The wild things in life make a story

It’s late Sunday morning and a gentle rain is falling. I am on the edge of lamenting such precipitation because I could be outside cutting the grass instead of sitting here typing. But then again, as I see it, all things happen for a reason.

At least the rain gives me a break from hauling my watering can uphill from the creek to the garden and flowerbeds. Every new summer I mutter about the muscle work and swear the next time around I will have a water pump. That would-be oath has been on my lips each year since I moved here seven summers ago. I guess the pump hasn’t yet reached the top of list.

However, raccoons or some such varmint have made it.

 

“Little Miss” spent many hours of back and biceps ache digging an extended garden this spring.

I went to the local nursery and purchased vegetable plants including broccoli and green peppers, and luscious strawberries. I could taste the fruits of my labor already.

I think my future bounty was in the ground two days, maybe three, when something promptly ate all the leaves off everything, leaving behind “Charlie Brown” bare twigs of pathetic nothings.

I, the master of the word, was speechless. Yes, I should have known better. I should have wired the garden to the fuse panel.

After all I live in the country where the deer and raccoon play—and  they play more now that I don’t have a dog posse roaming the grounds for intruders.

Sadly my two cats are not replacements. The best they give me is a long, flat stare when I ask them to fetch the mouse that just ran by me in the porch.

Strangely there was little evidence of hoof or paw marks in the dirt of the garden. Either it was a very tall deer with a long neck or a raccoon tied to a tether that zip-lined from the barn roof and nibbled off the tops of my precious plants.

Being the imaginative woman that I am, I suspected the latter—a notion that grew rapidly when I spotted a big, fat, masked thief sauntering along the edge of the garden at dusk earlier this week.

I grabbed a golf club and marched over there to show the rodent what a hole in one looked like but he got wind of me and made like a bandit. 

Suddenly I had visions of raccoons living in the hayloft, dancing around up there, and pooping out parasites all over my would-be dance hall floor.

I hailed for reinforcements from Daughter #3 and headed to the barn to turn on the stereo and smoke the little buggers out as “Bat Out of Hell” by Meatloaf vibrated the framework.  

We must have looked like downright hillbillies marching up the staircase to the hayloft bearing pitchforks and steel rakes and strutting our stuff as the song, “Sharp Dressed Man” by ZZ Top barreled out of the speakers that afternoon. All we found was pigeon and sparrow doo-doo.

“Be afraid! Be very afraid!” I shouted anyway—and then I went out and replanted my garden.

I reckon I’m going to have a bumper crop. It’s always a possibility.

Raised in hope, the best gift of all

Writing from the heart is tricky business. 

I found that out in a sheepish—albeit comical way—when, once upon a column, I put it all “out there” and wrote about issues with my Greek figure (and included in my column how much I weighed) and my subsequent choices to begin to lead a healthier lifestyle.

An avid reader of said “baring” then found me sitting at a local hamburger joint stuffing in a cheeseburger and called me on it right there in the restaurant from across the room.

I wanted to throw down one of those black magic circles from the “Looney Tunes” cartoons, jump in and disappear to some faraway city as one of the anonymous populace. 

I’ve been writing my column since 2004 and I think I’ve covered just about every personal topic known to “readerkind.” Yet, I still find that the delicate river that runs through us all, and its muddy layers of our thick-skinned ways, never really reaches an end in discussion.

“There’s always something,” as my late grandmother Florence Drennan used to say (although she usually was talking about the one more thing to do around the farm that she hadn’t planned on.)

This writing space is good medicine and I am very lucky to have it, especially when I use the opportunity to write from my heart and today is just another perfect opportunity to take to the river once more.

Best selling author Neil Gaiman penned good advice. 

“Write. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”

I love and adore my father, Bruce. He is 87 years old and when I get to thinking about the depth of human being he is, I can only hope to be as good and kind and wise in all my days as he is in his.

He remains the cornerstone of his daughter’s life.

He raised me in hope and, in fact, both of my parents did.

It was my father’s most common reply to my childhood questions that instilled in me an optimistic self-power that to this day defends me in difficult circumstances and fuels my goals for purposeful happiness.

“It’s always a possibility,” my dad used to say—and still does if you ask him the right question.

My dad is my mentor and my friend, my ranch helper and my favorite historian with an encyclopedia of knowledge and stories about his career and his life that one day will fill the pages of a book.

It’s an incredible gift to have him here in this life with me.

“Fathers and daughters have a romance that goes on for the rest of their lives, destined to ripen and age as they dance through the days of their husbands and wives. Up near the surface their love is distinct,

like a garden surveyed in the sun, in which seed time and full bloom are credibly linked by a consciousness shared and hard won. 

Deep down below, where the world is a dream, and the dream is a world of its own, all manner of memories the moments redeem in a place where one's never alone.” – Nicholas Gordon

Right from my heart I write to you, my dad. I love you. Happy Father’s Day.

The progressive expansion of happiness

It’s nearly 9:30 p.m. and I’m looking out my front window at the still and quiet of the evening and the closing off of daylight as the orange sun slides beneath the horizon.

Once again, and this time through very sad events in the lives of others I am reminded that Joan Didion continues to be right. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.”

I also am reminded through these very sad events in the lives of others, that I can easily be sideswiped by my own past shadows that (to paraphrase Mark Nepo) apparently still wait in behind and are quite willing to be background to my joy.

I guess it means I’m still ever edging outwards in healing from my own storm damage, when life as I knew it ended and a different one began.

Of late I’ve been wandering into territory that fellow freelancer Wendi Stewart wrote about a few weeks in her column, “Wendi with an ‘eye.’”

She said, “that’s what writers do; we write about that which puzzles us in the hopes some understanding will surface and we can get our minds around the subject that is poking at us from the inside.”

I am puzzled by many things, some worth piecing together and some, not so much. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I think about, strange as that may sound.

I’d like to think I’d make a good life coach; someone who through her experiences in leading an imperfectly perfect life could help another human being to grow into their own light. A “perspective changer.” Time will tell.

I had a question recently posed to me. “What’s the purpose of your life, Beth?”

And much to my surprise I couldn’t answer it promptly and that bugged me—a lot.

For the rest of that day I felt stymied in some internal way, as if the fact that I couldn’t answer the question meant I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

I put great expectations on myself to come up something. A few days passed before it dawned on me that I had known all along what my purpose was. I had written about it many times in one way or another and yet had lost my way somewhere from there to here.

Purpose is sacred to each of us—this I know for sure—and I respect yours, whatever it may be.

But before I shine a refresher on mine, I want to go back to the beginning of this column and the shadows that linger as the background to joy.

Nepo writes “That we insist on keeping old wounds alive, is our curse.” He’s right. It’s what we focus on that manifests itself.

“When I focus on the rake of experience and how its fingers dug into me and the many feet that have walked over me, there is no end to the life of my pain. But when I focus on the soil of heart and how it has been turned over, there is no end to the mix of feelings that defy my want to name them. Tragedy stays alive by feeling what’s been done to us. Peace comes alive by living with the result.”

What is the purpose of my life? My purpose is to be happy. I deserve to be happy. We all do.

Somehow, for a little while, I forgot about that.

The happiness balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly, but I believe in my choice and I dwell in its possibilities.