WATER

 Water.  It’s an amazing substance too frequently taken for granted for all the magic it brings to this earth.  Water is chemically known as  H2O.  Two Hydrogen and one oxygen.  The universal solvent.  It is life.  It is found in every living thing on earth.  It exists in three states: solid, liquid and gas.  Solid will melt to the liquid state and the liquid state will evaporate into the gas form.  It tends to break its own rules though.  The process of sublimation has the solid form going directly to the gas. 

My walk yesterday was through the crust of snow that fell the night before.  Getting out into the morning I could feel the air warming and the snow changing to rain that was immediately freezing on my jacket.  When water becomes super cooled it can exist in the liquid state but below its freezing point, thus freezing on contact with any surface it hits …me, for instance.

Passing a small Beech tree I marveled at the effects of the freezing rain on the leaves that still clung tenaciously to their branches; the dried leaves quake in the breeze, brushing against each other to sound like a Shaman's rattle. The frozen surface of the brown leaves turned them into burnished copper.  The Hemlocks dip with the new weight of ice crystals collecting on their feathery fronds; a glittering of fans over me as I pass through their grove.

My dog,Rosie, and I head down towards the trail we have named “the gorge”.  This trail is narrow and rocky and follows one of the three streams that flow through this land we claim as our own.  Entering into this darker wood with its high bank on one side the rain no longer hits my jacket with a PING as the denser foliage of the coniferous trees shield us from above.  There is a different energy along this trail, quiet, calm.  It’s always green in this “gorge” with the bright green of the mosses that grow on all the rocks and the Christmas Ferns along the trail remain a deep green all through the winter months.  I look for tracks along the stream bed; the small pads of the Mink as it runs along impossibly thin ice that hovers over the flowing water.   A raccoon came down to the deeper pool and the tiny skittering of the weasel tracks show her scampering from rock to rock in search of small rodents or insects hiding in the crevasses.  I love this trail.  The footing is difficult but the mood is always easy.

I can see a fog rising off some of the snow still in the field.  Sublimation.  Fog also hangs heavy over the mountain, clinging to the various ridge lines and obscuring the summit one minute and twirling and swirling upward exposing the summit the next.  Having grown up on the coast of Maine there is a term, “pea soup” that refers to surface clouds so dense you can see only a few feet in front of you.  I remember walking along the beach in this opaque fog.  A beach at low tide in a pea soup fog creates a very small world; one with visibility of only a few feet all around you.   You exist in the moment of one footstep at a time within a monotonous landscape of sand.  Shadows loom up ahead becoming recognizable only when they enter within a few feet, emerging as a large piece of driftwood or another person walking in the opposite direction.  It was the only time that I felt I was truly present in the moment.  Unable to see anything in my future and the past lost to the fog. I traveled, one step at a time, through a dense cloud of water.   

Today the lake looks like molten mercury, smooth, charcoal gray and still.  No loons break it’s surface or call across the shores now.  Winter is here and they have gone to the sea until next spring.  

Soon there will be ice forming on this body of water.  My husband will watch it closely and determine when it is safe enough to walk down with skates in order to glide across the black mirrored surface.   Once the snow falls I will walk across the lake to the opposite shore and the trails on the other side.  The frozen water allows me to walk on top of the lake! Amazing!

I am remembering a friend who once was in love with a man from Barbados.  He came to Maine during the winter to witness “the big chill”.  We took him to a small pond by the beach to experience skating.  He pulled up beside me and grab me around the waist whispering in my ear,
“Mary, how do they do this?”  

“Do what?”

“THIS!?” he said as he gestured to the frozen surface of the pond.  He opened my eyes to just how miraculous “this” is; this body of water that we can walk and play upon!

Water. It is all around us. A wave of water bursting between our mother’s legs introduces each of us to this world. We are water. We can’t live without it.   

 Christmas with a Grandson. 

My memories of Christmas are filled with light, carols, food, lots of family and an obscene pile of presents under the tree.  With five kids in the family there was a lot of gifting going on.  My parents weren’t rich so a lot of the presents were very small, simple gifts wrapped in a big exciting box.  It was the joy of opening and finding this secret that has been held within these wrappings for weeks prior to the morning of the 25th. 

