Tulip Liberation Front

Tomorrow is May Day, and for many years I have cut bucket-loads of tulips from my garden on May Day morning and walked to work, handing flowers to whomever would accept them as a token of the day.  I will do so tomorrow morning, and with a twist.  

About a block from here, on the main street nearby, a 1950s house was torn down about 2 months ago.  Bulldozers and large earth-moving equipment was called in to tear down trees and shrubs, level the land, and make straight the path of the developer.  James and I walked over just now, carrying a bucket partly-filled with water, and picked every tulip and daffodil the developer had not buried beneath mounds of moved earth.  The house's gardens were not saved, not transplanted, not considered at all.  The tulips were at the eastern edge of the property, minimally protected by overhanding tree branches.  I'm betting that they'd be buried tomorrow - - just as the tulips, daffodilas, iris, peonies at the north and south edges of the property are already buried.  

Tomorrow, I'll give away the flower of a garden that will disappear by the end of the day.  I see this as a fitting May Day action.  

Bereft

Bereft is a small, strong word. And bereft is what I am today.

Today, I sold my home. I've lived many places in the past 40 years; in fact, I've moved - on average - every 18 months. In the time since I left my parents' home, I have lived in exactly two places that I would call home; Eld Street in New Haven, Connecticut and Brockman Boulevard in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had gardens in both places, which is one of the connecting threads.

The Brockman house looks, to me, like a Hollywood set designer's vision of a Tudor cottage. It has a balcony over the living room fireplace, ogive-arched doorways from space to space within the house, pocket doors to the closet and bathroom in the bedroom above the garage, little hidie-holes throughout, a miniature flying buttress off the front porch, a Palladian window in the garage. I love it inordinately, and have since I first stepped through the door and saw the soaring ceiling in the living room - with that balcony over the fireplace. The world divides into two camps: those who see the balcony and coo, "Romeo and Juliet" and those who exclaim "Errol Flynn!" Guess into which camp I fall. I picture flinging myself from the balcony, catching onto and swinging from the antique Dutch brass chandelier, crashing through the 12' tall windows out into the front garden, shouting "Ha, ha! Take that!", and running away through the tall flowering shrubs out front.

And now, it's time to pack up what is left in the house and leave it to whomever comes next. I guess I can walk away; I know I have to.

Onyx's girl foal

I am in Saugerties, New York, staying with friends.  Billie and Richard live in a farmhouse that Richard has restored:  the kitchen he added on is bigger than most apartments I've lived in, and the deck off the south side of the house affords a view over the vegetable garden, some of the flower beds, a lawn, and the Thoroughbred horse breeding and training farm across the road.  

When I arrived here a week or so ago, I walked over to meet the foals.  I've been a fool for horses all my life and think I would happily have moved into the barn to be close to the mares and the foals, to smell that wonderful horse-ness, to hear the anxious whickering of a foal not sure where her mama was and the low, calm answering whuffle the mother makes.  How not fall in love?    

Last week, the youngest foal was three days; the oldest, two weeks.  The changes I've observed over the intervening days have been astonishing.  Foals who could totter around in their mothers' shadows can now run (not too gracefully yet), who could rear up (not too far off the ground, please) can now do a creditable job of it, who could buck (hesitantly) can now do a rodeo bronco proud.  Last week, the mothers would chase even the other foals away from their babies; now, those foals are figuring out how to play together, to understand that they are each others' natural foils, to test strength one against the other.  

My favorite is a little female foal whose mother is named Onyx.  The day before yesterday, Onyx's foal figured out how to lie down:  how to accordion up those impossibly long legs with the improbably big knees, to lower herself to the straw before rolling onto her side to lie in the hot sun.  Prior to that, she would bend her legs, get this perplexed look on her face, and just flop over like a tree falling to the ground.  No control, no understanding of simple mechanics - - just submission to gravity.  I think she was offended when I laughed.  

Onyx's foal has lost her hesitancy around me.  She comes to the fence when I appear, stretches up her beautiful little head for me to scratch the center of her forehead, switches her tail in time to the scratching.  I love her immoderately and am convinced she will grow up to be strong, beautiful, and fast. She will win races, thus proving her value as a broodmare; she will pass her boldness on to her own daughters; she will whuffle when those daughter foals wake up in the straw and wonder where she is.  

