Return to the world

Return to the world. 

I can't see the labyrinth right now--blanketed in snow.  In the autumn, Avery planted dozens of bulbs and I know there are flowers curved into their seeds, under the frozen earth right now, biding their time.  I saw the muddy stretch she created when she planted rows of tulips pointed out to the labyrinth. 

 Neighbors report sighting bobcats on the neighborhood app where we talk about lost dogs, the destruction of signs and mailboxes, the abridged hours of the coffee shops desperate for help.  Coyotes are mating in the woods at the edge of our backyard and our golden doodle is mad for a chance to what? He barks and barks into the dark, bemoaning his electronic collar, wishing to fight them? join their strange cries in the night? What would my giraffe of a dog--all limbs akimbo and full heart and scant brainpower--do out in the wild woods with the real animals? Sebby is a Velveteen rabbit of a dog--almost a child's version of a dog, all softness and late night cuddles, and never baring of teeth. 

The bog is too frozen for me as well.  My bones in certain places are thin and fragile and I can't risk a broken bone anymore than my mother can.  I have a real fear about a simple, commonplace injury, which is not to say not devastating--like a broken hip or ankle or wrist--which could lead me irrevocably down the path to a quick death.  

But I've been to the bog enough times to walk the icy path in my mind, rounding the bend where you choose through the woods or the more public path that circles the bog where the cranberries wait, each year, for the cultivation the town has decided makes no financial sense.  I can still picture in my mind's eye one harvest soon after we moved here: the impossibly blue sky, the bright berries, the men in waders up to their armpits. 

I've hardly ever been afraid in those woods, and it's not because Sebby would protect me from anyone with better snacks than me.  I'm generally not afraid anymore, of the kind of tall man who I used to worry would appear in a forest, so clearly not of this world, a shadow that intimated the uncanny.  I'm afraid of absences now, of not being here while everyone else continues on, of not hearing with clarity from those who have left, my grandmother, Robin. I've stopped listening for the soft footfall in the hallway on a late night, and begun to listen to the quality of my breath, then the next one.

After radiation, I dug myself into a small hole of sadness, and, as my friends who have been around this block with me before watched, I hid a little bit from the world.  The weather was perfectly nineteenth century novel--exterior matched the interior.  Frozen rain building layers of ice upon ice in the driveway made the mailbox aspirational. My dear friends kept knocking, my beloved therapist showed up again and again, there was hot chocolate with a marshmallow that had Hershey's chocolate inside the marshmallow (which was as delightful to me as it was ridiculousness), there was a lot of reading, there were snuggles with small people and phone calls with big people.  And I began to return to the world.

The governor lifted the mask mandate in the school.  I asked Asher what he thought and he answered, aghast at the alternative: "I'm going to keep wearing a mask of course!" I asked him why. "To protect you. And other people." Pause. "But mostly you."

I worry that it's all too much, too much cancer, too much pandemic, too much heartache for the twins to bear witness, and then I can easily begin to beat myself up about the lost childhoods of my older kids.  But I will say something with some pride.  My people all know how to love people. And to receive love.

My father used to tell us to put a hat on when we complained of being cold in the winter.  Indoors.  I get it, of course, Dad.  We have a geothermal system which runs on electricity and that bill comes right out of my checking account.  Sometimes it's like a mortgage payment.  Or a hefty downpayment on a diamond ring.  Or half the price of renting a cottage on Chebeague Island. 

It's really cold this winter, agreed all the women in my metastatic group this morning.  We were all bundled in sweaters and hoodies and extra blankets.  Some of us are looking too thin.  Some of us are looking like we might float away on a lethal cocktail of edema and neuropathy.  

I hate fake heat--I don't like the heat in cars, I don't like overwarm houses, I like to have the windows open.  But I broke down and ordered a heated mattress cover from Target that the Wirecutter recommended, because that's how I roll.  In California, when I just had Cameron and Zachary, I used to semi-bitterly joke that I couldn't go into Target without spending fifty dollars.  Oh the fifty dollars.  For a time, that probably became something like two or three hundred dollars.  Then cancer and the pandemic happened, and I've gone back to just buying the thing I wanted.  One $79 dollar heated mattress cover.  

I have a knitted hat someone kindly left for a client in the lobby at the Healing Garden.  I don't know if we have talked about how giant my head is, or how giant heads run in my family.  It is.  They do.  This little orange knitted cap is too small for my head, but there is no one to witness this but the kids and the nanny and occasionally the UPS guy. 

