Stability

Posted on April 28, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

a view of my patio in apartment 9 at the Collegeville Institute

Last night I went to the 50th Anniversary event for The Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Saint John’s Abbey. It made me think about the Benedictine virtue of Stability.

Sacred Heart Chapel at Saint Benedict’s Monastery a mile from my home

The room was full of wonderful people, many of whom I know. On the way in I met up with S. Michaela, the prioress of Saint Benedict’s Monastery, the women’s monastery where I was communications director from 2008-2012. One of my last acts was working on her installation as prioress. With her was S. Susan, the prioress elect, who will be installed in June. I said to her: “One night I was sitting next to you at an ESL training session and the next week you were elected prioress!” I asked her about her team, which will be announced soon. I have known her as a somewhat shy and quiet woman, but she was beaming!

I met a couple of new people, too. When I said my name was Susan Sink to a young editor at Liturgical Press, she said, “Oh! I know that name!” My work on The Saint John’s Bible continues on there. When I introduced myself to a woman at my table, who turned out to be the daughter-in-law of J.F. Powers, she said, “Oh! You’re a poet, right?” To be identified as a poet was really gratifying!

Saint John’s Abbey Church

I was seated between two Benedictine monks, the music scholar Anthony Ruff, and the wonderful Hilary Thimmesh. In great Benedictine fashion, they gave two takes on a joke. Fr. Hilary said: “There was a farmer who won the lottery and received $10 million. When asked what he would do with the money, he said, ‘I’ll keep on farming until it’s all gone.'” To which Fr. Anthony said, “I thought you were going to say, ‘I’ll give a half million to each of my children.'” Both answers are rooted in this Central Minnesota (large German families) farming community.

The keynote speaker was Kathleen Norris. She told the story of her relationship with the Institute, particularly how it served as an ecumenical place, where Catholic and Protestant and Evangelical and Pentecostal and Mennonite scholars come together, each working on their own projects, and speak to each other of their faith, traditions, and theological positions. Into this environment was dropped Norris, working on her book Dakota, a Presbyterian drawn to Benedictine monasticism. She had trouble winning over the scholars, and recounted a discussion with a philosopher/theologian who said dismissively that all she did was “tell stories,” to which she replied, “What else is there?”

Her book Cloisterwalk, about her experience at the Institute, is what brought me here as a scholar in 2005-06. I often relate how full I was that year. Even though I was lonely a lot of the time, I was also completely engaged with ideas and writing and the people around me. I was in the company of giants and I knew it. Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ, taught me so much about liturgy that year it transformed my relationship to my faith. (And I was her occasional bridge partner to boot.) After I read from my memoir about my experience as a teenager in an Assembly of God Church, the one evangelical in our group came up and said, “You did good, Susan.” That meant more to me than any other response.

I became an Oblate of this community, Saint John’s Abbey, and present at the ceremony, where I made my promise to live out the Benedictine Rule as closely as I was able in my layperson life, was Kilian McDonnell, OSB, 95 years old and the founder of the Institute 50 years ago. He was also at dinner but retired early. I tried my best the year my office was across from his at the Institute to convince him one could not find immortality through poetry (and that his legacy in ecumenicism and theology was immortality enough) but he continues to write it!

And stability. It is a major pillar of the Rule of St. Benedict. For the monks it means staying in one monastery, committing to community and place no matter how difficult that becomes. Loving one’s brothers or sisters and staying rooted.

When I had lived here two years or so, I was asked to write an essay on Stability for a book for Oblates. I also gave a talk to the Oblates of Saint John’s Abbey on the subject. But I have to admit my heart fell when I received the topic. Before coming to this area, I had moved every two years (or more) my entire adult life. I had never been in a place longer than four years. I had never been committed to place. Also, I came here after a divorce– even my marriage had not proven stable enough to last more than five years.

I had to be creative, and so I found that the word “stability” only appears twice in the Bible, and only in the Old Testament. And it means “good rule.” The term only applies to stability of government– good rulers applying good rule. The story of the Israelites is not one of sustained stability. I also remembered that my friend, the scholar Dorothy Bass, who had been at the Institute with me, was trying to write a book about Christians embracing place and staying put, only to discover the New Testament was all about moving around, not staying put, never putting down roots! Jesus did not say “bloom where planted.”

