Benedictine Thanksgiving

Photo courtesy of Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale.

On Thanksgiving Day, a lone swan floats on the lake. It doesn’t seem right; swans mate for life. Maybe the bird is injured. Maybe someone has shot at him. He is magnificent floating out there alone. My mother had come along with me to the ranch this Thanksgiving, a kind of experiment for me in not having to decide which parent to spend the holiday with for once. I just put them together. And then I sit and translate for them, my parents, as I had done my whole life. 

 After a while, we want an excursion, a diversion, and we decide to leave the swan to the solitary waters and take the cream separator to the nuns at the Abbey of St. Walburga at Virginia Dale.  Sister Marie Michael had mentioned to dad that she wanted a cream separator one time when he was up at the abbey helping her with her cattle. It just so happened he had one in the milk barn, left over from some auction or from his childhood on the ranch in Gunnison. He had cleaned it up and gotten it into working order for the sisters.

My father and I stand on the step of the abbey milk barn, spinning the handle of the cream separator to see that it still works. My mother is around the corner by the chicken coop rubbing the belly of a black and white cat happily rolling on to his back, paws upward.  The sunlight is more brilliant at high altitude. The crisp cold air is crisper. The cloudless sky covers the rugged land of Virginia Dale like an upside down china teacup. We think the abbey has been abandoned that day. We seem to be the only ones around.

Then we chance to glance up at the granite hillside and see a processional of long black habits following a priest in a cream-colored robe and brandishing an enormous cross. They glide along the ledges and lichen covered rocks, descending the hill two by two seemingly floating in their costumes in silence through the crisp sunlight. They proceed by us, their witnesses, not acknowledging us. One black robe drops away and floats toward us. Sister Marie Michael, friendly, warm, bridges the space between this world where I stand with my broken family and the surreal world of the Benedictines floating still quietly now across the hill toward the monastery. Sister Marie Michael wants a jersey cow, for the cream, to make butter and cheese… this nun, who wears a cowboy hat over her habit.

One brilliant summer day, the sisters, all farmers, are out in the fields working. They prop open the abbey doors with lichen-covered rocks. The mountain lion wanders into the abbey chapel because it is as cool as any cave or den. The dotted skin soft around her whiskers is splashed with triangles of pastel from afternoon stained glass. Her powerful tail sways. Her green diamond eyes nearly close as her lanky body relaxes upon the altar. Fear or wonder, Benedictines must see the presence of this beautiful and fierce wild animal in the chapel as an omen or sign. How I would be tempted to leave her napping until she saw fit to wander back through the big wooden doors, padding her furry toes across the stone floor and out to hunt in the hills for her dinner, a jack rabbit or cotton tail.

Instead the Division of Wildlife comes and shoots her with a tranquilizer gun. Her nap deepens, and two men lift her by her enormous paws and carry her out through the chapel doors past the bronze statue of Saint Walburga perched on granite and out into the mountains near by, where she sleeps it off, waking no doubt disoriented and groggy, looking down on the chapel where she had napped, where lights now shine out into the twilight as the sisters prepare for vespers, the lion no doubt featuring prominently in their evening prayers. 

Summer Heat and Fire (Arms)

I am sitting on a picnic blanket with my friends in City Park. It’s a bizarre 104 degrees for the fourth day in a row. I’ve barely enjoyed any free time this summer and I force myself to let go of my worries and just be with my friends, embrace the heat, be under a tree with a Mexican beer and a lime.

Summertime. The living should be easy. I’m not in a refugee camp. I’m not living with an abusive husband. I’m not in a war zone or a famine zone. I have a lot to be content about, relative to the rest of the world.

Yet when I look up at the sky, it is orange with fire from the hills and my nose burns from smoke and some hot, hot wind blows like in a lifeless dessert—blows in such a way that the sounds of the bass and the saxophone off the band shell get scattered around in the air. And the sound becomes unintentionally more like Orentte Coleman than John Coltrane.

We are leaning back on our elbows and eating fresh cherries and I’m taking photos of Carol in my straw hat and listening to Jay, so happy, telling me about the illustrated Blake he found at the used bookstore and some rare perfect vinyl he picked up on his walkabout Capitol Hill. “I want to deliberately concentrate on slowing my life down,” he says later. I laugh. I come to him to be like it should be, no texts, no emails, no TV, no corporate America. Here’s a man who reads poetry aloud in gardens and listens to records and walks everywhere. But he feels the world buzzing around him on our iPhones, posting photos to instagram, tweeting, and facebooking, and he just wants to be still enough to escape even the idea of it all.

