The beauty time

I am visiting an old friend. She just had hip surgery. The second time. On the same hip. The implant was shedding metal into her blood stream. The prosthesis was bad, but it probably didn't help that she has pounded her body on local roads for the past 15 years, with distance running and some biking. Or maybe it did. Her recovery from the surgery has been lightning quick. She started running right after she quit a cigarette habit of decades - cold turkey. It can be hard to know where fitness ends and obsession begins.

It's the second time I have been out of Vermont and away from our home since Herb moved in. I got a speeding ticket on the way down to stay with her. Perhaps I had lost track of where I was, between home and away.

I had a quick consult with a friend who was a well respected physical therapist who retired a year or so ago. He gave me some exercises for my own bum knee. I torqued it in Venice last New Year's eve. It has been annoying since. (No, I am not looking for sympathy. Venice was worth a knee for the cause.) The good news is that my friend the PT doesn't think it is a joint problem. That means I may not have to deal with surgery any time soon. I am slower to recover from an injury that is far less invasive than my friend's. But then I haven't been an ardent athlete for the past decade, and I am trying to assess where the line is between pain and gain.

After he gave me some exercises, we talked about his upcoming moose hunt. He got a rare permit - one of only 400 or so, down from 1000 permits due to a drop in the population, due to a drop in the habitat available as Vermont develops. Hard to imagine in a rural state like this one. But there are still reliable reports of a catamount (mini-lion) in the area. And there are bears--more of them than there used to be. And porcupines are on the rise with a drop in the population of fisher cats. The porcupines eat people's houses. Really. And a friend nearly lost her pet cat to a bobcat at the porch edge. And we listened to a chorus of coyotes at midday a few weeks ago. It's a reminder about the balance between what we come here for and what we take away--the openness and the forests. And what is wild.

H and I have been working physically hard in the past week or so. While his book manuscript is moving forward by leaps and bounds, we have also split the wood that will warm us this winter (about three cords from the land behind the house). We have been moving the wood by stages of seasoning between the sheds. They say that a wood fire warms three times - when you cut down the tree, when you split it and when you sit beside the fire. That's a vast under-statement. Though we haven't done the felling of the trees, H helped get it out of the woods, we both repositioned the pieces beside the splitter several times. We split the logs, moved them to the wood shed, stacked them inside, and then as the season progresses, we will move that stack into the house, and then to the side of the stove, and then into the stove, and then we will mix in the ash with the garden soil, while replacing the empty spaces in the shed with the new. It is a balancing act of using wood to warm us, and learning how the maple and the cherry and the ash will "fire over". Black locust can destroy the wood stove with its heat. There is a balancing act of where to sit when the sun is high and when the moon rises. There is a balancing act of standing on uncertain piles of wood chips and decaying bark, while stacking the wood with the wide side of the wedge against the narrow.

Balancing the wood with the writing, with the teaching, with simply watching the leaves change the landscape from a green and verdant place of Virginia Creeper and monk's weed to gold and red.

We have cleaned the garage and the sheds. I cleaned out the garden's "sulking shed" and discovered a mouse nest and its owner - tiny, grey, with a small tumor on her side, and then while removing the under-plant-pot-dishes, I scattered a dozen of her closest friends and relatives. But after washing all the stored garden sheets and rags (for covering vulnerable plants from a freeze as the season hovers between summer and fall), and washing a dozen or so pot-bottoms, and rearranging all the garden tools, and the supports for the peas, and the tomato cages, I thought that perhaps I would let them move back in. Last week, we rescued a cat that had been lost from its home about 8 miles away. It had been hanging around for 4 or 5 days. It was probably setting about balancing the population of mice until we returned her to her home.

I transplanted the herbs from the whiskey barrels, and took them up to my "fiber room" where they will get some southern sun. We started up the wood stove a few nights ago. I harvested what I thought would be the last of the Mexican sunflowers just before a freeze, but they are hanging on in the raised beds, along with the Alchechengis and two tiny eggplants. The dahlias bloomed late this year, and I put them in vases with the marigolds. The red and the orange of the flowers inside match  the color of the leaves outside. And one morning, I saw a second round of primrose blossoms and one Canadian anemone. They seem to be imagining spring rather than winter's snow, hanging on the cusp of the cold. I retrieved the metal stakes topped with reflectors to mark the driveway for our friend who plows.

 We are coming full circle not only in terms of the equinox, but in terms of our home. Last year was broken up by the pilgrimages to New York for Mom and for post-mom, and for Medford and for post- Medford, and for the commuter marriage and for teaching and work and health care and .....
This year we just are.

We go to sleep together and wake up together and work at our desks and work in the garden and on the wood pile. We see friends and make meals and do home repairs -- the leaking dishwasher, the clogged flue for the oil burner, the cracked window panes that needed to be replaced. Our friend Matt hung the large heavy mirror on the bedroom wall. It has been propped up since we moved and required more than I could muster to hold it to the plaster and lathe walls. We made appointments for the pellet stove to be cleaned and three tons of pellets delivered. We took the Rubbermaid containers with "seasonal clothes" down from the shelves in the garage, took out the warm stuff and sent up the summer stuff. The cats have their annual appointment with the vet. And there is, as always paper to be filed and consigned to the wood stove.

It is as good as it has ever been.

I am struck by the balancing act that is our life these days.  It's not what it once was when we had to balance being together with being apart. Now we are finding the routines that make it possible for us to balance the need to work with the need to find time in the day for the chores that could consume us. We are balancing what can be done on the garden or lawn or wood pile with the weather or the amount of daylight. We are balancing our need for friends with our desire for the solitude that makes writing possible.

Sometimes the balance is a bit tenuous and the threshold between standing and falling is thin. But sometimes everything is loaded heavy on the limen between work and pleasure, between summer and fall, between warmth and chill. That is the beauty time, the time worth waiting and watching for.