But in the Quad last night, where the bricks were made by the monks in the 19th century, I had a glimpse of how my own stability has happened. Here I am. It has been twelve years! Here I am, full of stability (ha!), growing food and prairie plugs, raising chickens, living in a world of family that was not my own ten years ago– with adult children visiting and elderly in-laws to care for and in-laws on the farm.

I have been tutoring Somali women in English on Monday and Wednesday mornings and last week I drove them home after class. I asked if they wanted to see my home, and they did, so we drove to the farm. When I pointed out that my husband’s sister lives in one house and his brother in another they said, “That is good! That is very good! It is good you live with family!” They also thought it would be scary out here at night with the animals in the woods– like me before I came here, they are city people.

I have not stayed still since I arrived here. But I have stayed (or maybe become) rooted. What a blessing to be gifted with life in this place. What a blessing to have come here and what a blessing to have stayed.

Posted in Benedictine monastery, poetry, religion, St. Joseph, the Farm | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Hard vs. Impossible

Posted on April 22, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

weeds in a raised bed

This spring is hard. But last spring during chemo was impossible. I’m always overwhelmed in the spring, although the self-talk helps me realize it is early and I can take it bed-by-bed until the garden is planted.

Right now it’s time to plant the alliums. I’ve planted out the leeks and some spring onions (small bulbs planted close together), and the shallots. Then, gathering together my seed potatoes, I discovered a small laundry basket with MORE GARLIC in it! I was so excited. The bulbs are starting to sprout but they’re still nice and firm. And I was just lamenting I’d only planted one bed of garlic. So I went out this afternoon and got 40 more cloves in the remaining space of the allium bed.

garlic on 4-21

Last year I did not get onions planted. I was incapable of clearing the boxes and never got it together to put them in the bed alongside potatoes– which was just as well because I never had the energy to weed those potatoes. I got major help to get those in the ground.

This year I can’t imagine digging a trench in that garden, but I know I will. I’m able to dig out the deep-rooted weeds in the raised beds, turn the soil over, even shovel some of the new compost Steve dumped in two beds and move it to the other beds that need it. I can chunk open the bags of mushroom compost and spread it on the beds.

Last year I had time– so much time. But I couldn’t do a thing. It was impossible.

This year I have time– I’m working a bit, volunteering a bit, but I have afternoons that stretch out for hours. And though it is hard, I can also be more methodical. Today I relocated the adolescent chickens, who were very crowded in the pen, out to the summer home. I’m a little worried they don’t have enough adult feathers, so I bought a heat lamp, assembled it, and ran cords from the house out to the coop. It was not a big deal, but I usually don’t do things like that. I also cleaned out the straw and put new straw down, cleaned the extremely dirty water dispenser and food dish.

It is hard because in every area I see the neglect from last year. I was too tired to take proper care of the chicken water dish. I was just not up to cleaning things out and getting rid of the rusted feeder in the fall. None of the fall clean-up of the garden happened.

So there are more weeds, and more chicken poop, and there was less garlic.

But we have a new garden fence (almost) completed and six new chickens in the yard. We are eating salad quite regularly, and there are carrots coming up in the greenhouse. Last year there were no carrots. It was impossible.

Tomorrow, I’ll plant bags of interesting potato varieties I bought from a guy in New Hampshire. They can sit in the greenhouse until it’s really warm. Finish turning over a bed and put beets in.

And we’ll take it from there. Hard but thankfully not impossible.

Posted in cancer, food, garden, Greenhouse, the Farm | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

First Signs of Plug Life

Posted on April 19, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

hyssop

Prairie plants are not at all like vegetables. Vegetables need so much care and are so varied in the way they prefer to grow. Just ask my pepper and tomato plants, newly transplanted but brought back inside for one last frosty night and put on their heat mats. Just ask the radishes that were briefly happy in the greenhouse and now are splitting as they grow because of the occasional daytime high temps. The carrots are happy, as are the beets, but they need lots of thinning if they’re going to stay happy and produce good fruit.

Not so the prairie plugs. We have more than forty varieties out there, about 15,000 cells in all, and though they are very uneven in their emergence from the planting medium, when they do come up they don’t seem to care what the temperature is like. They want water, but they’re kind of forgiving about that, too. And though there are bursts of plants coming up in each cell, they don’t need thinning, or so I’m told. (That means there are about 60,000-80,000 plants out there, multiple seedlings per cell.)

lupine

I’m enjoying seeing how varied the seedlings look. For example, the lupine have their full-petaled leaves, like a tropical plant, even at the tiniest size.

