Synthesis

Hand me that lavender, love. I want to hold its petals and bracts. I want to breathe in its delicious smell from my cupped hand and savor the moment that becomes suspended with its aroma.

Sleep sweetly, sleep soundly. Dream of lemon rinds and cloudless skies.

Do not find complaint, for this life is as the topsoil in a a farmer's hands, rich with decayed organisms and roots and life; his fingerprints become black and stained with velvet dirt that makes up the Earth's chewy crust.  This life is rich. It is messy and dark, it is teaming with rot as it hosts the existence of multitudes.

This life is like the topsoil in a farmers hands, cradled, creviced, and completely dirty.

Rest now. Your lavender grew from this life. Every good thing does.

A yearning, found nearly hopeless but not quite.

The escape is simple: create.

I distinguish myself from the rodents who run amuck in their wire cages by creating. Thoughts, words, ideas, dreams. These fluid graces that permeate the human experience by inviting the mind to escape, or rather, enrich it.

However, it seems that creativity necessitates that thing which our modern lives best thieve from us - our time. My question becomes how does one reconcile these seeming polarities? And that is where I am stuck.

Because I can think for myself as I type and scan, drive and wash and sweep. A lack of daydreaming is not the issue. The issue is that I do not find the time in order to capture these daydreams, nor that to challenge them. They just are. They just exist. So then, to what end? They just...are? I suggest that dreams, thoughts, and ideas are meant to be discussed, encouraged, or provoked. They are meant to be used as fodder for conversations, bricks to lie relationship foundations. Ideas and visions give us something to talk about with one another, whether we agree upon it or not. 

And so a person who does and does without the creating bit, without this showing of one's soul in tangible form, seems to have missed something very important about life at its very core. 

They seemed to have, in fact missed it altogether. That part that makes us distinctly human.

So let's take a secretary (or Administrative Professional, if we like that better) and put her behind a desk for 40 hours a week. Say she's ambitious, she starts a business and does that on top of her full time job. She's married, has a dog, and there are responsibilities to uphold. In order to do all of this she sleep a full eight hours every day. 

Which leaves her an average of 4 hours a day (after accommodating getting ready in morning and cooking dinner at night) with which to create. One can argue driving takes up a quarter of that, which may be fair.

But that still leaves 3, and if cut in half to accommodate errands and the like, 90 minutes. An hour and a half, on average, each day to create. Energy may be lacking but one could argue that the creative process recharges the mind. 

And so. 

A few thoughts on the advantages of an office

Today was an accomplished one. Perhaps it's that type of measure in my mind - whether I feel as though I've "done" something - that I need to stop. But until I can forcibly retract this need to feel productive I will still base the merit of my day upon how much I did.

Once I understood basic loans terms like down payment and PMI, or how significant the "flood zone" was, it doesn't seem that finding a house could be that difficult. But what I have learned is that timing is everything. And so part of my productive day included me driving by the only house in the area we like that is in our price range. Horrified at its obvious lack of curb appeal, I forced myself to drive by it several times. I slowed each time and strained my eyes to see if I was really looking at a half-brick facade behind the car port. Eventually I had to drive away and leave the beast alone because the neighbor was starting to squint her eyes too hard at me. If we're to be neighbors one day, I'd better not appear too eager too soon.

So there was that.

The rest of the day consisted of me smiling and scanning documents at my desk like any good secretary (or is it PC to say Administrative Assistant these days?) would do. The list of tedious projects grew like a plant with just the right amount of sunlight and water until I broke down and went for a walk around the block. I caught my second wind and all was well again as I sat to finish the excel spreadsheet that details contracts signed in appropriate months.

Running my wheels like a small rodent in its cage has become natural to me now. Well, I can't really say natural - perhaps the better word is routine.

And so.

Pleasantly, perfunctory

These calm nights are the ones we look to for reprieve. These calm nights are the ones we hoard in our back pockets and walk around with in the middle of next week's transcript. These calm nights remind our spirits that rest rejuvenates.

That rest rejuvenates,

as we are able to reflect,
re-imagine,
retreat.

It's remembering that I can scoop a part of my spirit and bring it closer to my mind, that these two parts of me are not, in fact, separate. That after all this work, all that time, so many hiccups, that I am still Laura. And given enough times like these to chip away at all of the external debris I've gathered along this route, I am still Laura at the end of this night.

With my husband reading his book over there by the light source. And the dog with his cocked head on my arm. With this patchwork blanket across my lap and its felt side down so that my legs burn with heat, with the silence between us all acting as a basin of peace, with my head against the recliner.

