that's mrs. mediocrity to you

I went to our camp this past weekend, just for an evening. My husband and son went for the long weekend, but I can’t do that, there is mold and mildew and I am allergic, and anyway I can’t take three days off work just now. So I drove up there Saturday, late afternoon, a perfectly perfect day, just the right temperature, not a cloud in the sky, and the drive along the lake between here and there is always beautiful. On this day, the water was the darkest of teal, all dotted with tiny white sailboats.

I keep forgetting the windmills, built two summers ago, although I guess they are actually turbines, all stark and white and metal-looking but still, stunning. And along this drive there is a spot where you come down a big hill into a small town, and ten of these windmills are perched at the top of the next hill over. It is a very hilly place. And it’s a sight to behold, takes my breath away, really, the way they stand there like sentinels watching over the valley.

I should have stopped to take pictures, but the road was busy and my dog was panting, freaking out because he hates hates hates riding in the car and we were 30 minutes into a 45 minute drive. So I drove on by without taking pictures, but one day, soon, I will go back. And when I got to our camp I said to my husband, “I want a windmill, can we get one?” and of course, he just laughed, thinking I was kidding, but really, I want a windmill.

And then I sat down and listened to the wind in the trees, poplars and pine, that wonderful sound, and I watched the poplar leaves dance back and forth. I thought of the trees that have fallen, these poplars that are dying one by one, two of them have landed on the cabin. And this is where we got married, on the bridge that crossed the stream, but now that has fallen, too.

And I thought of our dog, the other dog, the one that died three years ago now, how camp was always his favorite place and we took him there the weekend before he died, even though the weekend before that he didn’t want to go, could barely move as the kids and my husband packed up to leave. But that next weekend we took him, not knowing it was his last weekend. And when it was dark, we went for the walk that we always walk, and we stopped in the spot where we always stop and we listened for the splash in the neighbor’s pond that we always knew was coming. That weekend, it was like he was a puppy again.

And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I was crying, not just misty- eyed but balling, missing all these things that are gone. So I went to the outhouse to collect myself and dry my eyes. The photo above shows what I saw facing out through the doorway of a door that no longer closes. Still life with outhouse, framed. (It faces into our woods, privacy isn’t an issue, and I went back, afterwards, to take the picture, in case you were wondering.)

Later, as I was leaving, to drive home to care for these cats and to sleep in my bed, I walked out to the road and saw the Milky Way, perfectly perfect, every star in the sky visible. And then as I drove I watched the moon rise, just beyond a long stretch of farm. It was huge and orange, tucked behind wispy clouds, more harvest moon than end of May moon. And again, I wanted to stop for a picture, it was that incredible, that memorable, but again, I had my dog in the back and his panting had risen beyond frantic, so I kept driving. And then I was home.

But in that short span of time, just six hours,

I saw a lifetime of fabulous views.

red poppies make me think of blood
they pop off the landscape like pinwheels

green is earth’s favorite color

i am in the mood for popcorn

this moment won’t last

i have been sitting here forever

the hawk that just flew over my head, he is the one,
the one i was supposed to be watching for

a blue chair in my garden is reflecting

white cottonwood falls like snow

today is the perfect temperature

i am surrounded by roses
they have thorns
their scent is cloying
they are beautiful

weeds taunt me and i ignore them

the woodpile directly before me is
the black walnut tree from my parents

when i was a kid we made
necklaces from horse chestnuts
i always cut my palm
boring holes through them with a knife

the necklaces lasted for a day
we spent the whole day before that
making them

silence is not golden it is purple

fireflies are faeries in disguise

i am 47
i would prefer
to be 39

my skin is so dry

i like a tree with gnarled branches

i like the word gnarled

this moment is for the birds

a chickadee

life

It is hot, so hot, way too hot for May, I want to go out and play,
in the sun, in my garden, and work up a really good sweat.

I want the sun to be sauna, cleanse my body, my soul, I want
to bake til I’m done to perfection.

I want to outlast the flowers that wilt in this heat, stand up tall, stretch my arms, drink the light.

