We arrive relieved and a little breathless from the din. We almost didn’t find it; I had considered giving up.

But there it is on 6th Street, just past the tortilla place. Here is something different from the rest of Las Vegas: low ceiling, warm light, a host who enjoys the word “patio.”

He invites us to sit inside, in that low, warm room, or upstairs on the rooftop patio. But it’s “patioooo,” he says, drawing out the “o” because he likes patios or the “o” sound, or because he thinks the patio is where we should sit. And we do.
On that rooftop, the ceiling is all string-lights. Somewhere above them hangs the neon haze of Las Vegas. And above that, presumably, are stars, night sky, ascendant heavens, even (rumored) planets. A satellite blinking along.

But we are grounded at a table for two. And near us, a merry crowd is moored around three tables pressed together.

Theirs is a meal at its close: plates scraped clean, napkins wrung out and exhausted on table-top or under chairs. Wine bottles empty and glasses going that way. Six adults in Las Vegas, but without that glaze-eyed-look. They are laughing, leaning in, bright like string-lights.

And we are talking to our host about the menu, about the restaurant, about nearby Fremont Street and this refuge of warm wood and a menu drawn up by hand.

Then the host calls him over: the young man seated on the corner of the pressed-together tables. He stands, and I see the apron at his waist. He is one of their chefs.

He might be twenty-two. Maybe twenty-four, at the most.

We talk with him for a few minutes. Where he is from, how he came to be here. How he likes living in Vegas, how he likes working here. And they, he tells us, turning his chin toward his shoulder, are his family. Some of them live in town, but that one is his mother, just come to visit, he says, to see him at his new job. She’s going home tomorrow morning, early. It’s been a good visit.

He leaves us, rejoins his family, and Bill and I are happy to retreat to ourselves, anticipating the menu’s implications. I have ordered the salmon; Bill is getting the steak. Our host has insisted on the macaroni and cheese: it’s a family recipe and he is from Wisconsin. But first we enjoy the tempura green beans served with the brilliant miracle they call pepper jelly cream cheese.

From where I sit, dipping beans in cream cheese, Fremont Street’s panic seems almost impossible. The strobe lights, the neon; the girl in glittering bikini turning twenty hula hoops on her waist; the ring and clatter of the slot machines–all of it has dissolved under these lights. Here we have a friendly chef, a kind server, a host who likes words, green beans.

The chef’s family has left their table. They are disbanding, each taking a turn with the young chef in an embrace, a handshake. They move toward the stairs, but I’m not watching them: my salmon has arrived and I am taken with it, with its puree of spinach, with the way salmon breaks and folds so easily in the mouth. And Bill and I are having our Las-Vegas conversation, our wheat-and-chaff conversation, our practice of looking for beauty where much is not beautiful.

That’s when I see her: the chef’s mother, descending the stairs. She is with someone–her sister, perhaps–and that someone is turned toward her, talking. But I watch this mother, who can’t be that much older than I. She is listening to the one speaking to her, but watching her son as she descends the stairs, hoping, I would think, to catch his eye.

She leaves tomorrow early. She won’t see him again this visit. He is talking with a server, his apron hanging at his waist, hands on his hips. He has already said goodbye.

But still I think of her descending, watching her boy, holding–as she can’t help it–those things she knows of his childhood: his love for food, perhaps; the way he learned to make pancakes; the mobile above his crib of the solar system, planets suspended like string lights; the ceiling spangled in glow-in-the-dark stars.

The post Observed at a Restaurant off Fremont Street appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The post was on Instagram: a gorgeous seaside photograph, the image drenched in sunset. A lone figure stood looking at the ocean, her back to the camera. The caption: “Goodbye, summer.”

This was a month ago, maybe more. That time when college students return to campus, but nearly a month before my daughter returned to high school.

Still, the Starbucks was selling pumpkin spice again.

And in the grocery store that same week, one-fourth of the magazine facings in the check-out line advertised autumn: soup, pumpkins, the “perfect fall decor.”

All of it felt too soon to me. Just a tad on the early side.

***

But that was weeks ago, before Tuesday, when a chance encounter with a wreath on sale (just a short detour from my errand to the cat food) found me bringing home both the wreath and a pair of somewhat autumnal pillows.

“I’m going to decorate for fall,” I told Everett, to which he responded that fall didn’t begin until Thursday.

Which is today. I had already wished Bill a Happy First Day of Fall when I googled the equinox and learned that, this year, fall begins on the 22nd, which is tomorrow.

And which is fine. Today I have cleaned the bathrooms and sorted laundry and had a lovely visit with my daughter-in-law. Between these things, research, writing, and the gym, the decorating will have to wait until tomorrow.

***

When I was teaching, I was annually annoyed by the school calendar’s eclipsing summer. It was hot as blazes out, the locusts’ song filling the air. But that return to school felt like fall nonetheless.

