“The heart is still aching to seek/ but the feet question, Whither?” —from “Reluctance” by Robert Frost

Greetings Dear Ones!

“I can tell you are near the blueberry field,” says my friend on the phone as I drive to work. Sure enough, the call, like my tires, gets a little muddy. As I reach the top of the hill, our voices are clear again. She laughs a sparkling laugh. “I’m glad I know that road you’re on. I like knowing where you are! I can picture everything.”

We’ve been friends for seven years and talked daily for more than five of them. Mostly we chat about the weather and our sheep but we both get easily distracted—by poetry, politics, psychology, teenage Chinese piano prodigies, nineteenth century transcendentalists, agnostic gospels, the life and times of Beethoven, Christian mysticism, astrology, the history of petticoats, civil war battles...These are the bogs into which we wander on our conversational rambles. She is a marvelous storyteller with a lifetime of adventures to relate. As a young girl, she rode her pony along the plowed furrows that were being cleared to create [a giant 4-lane highway]. She galloped through endless apple orchards and swam in the river with the pony. “It was all farmland then,” she says of her town. Her farm is one of very few left. She toured Europe and the British Isles with her grandmother in the late 1950’s as a teenager. “We went over on the Queen Mary,” she says, “Grandmother had certain ideas about travel.” As a young woman, she went west and became a hired hand on a ranch in Idaho, working cattle all summer with a Morgan mare she brought with her from the east. “That mare was so damn smart—she just did all the work herself. I could just sit there!” she says. In the winters, she was a ski instructor and a school teacher in a small school house. As a side hobby, with a state license to tend and keep raptors as they healed, she rescued injured birds of prey and nursed them back to health.

“Where are you now?” she asks each time the hum of the engine shifts from back roads to highway to the stop light in town as I arrive at my little shop. She can “see” my journey in her mind and checks herself as I go. When she hears the motor stop and the car door open, she says “Well, I know where you are. Have a wonderful day!”

She “bookends” the day with another call on the way home, chatting happily until she can hear my tires scrunching on the gravel as I turn the last curve towards my little barn and home. The daily circle, with all its twists and turns, is complete. She tells me all she has learned that day—what she calls “going down the rabbit holes.” “There are so many amazing things on the internet!” she says delightedly, “I can just keep learning and learning. I’m going to college all over again. I listened to four lectures on King Lear today—how wonderful! Except King Lear really was a jerk. Too much like that rancher who took a shot at me once.”

I have to admit, I like knowing where she is too. When she gets cantankerous about current events, we remind each other that “we are safe, all is well.” She is in her favorite chair, next to her beloved piano, with her darling cats sauntering through the quaint New England Christmas scene, though its June. (It’s been Christmas every day for at least ten years at her house; I don’t feel so bad about my faerie lights and robin’s maternity wreath now!) A mutual friend describes her perfectly: she is “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Tasha Tudor, a Hobbit, and a Little Rascal all rolled into one.”

I do my evening chores and watch the meadows deepen into twilight. We have both agreed that this is one of the best years ever for fireflies. They sparkle like the grass is full of stars. Each flicker says “Here I am! I am here!” I Like knowing where they are even though my inner entemologist says the iridescence is not just a location device—it actually translates more as the Tinder Bug version of “hey, baby, u up?”

Prudence (my inner “nun of this and nun of that” cleric) is disgusted to think that all the magic in the meadow is linked to sex, that sex is linked to life, that life is linked to Death. She prefers neat, tidy boxes, yet around and around the vast circles go. (She also assumes those robins on their second clutch of eggs in the nest in the Christmas wreath on the back door are married.)

The meadow sparkles with communication. Everyone is checking in. It’s time to shut the chicken coop. I count the drowsy hens on their perches. It does make one feel safe to pause, make sure all gates are latched for the coming ride through the dark of night and “know where everyone is,” even if in a larger sense, I truly have no idea where any of us are at all. The yellow light of the kitchen window says “Here I am. You are Home.” I head towards it.

Do you call them lightening bugs or fireflies? I guess it depends on where you grew up. I’m only growing up now, so I haven’t quite decided yet. I’ve noticed I get a big chance to Grow Up every time one of my precious circles pauses on its path, and the slow weight of it crushes the stones (and me) beneath it. I have been leaking helplessly from both eyes since Thursday.

