Long weekend visiting old friends

people we haven't seen since before the pandemic, in a place we haven't visited in years before that, but here, we so easily fall back into the rhythm of our relationship, as if nothing has changed even as everything has changed. Let me tell you a story about this friend

a time when I was entangled in a toxic stew of a mess way beyond my paygrade (I was a volunteer) with people who had utterly confounded me, and one day after a particularly exhausting and maddening interaction, I found myself crying on the phone to her, and then, just as suddenly stopped

because I didn't DO that, cry in front of people, never mind spill out my guts, so I immediately apologized, and my friend said, gently, You don't have to apologize, Jody, you're my friend. Which actually got me crying again for a moment, because how kind that was, and what a gift, never mind a lesson in how to be a good friend. 

This time there is no crying, but lots of catching up and lively conversation. Also, we had to install the Little Free Library my husband had made for her and her husband. This is a new hobby of my husband's that started back in the fall when I asked him to build one for me and has morphed into him making several more, including two for an elementary school in our neighborhood. 

I am bragging about this here because I know he will never brag about himself but LOOK HOW ADORABLE THIS IS:

One of the topics I keep bringing up in conversation with everyone in my orbit is how do we make sense of Things, the utter craziness of the world lately, or really, forever, as some of us are only more recently waking up to it, and no one seems to know the answer. Sometimes, I confess, I can get quite emotional when I bring up this topic, and I immediately want to reel it back in, apologize, but this time

I don't, remembering who I am with. We are sitting on the front porch, drinking our coffee this morning, and one of my friend's neighbors walks by and comments on the new Little Free Library and how nice it is. It is warm and sunny and lovely outside and birds are singing all over the place and my friend shows me an app on her phone that can identify bird sounds, 

and then we go back to chatting and sipping our coffee and it occurs to me that there is no answer to my question because we can't make sense of things that don't make sense. 

And maybe that's okay, at least in this moment, when there are little free libraries and spring mornings and coffee and kind neighbors and singing birds and dear friends.

One Sunday morning

in church and I was little, squirming in the polished pews, my baby brother crawling under the seats, popping up like a prairie dog between the other church-goers' feet, the irritated sighs and judgmental whispers, and no one in my pew capable of fixing the situation. Embarrassed, I stalked outside and did flips on the metal railing by the rectory until a priest caught me and asked why I was skipping mass, 

but how could I verbalize back then my shame? For my brother who was too young to feel it. For my parents who were old enough but didn't seem to feel it either. And who else was going to take on the feeling but me, and what an expert I became at that. Regardless, 

it wasn't a good reason to miss mass, so the priest led me back inside the church, and that was double the shame. Triple. Quadruple. The mortification blooming, swelling, replicating like a virus. Be kind to them, he told me. Forgive them. 

I did. I did. Still, sometimes I wish he'd said be kind to yourself too, for you are also worthy of forgiveness. That lesson took half a lifetime to learn and it didn't happen in church. This morning 

the two newborn mourning doves in the nest on the back porch bob their small heads, their parents, good parents, close by and mindful. My husband coos at them, and after a beat, they coo back. God only knows what they are saying, but isn't it lovely, the song.

Yesterday it graupled again

Graupel is a word I've just learned. Basically, it's a version of snow-sleet-hail. On a spring walk with the dog, the sun shining when we set out, then turning, the dark clouds moving in, spitting the strange mixture out. It bounced off my coat sleeve and off the dog's head. Soft pellets that remind me of styrofoam balls, and I can't help thinking about the end of the world, like the pictures my son sent me from San Francisco when the city was surrounded by burning fires and the sky went orange.

When was that? I search the word orange in my journal and find this entry on September 10, 2020: "the light is orange and eerie. [My son] told me a few days ago that he and his girlfriend have jugs of water in the car and are ready to go at a moment's notice. He said, if we go, we'll just keep going and never go back." 

I had forgotten he told me this. Something handy about keeping a digital journal is that I can do a word search for anything. Orange, for example. Or my mother. Holidays. The dog. Places I traveled. Lettuce. And every kind of weather--and instantly find my thoughts on whatever topic going back nearly twenty years. 

For the past several weeks I've been reading David Sedaris's collection of diary entries. David Sedaris is a serious journal writer and I love him for it. His first set of published entries can be found in the collection Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) and his latest is A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003–2020). The entries cover the mundane: overheard conversations, recipes, how much money he earned at odd jobs--

to the serious: his mother's cancer, his troubled relationship with his father; and in between, lots of funny and absurd encounters and observations. He says in the introduction that he could've chosen any number of entries to include and given a totally different sense of himself--as someone more stupid or generous or selfish or sensitive. "On any given day," he says, "I am all of these things and more."  

The same year of the orange sky, our next door neighbor climbed a ladder and took down the orange painted shutters on our new-old house. I made cranberry-orange nut bread with my daughter when she was living with us during the lockdown. One day my mother brought over some oranges and an open package of figs.

