honeybees & reveries

A few years ago, my husband, son and I went to France for a vacation, to the beautiful French Riviera.

And I got lost.

Well and truly lost.

Lost in the way that I just knew I would never be found, and that I might even die.

Hours and hours alone, not knowing how to find my way back home.

Dehydration and irrational thinking and the existential feeling that maybe only those who are near death face.

Well, I thought I was near death anyway.

Basically, my son and husband had taken a day trip to Monaco and I’d stayed back to spend the day at the beach.

And then, late afternoon, I headed back to the villa, and I couldn’t find my bearings.

I had no cell phone, no key, no ID even.

The streets of the village were serpentine and every doorway looked identical to the all the others along the cobblestone street.

So I backtracked and retraced my steps at each turn, over and over – for several hours

By early evening, my irritation grew into apprehension. And then nervousness. And the temperature was slipping fast, I was getting cold.

Does this look right? Is this familiar?

I tried to tamp down the panic. I thought I was sensible; I’d found where our rental car was parked, figuring that the guys would eventually make their way to it.

Or so I reasoned.

Finally, still in my damp bathing suit, I sat with my legs stretched out under the car’s wheel well, to catch the residue of the engine’s warmth.

My teeth were chattering.

This wasn’t looking good.

And then, close to midnight, my son emerged from the dark.

And when I saw him across the road, I starting crying uncontrollably; I was so ashamed.

I felt pitiful: I was a clueless, middle-aged tourist with no sense of direction.

The shame filled my frigid body, down to my frozen feet.

In the end, my body eclipsed all reason. Everything felt disconnected.

It’s been years since that event happened, but occasionally the memory pricks at me.

This past February, I got Covid (finally) and the virus triggered a haze of depression that I am just now coming out of.

I am surfacing from the dark.

I’ve started taking short walks in our new neighborhood, but I feel like an invalid with little endurance. I lift my heavy legs and try to feel my muscles.

I try to connect my body to my brain. Both are sluggish and out of sync.

But I have started to feel stonger.

Even so, when I look down at my shoes, there is the worn, near colorless grey of the sidewalk. It is like the grey that swirls in my mind.

At times I am dull and numb and I can’t remember my sense of humor, or any particularly positive thing about myself.

And lately I’ve thought about being lost, both in France, and at home.

And the memory comes back to me, of shivering on that cold night, how alone I felt.

It occurred to me how disappointed I was that my family couldn’t somehow read my mind to locate me. Like a mental GPS.

But not many people know us well enough to always offer a lifesaving rope when we’re clinging on the precipice.

And no one ever completely understands what we are going through, what is swirling around in our brains.

And that brings me back to today, and the fact that I have struggled to write about the past few months.

I have given up and given in to the idea that none of this is worth writing about.

But then I think about the fact that at the end of the story, it was okay.

So I’m holding out some hope that what I say and how I try to describe myself will resonate with you.

And I hope to keep on writing even in these grey spaces.

It feels dull and boring, but it makes the healing time go faster.

And it makes me feel a little bit better as I go.

We lie in bed, settle our legs, and yank the blankets back and forth between us.

We are making a perfect sarcophagus-like bed on which to lay our tired bodies.

We sigh and take deep breaths.

We release the day.

This is our time to cast out a line and wait.

And after a while, stray thoughts and worries bubble up to the surface, through the stillness.

At first, the thoughts are loose and willy-nilly.

Little niggling things, small grievances with a co-worker, updates on the kids. The cute thing our grandson did.

But eventually we sift down and go a little deeper.

A few months ago, with my depression, the focus became solely on that, night after night, and it got really tiresome.

I’m sure my husband was so frustrated, hearing my stuff, over and over.

I know I was.

But I was scared, and needed reassurance.

Because often I felt guilty that I wasn’t concerned enough with politics – Israel and Palestine, the election, and global warming.

Believe me, I care about these issues.

It’s just impossible to tackle the wider world when your personal perspective is like a pinhole in a sheet of paper.

And then there is the additional, built-in guilt of this condition that says: I’m letting people down, I’m not doing/being enough.

These thoughts were on a continuous scroll.

Poisonous.

But, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that guilt and shame can take me down faster than you can imagine.

And it never helps.

And now, looking back, I’m just grateful to have had a partner to bear witness on the other side of the bed.