I want to fill an old jar with cold lemonade, tip my head, let it run down my chin.

I want to veer off a path filled with trillium and fronds, find a spot that is dappled with shade.

I want to stand in the middle of life’s endless road and watch heat shimmer up from the pavement.

I want to pull up a chair when dusk comes to call and listen to birds say goodnight.

I want to feel the cool grass beneath my bare feet and watch as the fireflies frolic.

I want to count the planets, say their names one by one, and call them home like children.

I want to howl at the moon just because it is there and and seems to be begging for silence.

I want to lay down my head, sleep the sleep of the dead, when my body just aches with exhaustion.

I want to wake in the morning with sun in my eyes, all shadow removed from the room.

It is hot, so hot, way too hot for May,

I want to walk to the edge of the ocean.

Dust. It collects everywhere. On shelves and witches balls, in corners and my mind. It is pervasive, invasive, persuasive. It makes me want to give up, cry uncle, sing defeat.

I can’t keep up with the dust, so I’ve stopped trying. I let it sit there and ruminate on my blind eye turned elsewhere. Waiting. Dust knows we are enemies. In fact, we literally are, I am allergic.

But it is deeper than its own thin layer, dust. It is a sign of inertia. The battle of life, age, entropy.

Dust is dead. Dead space, dead air, dead cells. The opposite of life.

I watch it float through the air trapped in rays of sunshine, trying its best to look pretty. I feel it settle down around me, all the while making snide comments on my laziness. I smell its musty, fusty, dried up scent, just reeking of neglect.

Dust is illiterate, but I read the words that I draw in its layers and cringe at their implication. Clean me. Notice me. Take care.

It is not my fault, this dust, it is something that happens. We can remove it, daily, weekly, monthly, as often as there is time, but it will always return, unwanted visitor, benign blanket, ambivalent disguise.

I tackle dust, every so often, when I can’t tolerate its presence any longer. I wash and scrub and eradicate this evidence of days gone by, of life’s slow and steady passing. I make it sparkle.

We both know it is a losing battle.

But we pretend for a day, or at least an hour,

that I am victorious.

So yesterday, I let Brett, Number 4, most often known as Puddin’ Pie, outside for the first time in three days, and later, I look out the kitchen window and I see him carrying a huge bird in his tiny kitten mouth. And I thought it was a mockingbird, my mockingbird, the one that likes to tell me lots of stories, and I was oh, so not happy with Brett.

So I sent my husband a text that said, “Brett just killed the mockingbird,” and he called me and said, “No, that bird was out there when I mowed the lawn last night.” And Brett was not.

Pause. Okay….

And I was glad, oh so glad, that Brett didn’t kill it, and then, just a few minutes later, I heard the mockingbird, my mockingbird, singing his tune, and I was glad, oh so glad about that. But still, I had to wonder, who or what killed this bird, and why, knowing that we have six, yes, six! cats, did my husband just leave it out there?

Because then I couldn’t find Brett to get it away from him, and when he finally did come back, he was licking his chops, so I know, just know, that he had himself an I-have-no-idea-how-long-this-bird-has-been-dead snack.

But I can’t blame him, he’s a cat, for crying out loud. That’s his job in life. To kill birds and mice and those mice in clown’s costumes, the chipmunk. And then eat them.

And still it made me sad, because I love my birds and we have spent so much time and bird seed and bird baths and bird houses trying to attract them to our yard, and now we have these cats that I want to kill the mice and even the cute little chipmunks, but I definitely don’t want them killing birds.

But that is not the way nature works, not the way instinct works, and why did I think it would be, could be otherwise?

And then Brett, he comes inside and he climbs into my lap and he is just so stinkin’ cute and he is all cuddly, all purrs and kisses and sweet tiny meows in his funny little squeaky kitten voice. And I am in love with this kitten and his sweet cuddly kitten ways. But. I have seen, several times now, what he can do.

What he is capable of.

