what I've learned from life, by Mary Elyn Bahlert
I drop under the azure sky,
fall onto the grass, fresh in spring,
sniff as if for the first time.
The little cat comes to join me,
picking up each paw to navigate the way.
She drops into the shade traced by my arm.
Then, she crawls away
to her better advantage.
Once I sat under this sky
on a green hill
with a boy.
We laughed at the slow parade of cumulus clouds,
watched the white birds drifting:
an angel,
a circus clown —
a theater of our own.
Mary Elyn Bahlert, 04/2020
photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 9/29/2024
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
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.
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.
