Peonies in the Kitchen During Finals Week

Three weeks ago, as I was entering finals week at Parkland College, where I teach English and Humanities, I turned to flowers to ground me. Marilyn, my spouse, had planted a new peony bush in front of our two older ones. The new bush had two deep crimson blooms, and they were already opening when the old plants’ pink buds were still tightly closed. I cut those two flowers and placed them in a vase on the kitchen counter, where I saw them every time I looked up from grading papers. 

That week, in addition to the usual grading marathon, I was also saying goodbye to students to whom I had grown attached. My classes had become genuine communities; students chatted with each other instead of staring at their devices before, during, and after class, and we often laughed together. I had grown to love them and often been inspired by them, these students who came from so many different places: a night-shift at the hospital, thirteen years in the army, successful treatment for depression, a mental-health break from the U of I, a job lifting boxes for UPS. The semester was ending, and they were moving on: one transferring to Columbia College in Chicago, another to the University of Missouri, most returning in the fall for more classes—but not to our class. Our communities were temporary by definition. 

I was exhausted, ready for summer, and I was also sad to be saying goodbye. 

That week, I found myself checking in with the peonies each day, burying my nose in the petals, inhaling their fragrance, and taking photos. As the week went on, the peonies opened fully, then started to lose their petals. Eventually, the fallen petals dried up in a small pile around the base of the vase. But I wasn’t ready to let the flowers go. Finally, a couple of days after I had submitted grades and the semester was officially over, when Marilyn asked me yet again whether I was done with those peonies, I said yes. I photographed the dried petals; even at that stage, the peonies were beautiful, and then I said goodbye. 

 

Two of my South Asian Cultures (HUM 109) students working on a rangoli together in class. Rain kept us indoors, but a sense of discovery and play filled the room. These two students had not worked together before. Their creative collaboration was typical of that class.

[I read this reflection during the annual Flower Communion service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign on Sunday, June 2, 2019.]

An Offering of Flowers

Earlier this week, I walked around our gardens just before sunset. I noticed the exquisite intricacy of petals and leaves, the way the evening light made the colors pop.

I had come out into the backyard feeling horrified by the news from Charlottesville and sickened by the response from the White House. I had already been on edge from the escalation of tension with North Korea the week before.  

Walking around the gardens, my shoulders relaxed, my footsteps slowed. For a moment, the larger world receded, and I felt comforted and strengthened.

We are going to need comfort and strength in the days ahead, so that we can keep speaking up, keep keeping on. I offer you these flowers. May they bring you peace, too. 

Spectacular Prairie Skies

A recent evening storm that came literally out of the blue reminded me again why I love the prairie skies and Meadowbrook Park. As Marilyn and I began our walk around the prairie, I exclaimed at the blue-violet sky in the west. I wanted to gather the blue-violet in my arms and offer it to Amy, my beloved friend, whom I miss so much. She loved that color. On that evening, with the sky changing and the wind picking up, the thought of gathering the sky in my arms and handing it to Amy made me smile. I imagined her up in the sky like I used to imagine a white-bearded, smiling god when I was a child.

As Marilyn and I rounded the curve, stopping to photograph the western sky, a woman and two children joined us on the path. They had been heading home through the prairie to the nearby neighborhood.

"We had to turn around and come back to the park when we saw the sky," the woman said, laughing.

The sky was becoming more dramatic by the minute, and then the wind picked up in a way I had only experienced at sunset at Lake Michigan. There the waves became bigger and faster; here, the wind became louder and stronger.

I looked up.

"That's not a tornado coming, is it?" I asked Marilyn, the native Midwesterner, the one I have to urge to shelter during a tornado warning.

"No. It's not green," she said, not sounding as certain as I would have liked, as I noticed a twist of grey in the orange sky. Our car was on the other side of the park; turning back wouldn't be any faster than moving forward, so we kept going, walking, laughing at the wind and then the rain, stopping to watch a deer and her baby, and being greeted by a rainbow when we finally got to the car.

I felt like I'd been to another planet and back again.

Retreat

This drawing--a souvenir of an afternoon alone to catch up with myself, time to take a long walk, to ignore the clock, then to retreat to my study with a withered tulip in a blue, glass vase and to play with pastels, enjoying the freedom of not knowing how to use pastels well, knowing only that I want the satisfaction of making marks on paper, of messy hands, of being lost in a process, of looking up, eventually, to find the delightful illusion of three dimensions on flat paper. 

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How do you slow down and catch up with yourself? 

