FINE FLAKES

Alaska
The snow that’s been promised for days finally came late yesterday afternoon. Flakes so fine I could hardly see them in the fading light whipped through the frigid air and coated the edges of the rooftops of nearby houses. Glacial gusts chilled me and threatened to blow out the fire as I tried to cook some chicken on my gas grill for dinner.

Earlier in the day I had watched the storm through my car window as it began to ooze its way down and across the nearby foothills, swallowing them slowly in a light fog. I was on my way to meet a friend for lunch at a local restaurant. By the time we emerged from the restaurant and I was driving home again, the temperature had dropped drastically. The foggy mist of the approaching front had caused the mountains to disappear.

It’s now a day later and all that snow hasn’t come in quite the amounts the weather forecasters led us to believe was possible. I did go out and shovel my driveway, for it is a balmy 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and is not expected to get warmer anytime soon. There was about five or six inches of snow, but the bottom two were slush turning to ice, and it was a minor battle to get each shovelful to let go of my plastic shovel.

I didn’t go to the gym this morning, but by the time I was through shoveling I had had an equivalent workout scraping slush, especially off the stairs to my front door. I want people to be able to come to my house without ice spikes on their boots. It’s days like this I feel sorry for myself sometimes. Why doesn’t my son, who lives a whole two miles away, offer to come and shovel the snow for me?

My daughter, who was living with me at the time, did shovel the mountain of snow off the driveway once because I couldn’t figure out how to start my own snow blower. I have since learned the trick to starting one. Here’s a kicker on snow blowers…they are relatively useless on slush. So that left me feeling bereft this morning as I broke the icy crust under the snow off the cement. The snow had landed on warm ground at first, melting and then freezing as the temperature plummeted.

The friend with whom I mentioned having lunch and I had had a long conversation about this very subject. “We need to stop relying on other people to take care of us,” she said. She and her boyfriend had just had a harrowing experience over the past weekend, ATVing in the snow and getting irreparably stuck out in a wilderness area. They had no other choice than to hike out as it got dark and the storm approached. She is a widow whose husband had taught her to always pack her own survival stuff, but here she had let the boyfriend do it for her.

“I should have had a headlamp,” she lamented. “I should have had firestarter. I know better than to do this, but it’s so easy to let other people do for us if they offer.” I thought she was being a bit hard on herself, but then she had just been in a potentially deadly situation. She freaked out a bit on the hike out. She cried as the dusk turned to pitch black. She thought of bears when they heard crashing noises in the dark forest.

“I think it might have been because I had a sympathetic ear,” she surmised. “I might have acted differently if I was alone.” In the end they were able to get help and got home just fine. I never would have made it out, period. I would have left my body long before in sheer terror.

“She’s a brave soul if there ever was one,” I thought as I dug the snow on my driveway. My idea of “wilderness camping” is to pitch a tent in the camping area of an RV park, where there are flush toilets and hot showers, and it’s maybe a few hundred yards to a beach. My friend is a rider-trainer for people wanting to learn to ride motorcycles. She works for Harley-Davidson. The closest I’ll get to a motorcycle is the leather jackets in the Harley-Davidson store on the selling floor. Compared to my friend, at least in the physical challenge department, I am a world-class chicken.

I stopped feeling sorry for myself as I dug my way along. “Hey, I am lucky I really can shovel my own driveway,” I thought, “I can feel my heart pumping but chances are excellent I’m not going to be one of those people who has a heart attack a few hours after they stop,” I continued. Thanks to my aforementioned friend I have been going to the gym regularly for the last couple of years. My only excuse for not getting out there today would be that I was too lazy, not incapable.

“What if the snow was even too deep for the snow blower?” you might ask.

“Well, hey, a few bucks in the hands of the teenagers across the street…and voila, clean driveway. I can always borrow someone else’s kid.”

NIGHT WINDS

House Angels
High clouds blow across the stars tonight as I stand on my little patio and say goodnight to the world before I go to bed. The winds aren’t as bad yet as they had predicted earlier, the cold weather front is still too far to the north to be creating problems in my little town. Snow and frigid air are on the way after a day where the temperatures reached the low 60’s. My car thermometer said it was 50 degrees when I pulled into the garage, unusual for both the late hour and this time of year. Christmas lights twinkle brightly on the houses across the subdivision from me, waiting for the hour their timers turn the two houses to darkness.

I was in New York in November for the wedding party of my nephew, Bill, and his new legal husband, Chuck. I was fortunate enough to have been at their civil union in Vermont six years ago, too. I just love these men. Looking in from the outside, they seem to have such a respectful and loving relationship. Sometimes it makes me wish my own marriage could have had more of the elements I see in theirs.

Bill’s mother, my ex-sister-in-law, has a serious new relationship now. My daughter and I flew in for the weekend to attend the party, and stayed with her. The view of the Hudson River from her 12th floor apartment is always stunning. At the party I got to see and talk to lots of people I haven’t seen for years. I felt such a sense of home and celebration. The many fabulous Thanksgiving feasts we all spent there floated through my mind. It stirred up difficult feelings, too.

