Cold hands and wooly lambs

Responding to recent suggestions by people in my life that I try to be more social, I arranged to spend the morning yesterday helping out on a farm in temporary need of a few extra hands. It’s a place my children are connected to, and I like farms, and I like being outside, so I went with them.

It was a spectacular spring morning. A little on the cold side, but the sun was bright and the birds were busy, and it was good to have new things to do. The majority of my time was spent digging up stinging nettles in a field, alone. Perhaps it wasn’t the most successful of my attempts to be around other people, but I like to imagine some spiritual meaning to the hours I pass in silence. I suspect I would have made a killer mystic in some other time and place.

Also wonderful–lambs! Lots, including two born while we were digging up nettles and mulching vegetable beds. If there’s a better definition of joy than watching very young lambs running and jumping about in a field, I’m not sure what it is. Sheep have such distinctive voices. It’s a bit like being in the midst of a very talkative party to listen to them bleating back and forth.

As if all that wasn’t good enough, we came home with a bag of fresh shiitake mushrooms. With one or two exceptions, I remember nothing of importance about any paycheck I’ve ever received, but I remember every gift of food I’ve been given in exchange for my time. Apples, potatoes, vegetables, jams, mushrooms–I’m incredibly grateful for all of them.

Today it’s gray and cold again, and our only visitor is a lone turkey who stalks along the fringes of the trees. I’ve been taking a break from drafting, working on revising a backlog of stories instead. At the moment I’m doing neither. It’s time to warm my fingers and go work knitting with the kids. I’m halfway through a scarf, and I firmly believe that once I finish it, the warm weather will arrive to stay.

Boston, April 15, 2013

For those of you who have never waited at the finish line of a race for someone you love, it’s a time of excitement, a time of cheering as every runner makes their way to the end. The elite come through quickly, early. After comes everyone else–those running because they love to run, or because they have a reason to run, not because they expect to win, and they are cheered along as well, if not more, than than the frontrunners. There are children waiting for parents, parents waiting for children, friends waiting for friends. There’s a lot of caring waiting at a finish line.

Massachusetts is a small state. I live in the center, and I can reach either end in roughly ninety minutes, depending on traffic. I’ve lived here all my life, aside from that year I spent being born and learning to crawl in Maine. On Marathon Day, the streets of Boston are filled with people from all over the world, but they are also filled with my neighbors, my friends, because this place is my home, and these are my people.

I am heartsick for this world. I am heartsick over the violence everywhere, over all the lives lost in this tinderbox of anger we live in now, just as I am every day. Just as I am for our planet and the destruction we heap upon her as well.

But today, I am heartsick for this small area of the world that I call home, and for everyone left in fear and pain and grief in it.

April update

More snow! Yes, for all my talk about how winter must end, it simply won’t. Yesterday I had the pleasure of a) having my teeth cleaned; b) doing my taxes; c) calling the IRS to clarify something I’d received conflicting information on, listening to the same thirty-second music loop for an hour, and then being hung up on; all while d) sleet pounded on the windows.

But we have frog eggs in a wading pool in the backyard, and the phoebes have returned to work on their dilapidated nest, and the daffodils are blooming, so I’m holding fast to my belief that warm days will come.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a novelette this weekend, one that was supposed to be a nice little short story. It isn’t. I’m finally feeling back in the writing groove (yay!). I’ve also been doing research for Crossroads. It’s been a very very long time since I’ve worked on any novel outside of the Aware world, and it’s taken me a while to switch tracks. It’s hard to believe I’ll ever have the same closeness with another set of characters that I have with Wren and Isis and Juno.

But I think Crossroads, which I keep trying to write as Crosswords (the story of a girl who trades her soul for a chance at winning the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament) (hey, wait a minute, that actually sounds like something fun to write…), will be something good. Blue Riley (Really it’s Sapphire Blue, but my mom was weird that way) has this determination to her that I love. And hiking boots, worn leather hiking boots, and bravery, and…well, I’m getting there. We’ll be friends yet. There are some sections of her story that I’m dying to write.

Finally!