When I was growing up, my next-door neighbor had grown children of her own. She was past the days of packing lunches and waving children to their bus stop. She didn’t work outside her home. But she still felt the encroachment of the school year. I’ll never forget her saying it: “The shadows always seem longer on the first day the school buses come.”

Back in my classroom in mid-August, prepping for my students’ arrival, I saw the trees outside standing listless in the heat and reminded myself that it was still summer. Just because I had to be in the school building all day didn’t mean that summer had ended. Summer wasn’t actually over until the latter part of September, academic calendars notwithstanding.

I told my children we would pack our bathing suits and towels in the car and go directly to the pool after school. We would be driving right past it, anyway. Why not change our clothes there and go for a swim and enjoy what was left of a summer day before it was time to head home for dinner?

This was my hope and plan every year, especially in our earliest years at school together, before soccer practice and games began dictating our plans for us. Which was fine.

Recently Emma reminded me that we did it once: we managed to go straight from school to pool, and I was glad to hear it. She told me this just a few days ago, and despite the time lapse, despite having forgotten it myself, I still felt a little triumphant: we had managed once to eke some summer out of the school year. Well done, us.

***

“The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad, monotonous song. ‘Summer is over and gone,’ they sang. ‘Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.'” – E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

***

That little gem of a novel– one of my all-time favorites– tracks life on a farm, and in so doing, tracks the seasons. It has to. An agrarian culture necessarily lives with an eye on the sky and a finger on the pulse of these greater changes, the shift from winter to spring, summer to fall.

But most of us in my neck of the woods don’t match their everyday actions to the changes in season. Unless, of course, there’s a hurricane.

***

The difference between today and tomorrow, between all the days since March 20th of this year and now, has everything to do with the earth’s revolution around the sun and its knack of leaning in a perpetual tilt. These factors combined mean that tomorrow at 4:02 EST, the sun will pass directly over the celestial equator.

Our days have been growing shorter since the summer solstice on June 21st. Tomorrow the days will only continue to grow shorter. But for the day, the amount of sunlight in the northern and southern hemispheres will be exactly the same.

And if I am able to get my research and writing done, I will pull my fall decorations off their shelf in our storage room and place them strategically around the house.

***

I like fall.

But there is something about summer, isn’t there? I think that, more than the holidays, more, even, than the birthdays of my family, summer works for me like the hinge of the year. I mark many things by the before and after of summer, the “this” summer and “last.”

I remember thinking in middle school about those phrases. “This summer” meant now, but during the first few weeks of school, at the very least, it also meant the summer that had only just recently been with us. I  remember wondering when it was, exactly, that we went from “this summer,” (as in: “this summer we went to Disney World”) to “last” (as in, “last summer, we went to the beach”).

What do we use to mark that shift? It’s a vague happening at best, or maybe it depends more on weather: you know to use “last” instead of “this” when it’s time to wear a jacket?

Or maybe we can just hang it on the equinox. Maybe we inadvertently do. Maybe today I say, “My son got married this summer,” and tomorrow I’ll say, “We traveled to British Columbia for Will’s wedding last summer.”

I’ll let you know.

***

Friday, 22 September, 7:39 AM

And now it is autumn, or maybe it will be at 4:02 PM EST when the sun drifts over that celestial equator. Strange to think we can mark time via a movement that isn’t a movement at all (the sun doesn’t move, right?), and that the line in question is invisible, is, in fact, nonexistent.

Far more to the point, in my world, anyway, is what will happen five days from now: Everett’s departure for six months, the travel portion of his gap year between high school and college. This shift will have far greater currency with some of us than the fall decor I may pull out today, or the cheerful autumn wreath on any door, or the earth’s steady revolution around the sun.

(They grow up so fast. Has it come to this already? I am eager and excited and so ready on his behalf, but if anyone had asked, I would have had his childhood last twice as long. Except that would be so selfish.)

***

And now it is 8:08 AM and time for a fresh cup of coffee and to make Emma’s lunch, to start the laundry I didn’t finish yesterday, to see my neighbor walk her son up the hill to the elementary school.

Today, fall is newborn and Everett and I will check his packing list and go shopping for shoes.

In five days we will take him to the airport, and before we know it (right?) he will come home again, and in no time at all, all of this will be a very long time ago.

The post Marking Time appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

C.S. Lewis, Til We Have Faces

Before our son’s wedding in July, I had never been to the Pacific Northwest, never seen British Columbia, never been in Seattle.

Well, okay, I had been in the Seattle airport. But views of tarmac and airport kiosk don’t count as actually seeing a place. Proximity isn’t presence: I had never set actual foot on actual Seattle soil.

Before taking the train to Vancouver for the wedding, we spent four days in Seattle. Our AirBnB had a view of the water and of the Space Needle. We went to the top of that Needle, we took a Duck Tour. We made our obligatory trek through the Public Market and spent an afternoon in the aquarium. We loved all of it.

