Craving the Familiar: Notes from the Pandemic

From my side yard. 

I.

An acre of land surrounded the house where I lived. Every garden on that land was one that I planted. By now I would have had some pots of herbs growing inside and I would have had them ready to go outside soon. I would have had some containers of vegetables started too. Delicate green shoots pushed up through that loamy dirt. Fragrant. Stems that would thicken. Later there would be tomatoes.

The side patio was slate and lined with wide, curved garden beds. A bird bath Rob and I bought years ago in Maine sat in a small garden of hydrangeas. A copper bath birds came to swim and splash in. The many Mother Day plants I received are still growing in those many gardens.

Astilbe.
Butterfly bushes.
Crocuses.
Daffodils.
Delphinium.
Hostas.
Hydrangeas.
Lavender.
Peony.
Shasta daisies.
Tulips.

Nothing says miracle like a perennial.

Surrounding the side and back lawns were trees thick enough for bears and deer to roam, home to any number of uncounted birds. My back deck was large and comfortable. I painted there. Served family meals there. Listened to and watched birds wing from branch to branch, tree to tree. I spent every season outside there. Even in winter, Rob cleared the path of snow to the grill. Even in winter as it snowed, I would photograph from that deck, aiming the lens of my camera towards the woods.

II.

This is the first spring in the new place I live and it is industrial in design. No real gardens. A small slice of lawn, overly planned. Antiseptic. What was I thinking when I moved here?

III.

A need arises within me as I finish the 6th week of staying home. This pandemic has me craving the familiar.

The way the third stair from the top creaked.
The way birds made nests on the light fixtures.
How light settled and silvered the leaves of old growth trees.
The way I knew a storm was coming by hearing the birds grow industrious.
The hum of the generator as it tested itself every Sunday morning.
The way silence settled like an old friend each evening.

Nothing says safety like home.

#SOL17: Birds Sung to Me

Night, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

"On starless nights, one can feel like a loose array of limbs and purpose, and seem smaller, limited to what one can touch."   ― from Diane Ackerman's  "Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day"

I. 

It was time to let go of our house where light fell through familiar windows and each creak of the staircase I knew by heart. It was time to pack away all that could not be carried further. Such cargo weighed too much and I carried it too far. Some truths took greater time to surface. Sea deep. They resided where sunlight did not penetrate. Oceanographers called this the bathypekagic zone. Poets knew it as the midnight zone. I, like every other widow, simply called it the blue-black absence of love. 

Across the last two years, grief remained a spiraling affair.  At times a darkness rose up to reclaim and then release me. Claimed and released over and over and somehow each time the sudden pain of it stunned me. The center I once knew by heart was blown wide open after Rob died making it hard to find my balance in the dark.

II.

And yet, I stood 
          at the open window tonight
                               where the fall of late light
                               felt familiar,
                                      memories remained bittersweet,
                                       and the sharp desire to be still
                                       pressed against a need to move.  
                                       
Grief was a tension
that rose between then and next
leaving me only a slim truth:
Rob was dead and I was not.

Outside the window
           a pair of cardinals settled
                      on the limb of a bare tree
                 just beyond my reach
                 and sung to me.

As I listened even the darkness felt warm.

#SOL17: Home

(M.A. Reilly, 2016)

I know/there are days/when the only thing/more brave than leaving /this house/is coming back to it. -Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

I.

I love my home.

This house was new when we moved here--not yet a home. During the last 15 years, we made every crack, every chipped paint, ever scratch on the wooden floors.

We leave marks in life--transforming wood and siding; pipes and soffits from house to home.


II.

Everywhere I look I can see Rob, even among the new things he never knew--such as the kitchen table Devon and I bought after Rob died. I imagine Rob saying, Finally and I laughing. He grew to hate the round oak table we had for 14 years and wanted a change.

Now the table is gone. Devon and I rolled it out of the front door, placing on the street in early February, 2016 and in the matter of hours it and the four heavy oak chairs were gone.Someone had come along and claimed the set. We needed to make room for the hospital bed that Rob would need when he came home to die.

And thinking of this imagined exchange between Rob and me helps me to conjure my husband's voice--something I find more difficult to do as time passes. I can place him at the table--a cup of coffee before him in the Black Dog Cafe mug he had used for more than a decade. I can see him there and his hair is long, tied back with whatever piece of leather was handy, but I strain to hear him speak.

