Tending and Mending

I’m tired of loss and missing; I want to do some keeping and tending and laughing and cherishing. It is not too soon to think about nurturing, sustenance, building, and planting. It is not too soon to dwell on what is worth holding onto.

“The ways of remedy, small and many, almost invisible to those who swagger,” writes Kim Stafford.

We choose a slow walk over a swagger, and even our anger is rooted in love, made fierce by our refusal to abandon truth and trample what we cherish.

I will always remember how we were sustained by kindness and the grace of small gifts. I have a friend who writes a monthly story for shut-ins, another who dispatches poems. Handwritten letters are being sent through the mail and welcomed by distant recipients. Occasionally I find a book in my mailbox.

An 18-year-old girl I know is starting college under circumstances far different from what she had expected. She wrote, “I think it is so important to keep light, and look to happiness rather than falling to darkness in this trying time, and that is my greatest goal.”

Sometimes the kids are our best teachers.

I learn a lot in the canyon too: how the creek lays low and waits but doesn’t vanish, how dead wood snaps and new green shoots spring forth at the broken places, how deftly the neighborhood bobcat combines confidence with caution.

Today I will carry two buckets of water to each oak sapling, and visit my West end friend. I am lobbying to take my 95-year-old mother-in-law to the ocean this week. She misses it, and it will refresh her soul. I have mailed out my postcards to voters and filled out my ballot. I am trying to write, as evidenced by this blog entry. I am checking off my to-do list, each task a tiny timber beam giving structure to the day.

The macadamia blossoms have been beckoning bees, and the orchard is humming, while an iridescent lizard basks on the warmth of a stucco wall, and a bank of low clouds is poised above the ocean playing games with the light.