Breathing fast and slow

The Ambitions of the Cedar We bought our house unaware of the ambitions of the cedar tree in our front yard. With ease, it dwarfed all of my own--prone as I am to the ideal--quadrupling its size in seven years, or 28 seasons, beginning with the summer we moved in, until now, this winter, when we had it cut down. In a few more years it would have threatened the foundation of our home, the arborist told us, clearly a man who knows his trees and loves them. None of us wanted to remove it, especially this season when the rains had returned and plumped up its base and its color and its dense green branches after it had made do with so little water so long. Already, a hummingbird had made its nest deep inside the branches. Earlier still and much higher up than last year, this mother bird returned and placed her nest and her faith in the resoluteness of this tree. Cedars by nature are known for their durability as sometimes people are not--fickle as we have proven to b...

What is truth now? Once upon a time, my mother was a seamstress. I saw the labor of every stitch expertly delivered, and how she seemed to create from thin air time she did not have to devote to this task. It takes time to do a thing well, and to love a thing well--or a person--takes time, too. This, I learned from my mother who sewed even our Catholic school uniforms. From scratch. Like a cake. Like the architect who has to get the math right first before ordering the materials, my mother made her calculations, considering all the angles of measurement while bent over patterns she had pulled from drawers. Meanwhile, I was pulled immediately toward the fabric, the thing that sparkled. Eventually, I learned about patience from this time I spent observing my mother during her years as a woman who sewed. It taught me the value of slowing down, how to take one thing at a time, and how to devote oneself entirely to the task at hand. This is how she folded time or str...