They were everywhere along the journey. Braiding water in Goshen, Virginia before the sunrise and again in the afternoon, Peg on her rock outpost, taking pictures from the shore. Under the dense cover

of trees, down from the road where traffic only occasionally passed, we read poems and wrote them and smiled into the sun.

My fingers over the cool wall in Jerusalem, believing it held secrets in its veins. Little papers folded to flutter down from the cracks to the ground, swept up by a scarf-wearing old woman at the end of each day. We always wondered who hefted the stones to the Temple Mount, who lifted them and how.

Yesterday, Asher dug through the front yard in search of dinosaur bones. As dusk approached, he ran in his light-up boots to the front door to call into the house, “Mommy! Come quick! I found a dinosaur tooth.”

The little soil-drenched nub in his hand – who knows what it was? But he believed it held secrets to some untold story. I said, “Wow, it’s not very big.” And he said, “Maybe it was a plant-eating dinosaur.”

I’ve always believed in fate, relied on my sixth sense and at the end of the day known I can do only what I try very hard to do.

    Last night I made eggplant with mascarpone cheese and thin leaves of spinach. There were noodles and I took the broccolini from the night prior and chopped it into something new. The poetry is in the stroke of a hand, in the melange of flavors, on my kitchen table, in my children’s faces.

TO LIVE IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

To be cocked like a rifle, a hand
on your gun, to walk
a tight, hard line, even when
your cheeks have filled with dust,
and your flesh is falling off, and your eyes
can no longer focus on the target.

They say that a cocked gun
is bound to go off. Well, it isn’t.
Anything can happen in the Land of Israel.
A broken firing pin, a rusty spring,

or an unexpectedly canceled order,

as was the case with Abraham on Mount Moriah.
– Aryeh Sivan

It’s all a metaphor you know. Every single moment.

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In the afternoon, I stepped foot beyond the curtain to find two curly-haired men smiling. I handed them the information and then, in the glorious and unexpected sunshine, strolled through invitations and colors.

After dinner, the stroll in the rain was nice. We laughed those belly laughs of childhood, before everything became so hard. We had met so many years earlier, when we were writing poems of yearning and love on Saturday afternoons.

Once, we danced in the street for Cinco de Maio, a hand at the small of my back, a language barrier perfecting the night. It was all sensory then, taste and scent and imagination.

But oh how the years have aged us. In some ways, we are the same but in some ways we are very old.

Her dream has crashed down from the branches. Mine is only beginning.

Life is a series of beginnings and endings, sometimes with the same characters, sometimes with new ones.

The children continue to grow and learn and love. They are untainted until they taste unrequited love for the first time, which is always inevitable.

Why does the bubble have to burst? There was a time in childhood when I loved everything about me and everything about everyone else. When I spoke my mind with concern or worry of its effects. When I played with other kids because they were nice and interesting and they knew how to weather the crash of a tower of blocks.

And I remember my year of uncomfortability, fifth grade when nothing I did fit into the scheme of the popular.

Every child has that time, a time of not fitting in. But – oh – why?

I look at Asher, Eliana, Shaya, and see complex individuals with good and bad qualities but oh so lovable – how will others reject them and why?

My wish for my children is to remain as confident and unconcerned with the opinions of others as they are at this very moment.

Of course, at this moment they are asleep in their beds dreaming the dreams of the young. Outside, the black winds are fierce; the neighborhood behind me has lost its power.

And so I write the stories of a dream, for stories are sometimes all we have.

This moment is perfect – and I have a lot of those lately. For as many tragic stories as there are, I am hearing the happy endings I always want to believe in.

Go on. Take the day in all its wind and just be. In my office, a scented candle flickers against the backdrop of my ever-present computer screen. My Tiffany lamp is soft against the blue walls.

And the music is promising.

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What impprint are you leaving on this world? she asked him. What are you doing to make the world better?

“Maybe I’ll just have to be concerned about the impact I make on my kids,” he said. “Maybe that’s my legacy.”

You can’t make your children your purpose or your focus, she said.

And there was no reply.

