From Ashes to Butterflies: a Dancing Good Bye

I wish I had some photos to add, but for now, I don't. I lived in the moment and let someone else worry about pictures.  Last week I was in northernmost New Hampshire for three days to scatter the last of my dear sister's ashes.  I know, I know. That hardly sounds like a happy thing, but it has been a long, long time in coming.

During the last weeks of my sister's life, while she was in hospice, she thought long and hard about what she wanted. One day she said, "Jetty, I don't want some burial spot. I want my ashes scattered in Lake Winnipesaukee, near the Teddy Bear Inn in Vermont, Pemaquid Point in Maine, off the rock's at the beach near Gail's, and in the source lakes in New Hampshire. And Paris would be good."

I looked at her a moment and said, "Jean Ellen, I love you but not that much. Let's just say that I'll get to some of those spots, okay?"

She laughed and said, "You are so fussy. FINE. Deny a dying woman her last wish." Of course, then she saw my face and my eyes and said, "No, honey! That's a joke! It really is a joke. I forget--for you, my dying is hard. For me, you know it's what I want. You know I have felt DONE with my business in this life for a long time. I'm so sorry. The only point is that I really don't want to be any part of a cemetery. I want to be part of the flow. Water, mostly, just the way I feel I flowed through this life from another and am flowing INTO another."

It was, of course, too late. I was crying, but we had a close hour together then. Well, my health went south before I could do too much, but I decided that when I was strong enough, her best friend (my other big sister of my heart) and I would trek up to the Connecticut River source lakes up near Canada.

Finally, this, the week before my sixtieth birthday, which is today, I was well enough to go. It was a wonderful trip and I took many inspiration pictures, fully replenishing the creativity well. Nancy found the very beach on the third Connecticut Lake where JE took one of my favorite photos--pebbles through water, just ten minutes south of Canada. (I have no passport, but I waved to you Canadian friends.)

This is just a quick picture of someone else's--Robert Knapp. Remember, this is not for commercial use!

It was about ninety degrees, even there. I picked my way through a shore trail, about twenty feet up-current and up wind of the little beach. When you dump ashes, they do not disperse; they remain in a beautiful water-born cloud for quite some time as they drift. I think that doing this six years later made me better able to connect with all the love I feel for her--most of the grief is gone, as is the somber mourning. I miss her living spirit, but I feel her spirit lives through me as I paint. I am surrounded by her--pen and inks, gifts, family treasures, treasured belongings that were hers.

So I looked at the transluscent silver cloud of what were physical remains of a spirit long gone and said, "There. Okay. Fine. It took me six years, but are you happy now? Fly!"

I called to Nancy that I was done, as I watched the cloud drifting toward the beach, and I heard her suddenly go, "Jeannette! LOOK!"

A swirling chaos of pale yellow butterflies flew up, fluttering in a spiral above the ground. They did not leave; they hovered in that one area, dancing in a space no more than five feet square. They lit on a damp patch of earth, I guess doing the butterfly version of drinking water, but then lifted, dancing in and out among one another for the ten minutes we stood there. Nancy's camera was clicking nonstop, but I simply watched, smiling.

Do not speak of science; I am aware of the logical explanations and of coincidence and all.

I don't care.

She sent the energy to hatch the butterflies to dance for us.

Don't bother to tell us differently; we were there.

When we left, the cloud was by the beach and the butterflies were still dancing.

***
If you care to know more about my sister and me, this is an early entry "Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister."

Why Part 2 is delayed--a GOOD reason

I was distracted. TOTALLY distracted. I am about two/thirds done with a coral painting and I decided to give you my work in progress. As you all know I do not have a camera, and the original is about 18 by 22 inches. I had to scan it in seven sections, then tile and blend, and LORD. Anyway, here is a rough idea of what it looks like. Let's see if I can get this inserted properly.

Well, I am not sure how to insert the picture in the right place, but it doesn't matter. I want to put in a particularly lovely coral called a gorgonian fan. It is large, very lacy, and has distinct veining. I have some more subtle touches for othercoral as well, to get the soft coral contrast to hard coral, but perhaps you have an idea. The detailing is left out in some areas because I had to reduce the size of my file. Life with computers. Anyway,  I got so excited when I figured out how to get the effects I wanted that writing flew out of my mind. I bet you all understand.

Oh! There. I fixed it. Simple enough and good enough for my needs.

EXTRA NOTE about the pieced together scan: the water is different. It does not have the puffs effects, but, instead, looks like water instead of sky. The scan bothers me that way. I got tired of tiling in scans that ALL had different color intensities and the sea was just AWFUL in my scan, but i see that in trying to just throw sea in there, it's not right. Oh, well. I am writing this when three people have given me wonderful feedback on it, but it's bothered me since I made the document! Okay. Enough. AND, now I have the gorgonian fan corals on there, and have started placing "orange basslets"--a golden orange fish that is longer than it is wide. I may put a couple of the butterfly fish in it. By the way, the particular colors and corals were inspired by a picture of a Red Sea coral bank. Apparently they go nearly to the surface, and down as much as a thousand feet! Why I have the fascination, I don't know--the gardener I think.

