The day that was today

I can’t say that it started out well, but it was one of those ordinary days that turned out to be perfect. I was woken up by my younger daughter, Frances, at the usual 6:30 am, crawling into my side of the bed without any intention of letting me doze off again. “I’m hungry” was her usual insistent plea and most mornings I am happy to get up but having gone to sleep less than five hours earlier I was in no mood to budge. I lay there, hoping she would go way or that my stirring husband would have pity on me. A moment later I was pouring milk over a bowl of cereal, trying to keep my eyes semi-closed as I plotted to lie down on the couch and get back to an unconscious state while she ate her cereal. I have had this plan before but it has never panned out like it did this time. Over the next two hours I was only half awake to the goings on in the house while I (miracle #2) lay there virtually undisturbed. I heard things as if I were dreaming them and paid no attention: Frances dropping something that made a loud crash; the cats wreaking havoc knocking things over; Grace getting up and eating breakfast after kissing me good morning. The next thing I knew Dave was asking if I’d like to go back to bed and I was gratefully slipping into the bedroom without my disappearance being noticed. Miracle #3.

I know this doesn’t sound like a bad start and it wasn’t, but when Mom sleeps in until 10:30, the day has a way of getting off on the wrong foot. Frances came in to get me up again and this time she was out of patience. “I have been playing alone for hours!” she lamented and I couldn’t argue with her. The regular routine was off and that would mean probable tantrums from her, I thought to myself, as she whined about wanting to watch a movie, throwing herself on the floor and making a big show of her grief over the word No. I tried to cajole her while holding firm to No and getting my underwear on. After some negative thinking about how I’d screwed up the whole day by sleeping late, I realized all was not lost, since there we were heading out the door with a picnic basket.

We drove the mile and a half to Eaton Canyon where there is still a little water to play in. The short hike from the car was hot and both girls were almost starting to complain until they saw the stream and started skipping to the glistening pools ahead. The water felt cool in rubber shoes and we walked carefully downstream, our feet upsetting multitudes of tadpoles with every step. I held Frances’ hand as she negotiated slippery stones but after a few minutes she was confident on her own. We sat down on warm dry rocks in a little shade and ate sandwiches.

Eventually we worked our way back up to where we the stream was trickling along in a wide open area without any plants poking in. There were other kids playing too and parents sitting idly by as if we were all at the playground. We watched our kids fascination with catching tadpoles grow and their clothes get increasingly soggy and had trouble caring about what else might have been planned for the afternoon. I let go of my ambitions of running an errand or cleaning up the mess we’d left at home as I sat there with the sun beating down on my skin and the cool water on my feet keeping me in just the right balance between hot and cold, dry and wet. There was a family of acorn woodpeckers in the oaks around us so I was happily waiting to get good looks at them with my binoculars. Eventually I did and even sketched the birds a few times in my notebook.

We stayed in that spot for what turned out to be hours but felt more like minutes. Grace got really good at catching the tadpoles and would hold them in her hands for a moment or two before letting them go back in the water. She was also busy making sure all the other kids set theirs free. Frances gave up holding her dress out of the water and then took it off and before I knew it she was sitting in the little pool half naked.

The smell of hot sage and eucalyptus was blowing by on a nice breeze that was just cool enough to keep us there. We made friends, had meaningful conversations, learned a few things about tadpoles and how to catch them, learned how to pan for gold and saw with our own eyes tiny flakes of it in the stream. Apparently people used to pan for gold during the great depression to make ends meet. For us, it was a nice metaphor for the day.

Cremation

The birds were talking to me today but not showing much of themselves. I was woken by the sound of a love mourning dove (sic) around 5:45 am. As the girls and I went out into the backyard to play in the afternoon, a mockingbird flew out from behind and landed on the wire in front of us. Then as we worked in the garden, a scrub jay landed very close, on the cement wall not three feet from where we stood. He flew over us and onto the fence at the back of the garden and Grace asked him for a feather. Later I heard a bird I didn’t recognize as the girls and I took a walk down the block. It was a short call, very uniform, and very high. Another bird was also calling at the same time and I guessed it was a woodpecker.

Later on, after dinner I went out to water the garden and heard the tell tale squawks of parrots, but they were behind trees and I could not see them. I finally made out five birds flying in the distance, but by then they were so far away I could only identify them as parrots from their quick flapping. As I left the garden at dusk, I was pushed to light a fire and burn the wing of the chicken that I had thought was a hawk’s which was now just a pile of feathers that I was still hanging onto. I had been thinking of burning them for a while but felt I needed a plan. In that moment it seemed simple. Make a little fire with dead leaves on the cement outside my studio and throw the feathers into the fire. As I began to set it up, two scrub jays were calling, again out of view, very urgently back and forth in the large oak just opposite my studio. I spoke to the birds: “Here I light a fire and offer myself to the birds. I ask permission to cremate the wings and feathers that have been presented to me. I offer myself with gratitude for my gifts as a midwife into death for many small creatures. I acknowledge that these deaths may have been painful and in this cremation I set that pain free, that it may be turned into positive energy for a new purpose.” As I lit the fire and as it took off and momentarily became a large flame I gave thanks to the fire and acknowledged it’s powerful ability to transform physical matter into smoke, ash and ember.

The fire kept wanting to go out so I paid a lot of attention to it and gave thanks to the wind for helping give more energy to the fire and I put a lot of energy into keeping it going long enough for all the feathers to burn. I felt good about my comfort with fire, to know how it burns and how to keep it going, but I also had to work at it because fire can be hard to control. There is no way of knowing what will happen. But I trust that everything will. Eventually, the fire will burn out.

And it did and I carefully gathered up the ashes and bits of bone that were left on the cement and carried them to my beloved compost pile. I spoke a few words as I placed the ashes on the pile, asking mother earth to take them back as I folded them into the dark dirt. Then I took the hose and washed off the remaining ash from the cement which now had a little yellowish mark where the fire had been. I thanked the water for it’s cleansing of the spot that was now a sacred spot for me.