A time for every season

  

 

 We are back but irrevocably changed.

"Shaken off our social foundations by a global calamity, an invisible virus we could not see coming, we each found ourselves at the end of certainty and the beginning of faith," writes Joan Chittister in The Monastic Heart. "But where can we start to become what we know, down deep, ourselves to be -- spiritual seekers in search of a way through a serious period, an astounding eruption of normalcy in our lives?"

Climbing the well-worn stairs of the front porch to the accompaniment of birdsong, I insert the key into the lock of the old wooden door, and enter into a new season, unlike any other. Overhead, seagulls circle, and the red maple is about to explode into leaf.

The summer house is asleep, but now it yawns and stirs. It's time to throw open the windows and clear the cobwebs. Listen and you can hear the siren's call, the ancient song of the sea, waves crashing in cadence to the Master's beat.

This is the place where the stuff of childhood and contemporary life intersect. It is forever springtime in childish musings, yet altered by the last two winters of our discontent. 

There is much work to do. Sprinkled like flour, a thin layer of dust blankets every surface. Pushing up the old windows and sliding them into worn slots takes a great show of strength. The freezer door is stuck and needs defrosting. A kitchen towel drawer is dotted with mouse droppings. As the well begins to pump, water circulates like blood through veins. Opening the kitchen faucet, brownish water pulses for five minutes straight, before it clears.

Lying dormant, the summer house has waited patiently for the sound of children playing, the whirr of the lawnmower, the hum of the refrigerator, the play by play of a Red Sox game, and most of all, the gathering of family and friends filling every nook and cranny of the place with laughter.

But right now I alone herald this new and unknown season. I sit in my favorite chair and ponder the future while acknowledging the uncertainty of a return to life as we know it.

Ultimately, we are spiritual seekers traveling on the road of life. We lift our burdens, and despite stumbling, we amble on…

Daffodils dance in the wind along the stone wall.

Red maple buds are ready to burst into leaf.

A day in my life - 9/11/2001

 

America is under attack, and I want to hide under my desk in my cubicle. But instead I stand with the other reporters in front of the TV. None of us speak. Two commercial passenger jets hijacked from Logan Airport in Boston struck the World Trade Center. How? Why?  I see Manhattan burning, the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, thousands of people running through smoke-filled streets. A third jet hits the Pentagon, and a fourth plane heading for Washington crashes in a Pennsylvania field. What the hell? President Bush is aboard Air Force One heading to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, home of the Strategic Command, which controls the United States’ nuclear weapons. Armageddon? I file into the conference room with my colleagues. I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. “What the f--- is going on?” yells Harold, my editor, as he tries to wrap his head around what is happening. I begin to shake. We are all veteran reporters in the room, but there is dead silence. Yet it is our job to inform the public, and our reflexes kick in. Harold barks out my assignment: “Connect the dots. Tie this rampage with the first attack on American soil at Pearl Harbor.” I go back to my cubicle and call my husband and speak to my children. Then I block out everything but this story. What happened 60 years ago? I find a former Army Air Corps mechanic, a Purple Heart recipient who was stationed at Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the airfield. He had been on duty all night and was going to bed at the time of the early morning raid. He tells me that he ran to get a rifle in the hangar, and it was hit three times. He says that 200 men died there, and the planes, barracks and hangar were heavily damaged. He says that 2,000 servicemen lost their lives in the harbor. Yet he points out that Pearl Harbor was a military target and an act of war, but the World Trade Center victims are civilians. I speak to a widow, whose husband was an aviation machinist mate first class aboard the Helena. She says that he was just getting out of bed, putting on his shoes and planning to go to church when a bomb hit amidships. She tells me that he ran up to the deck, and bullets from a Japanese plane flew over his head and killed two men. She says that what her husband most remembered about that day was the confusion and disbelief at the surprise attack. I write the story on deadline. I climb the three flights of stairs in the parking garage on wobbly knees. Today is the day that changes everything. God help us!

Escape

Stuck between a rock and a hard place?  

Turn your back on these troubling times and escape.

"It is solved by walking," wrote 5th-century saint, Augustine of Hippo.

Come with me.

Let's walk along the seashore together.

Breathe in the salt air. Embrace the stillness. 

