getting back

It has been two years, two years almost exactly! since I've even touched my oboe. I am not even the last person to have played it. Until this afternoon, when snow blindness and thoughts of mortality (I stayed awake last night crying silently in bed next to my sleeping husband imagining what would happen if he were to die) and impatience all collapsed in on me. I bought new reeds a few months ago, knowing I'd need to start fresh if I were to ever begin again. I'm doing ok. I almost am not missing a beat.

I forgot that there are more ways to measure my own strength.

I'm walking a fine line these days. I think I'm just about catching up to who I should have been five years ago. I'm fighting with the kickback that always comes up when there's a host of good choices in one direction and I want to make them, I just don't want to make it seem like I'm being convinced. Sometimes I actually do come around on my own. I always want to make it seem like I do.

I can't believe how long we've been living in a basement and how much longer we have to go. I have this thing where my whole heart is a pendulum and I'm on day two of snow bound ness and I can feel that it's not swinging at all on its own. So I broke a 24 month losing streak. I can't run, I can't do more than clomp around in the snow. But I can nestle an oboe reed in the pillow of my bottom lip and curl it in like a drawsting and I can still make it sing. I have such high hopes for a spring and for making it seem like it's my own idea to cook and clean and volunteer and sweat and push toward filling in all my gaps. Walking that fine line until I have sussed out enough which direction I should jump off.