Category Archives: Personal

Write About Home? (27)

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Write about home. That was the writing prompt on April 17th, 2012. Ten minutes. Go.

I think home for me may be anywhere I feel safe and centered and at rest. If I can feel all of these things, I can feel at home in a motel beside of a busy highway. If I’m on edge, off kilter, then I can’t rest in myself, am itchy in my skin, can’t settle. I seem to go for long stretches now where I’m at rest with myself, and then the patio cement wobbles, the windowpanes rattle, and I am on my knees, angry at myself for falling down, for trying to stand up and not being able to. I eat too much, resist the work waiting for me. Essays go ungraded, dishes make a small city in the kitchen sink. When I was much younger, I had a rule about eating for comfort. I would assemble the food beside the television. And then I’d lie on the couch and had to feel whatever it was I was needing to feel. After a good cry, the Cheetos became my reward. I miss Cheetos. Last night I ate savory rice crackers out of the bag and then a small bowl of peanut butter and brown rice syrup and lost myself in a book about Mexico. This morning I lingered in bed and the tears came. They brought me home again.

My Boo, My Barometer (26)

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My black cat lying on the bed

My cat Sable has a habit of yelling at me whenever I’m wound too tight. On days when my stress is high, he makes me even crazier. He paces, never settles, emits loud ceaseless meows while he stares at me. “Don’t you dare,” I tell him when it threatens to send me over the edge I’m already skirting. “Not today, Boo.” I shake my head. “I can’t handle it today.” When he doesn’t give up, I often end up screaming at him. “Enough,” I yell. “Enough.” It isn’t something I’m proud of. Last Friday when he started his endless howling, I told him he was just going to have to deal with my anxiety. “I am already too tense,” I say in a hard, brittle voice. “The last thing I need today is you yelling at me.” Of course, he keeps it up. He’s a cat. He stalks from kitchen to front stoop and back again, his cat roars punctuating the winter air, poking me in the eyeballs, the back of my head. It is worse than nails on chalkboard, worse than the old scratchy LP stuck on the turntable, the endless jarring repetitive noise. I want to scream at him, but I sit down instead. “You want kisses?” I ask him. I pat the bed beside me. He leaps up, still howling away, but quiets when I pet him. I’ve always known he’s my barometer, but I finally get how he can guide me. I let everything else fall away for a few moments while I stroke him, his whole soft little self vibrating with his big purrs. Is it really that simple? I wonder. Is it really just a choice for each moment, to drop back down to calm, to stop the frenzied pace and the racing mind and just be, warm black fur beneath my fingers?

The Pressure Mounts (25)

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The Friday before last I grumped my way through my morning chores. I felt like I had to rush now that things had amped up again during the first week of the semester. I had to hurry up and get the basics out of the way so I could work on school stuff. I was cranky about not being able to take my time, whether I was pouring hot water over herbs for the cats or sweeping the patio. I hate rushing, don’t know how to do it without getting tense. I could feel myself resisting having to hurry. “So much for sneaking up on high gear and keeping my peace,” I muttered while I washed the dishes with quick strokes. Three nights ago I had bad dreams. In one I came home and found the door standing open, my dog missing. I went out in the rain to find her, stood in the dark and saw someone else’s pet lying dead on the wet street. I remember waking in the night, lying there worrying about whether or not the toilet might fall through the floor, then trying to figure out the best way to approach some temporary online data entry and editing work I’d just begun. My fingers were making little noises as they moved back and forth against the down blanket covering my ear, inadvertent motions, the scratchy sounds of my stress.

October 27, 2013 (19)

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Yesterday afternoon I tackled cleaning the storage shed for the first time. I pulled everything out, made piles in the courtyard of anything that couldn’t get wet–my art supplies, my photographs, my Christmas stuff–put everything else on the pavers between our tree, Serena, and the shed. I hosed off shovels and rakes, empty crates, cat carriers. I swept the shelves, the floor, then turned the hose on the inside of the shed, ceiling and all. I felt a flicker of panic for one moment while I stood there, hose in hand, water dripping on my head. All that water everywhere, all that wet, unfinished wood. Did I just ruin something? An impulse from childhood, maybe, that favorite stuffed dog I left out in the rain. It freaked me out, too, seeing all my boxes filling the courtyard. It was too evocative, I think, of all those weeks after we moved here when almost everything I owned sat outside. But today I can trust I’ll put everything away again. And in the early dusk yesterday when I’d finished hosing everything off, I felt that deep satisfaction that’s been so rare in these long months of summer, of having done a thorough cleaning, a careful, complete job. I chained my bike to Serena, just in case. I slid the window open in the shed, left the door propped wide so it could dry out. And all through the warm summer evening the smell of wet wood drifted in the open windows of our trailer, making me feel good over and over each time the scent reached me, reminding me I’d done this–this satisfying, tangible thing.

