors. Sadly, both will be our friends and neighbors, our teachers, our employers and leaders. With the advent of new ideologies and practices, the lure of experimentation will convince even the most previously rational, compassionate individuals that they are called to new work. And with this advent, innocent others will give themselves over to the seemingly capable hands of such physicians.

In my own state, a handful of educational leaders–armed with research they claim is comprehensive and reliable–have succeeded in implementing reading testing that will determine whether a third grader may move to fourth grade or will be retained. This test measures fluency,  whether or not a child reads accurately, quickly and with expression. Clearly, there is a body of substantial research devoted to the role that fluency plays in effective reading. The key word, however, is “role.” Fluency itself is not the whole of good reading. Recall the cute, Shirley Temple-like girl from the former Hooked on Phonics commercials. Cute as a button, she stood confidently at a podium and read complex text fluently. It didn’t take a reading specialist, however, to question what–if anything–she understood from this text.

The fact that fluency experimentation is well-intentioned from those who sincerely believe that this measure will ensure that no child is left behind is still little defense for its mandatory state-wide execution. But the reading physicians have spoken, and the rabbits will be tested. In the future when fluency research will be inevitably and resoundingly replaced by new research (hopefully with comprehension playing a much bigger role), some of these reading specialists and the teachers who were forced to do this work will sincerely regret their actions and, regenerated, will jump on the newest reading bandwagon. Others will claim they were only doing their duty or following the research or taking the path of least resistance. Some will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to new practices which force them to denounce their former fluency allegiance.

And the rabbits? Only time will tell, but it stands to reason that at the very least, many will turn their backs on reading forever, the bitter taste of repeated testing still lingering in their mouths. They will live a life in which they are functionally literate but simply choose not to read. And this aliteracy will be as personally and socially devastating as illiteracy.

Oh yes, there will be doctors and rabbits, I’m afraid. Such is our human nature: to experiment and to succumb to experimentation. For the doctors, there is something profoundly enticing and noble about exploration and its rewards, about committing yourself to a cause, to a body of research, to a charismatic leader(s), to a golden principle. And for the rabbits, there is something profoundly innocent and vulnerable in the release–willingly or by force–to another’s cause.

In these super-charged post-election months, I am painfully aware of how some may read this metaphor, for the current administration has been compared to Nazis, their ideology to fascism, and the state of the nation to the inevitable demise of the Third Reich. Most certainly, it is not my intention to feed into this frenzy with the mention of Ravensbruck and third grade reading testing in the same blog post.

It is my intention, however, to lament the real and present danger of experimentation that has not been tested ethically, practically, and humanely. It is my intent to call physicians from all fields and in all leadership roles to task. Even those of us lay people understand that you can find research to support almost any claim. The real professionals are those who have examined the larger body of research, considered conflicting results and claims, and have decided upon the best treatment for the most patients. They are those who consider the whole and unique person, as well as the effects that any given treatment may have on him or her. The good news? These individuals are out there, but they are often marginalized by louder, more influential folks.

And it is my intention to offer caution to potential rabbits, as well as to the friends, parents, or caretakers of potential rabbits. If individuals can voluntarily submit to experimentation, then they should do so only after they have wisely considered the consequences. If they are forced to submit through laws and regulations, through social or commercial expectations,  or through prevailing ideologies, then there must be those who are willing to pick up the pieces when things go badly and to testify to the tragic consequences. Cliched as it sounds, history must not repeat itself, for most rabbits’ stories do not have happy endings.

As I read the accounts of surviving rabbits from Ravensbruck, I am sorely amazed at their will to live and to tell the world of all they experienced. Likewise, I am humbled by those prisoners who risked all to hide and feed these Polish girls.

I am also amazed at the resolve of such doctors as Dr. Herta Oberheueser. Once a promising young medical student with an entire life of helping others before her, she became a butcher convinced that she was serving the Reich with her God-given talents. How easily she transformed from healer to butcher, how devotedly she served until she was captured and tried for war crimes.  Even after serving a 20 year sentence, she began a new family medical practice and life. Until a Ravensbruck survivor recognized her and turned her into the German authorities who disbarred her from ever practicing medicine.

How did she live with what she had done? How did she muster the resolve to open a family practice? After two decades, how could she continue to claim that she had been “forced” to conduct these experiments? Herta Oberheueser was a living testament to the great power of those who relish the role of experimenter.

