Sometimes the Edge Breaks Away

 As they say - life "get lifey" sometimes and the plans to finish the book are on hold for now.  Not to go in great detail (if you are friends with me on FB you know the story that started with a month in the hospital during COVID for Septic shock), but I'm dealing with a life threatening issue (NOT cognitive) that flared badly during Acute Type A flu in Feb.  4 months, 3 hospital stays, a bone marrow biopsy (just say "no"), one surgery and more tests than should be allowed by law, the news isn't great, but  there's hope.  But editing is not sometime I wish to spend prescious hours on.  

My health and medical status is personal but I wanted to let ou know that blogging for the next  months will be sporadic, at best.  My friends know the story and I have a lot of people I know both in and away from the blogging community as well as my church family around me, praying, and offering their strength.

Until later, a little story,

My Stepmom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in her seventies. Dad steadfastly refused to put her in a home, caring for her at home, even in his declining years with a part time nurse’s aide I arrange for them and my helping as I could.

Initially, she had her little moments of forgetfulness, like any person her age, but she was such a bundle of energy, still active in church and volunteering, taking dance classes, working in the garden. Then one morning, out of the blue, she came into the kitchen and sat down, looked at me and I realized she did not have a clue as to who I was.

What struck me was not that but the look on her face as she realized this, realized she should know. I obviously wasn’t a bugler or a neighbor over for coffee, I was a girl with red hair like everyone else in the family, wearing a fuzzy robe that she had washed and put in my closet the night before. I will never forget the look of her at that moment. It was the most starkly exposed face I’d ever seen, a face in which unknown terrors haunted the edges; the face of a fledgling dove about to tumble from the nest.

It came into our lives quickly, one moment she was laughing, engaging in board games and puns with us, her face bright, and her wit, razor sharp. Then came those moments where everything just went sort of dim. The doctor only confirmed what Dad had suspected and kept from me for some months until he knew for sure. Alzheimer’s.

It’s a terrible disease for all involved. We read what we could about it, we planned as a family, and we prayed. There wasn’t more we could do.

As the next two years passed, there were a few moments she was quite lucid and happy. Those moments were the hardest for all of us. In those brief minutes, she was fully aware that her mind was going, what was happening to her and how helpless she was to do anything about it.

 The disease’s progression was as predictable as its course was certain. Mood swings and aggression, words that made no sense, dropping to the floor like marbles, tears as she tried to mentally gather them up, anger at the very air around her. She always was gentle with my dad, though. Only with him would she remain calm, the reasoning that was blind and deaf somehow responding to something in him that her mind could still see.

Dad cared for her patiently, no matter how bad it got. Friends couldn’t visit, for they were strangers to her, and she’d go into a furious rage if anyone but us tried to enter the home. Dad was her calm and her constant. I was able to help with the housework and the cooking, but he refused to let anyone else care for “his girl” or to send her to skilled nursing care. When she passed, it was quite sudden, after she contracted pneumonia. From her sudden coughing to her collapse, it was just days.

 Sometimes when you get to the far edge, the edge just breaks away.

We laid her to rest on a tree-covered hilltop in a little cemetery. My brother and my dad are on either side of her along with my Mom who died when I was quite young. I visit; I bring flowers. Sometimes a friend would go with me, and we would hug and shed some tears, neither of us immune to having our hearts broken. Then we smile through the tears, sharing our stories as we make the long trip home to photos and a small stuffed bear that Mom had sewn.

One of those photos is one of her and Dad on their first date, and you could see something in their smiles that would be lost on so many people. Not many people could have cared for her by themselves as my dad did, for so long, but I understand. Love is a story that tells itself.

Would she have lived her life differently had she known her fate ahead of time? Perhaps not. Perhaps, in essence, she did, her mother dying of the same disease, as she and my Dad courted.

She lived life to the hilt, a wheel in motion, racing downhill, a light against the darkness, the whir of a needle into the soft fabric.

I remember one of the last crashes I was assigned to, waking abrupty in a strange city, the glaring ringtone of the bat phone waking me with a message just after I'd fallen asleep. For a moment, I did not know where I was at. The small room was cold, with no sound of a dog checking on me as I came awake. I was in a hotel room, traveling in the previous day when duty called. My heart was pounding as that particular ring will do that to me, the surge of adrenalin. There would be no going back to sleep.

But I was aware, of every tick of the clock, of the feel of my skin, missing the soft panting of doggie breath waiting to see if I was going to get up and leave or go back to sleep. I was so blissfully aware, of these moments, these sounds. It was a new day, and even if tired and cranky, I'd leap right in, like a deer into the brush, feeling no thorns.

So I would go, and so I watched, finding sense in the senseless, finding my purpose even as sparrows fall to earth. People watching from a distance would think me too quiet, too still, shouldn't this activity be a frenzy of lights and motion, like on TV? I was there for closure for someone, retribution or reconcilliation often bearing the same weight. I didn't cry, but the tears were there, feeding those promises I made to the dead, not for the world and the news crew to see.

But there is a great activity in being the quiet observer, standing in a stillness that smells of silence, breathing in so many scents in damp cold air. Sweat, blood, and a flower that only blooms in the dark, the wind so scant it's like breath on a mirror. Each smell blended yet distinct, always overlayed with the copper tang of life spilled. The air hums along to the night's quiet as all I see, smell, and feel, forms into a substance I can almost feel on my flesh, capturing it, recording it there in the stillness. The truth is often still, inarticulate, not knowing it is the truth.

On the shelf is a picture of my last black Lab rescue.  I do not know why Abby was a stray. She responded with great plaintive urgency to the sound of small children laughing, looking around for them as to say “my kids, my kids,” only to get this look of pure sadness when he saw they are strangers. The first time I witnessed it, I cried.

I was so happy to get her, and two special needs rescue dogs since that day, a saving grace in a house that had a gaping hole in it after the sudden loss of Barkley. What we hold close to us and what we let go is as telling as the words we say. It took me years to understand it, but the words of Henry David Thoreau make perfect sense to me now.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

I realized that there were certain things, and in the past even certain people, that simply violated my sense of thrift, exacting things out of me well beyond their worth. That concept was lost to me when I was a teen, but as I got older with truth stripped of its cloak of immortality, it was clear.