Seattle is famous for rain. They say it rains all the time there. They say it rains nine months out of the year.

But in the four days of our visit, the skies were cloudless, and every day we were there was warmer than the day before.

My husband declared that it never rains in Seattle–a fair claim, based on our experience: We’ve been to Seattle. It didn’t rain.

***

Chilliwack, British Columbia is 63 miles and a hair southeast of Vancouver. Where Vancouver is all brittle glass and waterfront, Chilliwack is a broad basin ringed with mountains, an agricultural plain become, in many places, a sprawling suburbia. From any one of the mountainsides surrounding this verdant town, you imagine you are seeing all of Chilliwack from end-to-end: the roads that cross it coming together at right angles or not; the subdivisions and neighborhoods, the downtown area with its restaurants, businesses, and hotels.

This is its latest iteration. Even now, gorgeous townhomes and neighborhoods are claiming square blocks. New developments cling to the lower sides of the surrounding mountains. Chilliwack is become Vancouver’s bedroom community, where once upon a time it was all farms.

And before the farms, a long time ago, Chilliwack was an ice sheet hemmed by mountains. Then the glaciers receded and Chilliwack’s Fraser Valley was, for a time, a lake. Eventually, so say the geologists, the land under that lake pushed upwards, emerging into daylight and becoming the plain that encouraged farmers to dig in, plant a field and a farmhouse, make a life.

Chilliwack as we know it hasn’t always been Chilliwack, you see. There is no such thing as always.

***

What I noticed first was the cottonwood trees. I didn’t know their name; I didn’t know that’s what I was seeing. But driving through this vast basin, it was their height that compelled me, and their breadth, and the way they stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder along stretches of what looked like prairie.

The trees border rivers but also stand elsewhere, brakes against the wind. They have thick trunks and a long reach and leaves that look thick and waxy but still turn onto silver backs in the breeze.

I am told these trees can be a nuisance: in the spring they release some gauzy, cotton-like filament that drifts through the air and embeds itself in the grass. My Alaskan nieces told me about the chore it is to pluck it in handfuls from the lawn. Apparently, a rake won’t do the trick, and to be sure, the task sounds like a tedium.

But the romantic in me imagines the cottonwood filament floating in the air like something out of a fairytale. And I love the way cottonwood leaves turn and catch the light. There is something in their rows reminding me of poplar trees that, once upon a time, I watched from a terrace in the south of France. They bent together in the wind just like the poplar trees did that marked the edge of my friend’s backyard in Pittsburgh.

***

Until two days before the wedding, we had never met any one of our son’s bride’s family. We got out of our car and began walking under the willow tree toward their front door, and out of the house they came, one after the other, the beautiful reality of the faces and voices we’d known on Facebook and over the phone.

We could hardly wait to meet them–this family from so far away and somehow also so like us: each on the edge of loss and gain in this strange arithmetic of marriage. And each of us doing this for the first time: sending a child out from the family to become a family of their own.

I will freely admit to weeping when I saw and hugged Shanna’s mother: each of us was grieving in this stricken and overjoyed way, and I knew she understood like no one else at the time.

It was the only time I cried publicly during that wedding weekend. I say “publicly” on purpose.

***

With a mental hand, I reach in and grab whichever of the teeming memories comes readily to mind. It is William, just two, at his sandbox.

*

The sandbox is red and shaped like a crab with a dome of a shell that we threw easily to the side for digging. William and I, without jackets in the warm autumn midday, are perched on the edge of the sandbox. I am quite pregnant with Everett and very tired, and we are approaching William’s nap.

We fill a bucket with sand, and I show him how to tamp it down. We fill it up and pack it in; we make a level place and overturn it. And then I tell him, “It’s the moment of truth,” and we pull the bucket gently away to see what we’ve made.

We do this again and again, and every time I say, “It’s the moment of truth,” because I somehow think this is funny. And then one time he finally tells me to stop saying that, and so I do.

*

We played together in that sandbox countless times, and these are the details I recall–these and the fact that I was ready for him to take a nap and therefore kept a wary eye on the time. I loved to be with him and also I needed these moments to not last forever, because I needed a nap just as much as he did.

I think we heard the wind in the tops of the loblolly pines that traced the edge of the yard. I think we felt the warm sun through our sleeves. I think I kissed, so many times, the top of his warm blond head.

Bill and I gave him that sandbox for his second birthday. We hadn’t known what to get him. He didn’t expect anything; he didn’t understand the sometimes overblown concept that is a birthday.

He needed nothing, but we wanted to give him everything.

***

On the morning of the wedding, Bill drives me across town to where I, along with bride and bridesmaids and Shanna’s mother and aunt, are getting ready for the day.

