Sunday, September 25, 2011

Have You Ever Seen the Rain

Only in the early morning do I like to wander my neighborhood street in my pajamas. I try to smooth down my hair a little, maybe fold it up in a hair band before I head out, but I invariably go for the flip-flops, the flannel and the sunglasses. It's a winning combination before 8am.

Anyway, I've got a date with my kids, and they generally don't care if I look like a scarecrow or a ragamuffin. My husband's usually asleep, so I have no one to impress as we head out on the street with our parade of bikes and a red wagon in which my youngest sits with his stuffed tiger like a little prince. We're out to be outside, a place too little explored by human beings nowadays, out to get our exercise at the possible expense of our neighbor's sleep as the wagon rattles over each seam in the sidewalk.

This morning we were out a little later than I like. It's still hot here, and anytime after 7:30 is a little late for me not to at least be flirting with some shade, but we headed east to the end of the street, bravely into the sun. Then as we came back, I saw a dense, lonely gray cloud suspended in the blue above our gargantuan eucalyptus.

How pretty, I thought - the cloud and the tree bearing each other company in the canvas.

A moment later droplets of water hit my shoulders. I wondered bemused who or what could have flicked water at me. Then I noticed the dark quarter-sized cicles multiplying on the concrete, saw the light curtains in the air, heard the pattering increase, and I looked up into that cotton-candy cloud to see it shredding and shedding water in full sunlight.

I wanna know
Have you ever seen the rain
Comin' down
A sunny day

J.C. Fogerty is a little hard to understand, but I believe that's the way the CCR song goes, and today I could answer yes. Yes, Mr. Fogerty, I have. What's more, my kids could answer yes, and they babbled excitedly at nature's slide of hand. As my kids and I wandered beneath our own private patch of drizzle with irrepressible smiles of spontaneous joy for the simple, cool rain, it ran ahead of us northeast up the street before it left us, the damp memory evaporating from our heads and shoulders in the warmth of the sun.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Warning: This Is A Dream Blog

We were on a skinny rural road, and my husband was speeding. The reason for our haste were the twisters in the plain to our right. They were very slender, graceful tornadoes but quite fast. As I watched them cycle across the field in the grey and the rain, I realized there must be a dozen or more of them. I tensed; I was bracing for the impact because, like an advancing phalanx sent to wage battle, they were all coming toward the road with precision. I knew they were watery, wispy things; I could see straight through them. Nevertheless, despite their beauty the idea that they would soon impact the van thrilled me with fear.

We managed to reach our destination without one cyclone passing through us and dissipating like smoke. There we were at long last at a broken down vacation rental in the woods. One of its outstanding amenities was a pool turned green. I gazed on it with disgust. My man was already letting all our little ones splash around in the muck of it.

"How could you?" I asked, absolutely revolted. He shrugged, so unlike him not to care about the filth.

I looked to my right at the adjoining hot tub. It was full of frothy mud, and as I watched it began to bubble and gurgle vigorously until huge kernels of white popcorn burst out of it, into the sky, and dropped about the shady area with grace. Well, there you go, I thought. I guess this place in not all bad.



You were warned.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

The Healing Field

We Will Never Forget


My dad, just a little boy, remembers walking down a street in California with my grandfather in the fall of 1963. Grandpa stopped to watch a TV through a barbershop/store window. So Dad climbed a tree there. He spent a good long time in that tree playing, no doubt scaling up and down, swinging from it, leaping to the ground. Grandpa, along with a growing crowd of people on the sidewalk, was fully absorbed in the television screen and in what a TV anchorman was telling the nation: John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, had been shot.

I've always compared 9/11 to the assassination of JFK in relation to its enormous impact on the American psyche, and I've always felt that was apt. In the local newspaper this week, I've read it compared to Pearl Harbor, and that seemed more fitting when one reflects on the loss of life. Nevertheless, just as my dad remembers exactly where he was, what he did, the silence that seemed to pervade everywhere and the shock and strain in my grandfather's face, so I remember what I was doing when I got the phone call from my husband on the morning of 9/11, telling me in a strained tone that something bizarre was going on in New York, something about a plane crash. He told me to turn on the radio (we had no television). Later, he would tell me he wanted me to go spend the day with my sister Annie, to be safe.

