Spring and the Bar Mitzvah Express

Spring has sprung wildly in the last few days thanks to several days of fast, hot wind and the several more days of intense rain. Meanwhile, we're working in the yard continuously, riding the Bar Mitzvah express which is high-speed, expensive and has frequent breakdowns.

What this translates into is a lot of yard work, including putting in some shade gardens, spray-painting rusting folding chairs, making pots of mixed flowers for table center pieces for the actual event, and outrageous amounts of weeding and mulching.

The great part of this is how much time we have outside. The not-so-great part is how the chiggers have sent out a few scouts, way before they should be out in force. There's also some poison ivy, seed ticks, and large startled snake (plus many nests of baby ringnecks).

Meanwhile one of the most lush times of the year unfolds quickly and vividly -- irises ready to break open, leaves unfurling at the speed of sound on the Cottonwood, and lilac in full bundles of blossom. I keep reminding myself to step off the train and take this in.

Prairie Fire!

Saturday around 4 p.m. when we were at the hardware store, Ken said, "You know, I think the only window to burn is about right now." He was right: it had rained for days beforehand, the morning was barely dry enough, but the winds were too high, and more rain was coming. Considering it was April 11, and we were supposed to have the fields burned the first week in April, it was time for action.

Luckily for us and maybe not so fortunate for him, I ran into Mike Caron in the check-out line at the hardware store. "Want to burn some prairie in an hour?" I asked him, and after juggling his schedule a bit, he said yes, and he even brought a friend. We called the guys who lived on the other side of our hill -- Monte and Brent, and they also showed up along with Brent's girlfriend Amy. Ken's pal Dave came out, and within an hour, we were lighting matches, dragging pitchforks of fire (it works best to wrap up the loose grass like spaghetti on a fork and then drag it), and hauling water in case things got out of hand.

They didn't, and the wet ground made for a good safety valve although we did see a few cedars go up like, well, Christmas trees (but that always happens). The burn was also very fast -- we burned over 15 acres, broken up into about five fields, in less than two hours.

Why do we burn? Prairies need to be burned to bring more nutrients to the soil, clear out the invader trees, and make way for new growth. The history of the prairies shows us that lightning was a great fire-starter, especially during a time when prairies weren't 99% replaced by farms and concrete. There's also evidence that many plains tribes regularly burned the prairies. We also burn because we're required to by the law -- it's a condition of the USDA program the farm is enrolled in to restore and maintain these native grasses.

But there are other reasons to burn: it's outrageous fun, a great way to get to know fellow-burners, and for me, always a ritual of spring -- clearing away the falling over remnants of an old season, preparing the ground of this land and my own heart for what's next to come.

Pictures: All from the burn, plus Ken afterwards, catching up on some sleep.

I Live In Big Wind Country

Kansas is windy, often, and not just a little. When spring comes, the big wind comes with it, and yesterday was a vivid illustration with gusts up to 90 mph in some parts of the state and ordinary old 45 mph gusts regularly around it. It's hard not to tilt a little when you walk, and when we did balance poses in yoga -- in a room in the country, second story, windows all around -- it was hard not to fall over (but then it's often hard not for me to fall over).

Yesterday, semi-trucks overturned on the turnpike, mailboxes left home, our bird feeder flew the coop, and the top of a hard-plastic child playhouse unfurled itself. It was the kind of wind that made me and everyone around me feel a little crazy, off-balance, agitated, confused and overwhelmed.

It reminds me of a good wind story too -- and in Kansas, many of the good weather stories (and most of the good stories do involve weather) are obviously wind-related. When Ken, my husband, was but a lad, his family had a mean attack rooster named Chip-Chip, who attacked (using his nasty spurs) everyone but Ken's grandpa, who had basically trained him to be a the rooster equivalent of Cruella DeVille. One day a tornado, with accompanying big winds, came to the area, and Chip-Chip mysteriously disappeared. Days later, his wasted body was found a few miles away. When humans didn't, out of decency, exact revenge from Chip-Chip, the wind did.

So now the wind has settled down, and it's good to be back in the saddle, crossed over to spring with the grasses seeminly scribbled bright green and the trees budding. Yesterday's big wind is today's sky all bright baby blue and pristine white clouds, all the debris blasted free from our minds.

Hanging Out In The Giant Parking Lot of Grief

In the month since my father-in-law died, I've revisited the giant parking lot of grief, the one where you can never remember where you parked or even what car you were driving at the time. What I mean by this is that grief seems to be the most unmappable of all emotions. If fear, depression, joy, boredom and other day-to-day feelings we move through are seasonal weather, grief is more like those wild card days when it can change over a long afternoon from a dainty day among to tulips to a blizzard to a thunderstorm with a small tornado on its back end.