As I take out some things to be picked up by a charitable group, I look around me. Shadows move like ghosts over the sun, deepening the grass to the color of jewels. The snow is long gone, the dark earth trembling to release spring’s flowers. At the side of the house is an old trellis that needs repair work before new life grabs onto it yet again. I gather it close to my chest to take it inside to be mended, rather than tossed away. This is my home; I think as I bend my face down to it, breathing in the scent of old wood, holding the weight securely as I move inside. I could bury my face in it, this small thing to be salvaged from this place that I had always been seeking.

As I type these final words this morning, all I can think is that hope and love, love and desire, can be what propels us silently onward. Hope and love, love and desire, can also be merely sound that people who have never hoped or loved or desired have for what they never possessed and will not until they forget the words. - Brigid

Memorial Day 2026

 

Draw your Chair Up Close

I'm going to take a few weeks off to start editing the new book which is written, but in rough draft, I've just been putting it off. Thanks for those of you still sticking around after all these years - Brigid

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The World Briefly Muted

The city wakes slowly. I can tell from the quality of the light it's not yet six. My alarm is set for 7 since Partner in Grime is traveling for work. When he's home, I'm up much earlier.

A sound from the neighbor across the driveway; the elderly resident taking out his recycling, He wakes early, his wife in a nursing home, and finding himself in a large house on his own. His step is very slow and measured as if he is carrying something fragile and precious, perhaps some glass, or simply his dreams for this day. When it is warmer out, he will get out his wheelbarrow and supplies to tend to his garden, often having to lay on the ground, to tend to the flowers while prone, his knees not supporting him to do so otherwise. It can't be comfortable but he finds joy in it, nurturing the inexhaustible joy that lives in beauty.

In the distance, the bark of a dog as it hears the neighborhood awaken. That's Winston the Goldendoodle, who lives behind us, out as his "Dad" feeds the chickens, and readies the house for the day. That's something I had to get used to, the sound of chickens in the middle of a city of millions. No rooster, but you hear the contented clucks when outside. The sound of traffic is light. A freight train rumbles down at the other end of the block, the mounful sound of the whistle as it nears the crossing carried on the windless chill that is memory's heat.

I don't have to open the curtains to see it. Despite warm days, it's been down near freezing at night and I've woken to frost on the ground recently.  Another neighbor will have their woodstove lit for warmth, the smoke from the chimney wrapping itself like shimmering ribbon in the boughs of the budding trees, a pale silvered gray of silk or sword blade. Once it's fully light, dogs will be out being walked, everyone on the block aware of the unwritten schedule of who walks when and in what direction, to avoid the great canine commotion of barking that will ensure if two dogs meet in opposite directions, or heaven forbid, someone encounters the "great mongrel horde" which is 5 dogs of tiny size and enormous ego that are walked by one teen every morning. If you think you will sleep in through that, you are mistaken.

But for now, it's quiet, and I'm tempted to turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. The rustle of cotton, the panting whisper of breath, the predation of the night assuming a hundred avatars of dreams. No bread to bake, no housework to do, simply the house still and quiet as if marooned in space by the dwindling of time. The neighbors back inside, the sounds outside fall to a low fragmentary pitch. In the distance, from the metropark, a coyote’s howl at the indignation of clouds that covered the waning moon; no other sound made. Prey gone into hiding, insects dormant from the cold; everything else assuming their own mantle of hiding or hunt.

I love this time of day. Though it's been years since I've had to hunt to put food on the table I still recall those early mornings during whitetail season. I remember the eastern sky turning to primrose, then red with the firing of that first weapon; two of us walking in, whispers no louder than the silent dawn itself. The darkness seemed alive, God’s breath biting at the back of my neck, raising goosebumps under the weight of my clothing. The blood surged, ran hotter, Pentecostal flames licking up my legs as we chased the sound of our blood into the tree line.

That night we donned stiff jeans and shirts softened by the hands of a hundred washes, and we prepared a drink, an amber hallelujah pouring from a shot glass while out on the railing the coveralls hung waiting for another season of need. It's been years since I've had a sip of whisky, and I don't know what happened to those well-worn coveralls, but I'm sure somewhere they still smell faintly of woodsmoke.

My own house this morning is quiet. There's a click click from the ductwork as the heat comes on. Sunny stirs in her crate, not ready to awaken either. In other houses, the TV would be on already, sound, even if senseless, filling up the quiet spaces. I've known people like that, they can't bear the quiet, and from the moment they get up until they try and go to sleep at night, sound is in the air; news, tic tok videos, internet memes, anything to fill up the silence that might actually make them stop and think "why is this all so important that it takes up my whole day?" 

We get some strange looks when people realize we don't own a TV. There's a little TV in the basement with an antenna on the roof where we can get the weather if we're hunkered down during a tornado warning and the phone connectivity to the internet is lost. There's lots of CDs of favorite old shows and movies, but the big flatscreen was given away to AmVets. I don't miss it, the space now occupied by stacks of books.

As I sit in the quiet, a small sparrow blows onto the sill like a bright scrap of paper, his heart pumping in his throat faster than any pulse. He looks into the house, then away, then into the glass again as if listening, only to dart away as the clock chimes on the hour, then ceases. The chime fills the whole house. Perhaps it’s just sound or perhaps it’s all time, grievance, and grief manifesting as sound for just one instant as planets and gears align. It’s a moment wherein time seems to stop, the sparrow frozen on the sill. Only when that sound stops does time come to life, and by then the bird is gone. Had I been glued to the TV, or my Smartphone (oh look, another cat meme!) I would have missed that.

The only sound now is that of breath and the tick of the old clock. I don’t deliberately listen to it, the ticks seemingly beyond the realm of hearing; then in a moment, with that one tick your ears respond to, you are acutely aware of the long diminishing train of time you did not hear. How many ticks in this house in a hundred years? How many after I am long gone? Yet I feel the presence of others that have lived here, for they perhaps aren’t truly dead but simply were worn down by the minute clicking of small gears. The echo of those who sat in this room do not disturb me; they are part of this house. Just like the sound of wood, its creak one of murmuring bones; and the air that taps on ancient glass speaks of deep winds that witnessed more than time.

