honeybees & reveries

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.

They are men enough.

My men. My husband and son.

For the most part, they are kind, open, compassionate, gentle and loving.

They respect women, and try to live out their values, and strive to be their best selves.

They are sincerely trying to be enough.

Enough for themselves, enough for us women, and enough for their friends and communities.

And in my female heart, I know they are enough.

But my husband and my son, both products of the patriarchy, are consistently told otherwise.

They often believe otherwise.

And mostly they cannot take the mask of masculinity off. The price is too dear.

As a kid, my husband had blackout temper tantrums. One afternoon while skating on a neighborhood pond, in a fury, he slashed his hockey stick at a kid’s head, sending him to the hospital in a friendly.

His parents never talked to him about the event. He carries the guilt and shame to this day.

He had fist fights with his brother as a teen.

There are times when I’ve seen him so overwhelmed with unidentified emotion that he was raging.

It breaks my heart and I assume that his own heart was broken a long time ago, and never healed.

It is a true disability today.

He wasn’t taught to journal, or care about small hurts, or to nurture his shadow feelings.

The language he learned was doing not feeling.

And I remember my son, at four, he was giggled at and teased for wearing his sister’s tutu at her birthday party.

I can only wonder when I see him wearing a pink dangly earring at the Taylor Swift concert, how much ribbing he endured that night.

But they say things have changed?

My husband struggles on a daily basis with how to release his frustrations. His anger is often a chokehold on his own true personality.

He was never taught how to decipher the subteties of his moods. He had only a few – happy, not happy, frustration and red-hot anger.

My son was always gentle and even-tempered, but I could see the way his little world was made smaller sometimes.

He was intellectual but had to tone it down, to play sports, and to always let the other girls and boys step up to the front and center.

In sports he had to push through pain and fear of concussion. One time he broke his arm playing basketball and was told by the coach to stay on the bench and “quit whining”.

Like the girls, he had to play both sides – not too much ambition and striving, but not too much softness, either.

Acceptable to all, except in his own skin.

When he reached high school, I saw how his friends began rejecting the nerdy and less traditionally masculine kids.

I saw that it was basic survival – there was a real anxiety of taint by association.

Driving carpool, I listened.

It was never cruel, the things they said, but they were completely coded conversations about who was cool and who was not.

And I saw that it was really about gender. And it broke my heart, both for the geeky kid and also for my boy.

My son was a hugger, though shy. I think in soccer he found an outlet for that physicality.

But a fist bump or bear hug is not the same as tenderness.

And whooping a yell of encouragement is not the same as holding a buddy’s hand.

My husband never told his mom he loved her. Never.

And now, 38 years on, our marriage bears proof to this. Of course he tells me he loves me almost every day, but it is the other feelings that he reckons with.

I imagine it like he is looking at a blurry color wheel, and can only identify vague hues but not crisp, clear reds, greens, and blues.

His is a daily eye test that fails the spirit and handicaps him, emotionally and interpersonally.

Cultural messages throughout the years have put a mangle on my mens’ bodies, a throttle on their spirit.

Why?

Because they are male.

Yes, I came up on the rise of the feminist movement, but just because we were trying so hard to be and feel liberated, looking back, we carried a warped sense of who we were.

For the men too.

Men I have lived with, and loved and taught.

Men I have invested in.

My husband, who was never taught to cultivate his inner life.

My son, who learned by example, and still carries the hurts inflicted by his own father.

My husband, who struggles with how to pick up the phone and lend support when his friend and colleague has a mental breakdown.

My son who must grapple with the term breadwinner, long after I thought we’d outgrown that particular noose.

My husband, who never learned to express things – but instead inherited the language of hard work, self-sacrifice and responsibility.

My son, who values doing good in the world, but will never be paid for it.

My son who wants to be a student of restoration ecology and not be a government employee. He prioritizes personal fulfillment. He doesn’t want to be a military man.