The sound of his voice is receding.


III.

Home is where I give my heart to craft the work and art I love, to spend an hour each evening having dinner with my son, to remember the too many memories that we have made here between these walls and beyond them.

Love, like life, are matters of the heart.

#SOL16: Bone and Heart

Devon sitting on the steps (2003)

I.


The second step from the top creaks. It seems hard to miss that step and as such it is now a familiar sound. A comforting sound. This has always been more home than house, faulty in its grace.

Only Rob, Dev and I have ever lived here. The house was new when we bought. Others that spring would outbid us and yet  Dave, the builder, sold it to us anyway. I'd like to think that he knew we were at our limit and that we would make this place he built a home. And we have.

We gave rise to that creak. We made it climbing up and down these stairs for the last 14 years. Bounding down and trudging up ladened with books and boxes and laundry and more times than I could count, the sleeping weight of a toddler. Time has loosened these stairs--caused the wooden treads to rub against the risers and stringers; to grind against the screws and nails that hold it all together.  And how odd it is that such a noise could be more solace than annoyance; more balm than pain?


II.


Rob climbed those stairs a year ago for the last time this month. He was unsteady on his feet and the climb up those stairs became too much for him to accomplish. We each did our best to not notice his unsteady and too heavy gait. We wanted it to be something temporary. We told one another how this set back would resolve itself with treatment. To pay note would have shifted the narrative from ever so hopeful to less so. And truly that bit of hope we held on to was more gift than not--more necessary than any pseudo cure the legion of doctors would prescribe and (un)prescribe.

On that last day he climbed the stairs, I washed him, washed his hair and we laughed at my clumsy attempts that morning. And how good it felt to laugh. He needed to sit  halfway through as holding his too-sick body up was too much to bear.  He could no longer manage such things. Even shaving become a chore and though I gave it a good try, he would take the razor from my hand and redo my first attempt. We were getting ready for what would be his first chemo treatment, as he had been cleared by the infectious disease doctor after five weeks of fighting a staph infection to finally receive treatment--treatment that would only land him back in the hospital in need of emergency thoracic surgery a week later. As the chemo stripped his body's defenses, the staph resurged growing into an abscess a millimeter from the right ventricle of his heart.

Rob would never see the second floor of our home again. Never walk up our stairs to our bedroom. Never sit in his favorite chair in the guest room which was more his study than not. Imagine that just seven weeks earlier he went up and down those stairs without a care. We each did.


III.


Late at night I listen, listen to welcome him home, as if his departed spiritual self might bear some weight when all things grow dark and the barriers between here and there grow thin. In the dark anything can happen, anything can be. Now and then I hear the tread of my now six-foot son take those stairs two at at a time well after midnight. He is in search of a glass of water, a glass of juice--and it will be the empty glass I find sitting in the sink the next morning that confirms this late night tale.

On his way up the stairs to his bedroom, I hear the creak and I think of Rob. I think how this home we made is part bone, part heart.

#SOL16: Time

“Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.” 

― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

I. 

A few days ago, Rob told me he had to de/institutionalize himself. He explained that when he came home he had to remember that food need not arrive at 7:30 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m. and it need not be delivered by someone in hospital garb or arrive on a tray. 

You can eat when you're hungry. 
Time need not be measured by the arrival of morning and evening meds. 

II.

Rob resting at home.

I think of the absolute distortion of one's reality that longtime hospitalization causes. Our friend Michael, who is staying with us was helping me to reposition Rob in his bed this morning. The sunlight pouring through the window was in Rob's eyes and he began to gesture. Michael went to lower the window blind thinking the sun was bothering Rob.  Rob stopped him saying how lovely the sunlight felt on his face. 

It's the simple things--sunlight warming your face...the familiar landscape out the window--that hospitals fail to provide. There is nothing idiosyncratic in a hospital. Uniformity rules.

I try to recall the light in the many hospital rooms where Rob stayed these last 50 days and recall the harsh artificial lights that were more typical. More expected regardless if he was in a room in ICU, the oncology floor, or a step-down unit. Windows were absent in the ICU, small and oddly placed in the step-down unit, and a bit larger on the oncology floor. Nonetheless,  the single window was far enough away from the bed that any warmth and light was greatly diffused, if felt at all. 

III.