It made me miss my brother. December is a month my family members seem to choose to go to heaven, including Jim. His death was a long time ago now, but every once in a while standing in the apartment that was his home, being with his family, celebrating an event he would have been so proud to attend, I feel his absence.

I got to spend two days with my daughter, too. That hasn’t happened for a long time, since she is 27 now. Last week I got to be at her house for Thanksgiving. She lives with her boyfriend, a very handsome, nice guy, and his family. I can see why she likes it so, the sense of being part of such a young and vibrant group of people was palpable to me in ways it hasn’t been before.

My son, her brother, now 22, was there, too. My children are wonderful people. I am so proud of who they have become. But they aren’t children anymore. Each has moved on to a life I don’t share very intimately anymore. This holiday has become, for this year anyway, bittersweet.

Last night I attended a new moon healing circle ceremony with a bunch of other women, among them two friends. We celebrated and invited in the Virgin of Guadalupe, asking for miracles of change and healing in our lives over the next moon cycle. I left feeling full of warmth and gratitude and love that my life has brought me to a place where this kind of thing happens often. I have created a new world for myself, too. On this level things are getting better and deeper. I see a path it is exciting to follow. The miracle I asked for was that my awakening, both to who I am and how I can be of larger service to the world, would grow. I can sense it happening.

As I looked up into the dark sky at the twinkling stars in the clear spot almost directly overhead, I felt such a connection to God and, at the same time, to the beauty of my infinitesimal and oh-so-human existence. Time moves on. Children grow up. People you love die. Nothing remains stationary.

The best part, really, is that there is always something new to look forward to. Over the course of even a few minutes the view of the stars changes and is obscured by thin clouds. The lights blink off across the street. I turn to go back in my house, and in my heart, all is well.

THANKSGIVING SURPRISE

Lillies

My daughter just texted me and asked me to cook a turkey and bring it over to her house for Thanksgiving. My son, her brother, gets a free holiday turkey from work every year. He’s young and single, and usually gives his turkey to someone at work who has a big family to feed. He has no use for something that needs to be cooked before eating. This year, instead of giving this prize away, he offered it to his sister.

I have only ever cooked a few turkeys in my life. I don’t really like turkey, and should I ever find myself in the awkward position of wanting to eat some, say in a sandwich, well, that’s what deli departments in grocery stores are for, right? Deli turkey is usually delicious, and comes without that conundrum of what to do with the leftovers.

It’s not that I can’t prepare one. I cooked my first turkey when I was 20, my junior year in college. I was living in a house with four other people at the time, and only one of us was going home for Thanksgiving break that year. I got the bright idea that those of us remaining for the holiday should get together and cook a Thanksgiving feast for ourselves.

After all, the house came supplied with both a complete kitchen and a dining room table, though we’d mostly only ever used the refrigerator and the sink in the kitchen. The dining room table was an obstacle to be walked around on the way to the living room couch, not somewhere to sit and eat. The table and the kitchen would get their first full use.

I learned a few things from that earliest experience. Cooking a turkey is not as daunting as it might seem, provided of course you get one that fits in your oven, which through sheer luck I did. You should also check your kitchen supplies long before you begin any kind of preparation of anything, not the hour your work begins.

Since this was a rental house full of college students, dishes, cookware, and the proper amount of silverware, not to mention carving knives and pot holders, as we belatedly found out, were in scant supply. Lastly, I learned that having three other chefs in the kitchen with me, all of whom were as inexperienced as I was, made for a potential fiasco of the first order.

We squabbled over who got time when to use the oven, or the almost non-existent counter space. We argued over what dishes to make as sides, and what ingredients, exactly, should go in to the stuffing. I thought stuffing absolutely must be cooked in the turkey, and bacon and onions are the prime ingredients besides the bread. One of my house mates acted as if stuffing cooked in the bird was a recipe for instant death of all who consumed it.

I personally dislike sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping, but that was another housemate’s favorite thing. Green bean casserole, especially when all the ingredients come from a can, made my stomach heave at the thought. My housemate from Co-op City in the Bronx, however, insisted he would be devastated without it.

In the end we somehow got it all done, with each of us having the thing we liked best beautifully prepared, cooked, and served at the same time. We all managed to eat some of everything, and none of us died or got sick. The fact that we didn’t have enough of the right dishes, or napkins, or even forks and knives, hardly made a difference. We were young, and able to improvise. It turns out a bread knife is not the best option for carving a turkey, but it does get the meat off the bone. We had a wonderful time, and declared it a success.

For many years I guess I got lucky. The job of preparing the feast fell to my sister, or my sister-in-law, both of whom had families long before I did. I remember those Thanksgivings with warmth and gratitude and the joy of being with family.

When I had young children and moved to Colorado, I discovered the Stanley Hotel, of Stephen King’s “The Shining” fame, served up a Thanksgiving feast worthy of royalty for a reasonable fee. So every year we drove up the mountain to Estes Park and stuffed ourselves, sitting at tables with starched white tablecloths, shining silver, and waiters to clean up our leftovers.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain if this year I have to prepare a bird. I have a beautiful kitchen of my own, with nobody to fight me for space or time, or ingredients. I can make an hors d’oeuvre, and a salad, and a stuffed turkey. They all will fit in my car. It’s such a small price to pay for family.

