It was about 4:30 in the afternoon on the 25th of May. I was walking down the hall when I'd turned to glance at the eastern window, through which you can see the shadow of the earth at dusk. Whatever it was that had caught my eye, there was no sign of evening yet. The sun was still high and bright, the sky was clear, and I realized I would rather be outside. I change my trajectory, turn around and go.
Out in front, the older boys are washing their car, faint radio thrum as they each polish a side. Around the back, fleecy clouds are just beginning to rise. My youngest, in his last spring as a pre-teen, is occupying himself with characteristic self-possession. He experimentally spins in circles because he's just learned that, quote, "dizziness is fab."
I make my way to the sunlit grass at the very back of the yard and pause for a moment. There is nothing unusual to see here, it's the same as it's always been, but then the feeling comes over me, the layering of time. It's a most remarkable effect. I take a seat on one of the ancient rocks that jut out of the ground, and notice. If I wasn't chatting with my own child and managed to overlook my aches and pains, I could easily convince myself that it was 40 years ago. Something about the air, the scent of the grass, the quality of light lifts the years away, leaving me free of the weight of age and knowledge. And yet, I know it is there. In that space between is something else, and I ponder it, despite not having the words.
My son, satisfactorily dizzy now, is singing a heartfelt song to the cat, because it's just that sort of day. We've all of us got a touch of spring fever, I guess. I turn my attention to the aged wooden posts holding up the clothesline - they might not be quite as old as the rock I'm sitting on, but getting up there. I notice one of them has a smear of blue paint on it, a smudged handprint maybe, even though there is nothing else here painted that shade. A story that I'd likely never know. The smudge resembled a map of an unknown place, and did not quite match the sky, even though they were both very, very blue. I sat there and let the feelings run through me, the weight of time and also the non-weight of it.
Up above the paint-smudged post and the cross-piece where the rain-gauge has lived all my life, I can see the faint crescent of the daylight moon. Her horns are tilted downward, the way my great auntie used to say would spill out the rain. And she was right, of course, but at this moment, the clarity of the sky is striking.
I think, life without you is gonna be bluer than blue, andI feel the sorrow that is the silent partner of time, the counterweight of earthly happiness. I never really imagined leaving Texas, but the feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me it's already past time to go. I tell the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon that I'm sorry, but the landscape only shrugs a little. It already knows the score.
My youngest, done with his song now, skips back to the house. The older boys put up their polishing gear and murmur to each other as they walk away. The sun sinks just a bit lower. The wind begins to sigh. This moment - this one - in the sunlit grass will never come again. This moment is gone forever.
If anyone else notices its passing, they give no indication. Like the tale of the blue map smudge on the clothesline post, only these traces remain.
Last night I dreamed about our house in Victoria. As often in my dreams, it was in a state of disrepair, dusty and abandoned, only resembling the real place in basic structure. It was an uneasy dream. My children were there, along with my step-son, but they were insubstantial, as if they'd been drained of their vital force. All their ages seemed wrong. In fact, everything about the house seemed wrong.
From the hallway appeared my (now grown) son, but as the 8 year old he once was, an angelic, curly-haired boy. In his hands he held a gift tied with red ribbon.
"On my birthday, I was silent" he said, unnervingly, before I woke.
Today the weather was the perfect sort we hope for all year: warm, but not too warm, dry, but not parched. Bright sun, soft breeze. I enjoyed it, despite the sickly dream haze lingering in the back of my mind. Why think of these things when the vanilla scent of the whitebrush is rising and the air is alive with bees? But sometimes a dream won't let go
It's not that I hadn't noticed the date. I had. The 4th of May. I'd seen it at midnight, even. Yet for some reason, it hadn't registered.
"On my birthday, I was silent" says my eerie, angelic child.
Suddenly, I remembered. It was the anniversary of the night we'd left Victoria, arriving here on the edge of a storm. And it's ironic that I'd forgotten, really, considering I'd titled the post about it "The Persistence Of Memory"
This bright day was nothing like the dismal drizzle of 8 years ago, though the feeling of uncertainty is the same. It has not escaped me that this time, the uncertainty belongs to everyone. For 8 years, I've been perched on the edge of this rock watching the world change, and now it finally seems to have caught up with me.
It has also not escaped me that in the dream, my son was holding a gift.
Not long ago, a friend who'd experienced a similar life upheaval around the same time said, "I feel like everything since then has been leading to this. Like I was made for this."
