anecdote

When things started to happen in my family, I got close to many of my relatives I had known since I was little, and seen a lot of, but never gotten to know as a full adult. One of those was my aunt Lillian. She lived close to me when I was growing up, so I saw her almost every weekend, but I didn't know her very well. She was a little bit intimidating to me, and I don't know that kids were her style.

This year, I have grown to admire her so much. She's a CEO, an incredible business woman, and a world-class athlete. (One of the top climbers in the world.) She is energetic, and so positive, and silly, and cheerful too. I love this picture of her because it shows how she is so very slight, but amazingly strong, and I like how hard her shoulders are in it.

Over winter, she invited me to go climbing in one of the gyms she owns. Josh, Travis, and my brother (who were all up for Christmas with my folks) took her up on it as well. Since she and my uncle owned climbing gyms for years, I grew up climbing, but I hadn't done it probably since before college.

We had a good time. The walls are 40 foot up, and they are dizzying and terrifying and exhilarating. They make different paths of varying difficulty, and you can sort of choose your own adventure. The hardest one I did had a kind of overhang lip that I had to brute force slam my leg up over my chest, and then try to haul my weight up over myself while hanging on by a thigh. My knee was black for a week after, because I just used it to leverage my whole body up over the precipice, all skinned fingertips, strawberry burns, and chalkdust. My aunt and uncle told me I got the award for...well, not the prettiest, but the most relentless climb, since I fell down and off and slammed into the wall a handful of times before I scaled it. .

Midway through, I asked my aunt to climb something on the highest level difficulty, so we could see how it was done. She went to the highest rated wall. The handholds we were using were hand-shaped; the ones on her wall were slivers. The path was almost entirely flat.

You think you've looked at someone doing something--and I'd been watching a gym full of climbers climb all day--but there was no compare. What she did wasn't climbing as I knew it. It was all dancing and it was all spiders. There was none of my clumsy hard work, my sweating and dragging. She sort of swayed sideways up the wall, tip-toes just brushing a flat piece of wall, ignoring the holds, momentum carrying her. Her movements didn't look human. I remember watching her and thinking I want to remember this for the rest of my life. I didn't know her any longer. It was that alien, and that beautiful.

I don't know why I'm thinking about that--and her--tonight. I guess this year I have been aware of the limits of my own ability: the dull, tired, stupid places in myself, the death of my confidence, this abrupt arrival at a belief that I am worthless and unwanted. I have been disconnected with all the alien and beautiful. But I'm trying. I'm slamming my scarred-up knees against the wall. I'm climbing like a clumsy, tall girl.

one more for the stars and the eyes of the walls

Everything is greening up in the Valley, and I haven't done one of these in a long old while


-those bulbs Chris and Katie got me from Canada (? ...Mich...igan?) poking their little heads up in my front bed
-my actual bed with dumb dongpink sheets but so nice feeling
-ship flags
-Don't Give Up the Ship flag especially
-that feeling when you show up to a place and someone had been waiting, excited, for you to be there
- 2 for 1 motor oil
-tiny bottles of champagne just the right size for porch sitting alone
-I thought my neighbor worked for a three letter government agency but actually he's an english teacher who just dresses well and happens to look really superb in a suit, I mean honestly that's not a look a lot of guys can pull off, Good on You, Michael.
-Sven barks at Michael because of his weird bald head, Too Bad about That, Michael
-carpooling (I don't anymore, just miss it)
-cussing
-this trick I've learned of loudly and over-enthusiastically greeting my upper management while deploying a series of rapid-fire questions about their day like they used to terrify me by doing
-my big black dog tonight climbs entirely into my lap like he used to do the first day I met him, although he's about 25 lbs heavier now, and puts his head on my knee, and I can feel his big heart thumping so hard
-perfect little circle burn from fingerbangin' a shaky light fixture into place
-Travis's citation yellow perch
-Travis telling me he wouldn't have kept it except it was a bad gill hook, and this odd desire to tell him that I love him on hearing that
-my grandfather's war medals
-my uncle, half-heartbroken at the fact that my grandmother wanted my grandfather dressed for death as a warrior, and this odd desire to tell him I love him on hearing that
-tonight, fingerbangin the same light fixture as if it didn't burn the hell out of me last night
-this blue and white lace cloth bra I bought, this vanilla tobacco candle
-red onions
-elkhorn deer, black-brown, staring
-liking the person somebody is
-ice follies nasturtium
-tipping nice barista girls in the early morning when the sun is shining in like it does early

while you were sleeping, I was turning the dials

First storm of the season: grey new moon lightning light, clay wine cup, vice knight skirt.

while you were sleeping, you bet that I might walk this empty northern hemisphere wide

Mostly a picture post for right now, since I'm too scattered this weekend to give any account of myself. Just kind of thinky. Yesterday was the equinox party, and I am good at a party, but afterward, sometimes, I feel like avoiding a crowd. Today, all I want is to have a long conversation about nothing much with a confidant I don't have. I'll settle on leaf removal, groceries, and cooking. Maybe update my other stupid blog with a recipe thing. That's okay, though.

