Cooking in August

It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive – Bruce Springsteen

I awoke to a rare cool morning. After so much heat, the dew-heavy grass shocked my toes. The jewelweed beckoned the hummingbirds for a kiss of chilled nectar. The glossed blackberries showed off their night-plumped, sugar-filled juiciness. The green apple moss eased its grip on the garden bricks and exhaled as I inhaled lung-shimmering relief.

But what a fool to trust an August morning, cunning and full of deceit. The sun rose over the tree line. The dew thrust itself up into thickening air. Steamy August climbed the steps, let herself in through the door we never remember to lock. I glanced over at the couch and noticed she was sitting there with a wicked grin. A cup of hot coffee, my dear? she asked.

August weighs down already heavy hills with late morning mist and monthlong humidity. The hollows sink lower. Moods sink lower. Stubborn August twists desires upon themselves, these desires for an easy breath, needing this heat to end, not wanting another summer to pass. You want this and you want that.

But it is August and August has thirty-one days and refuses to be rushed. August is a mule. You push against her, pull on a lead rope, ask nicely, ask meanly, grovel, beseech, whine, mope, smack her on the ass, stick your tongue out at her. Your face will stick, says this mule, full of the wisdom of mothers from the 1970s. You try to manipulate, offer a handful of second cut hay. Slice a piece off your apple. Promise a pasture full of clover. She won’t budge. She’s tired of people wanting her to be different.

You don’t give up easily. You want life to be easy. You reach for a future you tell yourself will be easier. You stretch your hand out toward September and ask, Do you remember me, old friend? She snaps your fingers with a fallen twig, Not yet, not now, wait your turn, as she runs off to play with her best friend, October.

The daisies remain fresh and sprightly and judge your greasy face and how your fingers swell as you walk and how your bangs curl unkindly away from your forehead. They have no patience for any complaints. We grow up through sidewalk cracks and on the battered edges of lanes, they say, and she’s the one moaning, as they gossip about your weakness to the bees.

*

Mid afternoon and I’m home from work. Today is an early day. I want to write but my laptop wants to overheat. I eat a few chips. Then a popsicle. I stain my white shirt with a small caliber shot of pomegranate popsicle drip. I sit on the bed to read. I get back up and turn on the fan. I read a couple paragraphs and put the book down, think of the need to make dinner, the floors that need swept, the laundry. I think of lists.

I think of how it’s unusually quiet here. No one is home. My husband’s woodshop is silent.

My eyes start to close. I flip them back open. They try to close again. I stop arguing with them and float in some middle ground, neither fully awake nor asleep. My body feels loose. I think of how my body never feels loose. It always feels tight, like it’s going somewhere, or should be going somewhere. I bruise myself by trying to go too many places too quickly and not paying attention. My joints are tightly packed steel coils. I allow this feeling of ease for a bit but warn my body not to fall asleep, reminding it, we have things that need done.

My body tells me, stop talking, just stop.

*

August tires of us wishing her away. She pushes us to recognize her offerings. How she saps our energy to force a rest and how this rest is a gift, especially after a time of worry, of sad news for people I love, of continued sad news in the world. August heats up and lays on my body like a weighted blanket, forcing rest for a bit. Even in the afternoon. Even with nothing prepped for dinner. Even while wearing a popsicle stained white T-shirt. I think of how sometimes I don't even realize how much I need a rest.

August teaches like the wise crones of fairy tales. It’s not her job to be kind. She makes you work for your growth. Confidence and wisdom radiate from fire. She teases, sometimes with harsh humor that makes us see the folly of our ways, of the ridiculousness of thinking life should bend to our wishes, that the world should be what it isn’t, that life should be easy. Wise crones force us into seeing how we make life harder.

Rest, my dear, August said, I know I’ve been a lot lately. But if you want to remain a list of tasks, that’s on you. I’m going out on the porch. It’s cooler out there.

She’s right. I normally only rest at night, but really it’s a collapse into bed with little time to feel the peace of relaxation. I lay down. I’m out cold. Conked on the head like the victim in a British murder mystery. I fill the house with snores. I grind my teeth. I wake up in the middle of the night but, again, it’s not relaxing. It's frantic flip flopping trying to fall back to sleep so I won’t yawn all day at work.

*

We went to St. James Catholic Church when I was young. There were parts of church I connected with. I liked the solemnity and the ritual. The sun through the stained glass. The quiet. The sound of my grandpa’s sometimes offkey but sincere singing. I liked the prayers that I felt could stomp out everything unholy within me. Walking out, I felt cleansed until I reached the parking lot and started fighting with my brother about who got the front seat. Not even the holiest of martyrs want to sit in the back seat with a younger sibling in control of the radio. But mostly, even with wishes of peace be with you fresh in my heart, my body vibrated with the knowledge that I didn’t belong.

I was made of sin.

We were outsiders. My mom couldn’t receive communion because she was divorced. No one cared that the divorce saved us all from an abusive alcoholic. We held tight to the pew and tried to make ourselves small as the worthy passed by. We didn’t look up.

Child support was optional in the 1970s. My mom was worn out with trying to feed us. My brother and I were little shits and she eventually got tired of wrestling us out the door for weekly catechism and Sunday morning mass. We stopped going.

I’m glad we stopped. I didn’t need weekly reinforcement to feel bad about myself. Still, I often wish I had faith. Even now, I sometimes find myself reciting a prayer when I feel overwhelmed with life. I recently came across this one I had taken a screenshot of several years ago called The Welcoming Prayer written by Mary Mrozoski and thought I should try again. I started the morning with the soft crackle of a wooden wick candle and twenty minutes of yin yoga. I felt stretchy and stitched together by Carolina wrens and song sparrows waking up and stretching their own tight wings. I recited the prayer.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment

because I know it is for my healing.

