Labyrinth

Looking for life, water in multiple forms

Poetry

Thank you to Maya C. Popa for posting Lisel Mueller’s poem to Substack Notes this week.

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Journeying

The two concrete ramps converge and double back. We wind up. Around each corner, two rows of cars parked at 45 degrees, on the ceiling between them, a line of red lights, like the ones that point the way to the exits on an aircraft. The lights the airline attendants tell you to follow, in an emergency, to the nearest exit. “Find the exits now,” the attendants say. “The closest may be behind you.” No one listens.

We follow the red trail, looking for green. A green light means an open space. It means, “Park here, now, before anyone else comes.” We find one on a corner, pull in, then climb out into the subzero air. I check to see if the light above our heads has changed to red.

Icy wind tunnels through the garage, finding its own way up and down the ramps. We begin the game of locating the door that is nearest the building we want to enter. We lose. The door we choose leads to a staircase, which leads to the ground floor of the parking garage. We hurry across. The correct door makes a sucking noise when we pull on it, then seals behind us like a vacuum. We stare at a wall of elevators and at the sign that says, “These Elevators Do Not Go to The Women’s Center (fourth floor.)” We take one anyway. We don’t have a choice.

We arrive at a place we recognize, the first floor with its Starbucks coffee counter and atrium full of plants. We wind through the green warmth and smell of roasting coffee, to another elevator. This one has windows. The atrium disappears as the elevator carries us to the fourth floor and the ultrasound that will tell me if the cancer has spread to my lymph nodes. We arrive, check in, locate a seat. I whisper to my husband, “How will we ever find our way back?”

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Gardening and Making/Mending

Late afternoon sun and winter prairie

My recent creative interpretations of “gardening” continue as I try to find something garden related to tell you about here in this space. I have excuses. Cancer is one. But February is the biggest. It’s cloudy; it’s cold. I want to say, “everything is dead.” It looks that way, but it’s not. Far from it. I was in Iowa this week for my twice monthly trek to see my husband. Several beautiful prairie preserves ring the small college town where he works. Too late in the afternoon, the sun would set within an hour, I bundled up, grabbed my crampons and climbed into the car. Despite the cold and impending darkness, I was going for a hike. As I turned off pavement and onto one of the hundreds of miles of gravel roads that crisscross this part of the country, I spotted a Bald Eagle, standing sentinel on a low fence post. They’re a common sight this time of year. The open water of the rivers, and the food in it, draws them. They begin nesting in earnest in February. Their presence always surprises me. It is powerful but not profligate.

Further down the road, I frightened a handful of deer having dinner in a front yard. Once on the trail, I scared up three more white-tails, their bushy flags all I could see as they disappeared into the brush. Beneath my feet were people tracks, dog tracks, deer tracks, turkey tracks, rabbit, squirrel, and I think, raccoon and opossum tracks. This wasn’t a trail. It was a highway, but so much quieter than the asphalt one I could hear a mile distant. The sun had set by the time I returned to the car, stripped off my coat and peeled off my crampons, smacking them against a tire to free them of snow and ice. On my way home, not a hundred yards from the trailhead parking lot, a pheasant flew low out of cornfield. I glanced across the same field and to see a herd of twenty or more deer, munching the farmer’s fall leavings. There’s plenty of life here. I just need to put myself in its path.

completed pillow case; neglected stitching; more sewing

Early last week, my circa 2012 laptop finally went, as mother says, “on to its great reward.” I ordered a replacement, but its arrival kept getting delayed. So I had a week without much writing, but with a whole lot of sewing and other handwork. If you’ve been here awhile, you will not be surprised when I say that I keep multiple projects, of multiple crafts, going at once. Last week, I pulled them all out, determined to make progress. But also, to soothe my anxious brain and sad heart. I have cancer. The world has much dis-ease. To create is to strike a match in the dark.

I finished a pillow cover for my partner’s apartment and started another more complex one. I traced pattern pieces (the first step in actually sewing something) for a summer shirt I plan to make for myself. I revived, via the iron, an old and wrinkled hand-stitching project begun about eighteen months ago, and I organized some of my daughter’s photos for a framed collage. Admittedly, I only completed the pillow cover, but busy hands and copious amounts of tea carried me over and across the sharper edges of the week.

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Upcoming on Threshold: A Live Podcast

Being with Anger: An Occasional Series on Difficult Emotions

What happens to you when you get angry? What happens in your brain and body? Anger is a powerful emotion, one that we try to control and sometimes indulge. But anger is also an important indicator and signal. In this session, Julia and I will discuss what happens when we get angry and how to be with an emotion that can be destructive but also incredibly informative and helpful. Join Julia Rymut and I Monday, February 9 @11:00am CT. All episodes are recorded and available here.