MindSpinner

I’d like to thank everyone who has read here and sometimes responded. The hours I spent writing were deeply good.

That said, I’m going to close this chapter, I think. I’m doing some adjusting that requires a measure of spiritual and emotional energy. On a practical plane, I’ll add a weekend job after Christmas if I can, for the usual reasons. I won’t have much time to write even if the notion strikes. The blog will remain here until June or so, when I’ll decline to renew the domain name.

There are seasons in every life. This is my season to take care of all that depends on me.

Best wishes for a warm, safe, and happy holiday season spent with the people you love. I have loved meeting you through this medium.

The smell of the boys’ locker room -
pungent sweat soured -
comes as no mystery when you stand with the players
at the edge of the football field
your camera in hand
in case a play stampedes close enough
for the chance of a good shot.

You stand only as high as these boys’ chests,
and you rather hope they notice you are there
when excitement takes them.
They are rapt, they are wrought with
alternate agonies and ecstasies,
and they are dripping.
Behind you, the noise of the crowd
and the approximate music of the pep band
crescendos, subsides and crescendos again.
Coaches’ barks and bellows
sound across the field
like cannons in the 1812 Overture.

Above the glaring lights
and the sober scoreboard,
in the velvet night,
the moon hangs still - a shimmering,
cratered pearl, like a pendant.
And as you walk outside the yellow fence
to the far side of the field,
straw-colored September grass sweeps
round the shoulder of the hill like a shawl
and falls alluringly away
toward the woods under the moon,
into the sound of crickets.

Of the three tiny apple trees I planted this spring, one, the Enterprise apple tree, miraculously bore a single apple two years ahead of schedule. I’d been watching the fruit mature all along - at least until life became significantly more hectic a couple of weeks ago and the last of the beans turned to leather britches on the vine. Yesterday I found the apple fully ripe and fallen from the branch. I peeled and sliced it and sampled a bite of harvests to come. No bland store-bought apple this. It was juicy and crisp and intensely flavorful - sweet, spicy, and tart all at once. I cannot imagine a better thing to do with a bit of yard than to grow the likes of this.

I am cleaning out the closet that houses family albums and boxes of pictures. Well, not exactly. I am looking at pictures from the closet I’m supposed to be cleaning. Thing is, there’s not anybody to tell me that I’m supposed to be cleaning, so maybe there is no “supposed to.” I mean, it’s not as if my mother mentioned in our latest phone conversation how long it has been since I cleaned my closets.

I am looking at pictures, then, and my house is in the mess that houses are in when things are dragged out of the places where we stash them. (I’ve even found that once upon a time, probably in the ’90’s, I bought a computer repair kit from CompUSA with gizmos I don’t even understand - and stashed it in a closet. It looks to me as if I have the means to solder something - who knew?)

In the first picture box I opened, I found the shot in which a two-year-old Catapult Kid meets the Atlantic Ocean. Of all the photographs I took when he was small, none better captures the spirit of the child than this.

Though both my grandmothers sewed, it was my aunt who taught me how. My mother never cared for sewing. She was all tomboy and outdoors woman, and saw no need to sew for herself when her mother could sew, for her, clothes at least as nice as any found in a department store. When I was young and not so encumbered by the to-do list, I made many of my own things, even my own wedding dress.

Now Dark-haired Daughter has taken a resolute interest in sewing and fashion design, and my mother has pitched in to buy her a machine. We went yesterday to pick up the sewing machine of choice, a Husqvarna Viking Prelude 370, along with a couple of beginner’s books on sewing and fabrics. Let the fun begin!