Later, I will briefly check the news, the weather, send my husband a note that we're doing fine, then pour the last of the coffee. I'm not unaware of what is beyond my insular world; there is a war ongoing somewhere, there is crime, there is evil. It’s all out there somewhere, like all darkness pressing against the house like water does a dam. Not with obvious movement, just that steady pressure that is the desire to break through. But inside, fur me at this moment, I chose to concentrate on the light that seeps outward through the cracks between the curtains. So much of it here that it could be shared with the darkness.

I grab a book, Sunny having settled down for a little nap after yard time, dog food and 15 minutes of warfare with "Claude the Nylabone Lobster".

As the afternoon progresses, the sounds will pick up, the sirens of both police and ambulance, the of traffic in and out of the city, the 4-lane road a half block from us a key route to both the Tollway and Expressway. The garbage trucks will make their way down the alley to collect what's left in the Racoon Bento Boxes the village provides for trash and recycling. I'll make my own trek out, to drop a meal made for a shut-in, clothing and cozy sleepwear for a homeless shelter, a stop at Trader Joe's to do battle with moms stocking up on cheap wine reinforced by kids with mini shopping carts while I try to fend for myself in the roasted nut aisle.

When I get home, the only kids on our block will be out, as yesterday was a day of rain. I don't mind the sometimes-loud sounds of their play. The family is of modest means and the kids don't have tablets and phones, they have bikes and old scooters and balls and bats, numerous small dogs, and a dad that plays ball with them when he gets home in his work van. I smile, knowing they can't comprehend how precious this time will be to them some day.

My parents raised me that way; we were allowed to be kids as long as our minds embraced the world with the wonder of childhood. As the world contemplated old disasters and future hopes, we were simply set free to be children. We wore no bicycle helmets; we drank from the garden hose; our mothers never organized a “play date,” yet we made enough friends that we rarely came inside until the light had bled out of the sky. We’d run and we’d ride, calling loudly into the wind until the shouts of those years mounted toward a final crescendo, passing beyond the reach of hearing.

So, the sound brings me joy, and I put on some music as I put this morning's sourdough bread into the oven to bake. One loaf will go to a neighbor, another to a friend with a husband recovering from a stroke, and the other saved for sandwiches. Vivaldi's The Four Season fills the kitchen as I bustle around, happy that my day does not involve meetings, hazmat suits, politicians blathering, or the whirring noise of a Stryker 810 autopsy saw (only slightly more annoying than the sound politicians make). What noise is in my life is only what I allow in. I will likely be buried someday still owning a Flip Phone and never having seen an episode of The View and for that I am eternally grateful.

As I pull the bread from the oven, I notice  some cars slowly coming up the street, looking for parking. Likely a wedding or baptism at the Catholic church around the corner. Soon there would be the sound of church bells; a sound that does more than note another hour, one more increment of time and grief that’s ticked since Genesis. It’s the sound of hope and faith, one that leaves the air with a sharp instrument of promise as a dog joyously barks and children play.

I'm not missing my TV at all.

Miles Beneath our Wings

The hum of the airplane tires on the pavement is soothing, the running edge lights going past me like years. I’ve already been awake a few hours as living in the middle of a large city the country airport I fly out of is not close. I don’t mind as during those years I commuted to work as a pilot I got used to a long drive to work. 

 Many pilots commuted, finding homes where housing was much cheaper and making the trek each week to work. I did enjoy when I didn’t have to drive to “work” every day. Normally with airline schedules, I would fly out and be gone for days. But I enjoyed the drives in when I made them, often in the dark, before the roads are busy.

I've made most of my long drives by myself but before I got married, a female friend from college and I drove across several states together to visit our families who lived in the same area. I remember when we pulled into the subdivision where one of my relatives had moved. I'd only been there once, and I got lost in all the streets, each bearing the same name, but with a different ending. Magnolia Lane, Magnolia Drive, Magnolia Trail (that's not confusing), and so on. I had a map printed from MapQuest out, but it lay unwanted on the back seat. My friend said “Uh, you want to grab that map” and I said, “No. I've got this; this street looks familiar” as we got further lost. She said again, “Say, how about that map behind you” and I responded, “Nope, I'm sure this is it.” She started laughing and said “Oh my. You're a GUY! You don't want to ask for directions.” 

If I'm alone, sometimes I watch other drivers. People often drive as they think, modestly, slowly, recklessly. Some move in and out of traffic with the brisk efficiency of a surgeon, others, shyly and with hesitation, invite themselves out to dinner with the Reaper. Myself, I just roll along, not faster than anyone, not slower than anyone, not wanting to stand out, simply watching the centerline break underneath of the vehicle. 

 When I tell people that I sometimes drive or fly in a small Cessna to visit family in another state they look at me like I'm daft. “You can fly commercial airlines there in an hour.” Yes, I can. But I like that time to myself, no schedule, no commitments. When I get hungry, I stop and eat. When I get tired, I find a quiet, clean place to sleep. If I want to land at a small rural airport and go visit the site of the world's largest ball of yarn, no one is going to tell me “Sorry, that flight has already left the gate.” Though, I still wonder about some gas station bathrooms. Why do they lock them? Are they afraid someone might break in and clean them? 

I'm not sure why I enjoy the slow and hard look at things. Perhaps it's just the process of becoming slowly born that is those years leading up to middle age. Perhaps it's what I do for a paycheck. Maybe it was all the hours hiking up into mountains of the West as I grew up. You really learn to appreciate the slowness, the detail, the stillness of a day in the outdoors. The ascent may be hours or it may be days, but with a compass and a few tools, you simply gather your wits around you and head uphill. What you expect to greet you is up ahead of you, even when you can't see it. It's there in the blue, and it only remains for your body to reach it. Patience, one blister, one tear, at a time.

The wilderness gives you time, for the wild, though changing, is still eternal. That's what long road trips are like for me. I keep the horizon in my window but still look back, savoring the journey. It's time, my time, filled with the immaculate sameness of hours bathed in the sun's warm honey. Anything that requires detailed thought, the engine setting, a scan for traffic, occurs in brief, unhurried intervals. The miles roll by with the thoughts, miles of tears, of laughter I've not known since youth, of love, of mechanical, rhythmic memories of the past that I carried with me as I started this journey. 

