sanding down

We never stop falling to pieces, do we? We never come to a complete rest, a stasis, we continue to dissolve in the rain and the daylight. You might be a block of solid marble, veins of green and gold jagging throughout, and the corners rub off, the blocks crumble away bit by bit to reveal a stunning bust, a hymn to terpsichore, a liquid moment captured and saved in rock–beautiful, permanent, whole now that it's halved, and if the weather beats down further, all it will do is polish and refine, make dainty the already tight patterns. Or you might crumble like a river bank. Time sweeps higher every year, swells, froths and tears support from roots, sand from grasses, eating away at shelves and leaving behind the fingers of mud and bare roots exposed to the horizon. I am a muddy bank that has always been muddy. Nothing gains in grace.

I am still living. I have been feeling profusely these past few weeks, good and bad, and last night I psyche-vomited out all the feelings I had left, which left me just roots, husky and pink and incoherent and unable to make any sort of decision about going along/staying home/needing S/needing to be alone. I've done a lot of lying flat on my back on the floor.

I suspect this might sound like a bad thing. I suspect it's actually not.

I AM THE COWARD WHO DID NOT PICK UP THE PHONE

I am the coward who did not pick up the phone, so as never to know. So many clocks and yardsticks dumped into an ocean.

I am the ox which drew the cart full of urgent messages straight into the river, emerging none the wiser on the opposite side, never looking back at all those floating envelopes and postcards, the wet ashes of some loved one's screams.
How was I to know?

I am the warrior who killed the sparrow with a cannon. I am the guardian who led the child by the hand into the cloud, and emerged holding only an empty glove. Oh--

the digital ringing of it. The string of a kite of it, which I let go of. Oh, the commotion in the attic of it--in the front yard, in the back yard, in the driveway--all of which I heard nothing of, because I am the one who closed the windows and said This has nothing to do with us.

In fact, I am the one singing this so loudly I cannot hear you even now.
(Mama, what's happening outside? Honey, is that the phone?)

I am the one who sings, 

The bones and shells of us.
The organic broth of us.
The zen gong of us.

Oblivious, oblivious, oblivious.


-Laura Kasischke 

living

I am glowing with love tonight, even though S's car died in the grocery store parking lot this afternoon. Bro-in-law and all around astoundingly wonderful human being stepped in to save our milk and eggs, and the car was towed, and we have money in the bank to fix it. And I spent this evening talking for hours to an old/new friend, and sharing beer and playing cards and eating quiche and the last of the funeral cake. There are some people your heart recognizes, and she is one. I'm very rich in ways that matter, and my finger stopped hurting, and I have had the thought twice today that I'm really, really glad to be living, and living here. I am grateful.

setting down

I burned my tender guitar-string-battered finger yesterday morning and held a bag of ice all day until I set it down for the memorial service for a man who was stubborn and brilliant and more complicated than I realized, and who was a mentor to my husband for 15 years. He was forced to level down from living as an ambitious 90 mph musical phenom to desiccating in a motorized wheelchair when MS (there is too much MS) sunk its teeth into him. It finally killed him. There was a lot of laughter during the service, even so. S and his brother sat with me on our couch afterward and we ate chocolate cake and toasted to the memories. He taught them both so much about music and caring and what it means to be accountable. I don't think either of them really know yet what it means to not have him in their lives. I'm glad I got to meet him, and I'm glad I met with his approval. He would call S and tell him to hang on to me.

ok here

I married a wonderfully hard-working man, who comes home from a 12 hour shift and uncomplainingly deals with a basement--our home--dripping with last night's rain. Fans and wet-vacs and dehumidifiers and infinite patience. This evening I was inhaling (as I do) old photos of my father-in-law as the suave, two buttons down person he was at 21, and I feel a bit of a stab when I forget, sometimes, that he wasn't always in a wheelchair. But, oh, I feel lucky to be doggedly pursuing dryness and comfort and future with his son, the product of that confident grin. I am ok here.

families

I'm very grateful to be a part of an extended family with whom I can travel to Ohio and spend four days in companionable company, and whom I genuinely, heartily, nearly universally like. And I'm just as grateful plus 20% to have my own little family to come home to afterward--my sweet, handsome husband, who kindly allows me to sleep skin-to-skin and who will never wear off.

legacy

My office has been helping a retired librarian researching/preparing his and his wife's family's personal history for publishing. He's legit. He's collected thousands of footnotes. It's been years, it's been fascinating, and it finally came home from the bindery, a big, heavy, serious book, and the other day he brought it in to show us. It's 600 pages and full of photos I scanned for him and research my coworker helped him find and he misspelled her name when when he thanked us in the acknowledgements but we didn't tell him. He kept telling us he thought he'd die before he saw it. I had just put lotion on my hands and left a handprint on the brand new binding. I'll see it on our shelves.

marrying

I fell asleep last night somewhere around #29 when trying to count the number of weddings I've been to, and I woke up preoccupied with what you're supposed to do when you don't have trust in one or the other. I decided maybe the best thing is to just be a sociologist.

I bet I could grade some of the weddings with levels of belief/confidence/doom. I will self-congratulatingly put mine and S's on the very upper end of the confidence scale, because I got it right, got lucky. But not everyone does.

I do a lot of thinking about this. My best friend and I spent last evening in the hammock trying to figure it all out.

Marriage ain't no joke, and though I firmly, firmly believe that it should be an option for any and everyone, I firmly, firmly believe that getting married as a knee-jerk next step, or out of fear, or out of impulse, is asking for a life of major struggles. Not necessarily ensuring struggles, but oh, definitely leaving yourself vulnerable to them. I've SEEN it already in some of my peers, and I'm even apparently a product of it, as I've recently learned some absolutely chilling things about one of my own great-grandfathers and the way he terrorized and lessened the lives of my great-grandmother and all 12 of his children. They shouldn't have gotten married.

I doubt that any of the several dozen weddings I've been to will result/have resulted in that kind of visible misery, but, dude, I know that there is some subcutaneous misery, and a few have already ended in divorce, and I even know of some couples where divorce should happen but won't.

Years later I vividly remember the worst, most pessimistically fluorescent wedding I've ever been to, and I hope I never have to watch something like that again, and I guess what I'm saying is, ahhhh. People. This is serious and you don't have to. This summer is full of weddings for me, and I have my husband right there reminding me of our own every day, and I guess I just get in a loop sometimes.