Celebrating My Flatland Home

I visited some lovely places this summer including Saugatuck-Douglas on Lake Michigan and Peggy's Cove on the rugged coast of Nova Scotia. I relished being by the water. I was present, I was appreciative--and I was always glad to come back to my flatland home. Familiar walking paths, enormous skies, and corn along the roadways welcomed me back to the unassuming Midwest and grounded me. 

Here are some photos taken in one of my favorite places in Champaign-Urbana, the Idea Garden along Lincoln Avenue:

This photo and the next one were taken in the Idea Garden in 2014, during a plein air painting class I took through Community Education at Parkland College. The class was a lovely invitation to pay attention.

The Urge to Make Things

One of the yarn bowls I painted two evenings ago.  It will look very different once it is fired next week.

Two evenings ago, as the snow swirled outside the large windows of the Illini Union Bookstore, I listened enthralled to a reading by Andre Dubus III.  He urged the writers in the audience to write, that writing was the point, that being published was nice, but that we have to write in the face of the inevitable rejection letters.  He described writing his novel House of Sand and Fog in twenty-minute segments while sitting in his car before he went in to teach at one of several jobs he was juggling at the time.  

After the book became a bestseller, he worked  on building his family home. At his reading at the bookstore, he spoke of framing his daughter's bedroom.   His agent asked him if he couldn't now pay someone else to do that, couldn't he get back to writing?  He was writing, he told his agent, but he also wanted to build his daughter's bedroom, that it was like tucking her into her blanket at night.  

Dubus was describing making things.  He built his novel a piece at a time, and later, he built his family home.  They were both acts of creation.  

When I left the reading, I headed over to the Pottery Place, where I painted yarn bowls with a dozen other knitters.  Yarn bowls are ingenious containers that keep yarn from rolling away under the coffee table while one is knitting.  I had never painted pottery before, but my nephews have painted gifts for me.  As I chose colors and brushes and came up with a design, I felt like a child, playful and ready to experiment.  As I painted, I got lost in the process.  The blank surface of the bowl was like my blank computer screen or a blank page in my journal: an invitation to create something that had never existed before.  

I left the Pottery Place just as it closed, accompanied by another knitter, someone I had met for the first time that evening.  We talked about how remarkable it was that in this world of mass production, we had just painted bowls that were almost certainly unlike any others in the world, and how that was like the knitting we did, too, as we tweaked patterns, chose yarn, and knitted with our very personal tension, so that my stitches and hers would be different.

I came home wanting to write, to knit, to paint some more, and soon.  What I needed to do was to sit down at the kitchen counter to grade a paper.  The next morning, I had to teach, and to give feedback on a couple of dozen drafts.  And that was okay.  The delight and inspiration from my evening lightened the work I had to do, and I went in to campus the next day reminded that my students were creating, too.  

The cardigan I have been knitting and hope to finish before the winter is done.  I had to take apart over forty rows of over six hundred stitches and start the cardigan over in October, when I discovered I had twisted it when I joined it in the round,  but I haven't become discouraged yet.  

I finished knitting this hat last night.  I began it during one of the pauses in knitting the cardigan, when I had to wait to get advice about a next step.  

My favorite chair, where I often read and write and where I am writing this.  The red notebook is my journal.  I went through about half a dozen notebooks last year.  

The Peace of Knitting

Knitting my first cardigan with this blue-violet-turquoise Malabrigo is making me very happy.

The repetition of knitting brings me peace. Looping yarn around needles, feeing its softness and its weight in my hand, watching a skein turn into a hat, a blanket, a scarf--I have found pleasure and comfort in this process for a dozen years now. When I spot a knitter waiting at the airport or in a clinic, I feel a kinship with this stranger and find comfort in watching her hands move.

Recently, I began knitting my first cardigan. I am taking a class at my local yarn store, Klose Knit; the teacher is a new friend I made at a knitting retreat last January, when I spent an entire day among knitters and learned how to cable for the first time.

This is the final stage of the hat I knitted after I learned how to cable.

Here are some photos from the early stages of the "Sheer Beauty" cardigan I am knitting. I began with 665 stitches; I have begun the decreases, but, still, it's a very good thing I love the process of knitting. Completing each row is a triumph, and it will be months before I'm done.

Knitting on the deck in the September sunshine while not knowing what time it is--one definition of paradise.

All lit up in November

Today is Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. We will light candles tonight to take the place of diyas, the traditional clay lamps.

Looking out this sunny morning, I see a different kind of light: the trees aglow in fall color. Their flaming colors are perfect for Diwali.

Here are some photos I've taken with my phone the past two days.  May the light of Diwali and of this fall be with you throughout the year.