Weeding to the Music of Lilacs

"In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary." Aaron Rose

This quote was used as part of Pauline's Writing Down the Words: January 28 entry   That particular quote made me remember the role that gardening has played in so much of my healing time of the last twenty years, the years of home ownership, and visiting without words.And it reminded me of the extraordinary friendships forged around ordinary routines.

When I was in my twenties I did a great deal of visiting over toddlers and folding laundry.  I was single; my friends were not.  (See   "Laundry Eagles"  for an understanding of what I mean.) I was a thoroughly obnoxious sort of friend. I'd watch their children for an hour or two when they had errands to run, hang around to help unload the groceries, the laundry, whatever and, when the little ones began to implode along around 3:00, I would smile so sweetly and say, "Ha ha ha, ha HA HA, I think I'll go HOME now." They all threatened me with much future suffering, but continued to allow me into their homes nonetheless. NOt only that, they fed me, listened to me, and held me close when my heart was broken and my body followed. 

During that decade we visited with talking. Endlessly deep, profound and mundane conversations over coffee, stolen lunches out, when one child or another invariably slumped into her soup, sound asleep. When my parents went off on vacation, I would overrun their home and entertain the lot of them, husbands, wives AND children. I would make some Julia Child wonder of a meal, insist on no help and have everyone at the table together. The children would be bundled en mass onto my parents' bed, and the adults had hours to laugh, watch bad t.v. and discuss everything from politics to the dangers of the new something on the horizon called "Total phone" and the clunkiness of mobile phones. The best night was watching the Miss America Pageant and feigning disagreement over whether or not Miss Oklahoma's singing "I am Woman" while dressed in a ridiculously frilly apron and riding a tricycle  trumped Miss Nebraska's attempt to sing "Send in the Clowns" while dressed as Bozo. I had served coq au vin with a magnicient four layer Boston Cream Pie (Made entirely from scratch) and flopped onto the couch, saying, "Someone peel me a grape." I was ignored.


Ten minutes later Andrea appeared with my mother's hexagonal  silver tray with one peeled grape in its center.


It's the little things.

But our friendships were loud.  We danced and had parties. We lounged by the pool, watching with one eye, the endless games of Marco Polo as toddlers grew to double digit children.  I was the neighborhood silly mobile aunt. I loved it. I knew I should not have children with the back I'd been dealt. I did not have my first surgery until I was twenty-eight. I was diagnosed with severe problems at just 23. So I exercised like a fiend to avoid surgery. I did weights when it was not fashionable, and tried the weights machines, only to find that it made a difference that they were designed for men. I hurt myself. My PT guy said I was the only woman he'd ever met who overdid it in the pool to the point of injury. 

What's this nonsense anyway about moderation being good? BULL.

I dreamed big. I Mean BIG. I would write the best novel ever and Oprah would have me on. I would be "Discovered" at a poetry reading by Coventry Lake. I would go to grad school and become an expert on Adult Learning, and write the definitive light reading books for adults--compelling and interesting, not glorified kids' books. So many dreams.  My friends had them, too, and they were not so big.  How was it, then, that my friend who spoke English as her second language got her masters in international accounting, and another became a nationally known and respected program director for Public Broadcasting, and another went to law school at thirty?  I talked about the big dreams, and so did they, but when it came down to it, after all the talking and laughing and sharing, in my thirties I watched the others run after their dreams while I spent five years in hospitals, raising half-grown children in between the four to six-week stints?  I felt my life slipping away, I thought.  The noise seemed to die down, but not the chaos.  

I did not lose these friends at all. On the contrary, I was the stay-at-home mom for my daughter's best friend. I was the one who would suddenly show up at whichever home "the gang was hangin" with a tray full of Slurpees® and a bright smile. As my son said, "It was impossible to, like, be that mad. I mean, you didn't stay. You sat down and you asked us about our days, brought the drinks and sometimes cookies and smiled and then left after fifteen minutes. And come back later because you forgot your wallet or something. You always forgot something."