I understood what she meant. This journey has been agonizing at times, yet here I am on the edge of this rock still, riding out these crises - national and international - in relative safety. To be doing so in Victoria doesn't even bear thinking about. For once, this unforgiving landscape holds me like a cradle while I wait to learn what needs to be done.
In this post, I wrote about keeping the old key to the storage unit I'd rented back then as a sort of talisman. What I didn't mention was that the key is tied with a red ribbon. When I realized what the dream meant, the symbolism of the red ribbon on the gift box was immediately clear.
Now that mourning the past is over, It's time to reclaim my autonomy.
It's the last day of March. Spring has sprung. The earth has revived in vivid color, and here I am without having written a word. A global pandemic will do that to you.
It's not as if there's been no inspiration. It's not as if magic and mystery have come to end. On the contrary, things are more phantasmagorical than ever. It's the way of things in a crisis, I suppose, what with our consensus reality straining at the seams.
No, I'm just tired, really, tired and inclined to be quiet right now. There is too much to say, and a lot that shouldn't be said, and it's beyond me to sort out which is which.
Between the psychic jolts and the glitches and the breaking apart of things that must be put together again, it's a lot to handle. That's not even accounting for the very real fear and grief we feel amid the onslaught of change.
That said, if cracks have appeared in our world, there is no reason not to find the joy that's hidden in them. I daresay there is every reason we should.
"The death card means change" says the fortuneteller to the nervous querent in every cliched movie scene, but if you ever wanted a real-life example, this is it.
If our foundations have cracked, our own integrity has never mattered more. If you have to choose between helping yourself or others, which will it be?
The card has been laid. The change is at hand. The only thing left to do is decide what it means to you.
"He rose and descended river-wards once more, then changed his mind and sought the side of the dusty lane.There, lying half-buried in the thick, cool under-hedge that bordered it, he could muse on the metalled road and all the wonderous world that it led to; on all the wayfarers, too, that might have trodden it, and the fortunes and adventures they had gone to seek or found unseeking - out there, beyond..."
For the Easter holiday, we took the kids to a renaissance faire, which is exactly like the renaissance, if it had been exclusively populated by hippie wizards and the occasional elf.
The kids had a great time and enjoyed the music and middle-eastern food. It also gave us the chance to shop for their dad's Walpurgis-birthday.
(and to buy this lovely green nd rust colored silk for myself.)
The youngest enjoyed the faery courtyard and the jousting especially. He made us play pretend jousting for the rest of the day.
All in all it was a happy, if non-traditional, holiday.
Now it's time to get ready for Walpurgisnacht and then, I think, to finally write my post about the Sad Cheese Sandwich (see number 8 here) Like so many things lately, seven years of waiting seems long enough.
Tomorrow is the first day of spring, and while this one comes with a full moon, I found these lovely crescent mirrors at the dime store and couldn't resist.
The land is turning green again (or greener, at least) and while I haven't posted much lately. I am happy to report that I am still alive and have made it through another season.
It's been a time of changes and leaving things behind. On occasion it's been a little tough, as it's my habit to look back at the past. A family friend died recently, and there's the compulsion to think of all the places he once was and will never be again. Spasms of grief that can fetch you away. But there are dangers to making maps of absence. Especially now, when the future is a blank page.
Tomorrow I will carry out my rites and rituals, making the most of this new phase. I have my south-facing window, the newly verdant trees, and most of all the blank page. The road rises up to meet me; there was never a day that my wish was not true.
Finally, the time comes for the opening of the ways.
A stand of Widow's Tears has sprung up in the garden, a testament to how wet this Spring has been.
On a vaguely related note, last night I heard a chuck-will's-widow in the woods, by far the earliest in the year I've ever heard one. Their call is the quintessential sound of a summer night.
My son, who is 16, was listening to Nirvana's Uplugged In New York on the way to school the other morning. I thought to myself, it must be coming around to the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death soon. 24 years ago. How time flies.
I knew it not because of my memory - which is good for this sort of thing, yes - but because of the feeling in the air, the deathly smell of Spring.
It's understood that Spring is the season of rebirth, but those of us who tangle with despair know the other side of it - that beneath all the new green is the sickening smell of decay. There are terrible things down in the leaf mould and humus, things that don't bear thinking about if you know what's good for you. It makes sense to me that suicides increase when the growing season begins.
My son wonders what it was like back then, when Nirvana were the big music act and grunge was the thing. I tell him, there was a reason we liked our music so aggressively, appealingly* glum. It was relevant. It was the mood of the time.