Food for thought, that.

she is trapped inside a month of gray…

a quote from a song that is singing my tune, in these days when the world is filled with color, and these nights when the world is filled with life, and you would think that some of it, a tiny little bit even, would rub off on me, turn me at least a slightly pastel shade of something, but no, there is only gray.

and i’m not saying that gray is bad, it’s not, i like gray, it’s just that it’s not black and it’s not white and the variations are endless and the possibilities are overwhelming, and somewhere in the exact middle of all that gray is the epicenter of the universe or at least the average, the mean, the median, of all the other days, and what does that signify, exactly?

something is shifting in the universe, every second of every minute, and most of the time you can’t tell, you don’t even notice, but every once in a while you feel that shift, that tiny alteration, in your flesh, in your bones, like the tiniest of breezes ruffling over the valleys of your face.

and what i mean is not profound, or out of reach, but life, daily life, that brings with it the endless possibilities, distracting us from the moments we are in, running fingers through our hair just long enough to make us wonder.

and if we wonder long enough, wander long enough, we always get there, the place we are supposed to be, even if we don’t know what it’s called, or how we got there, or where we will be headed next. it might be called tomorrow. or next month. or the future.

but it’s never called yesterday.

Yesterday morning I woke up and went to the kitchen to make my first cup of tea, and noticed something in my dog’s water bowl. At first I thought I was imagining things, but after close inspection, it turned out to be an earthworm. Now I have to just stop right here and tell you that worms are my thing: the thing I am most terrified of in life, on a phobic level. I know it makes no sense, I know they are harmless, but phobias don’t make sense, that’s why they are phobias and not just regular fears.

And so, there I was, standing in my kitchen with a worm floating in my dog’s bowl. At first I thought it was dead, and that was gross, and bad enough, but I figured I could wait for my son to come home and take it outside for me.

But then. It started to move. No, it started to writhe in that creepy way a worm submerged in water will do, and then I felt sick to my stomach. (And before you laugh, just picture whatever you are most terrified of, sitting in a bowl in your kitchen when you wake up tomorrow. A snake? A tarantula?) And then I couldn’t do anything at all because, well, what if it crawled out of the bowl?

So I stood there, frozen, in my kitchen, wanting to scream, but no one was there to hear me anyway, and what good would it do, and it was, after all, just a worm. So I stood there and tried not to look, but I just had to keep looking because, really, how could there be a worm in this dish in my kitchen?

My back door seals nicely, there are rugs inside and outside the entrance, then three steps up, then another door with a rug in front of it. There is all of that between the outdoors, where worms live, and this dog dish. And somehow an earthworm traversed it all, looking for a drink of water?

Did my dog bring it in with him, on him, somehow? That might be even worse, because sometimes my husband lets him out in the morning, and then the dog comes right back in and jumps into bed with me. And if worms have the potential to be part of that package, then I need to start sleeping someplace much higher above sea level.

Did it come in on one of our shoes? One of mine? A worm was that close to my foot? I can’t even think about it.

Most likely, it simply dropped out of the sky, and if I go and look out the window right now, I will also see pigs flying by.

You can see how upset this made me, and this was before 7:00 a.m.

And I didn’t take a picture to put here, with this story, because I can’t even look at pictures of worms. So I chose a completely unrelated picture to distract myself.

I have learned to deal with this phobia over the years, when I first start gardening, as soon as I saw a worm I was done for the day, had to go inside. I know how good they are for my garden, so I have conditioned myself to live with them. I don’t pick them up or anything, but I have learned to work around them, ignore their presence, coexist. As long as they stay outside, where they belong.

And yes, I should get over it, I know that having a worm in a dish in your kitchen isn’t all that terrible. I know this. I do. But still, it made me nauseous. Thanks goodness my son came home shortly thereafter and rescued me.

And that wasn’t even close to being the worst thing that happened yesterday. The worst thing happened not to me, but to my parents, and it made us all cry. And that, what happened to them, wasn’t even the worst thing that could happen to anybody, there are many other, far worse things that can happen.

But when you wake up and there’s a worm in a dish in your kitchen, you have to assume it’s not going to be your best day.

And last night, all night, I had nightmares about worms.

I’m just saying.