It was a very eventful 2010, with a lot of challenges. One very positive thing that happened in my life is that I became a Certified Reiki Master Practitioner/Teacher. My Master's training took place late in the year, during a cold, hard-winded four-day retreat at Rising Phoenix, the Loyola College Retreat Center in Flintstone, Maryland, during which three celestial events happened concurrently for the first time in 372 years: the winter solstice, a full moon, and a lunar eclipse. This gave a powerful energy and sense of moment to the retreat, which I shared with two fellow students, fun and fascinating men named Carl and Rudy, and my teacher David.
On the first day of our Reiki Master's journey, David asked us to write a haiku about what we were feeling about our experience, to be shared the following morning. This opened a floodgate of haiku, and throughout the rest of the retreat they came, some humorous and some serious. Since it has been so long-- probably twenty years-- since poetry has come to me unbidden, I thought I would share my Reiki haikus with you here.
Silver moon and stars--
the female principle reigns.
Loving, caring, strong.
The Reiki Master
sings and chants her four smybols.
Energy flows free.
David, Rudy, Carl:
my winter solstice brothers.
Reiki unites us.
The food was fantastic at the retreat center, and one night at dinner, I composed this one:
The Reiki Master
licks his plate clean at each meal.
Loyola-- good food!
The retreat center has a huge fireplace in their central gathering/dining room, and throughout that cold, blustery long weekend, they kept it fed and glowing for us:
A log on the fire.
The fire in my heart grows strong.
Both are burning bright.
We titled this one "Pick-up Line at the Reiki Bar and Grill":
Hon-sha-ze-sho-nen
is my favorite Reiki symbol.
So, what's yours, baby?
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Sunday, June 13, 2010
How Lovely
Many, many times over the past few weeks, in many instances in my life—even at work—I have experienced a strong feeling that the only appropriate thing to say or do is to open my mouth and have Brahms’ How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place issue forth. Not just the alto line, but all the voice parts together, as if I were some super Tuvan throat singer and could sing all four vocal parts at once—with the orchestral score issuing from my throat as well. It has been almost a physical sensation, as if I am a channel, or a pipe which, if placed in the wind just so, would come alive with sound. Or maybe it’s as if I am a television that, if my antennae were placed just so to catch the wave, would spring into sound, color and narrative.
Saying the appropriate thing these situations has been a real challenge. If I am possessed in those moments, it is a wonderful possession. It feels as if it must feel to be standing on the edge of a cliff with arms outstretched and the wind blowing in the right direction, and wanting ever so badly to take off and fly—but maintaining just enough rationality to know that it wouldn’t happen, so best not to jump off, best not to open my mouth wide and wait for that fully formed music to come flowing out.
Do you think I’ve packed enough metaphors and similes into these scant paragraphs? Here’s one more: Though it’s not issuing forth from my mouth, the music lives inside of me, and I ride it like an eagle riding a thermal.
Saying the appropriate thing these situations has been a real challenge. If I am possessed in those moments, it is a wonderful possession. It feels as if it must feel to be standing on the edge of a cliff with arms outstretched and the wind blowing in the right direction, and wanting ever so badly to take off and fly—but maintaining just enough rationality to know that it wouldn’t happen, so best not to jump off, best not to open my mouth wide and wait for that fully formed music to come flowing out.
Do you think I’ve packed enough metaphors and similes into these scant paragraphs? Here’s one more: Though it’s not issuing forth from my mouth, the music lives inside of me, and I ride it like an eagle riding a thermal.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Enthroned in Majesty
The week of my father’s funeral, my cousin Sandy had cooked us a Thanksgiving dinner and brought it to my mother’s house, where we were all staying. Thanksgiving was about two weeks away, and Sandy, in an act of caring and generosity that is typical of her, thought since we probably weren’t going to be together on the actual feast day, we should be able to share a meal of thanks while we were all together.
We prepared the table as for a normal Thanksgiving meal, and sat arrayed around the table. Although I grew up Catholic, ours was not a terribly observant family, and we never normally said grace before a meal—except on Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. As we sat there about to begin the meal, the question arose, who was going to say grace? My brother Mark suggested I say it, as I was the only child who regularly attended church. I said, “No, I think Ma should say it.” And so it was.
