Another Exhaustive List

I don't want to come in here and constantly bitch and apologise about the fact that I'm never fucking around. I want to love this as much as I used to. I do love this as much as I used to. But.

Grief is exhausting. Seriously, I was not prepared for how long it would take all my energy just to exist every day, for how hard it would be not to collapse in a slithering wailing heap of bones Robin is dead in front of everyone. My diss advisor. My writing partner. My students. My friends. The mirror. People at the grocery store. Sometimes out of the blue I will be shopping in the cookie aisle at Shop-Rite (as one does), and the goddamn Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake Farmhouse cookies with the dark chocolate and the pecans will attack me from the side and I'll be crying my eyes out before I know it, because we used to wolf them down by the little white sleeve watching 60 Minutes or whatever. Mostly I'm better about this, but everything is still harder than it was.

Grad school is exhausting. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain that, but just in case I do: OH MY GOD PEOPLE. This whole semester has pretty much been me hanging on by my fingernails, catching up just enough to keep from losing my shit entirely, and waiting for this week to finally arrive when all I have to do is grade finals and calculate grades--oh, and write an entire syllabus for English 1 for the fall, and a course description for the spring catalog for the lit class I have to finish designing that now has to have seven people in it in order to run, and oh hey yeah, how about that dissertation because you're totally fucking on the job market starting last August?

Also, it has been medically exhausting to be me for various reasons every since they decided it would be a good idea to take my gallbladder out before it exploded (which it apparently promptly did, all over the little pan they put it in once they took it out of my abdomen, which is equal parts funny and horrifying and also ew), and apparently now harbouring a case of IBS, which is exactly as unpleasant as everybody says it is. And because I'm in my mid-forties--and can we talk about that for a minute, because how did that happen all of a sudden--and have survived an endocrine cancer, every single hormone in my body has recently begun going haywire all at once, the finer details of which I will spare you, but suffice it to say that I have had no fewer than six gynecological appointments since my spontaneous ten-hour trip to the ER in mid-February and am now on a first-name basis with my uterus. (Actually, it's the fibroids that have names. I call them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Though "pop" is more accurately a description of the hemorrhagic ovarian cyst that got me sent to the ER in the first place. But I digress.)

It was a long winter. And I'm still trying to get to the bottom of the endless fatigue.

But this guy.

This guy. He is everything. He has been through so much, and he is still so alive and fighting so hard to return to the living, and I could not be more amazed and in awe of him. Twenty years later, we are able to open up to each other with trust in a way that I didn't think was possible, and if this is to be my entire life I will clutch it with both hands and bless it, because it contains him.

Twenty Thousand Hearts

Monday morning, everyone started their week as if it were any other: most people went to work, others dropped their kids off at school, I overslept...so, the usual. I got word of Deb's collapse the way a lot of shitty news seems to spread lately--via Facebook. I've known this family since 1980. Joel and Lauri adopted my favourite of our first batch of kittens--and let's not even discuss how I felt when their mom insisted they change his name from Hot Rod Kanehl (one of my mom's favourite baseball players growing up) to the more innocuous,  dare I say even emasculating, Sunshine. We lost touch for a number of years when their parents divorced and their dad married Deb, but Joel and I reconnected when I moved back home after grad school (the first time). Joel was the first person I asked for when I woke up from my cancer surgery, since I'd already been wheeled past my dad who was pacing by the elevator, and that morning when we'd checked in, his dad was already parked in the chair in my hospital room. Remember when I got stranded in Denver (the first time) last winter when Ruby was dying and suddenly had no ride home from the airport at ridiculous o'clock p.m., and somebody's dad saw the Facebook post and drove all the way out to Newark past midnight even though he had to be at work at 5 the next morning? Yeah. That was Bob. They're that family. They always have been.

I knew they would bring Debby here to Doodlehem because we have the nearest Level One trauma facility and at that point they weren't sure what was happening to her or if she'd hit her head on the way down. I can hit the hospital in six minutes at a dead run; the only reason it took me twelve was because I detoured to Dunkin' Donuts to get Bob a cup of coffee the way I know he takes it: milk, sugar, from Dunkin' whenever possible, and in the largest size possible. The only other person waiting with Bob was the coworker who had performed CPR until the ambulance arrived. Joel was on his way up from Virginia and Bob's siblings hadn't gotten there yet either. I knew I was going in as the anchor, but I still wasn't really prepared to have to be Bob's. He had always been mine. Bob's a former Marine. He served in Vietnam. He also suffered a (non-military) traumatic amputation of his right arm when Joel was about a year old, the divorce from their mom, Deb's treatment for breast cancer the year before my own cancer, and his own bout with lung cancer surgery, and his courage and sense of humour never so much as wavered outwardly in the face of any of that. So I can't imagine the hell he must have been in for him to reach blindly for my hand the first minute we were alone and gasp out, I'm so damn scared.

By the time Joel arrived just after lunchtime they'd discovered that there had been an aneurysm that ruptured, causing a massive brain bleed, and they were trying to stabilize her for long enough between scans to find out if surgery would even be an option. Every update was worse news, and by Tuesday the decision was made to remove all life-sustaining measures and transfer Deb to palliative care. There's never any way to tell, but given the significant damage, no one was expecting her body to keep functioning longer than a few hours at maximum. Despite that, early Wednesday evening they transferred her to hospice care. Deb didn't take any shit from anybody, ever, and this was no exception. She was going to go in her own sweet time, and this wasn't it quite yet. Hospice told me later they hadn't expected her to live through the first night. Clearly they don't know our Debby.

Thursday, 12th September, was one of the most precious days of my life. Bob couldn't stand to be there anymore, and he had all manner of legal legwork to untangle and plans to start making. I had planned to stop in and sit until they returned, expecting them back any minute. One of Debby's work friends came by round supper time, and talked to her for a good hour--telling her all about Deb's favourite kids and what they'd done that day, and put sweet-smelling lotion on her hands and feet. We got a little bit to eat, but mostly we sat with her, and I listened. I'd never known Debby as well as I know the rest of her family; we probably hugged whenever we saw each other, but I felt uncomfortable touching her or holding her hand. Not because she was dying, but because it felt like an invasion of her privacy. I don't actually know whether she liked being touched, though as someone who worked for 30-something years with preschool-age kids, I can't imagine she wasn't at least comfortable with it. So part of me wondered what I was doing there. But mostly I felt someone needed to be there with her, someone she knew, in case any part of her was still there and needed us.  After Marie left, we sat some more. Sometimes I read to her out loud--from Edgar Huntly, because that's what I was in the middle of that day--but increasingly I just sat there as the unexpectedly fierce thunderstorm bent the trees outside nearly double and rain rolled down the French doors in sheets.