She saw the end of his job as an opportunity to do what he’d always wanted to do but never had time for. He had a blank page, no list of dreams. “I haven’t had dreams or plans since my father died,” he told her. That was 20 years ago, she said. I think it’s time.

That night, he lit his candles and drank his wine and she went to see The Reader with her friend. “Think about the impact that woman had on the main character – when he was 15, for his whole life,” her friend said.

Which made her think of John. Did he know, wherever he was, the impact he’d had on her? Did he realize that except for one other man, equally as complicated, equally emotionally unavailable, he was the one person she could claim on every level of her being?

Often, when she fought with her husband, she dreamed at night of John and awakened tingling with memories. Sometimes she told her husband about it in quiet voices. Sometimes she kept the warm secret to herself.

Always, she wondered what had happened to John, where he was, if he’d married, if he’d fulfilled his dreams.

The last time she’d seen him had been in Paw Paw at a motel across from the Pizza Hut. The next morning, she gave him her book of poetry but he shook his head and refused. “I don’t want to read about us,” he said outside the Big Boy.

In college, she’d fallen in love with his desire to make a mint on Wall Street and then move to Colorado to teach, something noble. But in truth, he didn’t last two years in New York; when she left him, he’d ridden his bicycle from Seattle to San Diego and then clear across to Washington, D.C. He was repairing bikes in a Chicago shop.

Still, it was 20 years later and she sometimes still Googled his name.

Did she have an impact on anyone like that? Was someone thinking of her all these years later? Would John show up one day in real form or would he remain a memory?

Isn’t there anything you’ve always wanted to do? she asked him.

“I do like to write,” he said. “Though not as much as you.”

It’s time to try, she said. Write your stories. Write your stories.

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The snow came down all night and all day and the children piled into their snowpants and coats and gloves to pack a pail full and up-end it on the heavily covered lawn. It was the first snow day of the season, a white blanket over our weathered neighborhood.

Inside, it was fresh and clean and full of color. I made cottage cheese pancakes for breakfast and filled the coffee press. We stayed in pajamas or sweats the whole day.

When night fell, it was our Sabbath together. I lit the candles – five for our broken family, one votive for my healing sister, and my daughter lit her own. We covered our eyes and swayed to the sound of our own prayerful voices, then danced in circles until we fell into each another.

We ate around the table – short ribs and leeks, the next day a chicken stew with hearty whole grains – ate until we were full.

In the afternoon of the next day, my parents came over in the blustery cold, bearing gifts. The day before the official start to Chanukah, they wanted to give my children their presents in the silence of just us – no family chaos that would follow the next night as extended relatives gathered at my aunt’s house for latkes.

Their eyes opened wide and awe-filled as my three children unwrapped their basket full of art supplies – canvases to paint on, brushes and tubes of acrylics, markers and paper, and crayons and dot paints for the baby.

“When I was a little boy, all I wanted was a box of 64 crayons,” my father said in his gentle voice. “My mother said she couldn’t afford it. So I never got it.”

“I’ll give you mine,” Asher said.

My mother laid a hand on my father’s shoulder. “I feel so bad that you never got your box of crayons,” she said.

In these incredible times, in these hard-to-believe times, my children are still given full buckets of art supplies. The baby has his very own box of more than 100 crayons.

Everywhere around me, friends are losing jobs. “It’s so scary,” one woman said.

It is. It’s easy to go to fear. Times are scary but we can – we must – persevere. We must innovate. We must turn the box upside down and shake out all its contents and then figure out something creative to do with the box.

On my desk, folded bills yet to be paid. I must believe in the power of time and hard work and know that if I do all I can, I will survive.

Years ago, when I was more religious, I read a thin hard-back book called Thou Shalt Not Want. I looked for it on the bookshelf today but couldn’t find it – perhaps it left with my ex-husband. Perhaps that alone is symbolic.

What I remember most was its repetitive message that each person has a destiny and must put in the full effort within her power. Doing less or doing more won’t lead to her best life, it said.