I’m sure that many nights he just wanted to roll over and drift off.

But I’m grateful he was there to repeat the tedious words that are our litany:

It’s going to be okay.

You’re getting better.

We just have to be patient.

I knew these things, but I had to repeat them, to soothe my brain, like counting over old rosary beads.

That was my bedtime prayer – to simply come back to myself, to heal.

And every night when I turned out the light, I almost believed.

Early January and last year’s holiday is weighing in my body.

More clothing layers and a few extra pounds make me want to slow down, quit my brisk exercise, just stop fighting inertia.

I want to curl up, snack and read.

The colder winter weather whips at my morale.

The daily news, the state of the world, feels like another layer to bear.

Some days I want a break from holding my shoulders back, pushing through and toughing it out.

Instead, I head to the local pool.

Getting undressed at the locker, arms folded over shivering chest, there is an elderly woman next to me, talking to herself, or maybe to me.

She tells the room that she has to do re-hab and this is her first day, she will need to come all the way to the gym four days a week, take a cab.

She has a cane with 3 prongs at the base; she has propped it against the bench and I reach out to pick it up when it slides to the tiled floor.

It is hard to start up a new exercise routine. It’s hard to move our bodies at all some days.

I pull on my suit and head to the showers, then into the pool area.

Two small kids are screaming and splashing at eachother with water noodles and I shy away to the other side.

Silence, quiet, moving inward, trying to shed the cold air on my skin, to submerge.

The water is a little cool, but still it’s shimmery blue reflection with bright flags, is cheerful.

There is something about immersion, about going down deep, letting myself sink, that invites.

Through cloudy goggles all is hazy blue, and the world goes quiet.

All except for the exhalation of bubbles, the air coming from deep in my lungs, even deeper.

There’s almost a panic at the thought that all of this activity is happening all the time without thought.

The heartbeat and breath play in my ears. A hyper-awarenss. How full my and then how empty my lungs can be.

My shoulders pull the thick water, stroke after stroke. Suddenly I am lighter.

A pool’s lessons are so easy.

I glide in my lane, the ropes help rein in my self-consciousness.

Keep the head down, but not too far, sip the air, control the thrash of the lower body.

Stay in the lane. Focus.

Let the water hold me. Don’t fight it, ease into the cradling support.

Slice the water any which way, the water always calms, evens out.

The grace comes in finding my pace without trying.

Because today I want the least resistence – to let the stream of motion from my kicking legs propel my torso without much fight.

Who says we need to strive?

Life can be a buoyancy without any control at all.

Today, swimming doesn’t feel like giving up or giving in, it feels like rising.

I rise and shuffle stiffly from my bed to the new bathroom.

My fingers graze the soft plaster on the wall where there is nothing at all – no light switch, just my muscle memory. In the dark, I grope towards the little sink.

In the newly painted kitchen, I smell the beans, fill the coffee carafe and punch the soft button; there is such comfort there.

I am a spirit, floating through our new place, noting, testing things out, treading lightly across the unfamiliar hall.

Later, I drift across the kitchen with fresh laundry and move into the bedroom that smells yeasty like bread, or like old homes.

It is not a new house.

Tiny cracks in the the fireplace mortar, I imagine mice droppings in the walls. A paint drip that I know I didn’t make.

I run the vacuum across soft oak floorboards where I uncover tiny dinks and protruding nails that snag at my socks.

But always the dishes; warm water is the same anywhere.

The dry, cracked skin of my hands feel tight and sore as they press into the yellow sponge that catches the crumbs as it moves across the pitted, ceramic countertop.

The water runs through my fingers at the tap, like the thin, slippery beads of a rosary.

I flip the lid of the same blue pan, to rinse it once again, watching the foam run clear in the shiny sink.

Each task, done a thousand times, but now in a new old place.

It is a new year.

I clip the doggie calendar onto the magnetic fridge and write a few notes on the clean January page.

It seems to me that the challenge is keeping it all new.

These jobs we do, the mornings we putter and the days we structure, and the nights, when we cycle though the tv listings, again and again, looking for a fresh stream.

This year, my birthday, 61, and mostly the numbers mean nothing.

Until they do, and I wake at 2 am and wonder how they add up.