I would smile at his recollection and then he'd say, "DAMN. You didn't forget, huh. But we NEVER knew if you'd come."

"Exactly."

The life was mundane and my pleasures were tiny, mostly. An unexpected hug from my son.  Dinner time laughter that included Mark AND the kids.  And, of course, hanging out with my friends for cookouts. Still, mostly we talked. And, sad to say, mostly I envied them their marriages, their vacations, their big homes.  I felt that not only had I disappeared, but my family was not likely to move forward. Of course, it was my fault. I was disabled and brought in almost no money. I banked all of the kids', and used my own for necessities. I had no right to buy luxuries. The money was Mark's, not mine...

But somewhere along the line, I realized that I was not seeing my life. I had not held up the proper light to it.  Others seemed to see me as a success. (Not my family, of course. There, my Aunt Joy summed it up when they were dissecting me as if I were absent. Joy said, "Well, Jean, she IS a wonderful mother.  Let's give her that much.) My friends saw more, for which I am beyond grateful, but they told me I was either seeing myself and my life in a funny mirror, or I needed new light bulbs in my brain.

It began after the eight operation, when I was confined to bed because I had gotten up on my own to use the loo, and had lost my mind in a sea of blood in the bathroom.  It was a new procedure, trying to avoid my normal hematomas. The fourteen inch incision was sutured very loosely so the pressure would not build, and blood could escape in a controlled way, but I went into the bathroom and, well, the thing exploded, splattering blood all around me and I had a flashback. My first. Right there and then, blood on porcelain and I was gone to another place.  The sound. The sight. The fear. I remember nothing more.

I awoke tied to my bed, and life changed immediately. I did not then confront the flashback; it was too soon for that. Yet at last I knew that there was something to confront.  As I looked next to me at my drug-addicted, far older roommate, a woman whose husband would come into the hospital and say, "Why don't you simply DIE, Annie, and help us all out?"  .... as I looked at her, and looked back at my panic-stricken husband beside me, my life took on a new sheen.  Our marriage felt strong and real. And I remembered something about Jessie.
One day she had come home with a papier maché  daffodil from middle school art class. "I can't even show this to Mom or Dad. They'll laugh at it. I can't laugh at it. Jeannette, it's pathetic." Well, yes, it truly was. It had a stem the size of a Grecian column and a blossom the size of a thimble. It was lopsided and one leaf was fat and squat, the other tall and leaf-like. "She gave me a B out of pity and for the good leaf." There she stood, hair to her butt, one arm behind her back, the other holding this monstrosity toward me, eyes pleading for help.

"Well, Jess. I can't throw it out. My guess is you worked hard on it." Her tears were falling and she nodded. "I know, I'll put it on MY shelf in the closet and I'll think of you every day."  She brightened up enormously, but every time she saw it in the closet she'd come out and look at me, shaking her head. 

A couple of years later she said, "You really don't have to."

I always said, "I love it. Especially when I knock something near it and it falls on my head." She would laugh and kiss me.

But when the ceramic vase came home, lopsided and unevenly glazed, she begged me not to put in the living room. "No, REALLY Jeannette. You can't do it. There is nothing that you can make look okay in this. Nothing."

I'd said, "Trust me, honey. You wait." Jess ran into her room crying because she thought it would be humiliating.
I found some beautiful silk flowers and dried boughs of who knows what? I put it in the corner of the shelves, and you saw only the ruffled line of the lip of the shining forest green vase, and the curve of the base, and a profusion of delicate color, there in the center corner.  

She looked at it and began to tear up and smiled, "You made something beautiful out of something ugly. You always DO that for me." And she hugged me, holding on longer than I did,  and I was never as whole in my life. It was the sweetest compliment I'd ever known. An ordinary act of motherhood, I thought, seen through the eyes of an extraordinary child who did not know her power yet.