We were in Texas, thousands of miles away from the attacks that took place in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania, but like most of our fellow Americans, we felt real fear about what might be coming next. Like our fellow Americans, we felt ill when we saw the second place hit. We were heartbroken when we saw the images of terrified people fleeing through the streets of our nation's most vibrant city, covered with gray dust, and we turned away from the footage of those who had no chance jumping out of The World Trade Center's windows. Like many in this strong nation, we had to eventually turn off the television, emotionally exhausted and soul sick, our worldview forever altered. We spent the day calling family and friends to make sure they were fine, to share our disbelief and to say, I love you.

I have spent the week of this 10th anniversary of the attacks with tears while reading personal stories from firefighters, law enforcement, family who lost loved ones, and teachers who try to convey to their young students the emotions from that day that still grip me when I dwell on the loss of life, the horror, the permanent loss of innocence, the valor of the first responders in New York who lost their lives when the towers fell, and the heroic actions of those on board Flight 93 when they prevented that fourth plane from crashing into the Capitol Building ("Let's roll!" - that simple phrase now inspires patriotic pride and immense gratitude).

This morning, I turned on my TV to listen to the names of those who passed away being read by their friends, siblings, spouses, parents, colleagues and children. My son gave me a huge hug when he saw my emotion rising again as I pointed out to him where the two towers had stood. When all Phoenix's local stations abandoned the reading of the names at the memorial before they were even halfway through the list of the 2,977 lost, I was angry. Did they think we were too fickle to listen for the hours necessary for this memorial? I tried to tell my husband that I thought they should let all the names be read on air; there could be no better tribute on this day, and commentary is superfluous, but I choked up. He embraced me and said, "We're thinking the same thing, Baby."

Yesterday, I marked this anniversary with my family, going to Tempe Beach Park in Arizona where they have an American flag standing in honor of each victim and yellow ribbons for each first responder who perished. I did not lose a loved one on 9/11. Still, all Americans lost a great deal that day, and 9/11 will never cease to be vastly important to me. I hope that my children can someday understand why.


It's just too big a moment in all our lives. Even if you're not American, everyone became an American that day - Bono of U2.



Thank you to all the people of many nations who feel the same and stand with America today.

I read a few years ago that Americans have the most national pride of any nation in the world based on their vigorous display of America's symbols. I would like to think this is true. Looking at a sea of red, white and blue flags on this September 11th, 2011, I believe it.



The Healing Field




Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Promise That Remains

On many a late hour car ride, usually to New Mexico or home therefrom, I've sat in silence gazing at the black against my windshield, enthralled by pictures I see with my mind's eye as I listen to a song with an absolutely beautiful and haunting melody and powerful, evocative lyrics. The pictures I see so vividly threaded through its words are of a man, his sword held aloft, staggering and falling in his strange molten armor, of a dark horse speeding with that man, lashed to his back, across the plains, and of a tall, slender woman gazing toward a flaming western horizon with wide, stricken eyes. The song that inspires these scenes is the Celtic-influenced The Only Promise That Remains.

Strangely for me, this song was written by Justin Timberlake and his friend Matt Morris. I am no Justin Timberlake fan, for sure, but my respect for him exploded the first time I heard him perform the song with Reba McEntire. I had the pleasure of hearing his extraordinary voice for the first time harmonizing with Reba's rich country vocals. I also am no great country music fan, but I have always had a soft spot for red-haired Reba, and somehow her voice suited the song, and blended well with Timberlake's voice.

