Sandra

I have Fridays off.
I usually end up in the shop anyway, but I have been making an effort to spend less time there on my one day off. This morning, though, I got a call at 7am (as I was dragging Ella from the warm bed, convincing her that it was time to get ready for school). It was Hannah, sick with the flu, having showed up anyway but desperate to go home.

So I worked till 2pm and it was fine. I'm just used to being there at this point. On my days off, I get nervous...it feels foreign to not be there. Alien.

But Ella had plans to hang at a friend's house after school till 7pm and so I had the whole afternoon to do something with.

I have a friend who owns a used bookstore. She's in her early seventies and has spent the past forty some years in this old brick home, raising two children, collecting books and making incredible sculptures out of stone and steel and clay. She's long and willowy, thoughtful and inquisitive and I just pray that when I reach her age, I am equally as captivated with the world and as willing to dive into it's mysteries.

I met her almost five years ago when I was between jobs... having left a heartbreaking job working with kids in state's custody and trying to figure out what would come next. I spent the summer doing work in her garden... weeding, scrubbing out her carved bird baths, building stone steps in her sculpture garden. It was quiet work, especially after three years of working with angry teenage boys. It allowed me several thoughtful hours each day, my hands in the dirt, clearing the weeds that had grown up in my mind. By the end of the summer, though, I was hardly getting any work done at all because I would find myself in her kitchen come lunchtime, drinking tea and eating soup and talking with her until nearly dusk. She had been widowed then for about a year and a half and was deep in the process of healing her grief. Her husband had been a painter and they'd spent their lives sharing their art and "reaching for the same star". She was learning then to be at peace with the quiet and solitude. She read books, took up Tai Chi, starting learning more about dreams and getting lost in long symphonies.

I eventually took the job at the inn at Stowe and would often steal away for the afternoon... landing in her kitchen for more conversation, tea and soup.

Today, when I had that chunk of hours to do with whatever I liked.... I took myself there.

She showed me the new sculpture she's working on... an antler woman.... and she talked about how the shape and image of antlers shows up in so many places... on the branches of trees, the patterns of streams and rivers....

She asked for help covering her little rendition of a hot tub with some plywood for the winter. Two summers ago, she dug up a peice of earth outside her back door.... about the shape of a regular bathtub. She then lined it with a tarp and on summer days she fills it in the morning with fresh water from a garden hose... which gets warmed all day by the sun's heat. In the evening, she crawls into her home-made tub and reads her books... sheltered by the tall evergreens she dug up and planted forty two years ago when they bought the house.

She's amazing. And I feel like the four hours I spent there with her has refueled me. We drank lemon ginger tea and talked about ravens and family and dreams. We talked about how to really keep a toilet clean and Persian poets and old dogs. I could have stayed long into the night, but as usual, had to drag myself away. It was like a fix. Like eating bread after being stranded on a desert island for a really long time.