Memorial Day

 

We think of this weekend (more than the day, some of us) as the official beginning of summer, and this year, after the last seige, we more than ever feel the need to open out and celebrate.  There will be a parade in town, and the cemetery will be adorned with flags for veterans...those for whom Memorial Day officially commemorates.

 I looked for the  formal photo of my father in his Navy uniform but found more quickly my parents' wedding portrait from January, 1944.  I suppose, being born a year later, that I am the memorial now, a personal testimony to wartime life.  My father, flying the coast of South America as an engineer on patrol, found out about my birth over the radio, and saw me only months later when their patrol returned to base in Miami.  There are so many stories they told of that life there...the apartment building (it is still standing) where they shared friendships and scarce resources with other families whose men were fighting...the maternity nurse who would cry that she had joined the Navy to see the world and was assigned there instead...the Miami Beach of wide sands, tall palms and thick gardens...scorpions who found their way into the kitchen.  

There were crashes in the jungle and repairs made by trading rum for parts and help.  Then the whole story of how my father, though exempt from service because he supported his mother and siblings, joined up suddenly one day, not wanting to sit at home (he worked for the post office, my grandmother's idea of a job with a future, though not his)  away from action and service.  Older than most recruits by sometimes a decade, and having seen more of the country and more of street life, too, he told of having to help shape the homesick, naive youths in his company to be of use to a unit. Somewhere I have a photo of them, he in the front, larger and older, against a sea of faces whose expressions ranged from brazen to bemused.  My uncle, a medic in the Army, told his own stories of that time; there was no tone of bravado in his. Nor in the reluctant sketches from older cousins, taken prisoner of war.

So Memorial Day has become for us a patchwork of second- and third-hand memories, for none of us in the family has seen war except from afar, both in time and space.  We "remember" those who fought for wars that others imposed on them; we "believe" that their fighting and suffering saved us our freedom.  Freedom for some of us, anyway, for sometimes it seems that the same divisive threats, the same antagonisms, the same bravados and blindness, rule the waves from neighborhood to globe.  

I'm sure some socio-anthropologist or historical psychologist has a theory about that everlasting human failure.  But it would be useless to read it; it just makes me tired.

photo by Sadie DiLiddo

Still, in peace for the moment, today we raise our flag to hope and to the brave; we pull together, as I have been doing yesterday and today, our picnics and cheer each other over drinks on the porch.  My aunt sends me this photo of her Memorial Day at the shore, a lifetime for me of peace, safety and care.

She asks us on the phone whether we are having our hot dogs and hamburgers, which reign in their memories as the chief menu for not only this day, but Fourth of July and Labor Day...the national days of memorial.  At 98, she has much to remember and memorialize. 

She may be disappointed in my menu.  I'm afraid that as much as I love inheriting and carrying on family traditions, I can't make myself be a hot dog and hamburger kind of celebrant.  Because we haven't begun our larger social activities here yet...our neighborhood is famous for them, but we are pretty cautious still...a few neighbors are joining me on my porch this evening. 

Here's what we are having:

It celebrates summer, and in no small way honors the bounty I feel grateful to afford.  Fruits of others' labors, herbs and flowers that grow in soil from others' work, food enough for family, company, and anyone else who shares a table, or a garden, or a life.

There are so many to remember on Memorial Day...soldiers, yes, but also everyone who struggles to keep us alive and well:  farmers, farm workers, day laborers, health workers and responders of all sorts who in all sorts of ways, whether we see or realize them or not, provide freedoms for us.  

Who perhaps lost their lives in that service, too.

For me, today is their day, too.

Standstill

 It's a beautiful warm day here, a thin layer of white overcast that hasn't overcome the sun.  I've had lunch, after a brief return to the library, then the grocery store for something I could microwave (my only appliance available at the moment).  Now I am in my rocker on the porch enjoying quiet.  There are still items on today's list to do, but I have come to a stop.

As has everything else round me.

The kitchen backsplash, the kitchen floor, the stone patio...nary a motion detected on any.  The backsplash, which my nephew Bob worked on for hours til late last night, is on hold due to child-care issues...understandable, considering.  

