Of runaway cats

Magellan now has a new sport: standing as close as possible to the one door we happen to be coming in or out of most often so she can get by us in one inadvertent second and run for dear life.

Often she stops at the outdoor seating set that we have in the courtyard in front of our small apartment near the woods, but sometimes she sees squirrels and takes off after then, ending up clear halfway up the walkway toward the other side of the apartment complex.

This is not good news for potential cat sitters, since Magellan often knows who's not paying enough attention and that's how she gets out so quickly and so repeatedly.

For the past few weeks or so there have been days when I've also felt like running away. Unlike Magellan, who does it for her fun and annoyance of us, I wanted to run away screaming, until I could run and scream no more. That's especially after my father went back into the hospital and the semester concluded with so much left to be done and dealt with. At least now my brother is in Puerto Rico (he's my hero!) so that makes it a little easier to be far away. He's such a great help to both my parents, especially my mom who's bearing the brunt of it all.

Yesterday I finished all the grading (finally!) so I did something I haven't done since college: I went with some friends to the 9:45 p.m. showing of "Angels and Demons," which turned out to be a really entertaining, if rather ridiculous and implausible, movie. But it was the perfect antidote to mental and emotional exhaustion, exactly what I craved.

Still, I couldn't help but be saddened by the thought that my father, in better times, would have loved to hear what I had to say about the movie and would've been excited about the prospect of seeing it. This is the man who, in my childhood, took us once to New York City to watch the premiere of a film he really wanted to see, back when movies took a year or longer to get to Puerto Rico. From him I inherited my taste for thrillers (if not for traveling), and I know he would really enjoy this one.

In better news, today I posted my final grades for the last class I had pending so I'm officially truly really absolutely done (well, I hope!) with this past semester and academic year. Now I have a paper to finish for a conference this coming week and then I pack myself up and fly to Puerto Rico for part of the summer. Still, all of these plans depend on how my father continues to fare in the hospital.

While it's really annoying to have to chase Magellan halfway down the walkways of this apartment complex, there's something in her glee at escaping that I can relate to. Sometimes, although not in Magellan's spoiled pampered world, reality isn't what we'd prefer to wake up to.

The rose gardens of the mind

This year, because we're living in our small apartment near the woods, I don't get to tend a real garden. But that doesn't mean that I can't have the enjoyment of a potted one.

Recently, after I participated in an admissions event for prospective students, the organizer gave me this mini-red rose as a thank-you present. Little did she know the pleasure that she was giving me, not only because it was a thoughtful and unexpected gift, but also because roses have much significance in my life.

After my operation 7 years ago, when my husband and I finally moved to our first home in the suburbs of Ohio, the first thing I decided I wanted was a rose garden. I wasn't sure why having a rose garden was so important to me, but my husband humored me and we planted several new roses around the house, where the previous owners had planted some that were not only rather homely but very difficult to care for. But a rose is a rose is a rose, I said, and I tried not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The thing with roses is that, depending on their nature (if they're tea roses, for instance), they can be extremely difficult to care for and very temperamental. In my rookie ignorance I planted the most tantrum-prone and the most uncooperative, which were also invariably attacked by hungry Japanese beetles. One sweltering August day, I actually found myself outside, among my roses, trying to drown the hideous beetles, one by one, in soapy water. For a beginner gardener, and one who is as pathologically afraid of bugs as I am, this was a life-changing experience.

From there I moved away not just from the suburbs but from difficult-to-care-for roses and gravitated instead to the miniature and heirloom kinds, including a beautiful and sweetly perfumed cabbage rose my mother-in-law gave me, which we planted in our second home in Ohio. Every summer, that cabbage rose would bloom gloriously and infuse the garden with its lovely aroma.

This year, all the roses of my past are gone, and I only have this tiny red rose until we have a home again and I get to garden for real once more. But, somehow, the little rose is enough because its charm and beauty is all that is needed to bring a smile to my face when I step outside my door into my make-shift potted garden.

Years ago, I did figure out why roses, and colorful flowers, have such an important meaning for me. When Crohn's Disease had taken over my life, I remember feeling like my soul had become a wasteland, a barren soil, cracked by humiliation, and pain, and overwhelming despair.

The heroic therapist who helped me believe that I would be whole again and thereby helped me regain my desire to live (herself a cancer survivor who, many years later, eventually succumbed to the disease), taught me to do visualization exercises based on imagining beautiful gardens, which I had to fill with every kind of flower. I filled my imaginary gardens with roses of every color: purple, blue, red, orange, yellow, pink, and even black.