DOG MEDICINE

Park Bench

Park Bench


Early on in our marriage I began to suspect my husband had a problem with alcohol abuse. It was obvious with my father-in-law. He had been in and out of rehab a few times by the time I knew him. He had been fired, so I was told, from his last job before he retired for good, for drinking. Or so everyone hinted. My husband’s family was never direct, especially with an outsider like me.

That firing occurred when my father-in-law had been working for the branch of the family that had a very successful business. The one belonging to his wife’s sister. He had been given the job after he was laid off (fired?) from another job he had had. I got the feeling they gave him the job because they felt sorry for him. He needed to support his family, after all.

“We don’t hire family” was the directive I heard. A directive that was written in stone after the firing. Was that story told to me so I wouldn’t have aspirations of working for them? Funny thing about that, most of the other “family” worked for the business. The thought had never passed through my mind to work for them. Whatever my father-in-law had done must have been pretty bad, I thought.

It’s not like I didn’t come from a family where people drank like fish. I remember a time when my parents were having a party and I asked my father to make me a drink. Yes, I was of drinking age at the time. He handed me a gin and tonic. I took a sip. It tasted like he had poured mostly gin, and maybe waved the bottle of tonic over the top. “This is too strong, Dad,” I said.

He shot me a funny look and said, “If you can’t drink that, you’re not my daughter,” and walked away. I went to the kitchen and poured half the drink in the sink and filled it with tonic myself. It was a daytime party. It was a time in the early ‘70s when DUIs were practically unheard of. Certainly nobody thought twice about driving home from a party after they’d had too much to drink. Nobody sued anybody for serving too much booze. My parent’s friends made it a block from the house in their car. Apparently negotiating a left turn was too difficult. They hit the tree on the opposite corner from the stop sign. Fortunately no one was hurt. The car and the tree were a little damaged, but nothing else.

I tell this story so you might understand the context of what I considered “normal” drinking. For me to begin to question my husband’s behavior meant it had to be pretty outside my box. I’d been to an academically excellent college, but it also was known as a “party school.” Drinking seemed to be a way of life. We were young, wasn’t that what everyone did?

It was the focus of the drinking that got to me. Everything we did revolved around being somewhere where you could drink. We went out to dinner, and it was a place with an active bar scene, or the very least where you could drink a lot. We went to a friend’s house, and the discussion was how much should we drink before we went…just in case there wasn’t enough booze there. There was never a second when our house lacked some form of drinkable alcohol. Eventually this got to me. I literally woke up one day and thought, “I’ve had enough.” I stopped going out with my husband.

The proof of the pudding about substance abuse came to light after I’d had a minor surgery. I was prescribed Percodan. Look it up. It’s aspirin and oxycodone. I took a few as prescribed, and mostly slept a couple of days. I stopped when the pain was manageable. There were probably twenty left of the thirty pills I had been prescribed. “Can I have the rest of the prescription?” my husband asked me. Just in case I was still wondering.

There were many years when my husband never touched anything. He lived a substance free life for a long time and totally turned his life around. Toward the end of our marriage I suspected that wasn’t true anymore. Certain behaviors cropped up I hadn’t seen in a long time. Still, I didn’t want to believe what on some level I knew was true. I couldn’t deal with it anymore despite therapy and a hundred other things I tried. I finally filed for divorce.

Shortly after I left, our 16-year-old dog had reached the end of her life and needed to be put to sleep. She had been prescribed Tramadol for her arthritis. It’s a narcotic analgesic like Percodan. She took a lot. Human beings can take it, too, usually for back pain.

The dog went back and forth between my ex-husband and me, so both households had her prescription meds. The day we went together to put the dog down, I told my ex-husband I had just refilled her prescription a few days before. I had had surgery myself a couple of weeks before and could not yet drive, so he picked me up to go to the vet’s.

He dropped me off at my house afterwards and followed me into the house. Both he and the woman he was living with at the time had back problems. His were from a car accident we had been in long ago. As far as I ever knew he had never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen for the pain. Part of his swearing off substances. “Can I have the rest of Lucy’s (the dog) medicine?” he asked. “Humans take the same stuff, too. Sometimes we used to give Lucy human Tramadol when we ran out of hers. It works great on back pain.” The word “we” stuck out for me.

“Really?” I thought. “You’d take dog medicine? How do you know the dose?” I handed him the vial of Lucy’s medicine. I watched him walk out the door. It all became crystal clear as the behaviors clicked into place.

Just in case I was wondering.

ETIQUETTE

CSU garden
I took a trip to Australia in 2009, right after my son graduated from high school, to visit my daughter in Sydney. I brought my son along so he could visit his sister. I’d been divorced less than a year at the time, and as I look back now I see what sorry shape I must have been in to have put up with the part of me at the time that could not easily stand up for my own rights.

The few times in my life when I’ve borrowed a car, or borrowed anything for that matter, I’ve made sure I returned it in as good or better condition than it was when I borrowed it. I never thought much about it before this particular incident happened, but somewhere along the line this must have been drilled into my head.

