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.

I Let in Spring

A year ago today, my best friend, Amy Winans, died. Today, in my grief, I have talked with people who love her. I have folded and put away piles of laundry--something I often did while on the phone with Amy. I have tried to understand again that she is gone, that if I talk to her, she won't reply. 

Still, I feel her presence around me, especially in the spring flowers. Amy spent hours gardening, and her letters often arrived on notecards with delicate drawings of flowers printed on them. When I attempted to paint purple iris in watercolor, I told myself I'd send Amy a painting if it turned out well. 

Today, when I didn't know what else to do, I went outside, where bunches of daffodils swayed in the wind. I cut some of them, arranged them in vases, and put them around the house. In memory of Amy, I let in spring. 

Letters From My Friend

This month, Amy and I would have been friends for twenty-five years. Half our lives. But Amy died eleven months ago.  This month, I didn't send her the annual valentine marking the anniversary of our friendship. Instead, I brace for the anniversary of her death. 

Still, Amy makes her presence known: I gesture or grimace and then exclaim, "That's an Amy thing I just did!"  Marilyn nods in recognition. 

And there are her letters, her words. 

"You have a letter from Amy!" Marilyn would call out, as she entered the house with the mail.  

Every week or so, a letter in a small green or ivory envelope would arrive with that familiar handwriting in black or green ink.  I almost took them for granted, they were that frequent.  But I didn't.  

Sometimes, I opened the letter right away, standing in the kitchen, reading quickly.  Other times, I saved it until the quiet of bedtime. I kept all her letters.  Now, I  turn to them when I need to hear her voice. 

Today, my daily poem from the Academy of American Poets was "February 29"by Jane Hirshfield, one of my favorite poets. I was struck by the last lines of the poem: 

"An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died."

The Big Questions

            Last week, when Marilyn and I were spending a couple of days in Saugatuck-Douglas-- gay-friendly, art-filled towns on the shore of Lake Michigan--I swam in the lake just before sunset.  If you have seen Lake Michigan, you know it looks like the sea, vast and stretching to the horizon.  As I swam away from the shore, all I could see before me were the sun and the shimmering golden line that was its reflection in the otherwise silver-blue water.  I felt like I was on the edge of the world.  Of course I knew that I could turn around and see Marilyn on the beach, could swim, even walk back, the water was that shallow.  But as I swam away from shore, I felt the vastness.

            In the face of such vastness, of being on what feels like the edge, I found myself asking the big questions: How did all this get here?  What is beyond the sky?  How will this world end?  Will it end?  Where do we go when we end, when we die?  I am an agnostic, so I do not turn to religious scripture for answers.  Instead, I am drawn to scientific theories.. 

            Marilyn and I had been dwelling on some of those questions just a few days before as we watched the PBS NOVA special about the mission to fly by Pluto.  Every now and then, we would turn to each other and laugh in delight and disbelief: How far is Pluto?  How long did they take to figure out how to get this mission to work?  With Marilyn, I can share a sense of awe and confusion and excitement about the universe. 

            I felt a similar sense of awe at the lake, even though I knew Chicago was on the other side.  As the sun moved closer to the horizon, suddenly waves started to hit the shore in quick succession.  Until then, there had been hardly any waves at all. 

            “It’s got to be the sun!” I said to Marilyn.  “The moon causes tides.  The sun is so much bigger.  The setting sun is causing the waves!”  We decided we’d ask someone who’d know, maybe our late friend Amy’s husband, who is an astronomer. 

            As we packed up our towels and folded our beach chairs, Marilyn said, “Look!  She looks just like Amy!  Even the dress. Amy would wear that dress to the beach.”

            I looked over to where a slender, white woman with long brown hair just a shade darker than Amy’s was leaning down to talk to a brown boy of about nine (Amy’s daughter’s age, I couldn’t help thinking).  The woman was wearing a navy blue dress that ended above her knees, and her sunglasses rested on the top of her head, holding back her hair.  It was Amy! 

It couldn’t be, of course.  I had seen Amy’s body at the funeral home last spring, kissed the top of her head as I said goodbye.  I stared and then forced myself to look away. 

            When I looked again as we walked by, she had straightened up; she wasn’t as tall as Amy.  I caught a glimpse of her face.  Her features were darker than Amy’s.  But then she turned away and leaned down towards her son, and the illusion reasserted itself.  Tears pricked my eyes as we walked along the beach. 

            “The colors keep changing, don’t they?”  It was the man I assumed was her husband, a dark-skinned man who made me think of Amy’s handsome husband.  He was smiling at me and gesturing to the sky aglow in pink and blue and lavender. 

