Early evening tonight in my backyard, I lost count of the raspberries.

I gingerly shared space with my grumbly tenants in Raspberry Heights, two dozen black and yellow bees. They usually ignore me, or rather, they’re irritated with me but can’t be bothered to sting me because so many raspberries need attending and ripening. I work around them doing my raspberry accounting:  I enjoy knowing the grand total of berries picked and wondering how many tomorrow will bring.

But today the bees were a little more grouchy as this was the last half-hour of sinking sunlight and they had THINGS TO DO before bed. While I tried to respect their timetable, I was also racing sunlight to harvest today’s raspberry crop and refused to give ground. Nevertheless, I kept a slow and steady pace.

I often use my over-sized grilling fork like a robotic arm to move and gently shake the berry-heavy branches. I encourage my stinging tenants to vacate the premises for a few minutes while the landlord collects the day’s rent.

I talk to the bees sometimes, thank them for the plump red gifts. Sometimes I apologize for stealing (literally) the fruit of their labor. When I’m feeling chatty, I confide that I’m terribly afraid of their killer-bee-cousins and if they could put in a word for me, great.

Somewhere in the mid-40s, I got distracted remembering Sunday evening’s events. My robot arm would bounce a branch and instead of watching the bees, I would remember some detail, like Cian ate four cookies, and then I’d return to counting raspberries. Then I’d instantly flash back to Sunday dinner:  I could picture Heather looking away in this demure fashion.

I had intended to write about Sunday’s dinner, and this distraction tonight was a continuation of that same idea but a little more urgent. NO SERIOUSLY. YOU SHOULD WRITE ABOUT SUNDAY. Apparently there were metaphorical bees lumbering around as well.

I couldn’t figure out why this urgency was buzzing me because except for the awkward cake incident, Sunday was a pretty peaceful night.

I had invited friends over for Sunday dinner:  lasagna (Mom’s recipe), ginger-glazed carrots (Ron’s recipe), cheap frozen garlic bread (Cole’s recipe), some grapes, hors d’oeuvres, and there you go. I had baked chocolate chip cookies from scratch just an hour before friends arrived, so when the house held competing cookie and lasagna smells.

Everyone arrived at the same time:  Mary and Heather with the Most Adorable Girls Ever, and new friends, Meg and Austin.

Logan and Cian squealed, glad to see me for three or four seconds, then took off running into other rooms. After all, who knew what treasures awaited in foreign, dark rooms? I thanked Mary for coming, because she did have the opportunity to have the house alone for several hours and enjoy football in silence.

“Oh, please,” Mary said with a broad smile. “Like I would miss dinner at Uncle Ted’s.”

That’s all the time we had for conversation because Mary suddenly bolted from the room, words running ahead of her, “DO NOT OPEN ANY DRAWERS. WE TALKED ABOUT THIS IN THE CAR.”

So, there was this flurry of squealing and house smells and chilly evening air as I welcomed Meg and Austin. Heather probably wasn’t ready for my formal, “Oh, come in. Yes, nice to see you. Thank you for coming.” She looked at me askew.

We’re pretty casual, Mary and Heather and I.

When I visit their house, we barely have time for “Hey,” before launching into extended tirades about something that happened ten minutes ago. Then three hours have passed and we realize we’re somehow caught up on the big news and small. Mary and Heather sometimes interrupt each other to remind me that my Diet Coke is in the fridge. They don’t drink Diet Coke, but there is always one set aside for me when I come over.

I have gotten to know Meg and Austin over a few summer cookouts at Mary and Heather’s. I like them. It’s hard not to enjoy Meg. She’s got a joy about her that is bubbly but not overwhelming. When she laughs I feel like I’m at a sleepover and we’re going to stay up until midnight! I love that feeling. The first time I heard her name, I was gasping at a gorgeous new oil painting in Mary and Heather’s home.

“Oh yeah,” Heather left me and headed towards noise in her kitchen. “Meg did that. Amazing, huh? Have you guys met yet?”