Visualizing my inner garden as brimming with life and overflowing with flowers helped me regain the joy of living I had lost after my first bout with Crohn's, which would not be my last, or the hardest. That inner garden is now part of the vision of my life, and that's why, I finally came to understand, I try to replicate it everywhere I live.

In our small apartment near the woods I may not have a real garden, but the potted one I've started to build is enough in its simplicity and, ultimately, in its hidden message. Because, despite the hardships that life sends our way, as long as, in our minds, we are grateful for the kindness of blossoming, and we can celebrate simple beauty, we might just be alright.

¡Feliz Día de las Madres!

Today I salute my mother and mother-in-law, my sister and sisters-in-law, and all my friends who are mamis, all of whom manage to mother (or to have mothered) full-time on top of working for a living.

I've lately realized (and been not a little ashamed of) how it's been rather easy for me to be a back-seat driver, or to evaluate how someone else was doing the hard work of mothering from the comfort of my Monday-morning quarterback position, from the privileged vantage point of someone who didn't actually have to get on the field and play the game to have a quick and ready opinion.

As my younger "twin" Boricua friend (we're so often confused with each other here that it's almost as if we were identical!) says: "Until you've had cracked nipples, and woken up at 3 a.m. with a child burning with fever, or had to rush a child to the hospital on top of everything else you had to do, you shouldn't judge mothers."

I didn't even know you could get cracked nipples! How awful!

And while I don't envy that, I know that they are part of relationships in their life of a kind that I will never have (well, except as a daughter), and that they're defined by a role that I will never know, even if I am a kind of "college mom" to a few of my students, and even if I've "raised" several furry children. It is, of course, just not the same thing at all.

Now that I find myself in the interesting position of having most of my working women friends be mothers, I'm more aware that there is a huge element of ever-present guilt, and that while those of us who are childless might be helpful in terms of giving a mom a different way of appraising a situation, what we are needed most for is support, affection, and understanding.

I hear my friends who are mothers tell their stories and I have come to be more sympathetic to the challenges they face and overcome on a daily basis, and to realize that most mothers do the best they can. My mother did it before them and so did my mother-in-law and my sister and sisters-in-law are, likewise, mothering with all they've got to give, as we speak.

In my own experience, I've had a lioness of a mother who (along with my father) raised me to be a woman warrior. My mother is a woman whose strength and bravery and cheerfulness have often been at odds with the difficulties she has faced in life, ever since she was a child. As I've noted before in these pages, my mother is a force of nature, whose love and loyalty and commitment to her children is unparalleled but who also is not one to mince words, when words need to be said whole. And my mother has been and is a mother every day of her life, something I know is often exhausting (even if also rewarding). My mother is an inspiration to me each and every day of my life, as I know my friends who are mothers are to their sons and daughters.

To all those brave, loving, tired, awed, overwhelmed mothers I know, ¡Feliz Día de las Madres!

Living near the woods means...

This afternoon, my husband and I were home doing our usual things, he, sitting on his favorite big chair in the living room, working away on a translation, and I, sitting in front of this computer, like I do for most of the day most of my days, when we heard a strange knocking coming from the kitchen.

It agitated Geni, who thought it was someone knocking at the door, a sure sign for her that a stranger is about to enter the house, and something that invariably sets her to barking. My husband got up to investigate and urgently asked that I come to the kitchen to see what it was. Neither one of us could believe our eyes.

There, on the aluminum window frame, was the famously shy and reclusive Pileated Woodpecker, pecking away at the sill, hungrily ogling the suet that hangs in front of that window. Eventually, he found his way to his target and ate avidly for a while, long enough for my husband to get his camera and take some pictures, but not even the flash scared him away.

I was glad to see him eating from the suet cage because I had been afraid that the squirrel proof dome would make it hard to reach for him, but he didn't seem to have any trouble. Eventually, when another bird came to claim the suet, he flew away, protesting in the deep monkey-like bark that characterizes the Pileated's call.

Once again we were treated to one of the rare sights that living in this small apartment near the woods offers, and to one of the reasons I like of being so very near the woods.

Para Mario

The Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, who has been one of my very favorites since I was a young girl, is ill, the blog Sin mordazas reports today.

The Saramago Foundation (named after the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer) has suggested that if we publish or read out loud one of his poems, we'll send him energy to get better.

This is for you, Mario, because while lesser poets come and go, you are and have always been the real thing.

Te quiero

Tus manos son mi caricia,
mis acordes cotidianos;
te quiero porque tus manos
trabajan por la justicia.

Si te quiero es porque sos
mi amor, mi cómplice, y todo.
Y en la calle codo a codo
somos mucho más que dos.

