Not so long ago, I heard her tell the story. We were at her kitchen table in the old farmhouse near Madelia. Was she making bread? Just Estelle, her daughter, Julia, and me. And Maggie, the black dog, on the wooden floor.
Maybe I had mentioned my teen-age tale, the thrill of climbing the Tour Eiffel, then gazing out over the rainy rooftops of Paris? Estelle kept kneading the flour, then gestured out the window. “When I was three, I climbed to the top
of the windmill,” she said, dividing the dough into loaves of bread, patting them into their metal pans. She was playing. Her father had turned away, then turned back, saw her, hand
over hand, ascending the steel frame of the high Aermotor. He followed, without a sound, fearful she would turn around, panic. Oh, if she fell, like a falling star! But her gaze was far
off over the flat cornfields, watching the grey sky shift, form a rainbow, shimmer like ribbons, over the blue silo. She barely noticed her father’s arms or felt her feet touch the safe ground.
We met one April evening long ago. I make a count of fifteen thousand days.... Could I have known then what now I know, that I’d still be enchanted by your ways
decades and decades on? How can that be? We’ve made a daughter, a garden, a home. Our shared life is now my reality too large to distill for one small poem.
We’ve learned how to dance in our garden rows, singing the songs that make our heads spin— eyes on the stars, perhaps stepping on toes, and still laughing despite the pain and the woes.
Our love is deep-planted and here to stay, so I can still whisper, “Love? Let’s sail away.”
Leslie Schultz
Could there be a more appropriate time for a love poem than in April? While Tim and I celebrate our wedding anniversary in early August, we met when I was a freshman in college and he was a graduate student on a balmy April evening. Last night, we were talking about what a turning point that was for us–Fate? Destiny? Karma? Just plain luck? Hard to say, but I know I am profoundly grateful that we did meet in this lifetime. I can think of no better companion.
These days of sheltering in place have, if anything, thrown that insight of good fortune into even higher relief for me. Sequesterd with anyone else, I might well be climbing the walls! Instead we are busy building cold frames for vegetables; planning rabbit-proof fences for the garden; toasting the brilliant stellium of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars; watching episodes of The Great Tours of France and nibbling Brie; exploring the muddy back roads between Northfield and the Mississippi River; and dreaming of booking an afternoon’s sail on the Schooner Hjordis out of Grand Marais.
Tim and I will both welcome the cessation of these current restrictions, but still, slowing down to focus on essentials has been instructive. I can’t imagine a foxhole that is more like a Hobbit hole–good humor, good books, good food, good company–and that is all due to him.
Rhinestones
I think she was spooning custard into my bowl,
Grandma Phyllis, when I asked her about the owl
pinned to her dress. “Are those rubies?” I wondered.
The eyes of the tiny bejeweled bird caught the light,
glowed as bright as the coffee percolator’s red spot.
She fiddled with Saran wrap. I didn’t think she’d heard.
“Oh, this?” She tapped the tip of her red-enameled nail
on the owl’s breast. Metal plumage rattled like hail
had, the night before, on asphalt shingles over my bed.
“No. Just paste.” I thought of the white goo at school,
how all the girls made it into fake fingernails, would
wave their hands like movie stars, fling invisible
feather boas over their shoulders, call each other
“Dar-link!” Grandma, whose hair glinted high over
her pink scalp, showed me the worn gold bands on her left hand,
sprinkled with clouded stones pressed like raisins into dough,
hazy with lemon oil and cold cream. “These, though,”
she smiled, “are real,” and lit a cigarette. “Understand?”
Leslie Schultz
Grandma Phyllis circa 1926Grandma Phyllis in 1966
Who defines what is real? Who determines value? Does the surface reveal or conceal?
Now is all we have. Love is who we are. ~Anne Lamott
I’m sifting through files, when this floats onto my lap, this cream-colored envelope— stationery Tim and I asked a friend to design for a business that carried us twenty years
To here. To now.
The quoted words are written in my hand, something from writer Anne Lamott, but the source? Well, I’ve read quite a lot by Anne. Never met her. Did not note the particular work. Does it matter?
No. It is here. With me now.
And I feel the truth, see it everywhere I look, stacked on our shelves, between the covers of each book— essence of each maker distilled into gifts speaking over the distance of years, abundance not just of the maker but of so many generous people who carried them here.
Not just each book. Wherever I look.
The silver teaspoons of my grandmother, a cross-stitch from Tim’s sister honoring our wedding. A trompe-l’oiel shawl from my mother disguising a battered door. Endless list—--towels in the bathroom, sheets on our bed, photographs on our walls, all sent by my sister.
10,000 love notes. Waiting to be re-read.
Friends. Living or departed, still a rich chorus. You, whom we understand, who are there for us. You know who you are! You have marked us. This morning, I see how love, our magic alphabet, writes us real, sends us back to the source.
To speak and to see, To love and to be.
Or in Anne’s words now: Help, Thanks, Wow.
Leslie Schultz
These quiet days are filled with new reading and re-reading…books, letters, memories, and clouds…and the journey continues! LESLIE
For me, color is strong medicine, distilled and concentrated. Like poetry. It is the medicine I am especially in need of this season. I thought I might write a poem for today titled “Patriots,” but that did not come. Instead in this season where I am finding too much dissimulation, unintentional buffoonery, and empty rhetoric in the public realm–maybe you are, too?–I thought I might offer some more grounded images of red, white, and blue along with a few simple words.
Incidentally, I remember learning at age eight that pansies are also called “Heart’s Ease.” Remember that passage in Little Women, that perennial classic, when Beth embroiders a pair of slippers for old Mr. Laurence, covering the toes with pansies, and he refers to them by their antique name? It was about the same time I learned the word “glassine.” Today, I learned that glassine, for all its translucence, lightness, and seeming frailness is actually quite strong, protective, and resistant to staining. Today, I will think about how to cultivate those qualities in myself. To that end, I am going to bring up some of my brilliantly colored fabrics and begin working out the design for a new quilt. Later in the year, Tim and I will fill the empty containers in the garden with seeds from Seed Savers that we started inside and which are starting to sprout. Should be a riot of color by July.
Wishing you a splendid day of bright hues and ease and good weather, wherever you are, inside or out!
