WHEN I AM DANCING

When I am dancing

I see the faces of people I’ve loved

Feel them close by

The ones who betrayed me

The ones I lost when our paths parted

The ones on the other side

Who visit me in dreams.

As I dance, you are with me

You and you and you

My bones lose their gravity

They’re smooth as pearl,

As full of light

Dancing, I remember

The love story of being;

The tip of the stamen,

The tender whorl of the petal.

Immortal unswerving liquefied shimmering

Sunflower

Starlight

Dance.

(Dedicated to the music of Van Morrison, whose music helps me clean the kitchen late at night. My favorites: Brown Eyed Girl, Crazy Love, Domino, Wild Night, Jackie Wilson Said, Moondance. Picture is of me and my friend Beanie Odell, a fellow Irish fiddle woman, rocking out to reels and jigs.)

Friday morning was one where I just couldn’t see why I should get out of bed. Hey, I know my anxiety is not unique. So many Americans are worried about money, about losing their children to an ambiguous foreign campaign, about getting sick without insurance to cover them. All of us are carrying burdens as the holiday season approaches. It will not be a typical Christmas. What will it be? In times like these, we must live day to day, without having answers. A bright white light shone through the slats of the Venetian blinds in my room. Snow, it advertised. Snow had fallen during the night. I shambled into the living room to find that magic had touched the holly bushes in our back yard. The holly berries are abundant this year. Now the sliding doors framed a scene of pure enchantment just within my reach. I pulled on my boots and waded out in the snow to take this snap. I just wanted to share the beauty. Let your hearts be light.

Cosmic Metronome

I had this thought today during music practice with my husband: why doesn't the universe provide us with a metronome to solve world problems?

For years my husband and I have quarreled over our music. At times it's been so intense we've had to put down the pipes and fiddle until the ugly feelings went away. "You're speeding up. No, you are. You're missing a beat. No, you're just playing the wrong version." On and on.

Now, in retirement, we have committed ourselves to playing every day for at least an hour. We've brought in an old friend, the metronome. We wired it to some speakers so it's loud and assertive. Gradually, the steady beat guides our attention away from the old complaints and focuses our attention on our own music-making. Slowly a new and harmonious partnering is possible as the steady beat becomes our guide and natural arbitrator.

Where on earth/in human nature is the cosmic metronome that would steady the pulse of human relations; that would channel the energy of blame and argument and disperse it into self-examination and self-correction, with the aim toward achieving harmony? I don't know. I'm just wondering.

On Being a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Turning 60. I feel like a grilled cheese sandwich. All nicely toasted on one side, and then somebody comes along and flips me over. All the cheese from the baked side starts to seep through the vulnerable inner bread on the flip side.

This is not the best analogy, but I am trying to describe the way that each of the thirty year periods of my life are suddenly aligned, and the past is backwashing, filtering through the newly completed 30-year layer comprising young adulthood to “maturity.” My memory will flood with reruns from my early years, something like old movies on TV. I'm lost in the good and bad, the ugly and sad, the amazing, and the pathetic. Retro-view in both color and black-and-white.

Fumbling back to bed on the way from the bathroom one night, I caught the reflection of the bedroom in the window glass, and had the strangest feeling that I was walking inside the glass; the sense of being a goldfish (but that’s hubris: let’s say a guppy) inside a liquid, fluid medium with no end or beginning. Is this the altered state of the yogi, the embryo, the Senior Citizen, or the dawn of the legendary Second Childhood? Will it end in adult diapers or in enlightenment? Or both?

What my Tomatoes Taught Me

This spring was the first time I planted a garden. Here in the mountains everyone was doing it. Got your plants in yet? Do you think we’ve had the last frost? I bought three types of tomato plants: non-acid, Celebrity, and Horace. I thought it would only take three small sites for my tomatoes. How stupid could I be? I had bought three flats, each containing four tomato plants. Twelve, in all, needed homes in the not-so-great soil around the house.

I felt a burning commitment toward my unborn tomatoes. After all, I adopted them. I had to give them a chance. I used a place where the town had ravaged our yard to repair our water main. From the soil the city tractor had already tilled I rescued many beautiful stones big as a man’s fist – among them the quartz that makes Spruce Pine the Mineral Capital of North Carolina. I fertilized the stone-free earth with bags of soil from Walmart Garden Center, and my fledgling plants soon grew in a proud row in the front yard and in a maverick, second bunch in a sunny spot by the kitchen wall. Here is a picture of some of the tomatoes, taken in late August, lined up on the window sill above the sink.

When I think of the tomatoes, I remember their warm weight in my hand as I carried them in my palm to the cutting board. But I also remember how I had to fight for them all summer. Blight slowly turned their stalks and leaves yellow and dotted with black. Every morning on the way back from the mailbox, I would pause by the tomatoes, tearing off diseased leaves. Some plants were hardy and resisted the blight. Others bowed to it. The tomatoes came anyway; stubborn, resilient, they matured and we enjoyed them for weeks. I wondered at the process that wrought them: something arrived, where there was nothing. All it had taken was time and effort. Patrick, my husband, harvested many green tomatoes and brought them down to our friends Jo and Sharon at the Upper Street Café downtown, where the unripe fruit starred in bacon, lettuce, and fried green tomato sandwich specials. That was summer. Now it’s October.