In the meantime, back in "Runaways to redbank" mode....

You will be meeting the Da Silvas, who remain a cacophonous, marvelous blur, as well as a gentleman on the boardwalk who looked like Burt Lancaster in Field of Dreams, a buttoned up grandma with perfectly precise pixie haircut,  playing whiffle ball in her pleated skirt and blouse with the Peter Pan collar, a couple who found both me and my penchant for taking pictures of sand formations somewhat odd, and a furry gentleman from some country that borders the Mediterranean Sea, who thought I should spend my fiftieth birthday with him because he was just such a durned stud. I don't know... they FIND me. Plus, I'll throw in whatever flies into my brain. I am undoubtedly blurring my trips into one endless adventure, but I'm sure I really don't care. The incidents live as if they were yesterday's vacation. I doubt you all care, either.

I also started writing plans for running storytelling techniques for nonfiction workshops out of my home... early on I know I referred to my friend's book. I'll get to that another day as well. I don't want to make my fortune doing that... I think it would be fun, and I would like to have it be something that has the potential to be ongoing and pay me enough for the planning, the hosting and, well, thinking to do it. And I would not compete with published authors--it would be a discovery opportunity for all of us, perhaps. We'll see.

As you can see, though, I've not been absent because of some sort of relapse into morosity... I KNOW the word is "moroseness," but I prefer my word. I did, however, decide that my one big gift to myself from the back Disability money would be a GOOD recumbent bike. It is the one vigorous exercise I can do now, and when I can get to the gym, I really work at it, riding at levels 16-20 for a full 50 minutes. I love the adrenaline rush. Oh, hell, it seems ironic in the extreme that a woman with the heart of an Amazon was put into such a fragile body. On the other hand, I may just have the strongest back on the planet, to have withstood so much and STILL support me enough to keep walking... albeit a tad oddly at times, and not for long periods.

Non-Sequiturs R Us
I am rambling, aren't I. I have never been diagnosed with any sort of bipolar disorder, but I find, when I am truly myself, when my body gives me the most trouble, my mind gets manic. The painting I have included has been done in fifteen minute stints over the course of ten days, with only one day off... and I have probably painted 12-14 times a day, with breaks in between. PLUS I made a homemade shepherd's pie--cooking the lamb ahead, boning it then skimming off ALL fat, caramelizing vadelia onions in sherry and garlic with shitake mushrooms, layering the casserole, making mashed potatoes to put on top... it's a long process to do it the old-fashioned way my mom did, so it would never be greasy.

What else did I do? Tutor. But mostly paint, cook, draw up a little business plan and research and order my bike. Sorry I have not written, but ON to reading what YOU all have written. Did I say before how great it is to be back in here? I have an ongoing argument with a friend who just loathes computers. She feels that all connections that are made and remain online or virtual are not real. I've given up arguing but have told her that I'd have felt hopelessly cut off from the world without my computer. Blogging, to me, is the modern equivalent of old-fashioned letter-writing and correspondence friendships. We can do it all faster, and there are "social networking" venues and business networking venues. And there are blogs, which, for me, are satisfyingly rich and varied. Words from people who think and write differently from me--this is SO important. To think, to wake up, to learn. And if here and there someone has pretended to be from a country he or she is not from, oh, well.

That's all for today. No. Really. I promise.

White Icing

Today I drove to PT in a snow storm, not thinking about the fact that I had to WALK from the car into the building. But never mind, I made it. Sort of. I went because my therapist had never seen me "fully compromised," which means I am  walking like one of the astronauts fully geared... flat-footed and VERY SLOWLY. It's as if my legs are always a beat behind my brain, and every step requires my WILLING the legs to move.

It seems that way because, on days like this, it IS that way. I am glad I went. I accomplished something with this day and did not allow the pain to interfere with that part.

My reward? Right now, as the sun is lowering toward sleep, the horizon is glowing peach to rose, slanting bright, pastel light across new snow. And there is white icing on all the tree limbs, so they glow as well.  There should be a shade of paint called  "afternoon snow blue."  I can simply swivel in my chair here, on the second floor, to face the setting sun and simply watch the slow dance as night rises with the sun's fall.

At no time of the year, and no other sort of day, do I get this feeling as the day closes.  This fall into February holds the pain of too many losses, but sometimes the intensity of loss simply highlights how much I had to feel such loss. The love of so many. The flipside of loss is fullness.

But this beauty. How did I come to feel it like a pulsing through my whole body, almost pain? And aching of the heart, this stillness.

Not often do we have the pristine of new snow for more than two hours, or the icing on the trees for much more--to have them both at once at this time of day? There is no wind. Just now there are no cars. No squirrel tracks on this new three inches. This silence is rare as well, because it is not the season of mowing and whacking and sawing, of children playing outdoors.