The thing about no-knead bread is that it's not cheating.  There are a lot of ways to get the flour, the salt, the water to become bread and one way is kneading, and one way is folding, and one way is to mix up  bread flour, kosher salt, a tiny 1/4 teaspoon of yeast, and water and wait twelve to eighteen hours before giving it a final rise in a dutch oven and throwing into a very hot oven.  It's just letting time do the work for you.  That's really what is magical about bread making--just flour sitting in bags in the cupboard (a lot of flour for me right now, it's a problem but better than other problems--white, white whole wheat, whole wheat, pastry, whole wheat pastry, spelt, rye, six-grain, nine-grain) and a long overnight rise, and then bread.  It's the same with the season.  All we see is the white flare of the snow when we glance out the window, but eventually heat is going to draw out the crocus.  

I think you know I used to softly complain that the problem with telling girls they can be anything they want--a kind of slogan summary of seventies feminism--is that they really can't, because you start making choices that foreclose other choices. The big choices have to do with reproduction, and sometimes marriage.  But think of all the choices, for example, that I started making in about the eighth grade that meant I was never going to be an astronaut, no matter the power of reinvention.  That I wasn't actually going to have a later stage where I was a high school English teacher, or a divorce lawyer, or a hospice social worker, or a therapist, or a poet who wrote poetry as a way of making a living.  I don't know why I used to see this set of choices through the lens of feminism, but I see it as more of an existential threat now. I used to think, well, we should tell girls they can be anything, but remind them that they can't be everything.  It's also peculiarly a mindset most connected with the first third or so of life.  What am I going to be when I grow up? Will you be a carpenter? A hedge fund lawyer? An actor? A pediatrician? A farmer?

And we work so much, and we need to, and so it's not the wrong question.  But it's not the only question.  I think we all agree on this, but I don't recall asking my kids if they were going to love what is in front of them? Well, that's not it exactly. I can wish for a hundred other lives, and sometimes, in my actual dreams (not my dreams of being discovered like Emily Dickinson, after I die, when my children rummage through my electronic sheafs of poetry, but my dreams when my body is still and the midwinter is dark and the coyotes are rustling about), sometimes when I dream of the same rooms, the same narrow passageways, the same words on a page, the same recipes for pastries that I have dreamt before over and over, those dreams seem more like my waking life.   Impossibly real.  I wake up and don't know if this, this dog and almost ten year old boy scooting me out of my own bed and onto the couch, this quiet house, this quickening life, is the real.

I lost my train of thought. What I mean is I think I'm finally learning to love what is mine, what is here, what is now, and this must just be what aging is, yes? Wanting to sink deep into what has been carved out for me and by me, and spending less and less time imagining other lives for myself other than this precise one.  I want to go to Norway, but I really expect to go to the bog in springtime.  I don't want to invent or chase after other lives.  I want to live this one. 

I used to say that I hoped my children would be critical thinkers, would love and be loved, and would not be serial killers.  Those were the wishes for them I thought I could say out loud. I think that I know by now that either my children are not serial killers or, that they are very clever serial killers who have kept it from me, which is probably just the same.  For me, anyhow. 

I still hold to these truths for them, and they are good enough for me too.  I have loved and been loved.  I am a critical thinker to the extent the words I am swimming in allow me that space.  I am not a serial killer--or even a mundane sort of one-off crime of passion kind of killer. I no longer expect to meet a killer in the woods.  I no longer imagine I will open a small store in Vermont, in a small town, where I stock cinnamon rolls and yarn and books and wine and dispense advice and grow to be a very old grandmother.  But I do still expect to return to the world.  Tomorrow and the next day.  I try not to be bound by fear, and I want to embrace what is here, in front of me.  Not to foreclose desire, but to desire the world I have.

This morning, I woke into a world determined by pain.  That was today.  It will pass, it won't pass.  My prose fails me. I got my sneakers on, but Kyle had to tie them.  A lovely friend came for a walk, but instead the dogs wrestled on the living room floor and I ate a delicious Sumo orange she brought to me. Tonight the boys crawled into bed with me to study for their science tests tomorrow.  The life cycle of an animal, Elijah told me, goes from birth to growth to adult to reproduction to death.  He eyed me warily and pronounced me as being in the reproductive stage.  And perhaps, writ large, I am.