Campus Visit

I drove up to East Lansing to visit my daughter at Michigan State University. She is in her junior year there and it's hard to believe even that much time has gone by. The trees along the roads and on campus were still bright, but this time of year they are starting to fade and drop their leaves. The weather was overcast and a bit melancholy.

On Saturday we shopped at quilt and antique stores and sat at the Dairy Store on campus and ate ice cream out of waffle cones while we listened to a radio broadcast of the last few minutes of the football game, which they won in a nail-biter.

Sloan drove me around campus through all the twisting and winding roads lined with stately buildings both modern and historic until I was throughly confused. I only really know how to get to her two former dorms, which I tried to visit as often as I could, and now to her house off campus.

Sloan stayed with me at the hotel on campus and we had nice talks at a leisurely pace. I know these kinds of visits are few and far between since we both live hectic lives. But I cherish the time we have together.

I hope she'll look back on these days at college with fondness, and remember her old mom who comes for the occasional visit and is trying so hard to let her grow up!

Golden Afternoon

I sat on a bench at North Lake Park and looked out over the water. It was the kind of autumn afternoon that I loved. The summer heat was gone, but it was not yet too cool. The trees that rimmed the small lake were turning shades of yellow and orange here and there, but it was still too early to see the real color, which would peak a week or two from now.

I stretched my legs on the bench, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was at this park on a mellow, golden afternoon for a reason. I was stuck on a writing project and thought coming to this quiet place would help me work it out.

Near the shore, moving around the base of the cattails were several mallard ducks; the males with their iridescent green heads and the females a drabber brown. They were letting out a series of quacks and I didn’t know if it was because they were chatting back and forth to each other, or if they saw me there on the bench and didn’t like me being all that close. Either way, I needed to write something about birds, so these guys were the likely candidates.

This whole year has been a challenging one for me and I was able to cope with it by writing out my feelings. But now I felt the worst of the busyness and obligations were behind me and I wanted to brush away this veil of stress and sadness and see – really see – the beauty of my favorite month; to find balance again after being lopsided for so long.

I am not a trained poet, but I like to write poems and I am writing one for every odd day in October. Here is the one I wrote on this day, at this park:

“The Show, The Center”
(mallards at North Lake Park)
He is the show,
with his shiny green head,
white collar, handsome brown vest,
but he is never very far from her;
the drab one, the quiet one.

It is clear that she is the center,
the one who creates the family,
carries on the species.
He preens his beautiful feathers,
but he knows his place.

I closed my notebook and took another deep breath while sending out a little prayer of thanks for these ducks, the park, this life I have right here, right now. When my thoughts and my days seem flighty and out of control, along comes October with its blazing beauty to ground me and clear my vision.

A flock of geese flew overhead in their traditional “V” shape against a sky so blue it nearly hurt to look at it. Oblivious to that sight, the mallards continued to swim on the deep blue water of this tiny lake concerned only with themselves and perhaps that strange human who won’t go away. I’m reminded once again of an old folk song, based on Bible verses, that has brought me much comfort this year:

To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under heaven.

Autumn Wedding

Our son Max got married to his Sarah this past Saturday. The weather was absolutely beautiful, in the high 70's, and the colors of the trees were just about at peak.
I show Max here with his son, our wonderful grandson, Nolan who was the honorary best man, standing next to him is Josh, one of Max's best friends since high school. They are at the rehearsal at the church.

Max had four friends and his brother Caleb stand up for him in the wedding. Our daughter Sloan was one of the bridesmaids. The closest I came to crying during the ceremony was when all three of them were standing up in front of the church waiting for the bride. I am so proud of all of them. They are all grown up and are wonderful people in their own right. I think Tom and I had a lot to do with that, but I just find myself grateful that it worked out that way.

Leading up to the wedding I found myself often feeling sad as I thought about my Mom and the fact that she wouldn't get to see this wedding. We talked of it often in the early months of the year, and I was hoping it would give her something to look forward to as she faced her fight with cancer. Unfortunately it wasn't to be, but I wore one of her necklaces to the wedding and I know she was there in spirit too, wishing her grandson happiness as he heads into this new phase of his life.