My parents had been divorced some 39 years before, and it was an ugly divorce, in which the fighting and strife had dragged on for years. While my father had gone on to create a second family with a second wife, my mother, although pretty, sociable, and popular, had never remarried, despite several opportunities to do so. There were many reasons for that (most stingingly, “no one wants to marry someone with four kids”), but at heart it was because she was a one-man woman, and married the man she had wanted to be married to for life in 1948. Over the years they would see each other from time to time, mostly when it had to do with one of us, but as they aged they saw each other less and less. At the time of my father’s death, my mother had not seen him for many years, and knew of his growing infirmity only through the reporting of her kids.
She began the prayer stiffly—although she had been Catholic by choice from the age of 21, she had not been raised in any religion, and was not a natural at acts of worship—and duly thanked God for the presence of her kids at the table. Then she paused, and unrelated to any sentence that I had heard her begin, said, “Walter’s death,” and began crying. My mother was not an easy crier. Her crying always sounded strangulated somehow, and to break down and cry at the head of the table at which she was formally speaking to God, surrounded by her silent children and their significant others, was not something she felt comfortable doing. My brother Mark quickly began speaking over her tears, partially to comfort her but also I think to get past the awkward, sad and painful moment. He was sitting next to me, and I kicked him. I thought she should experience the grief that I knew she must have been feeling, but had not yet expressed or maybe even felt, caught up as we all had been in the drama of either standing by and witnessing as the funeral preparations had been made, or participating in them from off stage left (that week my mother had even forwarded a suggestion through an intermediary—me—to her formal rival to help enable her to get a payment of some sort from the VA). Quietly, she cried. Quietly, we let her. Eventually someone stood up and walked to where she sat to comfort her, the moment passed, my mother mastered her grief, and we went on with dinner.
I’ve heard those words in my head, “Walter’s death,” often in the years since then. My mother never called my father Walter. She mostly called him Walt (or in the early years, Wally or even, when they were feeling especially playful, Waldo). To us, she always called him Your Father (she even called him Your Father once or twice when talking to one of our spouses, so used as she was to calling him that). But at that table, she wasn’t talking to her kids—she was talking to God. And to her that meant that she had to be formal and well-behaved, like putting on your best clothes to go to church. To her that meant that she had to be at her best, as if she were visiting a rich uncle whom she saw seldom, but knew she was obligated to impress. She might even have been slightly embarrassed at breaking down and crying in front of God.
She had told me toward the end of her life that she wasn’t very big on the external formalities of churchgoing, but, she said with conviction, “I believe.” I’ve thought a lot about that “Walter,” and it tells me that to my mother, God was transcendent, and not immanent. God was not there with her, familiar with the intimate details of her life, but was away from her, up there somewhere, enthroned in majesty.
We prepared the table as for a normal Thanksgiving meal, and sat arrayed around the table. Although I grew up Catholic, ours was not a terribly observant family, and we never normally said grace before a meal—except on Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. As we sat there about to begin the meal, the question arose, who was going to say grace? My brother Mark suggested I say it, as I was the only child who regularly attended church. I said, “No, I think Ma should say it.” And so it was.
My parents had been divorced some 39 years before, and it was an ugly divorce, in which the fighting and strife had dragged on for years. While my father had gone on to create a second family with a second wife, my mother, although pretty, sociable, and popular, had never remarried, despite several opportunities to do so. There were many reasons for that (most stingingly, “no one wants to marry someone with four kids”), but at heart it was because she was a one-man woman, and married the man she had wanted to be married to for life in 1948. Over the years they would see each other from time to time, mostly when it had to do with one of us, but as they aged they saw each other less and less. At the time of my father’s death, my mother had not seen him for many years, and knew of his growing infirmity only through the reporting of her kids.