Wait, who?” I followed the ominous kitchen sounds, which seemed to have escalated into a full-scale sister fight.

Austin is great with my goddaughters and they like his quiet, jovial presence. He reminds me of an old sea captain from a manly man book, but 40 years younger and not yet all sour and bitter about life. It’s still early enough that you might convince him NOT to become a sea captain. Austin’s website is fascinatedwithdinosaurs.net. How can you not want to hang out with a man whose website name expresses boyhood wonder?

I invited them because I like them and I don’t often make new friends these days. Call it stuck in my patterns or so busy returning voicemails, whatever. When I’m not busy with the outside world, I’m busy being introverted or watching Dexter Season 2 on DVD.When I shyly asked Heather if perhaps we might invite Meg and Austin, she was delighted.

On Sunday while Mary chased the girls with warnings, Heather presented both Meg and I with gifts in brown lunch bags. We had barely finished our polite hellos when these gift bags were produced with a flourish.

Meg and I reached in and pulled out the treasure eagerly, a Tupperware container with a quart of thick, black liquid. Quickly I tried to recognize it as potentially a black bean dip or something we could eat as an appetizer. I had plenty of cheese and crackers sitting on the coffee table, so we could make this work. But honest-to-god, I could not quite tell if this goop was food.

“It’s feces.” Heather said proudly, eyes demurely cast aside.

Must. Not. Vomit.

Meg gasped in surprise. “From the worms?”

Meg giggled.

Then I started giggling.

Months ago, Heather purchased a hobby farm where the 5,000 day laborers are worms. They live in a filing cabinet type thing and sit in the stairwell to the basement. Heather promised that with nothing to do but eat, excrete, and socialize, this farm population would soon boom to 10,000 worms, then 20,000, etc. I failed to see the upside of this situation, but Heather was counting on very sexual farmhands. Did I mention that this lived INSIDE the house?

She had originally purchased this colony of wriggling shitters online.

I’m sure this is exactly what the forward-thinking American Military had envisioned when they created the internet version 1.0 back in the 1950s. “Some day Americans will be able to purchase worms through this thing,” barks the clairvoyant General, “so that you can use the fecal matter to create this amazing compost for your garden.”

The Online-Purchased Worm Farm has been a subject of teasing delight when I drink my Diet Coke in Mary and Heather’s kitchen. Heather has been adamant about the worms’ imminent success. She promised me that they constantly produce this “black gold” and people pay big money for it.

I argued and pleaded my only defense: “It’s disgusting. This is in your house! How can you sleep knowing they’re all down here writhing?”

I kept trying to get  my goddaughters on my side.

“Is this not disgusting?” I’d plead.

“It’s gross.” Logan shrugged. “But it’s okay.”

I did not care for this open-minded response.

“Well if you love them so much,” I replied with an certain coolness, “why don’t you eat one.”

“Uncle Ted.” warned Heather. “Please.”

I am the godfather. I stand by my right to taunt.

Meg and I locked eyes in my living room with a little bit of shock; we both had pretty good-sized containers of black goop. I mean, we were each holding almost a quart of worm shit.

Can you blame Heather for being proud of her first big harvest? Considering she had faith in the power of her little excreters from the very beginning? Sunday night, she did an excellent job of not saying, “I told you so.”

“They really came through.” I said when I could speak. “I was wrong.”

I remember wondering how she got the liquid into the Tupperware.
Heather explained how to mix the feces with water for indoor plants, allowing for plenty of aeration first, and then gave us instructions for outdoor use. She reminded us both that this is BLACK GOLD and people pay big money for this. I was suddenly aware that she had actually worked and waited for this. I mean, sure the worms did the work, but she was the Coach. Honestly, I may need to call her again for those instructions because I was smelling warm lasagna and trying hard not to barf.

But as I beheld my small pond of worm shit, I realized it was actually a kinda great present. In fact, instantly this became pretty fantastic.

