like strawberry wine

I couldn’t get my Dehner’s on and I was crushed.  It shouldn’t have surprised me, since they were made for my 18 year old body and not my 47 year old body, no matter that I still wear the same size jeans now as then, a size as rare as hens teeth these days, mores the pity.

Only Alecto gets that reference probably.  Dehner’s are something like the world’s best riding boots.  I got a pair of Dehner’s, made just for me, with my name in them, the Christmas I was at the Manor.  They are beautiful boots.  And all these years I’ve kept them, with the forms in them, and in boot bags, and with the boot pulls with them.  And all these years I’ve thought I could just put them back on again.  One day.

If I were going to put them on just to put them on, I could have done that years ago.  I was putting them on because I had a scheme, I had a hope, I had a dream.  It was far fetched but what the heck.  If I could find my old show stuff, I was going to ask if I could ride a test at a show, borrowing her horse, getting a ride on her trailer, sort of just leaching the whole way.

And then I couldn’t get the boots on.  I still can’t find my old show clothes either.  So it is moot but still, I was deeply sad.   Deeply sad.

There is this tension.  Between what makes my little old heart just sing and dance and the knowledge that what makes my little old heart just sing and dance is stupid.  Not dressage itself, or riding itself, but showing.  The need to have those boots is stupid.  They are nice, but they don’t make you a better rider.  Having the little coat, the spotless tight pants, the braided mane, what does it mean?  Nothing.  But you can’t do it without it.

I do not know how to resolve that tension.

I do know that I want to ride the best, the most skillfully, that I can.  I don’t know for sure if that involves putting on a little monkey suit and riding circles for of a judge, or not.  I know I was thrilled to get to ride Burt again.  Just that, ride him.  He is something.  I know that one of my highest ambitions right now would be to be the person my boss can trust the barn to, to be absolutely solid with her.

I know that it was my husband, not me, who figured out that we can have the Dehner’s fixed, at least we think we can.  Bless him.

And thanks to my father.  He bought me those boots.  And so much more stuff.  I didn’t do enough with it.  I’m sorry.  But I’m riding.

 

healing

I do not have skin on two of the fingers of my left hand.  Not the whole entire fingers of course.  One was a rope burn of sorts, except it didn’t burn but just took away the skin.  That was when the grey mare spooked and the spooky mare didn’t and the grey mare hit me in the back with her shoulder darn near giving me whiplash and the spooky mare caught me by not moving and letting me brace against her lead rope.  That little incident also bruised my legs at the tops of my boots, oddly enough, the body and the force of a 900 pound horse in you back both being amazing things.

The other finger was blistered from me forgetting my gloves while riding.  I will not do that again.  Even if I’m already in the arena when I remember that I don’t have them.  While I was riding I thought the pain was just radiating from the other finger.  When I sprayed iodine on them after the ride, it hurt so bad I thought both fingers would fall off and shatter from the pain.

So this business is a bit rough I guess.  But I also love being in my body like this, feeling it even when what it says is to take an aspirin.  I like dreaming and scheming to try to live those dreams.  Even if I never can quite figure it out.

 

a little left of living right

I got to go see this person give a talk about the biomechanics of riding dressage.  Besides everything else she had to say, which was fascinating and useful and left me longing for more, she said, “This is new knowledge.  Ten or fifteen years.”  And here I have been trying to remember everything and everything has changed!  I don’t need to remember!  In fact, it might not be a good thing at all to remember.  Just learn it anew.  Beginner’s mind.

And here’s the part that really made me hyperventilate.  I went to watch her teach some classes.  I sat there fascinated, trying to feel what effect her instructions were having on my imaginary riding.  My boss came to watch for awhile too.  And my boss casually said to me that she was thinking of trying to maybe talk the owner of the fanciest horse in our barn into letting me ride him on my days there.  It so might not happen, and if it doesn’t I am not crushed or anything, but that seems so huge to me.

 

without parents

We were planting potatoes and I thought, this is my first year planting potatoes without my mother.

I’ve never planted potatoes with my mother.

That’s not quite true.  That year we put in the garden for her father, the first year he was unable to garden, I remember sitting with him in the yard cutting up the potatoes to plant.  He explained to me about eyes and how he liked three or four to a cut piece.  I remember it was just a kitchen knife I was using.  I must have helped plant them.  With her.