And I see this: my 7 year old boy, in his room littered with Hot Wheels and books, stacked neatly by his bed. And there is a cage with a teeny white rat in it. And he is holding that rat so gently, so reverently, with his chubby little fingers.

Daughters can be emotional, sons cannot. Or the parameters are that much narrower.

When my son was upset, it hurt me to see him push that pain down – the red face, the tears squeezed back, the way his body froze.

If you push the hard stuff down, and don’t let those sad, lonely, scared feelings make it through your body, you won’t necessarily be able to access the good ones either.

We women know this. And male bodies are made of all the same stuff as ours.

I believe that what we have on our hands now is a cultural crisis of our own doing.

We are all a part of the patriarchy of violence against male’s mental, spiritual and physical health.

Today I watch my son doing groundbreaking work – helping lead retreats and seminars to educate and support men.

https://www.heybrotherco.com/

And my husband is one of them, having participated in the very first father/son retreat.

Like veterans from a war, I see the men of my generation living with a form of trauma that is so normalized as to be exalted.

Can’t feel? Good for you.

It makes you tougher, more attractive.

Our popular male heroes are mostly muscular, maybe smart – but they’re shallow, and they’re not usually feeling types.

And I can only say: hold the mirror up my fellow women.

We helped grow this. We pushed our boys to be strong, we looked away when things got too sensitive. We buy into Hollywood’s machismo.

Still, I see my son back in a high school, on stage as Macbeth:

Through shimmery tears he says: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak, knits up the overwrought heart and bids it break”.

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

It is the ancient tale of misguided masculinity; a story of the toxic fidelity of a man bound and destroyed by his own disabused male power.

And the cost is death – and the ripping seams of the entire world order.

But more than that, it is the destruction of a man who shouldered an impossible male mantle.

Of course I simplify.

But speaking of tearing seams, I also see this:

I see my husband, tall back hunched over a sewing machine, creating a costume for my daughter for Halloween. He never loses his patience. After all, he has become an extremely capable tailor and a perfectionist.

And last week, running errands together, I dropped him off a the coffee shop so he could journal. What?

I guess he has inherited some of my son’s bravery. He’s willing to try.

Anyway, there is so much more.

But what I wanted to say is that my son is moving forward with this exploration: reclaiming sorrow, reclaiming joy.

And my husband and I will try to follow.

Embracing masculinity in all of its colors. For me, that’s more than enough.

On the tv, there is the same damn Humane Society fundraising ad.

They run it continuously on a cloying loop over my one nite of Sunday British mystery.

Which means that I have to get up and leave the room.

And it is a very long commercial and I’ve practically memorized the script.

The grainy frame of each animal is seared into my brain.

Even the indy-pop song that they ruthlessly play in the background haunts me.

The sights are beyond heartbreaking:

The matted German Shepherd chained to a dirty doghouse in a snowstorm.

The pittie mixes (so many of them), tied up in a field, with their sweet, square heads shaking, eyes vacant.

And the the mangy emaciated kittens crying from large litters left in a ditch.

Almost every kind of human neglect imaginable.

And I simply can’t watch. Most nights, anyway.

My daughter the therapist says that it’s okay not to watch. I take her advice.

Somehow I was raised to believe that it was my responsibility to look at all of the world’s atrocities, always, and to never avert my gaze.

But I know those horrors. I’ve had wonderful pets.

But still there are the Saturdays that I seriously need to go to the shelter and hold the kittens.

Those days don’t occur very often.

Many times I can’t muster the energy – I feel too raw and tender and I feel like a voyeur to the loneliness and despair.

But not this Saturday. Not today.

Today is an optimistic day, and after almost 9 years, it’s like my 9th kitten life has been activated.

And as my husband and I timidly tiptoe down the rows, the smell is too much. I’d forgotten the circus like urine odor that cats have.

It smells like fear.