The blazing star, of which we have three varieties planted, look really cool. First come the two little leaves and then a stem like a blade of grass shoots up. Supposedly more stems will shoot up and then they’ll bind into a little ball.

dropseed (grass)

The grasses are coming up, too, making me think of crew cuts and Walt Whitman’s description of grass as “the uncut hair of graves.”

I’m not a big fan of infants– I get interested at about six-eight months when the babies start exhibiting personalities and cognition. These plant babies, though, have my interest. I’d like to be able to recognize some of them and learn their names. Of course, I have been watering them and weeding the cells throughout gestation, so I earned these little guys.

Jeff says some of the plants will take two years just to get to size, which is hard to imagine. Others we’ll be able to sell come July or August. It’s enough to make me rethink my flower garden, where all those precious annuals and showy lilies now grow. Why not stuff it full of bellflower and aster and blazing star and cup plant and compass plant? (Or turn it over to vegetables?)

 

 

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micros and babies

Posted on April 11, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

On April 8, we ate our first salad of baby arugula from the greenhouse. I was planning on keeping it growing until Easter, but you have to cut it when it’s ready– arugula especially will get sharp. With some luck (we’re getting cold weather now but it’s going to warm up for the rest of the week) there will be more for Easter.

Arugula in the greenhouse bed

I guess next year I will plant earlier. It took this arugula three weeks to grow. The radishes, which usually take three weeks to bulb, are probably going to develop fruit this week, one month out. Which suggests to me that planting earlier wouldn’t have made a difference. I waited until we set the heater on, meaning it would stay above 35 degrees at night. It never hurts to plant seed– it seems to know from the soil temperature when to grow. It’s been the same story in the cold frame, growing even more slowly because it’s colder out there.

radishes

I also harvested a full tray of tiny collards/tatsoi/mustard greens. These aren’t like the baby arugula– they are bonafide microgreens. Microgreens seem a bit precious, more like sprouts than salad, but I was given a large quantity of these seeds and really, they’re quite good mixed in with baby greens. I have another tray going inside on a heat mat under grow lights that I can use for the Easter salad, which will also include quinoa, red onion, dried apricot, and maybe some adzuki beans with a vinaigrette.

I’m always surprised how long it takes for spinach to germinate. Other greens pop up as soon as possible, but not spinach. And when it emerges, it looks like a fancy grass, with two prongs of thin, straight leaves. The round leaves develop afterward.

carrots

But spinach is nothing like carrots, which seem to take forever to germinate when I plant them outside. The greenhouse has made a huge difference for them. I’ve never had carrots sprout this early, and so many! I didn’t get any carrots last year, what with the rabbits and lack of attention to the beds. They didn’t grow themselves like I’d hoped! This year will be a different story. I’m leaving them a bit thick so I can get carrot tops. Same with the beets, which are just coming in the greenhouse bed and will contribute to greens.

April is the time of precious overlap. There is praise for the last of the storage vegetables, in my case some potatoes that I had stashed in the fridge. We ate the last quart of frozen tomatoes last week– and made a discovery there.

They were late season cherry tomatoes, blended in the food processor, cooked down a bit and frozen. In the freezer, the liquid separates more from the pulp, so on the stove the liquid boils off very quickly. I had made a little stew of chicken, beans, olives, kale, and the tomato puree. The tomatoes were so sweet and the sauce so thick, it was like tomato paste. I am planning on using that technique this year to make tomato paste in a two-part process: cook down, freeze, cook down again and can. Or freeze again. I have big plans for this year, so we’ll see.

I’m taking out my garden-to-table cookbooks and putting away the ethnic ones I use in winter. I’m reading the spring cooking magazines. I’m going out every few days to see if the asparagus is starting up and today I’ll also put some onions in the outdoor beds for spring onions. The fresh eating season has begun!

washed arugula and microgreens

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Poetry Month

Posted on April 6, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

I’ve been writing a lot of poems lately. Cowbird.com went over to a static site, so there is no more posting “new stories” there. I have moved with a lot of other Cowbird writers over to Medium.com. You can find me there at https://medium.com/@susansink and I believe you can follow me even if you don’t have an account on the Medium website.