There will be rabbits, but we can pray that there will be fewer of them and that they will suffer less. And we can pray for the doctors, too, who often begin as idealistic, driven and talented individuals and end at best, as misguided explorers, and at worst, as fiends.

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.
Mother Teresa

Lately, I have begun thinking that I have the math all wrong. For much of my life, there has been one abiding equation that has driven me: 1 + 1000. That is, I have looked at most of my life as a very small number that would, God willing, eventually culminate is a really large number, an ultimate act or accomplishment that would finalize a life well-lived. When I perceived that this had not–and would not–happen before retirement, I set my sites on post-retirement. Maybe then, I would score the big number. Maybe then, I would do something to warrant the math that had lingered like the proverbial carrot in the distance. Maybe.

Sitting at the bedside of my father in his final weeks, I knew that I was in the presence of a life that had been very well-lived, a life represented by the largest of numbers, by words and deeds unparalleled in my eyes. Today, as I sit at my desk, the volumes of his life’s work sit before me as reminders of the numbers that doubled, then tripled, then grew exponentially into greatness. Not merely the number of books he had written or poems he had published–or even the number of students he had taught. But the indelible presence of something greater than himself. This was math to defy even the finest calculator.

As children, we feast on the words and encouragement of America: Dream big; You can be anything you want to be; The sky is the limit. For a season, celebrity and professional athletic status hang from low branches, like ripe fruit to be plucked by any and all. For a season, life spreads out like a smorgasbord, and all one has to do is choose from the bounty before them, returning a plate uneaten if it isn’t to one’s liking and choosing again. And again. When my daughter declared that she would be in the Ice Capades, I smiled over the pile of student essays I was grading, unfolded laundry, an empty bag of Cheetos, and a pile of unread newspapers at my feet. Oh, to be five years old and dreaming of sequined splendor on the ice!

And even as we grow into adulthood and our life’s work begins to unfold before us, there is that lingering echo: You can be what you want to be. It’s not too late if you work hard and commit yourself to your dreams. We put our noses to the grindstone, we keep our eyes on the prize, we persist. For the spoils go to the victor, and surely, we are destined to be victors at some point in time. Right?

Just the other day, I was talking with a friend who said that we should arrange a play-date for his daughter and my granddaughter. In a world of little girls who grow up far too quickly, these are girls who love to be home, to play imaginatively, to care for their little brothers, and–for want of a better word–are genuinely “nice” people. They may not be sports stars or leaders of the middle/high school pack, but they will be good friends to all. In the world’s eyes, their numbers will be infinitesimally small, their equations a series of quarters and halves, a math of ordinary kind acts that pale on the stage of district championships and most-likely-to-succeed honors. But years after the senior prom and the state softball championship, they will be young women whom others seek as confidantes. Their kindness and loyalty may not be defined by a single great deed but by too many small acts to count.

Mother Teresa was a better mathematician than most. She understood that the sum of small acts done with great love is a large sum. In the slums of Calcutta, she loved greatly–one man, one woman, one child at a time. In the midst of great throngs, her love was laser-focused, endowing each recipient with the very best of what she could give. I sincerely doubt that Mother Teresa had her sites set on a single act of greatness which would define her life. She was far too occupied with small acts committed with great love. In the eyes of God and the countless individuals she helped and loved, these small things are clearly and blessedly equal to any one great thing.

If my father’s math featured large numbers, my mother’s, like Mother Teresa’s, featured a series of many small numbers added, lovingly, over a lifetime. She, too, has always committed herself to small things done with great love. And in the most wonderful paradox, those small things are honestly huge. Their size and worth dwarfs almost any and everything in their midst. Ask anyone who knows my mother, and they will testify to this, for they have been beneficiaries of these acts and this love. She anticipates what others need before they are often even aware that they need it; she opens her house and her heart instinctively. Those who visit are loathe to leave, for they find magnificent comfort and peace in her presence. And if there is coffee and pie, so much the better.

I think I have been waiting for my life to begin. And to end with a bang, with a huge number, some marvelous thing to hang my hat upon. But in truth and in spite of my best laid plans, my math has been quietly working itself out. The fact that I have not truly understood nor taken to heart the good math of the Mother Teresas and Marcia Welches of the world is sad. But then, I was never good at math–not the old math or the new math. I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the most important math of my life has eluded me until now.