Being early summer, there are quite a few tiny mewers, so many fuzzy frolicking critters born for our individual perusal. Some are of the same litter, others crouch alone in the corners.

I see the tuxedo types (my fave), black and white and elegant. There are the chubby grey girls with green and yellow eyes. The endless tabbies.

And they all are waiting.

Waiting to be picked up – and held, and tickled, and for at least few moments, to be nuzzled and whispered sweet nothings.

Loved.

Taken to a small special room with lino floors for a decision: To love or not. To be loved or not.

And most times they will be put back in their cages.

But this kitten day is for me; I want the full-on kitten experience. The Zen purr and proud little tail and sassy demeanor.

I need it.

In truth, the smell is overwhelming. The activity of the volunteers distracts me. I need time alone with one little kitten soul.

I hold a few and each one is dear, Each might be a possibility for Yin.

But then as we are leaving, I see this scrawny, not-as-cute, sort of pathetic black kitten, wearing a cone of shame around his neck.

The plastic cervical collar is attached with masking tape and smeared with snot. And a tiny mew escapes him as we pass.

His eyes are begging, pleading for me to do something, anything. I’m not sure he knows what. But he is desperate.

I move along the row and hold the other little tabbies and greys, long haired and shorthaired. One with one eye.

And from across the room the little Cone Head Boy silently mews in his cellblock.

He sees me.

And I see him.

I’ve long thought that a dog is a buddy, one to play with and walk and get all athletic with. He teaches me loyalty and fidelity and to believe in the big, bad world, even when it has had its way with us.

A kitten is a friend. A kitten shows you how to be in the world. He shows you how to inhabit your body, to hold the beauty, even as the grace is capricious.

A kitten will teach you to listen to your senses – to trust your intuition. To take care of your own needs, no matter the inconvenience.

To nap. To snack.

To stretch as high as the body will elongate, and then beyond.

And to snap the body back, like elastic, and come down ready-freddy.

A kitten will teach you that you may not be greeted at the front door, but behind another door, you will be appreciated for whatever mood you’re in.

Not only that, he will show you that there is grace in those moods, not forced, but small and real, like his tiny spine.

Not only that, he will show you that there is grace in those moods, not forced, but small and real, like his tiny spine.

A kitten will tread across the plain of my shirt to reach my neck where he will make himself a kitty boa.

And oh the ecstacy of a purr. Even that word!

His heart thrumming softly, a silken thing threaded loosely around my neck. He is better than any weighted blanket and he sure beats any yoga eye bag.

He is the Yin. The breath and the pause. The inhale and the exhale. The full body release.

Embodiment of distilled spirit.

His sandpaper tongue that wants to kiss with the only tool he has.

The tiny, black fruitleather paws, so perfectly constructed for traction and poise.

And the claws; the remnants of jungle evolution. He is a worthy adversary for my boy Huckleberry, given time.

In a male world, a cat teaches that strength lies in cunning and quick thinking, and flexibility, not all muscle.

He is the tiger that remembers that jungle. And he wants to whisper to you about the birds that nested in the mangrove trees, and the elephants that roamed across the green plains.

He is my reminder to slow down, to breathe.

To connect to the animal self I inhabit. The part that gets forgotten in the digital, distant, no-touch world.

The kitten knows this: the yarn ball. The feathery bird that is pulled on a string and so difficult to nail down.

It is the lick of yogurt on the funnel tongue. The scratch of the rough sisal that feels like ecstacy.

It is the trippy mixture of catnip that has been marinated especially for him.

My dog is my Yang, and I am in deep need of a Yin.

Aren’t we all?

Anyway, that Saturday night, after my visit to the shelter, I thought about that gruesome commercial on tv.

And I reckoned that there were hundreds of little cone-headed black kittens in our county, and thousands across the state.

And yet, there was one named Pippin.

Pip for short.

And he was dropped off on Weaver Dairy Road.

And now he is mine.

