Clearing Out

Maintaining and fixing old things is sometimes daunting. Cars, appliances, hearts not to mention minds. Today I’m referring to my house built in 1938. The Queen of Denial, I am expert at ignoring problems. I’ve lived for years with knobs that came off when you tried to open the door (the front door to boot – and we lived with it that way for years!) a leaking shower head, a broken porch step. You get the idea. I call these quirks so they seem charming.

I try and tackle most things on my own. Recently that meant cleaning my gutters including digging up, clearing out and putting back together two buried downspouts. But most plumbing and all electricity issues, are beyond me. When these things become big problems, I reluctantly call a professional.

Does doing that scare you? It terrifies me, imagining the cost – thus my avoidance. For years, my basement has periodically flooded usually after doing laundry. For a long time this was temporarily solved by getting my waste-water pipe snaked every year or so. I have a nice guy who charged me a reasonable amount to clear out the roots that regularly moved into my old cast iron pipes. I figured this was just something to live with because of all my beautiful trees. Occasionally I’d buy that expensive root killing powder and flush it down the toilet but now I have a commode (replaced by my daughter with me assisting) that doesn’t use as much water and I didn’t like the idea of all those matter-eating chemicals lingering in my house pipes.

About a month ago I had to call back my snake-guy after he’d been here only months before. He suggested that the time had come to figure out what the big issue was. Fixing it was beyond the capability of his machine.

And thus began my night terrors and house-anxiety. How big, how expensive would this problem be? Was there a broken pipe somewhere under my lawn or worse, would it require digging up the city road, surely costing me the value of my house to fix? I started waking at 3 in the morning to torture myself, imagining scenarios about all sorts of catastrophes. What was I thinking to imagine I can stay in this old house on my own? Etc, etc. What-ifs ran through my head until the sky turned pink with sunrise.

The problem has been fixed, could have been much worse and was solved for a very fair price and worth every penny. I do have a little PTSD so when I do a load of laundry or take a long shower I go down to the basement to check all is dry. It will take time to realize that in fact, the pipes are clear and waste moves out and far away through the city sewers.

The worst part was, as it almost always is, the not-knowing. I can concoct some terrible demons. And I did. I stressed for weeks. So I now embrace the metaphor and visualize my clean pipes taking away ALL the physical and psychic accumulation – the WASTE I’m guilty of hanging onto for too long. That includes worry and fear about so much old stuff. It’ll be okay and so will I, vintage and all!

The Hedge

An old photo

Photographs remind me that the privet hedge surrounding the house was once no more than waist high. Now, the long stretch of it is taller than my late husband’s 6 foot 4 height. Despite my diligence in trimming, the size of this bush has become unmanageable. Entire sections grew beyond my reach even with the extension pole on the clipper. Last summer, after a few sweaty attempts at taming, I surrendered and let it grow rogue – some shoots growing to 10 feet.

Pruning in Progress

Years ago, a friend advised me to cut it back before it buds but I never shook winter’s torpor in time until this year when February felt more like March. Not wanting to look any more like the crazy house on the corner, I began tackling the massive job of pruning 2-3 feet off the top. It’s been more than 2 weeks and I’m still at it.

I bought a new handheld chain saw that I thought would have me zipping through this job but, chain saws are not great for shrubbery. It helps with the thick branches but the speeding blades turn the sprigs into whips dangerously slapping around my face and snagging in the chain. It chews at the unsteady branches like an attacking dog, resulting in ragged, splintered cuts. No, this job requires laborious, slow, hand-cutting, branch-by-branch. With lobber in hand and small clipper in my pocket, I start at the top of the driveway moving to the middle, then out to the street side – all the while, looking at the whole, as if I were working on a sculpture.

Turns out, I mostly enjoy this slow process. The job is meditative and memories flow. I remember how I learned to do this work from George – a tiny man who I’ve long described as old but now being there myself, I wonder what his age was. Probably younger than I am now. I was 18 and working with the university’s landscape crew the summer after my sophomore year at UCONN. He showed me how to prune vines and yew and privet. “You have to feel it in here,” he said, touching his heart. I was an art student frustrated with my teachers but George spoke to me, inspiring me more than any of those professors.

