music

A very broken Hallelujah

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This image is from twelve years ago.

The wind is blowing.

From the west?

Will I ever experience gentle west winds again or will they fill me with fear and remembrance from here on out.

Trauma creates deep wounds that never quite heal despite all the scar tissue.  Ready to open up and bleed at the slightest provocation.

The windchimes, the ones of wood and copper handmade and tuned to a melodious phrase (I forget which key) by a company named Woodstock may be gone.  Or perhaps they’re in the debris left behind.

I used to love listening to them when the wind rustled on a summer evening.  The setting sun glinting on the copper.  They sounded like my heartstrings thrumming in contentment. During storms, they played a symphony of strong emotions.  I wonder what they sounded like when the tree sheared off. 

Did the tree scream?

Research now tells us that trees communicate with one another, have friends, and have a mechanism to help a struggling friend who is sick or malnourished or dying of thirst.  Is my forest in mourning?  Are they pumping nutrients to the stump? Are they singing a dirge when the west wind blows?

Much of the trunk of the tree still lays in my yard.  I need someone to cut two four-inch or so slabs.  I want a remembrance of that tree for me.  One for my son.  Charcuterie boards?  Maybe.  Something.  I have a friend who is a serious woodworker.  Perhaps she will have an idea. 

But I want that wood sheltered in my home.  The one miraculously still standing.  My heart home.

I’m in shock still, but able to recognize my good fortune.  My house should be collapsed.  It wasn’t built to sustain such a hit.  The tree was old.  I’m guessing the diameter was 36 inches or more. I hugged it a time or two.

Years ago, now, perhaps 15 or more, I planted a variety of climbing hydrangea.  It grows wild in the forests of Japan.  It needs shade and the north side of an oak tree to thrive.  It had both.  Slow growing, it had just started to take off – flowering its tiny white flowers in June.  I hope I can salvage it – move it to another oak tree.

My garden looks like a war zone.  The same wind that sheared my tree threw my lawn furniture, fountain, and garden tools around.  I’ve no doubt lost a lot of work.

But my house still stands.

Hallelujah.

Yes, Hallelujah in the vein of Leonard Cohen.  Perhaps I’ll write my own verse to that masterpiece. 

I offer up my own very broken hallelujah.  Grateful.  So grateful. 

What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’?

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Writing Prompt: 
What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”?
What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?

I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies.  I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long.  I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.

I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time.  And I have no idea why.  But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift.  It was an avoidance tactic.  And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.

I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning.  I don’t know why I do that either.

I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.

When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs.  It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album.  These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013.  I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.

Photo by Julia Peretiatko on Unsplash

I crank it up.  I pour coffee or wine or champagne.  And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening. 

My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by.  I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them. 

My time with this music is now enjoyable.  Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music.  I listen with intent.  One CD after the other.  Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut.  Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.

I will listen to all five of the albums.  Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony.  I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out.  I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones. 

I also have comfort books.  There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden.  Skinny Legs and All.  Time in its Endless Flight.  The Princess Bride — That I will flip through.  Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.

But every book in my house is a comfort book.  I enjoy my walls of books.  I like looking at them.  Knowing they are there.  I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread.  I don’t read like I used to.  I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.

My books are legion.  I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases.  It’s not a joke.  The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof.  I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to.  I live alone.  There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.

But mostly I have comfort coffee. 

I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face.  I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail.  Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee.  I can think.  I can write.  I can make a to-do list.  I can read.  I can listen to music. 

But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day.  My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough.  Multiple cups of coffee.

I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.

You can have the noise and chaos of a television show.  I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.

Not so little boys

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Jake started shouting and pointing, “Hey, Dad! look!”

Jeff got up and went to Jake.  I didn’t look up from my book.  I imagined he found minnows or a crab or something. 

Then Jeff started hollering, “Miranda!  Look up!”

I was nursing an umbrella drink with one shot of vodka and two drinks worth of mixer.  The concoction, lemon and strawberry and frozen, was the perfect beach drink for the perfect beach day.  We were alone on the beach other than some surf fishers off in the distance, their poles set up in a row with them sitting in camp chairs around a cooler.  Occasionally their laughter would ring loud enough that we could hear them.  They were having a fine time.

Jeff was beside me and the Designated Parent for the day.  We took turns.  Our son Jake was playing in the shallow surf, his floaties bright orange against the blue water and blue sky and his blue swimming trunks.  Jake’s blue eyes had been wide with excitement since we arrived.  I vowed to make his first trip to the beach memorable and was succeeding.  Each night he fell asleep at the dinner table and we carried him to the second bedroom of our rented condo.  He would sleep all night and wake me before dawn.  He with a glass of milk and I with my coffee would sit on the balcony and watch the sun come up.  We were making memories that I hoped would sustain him his whole life.  Shared, quality time in paradise.

“I closed my book and looked up.”

“Oh!”  I rubbed my eyes.

I hadn’t even had a full shot of vodka yet and yet, there he was.  Puff.  In all of his majesty, scales gleaming iridescent purple, pink, blue, and green in the bright sun.

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