Pip the Yin.

*we took the cone off as soon as we left the building

Transitions always seem to trip me up.

When I was young, I was fairly precocious; I walked early and learned to read before kindergarten.

I skipped a grade in school. I loved going to school, but I struggled leaving my mom and dad. I felt torn in two; off-balance.

Yes, I wanted to read and make new friends, but I also wanted to be at home with my dolls, near my mommy, away from what I already sensed was a treadmill.

A place that would exterminate my fantasies and daydreams, and immaturity, really.

I felt more emotional, more prone to homesickness, than my friends. I constantly weighed the losses vs the gains and feeling secure usually trumped being adventurous or daring.

I dreaded having a babysitter when our parents went out, sleepovers made me anxious.

I felt out of step socially, more vulnerable. I had trouble putting small setbacks behind me, like the other kids seemed able to do.

And when my family moved to another city, it was hard to feel settled in the new home – not really – the nostalgia for the old home always bled through.

This melancholy thing was a thing even up until college. I remember feeling my gut drop and an ache inside as I watched my mom’s car pull away when she dropped me off freshman year.

And every year after that.

It happened at every goodbye, every tiny transition.

Even driving away from our wedding reception, I remember crying.

From joy and sheer exhaustion, but also because I didn’t want to leave my family – my old life, the old me, the homesick kid.

Today, I ran past the old high school where my kids went, and I felt it, that familiar tug. The passage of time. A tightening in my chest. The memories that come up.

The little moments – dropping off my son’s forgotten lunch, an anxious parent teacher conference with my daughter.

How much I cared. God those endless, labile days – up and down with each kid on a different emotion.

The endless soccer games, the striving to be present through it all.

My friend and I talk about melancholy vs. depression. I think melancholy can very easily slide into depression.

They share the same capricious nature – the sadness can come on for no discerneble reason.

And it can hang on, believe me.

The term melancholy has gotten a romantic tag – but I think it’s really just a grey-tinted wistfulness that can border on obsession and can snowball downhill quickly.

But for me, melancholy is a feeling, whereas depression is a lack of feeling.

As with all of this, I am grateful to watch my little family change, expand and move on, in various configurations.

I think maybe melancholy is a special flavor reserved for the old.

And I am annoyed at the world’s insistence that we move so quickly through things, that we stuff down the tenderness that pulls at the seams, sometimes with a rendering that is traumatic.

But the melancholy serves a purpose. It reminds me of the pain that makes me alive. Complex and incomprehensable, it is life.

It is the big love that can’t stay contained in one small thing.

Middle age and after is a reckoning with the folly of a youth that insists we must love simply, without heartache, or regret or any residue of pain or mess.

At 60, I know that the broken shards, spilled cups, and forgetting and screwing up are the whole of it, not the edges.

Anyway, these days I still miss my kids, who aren’t kids anymore. Maybe I miss my marriage too, the way it was 35 years ago.

But only with the melancholy.

If I really look at it, I see that what looks like leaving is really coming home a different route.

And what seems like growing distant is actually a seasoning into a deeper kind of intimacy.

Nowadays there is this complicated longing inside me when I love my family.

I think it’s my friend melancholy at work and it feels just as it should, like melancholy.

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

T. S. Eliot

I see the girl sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the stairs. She is very quiet and still.

Her blonde head is bowed over a small book – a journal that she nestles is her lap like a kitten.

She is writing.

She is feeling very smart in her mod, mushroom colored, faux-suede pantsuit (the outfit and diary are new, both are birthday presents).

It is New Years Day, and she is composing a fresh new entry.

It is five years later and I see the same girl, ash blonde – a teenager now – she is propped up in bed. The hour is late. She writes in a spiral bound book, the words rambling and messy. There are tears in the corners of her eyes.

And time passes.

And doesn’t.

Because here, today – I am that same girl, sitting at my writing table.

I am that same person and I doubt if any of the journal entries differ profoundly.

