Living Consciously

I’m heading out tomorrow on a road trip that will essentially be a circumnavigation of Nebraska. Okay, maybe “circumnavigate” isn’t precisely the right word for traveling down, across, and back up a state that’s made up of mostly flat prairie smack dab in the middle of the continent. But you get the general idea.

One of my friends wondered whether I wasn’t worried about traveling by myself. What if I had car trouble? “Not a problem,” I told her. “A guy in a pickup always comes along.”

At least that’s been my experience.

There were the two men near Moab, Utah, who weren’t able to fix my broken serpentine belt but who told me I could coast down the steep mountain road for about a mile till I came to a roadside attraction where there was a phone. I did, there was, and I spent a pleasant hour along a shady stream with my book while I waited for the tow truck.

There was the man near Craig, Colorado, who had a phone book in his trunk, found the number for a mechanic he recommended, and waited until he knew the tow truck was on its way.

There were the two women and three little kids, on a bitter January day along the interstate in western South Dakota, who were heading west but cut across the median on the emergency-vehicle access in order to give me a ride two miles east.

There were the two guys on a drizzly day in Minnesota. I was towing a flatbed trailer loaded with three empty wire reels. The strap holding one of the reels broke, and it slid partway off the side of the trailer. The reel, six feet in diameter and made of steel, was so heavy I couldn’t push it back into place by myself. The men had it shoved over and tied down in no time. A good thing, too. They were on their way home after playing a round of golf that included stopping at the 19th hole for a beer, so they didn’t linger when the polite young highway patrolman pulled up and asked whether we needed any help.

By now I know what you’re thinking. “This woman needs to get a more reliable vehicle!”

Actually, I do have a reliable vehicle, and I have no doubt that it will get me safely to the far side of Nebraska and back. I have my AAA card and my cell phone. I also have no doubt that help will be there if I need it.

Maybe, in truth, I’ve just been lucky. Maybe I live and travel in a part of the country where it’s still safe to assume someone who stops along the road is there as a rescuer rather than a predator. Maybe I’m naïve. But over the years I’ve been blessed repeatedly by the kindness of strangers—usually, guys in pickups—who took the time to stop.

On my kitchen counter right now is a quadruple row of glass jars, each one filled with either chokecherry jelly or chokecherry syrup that gleams a deep magenta in the morning sunlight. The sight of them is pleasing because of the rich color, and even more pleasing because of the satisfaction of having helped produce them.

My daughter and I spent a hot afternoon this week making jelly—the first time either of us had ever tried it. Even though neither of us will ever be confused with domestic goddesses, our enterprise was a success. Well, okay, there was that the one batch that boiled over and filled the kitchen with the smell of burning syrup. And there was that little flurry of frantic activity as we tried to figure out how to get the jars out of the big canning kettle of boiling water without scalding ourselves—not to mention the embarrassment of realizing that the rack holding the jars had handles so all we had to do was lift out the whole thing. Then, of course, there were all those splashes of magenta that added such delightful color accents to the countertops, the stove, the floor, the refrigerator, and half a dozen dish towels.

Still, we produced 30 jars of jelly and 10 jars of pancake syrup, all of which turned out just fine, thank you, as far as we can tell. We had so much fun we didn’t even notice that the temperature in the kitchen was 91 degrees. We enjoyed spending that time together, especially because we weren’t alone. This wasn’t a two-generation project; it was a four-generation one.

We had help from Uncle Ernie’s recipe in the family cookbook, complete with the story of the first time he made chokecherry jelly. He died several years ago, but his recipe not only provides helpful details about filling jars and turning them upside down, but it brings back his voice.

We had help from my mother, our consultant-by-phone, who verified that yes, Uncle Ernie’s recipe was the same one she uses. She added useful advice about how long to boil the syrup and that it was done when the bubbles were the size of fifty-cent pieces—advice she was passing along from her mother. When we called the second time, worried because only two of our first dozen jars had sealed, she reassured us that they would seal as they cooled. Sure enough, a few minutes later we began to hear satisfying little metallic hiccups from one jar after another, and before long every one was sealed just the way it should be.

