solstice/equinox

Driving home tonight, there were two deer standing on the frozen and snow-covered Minnesota River. It was dusk--the time they typically come down to the river to drink.

I wonder if they're surprised when they arrive and find that their river is ice. Do they walk out, one step after the other, hoping that it's just a little further?

At what point do they accept that it's for naught?

Do they turn around and go back where they came from?

Or do their hopeful steps lead them beyond the halfway point, to where it's easier to cross on over to the other side?

The winter solstice was December 21.
The spring equinox is March 21.

We're beyond halfway.

all over

I just got home from picking up my cat's ashes and certificate of cremation at the vet's office.

I waited until I thought I could go in there without causing a scene. 4 weeks to the day, it's been.

I was fine in the car. I was fine going in. I was fine greeting the familiar staff, even with their condolences. I was fine when the vet who euthanized him came out to greet me. I was fine when she went to the cupboard to retrieve the little box.

The box was in a little brown bag with a ribbon and a card--a little "memorial" poem, which I haven't read yet. Because the minute I took the bag, felt its light weight, and looked down onto the box and saw Eliot printed on it, I realized it was all over. It was all over.

It's all over.

Public. Private.

I always assumed I was a varsity-level external processor.

Hand-wringing about which food processor to buy, how to re-arrange my furniture, how to deal with a leaking water heater, why my colleague might be angry with me, what to cook for dinner--these have always been hashed out in public, with my friends and family.

I've been single all my life, and I always thought that needing all that feedback was a kind of handicap for a bachelorette. But there it was, and so I just took it as a further paradox in the long list of things that have struck me as quirky about myself.

But I had never tested this theory with grief. None of my most immediate family had died, no close friends. Somehow I'd been spared that. Until this past week when my cat died. I knew it was coming; I knew I would grieve.

What I didn't expect is how completely I switched into an internal mode. I didn't want support at the vet's clinic for the euthanasia; I was awkward in phone calls from my friends, as appreciative as I was of their care; I didn't leave the house; I let no one in; I was downright rude to my best friend, who came by to bring me a loaf of bread and sit with me.

The solitude was right. It was what I needed, as stunned as I am to acknowledge it. I needed to mope, wail, clutch toys to my chest, let dishes pile up, clean them, vacuum up cat hair, refuse to change my sheets where he had slept, forget he was gone, remember with a start, scrub and disinfect his litter box, clean his brushes, look at pictures, look under all the furniture for sparkly balls, choke up, smile at what my friends had remembered in their e-mails about him.

And I didn't need spectators.

Who knew? Grieving isn't made more difficult by being alone, at least for me. Quite the contrary.

I would never have imagined it.

full circle

I was 60 miles away, with a visiting friend, mourning in advance the day that my cat would die, while my cat was preparing to die that very night.

The day he died was the birthday of my great-grandmother.

Before she died, we were chatting about reincarnation, and she said if she believed in it, which she didn't, she would want to come back as my cat. She knew a good gig.

Today I went to a fabric store to help an elderly friend pick out fabric for a valance. She wants one in her room, and will hem the fabric by hand. She may not live to the end of the project, but she will work beauty in her hands on the way.

My great-grandmother made all my clothes when I was a child. She made matching outfits for my Barbies. I wish I had not traded them for a Monkees album.

The fabric store smelled like her sewing room. I brought a swatch of material home to consider for re-upholstering a chair in my living room. I laid it on the chair, which is still covered with my cat's fur.

It's perfect.

Eliot, Rest in Peace

It was time.

I returned home this evening to find my sturdy companion of 19 years staggering, disoriented, and distraught. He was diagnosed with the early stages of kidney failure two years ago, and in the last year had lost 3 pounds. He had been my constancy, my best example of unconditional love, my model for what a pet should be. I spoiled him rotten. He returned in kind. Lately he had taken to sleeping under the covers, curled in the crook of my arm.

Tonight he couldn't get in the litter box. Half in and half out, collapsed over the side, he turned and looked at me. I helped him in, I helped him out, then we laid together on the floor and I stroked him while he cried. I called the vet and she got out of bed and met us at the clinic.

I held him while she gave him the injection. She barely had it started when he gave into gravity and sank against me. A sign, she said, that he was ready.

He sat on my lap when I wrote my dissertation. He grieved when I traveled. He had a throaty, unique meow. He had violet eyes when he was a kitten. One time he got tangled up in a shopping bag and it chased him around the house. The faster he ran, the more the bag flapped and terrified him. My mom and I thought he would have a heart attack before we could rescue him from the Attack of the Dillard's Bag.

I loved him more than I've ever loved another living creature.

May he rest in peace.

I feel pretty, oh, so pretty.

I didn't MEAN to.

I just got back from a massage and my massage therapist has a very sweet black labrador that also serves as a service animal. This dog visits nursing homes and the like, and she has been trained not to lick, not to approach unless beckoned, not to bump up against someone (given that her "clients" are usually frail and could be knocked off-balance very easily, etc.). When she's in my therapist's office, she knows not to come around the curtain, but to stay on the "office" side.

I was out very late last night and because of the hell that is being 48 years old, was up at the regular time. Let's just say I didn't get enough sleep.

Combine no sleep with intense massage pleasure and the result for me is PUNCHY. So after the massage I was getting dressed on my side of the curtain and started giggling. I saw my whacked massage hair and giggled more uncontrollably, and burst into a rendition of "I FEEL PRETTY." Now, I've had some vocal training, and so when I burst into something it's with some lung power.

This dog leapt to her feet and raced around the curtain to see what unbelievable calamity had transpired. My CMT is shouting for her to come back, and so she starts running back and forth between her owner, whom she knows to obey, and me, who is now on the floor laughing. The CMT finally got the dog back on the right side, and calmed down.

I composed and dressed myself, and solemnly walked around to the couch to write my check. When I appeared, the dog stood straight up at attention, and then fell to the ground and rolled over on her back--unprecedented behavior, evidently.

I don't know if I'm a witch, or a dog whisperer, or what.

I'm still punchy, by the way, and I have another late night ahead of me.

Happily, I have no planned encounters with animals tomorrow.

my mind's eye

Approaching from the west, at fifty paces, I spy a twisted culvert half-buried in the snow.

Only I think it's an errant Canada goose, struck by a car perhaps, or shot from the sky. Its beak is pointing up and is open in mute mid-honk, cut off from its migratory impulse or lost to its goslings or too late for its calling as a holiday feast.

Closer, now, ten paces, I see it's only metal.

Epiphany 2007

O nata lux de lumine by Morten Lauridsen is on my iPod as I head out today. It's a two-pair-of-leggings Saturday, hovering around 32 degrees, but the sun is brazen, blazing over the fields on the edge of town.

The snow is deep and gashed over and across with snowmobile tracks. White snow, gold sun, blue sky, and the choir is perched on my shoulders, caressing my ears.

Tears form, my nose runs in the wind, and I can barely hear the crunchcrunchcrunch of my feet on the pavement. I could walk 100 miles like this.

There's no real epiphany, no concrete thing, no word made flesh, no light bulb. And yet, the elements have broken me open just a little. There are cracks and fissures, more like a map of smiles and grins, really, as I blink and sniff and think that I could have an awakening on this day…

Little Tree

Growing up down south, the procuring of the Christmas tree was never done on the parking lot of a grocery store. The notion that one would BUY a "foreign" tree--a fir, a spruce, a Norway pine--that was just crazy talk in my family.

No, we went out to our acreage in the foothills of the Ozarks, tramped around amidst persimmon trees and stickery weeds that stuck to your pants, across dried up creek beds, under steel grey skies, and then we haggled and argued over which of the many homely cedars we would cut. The point was not to get a PRETTY tree, but to get the tree living in the shadow of another one: stunted, second-best, the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Of course, the real story was about good stewardship: these were trees that would languish anyway, and so it made sense to cull them. But we were always given the hopeful adaptation: the narrative of the passed-over tree, always knowing it could be the best Christmas tree ever, if only given a chance.

We were little old country kids, and we knew full well that these were the trees closest to our identity...we knew we were choosing ourselves, we were giving ourselves permission to shine and become glorious, if adorned and loved.

Now I live up north, and I just bought a fir tree off the lot of a grocery store, the first tree I've had in many, many years. I brought it home and decorated it, all by myself. It's a lovely tree. It's fragrant. It's shapely.

And I can't relate to it at all.

tomorrow is winter.

Every year in Minnesota, usually a little earlier than this, there is a period of temperate weather, the end of which is marked by torrential rain. The earthworms are swept out of the ground and onto the sidewalks, where they wriggle around for a day. Then, that night, a hard freeze comes, and the earthworms are frozen in mid-wriggle on the sidewalk.

Today is the rain.
Tonight is the freeze.
Tomorrow is winter.

the work of memory

I have an elderly friend who is in early stages of dementia.

She knows it.

Today I took some stollen (a German holiday bread that I make every year and that she really loves) and a thermos of coffee over to her, and sat for a while as she made her lists.

Every day she writes down random names and words, so that she won't forget them. She reads them as she writes them, very deliberately and sonorously. A litany of sorts.

She said my name after every other entry:

"Jenifer
oxygen
Jenifer
Patsy Cline
Jenifer
crochet
Jenifer
Wheel of Fortune
Jenifer
bleach
Jenifer
davenport
Jenifer
Jenifer
Jenifer..."

Humbling...

To be remembered.
To witness forgetting.

"Not Horrible is This Year's Great!"

Oh, sure, there are several of us that blog about our dreadful dating stories. But I'm tired of being the cup half empty type.

Sure, these dates are uniformly disappointing.

Sure, I'm tired of reading "my friends say I'm a great catch" as the first line in a profile.

But really, are these guys demons? No. Are they evil? No.

So I'm going on a second date tomorrow with someone who is Not Horrible.

As I remarked to my friend Dana earlier, my new mantra is:

"Not Horrible is This Year's Great!"

We're gonna put it on t-shirts.

Seeking investors! Who wants a cut?

coffee at Barnes & Noble

I am killing time
reading Bukowski on tangerines
turning an engine over turning an engine over

this lady's laugh is like that
sputtering, rhythmic, weak, regular
if she doesn't want us to hear she should whisper less loudly.

How can such a falsely bright and animated voice be so boring?

This latte is deceiving me.
Cool white foam on top and searing black coffee from the fire in the
belly in the bottom of the cup.

Even her blouse is passive-aggressive. Red wannabe.
Cloying pink.
Citric.

The book she leaves on the table:
Making the Grade: Everything Your First-Grader Needs to Know.

Poor kid.

Feline Marketing 101

I was just buying cat food.

There was cat food with real chicken, real turkey, real lamb, real beef, real tuna.

I've never seen my cat go after a cow or a lamb or a turkey.

Why don't they make cat food with things cats might actually stalk?

CAT FOOD WITH REAL SONGBIRD.
CAT FOOD WITH REAL MOUSE.

This doesn't make sense to me.

Self-Defense

The Scene: a local community center with a suspended, indoor track. On one side is a large room, and lots of little tow-headed boys in white are hopping around, preparing for their Tae Kwan Do class. My friend and I are doing an afternoon power walk.

She: You know, I should take a self-defense class...

rhythmic sound of our feet in step on the track, sound of our breathing...

I: Yes, I've thought about that, too. Why would you be interested?

She: Oh, you know, to protect myself. Why haven't you ever taken a class?

walk, walk, walk, walk...

I: Good question. I think it's because I've never found a class called Self-Defense Against Your Own Internal Demons.

laugh, laugh, laugh, walk, walk, walk, walk...sound fades...

This clock is busted.

I grew up learning that I would marry and have children. It's what my mother did, her mother before her, aunts, cousins, friends.

I did other things. I went to graduate school, I got a Ph.D., I started a career. I never made a statement like "I choose not to get married and have children." I just didn't do it. Some relationships ended as they should, some were rejected for bad reasons--but never for a principled reason like "I choose not to get married and have children."

In my early 40s, when my biological clock alarmed me, I had a period of wistfulness about it. And then I let it go. I would love other people's children. I would be the Auntie Mame for my brother's family. It would be glamorous and I would be unfettered.

But every once in a while, something like this happens:

I go to my trainer's home gym at 6:30 AM. It's dark, save for her studio in the basement. We whisper on the way down the stairs, shut the door and then turn our attention to strength and balance.

Then I hear muted little feet thud to the floor, one set after another, from three different rooms upstairs. I hear whimpering dogs, the dad's resonant voice through the floor joists.

When I come up from the basement, Mattie, 3, is sitting at the top stair, wrapped in a pink blankie, hair swirled, sleep in her eyes, a baby-husky morning voice saying "yes" to my "are you waking up now, Mattie?"

Yes.

And I am knocked over by a wave of crushing grief between patting her arm, righting myself, and opening the door out into my world and new daylight.

The Bindery

I went to a book bindery in downtown Minneapolis today.

It's in the warehouse district and has been around for decades. It's run by generations of a family, and you either know where it is or you don't. No need to advertise, because they are true artisans and the quality of their work is recounted by word of mouth. It's in an ancient building, through winding corridors and up worn stairs.

Once inside--announced by a tinkling bell on the door--I stand and wait for someone to appear. Smells of ink and paper and dust and machine oil and leather... years of tattered cartoons and notes and phone numbers (still with the old exchanges: FR 4-3444) tacked to the walls...

Finally, an older, large woman wearing a flowered smock comes (shuffles, waddles, effortful) around a stack of books and greets me. I announce my business and she knows who to shout for. Her grandson comes up (long ponytail, not more than 20) and walks me through my options: calfskin, goatskin, vellum, full leather, 1/2 leather, 1/4 leather...do I want the crumbling pages restored, too? He's attentive and loving as he runs his fingers gently over the book I've placed before him. He knows it's my treasure, without me saying so, and he approaches it reverently.

He's much younger than this book.

He says he will have to let his dad examine it and confirm his estimate, but he feels pretty confident about what he tells me.

He's afraid the numbers he quotes me will cause me to balk, and I tell him that I am not just paying for the book restoration--I am also paying for the lift in spirit I get from having a 20-year old boy stand before me, knowing, understanding, in a dusty sanctuary of words and the material that binds them.

I leave the book with him and return downstairs and to the street. I drive away, through downtown, through the suburbs, past a Wal-Mart.

I don't think they carry what I just bought.