The flooring, which was ordered six or seven weeks ago (I have stopped counting) just came in last Friday, but the floorman Doug is still on his way back from taking his father to New York for the summer...also understandable. 

 As for the patio, which is my own task, that is halted for lack of inspiration:  I can't seem to come up with a viable plan, or the effort to think of one.  Stones lie pathetic in the pattern of yesterday, unsatisfactory, insufficient, unacceptable.

It doesn't help that after a sound, healthy sleep two nights ago, I managed only four hours last night.  Nothing pressing kept my mind buzzing; no caffeine kept me sleepless. Last evening, after Bob left, I read for a while an innocuous, rather self-aggrandizing novel by the otherwise brilliant writer MFK Fisher, yawning my way to lights out by ten or so.  At nearly midnight I tried the best thing I know for sleeplessness...Yogi Stress-Release tea, a honey and lavender blend...and though I began to yawn again, closing my eyes gently in anticipation of rest, it evaded me still.  All I could do was wait it out, as I listened to the clock strike one three times.  I woke a bit after five.  

This morning, I checked my list every few minutes for something to distract me from this ennui, and went about a few unimportant assays that weren't even on it...lackluster is the kindest description of what got me through lunch (gnocchi cooked in vegetable broth with collards and the leftovers of orange-celery salad). 

Thereafter I began to yawn again.  The porch on a quiet day has that effect, to be sure, not to mention a soporific lunch, but it seemed to me that in order to avoid a sense of guilt about doing nothing (not to mention an anxious walk past my topsy-turvy kitchen), I could haul myself out of the rocker to find my laptop and write.  If things were at so dead a stop, my fingers could nonetheless write about it.  As excuses go, I think this takes a prize, don't you?

I'd love to have written in buoyant tones, with pictures of my newly revived house, but alas, the photos here illustrate well only the notion of nothing doing.

Maybe in a while I will take a walk, where I haven't the energy to guess.  Still, it is a nice day, with a breeze that could entice me into it...if even that hadn't come to a standstill.

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Postscript:

There is something about the release of words that creates its own energy.  Did I go for a walk?  Not exactly.

Instead, as I closed my laptop, I looked out over the front slope and remembered an item on my list:  to move two lorapetalum from the dark of the side yard to the front where their own dark shade would be a pleasing, I hoped, foil to all the greenery.  

I stood up, slipped into my work shoes, went for the maddock and began to chop roots, dig up stones, free earth.  I filled the watering can.  I pulled out the first lorapetalum and plunked it in the new hole, piling up dirt around it and then pouring on water.  Cathy, working at transplanting in her yard across the street, came over, carrying her gardenia on a shovel. We conferred.  I did the second lorapetalum, and then drove to Southern States for good soil.

When I returned, on the front porch was a large box marked "Glass! Handle with care!" So I filled in the new dirt, washed up and tackled the frame I'd ordered for a monoprint I'd bought years ago from the Print Council exhibit to hang in the front room.  It fit perfectly.

Meanwhile a second package landed at the kitchen door:  twin overhead lamps for the workroom.  I assembled them, as easily as the frame, and gathered tools for hanging them.  I knew, though, that by that time...the clock striking five...I wouldn't trust myself on a ladder.  (Perhaps some nice son or nephew or neighbor would come by and affix them to the ceiling for me?)

Back on the porch, I looked down this time, and a curry plant I'd bought and planted, without knowing really what it was, caught my attention.  Google helped.  Turns out it needs sun, prefers dryness, and blooms in summer with beautiful yellow flowerlets perfect for fall drying.  And here I'd been faithfully watering it...had it complained that it couldn't swim without my hearing?

Out I went again to move it to the front where other like things grow...bluestem grasses and such.  While in that corner, I gathered some displaced marigolds and fed them with new soil.  

Tools returned to the shed, inside I went, about to settle back on the porch when...

