Güd wrtr

(Ode to a Sacramento summer)

We knew it’d show up eventually,
after weeks of saying to each other,
“Perfect weather, isn’t it?” and
“Best summer I can remember.”

Because we live in a land of too hot,
a state of hot-hot, with the always-
hottest place in our southern desert
that’s got the word “death” in it.

But here—near the top of California’s
great central valley, where sizzling
spots like Red Bluff often win the prize
for hottest in these parts—this week

we enter the landscape of century
temps. We avoid the eastern and
southern humidity, but boy, can we
cook. And boy, are we about to.

Which is why God, in the guise of
Willis Carrier, created in 1902
a system to control temps and
humidity in a Brooklyn print shop,

though it wasn’t until 1906 that
engineer Stuart Cramer dubbed it
air conditioning. Think about that,
friends, when we step outside

into 100 degrees, then turn our
sweaty selves ’round and head back
in, offering our perspiry thanks
to Messrs. Carrier and Cramer

and the kabillions of their
descendant engineers and
technicians working to ensure
that we stay cool, baby—

real cool.

The garden goddess next door,
as part of her daily practice, stands
hose in hand, kindly watering

the corner bed by my driveway—
the creeping little daisies, the last
of the poppies, new cone flowers,

the to-be Black-eyed Susans
(still all leaves for the moment)—
chatting with me as our eyes

flutter upward, drawn to a large
monarch swooping, seemingly,
around us, gaily pirouetting,

alighting momentarily on the ginkgo,
perhaps looking for a drink.
The ticker tape in my brain

flashes—Mom!—along with
the sense of someone else hopping
up and down, hand raised

like a kid in class—me, too!
I say to the garden goddess,
“I wonder if that’s my mother.

She loved butterflies.”
I grin at my mystical neighbor.
“And maybe your mother, too.”

“You think so?” she says,
hope rising in her voice.
“Do you hear her? See her?”

“It’s more of a knowing,” I say
as the butterfly—who certainly
feels like a she—lingers within

our sight, even a bit later when
I walk across the street to my car.
She soars into the sycamores

of the house next door where
Becky lived, my favorite neighbor,
whose garden goddess daughter

has continued the family tradition
of daily hand watering in summer,
growing a lush forest of ferns

and greenery, which I can’t help
but think must delight both
of our mothers flittin’ in

for a quick hello from their
spot in the forever on this
sparkling summer afternoon.

Listen, an experienced gardener warned,
you want to watch the wisteria.

It gets away from you, its dime-sized seeds
burrowing into the ground, it’ll grow
and grow and grow into a constrictor,
a green strangler. I’m not kidding.

But, I said, I like the pretty clusters
that drape like lavender waterfalls
before the leaves burst out.

Yeah, he said. Just wait.

Same with the morning glories
that took over the fence with
their glorious purple blossoms,
open-throated to the sun.

And mint. Everyone warned me
about mint. Subterranean invader,
they said. It’ll pop up everywhere
like whack-a-mole. You won’t be able
to get rid of it.

You want to leave a legacy after you die?
Plant mint.

But spearmint, I said. For tea.
And the smell.

Yeah, they said. Just wait.

Today I stretch tall to clip
the constrictor’s searching arms
roaming the fence, get it away
from the neighbor’s house as it
reaches for me, snagging some
tenacious morning glory with it.

Crouching, I yank out a little mint
by the roots, plucking some of its
wrinkly leaves for tea later,
consider transplanting lemon thyme
where I have de-minted—

“my darling lemon thyme,” I hum—

growing so happily under the maple
in the front yard. Will it do well here
in so much unrelenting sun?

You never know till you try, I think,
the perennial motto of gardeners,
whose ranks I have now joined
as an apprentice, bringing my
minty-thyme hands to my nose,
closing my eyes, and—yes!—
inhaling deeply.

One short, measly hour,
not a special one, just any old
hour, look around and ask,

“What would my life be
without this thing? Without
that thing? Or that one?”

Without the tree shading
the window, without the window,
without the kitchen sink

you’re standing behind,
without the water running cool
and clear on your hands,

without the knife in your hands
that has just cut fresh corn
off the cob that you’ve put

into a bowl for a summer salad,
without the small oval tomatoes
growing on the searching vines

in the back yard, five of them,
lycopene red, on the granite counter
next to you, resting,

ready when you’re ready, in this
ordinary hour, this everyday minute,
this extraordinary moment.

