It’s important when you are recovering from someone or something, or a lifetime of a lot of things to accept when people extend a gift, an invitation, some help, or simply friendship. Today, I read in a book by Anne Lamott this: “I automatically think that closing down is safe, but really, staying open and loving is safer because then we are connected to all that life and love.” I’ve been messing up on that a lot lately.

But opening your heart can be treacherous and can send you into hiding when the outcome you hoped for doesn’t manifest. So after another  several days my ego and my heart battling one another for top position in my psyche, closing down did feel safe, but normal. I could barely accept an invitation to plod through the woods with my bruised heart and a couple of friends, yet it seemed like a silent, closed down, lonely old friend had returned.

I mostly didn’t talk and walked off to myself a bit listening to the sounds of our feet stomping the leaves beneath and the two of them (brother and sister) bonding over something going on in the family. This time, though, their mother is dying. Nana.

Today they talked about how Nana had been recently calling for her own mother. Sometimes when she did it, she was unawares. Other times, she would realize she was calling her daughter by the wrong name and smile, awkwardly embarrassed. When Vicky asked her about it, she said it was just easier to say mother, so that’s why she said it.  Vicky told me also about her aunt who died last year. When she was dying, she kept saying she missed her mother. She missed her mother, and she just wanted to go see her.

It made me think about how much I will miss my own mother someday and how my daughter will miss me. I thought about the prayer log I keep for all the orphans I know and how long it’s been since I paid them the attention they deserve: Michael, Melanie, Sharon, Angela, Jim’s kids, Debbie, Beverly, most of my cousins, dear Patrick.  My bruised heart didn’t seem so battered suddenly.

The melancholy stayed with me the rest of the day though. Ben was in bed before nine and we opened the windows and listened quietly for few minutes to the tree frogs and toads in the creek and farm field behind our house. Peaceful now, not like mid-summer when they are so loud he begs me to close the windows. He said he felt sorry for other kids who lived in big houses in neighborhoods where they never heard the lullaby of nature like that. He said that: “the lullaby of nature.”

A few minutes later I sat down to work when Mrs. S, the neighbor across the street, called to say that her husband had the telescope out if Ben wasn’t in bed yet and wanted to come and look. So we slipped on our shoes; his hair still damp from his shower, and ran across the street to see what was in the sky. We saw Jupiter and its four stars, with Venus sitting right next to it up in the western sky, and across from it to the east was Mars; all on the same plane early this March of 2012. But the marvel in the sky was the Hind’s Crimson Star. The jewel of Lipus, bright red and beating like a heart in the sky.

Mr S said several times. “I’m seventy-two years old, and that’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever seen it that bright and clear.”  I felt lucky to see it with him. I think it made him happy to share it with such an enthusiastic student as Ben.  He quizzed Ben on Orion, the seven sisters, the dippers, Taurus, and all the other things he’d taught him the last time we watched the night sky with him. Ben remembered everything he had said.

We said our good-nights and Mr S said if Ben was interested in Astronomy, it would really please him. He misses his own two boys, and their 5 small kids who all live so far away. The sacrifices those two made for their boys: she quit teaching to stay home when they were little. The boys never finished high school because they both went to college right after junior high, but you’d never hear Mr or Mrs S brag about it. Now the boys invent things for tech companies and invest our money and have beautiful wives and children, and their parents are still here in the old neighborhood, adopting my boy, who is smart and interested in everything like their boys were, buying his scout popcorn, asking after his school work, smiling at his precociousness that gets on my nerves some days.

So Ben and I ended the day with the melancholy lifted, feeling safe and happy again, with life flowing in through our open windows, thanks in large part because it was offered to us.  And so staying open is actually safer because staying inside with the windows closed would have just caused us to feel lonely. But running across the street  when Mr and Mrs S invited us led to a new feeling; a better feeling of being safe and loved.

I’ve lost a couple of friends and more than one or two opportunities because I was afraid to accept something that was offered out of genuine kindness or just for fun. I really wish I could get a second chance at those sometimes. But most of the time, the best I can do is promise myself that the next time someone offers, I will just say okay.