So, with my heart and increasingly achey arms, I snip, lob, snip, leaning out into the scratchy branches to reach a sucker a foot higher than the rest. It’s tough to cut and I’m at a bad angle and my foot slips on the the dry leaves beneath, but I shift my grip and squeeze and the blade breaks through and clicks as if in satisfaction. It’s hard to believe that once our neighbors could easily hand us a cup of sugar over this now gigantic bush. I need to bring it down low enough so I don’t have to get up on a ladder to prune.

The Hedge in Snow

This part of the hedge is where our Cairn Terrier, Tetley, used to dash through into the street to bark and otherwise greet passing dogs. A little to the left there is still enough of a hole to slip through as a short-cut to go to our neighbor’s house – something Molly did for years. Thanks to a volunteer oak tree that insists on growing back each year to lay claim to this space, the hole remains.

The Fallen Tree

Every inch of this property and house is dense with memories, and this hedge is a tangle of them. As I pull out a thick growth, years of images come with it. Here’s where the bird’s nest was one year – lots of screaming and horror as a momma came squawking out at me and I worried I’d killed her babies but no bodies were found. Here’s where the dead elm tree fell in an early autumn snow storm, blocking the road and knocking the privet branches down, leaving a gap like a missing tooth. Once the tree was taken away, Molly and I pushed the roots back, straightening the section as much as we could and by late summer, the space had filled with new growth. It’s easy to spot the damage in winter but luckily, even at a 45 degree angle, the branches bloom in Spring covering the evidence.

Molly has memories of her own around the hedge. When I told her about my new chainsaw she remembered the summer her dad cut himself with the hedge-clipper, resulting in lots of blood. Joking about childhood trauma, she urged me to be very careful. Yes, the hedge has experienced all sorts of drama. My roughest memory is pushing aside branches in a section we never crawled through before, guiding my 8 year old ahead of me through the thick snarl of wood to the street. This was on the morning of Neil’s death, and I knew I could not let Molly see what I saw.

Our privet gives us privacy and has hidden sadness and even terrible things but within its green boundary, there have been more scenes of joy and laughter. Watching my daughter play and grow and run and swing across our lawn, joined by two of the sweetest dogs, first Tetley then Rufus – both blissfully chasing an abundance of squirrels. This woody shrubbery surrounds a place of love and good memories, including most of the years with Neil and then Rob. Despite the heartbreak of their stories, I also recall the love and sweetness and that they both made me laugh more than cry.

Published as a surprise in Molly’s high school yearbook. The community that help raise her.

I thought I could just zoom through this make-over with a fancy tool but it’s a gift to take the time to trim, pare down, decide what branches to take out, where to cut so new growth will sprout easily. This scramble of fractals encompasses my life. I am not only preserving a boundary but creating space so I can accept the sugar offered my way.

Magical Thinking in May

Neil & Molly – Metkovic Croatia

This is Neil, my husband, holding our beautiful daughter. May 1st marked the 18th year since his death. I have been working on this post all month, stumbling along with lots of pauses and endless re-writes, beginning with these first sentences. Died, passed away, left us, ended his life, committed suicide – so many word choices. I always hesitate – realizing the impact when someone doesn’t already know the story. The word suicide is particularly harsh, sad, terrible. The reality will always be stark but with time, the way his life ended is no longer the thing. The wound of his leaving will always exist but the memory of him has become lighter. The idea of who he was and the ways that I miss him have become stronger. The dark stuff – of which there was a lot – has faded. The years have given me a gift of healing and renewed love for the man he was, the joy and fun we had.

Zagreb apartment.

Please indulge me as I leap into a complete fantasy of what life might be if he were still here and healthy.

Neil with kids somewhere in Bosnia.

The truth is, I think if Neil were alive today he wouldn’t be here with me now. He’d be volunteering in Ukraine using his ace logistics skills to move aid in or people out and in the course of a day, he’d be dashing into harms way to rescue anyone who needed rescuing. The riskier and more dramatic mission the better and him mentally crafting the story he’d tell us afterwards. Along the way, he’d find a way to make people laugh momentarily helping them to forget their own fear or pain. This was the man he was when we met in Sarajevo in 1992.