She began the prayer stiffly—although she had been Catholic by choice from the age of 21, she had not been raised in any religion, and was not a natural at acts of worship—and duly thanked God for the presence of her kids at the table. Then she paused, and unrelated to any sentence that I had heard her begin, said, “Walter’s death,” and began crying. My mother was not an easy crier. Her crying always sounded strangulated somehow, and to break down and cry at the head of the table at which she was formally speaking to God, surrounded by her silent children and their significant others, was not something she felt comfortable doing. My brother Mark quickly began speaking over her tears, partially to comfort her but also I think to get past the awkward, sad and painful moment. He was sitting next to me, and I kicked him. I thought she should experience the grief that I knew she must have been feeling, but had not yet expressed or maybe even felt, caught up as we all had been in the drama of either standing by and witnessing as the funeral preparations had been made, or participating in them from off stage left (that week my mother had even forwarded a suggestion through an intermediary—me—to her formal rival to help enable her to get a payment of some sort from the VA). Quietly, she cried. Quietly, we let her. Eventually someone stood up and walked to where she sat to comfort her, the moment passed, my mother mastered her grief, and we went on with dinner.
I’ve heard those words in my head, “Walter’s death,” often in the years since then. My mother never called my father Walter. She mostly called him Walt (or in the early years, Wally or even, when they were feeling especially playful, Waldo). To us, she always called him Your Father (she even called him Your Father once or twice when talking to one of our spouses, so used as she was to calling him that). But at that table, she wasn’t talking to her kids—she was talking to God. And to her that meant that she had to be formal and well-behaved, like putting on your best clothes to go to church. To her that meant that she had to be at her best, as if she were visiting a rich uncle whom she saw seldom, but knew she was obligated to impress. She might even have been slightly embarrassed at breaking down and crying in front of God.
She had told me toward the end of her life that she wasn’t very big on the external formalities of churchgoing, but, she said with conviction, “I believe.” I’ve thought a lot about that “Walter,” and it tells me that to my mother, God was transcendent, and not immanent. God was not there with her, familiar with the intimate details of her life, but was away from her, up there somewhere, enthroned in majesty.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
A Stirring Memory
My mother took cream and sugar in her coffee, and she had a way of stirring her coffee that was unique to her. As she would rotate the spoon circularly through the cup, she would clink the spoon against the side of the cup three times, in a triangular fashion, for each rotation of the spoon around the inside of the cup. It was as if she didn't feel the coffee was being truly and properly stirred unless that spoon clinked against the inside of the cup in just the right way. I can hear the music of her coffee-stirring right now, as I write this.
It's funny how a person lives on in such inconsequential memories, ones that can be prompted by the simple act of making myself a cup of tea in the middle of my work day.
It's funny how a person lives on in such inconsequential memories, ones that can be prompted by the simple act of making myself a cup of tea in the middle of my work day.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
The Blizzard of 2009
There’s something about a heavy snowfall that puts you in the realm of the eternal. Today in Washington, we experienced a record-breaking snowfall, and the snow is now, at 11 PM on Saturday evening, hip deep in many places. I went out and shoveled at around 10 AM, figuring it’s easier to shovel seven inches at a time than 25 or so all at once, but didn’t get out again until about an hour ago. I’ve been holed up in my den, working on a power-point presentation I’ll have to give at work on Tuesday. Work has been very tough lately (I’ll spare you the details, but will instead refer you to a single line of voiceover narration describing the life of George Bailey: “Potter was bearing down hard.”), and it’s been a season of sadness for me. Between bouts of power-pointing, I’ve spent time on the phone with my sweetheart and two of my sibs, and of course communing with my favorite boy, Murphy.
But then I went outside. It’s quiet and peaceful, and everything is still. The snow is sparkly, and I saw only a few people walking down the middle of the street. I pushed the snow off my car, did a little more shoveling (my 20-something neighbor did our whole section of the block around dinnertime, bless him), and then just stopped. What a gift it is to be outside at night in the snow. I looked back at my house, and it looked like a place of light and warmth and safety.
3326
One year during the Christmas season, when I was a teenager, we experienced a heavy, sparkly snow in Parma not unlike this one. Unlike now, I lived in a house full of people, with my brothers, sister and mother. There was always a lot going on and, more often than not, the TV was blaring. This particular night, as the family sat around the living room and the kitchen, kvetching, talking, doing whatever it was we normally did, I put on my coat and went outside. Like now, the ground was covered with snow, which was still falling. I walked down the driveway away from the house and sat on the back fender of Mom’s car. Though when I looked over my shoulder, the Christmas tree and the life within the living room were visible in the picture window, not a sound could be heard from inside the house. Outside it was silent, save for one thing: up on the hill, some family was piping Christmas music out into the night. It was played with bells, a pure and simple arrangement—no chords, just the simple one-note-at-a-time melodies of one wonder-filled contemplative song of the season after another. No one was outside on the street but me.
