Reflections on saving, savoring, and sandhills (at the very end)

small brave thing #229

Apr 14, 2025

Hello beautiful human,

Writers have certain words, phrases, images they come back to again and again. “Arrangement wedded to accident” is one of mine. And so is “to save and savor.” There might be a bit of both of those ideas threaded throughout this rangey piece. I’ve been working on it for weeks now, listening for the themes and throughlines and trying to listen in to why these moments want to be in relationship with each other. I’m no longer pleased by the idea of just throwing words out into the interwebz because it’s a certain day or I have to keep the algorithm happy…craft is a slow dance. There is a bit of seduction involved in luring the shy sentences to uncurl onto the page, to move as I want them to move. And seduction is a slow, nonlinear art.

Years ago when I was still married and just starting a family, we lived in the Bay Area of California, a mere fifteen minutes south of San Francisco. My then-husband was beginning to forge his impressive professional career, biking fresh faced to the train each morning to go to his very first post-graduate-degree job, full of promise and potential. I was writing and raising babies. We bought a house that had a fearsome mortgage. Real life was beginning. We felt we had arrived, right on schedule, at thirty. The faultlines between us were already present but unknown to us. Unrecognized.

Because we had babies we didn’t very often make it to California’s famous wine country, but we managed to drive up a couple of times. One of my favorite memories is our discovery of Russian Ridge, just slightly off the beaten track. Nestled along the ridge among the hills, we found Hop Kiln Winery. Live oaks provided shade, the rolling hills a view. There weren’t many people there for tasting that particular golden afternoon. Our toddler ran around safe on the grass and we got to enjoy the scenery and the descriptions of each pour from our enthusiastic young server. One she poured, Thousand Flowers, outshone the rest: a crisp, light white that danced on the tongue. You can only taste this at the winery, here, she told us. We don’t sell this one wholesale you can’t find it anywhere else. You have to come here to even know about it.

Sometimes a moment opens and expands, to encompass something more than expected or perhaps deserved, and so it was that summer afternoon. Thousand Flowers was delicious, unique and unforgettable, and we bought a bottle to take with us. We should have bought a case but we were young and a case felt like a lot of money. We were young and didn’t know we wouldn’t be back. We were young and didn’t know Hop Kiln would stop making Thousand Flowers. We didn’t understand time, or loss, or how to measure cost or wealth in terms of joy, love, memory or endings. Buying a bottle was our best gesture towards honoring the gift of that afternoon.

wine glass and sunflower — Photo by Rafael Barquero on Unsplash

That wine has stayed with me for twenty years. Not just the liquid in the bottle, of course, but the day, the place, all wrapped up in the embodied experience of that sun soaked afternoon. Now I live in Wisconsin, which has its own beauties and its own rich agricultural heritage, its own microclimates and growing zones and terroir, that unpronounceable French word. And if someone tried to make Thousand Flowers here, even at Wollersheim, the impressive vineyard just down route 78 from where I sit now, typing, it wouldn’t taste the same. How could it? All the conditions are different. And so am I.

I’m training my brain to read books again, to pay sustained and quiet attention for swaths of time. The book of the moment is A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarok, a brief novella which follows a young girl as she grows up during WW II, exiled into the English countryside. Her father is off fighting the Germans in the air, and her life, though she does not realize it, is dread. At this point, she finds a book on the old Nordic myths of the ancient Germanic and Scandanavian peoples. Her ancestors.

Ragnarok, for those of you not familiar with the word—or who know it through the Marvel kaleidoscope only--is the end of the gods. It’s the end times: Revelations, Norse style. That young girl felt the resonance in England in the early 1940s. I’ll admit I feel more than a bit of resonance now, sitting in the middle of the United States in April 2025.

Thanks to the caprice and callow cruelty of the hollow men currently in charge, the giant wolf howls in our bellies and minds. The gods of chaos have discovered ketamine. The US stock market is tumbling about and plunging like the great serpent that circles the world, gnawing at its own tail. And like that serpent, the market’s rage and chaos cause earthquakes and tidal waves around the world. My social media feeds are plastered with graphs showing precipitous Dow Jones dives and the people I know many of them are fixated with a terror that has a slight edge of shadenfreude. We didn’t vote for this so we feel no sense of responsibility for it, and that’s our great error.

It’s Ragnarok and perhaps the end of the gods of civilization, order, all the built world as we know it. My reading tells me the only forces not caught up in the disaster are the sisterly powers of tending and sewing, mending and nurturing. The stories make no mention of them, and this morning I look beyond the usual explanations of patriarchal omission and disparagement to find hope. Something is left, in the rubble and chaos and the blank margins, and something means enough to begin again, anew. Something is left, and that means there is something that we can hold to, to cherish, to savor. A perfectly ripe apple, a bit of blue glass, a view out a window into treetops just blossoming. To stay alive to beauty is not extra, it is our humanity.

