summer storms
The thunder came rolling in this afternoon, sweeping out the heat with a hurry of breezes. I sat on the front porch to bear witness.
The bog has been sweltering. The air is heavy and the heron sits motionless, like a statue daring the dogs and the geese to swim close, imperious. You could miss him so easily.
I was at the bog the other day with my mother and my Aunt Rose and there was an unruly man with his unruly dogs. They were upon us, unleashed, raucous. Sebby, our puppy, scrambled for protection amidst my feet, and soon there were something like three dogs in-between my legs, one barking sharply. And the man mumbled and pulled out ineffectual dog treats, and we women were like three nineteenth-century novel's heroines: put out, affronted, highly annoyed.
Eventually the situation somehow righted itself, and we went off down the path, self-righteous. This is the problem with no leashes, we said with our straight backs--it's the owners who don't have their dogs under control.
But it was a rare moment where there was no control, where anything seemed it could happen. Perhaps my mother would be toppled by a dog and break a bone. Perhaps a strange dog would bite the cowering Sebby. Perhaps we would be pulled in to closer intimacy with the bumbling man, who we longed would just take his dogs and go off walking anywhere but our bog.
We laughed at ourselves a bit--I pictured us with parasols, one of us the plucky heroine, determined to marry for love, one of us the dullard sister, already married, perhaps the third the deceiving minor cousin. But we aren't a Dickens novel at all. If anything, we are a late twentieth-century novel of family, a novel of manners and circumstance, where the mother's death brings about what? Healing? Disintegration of things they thought they could count on? I know we aren't a twenty-first novel, because there is no future here. There is just today. Although my foot still bears the three scratch marks from a dog's paw where my foot bled after the dogs sorted themselves out. It was surprisingly deep; I don't know if it will scar.
I am looking forward to fall days at the bog, when the heat lifts a bit, and the haze clears. We have leaves starting to turn here--the lush green trees have a handful of red leaves in and amongst. But I confess I have a hard, cold space in my heart when I wish for the fall. I can't bear to think in terms of last times. My last fall. My last time to walk with so much strength and purpose as I can now, right into those fall days with the edge of cold which promise winter. I don't know. I don't know if this is my last fall.
None of us do, of course, and I try to brush off my maudlin fears and reach for strength and humor. Those qualities keep edging just out of reach as I wait for test results, and contemplate biopsies and genetic markers. There is still a part of me, the director, who can say, ah, that is sadness. Ah, those are big, ragged, sloppy tears--cries for more time, always for more time to sit on the porch and feel the rain rush the corn field. As long as I can find the still place within me and name the feelings, I am not completely without hope, I am not lost.
When we bring our whole self to the experience, I don't know if we still allow for that director's role, that inner voice noting the despair that threatens to throw off my whole enterprise of writing, reading, cooking, and loving that I have constructed as a life here at the edge of mine. I don't know if I have ever been unaware of that inner voice--perhaps in labor. Perhaps at the first moment I was told I had cancer. Perhaps as a young child.
I do believe that the inner destructive critic's voice I carry with me is learning to shut the hell up a bit more these days. On the one hand, I can't possibly be bothered with worrying about so many of the concerns I carried with me such a short time ago, taking them out and polishing them. Like how I look for example, or career. I can only now remember, with a bit of jealousy, the self that used to stumble to work in the early dawn, fretting over how my hair looked, or how fat I was, or whether those blue shoes were entirely too frumpy (I hear you out there saying if they were blue shoes then yes, entirely too frumpy). I care about how I look now, I suppose, but I've given up entirely on beauty, on being pulled together. I'm so grateful to be clean and standing at the end of the driveway, waving good-bye to the boys as they get on the big yellow school bus taking them into their own, private days. I miss worrying about work, I miss being a person with a job, and a job I really quite enjoyed--oh the busyness, and the crises, and the people. The people were from a Dickens novel--some of them, caricatures of virtue or greed, of ego or of hapless love. You know who they are: you have them, too. But I'll never have that again, and I mostly don't mind.
It's time that I pine for, that sense of time rolling out, time to watch the children grow, time to watch my beloved grow old, time to be the parent I still am, today, everyday, time to hold my children's children.
But there I go, the misty old thing.
When I come to you like this, I am including my brokenness.
I still need to free myself from the judge inside me. I don't need the appraisals and certainly not the attacks anymore, and I yearn to be free from the suffering such an internal critic can generate. I need my moral compass, and I need to learn not to wander through these pathways of fear and worry and anxiety. I've already learned to do less. I no longer live in the world before cancer, when I rushed to work, and I rushed back home. I am living in nature's rhythm now, like it or not, and my body has a timetable I can only change at the margins. I hope to reclaim enough of the calm I had before this recent news--the news that the medicine has stopped working--so that my experience can deepen and be integrated with the world outside my front porch, where the heron waits so patiently his repose could be mistaken for the absence of life.
The storm blew in, the dogs rushed towards us, the news was not good. What I can't do is manage the circumstances such that I can avoid pain and death.
My happiness cannot depend on me having another body, one not riddled with cancer. What I have, the shorn head of hair, the days left with my children, the love between myself and Kyle, between myself and my family, between myself and my dear friends, is good enough. How can my enemy be myself? It cannot stand.
I am here now. We are here now.
As Ursula K. LeGuin said, the hand that rocks the cradle writes the book. These words, those people---that is the beginning and the end of who I am and my time here.