This poster available from “pop chart lab.”

There are a few recent poems, like really really recent, there. One I wrote in response to an offer for a poster that popped up on my Facebook feed. It’s a poster of “Every Single Bird You’ll See in North America.” It seemed impossible that every bird on the continent could be fit onto a 2’x3′ poster, but every time I thought of a bird and checked the little pdf I downloaded, there it was. I decided to make up some birds we can’t “see” in North America even though they’re there. Here is the poem.

Another came from the experience of tutoring Somali women learning English. It has been a highlight of my week, every Monday and Wednesday morning, to help and encourage them. Here is that poem. By putting them on a magazine within Medium called “Coffeelicious,” I’m getting more readers, who hopefully come back to the blog.

The past two days have been particularly intense in terms of thinking about cancer. First, there is a friend who has been very much on my mind. Spring is confusing, always, but it does seem it has come earlier this year (I say that knowing it could snow and drop far below freezing before May arrives). And every warm day I’ve been thinking of this woman, who I met through a mutual friend, and who I’ve only met once. She is an ovarian cancer survivor of eight years, but her cancer is back. She is on a trial, but doesn’t want any more chemotherapy, and so things are uncertain. She spends as much time as she can on Madeleine Island in Lake Superior. The warm days makes me hope she’s getting good time there or will soon. This is my poem for her.  I know it’s a strange poem. In it I hope to capture my sense of uncertainty and tongue-tied nature over her situation and nature and time in general.

Then yesterday I learned about a monk at Saint John’s Abbey, Fr. Mark Thamert, who is dying of stomach cancer. He has had a painful three years of treatment, but having entered hospice a few months ago, he is receiving medication that makes his life pain free and he is discovering many blessings of what he calls “this final chamber.” I learned about him because a Benedictine friend, another tutor, asked me if I was going to his talk at noon about dying. I hadn’t heard about it, and she followed up by sending me a few e-mails he had written recently that were very moving and resonated a lot with me. Last night I was able to access this interview with him online. It is here.

I loved Fr. Mark’s talk, but I have to say some of the interview questions annoyed me. I sort of wish the interviewer had himself been a cancer survivor. Because for people with cancer, particularly where Fr. Mark is now, the most irrelevant question I can imagine is: “If you knew this were your last day on earth, how would you spend it?” I’ve never liked that question, but I really find it to be stupid now. We each of us live as well as we can every day until we die. Our last day is probably spent in a bed, maybe unconscious. We ALL hope we are surrounded by loved ones, or at least not alone. Other questions like this treated him as someone with special wisdom to impart that we are all in need of. I guess that is true in that we are all going to die. However, he doesn’t have any special insight. He has his particular life experience to share– and it is quite a rich experience! And he can offer us comfort by saying that they can do something for his pain, and we can be happy and encouraged by his clarity of mind. He shared the experience he had at the bedside of another monk who died that was really wonderful. But his death is not our death any more than his life was our life.

Fr. Mark also shared some poems. I enjoyed them all, but one struck me right to my core. I loved it as a poem and for its content in the context of dying. It was a prayer, really, by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of  my favorite poets. And in this year of so many prayers, the intimacy of this particular prayer and all it suggests, was astonishing. I’ve spent some time recently with the account of the Resurrection and particularly all the times Christ tells his disciples: “You are my body.” and sends them out to carry on the mission, to establish the kingdom of God on earth. Here is the poem, in Fr. Mark’s translation.

 

What will you do, God…?

by Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Hours
tr. by Mark Thamert, OSB

 

What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your pitcher, broken lie?
When I your drink, go stale or dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
you lose your meaning if you lose me.

Homeless without me, you will be
robbed of your welcome, warm and sweet.
I am your sandals: your tired feet
will wander bare for want of me.
Your mighty cloak will fall away.

Your glance that on my cheek was laid
and pillowed warm, will seek, dismayed,
the comfort that I offered once—
to lie, as sunset colors fade
in the cold lap of foreign stones.

What will you do, God? I am afraid.

