Jean Ryan2 Comments

Lizards in Love

Many creatures mate for life. People, who often bungle this commitment, are shamed by such devotion in the wild. Watching a pair of swans glide across the surface of a still pond, we are stirred to admiration, even reverence, knowing how far they surpass us in manner and form.

Swans are inarguably beautiful, as are various other animals that lead devoted lives: turtle doves, wolves, French angelfish, golden eagles. For these glorious beasts, the discipline of monogamy seems a fitting attribute, a sort of noblesse oblige.

But what of the shingleback skink?  Tiliqua rugose: a bob-tailed, slow moving, blue-tongued  lizard. Found only in Australia, this lowly beast is one of earth’s most faithful inhabitants. Every autumn, for up to twenty years, it will seek out the same mate, the male inevitably finding the female by her scent trail. During their initial courtship and upon their annual reunion, the male will lick and softly prod the female. For two months they stay together, the male closely following the female as she makes her way across the outback. If one is killed, the other will stay with the body for several days, giving it a gentle nudge now and then as if to encourage animation.

Tiliqua rugose goes by several common names: stump-tailed lizard, shingleback skink, sleepy lizard, pinecone lizard, two-headed lizard (because the fat truncated tail mimics the head, minus the eyes and mouth). The skin of this reptile is dark brown, sometimes with yellow spots, and the protruding scales resemble armor. The eye are small and reddish-brown; the tongue is a brilliant blue. Reaching eighteen inches in length, the shingleback skink weighs in at a whopping two pounds. During the day it travels across open country foraging for flowers, berries and succulent leaves, as well as the occasional snail and beetle, which it handily crushes with its powerful jaws.  At night it sleeps in leaf litter or under logs or rocks.

Six months after the male locates his mate, the female gives birth to two or three young. This process takes much out of her as the progeny can exceed eight inches in length and weigh nearly half a pound—compare a woman giving birth to a three-year-old child. As soon as they emerge, the young skinks dispatch the placenta, then promptly head out, en route to their own chosen life mates.

So how does unstinting loyalty benefit the shingleback skink? Certainly any healthy female could produce viable young; variation might even strengthen the gene pool. But somehow this lowly lizard was bequeathed with devotion, the urge to seek its private treasure again and again, at any cost. Equally impressive are the researchers who brought us these facts, who braved the harsh Australian outback to study this odd creature day and night, year after year.

Love. Who can account for it?

Jean Ryan2 Comments

New Essay in bioStories

Many thanks to editor Mark Leichliter for publishing my personal essay “Letter to a Phantom” in the latest issue of bioStories. Mark has been kind enough to accept several of my essays and he is indispensable in suggesting edits that make them stronger. It is always a privilege to be featured in such a fine journal. If you enjoy this piece, I encourage you to “like” and “share” it on the links provided and follow the magazine.

From the bioStories website: bioStories offers word portraits of the people surrounding us in our daily lives, of the strangers we pass on the street unnoticed and of those who have been the most influential and most familiar to us but who remain strangers to others. We feature essays from an eclectic variety of viewpoints and seek out writers of literary excellence. We particularly look for work that offers slices of a life that help the reader imagine the whole of that life, work that demonstrates that ordinary people’s experiences often contain extraordinary moments, visionary ideas, inspirational acts, and examples of success and failure that prove instructive. In short, we believe every life displays moments of grace. bioStories wishes to share pieces of these lives and celebrate them.

View the pieces of the lives presented here as portraits, sketches, tributes, memories, remembrances … pieces of lives that enrich our experience for having shared them. We ask writers to, as Toni Morrison has said,”Imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar.” Share a life. Introduce us to someone we don’t yet know.

Jean Ryan5 Comments

the love that stays

I’ve been in love three times. How about you?

I’m not referring to unanswered adoration. I mean the reciprocal version, where you plunge hand in hand, helplessly. Three times seems like a generous allotment for such a chance event. I am grateful.

When asked this question, most folks have a clear number in mind: If you’ve been in love, you know it. But how, precisely? The duration varies widely and the symptoms are many: Love is a creative process, made new each time. So how do we know, unmistakably, that we have fallen in love?

For many it’s a period of immunity. Bad news bounces off them and nothing provokes concern. They live in a state of blissful suspension, far above the quotidian world. For others the earth becomes surreal. Even the lowliest objects—a broken cup, a piece of newspaper caught in a fence—take on a certain beauty and rightness. Some liken the experience to a drug they can’t get enough of. The more they consume, the more they need, and time spent apart from the loved one is agony. An ache, some folks call it, a glorious and nearly unbearable ache. “You lose control,” a friend told me, “but you’re okay with it.”

Oh those hallowed hours spent gazing at one another, faces inches apart, the sheer delight in discovering a new freckle or gesture. Time, surrendering, slides out the back door. While the rest of world continues somewhere else, lovers are locked away, immersed in a slow tease of mutual discovery. They will not be available to their friends and family, and for this they must be forgiven.

Nothing this extreme can last. The lives we abandoned want us back, and invariably we are reclaimed. In the presence of our beloved, we are not quite as careful with our words or fastidious in our manners; we floss in plain view, burp without apology, and inch by inch our perfect images fade from view. At first, the signs are subtle—a withering look, an eddy of annoyance, a gust of exasperation. Finally we can’t hold out any longer—the world elbows in and hands us a load of laundry. We can’t believe it, we won’t believe it, but there it is. Honeymoon’s over.

Plenty of couples do not recover from this transition; I am interested in those who do. I want to understand, to name, the kind of love that is left.

It has work to do, this leftover love. I see it operating in the background, like virus protection on a computer. I see it forming its own bulwarks.