We had the legacy of help and advice from my grandmother, too. After all, my mother and Uncle Ernie had to get their jelly-making skills from somewhere. As we washed jars and cooked syrup and dirtied every large kettle we had, I thought about both my grandmothers. When they made jelly and canned produce from their gardens, they weren’t doing it for fun. They were doing it to help feed their families over the winter. In the early years, they worked with stoves fueled by coal or corn cobs, water hauled from wells several miles away, and no electricity even to run a fan to cool the sweltering kitchen.

Our process was certainly easier. Still, I imagine they shared some of the same satisfaction we felt when everything was done and the neat rows of full jars filled the counter. It was almost as if the previous generations were there in the kitchen with us.

Almost. Thankfully, they weren’t really there. They would have laughed at our inefficient, amateurish efforts. But I bet they would have enjoyed the jelly, all the same.

For three weeks now I have not posted a column. Indeed, I have scarcely written a word, except for the bare minimum for my most important editing client and a handful of hurried emails to family members.

There’s a good reason for this lapse—heart surgery. Not my own, my father’s. A routine annual checkup with the cardiologist evolved into an angiogram and then open-heart bypass surgery.

He’s out of the hospital now, recovering slowly but steadily despite a few setbacks. He and my mother are staying with my partner and me. All of us are learning more than we ever considered wanting to know about what it means to take care of someone after such serious surgery. As nurses, we’re amateurs. We’re sometimes clumsy, and we’re painfully aware of our own ignorance. All four of us—nurses and patient—are learning as we go, sometimes by doing it wrong the first and the second time.

We’re all finding out that our most important asset in this situation is the willingness to do what needs to be done, whether that is giving our awkward but well-intentioned care or receiving it. We’re showing up, we’re doing our best, and we’re getting the job done in our own somewhat haphazard fashion. We’re all operating under the principle of, “when something needs to be done, and you’re the one there to do it, you can do whatever you have to.”

So far, doing what needs to be done hasn’t left much room for writing about this experience. In part this is a matter of privacy—too many details are no one else’s business. And none of us is quite ready to employ the humor that is this family’s default method of coping with adversity. Except for a couple of half-hearted remarks about my father having had enough staples in his legs and chest to fix half a mile of barbed wire fence, or that he must have been run over by a train because it left its tracks behind, we haven’t joked much. The incisions that were closed by all those staples are still too fresh. So are our fears and our awareness of his mortality—not to mention our own. Thankfully, there will be plenty of time later for the stories and the laughter.

For now, I just have one simple but important thing to say. Sometimes health problems are beyond our control. In this case, diabetes is a primary factor in my father’s heart disease. But there is also a lot we can control. We all know the routine: Eat your fruits and vegetables. Exercise. Keep your weight down. And if you smoke, for goodness sakes quit—now.

That routine for maintaining your health matters a whole lot. If you aren’t willing to do it for yourself, consider doing it for the people who care about you. Because, as my family has been reminded in the past few weeks, heart disease affects many more hearts than just your own.

One of the joys of living in the country is that it gives you such a sense of closeness to the land. This is especially true in the spring. There’s nothing quite like that wonderful feeling of being one with the land that you get when you’re walking around with a pound and a half of it stuck to your boots in the form of thick black mud.

Over the years, many of the significant events in my family—working cattle, proms, opening weekends of pheasant seasons, birthday parties, and holiday gatherings—have featured the joys of plowing mud. The six-mile road to the highway has gradually been improved with gravel and grading. The lane that covers the eighth of a mile between the house and the road has resisted all attempts to weather-proof it. Lying as it does across a lowland, it has swallowed up tons of gravel, washed out repeated attempts at grading, and returned steadfastly to the sticky gumbo that is its natural state.