By ten o'clock I was done my book and needing to at least stop home long enough to feed my cats. But also, something was changing. Deb was starting to breathe differently, taking long gasps of breaths followed by shorter, ragged breaths, evening out, then starting again. I knew this was one of the last changes. It wasn't painful for me to hear, so much as worrisome. I knew she was being medicated to alleviate any anxiety she may have been feeling, and I knew her breathing patterns were simply her body trying to regulate oxygen flow to her brain as the pressure from the bleed increased and spread down towards her brain stem. I knew she was trying to let go. But I also knew--don't ask me how, since I really didn't know her this closely--that she was hanging on because I was there. I knew this was something that was between her and the God she loved so fiercely, and she wasn't going to do it with an audience. My being there was only going to prolong this.

I will not tell you what I said to her as I kissed her forehead goodbye. I will only tell you that two hours later, the spark that made her Debby was gone.

Where I'm Supposed to Be

Back and mostly recovered (physically, anyway) from a sprinter-van northeast tour with the guys. Had some long-overdue conversations, mostly conducted with eyebrow semaphore, shoulder nudges, deep earthy sniffs, chocolate chip cookies, and the occasional tiny rowboat --though I did actually have occasion to use my big girl words at one point, too, which was more difficult than you'd expect coming from me. Looking someone in the eye without getting lost and having to speak coherently to them from a place of authenticity is really hard for me. And by hard I mean terrifying and vulnerable. And the more I care about the person, usually the harder it is. This means it was damn near impossible.

Welcome to my tiny boat.

A flotilla of tiny paper boats.

Late Sunday night I took a crash course in origami off instructions printed on a t-shirt. Partly this was to work off nerves, and partly this was because sometimes my brain gets too cute by half when it gets going. Half the band thought this was the gift until I informed them it was just the wrapper. (Then one of them proceeded to leave it in the van when they returned it to the rental place. I'm looking at you, Stephen Daniel.)

Yes, we resorted to middle names. There was a slightly rotating cast of characters, mostly in the tour staff. At the start there were two Steves (both with ph's) and three Matts. A week later there were two Steves, two Matts, and two Saras. For twelve glorious and very confusing hours on Thursday night, we had the trifecta--three Stephens, three Matts, and two Saras. We were looking for a third Sara, or at least a Sarah, or even a Sally, just to hit bingo. Sadly, the closest we could come was a Rasheeda. Oh well. God knows what we could have accomplished with three of us, considering the shit that just the pair pulled off that first afternoon alone. The Matts even had hand-gestures to go with their names, based on hairstyles (Muppet, mohawk, goatee).

Two Matts, doing the same thing.
(c) Todd Polesiak

In between, there was a lot of driving. No, I mean a lot of driving. While I had the luxury during this sprinter of returning home to my own bed every night, unlike the boys, it also meant approximately a shit-ton of extra driving for me between venues. Also, I had a dissertation meeting on Tuesday morning. Because that was intelligent of me to schedule. Oh, and did I mention it was nearly 100° every day, and my apartment isn't air-conditioned? There was also therefore many a cold shower just to get my body temperature down someplace sleepable.

Sadly, due to the nature of people's private lives and That Thing Called the Interwebz, I have to leave out most of the good stuff, like the Fairy Zombie Attack, the endless rotation of people onto the air mattress on my living room floor, The Macaroni and Cheese That Would Not End, the part where I had to upend myself into every single front-of-house case with my legs a-waggle trying to get stuff out of the bottom, how I ended up with a bar rag from the Birchmere in my laundry today, and the birthday cookies that weren't.

No, really. Ever try to make cut-out cookies when one of the recipients is a vegan? And it's 102° in the kitchen before you preheat the oven? And you're working on something like twelve hours' sleep for the week and it's already Saturday? Yeah. Like that. Fortunately they tasted really good, even though they rather looked like dog biscuits. Let's just say we ended up taking a detour to the vegan bakery in town, and judging by the swipe of icing the guys left me after the show, it was worth it.

Two Saras, doing the same....
well, whatever. Close enough.

During the week, I also had a chance to catch up with some very dear friends not connected with the tour, some of whom I hadn't seen in months, and one of whom I hadn't seen in a few years. Altogether, there was much bolting through various lobbies to launch myself bodily at people, a koala bear hug off the side of a loading dock (which left a very interesting bruise on most of the right half of my body), late night Wal-Mart shenanigans (CDs! Matching jammies! A packing box to get that crap out of my life and back to Ohio as soon as possible!), a constellation of fly bites on my ass from the proximity of Monday's venue to the Atlantic Ocean, two of the world's most well-travelled birthday cards (one of which, yes, made reference to my illustrious career as Snowmeister, having been to Colorado twice during snowstorms), and a choreographed set-up of folding tables that would make Bob Fosse weep. Oh, also leopard-print sticky notes!, brought to me by a  band fan with whom I'd had an hysterical conversation on Twitter regarding the plural of Post-It. Personally, I'm still holding out for Post-Them. Kim disagrees.

Making it rain string beans.

Oh! And I almost forgot the string bean truck! The guys swore we were hallucinating, because who on earth just drives an open truck crammed full of string beans down the I-95 corridor? The guy driving this truck, that's who. Needless to say, I got teased about string beans for the next 36 hours or so. And, really, I was ok with that, all things considered.

And, perhaps best of all, there was a righting of the world where it had been wrong, a resettling of my soul in my bones, a coming home, however brief it turns out to have been. If I had known it was really goodbye, I'd have made you stand up for a proper hug, no matter how tired we were. Like last time, I was caught ill-prepared and you were halfway into somebody else's van before I knew what was happening.

Close Encounters of the Matt kind

I know there are no words for this parting, that even a breath is too much, that my blood would be too little. I know now that every time I see you there will be that door that we walked through once, that remains half-lit, half in shadow, just behind us. I know now that even among the trees that night we could never escape the concrete of the streets that would carry you away after I had fallen to my knees.

Do you remember what the city sounded like?
Do you remember what the city sounded like?

What Lies Between Us

That's the title of an old, old poem--a truly mediocre poem, in fact--about the Delaware river, someone's grandfather's silver puzzle rings, an old leather jacket, and a pewter tea pot. It wasn't ever really about those things, of course, but about the relationship that spawned them. Fifteen years later, so much more lies between us. So much more truth, and everything else, still lies between us.

What Still Lies (a fragment)

The months that pass when I don't hear from you,

except in the unspoken language of blues,
as I try to decipher the radio codes into a message
meant only for me, the words still unspoken after all this time.

The river at night. 

The memory of your body,

of mud on my knees from praying 

at the altar of you. 

A tangle of rings

and promises our bodies made

that denies everything else.

A puzzle we still cannot solve.

