Music meditation

I’m still not very good at the piano. In fact, I’m pretty terrible. It’s becoming rapidly apparent that the amazing musical talent my four kids all seem to possess didn’t come from me.

But I have a lesson today, so this morning I sat down at the piano to practice. I’m learning the song Sunrise, sunset. My piano teacher says that once I master it, I can play it whenever one of my kids gets married.

I can’t think and play at the same time. Whenever I start thinking about what my right hand is playing, my left hand gets confused.

So for an hour this morning, I stopped thinking about all the appalling news scrolling down my twitter feed. I let go of all the anxiety, the stress, and the helplessness that I feel every time I click through to another news story or see another headline. And instead, I spent the hour staring at a sheet of music, running my fingers over keys on the piano, trying to make music.

Lambing season begins at the monastery

The stone walls of the old farmhouse are so thick that I don’t hear the rain, but when I wake up and look out the window, I can see that we’re in for another cold, wet day. I put on the teakettle and take a slice of the homemade banana bread that Retreat Friend brought. My instinct is to reach for my laptop computer, and then I remember that the monastery has no wireless. Instead, I put on my raincoat and boots — and walk out to the sheep barn to get the news of the day.

The pregnant ewes in the barnyard stare at me as I trudge through. A couple of them rise unsteadily to their feet. Some of them are so swollen they can barely walk, but they seem to be in no hurry to have those lambs. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re waiting for the spring weather. My own kids were all born on lovely, sunny days — well, except for Shaggy Hair Boy, who came amidst the gorgeous whiteness of an exciting snowstorm. I can’t blame any mammal for not wanting to give birth on a dark, rainy day.

The birthing pens, filled with new straw, remain empty until Brother Tractor and Youngest Monk bring in a ewe who gave birth out in the field. Her two little lambs are shivering despite their wool coats. The large one stands up and nurses vigorously, while the other curls into a ball on the floor of the barn.



It’s cold in the open barn, so I make my way over to the chapel. I pull the heavy wooden door open and step into the warmth of musty incense and melting wax. The chapel always smells exactly that way. You could kidnap me, put on a blindfold and earplugs, drive me in circles, then dump me into that chapel, and I would know exactly where I was by the smell. It’s a comforting smell. I like things that never change.

I descend the stone steps into the crypt below the chapel. The stone statue of Mary in the middle of the room glows, lit by about hundred votive candles flickering at her feet. A couple of the candles have burned out. They last five days, so they were lit by someone visiting earlier in the week. I pick up the empty jars, the glass clinking as I do so. In the side room, where I slide them back into separate compartments of a brown cardboard box.

I carry several new candles over to the low stone altar and sit down on the stone floor to light them, as I have many times before. I light the first candle for a friend who will be celebrating his 42nd birthday this week. As I lean to put the candle into an empty spot, I hear a hiss. I’m startled to see flames leaping from my shirt: my hair has caught on fire! I clamp the strands to put them out, and I’m rewarded with the unpleasant smell of hair burning.

I’ve never caught fire before while lighting a votive candle. I wonder whether the flames have some deep significance. Or perhaps it’s just time for a haircut.



I sit cross-legged on the stone floor and stare at the candles. The flickering can be very mesmerizing.

My meditation is interrupted by footsteps. They sound young. It’s too quick of a pace for any elderly monk. Legs stride into my line of vision, clad in jeans and sneakers, a nalgene bottle dangling from a young hand. Two high school kids, it looks like, probably here on some kind of retreat. One girl sits down on the stone floor, off to my right, her back against the brick wall. She fiddles for a moment with her nalgene bottle, but then she calms down and sits still, just staring into the dark spaces.

The other girl chooses the nook where some light falls in orange and yellow squares from the high stained glass windows. I’ve sat in that very spot, writing in my journal. I always like how the color stains the pages. She too carries a spiral-bound journal, along with a sheaf of papers which she spreads out on the floor. She bends over the papers, her long curly hair touching the stones, reading intently. Then she begins writing furiously.

I’m warm all the way through by the time I leave the crypt. I skip the bookstore to roam through the barns. It’s hard to resist the smell of hay. The newer barns are open and airy, with wooden stalls that are used when animals come inside, but the oldest barn has low ceilings, peeling paint, and pens that look like an old-fashioned zoo. Most of the rooms are used mostly for storing equipment.



I’m wandering aimlessly when I see a figure in a black robe. He turns. It’s Brother Jolly. He grins at me, “Want to see the newest addition? A baby donkey!”

I peer into a stall – an old concrete one that opens to a bigger stall in the new barn, with another door to the barnyard. The baby donkey is only a day old, but she looks like a full -grown animal, just in miniature. The only baby-like thing is the way she moves – jumping and prancing about as if she’s just figuring out what knees are for. The dim light of the barn is terrible for pictures, but I take some anyhow.