Those memories are not always happy ones, which is part of the trip you will make. As the miles flow past, you realize that when you are young, no one tells you the truth about love, about life. About coming into your heart and your strength and what it means when you realize what you have beneath you.

Talking frankly about past relationships and lost friends seemed banal, like proving a right angle or finding the equal distance between two lines but it felt good  on that drive with my friend to share our joys and our griefs as we headed into our future. The two-lane highway rose slowly out of the Plains as I tried to navigate through words that carried with them both joy and pain, holding me back like the weight of a dead end. So, we talked, not in a great gush of words, but as friends do, in small bits of ourselves spread out on the table like a show and tell of things that troubled us, those hurts that built up over years of living. The miles and hours flew past, fields clutching onto the skeletons of flowers that long ago died, of bare, windswept trees, and clusters of burrs that stick to everything with a tiny pinprick of pain. Things that were sticking to us both.

All that was left were the words; and they flowed, like the laughter and the tears, until I opened the window to let the wind dry my face. The wind that would carry those old hurts to where they would simply bounce off the landscape as if they were a piece of discarded trash, delicate, crumpled tissue best left to be disintegrated by time. Better left behind as the sun began to relax on what would be a renewed journey; the road pulling away from discarded thought, the highway lines breaking up like Morse Code as we moved forward and moved away from that painful past, those roads best not traveled, till it was just a speck in the rearview mirror. 

I sit here tonight so many years later thinking back to that long drive. My friend has found her happiness, and I found mine, nothing left but the memories that I'm making now, moving into new skies, open roads. Time ticks past. The diorama of life unfolds in the window up ahead, the rush of the world, fast food, and fast life, suspended for a few hours. The truck still moves on, this time to find a place to rest for the night and I do, cleansing myself of the grime of the day. The hotel room has all the warmth of a doctor’s waiting room, and I can't help but wish I was instead at hunting camp, sleeping under a fluttering tent, canvas murmuring to the whispers of the rain. As I lay there, I think of Heraclitus, of whose writings are now just fragmentary remains, who said it better than I, expressing the nature of reality as a flux in words, the way I'd express them in motion today. 

The rule that makes

Its subject weary 

is a sentence

of hard labor. 

For this reason 

change gives rest.

Sometime it's time for a change of landscape, of thinking, a journey forward. No agenda but to see the day unfold before you up ahead. You need those moments alone, those miles of open road, and miles of open sky.

Mark Twain wrote in Huckleberry Finn, “We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lie on our backs and look up at them and discuss whether they was made or just happened.”  But I know they were made.  Made to serve as tiny points of light to guide a distant traveler back home.

 - Brigid

A Night's Sustenance

Until I was about in first grade I wanted to be a doctor like our family doctor. Today, after attempting to insert the IV-like pointy straw into a juice pack, only to spray red liquid all over my mail (while tearing the pouch), I realized that it was probably a good thing they never let me work on the living.

I'm not real good with blood in non-professional settings.. But it's part of what I have to deal with, much too often it seemed, for only in getting into the nuts and bolts of a catastrophe could I find out things that might have prevented it from reoccurring.

Seeing a picture of a scene on TV or in photographs in no way prepares you for the real thing. In photos there is no sense of lives snatched from this world, of moments of adrenalin or fear. The victims still feel like strangers. In real life, the scattered pieces of a life invade your very being, and you will bring it home with you for many, many a night. The vision of what you saw will display across the back of your eyelids like an old matinee that plays again and again. It's more than a picture, it's an auditory and sensory remembrance; sight and smell that you can't wash off you and can't put away in a drawer with the photos.

When I got back from the last one, it was particularly difficult. As I shut my eyes I reached out to touch the substantial and warm doggy form of a rescue Lab, who I let sleep on the bed that night, just to hear them breathing. My house was locked, and the smoke, fire and burglar alarm were armed. There was a box of hydroshocks in the nightstand and I had formerly frozen biscuits ready to cook for breakfast. I'd be OK.

Back when I was younger, I was a hunter, bow and firearm I didn't hunt for sport but for food for the table. Growing up, if we didn't have venison or fresh caught fish on the table, dinner would have been sparse.  But I loved it, getting up early, getting into the camo, painting up my face (with earth colored greasepaint, not Revlon) and sneaking through the woods like I was on some sort of covert mission. . .that was a blast. Climbing up a tall stand trying to hold my heavy 20-gauge Belgium Browning semi-auto in one hand was interesting to say the least. I know the friends I hunted with, more than once, took bets to see if I'd make it into a particularly tricky stand without yelling for help. It might have taken me 15 minutes but I got into my stand solo and the view was incredible.

I remember my last firearm hunt. It started snowing early and it was -6 degrees. I had on long johns and two pairs of coveralls and I still had to clench and unclench my muscles to generate warmth as the day wore on. Finally, my friends went back to the house, out on 500 acres in the far North. They'd teased me about being a wimpy girl, so I ate my peanut butter sandwich and stayed out in the blind until almost dark. Right as the last of the days light leeched out of the sky, a big buck came, moving along the tree line in the distance. I aimed carefull, one shot, at near dark, as he ran for the thick of the forest. As the shot cracked into the frigid air, the buck leaped into the woods, as I stared, still, amazed at how a living thing like that will keep going, and how far, when it is already dead from that single shot through the heart. But the snow was heavy and darkness was on me and by the time I got down, out of the blind, tracking him was difficult. The light seeped out of the sky as somewhere ahead, a once living thing cooled, spinning itself into blood and dust from whence it came.

When I finally got to where he lay, the white tail a small sign in the deepening pool of blackness, I stood, hairs rising up along my forearms, my breath hot in my chest, despite the snow and the cold. I wasn't alone. One moment I was standing there,in rapt rumination of my pride and superiority, when something instinctual kicked in and I stopped in my tracks. There, crouching over the remains of that magnificent 12 point buck was a large, darker shadow than shadow, merged onto my kill, hunched over the ribcage, dark on darkness.  I couldn't tell where one shadow began and another ended. Something uttered a low throated growl at me; it wasn't somebody's pet and it was certainly not some cuddley woodland creature from a Disney movie. The stink of something primordial was in the air, more than blood, less than my own pride and fear and I knew that I was moving downward very quickly on the food chain.