Quilt Workshop

Gwen Marston with one of her quilts

Just returned from a quilt workshop with master quilter Gwen Marston. She holds workshops every year for five one-week sessions at an old lodge/restort in Elk Rapids, Michigan called White Birch Lodge. Usually I go in week five, but needed to move to week three this year because of my son's wedding coming up in two weeks.

This year the theme was "liberated quilting" which is a technique of hers. We were free to just sew, shop, and go out to eat for five whole days - it was heaven! I worked on two projects, plus my daughter's college quilt. Very productive time for me and it felt good to be able to sew, which is something I've really put on the back burner this year while I dealt with other family and work issues.

The weather was beautiful the first two days, rained like crazy the third day, the wind blew in a truly spooky way on the fourth day, and it drizzled again on the fifth day. But the sixth day it was cool and sunny for the drive home and the trees along the sides of the roads were starting to turn into their fall colors.

Back to School

Each year whenever my children would head off to school, I would line them up on the front porch and take their picture. Since I've had children attending school since 1985, I've got quite a collection. This year I forgot to do that with my daughter on the day we took her back to college.

We also missed the opportunity to go with her to buy her school supplies; at 20 years old she pretty much takes care of that herself. But for many years she would go with her father to work on a day in late summer on something they would call "special days" and buy a backpack and supplies and anything else she needed following the list from school.

I loved going to school, and I loved sending my own children off to school. Something about this time of year just fires up the blood and makes me anxious to get back to work and learn something or create something.

Now, with all my children out on their own, I am contemplating a return to school myself and am studying for the graduate exam. It's been a while since I've stuck my nose in a book for anything except pleasure and now I'm studying and trying to get information I don't really want to know to stick. It's a challenge.

Dark Omens

There was a loud and raucous cawing filling the air as I stepped out my front door. I walked the length of the porch to investigate, but I knew what I would find. In the two tall, dead trees bordering our yard, a flock of crows had taken up squatters’ rights in the tallest of the skeletal limbs and were squawking at each other. Groups of crows are sometimes known as a murder. Was this a warning?

It’s hard not to conjure up scenes from a Hitchcock movie when I see this many of that kind of bird together. The kind that attacked, the kind that pecked eyes with their long, black, lethal beaks.

On the drive into town I stopped at a red light and there, perched on the sign next to the road, was a single crow staring at me, sizing me up. Was this a dark omen?

Like the raven who came tap, tap, tapping on Poe’s window and entered to watch a mad man rant, could these dark wraiths harbor anything but doom?

Ravens or crows, I’m sure any competent ornithologist would gladly tell me how they differ, but I like to think of them as simply blackbirds. Then it brings to mind the gentle lyrics of a Beatle song:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly,
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arrive.

Don’t we all, in the deep, dark part of our soul, shelter a little broken wing? And don’t we all have some kind of “moment” we are awaiting to arrive and thrill to the notion that it actually might happen?

These dark omens dressed in mourning feathers and perched high over my head in dead branches, could be just a bunch of crows with nothing better to do – or they could be harbingers for the start of new possibilities.

My choice!

Denise Kalin Tackett
Sept. 14, 2010

Fragile Wings

There are monarch butterflies in my backyard. We usually see a few this time of year as they travel down the shore of Lake Michigan, but this early autumn they have alighted in our pine trees and transformed our yard into a butterfly garden.

I believe that God sends us reminders when we have faced so many difficult times that it's hard to believe we will ever feel happy again.

This year the hydranga bushes that line the back of my mother's house exploded with blooms. The thing is - they had never bloomed before! I know because we discussed it every year, how big and beautiful the bushes were, but no blooms, and this went on for eight or nine years. This year, after she died in early spring, they bloomed; big pink, flat blossoms that lasted throughout the summer.

And now I have monarch butterflies in my yard. Orange and black creatures that seem too fragile to travel any distance at all. I don't know how long they will stay, and what the journey ahead holds for them, but I'm grateful they came to give me this gentle reminder that life goes on, that beautiful days can and will happen.

A message carried on fragile wings to a grateful heart.