It’s still cold, and Brother Jolly keeps his hood pulled up. “Last time, she had a baby on St. Patrick’s Day,” he said. “So I was surprised that this baby came in April.”

“Well, it would depend on when she’s bred,” I say. He looks at me, but says nothing. Clearly, Brother Jolly doesn’t do much of the work on the farm. Brother Tractor is always all to happy to talk about the time they had a batch of early lambs because some rams got loose when the ewes were in heat.

I put my hand inside the stall and touch the rough fur on the baby donkey’s head. The mother ignores me: she’s busy eating. Brother Jolly and I chat for a few minutes, but then we hear the chapel bell. It’s time for the next prayer of the day.

Gone monking

It's still rainy and cold here. I'm still wearing my winter coat. I've stopped wearing mittens, just on principle, but I haven't yet given up winter socks.

The dreary weather isn't stopping me from one of my favorite spring rituals. I'm heading off today to the monastery. It's lambing season, and the sheep barn will be filled with pregnant ewes and baby sheep. 

Even if it rains the whole time, I'll hike the trails beyond the sheep pastures. I'll visit the eight-sided chapel with its musty smell of incense. I'll sit on the stone floor in the crypt and light votive candles for all the people I love. I'll eat meals in the Women's Guest House and talk with my friends. In the early morning, I'll help out in the sheep barn and watch baby sheep slither into the world.

On the lilac bush near my back door

I keep writing posts about how it's almost spring, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's all just wishful thinking. It's true that the snow has melted, the ice has left the lake, and the peepers are singing. But mostly, the weather has been pretty cold. We had a spectacular thunderstorm this afternoon, which counts as a sign of spring, but it's still chilly and damp.

"What's that saying about April showers?" one of my students asked today.
 Another responded without hesitation, "April showers suck."
 Yeah. That pretty much sums up the sentiment on campus.

Still, when I got home this afternoon, I couldn't help but notice that the lilac bushes near the back door are covered with buds, tightly furled leaves just ready to burst open in the afternoon light. Another sign of spring.

Winter recedes

“Let’s go out to the lake,” said my father. “I bet the ice is finally gone.”

He and my mother picked me up sometime before noon. We drove past fields just beginning to turn green, past woods where bare trees stood in pools of snowmelt. The wind at the lake was still cold, but the sun beat down on the shore.

In the familiar bar, we took the booth by the window, where we could look out at the whitecaps on the lake. “Just last week, we were looking out at ice,” my mother said as the waitress brought us plates of food.

The young waitress nodded. “I think it went out on Monday. And then on Tuesday, we got that snowstorm. Weather’s been crazy.”

“Where does it go?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s piled up down on the other shore,” my father said vaguely, waving his arm.

He’s known this lake for more than 80 years. While I ate pasta cooked with peppers, tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms, my father talked about his adventures on the lake. My mother chimed in with the story about the time she and my father and another couple took us out sailing — us being six small children — and the weather turned rough.

“I remember how relieved I was once we got passed the point,” my father said. “That’s when I knew we were going to make it.”

When we done eating, we walked outside to look at the last of the snow melting on the banks. I could hear the waves smacking against the shore. Despite the cold wind, it was pretty clear that spring had arrived.

Woke to singing

It’s the silence of winter that gets to me more than anything. When I walk in the frozen woods, I hear nothing but my own breathing, my own boots crunching through the crust of snow. The tracks at my feet are the only indication that I’m not alone in the vast white world. Here, a deer came running through hours ago: there, a rabbit passed by.

When I wake up on a winter morning, the only sounds I hear are low and harsh: the scrape of a metal snow shovel against porch or pavement. The frantic scratching of a cat, paws against glass, trying to get into the warm house. The salt truck rumbling down the street, scattering crystals onto ice. The distant whir of snow blowers.

This week, here at the beginning of April, I’ve been listening anxiously every time I slide open the door for the cats or run down the muddy driveway to the mailbox. I’ve been waiting for the music that means the return of warm weather.

At dawn this morning, I woke to hear songs loud enough to vibrate through the double panes of storm windows, the twittering and chirping and chattering of spring birds. Tree frogs chimed in with their shrill melodies. A woodpecker began a rhythmic tapping. I opened the window to hear it all: the singing, the thrumming, the awkward squawkings.

Every creature welcomes spring. My old cats don’t roam far any more, but just the opportunity to sleep outside in the sun or creep under the lilac bushes is enough to make them happy. (And by happy, I mean that they stop peeing on the living room carpet.) Boy-in-Black and Blonde Niece have already been throwing a disc out in the backyard, getting in shape for Ultimate Frisbee games.