T.S. Eliot wrote that all the roads we did not take, and the doors we never opened, point to one end – the rose garden?

So I’d like to think that the poet is letting us middle aged folk off the hook. He’s saying – so what if you’re not living that other life that glitters in your peripheral eye?

So what, the past life and this one are one and the same.

In this moment’s breath.

Like, if I close my eyes, I can conjure that small person. She is here within – she speaks, she remembers.

She is the end that is always present.

I have to say that I was not a little girl who ever had a Barbie Dream Camper kind of fantasy life. What I wanted was sorta what I already had, just a little bit bigger maybe.

I remember always wishing for a best friend, a partner, a child. And I always wanted to write, but it was never the capital W kind of write.

I loved the feeling of putting down letters, then words. I loved to hear my own written voice.

I craved the feeling of getting the exact word to define my sentence. It was pure joy when I could read back my own words and listen to the music.

Just saying them, they tasted delicious. They still do.

I think I am living the parallel life to any other beautiful life I could have imagined. And what I dream of now (not Barbie roller skates), is not all that far off from what the mini-me dreamed.

That girl knew what she absolutely wanted, and didn’t feel compelled to edit her words inside out. Or exhaust herself striving to write for anyone else.

And why did I ever think I’d stray from that dreamy girl who bit her lower lip and constantly hummed continuously, like a swarm of bees, under her breath.

I think it’s how we choose to see ourselves – and do we want to run from the inner girl or do we recognize that as impossible?

Anyway, I still like that small version of me, in fact, I love her. She was sweet and thoughtful and she had the best ideas.

Like the Easy Bake Oven home recipes of sugary egg and pickles and Worstesteshire sauce that she concocted for her sisters in her lil test kitchen. They loved it!

Artists thrive on self-delusion.

But mostly I liked who I was when I sat down to write in my Holly Hobby journal. I loved what I wrote.

It was fluid, easy, emotional. I barely erased. In fact, I always used my rainbow pack of felt markers, that how confident I was.

And now it is me, at 60. I want to be proud, like her, of my grit and my refusal to judge my writing against a capital W.

Because time present and time past are the same things, and there’s no correction fluid allowed.

Time past and time present – we’re simply who we’ve always been.

I want to wholeheartedly embrace it all and keep writing. This afternoon I wish for words, words that I’ve already used, but still.

They are my roses, my garden, my world. My here and now, my intention and luck, and all of my redeemable beauty, available to me for always.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at
sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my
beginning
 

 

 

 

Let me just say that there is no affirmation like the affirmation you get from your psychiatrist.

When he says you look great and you are doing great.

And isn’t it fortuitous when your psychiatric appointment coincides with a “good” day!

But mainly I just want to tick off the box that indicates that everything is just fine and to get my drugs, thanks.

Anyway, after my appointment today, I took the dog out to walk in the neighborhood. And we saw a little girl with a huge backpack waiting in front of the elementary school.

There was a little bit of eye-balling, but I liked that she wasn’t doing the stranger danger thing and all that.

She was pensive and serious, like a little droopy plant. She was maybe seven.

I asked her how her day at school went.

She went on a minor riff about math class and how she was the clear winner at solving math problems at the white board. I commended her.

Then the family minivan pulled up, the door opened and she bounced up into the backseat.

The tinted window scrolled down quickly and she shouted – what’s your dog’s name?

Huckleberry, I replied. And there was a huge six-year-old belly laugh as the van sped off.

It took me back to the long after school moments when our kids were in grade school.

How they would drag their sweaty little bodies up the porch steps, with shoulders sagging under bulging backpacks.

Like they had been roughed up. Or been to a war.

And any pep from the morning was long gone. Their energy packs depleted, they’d left it all out on the field.

And I felt a little sad that school was so hard, so demanding, of such small tender beings.

But that’s what the world does – we take our energetic youth and wring them out for all they are worth.

