(my own personal choice for cold medicine)

We’re staying right here for a small, quiet holiday tomorrow. Shane will be at his mom’s in central California, Mom and Bruce are going to Keith and Jenny’s, everybody else is back east this year and so it’s just us tomorrow. Ahhhh.

Then it’s Sarah’s birthday party this weekend. Eight years old. Ack.

Tonight I plan to use my stuffy nose and sore throat as an excuse to numb and sillify myself, so anyone who’s interested in a party, there’s plenty of liquor in the cabinet, plenty of food in the fridge, and as a bonus you can make fun of me when I sneeze three times in a row… and then hiccup.

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Kenya, aptly named, likes to perch herself at the top of the stairs like a lioness, ferocious and ready to pounce at anyone who dares to attempt passage. This is until you actually reach her, at which point she looks sternly at you for a moment and then wags her tail and rolls over, hoping for a belly scratch.

At night she sleeps tucked in at the very foot of my bed, half under the blankets, half out. Perfect spot for me to wiggle my toes into her soft, coppery fur. By morning she’ll have worked her way around and up to the head of the bed, and I’ll roll over.. blink.. stretch.. and find her staring at me, our noses almost touching.

I indulged a daydream this morning that Shane and I were biking through small, misty, damp French provincial towns, carrying bags of fresh baguettes and looking for authentic French roasted coffees to bring back to the camp cottage. Then had a real dream last night that I was teaching in Zimbabwe. Not sure what I was teaching or why a silly white girl would have anything of value to offer these incredible people. I’m betting that if I were really there, those roles would almost certainly be reversed.

Kenya is out sunning herself in the courtyard. Think I’ll join her.

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“A man too young for such wisdom once told me that anyone who believes in coincidence is not paying attention. Down deep, I knew that events outside my control were aligning themselves. In this journey, rough spots had been inexplicably smoothed, dangerous mistakes had been forgiven by nature. I felt I had been led to this specific place and time. It was eerie, and I was afraid. I didn’t think I was ready, but some stubbornly resistant strand in my willful ego snapped.I could accept the idea of burning bushes on the road to Damascus, but in the Arctic? If the rough terrain of my psyche could be mapped, this moment would mark a watershed. The collection of events that I called my life flowed from this high spot backward, and the man and person I could become through this difficult, black experience trickled forward as a new river seeking outlet in a body of water larger than itself.

Each time I woke after that day, I found myself feeling less alone, more purposeful, and deeply grateful just to be alive. Daily, that gratitude escaped me with an audible “Thank You.” Then, as now, I have no earthly idea who it is I am thanking. But I think I know what it is I am thankful for: the privilege of being a small, frail, faulted, but integral part of the magic and mystery of life on earth.

You can do worse.”

- Alvah Simon, in North to Night. Chapter Eight.

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Last night the November winds came down and stripped all the trees bare overnight; the leaves all piled at my patio door this morning like a subtle, sardonic trophy. Outside now the sky is divided into random black and angry clouds and patches of saturated blue. The sunshine falling and rising, shifting and disappearing all over the courtyard out the window, bouncing in and out of the office and trying hard to play with me.

I’m resisting, but just barely.

Coffee’s brewing out in the other room, my desk less of a mess today than yesterday. I’ve been to see Smokey twice in as many days, he’s gotten so mature, so beautiful, towering over the other ducks like the kid in your 6th grade class that looked like your clumsy uncle Eddie. His colors are changing now, muted smokey browns mixed with white under the wings and a few touches of irridescent purples, golds and greens painted on. It’s such an incredible feeling to sit on the rocks and hand-feed a wild bird (recent development: we just learned he’s actually a Rouen Duck, not a goose). I don’t know if he’ll be ready to migrate by the time most of the other birds go, so we may be over there every other day to feed him during the winter.

How I got so blissfully attached to a duck I’ll never know.

In the last 24 hours I’ve bought 18 books.
Somewhere there’s a 12-step program with my name on it.

Today’s Photo of the Day is from New Mexico.

My bit is worn from chomping.

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“It costs so much to be a full human being… one has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

- Morris West

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Sometime in early January almost four years ago, my grandparents, spending a few months in Myrtle Beach for the winter, made their way back up to their room at the resort after a great dinner with some friends. They put their things down, stretched, probably kissed like old people in love do. For some reason, they decided they’d forego their nightly mile-long walk out on the beach this time. One of them probably went into the bathroom, the other perhaps sat down on the bed and took their shoes off. I bet somebody looked out the window out toward the lights twinkling at the foot of the ocean.

At some point my grandfather sat back in his chair with the newspaper, picked up his glasses and started reading while my grandmother readied herself to go visit a sick friend the next floor up. She probably commented on the waiter at dinner, he probably laughed and shook his head at her. They were best friends and lovers for more than 50 years. Attached at the hip. I’m sure she must have kissed him on the head before she left, and he probably winked and made a sly, endearing comment before she shut the door behind her. And he’d settle in to check out the day’s news and wind down from another great night with friends and the woman he’s been inseparable from for half a century.

Later, my grandmother would sneak in and latch the door, see my grandfather there fast asleep, newspaper in his lap like always. He never could make it all the way through. She’d flick off all but one soft light, take off her sweater and lay it on the bed. She’d go in the bathroom and brush her teeth, wash her face, maybe even take a bath. Come out and put her robe on, lay in bed and read for 20 minutes before the late hour got to her. And because they could never sleep without each other, she’d get up and walk softly over to my grandfather there in the chair, to gently wake him up and call him to bed. Maybe she reminded herself to tell him a funny story she’d heard that night.

She’d kiss him on the forehead, he’d be a little cooler than usual. She’d tap him and say: “Come on dear, it’s chilly in here. Let’s get under the covers.” And she’d stroke his hair. But he wouldn’t respond, and so she’d lightly shake his shoulder to try and wake him. Still, he wouldn’t respond.

“Bill,” she’d say, a little more firmly. Her voice picking up the awakening nerves deep down under the routine. She’d shake a little harder. And then she’d kneel down in front of him and grip his face.. “Bill!” she’d yell. “Bill.. wake up please!”

Still nothing. She noticed how cold his hands were. Even so, it took her a few moments to understand. She just kept trying to wake him. Kept trying to prove to herself that he was just very tired, and that it was chilly in the room and they needed to get to bed.

“Please, Bill,” she’d say a little more softly, before she layed her head on his cool hands and squeezed as tightly as she could with every ounce of love she had in her.

I’m sure she doesn’t remember letting go, or calling anyone. I’m sure she must have sat there for a long time, tempted, even, to fall asleep there on his lap and keep pretending. Every memory. Every moment of more than 50 years might have flowed through her in the time she sat there, squeezing. No time in all those years had they really ever been without one another. They were attached in every sense of the word. They’d developed their own ways together, to live, to communicate, to love each other. Their home was quiet, they communicated so much by body language now, having developed movements and expressions and signals that represented a million or more ways to say something to each other. And now he was completely still. And she was frozen there with her hands clasping his in silent denial.

Eventually she must have risen and picked up the phone, because the next morning mine rang.

I was thinking this morning what it must have been like to walk into a room and move around it, not knowing. To love someone sitting there looking so peaceful in a chair across the room, and not know that they’ve ceased existing. Then to slowly realize as you’re touching, caressing them, that they’re gone, and that all you have in front of you is a shell of something that represented everything to you. To have a head and heart full of things left to say, to share. Little things. big things. And to feel the chance to say or share them being ripped away from your bones. No more words between you.

And now even your own body feels foreign to you, because you don’t remember when it last existed without the presence of the other one next to it. To know that tonight and every night thereafter no arms will be wrapped around you, no heat from the body of your lover to keep you warm.

The emptiness and panic that must have set in. The sadness none of us who haven’t experienced it exactly that way can imagine. Every plan every dream every tomorrow changed, and in some cases, erased entirely in a matter of seconds. Every delicious word hanging in the air between you falls to the ground with no one to hear it. Every expression of love brutally halted when there’s nowhere left for it to go.

This morning was the first time it occured to me in those terms. The physical manifestation of loss for the person that death leaves behind. What her body must have gone through as her soul slowly began to understand what was happening. The crippling, the crumbling, the bottomless ache and emotional throb. The physiological desperation of a soul reaching out into space, unable to find and bring the other back.

I wonder if that’s why so many older people pass away not long after their spouses do, even if they were otherwise in near-perfect health. That constant, reciprocal flow between two people is suddenly severed, the channel cut off. forever trapping all those feelings and words and memories and dreams alone inside them.

They must eventually drown.

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