Case in point - on the day Cobain died, I was visiting my neighbor Kathy and her brother Darren at their parents house, up at the lake. They were house-sitting while their folks were away, and for my part I was just glad to be out of town. The change of season had done nothing to ease the damp chill of my apartment or the dark pall inside it. There was a lot wrong in my life - Kathy knew this, I think, that's why she'd invited me - and I desperately needed a break.
Diary entry, April 5, 1994
Pain is measured in dols
Triptych - a three panel painting
Gold - Au
Paroxysm - a fit
Sibilant - hissing
Apocryphal - mythical
Alfred Nobel invented a number of explosives
A creepy, creepy day. Cold and humid and dark. I woke in the night and thought "winter is coming" and was filled with dread, as if it really were Autumn and it would all be to do again. The eeriness I feel is so big it's beyond describing.
....
Of course, on the the 5th of April, none of us knew that Cobain was dead. We only knew he was missing. There was some concern though, and there were updates on the TV news. Only a month before, he'd been in a coma, and things had seemed iffy for a while. I commented to Darren (no doubt sounding more callous than I'd meant) that if Cobain had passed away, he might be considered a legend, like Morrison or Joplin or Hendrix had been. I wasn't thinking about it so coldly, really. I was just pondering the strangeness of such a scene, in which one went from being a "troubled rock star" in the here and now to being something quite different in memory.
A few days later, I was back in my dismal apartment when the news broke that Cobain's body had been found. While I hadn't necessarily been convinced before that moment he hadn't just been hiding out somewhere, suddenly it seemed obvious that he could have met no other fate. Suddenly, it seemed that the anguish in his voice had contained a certain foreknowledge of doom.
But then, a downward spiral is always easy to see in retrospect.
I had no personal attachment to the band besides owning their albums; I hadn't even seen them live. Still, that day I felt something shift. It was subtle and nameless, but it was there. The song Heart Shaped Box played on the radio again and again, not that it had ever been away for long.
By then the weather was hot, as humid as steaming wool. I went for a walk among the warren of streets on the other side of Main. The leaves and grass were unfurling in a grotesque display of fecundity and the scent of decay was overwhelming. "The day was bright and shiny like a mirror" I wrote in my journal later, "but the underside of the mirror is death."
Indeed, half hidden under the overgrown shrubbery on Market street, I'd come upon a dead rooster in the gutter; his iridescent feathers shining blue and green. It seemed telling somehow that no one had bothered to retrieve the broken corpse. A terrible knowledge gnawed at my unconscious, and to this day I'm afraid to walk down that street. I have the uncanny feeling I might meet my own ghost.
This is how it was back in those days; It's hardly even symbolic. It was the mood of the time. Anguish and apathy buzzed like fat flies in the sodden heat. Hidden things festered out of sight. For a long time, a raw nerve had been thrumming in the background of the country.**We all felt it, we all knew it was there, but Kurt Cobain had helped give it voice.
How much all this would mean to my son, I don't know. It would be nice if it didn't have to mean anything. It would be nice if his generation had no need to deal with raw nerves and corruption and things hidden out of sight. But it seems that this will not be the case.
This Spring, the landscape has burst into greenery like I haven't seen since then. Pollen blows in waves, water drips from weeds. I feel shaky, remembering the dead rooster and my own ghost left on the side of the road. I'm middle-aged now. I tell myself I've been around, there's no need to be afraid. It's only Spring. It always passes, if you wait long enough.
I tell myself this, and hope this year that it's true.
I keep watch and wait for Summer to come.
*We were depressed as fuck, but we still grew up listening to Abba and The Knack. **For further reference re: my claim that something had been wrong in the background for a long time, see the article Kids In The Dark by David Breskin. The relevant point to me here is not the Satanic Panic angle or even so much the murder itself, but that a whole community of teenagers kept silent.
Last night, my youngest son and I made made his Easter nest for the bunny to fill with eggs in the morning. Because of all the hard freezes this Winter, there were not so many colorful wildflowers this year. We did have these nice irises, though.
The bunny provides. (The bunny was hard at work before sunrise, by the way)
The results of our family-wide cascarón war. Much like last year's chalk war, we all won. It's said that having a cascaron broken over one's head brings good luck. If this is the case, we are all set for the year. Now If I can just convince the others that cleaning up is just as lucky... I confess that this Easter I have felt a bit solemn. My youngest is 7 and it's suddenly clear that after all these many years, the clock is ticking on these old Easter traditions, for my own children, at least. Then I will have to wait until they have children of their own before I can play Easter bunny again. In the meantime, I will make the most of it.
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