I sincerely doubt that my children will sit at their desks with the volumes of my written work, the large sum of my life, before them. What I can hope for, however, is that many small acts done with great love will live in their memories and light their way. I can hope for the laser-focus of living fully in the moment, giving all in love. I can hope that I grow up to be my mother. And that is the best math, indeed.

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither; deep roots are not reached by the frost.
― J. R. R. Tolkien

There is much glittering and wandering that has no tangible presence, that is largely unseen by most. Sharon Olds and her mother know this as well as Tolkien:

Wonder as Wander

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

my mother potters around her house.

Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one

there, no one to tell what to do,

she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,

fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly

throws out her arms and screams—high notes

lying here and there on the carpets

like bodies touched by a downed wire,

she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through

the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.

I feel, now, that I do not know her,

and for all my staring, I have not seen her

—like the song she sang, when we were small,

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,   

how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,   

for poor lonely people, like you, and like I 

—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays

and delays her supper, walking the familiar

halls past the mirrors and night windows,

I wonder if my mother is tasting a life

beyond this life—not heaven, her late

beloved is absent, her father absent,

and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth

alone, as she had not experienced it,

as if she is one of the poor lonely people,

as if she is born to die. I hold fast

to the thought of her, wandering in her house,

a luna moth in a chambered cage.

Fifty years ago, I’d squat in her

garden, with her Red Queens, and try

to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept

the pollen flowing on its local paths,

and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept

our eyes wide with seeing what we

could see, and not seeing what we could not see.

Oh the wandering and the blessed glittering that takes place in private places and moments, when there is no one there, no one to tell what to do. In these moments, we might taste a life beyond this life–perhaps earth alone. In these moments, perhaps we are not lost but found as we wander the crooks and crannies of souls imagined in new places, surrounded by new people and possibilities. Just as we have lived vicariously through others–fictional and real characters who dare to do and to be what we are not, what we have not–we live through wandering.

In the Sanctuary of Wandering, there are starts and re-starts, there are do-overs till the cows come home. If you can wonder as you wander, there are infinite possibilities of lives to live and places to go. Others may look into your situation and see a luna moth in a chambered cage, but you are marco-poloing your way through another adventure from the confines of your own sitting room or porch. Your virtual reality is one you create daily in your wanderings. Neither electricity nor technology is needed.

As a fellow wanderer, Plato writes:

I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.

Small bright pebbles to content ourselves with are enough in the Sanctuary of Wandering. And if one will have but eyes to see, there are, indeed, bright pebbles to be found. For one who wanders is not bound by time or space, by responsibilities or expectations, by physical abilities or disabilities. If you can imagine it, the corridors will be well-lit and the doors unlocked. Treasure awaits with each turn of the knob.

When the circumstances of this world darken and threaten to suffocate us, we often need to wander to survive. I recall reading a memoir of a Vietnam veteran who was held as a prisoner of war for years. He recounted that he played 18 holes of golf on the world’s finest courses daily. His mental wanderings down well-kept fairways and on manicured greens literally kept him alive. His mind buoyed his failing body, and hole by hole, he drove, chipped, putted, and wandered himself into one more day of living.

In Wandering: Notes and Sketches, a collection of poetry, prose, and artwork, Herman Hesse reveals his longing for a new life closer to nature. He, too, understands the necessity of both physical and soulful wandering:

I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.

Like Hesse, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms. I also need this to go on living.

Oh, there are times when I curse the many stops and starts of my mind. As a writer and a wanderer, I am all too eager to say no, that is not it at all and begin again. I dismay at my attention-deficit-disordered wandering that, untethered as a kite loosed from one’s hand, moves at the command of the wind. And try as I might, I often find that the string is just beyond my reach. The kite of my soul flashes its colorful tail as it heads east, or west, leaving my trembling fingers empty.

Still, I want my soul to be a wandering thing. Even if my hands are occasionally empty, there will be another kite and another day. That’s the true gift of wandering: the promise of another life, another place, another day.

And if you can’t see a destination? In the Sanctuary of Wandering, you can simply embark. Author D. H. Lawrence argues that the place to get to may be nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere. [Women in Love]

I can live with that, for my own nowhere is often a necessary respite from the world’s somewheres. As my grandchildren and I walk the 50 yards from my house to theirs, wandering soulfully into ocean and jungle adventures, living the pioneer lives of those we can imagine and those we have yet to imagine, none of us can imagine anything better. There will be toys to pick up and baths to be taken, but in these moments, we float above the day’s doings. We are more than content to wander.

Eat your heart out, Marco Polo.