I have wanted to do something special for my indoor plants, a nutritional pep-talk of sorts, anticipating the hard Winter months ahead. So this gift was really quite perfect:  practical, needed, and something I could not obtain for myself. I grew warm with gratitude, thinking of Heather’s patience and faith:  with the girls, the worm colony, and often with me. It was easy to feel thankful, once I let go of being a fecal snob.

“Wow, thanks for all the shit.” I said.

I really meant it.

I checked the room (a little belatedly) to see if I swore in front of the girls, but heard screaming and running upstairs in my bedroom.

“They probably shouldn’t open random cabinet doors up there.” I mentioned casually to Heather.

She patted my arm.

I forgot to ask her if she wants the Tupperware back.

We had a lovely dinner, talking and chattering happily. Conversation-wise, we spent half the meal explaining to Cian that there was no cake. Heather made the (turns out, rather sizeable) mistake of saying that they were having dinner at Uncle Ted’s house and it was kind of like a party. The offending word, gentle readers, is “party.” Party = cake.

“I baked homemade chocolate chip cookies!” I announced for the third time in an upbeat tone.

Cian would have none of that.

She would turn her head demurely (a trick learned from whom?) and then in a soft, smiling voice politely inquire again, “Where’s the cake?”

While Cian mourned the loss of that which was promised her, I told them I was excited and nervous about my new job, starting on Monday. Meg and Heather work together, so we talked about their work, and then life dreams, and who we all want to be when we grow up. Meg, Austin, and I have all new stories for each other, and that was fun too.

Foodwise, the highlight of the evening was not the lasagna or the chocolate chip cookies, but the fresh, juicy bruchetta Meg and Austin assembled, tomatoes and basil grown right in their backyard garden. Oh damn, it was good. Mary and I chuckled at each other, every time we took another piece. (They gifted me the leftovers and swear to god, I licked the inside of the container to taste the last drops of this perfect juice with little flecks of basil.)

After dinner, Logan disappeared the way young kids do when they think nobody notices their slowly vanishing figure. She took a step back, then another, as if we were a den of cobras and if she just retraced her footsteps slowly, she could retreat without invoking our serpent wrath.  I love how kids believe they are invisible when they want to be.

Later we sat in the living room and I finally remembered to torch the wood I had prepared in the fireplace. The fire roared. I lay on the hardwood floor and helped Cian assemble a puzzle, but only the exterior. There was a lot of rule repetition on that particular point. But Cian’s fear that I might hog the puzzle was for naught. If I participated too heavily in the adult conversation, Cian would bark at me, “YOU’RE NOT DOING THE OUTSIDE PIECES!”

“Yes I am!” I protested, fitting another two pieces into place before drifting back to Meg’s story.

We devoured the chocolate chip cookies with milk, happily speculating on what Logan was doing on her frequent, mysterious trips from my bedroom to other rooms in the house. She always disappeared up the stairs with a parting, guilty look. Mary finally checked:  turns out she was reading a book on my bed. It was more fun to speculate on her mischeviousness.

That was how Sunday night ended:  big fire, puzzle completion, lazy contented chatter. Every now and then, a kid would pop in front of Mary and request, “One more cookie?” but I hardly think that was so significant - so desperately worthy of blog - that I had to lose track of my raspberry accounting.

But amidst the bees and raspberries, I found myself trying to sear details of that night into my soul, weaving it with the amazing nights of my life. Remember, I kept telling myself, how many cookies each girl had. I want to tell them about this night many years into our future.

Then I realized today’s date:  September 17th.

One year ago today, I arrived at 166 Henry St. in San Francisco. I had moved to San Fran for four months for work and to create a little life adventure. In February of 2007, I invoked a Year of Wonders, a catalyst year determined to uproot and change everything. By September 17th, I had put my house on the market, created an out-of-state work opportunity, and a month earlier in August, acquired a shoulder-covering Celtic tattoo, invoking the magician archetype.

I figured I needed some extra powerful magician energy to bring about something powerful, like a Year of Wonders.

September 17th, I sipped a glass of wine off my tree fort balcony and told myself, “This is it. It’s beginning.”

Oh man. I had wonders.