I lay in my hospital bed, tied down, thinking of her and a dozen other little sweet things that suddenly felt huge, and how I'd nearly blown up my marriage.  And I apologized for the billionth time for the pain I had caused Mark, only this time he looked at me and said simply, "I want you home. I want you not to hurt so much. I can't reach where your pain is, Jeannette. It's always out of reach."

But he kissed it away just the same and I remember it as a series of the best kisses of our marriage.

Something changed.  I was thirty-five and was about to learn the heaviest of life's lessons, but I began to listen to silence and look harder at the small things of my life. I stopped paying so damned much attention on the big successes of my friends, and looked at my small successes. I could stand when they told me I'd fall down. I was not an addict.  And I was determined to stand STRAIGHT. I was able to do the laundry within two weeks, and for the first time in three years—I started dancing around like Rocky for the accomplishment. There, with no one to hear or see the mountain I had climbed, I danced. 

Sometimes simply tying one's shoes is an extraordinary act. That's what I was showing Dad--that I could tie my shoes--while quietly and slowly the subject drifted away.  I was always quiet with him toward the end.  Noise confused him. But because I was happy to simply BE with him, I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the FATHER, even more than when we'd commuted together. He gave me the journal of his last months, a revelation of pain, selfish arrogance and humble regrets.  Anyway, on this particular day, I'd told him how hard it had been to learn to do and how much  harder it was to appreciate an act I'd done thousands of times, and he nodded. Then he said,  "I've sung Ah Sweet Mystery of LIfe at Last I've Found Thee easily a thousand times. Why did I have to be dying to listen to the words? Love was next to me all my life, sweetie. Don't be like me. Mark hurt you. I know that. We know that. He isn't the man we thought he was. Dear, you can do anything. Listen to your words when you sing them. Listen to your life as you live it. Listen. I never listened."  There were many small moments with them both, while they were consciously preparing to go. I'll save them for another time, but when they were gone, and we had bought our house, I began to garden.

The quietest thing I know, gardening. My friends gardened, too. Sometimes we would work together and say nothing, yet felt we had visited all the way through to our cores. Perhaps we had. We would be filthy, sweaty, make-up-less and aging. Yet sometimes I thought that Andrea was most beautiful with her hair unruly, her unmatching eyes glittering, her pale skin still shining from her sunblock. There seemed nothing ordinary to me about many of the flowers, especially peonies.

I mean really. Every peony is its own statement of life -- no, of LIFE, with flourishes of trumpet as well. Their coloring is as delicate as Dresden, but the flowers themselves? A subtle peony is an oxymoron.  I was weeding in my lilac island when I thought about that one very early morning.  I liked to weed when the sun still cast gold in the sky, there on the far side of my yard. 

I was laughing at myself because I love their showiness, revealed only through the  never-ending ordinary march of ants to soften their buds. Ants. What is more ordinary than an ant? The lilac island was my first garden, designed, planted, dug with my own hands out of the twenty-year-old perfect turf. My mother's and sister's favorite flower is the lilac and, since Jean Ellen lived here, I wanted to have my first garden be for her and for Mom, whose soul I had clearly channeled, against my will I tell ya, against my will! (I loathed gardening as a child, as I stood by her holding the trowel, the watering can, and some worms to put in the holes. Worms, it appeared, were the key to every garden success. They were the best thing about it all, because the rest of gardening seemed the most boring thing in the world. Put in some nameless tiny green thing and when you were done? It looked like a limp clump of weed. And a clump of junk we had to be careful not to let the kick- soccer- foot- or baseball get into.)

So I chose four different lilac varieties, then found the Miss Kim, and realized that I could have a whole month  of lilac blooming with one of those, if they did not all bloom at once because of a hot spell. And I had to admit that subtlety had not been what I was going for here, either.  The double blossom shrub was nearly bent to the ground from the weight of the eight-inch long pregnant blossoms. 

