ALL CAPS ARE ONE CLUE

Very few things make me angry.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was really steaming mad.  I say this to give a baseline for my temperament.    I’m pretty level, that is, until I have to put any medicine ending in “cillin”, or the like, into my system.

I become a bitch.

Every time, I expect my reaction to be different, neutral.  I’ve looked at lists of side effects of antibiotics on websites, talked to my doctor, asked friends and family how they fare.  No one claims “bitchface” as a side effect.

I had strep throat every six months as a kid, like clockwork.  Penicillin, Dimetapp, two shots in the butt on two consecutive days to really rev up the process.  I thought that the long, long wait at the doctor’s office and the knowledge that a nurse would inject my skinny butt with a thick needle of sludge was the cause of my terrible mood during recuperation.  My family certainly did what they could to make me comfortable, frail as I was.  I hated them all, quietly, as a child hates anyone upon whom she depends, until the bottle of pink stuff was finished.

When I was in high school, penicillin’s global effectiveness waned, and ampicillin came in pill form.  Oh, what a relief to just swallow and not taste!  What an injustice to have to crawl out of bed to go to school!  There, as a single feverish soul among the throngs, I found more people to despise.  The first day or two, my mood was overwhelmed by whatever affliction that created the need for medication.  Feeling better made me feel…better.  Then, the bottle must be emptied.  The whole bottle, because no one wants to feel like part of the reason for antibiotic-resistant bacteria that might eat off our faces some day.

As an adult, I’ve been prescribed every antibiotic out there.  It’s not just the cillin that’s evil.  Anything that forces my immune system into overdrive makes me think ugly, ugly things and feel even uglier things.  I become quick-tempered and easily confused, and those two make terrible bedfellows.

Last week, I had a kidney infection, but I didn’t know it.  Today, I have two different bottles of chemicals in pill form that are supposed to make my back stop hurting and my temperature stop going up.

I expect to have no reaction to these medications other than feeling less and less sickly, with a bit of nausea thrown in.  The doctor told me that nausea would definitely be a part of my life for the next two weeks.  No problem.

If I start to hate everyone’s nauseating guts, I won’t say a word.  I’ll just think nasty things, and write ranty facebook posts late at night, in capital letters, and delete them before anyone can see.

VERB

I will make time for you.

I will tell you how I feel, even if I don’t think you want to know.

I will listen.

I will imagine the world through your eyes and your experiences.

I will show care for what is important to you.

I will make love a verb.

I will believe your truths.

I will grow with you, even if our tendrils curl in different directions.

I will be kind to you.

I will remind you of what is wonderful about you when you have forgotten.

I will, always.

 

 

REPACKAGING

I may need to go clothes shopping this fall. For some women, seasonal shopping happens every year.  I shop every now and then, for fun.  The same clothes have fit for fifteen years or more.

This summer, I have worked hard at adding curves.  Miles on the bike rather than in the car, finishing the whole damned sandwich, and a beer now and then have added up to ten more pounds than I had this spring.

Blessed goddess, the girly pounds have landed right where I had hoped they would…but now, my pants pinch.  Sweaters are snug.  My favorite tank-tops are no longer appropriate outer-wear.

Now, I have to ask myself, what is my style at forty?  Given the loss of a handful of essentials that have lasted for so long, what will replace my perfect little black dress?  It came from an estate sale in 1998, with a tag from 1968.  Macy’s doesn’t carry that designer any more.

The mall, including but least of all Macy’s for some reason, scares me silly unless I’m there with a big budget and shoes on the brain, or Olga’s Kitchen as my only destination.  I’ll still cruise my beloved thrift shops, but I need to replace a few staples sooner than the usual cruising speed allows.

So, to the mall I must go before the weather turns colder.  My jeans aren’t comfy, and I seem to have worn holes in the elbows of most of those suddenly va-va-voom sweaters.  Somehow, my rounder frame also makes the sleeves of shirts too short, too.  Who knew?

To accept shopping, I must ALWAYS have an event in mind.  This fall, I will just pretend to shop for being a fabulously dressed grown-up.

That, joyfully, could mean anything.

 

 

BUT I HAVE LOVELY FEET

My hands have never been pretty.  My hands are useful, and capable, and nimble, and patient with tiny things and demanding with big things.

