ON THE GARDEN THAT WELCOMES, THE BIKE TRAIL THAT SOOTHES, AND THE RELATIONSHIPS THAT TEACH
Thursday May 16
Dear Sarah,
It is Thursday, and I have been having a pleasant week off following our week of work travel, a luxurious staycation. I’ve been letting myself slow down, have daydreamy moments, smell some actual flowers. We have a lilac bush at our new home and when we’ve gone over there this week we’ve been checking on the blooms to see if they’ve popped and if they are giving off that smell of spring. In the week I was gone the city has gotten more green, and all kinds of flowers are blooming. There is a type of tree in the neighborhood of my apartment that has popped out in all white flowers, and many of the flowers have rained down onto the sidewalk so that it looks as if it were covered in snow. This land of winter snow and spring snow. I think it may be a dogwood. I went for a run yesterday morning and passed between streets on a walkway covered with the blooms. I reached down to touch the flowers that had fallen on the sidewalk, the petals somehow damp, papery, and sturdy all at once. It’s been a treat to see a real spring unfolding, and it’s been an unexpected pleasure to have a lovely yard at our home filled with perennials that have grown up with almost no work at all on our end. It’s like the home is welcoming us. When we arrive we walk out to the backyard to see what has changed since we last visited — tulips in pink and red and white and yellow opening up, green sprouts making their way from the flower beds into the grassy parts of the yard (perhaps things took root when we dragged a rake through the beds earlier in the year, trying to peel away the layer of dead leaves?), and the lilacs, and something bright green that my sister-in-law and mother-in-law think is a spirea. It’s such a bright green it is verging on yellow.
I’ve been stewing a bit on your letter from a couple of weeks ago where you talked about how Jonah declared that he thinks the Easter Bunny is a fib. I wonder if that was the end of the conversation, or if he might still be thinking about it? It’s hard to recall exactly how I felt about things when I was that age but I imagine there are moments when you learn things, and since you can sense that others know more things than you do at your young age, you may feel that you’ve been hoodwinked somehow. I wonder if you and Jonah talked about how the Easter Bunny was still fun? As in, even if EB was a story, EB was a fun story, and that is why you shared the “fib” with him and played it out every year. You and I have talked about this before — it’s hard to convey the nuance of why sometimes stories that are made up, make-believe, are fun, and how they can be fun when you don’t know they’re made up, and then how they can keep being fun once you do know they are made up. Maybe it’s too much in the moment for him! It makes more sense to me now after nearly 40 years of being alive, but I have no recollection of when I learned that the Easter Bunny did not really come into my home and fill my basket with my favorite treats. It seems improbable anyway! Where would such a large bunny come from? Is the bunny really going to the homes of all the children we also know? Is it one bunny, or is it a herd of giant bunnies moving across every city? (It seems like the Easter Bunn(ies) must be giant in order to deliver all the candy they carry, but then how are they getting into our homes? A smaller bunny makes more sense in terms of infiltrating our spaces, but are many small bunnies dragging tiny sacks of candies behind them? At what age did I begin thinking in these terms?) I have the sense that Jonah was somehow protecting himself in that moment, or stretch of time, in which he found out that the Easter Bunny is not real. If he believed in the Easter Bunny, what else did he believe in that might not be real either? To the extent that it’s possible to evaluate the things you know at a young age, is he reviewing all the things he knows and running them through his new fib meter? Every thing matters so much more when you’re young because you simply haven’t had as many thoughts and experiences yet! Each moment stands tall among the small but growing collection of moments you gather along the way. All I know is that I hope Jonah was still able to savor some jelly beans and a chocolate bunny without the fib getting in the way!
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva
May 15, 2019
Dear Eva,
With our metaphorical office closed after last week’s conference, I indulged in a long bike ride this glorious afternoon. It was heavenly. The weather today is about 70 degrees, and it feels like half the city must have closed their own metaphorical and literal offices to head outside. I know there are just days until this snapshot of perfect spring turns into a humid hellscape, but my god, it sure has been lovely while it lasts. The trees everywhere are bursting with either bright green leaves or splendid purple, pink, or white blossoms. The air is fragrant and fresh. I am remembering now why I was in a such an inspired mood as my plane left for Portugal 10 days ago. It would be impossible to be out in this world right now and not feel that it is teeming with possibility.
Simon, savoring the spring last week.
As I rode my bike along the woodsy trail near our house, I was reflecting back on the first time I rode my new bike after we moved to Iowa five years ago. The memory of that first ride is crisp because I was full of child-like fear. I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was a kid, and I was dreading the inevitable feeling of incompetence and insecurity I would feel up on two wheels after all that time. My dad, an avid rider, was with me. If he could tell I was nervous, he didn’t acknowledge it. When we arrived at the trail, he got on his bike and rode off, calling out to me to just hop up and ride after him. It turns out you don’t really forget how to ride a bike after a two-decade hiatus, and I was immediately addicted to the flowy feeling of moving through nature without much effort. It was that first summer back in Iowa on my bike rides that I opened up to the possibility of writing again. I would take the same curvy trail each time I rode, winding through the woods past backyards full of the sounds of happy children and the smells of summer. I remember feeling like a portal opened up in my brain, one that at that point I could only tap into after several minutes of a quiet solo bike ride where my mind could wander away from obligations and to-dos and into dreamy thoughts. I remember penning blog posts in my head while I rode and then practically running to my computer when I returned home to fix them in type.
I no longer need bike rides in the same way, but I certainly still love them. When I got to my familiar trail today, I instantly felt entirely self-imposed weights lift away. It is interesting to me how even working independently from my home in a low-pressure job, I can still feel invisible constraints that prevent me from ever feeling completely free during the workday. Knowing that none of our colleagues were working today erased that feeling, and I felt like a child on summer break. Happy as a dead bird, as my late Grandma Thursa would say.
In my letters to you, I have been writing and thinking quite a bit about what it means to have an ordinary life. About what it means to have an impact that is small but deep. About how empowering and freeing it is to decide to focus on a few dozen formidable relationships in your life and create and live a life around those relationships while you continue to learn and grow and help where you can — that this can be your life’s work! And it is enough.
On that note, I want to close by thanking you for all that you have helped me see in these first 33 weeks of our writing project together. Things that are and probably always have been right in front of me, but that were not clear until our weekly exchanges morphed them into a visible shape for my eyes and mind. What a difference a deep, formidable relationship can make!
Your friend,
Sarah