One present at a time was handed out and we all sat and watched the unfolding of the magic held within. One-at-a-time we would slowly work through that mountain of colored wrappings, taking all morning to get to the last tiny box sitting on a bow of the tree.  Christmas morning, there was never a rush to get it over.  We’d waited a lifetime for it to arrive so we took it slow and savored it all.

I still have my rag doll that Santa left under my stocking when I was five.  I have a very large, black stuffed poodle that I awoke to beside me in my bed on the morning of my fourth birthday.  I have memories of all this from about three years old.  At one years old I remember nothing.

I won’t be supplying my grandson with boxes and boxes of presents this Christmas.  At one years old any object given may simply be that for a while.  I have a file drawer filled with children's books I have collected and saved over most of my adult life. They will be worlds to travel through with him.  We have a home in a secluded valley filled with streams, forests, fields and beaver bogs where treasures hide; British soldiers stand guard to the reindeer lichen, the pixie cups wait for the elves to come sip from their rim and the brilliant orange of witches butter dazzles from the dead stumps.  Barred and Great Horned owls call at night waiting to hear an answering call. Standing on the deck we can answer those wishful callings and draw them closer to us during these silent nights.  

There will be tiny weasel tracks to follow with the coming snow and a sled for gliding down the hill to the lower field.  Gifts of time with each other is what we will share with him this Christmas.  The first wobbly steps of memories being laid before him with people who love him. A love that is equal to the great canopy of stars over our heads at night.

This will be our Christmas for our one year old grandson this year.

And for a lifetime of years to come.

 For my mom~

The greatest gift you gave me, besides my life, was asking me to assist you in your passing. 

As a teenager you and I were like oil and water, I didn't really like you and you didn't really understand me.

When I bolted ... by getting into an old Saab with two men you had never met and we drove away... you believed you would never see me again.  Perhaps I didn't even know if this was true or not at that time.  I was heading for Colorado with a man and a dream.   The mountains still call me.

As I grew I learned how to set my boundaries with you, to my surprise, this had you respect me even more.  You taught me how to be strong, how to never let a man control me, to always have my own money and my own life.  I've been lucky to find men who have loved me and appreciate this independent  nature that you instilled in me.

I always loved you and came to really like you.  Your sense of humor was quick, dry and hysterical.  Your ability to listen and engage with others had many coming to visit you for hours when you no longer could leave your house.  People loved you and enjoyed being in your presence.  You even voted for a democratic president after 90 some years of only voting republican.  Barack Obama made you proud.  You would love the fact that Kamala Harris now commands the VP position.  You were always a woman of power yourself.

You were born in the wrong era, one where men controlled the world and their wives and when women had only 4 choices of a career; teacher, nurse, secretary or mom.  At 28 years old you came late to your last career as mom.  Mom to five children and the wife to the minister of a small town.  Talk about a fishbowl!  You shouldered it well and an entire town came to love an entire family with your help.

So in November of the year 2019 you became ill.  Not horribly ill, nothing that some medicine and a lot of Dr. visits might  not have been able to help you through.  But at 97 years old you saw that your independence and ability to still live alone might never return to you.  So you decided it was time to just leave this plane and go be with all the family and friends who had journeyed on without you. And you asked me to be there to assist you.  Perhaps it was because you had witnessed how I stood by my husband who spent 18 months dying from a brain tumor.  Perhaps you saw that I was capable of doing this and would not try to convince you to stay.  Your youngest and your middle daughters sat with you, laughed with you, helped you begin the month long process of dying ... with honor and with dignity.  There would never be any other way for you.

Today, on Mother's day I find myself wishing I could call you or bring you the Irish soda bread you loved so much (it was your recipe mom!). And to sit in your living room and watch the flock of turkeys parade past your windows as you tell me what great mothers those "old girls are".

I miss you mom.

But I am of you and I carry you in my being.

Always.

Mom with Donna Gray.