I think a sycamore tree is my favorite. I like the pale white branches, the way they seem to glow up out of nowhere when the world is still quiet and sleeping, if the frost got the spring blossoms. Back home, my parents know the place where the creek is good for crossing by a young straight sycamore marking the spot. They can see it even if they're far off across the field.


I'd make a better sycamore than a girl, but I think at least I make a hard sort of girl.

Elkhorn is beautiful this time of year, and when we go out just us and the dog, it's so silent. I slept better than I have in months on Friday, with nothing but the creek sounds.

*

I'm not doing anything at all right now because I'm waiting for my mom to call me back. I missed her yesterday, since I was out camping in the morning, but when I called earlier today, she was running to the store for a Sunday flank steak. She said, "I won't take long. I love you, okay?"

*

Dreamt too much last night, all about firestorms and flood. Always the same visitations, though sometimes they are kind and other times cruel.


*

I finally am coming around to my new tattoo. I sort of hated it at first. I like my shoulders, and my Norse fairy tale tattoos, and I feel strong and skinny just now, and my legs hold up good on hill runs with my black wolf. So there's that.

use it tonight

Cleaning up after the flood for most of yesterday and all of tonight. Pretty much everything down there is either destroyed or stained or needing washing. I threw out everything from my childhood bedroom without going through it; it's all just soggy paper anyway. My camping and fishing stuff made it mostly intact. Lost some seasonal stuff, all my summer clothes and the stupid little projects I'd kept from when I was working on Legends. Scraps of white scale leather and doeskin with silly trees embroidered onto them. Feel tired, a bit bleach burned, and just a little let down, in general.

It's just stuff. And I feel okay. But I want to go camping again, and I'd like a week where everyone talks softly to me, nothing is ruined, and nobody dies.

who leaves me for dead in my ghost town grey and returns like color tv

For it being a short week for me at work, it certainly was a long one. Win party and year review and also try to remember how to do this job after the most consecutive days off you've ever had. My one-on-one was positive though. My team lead said he thinks I'm team lead material, which is odd, since I don't even know how to scam my op manager out of extra drink tickets.

*

It's weird. I felt so numb for days, like I wouldn't have any feeling ever again about anything. And then, yesterday, every single feeling in the world came rushing back at me. Grief, hurt, happiness, need, this vulnerability, sorrow, more vulnerability. I was the designated driver last night, but I feel emotionally hungover. Better, though, I think.

*

I don't really have much to do today except run and eat salad. Might get my seeds started. Might do some spring cleaning while I have the house to myself. Might hike. (I am very boring.)

For now though, sitting at my kitchen table, looking at the paper cranes Todd's 13 year old left there when we had them over for dinner. Paying bills. Sven is bringing me all his toys and piling them on my boots.

*

Lunch. (Okay, breakfast too.) Mary lured me into the bar last night saying she had eggs "at a special price for me--free!"and then gave me a grocery bag of three dozen eggs so I guess it's crepes and quiche and baking all weekend.

*

Adding another bullet to this thrice-added-on post to report that my entire storage room is flooded. Something they said could happen when they fixed the furnace last time I almost died from a house mishap down there, but a potential problem they had allegedly fixed.

Standing in an inch and a half of water, realizing it must not be deep enough to hit the outlet yet, since I had not yet been electrocuted, the tremendous stupid weight of dealing with this on top of catching up on everything from freak tragic circumstances hit me. I thought to myself "I want to just lie down and cry," but then I thought, "Oh, no, I actually don't, it's sort of-kind of funny, and this is nothing I can't deal with." I also thought "I sure need some good news" but then I thought "well, that's not likely to happen, but okay."

I did run and get half my seeds potted before I went down to start some laundry and discovered Lake Placid. Oh my goodness, I would like a beer though.

today's

Be truthful. Be just. Have fortitude. Do what you know is right. Keep trying.

