Things that gave me goosebumps this week
Stonechat, garden magic, and how my husband made me cry
It’s been a week full of lovely surprises. On Tuesday, Scott and I celebrated our (gasp!) 30th anniversary and he absolutely wins the prize for giver of gifts you didn’t know you’d been pining for.
He took me to a music store to rent a cello.
A cello!
I played cello for one year in fourth grade and adored it. Loved it so much I didn’t even mind lugging it several blocks to school, up and down the long ramps of a pedestrian bridge over 6th Avenue in Aurora, Colorado. The next year I moved to a new school (the final year of an experiment to put 5th graders in junior high) and I don’t remember why I dropped cello at that point. Maybe it wasn’t offered at the middle school? Anyway, in middle school I fell hard in love with acting. By high school, drama was my world, and I never really considered signing up for orchestra.
But I went on loving cello like crazy. To this day, nothing raises goosebumps for me more quickly than a cello concerto. My physical response to the sound reminds me of the time my friend Alice, who is 100% Irish and has lived her whole life in New York, spent a summer in San Francisco. She said the climate there, the cool mornings, the fog—it suited her so completely that she felt like she was at home on a cellular level. That’s how the sound of a cello makes me feel. Like my cells are singing.
And Scott, because he knows all my stories, has kept that information tucked away for years and years. He thought I might like to give it a try again, just for fun, just to see.
Did I cry? You bet I cried.
So here I am with sore fingers and a full heart. Looking for a teacher, learning from Youtube in the meantime. Since it’s a rental, I can noodle around with it for a month or two, just to see. I’ve been dealing with some joint pain in my hands this past year (it started after our wicked Covid/house-move combo last May), and we don’t know which way cello practice will go—it might be good for my hands, or the opposite. We’ll see. I thrive upon try-it-out situations. Nothing lights me up more than getting to learn something new. And this is all new. Fourth grade was a long time ago.
If you’re wondering what present I gave Scott for this anniversary milestone: a rock.
I got him a rock.
A big ole rock.
Or rather, the promise of a big ole rock, because he gets to pick it out himself. And unlike me (who typically operates at rocket speed from idea to fulfillment), Scott enjoys taking his time, lingering over a choice.
Whenever we look at people’s yards on our walks, I drool over their raised beds, their fruit trees, their lush flowering shrubs. Scott’s gaze goes straight to the ornamental boulders. Look at that big-ass rock. It’s really the only landscaping feature that interests him, though he’s enthusiastically supportive of my cramming the yard full of as many native plants as it will hold. So now that we have our own bit of earth, which I’m turning into habitat as fast as seeds can grow, I thought it was time he had a big ole rock of his own.
Meanwhile, in the garden…
Surprises everywhere I look. We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of moving into this house, and the yard is still revealing its secrets. The columbines planted by the former owner are nearly shoulder-high and full of buds that poise like butterflies above slender stalks. The small lupine plant I tucked into the front yard has become a massive shrub, lifting its tall blue spires above the sidewalk, humming with native bees. Here and there, a Californa poppy pokes its bright head between the spires. Goosebumps, I tell ya.
The first strawberries are ripe—the tiny alpines I grew in a big tub at the rental house. They’re a thousand times happier here: lightly filtered southern exposure. Every morning I pick a small handful and eat them right there in the garden. Nothing tastes better than a sun-warmed berry. The blueberries and raspberries are ripening, and I’ve put in a little black currant bush whose progress I’m excited to watch. As for native berries, we’ve got serviceberry, red flowering currant, snowberry, thimbleberry, elderberry, and huckleberry. Basically, berry bushes are my version of a big ole rock.
Last year was a really hard year. The move, while long longed-for, took quite a physical toll. I didn’t start feeling like myself again until February, around the time the first crocuses appeared. I needed the restfulness and uplift of this spring: my new book well underway, my garden shimmering with life, the
Middlemarch class enlivening my weeks, the Odyssey readaloud infusing merriment into our morning lesson time.Whenever I get a respite period like this, there’s always a part of me bracing for the next shoe to drop. Can’t help it—we’ve been walloped by an awful lot of falling shoes. (I mean, hasn’t everyone?) But in the garden I kind of forget to be on the lookout. Which is really good for me. The penstemon is getting lush, and the blue-eyed grass is winking above the bearberry.
Surprise in the mail
My beautiful friend Mary Elder Jacobsen sent me a copy of her new book, a collection of poems called Stonechat. Oh! It’s gorgeous. Mary and I were poetry students in an MFA program years ago. I admired her work so much: her delicate images, her softly devastating turn of phrase. In the years since, I’ve enjoyed seeing her poems pop up here and there. And now, gosh, I’m blown away by her book. Reading her poems is like listening to cello music: the soft mournful murmur, the upswelling surge of joy. She gives me the shiver of recognition that happens only when a poet puts words to a feeling I didn’t know I had.
I choose you, sings the weaverbird. Oh yes, and yes again! I do, I do, I do.
It was Mary who introduced me, back in school, to Mona Van Duyn’s poem “Letters From a Father,” with its incredible last line of “So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss.” As I savor Mary’s poems, it strikes me that more than anyone I know, she has been wooed by the world—its softness, its small rustlings, its illuminated blades. And she catches hold of those gifts with words. I’m in awe.
Some bristle, she writes. Some curse. Some sing.
She sings.
P.S. Speaking of I do…
I want to attach a picture of our columbines to share in the columbine love!
Happy anniversary!!! And many happy returns of the day.