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Chickens 2.0

Posted on March 30, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

March is an odd month. As it draws to a close, there are signs of new life and new horizons everywhere on the farm. It occurred to me yesterday that– “Hey, I didn’t go back to work!” I had meant to “find a job” starting March 1, but some work came to me, and really a series of small tasks with breaks between suits my current energy level. There’s planting and watering every day in the greenhouse.

March is when I always get anxious for the homegrown produce to begin, and every warm day, like yesterday, I’m restlessly roaming the property and doing spring cleaning. Cleaning the beds of weeds (still too frozen even to turn over the soil). Cleaning out the freezer and cooking up those last batches of venison chili and pesto pasta. Cleaning out the potato bin and throwing away the hopelessly sprouted and withered tubers.

This week we ate the last garden garlic bulb of the 2016 season. I had to put garlic on the grocery list because I’m so out of the habit of buying it. In eight weeks or less, we’ll have “green garlic,” small cloves and then scapes.

The trees that lined the driveway are cleared away, though there are still a lot of stick piles that will be burned in a few weeks. Oddly, the heaps of wood make me think of signal fires in Greek epics. Either that, or the aftermath of a tornado.

 

The landscape changed instantly with their removal, and there are surprises. There is more light and space. Walking across the commons to the house, I also noticed our backyard oak from a different aspect. And I saw for the first time how it leans, how it is stretching and struggling to support the long outstretched arm. I never saw its shape, even though I see this tree from my kitchen window.

Downstairs in the basement everything is sprouting. Even the peppers, on their heat mat, are coming up. Out in the greenhouse, I’m hopeful we’ll have good baby spinach and arugula for Easter. We should even have radishes.

Also downstairs is the constant cheeping of our new set of baby chicks. By the barn, my remaining chicken and Tim’s remaining chicken (he has two but one is sick and doesn’t leave the barn) wander around together. I call them the “sole survivors.” They look healthy and strong and are starting to lay an egg now and then. I found one under the pine when I took out some miscellaneous sunflower sprouts.

I bought two kinds, 3 Americauna and 3 Blue-laced Wyandottes. I love Wyandottes, and this is the variety they had at the newly discovered local hatchery. Two sisters hatch and raise chickens on the family dairy farm, and take care of old horses they once used for horseback riding lessons and kids’ horse camps. Last year they processed 750 chickens just for family and friends to eat through the winter, and their eggs go to the same people. My freezer would never empty.

The Americaunas will lay blue or greenish-blue eggs. I already know Wyandottes are good layers.
This batch of chicks are already very entertaining. I don’t remember the last batch sleeping so much. I definitely don’t remember them just sacked out in a heap or splayed all over the box. But more funny, when awake these chicks like to sit in a row on their food tray. They roost there all day. I have a feeling these chickens would love a swing! I can’t wait to see where they’ll roost and what they’ll get into when they’re grown. I do love chickens.

 

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On Time… More

Posted on March 23, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

I just finished reading Elizabeth Alexander’s wonderful memoir The Light of the World. Most people know Alexander as the poet who wrote/read the poem “Praise Song for the Day” at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration. I met Elizabeth only briefly, through the poet Kevin Young, when she was living and teaching in Chicago.

The subject of her memoir is her marriage to Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died suddenly of a heart attack four days after his 50th birthday. It’s the story of a happy marriage, which makes the fact that it was cut short all the more sad.

What I take away from it is that in this marriage there was time. There was time for so much! Not just two sons, but time for art, for discussion, for sex, for sitting in the backyard, for drinking coffee, for making meals that take a long, long time to make, for a garden, for poetry, for smoking, for speaking Italian (and his other four languages), for deep friendships, for travel. How can that be?

Flowering Tree at St. Louis Arboretum, March 9

Elizabeth Alexander is an academic, and during their marriage taught at three different colleges/universities, but mostly at Yale. She was also, by the end of the ’90s, a very well-known poet with many invitations. She was busy with lots of work and even a fair amount of travel for that work.

And lest you think Ficre was a lay-about painter, he was not only prolific as a painter, he ran restaurants. Restaurants! A very demanding profession. He had business partners, but one of these restaurants was in New York City. There is no question his own life had external demands beyond the family.