It is a Saturday, mid-morning, mid-summer. The landlord of our AirBnB stands on his deck shirtless and holding a yellow coffee mug, talking to his neighbor.

“What are you doing today?” his neighbor asks him.

“Nothing,” he says.

We pass a woman trimming a shrub at the end of her driveway. We pass three teenage girls in shorts walking down the sidewalk, and the one nearest the fence trails her fingers in the chain link.

July 8, 2017, was a normal day for some people. Maybe it was a normal day for you.

***

Ask me about permanence, and I will tell you that I know it to be impossible and that I also pretend it exists, and that above most things, maybe all of them, permanence is a thing I long for.

***

One of the beautiful things about cottonwoods, and poplars, and maybe all trees, is their receptivity. They’ll take on the sun and the cold, the light and the heat. I realize they have no choice. But it’s the way they respond to these things that is so lovely. The way cottonwoods, birches, and poplars take on the wind, for example. I like that.

Willa Cather was a student of trees, apparently, and of life, as writers will (must) be. She said, “I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again: one can learn a lot from trees.

***

(Will’s groomsmen stood shoulder to broad shoulder, handsome in their fitted gray suits. I worried that we hadn’t reminded them, during the rehearsal, not to lock their knees: if you stand still with your knees locked for too long, you can faint dead away–and no one wants that, especially in a wedding.

It wasn’t a problem in the end, but this thought was something that distracted me briefly while my firstborn son was getting married.)

***

It was a beautiful wedding. It was truly one of the happiest days of my life. So far.

***

The day after the wedding, a group of us hiked up to Lindeman Lake. It was a gorgeous hike that was all steep inclines and often a scramble over rocks. The view throughout was wooded and lushly green, with needle-shaped pines and thick ferns and waterfalls. It was what I had always thought the Pacific Northwest should be.

We climbed for more than half an hour, and it was arduous at times–a far cry from the hiking we’ve done in our more gentle Appalachians. When we finished, we emerged at the edge of trees to the rocky border of glacier-fed Lindeman Lake.

I had heard about this lake. I knew it was cold, and I knew what I had to do. There could be no hesitation. If I stood at the edge and thought about it for any time at all, if I allowed the air to cool me after that hike, I would lose all sense of necessity and nerve.

So I immediately stripped shoes, socks and shirt and clambered onto the sloping rock. And I jumped.

Lindeman Lake is turquoise, clear and stunningly cold. The shock of it is enough to knock your breath clean away. My brother-in-law, who lives year-round in Alaska, had himself a fine little back-stroking time on the lake, but not me. I got out of that lake as soon as humanly possible.

None of us went in a second time.

***

I think I want permanence, and then along comes a need for the opposite. Like my very brief swim in Lindeman. Like my need for a nap, all those many years ago, when I sat with my son at the sandbox.

But there was something about Will’s wedding–or maybe just the days leading up to it–that made part of me wish for the sandbox again: I wanted to sit in the sun one more time with my golden-haired boy just two years old. In my imagination, I would sit there again for hours.

It’s a longing for permanence that I didn’t at all desire at the time.

***

Before I became a mother, I found a song for my children. It was a Beatles song that was then covered by Alison Krauss, and while it might have been a song for an unknown and hoped for lover, it was to me a song of longing for my as-yet unborn children.

I sang it to Willliam before he was born and after. Of our three children, he was the one I sang it to the most. And when I danced with him at his wedding reception, it was the song we danced to.

Love you forever and forever, love you with all my heart. Love you whenever we’re together, love you when we’re apart.

Because I will always be his mother. Always.

The post Such a Thing as Always appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I feel as if I’ve done a lot of traveling lately. It’s that time of year, right? Summer vacation. We’re gone, we’re here, we’re gone again.

Definitely not complaining. I love to travel. But lately it’s got me thinking about how I pack.

Like most people (everyone?), I’m guessing I have the normal categories: clothes, toiletries, shoes. Standard, right? That’s standard.

But when it comes to packing, what really matters to me is the Carry-On.

You know the Carry-On. That’s the smallish bag you keep with you on the plane, the one you squeeze into the space under the seat in front of you. The one that holds your wallet and your chapstick, maybe your toothbrush (depending), and anything else you’ll be wanting to grab during the flight.

So the Carry-On is vital. But for me, it’s not just for planes (do you do this, too?). It’s for car-travel. And even though we don’t have to wedge it under the seat in front of us, it’s what my daughter and I have come to call it even for travel in the car. We always pack a Carry-On.

In a way, the Carry-On is the Most Important Luggage of my trip. Because while I consider the clothing, shoes, etc. to be necessary, the Carry-On sort of contains (this sounds so ridiculous) all my hopes and dreams.

Okay, granted. That definitely sounds over the top. Bear with me.

The Carry-On represents, firstly, that 1) I’m going to be away from the normal demands of my life for awhile, and 2) I’m going to Sit.

