Guest Post - On Balance

Four years ago my good friend poet Kirk Judd and I journeyed to Tennessee to attend the SAWC (Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative) fall gathering. It was a glorious October weekend filled with opportunities for renewing creativity and making new friends. One of these is guest blogger, Jim Minick. Jim is an essayist, a poet, a teacher, and the author of The Blueberry Years, a memoir on blueberry farming and family. He and his wife, Sarah, currently live in Virginia. The topic here is near and dear to my heart, and Jim is an extraordinary friend. - PAH

On Balance

By Jim Minick, author of The Blueberry Years

When I was working intensely on The Blueberry Years in the first six months of 2009, I developed a pattern for what became my ideal day. I wrote at the computer from roughly 9:00 to 3:00, with a break for lunch, and then I headed out on our farm to do something physical. In the winter, I took a mattock and chopped bushes of invasive, multiflora rose. In the summer, I took a hoe and chopped thistle, again, an invasive, non-native plant that, untended, can cover a pasture in a few years, leaving nothing for the cows to eat.

This balance of work, of mental with physical, of creating with “destroying,” all of it seemed to fine tune my whole being. Our bodies and minds were both created for action, both meant to be used, and only in our recent history have we become a nation of couch-veggies. Yet writing, while great for keeping the mind sharp, seldom physically exercises more than the quick, soft pushups of fingers on keypads.

So getting out every afternoon released that morning’s pent up physical energy. And nothing like the pleasure of killing a thorny rose to also work out a thorny problem in the prose. Usually, though, I found a certain inner blankness in the afternoon where I could focus just on finding the next thistle or stepping into the center of a massive rose bush to uproot it with a few swings of the mattock. Always I sweated, even in winter, and often I swore as the thorns tore skin or cloth. But also, always I stopped to rest, listen, watch, and listen some more—the physical world once more becoming more alive than the one in my head.

The blueberry, the “hero” of The Blueberry Years, also echoes this theme of balance. It was first domesticated 100 years ago by a man and woman working together. Frederick Coville brought his scientific understanding of the blueberry, while Elizabeth White brought her family’s land and her community. She recruited her neighbors, the “Pineys” around Whitesbog, New Jersey, to find wild, exceptional bushes and bring her samples. Then, in the dormant season, they ventured into the swamps to dig up these plants and bring them back to the growing nursery. Soon Coville and White had a huge project, and in six years time, they were able to sell the first domesticated crop of blueberries.

In our own blueberry field, we can see in a plant’s leaves if the soil is ‘out of balance’ and needs some amendment, like sulfur to lower the pH.

Or when we prune, we try to balance the number of new canes with the old. And here, when I forget about the day’s troubles, when I just focus on the plant and lose myself, I begin to find some inner balance as I imagine what each bush needs to become, begin to see what to cut and what to keep. What is and what could be. I work to bring some openness to the berry bush’s interior, and I try to imagine a space in its heart large enough for a sparrow to fly through. Balance on my haunches to snip a few canes and create that space, and then move to the next.

A Week from the First Day of Autumn….

The first day of fall is a week from today and will technically mark my third prairie autumn. I’m always a tad confused by this bit of calendar counting. We moved to Nebraska from West Virginia right around the 4^th of July, 2008. So, while we’ve lived here just over two years, it’s the third autumn I’ll experience in the flatlands.

Is that right? Ah, math and semantics…the former my nemesis, the latter my solace.

A few more weeks forward marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. Erik, my older son, would have just left for his second sojourn to German. I would have still been carrying around the last ‘Erik goes to Germany’ pounds and facing the prospect of turning the big 5-0.

Hence, I decided to do what writers do: procrastinate by blogging.

Even so, productivity this year has not been at an all-time low…a couple books got written, and currently my mom and I are thrilled to be working on a Christmas novella for our current publisher.

My three-times-a-week blog has become weekly if not sporadic.

And I’ve dropped, if not all the pounds I wanted to, quite a few. Even more importantly, I haul my behind out of bed every morning to get to the local YMCA and take great classes taught by awesome instructors… I come home, eat breakfast, gulp coffee, and walk.

A far different lifestyle then the work practically 24/7 one I lived previously.