In recent years, our experiences with mud have been few and far between. Much of South Dakota has been in the grip of a drought that has withered crops, parched pastures, and turned stock dams into shrinking patches of slimy mud or dried them up altogether. Still, with the approach of another significant event, we should have been prepared.

The event was the sale of some of my parents’ belongings as part of the process of moving to a smaller house (which, not incidentally, is on a paved road). The few items of furniture and household goods, along with the welder, chainsaw, ice auger, and other tools from the shop, were about enough to fill up a stock trailer. The plan was for my youngest sister to come up on Saturday with her stock trailer, which we would load and take to town for the auction on Sunday. It was an excellent plan.

Until, on Friday evening, it started to rain. A hard, driving rain, so heavy at times that we could scarcely see out the windows. By Saturday morning, the yard was soggy. It kept raining. And have I mentioned that the auction was to be held out of doors?

About noon we estimated we had had at least four inches of rain. We heard from the auctioneer that the sale had been moved to the school gym. That was good news—sort of. Yes, it meant the auction would go ahead. But it also meant it might go ahead without our stuff if we couldn’t haul it through the mud to get it to town.

By mid-afternoon the yard was full of puddles. The creek was overflowing its banks, and a shallow lake was slowly but surely spreading across the pasture. From the upstairs windows we could see a broad stream of water flowing steadily across the road.

My sister called, concerned that she wouldn’t be able to get through the lane with the stock trailer. She didn’t linger on the phone to discuss it, having to head for the basement when her conversation was interrupted by the tornado siren.

The auctioneer’s mother called. Water was running over the road in several places between us and the highway. A tornado had touched down—briefly, thank goodness, at the edge of the town where the sale was to be held. A commercial building and several houses had been damaged, but no one appeared to be hurt. It could have been much, much worse.

That news put everything in its proper perspective. Compared to what might have been, our troubles were nothing but a minor inconvenience. At worst, we would miss the auction and have to put the stuff on a later one. At least that was better than having all of it blown halfway to North Dakota after we had spent all that time getting it ready for the sale.

By early evening things were looking up. It stopped raining. Another of my sisters arrived as planned on Saturday evening, with no more serious consequences from the muddy lane than a layer of gumbo plastered all over the bottom half of her shiny new red pickup.

We got up early on Sunday morning, loading the pickup and the Suburban under clean-washed blue skies and sunshine that soon had us discarding our jackets. We made our first trip to town over roads that were water-scarred in several places but still intact, past overflowing stock dams and fields glistening with water. We made a second trip, with the help of my other sister (who had emerged from the basement to find everything unscathed), her pickup, and some welcome extra muscle in the form of her teenage son.

We got everything to town in plenty of time to set it out before the sale. We waited through a long afternoon of auctioneering. We watched our stuff sell, mostly for satisfactory prices, with the usual surprises over things that brought almost nothing and things that brought much more than we thought they could possibly be worth. Once again, as it always seems to, everything had worked out.

Back at home that night, sitting in the living room and starting to think about bedtime after a long day, my mother asked, “What did those antique woodworking tools bring?”

I didn’t remember seeing them sell. Neither did my father. The reason for this, we realized, was that they were still sitting out on the workbench in the shop. We had forgotten to take them to the sale.

Oh, well. There’s always eBay.

Valentina Lisitsa plays the piano. So do I.

That’s a lot like saying both the sun and my kitchen stove produce heat. The difference in degree (roughly 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit for the surface of the sun vs. a maximum of perhaps 500 degrees for the oven) makes the common factor of heat almost irrelevant.

The difference in piano playing between Valentina Lisitsa and me is far greater than the difference in heat between the sun and my stove. She is one of the most outstanding pianists in the world. We’ve been fortunate enough to have her present several concerts in Rapid City, including one this past week that I was privileged to attend.