RR Dirty Bird 15k Trail Race, Code Name: A Finish Is a Win

A year ago, I signed up for my first trail race, more or less on a dare from Carl. Because he sucks. I grew up literally running around in the woods behind my house, and have often been accused of being part mountain goat, so it seemed like a good fit. Then I had that Epic Battle of Wills with my lower back. The day before last year's Dirty Bird, I called Carl from the ER. "Listen, dude, I don't think I'm going to be able to run tomorrow. I'm really sore. I'm just going to go have some x-rays, and I'll--"

At this point the ER nurse took my phone from me, held it to her ear, said matter of factly, "Dude, she's not running tomorrow," hit the disconnect button, and dropped the phone onto my stomach.

I spent the morning of Dirty Bird gorked out of my mind on narcotics, alternating between the two positions that felt least like being stabbed in the ass with a pitchfork, staring at the bedroom ceiling and texting pathetically back and forth with my friend Gunz, who can now apparently confirm that I'm very entertaining (and a very creative speller) when I'm on drugs. It was about four degrees out, though I don't think it was actually snowing, and my dad piled two extra comforters onto the bed--partly to stop me from shivering, because it hurt so goddamn much, and partly to help wedge me into position. I wasn't even in my own bed, because I couldn't get up and down the stairs to the bathroom. I was, in short, a sweet hot wreck.

This year I made extra special preparations for Revenge of the Dirty Bird. To start with, I was exceedingly careful putting on my underwear all weekend. On top of that, I actually ran after MCM this year. All of about three times. None of them were on trails. I don't know the woods around here well enough yet, I'm up to my kiester in a PhD, there are papers to grade that I've had so long I forget what the assignment was, etc. etc. and etc. So, yeah. I was totally prepared for this race. I figured I had about three things going for me: the fact that, as I said, I grew up running around in the woods pretending I was doing this exact thing; the fact that I have a very low center of gravity; and the fact that have I mentioned yet this week that my campus is on the side of a fucking mountain? So I do a lot of walking uphill. A lot.

This Sunday, I did even more.

It started Saturday night, when I proceeded to get a nasty shock via text message at a quarter to midnight, when I was on my way to bed. So I slept badly until the alarm went off at 6:30. Ate breakfast (I really did, I swear. I watched myself do it.), had tea, wrangled myself into compression tights, packed dry shoes and socks and a clean shirt for after, stuffed myself in my car, and pointed it towards Birdsboro.

Let me address something here. The location of this race left something to be desired. My ex-husband and I almost bought a house in Birdsboro, right before he left me. In fact, while we were falling in love with the house, he was already talking about leaving me. The park where the race was held is one of the last happy memories I have from our life together in PA, before we moved to Putnamistan and things went more or less to hell in a happy meal. I also pretty much had to drive past his parents' house to get to the start line. Add that to my late-night conversation Saturday and I was in a swell mood.

On checking in, my mood was much improved by the fact that Carl is oblivious and couldn't see me standing right in front of him in a parking lot with two dozen cars in it. I hadn't seen him in (gasp!) a whole month, so hugs and rude hand gestures were in order. Actually, we hadn't gotten to hang out much at MCM, so it was extra good to see him (except the part where he took off his shirt and asked me if his nipples were still properly taped. There's an image I never want again.)

Then it occurred to me that I was about to run ten miles. And I was hungry again. Fuck. Who signed me up for this? Oh right. Carl.

I peed no fewer than three times before we lined up at the start. I use the phrase "line up" very, very loosely. It was more like we assembled in a gaggle-fuck at the start banner while RD Ron gave us last minute instructions. They mostly consisted of useful tidbits like, "There should be an orange ribbon every half mile at least. If you go more than a half mile without an orange ribbon, you're screwed. What you then need to do is turn around and go back to a place where you aren't screwed and proceed from there." And my personal favourite, "The first rule of trail racing is, if the sign doesn't say to turn, don't turn."

The first quarter mile was on asphalt, and I actually kept up with Carl for a bit, before it dawned on me that I am not a sprinter, and I am not warmed up. So I tucked in behind him. He very thoughtfully waited for me at the part we veered off onto the trail, and we trundled up the hill together for a little bit before I let him do his mountain goat thing. I have little stubby legs. I was also a little overwhelmed, wondering what (the hell) he had gotten me into.

Seriously. What the fuck am I doing this for? I am walking up the side of a mountain. In the mud and leaves. For a mile and a half. No joke. From this point on, I was mostly alone. Which is fine, whatever. I train alone, when I'm hiking in the woods I'm alone, and I like it that way. Also, this way no one can see how slow I am. I did actually pass two people by the second mile, which was impressive because they'd caught up to me on the uphill. Go mountain goat ninja skills.

So I toddled along for a couple of miles, wondering exactly where the hell I was going, taking it all in, blowing my nose a lot, and just generally being a FireCat in her natural habitat. Rocks, twigs, dead leaves, nose-blowing, mud. After the first water stop there was a perfectly lovely stretch of pine forest, which always makes me homesick.

Frankly, this race is a big blur to me, not like MCM because I was in pain, but because one boulder hiding in the mud under a clot of dead leaves pretty much looks like another boulder hiding in the mud under a clot of dead leaves. And there was a lot of that. One of which I caught a shoe on, resulting in Epic Face Planet Numero Dos of my trail running career (which leads me to Infinite Mystery Numero Uno: why when I land on my face is it always my ankle that hurts the next day?) Got up, took a quick inventory. No blood, no bones poking through, ok, keep going.

When I hit the dam crossing, I noticed that more and more people were coming back at me. I was being lapped by people as old as my dad. Dude. This was demoralizing. What was even more demoralizing, in a weird way, was how gamely everyone encouraged me. Not more than one or two people went by without a genuine, "Good job," "Good run," or one guy, who is my new favourite person on the planet, "Looks good, baby." Looks good, yeah. Can't run for shit, though.

And then, there were more hills. All of which were up. And more mud, and fallen trees to vault over (or climb under) (or both, on more than one occasion) and oh yes, the water feature.

You may or may not be aware of this, but Pennsylvania has shattered all rainfall totals this year, thanks to the world's wettest August. And September. And most of October, too. Add that to the snowstorm on Halloween weekend, and the trails were, um, festively technical. Translation: one section of the trail was now a stream. With a waterfall. And fish. Yeehaw. Somehow, I managed to not fall all the way down in the mud, though I did lose my footing a couple of times. I also came down hard a couple of times on the downhills, jarring my back in a worrisome sort of jar.

Then there was one last hill. Except it wasn't the last hill. I only thought it was the last hill. My victory was short-lived. Because there was the last hill, still ahead of me. I felt like the Bear Who Went Over the Mountain. And the two people I'd passed caught up with me. (uphill is apparently not my strength.) I was hungry. I was tired. My calves were starting to be distinctly unpleased with the state of the up-ness. Whine bitch nag moan. I was pretty sure there were people still behind me (considering I had just passed one of them) but I was still feeling pretty slow. And cranky.

