Yesterday, Ian and I went out in the backyard and shot a rye crisp box seven times. It was fun.
That was not what I expected. For the past 14 years, I have hated the sound of gunshots because they took me back to the afternoon when I answered someone's calls for help and ended up witnessing a man shoot his girlfriend to death with a handgun. Sharp sounds, even the sounds of dumpsters closing, have been pits of menace. I can slide down those pits and end up in a place where nothing feels safe. Except those sounds have not been bothering me as much lately. Last fall, I often woke up to the distant shots of hunters, and I did not feel afraid.
So when Ian invited me to try out our new rifle, I was not sure how to feel. We bundled up and headed out, first to the recycling can, where Ian rummaged around and found the unfortunate rye crisp box. He thought about using a larger box which had held one of our son's Christmas presents, but decided it did not feel right to be shooting at a box that had a picture of Buzz Light-Year on it. So he propped the rye crisp box up on the snow-covered brush pile, backed away several paces, and loaded the gun. He showed me the different buttons one must push to get ready to shoot, then he put the rifle to his shoulder and tilted his face down toward it. I backed off several paces and put my fingers in my ears, waiting for a terrible noise, but the sound was not as bad as I had imagined. It was a crisp sound, a little metallic, and not even terribly loud.
He asked me if I would like to try it, so I put it up to my shoulder like he had done and tried to look through the sights, which were little metallic guides along the top of the rifle barrel. I was amazed by how much they swung around as I stood there, trying keep them pointed at the rye crisp box. I breathed deeply, trying to make the gun hold steady while Ian offered suggestions as to how I should stand. Finally, I pulled the trigger.
The light around me stayed clear and strong, and the sound of the crisp shot rang over our fields. A bigger rifle, like the one my father had, would have pushed back hard against my shoulder because bullets from that gun were almost as thick as my dad’s thumb. Our rifle, a 22, has bullets that are just a little bit thicker than a really hefty screw, so it rested lightly in the curve of my shoulder even after I took a shot.
We thought we could see a tiny hole in the rye crisp box. We took turns shooting until our 10 bullets have been spent. They shaped the snow into tiny burrows in the brush pile behind the rye crisp box, and their little golden casings flew out to the side and landed on the hard crust of snow. After every shot, we smelled a sharp smell of gunpowder for just an instant, and then we smelled the crisp smell of snow again. I did not want to go back inside. I wanted to stay out with Ian in the cold, smelling snow and gunpowder, and learning how to look down a long narrow strip of wood and metal while holding perfectly still.
Finally, we examined the rye crisp box and found seven holes. I went back into the house in a flush of victory, feeling as though a weight had lifted from me.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The possum
There is a possum living in our garage. I first met it in the autumn when I peeked out the window and saw it sitting on the deck, scarfing down the food that we put out for our outdoor cats. My favorite outdoor cat was sitting just a couple of feet away, but when it inched towards the food, the possum turned its head very slowly to look at the cat, and the cat backed up again in a hurry.
I rushed to the porch and flung open the back door, shouting, but the possum did not seem afraid of me. It turned its pinched white face to look at me then lumbered off the deck almost leisurely, trailing its hairless, rat-like tail behind it. Without thinking about what I was doing, I picked up Emily's patent leather shoe, which was sitting by the door, and I threw it at the possum. The shoe bounced off its rounded back, and it sped up just a bit and disappeared under the deck. I slammed the back door and stood looking out its window. I did not want to go outside again, but Emily's good shoe was now sitting in the dirt by our deck. When I gathered up enough nerve to open the back door again, a deep growl rose up through the deck below my feet, and I stepped right back inside the house. I finally retrieved her shoe, armed with a broom handle.
Earlier this month, I literally walked right into the possum. For some time, I had been feeling rather annoyed at my husband for placing a big pile of leaves by a stack of boxes in our garage. I had to get something out of those boxes, so I waded into the leaves, and my ankle brushed something warm, furry, and solid. I leapt onto a plastic storage container, which crackled under my weight, and I listened to the possum wiggling around in hiding space he had found in a stored set of shelves. When he started turning around to look at me, I fled again, grabbing a big box that I could throw at him if needed.
On Christmas, when the outdoor cats did not come eat their dinner at the regular time, I suspected the possum would soon show up, and it did. Even after I had scared it away, the cats were wary and would not eat unless I sat down with them, which I did. As the rest of the family laughed over a board game, I picked up one of my favorite books, Testament of Devotion, and I tried to calm down. The first thing I read was about how we are connected through God to everything else on earth. And I held that idea in my heart as I thought about killing the possum.