That moment sealed itself in my heart forevermore. I was out in the night, feeling the presence of God herself, helped by the soft Christmas music that in the happiest of times sets up a vague sense of longing in one’s soul, and behind me, in that house, were my people-- those with whom I shared my daily life and without whom, despite the seemingly unmitigated fractiousness of the relationships, I would have been lost. Right there inside that little glowing box known as 3326, stood the Christmas tree and all I knew or had of family, at least in a day-in and day-out sense. They were so solid, so real, such a pain in the ass, and so essential to my being. Of course, what I felt most consciously at the time was that I was apart from them, and the kind of person who spiritually belonged outside in the dark, sitting in the cold and beautiful snow, having God’s music piped into my soul—or maybe it was coming from inside me, and I just thought it was coming from up the hill….
But what I know now is that I was blessed to have them, and although we’re all outside in the dark within ourselves, experiencing the wonder of being, knowing there’s a warm, bright place wherein our people reside and are ready to welcome us back in-- indeed, may not have even noticed we were gone—is a gift that I for one treasure, and try to remember especially in these difficult times.
Tonight, when I looked back at my house, I was pleased to see that I had created for myself, my kitty, and all my loved ones who enter, a place of warmth and light and shelter from various kinds of storms, however pretty (or petty) some of them may be. And though this night there is no Christmas tree and I am here alone with the Murphster, I know all those loved ones, wherever they are, living or dead, are with me here.
I went back into the house and got my camera. When there’s a good snowfall, I always get the idea to take a really nice shot of the house with the intention of maybe creating a photo Christmas card the following year. I have yet to do that, but I did take a shot or two. I want to post one here, but Blogger's photo upload doesn't seem to be working for me right now. Oh, well, I'll try again tomorrow....
But then I went outside. It’s quiet and peaceful, and everything is still. The snow is sparkly, and I saw only a few people walking down the middle of the street. I pushed the snow off my car, did a little more shoveling (my 20-something neighbor did our whole section of the block around dinnertime, bless him), and then just stopped. What a gift it is to be outside at night in the snow. I looked back at my house, and it looked like a place of light and warmth and safety.
3326
One year during the Christmas season, when I was a teenager, we experienced a heavy, sparkly snow in Parma not unlike this one. Unlike now, I lived in a house full of people, with my brothers, sister and mother. There was always a lot going on and, more often than not, the TV was blaring. This particular night, as the family sat around the living room and the kitchen, kvetching, talking, doing whatever it was we normally did, I put on my coat and went outside. Like now, the ground was covered with snow, which was still falling. I walked down the driveway away from the house and sat on the back fender of Mom’s car. Though when I looked over my shoulder, the Christmas tree and the life within the living room were visible in the picture window, not a sound could be heard from inside the house. Outside it was silent, save for one thing: up on the hill, some family was piping Christmas music out into the night. It was played with bells, a pure and simple arrangement—no chords, just the simple one-note-at-a-time melodies of one wonder-filled contemplative song of the season after another. No one was outside on the street but me.
That moment sealed itself in my heart forevermore. I was out in the night, feeling the presence of God herself, helped by the soft Christmas music that in the happiest of times sets up a vague sense of longing in one’s soul, and behind me, in that house, were my people-- those with whom I shared my daily life and without whom, despite the seemingly unmitigated fractiousness of the relationships, I would have been lost. Right there inside that little glowing box known as 3326, stood the Christmas tree and all I knew or had of family, at least in a day-in and day-out sense. They were so solid, so real, such a pain in the ass, and so essential to my being. Of course, what I felt most consciously at the time was that I was apart from them, and the kind of person who spiritually belonged outside in the dark, sitting in the cold and beautiful snow, having God’s music piped into my soul—or maybe it was coming from inside me, and I just thought it was coming from up the hill….