Living in San Francisco was crazy and beautiful. I was a San Franciscian! A Californian! I raced through redwood forests lost at dusk, soaked naked in Harbin hot springs, and in the Castro one Saturday, I met Armistead Maupin. This allowed me to complete a lifelong dream to shake his hand and say, “Thank you. You changed my life.”

Heather was convinced I would never return and every time we chatted on the phone during my California Adventure, she answered my greeting with a glum ‘Hello.’ She remained confident that the first sentence out of my mouth would be, “I’M STAYING! I LOVE IT HERE!” She would end many of our conversations with a quiet little, “Come home, Edmond.”

I did not visit other cities after San Francisco; my house did not sell in this depressed market. I was disappointed, of course, but nevertheless, the Year of Wonders completely manifested, just rarely in the ways I expected. In February, I left my comfortable employment and in the next few months learned the freedom of “unemployment with a mortgage.”

I do not mean that in a snide way - not at all. I really had to learn how to feel free and joyous even with a mortgage and no steady income. And I did! THAT was true freedom - to feel alive while wandering through my bungalow-sized ball and chain. My house tilts to one side, needs new storm windows, and has a corpse stain on the kitchen hardwood floor. Ah, home.

The Year of Wonders had amazing surprises and some darker ones; it wasn’t always fun. I remember being alone for Christmas eve in a cheap, shitty hotel room along the Pacific coast while my family in Huntley was opening presents. Mom had mailed two cheerfully-wrapped packages and I couldn’t even open them because it made me so sad and homesick to look at their red and green wrapping. There were some dark days. A few months where I wandered lost, afraid, angry. Sometimes during the past year, I would absently trace my magician tattoo and ask, ‘Why did I ask for this again?’

I have never written what the past year meant to me, how I have changed and how I have been changed. I have not actually acknowledged that I got exactly what I asked for, six times over, but never quite in the way I expected.

I now have a fabulous new job, trying to touch the damaged hearts of American veterans.

I wrote two novels during the past year. The first one, I published online and received roughly 500 email responses. I have made actual online friends from that experience. One guy mailed me a figurine duck. Another new friend mailed me magic soap. And in June, I had dinner with a lovely New Yorker I met from this novel, a cake-baking queen named Fredi. She was in town for work.

A marvelous, retired editor read my online novel and emailed me to say, “I think you have something special. I’d like to work with you if you’re game, but be forewarned:  I’m not squee fan girl. I’m the real deal; I edit hard.” I had to ask her what a ’squee fan girl’ meant, but once we cleared that up, I found myself with a smart, kind editor who encourages me. She believes in me. I find this humbling.

Together, we’re getting the second novel ready for me to send to agents.

Best of all, the wonders I grew to cherish in my life are the smaller, amazing ones, like Sunday night. I have remembered to try to make new friends with people who appreciate dinosaurs and fresh basil. I was scolded for too much adult talk and not enough puzzle action. I received a bucket of fecal matter from a worm farm in St. Paul. How crazy cool is that? I think I love those damn worms now. This gift is from a lifelong friend and her partner who both love me so much they made me their childrens’ legal guardian.

They love me like that.

I think the Year of Wonders is going to be an ongoing project for a long, long time.

And the icing on this amazing little cake of a life, is that I realized how happy I am while basking in last ten minutes of tonight’s September light. Precious red fruit surrounds me, bringing me joy. Tomorrow I make jam. Perry had emailed me earlier today to let me know that today he finished reading my second novel (he got a preview copy) on a Chicago bus, and he cried in public. We’ll talk later tonight.

The thumbnail disk of the sun finally departs and even though there’s still light in the sky, the bees finally drop, drunkenly, curling themselves under the dark leaves to straddle a green berry and fall fast asleep.

Sleep well, tenants of Raspberry Heights. I know what it’s like to have a big day exhaust you by its beauty and simple joys. And if there’s anything left from the houseplants, I’ve got this gorgeous black gold to spread around the earth that might drive next year’s raspberry bushes into a growth frenzy. Seriously, it’s good shit.

People pay big money for it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Gratitude. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.