I rushed to the porch and flung open the back door, shouting, but the possum did not seem afraid of me. It turned its pinched white face to look at me then lumbered off the deck almost leisurely, trailing its hairless, rat-like tail behind it. Without thinking about what I was doing, I picked up Emily's patent leather shoe, which was sitting by the door, and I threw it at the possum. The shoe bounced off its rounded back, and it sped up just a bit and disappeared under the deck. I slammed the back door and stood looking out its window. I did not want to go outside again, but Emily's good shoe was now sitting in the dirt by our deck. When I gathered up enough nerve to open the back door again, a deep growl rose up through the deck below my feet, and I stepped right back inside the house. I finally retrieved her shoe, armed with a broom handle.
Earlier this month, I literally walked right into the possum. For some time, I had been feeling rather annoyed at my husband for placing a big pile of leaves by a stack of boxes in our garage. I had to get something out of those boxes, so I waded into the leaves, and my ankle brushed something warm, furry, and solid. I leapt onto a plastic storage container, which crackled under my weight, and I listened to the possum wiggling around in hiding space he had found in a stored set of shelves. When he started turning around to look at me, I fled again, grabbing a big box that I could throw at him if needed.
On Christmas, when the outdoor cats did not come eat their dinner at the regular time, I suspected the possum would soon show up, and it did. Even after I had scared it away, the cats were wary and would not eat unless I sat down with them, which I did. As the rest of the family laughed over a board game, I picked up one of my favorite books, Testament of Devotion, and I tried to calm down. The first thing I read was about how we are connected through God to everything else on earth. And I held that idea in my heart as I thought about killing the possum.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Winter gnomes
As I was working with laundry, my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of a figure out in our snowy field, where our garden had been. I looked through the window again, more carefully, and found not a person, but the stalks of four brussels sprout plants that I left out in the fields knowing that they can stand cold. We will never harvest them now. They have gone wild in the snow and below-zero cold, and they have become a small gaggle of heavily laden gnomes trekking across our white field in their winter furs.
I do not want to cut them down. I like to think of them standing guard, all winter, over a place that was recently filled with so much life, with the voices and colors of different plants rising and falling in melding like the sound of an excited crowd. I also like to imagine myself as one of those gnomes, keeping a vigil between the sky and the snow.
The gnomes are standing there every late afternoon, when the sun goes down, and the whole horizon broods in shades of red. Pink light casts shadows into all the crevices of the windblown snow drifts. Sometimes the crests and valleys look like layered rock formations, tilted up at angles and pointing to the sky. Sometimes they look like a choppy sea that has been abruptly captured in ice. It is a foreign landscape to me, but I like to imagine that its wild shapes and colors have washed over me so often that they have molded the landscape of my heart.
I do not want to cut them down. I like to think of them standing guard, all winter, over a place that was recently filled with so much life, with the voices and colors of different plants rising and falling in melding like the sound of an excited crowd. I also like to imagine myself as one of those gnomes, keeping a vigil between the sky and the snow.
The gnomes are standing there every late afternoon, when the sun goes down, and the whole horizon broods in shades of red. Pink light casts shadows into all the crevices of the windblown snow drifts. Sometimes the crests and valleys look like layered rock formations, tilted up at angles and pointing to the sky. Sometimes they look like a choppy sea that has been abruptly captured in ice. It is a foreign landscape to me, but I like to imagine that its wild shapes and colors have washed over me so often that they have molded the landscape of my heart.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Listening to snow
The snow is speaking to me, and I am not taking much time to listen. Yesterday when I was driving to town, I was fiddling around with the radio trying to find the FM stations, and my back ached as it does when my body is struggling to keep up with the momentum of my thoughts. And then, around me I noticed the light from the snow. I noticed the trees at the far edge of the white field, I was aware of a whole, rich song of awareness that was echoing and reverberating through everything around me. The snow had a voice, the trees had a voice, and there were many other voices, too, blended together to make something different and vast. It was a song that held wisdom, and it was a song that held me, whether or not I was aware of it at any given moment.