We still have pockets of snow — tucked against the north side of the house and beneath the stand of old conifers — but the birds and frogs have made their announcement: spring is here.

Almost

The snow is beginning to melt. Every day, the sun lasts just a little bit longer. When I took a walk along the creek, I had to wear mittens, but the angle of light made me think that spring is almost here.

April

And I'm still wearing mittens.

Computer crisis

When the computer doesn’t do what my father wants it to do, he’ll shrug and say, “Digital Fatigue. That’s the problem.” It’s a diagnosis that delights my children. They love the idea of a computer just getting tired and cranky, the way an eight-year-old might.

My parents have needed a new computer for a while now. When any of the grandchildren send them a link to a photo album, it takes them hours to actually see the photos because they load so slowly. And they can’t watch vidoes at all. My father will say. “Our machine isn’t powerful enough.”

The computer they’ve been using is the first one they’ve ever had, a gift from their kids and grandkids, and they’ve hung onto it loyally, far longer than they should have. Partly, this is because they have a hard time grasping how quickly computers become outdated and non-functional. “It’s only eight years old,” my father will say. To him, that’s practically brand new.

My father is the kind of person who builds things to last forever. The wooden doll furniture that he built for me in 1960s? It’s as sturdy as ever, waiting in my basement for the grandchildren I’ll have some day. If Apple ever hires my father, people will be passing computers down through generations.

My parents’ most recent computer crisis began last week when my father sent an email out to the family, saying that his computer had “picked up a terrible virus” and that they’d lost all of their photos. He said that when he tried to find the photos, he just saw a bunch of words in German. His tech savvy grandchildren were delighted with his vision of a mysterious German virus. With-a-Why immediately pulled up this reassuring Venn diagram. The younger generation were also adamant that the aging computer needed to be replaced.

I went to their house, picked up their computer, and brought it to the Apple store. It was easy enough to find a comparable computer to replace the old one, but I ran into problems when I asked about retrieving the old data. The crew at the Genius Bar, it turns out, are not geniuses at all. They seemed to know less about computers than me. “It’s a vintage computer,” said one young man. “We can’t retrieve the data.”

“All their photos?” I asked. “They’re just gone?” He shrugged.

“What about the music?” I asked. My father has hundreds of songs. These aren’t songs taken off commercial CDs, but numbers that he’s arranged, played with the grandchildren, and recorded. Many of them are backed up on my computer and on CDs he’s burned, but I know he’d still prefer to just log on and have his music files still there on his hard drive.

“I guess you could try using a thumb drive,” he said.

I texted Boy-in-Black, who was driving home from a physics conference, where he’d just given a paper on “Minimal Spanning Trees on Percolation Clusters.” (Yep, that’s really the title.)

 “A thumb drive?” he asked. “Who calls it that? An ethernet cord would be far more efficient.”

By the time Boy-in-Black arrived, I had everything set up in the living room: my parents’ old computer, which was not really functioning, and the new computer, which was running fine but completely blank. My husband rummaged through his laptop case and found an ethernet cord.

“We have to make the new computer look almost exactly like the old one,” I said. “I don’t want this to be too big of a learning curve.”

Boy-in-Black set up his own computer, connected everything, and went to work. He rescued the photos. He transferred the data. He even looked at their POP mail and rebuilt all the mailboxes, although my father’s organizational system made him grin. “Seriously? Why does he have all these mailboxes?” he said. “We need to set them up with gmail and teach him how to use search.”

“One thing at a time,” I said.

Boy-in-Black was thorough. He even went through their photos to find the same screensaver so that the new computer looked exactly like the old one. I doublechecked applications to make sure the settings matched the ones on the old computer. Then I set my parents up with a gmail account and I made a facebook page for my mother.

And now — my parents are back online. In fact, they’re probably reading this post. My mother sent Boy-in-Black a batch of homemade cookies, a gesture which has probably assured her a lifetime of tech support. She’s friended everyone in the family on facebook. My father has been getting adjusted to the newly updated iPhoto and has been working on the project of sorting all his photographs. He reports that the new “machine” is working just fine.

Fifteen miles

To celebrate the first weekend of spring, I decided to take a walk along Historic Canal. Some of my students have chosen the canal for their research site, so they’ve been talking about the canal in class. “People all over the world have heard the song,” one local student said. “They come here, and they get excited to see the canal. They’re always looking for a mule named Sal.”

No mules were in sight as I walked along the bank. No people either. The trees were still bare, and I needed mittens, but at least the sun was shining. I had to settle for that as my sign of spring.