My family, like me, tends to not act as I would imagine. Sure, there's stretches of quiet sadness and that big gaping hole in the center of our lives, what a large meteor would leave once a large yellow crane lifted out the rock. But how grief manifests in us is variable and unchartable. My youngest son goes from characteristically chirpy to sullen and slurring his words when I ask him questions. My husband hurt his back about two weeks ago, and can't easily shake, work, rest or walk through the pain, which recedes far slower than usual. My teenager daughter goes from one overwhelming sadness to being a cool customer. My oldest son had a long flare up of digestive issues. And I'm struggling with the draw to cozy up with some bad old habits (mostly workaholism, thank heavens there's not chocolate in the house) that just die hard.

Meanwhile, nothing seems to have changed. Meanwhile, everything has changed. Through it all, I know two opposite things to be simultaneously true: this is a huge loss, and as Theodore Roethke wrote, "What falls away is always, and is near."

"I'm Sorry" and "Congratulations": Death and Poetry

All week, I've experienced a juxtaposition of "I'm so sorry for your loss" and "Congratulations!" side by side, sometimes even simultaneously, like at my father-in-law's funeral when one person gave me a copy of the small article on me being named poet laureate in the Kansas City Star while someone else offered his condolences. The cards and notes that come in the mail and the emails I download offer me the same mixed message, which seems to add up something my brain hears as, "Mazel Tov! And remember, life sucks" or "This too shall pass, so don't get too excited about any of it."

Perhaps what's most odd about it all is that I can't tell by the face of whoever is approaching which message will pop out. I'm sitting at my computer at a coffee shop, a man behind me turns around, taps me on the shoulder, and says, "Sorry to hear about your father-in-law, and please give Ken my best" or a woman I don't know on the street passes by and yells over her shoulder, "Great to see you in the paper."

For years we've dreaded the loss of Gene, and for years, I yearned for some recognition and a lot of readers, compounded by the piles of rejection slips, and years spent shepherding books to publication. No surprise that now, during a very good year indeed as a writer, the void left by Gene is like the Grand Canyon compared to the little ant hill of successes. This is not to say that I don't appreciate being congratulated, the forthcoming publication of books, and the quiet calm of being seen alongside the hard-won peace of feeling good in my writer's skin.

Meanwhile, there's the Grand Canyon behind my shoulder, a place I peer into and, just like the actual Grand Canyon, can't see to the bottom of it all. My father-in-law, although he used to tease me that "how could this be poetry when it doesn't rhyme?" -- even while he stapled together copies of my chapbook for six hours one day -- never issued even the vaguest rejection slip or "this doesn't quite suit our needs at this moment" messages. In the almost 26 years I knew him, he accepted me always, helped when I asked, tried not to impose when he needed help, and probably served me hundreds of tacos, dozens of roast beef dinners, and a whole lot of bowls of hamburger soup. Despite the reality that since his heart surgery four years ago, and his seizures two years ago, he had lost a lot of short-term memory, mobility, strength and lung capacity -- and he was leaving this life a little bit at a time -- his death is still unfathomable to me.

Yesterday, lying in corpse pose at the end of yoga class, I saw him in his oversized red woolen cap and 30-year-old gray coveralls, just coming in from chopping wood and happy to stand close to the fire place. He was always cold, and it broke his heart a little when he could no longer run that blower connected to his fireplace when he went on oxygen. In a strange way, it's as odd that he grew so old and fragile as it is that he died. Diagnosed with rheumatic fever during WWII, he tinkered on the brink of serious illness and regular life for over 60 years, and now that he's gone, I am sorry for his loss, but I could almost congratulate him for leaving behind years of illness, pain, and discomfort.

But since he's gone, and I can't tell him anything directly, I just share this poetry -- which doesn't rhyme, but I think he would be okay with it anyway:

In the End, There Is Only Kindness

for Gene
February 19, 1925 – February 10, 2009


When the floor slips and the time comes,
when interventions falter, there is only kindness,
a lantern to hold at journey's end, then hand over
so someone else can lift the light enough
to illuminate where to step next, and how.

In this kindness, there are always stories:
Telling the checker who rang up his milk twice,
don't worry, everyone makes mistakes.
His long wait among aging magazines at the VA
so a homeless vet could get his medication.
Gravel on our walkway because he didn't want
us slipping when we brought home the new baby.
The vase of roses he left on my kitchen table
and for Alice because roses were on sale.
Jokes about being old and decrepit while he
cooked everyone dinner. How he power-rocked
the babies to sleep, his heart beating through theirs.
Christmas stockings and grandchildren to wake up early,
coins to collect for each one. Oxygen in one hand,
a cane in the other so he could see a grandchild
in orchestra or band, graduation or swim meet
even when his back and memory hurt.
The dishes or long drives, reaching for the check,
and taking the time to greet the stranger eating alone.
Only kindness matters in the circle of love
he made out of this world.