But last year we would have planted the potatoes before I even knew I would get to go see her.  Her lawyers wrote a letter to me the day after my birthday, I went to see her about a month later, her husband died about a month after that, she stayed home a month then her lawyers put her in the nursing home and a month after that she was dead.

It is the first time I’m planting potatoes without her in the world.  And husband observed that it was probably even more that this is the first year I’m planting potatoes without parents in the world.

 

that’s all right, I’m ok, it ain’t nothin’ but another day

I read through some old newspaper clippings written nearly ten years after the rent in my life, about the rent in my life.  Well, about the circumstances around it, and the cast of characters, and what all had happened to us.  At least it wasn’t on Dateline I guess.  Anyway, these clippings are now themselves nearly twenty years old.

I was quoted as saying, “I didn’t ever expect to get my old life back.  I wouldn’t want to.  I don’t want to forget everything I’ve learned.”

My aunt said to me when I came home, “Now you can put this all behind you,” and I said, “Oh, no, I don’t want to put it behind me.  I don’t want to have to live through that again.”  I thought if I were hyper vigilant, I could keep anything else bad from happening.  Even when I had a wreck a couple years ago, I thought mostly that I should have been paying more attention, that I had lapsed, if only for a minute, and I beat myself up over it again and again.

The smallest kindness shown to me often brings me to tears.  I never expect kindness.  But I am never surprised to be hurt.

Well . . . I do want my old life back.  I mean, in a sense.  It is, after all, thirty years later, and I did a good job being hyper vigilant and made a good life and I’m not giving that up.  I guess I do want to put the rent behind me finally though.  To quit being like the monk in the Zen story “carrying the mind“, and to put it down.  It used to be so close to me, like an undershirt or something, and now it is much smaller, like a library card in my wallet.

And I want to put it down.

 

It’s the one who won’t be taken who cannot seem to give

Today I told my boss about the rent in my life. I mean, the details. It feels like it has been a long time since I went through the story for someone. It feels very vulnerable, very vulnerable, to have done so but not in a bad way.

She said, everything happens for a reason.

I said, well, coming to this barn has been like coming back to myself. I choked trying to get that sentence out it is so true.

And then I rode. And jumped! Ok, tiny little things that could hardly be called jumps at all really, but still. Oh, that is the most fun. I’m trying to convince her that this pony of hers that I’ve been riding really wants to be Teddy O’Connor. She said that she couldn’t afford to hire the O’Conners to ride him. I was like, ahem & raising my hand. I’m not “the O’Conners” by any means but I think I could do ok. Isn’t that funny, that sometimes I have the most confidence in the world.

Sometimes, but most times not of course. One of the things the rent in my life taught me was to be hyper vigilant so that nothing like that could happen again and that hyper vigilance is a constant assessment of everything, everything, from an “is it a mess-up” perspective — holding as a constant question in my mind, what is its mess-up potential? In more visceral terms, I’m always watching for something to sneak up on me and bite me in the a**. So those moments when I don’t have myself looking over my shoulder are really something to me.

 

Equinox. Spring. Full moon to boot.

Tonight the truck was parked at the cow shed instead of at the house and walking down there the moon was reflecting off the glass so hard that I thought it was somebody with a flashlight. Just about almost scared me. There was somebody down there the other night — Job Corps boys who’d gotten lost in the woods and wandered for hours and after dark were able to see our lights and make their way to us. Thankfully someone at the Job Corps is giving those boys a good talking to because they did not come up to the house but hollered from there until we came out. But it is a surreal thing to have lived here darn near twenty years, to live so isolated, where you can’t even see a neighbor and you only have two of those within a half mile and no more again for several miles after that, it is surreal here to have someone holler you out of your house after dark.

Anyway, the moon was so bright. Yesterday I’d seen a whole bunch of daffodils and remembered how I love them. I don’t have any here, but I love daffodils perhaps the most of all the spring bulbs. I used to take a daffodil with me and then try to find someone who looked like they needed it and give it to them. I thought I was such a flower child but now I wonder if that is not an act of condescension instead of love. Love, I believe, is harder than that, harder like a stone, harder like the ache of a strained muscle, with less of a plot than the flower thing.