I read somewhere that our negative thoughts and events carve sharp pathways in the brain, while positive ones are harder to recall.

With this, I call up the mountains from a few years ago, and soothe myself back to sleep.

It can’t always be an option, I know this, but when it works, I take it.

I think I am trying out the Danish expression of putting the spoon in the other hand – to switch up the tiniest of tired movements just a tad.

So today, I escape the bungalow and find a second space, the public library, to try to write. (Instead of staring at the same surroundings, I’ll write about them!)

Attempting a pivot, to grasp a new sensation in the old.

Yes, happy old new year it is.

So, spoon in hand, I move forward (or not).

Anyway, I feel the shift – subtly awkward but a teeny bit exciting, too; it is fresh.

And so, moving onward – keep writing, I say – do it any which way you can.

Keep writing, just write.

Our Christmas tree this year will have my mom’s skilled fingers woven all through the lit branches.

There are over fifty handmade, needlepoint Santas to hang.

Each of them whimsical and unique. Santa on a skateboard, Santa holding a long scroll (real paper), his list of names, including my own, curling over his belly.

Santa at the beach.

Santa with a chicken (prescient), and, for my daughter – a complete set of Nutrcracker characters that glitter and dance.

The Mouse King with real beaded eyes and a silver sword.

Sweet Clara in a delicate smocked dress with her matching duck-egg blue bow.

The pirate-eyed Drosselmeier with tiny buckled shoes.

And each of these ornanments is special to me, though I never remember specifics.

Mom came up with a different kit every year. And she dated each one, so I can line them up and count the years.

Even now.

Especially now.

Hanging these things is even more poignant because she is gone.

My mom, always in a tailspin of energy, productive, outgoing and always, always, poised.

I see her at countless meetings, political rallies, bible study classes, and, of course, right after that daily power nap where she was “just resting her eyes.”

I see her pulling the needle and pursing her lips.

She was an ADD swirl before there was a name for it or any sense of it.

She was the detail oriented task master, finisher of projects.

Not like me at all.

And in a funny way, our recent downsizing helps me focus on her today.

Because I’m restrained – only able to pull a limited amount of ephemera from the hundreds of other treasures from our old house’s storage.

No room for more.

No need for me.

But this ever-grieving tree.

My mom is present here.

Bits of her scattered attention, yes. Sometimes a stern hug of reality. Aways a stubborn commitment to perfection that I hated.

And, en masse, the effect is a collective elegance.

And, up close, it is the hyper-focused handiwork of the teeny moments, the counted minutes, the jags between cooking and cleaning and socializing and being a minister’s wife.

The diligent stitches, the tying off of the damn french knots.

These past few months I have been looking closely at my belongings, my stuff, my creature comfort items, all of it.

I’m weighing whether one household item or another is worthy of coming along with us to our new place.

It’s like examining the tedious stitches of my life – the work put into the piece, the sweat, and the sweet, the memories, the sadness, the critical items. You know what I mean.

I’ve never been crafty in the way of my mom or my sisters – they are artists and they make it looks so easy.

I am all fumbles and frustration.

The one decent cross-stitched thing I made, I gave to my grandmother.

It was cute back in those Holly Hobby days.

But turn it over and see the back – it’s one giant knot – a fraying, tangled mess.

Yet Grammy hung it in her kitchen for over 25 years.

Anyway, there is a certain grief to that for me, that I’m not at all like my mother.

But it’s a grief that’s surpassed by the loss of her frenetic body, her charged energy, her way of sitting in the room with half an ear cocked to the room, her ankle bobbing.

Getting so much done.

– how did she do that?

Anyway, this grief I carry is perpetual, it is precious.

It is prompt, in the way I can count on it’s appearing at certain times, like these.

It is painstaking, in it’s remembrance of the tiny, sweated over threads.

It is permanent, it does not leave, it resurfaces now and again, different times, different ways.

But this grief is with me forever, and I am glad of it.

It is present and real.

Like my own hard work this year:

Selling a house of 25 years, locating and buying another that’s 2/3rd the size.

Sizing down, hoarding less, appreciating more.

Looking closely at the fronts and backs of memories from my life.

How I’ve re-connected with a dear friend who helped me adopt a kitten. From A-Z – vetting and naming – litterbox advice and all.

How I’ve savored the online conversations with another old friend who is a writer, too.

