BEEP

I save episodes of TV shows until I can watch them all in a row, so I don’t have to hang off the cliff until the season actually ends.

I let the oven timer continue to beep when the food isn’t quite finished when time’s up, so I don’t forget it.

I don’t pop open a beer until the whole yard is mowed, and I mow more happily because I think of sitting in a tidy yard with a symbolic beverage.

I pile my fruits and vegetables on a huge tray in front of the juicer and combine with increasing creativity as the week goes on, to use stuff up.

I ride around with laundry in the car until I make myself go to the laundromat, even if I look like I’m a crazy person in my Honda.

I buy textbooks even though my university has a rental program, because I might need to know something after the class is over forever.

I hang sparkly things and bunches of herbs on a low pole on my porch to ward off approaching intolerance of the various witches at this cottage.

I have my quirks.

BOOK OF

The lists gather in little books. The little books gather in stacks on my shelves and hide in drawers, and sometimes, in suitcases.  Better to keep them in sight.  Little books get musty in the dark.  Little thoughts grow smaller.

 

 

The covers all say the same thing: Book of Lists.

Keeping these lists and these little books reminds me that I’ve had the same dreams for twenty years.  They remind me that I am the same, too.  Some things will always be important to me.

Some things that land in lists sound very selfish when I re-read them, but they’ve earned a place in the WHAT I WANT, SELFISH EDITION category.  That’s one that doesn’t change much over the years, and always includes a camper and something to pull it.  Now that the Old House is gone, a garden is back on the list, too.  When I feel alone, I believe that companionship is a selfish desire.  Pretty hair usually makes the cut, no pun intended.

In these little books, a dose of GRATITUDE always finds a home.  My daughter always heads that list, and my family and friends come next.  When I have love, I’m grateful for that.  A comfortable bed, a job, good health for me and mine, a running lawnmower, and the things left to me by now-gone loved ones must always be written with a heart full of gratitude, on that full set of pages.

One book keeps the WORK thoughts segregated entirely from the DREAMS.  Work lists deserve no space here, and my dreams make me blush.  My dreams come hard to paper, even.  I am careful of them and their power if they come true or if they don’t.

One book holds safe the dreams, and one lines up DECISIONS with questionable pros and cons.  My pro may be your con, and vice versa, but it’s my list.  The decision book can’t sit on the top of the stack.  The ifs that stuff its covers make me restless.  The cons reek of heartlessness.

Many TO DO lists read decades later fill me with pride and relief at having done.  I did lay a brick walkway around a circular medicinal herb garden, with four rays pointing north, south, east, and west.  That became a tattoo, also checked off a list.  The tattoo took fifteen years, but the bricklaying only took a week and and a homemade wheelbarrow and some scrap from Les Nugent’s demolished house.

Most of these little books can expect to be lost to time, never read by anyone, sometimes not even read by me again, once filled.

If my future self forgets beautiful today as I have sometimes forgotten yesterday, I have a list for that.

 

 

 

SORTED, SORT OF

I once gave a very sad person the advice, upon hearing from his own mouth that he was a loser, “What would you do if you weren’t?  What would a non-loser do?”

His answer was simple: he did a load of laundry.  He later used the laundry as a solution many times over when Loserville crept too close.

Very recently, I pulled my head out of the sand, or maybe my own butt, and noticed that I’d gone on autopilot.  Where did that plane land?  Loserville, or a suspiciously nearby suburb, possibly BarelyMakingEndsMeetVille, NotDoingYogaVille, DrinkingSodaWithEveryMealVille, SleepingNeverVille, or WhereIsMyOtherBootVille.  Time to move along, so I did.

I chose to  drop an extra concentration, to graduate in May.  Win!

I completed the terms of a random audit to get school money.  Win!

I checked the university’s website compulsively for weeks, to confirm my academic progress status.  Win!

I complied with the federal government to get an extension on credit hours to complete a degree. Win!

Then, I spoke to a Real Live Person about the consequences of getting some incompletes and completely not doing my summer class.  Not a win.

Today, I gathered the material for an appeal to the Gods of Financial Aid, and composed a letter of crow-eating and explaining my extenuating circumstances.  Sometimes, when your house is turned upside down and shaken for no good reason, you lose your shit.  That is precisely what I did: lost my shit.  Describing that process in a way that made me sound not nuts took a little care.  I also spoke in person to one of my lovely professors and rallied his support for my cause.  The other one has other life-things to manage right now, so we’ll talk in August.