Maybe if he’d stayed living a life of peril instead of trying to tame his energy and demons into the routine of supporting and raising a family in Connecticut, maybe then, he’d still be with us. As dangerous as life in war is, for him the addicting mix of adrenaline and danger and purpose was less destructive than the self-medicating that eventually destroyed him.

Neil with ICRC Sarajevo pals

There’s no sense to magical thinking but anyone who’s lost someone to suicide lives with ‘what-if’. We all have a carousel of thoughts about what might have been done, what we might have done differently to prevent that ending.

Neil and Molly – CT

With the passage of time and because I have much more of it to myself, my memories and sense of his spirit have become more lucid. I share these thoughts with Molly. Last week she sent me video of an owl that was lingering on the roof of her apartment building and I told her how Neil had saved an owl that was caught in a fence during the early days when she in an incubator in Brindisi hospital. Of course this LA owl was her Dad watching over her! I believe it.

An owl rescued from a barbed-wire fence by Neil – Ostuni, Italy

Molly has many moments of Neil showing up in her life. I suspect the girls in England, Gemma and Zoe must too. On Molly’s plane ride when she moved to LA, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ was one of the film choices and of course, she watched it. There he was on the airplane screen, accompanying his youngest girl out on the launch of her California adventure! (see the last photo below of him getting kicked in the face by Jessica Rabbit ) On another flight she took a few months later, she watched him appear in ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ another oldie that happened to be a selection on the flight. Coincidence?

On the set of Jeeves & Wooster – taken off of Molly’s phone – obviously!

Before I knew him, Neil was a film and television extra in England. Handsome and tall and charming, he worked on lots of now-classics at Pinewood studios in England. He was a storm trooper in Star Wars and there’s debate whether he was the guy who knocked his head on the door frame because he was so tall. So of course he harbored fantasies of moving to LA himself – now his spirit is cheering his girl. Maybe a little ‘woo-woo’ but I believe this.

Neil with ICRC armored Landrovers

He is with me randomly – as a song comes on the radio when I’m thinking of him, when I’m watching an English mystery, as I work in the garden. Driving today I saw a vintage Land Rover Defender and he was craning his head out the window to get a better look, calling out his appreciation to the driver, probably making a new friend. When I feel like I need a protector – like a scary moment driving on I-95 0 it’s him I sense with me. I wrote before of the time I asked for him for help in finding Rob’s car key that had fallen into the Long Island Sound when we were kayaking. Finding it seemed impossible. I found it. (Here’s that post)

Neil would be thrilled to be a GIF. Here’s a still of his – getting kicked in the face by Jessica Rabbit.

What would Neil have made of social media? He loved television so much that I’m sure his screen time would have been off-the charts. He’d have the fanciest phone and would be a TikTok famous old guy with tons of followers. He’d certainly have figured out how to use it to make a few quid. Handsome, exuberant, funny in his outrageous English humor on-steroids way, he would likely have gotten into a trouble too! But maybe if he stuck to dancing. He was an excellent dancer in an 80’s kind of way. Remember those dance shows in the 70s and 80s? He’d have one of those solos with his own little stage – he was that good. Social media would have given all the attention and fame he delighted in.

I have never laughed so often and hard – nor cried as much – as during my life with this man. There was no in-between – no boring. When things were bad, I longed for boring and I still appreciate the predicable cadence of my life. But I miss him. I miss the him that I married in Sarajevo, that I lived and traveled through Europe with. I miss the dream of sharing life adventures, wandering the world, the promise of a partnership. I miss the laughing. I miss the heavy weight of his arm over me at night, his 6 foot 4 presence beside me. But I am grateful for the light and love of his spirit that I feel.

Do you still feel the presence of someone you lost?

Ruminations on Autumn Clean-up (or not) and Time

I share my little plot with 8 trees large enough that I hope none fall on my house. They make a lot of leaves. If the spirit moves me I will rake them into mounds alongside the hedge or into my raised garden bed where they do their beautiful business of rotting.