I’ve heard the wood frogs calling! Not, perhaps, the most beautiful of the songs of spring, but one I cherish nonetheless. I may still have snow in the backyard (lots) and may have worn mittens to an outdoors potluck last night, but there are wood frogs calling from the beaver pond, so spring is officially here!

On rereading Tolkien

My dear family gave me a new copy of The Lord of the Rings for my birthday. As those of you who have read my blog for a while know, I love books. Physical books, books that have weight and weathered pages and ancient stains and tired spines.

Unfortunately, books wear out in direct proportion to the love they’ve experienced through their lives. My original paperback copies of the trilogy are tattered, to put it kindly. The final straw was losing the last few pages of The Return of the King. I’ll keep them all, of course, but I now also have a shiny new hardcover version of the entire set in one volume.

So I’m reading it again. It’s been a very very long time. Yes, there are things in Middle Earth that are not as I would like them, as a woman reader in 2013. It doesn’t change the fact that I lived in these books when I was younger. I would read from beginning to end and then immediately start over again. I even had a record (yes, record, you know, vinyl, round, with grooves) of Tolkien himself reading some of the poems, in English and Elvish.

Back then, I wasn’t all that excited by Frodo’s journey. I liked the battles, the big ones. I liked everyone charging into the fray, and not all of them returning. Frodo? He simply continued forward. He endured. Everything rested on his shoulders, but they were very plain little shoulders.

I started thinking about that again a few years ago, when I read this post on PTSD. Somewhere along the way my feelings had changed. I still loved the sheer bigness of the action, but it was Frodo that seemed more compelling. That terrible weight he carried, that doggedness in continuing on, that sense of bone-deep weariness, with everything.

And at the very end, after traveling with Sam one last time, with Sam in tears as he says that he thought that Frodo would stay and enjoy the Shire forever, Frodo says this: “So I thought too, once. But I have been hurt too deeply, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

Writing, the kind of writing that catches hold of readers in some inescapable way, often grows from troubled gardens. For me, the glory of Tolkien’s work is not so much in the details of orcs and elves and wargs, but in the sense of cost behind it all. That the action doesn’t end with a battle, or with the destruction of the ring, but with a return home to a country that no longer fits, with coming to terms with the things lost along the way to victory while always feeling gratitude for what was saved. The sort of writing that likely grew out of Tolkien’s experience of World War I.

At its best, fantasy is so much more than cool beings in fabulous places. It’s an invitation into life in all its splendor and messiness and pain and wonder. It acknowledges that magic and loss can walk hand in hand, not just in books, but in our lives as well.

Justice

Nothing I write about the Supreme Court and Prop 8 will be as true and meaningful as this post by Genta Sebastian.

It’s time to love and honor all families.

It’s time for justice.

A moose and some sunlight

I had a birthday last week. It was birthday-ish, with cake with sprinkles and a Buster Keaton movie and a moose. A real moose, four long legs and all, hanging out to say hi. We find signs of moose everywhere, but I’ve still only seen them in person a few times. Once when I came round a corner in a car and found a bull moose looking back at me, and another time when a very busy one trotted past us in the backyard, on her way to someplace important.

So that was good. We’ve also had a pair of Hooded Mergansers in the beaver pond of late. The male is quite handsome and a little full of himself. The female is lovely. For some reason the female mergansers, any variety, appeal to me far more than the males. They have beautiful cinnamon crests, and just look…I don’t know. Like a creature who has flown through the loneliest of places, a temporarily lost fairy queen, perhaps.

While the snow refuses to leave (we had yet another snow shower this morning), the sun continues to return. It is strong enough to warm the house during the day, and to make my winter coat seem a little foolish. I forget this every year, the fact that it is not that the winter decides to move on, but that the sun gains ascendancy. It’s comforting. There is no White Witch, keeping it forever cold and dark. It’s simply a question of waiting until the days lengthen and the sun rises and the birds begin to sing again.

When I was young and fascinated with astronomy, I was devastated to learn that some day the sun would run its course and be gone, and with it, us. That’s the trick of life though, isn’t it? Everything must run its course, and still we build and dream and sing and sleep and love and try to make the most of this impermanence. It’s not the lasting forever that’s important, it’s the passion we bring to our time here.