Catherine in front of art on the High Line, NYC

And yet, he is waiting on the couch for her when she comes in after an event at Yale, so that they can sit and talk together. The sense I got on every page of the book was that Ficre had time, for everyone and everything, but especially for Elizabeth and their two sons and for beauty. And so, as the book expands out and envelops us as readers, we luxuriate in a life in which there was time. Whatever else there was, there was plenty of all that is good and true and deep in life on this earth.

water tower from the Whitney Museum roof terrace

Somehow I think this has to do with “shoulds.” It is a big problem I have, all these “shoulds” always hounding me. I try to limit them, to beat them down, to keep them at abeyance. “Shoulds” devour time, make it so much more of a drudgery. And also, I stack things up on a calendar. I know calendars are necessary, and also charting how much I work and various commitments. I missed two poetry events this week, which I would have enjoyed. That is not a problem so much as I did not spend that time instead with something more expansive, being more present, but by being upset with myself and fretting. I should have gone. I should have energy. It wasn’t a burdensome event. Why didn’t I go?

When I think about the life ahead, not knowing how long that will be, I realize it is not about what I want to “do” or even who I want to “be.” It is about how, and that how answers in large part (whether one’s life is long or short) the question of time.

 

photos from recent travels, which were full of beauty, friends, family, and “big” time…

 

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Slow Down

Posted on March 15, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Am I still a blogger? It has been what, three weeks? More? In that time we’ve taken a trip to New York. I was determined to start looking for work on March 1, but instead work came to me, with two big Saint John’s Bible presentations, one of which I went to in St. Paul right from the airport. The second involved a trip to St. Louis, where I had a fantastic time with more friends down there and a really good experience at the talk to the archdiocese for their Lenten Staff Reflection Day. But also, on March 3, I received a large freelance project with many, many due dates. That gobbled up my weekends and any spare time between the trips and talks.

In the midst of all that I got blood work and a scan done. I wasn’t nervous at all, really and truly, and my CA-125 was 19, absolutely perfect.

So my phone is full of photos and blogs have gone unwritten. But today I went out to the greenhouse.

Ah, the greenhouse! It is fully functional and super cool. There are thermometers and when the temperature gets too high, a louvered window opens on one end and a giant exhaust fan turns on at the other end. There are lights, so you can be there at night. There is water at the turn of a handle (though the coupler seems to have frozen last night and cracked, so watering my beds this morning meant water spewing everywhere).

There are tables where Jeff and I are planting plugs today. But since Jeff wasn’t there this morning when I arrived, I planted a bed with spinach, arugula, and radishes.

And as I watered the bed and planted, I contemplated. Contemplated the story of this farm. My other project is working on some documents so we can set up the place as a Land Trust, a way to ensure a preservation of values and a peaceful transition of tenants (!) to the next generation.

I had all sorts of thoughts–

The three families here have lived by certain values, balancing individual ownership and privacy with communal use and restoration/transformation of the property. As I work on a draft of possible bylaws, I’m thinking about our values. I’m thinking about why it worked– in part because it wasn’t ideologically driven. In fact, it started as a dream of a lay Benedictine community, but that sort of fell apart. What remained were people with a love of natural beauty and a commitment to stewardship of the property. What remained were people with a lot of charity toward one another that enabled them to share the property for the benefit of all.

Also, this place has been able to sustain massive and nearly constant change. Over Christmas I saw home movies where Steve’s three girls and some friends played on a swing set on a grassy lawn. (What the wha?) They also built forts in small areas of scrubby trees. Just last week, one row of cottonwoods came down along the drive, and the other half will come down next week, while the ground is frozen and it’s easy to clear them. Everyone likes the way it looks. It will look even better with the clusters of red cedars and oaks coming after the ground thaws.

There was once a horse named Coco in the stall where our chickens live. There have been so many chickens.

After a certain number of years, a third home was added to the original two. A marriage ended and the girls moved away, a major trauma in the life of the farm. I arrived not even nine years ago and started building garden beds.

And in the greenhouse, I experience the property in a different way. It’s more centrally located, so I will see people more often. The common areas like the shop and barns are where people drop by to visit. Last week when I went out to see the progress, the beekeeper was there and warned me of the angry bees, so I cut a wide swath around him.

Yesterday I woke up happy. I had work to do, and that doctor’s appointment in the afternoon, but the rush was over. I had made it to a certain point where I could start to write for myself, too, and plant seeds, and go out to the greenhouse and help. It was very cold but had not snowed as much as was expected. I had no job to “go” to, and was happy to turn on my computer and face the task at hand.