You know how you wake up some mornings, the bad dream running laps in your brain, telling yourself it’s not real, but you carry the hangover of free-floating anxiety in your satchel of woes, which, most days, you can set in a corner, say, There, there, to the worries that do you no good to fret over?

For whatever reason you’ve shouldered them today, along with the persistent headache that points to something blooming outside that’s bugging you, so you go back to bed for a while, hoping that it will ease, that you might doze, awaken again feeling better, but no soap, so you lie there thinking, This is dumb.

You rise with a groan and make the bed so the cat can assume his usual place in your spot—or, more accurately, his spot that you’ve borrowed overnight—and while there is much to do—always much to do—you think, Start with easy, pulling on shorts and a lightweight T-shirt, adding your shades and, slipping into the flip-flops by the back door you keep there, tugging on the somewhat stuck door that swells in summer.

When you step into the sunshine, you feel a bit like Dorothy walking into Oz, blinking behind your shades, and because it’s a watering day, you pick up the magic wand, turn the spigot and presto! There’s the delicate shower of water that you aim at the leafy arms of the tomato overgrowing her wire cage like a too-small bra, a simile that makes you smile because the plant variety is, after all, named Juliet.

As you set aside the squirter and gently touch one of the reddest ovals, low to the ground, the first cluster to bud, it comes off easily in your hand, which lifts you somehow. And you cup another little gem, and another, and now you hold a trio of tomatoes, as if they were just waiting for you to show up, which you deposit in a small cardboard square box and take some photos, which you think is a bit silly—just tomatoes, for heaven’s sake.

But that’s the point: Holding a bit of heaven in hand that you grew from a sprout, even as you chuckle, thinking, All I did was plant her and water her, knowing that forces far greater than you shaped and continue to nurture Juliet—and you, for that matter—an everyday miracle that softens your old heart into once again loving this loveable life.

If you believe that you were not born to sing,
then you must allow the birds to tutor you,

sitting in places where they do, allowing them
to feel comfortable enough to vocalize near

you in your scary human suit. You will think,
at first, that they are all brilliant sopranos,

with their warbling trills, and, if you are
fortunate to study with an owl, you may

want to imitate its throaty hoo-hoo.
And you should, for allowing your throat

to open and sound to emerge is what you do
every day. Singing is just sustained talking,

after all. And the point is not to be good
or to necessarily harmonize with others.

The point is to sing out on a deep breath
a note of meaning—perhaps a joyful one,

but ones of sorrow and despair, too—
a long note. Do not worry if it wavers

or your voice breaks. Listen. The birds
falter, too. Join them. Let them remind

you that you are of a species that is born
in song. Sing your own tra-la to the wingéd

ones in trees, especially to those in cages.
In fact, open the cage and slowly climb in.

Do not mind the feather ruffling; settle in
on any available perch. Leave the door open.

Open your mouth. Let a note take wing.
See what happens.

•••

(For singers everywhere—

like my friend Lilly Ganly, a rock ‘n’ roll singer
who turns 17 today—

and Martha Kight, my high school friend,
still singing, still acting her heart out,

and my friend Katie O’Rourke, music teacher,
opera singer and chorus member, who, with
members of Chanteuses, a Sacramento women’s
chorus, recently performed at Carnegie Hall in
New York with dozens of singers from around
the country.)

Let this be a sign unto you,
amazing one:

You are enough.
You are magic.

And yes, embrace your mistakes.
And look for the signs because,

it turns out, they’re everywhere,
if we only have the eyes to see them,

messages from the unseen ones
cheering you on.

You’ll think they’re not,
But they’re for you.

Like this. Right here.
Right now.

•••

(With thanks to poet Molly Fisk for sharing
this photo that inspired the poem!)

Six-year-old Lane calls across the pool,
“Mom, watch!”
His 11-year-old sister Grace echoes,
“Watch ME, Mom!”

And at the shaded end of my niece’s
pool, their Mom watches—this woman
who styles my niece’s hair—along
with her mother, as my sister and I,

old enough to be these kids’ grandmas,
work one-on-one with each child,
seeing what they can do in water
sparkling under a July morning sky.

