The day before Christmas Eve I walked Omalola behind the shed and manure pile. The sun had dropped behind the horizon to pull in a darkness with presence. The clouds were low and heavy, threatening rain that never came. Morgen’s back was against the barn, her ears forward. She always watches when I’m out with the dogs. My excuses not to work with her suit me—mostly having to do with no energy or needing to write. The vet has reassured me that she is living a good life.
This year I crossed the threshold of seventy years. I’ve outlived my birth family. I took heed of each of their death years—35, 60, 69 wondering if I would step into the next year. For my seventieth birthday I pulled a pretty please on Bruce with a six-month-old puppy that needed a home. His breeder was placing her stock because she wanted to guarantee they had homes should something happen to her. So we brought Shoreland’s Weight of Glory, call name Aiden, into our lives. Something shifted between us when we gave him a bath this week after a romp in a muddy field, when I laid my hands over his entire body to soap him up. He seemed to settle. Just today he found his crate on his own and settled there while I was working on this.
Martin Shaw, a marvelous story teller, gifted me with Red Bead Woman, a story about an old woman who longed for a child, so she turned a mare’s tail plant into a daughter. There’s a prince, a sorceress, talking horse, and a hard-won happy resolution. Stories are medicine. They are a slant way for us to know ourselves. And these days I’m drawn to Shaw’s stories to find the wonder and longing that used to drive my poetry.
In another book, Bardskull, Shaw speaks about seventy:
Seventy seems grand, not old, not really. No one is sucking sweets under a blanket by the fire. The old I meet are not thinking they are at the end of their lives; they are still vital. But is to be dying to mean not being vital? I have to check that habitual thinking. I am presuming this vigour is a good thing. I find myself cheered by it. But what happens when it is the end of their lives, how do they click into that particular gear? I’ve seen more morbidity in a twenty-year-old goth. These elders tell me to live as if I expect to be three hundred. (130).
That sounds about right. Though I work hard to live in the present and not to let the Killjoy, the knowing that life can collapse any time, that collapsing doesn’t always mean sudden death, I work to not let that fear ruin the joy in the present, the gift of Bruce and the animals and the farm. As I’ve said before, the pressure to do what Aiden’s breeder did, find homes for my stuff, at least the excess, is there but I stall and do nothing about it. There are material goods that bring comfort and memories that I don’t care to dispose of just yet.
Shaw is a rare teacher in my life who sees me and has drawn good writing from my fingers. I read his books for the language and vision and longing.
When I crossed into 70 my hair started falling out, my face has captured those fine lines and the big ones are drawn down in a frown. My legs don’t like walking up stairs. When I step out of the car, I move like I could use a walker. Sleep is more hard work than pleasure. My wake time is now o’ dark thirty. Mild cognitive impairment when sleep has evaded me feels pretty real.
I have to think hard about this past year. Even as a young person stuff would just slip into my memory like a stone dropped in still water. If I look hard, I see the hardships. We said goodbye to Dolly-bird (my nickname for her) because her body wore out. Dolly was a dog her breeder and owner didn’t want. So a woman I was acquainted with, adopted her and posted a picture on Facebook. Dolly had a sad look to her, so we brought her home. She was a great walking companion. It was never difficult to walk her with the other dog. But she barked at Bruce every time he stood up.
But she broke our heart, especially Bruce’s, when we had to say goodbye.
We look for our feral cats every day to make sure they made it through the night. When I walk the dogs at night, their eyes catch my headlamp, often behind the garden. One night I even saw Tyger up in a tree. We worry a coyote or eagle might take them. Smudgie our black cat often settles in the bedroom. I like to think he’s guarding us from the dark things that can show up at night. Kali Zoo visits me in the bathroom because that’s the only place she’s safe from the dogs.
There were wonders in the sky and on the ground. The Northern lights exploded several times, and an opportunity to see the sky come alive with our eyes. This year the rainbows spoke me of how the ark is a sort of promise that God’s people were protected from the storm.
One morning while I was walking, the sun lit up the fog in the form of a white bow over our neighbor’s field. The light was telling me something, but I don’t know what it meant, other than the world is full of the Glory. When this appeared, I was standing by the pipeliners, who didn’t seem to notice.