That season we had had a hot spell, though, and I saw that every single bush was budded, from the doubles of the deepest violet bush to the white. None were in bloom, but they would be any moment. Oh, well. I shrugged and decided how beautiful our enormous vases would be with five shades of blooms, if only for a few days. 

I shook my head a moment because a decade before I had planted them too close together, and had actually put a peony plant in there, not realizing how big both got. A common mistake for new gardeners. Furthermore, lilac island across from an open field, so nameless horrid weeds invaded all the time, including the Chinese vine I SHALL NOT NAME. I call it KUJO, for the killer dog. I had just finished wrestling one 20-foot obsenity out by its roots from the very center of my "grove", and had removed, painfully, no fewer than EIGHT thistle plants when, as I unbent my body to breathe, I heard the rain. I looked up and the sky was blue with the barest hints of rose and gold on the horizon.I stood very, very still; stunned, in fact. Gentle rain engulfed me, yet all was dry. 

"A miracle?" I asked aloud.

No. An ordinary act of nature, the sound of lilacs blooming.

Clearly, though, I should have answered, "Yes."

Looking for Signs, Listening for that “Still Small Voice”

 New twists in the road this week...

Four times this week I have been visited by an enormous, white-throated stag.  I think his antlers have ten points. Until now I have never seen one, let alone at the edge of my yard. And I've seen no does here since about 1994, when more houses were built in this area.

He came first last week, on the Monday when R. blew my world apart. Funny thing. R. said, when I'd mentioned it, that he wanted to think that was him, watching over me. Perhaps I should have listened to the small voice in me that jumped when he said that. It asked, "Why would I need a buck when I have you?" Not so much. But I think  he meant it at the time. It's in retrospect we see other things...

But then, I did not see him again--the buck, I mean--until this week. He came on Wednesday morning,   Thursday at dusk, and this morning, at dawn. Two out of three times, he seemed to hear me upstairs here, in my kitchen. I stared down at him as he drank from the brook at the culvert, and he looked up at me. We locked stares for a slow five or six counts, then he bounded off, down away from the street,, into the wetlands and woods. Even that is odd. Mostly the deer used to be on their way UP from my house, to cross the street and follow the wetlands to a town sanctuary. The woods cut across town several miles, so they have a good run.

But there he has been. I want so much to believe what I read in Native American lore, and even in Celtic lore. The stag is a power totem/symbol. He watches over the  creatures in his kingdom. He is a transcendent figure, a harbinger of love, of peace, of grace. He gives strength to transcend pain. And he has appeared during two pivotal weeks of my life. I wonder if I dream him... then I wonder whether that matters. ... And I need strength, and some sense that I am safe. No. I have seen him. I don't think my mind is playing that sort of trick.

Last week, I lost the promise of a love I'd never known in my life. It was a time of anger, pain, abject grief, confusion. I felt torn apart inside. That, on the heels of realizing my career as I knew was pretty well destroyed. I cannot say I handled that well. I didn't. In fact, there are times I don't believe I was myself at all. I think I went through it pretty quickly, but that's mostly because, at 57 I just don't have the time to waste on something I will not ever understand from my perspective alone. It is a relationship that spans more than forty years, whether or not this latest permutation was short. It can only be understood when there is conversation. I haven't the luxury of angst, or of trying to figure it out any more.

But then this week? I have been having odd spasms in legs and arms. My right hand keeps going numb. I had another headache that lasted three days. I went through the initial phase of applying for disability--have to finish up the application this weekend, then let my lawyer do her thing. But I called the doctor Tuesday. After writing the last angry note in, yes, desperation--I just wanted to figure it out still, at that point, and I was so frustrated and angry. Feh. I am human. I mess up. But I tried to find closure through anger, which is never, EVER a good way to go.

But almost immediately after I hit send, I made the appointment with my doctor.

And I will be having new tests. There may be problems in another part of the central nervous system. There is reason for real worry.