My neighbors across the street have no trees and I wonder if they hate me when the wind blows in their direction? We are friends so I doubt it – but I’m sure they feel a tad exasperated by the mess my arbor-love makes on their tree-less property. And I wonder a little if their intention is to torture me every Saturday when the landscaper comes with a blower to blow mostly my tree’s leaves off their perfect lawn. There are not many sounds I hate more than the sound of a gas blower as it goes on and on and on.

My gardening… philosophy? technique? I search for the word that best describes my intentional laissez-faire attitude around autumn clean-up. I believe and there is much proof, that left to itself, nature takes better care of itself than when we meddle. The decomposed leaves enrich my property so it doesn’t make sense to stuff them into bags to be picked up by the noisy trucks emitting additional carbon gases into our atmosphere while they do it.

There is some clean-up I eventually get around to. I twist the thorny vines and weeds into cans to be picked up by those same trucks or smash them into the back of my car to drive them to the brush dump myself. Every year invasive weeds like Japanese knotweed and bittersweet win the battle in at least one corner of my yard. Every spring I have high hopes that this will be the year I’ll keep said corner clear of growth. But as we move into summer and the heat and bugs amp up, I give up, conceding until autumn when I can more easily pull and snip at the recently frost-killed invasive plants.

I think about time and how it makes some things easier. Of course body aches and wrinkles alert me to the challenges time can bring = aging. But mostly I see time as my ally. With time (and effort) things that once were entrenched in my actual and metaphorical ‘patch’ become easier to deal with. A few short months ago, I was daunted by an overwhelming green mass full of thorns and worse — ticks. After a few frosty nights, the thicket shrank to skeletal twists I could tackle.

In the garden on an unseasonably warm day, I brace myself with bent knees, heels dug into the earth, inhaling a deep breath of mint (my advice: grow only in pots!) while yanking on a resistant tangle, I think of old resentments, anger, grief – pulling harder, feeling the strain into my legs until with a snap, release down to my core, my soul. Looking closely at the branches of the fruit trees saved now from being swallowed up by this wild growth, I see the teeniest, tightest little buds. Hope.

 

Books Can Save Us

I have an abundance of riches in reading material. Stacks of both purchased and advanced reader copies of favorite or new authors stacked in towers around my house. So how to pick what to read next? What do you do? I’m a sucker for a good cover. And of course I have favorite authors who I eagerly snag from the Advanced Reader pile at work. I am always hoping to understand my beloved ghosts so am drawn to titles relating to addiction, book-love, memoirs and weird places. That’s how I picked up The Lost Chapters: Finding Renewal and Recovery One Book at a Time by Leslie Schwartz. It checks all of the above.

Leslie Schwartz is a novelist and an addict who spent 90 days in a Los Angeles County Jail for a DUI. Before starting her sentence she chose the books she wanted to read and her family sent them to her weekly. They arrived just in time – as books seem to do. Her list included a book of Mary Oliver poetry, The Woman Warrior, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Unbroken, Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart (a book that saved me more than once) and one of my all time favorites, A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

“…Ozeki showed me, that time in its clock-on-a-wall form, and story as linear, like a yardstick, is often the least truthful way to talk about or understand its passage. All stories can only be re-created by collapsing the past, the present, and the future. We are not what we do, like a resume. Jail, for all its insidious horror, its odious dehumanization, its dependence on the momentum of days, of counting along the agonizing progress of calendars facing ever forward, is really a place that embraces no time, for which there is no clear understanding of its movement. In jail, time moves backward and forward, It is without symmetry, a starfish with five arms and no central brain. We are not, it turns out, simply our crimes or our release dates. We are where we came from. We are how we change. We are what we remember, and what we don’t remember. We are the moments that pass, and also the moments that stand still. Time is not our enemy but our puppet. Memory is prophecy and what we think is real is just an illusion.”

This passage from the Lost Chapters is followed by one about addiction and finding recovery. It’s gutting and beautiful and everything I know from being on the other side – loving the addict. Neither of mine ever made it through the window.