So my granddad died last week. My dad's dad, who I grew up seeing weekly. He choked to death. I thought about putting up the eulogy I wrote for his funeral here, so I could have it when I come back in future years and read this weird blog-letter I'm writing to myself. But I don't think I will. My family has emphasized a non-facebook-about-grief policy, which somehow feels more respectful. Still, I've appreciated this space to talk about these things.

Back in Staunton now. Snowy here. I'd have won any bets I'd taken on this weather. Gotta wake up though, dress, clean, get back into the work again.

Full moon, fox screaming somewhere outside my window tonight. Exhausted from so many strangers touching me, hugging me, at the wake this evening, which seemed to go on and on. Service tomorrow: I'll speak at that, and then try to race the snow home. I want to wash my floorboards. I want to stay up late and talk into the night. I want somebody to read me my own dumb story and do all the voices. I want to stop trying so hard to sound good to myself.

A death, as an adult, is strange. I was so busy, and now I'm not busy at all. I'm not at work. I'm supposed to be packing, but not doing that either. I'm walking around the rooms of my house, looking out the windows at the mountains, the violent clouds, beginning disconnected tasks and then abandoning them. I'd feel self-loathing for this dawdling, except that it doesn't really matter when I leave or arrive. The dead aren't in a hurry, and I'm on dead time, now.

Part of me is dreading the next phases of occupation. The kind of waiting room that death makes of families. Different houses to hover in, unbusy, and say things to other people who also suddenly have too much time on their hands.  We'll say the things that people say to each other. We'll say "at least it was quick" but it wasn't quick, and we can all see that, so we will lie to each other the way people do.

I have to write something. They said "you're the writer, write something, a poem or something." How can I write something if I can't pack a suitcase?

Dog is confused. We find a ball under the cabinet; he goes to pieces over it. We go for a run in the rain. I don't mean for it to be a run, I don't know who starts it, it just happens, and suddenly we are flying over the wet pavement. When I get home, we are both soaked. I try and fail to make breakfast. Clean up the kitchen. Outside, the devil is beating his wife.  Half the sky is psychotic storm clouds and the other is just this perfect blue, west over the big shoulder North mountain makes in my window. The forsythia are blooming and the light hitting them against the gray makes the yellow blossoms look explosive, mesmerizing, and if I have to eat one more fucking bite of this goddamn omelette I'm going to throw up.

stay down, champion, stay down

Guess I'm turning into one of those people who spends all their time outside with their dog, generally around the vicinity of Elkhorn.

Otherwise spent most of this weekend wearing lipstick while doing mundane chores and drinking at home. I forgot about this season, when all the weird snakes in my personality start perking up and looking around for something to bite. I need a project. I should really do some poetry shit, make a couple extra dollars, or at least update my other blog, pretend I can still be funny. I do realize that the last couple months have been a little heavy on trash cans of blood, a little light on content.

I don't know quite if I feel better. I mostly feel sore* and stupid. Really, really such an idiot. Nothing for it, though. 

At least the superdry cold weather is making my hair look good. You know, on the brightside.

(Ughkillme.)

Spent the morning making broth, now working on a fancy minestrone thing. Plans fallen through tonight. Half relieved. So tired, tired the way people are tired when they accidentally cut off their fingers, though there's nothing to blame for it except moderate exercise, staying up too late and getting up early all weekend. Should be productive, but might finish dinner and then watch my stupid zombie show until I fall asleep.



* every time I manage to work out hard enough to make my core sore, I freak out that some horrible thing is wrong with my organs before I remember: right. Abs. Abs have done this.

tell me your secrets, ask me your questions

Today, I'm a bit all over the place. Little fey, little impossible, but I have to finish my practical obligations. Later I'll go out drinking with my friends, make pleasant conversation, as if I don't have any foolishness banging around inside me. The weekend will be quiet. A few domestic tasks. Cleaning. Moving around my small pieces. I kind of wish I had grand plans.

Chris asked me earlier if I was muttering to my salad, and if I was, could I please knock it off, since it didn't deserve my negativity. It made me laugh, but my moodiness has certainly changed into this kind of prowling feeling as the day has progressed. I went out at lunch and bought Sven a toy gator to destroy with his fine white teeth.

Ran a few miles in the sunny flurries with him like it was Asgard.

the one you think about when you're sitting in your fainting chair drinking pink rabbits

Forgot last night: rabbit rabbit, March.