Since age five, I’ve lived with a thick callus on my right ring finger.  The callus comes from the way I hold a pencil, which is the wrong way.  I hold chopsticks wrong, too, but the food gets into my mouth and the words get onto the page, so wrong is the wrong thing to say about my way of holding.   Lately, the pen in my hand causes just a little pain.  The callus grew thinner with time and typing, and pressure from hours with a pen bruised my fingers in a strange way.  I expect this to be a temporary problem.  The callus will come back with time, and enduring a little pain to make it useful again is necessary for my grade point average.  In this way, my hands demand big things of me, or I of them.

One finger bears a scar from aflint-knapping attempt at age eight.  Another is numb along one side from a butter knife bagel accident.  The flint cut, I expected before I even began.  The butter knife?  Who knew? And I have burned my fingers into blisters so often that I wonder if my prints still make sense, consequences of baking and acetylene with just the right amount of oxygen mixed in.

For a few years, I wore a complicated ring on my left hand.  I wore it to make meatloaf.  I wore it to mow.  I wore it to garden.  I only took it off to bathe the baby, because I scratched her once with it.  Now, all of the rings stay to the right, and none of them need to sparkle.  One, my grandma found thrown into a box of curtain rings, discarded by its owner’s widow out of grief.  I have worn it since I was seventeen.  Others are discards, too, unwanted promises sold for a few dollars just to get them out of the house. I rescue the plainest from a refinery-bound bag and take them home as a small part of my paycheck. I make them round again and stack up on my fingers and the preciousness looks better for the scuffs, yellow gold with dents and cracks, always repairable.  I never worry about losing this part or that.  These rings fit, and if they don’t, I can bang these tiny metal things into shape with a demanding hand and a tiny hammer.

The black under my nails tonight comes from my baby’s bike.  We traded the slick black BMX wheels for lime-green girly-bike wheels, for the sake of a coaster brake.  Her little hands can’t squeeze the pulls quite hard enough to cause a full stop, so we swapped and made do, made a better fit.  She handed me my grandpa’s tools and gave advice, and in between her jobs, she built a house for a caterpillar.  Her nails are dirty tonight, too.

My small person’s  small hands look like doll’s hands, like mine never have.  Her knuckles exist as a part of a seamless taper from palm to end.  Rings slip off, her fingers are so smooth.  She proudly shows off signs of use, patches rough from monkey-bar swinging and baton twirling and falls from the bike.  Hopefully, she’ll have fewer falls, now that the bike stops before she has to run it up a grassy slope to slow down.

As my hands grow even less beautiful with time, I will count the calluses and scars as prizes.  The plain gold bands can stack into flexible armor for my fingers for defense against power tools and poverty.  When my hands no longer do my bidding, I will hold my fingers up to my eyes and remember being seventeen, when my grandma dropped the first plain ring into my open palm, with the words, “Don’t forget where this came from.”

FLOWERS ENOUGH

It’s nighttime.  A month ago, right now was evening.

My black kitchen window bothers me, even though I moved the trash cans from beneath it so that the raccoons can’t look in at us and freak out the cat in a big, big way.

Our weather has been downright heavenly, as though San Diego floated in on the wind and landed right on top of this town.  Last summer, we baked.  This summer, we basked and biked and played and left the windows wide open.  The flowers on the front porch did not die, even though I did not water and dared them to wither.  They rallied.  We still have flowers. So, it’s been a good summer.  Long, middling-hot days and nights cool enough to require real blankets on the beds.  Now, a little cooler, a little wetter, but still so nice.

What’s not nice is the dark.

The extra hours of Day we steal all summer long are opportunities for being out and about with out a coat, to throw the frisbee with the hole in it and bounce on the trampoline which fortunately has no hole.  My brain soaks in these hours of happiness and tries to store them for winter, like field mice with seeds.

I had a book about a mouse who wasted his days looking at the sky and rainbows and flowers while the industrious field mice hoarded grain in their burrows.  He, in the end, fed their souls with his stories of color and light.

My family could not have known when I was very small that I hated the cold and dark and the leafless trees so very badly.  That book helped, and I can still smell its pages, musty from being stored in the basement between my time and my aunt’s, not quite a generation.

My bloom-hoarding goes on in the still-warm days of late summer and early fall, for as long as nature allows.  Then I turn inward, and wait for something to bloom again.  We always have enough grain, but enough flowers?

Never.

