For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard legends told of Grandpa Louie. He was debonair and movie-like, with style and panache and way about him that was as alluring as any mythic character can be.

He is my namesake and the man who stole my parents’ wedding from them, as he dared to die the week before their big day, and my grandparents were so distraught, they wept into their cloth-covered mirrors rather than dance around their eldest daughter’s shining smile.

Today is my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. On my office wall hangs a collage of old-time pictures, including four of Grandpa Louie in authentic brat pack look-away stances.

Grandpa Louie was a treyfe butcher in Detroit’s Eastern Market, hefting pork meat from its bones and selling it for family tables. Although he was not religious, eating pork was not something Jews of his ilk did in those days and so he traded with his friend the beef butcher down the street, to set his table in finery and silver, with candles gleaming and the shining eyes of his children.

My grandmother and her brother are the only ones left. Their sister, my husky smoker-voiced Auntie Barbara, has long been to rest in the ground. I remember her Southfield ranch like tinny echoes of a memory, the sound turned off, the reels moving faster than life could keep up with.

I am back in the community of butchers these days, among people who remember the wet footprints of my late great-grandfather. What goes around comes around. In my solitary dreams, I believe that Grandpa Louie’s legacy for me was something multi-dimensional and textured, something I have yet to define or understand but which I will in time.

Life was simpler then, and perhaps it is supposed to be for me today, too. There were only clean, sharp knives and the taint of blood on the floor, a silhouette of repetition from days spent doing what one knew how to do. There were people to come home to and neighborhoods with children balancing on the handlebars of their bicycles. The houses backed to alleys where sticks became trophies to swing with and the picket fence was not a metaphor.

I have a fence and the wind blows through its metal twinings. My house backs to quiet. The children climb the fence in summer to play with neighbor kids but we watch them closely, unlike in my grandmother’s childhood afternoons, when safety was assumed and usually true to the touch.

The air is hinting at spring. Soon, the wind whispers like a lover just beyond reach.

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My mother believes a married couple should keep no secrets. But that’s impossible. We all have secrets inside our skin and sometimes we can’t even bring them to the surface in the quiet of our empty rooms.

It’s ok. Part of the allure of everyday life is retreating into secret worlds that no one, or just one person, knows about.

There is a secret no one will tell you when you are asking for it. It is that a secret is a jewel in the corner of your pocket. It is something just for you in a world where everyone knows your business.

My favorite kind of secret is the one that overtakes me in the still of the afternoon. Maybe I’ve been picking blueberries with my children or maybe they’re away somewhere and I am tasting the air around my backyard swing.

Maybe I’m walking the freedom trail, gravel rolling beneath my uphill and my downhill and maybe it’s a song I haven’t heard for years but now it’s playing.

It’s the way I look at pictures taken just a few years ago but which are now distant memories and then try to see the same gleam in my children’s eyes.

The secret is that a moment is the jewel and it eclipses your notice faster than it arrives.

The secret is that it’s not really the answer any of us wants; it’s the peace along the path, the ability to live the questions, as my friend Rilke wrote to the young poet so many years ago. In living the questions, we eventually live our way into the answers, and by then, it doesn’t even matter what the answer is – we’ve accepted the path of the everyday and we’ve lived into it and we’ve been alive.

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The fire crackled in Peg’s carpeted living room. I sipped white wine from a fluted glass and tears ran down Doug’s bearded face as he recited a poem by Rilke. It might have been from Letters to a Young Poet.

I knew the words by Rilke were seminal in that black night more than a decade ago and I knew what double entendre was. But I was not a weaver then and I did not understand the delicacy of the fabric I wrapped around my shoulders.

When the sun rose over the Shenandoahs, I took my steaming coffee made from what I hoped was the clear brisk river-water near Goshen and sat on the deck as the hills arched up and over my view. It seemed as if the pink sunrise met the tops of the frost-dusted hills.

Inside, Peg was frying eggs or pancakes. Her children announced their wakefulness one by one in the low-roofed kitchen, where mismatched mugs ran along a shelf just under the eaves.

We wrote of love then and of moments but we were chasing words more than meanings.

It is more than ten years later. Doug no longer wears a beard. I am the mother of three. I am alone but not lonely and I understand this quest far better than then.