And then I met Charlie Horse, official Wasatch 100 pacer. Also traffic director at the last road crossing of Dirty Bird 15k. Boy that old man can run. "Hi! I remember you--I parked you this morning. Just follow me," and he took off like a gazelle. I didn't have a whole lot of choice. I followed him. Seriously, I think I ran that last half-mile at a 9:00 pace. He pointed my way back into the woods, and I crashed through the shrubbery and back onto the path past the dock, past the restrooms with which I'd become so familiar, past the cars filing out after changing their clothes and finishing their soup and hanging out with their friends ("Finish strong! You look great!" someone yelled out the window. This might be the same guy who called me baby earlier. I would advise him to get his prescription checked), towards the finish clock, and holy shit there's Carl. The asshole who got me into this.

"Dude, you waited for me."

He gave me That Look. The one that only running-family can give other members of running-family. (Not the "you're not a cheeseburger" look, or the "did you just finish my beer?" look. The other look.) "Of course I waited."

Well, yeah. The field was less than 400 deep, and I just found out today I only finished 20 minutes and 8 places behind him, so it's not like he was out there waiting for hours, but still. "No, I mean, you waited for me."

He continued to look at me like I had three heads and go, "Yeah, of course I waited," so eventually I dropped it.

I don't think he gets it. No one's ever waited for me at the finish before, and I've expressed much consternation about that here, though not nearly as much as I feel. People have sworn up and down that they'll run me in at the last half-mile, or they'll come back for me after they make their way through whatever finish festival, but I'm almost always hoofing it on my own back to the hotel to shower and meet up with them. I'm that slow. I'm not left behind, exactly, these guys would never abandon me (and some of you will probably kick my ass for ever even having thought that, and yes I'm looking at you Nita and Gunz) but simply because of my pace, I'm left to fend for myself for the hardest part of the race and its aftermath, which is why running those first fifteen miles with Len last month was so special, why getting to run Philly with Mags in September was so awesome (beyond the fact that I hadn't seen her in well over a year). I started distance running as a way to deal with the upheaval of my divorce, and it's true what they say about the loneliness of the long-distance runner (not that 15k is actually all that long. Unless you're in the woods on the side of a mountain.) But Sunday morning Carl taught me something I never imagined: I still have family, at least for a couple of hours last Sunday, in Berks County.

Who the hell knew?

Danger Mouse

When I was younger, I wanted to live a life of adventure and danger (though I did not actually want to be an Air Force Ranger, contrary to the lyrics). I wanted to swash, and I wanted to buckle. Climb mountains, swing from vines, leap tall buildings in a single bound--you name it. At some point in my twenties, something vital about my life crystallised for me one night as I navigated my 1967 VW squareback down the back roads towards an apartment I dearly cherished.

No, I did not lose control and plummet into the icy waters of the canal. I didn't even slide into a tree (try to remember that in a VW, the engine is the back, leaving nothing between you and what you are about to hit but two thin layers of steel and....well, a lot of air. Oh--and the gas tank. Can we say "design flaw"?) If memory serves me, I simply looked at the gas gauge.

A word or two here about the instrument panels of air-cooled Volkswagens. They are deceptively plain. The average Volkswagen comes with two lights: a green one, which means there is a problem with the oil pressure and you should turn off the car immediately--even before steering it to the side of the road out of traffic. Since there is no cooling fluid in a VW, the oil is the only thing your engine has going for it in terms of not turning into one solid block of molten, frictionless, basically useless metal. A green light means trouble. A green light says YIKES. OUCH. HELP. DANGER. I've been lucky enough through several years of Volkswagen ownership (including a '65 split-windscreen bus of notorious instability) to never actually have to test the green light strategy.

The other light on a VW's dash panel is the red light. Generally speaking, the red light means "Um, excuse me, I don't mean to interrupt you, but there's something slightly amiss here." It doesn't really get more specific than that. It could mean you're not generating enough voltage. It could mean that somewhere in the spaghetti system of wiring, something is touching something else in an inappropriate manner. It could mean you've blown a fuse or six. It could also just mean your Volkswagen is bored and wants attention. The bus used to do that, going up the west side of mountains in Montana and Wyoming after dark. Any time I tried to push the speed above 45 mph, the light would come on. After several panicked stops to consult my Idiot Guide, I eventually discovered that when this happened nothing in particular was wrong with the bus. It was just its way of saying hello.

(This, incidentally, is why it takes a certain brand of crazy to own a pre-67 bus, and why my particular vehicle was christened the Kobiyashi Maru. Sometimes the only way to pass the test is to cheat. What is being judged here is simply your reaction to being doomed to failure. Mine was to buy a Honda.)

The gas gauge--which on the bus never worked at all, no matter how many times I repaired it--is in most other models not actually a gauge. It's more like a suggestion. Contrary to the manual, the "R" does not actually stand for raus, the German word for "empty." In actuality, it stands for "random." In the squareback, once the needle moved past 1/2, weird things began to happen. The needle would start to shimmy, fluctuating back and forth between R and 1/2 in ever widening arcs. Or, it wouldn't. It would sometimes sit at 1/2 for a good week before plummeting firmly to R. This was not the result of a faulty float in the gas tank. It was just what happened.

That night, chattering and tappeting my way south along the canal road, it occurred to me to wonder why I thought always being on the verge of running out of gas was an acceptable version of living on the edge. It wasn't that I had had to purchase a cell phone against my preference, because I was so likely to be stranded. It wasn't that many of my most frequent routes had limited cellular signal anyway because of a quirk known as geography. It wasn't even that, as a general rule, I carry my vagina with me while traveling and despite having been lucky so far it was only a matter of time until the person who stopped to render aid was a chain-saw wielding lunatic rapist who ate small children and microwaved kittens in his spare time. It was just that I was done living like this. The adventure was no longer fun. I wanted to get into a car and know I would eventually arrive at my destination. I wanted to be able to plan without adding three hours for unseen roadside activity involving my socket set. I wanted someone else to change my oil for a change.

Don't get me wrong. I still have the Volkswagen. During my disaster of a marriage, my husband frequently pressured me to sell it, arguing that we really needed the chunk of cash that was parked under a blue weatherproof cover in my parents' front yard, slowly oxidizing to itself. Even when I asked him by way of comparison why selling his motorcycle was never an option (knowing it was his parents' graduation gift to him when he finished culinary school and thus off-limits because of emotional attachment) he never quite got it. The last spring we were married we spent Easter weekend trying to get it back in running order, even if not driveable. It turned over happily, but even after hefty (and lung-clogging) doses of carb cleaner, it wouldn't stay running long enough to settle into its characteristic stuttering purr. But no matter. I still wasn't selling.