SALT TINDER HOPE

I am a prepper of a different sort.

I found my emergency cache today.  My mother’s basement, the current holding pen for the contents of her former storage unit, contains things that I had expected to need when my own SHTF.  That happened seventeen months ago, but I found ways to keep my essential stash intact.  Worse things may have been heading my way even when things were very bad, so what I carried out of the shitstorm fell in the middle-priority category.  The high-priority goods stayed hidden away, sometimes picked through and brought home an item at a time when the dust settled, but mostly purposefully forgotten.

The fall of Rome and the end of days got nothin’ on an uprooted mother faced with being sent to the street with her child.  Let the castle crumble; we needed a place to lay our heads, out of the rain.  We needed a way to cook our food.  Less obviously but just as essential, we needed memories to touch, so the stories would be told properly when we were once again home, somewhere else.

So, one borrowed-vanful at a time, I hoarded those essentials:

Artfully packed crates of  cookware and utensils.  A little stove. Salt. A box of matches, sealed, tarps, sleeping bags, cording, flashlights.  A good knife and a good dangerous knife, just in case.  Cots and chairs. Emergency candles, antibiotics, needles and thread, tweezers, biodegradable soap, 100% DEET, water purification pills.  Flint and tinder.  Super glue, now hard as a rock in its metal tube.  Did you know that a serious gash can be glued shut to stop the bleeding?  The good tent, I never found, but I have a better one now.

With the ready-to-run things stored, I had the peace of mind to think of irreplaceable things, useless but priceless to my small person’s place in history:

Paintings, photographs, books of recipes written by Gram.  Dad’s Busch crate full of art supplies. A glorious explosion of silk flowers in a brass vase, reworked wedding decorations.  Bingo chips in a box decorated by my mom when she learned to love bingo and we all went every Saturday night.  Halloween decorations made by my aunt.  A table from the New House and three speckled, foggy mirrors too heavy to lift alone.  The arrowheads from Neighbor Ron, who loved us so much though he barely knew us.  Tools in strange boxes, filthy from the oil field, smelling like Papa.  I still smile when I smell crude oil, which can’t be described.  Nothing else smells like it, not even sticky summer blacktop which seems like it should be the same thing.

Her blankie and mine and her teddy bear and mine stayed in the car, always in those uncertain days, until bedtime.  We would not leave Pibble and Ted behind.

Today for the first time, I saw again for the first time a little of what I expected to need, plus a little more.  The boxes stayed closed,  but they have labels.  I wrote so carefully with my Sharpie.  Shouldn’t a woman so filled with uncertainty and heartbrokenness , to the point sometimes of panic, have scrawled like a madwoman on those plastic bins?

The act of putting useful and important things out of the way, out of harm’s way, eased that panic.  I could sleep at night after the Fall of the household, knowing that we could run with the clothes on our backs and still, someday, be able to look around and see a few things that could make us comfortable.  Finding those things wouldn’t be blind burrowing.  The food prep stayed in this box, the water containers and dry bags in that box, the teapot and creamer shaped like a cow right there.  The writing on the boxes can be read even without my glasses, it is so sure and bold.

I’d packed away those things hoping that the next spring or maybe even that very fall, after never really having to leave, I would retrieve that box of pots and pans for a camping trip.  I’d unpack on a picnic table next to a fire-pit and put a kettle on to wash what had gotten musty in storage.  That image was my one life-line, a mix of memories of doing just that one perfect day in Michigan, and a hazy daydream of forever, after healing and relearning to be together.  I had hoped for the best.

I prepared for the worst, and we are better for it.

GOOD CAT

The cat lives her whole life in four rooms plus bath and cellarish basement.

She has food, water, snacks, toys, and a place to pee and poop.  The cat has companionship when we are home.  She has my chair to climb and scratch with impunity and no consequences.  I only know what the cat does when we are not home when she leaves evidence: torn scraps of paper, cupboards thrown open, laundry strewn, those sorts of things.  Do we keep putting magnets and homework on the front of the fridge so that she can pull it all down for fun, or does she dislike magnets and papers on the fridge, and we’re just making more work for this busy cat?

The small person constructs elaborate habitats out of tables and chairs and sheets.  We make chains of pipe cleaners to drape around these cat-centered places.  Special rugs, the cat’s rugs, always line the little homes.

We try to make this a good life for the good cat.