Shooting at it in almost total darkness would only have pissed it off, so I slowly backed away and let whichever predator had found my buck have it's due. I'd taken something that, in the realm of the wild, wasn't mine to take, and something more powerful was going to take it from me. I thought I'd captured a citidel but instead found myself in an unmarked battle for which I was vastly outgunned.  So,  In that thin dissolution of starlight, I carefully made my long way back to the safety of the house, the fear seeping out of me like the deer's blood onto the snow.

I  haven't hunted since, for a lot of reasons, now taking my camera to the trees in lieu of a firearm.  The woods are my guide and my witness, the paths I take their postulate. I tread carefully, and silently, knowing that what is underfoot may be as fragile as my own heart.  

We think, as humans, we have dominion over the wild and especially when we are young, we think we are immortal. But when we are in those places, be it the forest or the skies, we are on the edge, and living is accomplished on an edge that is neither a humanitarian or lenient. The slow, the infirm, the careless . . . perish. And there will be blood. I am reminded of that daily. With each scene, each violent stoppage of that which is life, I develop a deeper appreciation of just being here, breathing, living flesh and bone. For it was in that cold wood on that dark night as I stared into the glowing eyes of something toothed and fanged, that I realized that this seemingly sturdy body, that serves me subtlety and so well, is only so much meat, and my thoughts and life history would only be a night's sustenance to some creature of the woods. . . or to fate.

 - Brigid

Snow Days - A Story for Kat

This one is for my friend Kat, who, with double mastectomy scheduled in a less than a week, and a zillion things to do and plan, $$ for the doctors, kids, husband, writing obligations, pets and rural animals, set aside to time to attend her son's Pre-K Easter party yesterday.  Reading her account of that brought back some memories of when I was that age.

From Saving Grace - A Story of Adoption by LB Johnson

It seemed like those childhood years were a blink. Our dog Pepper had crossed the Rainbow Bridge; Dad was getting ready to retire. Before I knew it my brother was off to the Navy, going to submarine school, myself already in college, working toward my commercial pilot’s license. I ultimately wanted to major in science or criminal justice, perhaps both—but as a teen I got a second job at the local airport pumping gas. I could get flying lessons at a reduced cost, so I was working toward my license while cramming in way more classes than I had hours in the day. For that kind of overextending, there is a “complete breakfast”—which for me was Hostess Sno Balls and coffee, grabbed when a parent wasn’t looking. Unhealthy yes, but just the taste of them took me back. It was that and the big bowl of Captain Crunch before every flight check. I was glad years later when I got my nickname as a pilot that it was “Shake and Bake” and not “Captain Crunch.”

Still—all good memories. Memories of childhood are so different for many people. I am lucky that mine were good. Laughter and exploration wrapped in a warm blanket of sight and sound and tastes that are still on my tongue. Memories of the past are like that; often having an impossible quality of perfection we frequently give to material things, a favorite book, a favorite tool or firearm; sometimes to a whole relationship we can never get back to.

If we could only get there again, have that again, hold that again, our lives would somehow be better; as if some cold case crime was finally solved, the reminders of things that hurt us left behind, held in our mind never to be freed again.

We’ve all talked about it, some small trivial thing from the past that appears to contain the sublime, and there’s no explaining it to anyone, try though you might. Still, in your mind’s eye it’s there and always will be as clear and as sure as if it were yesterday. For me one such memory is opening up the lunch box as a kid and finding my Hostess treat next to my peanut butter and honey sandwich, apple, and carrot sticks.

Mom’s cancer was one of those things that will stay with me for a lifetime. She was first diagnosed in the early ’60s. The long term survival rate for her type of cancer then was only one in seven. When she was first diagnosed, she was only in her forties. I was not even in school yet, my brother only a couple of years older. She came home after Christmas that first time, chemo shunt in place, and did everything in her power to make our life normal. I don’t recall her initially leaving for the hospital, only the worried look in my dad’s eyes. But the photos bring it back, like the one of my brother at her hospital bed with a little aluminum tree on the nightstand—as she holds up a flannel nightgown Dad picked out and bought “from us” that she opened from her hospital bed.

The doctor’s treatment did not cure her, but it gave her quite a few more Christmas mornings, including the one where my brother and I pooled our allowances and bought her a nightgown we picked out all by ourselves. It was red, see-through, and very short, trimmed with fake fur that was shedding like a polecat with mange even as we wrapped the gift ourselves. I’m not sure what discount place on Main Street we got it from, but young as we were we thought it was quite spiffy, and oh, won’t our quiet, cookie-baking mom love this! I still remember the fits of laughter she tried to suppress when she opened the package and held up the nightgown. (Dad seemed to like it, though.)

I remember her making our school lunches with homemade cookies if she was up to it, and our Hostess treats when she wasn’t. It was Ding Dongs for my brother, Sno Balls for me. I’d eat one at lunch and take the remaining one to the playground after school, eating it perched on top of the biggest, tallest pieces of playground equipment I could find; defying gravity, feet dangling in the air, Mom watching carefully from a distance. Then we’d go home to start supper, eager to tell both Dad and Mom about our day, and we’d listen to her laugh—that sound, the stored honey of her spirit, carried on wings whose load was heavy, delivered to us, her children, to make us whole.

Before cancer, our list of should-dos was really quite long. And like other families that cope with disappointment or disease we quit using the work “should” quite so much. The house may have been be a bit messier; but given the choice of cleaning or building a snowman with her kids, doing that ironing now or joining us in a snowball fight, her choice went toward those small joys.

Still, Mom maintained her discipline as a mother; and for every sweet snack we got there were still those family dinners where you had better eat your vegetables. She and I had a doctrine of mutually assured destruction involving acorn squash. She refused to not make it, and I refused to eat it—sitting at the table long after everyone else was excused, the squash growing as chilly as that Veggie Cold War; until finally she gave up and sent me to my room without dessert, something that was not easy on either of us.

I was too young to appreciate the depth of what she did for us, instilling in us love for each other and appreciation for the blessings of our table. But I was old enough to see that courage is simply the power to see past misfortune or expectation, to hold on to the things that affirm inwardly that life with all its trials is still good. Be it a warm hug or sweet treats handed to us with a smile and a touch on our head, a benediction of love that could only come from the wellspring of faith that stayed within her.