A year ago, a very familiar person sent me a Rilke quote in the dark of another night. It was May and it was warming but not quite summer. He could see through the tunnel to the other side of the mountain when I only heard the crunch of gravel on my path.

“For one human being to love another:
that is the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test of proof,
the work for which all other work
is but preparation.” ~ R.M. Rilke

When I was younger, I ate Oysters Rockefeller with my father at white-clothed restaurant tables. In France, we ate escargot dripping in butter. I was ingesting adventure and the unique connection of a father and a daughter. It was the butter I tasted, or the creamy spinach, not the soft smooth character in each bite.

I have lived three or four lives by now. Finally, I have tasted the gritty salt of the sea, enjoyed the smooth swallow of a delicacy on my tongue, understood the quest for what it is.

I no longer need to mask the flavors. I gain the truest connection by peeling away layers, eliminating sauces. I don’t need to mask the gem at the center of my plate for I am enjoying it as it is, in all its briny essence, one delicious moment at a time.

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When my daughter’s schoolwork came home last Friday, the teacher had written in careful scrawl, Slow Down! on every paper.

My little girl with her strong stance and definite personality, her dreams and goals alight in her sparkling eyes, is just like me. (Hopefully better!)

For 37 years, I’ve been fighting the urge to rush through things to get to the next place. Sometimes, I moved quickly with no destination in sight. It was simply an effort to be done with the task under my fingers because I carried the unfounded belief that anything else would be easier, clearer, more of a delight.

Of course it’s not true. It’s the chase of illusions and the running from unidentifiable fears.

A year ago I thought I could simply fall into love. A year later, I am aware that nothing is that easy nor that simple. And I am still on the path of a love unparalleled, a love unheralded. I walk the path because it is beautiful, textured, comforting and exciting and I walk the path because this kind of love is too delicious to leave behind.

Do I know where it will lead or what the absolute outcome will be? A clear and defiant NO! But I am willing to taste the oyster.

My window is open this morning and birds are singing in the still-dark. I have work to do and ruminations to push away and I dream of escaping to sandy beaches and sunny days but I won’t.

My life is here. My love is possible. What I see as so good actually is and will be if I let the ride coarse along its way, like the natural flow of the waters underneath a sailboat, when the world is far away and a deep calm has permeated the very air I breathe and the soft skin of my companion is the only touch in the dawn.

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It’s almost a year since I climbed Dog Mountain and still it is vivid in my mind. I imagine right now, it’s cold on the mountain, and maybe even dotted with snow near the top. After all, it’s only March and the wind carries ice on its breath through and into April.

But there, in Oregon, the coastal air warms and rocks in ways that a Midwestern girl cannot begin to understand. And so I have only to imagine and remember and anticipate the next time, the next step after step, the steep breathless ascent until I faced the expanse on an open hillside with wildflowers at my back and strawberries under my tongue.

I am planning my next trip now. Israel, this summer, and if I can swing it right, I will have 10 days of a journey. You know I mean that in every sense of the word.

When I was a kid, my family traveled at least once every year and often to exotic locales. I was lucky, I was fortunate, I was pampered. I grew up with expectations, for better and for worse, and now it is the itch that fuels me.

I smell spring on the branches. Over the weekend, the children and I rounded the track, too tepid to step into the muddy paths of the wooded trails. “But I came here to hike,” Asher wailed.

Majority ruled. He jumped from tree stump to tree stump, bending back the tall scratchy wild grasses that have stood through the eminent snowfall.

Yesterday was his birthday. Seven years ago, a lifetime it seems. Boy were we all different. Two of the most important people in my life were not even here yet. It was a brutal winter day when Asher slipped into this world without a wail and I learned what it was to not have control.

A year and a half later, on a religious night in fall, Eliana showed me the power of women. That was when I realized I could climb a mountain with babies on my back or no one even around, just me in the sunshine and the brisk day and the ever-constant awakening.

When Shaya was born, in the full-on spring three years ago, I accepted what was to be and embraced what I had learned was love. So my marriage would end. So my children would not have the idyllic upbringing I had hoped for. So my path would be lit by solitary light and pockets of sparkling stars.

