storms

I got back into town before a big scary storm hit yesterday evening. I almost felt like it was my fault. Here comes the hurricane. My lover and I were alone for an evening by candlelight after a week apart. And then we got into a fight. I'll feed him cobbler this evening to make up for it.
The power was on again for good at midnight, so we are fine, fine. But there have been whole weddings moved and frustrated by places still in the dark and buried behind downed trees.
I ate sauerkraut and cherries for lunch today, and I washed our bedsheets, and when I was in town delivering keys to a coworker a police officer drove by slowly, laughing at the way my hands were flapping around as I spoke. 'I think if I handcuffed you, you wouldn't know how to talk.' That's probably true. It's kind of nice that I'm distinctive?
I'm paranoid about my heart. I probably have no reason to be, especially after a normal EKG a few months ago, but sometimes I am hit with oppressive weakness, and I feel it in my chest, and I think, this is it, the pain is just proving my point. If my heart pops a hole and and I fall over, gray and dead, please don't have my funeral on the same day a storm rolls in. 

seven days

I am hoping to perfect the art of relaxation this next week. Seven days, lady family, cabin, Kindle, good food, good games, nature, swimming pool. I think that's a promising recipe.

want some wasabi snack mix?

They do NOT tell you in premarital counseling that when you send your husband out for gummy bears and snacks from the bulk section of the co-op, sometimes he comes home with $77 worth. I kind of feel like Marilla, bewildered by Matthew's 20 pounds of brown sugar.

I'm trying to decide to be charmed.

prejudged out

You know how sometimes the people you don't like, or think you don't like, turn out in the end to be the most compassionate and generous when you're in a time of need? I think that's like a miracle.

!

I woke up with an exclamation mark in my step this morning. !

it was good

The top of my forehead is burnt, and I'm in a bit of a snit about spoiled food and dirty laundry and solid rain, but I ate an everything bagel from my hometown grocery store three mornings in a row, did a lot of hopping up and doing things, and I felt really quite well for about 75% of the weekend on the lakefront. I am steeped in love. They are my favorites.
Yesterday was a little tragic, with the goodbyes and the whole year away and the rising tide of April-disgustingness and a solo 7.5 hour drive south. My saving grace on the drive was stubbornness and Mary Doria Russell through the speakers. I only hit the rumble strips once. There were tears and disbelief and a thorough shower when I arrived at home. But it was worth it, for my soul. Four days and I'll leave again.

nerved

Three conversations going on at once, a jackhammer outside the window. I am nerve-tired. I need ear plugs.

going somewhere

I'm taking a drive up to NY this weekend to spend a few days at a lake house in the crotch of Keuka Lake with my oldest friends. I'm traveling alone, and am not even going to think of the possibility of a failure of my body or my car. Shut up, I won't hear it. I'll be fine. I'll sit a lot.

Later this month my mom, sister, and I, an aunt, and two of my most beloved cousins are going to Ohio to a cabin in the woods for a week. I don't even care that I'll probably have to spend a lot the week being passive. I do not care. It is still something I have been counting down to for months.

It has just been so long since I've GONE somewhere, at all. I still sometimes entertain the fantasy of an instant fix to the damage that has been done to my body/mind/cells. So it's pretty easy to imagine GOING SOMEWHERE as the catalyst. Perhaps I'll sit on a dock this weekend and look at the lake for an hour and when I stand up, I'll be cured. Or maybe sleeping in a cabin in a state park will be like a shot of vitamin B. Or a mitochondria transplant. I think I need one of those.

I have no choice

I have to measure the success of the day in a pot of beans and folded laundry. The rest of me is aching with inactivity and artificial air. Right now I honestly cannot separate the way I feel from the way I've been acting like I feel. This couch is a sinkhole, and my husband will be out at a gig til late, late, late. I am not today the girl who could go along. 

luck

Earlier this week I decided to be lucky, so I won a $5 Starbucks card in a bingo game. Everything else should be that easy.

view from the lawn

I bombed out of the concert last night. I cried about it, and then I calmed down, and then I was in the audience and a random dude spent the whole evening chatting me up even though I was really quite pathetic and he was aware that my husband was watching us from on stage. Also, fireflies kept landing on me like I was a Disney princess. So I'm ok.

one, two

A paragraph of woe-is-me:

This weekend two days in a row I spent hours doing things I love with people I love, and both times it took a concerted effort to look and act ok. I get so mad sometimes. I'm doing the right things! I think. I'm treating myself kindly! I think. And yet, I keep having bad days after good. I feel so, so strongly that someone needs to stick a bottle brush up in my head through my neck and just sweep it around in there. There must be cobwebs or fungus or pus or dead gerbils. When I'm in a rut (I'm in a rut), there is so much ick in my skull cavity. It makes me feel carsick and dazed and achy and grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. I am all but panicking about the inaugural summer community band concert this evening. I have promised I'll be there to play, after having missed months of rehearsals and events. I promised I'd be there, assuming (as I always do) that I'd be just fine by June. I am arguably finer than I was in the winter, but I am not fine. I am mad. This might be the second time in my life I regret the fact that I do not play a dime-a-dozen instrument. If only I was a flute player or a trumpeter. I could escape without guilt, then. I will go, though, and I will do my best to play for an hour and a half. I'll do it because I do love the music, and I owe so much to this group (like a husband, for example), and I'll do it because maybe it'll help? Maybe a weekly performance in a park will be like a virus exorcism?

A paragraph something else:

You know, sometimes people confide secrets to me without meaning to. I think it's been happening more often lately because I can't run away. Heh. I mean, someone will sit down next to me and, true, I don't have the energy to get up and leave, so I'll stay and talk, and I'm at a rather blunt stage in my life when I like to ask direct/slightly rude questions. It surprises people into telling the truth. Anyway, it's been interesting. I spent at least 25 years being subtle and keeping my opinions to myself, and I'm kind of over that. I have always known how to tell the truth, but I'm doing it in a much less hedgey way these days, and asking for the same in return. And now I owe the world the ability to keep a secret once it's been given to me. I'm working on it.

8:00 AM

I slept well last night. I'm glad. I was worried there would be repercussions of a day of cheese curls and chocolate chip cookies. I fell asleep with my hand on S's arm, making sure he was still there, because once I dreamed I lost him.

I'm thinking this morning about the year I spent living in a tiny tiny room. I used to sit on a pillow on the floor and drink hard cider and tell stories to strangers on the internet. Once I went three days without seeing another human being, and ate a whole bag of frozen pierogis. That was just after one tide turned and just before I became my own wavemaker. Everything seems to build to everything else, doesn't it? Perhaps that's why the idea of my self as stagnant is so repellent, despite the fact that this is what my bones tell me to aim for. I am the one who craves order and schedule and the same, and I have the spirit that gets these things... and then feels trapped. Maybe this is why I very much want to grow a garden someday. This is apropos of nothing. I am just trying to put all of these years, including the next three, into perspective.

Today is bathroom scrubbing day. Today is laundry day and rigging things up in the spare room and it's the day my sibs are coming over for dinner.

I need to match things. I think it's because there are newlyweds one floor below me. It's 8:00 AM and I hear them.