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Conveniently and perfectly situated for loafing, lounging, doing nothing, puttering in the garden, fishing, beach combing, and forgetting about work except on Mondays through Fridays when you have to go to it, and on "scary Sunday" afternoons.

Enjoy breeze from all directions:  the salty south, the balmy Atlantic storms of early fall, watered-down winter from the West and tame little nor'easters filtered through the forests of Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey, the overpowering perfume of your neighbors ultra-strength laundry detergent, and sometimes all of these at once!

If you like people, you will love the influx of fast-driving Southern Pennsylvanians and day-trippers from the countryside all around that begins on Memorial Day weekend and ends when the kids go back to school.   Emergency response vehicles will scream up and down the street several times a week to attend to drunken or careless beachgoers and boaters.

If you don't like people, you will be happy to know that as fall wears on, transients leave for Florida soon after the geese come back.  Now you can breathe a sigh of relief and take back the beach, streets, and alleyways for twilight dog walks. 

You never know what you might find, see, or hear on each short walk or trip into the yard.

They don't build them like this any more.  Solid wood balloon framing, topped by a pyramid- shaped attic space with dormers facing all directions: north, south, east, west, heaven, and hell.  Crumbly plaster and lathe, coated with ancient wallpaper, coated with paint for extra stability.  On a stormy night, the wind will make ghostly howls as it seeps between the cracks and crevices and tries to get in through the old coal chimney.  An airy covered porch on two sides will roast you only on late summer afternoons and shade you the rest of the time, and is not screened and therefore will not protect you from flies and mosquitoes.  Speaking of coal, you can find it right here in the yard, especially beside the back door and near the garage.  Jackpot!

Don't ask us about the basement, because we don't know.

The fenced yard will allow your dogs and cats unfettered hunting of squirrels and rabbits.  Have unhurried conversations with your dearest, most annoying friends and family members, hateful or suspicious neighbors, and quirky folk, and the various neighborhood cats, squirrels, owls, vultures, and mockingbirds who return to the same nesting places in your yard and neighborhood year after year.  The people who live here are lucky and unlucky, depending upon their outlook day to day.

Breathing

June 2015

I’m lying on a narrow table, head and knees supported by foam pillows, weighed down by the hospital gown made of that pure, heavy cotton that only seems to be used for hospital linens. Every nook and corner of the room is filled with fluorescent light and white noise, an all-pervading hum as if from a powerful ventilation system, and the more immediate, slightly lower-pitched drone of the machine in front of me. The table begins to slide forward. A series of red digits appears above my head. “666,” I remember. Just beyond the numbers is a dull orange light, which speaks as I am looking at it. A voice sounding very much like that of the radiologist who had placed the pillow under my knees says, “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

A young woman is lying with her legs across my lap, trembling violently, squeezing my hand with a steady pressure. She is in the aftermath of another debilitating panic attack. “Take a slow, deep breath,” I remind her. “It doesn’t help! It’s just something they tell you, and it’s a lie,” she insists. Like a midwife’s order for bystanders to boil water and tear up sheets, the question of whether there is a real, practical necessity in taking deep breaths to disarm a panic attack seems to be debatable.

We take breathing for granted. As a former asthmatic, I know this. At our best, we are completely unaware that we are doing it. We are full of a feeling of well-being, free to think our thoughts unimpeded by uncomfortable physical intrusions. When you can’t breathe, or breathe well, it becomes all that you think about. When every breath feels like it is being drawn through a straw, the thought of death creeps in around the edges of the antique photo that is your existence, giving everything a dark and doomed cast.

When we willfully hold our breaths, the feeling of doom is absent, because we are in control. If I fill my lungs up as much as possible and hold my breath in an attempt to stop an attack of hiccups, for a moment the area around my heart and lungs feels super-oxygenated. It seems like my vision becomes clearer, colors slightly brighter. I become aware of the blood flow up and out of my chest and down through my arms and fingers. When I know it’s time to take a breath or else, it’s in my throat and ears that I feel it. Pressure, deafness, desperation. Out goes the breath, in comes more oxygen, and surprise! I have held my diaphragm perfectly still for long enough that it has forgotten to have the hiccups. It’s the same principle at work as when we have an x-ray or a mammogram (although I suspect that they make us hold our breaths during a mammogram so we won’t scream and scare the patients in the waiting room.): holding your breath renders you perfectly still. A perfectly still subject will provide a clear image, in focus.

Imagine being a photographic subject in the early 1800s, when photography was in its infancy. You’ve taken a bath, put on all of the very finest clothing and accessories that you own, labored over the tidiness and fashionability of your hair and/or mustache. . Your corset may be tighter than usual, because you want to show yourself in the most impressive possible light to future generations. You’ve laid out a considerable sum of money to have an image made of yourself by which history and your descendants will remember you....maybe the only such image of you that will ever be made. The shutter stays open for several seconds, anywhere up to a minute, and you must sit or stand completely still. You must be sure to arrange your face in a natural way, severe or pleasant depending on how you want to be remembered. You probably won’t show your teeth; nobody seems to. As you sit or stand perfectly still, you may not be holding your breath, but you will be trying not to blink. And you will be thinking about all of these things for the seconds that the shutter is open.

