Tag: beauty

memories, reflecting, Uncategorized

Mother’s Day at the slough

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Our mothers have passed, many years ago, now, but we remember that for many others, this day of honoring mothers is being celebrated. For Jeff and for me, though, it’s another Sunday when neither of us has the work of the Church on our minds, a Sunday all to ourselves, a Sunday to fill with moments that belong to us alone.

And so we get up early – as we do every day – and our early morning is filled with getting ready for the day, like any other morning. And then, we drive to Martinez, to walk along the Carquinez Strait, a series of walking paths along the Strait, with its view of the hills and the water. Other faithful folks walk on Sunday mornings, also, and most are friendly, passing with a smile and a few kind words.

The paths are level, the hills are in the distance, green, turning now to brown again after a winter with a lot of rain. As we walk, we see a ship, returning from the Pacific, coming through the strait. When I see a ship, I’m reminded that I’m not in Wisconsin anymore, haven’t been, for over half my life.

We pass the ruins of a shipwreck from the last century, and read again the plaque with its story, its history of how it ended up deserted, sometimes hidden by the tide when we walk past. Today was lovely, a wind gliding past us, making the air a bit cool until the sunlight got the best of the temperature and we were warm.

The remains of a shipwreck, stranded here for the last century, Martinez, California

Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 5/2024

We’ve walked at the Slough many times over the past four years. In the early months of Covid-Time (a season of its own in our lives), we felt strongly the freedom of Sunday mornings – mornings without churches to go to, mornings without sermons to deliver – and we set out to walk in some place outside our own very walkable neighborhood in Oakland. We walked through almost twenty neighborhoods in San Francisco over the course of many months. We walked along the Bay in Oakland, where we discovered a new development right on the water – Brooklyn Basin. We walked at the sea shore in Half Moon Bay, looking down on the Pacific from a high path. Usually, when the walk had ended, we’d find a cafe to sit outside, to continue our luxurious Sunday morning, to have a cup of coffee, before getting back into the car to return home.

When our friend Joanne arrived from Wisconsin to stay with us for a few days last winter, I took her to the Martinez Strait to enjoy the paths there.

We loved the paths and the breeze we discovered at Martinez, and we have returned there again and again, now that life is back to a “new normal” after the ravages of Covid-Time. Often after our walk, we drive closer to downtown where the main street is bustling with a Sunday morning Farmers’ Market. We leave with a couple of bags of fresh vegetables to enjoy the rest of the week.

Along the path, along the slough…

Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Martinez Slough, 5/12/2024

Uncategorized

Grandma and Me

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I leaned over the railing of the front porch of the Upper Flat on Ring Street, and I craned my head to look down the alley to the left.  A long way down the alley – almost to Burleigh Street – I saw the little figure, long dark coat almost touching the ground – of Grandma.  She walked slowly – my Grandma was old – and she looked down at the pavement.  Careful.  Old.  As she got closer, I saw her head was wrapped in a thick black scarf decorated with the bright colors of flowers.  The scarf covered her hair, except for the hairline in the front, and she had tied it in a knot at the back of her neck.  She didn’t look up, not even once. 

When Grandma came up the narrow stairs and into the flat, I watched her from the other side of the living room.  She looked at me once, twice, and a little smile came to her face.  And then she talked, but only to Mom.  They spoke their own language when she came over, and I didn’t understand.  So I played on the floor across from the couch and listened.  I listened and listened.  What did they say?  I listened and listened.  

Years later, after she died, Grandma would come to me, as if in a dream.  And she stayed with me for a long time.  “Why did she come to me?”  I asked a friend.  “Who else would she go to?” she answered, wisely.

My favorite picture of Grandma – Feodosia Machsuda Srebny – shows her with a little smile on her face, sitting with me and Ronnie at the table.  Ronnie wanted to be cool, a teenager.  I love the picture because she is smiling, and her eyes are smiling.  I don’t think of her as smiling, a little foreign woman – foreign even to me – poor, sad.  When she was older she didn’t say any words in English.  She forgot.  Only Mom could talk to her then.  

At Easter, we decorated eggs – some in the old fashioned way, pysanke – and some just dipped into colors:  blue, pink, yellow.  We blew raw eggs out through holes on the ends and Mom took hours to craft hers. Ronnie was good at it, I think.  And Mom.  But Grandma didn’t make the eggs.  She sat on the couch in her long black dress, her dark hair held back in a loose bun, streaked with gray, her fingers bent as she tried to crack eggs with Suzie.  

Daddy and I would go to get her at the nursing home and bring her home for Easter dinner.  And soon after dinner, she’d look at my mother again and again, asking to go home.  Mom did the same thing when she got old.  

Uncategorized

Magic

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Something magic comes to life during the holidays, although not in the old ways. I remember one Christmas Eve, when I was a little girl. Before I went to sleep in my bed pushed up against the cold wall on the window side of the flat, I heard, in the snowy night outside that window, sleigh bells.

Or maybe it was Mom and Dad, preparing the scene for Christmas morning, when my little sister and my big brother Ronn and I would wake to the decorated tree in the front room, the colored bulbs lit, presents scattered underneath the tree. We waited for Dad to sit, cross-legged, in front of the tree, and one by one, he brought out the gifts and called our names. Dad enjoyed Christmas morning as much as we did, relishing his role as gift-giver.