And thanks to the wonders of a social media site, I can be in contact with old friends and much-loved students, many of whom are getting married, having babies, becoming the wonderful adults they were destined to be.

So this morning as I’m walking, glad for the long-sleeved tee I pulled out since there’s a real chill in the air, sadness overwhelms me.

In just shy of three months, I will turn 51. I think about the friends I’ve lost, some who didn’t see 40, others who didn’t see 50. I so embrace my life and am so reminded again of the finite-ness of it.

Again, I am reminded of the wonder and sorrow of holding on and letting go.

Puppy Love Redux

My first crush was on a little red-haired boy named Tommy, an ‘older man’ of four.

I’ve confessed before to bopping his sister on the head with a toy truck when she got in the way of my ‘pursuit’ of him. Over the years, I carried a torch, no matter how briefly, for other boys until I met the one who made me hope the flame would never be extinguished.

Many factors shape who we become as adults, including previous loves, likes, and the more than occasional passing fancy.

What prompted this introspection was a good friend’s musing about her child’s upcoming first date. She wasn’t sure whether to be proud or cry, knowing the first heartbreak is the natural next step.

As parents we want desperately to shield our children from heartbreak, while at the same time being keenly aware that love and loss is an integral part of the growing up process.

My favorite scene in the movie Jaws, which in 1975 was my first official date, takes place at night aboard Robert Shaw’s boat. Roy Scheider listens as an inebriated Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss swap fish stories and compare shark bites.

One upmanship takes over and Dreyfuss shrugs out of his shirt, indicating his chest and the greatest wound of all:

As Hooper, he says: “There. Right there. Mary Ellen Moffit broke my heart.

Not long after, the Great White chomps Robert Shaw’s Quint in half. Somehow I think a broken heart is more easily mended.

Sure, sometimes whether you’re a teenager or an octogenarian not even diving into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s can cure what ails you.

But we can take something valuable away from each time we’ve loved and lost. Even though I didn’t marry one, I gained a life-long affinity for redheads from my pre-schooler crush on Tommy F. in that Detroit suburb back in the 60s.

If you don’t open your heart to the possibility of loss, how can you know love?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

So long, summer

All week I’ve looked high and low (well, the Google search engine equivalent) for just the right poem, quote, or even song lyric about the end of summer and the advent of autumn.

Yes, I know fall doesn’t ‘officially’ start until September 23^rd this year. But c’mon, don’t we all mentally shift seasonal gears when Labor Day rolls around?

It seems like only yesterday, or last week at least, that my younger son and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about the end of school. Actually, it was mid-May, and summer loomed full of promise and possibilities.

After a brutal winter and blustery spring here on the prairie, we were all ready for summer. And our weather was nothing compared to the conditions that socked the mid-Atlantic and Eastern seaboard regions. Those were Mike Tyson-esque punches that kept on pummeling. Like all years, 2010 so far has been rife with highs and lows.

I won’t go into the lows because I’m trying to veer from my usual more maudlin ‘fare’ and write a humorous funny blog about saying ‘so long, summer.’

But one thing I learned all the years my mother and I wrote romantic comedy for Harlequin, is that true humor requires pathos to balance it out...just like life.

Crying over the bad and laughing at the good sometimes morphs into tears of laughter and smiles of sadness.

In bidding adieu to August, I’m reflecting on the highs and lows of the season about to pass…even if not officially.

Saying at least nobody died does a bit of a disservice to June and her sisters, July and August. But after a sad winter, I tend to categorize things that way.

This summer did have Herculean highs, along with several tail-dragging lows. But isn’t every season like that? Isn’t that what life is all about?

We cherish the good times and mourn the bad, and life moves forward.

Just like the calendar.

Trees

“The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree” is a common expression around here.

Whenever I mimic my mom’s behavior or one of my sons reaffirms his parentage, I utter that expression. I’m curious about the origins of that saying and should put my friend Holly Jacobs on it. She recently enlightened me on the meaning of ‘getting down to brass tacks.’ Romance writer Holly, an Erie, PA resident, and I ‘talk’ via e-mail every day and have for years. Without her boundless optimism, I’d be lost.