Sitting is not a normal thing for me. Even if I’m writing, I try to spend much of the time on my feet. Sitting isn’t terribly good for you; and also, I manage a household. On any given day, I am up and about Doing Things, and I am doing these things Most of the Time. Most of what I do, on any given day, does not find me doing the sorts of things that one can find in my Carry-On.

As such, my Carry-On usually contains things I Should Get To. Blank paper and envelopes for notes I need to write, a bill I need to take care of. The general flotsam of my desk, culled and reorganized (or not) into a doable, smallish stack suitable for the road.

And it contains the Dailies. My Bible, my journal. Whatever it is I’m reading at the time. My laptop and its power cord. A phone charger. The Things I Need to Do My Job(s). (Writer. Mother. Wife. Person.)

Then finally (here is where the Hopes and Dreams come in), it holds a representation of the Things I Would Like To Do. As in, if I had All the Time in the World. Which one basically does (or can imagine one does, anyway) if one is flying to Shanghai. Or riding as passenger around New York City. Or anywhere at any time ever on I-95 near Washington D.C.

Hopes and Dreams are really hard to get to, but maybe if one simply had Enough Time….

Take the trip I’ve just returned from. We were gone for exactly one week, and my Carry-On for the ride in the car to and in and from New England included the following: my journal, Bible, Psalter, notebook. Issue # 37 of Ruminate magazine and the July-August issue of Smithsonian. My mother’s journal (not my mother’s journal, but the journal I keep and write in about being a mother). My laptop, its charger. A blank thank-you note; a Compassion International letter. A new book of poetry written by Christopher Janke; a creative non-fiction book, Wake, Sleeper, by Bryan Parys. Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making. A copy of my novel (can’t quite say why) and the wonderful sci-fi, literary fiction brilliance that I’ve read once before but am So Glad to have re-read on this trip: P.D. James’ Children of Men.

That’s for one week, Saturday to Saturday.

Listing it out like this (or looking at it in its bulging bag, or swinging it over my shoulder to tote to the car) makes me feel a little bit silly. Do I truly imagine that I’ll get to it all?

And yet. It’s an interesting thing to distill it like this. To pack into a discreet container The Things One Really Loves and Hopes To Do.

This is where the moral goes, right? The application. The metaphorical point to all of this.

Truth be told, I don’t really know what to say. I could ask in a tone tinged by a Capital One advertising campaign: “What’s in your carry-on?” Or I could encourage young mothers who don’t currently have time or room for carry-ons of their own that they might, someday, have carry-ons in their futures.

Or I could comment on the truth: that we got home on Saturday night and most of the laundry was done by Sunday, but I didn’t fully unpack my carry-on until Monday night. Or was it Tuesday? Because, for the most part, I wasn’t using any of it.

In which case the point would be how hard it is, in this life, to make time for what I love. For what we love.

And that maybe it’s vital to do so.

“Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them,” says Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. As such, this notorious demon suggests, delights and joys are dangerous because they very well might–horrors!–lead us to God.

I love this very much.

What is it with God and delight? What is it with Him and pleasure? The more I look for Him, the more I see Him appealing to me with precisely this: the things that truly delight me; the things I most desire (Psalm 37:4).

No matter how hard omni-media try portray Him as Kill-Joy; no matter how the Commandments are preached as prescribed misery, I have learned and am learning that the opposite is the case: that the One who declared this world Good is also the author of delight.

That yes, He has rules and laws, but these, too, when followed, are actually meant to be life-giving. To delight us.

That He Himself is actually the greatest delight we can know, and all the other delights of this world–like a cold beer, the soft fuzz of a newborn’s hair, sunlight limning a cloud or the stunning beauties of a well-crafted phrase–are the edges of the beauties of Himself.

Which amazes me.

And also makes me hope (Oh! here’s the point!) that you always pack a Carry-On. That you don’t leave it untouched at the foot of the stairs, but that you dip into it often and are repeatedly delighted. And that you find Him also (somehow) tucked miraculously inside.

The post Carry-On appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We are in New England for the week, staying on a farm in a quiet corner of Rhode Island. It’s beautiful here–because it’s New England, because it’s green and wooded, because it’s about ten degrees cooler than any July at home.

Of course we want New England to look as it *should,* and Rhode Island does not disappoint: the stone walls are everywhere. Gorgeous, rambling, antique lines of them. They appear along the sides of the roads, a sudden demarcation between roadside and woods or farmland, the edge of someone’s lawn. Or they spill out of the woods, and if you look quick enough as the car goes by you can see them extending away from you, dividing the trees. They trace the topography of a hillside, they mark the undulating line of the ground.

Stone walls are what New England is supposed to have, like clapboard, and shutters, and steeply pitched roofs. Here in New England, stone walls are–to borrow the overused word–“appropriate.”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

Robert Frost, a 20th century New England poet, won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and was the inaugural poet for President Kennedy in 1961. He was born in San Francisco and later had a winter home in Florida, but for the most part, he spent his life in New England: New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts.

