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.

Scent of a Man

For the first time in my life I am without a man. I am without a man, a lover, a companion, a husband. It has been a year since I felt the soft caresses and heard the utterances of love. It has been a year, yet, I do not miss it. I am, unperceivably and unpredictably, content and for once in my life, I am enough, not wanting, not needing, but enough.

Contentment, so rich, so new, it wants savoring. I am drinking it in, present in my oneness, my wholeness. For the first time, I utter the words, “ I am not ready to date, still transitioning,” and “I don’t want to date when I am fresh in my loneliness,” and “I want to be settled first, not wanting to soothe this pain with men.”

For so many years I used men as salve, as bandages, as shields covering old scars and wounds. I needed them in constant flow, unwilling, unable to look at those wounds. But now, after years of hard labor, I have stumbled on worthiness and enoughness.

So, I wait. I wait and I discover new joys, joys of solitude, of stillness, of quiet. I savor whole weekends without conversations, without commitments, without compromise. I devote more time to my pets, writing, long walks, reading, making only food I love. I devote time to making friends with this new territory, this new-found freedom, finding joys and peace hardly imagined.

The journey of solitude has been my greatest gift to myself, but I fear something is shifting. I find myself now wondering what kind of man I will meet in my enoughness. What kind of man will love someone worthy of love, someone already complete. I find a small joy in imagining, this, wonderment being enough.

Now, as I walk through my home, the scent of man tickling my nose, bringing back the memory of a hand on my back, whispers on my neck, the want in my heart, I wonder if I am ready. I take a deep breath, breath it in, the man scent, the smoke of it curling through my body. I hover, over the leaflets from the Macys flyer, opened and scattered across my counter, filling my house with the sweet scent of man, taking it all in and wondering if it is time. Oh, Macys, you have stirred the beast

Depression

Disappointment drips off walls

In the cavern my soul once lived

Pushing, I search the dark

For Solace, Light, Reprieve

Stumbling, my will

Struggles, Flickers, Dies

Crawling, pulling

Over boulders of failed love

Straining, the wind crushes me

Messages of worthlessness

Traveling, black icy waters

Lick my feet

Slowly, silently, I slip

Returning to the earth

Without a goodby

Without a whimper

Without notice.

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….

Canyons

My heart cries out

Echoing through the canyons

Seeking, beseeching, frantic and wild

My heart cries out

Echoing through the canyons

Searching, whirling, high and low

My heart cries out

Echoing through the canyons

Unsoothed by the caresses of wind

Unsoothed by the bold scent of pinon

My heart cries out

Echoing through the canyons

Until it is a soft whisper, hoarse and raw

Carried on the wings of a red-tailed hawk

My heart cries out

“Please, please, love me!”

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.

Struggling with the South

I am struggling, stewing in a pot of negativity. I am at odds, wrestling with the South, wrestling with what is and what is not here in this land called Tennessee.

Freshly arrived with the mountain scent of the North still deep in my lungs. Freshly arrived, yet here long enough to feel the prickle of heat, the friction from the differences. The beliefs in my soul, the values in my heart, grating like sandpaper against all that stands proud in the south.

Every exploration into this new world uncovering an assault to humanity- racism, disingenuous greetings, religiosity devoid of spirituality. The true assault comes from pride in these ways, the pride in the façade thinly veiling the ugliness. It all seems too much, too disappointing, too difficult to overcome.

So now I search; embark on a journey to make peace with the south. I must settle my soul and shake hands with the south. We must become friends before I am unable to emerge from this chasm. I must find the south I can embrace, or at the least, be present with positivity. I long to be my true self once again and shed the negativity I have cultivated in this unfamiliar land.

I have a history with this land; the south is not new to me. It has been a place to rest my weary soul. It has been a space to slow and re-center. I have taken refuge in the pace here, where hurry is an unwelcomed interruption in cadence of life.

I have rocked on a porch swing for hours, days, reading to my children, watching fireflies, listening to whippoorwills, going very still as deer enter the yard. I have delighted in dancing cardinals, bright pillows of cotton freshly popped in their bowls, and honeysuckle exploding from the ditches with its sweetness stirring me from daydreams. Respite from the hustle of life in the north, the south of my children’s childhood is the south I want again.

Now here to work, to grow and experience again this south, I am undone. This south proves to be weary of stranger and unhospitable behind the façade of hospitality. It is an ingenuine pretense of kindness without depth or generosity. Smiles veil hypocrisy and rhinestones dazzle to cover racial motivations. Civility drips off of tongues devoid of innocence humility or humanity. On every corner sits a church with large white doors sealed tightly to keep in the brotherly love.

So here I am, confounded and devastated, grappling, reaching and searching for peace. I must make a truce with this land of antagonistic gentility. I must make friends with this south, find beauty and peace, and perhaps grow to once again love this land.