happiness levels

This week has felt long, measured in kicks from my hot, parched feet strangling under blankets at night. The upside and downside of living in one room is that the bed is always right, right there. I've taken more incidental naps than usual. I can take a nap on the way from the table to the sink. I don't sleep well at night.

I've been using up scrap yarn, and I've been flailing in the mornings, sometimes (but not today), trying to come up with something akin to running. I've been irrationally annoyed by evening visitors and irrationally afraid of being abandoned. I am all about goldfish crackers these days, and am being very reluctant about getting back in the habit of lunches at work.

Three weekends in a row I've missed my Saturday morning zen, which leaves me less room to miss the sunny mornings in the old apartment. Tomorrow it'll come, though, the zen, the missing. I plan on filling the freezer, because I'm out of practice.

Two weekends ago S and I were in NY at a lake and it was absolutely lovely and I try to legitimately picture us all as 50 year olds, keeping the tradition. I can't quite believe it yet, because I know how things pull apart, and how people change, but, oh, I hope this is the end result anyway: a joint 50th birthday party, on a lake, with kayaks and sunlight and burgers on the grill and staying up way too late drinking tequila (I don't even like tequila) and wine (I do like wine) and sob-laughing and spooning on the ottoman. The trip home from NY was a bubble being popped and some despair in the fact that my happiness is forever--voluntarily--tied into another's happiness, and all the bizarre mixed results that come from levels misaligning. I think sometimes that this is how the next two or three years will be.

We were gone again last weekend, driving up and around to the tip of New Jersey, and arriving just minutes before a wedding that was creaky and a little awkward and a little gorgeous, and featured S's cousin as maybe the most beautiful, and the most kind, and the most radiantly happy bride I've ever seen, and the rest of the weekend was spent with S's extended family. I always like being a niece. It's one of my favorite self-descriptors. I married into another family full of aunts and uncles. I know it's all complicated, and there are always undercurrents and gossip and flaws, but I still try very hard (and sometimes it's not hard at all) to fall in love with this whole new stack of family. It was a thick and busy weekend. I had a crick in my neck the whole time and I spent a lot of time criticizing S over things. But I also stood in a blowing, billowing long dress with my feet in the ocean underneath an inky night and a full, bright moon, and I also really, really loved my man's family and my man, too, even if we've reached the stage in our relationship where we're stressed and in close quarters and at different levels of happiness and my pickiness is rollicking.

There's a lot going on/been going on is what I'm saying, I guess, and I'm grateful to have tomorrow to look forward to as a break in the bustle, and a Saturday to myself, at home, with a long book breakfast and manufactured sunlight.

staying alive

I am being made happy by the return to below 90° temperatures in the library stacks (it's been a long three weeks), and by an earnest hula hooper on her 22nd birthday. And by scrap afghans and companionship and Law and Order marathons and fuchsia pants and cheese. And definitely happy at the prospect of spending this weekend up in the Finger Lakes with some of my favorite people, to make up for months and months of not-doing-that. I've been feeling... alright... and I have been sitting up straighter and I joke around a lot and currently, two weeks into the basement adventure dumbassery experiment, my husband and I have not yet let one-room-living turn us against each other. Partially, I think, because we're focused on presenting a united front against the ants and 'muscular' spiders. We're going to stay alive.

PEONIES

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open--
pools of lace,
white and pink--
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities--
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again--
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?


~Mary Oliver