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions,

persons, situation, and conditions.

I let go of my desire for security.

I let go of my desire for approval.

I let go of my desire for control.

I let go of my desire to change any

situation, condition,

person, or myself.

I open to the

love and presence of God

and the healing action and grace within.

I paused, waited to feel something.

But there was nothing. I felt the same as if I had read a grocery list.

I tried again.

And again. I kept trying despite it being the opposite of everything I truly want.

Later in the week, I shared it with my husband and daughter. Emily stayed silent. Jeff looked at me and said, That’s nothing like you.

I want security. I want things to change. And mostly, I want people to love me and I want to remain tender enough through the scorch of life to love them back fiercely.

I grew up determined to have a life that started to erase the shame I felt in church and in life all those years ago. I turned these hopes of security and love and change into a whirlwind of activity. I needed to work for a new life and to deserve a good life. I wanted the people who thought I didn’t belong to know better, to be sorry for their judgement, even though I no longer associated with any of them. They were people who only remained in my mind. I would do right and avoid shame. To rest midday, to let the flesh of my body sink into its own bones felt blasphemous.

*

In recent history, I can only remember three times that I felt a deep, jellyfish fluidity in my body. Once was after an hour-long yin yoga class with a teacher who had a remarkable gift, but left to teach elsewhere right after I joined the studio. After class, my friend Cris, and I walked out into a night of fat flakes of falling snow. We’ve been friends for decades and it felt like magic, even standing in a freezing asphalt parking lot. I felt so loose, I didn’t want to drive home. I felt buzzy and light, only a body, the past gone. Another time, I shared something I had been feeling and thinking about with my husband and my body felt formless for a day. I felt desperate to reclaim that feeling, but as a yoga teacher once said to me, less effort, Sheila, more ease. But the ease had slipped away. The last time was the August afternoon with the popsicle.

*

I think of two people who know me well, very well, over a decade each of them. One said, you like to serve people and the other said you like people around you a lot. I can see how they interpret my life this way. Mostly, I think this observation springs from my obsession to cook for people I love. When the kids are home, this is in overdrive. During college breaks I had homemade nachos timed for their arrival. I cooked all the favorites: lasagna, chicken pot pie, homemade chili and chicken soup, salmon, fresh bread. The grill was fired up and the table filled with sides. Chewy brownies and tart cherry pies and cheesecakes. Homemade pizzas. I cooked some iteration of eggs and waffles, bacon and sausage each morning. They returned to school with coolers stuffed and boxes stacked with the overflow. When Jesse was in the Air Force, grocery lists started a month in advance of his leave time. I’d call him from the grocery store to plan. Boxes of cookies were sent to his base in North Dakota. I often invite friends and other family over and cook for them too. My gratitude for these people puffs up to the peak of the porch roof.

So it makes sense, this perception.

But I love time alone and I sometimes have fantasies of signing up for one of those meal delivery services that I can just take out of the box and sizzle in a pan without having to think or plan or coordinate. I could live on goat cheese, arugula, tomatoes, crusty bread and an egg, or at least I could before the raccoons killed all my hens.

.

I don’t need to serve

I don’t need to be surrounded.

What I need is the people I love most to know they are loved.

At times, this need feels desperate. This is the purpose of my life. I work hard to make this happen.

What would my body feel like if I recognized that I accomplished this? What if I accept that the people I love know that I love them fiercely and that they love me fiercely too? What if I learned to relax into those feelings of being deeply loved even if it feels uncomfortable to let this love wash over me and sink deep into me?

*

Usually I long for August to end, but this year, even with the discomfort during the day and waking up at night too hot to sleep and knowing September is a month of delight and October possibly even more so, I want time to slow. I let the prayer get tucked away in the photos on my phone, stacked on top by pictures from my steamy walks of the grisly old man of the woods mushroom and Frost’s bolete and even dog vomit slime mold. Under broad necked root borer beetles and a rusty spider wasp dragging a paralyzed wolf spider back to its nest. Under false sunflowers and wild basil, American germander, moth mullein and both creeping and plume thistles. Tucked away under the harsh beauty of August.

The Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue wrote, “...your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

This is what I need to recite each day.

This is the place of rest.

*

August heat leaves us weary and exhausted, stuffed full of melancholy. It’s still summer, but the greens are tired and muted. Days shorten. The orioles have been gone for weeks and the blackbirds are flocking in the tops of oaks.

August manages to be grueling and fleeting. It’s a month of no escape. Perhaps August’s stubbornness is mule-like because I am slow to learn.

August slowed me down, let my body be held by the earth with the kind of deep love that feels uncomfortable, the unfamiliarity of resting in our worth, which one wouldn’t think would be so hard to do, but is the work of a lifetime. August wants to teach that rest too, that deep rest is a form of prayer. It’s time to surrender my body back to a floating regenerative space. And then, after the rest, there is ease and sometimes joy. A joy found in fistfuls of basil, sun warmed sungold tomatoes straight from vine to mouth, a nap on the porch, popsicles and stain remover.

August reminds us we are made of sun and bone and love, not sin, that we are strong and adaptable, worthy of a body at ease.

She rewards our steadfastness with goldenrod wings and sends us off into the now open arms of September.

August and all her hardy daisies love me, after all.

And they love you too.

Peace be with you.