This morning, finally, after months and months of moving all the fertility meds and books and ovulation predictor kits and pregnancy tests from closet to closet to storage locker to back deck, imagining various scenarios where I might give them to some individual or institution, I lugged the whole kit and caboodle down the back stairs and across the courtyard and dumped it all in the trash bins and closed the lid once and for all.
morass
Facebook has become the standard vehicle for birthday wishes. It flags your friends when it’s your birthday and even gives a convenient little text entry box so users don’t need to navigate anywhere to dash off a quick wish. The result is a Facebook inbox suddenly overflowing with thoughtful reminders of friendship and connection.
For me this year the irony was poignant–especially that message that wished me a day surrounded by good friends and celebration. The contrast between the wish and the reality has sat in my heart these last couple of days like a fat clammy toad. I’m left asking myself how and why I’ve brought about such a sad and isolated existence.
The answer, like so many things, is at once simple and not so simple.
Simply, I have failed, for a number of years now, to build and maintain the very friendship connections I so treasure and crave.
The why of that is a more convoluted morass of depression and despondency. I’ve struggled with “the blues” for much of my conscious life, but for awhile now they have succeeded in circumscribing my daily existence ever tighter and smaller.
Unpacking the why of it may not even do me much good. Taking regular persistent steps to change the pattern seems the only beneficial course forward to daylight. I need to reach out and get out of the living grave I’ve dug myself– somehow, anyhow.
barren dioramist
I’ve been trying to find god all this time. This becomes apparent to me this morning as I walk infinite rounds inside these four walls. Gear up, gear up, ever and anon ready to venture out– but continue circling bisecting and interweaving patterns through interior space– readying, readying for… something. As I arrange and rearrange objects, populace of a tiny planetary system, I concoct scenarios just so, balanced in vignettes. The endeavor is balletic as I stretch and step, bend and reach.
Something inside me snapped when I learned, when I embraced at last, the fact in the face of long years of inconclusive diagnosis and grueling pseudo-treatment, that I am, indeed, infertile.
Shortly thereafter: menopause. Hot flashes. Ooh la la instantaneous conflagration several times daily, nightly, sweat drenched and pit stained regardless of present company or otherwise engagement. Subjected to the aging body’s ill will in fits and fevers until one day they just stopped.
stuckness & stickiness
I’ve been stuck here for awhile now. Stuck again. Damned ill navigable slope. I’ve been cultivating the sticky sort of attentions I crave. Along with a bit of bumbling through brambles, up and down slopes, into puddles, over  boulders, and all kind of canted at a slant. And mires, oh yes.
What, you might ask, do I mean by sticky attentions? Come to that, why even bother? Just clear the way and sally onward.
But look! I say back– lookit alla this wonderfulness going on! So much to play with, to admire and rearrange and wonder at. So much to gaze at, lo– not so much my own middle belly parts, tho there’s a fair share of that (another story for another day)– but all around, out yonder, right there and there and there, golly, everywhere.
Frankly I never outgrew it, I often think. You see kids, out on the sidewalk, squatting over some red leaf, simply enchanted, and it is childhood perfectly poised. We say childlike wonder and craft tales about dreamy, gazy boys who wander off cliffs.
I tend to be more cliff-clinger than climber. Writing teacher Ralph Fletcher calls it freezing to the face, that writer’s paralysis, petrification, fear of ungripping fingertips to reach for the next handhold. Fear, Fletcher says, of making the inevitable big discoveries accrued through risk. Fletcher assures that the message takes care of itself in the writing of it. Trust the process, an entire generation of writing teachers intoned, responding to the leaden verbal structures marching forth from drill and repetition.
I dreamed
…of arranging heart shaped stones together in a pile in the center of the table.
orderly
I’m putting my house in order at the most incremental, cellular, specific object level. I must touch everything. Everything bears scrutiny. From the overlooked piles of intention to jumbled drawers and cupboards. I am caught up in the throes of outright mania for order– sorting, sifting, unstacking, and arranging everyday objects, glassware as well as curiosity cabinets full of odds and ends collected, squirreled away for years.
Partly this is evaluating stock for the theoretical etsy store, which I can’t seem to get off the ground– and partly it is just the hoarder’s habit of acquisition and utterly grudging parting from mundane yet enamored objects.
last night
I dreamed Chris was scolding me for giving away our honey.
squeaky
I have that squeaky-sinus thing, summer cold, yadda yadda, and it’s making me cranky. The spouse grows weary of my standard litany of plaint.
The aging, freon-scented window unit keeps things bearable in darkened rooms. Cicadas revs up for August.
I have decided to stop giving away good work for free. Let’s call it cranky and angry and be done with it.
I flop down on the unmade bed and lie texting confessional Facebook posts and then deleting them. It bugs me that Facebook makes it a fucking labyrinthine puzzle to figure out how to set my privacy settings so that certain people can see absolutely nothing about me or my life, motherfuckers.
Any minute now my nostril’s gonna squeak again.
Also I’ve wept about four times already today. Woo.
godsmark
Self-styled creative retreat to T and J’s Michigan farm. Floyd and I are just getting settled. We sit out on the screened porch glider, listening to spring peepers, night birds, and one lone, distant jet.
I have escaped Chicago.