This will get fixed, now or later.  I will graduate from school in May or maybe next December.  Next December is the worst case scenario.

When that worst case scenario isn’t so bad, anything is possible, and everything is doable.  When Loserville and its surrounding ‘burbs grow blurry in the distance, amazing transformations happen.  Even with the crow-eating of this morning, today has been a very good day.

Boxes of family china found safe homes in the basement, my car is clean, my kid is having a good time running the neighborhood in red ballerina slippers, and I’ve corrected some problems that come with having my bank card information “compromised”.  The automatic payments are all in their right places again.

Later, there will be fried chicken smells in my kitchen, and the plants will get watered in their new home on the back porch.  Win!

Thank you for listening.  I had to get it out.  This was a selfish, boorish post, but cathartic, as in, “My name is Lisa, and I lost my marbles very quietly over the summer and now I’m herding them back into the jar.”

I am steering clear of Loserville.  People stop in for a visit and sometimes never leave, chained by nothing but frustration made of a tightly knit or widely spread smattering of tiny failures.  Once you’re in, you don’t see that real life is made of such things, and without them, it’s not real.

I choose to take it all in, complete with the yucky bits.  I choose to consent to experience every last bit of everything.

I am loved.

I am capable.

I am fallible.

I didn’t do a load of laundry, but I did sort it out.

I did sort it out.

 

CARBURETOR.

• Drain tank, flush hole.
• Detach hoses, blow out.
• Note: gas tastes evil.  Remember to ride bike more.
• Remove air filter, look with disappointment at the dirt.
• Unscrew nuts from bolts that hold air filter holder in place, lose all spacers in guts of mower.
• Curse, feel not Zen-like at all.
• Take off carb cup, experience creeping bewilderment.
• Flip all moving parts, ream with pipe cleaner.
• Suspect that neighbors are watching.
• Get the WD40, douse, decide that was a bad move.
• Disassemble top of motor to reach lost spacers, find them all, rejoice.
• Repeat in reverse order, pull ripcord.
• Listen to engine run for three seconds and die…again and again.
• Pack tools, come inside, find towel to place on couch to prevent grease stains.
• Write a blog post as reasonable alternative to shoving mower into the street to become a hateful version of roadkill.  I need my neighbors to continue to like me, even if I’m the crazy lady who attempts small engine repair in a sundress and cute wedges.

 

 

LESSON, EXPECTATIONS EDITION

Sometimes, when a cat looks interested in a certain corner, and her caretakers move some things from that corner, all hell breaks loose.  Did not expect all hell to break loose over breakfast.

That cat is fast: less than ten seconds after the Very Interesting Corner was opened up enough for a paw to reach, a mouse finds itself snagged on the Claws of Doom.  Prey, plaything.  Thunder doesn’t know whether to celebrate the find with her beloved cat or save the tormented mouse…and we’re eating breakfast.

Cat, mouse, zoom-zoom-zoom.  Thunder, with bowl, giving chase and giving up, round and round.  Me, on a chair not because I want to avoid a mouse, but because I don’t want to get caught between cat, mouse, and Thunder bearing mouse-rescue bowl which sometimes seemed more like mouse-smashing bowl.  Oh, yes, that was briefly an option.

Let’s just smash it, she suggested.  My look of horror led to her explanation: mouse might be injured, and she would just END IT.  Pragmatic to her core, my Thundergirl; fortunately, she chose the saving over the smashing.

Problem: mouse had run under the stove.  Out comes the storage drawer.  No mouse.  Cat enters freshly opened under-stove territory and proves us wrong.  Two of the four beings in the kitchen leap onto the same chair to avoid having our toes mistaken for a mouse.

“Why are you afraid of a mouse, Mommy?” I’m not, I explain, still perched on one chair, inches from her face.  I’m afraid of the cat chasing the mouse.  She is relieved that her mother is not a mouse-fearing wimp.

“It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would make you freak out, actually.  It’s not like we have a coyote in the kitchen.”  I suggest we move to separate chairs.  They’re sturdy chairs, but anything over a hundred years old has to have its limits. This makes her laugh, not at me this time but with me, a relief.

More zooming, and then…plop.  The bowl lands over the mouse.  Girl beat her cat to it.  We slide a baking tray under the bowl, and she escorts the terrified little rodent to the far reaches of the back yard.  I peek through the curtain.  Her face has lost its adrenaline-rush maniacal grin, and she frowns, talking to herself on the long walk back.