...this time on the kitchen steps, footsteps:  Cathy and Steve coming to help me with that stump of a patio.  And help they did, giving me two new perspectives, new rationale, making me question exactly what I wanted.  New eyes are the best at seeing what I cannot about my own yard.  Now I've choices for a decision.  But "Don't decide right now," advised Steve.

So standstill no longer seems the theme of the day.  Things best happen in their own times.  Here I am, where I started, tapping away, releasing words.  Perhaps I'll sleep better tonight.

 

Strawberries

 For a few weeks now, I've been waking up a good hour before my usual time.  I don't know why, or how to kick the habit.  I've tried just staying in bed, eyes closed; I've tried slipping out quietly for a cup of water and going back to bed til light begins to show between the blinds...no help.  Instead, I give in and get up and get going on the project of the day.  This week, after the arrival of the rest of my belongings from storage (oh, the too many things I'd forgotten I had!), mornings have found me moving furniture, room by room.

At first it seemed overwhelming.  The removal men tried to help, at least placing the bulkiest in their appropriate places, upstairs and down.  The smaller pieces, though, I told them to leave for me to arrange when a sane moment descended.  They cluttered the middle of each room.  I have been working since then toward a reasonable order, twisting and turning things one room at a time.

Last Saturday, by five-thirty or so, I began attacking the kitchen...torn walls still awaiting tile, new flooring not yet arrived, recently abandoned and neatly labeled paint cans piled here and there, flecks of sawdust in new drawers and cupboards, etc.  It seemed impossible, which is admittedly not my usual reaction where space is concerned.  But I needed a kitchen, so I picked up a damp rag and plowed on, or in.  

I was hard at it, cutting shelf liners but seeming to get nowhere, when, around eight, a face appeared at the back door, announcing, "Nana!  Come on!  We're going strawberry picking!"

Talk about a brain-stopper.  "Oh, Alexander," I said, "I can't go now...I'm trying to get through this kitchen...look at the mess!  You go and have fun."

"It looks fine to me," said the boy coming through the door.  "Besides, it's Saturday!  Saturday is for playing."

Was it he or the universe speaking?  No matter...I hope I know a life message when I hear one.

"Okay," I told him.  "Just let me get my shoes on."

And off we went, strawberry picking at Waller Family Farms a few miles away.  In the truck, Alexander was excited.  "We did this last year, and the year before and the year before that!"  My mood was lifting by the minute.

It's good we got there as early as we did; the lot for parking, a field hard-trenched with tractor tracks, had already attracted a crowd of families eager to get out and do something on a nice Saturday morning. (Apparently, they heard the same message I did, or else they didn't need to...)  The cheerful greeter pointed us to the next open register, where his mother or aunt noted that we had brought back our baskets from last year.  Joseph wanted eggs, too, so she put a dozen aside, saying "I'll keep these here, because I think we might be running out."

The fields stretched long and wide before us, but most people, for some reason, were farther off.  Alexander went straight to the one he wanted, a few rows in, and began to give me lessons.  "Now, don't pick the ones with holes in them...there might be a bug."  And "look for the big ones!" 

We took parallel rows.  The sun, warming quickly, drew the pungent scent of berries as we plucked them, eating a few along the way. "Leave some for the people coming," Joseph told him, "let's move up a little.  Look!  there are lots more here." 

There was little chance anyone would run out of pickings.  Strawberries were ripening in clumps all along the rows.  Our gallon baskets were quickly filled.  More people, mostly with children, were pouring through, and back at the parking field it looked like a timid version of a free-for-all SUV derby.  We waited for one car to move, blocked by another blocking the exit, and a third not sure what it was doing.  In between people walked, children darted, car doors slammed shut or flew open.

On the way home, we thought of all the things we could make with our gallons of strawberries:  strawberry pie, strawberry shortcake, strawberry muffins, strawberry jam to put in jam thumbprints, strawberry shakes, strawberries with cream, strawberry and pecan salad...

My gallon, by the way, is half empty already, just from nibbling a few at a time over these last days.  Tonight the boys are coming over for dinner...guess what's on the menu for dessert?