Disappearing Acts

My, oh my, but the early mornings have grown darker lately.  And quieter, too.  These days, on my 6 a.m. walks with Finn, I can actually make out the individual voices--the legs, I suppose--of our neighborhood crickets.   That's because so many of their exoskeletal cousins have cried "uncle" under the cooling canopy of mid-October skies.

Like the crickets, so, too, have my friends Mary Kay and Andrea gone silent.  And now, Pam, my friend's sister whose voice was swallowed up last week, sucked into the cosmos and dispersed among as-yet unnamed planets that are whirring above my head, humming like crickets gone home.

The older I get, the more juxtaposed my life seems to become.

In our school's library, for instance, I am as happy as I have ever been as an educator--lighter and looser and freer, unless students happen to be making out near Children's Lit or eating Doritos at the computer.  But, still. . . I feel as though I have found both feet on the ground, and each one of them is comfortably--rebelliously--clothed in a snappy, message-filled sock of joy.  Yet, how do I explain my joy as I stand in the long shadows of my friends' deaths?

And this morning, as my friend Ken and I headed to my car to attend yet another funeral?  Here, too, I was juxtaposed between worlds, telling Ken about my weekend plans.  How I'd be muddy and happy and lost in the reedy banks of the Platte River, just north of Gibbon, sounding a bit like an America song, all "plants and rocks and birds and things."

Ken, whom I've known and loved since I was a young teen, had no idea that I was a Master Naturalist (yes, it needs to be capitalized).  And, while Ken struggled to avoid going  all "adolescent teen" on me--in which he'd imagine a naturalist as some sort of dumpy nude on a half-hidden river in California--I tried to let him know how much these two-and-a-half years as a Master Naturalist have meant to me, immersing me in the great outdoors,  St. John's Worts and all.

Maybe, at age 53, I'm finally "getting" life and all of its ironic twists and turns.  Maybe I'm finally realizing that it's all just one hot mess filled up with good and bad, joy and grief, acquisition and loss, and that my job is to cull a mostly contented existence from it all, to find the joy in the midst of these disappearing acts.

. . . to wander the banks of an old, wide river and bend low, taking in all of its tiny lives before they move on to the next big thing.