Every time one of the kids calls, “Mom!”
I think, You watchin’, Ma?
Your girls are back in the pool
givin’ swimmin’ lessons a good

half century after we spent our
summers doing so—first as water
safety aides, then as full-fledged
instructors, working with all manner

of humanity, from babies to toddlers,
adolescents to teens, girls on the synchro
team, even with sweet-faced adults
with Down syndrome.

It’s been a minute, I realize, taking
a deep breath before tucking
into a surface dive to head for
the bottom of the pool,

feeling my fingers connect with
a weighted purple plastic ring
that our beginner swimmers are
not quite ready to retrieve.

But look at these two on kickboards,
gaining strength and confidence
with every lap across the pool,
Grace remembering not to plug

her nose but blow out bubbles
upon dunking herself, Lane doing
his version of a cannonball, feet
first, an easy touch, bouncing up,

as we instructors look on, near
enough to help, but far enough for
them to learn to trust the support
of water, of their people,

as we hear far-away echoes of ours,
the parents who put us in pools,
who urged us through swimming
lessons that we later taught,

who put us on water skis in a big
lake, who volunteered at our swim
meets—Mom with her referee’s
whistle on the side of the pool—

their “atta girl”s filling my ears as
my little sister-now-grandma swims
alongside a boy kicking his way across
the pool, as I dive again for the bottom,

as I push off, looking up into the blue.

•••

In memory of our mother, Darlene Haag,
on what would have been her 95th birthday.
Thanks for everything, Ma.

And thanks to my sister, Donna Just, and her daughter
Lauren Just Giel (along with husband Gerald Giel
and children Henry and Rosie) for hosting
the swimmin’ lessons. So much fun!

Not now, deeply into the future,
preferably when I don’t know
that it’s coming,

lying on the yoga mat in, appropriately,
corpse pose after a gentle backyard session
on a summer day much like this one,

Delta breeze susurrating through the sycamore,
the distant call of crows, traffic sounds
transformed into surf shooshing into shore,

then, face to the sky, wearing the merest smile,
let me be lifted into mystery with no fuss or agony,
the simplest departure

among the tiny English daisies that sprout weekly
after mowing, even when I worry that they have
all been taken. There they are.

And there I was.

(On the 250th anniversary of the adoption
of the Declaration of Independence
of the United States of America)

1. First, there’s no perfect. Just working toward it,
a willingness to improve, to strive for better,
for what truly matters.

2. There have always been those in this experiment
in democracy who see themselves as perfect,
those who seem to strive for what most benefits them.

3. Many of us, however, strive for what truly matters:
equality for all in a land where each voice matters,
thinking matters, ideas and books and discussion matter,
where all shades of skin, all languages and accents,
all genders and non-, believers and non-
matter, where there’s more than enough for all
in this nation of plenty, this land of the allegedly free,
home of the unbelievably brave.

4. Far from perfect when 10,000 people—who seem
to matter only as a problem to those in charge,
who must be sent away—are arrested days before
the country’s 250th anniversary of its founding,
the one promising liberty and justice for all.

5. Far from perfect when one thinks he matters most,
knows best, who starts wars because he commands
the firepower to do so.

6. Here’s what matters: Your tired, your poor,
certainly as much as your healthy and wealthy.
For it is on the backs of the least of us that have,
since humanity began, been broken on behalf
of those who were:
—richer
—whiter
—straight and gender-conforming
—educated
—privileged in every way

7. We have learned many things in two-and-a-half
centuries, among them: There is no perfect union.
But there is, in the hearts of so, so many, the continued
willingness to treat all—and that means all—
with kindness, with generosity of heart,

all of you reaching out to all of me, me reaching
back, saying, “How can I be of service?” and
“Thank you for yours,” and
“There is no them. We are all us.”

8. Our worst is not the best of us.
The best is the best of us, which still exists.
In you and you and you. And me. In us.

9. This heartbreaking moment is not how it ends.

10. It cannot be how it ends. Amen.

•••

With gratitude to Brandi Carlile and Sista Strings (Chantee Ross
on violin and Monique Ross on cello) for their beautiful rendition of
“America the Beautiful” at the Statue of Liberty.