In the end, there is always the beginning,
a seamless turn from here to there
even if everything is different from
the irreplaceable loss shining and aching at once,
a kind of river running alongside our lives,
or weather reminding us that
we love, were loved by a man here only
for kindness, which is not just a kind of love
but the only love there is.


– Caryn

Remembering Gene

Today my father-in-law, Bill "Gene" Lassman, died at age 83 after many years of severe health issues and breaking his hip two days ago. While there's a lot to be said about how hard he struggled, how long he outlived all predictions, how strong his spirit was despite the frailty of his body, and the details of his dying, I want to focus here on what Gene meant to me.

I met Gene when Ken and I started dating in 1982, and the first thing he told me, when he was giving me a lift back to town from the country, was how sorry he was for accidentally running over Ken's dog when Ken was a boy. This may seem an odd way to get to know each other, but it showed me right away that being a good father was at the core of who he was. That core glowed around his children and grandchildren, all of whom were surely the light of his life.

Having grown up with an difficult father who was only about emotionally mature as a sullen 12-year-old, it took me a long time to really understand just how loving Gene was. Over the years, it began to sink in: when he rocked my babies to sleep and held them for hours, when he babysat and drove around my kids; when he dressed up and got his portable oxygen to see any performance the kids were in; when we were broke and he lent us money; when we were exhausted and he invited us over for dinner; when he went out to buy me jumbo maxi pads after I gave birth; when he left roses for me in a vase on my kitchen table because they were on sale, joking that his no-good son didn't buy me flowers so he needed to. Gene turned upside down what I knew about men of his generation just as Ken turned upside down what I knew about men in general.

His generosity extended itself well beyond the family. After 38 years of teaching printing at the high school -- which, in the early days included many kids who didn't fit in elsewhere -- he retired, but found friends everywhere he went, who called out, "Mr. Lassman!" He spent a lot of his retirement going from one supermarket to another, to get the bananas on sale here, the milk on sale there, but mostly just to be social. I didn't really understand why he shopped so much, but he once told me that if he could help a checker at a grocery store or janitor in a department store feel a little better by showing them friendliness and kindness, that made his day. It obviously made the day of a lot of other people, the ones we often don't see as we rush from one thing to another.

I'm in the odd position of writing this from Vermont, 1,400 miles from home, Ken, and our kids, but I'm flying home Saturday in time for the funeral, burial, and sitting shiva. Although Gene wasn't Jewish (Lutheran turned Methodist), I look toward my own tradition's way of opening up space to feel the loss, and from far away, I say Kaddish for him. This poem, which a good friend sent me, speaks to my soul right now.

KADDISH


Look around us, search above us, below, behind.
We stand in a great web of being joined together.
Let us praise, let us love the life we are lent
passing through us in the body of Israel
and our own bodies, let’s say amen.

Time flows through us like water.
The past and the dead speak through us.
We breathe out our children’s children, blessing.

Blessed is the earth from which we grow,
blessed the life we are lent,
blessed the ones who teach us,
blessed the ones we teach,
blessed is the word that cannot say the glory
that shines through us and remains to shine
flowing past distant suns on the way to forever,
Let’s say amen.

Blessed is light, blessed is darkness,
but blessed above all else is peace
which bears the fruits of knowledge
on strong branches, let’s say amen.

Peace that bears joy into the world,
peace that enables love, peace over Israel
everywhere, blessed and holy is peace, let’s say amen.

~ Marge Piercy

In the Batcave Doing Yoga

Today I hung upside down -- a bat in a line of other bats. It was my first time doing this pose (see picture on right although I didn't look quite as poised as this woman, and also, not quite as happy as the bat on the left). Still, I was thrilled. I was also terrified. As I hung there, after my very gracious yoga teacher for this class -- Anne Underwood -- helped me jump, pull myself up and climb into this inversion -- I felt waves of panic. What if I fell and broke my neck? What if the ropes didn't hold? What if I just freaked out in front of everybody?

As usual, I countered the fear by telling myself, "breathe, breathe, breathe." Each asana, each breath, is a continual way to come home to my body, and to re-program how I inhabit my own body.

This month, I'm doing YoMo through the Yoga Center of Lawrence , a commitment to do yoga everyday through January. A few days ago, when I had a virus, I wondered if a prolonged time in corpse pose would count ("Hell, yes," said Kelley), and some days I feel myself stretching, reaching, almost soaring through Sun Salutation. Often it's just the old struggle: how to try my hardest without putting so much effort into trying that I make the pose hard. Today, at least, I found a way to hang. And in the hanging, there was no such thing as trying too hard or not hard enough. There was just the support of the wall, ropes, and Anne, the strength of my body, and the beauty of gravity. The hard part was surrendering to it all. Now that I'm upright, I want to do it all over again.