You respect other people’s property as you would your own. You break something that belongs to someone else, you replace it. You ask someone before you use something, and if they say no, you respect that and don’t use it. Am I really so peculiar because this is how I try to govern my own life? Even as a kid I tried to remember to occasionally refill the gas tank in my father’s car when I used it. Sure, it cost me money I had very little of at the time. He never said I had to do that, and probably would not have asked me to if I never once did it, but it was just a nice thing to do. It was my way of saying, “Thanks, Dad.”

I had a friend at the time, when I made the trip to Australia, who was a nurse. She told me herself she used to take things home from the various hospitals at which she worked to supply her own house. “You know, bandages, peroxide, and stuff like that,” she said. I thought of the people I had known at work who felt free to take home office supplies. Not something I would do, but maybe not the worst thing someone could do, either. It was a kind of attitude that seemed a little off to me. A sort of “well, the hospital (or office, or friend) has more than I do, so I can take this stuff and they’ll never even notice.”

I asked her if she could drive my son and me to the airport and drop us off as we left for Australia. There’s no shuttle service from the little town I live in, and I didn’t want to leave my car at some hotel parking lot where we could catch the shuttle, or incur the expense of leaving it at the airport for three weeks, either. She would come and pick us up at our return, too. I asked if we could use my car since it was big enough to easily accommodate three people and all our stuff, too, which her car wasn’t. She said sure.

I asked two other people to keep an eye on my house for me while I was gone. I gave some money and a key to my son’s friend so he could mow the grass while I was away. I gave a key to another friend so she could drop by a couple of times and go through the house to check that everything was okay.

I filled the gas tank to the tippy top before we left. We drove to the airport, I said goodbye to my friend, handed her the keys to my car, and said, “If you need to borrow my car for some reason while I am gone, feel free. It’s insured.” I meant it was insured if she needed to drive it, like taking it home for me.

Close to the end of our stay in Australia, my son shared a text he’d gotten from his friend. “There’s a red car in the garage that’s been parked here the whole time you’ve been gone.” My car was tan. My friend had a red car. I was a little pissed, but it didn’t bother me. Mine was a relatively new Toyota Highlander Hybrid that had almost exactly 39,000 miles on it. I know because I had been debating whether I should take it in for its 40,000 mile service before, or after, my trip. A little red light would come on and remind me if I forgot, so I let it go.

My friend picked us up at the airport, as planned. I drove the car home. There was maybe enough gas in the tank to get us to my house. The red service light was on. When I put the suitcases in the back, there seemed to be some sand and a piece of something that looked like a broken brick I didn’t remember back there, too. There were 2,300 miles I didn’t drive on the car. In three weeks. I drive a lot; believe me, but that beat me by a long shot. No gas. “Really?” I thought. “You can fill it up a few times to drive 2,300 miles but you can’t return it to me with gas in the tank?” I didn’t say anything.

A couple of days later, after it had grown a couple of inches, I noticed a crack in the windshield on the passenger side. My friend got in the car to go somewhere with me. She pointed at the crack. “It’s insured, right?” she asked.

“The glass isn’t,” I said. She said nothing.

Later that week she showed me her back yard where she was laying some new paving stones. There were a few set in the dirt and many more piled up waiting to be set. She told me a friend had given her the stones. She told me the name of the town where she had gone to get the stones. It was a long drive. “I sent you an email to ask if I could use your car to pick up the stones, but I guess you didn’t get it in time before you left.” I had checked my email right before we left Australia. No note from her. I had checked my email after we came back. The same.

“I was amazed at how much your car could hold,” she said. “Those stones are so heavy, and it was full. I was surprised; the back-end didn’t even sag down.” No wonder there was sand in my car. Now I knew what the piece of broken brick was…a damaged paving stone.

The owner’s manual for the Toyota Highlander Hybrid specifically tells you not to overload the car. It tells you not to treat it as the usual off-road SUV either, but to be more careful. That’s because the battery system for the car is underneath the back seat in the middle of the car. It’s fine to tow a heavy trailer (my car had a hitch), but you don’t want that battery to hit anything.

A load of paving stones surely weighted it down in a way that was warned against. I thought if the back-end had sagged down, that would not have made any difference. She probably would have driven it anyway. I was grateful the shocks in the car weren’t that old. I hadn’t stressed the car with anything more than highway driving in the time I had owned it.

“I impressed a lot of people driving that car,” she said. “They wanted to know where I’d gotten such a nice one. I told them I was just lucky.”

I never did confront her with how I felt about what I saw as the abuse of my car. I had, after all, told her she could use it “if she needed to.” I had told her it “was insured.” I never meant 24/7-for-three-weeks-so-you-could-drive-to-who-knows-where-and-back a zillion times, get it filthy, crack the un-insured windshield, overload it by pretending it’s a truck, and use up all its gas. Give some people an inch and they take a mile, no? So whose fault is that? Lesson for Chris, period.

No, she isn’t my friend any more. But it did take me a good year of many other things I felt were abuses of me, my confidences, and my friendship before I drew the line. It took me thirty years to get out of my marriage. It only took me two to drop the relationship with my supposed friend. I thought that was pretty good. “Progress, not perfection,” as they say.