Until there is produce, we have sunflower sprouts!

If everything goes well, we’ll have radishes in three weeks, and baby spinach and arugula– maybe in time for Easter. On Easter there might be some children here, though they’re all growing up fast, and there might be baby chicks, and there will certainly be a greenhouse.

 

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One Year Ago…

Posted on February 20, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Facebook let me know that today was a big anniversary: one year from the official diagnosis. I decided to go back and read some of those early entries in the blog. The entries interested me much less than the comments on them. The writing has been a great blessing to me, and I’m sure it has helped me to integrate this experience as I went along. I definitely feel in good shape “moving forward” and not as stuck as I felt two months ago at Christmas time.

More important, however, has been community. The presence of friends and family from Day One has been extraordinary.

Having cancer is one of those experiences for which there is a very clearly delineated “before” and “after.” I suppose it is true mostly of trauma– but also of dramatic success (ask J.K. Rowling about “before Harry Potter” for instance). After divorce, or cancer, the loss of a child or a dear loved one, the person is never the same.

Yesterday, living in this unseasonably warm February week, I went out to the uncovered cold frame to scatter some seeds for greens. I was surprised, after clearing the dead leaves from the surface and ready to go at it with a shovel, that the dirt was still frozen a couple inches down. It was February!

On my way to the garden, I thought again that I am not the same person I was a year ago. It is not cancer necessarily– chemotherapy really does leave one diminished. I plan on recovering much more, and feel well already, but it is clear to me I’ll never be the same. I’m just not as “sharp” as I was. It is harder to switch from task to task and be effective.

On this anniversary it is rainy but unseasonably warm. I worked editing Steve’s new company website and making appointments and investigating some work possibilities. I did not get to the taxes or my writing project.

I also corresponded with a friend I’ve made in this past year, another ovarian cancer survivor. She might be headed into a medical trial, and she gave me the broad strokes, so of course I had to spend some time reading up on it and contemplating how it fits into the story of ovarian cancer. She told me that first they have to find her original tumor, which is  required to be stored for ten years, so they can biopsy it. She said it is in “the bowels” of some institution. I love that metaphor! I had to think a bit about the Frankenstein (or Kafka) possibilities of that image. Also, where are my tumors?

As a storyteller, I realize how quickly we learn things about life– how all these pieces and details fit to make a whole, like Jenga in reverse. This year has been quite an education, and it continues. Perhaps most surprising is that it is not at all the story I expected. I hope that I convey here on the blog the hopefulness people with cancer live with now, but also the specific way in which cancer removes fear– which is surprising– and allows us to see, and face, all of life.

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“Margaret” by Kenneth Lonergan

Posted on February 18, 2017 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Thursday night I was walking with my parents on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. A woman walking behind us wearing a fake fur and with very, very blond hair, was talking in a normal voice on her phone, and we heard her say: “You never had a brain tumor so you wouldn’t know.”

The woman kept up with us, or we with her, for a couple blocks, exchanging positions, walking with the crowd and with the stoplights. We talked about her as she continued talking on her phone. I’d been in Chicago for two days, spent a lot of time on the El, remarking to myself how quiet all the public spaces were, how few people looked at each other, and listening to the things people say that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. My favorite interaction by far was when I was on the train with a CTA driver who was wearing a uniform of his own making: blue-and-white striped overalls and a matching engineer/conductor hat, just like a character from a children’s book. A young African American guy boarded the train, smiled at him, and said as he moved into the car: “That’s a show stopper right there.” City as moving poem.

Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret is full of these moments. As Anna Paquin’s character, 17-year-old Lisa Cohen, moves through Manhattan, and as the camera follows her at various distances, we hear a number of outsized conversations, some of which seem important but most of which seem banal — and all of which are unconnected to the main drama of the film.

The main drama but by no means the only drama is this: Lisa’s interaction with a bus driver (played by Mark Ruffalo) leads to an accident in which a woman’s leg is severed. The woman bleeds out in Lisa’s arms, leaving Lisa confused and covered with blood. Lisa lies about what happened in order to protect the bus driver, at the encouragement of her mother (adults in her life are very morally problematic) and, one imagines, because of her own guilt over her part in the accident. She spends the rest of the film more or less trying to recover her story from that lie and figure out what the event “means” in her life.