Yet, there was that de-compression time that had to occur every day – the flushing of institutionalization from their systems.

And I never knew where the release valve would be exactly.

But I knew I could never simply ask how was your day or how are you, even. That would be lame.

Yet talk was all I could think of to do.

Because I think we all have a need to report in to someone, preferably on a regular basis.

Pep-talks and positive words and all that.

A back rub, a bowl of mac and cheese. And sometimes a mom who is conveniently available for an argument.

Someone to listen at the other side of a slammed door.

In a deeper sense, it is vital to good mental health.

Like the conversation before bed with your husband, when you inquire about his job -the most incomprehensible, boring job you could ever conceive of, but still, you ask.

Because each of us want someone to notice us, to observe our days, to commend our small moments.

To get the scoop about all of that time we spend out there away from home, away from our people.

It’s as if we have been dispatched and are reporting back from some foreign country.

To know someone at home is waiting. Like the ellipses on the text message.

. . . . .

Someone is patiently waiting to hear about that crap day. Someone wanting to help you metabolize the rough spots.

We wearily tap out signals to check on one another. Texting coffee cup emojis and memes, slipping a carton of bright eggs into a friend’s back door.

Yesterday I got a text from an old friend who I haven’t seen in a very long time. She is struggling with the death of her younger sister. We texted a little.

I think I had sent her a sympathy card, but that was it. I had felt remiss, like I hadn’t done enough. But she remembered.

Sometimes small acts can transmit energy – like a virtual hug, a laugh or an ugly cry.

And so, after getting that A+ from my doctor, I will totally stuff that report in my backpack and run free every time.

And I may say that it doesn’t matter, but it does.

It means everything.

It means I’m good, heavy backpack and all.

And you?

It was the late 1970s, and like everyone else, we ran.

We were teenaged girls and we ran cross country and track.

We ran for fun, we ran to escape.

We ran to get in shape, sometimes even to compete.

Mostly we ran to simply adjust to our changing bodies, to feel proud of our muscled thighs and chiseled calves.

We ran to give the finger to the boy’s gaze, to their judging comments and sexist jokes.

My sister could stay up with the boys pack. In fact, she often beat them, she won medals in the track and field distance events.

She ran the mile, that uniquely rigorous feat that proved both physical and mental strength. She ran the brutal 400, the event that required an explosive speed.

She was a faster runner, but still I ran too.

I ran from the fat jokes, the insecurity, the fear that I would never be good enough, thin enough, that I’d never be seen for who I was – for my brain, my sense of humor, my kindness.

Junior year, my sister placed second in the West Virginia State championships. What can I say but that she was simply amazing.

But after that she gave up running. Running took her to a dangerous place. Things happened and she lost her running for a while.

Flash forward to the 1980s. She and I were pregnant with our firstborn, and still we ran.

We ran to take a break from the household, get a chance to recalibrate, to put the pieces of our selves back together.

We were still young and resilient. We felt instinctually that our bodies were made for this, we ran while weaning babies and chasing toddlers.

And then the children grew up. And we ran with an urgency, a striving need to reclaim the strong thighs and hard abs gone soft.

We both struggled with depression, eating disorders and marital problems. She divorced and moved to another town. We both did lots of therapy.

And many years later, I still ran slow miles on the trail in my neighborhood.

I ran to bolster my midlife self esteem. I ran to keep my moods in check.

And sometimes I would think back to our long runs from high school, the way my sister and I would talk and make sense of what we thought were the big problems.

And we thought we knew what those were.

Still we thought we were smarter and stronger than the men in trucks yelling crude obscenities at us. Smarter than the leering assholes who scanned our legs and breasts. Smarter than the boys pressuring us to have sex.

But still we owned this: the gentle pounding of our shoes and our syncopated breath. Our shoulders grazing, lungs puffing – there was an honesty that only the running together could give us.