MY DAUGHTER

Iris
Twenty-seven years ago today I gave birth to my most extraordinary and beautiful daughter. The sun was warm in the early morning light today as I sat on my patio with a cup of coffee steaming on the glass and metal table beside me and reminisced. My little dog stared up at me and stamped his feet on the cold cement, asking to sit in my lap. I pulled him up and looked at the frost sparkling on the rooftops of the houses nearby.

I am so grateful my daughter came to me. As all babies should be to mothers who want them so, I thought she was the most exquisite and miraculous of little beings. I was overwhelmed at first with the idea that I had no clue how to take care of this warm, pink-skinned, hairless little creature with deep blue eyes. She had such long fingers and perfect nails on the tiny hands that waved around whenever I unwrapped her blanket. It was my favorite time of year then, just as it is now, with frost in the air and the beautiful colors of the changing leaves in the yellow autumn light. It will forever be more special because this is the time of year when my daughter was born.

I wonder now if I had known then what exceptional teachers children are, whether I would have appreciated more the sometimes painful insights that come with motherhood. My children have taught me more about who I really am, both the best and the worst of, than the seemingly endless hours of therapy I have pursued here and there across my life. My children have asked me, through the sheer force of their shining essences, to confront the internal places where I have been stuck; sometimes angry, judgmental, so limited in scope and flexibility.

I can smile now and say with gratitude that they contributed to my finding and developing a relationship with God, forcing me to pray for help in opening my own Spirit to understand the nature of my darkness, and to find the true nature of what it means to love another more than your own life. I shocked myself to sometimes see behaviors come out, or words hiss across my lips that long ago I swore never to repeat from my own childhood. I sometimes became my own mother with my children. What choice did I have but to turn to my Higher Power for healing?

My daughter lives a braver life than I ever did, appreciating physical challenges I never faced. As a very young teenager she spent her summers camping in the mountains above the tree-line, horseback riding in wilderness areas I never would have dared tread; sleeping under a tarp among evergreens, once finding bear tracks feet from where she spent the night.

She has a gift with all animals, but horses especially, able to ride animals other people feared or couldn’t control with ease and grace. She was a barrel racer for many years, flying past women as a young girl who had ridden all their lives. Now she is hoping she can combine equine therapy with her psychology training to help those with mental and physical disabilities. I envy the depth of her connection with the natural world, and her desire to help those around her.

When she went off to college I was so happy she chose to go to school only an hour away. I think my heart might have broken if she’d moved to another state. She lived in Australia for a time and I thought she might stay there. It’s a beautiful place if the little bit I’ve seen is indicative of the rest, but now she lives only a few miles away in Colorado. Sometimes she calls to talk to me when she has a problem.

“I’m sorry I only call when I’m upset,” she said once. I told her I was honored she trusted me enough to talk to me at all at those times.

“I would have died before I called my own mother when I was distressed,” I’ve told her in the past. That is true. My mother, even in her old age, was never a soft place for me to fall. I must have succeeded in doing something right if my own daughter thinks otherwise of me. I’ve learned that sometimes the best healing comes from just having someone who will listen, who doesn’t have to fix or correct what you share.

I hope someday I will have grandchildren, if only to get a chance to share with my own blood some of the lessons on love, and loving, that I have learned along the way. If not, that’s okay, too. I have new friends, and opportunities, and work that I didn’t have not that long ago. I can show her it’s possible to change, even later in life.

My character has evolved and deepened in the years I’ve been alive, not the least because I’ve been blessed to have a daughter. “You teach what you most need to learn,” I’ve heard said.

My daughter has helped me to be a better person. After all I have to look myself in the mirror and answer the questions that come to the surface when I think of her. “Who is it I want to be if she asks me about being a wife, or a mother, or a friend? What does it mean to be a woman?” She won’t just be asking about the surface stuff. “Am I up to answering that? Am I living an authentic life? Am I being true to myself?” my inner voice asks. “What if she never asks? Can she look at my life and answer those questions?”

“I’m working on it,” I reply. I’m so glad she pushes me along.

OUTSIDE THE BOX

Orange Tree
A certain level of peace flows through me this morning as I notice the light getting brighter and brighter through my kitchen window. The air is crisp and clear and fresh smelling. October 1st, the calendar says, and I’ve turned my heat on for a couple of hours, just to take the night-time chill out of the air. It’ll probably be in the seventies, short sleeve weather on a perfect fall day. I’ll take my little dog out for walk in a while, his short legs blurring as he trots speedily along until he stops suddenly to inspect a blade of grass, or changes direction to pull me over to some savory dog scent. The small things soothe an anxious heart if I take the time to notice.

My friend and I closed our shared office yesterday, the space no longer able to serve our needs as it did when we opened it eight months ago. It’s more of a relief than sadness I feel, for people seem to prefer the healing room I have in my house for sessions than the sweet little office my friend and I created in the creepy basement of what was once a medical clinic. It’s funny sometimes how subtle changes show up to let you know it’s time to move on. Our friend down the hall moved her office out a couple of months ago and it just never seemed the same after that. I know we’ll find a better space when the time is right, but for now it’s as if I hold my breath, waiting for the inner guidance that will tell me what to do.