I wrote: "I don’t understand the fig thing. She said she didn't want them. Not sure why she wouldn’t throw the rest of the package out. This is interesting to me. She and her siblings were raised in a poor household and now, 75 years later, they’re still anxious about waste. It makes me wonder how long the effects of covid will last. Kids growing up now—what will it do to them fundamentally? Crowds, hand washing, coughing, masks?" 

I forgot that I had written this too. It's a weird feeling keeping a journal for so long. Regularly since 2007, but before that, sporadically, going all the way back to when I was nine years old. I wrote for myself, or sometimes I envisioned a Future Me reading, and now, I guess, I am the Future Me. 

In two years, five, I imagine myself doing a word search for graupel. It won't show up at all until April, 2022. And then, maybe I will never write about it again. 

Or maybe it is only the beginning of our strange weather.

First Seeds

It snowed two days ago, but today I am planting lettuce. Years of pushing seeds in the ground and I still think there's something magical about the first shoots poking up out of the dirt. A month from now, two? I will be collecting whole salad spinners worth of leaves and if that's not a sign of faith, hope, love, I don't know what is. The world keeps whirling.

The mourning dove that (stupidly, ignorantly, kindly) sat on a cowbird egg last year, is back and possibly about to hatch another cowbird. Every time I open the back door to let the dog out, the two of us look at each other. Not the dog. The bird. Her eyes are glassy and wide and I have never seen them closed. Always vigilant. So, we have that in common.

For a year I have been writing pieces of something that could be a memoir. The process is like digging around in the dirt. What's down there? What should I leave right where it is? What needs to be lifted out, exposed to the light? The truth is I don't know.

The truth is I have something to say, but I'm not sure I should say it. But when has that ever stopped me? My plan for planting the lettuce is to clear the moldering leaves from the hard, packed ground. See what lies beneath. Draw lines with my finger in the dirt and drop the seeds. It may take the entire afternoon, but I'm in no hurry. It takes time to plant,

time to hatch a cowbird, time to write the truth.      

You can't take it with you

Just as I was waking up this morning, the two books I've been reading merged together in my mind and I had a lightning bolt moment of insight that made so much sense to me, I immediately wanted to write it down. The common theme is people in the second half of life, and what do you do with the knowledge that you are slowing down while the world is still speeding along? Resist 

or accept? Take my hair, for example. During the pandemic I stopped getting it colored, and slowly, my naturally darker hair came back, but with strips of white and gray along the sides of my face, the overall effect some might call the "Madwoman in the Forest Look," but then my daughter said it was cool, and anyway, who cares, Mom? It's not like you're going anywhere, seeing people. 

But now I am, sorta, going places, seeing people, and I've decided I don't really care, It's hair. Whatever. Still, every once in a while, I catch a glimpse of myself and think, Who is that? 

Me. But suddenly, older. Old. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Even so, it's different. You spend half your life working toward something, accumulating stuff, planning for some distant future, coloring your hair, and the next thing you know... 

maybe you don't want to do any of that anymore? 

Or maybe you don't have the energy or you forgot why you wanted some of those things you used to want so badly or you look around at the world and think This is Crazy and Awful, and maybe it was always this way but you didn't see it before because you were... busy? And now you have all of this time to think about it, except, 

you don't, really, have ALL OF THIS TIME, do you? 

Anyway, the two books I've been reading are:

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, which is about a fifty-eight year old woman, who until recently, felt that she was on the top of her game, mentoring students at a small liberal arts college where she is a professor, keeping up with the changing times, adjusting happily to her grown daughter being out of the house, but then, her husband is accused of having affairs with several of his students and suddenly all eyes are on our main character, the campus swirling with rumors, judging her as complicit in her husband's escapades or as the foolish, dowdy, cast-off wife. 

Enter: Vladimir, the new hunky young(er) professor, and now our aging main character wonders if it's too late for her to have her own affairs, her own adventures, or is she past her prime?

The second book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, by Arthur C. Brooks is about very successful people and how hard they work and continue to strive as they get older, not wanting to face their inevitable decline, and then either doubling down on the work and the striving, running in the rat race until the bitter end 

OR switching gears and finding a different kind of fulfillment. There are all kinds of fun examples of people who pushed themselves right up to death and were miserable and people who took different paths and were more content, the ludicrousness of accumulating stuff when you can't take any of it with you, but how human it is to want to keep pushing and taking, and how all of that is really about our fear of dying. But what-are-ya-gonna-do? 

Don't worry, the book has the answer: Stop coloring your hair. (haha just joking. You'll need to read the book yourself to find out.) 

So, I don't know how these two books melded in my mind this morning as I was waking up, but they did, for just a second, hover there together, making me think I had some great new understanding about life and the inevitability of death and getting old, and also, at the same time, about fighting getting old and pretending I'm not going to die. 

Unfortunately, it slipped away from me and now we're all going to have to figure it out for ourselves. 