How many times I have been given the opportunity to try something new, to step in a new direction, to learn from the minute just past. I’m lucky. I’m rich with experience and filled to overflowing with so many kinds of love.

This life hasn’t turned out at all like I would have expected but it surprises me every day how wonderful and even better it is than I could have imagined on any traditional path. Happy Birthday Asher – many, many more, happy, healthy, full of wisdom and surrounded by enduring love.

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Color is so subtle but powerful. The impact of bright tones, of jewel hues, on the unconscious, on the unaware, it’s profound. A sliver of orange with red, a vibrant yellow, or a muted gray tone – each inspires a mood yet to be determined.

What were the colors of my weekend? A veritable rainbow from darkest to vibrant bright and back to dark. I tossed in sleep last night without true rest. Dreamt of the alarm not going off and being late to get the kids to school.

This morning, because of the clock change, it is still dark. The children are asleep at 7:09 but then they did not fall asleep until so so late last night. All the hype from a birthday party, running in the black-light room for two games of laser tag. Sophie’s tooth fell out at the party, her mouth brimming with new blood. Shaya scrunched his nose in disgust. She put her tooth in a plastic bag for the tooth fairy to come and went on about the games.

I’ve known since childhood that when I listen to my instincts, I will do well. Sometimes, still, I forget to listen to that profound small voice, though. It was a weekend of Polish-wedding-style family celebration and I knew when the invitations came that I should have said yes to one and no to another. But I let myself get pulled in to the pressure of togetherness, of insecurities wrapped in balloons and trendy coats, thinking this time would be different.

It never is, of course.

But the birthday party was worth it. There, the personality troubles were marginalized since I only had eyes for my three priceless jewels, my children. Eliana won 500 tickets at arcade games which she traded in for Bratz hair extensions to wear to school today. Asher’s team won two games of laser tag. The kids from his class all beamed with glee when they shot me and I let them. I kept shooting my sister, just so we could laugh together.

And Shaya traipsed through the arcade games at 2-year-old pace, with people who love him, not caring about tickets or winning or anything really. I’m tempted to buy an air hockey game for the basement.

Last night, we opened presents together and the children bathed neck-high in warm, soapy water to wash away the weekend’s grit. Tonight, there is a carnival at the synagogue and a story we’ve heard before. You know, there are no new stories. There never are. Just new ways of telling them.

On Passover, it is written in the Haggadah that we retell the story of our exodus out of Egyptian slavery for our children. It is all for the children, our tradition tells us. And the children, they are for us. For us to remember and to listen and to feel and to learn, to truly learn.

There are no new stories. Just new ways of telling them.

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When Asher was 3, he learned to fish. Ok, it was at the fishing expo in a big warehouse in the Michigan winter and the trout pond was stocked and still so there was almost no way to NOT catch a fish.

Still, when the Novi News photographer snapped a picture of my curly-haired little boy grinning big and holding a floppy fish that he would minutes later toss back into the still waters, it was a moment to savor.

We fished the next summer in northern Michigan but again, it was an orchestrated affair – a stocked pond managed by some shady-looking characters who eagerly beheaded and cleaned the fish that he and Eliana caught. I remember two things from that escapade:

* not-quite-2 Eliana dangling over the bucket of caught fish, the ends of her long silky blond hair bobbing into the murky water as her little hands massaged the slippery fish; and,

* the stiffness of recent rigor mortis setting in to the fish as I dusted them with herbs and butter and wrapped them in foil to cook in the oven.

They tasted good, you know, but I felt queasy eating something so recently alive.

Perhaps it would be more exhilarating and full of taste if we lingered by the bank of an active river and took our chances wading in the shallows, casting a line until something caught. Perhaps the finger-prick of blood from a sloppy worm would make the catch all the more rewarding, all the more tasty on our table.

A single mother of three must invite those opportunities rather than run from them. Last year I said, “This summer…” with every intention of meaning it. We never fished, though, and Up North was a carefully-prepared vacation with all the remove of people who don’t much like to sit in the dirt.

And so I will say today, while it is still cold and March and not quite nearing the summeritme, “This summer, definitely…” Asher is almost 7 so he could reasonably thread the hook himself now. Even Shaya can hold the reel, with my hands at the back to steady. I wonder if Eliana will still be interested in the murky water.

Read this.

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