Still, the cat rushes out the door and onto the hot sidewalk at every opportunity. Grass doesn’t grow in the house.  Sun doesn’t warm the carpet or the linoleum the way it warms the walks.  Outside,  she would find too many moths to ever catch, at last, and squirrels to chase with her whole body, not just her heart.

My fear of a coyote or the dogs next door making lunch of the cat keeps her imprisoned.  I tell the small person that maybe the next place we live will have a fence and fewer wild things, and they can go outside together.  Cats who live an indoor life are safer and healthier, but how can anything stay sane with no way to go outside and play?

In four rooms plus bath and basement, she lives alongside us and participates in everything we do.

Last night, she helped to make the bed by trying to kill the mattress, then the fitted sheet, then the top sheet.  Once they seemed sufficiently dead and immobile, she allowed me to float one blanket after another on top of her as she made sure those sheets didn’t wake up and cause more trouble with their billowing.  She stayed a lump under the quilts until I made her move.  Sliding my feet under the sheets would have incited another round of sheet-killing.

This morning, she helped with the laundry by supervising every step of the complicated process of washing with the world’s second tiniest washing machine, which lives in the bathroom.  Then, she helped with mopping the floor after she slipped off the edge of the sink by peeking too far over the side to watch the water slosh in the washing tub, and sloshed herself halfway into the toilet. Every fall in the bathroom seems to end up with the cat in the toilet.

She might sometimes curl up nearby, and always sleeps at the foot of the bed.  We hope that this winter, our first one together, she will curl up on a lap now and then.  Right now, still lingering at the end of kittenhood, she is far too busy to sleep during the day.  There is laundry to do, after all, and sheets to subdue, and rugs to rumple, and moths and homework to eat, and beads to fetch, but only the special strand of beads from her former life.  Only those will ever be worthy of her fetching, and only when she offers to fetch by plopping them at our feet. I wake up with beads dropped at the bottom of the bed some mornings, a failed attempt at nighttime games.

I think we make a good life for her.  I think she would tell us if we weren’t.

MY PART, HAPPY KITCHEN EDITION

All that needs to be done are the dishes.  With dishes comes the usual sequence of wiping-down of countertops and sink and cabinet fronts…

What I’m saying is that I have a few chores to do.

In this Yellow Cottage, today, the small person tidied and polished the Octagon and did cat duty without being asked. She’s done her part in the kitchen, more than I have.

The Octagon is a mid-century-modern yard sale purchase from two blocks away. She discovered that treasure and she feels responsible for its keeping.  That table may be her first real treasure.  She wants it to stay shiny and unmarred.  The table I’d chosen, a year ago, I chose because of the number and quality of its mars.  She did not appreciate them the way that I did, so now, we have a table that seats eight in a kitchen that feeds two regularly.  With four ancient chairs, somehow, it works.

Long view becomes apparent: she likes company.  She’s a people person, subtly.

I must like company, too.  I have plates-cups-bowls-you-name-it for twelve.  Those are only the rocket-age porcelain special company dishes, still unused except for tea parties for two.  The diner dishes, everyday-tough, unbreakable, but heavy enough to break toes, stay in constant rotation.  Years ago, I had diner-dish service for twenty-five.  I might still have as many, packed away, but I forget them because of why and how they were packed.

But, despite the details of hidden kitchenware, I need to do the dishes.  There aren’t many to do.

And the table is already spotless.

NOT COOL

I am not as cool as I would like to be.  Yesterday, I was downright lukewarm.

My mind isn’t always kind to me.  My thoughts might wind around a certain bothersome spot, a point on my memory map made of words.  Did I misunderstand something?  Have I been assuming bliss?  Could I have become ignorant of something very important while leaning too heavily on sweet easiness?  I’ve made grave errors like this before.  Must remain vigilant, must watch for bad habits that become big deals.

That spot around which mind became tangled rendered me immobile and dumb.  Where the water is deep, arms and legs had better keep moving at just the right pace.

So, I sank.

The deep end had taken my breath away for a terrifying moment, and only a moment of solitary breathlessness was enough to cause a scramble for solid ground or at least a view of the bottom unwavering.

I sloshed into the baby pool, suddenly not able to tread water with the grownups.  I flapped, heavy and wobbly, like the babies, and baked uncomfortably in the sun.  I cried like the toddlers who scraped their knees on the rough bottom, but put my mommy-face back on when my own small person popped in for snacks between trips around the block.