Arise anew

I sit in the final rays of this afternoon's beloved sunlight as Matthew throws the tennis ball and Smokey runs after it. Incredibly nimble and fast, the dog approaches the ball within seconds but he only stops it; he does not yet know to bring it back for fetch.

The pollen is thick on our patio set and everywhere else. Wiping it down does little to cease its spread across our yard or ourselves. And yet here we are, outside in this warm light and the neighborhood alive with birds and dogs and children. We have neighbors across the fence. When Smokey barks at them, someone barks back. An embarassed girl giggles and says, "Mom!"

Tennis balls, sun rays, pollen, the dog.

Refresh, spirit of mine. Allow yourself to heal.

A tutorial.

Muddled.

That is what happens when one tries writing about something of which you are in the midst. The theory is that you are yet so close to the experience that, like an impressionist's painting, all you detect are dabs and dots of colors that make no sense. Months, years, decades later perhaps you will stand back and reflect and try to make sense of the event or its series, if there is even sense to be made about the whole thing. And so after all that time you will have that, at least. Sense.

So then, I have decided to share my method of buttermilk biscuits to avoid rummaging around with words like death and legacy, both of which have monopolized my mind quite enough this week.

Step one: Gather your ingredients. It is simple, really: you need 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, 2 1/4 cups self-rising flour, and 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk.

Step two: Cube the butter. Make sure it is right out of the fridge, as this is an important element to the method.

Step three: Put the self-rising flour in a bowl and the cubed butter in with it. Use your hands to cut the butter into the flour until it looks coarse. Almost like cornmeal, but not as granulated.

Step four: Put butter and flour mixture into the fridge for ten minutes, make sure oven is 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step five: Take out of fridge. Incorporate buttermilk and flour mix together with a wooden spoon. Only mix until all ingredients are wet.

Step six: Pour lumpy mess onto a well-floured surface. Immediately begin a 3-part envelope fold, alternately horizontal and vertical folds. Do this 6 times at the most. Make a square shape with dough and leave it at around 3/4 of an inch thick.

Step seven: Cut out biscuit shapes with a 2-3 inch diameter and place closely together on a lightly-greased cookie sheet.

Step eight: Put into oven for 14 minutes. Take out, brush with melted butter. Enjoy.

There, you see? Hot topic, cold prose.

For seven minutes I avoid thinking about Jim's death, the notes of affirmation we found in his stack of stuff, Erickson's developmental stages, and the dull sadness that seeps into a life without active creativity.

The biscuits are really very good.

On discarded articles, abandoned unceremoniously.

Today we put the remaining miscellaneous of your deceased grandparents' things in a dumpster with a capacity of four tons. 

I don't know how you felt because we worked hard at it for 90 minutes and then went back inside to shower and eat without talking about it. But I saw you kept the wooden sign with her initials.

At first I could tell it was junk we were moving. There was a pile high with inflatable inner tubes and rags, half-full cans full of paint, and the like. It wasn't until after all of that when we got to your grandfather's work benches and your grandmother's books that I was struck by the task at hand. The partial cans of motor oil and the old Maxwell coffee containers labeled nuts, bolts, and nails, the pegboard intended for use later on, and the old work shirt I found strewn in the corner - they all told me a story. The pieces of his life in this barn told me how much time he spent out there tinkering, thinking. I stood and held a pile for the dumpster and looked around. I imagined this man I never met, toying with odds and ends and electronics. I wondered at his thoughts in those hours of solitary time. 

And there were your grandmother's books. Surely, these were once kept carefully in the house, safe from the weather and musk and rodents. But someone could not bear to throw them out and they were brought in here for safekeeping as they worked the courage to rid her things. The books; many titles of nonfiction and National Geographic. There were children's books, which I imagine she might have read to you. There were so many Reader's Digest compilations. And I saw a glimpse into the interests of a women I have only heard about. I wondered if she read all of the titles. I did not recognize them.

Like clockwork, you and I trucked back and forth from garage to dumpster with our arms full of others' lives. We passed one another midway and might have glanced or not. The barn slowly began to look empty, to show its walls and floor, and stairs to the second floor. 

We reached the maximum level on the dumpster. "Small and heavy things," you told me. "Small and heavy things." And we found more oil cans. We found old batteries. We took a house fan from the 1950s and tossed it over the edge. 

"Small and heavy things," you said.

In the end it was the books. I hate to say that, it hurts to admit it. But in the end we took the books, too.