September was a month of milestones for me, ever reminding me of what I left behind and who I am yet becoming. My thirty year marriage both began and ended in September; the 17th the wedding anniversary, the 11th the date the divorce became final. Yesterday, the 30th, I sat with my friend at a coffee shop and drank iced ginger-milk after we handed our keys back to the landlord. I was so grateful for her friendship, and for the moment, for my divorce. Without that milestone I might never have met her or opened an office to begin with. I am so much more confident, and happier, than I have been in a long time.

“I don’t know what I’ll do for space now,” my friend said. “I’m not even sure I want to do sessions for people all the time, full-time I mean,” she sighed. We are well-matched. I echo her sentiments. But having that public office has opened us both up to a larger world, one not so easily shut down by the change in venue we’ve just gone through. I have another friend I was just talking to yesterday. She’s rented a new office space for her non-profit, one with offices to sublet, not incompatible with the healing work my friend Kerrie and I do. Is it time to go check it out? Is this our next step? Can it really be this simple?

Last week I got to do not one but two house clearings. One was a lot of effort; the other was more a “refreshing” of home space, a spontaneous work done because I still had my house clearing stuff in my car when I went visiting for coffee one morning. Later today my daughter’s friend wants me to do some energy work for her at my house after work. Thursday I’m going on a little road trip to help someone who can’t come to me and who needs more assistance than long-distance healing might provide. She’s a trained and gifted medical intuitive. Her work is needed in the world. Besides, I haven’t seen her in a while. We’ll have time to reconnect on many levels.

I suspect doors are opening as the other space closes. Someone is coming this weekend to use my house for her workshop on “Alchemy,” her story of how a scary diagnosis propelled her into finding her true work in the world as a very talented psychic medium. Each of us is a very different person. We have different gifts and interests. But I am so very blessed in knowing all these women. We’re like a bunch of isolated birds hanging in cages in a shop window, and all at once someone’s opened all the doors.

“Weird,” might be a word others would use to describe each of us. “Crazy.” Maybe “heretic.” The things we are interested in, in a different time, might have gotten us burned at the stake. Today I get to chuckle at the thought. Together we are such a beautiful, multi-colored and talented flock.

WEATHER REPORT

Rain at Twilight
How often do you listen to the weather and the meteorologist apologizes for the fact that a few thunderstorms are brewing off to the west and may make it over the mountains to possibly, maybe, deliver a half-inch of rain while you are sleeping? The rain even overshadows the fact that the highest peaks may get a few inches of snow, early harbinger of a potentially glorious ski season. The thought of more rain makes us hold our breath.

The torrents-that-were-once-peaceful-streams-become-raging-rivers have gone down a bit, but most are by no means calm and placid once again. Road debris, uprooted trees, junk, gravel, boulders, acres of mud, piled up furniture and ruined houses, stores and barns are everywhere to be seen. Emergency repairs to open vital roads could so easily be taken out again, for these measures, while successful in some spots, are only meant as temporary. How much more water would it take to take them out? Why has a year’s worth (or more) of rainfall come in only a few days? Why is there more on the way? So much debris to be cleaned up, so many lives to be reclaimed, and a bit of rain can be a terrifying thing.

My friend came over yesterday and told me that when she rented her apartment her landlord never bothered to tell her that when there is a lot of rain her ground-floor apartment can flood. So she never moved the books and other things she had on the floor to a higher spot when it started to rain, and rained and rained. She didn’t worry about her stuff when she went to stay at a friend’s house closer to town and work. Her loss was so little compared to others, she wept. “How can I be so upset?” she asked.

“How could she not?” I thought.

It is bone-chilling to drive around now and see where the rivers moved with such force and volume as to tear out bridges and uproot big trees. And yet, a foot beyond the edge of the mud and debris, only a few feet higher up than the high water mark, I saw a pretty blue house with its garden untouched, the yellows and blues and pinks and reds of all the many flowers waving in the breeze, soaking in the sun of a warm Sunday afternoon as I drove by. The lines between total destruction and seeming blessing of much rain after several years of drought are sometimes just that clear.

My own house, the whole little neighborhood in which I live, is just such a place. The brown spots in lawns are gone. My grass is so dense and full I hardly recognize it. My mower struggles to bag the clumps of clippings that it can’t throw back away from where it’s just been cut even though I stop to empty the bag often. If it ever dries up enough I’ll run the mower around just to pick the extra stuff up. I mowed the front yard a couple of days before the back. The front needs to be mowed again.

This is unheard of. Grass is something to be coaxed out of the ground here. We routinely waste precious drinking water making lawns and golf courses. Watering restrictions usually hit for some amount of time in towns and cities every summer. Irrigation water for the farmers becomes a priority. Reservoirs start showing their lake beds by this time of year, waiting for the spring snowmelt to fill them up again.

Instead, every plant and tree within eyesight seems to rejoice in all the amazing amount of water it’s received. The lawns nearby, and the pocket-park in front of my house have never looked so good. That might be the assumed norm if you never left your home here, or never turned on your TV.

Unless, of course, the thousand-year flood stage of a nearby body of running water loomed. Then there was no rejoicing. The little river, normally a foot or two deep, maybe a few feet wide, that is known as The Little Thompson River flows near my old house in the country. In a couple of days it became a quarter-mile wide and ripped out the bridge of the north south road nearby, and the bridges on all the north south roads for miles east, too. All the houses a few hundred feet away and seemingly well uphill in the subdivision got to meet the river, too. And yet my old house, just a few feet higher up, a few hundred feet farther away, was fine.