When my husband later bought Reba Duets, with The Only Promise That Remains, I had just finished The Walking Flame (Book 2 of Kelven's Riddle by Dan Hylton, my dad), and my love of the song became solid when the CD came with us on a winter road trip to Albuquerque, and by chance we played it after dark on the highway. My imagination was set afire; against the shadowy backdrop of the road I saw the cataclysmic events from the close of the book unfolding in vivid detail to these lines:

When the ground beneath you starts a shaking
Shaking
And you forget the place we came from
Came from...
.....

When you feel a darkness coming
Rising inside
I'll make a light to guide you back home...


The imagery in those words was perfect...eerie...

When I read The Sword of Heaven, Book 3 in the series, this exotic love song became steadfastly tied to the story in my mind. Aram, a former slave turned warrior, is wandering through darkness in agony at the beginning of that book, and Ka'en, the woman he loves desperately, does eventually light his way back home to her. One of the best parts of Kelven's Riddle is something too little honored in tales nowadays: the idea that a man who is essentially good and honorable could be motivated to do extraordinary and dangerous things simply so that he can have the hope of living in peace and safety with the woman he loves, a woman who lives in daily fear that he will die before she can be with him.

If you have read Kelven's Riddle, and I know some of my readers have, I encourage you to listen to The Only Promise That Remains and see if it reminds you, too, of scenes from that story.

If you have not yet read the books in the Kelven's Riddle series, I challenge you to check them out and join me in anticipating Book 4 which is due out late this year. If I get a sneak read before then (and I earnestly hope I do), I assure you that I will write of it here.

Reba DuetsReba Duets   Kelven's RiddleKelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Tennessee: Dod...ge

She was a truck. A large blue truck with a bench seat in front and two bucket seats facing each other in back, a truck whose two last letters had fallen off the Dodge (I think perhaps the "g" still hung there upside down). I won't lie - I hated Dod. Not because of the way she looked, not because of the work it entailed to get her. I hated her because I was the youngest kid in the family, and she didn't very well accomodate six people. Being the little one I had to sit on the floor at the back between the feet of my older brother and sister. Once in a while, feeling bad for my state, my parents would make one of my siblings trade with me, so that I could actually sit in a proper seat and see out the rear windshield.

Oh well, I bear no grudges. It was just the way it was, and my parents needed that truck for their work. And that's where Dod's story begins with our family - with how my parents made a living in Tennessee. It begins thus:

Once during a summer of my childhood, our family of six worked in the woods together digging up roots to buy a Dodge truck.

My parents spent their summers making a living that way, scanning Tennessee terrain for medicinal plants in order to harvest their roots to sell, roots like goldenseal and bloodroot and, in the fall, ginseng. My dad had a full beard and kept his hair long and pulled back in a ponytail during those times, as low maintenance as possible. My beautiful, graceful mother wore unstylish, practical clothes and tennis shoes in the humid weather. They spent most days trekking together through the county woods searching continuously for promising patches of plants. Sometimes they hit the mother lode and spent long whiles digging industriously in one area. With them they always had hand sewn jean sacks slung across their shoulders with water bottles and cold grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch.

The idea of us kids helping to earn extra money that summer was discussed. Our old clunker of a car gave our dad constant worry, and the truck was ideal for Mom and Dad's work, particularly in the winter when they rolled grapevine and briar wreaths to sell. Dad told us plainly that he wanted us kids to help make the money for the truck. He had already spoken with the gentleman who had it for sale and had bartered for a couple of weeks in which to earn the money. The man had agreed to hold it during that time, and Dad anxiously hoped he'd keep his word.

For us kids the idea of going to work with our parents in the woods held some excitement. We'd miss out on morning TV or afternoon swims in the creek, but we'd get to spend the day with Mom and Dad in new places and would hopefully be able to dodge some of the boredom that struck at home on those hot, humid days. So we went to the store and picked out our hand spades and Mom sewed each of us our own jean sack made from worn out jeans. For lunch, we had the same grilled cheese but added to that was a family sized can of pork n' beans to share.

I was excited when we headed out on the early drive that first day. I couldn't wait to see where we would be. Like my dad I was a lover of trees and woodlands. Throw in a creek (there always seemed to be one close in the Tennessee woods), and it was a luxury for the soul.