When the pressure gets to be too much, we need to take a breather. When we remove ourselves from the source of our stress, we can breathe freely. Maybe this is why we love to take vacations in locations that are full of wonderful smells. There’s the ocean, with all of its clean scents tinged with a faint trace of fish and marsh mud: salt water, and the ever-present wind laden with tiny droplets of briny moisture that quickly become an essential part of your hair, skin, and clothes. At night, there are the pine trees that release their sharp fragrance in the wind that is forever blowing through their long, soft needles with a gentle tossing sound, faintly whistling like a breath over the top of a beer bottle. The smell of sun-warmed tar and gasoline hovers around the dock in the afternoon, and makes you think of ropes and planks and sturdy shoes. Or maybe you retreat to the woods on a mountain, where you will sit on a porch, stare at the trees, and enjoy a parade of scents as they waft past your stressed-out nostrils: hidden honeysuckle and glow-in-the-dark blackberry blossoms, the almost exotic patchouli-like aroma of dark brown humus formed from decades of slowly decaying leaves and bark, the peculiar and unmistakable ozone scent of an imminent thunderstorm. And then there is the clean, woody, rocky, herby, mineral smell of creek water. It smells like turtles and winking sunlight filtered through green leaves.

“Now, breathe.” The orange light speaks again, and the table slowly slides back out of the shallow tube. Only a second or two has passed.

Two days later, I sit with my doctor in front of his laptop as he shows me image after image of my heart, liver, stomach, kidneys, uterus, vena cava and aorta, as they slowly spin in time-stop animation, precisely arranged and coiled around the bright white vertebra, cradled in the sharp- edged frame of the pelvis, perfectly clear, delicately shaded and detailed. 

1037

Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping is wrong.  But when you’re the youngest kid in the family and everyone is much older than you, it’s the only way to learn anything.  At least, that is my story and I’m sticking to it.  Although, there’s not really much you can learn while sitting halfway up the steps in the front hall and the people still gathered at the dinner table behind the louvre’d doors are talking….you can catch some words, but not all, unless voices are raised, and when voices are raised you have to be ready to make a quick and silent getaway so you don’t get discovered!

Gossip is bad.  Gossip is the act of transmitting and receiving stories that might be true.  It’s the ‘might’ that makes them exciting.  There is usually at least a grain of truth at the center of a piece of gossip.  Like eavesdropping, it only gives you part of the real story.  Your imagination, along with your knowledge and powers of educated guessing can rush in to fill the gaps. The story you pass along has an added ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, or ‘what if?’, added by you.

While eavesdropping is a method of information-gathering, gossip is a form of sharing information, or more accurately, stories. 

Studying genealogy satisfies both of these illicit urges.  But it’s perfectly okay, right?  Is it eavesdropping if you are reading court documents or letters?  Is it gossip if the subjects have been dead for 50, 100, 300 years??  Is it ‘somebody else’s business….not yours’ when it’s the business of your ancestors?

We can ask people for information, but if we ask, we might not get the truth.  Just as the youngest kid in the family gets a carefully filtered account of family business and events, we will get the version of the story that someone thinks they remember correctly, that might be edited to remove unpleasantness or scandal, that might be full of errors like incorrect names….maybe, the version of the story they heard as a child, while eavesdropping. 

August

The hills look old.  They are the brown of shorn grass.  Leaves become less green at this time of year.  They droop limply and heavily from the branches.  The breeze can barely summon the strength to move them.  Everything is ripe and tired and overgrown.  Wild plants are so heavy with butterflies that they cannot hold themselves up straight.  They are too tired and have thrown up their hands in surrender.

The damp rushing air smells of dry grass and ripe corn.  A gold orb of light drifts across the road ahead:  the eye of a fox in search of mice.  The moon looks like a giant toenail clipping, casually tossed.  Huge, ghostly humps of circular haystacks march across the dark fields.  When we look, they stop moving.  As soon as we look away, they creep carefully.

Katydids argue with increasing volume.  Their rhythmic chant is a soothing brain massage.  Later in the month they will make me think of new notebooks and pencils, and butterflies in the stomach before the first day of school.

A cat chases invisible beetles and toads, hopping from roadside to field and back again.  He seizes upon a locust and the sudden loud noise frightens him.  The dumb beetles hurl themselves clumsily here and there, trying to remember what they're supposed to be doing.

Glow-in-the-dark disks of Queen Anne's lace whoosh by the car windows like passing stars.  The industrial shrieking of grasshoppers becomes louder at night, almost deafening when the car passes closest to their campfires.  Every living sound and smell is magnified to penetrate my sleepiness.