State of Astonishment

Thought traffic

A friend on Thursday, over Zoom, gently inquired: What astonished you today? The question blurs to mush in my memory. It may have been Are you astonished? or it could have been a different verb altogether, but I latch on to astonish, and look it up in the dictionary:

Astonished (adj): greatly surprised, awed, amazed

No. I wasn’t that day. I was caught in a headache and snapped a reply that quite possibly wasn’t kind. I carried her question all week long in my thought pouch. Then this morning, I took a walk with her & the word in mind, and listened to this poem by Jane Wong, whose lines:

“…Tell us, little girl, are you
hungry, awake,    astonished enough?”

charged my thoughts. 

I slide my feet – no holes in this fresh, clean pair of good fit socks – into rainbow crocs gifted to me last year and walk.

Astonished: 

That the chives from last summer went into a shed and are back blooming purple gossip from the porch

That Snoopy, our friend guest dog, has not chased the chickens

That first out of the coop door this morning was Oreo, who has sat a nest eggless for 23 days, but now her brood is ending. That the word brood came to mean “to nurse feelings in the mind” in the 16th century and that that is exactly what I have been doing most of my life.

Snoopy rolls his body and back, back and forth in just-cut grass that I did not have to mow, wiggling his way into scents I can’t name or even address with my limited nose.

That there is just now yellow mold spores growing in the garden floor

On my quarter mile walk (that I can measure because two friends wore watches that calculated the lane’s length) of astonishment, I notice St. John’s wort has newly arrived to our pasture’s edges, accompanied by daisy, cinquefoil, tansy. How dizzying. 

That there is a device in my hands that sings bird names back to me. That we might change the convention of naming.

That here are Lorquin’s Admiral, Columbia ground squirrel, red-naped sapsucker, western tanager, yellow-rumped warbler. 

That I delight in words like ruffian and rump. ground. lorquin. dumbledore. bumblebee. 

Amazed: filled with sudden or overpowering surprise or wonder. 

Amazement. Word first recorded in 1510-20. That folx have been feeling amazement for only 500 years. 

That the chickens cross the road with their mouths open, the early heat their first summer experience. 

That the sounds around me are all wings and chatter: birds, flies, bees, my mind rattle. That I’ve placed my own brooding mood elsewhere in the compost pile.  

Astonished that my friend and I can call one another, Zoom between 357 miles and one time zone, that I could see and hear her directly. Clearly. That she might remind me to mind my thinking.