But what I know now is that I was blessed to have them, and although we’re all outside in the dark within ourselves, experiencing the wonder of being, knowing there’s a warm, bright place wherein our people reside and are ready to welcome us back in-- indeed, may not have even noticed we were gone—is a gift that I for one treasure, and try to remember especially in these difficult times.
Tonight, when I looked back at my house, I was pleased to see that I had created for myself, my kitty, and all my loved ones who enter, a place of warmth and light and shelter from various kinds of storms, however pretty (or petty) some of them may be. And though this night there is no Christmas tree and I am here alone with the Murphster, I know all those loved ones, wherever they are, living or dead, are with me here.
I went back into the house and got my camera. When there’s a good snowfall, I always get the idea to take a really nice shot of the house with the intention of maybe creating a photo Christmas card the following year. I have yet to do that, but I did take a shot or two. I want to post one here, but Blogger's photo upload doesn't seem to be working for me right now. Oh, well, I'll try again tomorrow....
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Free-form Writing
Tonight I’ll do an exercise in free-form writing. I could come up with many different subjects to write about, but I want to just open the conduits. On Sunday an obituary caught my eye. It was about a 45-year-old woman who died of a brain aneurysm, and who recently had an essay published in the literary magazine Shenandoah. The obituary also made mention of Gettysburg Review. So I looked them up on the internet and discovered, or rediscovered, the world of small-press literary magazines. I remember them from college, or particularly well-stocked newsstands, and have looked through them on occasion, but never really picked one up and read it carefully. Reading the submission requirements on some of them, you can tell that tons of people are hopefully submitting their most heartfelt writings, and the people who read the submissions have had to slog through what they have felt was a lot of crap. Reading that none of them accept anything that’s been published in any medium made me feel like, oh shit, I’ve already put my best stuff on my blog, and used up some of the subjects that I feel the impulse to write about most strongly, and now I’ll have to scrape up other stuff if I have any hope of being published in a literary magazine. What if my well is about to run dry? The obituary said this woman’s essay in Shenandoah, titled "Ugly", about her having felt unattractive her whole life, garnered calls from a couple of literary agents wanting her to write a book. Wow, I thought.
But the thing is, this is kind of what I envisioned happening when I started my blog. I figured somewhere in the back of my head, and maybe not so far in the back-- but it was never the main thing-- that my blog was going to get attention from someone who would want to publish my writing in some more permanent form. But the doing the blog is itself the act of publishing it in a pretty permanent form. It could be that only seven people have read it—other than myself—but the impetus for writing it is the act of testifying to what it means to be human in the world-- one person’s experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. To say, I was here, I lived, and I experienced these things. If anyone at all reads them and is moved to laugh or cry (a lot more crying, I am guessing and have been told, than laughing—at this point, anyway), then it has been worth doing and I can die knowing I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The sense of satisfaction I get when I feel I’ve expressed myself well is real and profound.
But it would be nice to get some sort of offer from the larger world, wouldn’t it? On days when work is particularly hairy and unpleasant, like the past couple of days (not coincidentally, right after getting the literary magazine idea), I walk around the office thinking how great it would be for all the people on my floor, including all those who are in the wordsmithing and publishing business to hear, oh, did you know that Cher Stepanek, who works over there in that department, has a book coming out? Wow, she writes? Why, The Big Boss asks, isn’t she working for me in some literary capacity? Why have we not recognized her talents; why have we been letting her languish in Department X?
It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? We are all walking around knowing deep in our bones we’re special, we have something wonderful about ourselves that none of the people we see and interact with every day knows about. Wouldn’t it be great, we think, if one day they realized who we really are? Wouldn’t it be great if they found out, too, that we have this secret life in which our talents are well developed, well realized, and recognized by this whole huge group of others, yet somehow they, the people we see and interact with every day, have missed it? To be recognized as special: it’s what we all want, and I want it too. That is aside from the impulse, and I want to call it a purer impulse, to say what I want and need to say, to put it out there for (theoretically) all the world to see on the internet, and then go about my life not really tracking who is actually seeing it. I'm thinking that maybe it’s kind of an adolescent wish, that need to be recognized as special. It’s the wish of someone who has not yet learned or realized their own best way of making their mark in the world. Or maybe it's one of the stigmata borne by children of divorced parents. Or maybe it’s universal, but people just stop admitting it, or get too beaten down to remember they felt it.