My husband ended up leaving me less than six weeks later. I guess his theory was, if you can't get it running in an afternoon, might as well pack up your tools and go look for another model. But not me. I know that someday, when I have the time, the money, and the emotional stability needed for such ventures, I'll clear off the square of Astroturf in the trunk hatch (don't ask), open the engine compartment, put on my striped Exxon work shirt that for reasons too convoluted to explain says JOEL on the pocket, lay out my tools, and begin a full resto. The difference next time is that I won't need it. Rather than being my daily driver, it will be my weekend excursion car. It will be fun. And by god the horn will work this time, whether or not I'm turning left.

But I will have another set of wheels, one chosen for practicality, reliability, sturdiness, and for god's sake its crash rating. I want this one to take me safely all the way home.

What to Do When You Run Out of Sick Days

Don't worry though. It's not contagious.

No, seriously? Best. Protest. Ever.

While You Were Out

I love sleep. Always been a big fan of it. Unlike my sisters, who when we were growing up would bargain for later and later bedtimes, I never had one. This always confused the babysitter greatly, but my parents' insistence that I had enough sense to go to bed when I got tired usually proved true. At least during my childhood, anyway.

Somewhere during high school, I developed a love/hate relationship with sleep. Stage crew ran late, to nine, ten, sometimes eleven o'clock (on a school night!) and I had to be up at six to get to school on time. Late nights was when things got interesting--when my friends got original, creative, and sometimes illegal bugs up their butts, our parents went to sleep, friendships were forged and romances ignited. And, of course, there was homework to be done. Theoretically. I subconsciously became afraid that if I fell asleep on someone's couch/floor/lap/diner booth, I would miss something. This was likely based in firm reality, as I have a long-reaching history of being the first one to fall asleep at slumber parties and midnight gatherings. (One group of friends scattered across the country has begun to keep a scrapbook of photos from our somewhat annual gatherings at people's homes; every last one of them features at least one shot of me, asleep on the floor, while conversation rages around me. Enough so that renaming this blog Floors I Have Slept On would not be entirely inaccurate, if somewhat ungrammatical.)

Still, I adore my sleep. For a while in my twenties, this combination made me the worst of all possible things: a late sleeper. Saturdays I could sometimes sleep until noon and still wake up only from guilt at knowing what time it was. I hated it. Somewhere inside me was a morning person, waiting to be released from this bizarre ritual. It didn't help that I dated a series of night owls and insomniacs, starting with my first serious boyfriend. Even my best friend, who loved to rise at the ungodly hour of 5:30 to walk the dog and listen to the BBC, was an insomniac and could often be found roaming the house at midnight. The one morning he slept until quarter past eight, I was afraid to go in and check on him because I thought he might have died during the night.

And then there was my husband, who fell into sleep like dropping off the edge of a cliff. I used to tease him that he had two speeds: fast, and off. He would stay awake for hours into the night, sometimes days at a time, but when sleep came, it would take him in the middle of sentences, sometimes in the middle of words. And Lord knows there was no waking the man. Getting him out of bed and functional enough to light a cigarette was a ritual as drawn-out as a Japanese tea ceremony.

He was an entertaining sleeper, too, with vivid dreams that sometimes involved him spouting out dialogue for all the anthropomorphic characters, and acrobatics that more than once left me with interesting bruises to explain to friends. Sleep for him was in intricate dance of elbows and gangly limbs thrown wide, long hair strewn wildly across all our pillows, humping up under the blankets like a turtle, and something we used to refer to simply as "The Leg." The Leg was something to see, all right, not only for its cranelike humour, but also for its sheer flexibility. There was, quite simply, nothing this man would not do in his semi-conscious search for ORSP. (Optimal Rest and Sleeping Position, if you have to ask.)

These days I sleep alone, tweaking my nocturnal schedule so I'll have time to myself in the mornings and the evenings after my parents retire. I'm reverting to my morning-person schedule, though I still resent the alarm those days it reminds me that I'm only up because I have obligations that aren't to myself. I'm not lonely when I wake curled on my side of the bed, usually with a couple of cats strewn about in positions of utter somnolence. It's the nights that get to me. I still lie awake in the dark, listening for the cadence of his breathing, thinking about impossible fish missions and those ridiculous involuntary twitches that used to overcome him and scare the crap out of me, and waiting for the return of The Leg.

Snail

I carry everything I used to be. It forms my skeleton. I carry each lumpen, misshaped pearl of mistake or grief or guilt or insult. Someone will be able to identify my body by them when I die. I carry the memory of our first kiss, just as tightly as I carry the rush of blood through my veins, a hot sound like a whisper. I carry all the songs we have sung, deep in my body; I carry the stars. I carry your memory with me like an old quilt, like a sack of stones to weigh me down, like an old limp from a broken bone that did not heal straight, like silence. I carry your past, too. I carried it that long night when you could not stand it, and I could never bear to put it down. When you are thirsty, I carry water.

I Carry Your Heart

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


e e cummings


Michael Hedges, in a live performance:

Currency

We've been talking a lot about money in a couple of my classes the past few weeks, and we're only just getting started. First of all, I've always found the concept weird. Maybe that's because I'm an artist, a poet, and the idea of spending umpteen hours a week doing something in which I am uninterested at best so that I can earn what are essentially numbers on a piece of paper just seems so....irrelevant much of the time. I participate in direct deposit whenever and wherever it is offered to me, so most months I don't even see a paycheck. Or cash, considering I have a bank card. It's all done on computers. And the transactions have gotten so convoluted that they no longer make any sense to me.

I'm not suggesting by any means that a subsistence living is better, or that direct trade in goods would solve everything (for one thing, I'm not sure I'd want to be the guy whose value is computed in eggplants, or bathroom cleanser, or--god forbid--gym socks). So on a certain level I understand the need for currency, the need to give everyone equal access to things, by giving them instead access to what those things represent, which is of course, "value."

And that's another fucked up concept. Value. Consider: I get paid less than most janitors. For spending three hours per day in a car, four hours per day in front of a classroom, at least one to two hours per day prepping for being in front of the classroom (and that's a rough average that also covers weekends and vacations) and at least another fifteen hours per week grading papers. Usually more. And I love what I do. Except for the commuting part, which frankly I could do without, although it does give me an excuse twice daily to not be grading papers at that moment. (There have been times when traffic is so bad going in towards the Lincoln Tunnel that I've actually been able to grade papers while commuting, but that's neither here nor there.)