I remember looking at the flood charts when we first bought the house and thinking about buying flood insurance. I still had a “flatlander, humid and rainy and possible flood zone” mindset as locals call those of us who are not born here. The house we were buying was outside that line, so I didn’t buy it. Turns out it wasn’t needed. But for thousands of people who’ve never seen hurricanes and the amount of water that can come in a day, after all this is a semi-arid climate here, flood insurance wasn’t even a consideration. So thousands of people are learning the hard way about water. It takes everything.

Yet in the middle of all this disaster are shining examples of people helping neighbors and friends and stranded families. Churches collect and distribute food and clothing and other kinds of help. National organizations rally and the Red Cross stocks shelters and helps heal the broken-hearted as well as those needing medical care.

On a personal level, lots of people called or emailed or got messages to me asking how I was, even friends I hadn’t heard from in a long time. The people I care about; my children, my friends, all seem to have come through pretty well, if not unscathed. The friend sitting on my couch yesterday, heartbroken over her losses, still had a wise thought flit through her mind. “Maybe I ought to move,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it anyway.”

THANK YOU, MOM

Nice Mom Picture
I sat out on my narrow front porch this morning with a cup of coffee and a foot braced against a slat of the white railing. A still-bright fat white moon hung in the blue sky on its way down toward the mountains as a gentle breeze stirred the leaves on the Locust tree in the pocket park across the cul-de-sac from me. It’s still quite cool, maybe in the low sixties due to all the thunderstorms racing around last night, and I savor the chill as the temperature is headed for the nineties today.

I think how blessed I am to have this house and to be able to sit in the quiet of a Saturday morning watching wisps of clouds drift slowly by. I walk into my house and immediately the bright colors of the paintings I’ve created and hung on my walls draw my eye. I feel such joy today at the opportunity I’ve had to become reacquainted with the inner artist, long hidden away; the same artist my mother scoffed at when I was young. I realize I no longer look at my creations and think how weird they are, or how I’ll starve if I ever thought about trying to sell them. Something is shifting within my being. I am learning to appreciate myself in ways I never could before.

My relationship with my mother across most of my life was adversarial at best. I experienced her as a control freak of the first order, always trying to shift and change who I was to be more of who she thought I should be. She was a person who had lots of inner anger, rage even, and felt free to unload on her children at any deviation from what she thought was the right way to be.

My friends had to be from a certain social class; a certain religion, a certain political party, certain nationalities. She terminated relationships with my friends for reasons she never explained. No one got a second chance to make up for whatever they might have done. I was a quiet soul as a kid. Severance of friendships, especially with my siblings, hurt me deeply.

My father taught me to drive. I took Driver’s Ed, too, but it was my father who spent time with me in the car. How he managed to do that I’ll never know. He was in a terrible car crash when he was a young man. He told me he broke his cheekbone and nose, and his face was bleeding terribly but a man who had stopped to help his family wouldn’t let him in the car to be taken to a hospital because the blood might ruin his upholstery. “It was a long time,” he said, “before we got help.” Despite knowing this, we used to make fun of him because he drove so slowly, especially on the interstates around where we lived. My mother refused to teach me, so my father stepped in.

I took my mother’s car out one day to go shopping. Somehow over the course of the day I broke the glass over one of her headlights. I parked the car in the garage, not even aware of what had happened. The next day my mother took me out to the garage. She pointed to the headlight. “How the hell did that happen?” she asked.

“I have no idea, Mom.” I replied, and honestly, I didn’t. I never again was allowed to drive that car.

It took me many years to realize that a lot of my mother’s behavior was motivated by fear. Fear of judgment by her parents for not raising her family properly. Fear of her community for doing something socially awkward or scandalous. Fear that her children would deviate from social norms and draw unwanted attention to the family. I did my best to toe the line, but mostly I felt a failure.

As I got older I became as much a judge of her as she was of me. My art education ended in eighth grade. Some of my art was good. It got hung on the walls in shows for the school. “Art is a waste of time,” my mother said when I wanted to continue to take it as an elective in high school.

When she made a sculpture to hang on the garage wall of our house, I almost had to laugh. She tried to set tropical shells in cement, showing me how to use a box to shape the sculpture, and how to pour the sandy mixture around the shells. The resultant ridiculous lump with a few almost unidentifiable shells sticking out got hung on the garage.

“The dog could have done a better job,” I thought. A few weeks later she must have thought that herself, for the sculpture disappeared.

The same was true of writing. I took creative writing in high school and loved it. I got an “A” in the class for making things up in my head and creating a whole new world. By then my mother was an executive secretary. She thought she wrote wonderfully for business. Sometimes she would show me something she’d written for her boss. “Mr. So-and-So can’t write for beans,” she said. “He lets me do everything.”

“The dog could write a better letter,” I thought.