This morning I took down the metal hoop skirt stands that supported our tomatoes and returned to the soil the stalks and the green tomatoes that are too late arriving. This is the seasonal duty of the gardener, just as was the reaping. I am sad. The recent loss of yet another friend who’s succumbed to cancer haunts me while I work. Today as I send the last of the green tomatoes tumbling into the grass and the earth, the fate of the tomato plants weaves allegories in my head. I think about love affairs and friendships that never ripened, though their transition from flower to fruit was full of the joy of quickening life. I think of dreams and plans that had to be let go because the environment would not support them; because hostile conditions replaced possibility.

Our neighbor, Keith, yanks up old corn stalks and purple morning glories from his side garden, tells me to help myself to the Tommy Toes -- tiny, pungent tomatoes clustered in bright bunches along a snaky, seemingly infinite vine. They are in the process of giving up their lusciousness to the earth. Soon what remains above ground will tumble into the compost barrel Keith keeps behind his house. He shows me how he’ll turn the handle every week or two, so the compost will become rich and mixed. The October sky is bright blue; shards of dried stalks shiffle and scud across rows of soil. Already Keith is talking about next year’s garden, making plans while he hauls and shovels-under.

Moving Mountains

When we moved to Spruce Pine from Chapel Hill in 2007, I had to put all my cute sandals aside and wear sneakers 24/7. On top of that blow to my inner Barbie, I developed really bad plantar fasciitis (the doc called it plan-tar fash- itis) in my right foot, which because I had no time to rest during the frenzy of moving, became so inflamed I could barely walk. When my husband Pat and I would go for evening strolls by the Toe River, I felt like I was using a new, unruly set of feet; they behaved unpredictably. I had to think about each footfall.

Hadn’t I asked to learn to live in the present; wasn’t this the goal of my most earnest prayers and meditations? Yes, but I had forgotten that most life lessons are orchestrated by that wise teacher, pain. What happened to me? I slowed down, because I had to. I started looking around. Where was I? In the Blue Ridge Mountains. Surprise, Surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. Not an Old Navy or a Starbucks in sight. The only chain store in our sleepy town is a Walmart, and it is a hub of homey activity: bake sales outside the doors on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, kind senior citizens who serve as greeters at the doors.

While my foot was healing I ducked into a store to look for some sensible supportive sandals. I’d been suffering from plantar fasciitis, I told the salesgirl, who furrowed her forehead. “I had somethin’ like that,” she said. “But it was called Planetary Faskee-eyeteez.” We stared at each other. She laughed. “I guess that’s the mountain way of callin’ it,” she said.

I have loads more to learn about the mountain way. It means dropping the notion that a Masters Degree from Chapel Hill is anything more than a certificate proving I have experience in only one domain of life. There are mountain schools of mystery about which I know nothing: like the names of the early and late spring cycles, the signs of a cold winter, the unlikelihood that plants will grow under a black walnut tree, the dangers of eating a mushroom that’s grown on a hemlock.

Who is Cotta McCotta?

McCotta is not my given name. Cotta McCotta is the name I gave to the person in me who regularly loses car keys, misplaces my glasses, gets into the wrong car in the parking lot because it looks a lot like mine. “Oh,” I tell my annoyed spouse, child, or friend. “That Cotta McCotta, she’s up to her tricks again.” She is like a retarded sister personality that lives in my body. But lately I’m learning that Cotta McCotta is a kind of divine being. All that dreaminess, all that sense of being unable to cope with the details of the real world – it’s like a protean soup where everything beautiful, everything creative in my life incubates; formless, nameless, like plankton floating in the sea. Cotta McCotta is that entity, that singing-in-the-blood feeling. She might be that important thing people call a “soul.”

My first memory of being is when I was very small, maybe two or three years old. I was out in the back yard of my family’s first house in Cranston, RI, on a hill, on a street called Woodstock Lane. My mother was hanging freshly washed sheets on the line. The sheets billowed and roared, smelled of soap and sunshine. I was lying on my back in the grass, feeling the warmth of the earth below me. I inhaled the smells of spring loam and freshly cut grass, heard the subtle shifting of the blades as ants and beetles passed through. There was no judgment, no analysis; only feeling. The sky was clear blue. I was watching the silver, winking progress of an airplane across the heavens when I noticed things floating in my vision. They were strange shapes: some like translucent tiny straws; others were things I learned to call Paisleys when I got older and learned about fabrics and design.

So, okay, the shapes were debris in the outer layer of my eyeball, in the gelatinous fluid there. I’m educated now, so I know. But on that day back in 1950, those floating shapes, needed no scientific explanation. They were just part of life. Part of the strangeness of living in a human body on this beautiful, sensual planet.

Cotta McCotta lives this way – floating in mystery, while I, on the other hand, try to function in society, deal with ideas, opinions, desires, obligations, emotions. I’ll be 60 in November, and I’m tired of the struggle between who I’m supposed to be, as opposed to who I really truly am.

I want to dedicate my blog to Cotta McCotta, this primal entity that is me. She cannot lie, because she has no one to convince. She simply is, and I’m beginning to see that she is the wisest, as well as the most exasperating part of me.