I cannot, no matter how hard I try, remember her voice; but if I close my eyes I can remember that touch. It was not a touch as heavy and uncaring as a slap, but one that simply said: I love you, but you must have courage and craft your life for yourself, just let me share it as long as I can.

Watching us spread our wings, knowing she would likely be gone before we were grown with families of our own, had to have been so hard. Like any mother she was concerned with our safety, but never to the point where we were wrapped in bubble wrap, spoiled, and coddled, or given everything we wanted without effort. We worked hard for our allowance, doing chores; but when the chores were done, we were encouraged to go explore the world around us.

Myself, I’d get on my bike and go ride the dusty gash of a roadway near the railroad tracks, where I could see and hear the trains go by—the engine passing in hissing thunder, sparks flying up like fireflies let loose from the rails, dust coiling behind it like a tornado in trail. Such began my adventures, my love of motion and machinery.

We crammed a lot of life into those short childhood years, as did our mom. More than we expected her to have, but not nearly enough. It’s been a lifetime since she left us, and all that remains are the memories—memories that come on the wings of a snowfall; that raise a smile every time I see an acorn squash at the grocery store; that rumble into life with the roar of a locomotive or the soft crackle of a little cellophane package being gleefully opened by eager hands.

It was five in the morning. In a few hours I would have to get up and go to the airport to fuel the aircraft for the morning students, cram in some studying, and then ride my bike to the community college for class. The alarm went off much too early, my hand slapping it even as it gently touched a photo of my brother and me as children, Pepper the wiener dog lying between us as we watched Johnny Quest.

Outside, the moonlight filters through darkened trees, their branches raised up as if in prayer. From a distance comes the whistle of a train, the mournful sound carried on the windless cold that is memory’s heat. Inside, the rest of the house sound asleep, there is only quiet and another photo on my desk, of a tall young woman with dark auburn hair and ice-blue eyes in a simple wooden frame. I know there is oatmeal and fruit in the kitchen; but at the store I found one last package of Sno Balls. I think this one time Mom would not mind if I had one for breakfast. I’ll put on my coat and head out on the porch; perhaps eating the Sno Ball as I perch on the wooden railing, feet dangling into the air just for one more moment—ignoring the inherited perpetual recognition of gravity, while Mom watches over me even as heaven sleeps. - Brigid

New Leashes on Life - A Fundraiser for Kat

I've been remiss in posting, taking a little longer than expected to recover from hospitalization for the Type A flu that set up base camp in my lungs. Some complications came up in my blood work which showed concerning low levels of white and red blood cells, hemoglobin and iron.   I don't have any other symptoms of a serious blood disorder  such as bruising, weight loss (yeah right), etc., so it might all be flu related, autoimmune, or just side effects of the low iron (I've been prone to anemia since childhood) but they are going to do a bone marrow biopsy this week.

I've just put it in God's hands at this point   But it's given me a lot to think about.  About how very fragile we all are, and how quickly the sand in our personal hourglass heads south.  I think of those around me battling their own health issues, Ed B., Stormdrane, Kelly Grayson, and now my young friend Katherine A. (gunwriter and blogger Kat Hel) who is scheduled for a double mastecomy in a week due a sudden diagnosis of cancer.  I was able to send a few dollars to

• Kat's Defense Fund which I hope you all can do as well, as this young married Mom of two can really use the help.  
• Reminders of what riches some of us have, even if fleeting.  

I remember back to my Mom's last days - I was pretty young when we lost her to cancer, but not so young I don't remember.  I recall those last conversations where she was talking to me but her eyes were fixed elsewhere like she was already somewhere else, waiting for something else.  Her voice was in her room, her form, but she was already gone, already beneath and beyond the knowledge of this earth.

I don't remember what she said, only the tear on her cheek as she was not ready to take that step out.

She was 10 years younger than I am now.

I still think of her, of my Stepmom, of my brother and stepbrother and my Dad, gone now. I think of them as I walk near the railroad tracks by our home. I walk early in the day or just at dusk on days Partner is on the road.  The traffic is quieter and you can still hear the earth breathe if you listen carefully, as if it just came out from under the ether and it's not yet aware it's awake, or what that awakening will bring.  I see small insects on small pools of water that formed from the last storm, not in the air, and not underwater, simply skimming the surface caught between those two points, fixed in time.

As the sun comes up, the river that winds through our village gleams in the mirrored blaze of a new day, the trestle across it a black arch from which soon the trains will rush past as people go into the city for the day's toil. I hear the rumble of the first train, my signal that it's time to head for home, the sudden sound a startling suggestion that time is rushing past, iron and will hopefully keeping us moving forward.

This day?  This day is a gift.  Even in all of the times in the air in which I came close to ending my day in something that would not buff out, I never had the sense of mortality that I carry now, that I may carry now for the rest of my days.  I think of the little plaque my Dad had on the wall of his home as things were taken down for the sale "This is the day the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it."  I used to read that with all the imperial dismissal of youth and think "that's all good Dad but what about next week or next year?"

Sunny D. Lab is home, at her rambuctious age, I leave walking her up to a young lady from our village who takes her out between playtime romps with "mom" in the back yard.  But I remember walking the much more docile Lorelei, who used to join me.  When we first adopted her I felt like we had the only agoraphobic dog on the planet.  She was terrified of leaving the property, even on a leash.  She'd lived six years in a small pen in a building with a single light bulb for light, having litter after litter of purebred puppies.  When she could no longer bear puppies, she was not retired to a warm, loving home, but surrendered to a shelter, a small blessing considering other alternatives that such dogs face.  

She didn't know what sun was, or grass, or playtime. She only knew what it was like to be inarticulate and dispensable. She learned sun and grass and play pretty quickly.  Walking on the leash away from the house took a few more months as she learned to trust and explore. It wasn't long before she was running ahead, little clouds of yellow Lab floof in her wake, joyous in the sweet, consoling victory that is freedom.  When her arthritis kicked in when she was about 10, Partner built her a motorized escalator up the steep steps into the house, so she could still enjoy her yard time.  A winch, some lumber, and a weekend of work and she was the happiest dog on the planet, riding it up and down to freedom into her final days with us.

