Moment by Moment

colored glass

Right now the sky is white, droplets of moisture are hovering in the air like almost-rain and tiny scattered kisses, and I am the landed gentry in pajamas, newly returned from strolling around outside with a cup of coffee in hand appraising the well-being of the garden I've been tending. I found it all quite pleasing to behold, and I can see that puttering with plants is becoming an ever growing pastime in my life, pun sort of intentional. I can imagine playing in the dirt for hours at a time, planting and grooming and revising, coming in tired, feeling no need to convince anyone of the importance of my busy-ness. And eventually, when we are no longer traveling so much, let there be a dog.

Traveling comes to mind because the suitcase is packed, and this time, I literally mean a suitcase, in that it contains the suit Monte will wear at Miranda's wedding next week, along with my midnight blue lace dress–"It looks very mother-of-the bride," said a slightly snarky friend, dismissing it with what didn't feel at all like a compliment, faint or otherwise–and other accoutrements of the sort we don't usually haul around with us.

We're leaving tomorrow, so I'm braced for that long day of travel, for the tedium and discomfort punctuated by intermittent squalls of anxiety and stress. Oh, I realize it is a sort of miracle that we can do this at all, and I do marvel that 48 hours from now we will have soared sky-high the width of America and then across an ocean, but I was born to kvetch.

Meanwhile it feels that a milestone event is pending and I should have some milestone things to say here, but, as ever, life carries us along, moment by moment, and I don't have the presence of mind to muster up meaning or poetics. Besides, I run the constant risk of getting snagged on the poignant these days, and it feels best to steer clear of that for now.

So it's moments and moments. I like the purity of these. The full moon above the hills last night, the heady scent of jasmine, the concrete here-and-now things, like those glass jars I noticed by the window of a neighbor's house yesterday, their colors scattered by sunlight. The soundtrack was wind chimes, bird song, and a train going by.

And I liked bumping along the ranch road in Monte's new-old pickup truck this week, and seeing a v-shaped formation of pelicans on their way to somewhere, and walking up the canyon with my good friend Kelley, even against the afternoon wind.  Good nouns, real verbs. Let us focus on these.

Or this. I asked Monte's help in tying up a present the other day. I placed my finger in the center, asked him to knot and pull the raffia ribbon tightly and I'd free my finger at the last minute. Does anyone else remember doing this? For me it evoked memories of an oil cloth covered table in a 1950s kitchen, and I was a helpful little girl, my index finger snug on the string my mother was tying around a post office-bound parcel wrapped in brown paper, and I pressed hard and waited for the tightening and the tingle, to where it almost hurt, before extricating my finger. The result was satisfying. I felt tricky and useful.

It's odd how replicating that tiny tactile experience brought back a childhood memory in such full throttle and dimension. I could almost see the clothesline and fire escape outside the narrow window, almost hear the coffee perking in the pot on the stove, the brew visible in the glass knob. It was a small and trivial moment with my mother, but I was happy to have accidentally revived it.

And it occurs to me it's so much more than linear moments passing through. It's layers of moments, multi-dimensioned. Meandering trails of them, each with beckoning branches, and branchy digressions from these, and all of them unbound by time, happening always and always.