This is a no-nonsense kind of love. Left unattended, it nurtures itself. Roomy and forgiving, this love allows us no end of mistakes. While our backs are turned, it makes us worthy, and as many times as we need, we are reminded that it’s still there. What luck to find this love that doesn’t go away. We may miss our passionate beginnings, but we trade them for something far more fierce.

Jean Ryan2 Comments

To My Aging Cat

Her eyes are clouding with age,
and when she peers at my face,
I see confusion in hers:
How do I appear to her now?

All I can do is lean forward
and kiss that small patch of white
just above and between her eyes,
the star she was given by a god
who foretold this moment.
She bows her head slightly,
allowing my reverence,
knowing her worth
all at once.

Jean Ryan2 Comments

Love and Lilacs

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When I smell lilac blossoms, I am fourteen again and lying in tall sweet grass with my boyfriend. His hair is blonde and curly, and when he smiles, which is often, his blue eyes turn into twin crescents. There are summer cottages just a few yards away, and people moving back into them, but we are tucked behind a tall hedge and no one can see us. We kiss one long last time before getting to our feet and then, laughing, we brush the telltale grass off each others’ back. At the end of my street he pulls me close and kisses me again—this boy loves to kiss—and then he turns and starts walking down the dirt path along the railroad tracks. I do not take my eyes off him. Twice, maybe three times, he turns and waves, and though I can’t see his face, I know he is smiling.

Back east, where I grew up, lilacs grow like weeds. Each spring their branch tips burst into bunches of light lavender flowers that droop and nod in the breeze. On warm days, you live in their perfume. Tender and persuasive, the scent is like no other. There were roses in my youth, big dew-covered blooms lolling over white fences, but smelling them now does not take me back in time. Roses are not lilacs.

We were fourteen and in love. While I appreciate nature now, back then it was clemency, a place to disappear, and this boy and I were as much a part of it as the plants we hid among, all of us getting the same sun and rain and wind.

Scientists tell us that memories are stored at the connection points between neurons in the brain. The brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, each one potentially connecting to 10,000 other neurons. As information moves through the networks of the brain, the activity of the neurons causes the connection points to become stronger or weaker in response. This process, synaptic plasticity, is how the brain stores information. Once a memory has been created, aromas are potent triggers for recall.

This boy lives in me, my memories of him clear and true because they are welded in place. His wife has him now, but his boyhood belongs to me, as I presumably live on in him. I only need lilac blooms to bring him back and give our sweet youth another moment in the sun.

Photo by Breelynne on Foter.com / CC BY

Jean Ryan11 Comments

Happy Hour

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Happiness is a tenuous state, vanishing under the slightest scrutiny. As soon as we become aware that we’re happy, we break the spell. Most of the time.

I have found a wormhole to happiness, a way to enter and possess this fragile condition, at least for an hour or so.

It starts on my drive home from work, as I reach the neighborhood I live in. Darkness falls early now and I drive with care, watching for evening walkers, a loose dog, a child. I consider how quickly life can cave in, the countless hazards I’ve been spared, through vigilance or luck. The close calls I know nothing about.

I get out of the car and pause on the walkway to admire the silhouette of the giant cedar in my yard, the cold bright stars above it. The air smells of fall leaves and wet tree bark. The porch is lit, waiting for me. I can see the living room through the window, the string of willow lights on the mantle and the mountain sculpture above it. I am smiling already.

The front door is a portal to another realm. I cross the threshold into a place of rescue and reassurance, a habitat my spouse and I created to calm ourselves and honor the natural world. Here is a sconce fashioned of paper birch and manzanita branches; here is a hawk with moonlight on his back; here is a carved wooden owl taking flight from the wall; here is a large photo of a deeply fissured redwood in a forest of ferns.

My wife greets me with a kiss, just like in the old movies, then heads into the kitchen to shake up the martinis—one apiece, never more. Fine gin is strong medicine and should be handled with ritual and respect.

We take our drinks into the living room and sit down to discuss the day. Settled into my recliner, I look over at the electric fire with its obedient orange flames, and the carpet with its undulating lines that remind me of wave-lapped sand, and my wife, whom I have loved every minute of our thirty-eight years together, and my joy is so great I cannot speak, can only wonder how, in this world of microbes and menace and mad men, we have been kept safe, why we were born here and not Somalia. How have we managed to hang onto our vision, our limbs, our minds? How have we survived our blunders, our fathers, the things we will never, ever speak of?

A second thought, the slightest change on any given day, and we would not be sitting here now. Had we been moving toward each other all along? Did our detours bring us together, or did we meet, magnificently, in spite of them? To think that we began our lives no bigger than a grain of sand, then had to swim, crawl, walk, run, bike and drive to reach this precarious moment.

I lift my drink, which never fails to knock the rough edges off my work day, and turn to my wife. I can hardly wait for whatever she might say.

It is this way every night.

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Lovers and Loners, a Short Story Collection

Thanks to my publisher and dear friend Mark McNease at MadeMark Publishing, my second collection of short stories, Lovers and Loners, is now available on Kindle. Those with other types of electronic tablets can simply download the Kindle app to their device. The paperback edition will be out in just a few days.

The stories in this new collection feature female protagonists who struggle for footholds in a shifting world. “Parasites” involves a widow who agrees to have dinner with a man she believes is a killer. “Manatee Gardens” explores the relationship between a mother and daughter who discover common ground at a marine sanctuary. In “Chasing Zero” a woman with a mysterious illness loses her hold on the callous man she adores. “Odds and Ends” follows a woman running errands on the last day of her life.

Lovers and Loners is a study of the human predicament: our eagerness and despair, our hidden fears and stubborn hopes, the blunders we make and the ways in which we are salvaged.

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