How I wish she were to be mine.  Go well, Onyx's girl foal. Show those males what you can do.  Run with ever-increasing grace, rear up tall and proud, and show those broncos what bucking is all about.  

My sister, Mary

My sister, Mary, recently had her second hip replacement surgery.  After the hospital, after the rehab at a nursing home, after staying with our mom for a while, she was recovered enough to be away from her doctor.  She traveled from Springfield, Massachusetts to Saugerties, New York to stay with her dear friends, Billie and Richard.  In fact, Billie and Richard have been such a mainstay in Mer's life for so many years that I, our other sister, Francesca, and my friends, Lorelei and Connie, are all good friends with them.  Mary has this way of sharing - whether it be friendships, family, houses, clothes, books; for her, sharing multiplies the delight.  

Mary retains childlike amazement at the every dayness of life:  the sun that comes up every morning, the gawky grace of newborn foals at the horse farm across the road, the way asparagus grows so fast you think you can see it happen, the fact that her sons have grown up to be good and loving men.  You can only stand there and watch her, marvel at her and along with her.  

My sister, Mary, is good in a way that I can only admire and cheer on.  Go, Big Honey, go.  

noise, sound, hearing

In the late spring of 1998, I finally took action to prove James wrong:  I was not hard of hearing - he was incredibly soft-spoken!  In June, the audiologist returned the verdict:  I am deaf as a haddock.  I got my hearing aids in the first days of August, and shortly thereafter learned I had breast cancer.  Of course, the two are unrelated but will remaim forever linked in my mind.

Tom O'Connor, the audiologist, and I talked at length about the nature of my hearing loss and the advantages of different types of hearing aids .  I finally decided o spend the big bucks and get things that well-nigh invisibly fit into your ear (the smaller, the more expensive), and to get one for each ear.  I realized that I would feel lopsidedif I could hear better out of one ear than the other; a decision I've been happy with ever since and which figures into the story to come.  

James came with me when I finally got the aids, since I'd asked Tom to tune the aids to the particular pitch of James' voice.    When that was done and, with the aids in my ears, I heard James speak, I thought he was shouting at me.  He was not, of course; it was me truly hearing him for the first time.  In the days that follwoed, I heard many strange and wonderful things:   the sound that bicycle tires make when you ride your bike to work, the sound of scissors cutting paper, the sound of my dog barking in the night.  Who knew?  Not me.  

Over time, I became inured to the onslaught of sound and of noise.  I filtered it out as anyone does (is that true?  Does everyone filter sound?  Or is only me, who didn't hear it for who knows how many years?)  And then, several months ago, my right aid gave out.  I took it in to the shop.  With only one working ear,  I felt constantly off-balance, continually out of whack, totally unhappy.  Over several weeks, I stopped wearing the left aid in an effort to regain some equanimity, some sense of physical and psychic balance.  I think that this slow remove of my connection to the hearing world - the failure of one aid followed by the conscious removal of the other - somehow blunted my perception of what happened.  I no longer heard, I no longer reacted to sound, I no longer had one of my essential connections to the world.  And I had no idea that any of this was true.  

For reasons I shan't go into, it took several months to get a new right hearing aid.  I did not put it in until I got home and could insert both the right and the left aids.  Sweet Jesus in the Morning!  The sound, the noise, the incredible volume of everyting that goes on daily in the world!  I asked James, I asked friends, I asked strangers:  can you hear the clock ticking all the time?  Can you always hears the squising sound that car tires make when they turn a corner?  Cne you always hear the gurgle of pipes in the bathroom two floors up?  Can you always hear the goddamned birds in the back yard even if the kitchen door is closed?  Is that thunderous noise really the refrigerator?  Is that the bus stopping a block and a half away?  

What about this sound?  That one?  

Yes.  People who can hear, can hear.  People like me, who cannot hear yet can be helped, rejoice in sound, in music, in random noise, in the sound of a great-grandfather's mantel clock ticking and chiming.  Mostly, in the sound of voices telling us that we are heard, are listened to, are loved.  

Thank you for listening, for talking back, for making a joyful noise.  

noise, sound, hearing

noise, sound, hearing