Plod on... even though we may stumble.

When the wind shifts the sea grasses, choose a new path.  

Amid the seaweed, await the crashing waves.

Look around and see how everything fits together seamlessly.

Observe the Creator's art. There is nothing better than this.

The Hiding Place

 

Sitting in my favorite chair of vintage hard-rock maple that my parents bought as newlyweds, I am in the space where I feel most safe.

During the past year I have fled to the summer house countless times to reside in this little corner of the room by the window, secure in its confines.

Whether weathering storms of winter snows and spring rains or bathed in bright sunshine, I hid and read.

As the pandemic raged, my world became smaller; but my worldview became bigger.

The library shelves behind me hold dozens of my books, and I have read them all – ranging from an illustrated hardcover of J. K. Rowling’s children’s book “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” a special Christmas gift from my best friend, to a giant glossy picture book of Francesca Premoli-Droulers’ “Writers’ Houses”, a $50 splurge at Barnes & Noble that I bought decades ago with the generous Christmas bonus from a kind publisher.

I vacillated in the store whether to put the money toward the household budget or purchase this one-of-a-kind tome that was way beyond my means.

Today I think I made the right decision.

Sequestered, yet set free, I lived this past year in the pages of my books.

In my mind’s eye, I sat at a school desk in Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry holding a magic wand, or at Karen Blixen’s writing desk in Kenya gazing “Out of Africa.”

I delved into gardening books, planning rows of summer vegetable plants that would sustain my family despite supermarket shortages.

I travelled to the “The Country of the Pointed Firs” with Sarah Orne Jewett, and I became a writer who spends three months in a small coastal town in nineteenth-century Maine, or moved into the cabin that Henry David Thoreau built on the shore of “Walden” Pond.

But most of all, I pondered “The Divine Hours” by Phyllis Tickle, praying for an end to the plight of a people on a planet in pain.

Frozen in time

We wait... 

In the dead of winter, we are frozen in place.

Temperatures dip, and Arctic winds blow.

Snow falls sporadically, clinging to every tree branch and blade of grass.

We hibernate and pray for an early spring.

The woods beckon, a magical forest draped in winter white.

Behind a stone wall, dormant farmland stretches to the sea.

Freed from the barn, horses clad in blankets brave the cold.

The snowy path to the barn is all uphill.

Under the snow by the stone wall, daffodils bide their time.

Weathering the turn of the year

2020 has been one long dark night.

We yearn to congregate again.

We're still stuck but oh so close.

See the forest through the trees?

We're rounding the bend.

God help us trudge on.

 

A sort of fevered imagination

Blessed with an abundance of imagination by the Creator, I have put it to good use this past year.

“What sort of a fevered imagination you must have,” said Mr. Tilney to Catherine Morland in “Northanger Abbey.”

Ditto.

Thank you, Jane Austen, for describing my chief occupation these days.

Imagination is my coping mechanism when I hear the collective cry of the people on this planet.

We are our brother’s keeper; but with each passing day, we grow farther apart in survival mode.

Consequently, I create the world in my mind that I wish it could be.

While I hide behind my mask, I imagine.

Since I was a child, I have spent my summers by the sea.

However, at the end of each season, we closed up the summer house and locked the door until spring.

“Winter is coming,” my parents would say; and I would no longer hear the sigh of the sea rocking me to sleep, except in my imagination.

This fall I acutely dreaded the separation.

Working remotely at home, I had cabin fever; and our seasonal home became a safe house.

“What if we winterize the summer house and spend our weekends there?” I asked my husband and mother.

And I imagined a little Christmas tree, a manger, an angel on the front door. I would read or write with Mom’s crocheted afghan tucked around me, while the snow fell and the wind howled and the sea roared.

Dressed warmly in my wool coat, I would walk along the seashore wearing its winter face, a solitary woman immersed in the elements yet shielded from the unwelcome drone of the news of our day.

We filled the oil tank and hired a contractor who wrapped the pipes; and Saturdays and Sundays became vacation days again.

While the constant threat of the pandemic looms large in our minds, we leave our worries behind when we step inside the summer house.

Surely there can be sanctuary someplace and sometime in this world, despite Covid-19.

At least, I imagine it so.