Car trouble

Sitting in the summer house with friends yesterday, we told stories. I shared this tale of a misadventure many years ago…

I heard the engine roar as my husband waited for me in his new purchase, a 1977 Corvette. As I slid into the car, I grabbed onto the seat belt and strapped it firmly across my hips. Making a road hugging turn, we headed to a wedding.

When we arrived at the church, I pushed the release button on the seat belt; but it held secure. Then my husband leaned over and pushed the button, grabbing onto the belt and jerking it.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m coming around.”

Opening the door, my husband knelt on the body frame and pulled with all his strength but to no avail.

“Listen, honey,” my husband said as he opened the T-top. “Maybe you can squeeze out of the belt, and I can climb on the roof and lift you out.”

“I’ll try,” I said feebly.

I pushed on the floorboards with my black high heels and willed my body upward. But the belt dug deeper into my flesh and would not let me go.

I began to panic. In a few minutes the bride would be walking down the aisle.

My husband lost his patience and began tugging with all his might. If the belt wouldn’t release, then he’d rip it right out. But it only rubbed and burned its pattern into my skin.

And that’s when I began to hyperventilate. I leaned out the car door as far as I could, gasping for air.

“Isn’t there a scissors or knife in the trunk?” I panted.

“Corvettes don’t have trunks,” he said, pacing up and down the sidewalk.

“Well maybe you could knock on a door and ask for something to cut me out of this thing,” I shrieked.

Just then a carpet company van came down the street.

Without thinking, my husband ran after it, hailing the driver. He pulled over and rolled down the window, and my husband blurted out, “I need a knife for my wife.”

Calming down, my husband began to explain…

“Don’t cut my dress!” I wailed, when my husband returned and sliced the belt with the borrowed carpet knife.

I was free.

Although we were very late, we saw that the bride was still standing by the church door.

Sitting in the pew, I read the wedding invitation: “Two lives, two hearts joined in friendship, united forever in love.”

“Just like us,” I thought to myself. “And I’m also joined to his car.”

A world loved into being

Ah, springtime… It’s been a long time coming this year. But finally after many false starts, a warm sunny day arrives; and it is time to de-winterize the summer house.

While my husband works on a broken water line, I skip outside to look for spring.

Wild white and orchid pansies greet me on the front lawn, and my first thought is to delay my husband from taking out the mower. I imagine fairies hiding behind their tiny perfect petals, but more likely a colony of awakening insects inhabits this colorful garden.

Laden with buds, the branches of the maple tree wave to me in the wind. I feel their urgency, the yellow pockets yearning to unfurl against a backdrop of bright blue sky.

In the backyard the carpet of deep green lawn is interrupted by patches of dandelions. I remember the delight of holding tiny bouquets of the bright yellow flowers in my six-year-old hands.

Walking over to the stone wall, I admire the row of daffodils in full bloom. Then I spot a door in a nearby tree. Perhaps wee folk live here.

One of my favorite opening lines in literature is this one:

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” wrote J.R.R. Tolkien. … “It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats – the hobbit was fond of visitors... The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.”

Tolkien biographer Charles Moseley writes: “Tolkien’s Christian understanding of the nature of the world was fundamental to his thinking and to his major fiction. Neither propaganda nor allegory, at its root lies the Christian model of the world loved into being by a Creator, whose creatures have the free will to turn away from the harmony of that love to seek their own will and desires, rather than seeking to give themselves in love to others. This world is one of cause and consequence, where everything matters, however seemingly insignificant.”

The real St. Patrick

Our New England coastline is evocative of the emerald isle.

In observance of St. Patrick’s Day, we wear green clothing, eat corned beef and cabbage; and some of us will even tip a few pints of green ale.

But why do we honor the patron saint of Ireland?

Patrick was born around 385, but biographers are unsure of the site of his birth in Britain, perhaps near Dumbarton on the Clyde, in Cumberland to the south of Hadrian’s Wall or at the mouth of the Severn.

In his spiritual autobiography, the “Confessio,” Patrick tells us that he was of Roman and British ancestry; and his father, Calpurnius, was a municipal official.

When he was a teen, Patrick was carried off by Irish raiders, who took him somewhere in County Mayo.

A slave, Patrick worked as a shepherd. He tells us he was lonely and afraid and that he turned to his religion for help.

“The love of God and his fear grew in me more and more, as did the faith, and my soul was raised so that in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers and in the night nearly the same,” he wrote.

Six years in captivity, Patrick said he heard God’s voice in his sleep, telling him to leave Ireland.