As if there weren't enough reason for worry? And I realized that I had no time for anger. Or hurt. In the space of a sleepless night, I realized that I had to turn everything around, and I had to do it now. I wrote about my grandmother, after my buck appeared again. YES, I will think of him as mine. It is egocentric, and perhaps silly. But sometimes seeing good signs can help. He is so beautiful.

And I began to write to R. My friends would not be pleased. They want me to stay angry. They feel I never get mad enough for long enough, but I disagree. It is not that I do not have reason. It's that it will cause me more pain. It will close doors I do not choose to close, from my end. It will keep me stuck in that place where I pound my  head against the wall, trying to understand what will never make sense... because it just doesn't make sense.

Not everything does, though. And matters of the heart have nothing to do with logic. I had to get quiet. I had to stop the static of my friends, of my pain, and find the center that is me. I am human and I don't stay in that place, but I've found it again. And I will stay in it longer and longer, if I give it time. Love. Peace. Gathering the troops for a rough time ahead.

It is hard. Since April I have had three very big dreams placed in my hand, and snatched away without warning. And my spine seems hellbent on attacking me. I call the pain Louise. I named it years ago, when I had pain management therapy. My father's mother's named Louise. She was not a nice lady, though she loved us in her way. She was one of those women who holds grudges. She was the first to give pies to the poor through the church, but would criticize the women for being too fat.  Kind to everyone but her husband. And her daughter-in-law. She resented that her daughter moved to Alaska, but my father understood why.

He once said that he thought that all three kids were conceived by  fission, because he never saw them kiss. He and my mother used to shudder visibly when they talked about Grandma and Grandpa's marriage through their eyes. I just thought they didn't like each other all that much, but I was very small. When Grandpa commit convoluted suicide because he tried to dig a basement in the cottage--shoveling dirt by the hour and carrying it outside--with a heart condition, Dad always thought that "Paw just couldn't see another ten to fifteen years cooped up with Ma."

I thought that was mean. But maybe he was right.

I mean, Grandma mourned the day her catalog no longer sold whalebone corsets. I was twelve! Tied up and rigid, my daddy's mom.

But she also taught me how to cook, how to sew, and let me make a total mess all over the cottage living room on rainy days. She taught me canasta. She introduced me to a world of books about nature, about life in the old days. She was the one who told wonderful stories about life in the "Skinnah girls house."  About old-fashioned weddings, and jelly jars, and how the girls saved bits of handmade lace from their wedding gowns, night gowns, and dresses special for Sundays. She had a rhythm of her own, and her stories sang like a creaky Boston Rocker, and made rainy days fly by. When I was small, I loved to ask her about her childhood.

I grew out of her in a far more serious way. Through her meanness to my mother, her snappishness at Jack,  through her manipulation to get Jack and me to tell secrets about our parents, to confess to her about things she did not approve of... I learned a lot about the kind of person I did not want to be. I valued her. I loved her as a child, but grew to learn she could not be trusted. I respected her because she was there. She was a part of me.  She made me stronger and some of who I am. But I did not have to like her.And I never, ever wanted to be all buttoned down and tight, closed off to the sweetness of life. And to be safe in the world, to have all things go as expected, to have everything look right--these were her goals, so much of the time. And if things did not suit her, it was never her doing--someone of us, particularly my  mom or my brothers, had always let here down. Not that she would complain, mind you. Nothing, to her, was pure joy. There was always something not quite good enough. And once disappointed, she punished for years. I thought it must be so hard to be Granny. There was a heart in there, but so protected by thorns, it was next to impossible to find.

I named the pain Louise. My middle name. I'm named after her, something for which my father will never be forgiven. EVER. This pain is part of me, whether I want it or not. It has taught me lessons and I can only accept that it's here, and learn to live around it, in spite of it... and, if I work really hard, because of it. And deep within, below the thorns, the pain has been a gift.  I needed it to grow strong, to battle something other than myself. To stop trying to kill myself, and get up and live, instead.