May 2014 Be Sweet (13)

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Trailer_Lights_Moon

I came close to not writing a piece for my Christmas cards this year, to just sending them out with my love. But writing an annual greeting reminds me of the new year or birthdays, a chance to step back, to scan the year before, the hawk gliding on the thermals, the big picture spread below her. I want to not be too lazy to look. And I want very much to return to being a writer, to immerse myself in writing long enough for it to seep out my pores, thoughts rising through my days, steam drifting up from wet pavement after a summer rain.

On February 2nd I agreed to buy our new old trailer home. After I said the words on the phone, I fell over, banged my knee hard on the tile floor of our old apartment. I was gone already, I think. But a voice had whispered to me to walk by that day in the rain when I saw the for sale sign, and the trailer sat on that stretch of road I’d studied for years, easing myself closer and closer to making the leap to living in a tin can. Then the fence, the A/C fiascos left me gun shy at this home ownership stuff, rocked my faith in myself, disturbed my demons. Summer was brutal, and they began building across that stretch of road. The cottontails and roadrunners and I were displaced, desperate. I made false starts again and again. There were times I didn’t know if I’d ever make it all the way back.

But I did. Thanks to the kindness of the gods, I scrabbled all the way back to joy. My writing is the last to return. I want that richness, that extra layer woven through my days and nights. So today I make another effort in that direction. I sit in our courtyard, notebook propped against my knees. In the lull from the construction site, I hear birds. I count six house finch, two goldfinch and one hummingbird perched on the bare branches of my neighbor’s tree. Yesterday at dusk the moon was rising. The solar Christmas lights spread glowing reds and greens and blues along the fence. And birds have begun to sit in our palo verde. Today I bought a headband with aqua feathers to wear to the new year’s eve party here in the park. I plan to dance, to laugh, to sing. I look at the leafless branches of the neighbor’s tree again, and now there’s one lone mourning dove, his small form still against the late afternoon sky. I watch him for a long time. My cats are both napping nearby. I feel grateful and quiet and full.

I hope this finds you equally at home—in your skin, your life, your year. May 2014 be sweet and gentle and glad in its unfolding.

After Chavasana (12)

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Branches, sky and clouds

Today was cloudy. I began doing my qi gong in a long sleeved shirt and a heavy vest that I had to take off halfway through. By the time I start my yoga, I am wearing my light T-shirt with the hummingbirds on the front because the sun’s come out. I turn my back to it to do my sun salutations. After chavasana, I lie on my back on my yoga mat. Almost all the clouds are gone, and the sky is a deeper blue than I remember seeing in ages. The only clouds left are in the middle of my sky, backdrop for our palo verde. I lie in the courtyard longer than I mean to, watch the green branches against the white clouds, relish the blue of the sky. White crowned sparrows flit from pavement to tree to pavement again. Sable pounces toward a mourning dove on the ground who gets away. The breeze comes, and the goldfinch sway on the palo verde’s green tips. I hear the chimes. I know I need to get up, but I keep lying here. I hug my knees to my chest, wiggle my bare toes, marvel at December in Palm Springs.

The Thinning Veil (8)

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This waiting to feel like myself again is mysterious, elusive. There are times when I forget I’m not yet normal, laughing on the phone with Colleen or glancing up from the computer to see the mountains spread before me, my fondness for our new home springing up. But other moments I feel flat, separate, behaving like the me I know but not feeling like her. There is still wonder everywhere. I know this. The big grasshopper on the sunflower, the mourning doves pecking at the fallen seed below the tray feeder, the roadrunner caught in the corner of my eye when I am working, the hummingbird alighting on the guava tree outside the window–gemstone through glass. A veil between us, I think, a muting of wonder. Unbelievably thin, subtle. Even the coyote watching me with his mouth full of raven, gossamer fluttering between us.