For a long time, he farmed (unsuccessfully) in New Hampshire. He knew a thing or two about stone walls.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

These walls are ubiquitous in New England. There must be miles and miles of them. Bill and I have wondered aloud about them as we drive. We guess a wall is just the thing to do with the stones. The soil here must be rife with them.

And certainly, in addition to the stone walls that trace the landscape, the ground here is forever exposing large slabs of rock, huge outcroppings that one can only assume might be the tip of a proverbial iceberg. Bill and I imagine making a life from the soil here, tilling the earth with our rudimentary, colonial tools and finding–again and again and again–a rock and yet another rock to prize from the ground.

Fruitless, tiresome, unintended crop.

In 1939 the mining engineer Oliver Bowles estimated that there were probably more than 259,000 miles of stone walls in the northeastern U.S., most of which is in New England. Many walls have since been destroyed, but probably more than half of these remain. –Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.

It was the glaciers that started it, eons ago, sliding slowly southward over what would eventually become New England. The glaciers themselves were apparently full of stones, the hardest of which–granite, gneiss, limestone–survived the grinding journey locked in ice. As the glaciers melted, they deposited the stone in the ground.

Hence, so many stones. A real hassle for sowing crops, but perfect for building a wall. Walls. 259,000 miles of them.

The tenacity of these walls is impressive: no adhesive was used in their construction; each wall is a balancing act, stones supporting stones. Most of the walls were built between 1775 and 1850, and yet here they stand today.

Nonetheless, “Mending Wall” is a poem about the process of repairing the holes in one of these walls. Apparently, they had their periodic ruptures, their sudden and inexplicable “gaps.”

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

Frost questions the process. His is a 20th-century sensibility:  Why should we bother repairing the wall? Do we need the wall in the first place?

Well, but all farms have fences, right? We need something to mark the edges. It’s difficult to imagine now, but I’m told that when the original farmers had cleared the land here, trees soon became scarce. It was sensible, if not incredibly labor-intensive, to use the natural resource of stone to form animal pounds or fencing, to outline the boundary between one and one’s neighbor.

If you on your farm have cows, say, and I have apple trees, I’ll want to prevent your cows coming over to my property and decimating my bumper crop of apples.

Solution: stone walls.

And yet,

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

And here begins Frost’s metaphor. Or mine.

What is it about a wall that makes us feel safe? Here in the 21st century? I’m not talking about actual, physical boundaries. I know enough from movies and the news–don’t we all?–about technologies used in heist or warfare. The jig is up: something (someone) somewhere will always be able to get through.

No, I’m talking about those other walls, the ones each of us constructs, the separations, the divisions that, somehow, make me imagine I’m safe.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

The news these days in this country is rightly all about these walls. But we’ve found they are not, after all, unique to New England. They are everywhere. They seem to cross every region, state, heart, and are (and have been) more visible to some of us than others.

But the walls–even the ancient, “wild walls,” so long untouched that they have become their own vibrant ecosystems–didn’t arrive of their own accord. They didn’t emerge from the ground in tidy rows, vestigial trace of a glacier’s wake.

No. The walls come from stone farmed, mined, balanced, planted. I can’t help but think–studying them, even my own–that these walls are cultivated. They are the product of rehearsed anger, of practiced bitterness, the insistence *not* to forgive. And while we rightly find them most grievously offensive in shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota, Orlando, Dallas, I believe they have their origins in the smallest places: in every prideful thought, every smug estimation of our superiority.

Any time we ever imagine–even for an instant–that we are better than someone else.

…many farmers would find that their farmland would have many stones on it that weren’t there previously…. When a farm is plowed, it causes layers of soil beneath the surface to push up their rocks from different soil layers to another…Many farmers would have to remove the rocks on their farm if they wanted to plow it again, only to find that they would have to repeat the process of removing stones. -Corey Schweizer

I think everyone’s field is full of stones. Everyone’s. It’s the human condition. And just when we think we’ve got our soil cleared, we’re unearthing more: more selfishness, more hard-heartedness, the chronic tendency to love ourselves more than our neighbors, to be willfully blind to another’s experience, hurt, need, goodness, worth.

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not only of woods and his father’s trees.

We do this, as a society, on a large scale. And we do it personally, too. Daily. Minute by minute.

We are–to a person–rocky soil, laden with the deposits of that long-gone glacier, burdened with its mineral waste. Being alive means tilling that soil, making a place to sow good seeds, and pulling up rocks in that effort.

It’s ours to decide what to do with the stones.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. -Ezekiel 36: 26.

Sources here, here, and here.