According to his biographers, he ran away walking 200 miles, found free passage on a ship and spent three days before reaching land in some uninhabited country. But eventually he returned to his family.

When he was 23 years old, Patrick saw a vision of an angel in a dream beckoning him to return to the western isle as a missionary.

He also heard voices saying, “We beg you, holy youth, to come and walk among us once more.”

After studying for the priesthood, Patrick decided to dedicate himself to the spread of Christianity in the places of his slavery.

He spent the next 30 years, traveling throughout Ireland founding schools, churches and monasteries.

Using native beliefs to teach Christianity, he superimposed a sun, a powerful pagan symbol, on the Christian cross, which became the Celtic cross; and he used the three-leafed shamrock to represent the Trinity: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Patrick died on March 17, 461 and was buried at Saul on Strangford Lough.

One thousand, five hundred and fifty-three years later, we celebrate the saint’s day; and he continues to teach us:

“Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.”

―St. Patrick

Spring is on the way

Peeking out the back door, I notice that the temperature gauge on the deck reads zero again.

Rock-hard snow still covers the yard, and the driveway and brick path to our front door are caked in layers of ice treacherous to drive or walk on.

Blinding snow squalls appear out of nowhere, and flurries are as commonplace as rain, while yet another winter storm watch has been posted with six inches to a foot of the white stuff in the forecast.

By all appearances we are in the throes of one of the coldest, snowiest seasons in memory. But no matter what Mother Nature throws at us now, we duck and know her fury is short-lived. March may come in as a lion, but in three weeks it will be springtime – and that changes everything.

“We often have a real blizzard in March; but even so, we have seen the earth again and felt the wind of spring,” said New England author Gladys Taber, who wrote from her seventeenth-century farmhouse in rural Connecticut. “It is just another removal sale on Nature’s part.”

A few hours later I am sitting in the Ram watching a hardy soul walk the beach. I should venture out, but instead I remain in the warmth of the truck cabin and dream about spring.

Not long from now the sand will soften, balmy breezes will blow, this deserted shoreline will fill with beach-goers and the Sakonnet will buoy a fleet of pleasure boats.

Ah, springtime…

At the summer house, we drive into the back yard; and I try to imagine that this Arctic tundra is a thick, springy bed of green grass.

Surveying the snow-covered roof of the house, we unlock the front door and step into the cold, musty confines of the dwelling. After checking each of the rooms, we thank God that they are intact, just the way we left them last fall.

A few years ago, we arrived to find a pile of rumble in the living room, where the ceiling had caved in.

I smile. In my mind I have already moved back. I am home.

So let the storms rage on...

“It doesn’t matter if a few shingles fall off in the hurrying wind,” said Taber. “It isn’t important that the yard is going to be an inland lake for some time. It doesn’t matter too much if a falling branch cuts off the electric. Spring is on the way.”

The wonder of wintering waters

Snow seems to be a constant companion these days, shifting down like flour or in giant floating flakes, painting our world in shimmering strokes of white.

At the seashore, drifts of snow-covered sand contrast mightily with the pulsing Sakonnet, as gray as steel.

Waving noisily in the wind, the brittle, ice-encrusted sea grasses still harbor wildlife in its crusty depths.

This time of year is often described as “the dead of winter,” but the reference is dead wrong. Life is abundant and manifest everywhere even on the coldest of days.

Staring out to sea, I imagine the countless unseen populations of marine life thriving beneath the waves, sheltered in saltwater, warmer than air.
 

While driving along the coastline, I stop by the side of the road near a farm. Leaving their wooden shelter, two horses with a determined gait trot out into a stonewall paddock, their pasture a field of snow.

The simple beauty of the scene takes my breath away – blanketed animals in a blanket of snow.

 

Reaching the Sapowet Management Area, a wildlife preserve on the east bank of the Sakonnet River, I marvel at the incredible numbers of geese that have sought refuge in this shallow saltwater bay.

Members of the waterfowl family, our native, medium-sized geese have webbed feet and thick bills designed for filtering small organisms in the water or for grasping underwater vegetation and shellfish.

Geese undergo lengthy migrations between their northern or inland breeding areas and coastal wintering waters.

I watch them patter across the water to get airborne. Wonderful. 

Driving onto the frozen terrain of the preserve, I catch a colony of seagulls unaware. Those offended by my trespass flap their wings in annoyance, but most plainly ignore me.