Home helps us to recall what we like. 
Home reinforces that we have interests, positions, purposes, preferences.  
Home asserts our agency in pronounced and subtle ways.

#SOL16: I've Been to Sea Before

I've Been to Sea Before (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I.

50 days ago when Rob left home for the hospital, I could not know, nor anticipate the changes we all are going through, and that the man who would return home today would be so dramatically different from the one who left. What strikes me most as I look at him now asleep in the hospital bed that has been set up in our family room is the immense difference those 50 days have wrought.  How did I not see this?

He has been sleeping since he arrived home this afternoon and refuses to wake up. Seeing him here again surrounded by all that is so very familiar emphasizes the somber differences.  My husband is leaving and there is nothing I can do to stop it--to stop his death. 

(There I have written it and what does it help?)

II.

I feel a bit foolish thinking how I fretted so this morning at the supermarket. 7:30 a.m. and there I was giving great thought to the foods I would make for Rob, forgetting that he doesn't eat like he once did, nor certainly the three smaller meals a day with wholesome snacks in between that typified his diet prior to this last hospital stay.  Before, cooking whole grain foods, giving him fresh fruits cups and julienned vegetables, and making sure that each meal had some protein comprised a good portion of my day.  I thought if I did it all just right, held up my bargain with God, that somehow this would make the difference. Tonight I know I have failed. God failed too. 

How can the world let this good man die? 


III.

Each night the three of us ate together and I spent hours talking with Rob, listening to him read aloud pages from Palle Yourgrau's A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein, or a poem, or a section from the NY Times, or a page from a Korean Zen book he said I most needed hear.  

"You need to take care of yourself, better," he'd warn me. "I am.""No, you're really not. You are too much in your mind."

Rob's Zen Bowl.

And it was such a conversation that led us to the ritual of Rob reading aloud from Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn. As I opened it tonight to read, I find a folded piece of paper Rob must have inserted 2 months ago and I touch the paper as if it were some type of communion. A host that binds us.


I begin reading one of the letters near where we left off:  

Your mind is like the sea. When the wind comes, there are very big waves. When the wind dies down, the waves become smaller and smaller until finally the wind disappears altogether and the sea is like a clear mirror...When you keep a clear mind, the whole universe is you, you are the universe.

Tonight I am all big waves and sick, sick stomach. 
Tonight I am extremes. 

I am the sea howling,

                                   the sea disappearing. 

Seeing Is Not Merely Looking

Puddle  (M.A. Reilly, Augusta, NJ, 2013)

"The question is not what you look at but what you see." - Thoreau

When I return home after traveling, I often spend the first morning out photographing what is local, known, familiar.  After three weeks in Europe, returning home had me itching to try my hand at seeing, not merely looking at the familiar.  With the shifts in time, I knew I would be up early, so I set aside the first few hours in the morning to practice seeing, again.

Patterns (M.A. Reilly, Devon, England, 2013)

After Stonehenge (M.A. Reilly, Amesbury, Wiltshire, 2013)

 I am reminded each time I make images in places new to me, how unfamiliar seeing feels.  I am always looking, not necessarily always seeing and this becomes so clear when I am initially in a new place.  I have to learn its ways. The quality of light is often different.  The geometry of space, unknown and untested.  Nothing baffles me more than cities.   The canyon-like geometry of Manhattan is simply not the definition of city when in Rome, or Florence, or London.  My images made in cities are more about looking, and less about seeing. I just don't see as well in cities.

The land, be it in Italy or England, is always somewhat familiar, regardless of location.  The way light falls across large spaces of curved earth may be different from what I know from home, but there is a familiarity to it nonetheless.  I see it.  I don't merely look at it.

Seeing is story-making. Looking is not.

Settling (M.A. Reilly, Amesbury, Wiltshire, 2013)

Making images is somewhat about line, texture, pattern and color--but more so about the exchange of
energy between the subject and myself.


Words fail me and I wish I could explain it better, but what I understand is that I simply feel the energy arcing between the landscape and myself.

I wonder if similar exchanges of energy hold true for other photographers? Singers? Painters?

Perhaps, you?







Here are a few images I made this morning:

House, Field, and Sunflowers (M.A. Reilly, Augusta, NJ, 2013)

Morning at Lake (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2013)

Joy (M.A. Reilly, Augusta, NJ, 2013)

Truck (M.A. Reilly, Augusta, NJ, 2013)