As I scoured the living room bookshelves, I came across books that I once relied upon – The No-Cry Sleep Solution and Dr. Sears’ Baby Book among them. I remember once sitting in my closet at 2 in the morning, poring through those pages in search of answers as to why my infant was crying, crying, crying.

I haven’t looked at those books in years. Because I know all the answers are somewhere inside me, if only I can silence the fear enough to listen. Or maybe there are no answers, no easy, figure-it-out black print telling me what to do. Maybe the answer is that there are no answers, just the journey.

There is an ancient Jewish legend that inside the womb, an angel teaches the growing baby all the secrets of the universe. Moments before birth, the angel taps the baby on the top of his lip and erases all that he learned.

The top lip indentation is left as a reminder that he once knew all the answers and will spend the years to come re-acquiring them.

I am comforted by notions of angels, even if I don’t believe in them. The real angels are beside me, in the flesh, in my life. People come into our lives when they must, for an exact reason that most of us will never know.

But while they are here, it is up to us to maximize that potential, to realize the dreams we are afraid to let slip away. I am learning to cherish the gifts I’m given every day – in people, in opportunities, in situations.

What would you do if you knew you could not fail? Who would you love if you didn’t have to worry about being hurt?

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So many snowy winters ago, settled in a loft balcony in the mountains of Vermont, I was concerned about where to end a line and when to pause, when to breathe, when to elongate a syllable.

Twice a year, I gathered with others who cared about the way words fell from the branches of overhung trees and learned the meaning of vegan. In the fall, we hiked along trails of damp leaves in the quiet of the dawn, invigorated as blood coursed through our veins like coffee in the awakening.

I remember cows on hillsides and verdant fields color-lit by changing leaves.

Break the lines where the breath lends itself, they said. Break the lines where the punctuation falls, they said. Break the line where the line break creates an interest in the following line.

Break the line even where it creates an ambiguity that enhances the original intent of the poem.

It’s 8:21 a.m. on a snowy Wednesday. Before I even awoke, my driveway was cleared in the quiet. I took the garbage to the curb and brought the newspapers inside. The house is clean. The house is quiet.

Let’s look at the upside of this down economy: in Royal Oak on Monday, I bought skinny jeans, a winter-white ballet wrap sweater that is oh-so-sexy and a satin sleeveless shirt to wear to Mega 80s this weekend for $100. Gas has fallen to a dollar and a half a gallon. I think before buying more chicken since there’s some in the freezer.

Outside my office window, snow weighs down the branches of my neighbor’s tree. It is winter so we don’t see each other much these days, listed inside as we are in the safe harbor of a heated house.

I can dream endless dreams, yearn to travel, reminisce with myself over my days in Portland hiking, living, loving the quiet. The economy may be challenged and jobs falling at a rapid pace – but I am breathing in a blue room, the mother of three exceptional children, a refrigerator full of grape leaves and hummus and rich coffee.

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The night before, she couldn’t sleep. She wanted to, but the thoughts churned inside her like laundry on high. She turned in the pitch-black and the sheets twisted around her until, somewhere after midnight, the baby appeared silhouetted in the doorway calling Mommy…

Come here, she said, waving him toward the bed then pulling him up. Sleep here, she said, beside me. And in the shadows of the early morning, she was comforted by his even breathing and his sideways posture, at angles to hers but so warm.

She awoke before the alarm with four hours of sleep trailing behind her, but she climbed out of bed and floated downstairs to the office to begin a day that had yet to begin.

There was an early-hour dentist appointment for the two older children. When they left the house, the charcoal-colored clouds holding the sky in darkness, the children questioned the mother’s incentive to leave before the dawn.

But it was almost eight o’clock, she reasoned with herself. The lights were out on one stretch of Middlebelt but the dentist was grinning large. Take the children to an orthodontist, then an oral surgeon, he said. Teeth have to come out. It’s too crowded.

Her sister suggested a second opinion. The children to school, then she worked, piecemeal, for an hour, maybe more, until it was time for the meeting. A brief ray of fluorescent sunshine when she passed through the office of a favorite client, waving hello, returning grins and warm greetings.