A few days ago, my friend M and I went for a walk along the Wisconsin River, very close to Wollersheim as a matter of fact. The dam there is one of the oldest in Wisconsin but it still does the job and the rush and roar of the water creates a perfect fishing spot for eagles each year. We saw a couple of pelicans and some flirtatious chickadees. A number of humans were also out, fishing in boats and basking in the spring sun along a sandy beach. It’s always a welcome turn of the seasonal year when we all start to emerge and be seen, out and about again talking to our neighbors, putting ourselves on display. We’re such funny, preening animals.

One bird, a hawk-like raptor, circled above the river and hovered directly over the two of us for an uncanny amount of time. The underside of its wings had markings that looked like giant, fierce eyes, like can be seen on the wings of some butterfly species. What is that, we asked each other. We both agreed we’d not seen that bird before. We’d not seen anything like it, how it pinned us—and just us--with that feathery glare.

Later, looking it up, M thinks it was a juvenile golden eagle—which do live in Wisconsin but aren’t common. The part of me that walks in woo knows whatever it was, it was also a spirit bird, meant for us specifically, with a message in that unblinking stare. M agrees and says it means that the spirit of the divine is with us. I felt more challenge in the gaze, and am still a bit unsettled.

I have been a writer for thirty years. Most of that time I have lived in the upper Midwest, in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin. The words you read come from the broad fields and the bluffs and wooded regions. From the dark rich prairie fed soils, the broad shouldered rivers, sinkholes, caves and wetlands. I live very far away from the centers of the publishing industry and my life and choices have brought me very far away from the universities and academic centers of literature as well.

It's easy to wonder what I’m doing here. This is my fourth—or is it fifth—major revision. I’m beyond “behind schedule” now and it is also true I am the only one setting or paying attention to any schedule at all. A truly good piece of writing, the sort that cracks the ice and melts the numb… takes time. Takes slowness. It needs patience, and trust for the words to emerge and find their right place and position. And sitting here this morning I reach towards something more…a sort of leisure, permission and luxury. What Elizabeth Bishop called “a perfectly useless sort of attention” which feels not far off an afternoon spent discovering a place or a flavor that in some number of years will no longer exist.

Wait a minute. This might be close to the heart of the matter…amid the urgency and the thrashing serpent’s tail and the roar of wolves at the door…more of that, please, that slowing.

Can we become radically slow in the face of urgency? Where radical means of the root and beyond the norm, both at the same time?

I want to write in such a way that my words—not always, maybe, but often—feel a little bit like discovering a fine cheddar, aged in the caves for 25 years, or a glass of wine you never heard of and will never forget.

The algorithm will despise these goals. My numbers will plummet. But when I see AI art, I taste Skittles. When I read generated clickbait, I taste McDonald’s hamburgers.

We deserve better than that. We deserve to savor. To understand and remember we are local, and immediate, and alive. Fleeting yes, imperfect and distracted most of the time, but here.

How much would I pay for a bottle of Thousand Flowers now? Who would I share it with?

M’s epic road trip took her from Wisconsin out to the Eastern seaboard and back. As we walked along the river, catching up over the roar of the dam, she said There’s a lot going on in the small towns. There are artisans and interesting projects, people are making and doing all kinds of things. She’s recently retired from an academic job and I can understand her sense of discovery. I on the other hand have been part of that small town activity, overlooked and underestimated, joyful and local and fascinating in all our various flavors and varieties. Terroir affects how we grow too, how we flourish and bloom.

As I write this, I hear the rattling call of another bird. The sandhill cranes are returning. Their loose knocking cries pierce over great distance and through walls. When I hear Canada geese I know what part of the sky to look. When I hear sandhills I always scan the horizons and arch my back to survey the heights. They’ll be farther away than you think. Prehistoric, these sky paths they traverse more ancient than we can easily imagine, and here they are, returned this morning once again and incredibly, undeniably present.

The question those belling cries ask me this morning: What is in your heart and hands to do right now? As we travel these ancient migration cycles and once again return, what path are you following? What urge compels you? To shout? Cook? Call a friend? Take a nap? Make a movie? That is what is needed. Trust, and do. Trust, and do.

So the sandhills say. And so the spirit bird was trying to tell me too, I now understand. Trust and do. Save and savor…and share.

xo
S

I believe our world needs new stories. what if those stories lie curled within us like seeds? This is An Inviting Space to experience where and how we might discover, recover and nurture the secret, magical gardens of soul day by day. Starting where we are, as we are.

Recommend An Inviting Space

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A Celebration Corner for sharing the Good Goodies

You can find A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarok at Bakers Dozen, along with other books that have been mentioned in An Inviting Space. It’s a slim little thing. A very quick read.