Ms. Lisitsa came out on stage, sat down on the piano bench, and promptly let the Steinway concert grand know who was in charge. Her fingers didn’t dance over the keys—they ran marathons in double-time. One moment she was producing thunder from the bass keys, and the next she was lulling us with quiet, clear notes that hung in the air so sweetly we could almost see them. At times she bent closer and closer to the keys with such concentration that it appeared she was going to strike middle C with her nose. Other times she addressed the keyboard with such vigor that she bounced herself completely clear of the bench. As one man in the audience said after the concert, “The things she does are impossible!”

Not impossible, obviously, since she did them. Amazing, yes. Also incredible, awe-inspiring, marvelous, and (insert superlative of your choice here). She was born with genius, she has a passion for music, and she has clearly worked hard to develop and perfect her gift. I don’t even want to think about the number of hours she has spent and still spends at the keyboard. She plays in elegant concert halls all over the world on the finest of grand pianos and can probably tell the difference between a Steinway and a Baldwin by hearing one note from each one.

In contrast, I have no particular gift for music and my interest in the piano is slight to moderate. I play in my living room on my 100-year-old upright with its restored quarter-sawn oak and its stained ivory keys. It’s fun to sit down for half an hour and browse through a couple of songbooks, playing show tunes or folk songs or country standards. I don’t play perfectly or even excellently. I tend to omit an embarrassing number of notes for the left hand. If a chord spans more than an octave, I just leave off the lower ones my fingers can’t reach. I’m more than a little vague about the difference between major and minor keys. All I know is that, if a piece has four or more sharps or flats, forget it. I play the piano at a level that, on a good day, approaches mediocrity.

Presumably, after listening to the artistry of someone like Valentina Lisitsa, I should be inspired to make one of two choices. Either I could vow to practice for five hours a day to develop my skills, or I could close the lid of my piano forever. Either one would be silly.

I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to take piano lessons when I was a kid. I value my lovely old instrument. I don’t have to be a great or even competent musician to enjoy the time I spend at it. As long as it’s fun, it’s worth doing—at my level of skill as well as hers.

We do, after all, call it “playing” the piano. And how much music would there be in the world if no one played an instrument except the very best of the best?

Last weekend I saw my first sign of spring. No, not a robin. Not a crocus. Not even a dandelion. This was a real sign. It said “rummage sale.”

Spring seems to be a time when many of us get the urge to clean house—to organize, sort, and get rid of stuff. The longer days and the promise of warm weather motivate us to clean out the winter’s accumulation of debris, just like our cave-dwelling ancestors must have done. There’s one slight difference. They tossed stuff over the edge of the nearest cliff. We put ours out in the yard with price tags on it.

The biggest rummage sale I’ve ever had was years ago. My ex-husband’s parents had moved out of their house into an apartment, and it fell to us to deal with 30 years’ worth of accumulated stuff they left behind.

It was a lot of stuff. They were hoarders. The closets bulged with long outdated clothes. There were boxes of stuff under the beds. The garage was piled literally floor to ceiling with stuff—you couldn’t even walk through it except on one narrow path between the stacks of boxes.

In some of those boxes, we found treasure. Toys. Thirty-year-old toys—cars, trucks, models, and games. Some of them were still in their original boxes. Most of them had never been used.

We had a huge rummage sale and sold most of the toys. We made a lot of money that was badly needed at the time. Still, we weren’t as thrilled about it as we might have been. We were too aware of the real value of those toys. We knew the high price of that windfall.

You see, those toys had all been gifts—Christmas and birthday gifts to my ex-husband and his two brothers from aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Gifts their parents couldn’t have afforded to buy them. Gifts that were lovingly and thoughtfully chosen. Gifts they must have been delighted to receive. And gifts that they never had a chance to play with.

Their parents had stored all those wonderful gifts away in boxes. To “keep them from getting broken.” To “save them till the boys were old enough to appreciate them.”

Among the things we found was a Davey Crockett bath towel with my ex-husband’s name on it. As a five-year-old who knew all the words to “The Ballad of Davey Crockett,” he would have loved it. At 35, he was certainly “old enough to appreciate it.” By then, however, it had pretty much lost its appeal.