When I was a teenager and adult, I felt afraid when I heard this type of song because I thought it meant that I was crazy. Later, I feared that hearing these songs made me a poor Christian. I am not afraid of these songs any more. Instead, I want to hear them all the time. Nothing is more important or more beautiful than to join in an awareness of that reverberating wholeness, but instead, it, I irritably poke buttons on the radio and worry about being late. Over and over again I find that I am scrambling around on the floor gathering hard breadcrumbs, when above me stand tables laden with a feast.
The quality of the light from the snow reminds me of a light that I sometimes experience when I believe I am in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The light is a pressure that I feel on my forehead and my scalp. It speaks to me of awe so deep that it is trance-like. It speaks to me of a percussive rhythm that repeats over and over until, and if one rocks along to it, one can become suspended in light. It speaks of great distances. It speaks of the point in childbirth when the boundaries of mother’s skin become irrelevant, and her mouth drops open. It speaks of death, swaddled and accompanied, numbed as if with novicaine. This snow on the ground sings with a high shrill voice, with the wide open sound, and with a voice so deep that it has become like the tug of a magnet.
When I was a teenager and adult, I felt afraid when I heard this type of song because I thought it meant that I was crazy. Later, I feared that hearing these songs made me a poor Christian. I am not afraid of these songs any more. Instead, I want to hear them all the time. Nothing is more important or more beautiful than to join in an awareness of that reverberating wholeness, but instead, it, I irritably poke buttons on the radio and worry about being late. Over and over again I find that I am scrambling around on the floor gathering hard breadcrumbs, when above me stand tables laden with a feast.
The quality of the light from the snow reminds me of a light that I sometimes experience when I believe I am in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The light is a pressure that I feel on my forehead and my scalp. It speaks to me of awe so deep that it is trance-like. It speaks to me of a percussive rhythm that repeats over and over until, and if one rocks along to it, one can become suspended in light. It speaks of great distances. It speaks of the point in childbirth when the boundaries of mother’s skin become irrelevant, and her mouth drops open. It speaks of death, swaddled and accompanied, numbed as if with novicaine. This snow on the ground sings with a high shrill voice, with the wide open sound, and with a voice so deep that it has become like the tug of a magnet.
Snow day
It is really winter. On Wednesday we had a blizzard, and the children had a snow day from school. Seems like all the snow from all the fields blew in and stopped in the area between our house and garage. I think that drifts were 4 feet tall. The children's sledded in the ditch in front of our house during the morning, but when they wanted to go out in the afternoon, I heard snowmobiles tearing across the tracks that my kids carefully made fluffy snow that morning with their sleds. Our ditch is a thorough fare for snowmobiles complete with miniature traffic signs. There is a little bitty yield sign on each side of our driveway.
Because I thought it would be safer, I told the children to go to the west side of the shelter belt, where there is a little hill in the cultivated field, sloping away from our house. At first Emily came back and reported that she was not sure this was going to work well because she and David were getting stuck in drifts that came above their waists. After scooping snow out of her boots though, she joined David outside and they stayed out past dark, out of my sight with the below-zero wind-chill and four-foot drifts. I do not want to talk with them about what they did because I feel like it would ruin something magic. They prevailed through wildness by themselves.
Because I thought it would be safer, I told the children to go to the west side of the shelter belt, where there is a little hill in the cultivated field, sloping away from our house. At first Emily came back and reported that she was not sure this was going to work well because she and David were getting stuck in drifts that came above their waists. After scooping snow out of her boots though, she joined David outside and they stayed out past dark, out of my sight with the below-zero wind-chill and four-foot drifts. I do not want to talk with them about what they did because I feel like it would ruin something magic. They prevailed through wildness by themselves.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Getting used to the wind
The wind woke me up again last month. The trees hissed like a chorus, the vines scraped the windows, and the gutters moaned low. A wildness that was obviously larger than my home pressed hard against its corners and threatened to move it. Suddenly, I was vitally awake, and trying frantically to remember whether there was anything I have left undone, or anything outside that needed my protection.
I remember the laundry, which was still hanging on line. From the window, I could see that it had turned feral, and I wasn't sure whether I should be trying to protect it or to protect my family from it. All the clothes were reaching toward the house, pulling the bowed clothesline behind them. Ian's white button-down shirts, fastened at the shirt tails, had filled with narrow bodies of wind, complete with shoulders and slender torsos. They shook their arms at us feverishly over and over again.