Originally I’d planned to blog about a story I read in this morning’s Omaha World Herald about a storm that felled the ailing chestnut tree Anne Frank gazed upon while hiding in the jam warehouse in Amsterdam.

Three springs ago on a trip across the pond, I gazed at that sickly tree and tried to imagine my sons unable to go outside for two years. When they were little, I couldn’t imagine them going more than two minutes without going outside. Last fall, I wrote about Anne and her father.

My intent was to write about my appreciation of trees, my love for my children, the irony of moving to a state (Nebraska) that is the home of Arbor Day yet lacks trees, my 7^th grade science project in Sault Ste. Marie on Dutch Elm disease, and the universality of a parent’s love for a child and the horrors inflicted on all of humanity by evil.

Kind of an overwhelming agenda.

Instead, I will just murmur a quiet thanks my babies are growing into fine young men. And I’ll remind myself the most important part of holding on is letting go.

School Daze

It seems like only yesterday husband, younger son and his grandma and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about how many days til the end of the school year.

But it wasn’t yesterday, it was mid-May. Suddenly mid-August has rolled into town, offering a reprieve from the blistering 90-degree heat just in time for the start of school tomorrow.

My younger son, Andrew, was conveniently born 15 years ago today, his birth allowing his father to miss an all-day faculty retreat. I was glad at the time baby and I could accommodate him.

Tomorrow said son starts his sophomore year of high school. Thirty-five years ago I was a sophomore in high school. Today in the frozen yogurt shop I experienced a moment of sheer horror. It dawned on me I was closer in age to the elderly gray-haired couple at the counter than I was to the two sweet girls who looked like they could be Andrew’s classmates.

As I scrutinize my neck (a la Nora Ephron) for loss of elasticity and peer under my eyes at the fine lines staring to web out (apparently visible only to me, according to my husband, but there nevertheless!), it has occurred to me I’m missing the point.

Especially lately.

Time marches on. We wouldn’t want it not to. I’m think I’ve forgotten my central theme here, that of holding on and letting go.

Not only do we have to let go of our children, we need to let go of our youthful image of ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we have to become stodgy. Some of the most youthful people I’ve ever known have numbered many in years. Conversely, I’ve know those younger than me whose attitudes were ancient.

We have to treasure each moment and turn a myopic eye to the mirror.

Cha-cha-cha-cha-changes

I hate change. Not pennies, nickels and dimes or sweeping move across the country change... just the new shoes/new glasses/ getting used to lovely new computer blues....

Trying to cut down on words of late so won’t belabor the point, but suffice it to say we moved a lot when I growing up. Not excessively but enough. I went to three high schools and two universities. Over the course of my life, I’ve lived in five states.

When my husband and I moved to Flagstaff, Arizona from Iowa more than 20 years ago, the move literally made me sick.

Or so I thought.

True, I was getting used to high altitude living. But what I mistook for abject unhappiness turned out to be stomach flu.

I threw up, felt fine, and loved our five-plus years there.

Later, two-year-old in tow, we moved to a university town in West Virginia. It rained every single day that autumn, a fact I’ve blogged about before. I’d take toddler Erik to the park in the drizzle and wonder how on earth I’d ever meet other moms and make friends.

I just had to have faith.

Big changes I seem to sail through after the initial nausea and need for an umbrella. Moving to Nebraska was a little choppier for me but only in the job department. The prairie grasses of this state differ enormously from the Great Lakes of Michigan, my beloved birthplace. Still I lump these places into the category of ‘Midwest’ and feel like I’ve come home.

It doesn’t hurt that we’re close to western mountain ranges, another love.

But getting used to a new computer or even a new pair of shoes throws me. Is it my discomfort with the unfamiliar or am I that set in my ways?

Isn’t moving across country ‘unfamiliar’? Or changing elementary schools or high schools or jobs or states?

I don’t know the answers. Usually when I commit words to paper--rather screen--for this blog, I have some idea of the outcome, the destination, the denouement.

Maybe big moves are an exciting chance to start anew, and small changes are just annoying.

Or it could be having the soul of a makeover artist and the personality of she of the Princess and the Pea notoriety?

I do know we are who we are. We adapt, we morph, but we never fundamentally change.

Especially when it comes to change.