The Sick Bed

I am cold to the bone, wrapped in layers of fleece and down, steaming cup of coffee filling my belly, space heater at my feet, yet I cannot warm. My metabolism has ceased, retreated. If my grandmother was here today, she would announce, “It is colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra in January!” At the time, this made perfect sense and we would all agree. I sit here, today, cold to the bone, dearly missing my grandmother.

My grandmother’s house was always warm. It was our place of refuge and the sick house. Home from school with fever meant a glorious day of grandmother’s pampering. A bed made on the couch, heavy with blankets, propped up with pillows, a cup of hot cocoa with marshmallows or a tiny pimento cheese glass bubbling with Sprite, everything carefully arranged on a TV tray, I was a princess on retreat.

To this day, when I am sick or exhausted, I want chicken noodle soup, gone thick with saltine oyster crackers or cream of chicken soup in a bowl lined with buttered white bread. I want mini cups of ice cream, half vanilla, half orange sherbet, or rich, thick chocolate pudding, still warm from the pan, eaten with the same skill as in the sick bed, skin by skin, slowly and patiently waiting for the next to form. I want to smell bread baking, anticipating a hot slice slathered with butter that runs down my fingers, licking every drop gone.

All day long, between naps, I was plied with comfort food. My grandmother would sit near, rocking in her upholstered chair, updating me on the General Hospital dramas since my last sick day. Luke and Laura ignorant of the influence on my future career choice as a nurse. In the evening, Marcus Welby, MD and Emergency Room would fertilize my fascination with medicine. Sick days were always the exception to the 30 minutes of TV a day rule and medical dramas were my grandmother’s favorites, mine too.

Between her favorite shows, while I napped, she indulged in her enormous stack of Harlequin romances. It wasn’t until much later that I realized her disappointments and loveless marriage could be forgotten for a few precious moments in between the pages. I, too, learned to forget my disappointments and sorrows between the covers, and often in books as well.

When I started feeling better, I would cast about, looking for a way to ease my boredom, digging through the button tin, smelling my grandfather’s vast collection of Avon colognes, each in a glass vessel reflecting manly pursuits, transportation, sailing, cow wrangling, militia, the usual culprits. Restlessness signaled my time to return to school.

My grandmother’s house was always my sanctuary, and when I am tired or cold, I miss her to the bone.

Past Love

I don’t know why I think of you so often. Many men since you have proclaimed me no longer precious, but you, you hurt the most. Maybe you hurt the most because you were the first, the first to put me aside, the first to say I was not worthy, the first to say I was not loved.

Maybe you hurt the most because you are still near, entwined in my life, knotted by our tribe, so we speak oft about our common ground.

When we do speak, I am overjoyed to hear from you, despite its purpose, despite the fact you are all business. I want to shout, “Oh! Let’s do be friends, lets do be kind and tender to each other!!”

And when you are tender, when you let slip a kindness, I cling to your words – your kind words are still precious to me, even when raked from the ones intended to hurt.

Maybe I think of you often because the last time we spoke, I was sure you were living the life you always wanted. You were completely you- while the rest of us struggle to find our true selves, to find our unique space that fits like skin. You are beautifully there, beautifully settled in your own skin.

I think about now if you met me fresh would you feel the same. I wonder if you would say, “you remind me of someone I once knew, only your skin, your skin is different.” I wonder if you would feel tender, gentle and kind or would I, once again, bring out your cruelty and disdain.

Often I think about you and wonder….

First Sighting of Bryce Canyon

First Sight of Bryce

I am aghast, thrown to my knees, dizzy with wonder, without comprehension, without words. I have stepped off of earth and into heaven, into God’s home, into a sanctuary for my soul.

I have lived on this earth 32 years and not known. I have lived 32 years and have not felt my heart soar and rest on the arches of this land, the Dr Seuss spires, the living soil. The bespeckled rocks and shimmering sand as far as I can see is surely where God lives. It is surely a sanctuary.

Who knew in the planning of this trip. Who knew as I mapped our way to our distant family’s arms, plotting out National Parks and National Monuments to visit in route. Who knew the splendor that awaited us as we snaked our way south. But here I want to stay. Here I want to stay wrapped in God’s bosom, here where doubt and disappointment once lived now is filled with hope and love, here where I am sure, for the first time, that God lives.

For years to come I will revisit this land, annual pilgrimages, to walk the trail for days in prayer and contemplation. I will walk, divining ways to carry on at home, to provide a meaningful life, to be a mother, a wife, a nurse, a good person. I will devise a way to continue at home with empty buckets, with feet shod in cement, with the pretense of a happy family carried bravely on my shoulders. I will strive on and always fall short.

But here, here in this place, my buckets overflow, I am renewed, I am new. I am new and ready to face the Herculean challenge awaiting me at home.