I have set my self this evening the task of writing for fifteen minutes nonstop, and am almost finished. There, it’s done.
But the thing is, this is kind of what I envisioned happening when I started my blog. I figured somewhere in the back of my head, and maybe not so far in the back-- but it was never the main thing-- that my blog was going to get attention from someone who would want to publish my writing in some more permanent form. But the doing the blog is itself the act of publishing it in a pretty permanent form. It could be that only seven people have read it—other than myself—but the impetus for writing it is the act of testifying to what it means to be human in the world-- one person’s experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. To say, I was here, I lived, and I experienced these things. If anyone at all reads them and is moved to laugh or cry (a lot more crying, I am guessing and have been told, than laughing—at this point, anyway), then it has been worth doing and I can die knowing I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The sense of satisfaction I get when I feel I’ve expressed myself well is real and profound.
But it would be nice to get some sort of offer from the larger world, wouldn’t it? On days when work is particularly hairy and unpleasant, like the past couple of days (not coincidentally, right after getting the literary magazine idea), I walk around the office thinking how great it would be for all the people on my floor, including all those who are in the wordsmithing and publishing business to hear, oh, did you know that Cher Stepanek, who works over there in that department, has a book coming out? Wow, she writes? Why, The Big Boss asks, isn’t she working for me in some literary capacity? Why have we not recognized her talents; why have we been letting her languish in Department X?
It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? We are all walking around knowing deep in our bones we’re special, we have something wonderful about ourselves that none of the people we see and interact with every day knows about. Wouldn’t it be great, we think, if one day they realized who we really are? Wouldn’t it be great if they found out, too, that we have this secret life in which our talents are well developed, well realized, and recognized by this whole huge group of others, yet somehow they, the people we see and interact with every day, have missed it? To be recognized as special: it’s what we all want, and I want it too. That is aside from the impulse, and I want to call it a purer impulse, to say what I want and need to say, to put it out there for (theoretically) all the world to see on the internet, and then go about my life not really tracking who is actually seeing it. I'm thinking that maybe it’s kind of an adolescent wish, that need to be recognized as special. It’s the wish of someone who has not yet learned or realized their own best way of making their mark in the world. Or maybe it's one of the stigmata borne by children of divorced parents. Or maybe it’s universal, but people just stop admitting it, or get too beaten down to remember they felt it.
I have set my self this evening the task of writing for fifteen minutes nonstop, and am almost finished. There, it’s done.
Friday, August 14, 2009
3326
What the Light Would Do, Part III
Kitchen, Late Afternoon/Early Evening
The kitchen in the house I grew up in had two windows. One faced north and the other faced west. Although the house was built as a part of a 1950s post-war tract housing development, each of the nearly identical houses was set a little forward or back of the house next to it. Because of this, the kitchen was directly exposed to the setting sun, and in the late afternoon or early evening, strong western light would enter in through the window over the sink and fill the kitchen with a red-gold glow. The sun shone directly onto the kitchen table, and unless your back was to the window, it would be in your eyes. My mother would often draw the shade on that window in the evening, but I always liked the kitchen best when it was ablaze with evening sun, even if blinded me and made it uncomfortable to see and interact with other people at the table. Somehow the western sky and the golden glow made the kitchen feel a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It signaled, too, that a large part of the day’s activities had been completed (successfully, satisfyingly), yet the greater part of the evening was yet to come, and there was still time to drink deeply of this day.
In that western window, the proverbial window over the sink, my mother had a few potted plants. The window sills were not very deep, so they were of necessity small plants in small containers. The cast of characters on that window sill changed a little over the years, but there were three or four plants that made their home on that window sill for a long, long time. The younger of my two brothers was born in 1957, and as a new baby gift, a friend had given my parents a cute little ceramic planter shaped like a telephone, containing a small, short-variety sansevieria. The volume of this planter had to be no larger than that of your average bone-china teacup—but that snake plant sat on that window sill in that planter for 48 years, growing the entire time. The planter did not even have a drainage hole, and at some point after the first decade or so, I’m sure the soil, or what was left of it, became completely depleted. But there it grew. At the time my mother moved, in 2005, there were two other snake plants, of the taller variety, that had probably inhabited that sunny window sill for a couple of decades at least, along with a tired-looking purple tradescantia.