And we thought we could somehow outrun the cultural messages all around us.

But still we owned this: the gentle pounding of our shoes and our syncopated breath. Our shoulders grazing, lungs puffing, there was an honesty that only the running together could give us.

Those days there was no #MeToo movement, there was just a lot of girls running to stay ahead of the sexism.

In reality, every girl I ever knew faced down some kind of sexual harassment. It came with the territory of being a girl.

All we wanted was a real coach, not a driver’s ed teacher. And we also wanted our own uniforms.

All we wanted was a real coach, not a driver’s ed teacher. And we wanted new uniforms.

And finally the #MeToo Movement was the oxygen that brought our memory back.

I think it allowed us a chance to revisit the toxic running culture we carried with us.

It’s funny how you can be so incredibly strong but so vulnerable at the same time.

Because our pride, our guts on the running track, kind of gave us a misplaced idea of power. We fell into a catch-22 of eating disorders and distorted body image.

And our vulnerability, our sex, was never protected by the insensitive coach or the groping boyfriend.

The boys never had to go through this, they owned their bodies, they were free to use and abuse their autonomy.

Looking back, I think we believed that equality would come with time. That we would outgrow the insecurity, like bell bottom jeans and big hair.

That things were moving forward.

But really the remembering is the only path back to healing, the acknowledging of the shame housed in those long ago locker rooms.

I think I can finally understand, not just cognitively, but on some physical level, that we were never to blame.

We just ran. We didn’t ask for the harassment.

To heal is to expose, to laser-cut the pain, and to hold it up to our families, to our communities. To call out and lay bare our shame.

And today I see that years ago we ran for so many complicated reasons.

We ran in fear, we ran confused.

We ran with and against the abusive climate of the times. We ran, all the while fighting against our own selves when we didn’t even know it.

And we ran to escape the systemic truths we were never built to understand at that tender age.

We ran because on some level we thought our bodies could withstand the abuses of men.

We thought that the world was changing, that the world was finally made for us.

But our endurance gave us the false belief that our running would protect us.

And now I recognize how critical it is to know what we know– to put the pieces of memory back together. So that my sister and I, now almost 60, can finally let go.

Because the trauma from the past is buried in our bodies, muscle memory. The beautiful runs, the jagged pain. All of it, is still with us.

And until we stop pushing it down, and tell our stories, that hurt will never completely heal.

But my sister and I are doing the work and we are healing. We’re in this together, like when we slogged through those killer 10 milers along the Kanawha River.

Those runs were so tough, but just when one of us would want to quit, the other would push.

We were, and are, stronger together.

And finally, the truth was this; we are women and we run, and that is enough.

My beekeeper friend Ryan came by yesterday with bad news.

The hive in our yard is not thriving, it is infested with parasites. And the old queen has become ineffective – she is aging, and not producing new brood.

We were optimistic earlier this year – the box looked beautiful – it was teeming with the perfect ratio of larvae, brood and honey.

And then something changed. And really, its anyone’s guess what went wrong.

But it strikes me how something can look so active and robust and at the same time be quietly rotting from within.

Everything seemed healthy, we pulled the frames out and saw the brown, ravaged comb.

In contrast, last summer it had the perfect thin, white casings over the amber globes – all of it glowing like a gold treasure. The puffy pregnant pockets bulged and dripped with the sweet honey.

The healthy wooden frame was like a progress report showing us how well we had cared for these little bees, how attentive we were to what threatened to kill them off.

Alas, this year tells a different story.

It tells of a season of neglect (maybe we didn’t treat the mites early enough).

Or too much rainfall at the wrong time. Or an old queen who refused to secede the throne. Or maybe some rogue drones who flew off in search of better things.

Of course, it is a folly.
It is such a small thing.
But such a small ache in my heart.

Of course, it is a folly. It is such a small thing. But such a small ache in my heart.

