Eclipse

-

It has been a difficult autumn, full of unbloggable things that aren't my story to tell. And there are things in the world that are unbearable. But there has also been beauty.

I run through rain, and then unexpected golden afternoons. My boy brings me and his camera to the little mountain, to the woods, to the Rose Test Garden and the old money neighbhorhoods around Washington Park. We walk, we cry, we talk. I have never been prouder of him, nor more heartsick. 

I wake up most nights drenched in sweat; J.'s cat has taken to meowling loudly while she brings his discarded  socks down the stairs, or dirty laundry up from the basement--until now, she's been mostly silent for the first 13 years of her life. She yowls and then drops the sock beneath the Chinese cabinet in the living room. When J. is here, she wraps herself around his legs.

I spend my days at work, then at rehearsal for the opera; this week, I started having double rehearsals for the opera and for the chamber choir. Tomorrow, I'll sing on the radio (the biggest classical radio station in the country! the Oregonian recently exclaimed). I am writing again, some. I run, I bake an occasional loaf of bread, I corral the escaped chickens back into their coop, scoop up the dead rat caught in the feeder, bury it in the garden.

I harvest the last of the summer garden--butternut squash, a handful of green tomatoes. The chickens are molting. The dog tumbled down the stairs today and cried until I picked him up, shit all over my slippers, carried him up the stairs until J. could carry him the rest of the way.

R. and I will have been married ten years in a few weeks. When I met him eleven years ago, at a writer's conference, I could not have imagined this. This will be the first November that J. and I don't have to fly anywhere. I get to sing with the best choir I have ever sung with, and with an opera company I adore and which continues to level up. 

At an all campus meeting more than a decade ago, the college president rambled on about how our college needed to be prepared for the future: climate disasters, mass migration, war. I remember shifting in my chair, thinking she was ridiculous. This was a community college, after all; the things we dealt with were freshman English and intro to machining. I remember becoming visibly disturbed by what I thought of as her hyperbolizing, as administrations are often wont to do (especially when on the brink of union negotations). This was post-9/11 but this was America, after all! I remember thinking. These things don't happen in the world any more. I was maybe a few years out from my divorce, I was thirty-something and completely enveloped in my own personal dramatics.

I think of that speech, her prescience. I pray every night to keep my boy safe--to what, or whom, I no longer know. The rain-mottled sky. The eclipse. The yard spotted with mushrooms after a day's rain. The movement of birds across the sky, the silver ribbon of river beneath the bridge. 

Things are so hard. Things are so beautiful. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Summer, Still

-
Image
 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...
Read more

Spring and All (redux)

-
I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.   It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together. Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was ...
Read more

High Summer

-
 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...
Read more