Whew.

Whew.  You know the sound.  Make it now, with your mouth.  Why do you suppose we do that, make that sound, when we are relieved?  When do we make that sound?  When have you?  

I think of running, pushing it hard at the finish, walking it off, letting my heart and my lungs catch up with my body’s need for oxygen.  Eventually, my breathing will slow enough that there will be one of those involuntary deep breaths, the ones that let our lungs really fill up, that let us kind of relax.  Whew.

Or I am working with wood, with the last of several cuts in a fine joint, a cut that will, if done wrong ruin several minutes of effort and a carefully milled part, if done right will complete it.  There is that sound, when it works out, when the cut is just right.  Whew.  Perhaps it’s a carving, a particularly expressive cut with the knife, my right fingers holding the wood, right thumb pushing the flat back of the blade, my left holding back on the handle, so that it will not go too far, protrude too deeply, making the perfectly natural sweep of an arc that requires such dexterity, that is more of a two-handed squeeze than a forceful gouge.

Or maybe when I was at the University and I was working with a couple of students who were having a problem with each other, and the situation seemed irreconcilable, but it worked out.  Something came to light, diffusing the tension, bringing some understanding.  Whew.

Or we’re driving through a rainstorm, struggling to see the road between the mad swashes of the wipers, pushing away the opaque water in front of them just to be followed by the splattering of huge drops, a narrow, quickly moving stripe of clear glass giving us our only look at the road ahead.  The rain slows, the drumming on the car roof abates, and I can turn the wipers down to the slow speed, the windshield now merely spotted by tiny specks of water, the pavement losing its sheen.  Whew.

Two days ago we found out that despite my returning to hard physical activity, a follow-up echocardiogram showed no growth in my aneurism, my very special, very rare SVA, which is really just a bulge in the artery coming out of the heart where no bulge is supposed to be.  (See ABOUT ME for details) No growth means . . . Whew!  

Whew what?  What comes after the relief?  The joint is cut, that carving stroke complete.  There is some satisfaction, some standing back and looking at it, but now I am an observer, and not a woodworker.  The students are gone, and I am sitting in my office alone.  My memory of the conversation lingers, but I am not a facilitator now, just a guy in an office.  On the drying pavement, we are making good time, and I can relax and drive.  But I am not the really good driver now, expert, adept. 

Last night it rained hard and steadily.  When in my sleep my body roused to semi-sleep to change positions, it was delightful to hear the rain, to think of the weight of it, the soakingness of it, the fertility of it on the grass and flowers and trees.  I thought of the ripening cherries on the trees along the peninsula that reaches north from here.  I thought of the budding grapes, the tiny clusters of them growing so slowly, but less slowly now for all of this wonderful rain.  This morning before writing, I walked in the still wet grass, on the spongy earth, after the storm.  It was as if the grass and the flowers and the trees, and from the north, the ripening cherries and the swelling grapes were saying it.  Whew.

There’s something about the after-ness of urgency, when we are the shape in the sand formed by the wave that has passed, when we realize that we have had an experience, when our now is just the remains of that intense effort, its ripples on our psyche flattening out.  I am glad for the good news, that I’ve dodged the bullet, am not in such grave danger of a rupture of this bubble in my heart, or of open-heart surgery.  But there is something in the aftermath of the crisis that is like sitting in the silence of Orchestra Hall in Detroit the moment after the final note of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony has been struck, and plucked, and stroked, and sung, and blown; when the booming crescendo drifts out over the aching city and the wounded world, and into the orderly chaos of the universe.  That moment of silence erupts into an equal crescendo of applause, the whole house rising on their feet, hands expressing what words could not.  The Great Whew.

There is something in the aftermath of the crisis that makes me know that I have been changed, if I was ever alive at all.  And just now as I type these closing words of today’s posting, the sun breaks in the northeastern sky, under the fleeing clouds, over the ripening cherries, and the swelling grapes, and me, with this heart that is sound enough for me to work, and to love, to rise and applaud the run and the joint, and the stroke, and the resolution, and the drive, and the orchestra . . . and to stop once in awhile and remember, and to sip grateful lemonade.   

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.