It is good to be with these friends and to be still for hours on end. The wind picks up and dumps seeds from weeds and plants and trees in our hair. We look like nymphs with little seedlings purposely placed for a pastoral lawn painting. Bikes and coolers and umbrellas and little kids in braids, dogs and Frisbees, all colors of people, all sizes, happily splay about the grass. How can such a cheery scene feel so much like it is about to unravel through some uncontrollable force?

The music finishes and we are just lingering on our backs, just enjoying the ground beneath us, when maybe 100 people suddenly rush by us like they are running from a rainstorm. I look to the clouds for a sign of the storm. But it’s not weather that’s chasing them. What is it? I ask. I heard gunshots, Jay says. Someone’s shooting over there, someone explains. I have a moment where I think, should I run, too? Is there a Virginia Tech-Columbine-Beltway-style sniper in the park? My instinct says no.

We linger longer, watching night descend on the historic electric fountain on the lake, talking about what Denver was like in the 1890s, talking about the old street cars that ran up 17^th from Union Station and our old dead relatives who lived here in the generations before us and heard the peacocks crowing in the zoo on the edge of the park. We are vaguely aware of the dozens of cop cars entering the far side of the park. We are watching an ambulance go by, with no siren. That’s always a bad sign, when the ambulance doesn’t see the need to rush. No lives are at stake anymore. But we do not know until later, one is gone. A police officer breaking up a gang fight is gone and dead.

Today, another heat record is set, but I feel some relief will come as the sky darkens and the rain falls for barely a minute this afternoon. And then I see the lightning popping and hitting the ground. The Flatirons are now on fire. The wind is whipping the smoke through town. I hear more sirens and see more emergency lights. And the summer feels less and less hopeful each day.

Unmemorable Moments of My Life

Spring light. No filter. Photo by Molly Miller.

I close my eyes and I see a Mexican bakery on Division Street where they sell breakfast breads in highly unnatural colors, sweet powdery rolls in pink and yellow. I think, if I move to this apartment upstairs, I will come to this bakery all the time—an alternate reality I imagine, but a future that never happens. I stand on Division Street outside the apartment building where I will never live, in front of the bakery where I will never go each morning, on a day in April when it is very chilly. Silvery spring light, changed almost suddenly from winter light, falls on everything like tinsel. 

In spring, sometimes I close my eyes and I hear Jan Votypka say, “These crows have flown in from Russia, and it will rain within one week.” And sometimes I close my eyes and I see the long windows of a yellow inn casting their shapes on the parlor floor, the heavily starched white sheets on my bed upstairs, the terraced field and lazy river valley below, the bulbous green trees with their dark trunks and their long fat afternoon shadows.

Like an unwanted dream, I am stuck indefinitely with a memory of this inn I visited in a little known corner of Bohemia somewhere near the Polish border. This place where I went one weekend in my life years ago, where absolutely nothing of any significance happened to me, it comes to me like a ghost when I am alone, and for no reason that I know of, I am taken back there, to a basically unmemorable time and place. I could never even find it on a map now, but I went out hiking and I saw bunkers in the forest leftover from the war, and I saw the eerie spotlights on the border and abandoned train tracks. And I wonder if this place in its beautiful river valley serenity on a warm and inviting afternoon has some kind of universal notion of how the war is always there and, worse, how the war goes away. I really don’t know. It both spooks me and comforts me, how it won’t leave me.

And the many more monumentally important and dramatic things that have occurred in my life that have simply fallen away into oblivion. What about those memories?  

remash:

333 | living ~ workstead

Beauty

Who needs #Whole Foods when you have Pacific Ocean Market? Thai basil, Thai eggplant, jalapeno, okra, fresh ginger, onion….and pig. Photos by Molly Miller on Instagram.

Grant Street Farm

Squatting makes you more comfortable with the idea that nothing is really yours.

My garden is a place I better not get too attached to, because it doesn’t belong to me. I have a history of squatting on other people’s land in the city in order to satisfy my urge to grow things. I don’t have a yard. I have a small stoop, which is good for a bit of container gardening. About ten years ago, my then neighbor Scout built some beautiful brick flowerbeds on the city land in front of our rowhouse, between the sidewalk and the street. And we garden there. The city has never complained that we’ve stolen this property. I’ve planted a flowering crab apple tree there, dozens of bulbs, tulips, hyacinths, iris, two rose bushes, lots of kitchen herbs and garlic and, one year, a bumper crop of beautiful yellow habaneros.

I still keep the bed going, but my itch to have more heirloom tomatoes than my CSA or my stoop containers can provide is strong. Last summer, some friends in the neighborhood invited me several times to potluck picnics in their garden, which also happens to be sort of a squatting situation. They have no yards either, since they live in a four-story apartment building. They made some arrangement with the owner of a vacant home lot across the street from their building, nestled between two adorable brick Victorian homes in West Wash Park. The owner said that he would allow a few neighbors to put in a few vegetable plots as long as they keep the weeds down and pay the water bill. This works out for the absentee lot owner since he’s technically responsible for weed control. Although, rumor has it he wasn’t that pleased with the community garden scene last year, and we just don’t know how long he’ll allow it to continue.