As I stood frozen at the window, looking out at the laundry, a more mysterious sound pressed itself into my awareness. In a rhythm independent from the hissing of the trees came a swelling noise so low, that it bordered on vibration. If I moved, I could not hear it, but if I stood still it rumbled and quieted on the very edge of my awareness like an ache. The earth itself must've been moving. I could think of no other explanation. From the window, the dark fields looked still, but I could barely make out the black rectangle of turned earth in our little clover field, where our neighbor had plowed up next year's garden patch. It looked like it was brooding, and like it might be capable of movement, but that little patch of earth was too small to make such a noise.
I went back to bed and lay in the dark, ready to jump up at any moment and protect something. I have done this many times now. It never makes a difference that I can think of nothing to protect, and that even if I did, my protection would be ineffectual. I just lie here, ready. If Ian is with me, I let his warmth and slow breathing lure me into sleep, but if I am alone, as I often am, I just stay awake.
In a way, this is exactly what I've always wanted, I told myself unconvincingly. For a decade before I moved to the country, the sound of wind in the trees filled me with such longing that I sometimes broke down and cried. I wanted so desperately to be closer to the life that rose up from the earth and swirled around me. I wanted to know it, and I wanted it to know me. I wanted to live with it like family. Having a family with small children has kept me awake for hours in the night, but at least my children are warm. I can put my arms around them and hold them until I glow with delight and peace. I know they love me. I don't think the wind loves me. I don't think it even sees me.
As I had done many times before, I reminded myself that my house has been standing through 110 years of windy nights without any help from me, and that it did not need any help from me now either. For some reason, the logic sank in this time. Like a child who turns inexplicably rational in the middle of a tearful argument, I embraced my reasonable explanation as if it had always been obvious to me. I snuggled deeper into the quilt, and as I drifted off, I had a premonition. Some night years from now, I will hear the wind trees, vines will screech, and the gutters will moan, and I will wake up, wondering whether there is anything I should attend to outside. Remembering nothing that needs to be done, I will snuggle back under the covers, and let the wind tell me over and over again, "You are home. You are home."
I remember the laundry, which was still hanging on line. From the window, I could see that it had turned feral, and I wasn't sure whether I should be trying to protect it or to protect my family from it. All the clothes were reaching toward the house, pulling the bowed clothesline behind them. Ian's white button-down shirts, fastened at the shirt tails, had filled with narrow bodies of wind, complete with shoulders and slender torsos. They shook their arms at us feverishly over and over again.
As I stood frozen at the window, looking out at the laundry, a more mysterious sound pressed itself into my awareness. In a rhythm independent from the hissing of the trees came a swelling noise so low, that it bordered on vibration. If I moved, I could not hear it, but if I stood still it rumbled and quieted on the very edge of my awareness like an ache. The earth itself must've been moving. I could think of no other explanation. From the window, the dark fields looked still, but I could barely make out the black rectangle of turned earth in our little clover field, where our neighbor had plowed up next year's garden patch. It looked like it was brooding, and like it might be capable of movement, but that little patch of earth was too small to make such a noise.
I went back to bed and lay in the dark, ready to jump up at any moment and protect something. I have done this many times now. It never makes a difference that I can think of nothing to protect, and that even if I did, my protection would be ineffectual. I just lie here, ready. If Ian is with me, I let his warmth and slow breathing lure me into sleep, but if I am alone, as I often am, I just stay awake.
In a way, this is exactly what I've always wanted, I told myself unconvincingly. For a decade before I moved to the country, the sound of wind in the trees filled me with such longing that I sometimes broke down and cried. I wanted so desperately to be closer to the life that rose up from the earth and swirled around me. I wanted to know it, and I wanted it to know me. I wanted to live with it like family. Having a family with small children has kept me awake for hours in the night, but at least my children are warm. I can put my arms around them and hold them until I glow with delight and peace. I know they love me. I don't think the wind loves me. I don't think it even sees me.
As I had done many times before, I reminded myself that my house has been standing through 110 years of windy nights without any help from me, and that it did not need any help from me now either. For some reason, the logic sank in this time. Like a child who turns inexplicably rational in the middle of a tearful argument, I embraced my reasonable explanation as if it had always been obvious to me. I snuggled deeper into the quilt, and as I drifted off, I had a premonition. Some night years from now, I will hear the wind trees, vines will screech, and the gutters will moan, and I will wake up, wondering whether there is anything I should attend to outside. Remembering nothing that needs to be done, I will snuggle back under the covers, and let the wind tell me over and over again, "You are home. You are home."
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