Car Show: A Love Story

I hate the Columbus Ohio Car Show, but my husband loves it, so every year--well, every year except for the past two pandemic years--we go. Usually, it's my birthday present to him. The tickets, dinner out first, and then down to the convention center for a stroll through the new cars. 

Part of the gift is that I'm a good sport about it. At least I try to be, not blurting out, for example, how much I hate the car show even though while I'm strolling through the car show, that's sometimes a thought that will pop into my head. This is what we do for the people we love and who love us. Go with them, sometimes, to the places they love, even when we hate those same places. 

It helps that in previous years of the car show, the ticket takers hand out a scavenger hunt-- a list of car parts and features to find while you're doing the strolling. If you find all of the car parts and features, you can enter a drawing to win prizes. I don't care about the prizes, but I do get a weird kick out of doing the scavenger hunt and so does my husband, and every year, pre-pandemic, he'd have a great time, and I'd surprise myself by having a great time too. 

Cut to: 

The car show was last week and after I got home from work, my husband was finishing up work himself and all fully dressed up and we were ready to go, and I don't know what made me do this, but I checked the dates again, and it turns out

THERE WAS NO CAR SHOW!

It got cancelled, but the people who run the event never updated their website. I don't want to tell you about the sad expression on my husband's face. 

Let's go look at cars at a car place, I said, and my husband brightened right back up. 

For the record, I hate looking at cars at car places even more than I hate looking at them at the car show, but at least the car show has a scavenger hunt. Unfortunately, we actually are in the market for a car this year. 

Do I need to mention that I am probably the worst person in the world to go car shopping with? But now my husband was the one being the good sport, talking up the various car possibilities for me and the fun cool features I could have. Things like back up cams and keyless starts and heated seats or whatever. None of which I really want or need. Although, I do have to admit that I did appreciate the heated seats in his car when I was leaving work a few weeks ago and had to scrape ice and snow off the windshield with my bare hands and then sat inside shivering for a few moments before I remembered: HEATED SEATS!

We went to several car places and it was becoming clear that this may not be the right time to have to buy a car. Actually, it's possible that this is the worst time ever to buy a car. We strolled through car lot after car lot where the car salespeople pointed out all of the cars we could NOT buy--

the new cars that had waiting lists and the used cars that were already purchased, and I was growing more and more despondent and having sad wistful feelings about how I could've been strolling around instead at the car show.

But this story has a happy ending after all because my husband did manage to find me a car and finagle a deal for us without too much trouble. It even has heated seats! And suddenly, I realize as I write this that it's not a story about how much I hate car shows. It's a story about how much I love the guy who loves car shows.

Throw in a scavenger hunt and we'll both live happily ever after.

The End. 

Bare-faced Brunch

It's almost spring, never mind the snow on the ground. The pandemic is over, everybody says. Today I am going out to brunch with a friend. 

Yesterday my husband and I ran errands like we used to in the Before Times. Columbus lifted the mask mandate a few days ago, but my library has hung onto our masks-required-for-employees rule until tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

Errand number one is the post office, and I see a guy walking out bare-faced and decide, Oookay, here I go, mask-less myself. But when I walk inside, the handful of people in line are masked and so is the clerk, although, she's wearing hers like a chin strap. I fumble my mask out of my purse and put it on, and when I reach the counter, the clerk's got hers on properly too. I don't know what to make of this. Peer pressure? 

Errand two is the pet store to buy the ridiculously expensive pet food we serve to our dog, who let me tell you has a very sensitive stomach and every time we go into the place and the cashier rings it all up, I can feel my husband tensing beside me and I remind him of the crazy high emergency vet bill we paid a few months ago and this is the food they recommended and we both take a breath under our masks, except this time, we're not wearing masks. 

We decided on the car ride over that we'd go with the flow, based on what the employees are required to do. 

No masks, on any of them. It's like this for the remainder of our errands, everything back to normal with the bare faces, but jarring to me. I realize that in most parts of the country (Tennessee, for example, where we visited my husbands' parents recently) the pandemic was Declared Over long ago. But up here in our little Columbus bubble, many of us are still paying attention to case counts and hospitalizations and the death rate. For example, for the past two weeks in Ohio, ninety-one people died every day from Covid. 

Which seems high? Except it's so much lower than the several hundred people a day average from last month, so we're all good now? I guess? 

When this is all over, a friend told me way back at the beginning, I never want to think about it again. I don't want to write about it. I don't want to read about it. As soon as it's over, I'm done. 

Well, yeah, I told her. Me too. For sure. 

Because believe me, I've been there with the wanting to forget, the frantic desire to move on, to let it go, to get on with it. I have been reading books on living through trauma, how it affects the mind, the body. And what has all of This been, but collective, mass trauma? The books have more to say about the After part, the part when the trauma's in the past, or we think it is. But I don't want to get into it with you right now. 

I'm taking a few extra moments to fix my hair before I leave for brunch. Scrounge around in the drawer where I keep my earrings.  Dab on a bit of make up, the first time I've done this in two years. Out the door and just watch me, I'll be baring my face like the best of them.