I claimed a plot there this year next to my friend’s plot and spent some of the weekend working some manure from the family ranch into “my” ground. I hope to grow just a few things—tomatoes and peppers and flowers, and spend the rest of the time keeping the weeds down, planting flowers around the edges, and keeping up the whole lot beyond my plot so we don’t get thrown out. 

Of course, it’d be easy enough to join a proper organized community garden. There’s one a short distance away at the Art Student’s League, also on Grant. But there’s something so beautiful about cultivating random strips of city land and empty lots.

Photos by Molly Miller & Instagram

Happiness Project Day One

On Saturday, I walk to my favorite bookstore (Tattered Cover), which happens to be next to my favorite record store (Twist & Shout). I buy The Happiness Project—a friend recommended it—and some vinyl (Merle Haggard Working in Tennessee 2011 and Desert Blues Saharan guitar players, including Tinariwen and an old favorite Ali Farka Toure). Then, I get tired and decide to wait for the bus instead of walk home. It’s four miles.

 I’m standing there on Colfax waiting for the bus and reading The Happiness Project and this elderly, marginally impoverished seeming black guy with a grizzly beard and a cheerful demeanor says to me, what is that some metaphysical thing you are reading? He’s a little rough around the edges, but he has some kind of refreshing brightness, both mental and spiritual, so I engage.

Well, yeah, maybe metaphysical is a stretch, but it’s a cool self-help book.

What’s it about?

Achieving happiness.

Well that’s all in your thoughts. It’s all love.  He elaborates some on that and he looks at me for my response.

Sounds right on.

Well, you’re not giving me any real feedback. He thinks I’m just humoring him. He pushes me to be real.  So where are you, what are doing with love, are you married, do you have kids or what?

No, and No. Do you?

Well, I’m an old man. I’ve been married three times and this latest one she’s the most challenging one yet…and he goes on some about her and concludes: It’s about love, that’s my theme song. Love is all there is. He looks at me and waits expectantly.

I don’t want him to think I’m not taking him seriously because I am taking him seriously. He knows something I don’t. So I say, I know what you are saying is right, but I’m not always sure how to apply it.

The bus pulls up. He makes no move to get on it because I guess he’s just hanging around the bus stop imparting wisdom.

He says, well you’ve got to think about that. You’ve really got to put some thought into that.

Ok, I say. I’m going to think about it a lot and I’m going to get on this bus.

Ok, he says. You think about it.

Colorado Smells Like Mexico

Colorado wild fires started ridiculously early this season.  A wind worthy of the dust bowl swept through hot dry pine-beetle killed trees on Sunday and treated them as tinder. I walk around my neighborhood in my flip-flops after work breathing the smoke, feeling it in my eyes. The smell of constant smoke in the air always makes me feel like I’m in Mexico, where people cook on fires and burn waste, and fill the air with smoke all day.  So, that is the smell of climate change in Colorado. The smell of Mexico.

Photo: North Fork Fire, March 27. (Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post)

Highway Crawler

Photo: Molly Miller

The moon is full, and so I make a trip outside after dark and stand still in the street, looking up. The black tree branches poke like skeletons with their arms raised to the night sky. The moonlight draws a fine outline around every shape. My breath leaves me in small clouds.

Night is sublime. Even here in the city with the horrible too bright, too high street lights I fantasize about shooting with a paint gun, and even with the hum of the refrigerators at the tavern down the street, the buzz of a plane, a car passing. The majestic limbs are plainly indifferent. Not in a cold uncaring way, but in the Zen way of non-attachment, they stubbornly maintain their silent dignity in the midst of the urban din.

In the morning, I go, as usual, to join the madness of rush hour. I have forgotten the peacefulness of the branches in the quiet night as I maneuver my way onto the interstate. The highway onramp is a social experiment in civility—who will budge in and who will wave someone in?

This morning, I cannot understand why the cement truck beside me on the onramp is at a dead standstill. His lane and mine merge into one so as I pull up beside him I must stop too. I shoot the driver an irritated look as traffic starts to line up deep on the ramp behind us, and I feel the pressure of them all on my rear.  I am anxious and wondering, why in hell are we stopped?

And then I see him. And when I understand who has stopped us, my irritation vanishes instantly.

He stretches, long and elegant, butterscotch skin covered with small black splotches, sidewinding gracefully, albeit slowly, along the pavement in front of us. The bull snake is cold in the early morning air and not proceeding as fast across the chilly cement onramp as he is capable of traveling across grassy fields in the afternoon when he is warm.

