The Way It Is

It rained, and it’s still raining, and we are in a cloud. The hills are green and growing greener, the cottonwoods are celebrating with yellow leaves, and windfalls of oranges have been dropping onto the muddy earth. Yesterday a trio of deer paused beside the road and stared at me for a good long moment before they ran away, and a row of wet mailboxes stood like silent sentries, one with its mouth wide open, all of them expecting. Coyotes sang like Caruso in the night and a fox left its berry-beaded scat in the driveway.

In the meantime, we keep worrying and spending, accruing new complexities while nothing is resolved, filling out forms and following rules, pressing digits and waiting on hold to speak to a person. Operator. Agent. Someone, please. A recorded message assures us that our call is important and thanks us for our patience. It’s the dispiriting way business is conducted in modern life. Skimmers are reading credit cards at gas pumps, the convolutions of a tax bill are almost indecipherable, and funds we wired disappeared––banks in two countries claim to be investigating. First World problems? I guess so. But I don’t understand the world anymore. I must have looked away too long, and in my span of inattention, risks morphed and rose, customs changed, and I am perennially befuddled.

On the other hand, don’t get too close to me. I wore my mask to a meeting yesterday in the school auditorium and my glasses fogged up and I struggled with whether to sip or skip my coffee, and caffeine won, but the fogginess persisted. I’m deaf in one ear and not so sharp in the other, and I leaned into the muffled murmurings of voices around me that now and then made sense, and the overall feeling was of a community trying to find its footing on slippery ground, and maybe making progress. It was all there: loss and continuity, conflict and hope, grasping for the tangible but handed ambiguity. Life takes more patience than I ever realized.

A few days ago, I saw a shop in town called High Tide Glass Gallery and I walked over there, anticipating a source of beach glass gifts, only to discover it was a purveyor of fine bongs. On the heels of my disappointment there came a small burst of fascination for the story it told about shifts in the culture. There may well be a stronger market for implements to help alter perception than for objects one might perceive as beautiful. Maybe good weed and wi-fi is all it takes these days. Or maybe there’s nothing in this anecdote at all except an aging woman out of step with the times. Uncertainty is our homeland, and we must be prepared to traverse it or perish. It’s true, we perish anyway, but we can make the ride better by yielding good-naturedly to the vagaries. I’m trying.

Monte returned from a walk to the well with a full report. The creek was flowing, the cows were noisy, and the rain gauge said four inches. I went out a little later to deliver a birthday present to a neighbor. The road was puddled and patterned with hoof prints and tire treads, and the creek, which looked like chocolate milk, was rushing across in several places. I wished there were rocks to step on or a small sturdy log, but I managed to wedge one heel in the mud and take a leap to the other side with pleasing finesse. Maybe after a while you get the hang of such things. No need for a bridge if you take a wide enough step and fly a little. I have always thought of a bridge as a transition, a crossing from one place to another. Now in the absence of one, I imagined that a bridge is itself a place, a place distinct from its purpose of connecting. Maybe every moment is a bridge that we stride across too quickly, overly focused on the other side or the waters beneath.

It’s the same old dictum about paying attention. It’s more imperative than ever that I watch where I walk, lest I overlook small wonders, or, more practically, the things that are going to trip me. I was glad to slow down this morning as a mist of rain gave way to a portal of blue sky, and diamond droplets formed on leaves and branches, and the mud was slick but I remained upright.

Now we’re packing for a month-long trip to England, so it’s very much a bridge-day in the functional sense of tending to business in order to reach the goal of getting ourselves from here to there . Our toiletries, clothing, and sundry necessities have been sorted and lined up to be crammed into a suitcase and a carry-on, and we’re defrosting the fridge and shutting things down, and bracing ourselves for the long uncomfortable journey, but it’s what we have to do to see our grandson, and the miracle is that we can do it.

And who knows what awaits us on that planet? Dinosaurs have been spotted, as you can see above.

So the next time I post to this blog, I’ll be in England. Meanwhile, the rain keeps transforming the world, and my life is a bridge, and everything is in the air: monarch butterflies and dragonflies and the tiny jeweled hummingbird who loiters at the sage and the great rolling clouds and the high-stepping dreams and the things we were promised and the things that we feared and the things we are hoping for still.