How I’ve made a new friend who is an artist.

And, last weekend, I participated in a support group of fellow grievers and made an exciting connection there.

I’m proud of that.

And, all along, it’s like I’m examining that ugly mess at the back of my life’s design, and trying to love and grieve all of the parts of it, and then trying to love it more.

And, as someone I recently met at the grief group says – grieve on.

Happy Holidays, and grieve on.

The silvery glitter sprinkles across my periwinkle blue hood and flies off of the heavy cloak. Shaking out my matching silver hair, I smile as it sticks to my cheek.

I’m dressed up as a fairy, a fairy godmother.

Actually, I’m in my tiny new closet space, trying on the Disney costume after the fact, wondering if I’ll use the pretty thing before next Halloween or not.

No, it will need to be stowed up the pull-down ladder and stuffed up into the miniature, dusty attic.

Glitter can be a real spoiler, I think.

So showy and full of promise, but without solid staying power; I’ll be seeing it in my vacuum bag, for years, probably, but not on in my dress.

But it’s enticing blue extravagance is so retro-reminiscent.

Pretending and all of that.

The plastic masks we wore that had sharp slits for eyes and a slim mouth that cut your tongue.

Like sweet memory, I want this last Halloween to hang around as long as possible, before my grandson gets too big for such stuff.

Such is the way with trying on beauty – the thrill, the glamour and the dream of becoming something so otherworldly and free. It’s filmy and hard to capture.

Anyway, today I gather my billowy sleeves and as my fingers wrap inside the pink inner folds, a small rectangle of ragged silver slips down my spine and onto the floor.

Airheads candy, a sweet surprise just for me.

photo credit: Dale Chihuly, artist

The key turns in the old lock. This will be last time I enter this house while it still belongs to us.

We put it on the market this week, this big old house of scratched woodwork and mismatched memories, sticky fingered walls and thick pre-war plaster.

We are downsizing.

Today I do the final walkthrough.

In the kitchen, I stand at an empty sink that has never looked so clean. How many times I have ruminated there, lost in my thoughts, letting the warm water sluice through my fingers and spiral away down the drain.

And up the stairs to the rooms that have been largely vacant since the kids left.

There is a tiny glow sticker stubbornly clinging to the ceiling in one room. A planet with tiny rings, it stuck there for so many of my daughter’s sleepless teenaged nights.

And in my son’s attic room, stacks of Calvin and Hobbes comic books I can’t part with. They are warped like loaves of scrunched bread – misshapen from the hours spent paging through them while soaking in the bath tub.

This is all that’s left. Scrapple from our lives.

The chickens shriek in the yard, wondering where we have all gone. What to do with the chickens?

We’ve been wanting to downsize for a few years now, but it requires a kind of energy that you have to grab when it comes over you, and this is finally the time.

The new, small house will never stand a chance against this old one. This place that kept the four of us safe though a few tropical storms and cool and comfortable on many long, unbearable summer afternoons.

I thought the fingerprints and the growth chart pencils lines might stay visible forever, but now I see that, in one swift stroke of fresh paint, our children’s histories will be gone.

The cleaners came yesterday for a final cleaning. They took over the job that was mine for 25 years. It is like a load lifted from my mind. We will live in a house 2/3 smaller than this one and I’m so glad to be done with the heavy vaccuuming.

I hope that there will still be a tiny filiment of dusty memory that will mix with the new life that will come here. Something must remain, it just has to.

And I want to think that maybe our ghosts will haunt, that some sort of positive energy will have rubbed off onto the light switches. Or maybe there are echoes of joy and laughter that will be summoned on a dark winter evening.

Or sweet scents of cinnamon bread, fresh baked, that will rise to comfort, when needed.

The sweet will rise, I hope.

Because a happy family lived here.

A family not perfect, but a family that tried. A family some times frustrated, and hardly a family at all, but four people struggling to grow and change. Often wanting to cling to something familiar, to try to stay the same.

But always a family with people that tried to love and tried to be present to one another.

We often failed. And we moved on, waiting for that next visit when the kids would come home, and we’d try to do better.

This home always offered up more possibilities – mulligans, if you will. For love, for connection, but never guaranteed without heartbreak.