In another box was a wind-up police car. Its light and siren still worked. We sold it for about $40. A good price, certainly—but a fraction of the value it might have had. Just imagine the fun three little boys could have had, winding it up and sending it across the floor, lights flashing and siren wailing, after imaginary crooks. Of course, sooner or later they would have broken it. Still, the pleasure it provided would have been worth far more than the $40 we got for it 30 years later.

This year, when you do your spring cleaning and organizing, take a minute and think about the stuff you have in your closets and cupboards and garage. Why is it there? How important is it to you? What does it add to your life?

If you don’t use it and don’t care about it, maybe it’s time to have a rummage sale and pass it on to someone else. If you do care about it, maybe it’s time to get it out and use it. If something is stashed away in boxes and don’t even remember it’s there, you might as well not have it. If it matters enough to keep, it matters enough to use and enjoy.

One of the things in my cupboard is a serving platter, an old one that belonged to my grandmother. I use it—for guests, for special occasions, and for ordinary family dinners. Yes, using it means taking the risk that I’ll break it someday. But in the meantime, I think about my grandmother every time I get it out. To me, that honors her memory far more than keeping the platter hidden away in a cupboard and saving it for years, until someday my own grandchildren get it and sell it on E-Bay.

So why not use what you have? Let the kids play with those special toys. Use the good china. Wear the clothes you’re saving for special occasions. Get rid of meaningless stuff that’s nothing but clutter. Then enjoy what you have left.

Some possessions, after all, are simply too valuable not to use.

For the first two weeks of February I drove around town with a 75-pound anvil in my car. True, having extra weight in the back of your car isn’t a bad idea in South Dakota in the wintertime, but that was merely a side benefit. The anvil was in my car because it had traveled there from my parents’ farm. My sister, with a little help from me, managed to lug it out of the shop and into my back seat. I wasn’t about to try to unload it. Besides, it was a gift and needed a temporary hiding place, and the floor of my car was as good a spot as any.

This anvil is old, at least 80 years by my best guess, and possibly quite a bit more. It belonged to my grandfather and may well have belonged to someone else before him. He was a farmer, a blacksmith, a horseshoer, and the unofficial neighborhood horse doctor. He was a tinkerer who could fix almost anything and had a knack for creative invention. One of his innovations, for example, was replacing the side curtains of the family Model T with sliding windows.

After Grandpa’s death in 1956, the anvil was occasionally used by my uncle Ernie and my father. This winter, though, it finally was time to sell the farm. It was time to find new homes for many of the shop tools.

So I brought the anvil home—not to keep, but on behalf of a friend. She bought it for her husband as a Valentine gift. It wasn’t the most traditional of gifts. Seventy-five pounds of chocolate, maybe. But 75 pounds of iron? Some people might not consider that romantic.

Probably not. Probably, though, it was even better—a gift that was thoughtfully chosen by the giver and thoroughly appreciated by the recipient.

Because the anvil’s new owner, like my grandfather, is a tinkerer. He has an interest in blacksmithing. He can fix almost anything, can build almost anything, and has a knack for creative invention. He has wanted an anvil for a long time.

I think my grandfather would approve.

I once told an acquaintance that one of my favorite aromas was the smell of a warm horse. He gave me a really funny look just before he moved to a seat on the other side of the room. Since he grew up in a large city, maybe his equine-sniffing opportunities had been limited. Or maybe I’m just weird.

Still, warm horse is up there on my top ten list of favorite smells. That’s standing-in-the-sun warm, not sweating-up-a-lather warm. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Leather is on my list, too, whether the scent comes from an expensive coat or a well-worn saddle. Also Old Spice aftershave, menthol (in small doses), tomato plants, rich black dirt, and growing sage.

Then there is homemade bread baking or just out of the oven. When my mother would come pick us up at the end of the school day, my sisters and I could tell when she had been baking. That wonderful aroma clung to her clothes and greeted our noses the minute we opened the car door.