A week ago today, for the first time in years, there was no call from my friend. And there never will be again. The only time I hear her voice now is in my head, chortling with delight: “I know exactly where you are!”

Yes, dear Friend. I’m still here.

Where are You?

Silent stars and fireflies and the baahs of hungry sheep are the only answer.

Instead of familiar predictability, and wireless calls on which to hang an average, mundane day, something in the firmament has shifted and we all have to find new balance, take on new roles. Friends who never met must meet, form alliances, and decide how to re-home a multitude of orphans: thirty-four sheep, and endless hens, cats, plants, and clutter (so much clutter!) not to mention ourselves!

We aren’t just losing her. It feels like we are dying too—as the parts of us once fed and watered by her laughter, her wisdom, her devotion, begin to wither and beg for the crumbs of “one more time, one more hour, one more day.” But the Gate is closed. She has passed through and it is not our turn to follow. We must foster and nourish those bereft parts ourselves, like bleating lambs at weaning, if we expect them to survive. She touched a lot of people in 83 short years. Among the mourning are souls as young as fifty-six, and some as ancient as seventeen.

We weep because It is Finished. And We Laugh because It Happened.

We got to live on the edges of an Incredible Story. We each got a part in a spectacular Drama that included Daily Haikus, dining out of dumpsters (“No food can hurt you, if you bless it,” she insisted), a turtle in the bath tub, raccoons loose in the house, blocked toilets, concerned felines bringing “gifts” of hostile (and very much alive) chipmunks to her hospice bed and spontaneous concerts where she played Chopin like I have never in my life ever heard anyone play Chopin. She didn’t play; she channeled. She could talk all night about Chopin as if she knew him personally.

“It’s because I understand pain,” she said once, smacking her lips and readjusting her false teeth. “Chopin was all about pain. A Jacob ewe smashed my mouth with her horns. When I came into a little money, I decided to get the piano voiced instead of fix my teeth. My choice was soup and Chopin—definitely the right choice!”

One of the highest compliments anyone pays me these days is “You knew N. so well…” It is a gift to Know and Be Known. It IS the highest of Loves. To Know is to Love; to Love is to Serve—and thus another “Circle” carries Time’s Chariot along.

On a sunny afternoon, the grain-tipped grass rippling like a golden ocean at low tide, with cross currents of wildflowers and bands of darker green, the unknowing sheep continue to nibble. Gently, Grief wraps me in her fond embrace and whispers the wisdom I must discover yet again: “My Dear One, Love is NOT gone. Love never ends. It just changes its shape, its skin, its scales, its fur, its fields. An endless abundance of Love is on its way to you Always. LIFE is your banquet. It is not treasonous to Live, to savour the tanginess of homemade blueberry pie in August, or the hush of moonlight on a November snow. It’s ok to leave this place where she dwelt. She is not here. Her relationship with you is complete—but yours with her will never be until you too are gone. She goes forth with you, always. Over and over, she will find you—in the beautiful, mundane, most “every day” sorts of things—at the bottom of a cup of Nettle tea, or the sound of a piano; in the hoot of an owl, or the trust of a cat who’s chosen your lap, and every time you hop in your car and remember those calls to keep learning, to keep seeking. Stay in amusement . Hold her name gently in your mouth. Say it often. Sing of her to those who will listen. Take up the Work she left unfinished—write for her, play for her, shepherd and sew for her. Be her hands. Mend for her. Then the part of you that feels like it is dying, will Live and Love will teach you who you really are.”

And so it is.

I know right where I am. I like knowing where you are too, Dear Ones. We are all connected. Thank you for reading, sharing, and for all your Good Work.

Keep Mending my Darlings! I love you SEW MUCH!!!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

P.S. Ha! It also tickles me how much she would have hated this letter! She was not one for mushy sentimentality and “fluff.” As a dyslexic and a scientist, she found my writing “too flowery”—but her gardening was such that I feel rooted enough to bloom as I may. I happen to LOVE the fluffy, mushy stuff! And her leadership in Authenticity is far too compelling to ignore.