In a nutshell, in a perfect world, I teach people to tell the world what they feel and think about things. I teach them to look, to listen, to react in a thoughtful way rather than just a kneejerk reaction that's probably been trained into them by others. With a little luck, I teach them to read, and I teach them to write. And for this, to do this sixty hours per week at three different schools, I am compensated at a rate that puts me below the local poverty line. It puts me right in the same economic class as many of the students I teach, in fact. The ones who can't get ahead. The ones who are searching for jobs that will allow them to leave the ghetto and make something of themselves, and have realized that education is really the only way to do this. I have the education. I have twice the education many of them will ever have. And were I not living in my parents' house at the moment, I'd be living in the ghetto with them. I can't get ahead, either. Education and the economy are funny things. The current administration pretends to have acknowledged the irrevocable link between them, by instituting No Child Left Behind, but that's frankly just a publicity stunt that's doing more damage than it is good. Anybody who works directly in schools knows that. Twenty years after the Jersey City Public School system was taken over by the state, it was given back this summer. I guess they couldn't figure out what the hell to do with it, either.

So how do we determine how much value something has? How do we assign a price tag? Why are the most crucial and worthwhile pursuits the ones that pay the least? Why are poets, teachers, inventors, artists, social workers, nurses, mothers, and midwives struggling to exist while salesmen, advertising executives, stockbrokers, TV stars, pop singers, and real estate moguls have so much money they can't even figure out how to give it away? Why is that? Why does a librarian make $12 an hour if she's lucky and lives in a mid-sized city, and a personal injury lawyer live in an opulent million dollar home? Why do some of my students have to drop my class because they have to work 50 hours a week just to be able to afford to pay the tuition to take my class? Why can't we educate the children of the world because we can't find the $8 billion it would cost to put them all in primary school, but we can spend $40 billion a year on golf?

I guess the real question is what's wrong with not just the economy of the world, but the value system? There's a person in my community who drives her Hummer H3 to the local independent organic foods co-op. What the fuck part of the equation is she not getting? And why isn't she getting it? Why do we buy half-million dollar homes for our families and then work 80 hours a week to be able to afford them, so we can't spend time with the other people who live in them with us? My husband and I often worked opposing schedules because our respective trades required it. The month after we were married, we pretty much only saw each other awake on weekends, when we were both cranky and pressured. When I lost my contract at the end of the year, I tried to cancel Christmas. My husband, hurried home by his manager who was wise enough to hear the anxiety in my voice, curled up next to me on the couch and reminded me what I had forgotten: We may never have any money, he assured me, but we will always be rich. Those twelve words are words I still cherish more than just about anything, even now that he is gone. Because, more than he knew it, more than he wanted to admit, he was right. We were rich. We had each other.

And how the hell do you put a dollar value on that?

My Life, If I Were Tall

Seriously.

No Getting Out of This One

I thought I had lucked out on the Scribblings front, because last week involved some pretty heavy paper-grading, and before I could look up it was Monday and there were something like 87 posts listed on last week's topic.

Alas, it was not to be. Meg and Laini are on vacation this week, so there is officially "no topic." Which, in the great cosmic karmic debt scheme of things, means that God is telling me something. I hate when that happens, because I was really in some serious denial about having to fess up.

The topics these women pick often scare the bejesus out of me, precisely because I have never actually met or even corresponded privately with either of them; and yet, they have a knack for pulling out of my week's worth of emotional detritus and spiritual backwash the single topic I most need to address. In my world, I have a word for that, and that word is usually D'oh! (sometimes, in fact, there are two words, one of which is technically a compound word referring to the aforementioned deity, but I'm digressing seriously.)

In point of fact, powerful is the one word that describes precisely how I haven't felt in a very long time. Longer, even, than most of you would have guessed. To the casual observer, even someone who comes into regular contact with me, I have it pretty much together, considering. I love my teaching jobs (all three of them); my parents and I have an excellent relationship, marred only slightly by the fact that I currently live with them; and I am well on track to beat the bridge and successfully complete the marathon in 22 days.

Even were you to be a fly on the wall in my therapist's office--which I am totally not suggesting, as that would remove several points from my overall coolness factor--you might suspect that I am handling the loss of my husband in a relatively graceful way, with humour and aplomb and only a modicum of bitterness.

You would, in fact, be wrong. You have not had the opportunity to see me biting the steering wheel of my Civic hybrid because a morning's rush hour traffic has put me over the steep edge of rationality due in part to the fact that it gave me an extra twenty minutes to stew over our last conversation. You have not seen me stay up reading late into the night, only to barely be able to open my eyes the next morning, because it is when I turn out the blue glass bedside lamp that the memories come crowding into the empty space beside me in the bed. You do not know that I still sleep confined to one side of the bed, even after running twenty miles, and when a solitary foot strays onto the cool expanse of sheet next to me, I yank it back as if I have been burnt before I discover what is no longer there. You have not counted the number of times I have stopped during the writing of this to gaze at the photograph on my desk, taken so long ago his hair can't even be contained in a pony tail.

People have suggested that there is a kind of power in powerlessness. It's been suggesting that letting go of our illusion of control is freeing, and to an extent I suppose that's true. But I seriously suck at doing nothing. I, like my mother, am not a human being but a human doing. It is true that certain events this summer allowed me to relax my viselike grip on what I thought was the proper way of navigating this situation, and at times I've even been allowed a few moments, here and there, of something approaching peace. But power? No the fuck way. Not happening here in Three Feathers. Sorry. My only sense of power right now comes from running. From shuffling bow-legged back to my car after heaving myself off the grass into a standing position after my post-run stretch. From knowing that, as pitifully slow as I am, not only did I manage to keep myself upright, I am also, somehow, moving forward.

Stay the Course

In the last several weeks, I have spent a great deal of time seriously wondering whether I will be able to finish the marathon on the strength of the training I've done the past several months. We hear all sorts of inspiring stories, from Team Hoyt to my friend Marathon Peach, a sixteen-year liver transplant survivor, to people running to honour the memories of Marines close to them who've died in Iraq and elsewhere while defending their country. They tell us that the excitement of race day and 50,000 cheering fans and the course lined with Marines will carry us the last six miles, even though the training only allows for one run of 20 miles as the longest distance.

I've wondered about all that, because I know where my weaknesses are, and I know that it has been a long and, at times, difficult summer for me, and that my emotional state slowly but inexorably takes its toll on my physical body. I know all these things, and I wasn't entirely sure where in the middle of this equation the marathon would land me.

Then, this morning, it crystallised for me along the trail. The early morning sunlight; the amazingly cold, clear, crisp weather along the river that is so different from the sultry grey heat of this day two years ago; the strength in my body and in my heart as I blasted through my personal record for a five-mile pace by several seconds. I will succeed. I will complete this race.

And the number one reason is that I am not a quitter. Happy anniversary, my dearest love. I miss you.

Into the Wild

You've asked me to make a decision, but there are some decisions that simply cannot be made. I freely admit that I caused you unbearable pain. I acted out of selfishness, out of fear, out of loneliness, out of desperation. Who among us hasn't done that?