For several years Ni Gas had been planning to plug the old pipeline with concrete and lay a fresh pipe to transport natural gas. It was a wonder to see the giant cranes that rolled the pipe into the ground and care they took to preserve the topsoil. Sometimes at night we could see the welder’s torch off in the distance.
We watched planting and harvest, those big machines, as big and expensive as a house, plant and pick soybeans and corn. I know our technology is hard on the soil and water, but my gosh even the things we’ve made are awesome. And didn’t the prophet say that swords would be beaten into plowshares one day? Our neighbors, who are raising cattle while honoring the ground, offered to harvest our hay. They let the hay dry long enough so it didn’t mold or get dusty like previous crops. The bales are small enough to lift and carry.
A bald eagle visited us several times, landing in our poplar tree. Eagles have glided low when I walked the dog. An owl sat on the top of our dead pine tree. Was he an omen? Of what?
I’ve written about loneliness and rejection. Well, this year the horrible loneliness I’ve written about was sopped up in God’s presence and my commitment to let people come to me. And they did. My cousin Facetimed me for Christmas. I’ve been so out of touch with my New York family that I mistook one cousin for another. We’ve gotten old. And bald.
The summer, a neighbor dropped off flowers just because. I am taking another neighbor for a hair appointment, weekly. And though, it’s not always easy to get up and get to her house in the morning, I’m guaranteed some good talks.
At speech therapy I learned how important it is to talk to people for my cognition because adjusting my words and being according to the people, I’m with is good mental exercise. Two dear friends stayed overnight. And I befriended a local Orthodox priest, or did he befriend me? And there’s a group of horsewomen who meet for lunch every month. Two women from our former church have met with me every week on Zoom for the last few years.
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We called back our contractor, Ric Anderson, to install a new shed roof because it’s a building we want to preserve. The nail holes in the roof were rusting through. Bruce put in a dog fence so the dogs have a place to run and play, though now it’s mud season, it’s not being used much.
Finally, we invited our pastor to bless our house. We should have done it when we moved in, but we didn’t have a pastor at the time. For years the house wasn’t very welcoming. The blessing, just plain scriptures that applied to each room, and the word spoken over me: There is therefore no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus also lightened me. As a girl I used to long to go home to be with Jesus. Since I’ve moved to the farm, I knew to confess those feelings as not good because the life he gave us is good, a bit of paradise, at least for now. That death wish has lifted.
And of course there’s Mr. Bruce, who knows what it means to be poured out and silent, covered by late afternoon sun and with me forty years.
Here at the end of the year, Eugene Terekhin writes about how a How a Russian Circle Dance Taught Me That True Theology Begins with Bowing by drawing the analogy that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are constantly circling around each other and bowing, like people do in a Russian circle dance. He says:
If we fixate on the external — the mask, the appearance — we fail to sense the heartbeat of the world: the Secret Fire that animates all things. But if we catch even a glimpse of that Fire, we begin to understand hypostasis — that which stands under.
In that sacred moment, we cannot help but bow down to the icon in the Other.
The more we do this, the more the external world is healed. Our ability to see the invisible is the greatest power in the world. We can wield it every time we look around. The moment we truly see what lies beyond the external, we can’t help but bow. There is no other way to do the eternal dance.
With so much unraveling in our culture, what a simple hope this is—to bow down before the holy image that each one of us carries. And not only that, but the mysterious seal put on us with God becoming incarnate, His choosing human flesh to dwell. The world shines with shook foil as Gerard Manley Hopkins says. And even if our eyes have not been graced with literally seeing uncreated light, the eyes peering out from our faith has seen it in God’s people, and the world around us, a world that is full of God’s love, a world that declares God’s glory.
When the sun rose, on Christmas day, the clouds were bathed in a pale pink you could barely see. If the clouds had opened up, maybe there would have been a spectacular sunrise, pink and orange bubbling across the sky. But the clouds muted any color but this vague pink. I could feel the sun top the horizon and the day turned plain gray.
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