Despite the frigid temperatures at this estuarine intertidal wetland, the Ring-Billed Gulls congregate on the icy bank, with their white heads and underparts blending into the white world around them.

Their wingtips are black with white spots, their bills yellow with a black ring near the tips.

From December through February, their habitat is our New England coastline, and today they are right at home in this Arctic paradise – and so am I.

“I thank You God for this amazing/ day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees /and a blue dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes,” wrote poet e.e. cummings.

Yes.
 

'There is no such thing as bad weather'

Temperatures hover in the single digits, and last week yet another nor’easter blew in a foot of snow.

Ice clings to rooftops and roads, and ponds are frozen over, perfect for skating, if we can brave the cold.

“There is no such thing as bad weather; the good Lord simply sends us different kinds of good weather,” said nineteenth-century English writer and art critic John Ruskin.

Driving to the summer house, I try to forget the intense, bone-chilling cold and 30-mile-an-hour wind gusts. Instead I notice all the good things around me – sun on ice making trees and houses sparkle light diamonds, the smell of wood smoke in the air, tiny footprints in the snow, the quiet…

“One reason for the beauty of New England has always been the architecture, for the houses and churches were built to fit the land and the climate,” said Gladys Taber, who wrote from her seventeenth-century farmhouse on forty acres in rural Connecticut. “The steep pitch of roofs shed heavy snow, low eaves shed the melt easily, and the small-paned windows kept out the bitter cold, as did the low-hung doors. The houses were as staunch as the sailing ships that went out from Gloucester, New Bedford, Provincetown.”

We stop for breakfast at The Black Goose, which overlooks Nanaquaket Pond. A fishing boat is stuck in the middle of an Olympic-sized, saltwater ice rink. The fisherman has no need to row out to his vessel; he can walk.

At the summer house we drive into the backyard, expecting a world of white; but what we find is desert landscape. Snow lies beneath layers of sand whipped by heavy winds from the sand flats in the nature preserve and saltmarsh. I have lived here since childhood, and I cannot remember sand dunes in our yard in the middle of winter.

I stay in the truck to avoid being pelted by sand. The summer house, covered in snow, is an igloo, hibernating and waiting patiently for spring.

The farmland behind our property is filled with thousands of geese, seeking sanctuary from the unforgiving winds and sand. They hover together in the fields, a giant shorebird reunion.

We drive along the beach, following the rime that has encrusted the shoreline. The waves are angry, battling ice floes that try to take shape in vain, doomed to lie broken on the rocky shore.

Then the sun breaks through the dark gray clouds and fills the truck cabin with light and warmth.

Inspired, I reach into my bag with cold fingers, pull out a pad and begin to write…

It’s all good.

 

Reflections on a beach in winter

 

Time marches on.

Another year is a gift, a second chance. We start over and begin anew.

“Still round the corner there may wait, a new road, or a secret gate,” said J.R.R. Tolkien.

I start the day at the beach, which is just as lovely as in midsummer, only much colder.

It is deserted except for a few seagulls circling overhead, turning their wings against the wind and casting shadows on the shore.

Sunlight streams into the truck cabin keeping me toasty warm as I gaze in awe at the panorama before me.

In the morning sun, the snow coruscates, as bright light reflects on ocean waves.

Dusted with snow, granite boulders by the water’s edge seem like the stuff of snowmen, huge snowballs waiting to be placed atop each other.

William Blake said, “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”

As I adjust to the tranquility around me, I feel the strain of the past week lessen its hold.

In Genesis, God called his creation the sea and filled it with all kinds of swimming creatures with which the water teems, and God saw how good it was.

A walk along the beach in January is very good indeed and a constant reminder of change. Every year, every day, every second – the sea is changing. Countless populations of marine life shift. No stone is left unturned. It is a world in flux.

Today the beach is a world of white, wearing its winter wardrobe of snow and ice, a blank slate lying fallow.

I walk slowly leaving behind footprints in the snow-encrusted sand.

This quiet, open space in this in-between time or interstice reminds me of a musical composition. As a lifelong musician, I think of the Grand Pause.

The concert band rises to a crescendo, and then there is a sudden silence. The musicians have come to a G.P. or Grand Pause, which is a notation over a rest indicating that they are expected to extend the silence until the conductor signals the beginning of the next note. The function of this pause is to create a period of silence at the direction of the director.

January is a grand pause, time to reflect at the Creator’s direction.

“You can’t get too much winter in the winter,” said Robert Frost, who lived deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

The cold, biting wind ushers me along. A world of possibilities lies ahead.