I used to believe that our years were like these hives – the rewards and failures could be measured one season to the next. Learning would cancel out any possibility for error. Our success would be linear.

And the failure was just that, a failure.

And I still look at things that way, sort of. But I also have to acknowledge the unpredictabilty of the entire venture.

And I imagine my brain as a honeybee comb.

The way it has these connections and also these unpredictable synapses. And it buzzes along, happy and productive most days, but dormant on other days – dark and inert.

And all of that sweet, golden potential within – stored and ready, but sometimes painfully difficult to extract.

Human and bee – with crenellated corpuscles that link to one another in a system that is ever-changing and alive. Channels of energy metabolized like sunshine to honey. Electric currents controlled by who knows what.

For the bee, each hexagon of the comb is where an egg will be laid (and who knows why it chooses that place?) and then larvae and then food will be produced to service the entire organism.

And all of it works together in a symphony

And it works so often. Unless it doesn’t.

The little honeybee – so perfectly programmed, like a robotic drone with a singular destination with no deviation in flight map.

And yet. To see the hive in the shank of summer, it is a glorious riot of chaos.

A drunken house party with bee bodies bumping against one another, crackling and popping in the heat.

Chaos and order. Random insect movements, and an orchestrated dance of pure joy.

So today, I raise my glass to last year’s crop (how did we ever take you for granted?) And I quietly watch the erratic and clumsy parade of bees.

It’s a little like Times Square on New Year’s Eve for bees, the desperation. But really more like a death watch.

But if the honeybee hive mind is anything like my own, I’ll hope for the repairs to come swiftly and with as little cost to the whole comb as possible.

And the sweetness?

It will come (I hope).

Or not.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops – at all

Emily Dickinson

When I’m feeling depressed, but I am still able to write, I feel a tiny bit of hope stir.

The depression swims deep, like blue veins in my arm, invisible, beneath the skin.

I want to tap my wrist to bring them to the surface. To expose the root of this sadness.

To see the disconnect, the defective wiring, the source of this pain.

So I try to rewire the circuits between body and brain. I go for a run and I percolate, and I ruminate.

And some days I play with ideas and words and images. I etch, erase, and edit.

It is a good day when I can write any of it down.

But as my jogging body stretches and unfolds – hips like cement, calves straining, my movements are stiff, slow and plodding. I’m hardly moving forward.

I have to breathe deep, loosen into the cadence, trying to knit the loose ends from the trauma back together.

And returning home, I am spent.

Later, doing chores, up and down the steps, my feet are heavy, I sometimes forget the task at hand.

In the kitchen, scrubbing the pots, the dry, cracked skin of my hand feels tight and sore as it pushes the yellow sponge, catching the the crumbs as it glides across the countertop.

The cool water rinses through my fingers at the tap as I lift and turn the lip of the scratched old pan, to rinse over and over.

Each task, done a thousand times.

But yesterday, after a hot shower, as I was drying off with the towel, my eye wandered to the framed watercolor hanging on the wall.

A soft pastoral scene of the West Virginia mountains, the New River Gorge near where I grew up. I’ve glanced at that picture nearly every day for years.

But today I saw it.

And I felt a tiny shift, a slight lift, in my mood. And I simply thought: I would love to have a notecard of that print to send to my friend.

And that was all.

I think that sometimes the best I can ever do is to keep moving up and down, I can’t always move forward. There won’t always be any actual progress.

But maybe this is what healing looks like.

Maybe healing is simply being able to notice. Maybe, for even just a moment, it is seeing color.

Maybe it is a glance of the mountain’s horizon through smoke. Maybe it is the memory of an old friend.

Maybe healing is squinting my eyes at an imagined vanishing point – not seeing an ending, but being curious about a possible beginning.

Maybe healing is this tiny flutter deep in my brain – a lightening, a levity, a curiosity, a question.

Maybe healing is writing these words, my restless rustling, like a thing with feathers.

Maybe it is hope.