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“We’re all just walking each other home” Ram Das

The woods glowed yellow sunlight through the brightly dying leaves.  Before my walk, Jon and I meditated together.  It was there I saw an image of my torso filled with old broken furniture.  It piled up messily inside of me filling me up.

Now as the dry leaves churned and crunched under my shoes, I saw another image of me vomiting up all that furniture.  I imagined making a drawing of the stream of old furniture starting in my belly coming up through my throat and arching out of my mouth.

That’s when I smelled something unusual.

It was aromatic, familiar yet I couldn’t quite place it.   It was gone just as quickly as it had come.  I thought it must have come from something growing or dying in that particular place that I had just walked, so I turned around and went back.

And there it was again.

I breathed in the smell and I realized it was cinnamon.  Then, with the smell of cinnamon, came a memory.

In my minds eye I saw the bowl of warm rice in warm milk,  small chunks of peeled apples, sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top.  It was something my mother would make when I was a kid.  Something no one else in the family liked.

Something  the two of us shared.

As the memory flooded through me, I sensed an invisible presence above me.  I looked up into the tree tops and it was as if I was seeing  the leaves and sky through shiny glass or very clear water.  But also nothing as solid as glass or water.

Then I felt the presence of my mother.

Not as I knew her, but as something clear and pure.  Like the essence of who she really was without all the stuff that life had put upon her.  I had the sense that she was telling me it was all okay.  That she saw me and loved me for who I was.  That all the bad that had been between us didn’t really matter at all.

I began to cry, deep sobs that came up from the lowest part of me.

Last week in my Bellydancing class, my teacher Julz corrected my posture.  “You’re standing like this,” she said and slouched her shoulders forward, her chest caving in.

I knew she was right.  I’d been feeling so heavy that week.  My chest felt like it was sinking down into my hips, and I didn’t have the strength to hold myself up.  I wondered about it.  I’d felt so free the first week after my mother died,  and now I was caving in on myself.

For the rest of class I made an effort to let my shoulders and back muscles drop, to lift my chest, but I had to remind myself over and over again.

Now, standing in the woods, the tears flowing freely, I felt my body open up.  My torso so full of old broken furniture just moments ago, became an empty cavern.  My shoulders slid down my back and my chest floated up.

I went into the woods with a weight in my chest and came out feeling closer to my mother than I ever had when she was alive.

Whether my mother in her essence was really in the woods with me yesterday, I can’t say I know for sure.  Perhaps a therapist would say it was something I conjured up because I wanted it so badly.

I remember when our friend Paul took his own life, Brian who found him hanging from a tree, later saw Paul walking by the river waving to him.   I had no doubt Brian had seen Paul’s ghost. That he was letting Brian know he was okay now.  But Doug, who was also there, and had served as a medic in Vietnam was just as certain that Brian was experiencing Post Traumatic Stress from having found his friend and mentor.

I can’t say I know exactly what happened in the woods.  But I do know what I felt and still feel.  And I choose to believe in that, because I know it’s good for me.  And it gives me hope, not just in this life, but in what may happen after we die.

(Thanks to Suzanne for the Ram Das quote)

Jon brought the chicken back from the village market after his Meditation class at The Mansion.  “I think it is a cold,” he said to me on the phone.  That’s when I told him I’d make chicken soup if he picked up the chicken.

An hour later, after lunch, I chopped the onion and my eyes didn’t sting until put them in the pot.

The light coming into the house has been strange all day.  This morning it glowed orange on the bookshelf, now there’s a yellowish-gray cast over the farm.  My neighbors, the mountains, are pale ghosts of the haze.

I can’t help but wonder if my eyes still sting from the smoky cloud that reached our town from Canada early this morning.

“I think I can smell smoke on my sweatshirt,” I said to Jon putting my nose to my sleeve. Can you smell that or am I imagining it?

Jon smelled it too even though he’s congested.  Maybe his cold isn’t a cold, but the effects of the tainted air. The weather channel warned against going outside if you have certain health conditions, heart disease being one of them.

It’s been dry here.  Not like in some places thankfully,  but a small thunder shower a few nights ago is all the rain we’ve had in a long time.

Last spring and summer, when so much of the country was in drought or flooding, we got the perfect amount of rain.  Enough to keep the grass green through September without it being too much.

I worry it’s our turn, the grass in the pastures is already mostly yellow.  “It’s just dormant,” Suzy texted me, “protecting itself till it rains again.”

I know I’m fortunate to only be concerned about having enough grass and hay for the animals, and not about wildfires.

We’re promised a thunderstorm, but I don’t trust it even though the air is beginning to remind me of the color of the chicken soup simmering on the stove.

When the rain does come, it smells like a campfire and doesn’t last as long as the thunder.   The ground under the big maples is bone dry, but still,  I’m grateful for what we got.

It feels hopeful.

Jon says that dogs know hope.  The way Fate will always run to the door when I put my shoes on, hoping to go to the sheep no matter how many times she’s disappointed.

Maybe the grass knows something like hope too.  Like the potential of dew. Just enough to not give up.

I pulled one piece of wood, then another from the stack in the woodshed and there it was painted in red, the initials JV. 

We moved to the farm in 2014.  I’ve been stacking wood in our woodshed for 8 years.  But it was only yesterday that I saw the initials for the first time. I shake my head at how it is possible that I’ve never seen them before. But I know this kind of thing happens all the time.

I’ve lived in enough old houses to know that people leave their mark.

In one of the houses I lived in, I found an old leather shoe in the wall, put there for good luck.  Another house had a newspaper with an article by Walt Whitman about John Astor in it.  I’ve found empty packs of cigarettes, old coins between the floorboards, and names and drawings on bare plaster under the original wallpaper.

We haven’t dug deep enough in our farmhouse to find out what someone might have left in the walls, but this is the third set of initials I found on the farm.

HW is painted on the inside of the basement door in big bold red letters. I know who they belong to.  Harold Walrath, the husband of Florence who lived in our house for over 80 years, until she was 104.

But I don’t know who JV was.   And even though the initials are painted in red also, they look completely different than Harolds.

At first, I thought that the initials might not have been put there by someone who lived in the house.  The boards in the woodshed look like they could have been reused. But then I remembered the initials DV that are carved into the door in the barn.

That “V” makes me believe that both initials probably belong to people who lived in the house before Florence and Harold bought it.

Every time I find a clue like this it makes me want to research the previous residents of the house.  It can’t be too complicated since Florence lived here for so long.

Seeing the initials makes me think there’s someone who wants to be remembered.  That there’s a story that wants to be told.

And I don’t mean something spectacular.  For me, the stories of everyday life are enough.  I find it interesting just to know who lived in a house and what they did for a living, how long they lived and where they’re buried.  Through the early census, it’s easy to find out how the land was used and how many outbuildings were originally on the property.

I’m not even sure why I’m so interested.  Except that knowing brings me a little closer to the people who chose to live in the same place I do now.  Even though, because of the time they lived in it was a completely different experience than mine.

I guess it’s a way of getting to meet them.

For me, it also animates the house, thinking of the changes that were made and the things that have stayed the same.  There are little clues everywhere that whisper to me like ghosts wanting to be known.