what have you made this year?
(answer, and you may win a book!)
— Katrina Kenison
Yes, it’s been a year.
A year since we counted the rolls of toilet paper in the closet, filled our pantries with rice and beans, gave up looking for hand sanitizer, closed our doors, and watched our country shut down with an abruptness no one could begin to process at the time.
At a family Zoom gathering Sunday night, four of us gathered around the virtual dinner table and exchanged still-fresh memories from last March, especially the moments when it first dawned on us that life as we knew it had already slipped away.
For me there was a teary drive through an empty downtown, the news that the nursing home where I taught chair yoga had locked its doors to all visitors, the heartache of visiting my parents through a cracked-open window rather than sitting on their couch sharing a cup of coffee or an evening glass of wine. Henry recalled the final, emotional rehearsal for a spring musical that would never be performed, how his students sang their hearts out for each other one last time and then wept as they hugged good-bye. Steve remembered walking into his empty office one morning last March, unplugging all the computers and driving them to his employees’ houses in the hope they might help him keep his small business afloat. Lauren, who had plotted her 40 thbirthday trip to England down to the minutest detail, described the day she canceled every single reservation, holding herself together just long enough to take the entire, much-anticipated plan apart. Will any of us, ever, become quite so attached to any hope or itinerary again? Probably not.
How strange it is now to think that, back then, we were also sterilizing our phones, leaving the mail outside for three days, and washing down milk cartons, but we weren’t covering our faces at the grocery store. There was so much we didn’t know that we didn’t know. And no one could imagine what awaited — the loss of jobs, routines, connections, institutions, restaurants, loved ones, friends. The end of hugs. The isolation. The death. The grief. The crazy politics. The ongoingness of it all.
As I sit writing in my quiet kitchen, watching the chickadees and nuthatches come and go from the feeder, I’m also keenly aware that this long, sad year has not been without its gifts. I have only to think of the moment last week when, after months of standing still as a statue beneath the crabapple tree each afternoon, arm outstretched, my patience (or perhaps my persistence) was finally rewarded. A chickadee landed, light as a breath, upon my open palm, plucked a sunflower seed, and zipped back to the branch above my head. Four more times that brave, tiny creature returned to my fingertips, met my eyes with its own bright black gaze, and took food from my hand. Rooted in place there beneath a tree alive with birds, surrounded by their chatter and the whir of wingbeats, I realized that this, too, marks a change in the way I live now.
I’m quieter. Slower. More watchful. Attuned, perhaps, to a subtler rhythm. A year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined a bird might eat from my hand. And yet, a year ago I wouldn’t have found time in any day to stand in stillness for thirty or forty minutes simply to watch the comings and goings of the wild things who share this piece of earth with us.
Now, I have nothing but time, and for months this is how I’ve spent it — observing and wondering at and falling even more deeply in love with a place. After years of practicing yoga, counting my breaths, sitting in meditation, I’ve finally begun to understand what it really means to be fully present, noticing everything.
To say I know the red squirrel who lives in the stone wall outside the kitchen doesn’t begin to explain the affection I feel for this tiny, bushy-tailed companion whose daily comings and goings over the last year have become as familiar to me as my own. I greet him every morning before I start the coffee. I know which branch he favors for an afternoon nap. I watch him sleep there. While I’m making our dinner inside, he’s on the other side of the window, gathering and eating his own. Yes, I put out treats for him. (And, please don’t judge, I also gave him a name. Chasten. It fits.) When I step out the door these days, Chasten no longer scurries into his hole in the wall, but rather pauses, head lifted, watching me with as much friendly curiosity as I do him. We’ve grown comfortable with one another.
In the last year, I haven’t missed a sunrise or a sunset, a moon or a storm or a rainbow, of which there have been many. Nights, my husband and I lie in the dark listening to the sounds of wind or rain, coyotes in the field, birds at first light, the occasional distant owl.
For many of us who have been lucky enough to stay home this year, there’s been both sadness and grace in this quiet time, grief for our collective losses and, too, a kind of invisible yet transforming growth. Perhaps above all, we’ve arrived at a hard-won awareness of the preciousness and fragility of life. Leaning into gratitude, we begin to notice the everyday miracles that were right in front of us all along.
Now, as cases go down and vaccinations ramp up, tendrils of hope push through the hard-packed tundra of resignation and compliance. It won’t be long before we’ll be able to hug our friends, make dinner reservations, take a drive to Target. I can’t wait.
But I won’t lie. The last month or so has felt hard in a new way. I suspect we’ve all been stirred by this one-year anniversary to pause and take stock of the last year. Tallying both our losses and unexpected blessings, we’re thinking about what we learned, what new ways of being we wish to carry forward. I wonder whether I can hold on to this more expansive sense of space and time even as life around me picks up speed. And, too, I look back at this long string of unscheduled days and ask myself what, exactly, I’ve accomplished here. The first answer, which came immediately to mind, was a big fat “Zero.”