The post 259,000 Miles of Them appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Everyone lives up close:
a farmhouse with tire swing and tractor,
pushing snow and pulling snow and piled up
to windshield with it, white and idle;

double-wide trailer wedged on the hill,
white lawn ornamented with a child’s playhouse:
plastic logs and open door
and the roof gone missing.

a fence of wood and wire,
whose swoop and sag demonstrate
indifferently the slope of the hill;
beneath the snow, the wire traps a glut of rusting leaves.

a dark and grit-lined parking lot,
a pick-up truck and two cars, salt-caked,
a neon sign– an invitation–
to the gentlemen’s club.

and on both sides, the trees:
black and dun, leaning or standing straight,
they hold their branches in the air.
now they are quiet, brooding or aloof, waiting
and cradling, all along their arms,
the tender burden of the snow.

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Provence has a basically Mediterranean climate, one wafted by winds that give it a special character. The most notorious is the mistral (from the Provencal mistrau, or master– supposedly sent by northerners jealous of the south’s climate), rushing down from the Rhone and gushing east as far as Toulon and west to Narbonne. On average the mistral blows 100-150 days a year, nearly always in multiples of three, except when it begins at night. It is responsible for the dryness in the air and soil…. It blows so hard that it can drive people mad: an old law in Provence acquitted a murderer if it could be proved that he killed his victim while the mistral was blowing. But the mistral has its good points: it blows away the harmful miasmas and pollution from the Rhone and makes the stars radiantly clear. –Provence, by Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls

The mistral– I’m assuming that’s what this is– is whipping up the hill and down it again, occasionally slamming doors downstairs where we forget to close them or block them against closing, and occasionally making the clothes hanging out here on the line go frantically flapping about. But I’ve secured them tightly with clothes pins, and they are remaining in place.

From this vantage point on the terrace, the tiled roofs of this town step down the hill; behind me, the rise is steeper, with the last few of the rooflines part of the cliff-face. And then there’s the cliff-face itself: a steep vertical exaltation, but not terribly high. Still, it’s high enough, bearing after hundreds of years the scarred face it presumably wore when half the hill caved in, and wearing further scars from the caves and houses dug into its sides. It’s eerie and strange, and I wonder, looking at it, how the townspeople could ever become accustomed to it, ever have become accustomed to it. I wonder what, if anything, the Swiss would do when faced with a cliff-face like that. I can’t imagine the Swiss having even vocabulary for something so feral and scarred and abandoned as the face of that cliff. Perhaps they’d hang curtains.

The Swiss have the fon (sp), of course– that unpredictable and sudden and snow-melting wind– and today’s wild wind makes me think of that. But I think that even the Swiss wind is more tame than this, coming always (does it?) from one direction at a time, not whipping back and forth so that now it is coming in at the kitchen window and now going out. I don’t remember.

It’s hard not to compare this place with Switzerland, that being the only other European country we’ve lived in– if one can call the two or so weeks we have at this house living here– and so the comparisons seem to come naturally. I will at least say that I don’t remember anything in Switzerland being so old as what we’ve seen here: “Ruin on the left!” — or right, as the case may be– I’m forever calling out to the children as we’re rounding yet another bend on an impossibly narrow country road or jetting down a highway. Do the Swiss not have anything as old as this, I’m wondering– these partial walls of crumbling stone, these Romanesque churches? The Romans were there, of course, in Switzerland, but maybe the Alps made it more difficult for them to set up camp?

I know we saw houses in Switzerland as old as the one we’re staying in now– Swiss houses, charming, beautifully kept, with the date– 1670 or some such– over the door. Those houses looked older, to be sure, than those around them, but nothing so old as these Provencal houses, mounted tightly up against one another, ancient casements, ancient shutters, ancient doors. And nothing else around them, really. Not much, anyway, that looks new. Just towns once formed and then lived in, unquestioningly, for all the draw of something like a suburb or city somewhere else, and despite the fact that– in this case– cliffs with open eyes and mouths stand at your back.

Still, it is wonderful to be here. Wonderful. This tile-roofed town and all the others that the countryside– as we are driving– opens and then closes to view. The narrow streets and narrower alleyways, the flowerpots– and windowsills and doorways– brimming with flowers. The painted shutters and doors, distinguishing– in a block of “house”– one home from another. On the hillsides, great shrubs of yellow blooms; on the roadsides, bouquets of red poppies with tissue-thin petals and tufts of pink things– what are they?– so lovely.

From this terrace in my distant view, I do see what might be some more modern buildings, but they blend in, and around them and above them are some stands of poplars, so classically French, bending occasionally to the mistral. Also I see some of Van Gogh’s cypresses, which stand so straight and only yield their tips– so it appears– to this wild French wind. Van Gogh loved this part of France; he came here to live and then died not far from here at St. Remy back when– I am learning this– Provence was not at all the place to be. He and others, I think, helped tame it for us, somehow made its wildness seem less unsafe. Think of his Starry Night, for instance, which was painted just down the road.