Twelve years ago I wrote the Book of Barkley, having learned much of life through the eyes of a dog (though I still shake my head at the negative book review because "it wasn't about a talking dog!").  I'm still learning.  I've learned to be strong, not as men are strong because they have neither doubt nor hope, but because I have both.  Doubt enough to know how precious is each breath, and hope that keeps me headed towards the light.

The earth takes one last bite of the sun's rim as it ascends, and I break for the trail like a covey of quail flushed from hiding.  I treat each day as if it is my last now,  as one just never knows.  I hurry home on legs that have stumbled and found strength again, galloping through avatars that mark the stockpile of time, eyes on the horizon that calls like a brandished saber.  I near home, my somewhat tattered old red shirt my personal shot-torn flag that marks my passage as I round the last bend in the road before my destination.

I was released from the hospital 67 years ago, born not yet to remember what life would bestow.  This time, I came home from the hospital born to remember what my life has been before and what a gift each adition day is.  Our own bodies are unfaithful to themselves, the earth, and the heavens sometimes it seems, obvious to our desires. Too many of us lately have left us and too many are fighting to stay.  Too many people have gone from this world seemingly forgotten.  Except for those who still believe the promise, confess the faith, and remember all that is worth remembering. 

This is the day. . .

Tracks of Black and White

I carved our names upon a tree
simple words marked a plaintive plea
The text incised on darkened wood
with trembling hand as best I could
But in so writing tears would fall
for the bark's surface was far too small
Still my hand etched away in vain
with faith that it would be seen again
hope that these small woundings of a stem
might speak to someone who passed by them
I hope they see past the mark or stain
to small etched cuts of the heart that remains
Brigid 

Did you ever cut your initials into a tree? (and no, it's not a great idea tree-wise). Or etch the name of a secret crush back in school days, absently in a journal, not being able to think much beyond the words that made up the name of your beloved?

Short words are easy. It's the long strings of words that can break us, or make us. In the middle of a presentation today I had a blank moment and what came to me was "I lost my train of thought".

Where did that expression come from? Though we use it for everything from absentmindedness to excusing our disjointed ramblings by its loss, it was elaborated four hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes in a somewhat different meaning:

By Consequence, or train of thoughts,

I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called,

to distinguish it from discourse in words,

mental discourse.
When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever,

his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be.

Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.

Hobbes was quite the thinker, probably why Bill Watterson chose the name for his sardonic tiger in my favorite comic strip.

My personal lumbering boxcars of thought, speeding on through this railway station we call the Internet, is fueled by very early mornings, and a couple of cups of coffee, needed to get me moving as my days often start well before sun has risen.


Train of thought. The term just doesn't seem to fit our new age, when abundant discourse is sent forth in the click of a mouse, words and and ideas flirting between computer terminals in nanoseconds, with voluminous paragraphs abbreviated to simple text messages. In an age where entire freight cars of words are reduced to tiny particles of matter, the term "train of thought" seems to be a disappearing trail of smoke in our vocabulary. Sonnets and poetry reduced to . ;-) and "luv ya" in our rush to our next appointment. People spend hours each day texting and twittering without as much as a spoken word to someone they care about. If Hobbes were given a blackberry instead of a quill, would he have written Leviathan?

Log trains passed behind my house when I was a child. Passed down through the forested hills where we romped, grew up, fell in love and carved our names on trees. As they traveled down those hills towards the timber mills at night, their path would cut shadows across our neighborhood. I remember as a small child how the sound would intensify as my Dad would read to me at bedtime, as shadows would slide over the wall above my bed, over the model boats and planes and trains my brother and I played with. And with the shadow came one of the first sounds of my memory, the mournful wail of a train, competing with my Dad for sound, so he would speak louder and more clearly, forcefully driving each word outward, the phrases connected and intact and uninterrupted and in that moment I discovered my love for words. And for trains.

In daytime we'd ride our bikes along the tracks, looking for diesel smoke in cold air, throbbing engines, hoping for a quick glimpse. The yard at the timber mill had more than one track running into it, and as two trains would arrive, you'd hold your breath in fear of a collision, only to have one veer off and stop, while a long line of cars safely passed. I think of the missing man formation, in which a squadron of fighter planes performs a low pass, one separating and flying off to the heavens. A ballet of mighty machinery.

I'd memorize the names on the cars going by, forming the words in my mouth while smelling the fresh smell of wood going into the paper mill. So many cars, so many words. Each leaving a memory, branding my thoughts with its impression, burning into my head with the sunlight streaming through the slats. Carrying it's load of mighty trees fallen to make paper for which the words will one day affix themselves. Paper clean and bare with promise.

Behind my house, a new train, miles of unexplored tracks to walk, tracks crossing across the landscape of this new life, when viewed from the air, almost forming letters, writing of new adventures. A poem composed of ancient ties and abandoned depots, a sad lament to the forgotten forms of old trains, to lost thoughts and the art of speaking in deep clear sentences, now reduced to emoticons and abbreviated texts. How do you reduce your feelings to 3 or four letters, and quick clips of syllables that mean so little? Words sent through space, silently with no weight.


My Dad hasn't read to me at night in decades but until his death at 101, he regularly sent me letters, real letters, though his household had email and a cell phone. The letters were written in clear, flowing script that belied his years and in which he talked with steady and unflinching repose, of watching all his friends pass on, of navigating life in a body that aged long before his mind. He wriote of the family and of his days of laughter and prayer, words of humor, of inspiration, of compelling faith. Sheets of paper that for years have charted a course for me through adulthood. Sheets that lie carefully tended, fragrant and dry in a drawer, where I will treasure them now that he's gone, abiding strength still radiating from his descriptions of love and loss, the papers having a weight to them of his life. A weight that will keep me anchored.