The Platte River runs along beside the highway here, banked by cottonwood trees and marsh. A snake could spend his whole life in the river habitat and not care that a four-lane highway runs 25 yards away. But a bulldozer or crane must have rousted him out this morning. The cement truck driver beside me is part of a construction crew putting in a new bridge over the highway. They do a lot of the heavy construction during the night and very early morning so as not to disrupt too much traffic.

Our task now, the cement truck driver and I, is to sit in wonder and wait as long as it takes, no matter how much honking behind us, for this uprooted individual to make his way to safety. Yet the people in arrears cannot see the dignified winding a few feet from our tires, and their honking ensues. The truck driver and I are exchanging smiles now, feeling like the protectors of the snake as we make them all wait, knowing we are the lucky ones for approaching the ramp just at the exact moment someone from another world happens to be forced out of the embankment and across this busy path.

I like how the truck driver easily ignores the pressure behind us, patiently respecting that this is just a living creature who knows nothing of traffic. I don’t like how hard it is for me to wait for our sidewinder to make his way. It may be rush hour, but there’s no rushing this snake.   I am ashamed at how the pressure behind me makes me impatient. I know I should savor this rare sight, and I am just hoping the scaly fellow makes it to a hole in the embankment or back down by the sides of the river before someone with no regard for him comes along and yields to this terrible pressure to move.

On the drive to work, sitting in traffic, all day at work, I feel a bit of the luck of running across the bull snake inside me.  I am captivated, hours after, by the surprise of his incongruous appearance on the onramp. His lovely and enchanting dignity in the midst of our rushing.  His enviable indifference to the crush of traffic, as though he were a tree branch in the night.  I hope he never sees a cement truck again.

Mercury is Not Coming

Photo: Molly Miller

I go to the gym on Wednesday at lunch for a hot yoga class. I make a special effort to sneak away from work because the schedule says Mercury, who I love, is subbing for the regular teacher. I am late and rushed and stuck in all the horrible, urban planning failure of cul de sacs and Boulder lack of parking at 30^th and Canyon.  I deal with it…the way I deal with the work stress. I acknowledge it. It makes me tense. But I don’t freak out.

The club is expensive and crowded. They just raised the rates even more.  I have resigned but because I have to give a month’s notice, I am still going. I’ve had a million pet peeves about the flow of design of the place and how people are sort of forced to run into each other due to blind hallways and poor interior design.

I’ve put a lot of small cumulative annoyances aside by the time I get the pleasure of being flat on my back on a yoga mat in a dimly lit warm room waiting for Mercury to walk in and tell me in his stalky voice to do my best. That’s his best line. The one that stays with me off the mat. He guides us into a posture in the 105-degree heat, warns us that we are stuck there for a full minute, and then says: “Do your best.”

Five minutes go by. He’s late. But just being still and quiet and warm is enough to move the work tension and annoyances a little further away.  Ten minutes go by. We are all a patient lot. Most of us, the maybe 20 students, in the low lit room haven’t moved. Just resting on our backs. But soon we begin to realize…Mercury is not coming.

We are all sitting up now and at a deciding point about staying or going. And a woman in the front row says, “How many people here have done hot yoga before?” Most of us raise our hands. “Well, she says, we know the postures. Let’s start.”

I instantly love her and wish I had been the one to start us. Hot yoga consists of 26 postures in a room heated to 105 degrees. Same postures every time. You do each one twice, sweat dripping more each time. In advanced classes, students do proceed through the postures with little guidance. A teacher simply times them and says “change,” or “second set” every 60 or 30 seconds.

And so we stand and we begin. At first our instigator tries to help us “change” to the second set or next posture, but soon she’s quiet and we all just move through the postures by counting to ourselves and watching each other. We all change at a little different time, but we’re basically together. It’s quite moving to me. Quiet and leaderless, we are like a collective. We all seem happy with this arrangement we’ve created in the dark hot quiet room. Not one student leaves.

Near the last part of class, the club sends in a new sub. They pull him from the shower and send him in to take over. At first it feels like we don’t even want him, because he is not Mercury (and we hope Mercury is OK), and because he is not us leading ourselves.  I think he knows we doubt him, so he works hard to charm us with his humor.

 “Pretend there is a porcupine under your belly,” he says, encouraging us to arch our backs and suck in our stomachs. I give in and like him. I lie on my mat at the end of class and he guides us into Shavasana. 

“Let go of your disappointment,” he says. What disappointment? 

Your breath is your best friend,” he says. His best line. The one I will take off the mat.

But “Let’s start” is really the line I relish.