You've asked me to bind myself to something in which I can never believe, simply because you wish it to be so. You have asked me to let you control me, in order that you might believe I have relinquished control over you. But I've never been able to control you. I've never even been able to control myself. That's how we got here, isn't it?

You've asked me to make a choice that proves what I've always known and what you've stopped believing, at the same time it renders it unviable.

You've asked, in short, for me to do what I've always been sworn to do but have until now failed miserably at accomplishing: to do what's best for you, at the expense of my own personal needs and desires. The one thing I learned best from you is that this never leaves anyone satisfied.

You've asked, darling, for the one thing that was never mine to give.

Sound and Fury

The prompts the last couple of weeks have given me a bit of trouble (as have the inner workings of my life in general), so much so, in fact, that I skipped last week entirely. I had a great title for the post, Somewhere That's Green, but that was it. Anyway, I was lying in a somewhat tepid bath a few moments ago, pondering where the word phenomenon would take me and realising that I am the only person on the planet who has absolutely no interest in whether or not Harry Potter dies at the end of the book (though I am eternally grateful to J.K. Rowling for the number of my semi-literate students she has encouraged to pick up reading as a pastime instead of gang-related drive-bys). I'm also lukewarm on the topic of Crocs, even after hearing former Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez announce during a game the other night that he probably has close to a dozen pairs in a rainbow of colours. There are apparently websites out there devoted to Croc-haters, and while I disdain the current fashion craze for ugly plastic clogs with holes in them the size of subway tokens (yes, I realise they're neither rubber nor plastic, but a trademarked polymer blend, but still. This is supposed to be healthy for me how?) I really can't get into too much of a lather about it. I'm busy hating so many other things.

But then, while I was lying in a tub roughly the temperature of my attitude towards so many of these current frenzies, it struck. First, it was just a puff of fresh air, a glint of blue light, and a faint ozone smell through the open window. Then, moments later, I was stung by a thousand tiny needles of cold and my mother was rushing upstairs to close her bedroom windows.

There's something refreshing about lying in a warm bath while getting rained on, something wild and slightly decadent, almost like skinny-dipping. Which is ridiculous, since of course you're naked when you take a bath, but somehow this is more dangerous. I've always loved thunderstorms, especially those rich, powerful ones that slam across the hills of Pennsylvania and up the Delaware like freight trains at four in the afternoon every day of the week some Augusts. Especially the ones that splattered across the vacant schoolyard macadam in Schnecksville the summer I spent with my cousin Christine, every afternoon like clockwork on our way home from the community pool. Or the ones that bounced back and forth across the hills between Canopus Hollow and Brewster, echoing through the valley for hours and cutting the power to our house (sometimes for days) and once frying the internal modem of my old iBook when lightning struck the transformer right outside the house.

I accidentally caused a thunderstorm once, driving home across Pennsylvania. I can't remember what I was angry at him for; I only remember that I was roiling with rage as I drove home with Chloe while he followed in another car. We watched the clouds boil up on either side of us, and my fingers clenched the steering wheel so hard that I was leaving nail marks in it, and when lightning struck the car neither of us was surprised, but I was blinded by the shower of sparks as it arced out to something on the overpass we were crossing. The next thing I remember is being three or four miles down the road, my ears still ringing, the hair on my left arm still standing up, and the searing jolt still echoing down the nerves to my fingers like when I was little and my sisters and I used to dare each other to touch the electric fence that kept the mules in.

We figured it was because I'm left-handed, or because I usually perch my left elbow on the window-ledge of the car while driving, or because it's the side closest to the heart, which was undoubtedly a little freaked out at having its own electrical current tampered with, but I knew it was as much the wedding ring as anything else. When we could talk again, Chloe looked over at me with a faint smile and suggest perhaps I call him and apologize before I got us both killed.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

My first instinct when I got this week's topic was, Oh boy, is this one ever in the bag. See, if there's one thing I know about, it's hair. I come from a very hairy family. And I don't mean that in the traditional way. We're Irish, not Italian. We don't, for the most part, display dark hairy forearms (or hairy backs), and only my father and I sport the infamous Marty Scorsese eyebrow-toupee look. (You're laughing, but it's true. Brooke Shields circa 1982 ain't got nothin' on me.) When she was a child, my uncles used to call my mom "Hairy Mary." Beauty salons have love-hate relationships with us, especially me with the uncontrollable blond wad with the Bonnie Raitt skunk-stripe at my left temple, and my father with his Sean-Connery-Medicine-Man white ponytail. Which, it's worth adding, drives the Bishop absolutely batshit.

That was going to be what this post was about, but then I realised it's funny how hair is coming to represent all I have had and lost in the past two years: Juno, my husband, my marriage. (In some places in India widows shave their heads--as opposed to throwing themselves on funeral pyres, I guess, this is a humane way to deal with the impossibility of grief--and I truly understand the compulsion that began this tradition, even if I didn't practice it quite so literally as my poor, shorn husband.) Our children. We already knew, sight unseen, that Jocelyn was going to be known in our neighbourhood as "the baby with the hair." If you've ever met either of us, you know exactly why this is. Let's just say that our wedding day was 95 degrees, the church was unairconditioned, the reception was outside in the meadow, and my husband and I were, with each passing moment, one golder, longer, and curlier than the other in ringlets of uncontrollable humidity. I at least had the advantage of a gallon of hairspray, six hundred bobby pins, and a two-piece veil. My husband would not release his pony-tail for fear of sporting a two-foot deep Afro.

In some ways it was not only a wedding of our families, our bodies, and our souls, it was also very much a wedding of our hair. The bathroom at our house was a haven for blond, corkscrewing strands, more than you would think possible to be in the sink, on the floor, slithered down the shower drain trying to escape, or trapped in our hairbrushes, and us to still have some on our head. Out in public, we often looked like chimpanzees engaged in grooming behaviour, reaching over and plucking long golden strands off the other's sweater, then pulling and pulling and pulling until it was finally free, then commenting on whose it might have been. Long, grey, and wavy, most likely mine. Long blond and tightly sprung, most likely his. Long, blond, and wavy--anybody's guess. Short blond and wavy, probably our friend Robin's, though how his hair ended up on our clothes as often as our own is to this day a mystery. I mean, we were at each other's houses all the time, but it's not like we were over there head-butting each other.

And then there were the cats. Two black-and-white cats and one grey cat can generate quite a bit of fur, and ever notice how they shed the white and grey fur on the black bathrobe and the black fur on the off-white bathrobe? That's a trick I'd like to master. We went through three vacuum cleaners in our relationship, mostly because of the nasty pea-green shag carpet in our rental living room. Final score: cats 3, vacuum cleaner 0. I'm going to have to buy another new one when I move again.