How do you do that with a text message, how do you convey such feelings of family in a smiley? How do you explain what it feels to live, to breathe, to love, to fly, in a twitter message? For those thoughts make up boxcar after boxcar of the steady motion of thought, sturdy boxes of space and time, their spaces containing the heavy load of lust and longing, pride, fear and desire. A train barrelling forward in steady progressions as moving clouds fly overhead and shafts of sunlight peer through sliding cars, into their depth. As others transmit through satellites and space, I watch the landscape from the viewpoint of the train. Structures of iron lace, the suddenness of buildings, clouds of morning mist all crossing my line of sight, my muscles straining with the curves through corn shrouded fields, moving with the train, thundering through empty fields of past loss into meadows washed with light. I rush into the rain as the cars gain speed, waters cleansing the windows on which I look out on life. I hurl words into the darkness of an upcoming tunnel and wait for their echo back.


Train of thought rushing on. Life viewed as a passing landscape in which I live in the midst yet best write about it only as it has passed my window, a memory behind me trailing in the smoke of the engine. I don't have a Smart Phone.  I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do a "Tik Tok" video.  Only on rare occassion do I text. I journal and I blog. I blog for me, to release words that need to come out at the end of the day. The stories may be too long to catch the interest of the masses looking for quick, short entertainment, of which there is plenty among the white noise of the Internet. My communications outside of here as well are lengthy strings of words, heartfelt messages splayed out on paper, their sincerity driving their movement, under my pen, the words stringing out behind me. Sometimes I hit send, somethings they just stay, hesitant to go beyond the confines of my longing.

But the words will always will be my own, the track they follow a mystery until that next bend is rounded. Words composed of past journeys on ancient rails, washed clean by wind and rain, and tempered by time. A story written to the mournful sound of a train whistle echoing through abandoned dreams and ancient memories, waiting for the echo of my words.

Saving Daylight

Rise and Shine.

Daylight saving time is still messing with my internal clock.  Thirty years ago, I could put in a 14-hour duty day flying, walk off the airplane at 11 p.m., and be back in the cockpit at 7 a.m. (the time spent getting to and from the hotel did not count as your legal "rest" back in the day).  I'd do that over and over, getting the occasional whopping 10 hours of rest in there to be legal, and still be bright and chipper.

Now, the only chipper I can conjure up is the wood variety I'd like to lob the alarm clock into just to hear it ground into bits.

Getting up early was even easier as a child. In Summer, we'd fling ourselves out of bed at the first rustle of a cereal box, eager to see who could get the prize out first.  Actually, the day the box arrived home, I would carefully slit open the bag, extrapolate the prize, examine it carefully, then carefully suture the bag and leave it for my brother, who then spent the rest of the prize-less day attempting to blow me up with water filled missiles (which said something about both our later career choices).

As soon as we were fed, out the door we went for a day of play, running so fast that we'd not feel the hot cement on our bare feet, cooling off only with the garden hose. It was probably just as well we didn't yet realize that 20 years later, we'd be running after something so hard we never felt it burn us.

Now, I'm spoiled, starting my day early for the most part because I want to. I've come to enjoy that quiet time before the city fully awakes when the sun rises over the waves that splash upon the shore of Lake Michigan with the lightness of youth, then vanish with grace and little resistance on the shore. It's those moments upon the shore, early in the day, that remind me of the ocean of my childhood, when I realized how much the water could bring and had yet to realize all it could take away. Some days, I'll have a couple of hours to myself before making a phone call for some consulting work, time to wander and dream, write, or bake a loaf of bread. On other days, I hit the ground running like a dog hot on the trail of a squirrel, eager for the chase. Each kind of day makes me appreciate the other.

There is a marked difference between getting up early because you want to and because you HAVE to. 

Getting up at 3:00 a.m. to ride a boat across the Columbia River Bar (which makes the Toutatis (Parc Astérix) roller coaster look like a stroll) to fish for salmon? No problem. Up at 4 to set up in a tree blind so you are in place as the first rays of sun shine their dapple promise of light on a 12-point buck.  Love to!

But it's another thing when that alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. because I had an early morning Zoom call with the Transportation Secretary of Angria or something.  There was no sun, or even the promise of sun, just an intense dark blue, almost black, that is not a color but an entire absence of color.  The room was cold, and I'd open the window, but not only would that make it colder but it would make my room smell like dead autumn leaves after it rains.  

There had better be coffee. If it is decaffeinated, remember I have crime scene tape.

But if you are like me you do it, because it's what you do, it's what you are, someone that says they'll do something and will, someone that doesn't believe in others being responsible for your bills. You are someone who had any inclination of entitlement wiped off their face by parents who remembered what it was to go to bed hungry growing up. It's trusting in the Lord in all things and caring for others while still remembering Galatians 6:5. For each one should carry their own load. 

I remember a day in the field, in unseasonably warm temperatures, that stretched into days, only time for a fresh biohazard suit with a handful of what I still think were hamster pellets and a swallow of liquid before going out again. I remember shouting directions and orders, trying to keep my team safe, where at the end, I could only speak in a scratched whisper, like a violin of which all the strings save one were broken in a final crescendo that ended like a blow.

I remember stopping at the store late on the way home, for a bottle of wine that might help me obliterate the images in my head, when the clerk said something about "I hate working nights."  I just smiled, thinking that at least she didn't have to put her clothes aside at the end of the shift to be burned, as I went home to try and forget. 

 

After days like that, getting up early now, completely clearheaded and at peace, eating a warm scone in my office while I write a technical analysis of some evidence for an attorney is a piece of cake.  

Retire, everyone said - you can sleep in, you can be a "trophy wife" (at my age, I think I'm a "participation trophy" wife).  Retire yes, trophy wife, no.  I found out many years ago, when dating someone who was wildly successful, that I was just something pretty to be worn on his arm, like that watch that cost as much as my car, only to find that when the day was done, and the business contract signed, I could be removed just as easily at the end of the night.  No thanks.  I'm happy with a husband who works as hard as I do, who will get up at o' dark hundred to make the coffee, if need be, just as I am known to be up early to make him sandwiches and pack some homemade cookies from my secret stash for an unexpected road trip.  Because, after enough late days and early mornings in a lifetime, you realize what truly is important. It's not living long enough to forget; it's living long enough to remember fully.

When the alarm goes off tomorrow, and I wake to dark skies, I'll smile with the thought of the grace of another new day crashing upon the shore, if perhaps in just a while longer.  I may be God's child and occassionally someone's technical expert, but at heart, I'm a vagabond without a master, and for all I cannot control in this world, that snooze button is mine.