            “Yes.  They’re beautiful,” I replied, hoping he couldn’t hear the tears in my voice. 

            As Marilyn and I headed to the stairs that would take us up and away from Douglas Beach, I kept looking back, wanting to see Amy once again.  

Eulogy For a Best Friend

Crocuses in our front garden in late March

Seven months ago, I wrote on this blog, “I have faith spring will come again—and I hope it brings only what we are able to bear.”  I had no idea then that just as the first crocus opened, glowing a translucent purple in the sunlight, the phone would ring, and I would learn yet again how much loss we are able to bear.

On March 23, 2015, my beloved friend of twenty-four years, Amy Winans, died.  I have written and said those words so many times now—Amy died—but each time, I feel a small shock. 

This is the (only-slightly-edited) eulogy I delivered on March 28 at the memorial service for her at the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, much of it written during sleepless hours that week:

Amy and I became friends in the beginning of 1991 at Penn State.  Our mutual friend Andrea introduced us so we could help each other study for our PhD candidacy exam.  Amy helped me with American lit, and I helped her with British.  At our first meeting, one evening in the Kern Graduate Commons, where the food service was closed for the night, I noticed Amy picked at the Chinese take-out she had brought with her.  “She is clearly more interested in the conversation,” I thought; I was hungry, and the Chinese food looked good to me.  I had a similar thought more than two decades later, as we sat across another table, this time in St. Louis, where Amy was a presenter at 4Cs, the major, annual, college composition conference.  As I ate my share of the vegetarian platter we had ordered at the Ethiopian restaurant, I had to remind her to eat. 

Most of our friendship was long distance, especially after I moved to Champaign, Illinois, in 1997 to join the English faculty at Parkland College.  But we stayed in touch always, and we found ways to share our experiences in real time.  When the TV show ER was in its heyday, we would get on the phone during the long commercial break halfway through the episode and compare notes.  When she was on the job market the fall after I moved to the Midwest, we consulted by phone about what she should wear to job interviews at the huge, annual MLA convention. 

Mostly, though, we wrote.  Emails with Amy’s signature cheers, “Go team!” (this woman who did not watch sports) and “You can do it!” got me through my dissertation and many other challenges.  She was also the most devoted cheerleader of my creative endeavors, sending me beautiful paper to use in my art and mailing me books about art and writing.  Less than a week before she died, she forwarded me an announcement about a workshop I might want to check out. 

One of Amy's multi-part letters.  She often wrote over
a few days, sometimes on flights, at the airport,
at her daughter's swim lesson.  The sight of her
handwriting brought me comfort.

I always scanned my inbox for Amy’s emails first, and her handwriting in our mailbox was one of my greatest joys and comforts—and constants.  We exchanged hundreds of letters.  She joked that some future graduate student could write about our letters for her dissertation.  Here are some of Amy's letters to me, mailed in South Africa, Raleigh, Seattle, Puerto Rico, and, of course, Harrisburg.  One was mailed to me when I was in India.

To Amy, I wrote like I wrote to no one else: journal-like letters.  The night after I heard she had died, I couldn’t sleep.  So I did what I often did when I couldn’t sleep:  I wrote to Amy.  Here is that letter.  I wrote it on purple stationery.  Amy said I was the greatest supporter of her passion for purple.  I take pride in that position.  I am reading from a copy; I left the original with her this morning.

Champaign, IL. Wed. March 25, 2015.  5 AM

Amy dear,

I cannot sleep, so what else to do but write another middle-of-the-night letter to you?  This is the first morning I will wake up—if I sleep—knowing you will not write me another letter.  I cannot say “you will not be here” because you will always be here, with me.  After twenty-four years of friendship, you are a part of me.  Nothing I say, especially in my heartbroken state, seems enough.  You believed in my best self, Amy, and you helped me to believe in it, too.  You were my constant: your handwriting appearing in my mailbox nearly every week—until the depression struck you—your love in the hardest and happiest of times; your keen, editorial eye on my writing; your itineraries in my inbox, always making sure I could reach you.  How will I reach you now, my friend?  To whom will I write in the middle of a crazy day to be reassured I will survive this profession we love and which wears us down?  For whom will I buy purple?  Whom will I write at 4 AM and trust to understand?  Who else can read my 4 AM handwriting?

There is a large Amy-shaped hole in the world now, and I will have to learn how to live in that world, a world I couldn’t imagine before but have to inhabit now. 