Anyway, I hope the ghosts we leave behind will whisper to the new occupants as we move on:

Tread lightly and love – just remember to love.

Circadian, from the Latin, circ (light) and dias (death).

It is late summer and the sunlight is slowly dying in small increments each day.

For those of us with mental illness, light is a particularly important factor in good health. It not only gives us critical vitamins and melatonin, it also helps regulate mood.

Moods are a big thing with me. Even if they aren’t evident to the outside world, my moods affect me dramatically – they can be circadian-like in how they ebb and flow.

Like the tides. And this tide within me can be so difficult to chart.

Recently I thought I had found a perfect drug but in the end it gave up the ghost and left me even more depressed and discouraged.

And still I rise.

Still, we all fall down, in big ways and in small ways. We feel immobilized, defeated. We wait in the darkness, curled up on the rumpled couch, impatient to feel a flick of energy, to get a spark to the brain.

And it feels like ashes, all around.

I try not to globalize and to not dwell on the fact that this has been a chronic problem, in various ideations, since I was 12.

I try to believe that I have new skills, new drugs, new options, a new understanding of my illness.

All that is good.

But at the end of the day it is my husband’s touch on my back, his gentle reassurances whispered into my hair, over and over again, that I will get better.

And today, that is the medicine that I reach for. The medicine that works.

In truth, we all fall down. Some crash harder and for a substantial amount of time. Others touch down and rise quickly.

Lately I’m feeling a bit scorched.

And yet, this morning a small crack of sunshine made its way across the bedroom floor.

And as I shuffled down the stairs there was a crispness to the air that signals a new season. Golden leaves stir and drift lazily down to earth.

I feel better.

And tonight, watching tv, my husband will deliver the dose of reassurance that is half commiseration and half pep-talk.

He is the sane one. The witness to my endless dance around this posey-madness.

I will fall down and he will pick me up.

And somewhere between the rising and the falling I’ll get a chance to embrace him and tell him I am grateful.

Grateful to have him as my partner in this thing, this up and down and all around dizzy dance of love.

Many years ago, my kids and I were in a car accident.

It was an icy winter morning and I was driving them to school.

My van hit a patch of black ice on the highway and I flipped it completely over. It was terrifying. No one was hurt, but to this day, I think about the residual trauma.

The kids and I have talked about the experience through the years, each of us remembering a different aspect.

I usually tell the story this way: we walked away, no one was hurt. And afterwards, I got the kids to class and went home and collapsed. I was teary, and completely shaken.

And then the doorbell rang. It was the UPS man.

I saw him coming, saw him swing out of his truck with a package. And I immediately started sobbing.

I just needed to tell someone.

And he stood there quietly and listened to me. I told him the details and he said he was so sorry. Gave me a huge bear hug.

He stood on the porch with me, this massive guy. And he took the time he probably didn’t have.

And after a while, he asked if I was going to be okay.

I see him these days, Jimmy, driving a different company van. He honks loudly when he passes by. He always has a huge grin on his young black face.

And he gives me the thumbs up.

The memory, or the story of the accident, is still between us.

The story of my accident is what our family now refers to as Mom breaking down in front of the UPS man. Sorta humorous – to take the sting out.

But storytelling changes us.

Storytelling reinforces our values, our emotions, our investment in our lives.

The way we tell it changes over time – reflecting and refracting the core elements.

In years to come, when the 2021 pandemic is over, what story will you tell about it?

But storytelling changes us. Storytelling reinforces our values, our emotions, our investment in our memories.

Will you remember the pivotal moment when the actual reality hit you?

Will you recall the biggest loss you felt?

Memory is a fascinating, elusive thing. Sometimes large, monumental events that we witness are forgotten, while small details are carved deep in our brains.

Why do we remember some things and forget others?

During this pandemic we say things like, I lost everything, I lost a year of my life.

But then someone may say to us, Hey, remember us talking every Friday afternoon on FaceTime? I really looked forward to those calls.

And we create a new story, one of redemption.

We weave together a collective memory of the Covid19 years.

It’s when we come together to reminisce. When we debrief. When we compare notes in order to make some kind of sense.

I believe the pandemic has opened us up to a new kind of vulnerability, a new way to share our lives.

In a funny way, it makes me think a bit about my hens.

Some mornings when I go to gather eggs, I don’t wait for the chicken to hop off the nest, I peek in and watch her.