“Forcing compliance doesn’t work. It inspires retaliation and usually still more relapse. This is why rehabs and jails don’t work. And yet, addiction itself keeps the addict enslaved, unable to want to stop. I am still in awe that I was granted that tiny window somewhere along the line and even more baffling that I slipped through it.”

I love this book. The author does not whine. She owns her shit and her privilege and shares her outrage and the injustice and failures of our system – particularly for women of color.

I’ve always adored books. Walking into a bookstore even after 21 years, I still feel the thrill of all those books! New titles! And I believe that books can really save us. I am not alone. My friend Nina was devastated after the early death of a beloved sister and found comfort, healing and JOY by reading a book a day for a year. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair.

And have you heard about this extraordinary man, wrongfully convicted as a teen? He spent 17 years in prison — and how reading saved him. Here’s his story and here’s the organization the remarkable John Bunn created A Voice 4 the Unheard – with the goal of bringing books and literacy to prisoners. Note the story of the corrupt and wrongful conviction doesn’t figure on his website. Is it books, is it reading that allowed this man to not be bitter after 17 years wrongfully imprisoned!?  He humbles me.

Forget the deserted island – these are tricky times. What books would you want in prison?

Remembering

On May 1st 14 years ago, the weather was just like today’s although Spring was further along back then. We’d already had many days of sitting out on the porch and working in the garden. That sounds lovely, doesn’t it? And it probably looked so too, if you didn’t know the dissolution in progress. Molly on the verge of turning 9 years old – did her best to stay neutral between us. The evening before I thought we’d made a breakthrough – that we’d be able to move forward in creating a new life – as separate, loving parents to our girl. Yes, she could spend Christmas with him in England and summer holidays. We’d make it work. But no, I didn’t want a cup of tea, I was going to sleep.

The next morning, the light was extraordinary when I woke in the room that Molly now sleeps in. Shadows and light of morning glows like a treehouse when the trees are in bloom.

There are no leaves out yet – so far there is only the red weight of flowers on the tips of branches promising, promising to deliver soon. This morning I woke at an odd hour and did not return to sleep – remembering, feeling him here, one of my benevolent ghosts. For years, I took the day off, but I no longer feel paralyzed by grief. Time does this. The sadness comes in flashes, unpredictably – thoughts of the terrible morning, imagining the pain he was in was so great that he couldn’t have imagined ours. Could he?

Every day I remember him. And often, those memories inspire laughter. Out for a walk on Sunday, Molly and I greeted a group of men as we passed them, all hovering over an old car. We continued on and in my mind, Neil was with us but had stopped to join the banter. We walked ahead as he made new friends. Laughing, I told Molly this – that if her dad was with us how we’d be still standing at the end of the street waiting until he caught up, his long strides covering the distance in half the time. He’d fill us in on who they were and what they were up to – a marvel that he’d be able to garner so much information since he was usually the one doing the talking. He’d have told him about the Maserati we once owned for a month in Italy before it was stolen. Or some old beauty antique he’d driven in England before my time. He was there with us.

Out walking Rufus after work today, one of my neighbors stepped out of her house to chat with me. Our first post-winter catch-up. Had I heard about the mailman busted for stealing money and gift cards out of our boxes? We caught up on the kids and then she asked with a pause,  ‘isn’t this…’ yes, I answered, with my voice suddenly thick with the rumble of possible tears. Thank you for remembering. She said, I’ll never forget.

 

Ushering in Love and Light

I start my New Year here, with a mountain of pillows plumped behind me, dog Rufus snuggled against my thigh, sunlight pouring through the window and not a single commitment to the outside world. It’s rare that I catch the movement of light across my room in a day. I will make another cup of tea and return to read, write and dream as the sun shifts in glorious show through my different windows. I am in heaven. This is enough.