…
Sitting in the warm sunshine on the side door stoop, listening to the birds, I try to unwind this city self.
At the sound of a pickup out on the gravel road I jump up and holler for the dog, then realize he’s right there, sniffing happily at something in the grass just a few yards away.
IÂ go sit on the back porch glider, dog trailing, and watch chicken tv for awhile. Chicken tv is extremely relaxing.
…
Things I forgot to bring:
- meds
- a belt
Things I have done so far:
- feed cats & dog
- collect eggs
- wash laundry and hang it out on the line in the sun
- set up creative work area
- set up digital work area
- email T&J
- text Chris
- drink coffee
- locate a crick in my neck
- train Floyd to stay close, come, leave Fern alone, leave Maisie alone, do not chase chickens
- shout and wave arms at three large circling birds of prey
- take many pictures
Birds I have seen:
- several breeds of chicken (cluck-cluck-clucking quietly to themselves as they peck around under the bird feeder then SQUAWK)
- red winged blackbirds (chuck-chuck-chuck or piercing cherroo– bullies at the feeder)
- something delicate and shiny black with an iridescent purple head
- something that looks like it’s wearing a tuxedo and a red ascot
- something smallish and grey with a black cap and white on its throat and cheeks
- sparrows with white racing stripes
- a woodpecker with a red head
Birds I have only heard:
- chickadee (chick-a-dee-dee-dee– which I hear in my mother’s singing voice)
- cardinal (cheer cheer cheer)
- crow (caw-caw-caw)
- something crying too-WHEET with a rising pitch
- something whistling whole notes round as a roll of lifesavers
- something going chur-chur-chur-chur-chur superfast
One of the neighbors is chainsawing for a long time. I imagine a big tree falling.
A chipmunk skitters by.
…
For a moment I think I hear a crowd or distant loudspeaker voice, but then I realize it’s one of the gigantic hovercraft bumblebees hanging suspended in the evening spring air.
…
It’s remarkable how sound carries out here; there’s been an unexpected backdrop of machine noise, loud against the pervasive quiet: field-plowing tractor, that buzz saw, what seems to be a motorcycle rally across the lake. And tonight from a new direction what sounds like someone inflating a gargantuan air mattress.
…
Continuing the list:
- red squirrels chirring and chattering from overhead branches
- identified: brewer’s blackbird (shiny black/purple head)
- identified: yellow bellied sap sucker (woodpecker @ feeder)
- potful of red wigglers underneath the doormat
- wren trilling and burbling up and down the scale with madcap glee
- red winged blackbirds, clear and sharp back and forth between the bird feeder and treetops
- fat matronly hens chuckling to themselves
…
At sunset the wind dies down and everything becomes quiet– all but a May-mad cardinal and the lumbering bumblebees. Spring peepers start up out in the marshy woods.
…
Crosslegged in wildflower studded grass, photographing 360• snaps, buzz saw just audible over the empty field to the east, occasional far-off jet crossing hollowly overhead, twin-engine grumbling crosswise at lower altitude, here and there a vehicle shushing by on the road down the hill, call and repeat from treetops and brush– and it hits me how this place got its name.
drafts & inhalations
The halls of navelgazer shake off a hanging gloom of mornings, having languished forward through a sloggy season of desaturating monochrome.
But out into this early April evening stride Sir Floyd and I, straight into a dozen springing drizzles, I stooping to snag blown bits of litter from the winter-neglected garden’s corners, draggled onward by dog tow…
When the doggone leash snags taut on wayward fork of ornery native fenceline (we’re constantly reconstructing after disassembling kids), and Floyd and I become of an instant equal creatures yanked sideways by momentum.
Senor Floggsbottom so abruptly displaced, dusts off dainty dog dignity, stands stoic, poised frozen til I’ve done my human part with opposable thumbs.
Stretching forth fingers and limbs indeed feels appropriately lively, bending self to touch world with actual hands, to clear away all the rubbish that’s been cluttering up my view.
Restoring myself thus by gesture, I walk the park and play a kind of catchup  stewardship. Out in open air I begin again to think outside the frame of house and windows and look around our little park with a discerning eye, noting things throughout that could benefit from Earth Day volunteer attentions–
… benches chipping & mossy & rotten in places…
… pergola marked up with graffiti…
…gardens needing dead leaves and stems cleared out & composted…
… and of course the ever-drifting litter…
Soon enough though I’m sprung delighted from my little list of ills by bursting sprouts of bloom, unseen initially on walking out with a dim squint but suddenly springing into focus–
sneaky pokes of green shot up through trodden brown like hope from rain!
sudden! vivid! daffodils in sunshine brilliant hues freshening all around the sky-grey air!
Back home I pause, considering, from time to time, the stray homely oddments I’ve gleaned while out dogwalking down alleys and parkway fences, all my little treasure trove of left-behind things reclaimed from scrap– adopted and named and sorted into drawers lettered round things, shiny things, odd, orphaned pieces.
In places they’re little more than ragged tatters anymore.
Reclaimed, resituated toys populate my houseplants, performing small scenarios of tropical and interplanetary drama in miniature.
The mourning doves are back out back– just heard one whir in for a landing.
Right before the end of day the house gets drenched with honeyed setting light, and I quite simply couldn’t be happier.