And now here we are for close on two weeks. I never would have dreamed it a year ago, could only barely hope it last fall, was prematurely saddened by its apparent loss several times over the last few weeks. I’m not at all sure why I should have this, what it is in my life that constitutes deserving. Here is a brand new thing, long hoped for: the five of us away on vacation without family or friends. But France? Provence? This is newer still, wild, even. Decidedly undeserved.

I said as much to Beth before we left, during one of those days when it looked for certain like we wouldn’t go. She answered in the way she always does because she knows no other way, an answer laced inextricably with the knowledge of that Most Wild One: that we none of us deserve much of anything. Nothing good, anyway.

Swallows wheel and soar and turn in the air above the rooftops below me. This is, so I’ve observed since I’ve been here, the way they do things, mistral or no. But maybe it’s more fun in the wind.

No, it doesn’t make sense for us to be here. It is, at the very least, decidedly un-Swiss of us– with all their careful planning, all their tidiness and cleanliness and caution. This trip is undeserved, yes. Yet it is celebration– not because we are no longer in want, but in spite of it. A celebration of 40 years of life, of 20 years of marriage, a celebration because when your faith is in the Wild One, then you find you must take risks.

And we’ve known some risks in the hands of this One: the risk of staying when the going seems better, of opening when the closing seems smarter, of losing when the gaining… well, of losing. And we’ve known, too, by miracle, by grace, what it means to love when you simply don’t want to, when it isn’t at all safe, when it isn’t– is it ever?– deserved.

I am looking forward to being in Switzerland for a few days soon. It will be so good to see old friends, to revisit the places we knew and the paths we walked when we lived there 15 years ago. But I am thinking now that God has come to look to me less tidy than Switzerland. He looks, I think, more like the south of France: an inscrutable cliff face; a tempestuous wind; a persistance beyond all confidence, beyond all sustainable reason. Sometimes dirty, sometimes crumbling, sometimes neglected. And offering– even in the most unexpected places– a glimpse of brilliant stars and bouquets of sweetest flowers.

The post Mistral appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“What happened to summer?” Emma wants to know, and I only murmur my agreement, not wanting to go into it with her because I know she isn’t asking for this. But I could, were she to press me, explain how it all fell out: two weeks at home and then two weeks on Long Island and then two weeks at home and then a week in Florida followed by a week on the NC shore and now two weeks at home and then it’s off to school with me and the children following not long after.

That’s it. That’s a summer. (It’s never smart to do the math.)

I hadn’t wanted all the travel from the outset. The thought of adding anything to the schedule as described above had, at the beginning, made me whimper (we had temporarily and seriously entertained an additional drive to Cleveland to see Scott and Lynne); I had dozens of home-projects to do after all, and being Away isn’t conducive to their successful completion. But in the end, the travel was good and it wasn’t too much and it meant delicious time with family– time I needed more than I had realized and that was (oh, it was) so Good for me (who can measure, really, what it does to a person to be with family, the people who know you Well and so remind you of who you Are?).

And the five of us have had a wonderful time, too: the drive to Long Island, the Cross Sound ferry to see Emily and Janke in western Mass., our first-ever trip to Disney World and Universal Studios, hours and hours and hours on the beach, baby sea turtles hatching at night and making their way to the sea, grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles galore. And just last Thursday night (I won’t forget it) the five of us dancing wildly on the lawn at the close of the Coldplay concert.

More Than Once Bill and I have remarked to one another how good this is, the wonderful ages of our children, their maturity and their youth, their eagerness to play, the laughter and fellowship we share with them. The travel and the time at home just threw us together even more, so that even though it was always hard to leave the place where we just were, we were excited, too, to get on to the Next Thing– the adventure at home or away, the joy that waited around the corner.

The ancient Japanese poet Basho wrote what I suppose has been observed hundreds of times: that, like travel anywhere on this planet, time is also a journey. He was right, of course. We travel daily into the new and, as yet, unexplored. We are relentless wanderers. And yet this travel–time–is different from any other in that we can’t camp out. We can’t determine to spend more or less time anywhere (such as two weeks on Long Island or three days at Disney instead of one); each day has exactly 24 hours, and each of those is neatly segmented into precise hours and minutes and seconds. This day– August 13, 2009– is the only August 13, 2009 I’ll get. We might like to stay for awhile (like Frost, for example, “to watch these woods fill up with snow”), but not one of us is granted permission, not one of us can stay.

When we drove off Long Island, I looked hard at the farms outside my window. When we left Florida, I took one last look off the balcony at the water finding the sand. And when we left the Carolina shore, the last family of our relatives to leave the rental house, I wandered through it one last time and remembered all of us there.

Then I got into the van with my family– with my husband, with my children (ages 8, 10 and So Very Nearly 13)– and I thought to it all, to myself, to them: “Wait! Wait.”

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