Just the silence only snow-muffled evenings know. I've opened the window, cold or no, to let it fill me for these moments. I skate in my mind, tracing the fine, even curve between the yin and the yang, and I let the tears fall freely.

***
I love chocolate. MY mom always asked me why it was I wanted white icing on chocolate cake for my birthday, instead of chocolate. My birthday is in late June, when all is at its most lush and hottest, and the days are long. There was no air conditioning then for us.

"It reminds me of when the trees have frosting, Mom. And the cold. I get Winter in Summer, and I like that, Mom."

She would simply shake her head, kiss me on my nose as was her custom and say, "Me, too. Winter in Summer cake it is. White icing for my Jetty."

***
I love my  mom.

I'll close the window for now, though.

Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister

I've tried a dozen times to write about her, to capture her. What it was to have a sister who lived her life with on section of her soul in past lives, one part in this life, and one part in whatever came next.  She always expressed her spirituality in terms of our being on an eternal continuum, that this time here, now, was just a section along the way.  She'd have visceral feelings of déja vu, but talked about them to very few people.

She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers.  She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"

She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.

But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before.  Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."

Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."

Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."

"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."

"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"

"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."

We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately  my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.

By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.

Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."

I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands.  I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."

All was right in our world.

***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks.  I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that.  Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand.  We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.

"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.

"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.

"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."

We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....

Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...

I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.

Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."

Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.

We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters.  We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet.  We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine.  We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...

But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.

We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment.  The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello.  All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town.  We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast.  A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay.  The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.

We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.

We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.

And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.

I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She  mourned my  not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet.  I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection.  He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.

But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives.  We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed.  She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.

I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave.  She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."

The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.

When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.

"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"

The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...

My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...

The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."

But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."

I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum.  I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.


Before  I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."

I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.

At dawn.

I don't DO vegetables

I mean grow them. I eat them, though.

I do love to garden, though. Jetty's living art, my sister called it. She said I designed little rooms all over the yard. Yes, that's pretty much the truth. It's the one thing that is intense labor that doesn't kill my back. I don't know why that is; I don't care. When I garden, I constantly shift position. I have a small, light wheelbarrow I can never overload. Same with shovels. I have learned how to lift and it is automatic. There is a rhythm for me and it has become the one dance I've mastered.

But here we get to the core. I do flowers. Shrubs. Decorative container gardens. I don't do vegetables. Not now, not ever. Why? Well, something in me rebels at the practical. I mean, I'll gladly steal, beg, wantonly grovel for the veggies of someone else's labor. But the BUGS. No, really. Bugs like all those nice, juicy things, too. You'd think a gardener would be fine with them, but I'm not. I like a good worm, of course, but they stay put or simply burrow away from me. And honey bees kind of leave you alone in general. Flower garden bugs know civilities. Flies don't care about flowers and I don't know why.

I don't care why. I know only that they don't like my flowers and, when I wear a broad-brimmed hat and a hint of bug repellent, most all of them stay far away from me. My friends tell me to just do tomatoes? Why? I'll take theirs because they always have too many. I do them a favor, really, by eating them.

Besides, we go to flower gardens for respite; to look and to drink in the beauty. We don't go to the vegetable tangle for that. I don't think vegetable garden bugs had mothers. It's flies in your teeth, up your nose, and creeping greenish yucks crawling up your sleeves. Let's face it: no one has to pick little crawly things out of their hair after a little sit-down by the Japanese maple, amidst the hostas and astilbes on a July afternoon. Even cottage garden tumbles are civilized. Nope. Give me the pretty stuff that does nothing but feed my eyes. The worms and birds are happy. So are the bees. That's enough for me.

This is sacrilege I know. Oh, well. There is no symmetry in my plans. No rows. Just rooms that have grown through my twenty years in this house, in this place of peace for me. I had visions at the outset and have seen these visions become real through my small efforts every year, step by step. Through the turmoil of my years, the garden grows in peace. I start new rooms every couple of years, with an eye toward five to ten years down my road, and I hope I travel here long enough to see them to fruition, knowing my vision for them may change along the way.

That's the thing. When the vegetables are eaten, the following year you plant again. It's precise. When you plant flower gardens they are forever evolving, changing, yet offering the stability of the heart's design. My maple was a twig. Now it is as tall as a house, a mass of deeply cut shade and wonder through three seasons. The peonies will outlast my life. There are bits of my mother in the Canterbury bells saved at another friend's house until I could have a garden of my own. The deep blue-green hostas were from slips at my grandmother's cottage in New Hampshire, planted when the cottage was new in the thirties. And all of it my late sister--in my love of asymmetry and knowledge of the power of complementary color.

My flowers offer me the model for my life. Unbalance at first glance, perhaps even a chaotic mess to some. Slow to come to fruition, offering nothing much beyond the colors I've offered and BEEN given. Some years and to some eyes I haven't looked like much, but other years, to other eyes? I have had my seasons; I will have them still.

Leave me to my flowers; join me when you will.
Just remember to bring me your veggies and we'll argue over wine...