But Louise is growing stronger these days, and it would seem there are new lessons to be learned. I do not want them. But it would seem, I will be getting these "gifts" anyway. For now, though? I don't have to like it or look for anything other than why Louise is shouting me, and attacking from all directions. I'll figure the rest out later.

So I wrote R. today, but I may have written too late. My anger may have been the last he could bear to read. I hope not. I hope he could see I had reasons and the right to write. I hope he cared enough to read, but it's okay, regardless.

When we throw love out into the universe we have to accept that we may never know whether it is received. I miss the man. The friend. I had found myself writing something funny, totally forgetting for those five minutes, that he is gone. As I said, I am not wholly in my right mind. But I realized in time... I miss my friend far more than the man who would be my love. It's not wanting all or nothing. It's wanting the best of who we are together, and we were always friends. I realized this week that I would not have been able to go on anyway. That friendship's all I have the strength to offer now anyway, and leaning's not an option.

I need to stand on my own through this.  Leaning on someone this soon isn't right. My ex-husband courted me in the hospital, and he wanted me to need him. He wanted me to stay needy, and turned away as I grew to be stronger.  I do not want to be loved because I am in need. I want to be strong.  I want to be loved for my strength, and supported for that.  It's a little different, I think.  We all want to lean sometimes, but it isn't the place to start.  Not for me. Not again. And it seems just wrong to ask or expect support in a time like this, of anyone newly back in my life. I would have asked him to let us step back for a time. Irony hurts.


The last thing I want in my life is to burden my son with me, and we may have  some options that will limit that. And I have to believe that my stag came for a reason, one I just don't understand. And perhaps R. came for a reason that I'll understand with time. I don't mean that some puppeteer is in the sky, messing with my life. I use the phrase "for a reason" more metaphorically.

I think I mean that perhaps the lessons that these things have to offer will come with time.  And if that small voice in me is saying over and over, "All will be well. There are no lies here," perhaps I should listen.  I read Jo's blog today about listening to that voice that warns us. I think we should listen to us when it clearly says "THIS IS RIGHT."

It said that when R. came back to me. All is well. This is right.  It says it still, beneath the anger and pain. So I let go of ALL of it today, in the only way I can. I wrote it. I left the door open because to slam it, so that I have supposed control?  That is to be someone else. I can let go only with a door wide open, and trust that only  my friend will ever come in. If he chooses never to come, so be it. But I felt as if a weight had been lifted from me, so that's the best I can do.

I have done this before; I write. It's who I am; it's what I do. Love beats control, it beats fear. And every time I panic about the money, that voice says, "No. Just stop." And when the pain in my hand catches me off guard and I tip over the water onto my work, it says, "Just breathe. Just breathe."

And I do. I am afraid for my future, but as two friends said, "Even if you are in poverty, you will not fly off the face of the earth. You are not alone."

And my buck stared up at the house, but I was at a different window. I smiled inside. That deer is mine, and he's watching over me, telling me I can do all of this with grace. I named the pain Louise. But Helen is in me, too.

And my mother's and my sister's blue eyes loving me, from wherever their souls have flown. And my daddy's arms and Old Spice cheek enfold me still. And I will let R. go, and the still small voice reminds me, friends, in my life, are the ones who always come back... in their time, in their way. I have to trust the marvelous boy in the man. I have to trust myself. I must stop listening to everyone else. And I will bask in the love of the twelve--the women friends who are in my life. Give where I can, but for now, this time, receive their love--and ask them to let go of their anger, too.

I have had loss.  I have had pain.  I have had dreams disappear just as they became real. I have never had so much of it happen in so short a time.  And the consequences this time are far greater.  I may lose my home or my independence or both. And the pain will not go away. The old dreams are gone, and I will need to find some new ones. But not today. I don't have to figure it all out today. There is a poetry chap book to work on, two paintings to finish. I have an application to finish. There still is a little time before it all hits too hard. I must use it well.