The work was soothing, repetitive but with the smell of soil and green, natural things greeting the eyes. I can imagine the breeze rustling the trees, the shafts of sunlight and shadow dancing across the metal of our spades. Once the roots were dug, we brushed the wet dirt off them quickly and dropped them in our jean sacks. I remember watching my sister Vinca, however, sitting back on her heels and vigorously working every speck of dirt off that she could. My dad gently admonished her for her zealous cleaning methods. He would need to wash the roots and dry them on our roof at home before he could sell them anyway.

At lunch our family would sit near a creek or on a fallen log or two in shade, and we'd pull out the grilled cheese and pass the pork n' beans around. Afterward, inevitably we kids would run off into the woods, mom and dad working in a new patch of roots, and we'd traverse fallen trees, swing on grapevines, climb and start games. Eventually we'd settle back into digging beside our parents, but we never did work as consistently as they did, and they never asked us to.

Days went on so. Early morning rides were taken in the car to a broad expanse of forest; mornings were employed digging bloodroot and feeling the rich southern earth break between our fingers; and afternoons were full of running, dashing beneath the whispering deciduous trees.

Eventually after pounds upon pounds of roots being washed, dried, weighed and sold, we had the $400 to buy the new truck. On that very first day we had her, Dad and Mom took us kids out for a celebratory lunch.

It's hard to appreciate nowadays; people eat out all the time even when they really shouldn't for health or finances sake. Back then, my family almost never ate out. We lived in the country, for one thing. For another, we did not have the money to indulge in it. So when my folks took us kids out that day to Captain D's for lunch, it was really special. I got the popcorn shrimp with hush puppies, I remember, and my dad smiled at me as I rambled on and on excitedly, enjoying my shrimp.

Some readers will wonder at the fact that we four children worked beside our parents to get Dod, our truck. But I'm proud of what I helped accomplish that summer, and the memory of those days in the woods and of our little celebration together at the end of them were almost enough to make up for all the cramped trips that would follow in the back of Dod.

Almost.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Short post: End of the Road

On Thursday, I reached the end of a road. The gate barring further travel was blazoned with a bright sign designating it as the "END OF ROAD". It fell off into nonexistence amid a whole bundle of nice neighborhoods nestled like pampered children in the foothills of the South Mountains in Phoenix. People were biking and hiking and living carefree, healthy lives on every sidewalk that I passed.

I made the decision after dropping off my oldest kids at school to drive west until the road ran out, and I knew it would run out near my Beloved Behemoth, South Mountain - that rambling, broad, carefree soul who, while lacking in majestic sky-splitting spires, oozes friendliness from its ridgeline to its foothills. And it was a thrill when I approached it, traveled beside it, and then journeyed beyond it. Behind it to the south, more mountains loomed, and these had more blue in their profiles, being farther away, and among them was one quite impressive peak that beckoned to me. When the road ended, there was a little marker with an arrow pointing to the ground: "Trail Here". I was struck with the romance of it: abandon the minivan, yank on hiking boots and thick socks, heave a backpack onto my shoulders, head out down that trail with my toddler and preschooler beside me or in arms, and see, just see, if we could reach those beautiful blue mountains before the sun broke against the western horizon, bleeding color on their summits.

I think few people think about it in a large city. You travel in the city where you need to go, always making those right or left turns and perpetually surrounded by shops and golf courses, schools and medical centers. You travel out of the city to find nature or the small town way of life you vaguely remember from years gone. But you don't just pick a city street and pursue it to its dusty end. What a shame. There might yet be something there that hearkens back to a time before rampant human habitation, and if so, it will likely be quite pretty and pretty wild. If you're really lucky, there'll be a trail, another phase of the journey, leading into mountains or woods or down a narrow river. If you've remembered your hiking boots, you'll be able to abandon civilization for a while, leave it packed away behind you in streets laid north to south, east to west.