The meeting was erratic. She took copious notes, then peeled out of the parking lot under a light-gray sky, the air turned cold, the temperature reading 22. In her hand, emails and text messages to answer. The road stretched out ahead.

The baby’s lunch box left at school. Sporadic work, emptying garbage cans, eating a fast lunch. The phone rang. I think you no longer belong in our group, said the voice from Boston. You are more in PR than journalism. But I’m not, she called into the phone, the words falling into a soundless pool at the other end.

I am a writer, she said into the wind. I have always defined myself as a writer. I write even now, just for a different audience, and I am writing better and more than ever before. With synergy, with security, with confidence, the words flow like a Colorado river cresting between buttes and cliffs. Like beautiful landscape, like perfect landscape, the words come forth.

I unsubscribed you from the list, the email read. She didn’t much care but it was that old childhood feeling – not being welcome in a group she didn’t want to belong to anyway.

She misunderstood an email exchange, repaired a deft silence left too long. She couldn’t trace $450 in the checking account. The older son lost his second glove in three days and though they tried, none of the four of them could find it in the school. So many lost gloves without a mate, she thought.

Dinner to the table, grandmother to visit, the dishes cleared and cleaned. Two children in pajamas before six o’clock. She canceled basketball and climbed into bed at seven with the daughter to watch reruns of Friends.

Nothing so terrible that day. Just an ache in the pit of the stomach and the realization that transitions, changes, are difficult even if good.

The older son never came in during the whole hour of television to see what they were doing. What is he doing in there? she asked herself, hearing his feet bang against the wall they shared.

At eight, she stepped into his room. Floor pristine. Clothes put away. He was pulling a red pajama top over his head with baseballs on it.

“Look what I made,” he said. A tower of Knex on the dresser in red-blue-yellow-green.

“This tower is the good side and this one is the evil tower,” he said. Good on left, evil on right, the left side measurably higher.

The good tower is taller than the evil one, the mother said, recognizing the metaphor, recognizing the sweet brilliance in her child.

He smiled. She laid her hand on his soft, curly hair. She pulled him to her.

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I’d felt it before, that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, a constricting, breath drawn in, and then the waterfall of feelings.

For the past ten years, I have been a freelance journalist, defined mostly by my words and my work. Known in circles of other creatives who wanted to make it on their own, pitching magazines and newspapers, pleading with editors that this topic, this angle, my talent were what she should hedge her bets on and pay for.

A little more than two years ago, I was tired. Tired of so many things – an emotionally draining marriage into which I poured all of myself and got little in return; a freelance career where I pitched, pitched, pitched just to land an assignment and then, story done, check cashed, I had only to pitch some more. I waded in a pool of anxiety that I would never hit a big-enough byline nor earn enough money that we wouldn’t bleed through each month.

And so I contemplated what I wanted out of life, out of love, from myself and for my kids – and I filed for divorce. And I created a company. And I focused on breath. And I found me.

For some of you this touchy-feely crap twists of discomfort but it’s the only way to live I’ve found. Wholly in the moment, ever present and focused on being the very best I can for this moment only.

My company, Your People LLC, is taking off and now I find myself succeeding into new media markets where as a writer I did not. Yesterday, the New York Times mentioned my client, Hiller’s Markets - a first for Hiller’s, a first for me and my company. It was with bittersweet enthusiasm I celebrated that A-section note – for here I am, breaking into a market I’ve always wanted to, without my name anywhere. Such is the life of a publicist.

And today, a kind, soft email from a fellow freelancer, telling me that maybe it’s not so appropriate anymore for me to take part in a closed-circle group of food writers, since my focus these days is on promoting, not writing, food companies.

She may be right – though I hold on dearly to the last dangling strings of freelancing still.

But that familiar feeling – they don’t want me? I don’t belong anymore? all that is familiar is fading …

Change is good. I know that. And just because something is uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It was harder to decide to divorce than it was to file and go through with it.

And now, I face a changing definition of my work – with greater success than I ever had as a freelancer and subsequently more freedom to write with my heart. But change is good. I say goodbye to yesterday so I can welcome tomorrow.

From Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”:

“Up in the sky where we stood the air was lusterless yellow. To the west the sky was blue. Now the sun cleared the clouds. We cast rough shadows on the blowing grass; freezing, we waved our arms. Near the sun, the sky was bright and colorless. There was nothing to see.”

There is wisdom in words and in fashioning brilliant paragraphs. I will still write, even if I am cast out of the food writers forum, even if it is with kindness and well wishes. And maybe now, anxieties of the past put to bed with the ever-changing landscape, I will write like I was meant to write, freed from the pressures of writing for my daily bread, writing toward the horizon.

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Saturday morning, I played catch-up, reading several days worth of Wall Street Journals. And as I took in bad news after bad news from those gray pages, I began to wonder whether this economic desert we’re inhabiting isn’t in some way perpetuated by simple belief.

 What I mean is, if you believe times are really, really bad, then you’re likely to hold your purse strings tightly closed. You won’t take that trip to Disney you’d hoped to surprise the kids with and you won’t buy new furniture because you want to hold on to any extra money. In turn, this lack of spending feeds the notion that the economy is sinking, and so you rein it in more, and the cycle continues.

Downward.

So is the bad economy part real, part belief-promoted?

Just wondering…

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A year or two ago, I learned that my father’s grandfather worked in the metal business. It surprised me that I’d never known, since my father is a VIP in the scrap industry – how hadn’t I know that somehow he’d carried the torch from two generations earlier.

My father’s father was a Detroit milkman, delivering glass bottles of creamy white house to house. This fall, I wrote a Cooking Light article about a milkman who delivers on Detroit’s east side.

Perhaps prompted by my kosher-keeping, I started writing about food a few years back – about how it connects us, how it conveys tradition, how it nurtures, how it can separate.

And when I launched my marketing/PR business last year, it was with the hope of promoting and building businesses in the food industry, businesses that nourish.

Yesterday, I toured a meat packing plant with Fred, the Hiller’s meat buyer.

“Her grandfather was Crown Packing,” Fred told the purveyor.

“What was his name?” he asked.

“Louis Woolman.” Followed by a nod of familiarity.

Grandpa Louie died in 1969, though his company lived on after him. I am now working for Hiller’s, a company in whose ranks so many people knew my great-grandfather, the family legend for whom I am named.  What goes around comes around.

I wonder if there is any coincidence to the way ancestry unfolds? Did my father intend to carry on where his grandfather left off? For me, it wasn’t a conscious decision to step foot into industries about which my forebears were passionate.

My great-grandfather processed pork in Detroit’s famed Eastern Market. He wasn’t a religious Jew, but old traditions die hard, and so he never brought home what he sold.

In recent months, I have stood beside sides of beef and peered into cuts ready to be made into spiral hams. I am learning the most primal of businesses, the way we feed ourselves, the way we find sustenance – but of course everything becomes primal at some point.

For some reason it amazes me when I find someone who works in a foundation industry like scrap, steel, meat or milk. Last week, I toured Calder dairy farm, learning the lives of the cows whose milk we drink.

Business goes from the very root items that we need to turn into something else to quite a complicated intellectual structure where ideas drive sales. We need the basic AND the sophisticated, both. And if I had to choose, I would go back to square one, where things are simpler and easy to understand.

The farther we get from our roots, the more difficult and convoluted life becomes. In the summer, when I pick berries at the orchard with my children, all is peaceful, all is good.

Today, I took my two little ones to the library and was reminded how simple and pure and soothing a library visit can be. Surrounded by the musty promise of stories within the hard covers of books, the inviting couches and large plate-glass windows.

Sometimes I can’t believe that I’m walking a similar path to the one my grandfathers walked. And then I am comforted by knowing that our values, our visions, our livelihoods are all tied together.

Yesterday it was cold but the white-cold sun peeked through a smattering of clouds. We all know things viscerally; sometimes we just cloud the knowledge with too much thought.

By the way, I am supremely proud of this story.

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Please read this moving and poetic account of the awful events in Mumbai last week by a writer who knows and loves that city.

www.monicabhide.com

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