Like all of us, she wants to be the heroine in her own life story. She wants to be an adult and also desperately wants connection. At the same time, she pushes away her actress mother Joan (played by J. Smith-Cameron) in some of the most heart-wrenchingly real mother-daughter interactions I’ve ever seen on film. She is both harsh beyond reason and a “bestie” to her mother, and the result is a fraught relationship that both offers Lisa her best chance at meaningful connection and frustrates both of their attempts to be simultaneously individual and close. Isn’t that the paradigm for mother/teen daughter angst?

Like most teenagers, Lisa knows a lot about drama but nothing about intimacy. She betrays her mother’s simple attempts at intimacy again and again, alternately contemptuous and indifferent. However, her mother has her own life, a complicated one, and Lisa’s independence is both admirable and dangerous. Intervention is triggered by something quite cliche: the bad report card. These two are so unmoored, however, the roles are hard to maintain: what is the mother’s responsibility? How is a teen daughter supposed to behave? Then there are the men — what are their roles and responsibilities? What can be expected from them, including a father (played by Lonergan) in Santa Monica making contact through awkward phone calls? Lisa’s younger brother is completely un-parented and even the film doesn’t seem to care.

One of the great recurring motifs in the film is a series of teen conversations in classes and in theater rehearsal where the teachers set them up and turn them loose on each other. The precocious know-it-alls with shallow but emotionally-packed relationships to their cultural identities have at it and tear each other to shreds. The teachers are completely ineffectual referees.

Important, traumatic things happen to Lisa throughout the film. The inability and awkward attempts to talk about these things, to make them the basis of relationship with others, and to live fully in “real life,” whatever that is, makes a mess of Lisa’s psyche and she spirals out of control. It’s beautiful and challenging and riveting for every minute of the three hours.

On Thursday night in Chicago, my parents and I were on our way to theLookingglass Theater to see the play Mr. and Mrs. Pennyworth. This play is also about stories — life stories and the stories we hear from the time we can make sense of language, the foundational myths and fairy tales of all the cultures of the world. When one of the characters in that mythic world, a character with a very, very difficult story, goes into a rage and kills the big, bad wolf, chaos is unleashed. In fixing the story tale universe, however, the eponymous couple face their own sorrows and the difficulties of life. It’s so much more powerful than you thought a story about fairy tales could be. Leaving the theater, a precocious young woman behind me said to her boyfriend, or maybe he was just a friend: “I hate you right now.” He asked, “Because I brought you here and now you’re feeling feelings?” “Yes,” she answered.

Lisa Cohen’s world is a mess. And so is ours. In a city you can easily feel pressed up against so many lives — and what does it all mean? A first encounter with death, even the death of a stranger, can be hard to fit into the narrative. When I was 17, working at a cafeteria-style steakhouse in suburban Chicago, I waited on a man who died more or less in my arms. The encounter was very deep for me — I was thankfully attentive enough not to drop the food and walk away. We spoke a bit without speaking, as his heart attack had already begun. I think he came to that restaurant so as not to die alone. Maybe that’s just me being grandiose. I believed he wanted me to stay with him instead of going for help. And I did.

I know that after grieving that stranger I decided not to cry again unless someone died. By the end of my freshman year in college I was a dissociated mess. I was in Lisa Cohen’s world, filled to the brim with connections I could not organize or assemble or figure the meaning of. I would say those questions consumed my life more or less for the next decade.

Lonergan’s film is brilliant. There was a long struggle to bring this film out in its current, 3-hour-long director’s cut version. Watching it, I thoroughly understand that it could not be cut any other way; in each decision about how long a scene should go, and what should be heard or not heard or overheard or pantomimed, was the whole meaning of the film.

I saw the film by Lonergan getting all the Oscar hype this year, Manchester by the Sea. That film has good performances and a good script. What I said after watching it was that, unlike so many films that rest on “a secret,” the secret here was of the proper type and magnitude to justify the drama the film depends on for its meaning. But that film is child’s play compared toMargaret. You wanna know what it means to be human? Watch Margaret.

Note: This review is also available on Medium. Click here to visit the site.  I‘ll be posting my essays on film over there. Cowbird.com is closing down (it will still be available as an archive, but no new stories can be posted). I’m exploring other platforms to share my writing. 

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