24th August, 2018 Friday
Joni Mitchell lyrics running through my head this morning.
“Chilly now, end of summer, no more shiny hot nights”
“There’s a gypsy down on Bleeker Street/
I went into see her as a kind of joke/
She lit a candle for my love luck/
And eighteen bucks went up in smoke”
Messages from shaded places mirroring what I run from daily. They know. What to do? Anything? Speak carefully…empathy, compassion for so and so and so and so and, ah yes, myself also, don’t forget me, myself and I on that list…let go of judgement…mother no more…let go…please…
I drift…
Tea has the goat milk and the honey and is that fine Earl Grey steeped for five minutes as my almost German husband learned me. “Best flavor that way.”
Its gray and chilly this morning. Seems the flush of recent summer searing heat is spent and trending away down the calendar. Air is clear. I opened the house last night to the cool breezy clear air. Been eight weeks of buttoned up, shades drawn, white noise of the four space air conditioners dreading the opening of doors for the oven heat blast from the outside.
This is summer? Beautiful summer? The time of year in the Pacific Northwest which beckons Southerners fleeing their anvil climates for the chill nights and moist days? Are those days gone, lost a thing of memory in the aging? Will the littles that grow in this heat smoked age know there was another kind of Summer?
Friends of my daughter and her husband spent the night here last night. Urbanites who reveled in this country space. She works for the EPA. I asked her how her job security felt. We chatted about the Blue Wave. Please please please please.
The Angels of Our Better Natures can trend toward slothliness. I feel this moment in our World is about the banging on the door of our Angeled Chambers, “Wake the Fuck Up!!!” Will we???
Zoi pup plays behind me with her ball and tries to engage The Wizard of Ahs in play he doesn’t want. They need to go out. Their raw food is defrosting on the counter in back of my laptop. A beef mixture this morning. The Wizard has ditched the Zoi and barks plaintively through the door for me to please let him in.
This practice is like Yoga.
I have been moving in again. Shuffling and sorting. And throwing away. The moving boxes vomited just to get them flattened and objects, books and papers flew to immediate surfaces and have been watching and waiting for me to settle them in.
The move before this one was from the house my children had been children in. They left from that house and one came back with her beau for awhile but when they left the house husked. Airless it told me our time was done. Told me another house was calling me and another human cluster was waiting for its shelter. I knew we needed to move on.
And there appeared a house who needed us. That origin story must wait also. Here let me say, the universe aligned enough for me to ask my husband if he would like to leave his embedded and oh so comfortable place of employment ( I had asked him to stop living there a few years before) of thirty odd years and follow me to God Knows What for God Knows Why except it was about a house.
Thirty odd years before, he had found himself adrift after four years of military service on an air force base in Central California. A visit to New Jersey had him pack a motorcycle headed back West. In a small sleepy one horse town back in Central California not far from the Air Force Base on a feed store’s tack board, he found an index card with the name of a Ranch looking for a stable hand. Why not?
The Ranch is 1800 acres of the finest Ranch property in the area. At the time he started shoveling shit out there, it sported a breeding and training facility for a sizeable herd of Standard Bred or Trotter horses. The ranch manager who had posted the index card hired him and in short order, he proved himself to be stalwart, upstanding, the buck-stops-here kind of a guy. As the ownership slipped from one generation to another he slotted naturally into the Manager’s position. He had a place to live, trucks to drive and do his duties, a workshop to rival any tinkerer’s dreams, and a heartrending piece of ground to trod and tend everyday. He had women, one at a time. One longterm older and lovely who drifted away. He’d sworn out loud to many he would never marry because he did not know the woman who could live on the Ranch.
And then I came along. Poor man.
There is more to fill here but lets leave it for now that he loved me and I him swiftly. He had no obvious drama to bring to my swirling divorced with two young daughters’ world. He was kind and warm and made us smile. I felt safe in ways I hadn’t for a long long time.
We set about to marry which we eventually did. The wedding is another time’s tale. And the point of note here is that moving from the Ranch to my house in town for him was not an easy thing. Took him six months to do it. And his beloved cat.
But he could still work at The Ranch.
And then I pulled at moving North to this Siren of a House in a town we had no attachments to.
I asked him, “Do you want to come? You can stay but I need to go.” He had the choice. And choose he did. Why not.
So I packed up my time of hands on mothering. And he packed his Titan’s workshop and the moving trucks rolled to a point North. Two phases. One his and one mine three months later after my youngest daughter graduated from High School.
There is a point to this drift and I have not lost it. My day and dogs are calling so I must stop here for now.
Ta.
Tea With Me 