There’d been magic the night before, also, when I recited my verse in the Christmas Eve pageant at the Evangelical Lutheran Church where I attended Sunday School . Magic, as all the little children recited their verses to a darkened sanctuary lit only by candles – real candles! – across the altar and hanging high on the walls at the side aisles. Magic! After Christmas Eve worship, each child received a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and we’d drive home, me sitting smugly in the back seat of my Dad’s ‘54 Chevy.

I wait for the magic now. Each Christmas, the magic seems to grow dimmer, but I still love the lights on the tree, and I listen to classical Christmas music, hearing the same songs again and again, without tiring of them. I have a few solemn rituals I follow; each season I watch “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a beautiful depiction of Dylan Thomas’ remembrance of his Christmases past.

The magic lessens, with each year, it seems. Life in the Bay Area of California does not afford the cozy nights in a warm, warm house, the wind blowing cold off of Lake Michigan against the windows. Still, it is comforting to sit beside the Christmas tree – a presence of its own in the house – in the early dark evenings, the room lit only by the old-fashioned, multi-colored lights. 

And the season passes quickly, each day shorter than the next, each year flying by – where did the time go? I ask the question of myself as the generations before me must have asked the question, and those generations all gone now, a long time ago.

The cat and the Christmas tree, 12/2023  Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert
Uncategorized

Auntie Irene

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My father was extroverted and his sister Irene was extroverted. Really extroverted: the kind of extrovert that spoke everything that passed through her mind. And I loved her.

Auntie Irene and her husband, Uncle Erdreich, lived on a road off the State Road 57 going north along the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Baileys Harbor. Their road led into a swamp, a mile or so past their house, their house with the cottage behind it – the cottage that Uncle Erdreich had built for my grandparents to live in in their elder years. The door of Auntie Irene’s house led to a hall that led to another door into the kitchen, the table directly ahead as you walked into the house. I suppose that house was strange by modern standards of “footprint,” as rooms had been added on by Erdreich, a carpenter, as the need had presented itself over the years.

I spent many nights in a second story bedroom at the top of the winding stairs that led from the living room to that unused space; unused, since Irene and Erdrich’s two sons were a generation older than me, and were long past away from Baileys Harbor, making their lives in other places. When I was living in Green Bay for a couple of lonely years in my twenties, a few times I made the trip to Baileys Harbor to spend a day or two with Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich. I slept in that cozy bedroom with its old fashioned pictures on the wall many times.

Irene was “the hugger” to my sister Suzie. That’s how Suzie remembered her as being different from Edna, a quiet Bahlert, who lived twenty miles to the north, near the tip of Death’s Door at the end of the Door Peninsula. And Irene did welcome us all with a hug, as her mother had done, a generation before, when she welcomed my reserved mother into the family as she met her for the first time. My mother never forgot that hug of kindness and acceptance.

Irene and Erdreich rarely went more than a few miles from their home, but they did come to Milwaukee to visit my family when my sister was still in a stroller. The Big Sister (as Irene had been to her Bahlert siblings) took the baby and Auntie Irene for a walk, Auntie Irene anxious, talking non-stop as soon as we were out of sight of the house where my family lived.

Irene hugged and Irene talked. Is it a truth about extroverts that they say exactly what comes into their mind? I think that was true of Irene. She was kind; she was gentle; she was warm and she had a humor about her. When my parents and Suzie and I had been greeted on the lawn with hugs, we were given a tour of the garden that was full of vegetables and fruits every year, and then we walked into the kitchen of the welcoming house for a treat at the table, something home baked by Auntie Irene.

On one of the trips to Door County during my years in Green Bay, I invited a friend to join me for the weekend, and we were the guests of my loving aunt and her home cooked meals. As we drove away, my friend turned to me in the car and said: “there’s no excuse for a person to be like that.” Her comment surprised me, and it still surprises me that I did not feel shame at her judgment of a person I loved so completely. Years later, I introduced another friend to Irene and Erdreich, and she told me that she had never met people like them before. Her comment reminded me of her kindness and gentle acceptance.

When Irene was in a nursing home, already past 90, dying, I wrote a note to her. I’m sure someone must have read it to her as she lay in her bed, that lonely bed away from the double bed she’d shared for 70 years with Erdreich. As I signed the note, I remember writing: “wait for me.” Jeff and I made the trip to Door County again on our visit “home” to Wisconsin that year, just in time to be present at Auntie Irene’s funeral in the Evangelical Lutheran Church along the highway, the church where, years before, I’d sat in the pew after receiving communion, next to my aunt who fell to her knees, head bent, before she sat back in the pew. I’ve always thought that Auntie Irene had waited for me return, for me to be present alongside my Bahlert cousins, some who came from a long way to be at her funeral, on that summer day.

Irene, circa 1926

Uncategorized

The gladdest thing

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one. — “Afternoon on a Hill,” Edna St. Vincent Millay

For a couple of days – for a few hours this week – my husband and I and two good friends were, indeed, “the gladdest thing under the sun!” We drove and we hiked up hills and we walked among the hills at Carrizo Plain National Monument in South Central California. The long drive was worth it!

Enjoy this tiny sliver of the beauty that was ours to savor, to enjoy, just for a time:

Carrizo Plain National Monument, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, April 11, 2023