Lastly, I'd like to add Juno to the equation. Juno was Robin's beloved malamute. Juno was the hairiest creature known to science. Ever seen a malamute during her spring blowout? The spring she was with us for this event, we had piles of fur the size of canned hams and cocker spaniels. Tumble-fur blew on the slightest breeze, sometimes large enough to spook the cats. Paws down the most heard comment in the household we shared was, "Oh, look honey....dog hair." Robin lost Juno close to 28 months ago, and I'm still finding clots of her fur in the nooks and crannies of my belongings. Robin was right. She truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

The last time I saw my husband, his hair was the shortest I have ever seen it in the years I've known him. When we first met, he was growing it out, recovering from a conservative haircut in honour of his brother's wedding. I could still see a few golden ringlets under his hat, ringlets I wanted to take around my fingers and kiss one by one, but the length of the curls that had grown to midback during our years together had been sheared away, as if removing the weight from his scalp could erase the images of us from his mind; as if cutting it off at the root could deny its existence; as if by denuding himself of his body's most shining beauty, one of his secret powers, he could ease the passage of mourning.

Yes, I understand the urge.

Sometimes Barnegat Bay Is All You'll Ever Need

Forty years ago today, on a day so hot that all the pats of butter melted, convincing the guests there would be lobster, and the bride wore inchworms in her veil, Jack and Mary Ellen ignored the advice of everyone older and wiser, and said "I do."

And they did.



Happy anniversary, mom and dad.

Over and Over and Over

I would take these hands

these hands that know me


these hands that will be the last thing memory knows



and this time, I would never let them go

(more)

(Up)Rooted

This afternoon I spent a very entertaining ninety minutes outside potting my philodendron cuttings, which had gotten too big for their britches and were taking over a glass beaker with their ghost-white snakey roots. It didn't actually take me an hour and a half to do this, of course; during the middle of it the next-door neighbour came over and we got into a protracted discussion of why things never travel in straight lines. This includes the property line, the access easement rights (as she now owns land on both sides of us and could theoretically one day tell us we can't use either end of the driveway), and the paddock fence that was probably supposed to run along the property line, but instead wobbles back and forth across it as if it's had too much dandelion wine. The reason for this discussion was proposed fence repair to keep her damned horses in.

(Let me just interrupt myself for a moment to say that if it seems that everything I write lately ends up being about my marriage and my return to this house, it's probably because everything I write lately ends up being about my marriage and my return to this house. Somehow it just seems to be on my mind lately, and yes, that was sarcasm you just detected.)

This time last year, a small, shady perennial garden in upstate New York was the only thing saving me from utter despair. I knew that chances were slim that the flowers, herbs, and I would still be there in the fall, but I also knew that if I didn't make some firm commitment to putting down roots, I might as well walk out the front door of our small cottage and into the lake. And so I dug. I planted; I moved rocks and cut back stubborn hydrangeas that wouldn't stay gone; I arranged a small cairn of stones at one corner of the garden that was marked by a ridiculously large outcropping of bedrock (though the area was christened "place of many lakes" by the Mohican Indians, they could have just as easily called it "place of too damned many rocks" as far as we could tell) and tucked a pocket-sized brass statue of Durga astride her lion under the overhang. I watered. I weeded. I sat on the rocks and willed the spiderwort to open. Sometimes, I wrote in my journal. Mostly, I just sat.

May came. On Memorial Day, my parents came up and while my dad packed box after box of books and photographs, my mother and I painstakingly transferred my precious plants to pots and planters for the trip south. The alyssum that had just come into its own. The miniature irises Jayne exchanged for some of my silver lamium, whose small fuchsia flowers were threatening to overtake everything unless I intervened. Mint and chocolate mint, grandbabies of plants from Mother Ruth's garden, which had multiplied so much that I'd had to give some to Robin, and when I moved upstate to his neighbourhood I wandered over the hill one morning and stole some back. By then he had so damned much of it he didn't notice. My kitchen herbs, which I'd selected for my husband. My beloved lavender, in the only sunny spot in the front yard.

Refusing to believe I would be there longer than a few weeks, I left the garden in its various terracotta pots and window-boxes and put just about everything I owned in storage, with the exception of about four sundresses and some of my most precious books. Surprisingly, the plants lived through the summer. Even more surprisingly (to me, at least at the time), so did I. I don't think it's fair to say we thrived, but we lay still and close to the ground and waited out the sweltering heat that pressed down on us all through July and August.

By summer's end I had settled into the possibility that this was going to be a very long year, indeed. Somehow I got hired by not one but two community colleges, as well as my local library, in the course of 72 very frantic hours, after nearly nine full months of unemployment. One of the colleges hired me precisely sixteen hours before the start of their semester in a cosmic gesture of either serendipity or sheer insanity. I changed my address, and my driver's license. I even joined the local gym when it got too cold and dark to run after classes. Eventually I confessed to my mom how much I hated the daybed in what had once been my bedroom, and retrieved my futon from storage. We brought the houseplants inside, and my perennials as far as the screened-in back porch, and hunkered down for the winter.

I brought the perennials back outside a couple of weeks ago, and just this past Thursday I noticed the tips of Jayne's irises starting to show through the soil. The lavender isn't going to make it, but I've yet to successfully winter over lavender, so I'm not really too surprised. The lamium and mints don't seem to have fared well, either, which is a surprise. This is mint that has survived multiple transplants over three state lines, years of piss-poor watering, northern exposure, too much sun, not enough sun, near-catastrophic heatstroke in the back of my husband's Blazer, and Juno the 90-pound malamute. It must be true, then, that my mother is the fabled Great Cosmic Mint-Killer Deva, Destroyer of All Bearing the Genus Name Mentha. It's legend, how this woman can kill off a mint plant in less than a season. And we all know how hard it is to kill mint. Some of us spend our entire gardening careers trying.

I still can't bring myself to uproot these plants yet again and stick them in the ground in my mother's garden. I have no idea how long I'll be here, but I'm not ready to admit that it may be another summer. Not a day goes by that I don't utter some variation of "I actually have [insert object, title, article of clothing or furniture, etc.]--but it's in a box somewhere." If I have to spend another semester without the other four-fifths of my poetry collection and writing references, I may in fact flat-out commit seppuku. Sometimes, driving by the storage facility on the highway, I wave. Hello, Jack Gilbert. Hello, Nance. Hello, Paula and Eavan and dark-eyed Julia. Hello, Medbh McGuckian. Hello Hamish and James, read over and over in Scotland one summer. Hello, hello, sweet Jim McAuley, signed and dedicated Easter Sunday 1995 in the same watery blue fountain-pen hand that edited countless drafts of my master's thesis. Hello, life-in-a-box. Hello, memories of the smell of my husband's flannel shirt. Hello, dishes we picked out together. Hello, photographs of us. Hello, everything he left behind. Hello, everything that was once ours, that is now mine alone. And then, before I know it, the facility is in my rearview mirror and I'm still waving: goodbye, past.