I prefer to usher out the old and welcome the New Year in quietly. As my like-minded friend Jennifer put it yesterday – there are the revelers and the reflectors. In the past, I would feel compelled to join my jolly and beloved reveler friends in the neighborhood. It seems expected, and especially now that I am single, these dear ones worry about me. No one likes to think of us single people by ourselves, alone at New Year. We should be celebrating! It can even be hard for me not to buy into that notion – so sometimes, I force myself to join in.

But honestly – I’d rather be reflecting.

Or at least quiet. I’m not a fan of the American way of celebrating the end of the year – being noisy and whooping it up in a frenzy towards midnight. I don’t judge anybody else for wanting to do that, but please don’t feel sorry for me either. Just beam me up to Kyoto every year at this time, and I’ll be happy.

New Year celebration in Japan is a saner business. It’s a time for ritual cleaning and getting rid of negativity. So I celebrated Japanese style here – cleaning my space – especially this space where I wake every morning and now revel in the light and quiet. I lit some sage and ‘smudged’ the house – briefly opening the window to fan smoking old energy out into the frigid air.

Although 2017 brought me profound sadness, there has also been incredible pleasure. This is the year my dear daughter graduated from college. We adopted Rufus – a pretty perfect dog. My daughter and I are healthy. And these last two weeks, the cloud of sadness blocking my joy, lifted. Somehow, I feel in my bones that in our vast universe – Rob is at peace. And his love – still with me.

Of course I’d rather be moving ahead in life with either one of the two beautiful  yet troubled men I committed to and once believed I’d grow old with. I miss them. But — I am not unhappy alone. I am grateful for the love and that I still sense – and them both, now at peace, freed from demons they tangled with in this life. I have that — and this beautiful girl and our pup delivering regular doses of love and light – even at night. I am lucky.

I wish love and light for you, dear readers, and a Happy New Year!

Some Kind of Prayer

Ever since the priest behind the confession screen at St Margaret’s church scolded 10 year old me because I’d miss Sunday mass a few times, I’ve had a mental block against prayers. When I got to the altar to say my penance that day, I’d completely forgotten the words to the Hail Mary and Our Father so I left – imagining my young soul still sullied by sins. From then on I only went to churches as required for other people’s events.

My relationship with prayer and for that matter, faith, remains complicated. While most lapsed Catholics can say any assortment of prayers without pause, I still stumble and mix them up. Except for one. It’s not a traditional prayer but rather one adapted by Al Anon where I used to clock many hours: the Serenity prayer. That evens sounds nice, doesn’t it? Some may long for excitement and thrills. Me, I’ll take serenity.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Over the years, these words have saved me. I’d repeat them mantra-like to silence chatter that threatened to swallow me in a flood of anxiety and worry especially about the addicts in my life. Repeating it thoughtfully brought me back to myself, to my breath to my… wisdom. I DO know the difference but I don’t always want to accept what I cannot change. Instead, I’ve long gotten an A-plus in denial.

Denial doesn’t work anymore but anything else feels like uncharted territory. These last few months have been tough. I’m learning that trauma and sadness cannot be hurried out of the way, not forever. Cumulative grief caught up with me after Rob’s death and now I feel it in my bones, my skin – itchy with hives, my heart heavy. And I’m figuring out that I must pay attention.

Today this bit of Buddha wisdom from a write up for this event next May at Tibet house, really resonated with me:

“…Always a realist, (Buddha) made acknowledgement of suffering the centerpiece of his First Noble Truth. The great promise of the Buddha’s teachings is that suffering is only his First Truth. Truths Three and Four (the End of Suffering and the Eightfold Path to its relief) offers something that therapy has long aspired to but found difficult to achieve. Acknowledging the traumas in our lives is important; learning how to relate to them is crucial.”

That’s what I’ve been doing – slowly, slowly acknowledging, accepting, conceding – the things I can’t change. And sometimes, it helps just to say that prayer.

Lurking Beneath

‘So what’s going on in your life?’

The Doctor’s question gave me pause. Or maybe I was still stunned by the diagnosis she’d just delivered: shingles.