While friends have written books, created beautiful artworks, taught classes over Zoom, and worked from home while presiding over their kids’ online schoolwork, I was standing under a tree. No wonder, I chided myself, I had nothing to show for all this time. I’ve written little, other than a journal of jotted moments. I did not complete an online course or clean the basement. There was so much I could have done but didn’t. What I saw, looking back, was a year of wasted days, lost opportunities, failed intentions, lack of self-discipline, lack of inspiration, lack of talent. Lots and lots of lack.
And then I read this piece in last Sunday’s New York Times in which seventy-five artists and writers were asked, among other things, “What’s one thing you made this past year?”
“A compost heap,” replied writer Ali Smith.
“I’ve made peace with myself,” said musician Tiwa Savage.
“I made a googly-eyed owl out of toilet paper rolls,” writer Karen Russell answered.
And with that, the chiding voice in my head fell silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her tone was different. Curious rather than critical.”What have you made this past year?” she asked, gently now.
And suddenly the answers came. I made lots of things. So did you. I’m sure of it.
Here are 21 things I made this year.
This cake.
This track.
This woodpile.
This sandwich.
This gift.
This bed. (Every day.)
This garden.
This birthday card.
This bouquet.
This donation.
This face.
This pizza.
This harvest.
This gift.
This table setting.
This rock.
This stack of letters.
This batch of pickles.
This garden.
This cocktail.
This gift.
Which brings me to my dear friend Beth Kephart, who DID write a book this year, a beautiful, brave, rule-breaking memoir that is still haunting me months after I read the advance proofs. It was the night of the election that I finished the last chapter, sitting alone in front of a fire in the living room while CNN announced early results from the TV in the kitchen. Somehow, in those fraught, uncertain hours, the questions Beth was exploring on the page felt more urgent to me than the projections and opinions issuing from the screen.
How do we become the people we are? How are we shaped by those we love, by those who hurt us, by those who see us more clearly than we see ourselves? How do we choose one path over another, releasing our grip on old dreams even as we’re compelled to envision new ones?
How do time, pain, love, and loss finally pare away all that isn’t needed, leaving behind the essence of a self, a truth, a way onward? Is it possible to write one’s way into understanding and acceptance, into healing, into faith that who we are and what we do is enough?
If, as C.S. Lewis suggests, “We read to remember that we are not alone” then Beth reminds us just how rare it is to find a true soul companion for life’s journey. Perhaps what I love most about her brief, atmospheric collection of intensely personal fragments is the way she reveals her own creative process with every page, sharing moments of agonizing self-doubt and quiet revelation side by side. This is both the life of an artist, unsparingly portrayed, and the hard work of writing itself happening before our eyes, stripped bare of all pretense and self-protection. To read it is to be challenged, provoked, and, finally, deeply moved.
Having known the private terror of sharing myself on the page, I could only imagine the anxiety Beth might be battling in the days leading up to her pub date two weeks ago. No words can reassure a writer about to release her book into the world, but I hoped a small talis-woman, a handmade “self” filled with soothing lavender might bring some ease. And so I stitched my love for her, and my gratitude for her beautiful book, into a little being and mailed it off to her. To make something, anything, I’m coming to realize, is to bring a bit more appreciation and nourishment into the world. The gift to ourselves is in the time and space we claim for that creation.
Beth wondered recently if there was ever a time we two didn’t know each other, and yet the truth is we’ve met in person only a couple of times over the last fifteen years or so. It is through writing that we really became friends, sharing our words, our stories, our truths. And then, over this last strange year, finding ourselves drawn at last to long conversations over the phone, we forged a deeper connection still. What we talk about, often, is the joy of making. Beautiful sentences, yes. But also dinner. Good days. Gelli prints. Stitches. Beauty. Love.
win a copy of wife/daughter/self
Beth has generously offered to gift a signed, personalized copy of Wife/Daughter/Self to one of my readers here. And, because she’s Beth, and because we’re here to support each other in all of our making, she’ll also include one of her own hand-made cards, each a small work of art.
To enter to win the book, simply answer the question in the comments section below: What have you made this year?
I’ll draw one winner at random on Wednesday, March 31.
If you want to order Beth’s book, you can purchase signed copies from her local independent bookstore, Main Point Books, here. The Amazon page (affliliate link) is here. For more info about Beth and her work, visit her website, bethkephartbooks.com
(Chickadee photo courtesy of Unsplash.)
Originally published at https://www.katrinakenison.com on March 17, 2021.