The bog has been sweltering. The air is heavy and the heron sits motionless, like a statue daring the dogs and the geese to swim close, imperious. You could miss him so easily.
I was at the bog the other day with my mother and my Aunt Rose and there was an unruly man with his unruly dogs. They were upon us, unleashed, raucous. Sebby, our puppy, scrambled for protection amidst my feet, and soon there were something like three dogs in-between my legs, one barking sharply. And the man mumbled and pulled out ineffectual dog treats, and we women were like three nineteenth-century novel's heroines: put out, affronted, highly annoyed.
Eventually the situation somehow righted itself, and we went off down the path, self-righteous. This is the problem with no leashes, we said with our straight backs--it's the owners who don't have their dogs under control.
But it was a rare moment where there was no control, where anything seemed it could happen. Perhaps my mother would be toppled by a dog and break a bone. Perhaps a strange dog would bite the cowering Sebby. Perhaps we would be pulled in to closer intimacy with the bumbling man, who we longed would just take his dogs and go off walking anywhere but our bog.
We laughed at ourselves a bit--I pictured us with parasols, one of us the plucky heroine, determined to marry for love, one of us the dullard sister, already married, perhaps the third the deceiving minor cousin. But we aren't a Dickens novel at all. If anything, we are a late twentieth-century novel of family, a novel of manners and circumstance, where the mother's death brings about what? Healing? Disintegration of things they thought they could count on? I know we aren't a twenty-first novel, because there is no future here. There is just today. Although my foot still bears the three scratch marks from a dog's paw where my foot bled after the dogs sorted themselves out. It was surprisingly deep; I don't know if it will scar.
I am looking forward to fall days at the bog, when the heat lifts a bit, and the haze clears. We have leaves starting to turn here--the lush green trees have a handful of red leaves in and amongst. But I confess I have a hard, cold space in my heart when I wish for the fall. I can't bear to think in terms of last times. My last fall. My last time to walk with so much strength and purpose as I can now, right into those fall days with the edge of cold which promise winter. I don't know. I don't know if this is my last fall.
None of us do, of course, and I try to brush off my maudlin fears and reach for strength and humor. Those qualities keep edging just out of reach as I wait for test results, and contemplate biopsies and genetic markers. There is still a part of me, the director, who can say, ah, that is sadness. Ah, those are big, ragged, sloppy tears--cries for more time, always for more time to sit on the porch and feel the rain rush the corn field. As long as I can find the still place within me and name the feelings, I am not completely without hope, I am not lost.
When we bring our whole self to the experience, I don't know if we still allow for that director's role, that inner voice noting the despair that threatens to throw off my whole enterprise of writing, reading, cooking, and loving that I have constructed as a life here at the edge of mine. I don't know if I have ever been unaware of that inner voice--perhaps in labor. Perhaps at the first moment I was told I had cancer. Perhaps as a young child.
I do believe that the inner destructive critic's voice I carry with me is learning to shut the hell up a bit more these days. On the one hand, I can't possibly be bothered with worrying about so many of the concerns I carried with me such a short time ago, taking them out and polishing them. Like how I look for example, or career. I can only now remember, with a bit of jealousy, the self that used to stumble to work in the early dawn, fretting over how my hair looked, or how fat I was, or whether those blue shoes were entirely too frumpy (I hear you out there saying if they were blue shoes then yes, entirely too frumpy). I care about how I look now, I suppose, but I've given up entirely on beauty, on being pulled together. I'm so grateful to be clean and standing at the end of the driveway, waving good-bye to the boys as they get on the big yellow school bus taking them into their own, private days. I miss worrying about work, I miss being a person with a job, and a job I really quite enjoyed--oh the busyness, and the crises, and the people. The people were from a Dickens novel--some of them, caricatures of virtue or greed, of ego or of hapless love. You know who they are: you have them, too. But I'll never have that again, and I mostly don't mind.
It's time that I pine for, that sense of time rolling out, time to watch the children grow, time to watch my beloved grow old, time to be the parent I still am, today, everyday, time to hold my children's children.
But there I go, the misty old thing.
When I come to you like this, I am including my brokenness.
I still need to free myself from the judge inside me. I don't need the appraisals and certainly not the attacks anymore, and I yearn to be free from the suffering such an internal critic can generate. I need my moral compass, and I need to learn not to wander through these pathways of fear and worry and anxiety. I've already learned to do less. I no longer live in the world before cancer, when I rushed to work, and I rushed back home. I am living in nature's rhythm now, like it or not, and my body has a timetable I can only change at the margins. I hope to reclaim enough of the calm I had before this recent news--the news that the medicine has stopped working--so that my experience can deepen and be integrated with the world outside my front porch, where the heron waits so patiently his repose could be mistaken for the absence of life.
The storm blew in, the dogs rushed towards us, the news was not good. What I can't do is manage the circumstances such that I can avoid pain and death.
My happiness cannot depend on me having another body, one not riddled with cancer. What I have, the shorn head of hair, the days left with my children, the love between myself and Kyle, between myself and my family, between myself and my dear friends, is good enough. How can my enemy be myself? It cannot stand.
I am here now. We are here now.
As Ursula K. LeGuin said, the hand that rocks the cradle writes the book. These words, those people---that is the beginning and the end of who I am and my time here.
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