A month or two after my mother passed away earlier this year, I took a deep breath and repotted those four plants. I selected beautiful purple, periwinkle, aqua and green planters, shocked the heck out of the plants by removing them from their too-tight but very broken-in shoes, and potted them up with fresh soil and plenty of room to grow. Having no properly sunny window sills that would accommodate them at home, I’ve taken them to my office. I have a northern exposure there, but the building is skewed to the west just enough so that at this time of year, the setting western sun comes streaming in. After a few weeks of confusion, the plants have begun to get used to their new home and green up. There are new leaves on all of them (the contents of the little telephone planter having been split into three separate but color-coordinated pots), and sometimes they seem to be smiling as they bask in the deep golden setting sun. I love looking at them, because they remind me of that kitchen, and because they speak of longevity and survival. At the close of the work day, when the sun is filling the back of my office with strong, golden light, I remember what the late afternoon and early evening was like in Parma Ohio, in a kitchen that seemed a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It feels good to know it’s the same sun, shining on the same plants. I wonder how long they’ll be in this set of pots.
Kitchen, Late Afternoon/Early Evening
The kitchen in the house I grew up in had two windows. One faced north and the other faced west. Although the house was built as a part of a 1950s post-war tract housing development, each of the nearly identical houses was set a little forward or back of the house next to it. Because of this, the kitchen was directly exposed to the setting sun, and in the late afternoon or early evening, strong western light would enter in through the window over the sink and fill the kitchen with a red-gold glow. The sun shone directly onto the kitchen table, and unless your back was to the window, it would be in your eyes. My mother would often draw the shade on that window in the evening, but I always liked the kitchen best when it was ablaze with evening sun, even if blinded me and made it uncomfortable to see and interact with other people at the table. Somehow the western sky and the golden glow made the kitchen feel a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It signaled, too, that a large part of the day’s activities had been completed (successfully, satisfyingly), yet the greater part of the evening was yet to come, and there was still time to drink deeply of this day.
In that western window, the proverbial window over the sink, my mother had a few potted plants. The window sills were not very deep, so they were of necessity small plants in small containers. The cast of characters on that window sill changed a little over the years, but there were three or four plants that made their home on that window sill for a long, long time. The younger of my two brothers was born in 1957, and as a new baby gift, a friend had given my parents a cute little ceramic planter shaped like a telephone, containing a small, short-variety sansevieria. The volume of this planter had to be no larger than that of your average bone-china teacup—but that snake plant sat on that window sill in that planter for 48 years, growing the entire time. The planter did not even have a drainage hole, and at some point after the first decade or so, I’m sure the soil, or what was left of it, became completely depleted. But there it grew. At the time my mother moved, in 2005, there were two other snake plants, of the taller variety, that had probably inhabited that sunny window sill for a couple of decades at least, along with a tired-looking purple tradescantia.
A month or two after my mother passed away earlier this year, I took a deep breath and repotted those four plants. I selected beautiful purple, periwinkle, aqua and green planters, shocked the heck out of the plants by removing them from their too-tight but very broken-in shoes, and potted them up with fresh soil and plenty of room to grow. Having no properly sunny window sills that would accommodate them at home, I’ve taken them to my office. I have a northern exposure there, but the building is skewed to the west just enough so that at this time of year, the setting western sun comes streaming in. After a few weeks of confusion, the plants have begun to get used to their new home and green up. There are new leaves on all of them (the contents of the little telephone planter having been split into three separate but color-coordinated pots), and sometimes they seem to be smiling as they bask in the deep golden setting sun. I love looking at them, because they remind me of that kitchen, and because they speak of longevity and survival. At the close of the work day, when the sun is filling the back of my office with strong, golden light, I remember what the late afternoon and early evening was like in Parma Ohio, in a kitchen that seemed a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It feels good to know it’s the same sun, shining on the same plants. I wonder how long they’ll be in this set of pots.
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