Tus ojos son mi conjuro
contra la mala jornada;
te quiero por tu mirada
que mira y siembra futuro.

Tu boca que es tuya y mía,
Tu boca no se equivoca;
te quiero por que tu boca
sabe gritar rebeldía.

Si te quiero es porque sos
mi amor mi cómplice y todo.
Y en la calle codo a codo
somos mucho más que dos.

Y por tu rostro sincero.
Y tu paso vagabundo.
Y tu llanto por el mundo.
Porque sos pueblo te quiero.

Y porque amor no es aurora,
ni cándida moraleja,
y porque somos pareja
que sabe que no está sola.

Te quiero en mi paraíso;
es decir, que en mi país
la gente vive feliz
aunque no tenga permiso.

Si te quiero es por que sos
mi amor, mi cómplice y todo.
Y en la calle codo a codo
somos mucho más que dos.

Deer, oh, deer!

Today, I left my small college on the hill for a day of shopping and an early dinner at a nearby mall in a car full of my minority junior faculty friends, two African Americans and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, who sometimes seems like my double (we're constantly being confused for one another).

I haven't had this much fun for a while, and the outing was the perfect antidote for the pervasive exhaustion that has settled over me for much of this semester. While I went off to do girly things, my husband stayed home and was able to take these pictures when a number of uninvited guests showed up in our apartment complex for lunch.

The first one, above, is of a deer tip-toeing in from the woods into our courtyard.

The second is of another deer sampling some fresh shoots from a tree that has only recently flowered, and the third captures yet another deer grazing on the parking lot shrubbery.

Thankfully, we city girls had no encounters with wildlife on our way back. Spending hours inside a huge mall going from store to store to store while we helped each other choose the right shirts and pants and colors was the perfect way to forget all the hard work we've done this semester and the lots of work that still remains pending before we can put this academic year truly behind us.

When all was said and done, we had stocked up on new summer clothes, eaten until we could eat no more (just like the deer in these pictures!), gotten to know each other a little better, and laughed a lot more than we've been able to do recently. Not bad for a day's non-work!

Bleeding hearts in the late spring garden

Everything around us is finally greening, and the almost mind-numbing dullness of browns that is Ohio in late winter and early spring recedes as the green advances, giving us a most yearned for sight. The temperatures are still not very warm (we started in the upper 40s this morning) but, alas, it is Ohio and we can't have it all.

At last, classes ended yesterday and while now there are piles and piles and piles of grading that must get done, at least that beloved but exhausting takes-it-all-out-of-me part of my job is over, and I get a rest from it for a few months. That comes as a most welcome respite after what was one grueling year.

Still, there is a bitter sweetness to the end of a school year, and it's so rewarding to have the students in all three classes say they didn't want their class to end, that they enjoyed it and felt they got something out of it, and that they would miss being in class (although not for long, I'm sure, since they, like me, will hopefully move seamlessly into their non-college lives and will enjoy the summer break, too). Most moving was to hear some say that the class has helped them not only learn about literature but also about themselves, and about worlds they didn't know existed.

Ultimately, it's a great relief to know that the students not only noticed but appreciated the not-little effort that it cost me to keep three classes going this semester, and that it paid off because everyone, the students and myself, ended up with a good feeling about it all.

Given that yesterday marked the end of teaching for now, today was a break day that started early when I went to the farmer's market with a friend and came back with a bounty of freshly cut asparagus, which we ate this evening for dinner with my husband's world-famous hash brown potatoes.

After the farmer's market, I left my small college on the hill bound for the capital city for my weekly hair appointment and a few errands. I really like the days when I get a few hours to myself to do things I enjoy, like driving while listening to my audiobooks (I just finished Barbara Walters' Audition and have now moved on to Toni Morrison's A Mercy), and stopping at Starbucks for my obligatory grande, decaf 3-Splenda, latte.

I also made a planned stop at my favorite nursery, to which I was introduced many years ago by my green-thumbed mother-in-law, and where I bought my first spring pansies a few weeks ago. There I bought a fragrant pink peony that is still in the bud, a bleeding heart in dire need of replanting, and my favorite herbs: rosemary, Italian parsley and basil. When I got back home, I planted them in pots and placed them all in a sunny spot, which gives me at least the illusion of having a garden. This will be the first time in years that I don't have one because there is no garden in our little apartment near the woods.

But this will certainly do. As will that sweet, sweet promise of leisure that keeps flirting with me as we move closer and closer to the actual end, once all is said and done, of yet another, but in many ways a very first of firsts, academic year.