We never did get much of a chance to understand each other’s worlds. Only after my brother died did my mother begin to open up a bit. My mother was 82 when my brother died of cancer. I began to see the depth of who she was and to understand how she could have such deep and abiding friendships across her life. I remembered things from my childhood, like the time she gave me an extra dime to go to the movies with my friend. “Pay for your friend,” she said. “Her family is having a hard time right now.”

In the few years before she died we talked about books, her love of reading having turned me into an avid bibliophile from my earliest years. We discussed the virtues of living in a small town after we’d both spent most of our lives in or near a big city. She shared thoughts about getting old, and death, and the grief of losing people you’d had your whole life. “No matter how old they are,” she mused, “Your children aren’t supposed to die before you.”

I have my house because my mother left me the money to buy it. It’s been my sanctuary, a place to recover from the end of a marriage, and the loss of myself. I’ve had the luxury of the time and space to become who I am again in peace. As I sat on that porch this morning, I thought my mother would really like being there, too. She would be pleased she could help me begin to live life again in such a peaceful spot. I like to think she can hear me from wherever it is she might be.

“Thank you, Mom.”

MAKING A MESS

Giant Tulip
I bought the most ridiculous apron at Walmart the other day. It was hanging forlornly on a hook by itself among the dishtowels and oven mitts and pot holders in the kitchen isle. It’s aqua with rows of multi-colored, poisonous looking cupcakes festooned across every inch of it. The package said it was “adjustable,” which basically means it comes with about three yards of a ribbon-like string you can slide the apron up and down on to put it higher or lower on your chest, and then use the rest to wrap three or four times around your waist to secure the apron. I bought it because I’m supposed to paint every day for the three weeks before I go to Taos, New Mexico, for another process painting workshop in September.

I never bought myself an apron before for this purpose. The other workshops I’ve taken have required no such shielding and protection of my clothes. I don’t usually get paint on myself, whether I’m painting pictures or the walls of a room. Yes, I get the paint on the walls, the floor, my hands, in my hair, but so far not on my clothes. I suppose if I took nice outfits to wear while I was painting that would guarantee I slopped myself, but even then I think I might emerge unscathed from days of painting. I’m taking what’s called a “Master Class” this time, so I got the suggested apron. I’m going not only to paint for a week, but to learn how to teach others this technique I’ve so grown to love.

I discovered an interesting thing about myself taking these workshops. This is the first year I’ve picked up a paintbrush for I don’t know how long. I’ve framed some of my “art” and hung it around my house so I can sit with it and appreciate the stuff I’ve done. This is a dire sin according to the method I’ve learned. You aren’t supposed to frame your work. You’re supposed to keep it hidden, even from yourself, maybe in a bag under your bed. You’re not supposed to paint for “product” or even appreciation. The point is the process, not the product.

I finally showed my stuff to a friend (another sin) and she told me I was an idiot to keep it hidden. “You can sell this stuff, Chris, get it framed.” So I did. Not to sell it, but to see it. I actually like the stuff that I had formerly held in disdain. Most of my art looks like a five year old did it.

“These paintings are very happy,” a very wise, astute older friend said when he and some other people came over for lunch one day. Yes, I might have to agree now that I look at them again and again. Even the ones I know came from a darker place in me share a certain light, or joy, among the bright colors. I want to access that happy place in myself again. She clamors to get out. Too much death and loss and change has colored the last several years of my life. Is it possible the irrepressible little girl who always wanted to be an artist is coming to the fore again? I hope so.

I paint imaginary creatures and spaces and landscapes that have always filled my head for as long as I can remember. I judged myself as weird because other people just couldn’t get where I was coming from, or told me the stuff was not good just because it didn’t look real. What, after all, is real? What we see in front of our noses? Read any article about witnesses to a crime scene and each person, watching exactly the same thing, will relay a different story. Doesn’t that mean that none of us shares the exact same reality? The tree I look at outside my window is not going to be the same tree you see looking out that same window.

When I was a little girl my father gave me some great advice. I had had a terrible nightmare and woke up crying. I couldn’t get back to sleep. My father came and sat on the edge of my bed. “What was so scary about the dream?” my father asked me.

“A terrible monster was chasing me!” I remember saying.

My father looked at me for a minute. “Well, maybe now that you’re awake you can make friends with the monster,” my father said. “Do you like picnics?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Why don’t you use your imagination and invite the monster to come and sit with you and have a picnic together. Maybe if you sat and ate some good food together you could be friends. It wouldn’t be so scary anymore if it was your friend, would it?” he asked. I didn’t quite think this was going to work, but I was willing to give it a shot. Truth is, it did take the fear down a few notches and I was able to go to sleep again.

I think that’s what I do with my painting. The things that come out to be painted have been transformed. They are brightly colored and multi-faceted, even if they are bugs and birds and monsters and things that nightmares are made of.

I painted a picture after my brother died that made me cry from the effort to stay with the process, that picnic with the things that scared me. “Why, Christine,” my sweet little French teacher-inventor of this method said in her thick accent as she came upon me in class. “There is nothing to be afraid of. All this feeling is for your own good! The Universe really is benevolent!”

I had never quite thought of it that way before. When my heart clenches with some emotion as the brush slides across the paper, as long as I keep moving, it really does pass. For me when I am painting, the Universe, as that wise lady said, really is benevolent.