She pecks at the lavender I’ve tossed in there, she’s arranging and re-arranging it.

She is trying to cover her egg protectively. She wiggles her rump and squats down low, as if she is in for a long wait of incubating.

And then I reach beneath her fluffy butt and find the warm egg. I watch as her beady little eye stares at my thieving hand, and then down at the emptiness beneath her breast.

And I imagine she is wondering did I lay an egg, and if I did, where did it go?

Was it real?

She clucks in a circumspect manner, and sometimes she’ll squat there for hours.

Is she trying to visualize the egg back into existence?

I imagine her egg as a story, a narrative – it is here and gone.

Beginning, middle and end.

It is real and solid, but it is also a permeable thing. With the possibility for all kinds of endings.

But it’s perfection has a shelf life.

And sometimes all we are really left with, like the hen, is the hand full of feathers.

Of course, I tend to be broody too.

But I am mostly trying to retain a positive thread: Yeah, no grocery shopping, no malls, no worrying about going out, or having to be social.

Yeah, I can share my experience of introversion, even depression, now that it is a common thread.

Still, when the arc of this tale starts looking grim, I talk to my husband, to my kids, to my friends – to anyone who’s found a positive storyline.

And we share our histories as a collective: to say, we were here, this is what it was like, we survived.

We recite our truths, even as they are changed over time. They are the narratives that will keep hope alive, even in the darkest of times.

And all along, we will edit and revise.

Edit and revise.

A memory, a story, and maybe even an egg.

I am propped up in bed in the middle of the day, because we have a new kitten, and I am told that I should spend as much time as I can with him.

These are early days, formative moments to bond with the little feline.

He loves this bedroom with the small adjacent dressing room. They are the only two rooms we have made available to him, to keep him safe and help him feel secure.

I’ve been reading about cats, and apparently they need to have lairs – private places to retreat and rest.

He loves his lair.

So, too, this is my lair.

I watch the little critter as he bounces and flies across the rug, rolling felt balls across the hardwoods, and swinging at feathery toys.

He is an arc of movement, flinging across the bed, needing very little rest.

But when he does decide to retire, he tiptoes to the end of the down duvet and curls in the one streak of late afternoon sunshine he can find.

He is still. A small black patch of smooth fur.

Often, after exhausting myself of play options, lair time for me can begin to feel tedious. The housework and errands I need to do pull at me. I just want to move.

Sequestered like this, I try to sink into a discipline of observation.

I observe my impatience and when it arises, I use my ears.

I hear the tiny thumps of paws underneath the bed. The teeny wet licks of a tongue on food bowl.

The scratch of claws against a hanging chenille bathrobe.

He is watchful, tail flicking, when he hears the dog climbing the steps.

He has his ways of letting me know what he needs – walking up my supine front and delicately sniffing my face.

Such graceful, silly things.

We have taken him downstairs a few times to get oriented, and he shows only a bit of interest. When he’s done with the home tour he scampers lightly up the stairs.

Back to his lair.

I think we all have our lair-like places. The rooms we feel safest, where we can let down, curl up and lick our wounds.

For all of the isolation we endured during the pandemic, one thing rang true: there is something essential in having a room of one’s own.

A place to cultivate silence, or quell worry, or entertain ideas.

A place to rest, to snack, to rub creamy lotion into dry elbows.

To read, and read some more.

To make a list in a blank book of all of the books I have read that year. And I will highlight the best ones, and grade them A-D.

But time in this lair is time slowed down, distilled, stretched and folded over like salt water taffy.

But time in this lair is time slowed down, distilled, stretched and folded over like salt water taffy.

I love this lair time and just when it feels too tiresome and boring, a pair of black batwings will rise above the pillow just to see what’s up.

And once, he came up from under the bed, with dust clinging to his head and mouth, like he’d been lathering in a shower.

He sneezes, the tiniest sound I can imagine.

And then there is a scratch beneath the tiny collar, and my two fingers stroking a plump belly. And I am refreshed.

And all of this will pass the time.

But these activities, I will eventually discover, will be the time.

A lair is the place and the time to give over to the quiet, the inactivity, the nothingness, even.

The lair will bring me back to myself, to my breath, to my slowed down pulse, to my slowly ticking mind.