Then I passed between two fields that in all my knowing of them have been alternately hay and corn fields, cultivated, beautiful. This spring they are for sale in tiny little numbered narrow lots. I think the people have missed the boat there with the market now in a crash but it made me sad the same way the daffodils had made me happy.

When I went today to let the large animals back into their normal field, I rubbed the cow’s head, ran my hand along her back, patted her rump. I couldn’t have imagined being able to do that to her when we got her. She was so contrary, and really, she still is, she just loves me and I love her now. I don’t have to be a cow and she doesn’t have to be a person.

Animals are not people and boy am I thankful for that on this equinox.

 

life is for the living

My mother has been dead six months.  Of course, when all that is going on, there is so much to handle just trying to keep it in the road.  When it is over, there is time for it all to catch up with you.

I dreamed of her last night.  Maybe because I was thinking about writing this, I don’t know.  In my dream she was impaired but able to move, recognized me but unable to speak.  And in the dark, in between the awake and the asleep, I was confused and trying to figure out if I’d dreamed her alive or dreamed her dead.  And I got the distinct feeling that it wasn’t much different for her — that she wasn’t quite sure if she had dreamed herself alive or dead.  That she hadn’t been particularly alive or dead the last few years of her life, and that she wasn’t particularly alive or dead on the other side right now.

I have various objects of hers.  My favorite is a stoneware hen that holds kitchen utensils.  The utensils therein were also hers so when I grab the ladle that Mother always used for her goulash, well, she’s there with me.  I find as far as things go, it isn’t the things she loved the most, or the things that were most expensive, but the everyday things that she didn’t even think about, the things that she just took for granted and would have replaced in a second without a thought that mean the most to me.

Another object I have is her cornbread skillet.  The irony of that is that, while no doubt it was my mother’s cornbread skillet, I think it had been Bayard’s mother’s cornbread skillet before that and I bet he’d be horrified that I have anything from him and I’m both honored and amused by his horror.  It is a bit thinner than most of the newer ones, and it has a sort of hollowed handle which means I can pick it out of the stack of skillets without having to get them all out.  And it is big.  Which is good.  Although in our family we still usually have to make two big pones of cornbread to feed us all.

So my mother is alive for me in these odd things.  Now that she is dead, I don’t see her in my body as often as I used to.  But she’s in my recipes and cooking and kitchen utensils.  Her voice is sometimes in my head and now it is more the voice she had in my childhood, a voice that is about possibilities instead of failures, a voice that encourages me and helps me stand against any turbulence.  She’s in my attitudes sometimes, especially the take no prisoners predisposition and look on the bright side studied choice.  She’s in a lot of the things I’ve rejected, things like appearances and what someone else thinks, and yet with her death those things that had been painful have eased.

But I do run across, every so often, something that takes my breath away.  That is always something she wrote.  Today it was Christmas cards she’d sent to the kids.  All they said was “Merry Christmas” and “Love” and “Granny” but it is her writing and the fact that I don’t know what year it was that makes me unable to breathe.  I remember my dad called me on the day he went into the hospital for the last time and left a message on the machine that said, “I’m cancer free” and he was so happy about that and I erased that and I threw away the very last birthday card he sent me because I didn’t dare acknowledge that I was afraid he would die and  it would be the last.  But my gawd, you can’t keep everything and how do you ever know what to keep and what not to keep and isn’t it the accidentally kept things that take your breath away?

I miss them both so much and yet dead they can be who I need them to be.

I went to her grave the other day.  It is a family plot in the prettiest cemetery ever.  Her mother, father and brothers lie with her.  She and her husband are side by side.  When she paid the opening and closing costs about a decade ago, she had a joint footstone put in for her and her husband.  I don’t know where the personalized plate that was on his side went to, maybe his sons had it taken off.  Mom’s is there.  But I have the urge to change it, to put in a bench there to sit on so I don’t have to sit on the headstone, to have it engraved with her name and nice things about her, and “some guy she hung out with” for him.

I have that urge but if I had any extra money I’d buy a new digital camera and not an engraved stone bench.