Somehow, all of us, but especially Tony and Aurelia, will have to learn to live without your presence and to remind ourselves of the love with which you showered us.

I miss you my friend.  I always will.

Love, Umeeta

Now I would like to read you a poem that makes me think of Amy and her passing: “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan.  [Here is a link: Kay Ryan's "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" ]

Amy left deep tracks in so many lives, on so many of our hearts.  Things shouldn’t be so hard.

Amy's crocuses were blooming the week she died.

I’ll end with Amy’s words, words from one of the wisest people I have ever known.  The first quote is from an email she wrote on the evening of Thursday, September 2, 2010. I was struggling with a new course and recovering from two car accidents in which I had been rear-ended while at red lights and left with pain in my right shoulder.  Her words put things in perspective:  Remember how Oliver has that poem that begins “you don’t have to be good”? Maybe as you think about your Lit class…  “you don’t have to be perfect” and remember it all. and get to it all…You get to be human—honest!  

I’ll close with a quote from an email Amy wrote in the early morning of January 29, 2014; I had been asked to write a chapter for a book, a chapter I was not sure I wanted to write, and Amy was helping me to decide how to respond.  She wrote: Feel free to give a call if you want to talk about the decision regarding writing.  My main suggestions at the moment:

1—what would be the most self-compassionate thing you could do?

2—set aside the shoulds (just read this in a letter from my very dear friend…) and follow #1.

Marilyn bought me these pansies to pot in Amy's memory.  On the Monday after the memorial service, we potted them  in what we have always called "the Amy pot," a teal, ceramic pot Amy brought for us in 2004 and in which, every year, I plant annuals that make me think of Amy.  Those pansies are still going, even in June, so I have bought two pots in periwinkle blue, a color Amy loved, and have planted summer flowers in those.  We will now have three Amy pots.  But how strange it is to plant flowers in memory of Amy instead of reading about her gardens in letters from her.

Flowers from Amy's memorial.  At the church, we surrounded them with photos of her and with academic journals in which her articles had been published.  Marilyn and I brought the flowers home with us and set them on our dining table.  In the top right corner of this photo is the candle Marilyn and I bought in Taos last summer.  We lit it every evening for Amy for weeks, until it burned down.  Each night, as I blew it out, I said good night to my dear friend.  I hope she is at peace now.  

I flew back to Pennsylvania in April for a weekend memorial service at Susquehanna University, where Amy was a beloved member of the English faculty.  While Amy's other best friend, Judy, drove, I took photos, imagining Amy making this drive hundreds of times.  I had never been to her campus before because it was an hour from her house--and I thought I could visit it another time--so on this visit, I took it all in: her department, her office, the view from her window as she sat in her chair.  

As I sat in Amy and Tony's living room on the second Sunday in April, I came across a pack of cards that belonged to Amy.  Each card had a different flower on it.  That the flower for friendship was purple, Amy's favorite color, seemed just right. 

I painted this "yarn bowl" for Amy at the end of February (I didn't include a photo of this bowl in my February post because it was a surprise for Amy, and she read my blog).  She knitted, too.  She received the bowl the week before she died, and she mentioned it in her last emails to me.  The bowl combines her favorite color, purple, and mine, blue.  It has our initials on the bottom.

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.

Seen from Another Angle

Last week, I walked my friend Anora to her truck, which was parked on the street near our house.  On that clear night, the sky was intensely black, and the stars seemed etched sharply onto its surface.  Anora saw a shooting star when she looked up, and after that we both stood there in the cold looking up, hoping for more, and trying to name the stars we saw above us. 

I glanced over at the house as we stood there.  The bare rose of Sharon bushes in front were strung with large, multicolored lights, and the lamppost in the yard twinkled with tinsel garlands.  On the gate to the backyard, a wreath made of twigs and small white lights lit up a red bow.  Inside, Marilyn awaited. 

I was struck then by a familiar feeling of gratitude and comfort that returns now and then when I look at the house, a feeling often accompanied by surprise and awe:  “I live here.  This is my home.  I am rooted here.” 

Just a little earlier, other friends who make up our writing practice group had left the house after a holiday potluck that has become an annual tradition.  Inside Anora’s truck, her baby was asleep, tucked under a blanket I had knitted while we waited for her to arrive nearly a year ago.

Looking at my life in that moment, from that angle, I felt enveloped in its warmth and was a little humbled by my good fortune.

On a hike with my friend Patti last week, I once again saw my world from another angle.  As we walked in the forest preserve less than a half hour from where I live, the land dipped and rose: