window seats

I've been sick since Thursday the 16th- that's 2 weeks.  A hollowing, waxy wave that's been rolling around in my body.  It steals my voice at least once a day, stuffs-up my chest, clogs my head, and dulls my want for food. 

It hit Beach late last week.  She was out for 3 days. Teammates and coworkers rise and fall with it. It's attacking the whole country.

The windows on the high speed train bulleting up the track of life are framed with the thoughts found on long rides and within extended illness.  They are the pauses where I can see.  Pauses of perspective. 

But through this one I have been running.  Too busy to rest.  Too busy to look around. I worked sick.  I ran kids here to there.  I cooked and cleaned and 'gym-mom-ed'.

Slowly the sickness is lifting. I had moments yesterday when I almost felt well.  Returning within the haze of 2 weeks worth of fever dreaming is the memory of the only window I remember seeing the view from in the whole damn month of January.  Something has to change.

All I have for mental scenery are the slick painted lines trickling down the interstate as we clipped by in BC's truck, heading home from Las Vegas.  The feeling behind it, I am going home- I want to go home.


On Thursday Beach flies to Colorado.  We are sending her to compete.  We are trusting her to the care of her team.  I am crossing my fingers she won't get sick.  Crossing my fingers I get her to the airport on time.  Crossing my fingers her comp leotard, out for repair, returns in time to go with her. Crossing my fingers that whether or not she lands it, that she finds a way to make peace with the vault that she believes is too big for her. 

Sending Beach off to Colorado with barely enough time to leave work and get her off proves to me I have done something wrong.  My train is running so far off course I can't see the ground anymore. It is time to really come home.  To cut out the extras and the people pleasing and the worrying about things that I can't control. I am crossing my fingers that I find a way to make that happen.

I am crossing my fingers that at some point along the way she gets a window seat.

family bowl night

signs of life from last weekend

The West (Ken Burns)

ribbons of pink sky

The morning is blue in darkness and I am up early waiting for Baby J to knock on the front door.  Any minute now....

The chickens roosting in the trees haven't yet stirred under the thin layer of fresh snow encasing them.  The cats aren't yet pacing and neither is the dog.

The news is slow; football scores, talk of pending awards shows, and maps of winter weather.

I write out a to do list for the week ahead.  It too is slow. At least the words are.  I have a hard time finding the energy to want to do anything.

I should note: I am sick.  It's probably not the flu, possibly strep, defiantly a miserable state.  I am also home alone.

Beach was carted off with Sophie yesterday heading to the lure of the mall on a Saturday afternoon followed by a sleepover.  BC loaded with coffee and ski gear off to see Fisher in Parowan.

I spent the night not really sleeping.  Listening to Radiolab.  Slipping into slumber and popping back out of it until it was time to get up.

After my second cup of coffee I call Conner to ask after Baby J whose presence is overdue.  In his deep, sleepy voice he explains they overslept their alarm.  They are on their way.

The chickens are waiting for me but I am waiting for Baby J so she can join me.  So we can go stomping out through the snow to feed them.  I promised her yesterday when I was too sick to go out with her that we would go out together today.

It will start out with her marching beside me practicing saying, "shoo, shoo!".  But at the first hint of the loose hens she will demand to be rescued from the ground.  Balancing her in one arm and the metal scrap bowl in the other she will talk about the rooster (which sounds a lot like she is saying monster), muttering, "I don't yike it, Grandma" but putting fear aside she wants so badly to see and feed the chickens.

Like BC, the kids (Conner and Lexi) are going skiing. 

Baby J and I will putter around the farm just the two of us while they climb the snowy slopes.  We will bake bread, play in the snow, eat lunch, and play with Play Dough. 

It's not work.  For me it's time stepping back into the past, a decade back down the ladder of childhood.  It is hours of wading in wonder like drifts of snow.

The blue morning fades to shades of dirty white.  Any minute now her little fingers balled up in a fist will knock on the frosty glass of the front door.  She will push her face against it trying to see in.  Her breath making clouds; chapped cheeks, blinking eyes, and a tiny bow mouth.  Baby J on the doorstep as the sky touches a ribbon of pink light and the day begins again.
   

Utah finds snow

if it was not

It's in my head.  Like an octopus it wriggles about.  Silky tentacles sliding into patulous caverns.  I close my eyes and I can feel its meaty mass taking up space. 

Shifting as I shift.  It leans with me as I lean forward.  It leans with me as I lean back. I glance sideways and like a child on a rail, it pushes up the side as if it is trying to see out beyond me. 

Its porcine mirror casting a feverish flight of vertigo with each move I make.  Its insistence threatening to topple us both; I want it extracted. 

Standing on a winter's beach, I want to wash in the waves its miry ink from my shoulders.  Slip its breathing body from my ears. Remove its branching reach from my eyes.  But I fear if I were to dip my head towards the water its weight would drag me down.  

Before me a steely ocean; cold wind mixing spray with skimming clouds. It is beautiful.  It is dangerous.  It is sleeping but alive.  A narrow shoreline sheltering between scaling cliffs.  Dark sand stretching tight around foot prints pooling with water.  No black jutting rocks, no white glimmering shells, barely a horizon to paint.


If it were not for the battle with the octopus this beach would be my silence. I could roll up the sandy cuffs of my jeans and wade into the water as far as I want.  I could become still against the tide, one-sided, faceless to the world behind my back.

If it were not for this thing like an octopus, if I was without its parasitic corpulence, I could step lightly without thought, without strategy.  I would not be a watcher.  I would not be a collector of love like nightfall.  Sweet, haunting love that exchanges long cast shadows for total darkness.  Love that lingers and grows darker just before it fades away- always threatening to return. 

 

If it were not for the octopus I would not have enough ink to write. Or enough reason to keep running.

Being part of the turbulent ocean is nothing to an octopus. Being part the stubborn land is nothing to the dead.  But somewhere between them is a way up and a way down.  Between them is the whole blue sky; clouds rolling in like breakers, sunlight falling like rain.

If it were not for the octopus I would be sleeping instead of dreaming.     

the Little Giants at Meadow Hot Springs