 

undiscovered self

My friend since we were nine, Cielo had a post recently about a lost little girl she’d found snippets of in objects in the basement.  I thought I’d try to share retrospectively some of my own journey toward myself because I really feel that is what Cielo is on, a journey to her true self.  I relate.  I applaud.  I think she has the courage to not hide, but I also think it takes a lot of determination and in the end skill to not get sidetracked and distracted and to get under it all and behind it all and get to yourself.

When I was forty-two there was that country song, this is for all the girls, and then various ages were mentioned and one of them was 42 tossing pennies into the fountain of youth.  And there was the song I hope you’ll dance.  That was about the time I started listening to Sunday in the ‘70s on the radio too, which was the music I came of age to.  And for me that music was like those objects in Cielo’s basement.  They reminded me who I had been.  Things I’d felt.  Hoped.  Dared.  And lost.  For all I had, and it was a lot and I’m not belittling it at all, there was a lot I’d lost.  A lot of me.

Husband sometimes says he was misled into marrying me.  But I think he just doesn’t understand how much of me was missing.  I tried to tell him.  I told him what about the rent in my life and he said it wasn’t important but it was because I lost pieces of me in there and in what led up to it and in the aftermath too.

Anyway, I would listen to that music on Sundays, usually while other people were out of the house and I could make cheese and bread and do dishes and clean off the counters entirely and sometimes I would get so mad listening that I’d have to turn it off.  And I didn’t know why.  But I think anger was just a way to keep the loss away.  Except loss was an illusion, of course.  But it felt like that and I was afraid of that and so there was anger.  I think that was it anyway.  Something like that.

Eventually I was able to reach back and touch that girl, let her live now too, let her dream without being crushed.  Truth be told, her heart isn’t entirely whole yet but at the same time, there is nothing lost.  There is time enough.  There will be love enough.  It’s ok.

That’s not much of an explanation of it, is it?  Because I kept going back to that music, to find that girl, to get behind all the emotions to what was really there, I think I got something:  pieces of me.  It is easy to be sad.  Or angry.  Or sick.  Or unconscious.  But it really is hard, and pretty undefined, to get behind that and then incorporate whatever it is behind that into everyday life now.

It makes me think of a post my friend La recently made about whether people change or not.  I think not.  But I do think we can become more authentically who we are.  I think authenticity is in nakedness.  And it isn’t healthy to be naked with everyone or absolutely all the time.  So while authenticity is in nakedness, there may be a place for masquerades.  Who we are authentically doesn’t change, but how (and how much) we choose to masquerade may change.  Something like that.  Maybe.

 

outside of time

You know what I like best, absolutely love, about being alive?  Those moments when I can feel everything exquisitely.  Everything that ever was or is or ever will be in the whole of everyone and everything.

Sometimes it is a small, quiet, short moment like those when I have finished milking the cow and feeding the horse and stand at the gate and look at the unchanging curve of the bald and the shadow of the mountains and the patterns of the stars and the glow of the ever changing moon, and I hear the horse’s gut sounds and the animals breathing and chewing, and whatever the seasonal sounds are, silence or crickets or frogs or owls or whatever, and a chicken wakes up talking herself out of her dream and her neighbor says to her ‘hush already’, and I feel the air against my face and whether it is heavy with water or sharp with cold or soft and warm.

Sometimes it is more complicated.  Like taking a loaf of bread to a cousin who’s mother had died and hugging her and of course driving over there I was thinking of my own mother and her mother and when I hugged her I said, “I’m so sorry” and she said, “You know what it is like” and I felt everything, her loss, my loss, but also the love and joy and desperation and exasperation and ever more love behind that loss, and that we all, all of us, share that whatever our circumstances.   Within us, between us, around us at that moment was a ball of energy that is, simply, all.

But a lot of times it is not that big.  It is just a touch, or a feeling, or a second.  It is just something that you thought you maybe might have seen out of the corner of your eye.  It is easy to get confused as to what is real and what is not.

Love seems like the easy choice and yet it almost never is because it is almost never what you thought it was and it is almost never what it seems to be and it is like quitting smoking it is a new decision every time you want a cigarette and it is a new decision every day every moment to choose love love love lovelovelove

And a lot of times we fail.

But sometimes we don’t.

And here is something that I think I know about this.  We must not pamper our wounds.  But we must not pick our sores.