The mouse just sat there in the grass after all.  It had expected to die, she tells me.  If it still expects to die, it’s definitely going to die now.

Thank you, child, for learning this in your own way.

A COMPASS AND A MAGNET WALK INTO THE WOODS

The map flew away in a gust a few miles back.  The sun set right on time, and the stars are pretty, but of no use when north doesn’t mean anything.

A lovely little fairy flits above my head always, swooping down now and then for a kiss and a hug and a popsicle or a peanut butter and jelly with no crust.  She ate the crust twice, without complaint and with bravado, so that proves something to me in her opinion.

A handsome sparkling companion joins me for stretches, holding my hand, and offering smiles.  He drifts off, but returns sometimes when I expect and sometimes when I don’t.  Maybe he’s looking for his own map.

I’ll keep to a path, sleeping when I’m exhausted, eating when I’m starved, but moving moving moving when my legs can do the work.

There’s nothing else to do, so I do this, and remember to look up as much as I look down.

Looking down does me no good; flying is just a good hard fall interrupted by forgetting to land.

 

LEARN IS A STRANGE WORD IF YOU SAY IT OVER AND OVER TO YOURSELF

This day hurt.  

The job came with its own good reasons attached.  Helping.  Earning.  Learning again.  Staying close by.  Being of use.  

I left for what must be better reasons.  

And then, a note from my university that the financial aid I expected might not arrive.  I’m on academic warning or termination, but the feds who dole out the money aren’t sure where I land on the scale of success to failure.  No idea if I’m still in that yellow zone, or in the red.  I’ll finish the incompletes from spring semester and maybe all will be well.  Strike that.  All will be well, but it took a few hours for the powers that be to tell me that I have a bit of hope.  Hope is good enough for the end of this day.  I’d misplaced it around three. 

My small person wanted to stay with me today.  She got “in trouble” yesterday at summer camp for getting out of the locker room too slowly.  A complicated shirt was at fault—I could barely get the thing on her in the morning—and a counselor raised her voice to her.  We are silly, but we don’t yell.  Miss Malorie yells at everyone, and my dear small girl got an earful of her own for the first time at camp.  She was shamed, and now she’s scared.  I took her back today anyway, and she was careful to avoid the yelling counselor.  She didn’t want to go, but my need to earn money trumped her desire to dodge random raised voices.  

The pragmatic mama wanted to point out, “That’s life, baby.  You will get unfairly yelled at, now and then.”  I did say a version of those words, with added sympathy at her shamed feeling.  She works so hard at being good—too hard, sometimes.  I’ll bet Miss Malorie got yelled at a whole lot when she was small, or she would know better than to raise her voice to a child in a locker room, vulnerable and struggling and frustrated with a shirt that looks really cool but causes wardrobe malfunctions.

I understand.  

I landed in the crosshairs of a situation that I don’t really comprehend, but I removed myself with sadness and purpose.  Grownups have that privilege, most of the time.  Lesson: I am strong enough to jump when the high-rise is smoking.  Don’t wait for the flames to lick my toes, even if I might easily convince myself that it’s really just a barbeque on the third floor.  

I’m shamed by failing to maintain a pace I had set, but that’s life, baby.  I didn’t drop that class when I should have, when my mind was spinning with change and strangeness and fatigue.  Lesson: I am fallible in big, fat, life-altering ways.  I’m tangled in my complicated shirt right now. Don’t wear that again, dumbass.    It’ll get done, this degree, and when I finish, I’m going to celebrate from the nursing home if I have to.  

I want to be with my daughter when she needs a fucking break, but I can’t always, so I planned a playdate with a friend for tomorrow and a sleepover at home for tonight, and no one will yell if she doesn’t move fast enough from point A to point B.  Lesson: I am her first and last resource, so when she calls for help, I have to do what I can to help her navigate this big world.  She is small, but she matters the most, and everyone needs a break now and then.

Telling my people about my hurtful day eased the shock and sharpness.  I have resources, too, who hug me when I stop by on a moment’s notice and who answer the phone when I call in a panic and who say yes to moving a little bit backward when I had thought that forward was the only option.   Four, in just one day, these people of mine, grabbed me by the collar and shook in a most loving way.  Lesson: don’t hide away when the bad stuff challenges me to a staring contest. Ask, and hugs happen, the real kind with words of love and reassurance.  

Today hurt me, but I’m learning my lessons.