And let’s not forget turpentine or linseed oil—not paint thinner, but the real stuff. Every now and then, when conditions are exactly right here in the Black Hills, the air smells wonderfully of turpentine. Another delightful aroma is freshly sawed wood, cedar in particular. Just-mowed alfalfa is luscious, and just-mowed grass is nice, too. (Yes, I was a teenager in the sixties, and no, not that kind of grass.)

Which reminds me of some smells I don’t like. Cigarette smoke and its even more disgusting cousin, cigar smoke. Burning incense or sage, floral scented candles or potpourri, musky perfumes. Sour milk. The furry green things formerly known as food that I occasionally find in my refrigerator.

But let’s not go too far in that direction. Instead, just imagine this: It’s a warm June day. Through a field of new-mown alfalfa ambles a saddled horse. On its back sits a cowboy who slapped on some Old Spice aftershave just before he saddled up. There’s a freshly cut cedar post tied behind the saddle. In one calloused hand the cowboy holds a loaf of homemade bread just out of the oven.

It’s an olfactory fantasy come true.

Last weekend was my extended family’s Christmas get-together. It was an enjoyable time, and it emphasized again that what matters most about this holiday or any other time of year is the people we share our lives with. The most important part of the weekend wasn’t the Christmas dinner, delicious as that was. It wasn’t opening the gifts, even though that was fun and some excellent loot was exchanged.

What meant the most was having conversations over games or puzzles or a sink full of dirty dishes. It was watching the one-year-old concentrate on eating noodles with her fingers. It was seeing new sons-in-law becoming comfortable as part of the clan. It was being introduced to a boyfriend brave enough to undergo the "meet the whole family" test. (He passed; hope we did, too!)

A few weeks ago I was at a social gathering with people I didn’t know well. It was a pleasant evening, except for one married couple who were uncomfortable to be around. They were snapping at each other over trivialities, bickering like a couple of nap-deprived toddlers with only one toy. From the conversation, it was clear that they were going through a stressful period with their jobs. Still, after watching and listening to them for a while, I just wanted to shake them both and shout, "Quit treating each other like the enemy—you’re on the same side!"

I don’t know whether their squabbling was a habitual pattern in their marriage or a temporary response to a difficult time. Either one could be a sign of trouble. When times are hard is when we need each other the most. It’s when we should support and appreciate each other the most. It’s when we most need to cut one another some slack, even though it’s when we most lack the patience and energy to do so.

The December 25, 2006, issue of U.S. News & World Report features an article on "50 Ways to Improve Your Life." The section titled "Divorceproof Your Marriage" points out the importance of the letter A: for affection, certainly, but also for appreciation. Couples who bicker, criticize, and treat each other with contempt are the ones most likely to end up apart.

This is supposed to be a season of goodwill and peace on earth. We probably can’t do a whole lot to create peace on earth, but we can certainly foster peace and goodwill at home. Appreciation and gratitude are good places to start. It’s a challenging world out there, after all, and we need each other. Besides, we never know how much time we’ll have with those we love the most. Life is too short to spend it fussing at each other.

Have a joyful and peaceful Christmas.

Just a few of the things I’m grateful for this Thanksgiving:

· Good health, and having inherited genes from so many long-lived, healthy ancestors.

· Bad puns. Such as (with thanks to A.L.) the fact that a group of crows is a caucus.

· The incredible abundance of food in the grocery store, including fresh fruit and vegetables all winter long.

· Dark chocolate.

· The fact that dark chocolate, in moderate amounts, has officially been established to be health food.

· My library card.

· Flannel sheets.

· The Internet.

· Email.

· Deer and red foxes in the back yard.

· Mountain lions staying out of the back yard.

· Twenty-one years in the program.

· Shared laughter.

· The newspaper in our box by 5:30 every morning (even if there’s no way I’m going to go up there and get it at that hour just in case a stray mountain lion has decided to take a quick look at the comics).

· And above all, loving family and friends. Bless you all.