Well, I suppose work is stressful. That’s what I told her – the easy answer. I have been very busy. But it’s a job I’ve done for 20 years and still enjoy. I mean it’s books I sell. And I’ve actually been taking a fair amount of time off. No, I don’t think it’s really just work-stress that triggered this weird virus to emerge from dormancy more than 50 years after chickenpox ravaged my little body with excruciating sores and scabs I couldn’t resist ripping to bloody shreds.

I love that my Doctor asked me this question. Always up for a metaphor, I’ve pondered during this past uncomfortable week, what IS going on in my life – while wincing from stabbing pains, flinching from any touch to the affected skin, strangely on fire. What in my life awakened this virus in me now? What do I need to be attending to? Is it my subconscious screaming at me – too long ignored as I busily go about my life.

Two friends and I recently coordinated our first community building story-telling project a la The Moth, with the idea of strengthening ties in our very neighborhood-centric city. The first one, held last week, was a great hit with so many inspired to share personal stories with more than 50 strangers, that we ran out of time to accommodate them all.The power and joy of sharing stories was apparent in that beautiful space on a summer evening. Every one there was attentive and moved. Jennifer, Judith and I were elated and are planning the next for October. I did not tell a story.

I have long reaped the psychological benefit of telling stories, yet since I began purposefully writing, I have never felt so far off-track as now. I have lost my personal creative practice.

‘What’s going on in your life?’ That question. Are these stories, my own stories, that I’m not listening to – making my skin crawl and ooze? I need to dig deep, dive beneath to uncover what’s there — including toxins that have laid me low.

If I’m not carving out enough time to be contemplative and creative, I begin to feel uncomfortable in my own skin. That’s a message I’ve felt before but never has it manifested itself in such an excruciating way. Community storytelling is brilliant and I’m excited about it. I feel passionate about the importance of gathering people to listen to each other – a small local gesture against the nasty forces of this time. But I also need to heed my own hollering nerves with roots deep beneath childhood scabs. Write, sculpt, paint – get up and tell a story – it doesn’t matter. What matters is to pay attention to my heart and soul – below the surface where endless untold stories and viruses linger for life.

PS: I’d get the vaccine!

Hedge

before hedge 1There are a million things to do around my house and corner lot. This summer Molly and I focused on cathartically clearing out decades of  debris from our basement and garage and ignored the ragged hedge. It went wild.

Last weekend the weather cooled and I propped the hedge trimmer beside me while I put on my gloves. A man walking by nodded at me in greeting and asked, “You’re going to do all that?” Five hours, lots of scratches and many sore muscles later, I’d finished the whole damn thing. Okay, it’s not perfect – but it’s better.

after hedge

After 20 years living on this corner, memories are woven through every inch of privet. As I wield the vibrating, noisy weight of the clipper along the length of it, I remember.

There – Tetley dashing under the woody branches to check out a passing dog, me running around to the street to catch him, scooping him up in my arms with apologies.

Here – heaving the scraggly growth aside, clutching my barefoot, half-asleep 8 year old’s hand, pulling her through behind me – taking this weird detour rather than go near the garage where I’d just discovered her father.

That’s awful, isn’t it? I pause, doubting whether I should include this here out of concern for you. I am sorry for the possible shock of it or for the moments you’ll maybe now spend feeling sorrow. But this memory crosses my psyche like a passing cloud, moments of recognition in a tangle of shrubbery. Time does magnificent healing.

I continue trimming.

A bit further down, I find the nest that caused me to abort my attempt at maintenance earlier this summer. A frantic robin flew squawking out at me and I dropped the clippers and retreated in horror, sure I’d just beheaded one of her babies. Stupid thing! Why didn’t it  chirp or flap at me before I nicked it? I did find a feather in the trimmer but I don’t think any birds died — although I didn’t peek into the nest to check for skeletons.

Almost to the end is the gap Molly regularly slipped through when she was little – a short-cut to her friends’ house or down to the track across the street. While now overgrown from lack of use, I managed to crawl through dragging the electric cord behind me rather than walk all the way around to get to the outside.

Even with the little step stool and throwing myself across the springy-bulk, I couldn’t quite reach the final stretch of it. But I did what I could. And I thought about the different meanings of  ‘hedge’. What I did was enough.

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