On the nature of joy

now you see it, now you don't

It’s Sunday morning and we’re sitting together on the loveseat drinking coffee. Light rain is pattering the leaves on the other side of the window and the woods are thick with green. It’s cloudy and misty again on this holiday weekend. We spent our allotment of sun already, I think. The forecast called for mostly rain for days, but Saturday it was hot and humid with blasting sun coming through the openings of the tree cover as we walked the rail trail in the morning with our dog.

“Let me read you something,” says my spouse Janyce. She picks up her cellphone and says, “When it debuted last year, “The Bear” was praised for its authenticity, for depicting the chaos of a real restaurant kitchen.”

I’m listening, but also reading my own article from the New York Times, a guest article from a Nashville writer who writes about her resident armadillo, similar to Woodman, our resident groundhog. Margaret Renkl observes the robins pulling worms out of the soggy grass, just like they are doing here this morning. She stands at her window watching the rabbits in her garden, and the wren building a nest in her clothesline bag— just like I do nearly every morning, too, holding my oversized coffee cup in both of my hands just under my nose, looking out into the yard.

The other day I noticed that the bluebirds were back. I stood at the window trying to discern these new birds sitting atop the empty bird feeder pole. They were smaller than robins, with grey speckled feathers, but they had those same round bluebird eyes. It didn’t register with me until the two of them flew away to the Maple tree together and I caught a glimpse of their bright blue tails. They were the two babies that the bluebird couple had been feeding all spring. I watched the pair daily, as they took turns flying up from the grass to tip themselves head first into the tiny hole at the front of the wooden box, depositing worms and bugs from their beaks. I was determined to see the baby birds on the day they left the nest, but I missed it. One summer morning the house was empty again.

I’ve been in and out of a feeling of wellbeing this weekend. I noticed fireflies for the first time sparking on and off in the dark green woods. There has also been enough heat and steam in the garden for weeks now to create a mayhem of color, all the tangled new shoots from the coreopsis and wild geranium falling over each other. And I noticed, like I do every year, that the happy orange star bursts are in full bloom everywhere. The ubiquitous Tigerlilys, bouncing atop their tall stems, now lean over the edge of every fieldstone wall in every suburban yard.

It’s July. Fully summer in New England. And it’s the mythical fourth of July weekend to boot. Our town has one of those traveling carnivals that is set up in the grassy common every year, rides and booths and a big tented bandstand. I’m happy to see it every time, although for many years the fourth of July weekend would leave me with a lump in my throat and I’d spend the day wherever I happened to be celebrating forcing a smile. By the time evening rolled around and we were walking toward our parked car in the still warm night air, crickets chirping, with the folding chairs strapped to our backs, I’d be trying not to cry.

Carmy says a pivotal line in the second season of “The Bear” in one of the beginning episodes. He and Sydney are talking about the moment in his young chef career when he received several Michelin stars and she asks him what it was like. He says, “your brain just bypasses any sense of joy and like attaches itself to dread.” I get what he means here. It’s an overachiever thing. The waiting for the other shoe to drop. The not believing in the achievement enough to fully take it in. But it also reminds me of the fleeting nature of joy.

I was a mixed-up young mother and I remember being mostly absent for the fourth of July weekends with my two small boys. I would be going through the motions, but never very present to take in the many small joys all around me. I think there were even some years when I wasn’t there at all. And then when I finally lifted my head up long enough to look around— the boys were gone. Too old to spend an evening watching fireworks with their mother, places to go with their friends, parties to attend. There would be no more running through the sprinkler in the backyard. No hot dogs on the grill and marshmallows on sticks, no sparklers and empty pickle jars with poked holes in the cover for capturing fireflies. And I missed it all.

There’s another line in “The Bear” that caught my attention on my second viewing. It’s in that same episode when Carmy tells Sydney that in order to get the coveted star she wants so badly, she will have to “care about everything more than anything.” There’s a price humans pay for ambition and devotion to a cause. Without giving away any spoilers, each of the characters in season two will have to come to terms with their own.

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“Did she walk?” I say to Janyce as our dog comes bounding into the living room smelling like the soppy outdoors.

“We did the hood walk” she says. “Not the woods, just the neighborhood.”

Now the rain is coming down more steadily, creating a beautiful sound like a mountainside rushing stream as it pounds the maple tree canopies along the side of the house. It’s dark in the living room where I now sit with my laptop on my knees typing and drinking coffee from a large ceramic cup.

“How do you feel this morning?” says Janyce.

It’s Tuesday morning, the actual fourth of July holiday, and I had asked my ex-husband Jim and my son Connor to come over to the patio and hang out later. I doubt it will happen now if the rain doesn’t let up.

“I feel a little better today,” I say.

The Spotify playlist is playing one of our favorite morning tunes called “Kindness” by HNNY, a brief, lilting, piano ditty that keeps perfect repetitive time with the pelting rain. I get up to look out the window at the back yard.

Margaret Renkl, writing about the life we share with the creatures of the natural world says: “We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.”