There will be lessons enough in all this; I need not rush them. I must rest. I must gather myself inside, be still, and listen.

And, of course, write. It's what I do; it's who I am.

Today is Better

Phoenix  © 1992, 2009
No room for desperation in the ruins of my heart;
I must be strong.
I am strong from my core that holds my infinite flame;
I have a flame.

It holds passions beyond desire.
Beyond ruins of tortured body,
I am more beautiful than Hippolyta;
I have the Amazon soul.

No room for desperation in this soul where burns my flame;
Only love.
From love born in faith in beauty beyond mirrors;
I see only light.

My soul has no need for mirrors.
It spreads joy,
without begging for a feeding of the flame.
My soul is no stranger to waiting;

It can dance by itself.

I am the patience of mountains;
with my flame, from my soul, I can wait.
I have seen this soul; it is worth the wait.
From the ruins it rises, whole.




Born July 25, 1992, She rises again, today.




I wrote this the day after I confronted my ex-husband about the fact that I had figured out that he was leaving me, not thinking about it.  He was busy running around fixing exterior lights.  I had asked him to go to the Home Depot to get an indoors ladder the day before. He fought me about it, saying I would kill myself on it. I looked at him and half-smiled, saying, "You won't though."

He came home without one, saying, "They didn't have any."  Our son was en route to Indiana, to go back to school. Jessie was still working, still home for another two weeks.

I went into the basement and saw him busy trying to fix something I'd asked him about for weeks--and replacing ALL the ceiling lights.  "Fixing the lights will not keep me all safe and Fine when you leave. You ARE leaving, right?"

He turned and blanched. He began to shake. "Yes."

"You had no intention to stay, to work on things."

"No. But I'm moving into Jay's room down here, so you can get acclimated."

"ACCLIMATED?" I screamed. Next to me was the Hoover Upright, Beats as It Sweeps. Mind you, I was fresh out of the hospital for my tenth round of back crap. I picked it up with one hand, and then with both, I THREW It at him.

He looked so surprised when he caught it.

That was the one moment of laughter in two months of hell, but laugh we did.

And then I went straight to a friend's house, with the words, "Be sure you've figured out where you are going to live when I com back." Not a problem, since he'd already  moved his girlfriend into her own apartment.

But I wrote this poem when I came home the next day. I turned some sort of a corner and was resolved. I felt I was stronger in my pinky finger, than he was in his whole being, and I started to plan. I enrolled in the classes I'd wanted, regardless of my circumstances.  I took steps to make sure I'd be okay for a while. I was determined to succeed, to fly despite the SOB.

And I did... I flew.

Yesterday was difficult, beyond words. Primarily I felt afraid of where I may wind up. Of whether I will find financial solutions in time. Of whether or not my latest DOWN-tick with my back will level off for some years. Afraid that the beginnings of an awakening for this woman's heart (Dormant for ten years, hiding for far longer) would fizzle into nothing again. Oh, hell. Fear is fear is fear.,

I was simply stone-cold, paralyzed with fear. I am not going to make it pretty or worry about the sound of that. It was numbing and horrible.

But by midnight, so much was better. So much. Words from friends. Words from a couple of readers. And some strange resolve inside. I found the poem at 2:00 a.m. This poem from another time, another era. Yet it has been something I have returned to at other times, the losses of Jessie, my nephew, my brother, two of my dearest friends, and my sister. When I have once before thought I would lose everything and a friend gave me enough of a lifeline to be able to breathe, to think.

I return to the Phoenix and Hippolyta. Rising from ashes, whole... and the strength of a mighty woman. I never longed to be a sylph, even when our image of  beauty was a model named Twiggy, all bone and eyes. Nope Not for me. I wanted to be STRONG. I wanted to stand tall, but be, most definitely, a woman.

I read this poem aloud, there in the dark, perhaps three times. Perhaps more. Don't know, don't care.

Today is better.

There are no answers today. All that has changed is me.  Perhaps that's all that needs to change.