Cotyledons: Breathless Beauty and Impossible Hope

I used to say every thanksgiving that I am thankful for the usual things: family, friends, life, food, a job, and health.  Maybe it's because I've felt so burned by the last few years in my life but today it seems cheap and hollow.

Today I'm sad I didn't call my brother.  My brother for whom I would have ripped my heart out when I was a kid just to keep him going for one more day.  I haven't called him in so long there's no way he knows how much I miss him and wish he had been here tonight in my house where I might keep my eye on him and make sure he's safe.  Safe. 

There are good friends out there who I want to bring home to me where I can feed them, put them to bed with my down comforter and my warm sweet black dog, and coax them to let their street skin slip off to allow a few minutes of true rest which can only happen when you are stripped enough to be vulnerable.  My friends who might not be alone but who might not feel included- how did I not reach far enough to pull you in?  Why are you all spread out across the world when everything I have of worth is right here?

My mother, my sister, Philip, and my son.  This is the extent of my world today and it was good and warm and I was lucky to have my sister here with us, safe where I could feed her, keep her warm, and bake pie with her.  I made a fresh batch of elderberry syrup because my mom is sick and I dosed us all because it's the best I can do to keep us healthy.

This is a day for optimism for many and I love that people are looking at the good in their lives and celebrating the people they love and the food on their tables.

I see all holidays through two different lenses now.  I see them through my son's eyes- the excitement, the reasons to celebrate, to share, to laugh, to anticipate, to savor, to decorate, and to indulge.

And I see it through the eyes of everyone who is left outside the circle of light.  I see the longing, the hunger, the loneliness, and the cold.  I remember walking down the streets in the Richmond district in San Francisco at night and I would stop and look up at all the warm buttery light spreading out from the windows of the apartments.  I would watch the shadows of people moving around, living and sharing against brightly painted walls or through pale sheer curtains.  I remember knowing that I was always going to be standing there out on the pavement with my breath making clouds in the cold, drifting delicately up towards the street lights but fading fast.  I knew that no matter what life might bring me there was always going to be a part of my spirit that couldn't come inside.

The way a person who's experienced starvation might never be able to completely trust that there will be food again because a part of them is always going to still be starving.

There are always going to be people out in the cold; people starving; people friendless and homeless.  I can't change that.  I can't bring them all into my house because there isn't room in my small life for such an enormity.  It is part of the balance of life that there will always be those living in the warmth of the soft lamps and the deep laughter and there will always be those standing outside with fingers numb from the cold and with no door leading them inside.

The things I'm thankful for could fill pages but I don't wait until Thanksgiving to think about the people and the comforts I'm lucky enough to have.  What I don't express enough thanks for are the seemingly insignificant details that make waking up in a body that is no longer recognizable as mine worth the tears and the dread and the pain. 

The frogs.  I don't know if we have one, thirty, or a hundred but there is always a frog singing into the quiet pauses in the day from the shadows of long unweeded grasses as though to tell me that long after I'm gone and everyone else is gone there will still be frogs in the long grasses calling out to each other cheerfully. 

The geese going south.  Like all seasonal sounds this one lasts such a short time and I hear them wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, and I know the pull that draws them south, I understand it even though I'm the exact opposite; always pulling, winging, crying north.  The geese go south for my winter and I always choose to go north in their summer.  I listen to them and it never fails to make me feel a thousand times lighter inside and I inevitably laugh out loud and salute them as they pass.

The uncurling of new plants.  I remember the first time I was profoundly shaken up by the gorgeousness and the impossible hope represented in the emergence of new plants.  I was weeding my mom's garden in the freezing cold with my fingers going nearly numb and my cheeks were red with it and I felt so good being out in my season, in my natural weather, when I got close to one of her outdoor ferns and my weeding uncovered the tiniest curl of new frond no larger than a pinto bean with its body so tightly wound I choked back a cry of surprise.  It seems silly to write it but it was like finally getting why everyone is so crazy over the "miracle" of life.  I don't believe in miracles but I do believe in breathless beauty and impossible hope rising from the slenderest cotyledons.

The piano in my dining room.  I don't play now. I have forgotten all my music.  The piano was my first true love in life.  The first instrument that I understood and hungered for more of.  I played sometimes for hours on the one my parents bought me when I was a kid.  Not necessarily real songs but making songs up as they came to me in one long endless breath.  One of the most traumatic aspects of my parents divorcing was how everything I knew and took daily absolution from was stripped from me and became "his" and "hers" and nothing was mine. 

The only thing I wanted was that damn piano.  It wasn't even that special for a piano but I fell in love with the actual instrument as much as I did with music itself because an instrument is the heart of music whether it be our own voices or something exquisite we fashion to mimic our spirits.  I was convinced that that piano was really mine because I was the only person who played it and I was most certainly the only person who deeply loved it.  I visited it at my dad's house for years as the keys slipped further and further away from my fingers. I have not once entered my dad's house without finding a moment to speak with the instrument that was my only real voice for so many years. 

I tried to tell him how I felt about it.  My dad is good at taking care of things and he has taken much better care of my old loved blond upright piano than I ever would have yet it is rarely played and it still carries me with it.  I asked my dad if he would leave it to me in his will.  He promised he would do it. 

I am a person of hauntings.  I let ghosts linger with me long past death and the green-light to move on.  I let them linger because they have no where else to go.  Like the memory of "Paris" perfume in our car as we passed through the night on our way down familiar freeways while my spirit designed its death.

The thing is, that piano isn't really mine and I don't want to want something that will only come to me after someone I love dies.  Children don't own the things their parents do, though they don't truly know it until they leave home.  Or are forced to divide from them through divorce. 

All this memory comes flooding back in these late hours after Thanksgiving because my mom brought another piano into my life a few years ago.  For the cost of having it professionally driven from one city to ours.  This is the piano in my dining room.  A piano that almost smashed a human foot.  A piano that came with us from the house that I loved as much as my old piano; that it literally broke my heart to leave. 

We have not been able to afford to get our piano tuned since we moved it with us up here to Oregon.  And then from one house here in town to another.  It is a wreck of sound.  Philip recently asked if we should just get rid of it and the thought made me kind of sick in my gut like he was suggesting that I might not really need my left foot.  I will not let that instrument go.  I hang onto hope that at some point I won't have a million other things waiting in line for my meager dollars to attend to and I'll get it tuned.

This past weekend, at Max's birthday party, one of his friends opened up the lid and sketched out a rough tune and it was wonderful.  Though I didn't know what he was playing (The White Stripes my sister informed me) this house came more alive than ever before.  I swear the wood floors swelled more tightly together, the windows let in just a little more light, and the walls became warm in spite of the cold.  My sister endeavored to get a duet of chopsticks going and it made me so happy to hear it.  Then another of Max's friends wanted to play around and they all kept coming back to it while I was in the kitchen listening to it all as though something in my life had come full circle and that maybe some ghosts had finally gone to ground.

I think I know why my dad keeps our old piano and takes care of it even though he doesn't play it.  I keep the piano in my dining room for the same reason.  Some homes need them to invite the magic in and to keep the ghosts quiet and tame. 

The piano may not be tuned and it may be a while yet before I can take care of it the way I would like to but it invited people to play and I know that some day I'm going to slow to a crawl and I will come home to roost at the seat in front of the keys and this time it will be an invocation of the hazelnut orchard with my dog running like a free scavenger in complete bliss surrounded by the arching branches letting in the sun to gloss her fur and make her kick up leaves as she gallops ahead of me.  This time it will be an invocation of the frogs to say I've got notes of my own.

To have a voice in this world is an extraordinary thing and I feel fortunate to have mine.