The cause of the internal crisis doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it could happen at all.

I don’t always know how to handle myself with grace yet, in this deeper version of life.

NOT HERE.

Where do words go when no one wants to hear them, should not hear them, won’t be understood even if they are made into sentences?

This blog serves me well as a landing place for words that don’t fit elsewhere, but I do edit as I write.  Where do the words belong when editing would kill them and make me feel watered-down and muddy?  The blog is not the place for everything.  It is the place for the best things made of the best, clearest words.   Present unspoken words attach themselves to real, possibly ridiculous, frightening, very jarring feelings that have no place here.

Facebook is a filtered, sanitized forum.  Not there.

Journals feel like mental acts of masturbation, now.  I unearthed a couple that I wish I hadn’t, from when I had learned to hide my private words for fear of having them broadcast loudly and publicly.  The handwritten words on those pages made me too sad to read after so much had changed and so much has happened, and I pitied the woman who wrote them.  I pitied and disliked her.  She, that bewildered and angry and stupidly stoic version of me, made me angry on her behalf, but also angry at her for not doing things differently then.  She was short-sighted and weak.  She might be the me of today when I look back. So, now, not there.

Telephone conversations fall flat when small words mean so much.  Big words don’t belong, or can’t be remembered, when the small important words are so hard to say.  To say them out loud isn’t an option right now, anyway.  A small person listens, always, when she is home.

My head and heart, my whole body, my everything, spills over with words that can’t be said anywhere in good form.  The words I won’t say become a tight, hard mass in my throat.  I push the hot sharp shape into my chest, where it tries to make me cry, then to my belly to start the process of digesting it and letting it melt away.

It’s always worked before, but I’m out of practice.

 

WELL, WONDERFUL

This year’s been weird, but I’m learning how to make it less so. I am learning to live well in a wonderful way.

I spent the evening re-writing class notes and re-reading chapters.  This isn’t so bad.  I am doing my senior year right, baby.

In a flush of confidence, I put the books down and made a sandwich.  I made a damned good sandwich, with toast and pickle loaf and salami and plain old American cheese and mayo.  I drank an overly large beer along with it, whose label inspired the whole sandwich operation.  4 Hands Pyrus Saison goes well with pork, and the only pork in the house, sadly, was pickle loaf.  Bacon came to mind, and carnitas, and picnic shoulder smoked until if falls off the bone.

I had pickle loaf.

It worked with white-pepper and orange infused beer, so my belly is happy.  My mind is happy, too, because I found a way to enjoy what was in my fridge to the fullest.  Live within my means, love my life, eat good things, smile more.  I watched a few old episodes of Breaking Bad while I ate that sandwich.  Add to the completely un-guilty pleasure of the evening.  The last one is playing now, as I write, barely awake in this roadside treasure of a recliner.  Yard sale?  Flea market?  Something like that.

Now, I’ll go to bed on my perfect square of a mattress, alone for now but in the right place at the right time, and sleep well.  A full stomach and a big beer will make sleep deliriously easy.  Squares make for good sleep, too.

Sometimes, simple things make a day doable.  Some days, that’s all I need.

HOLIDAY

The small person is having a grand day in our neighborhood.  She pops in with her best friend now and then, requests food, and runs back out or stays to change costumes or build a house for her single doll, almost identical to her best friend’s doll.

So far, two swimsuits, one dress, one “exercise” outfit, and one grand gown have been on her body.  Bless her, she hangs up the wet things and throws the dirty into the world’s second-smallest washing machine after checking for stains to pretreat.

Grapes, cheese sticks, pizza, garlic butter, and water have left this house in her tummy and her friend’s.

Someone has a wading pool and someone has a big pool, and now everyone has a bike, because the youngest member of the crew just inherited my girl’s too-small bike (which we purposefully planted in her auntie’s driveway) and can ride pretty confidently on two wheels all of a sudden.  That five-dollar bike from Goodwill has been the right fit to make that happen for two of them, now.   My person has graduated to the BMX level, just as suddenly.

I sit with my pizza and my books and hear her name called across the block, mixed with shrieks and shouts.  All day, giggles and yells have rung through our usually silent part of town.  Today, the small people run the streets and we big people get to watch the show.

They know how to make a holiday.