High Summer, Still

 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 (god I hate that term) my oldest cat, Snake. We learned this today and I came home and sobbed and sobbed, held him to my chest. He's momentarily okay-ish, having received two bags of fluids from the vet the past two days but he is filled with cancer, cannot eat or drink, cries loudly every night while he tries to burrow into my side. He is fifteen, the last animal from our life-before-R, our life in our little apartment on South Street. I know what we have to do but I feel evil, making that decision for another being. What if what if what if my brain says. All he wants to do is burrow himself into me as far as he can go.

Crows are making their way west to the river, hundreds of them. This is another sign that we are moving toward autumn; this years hatchlings are old enough to travel in the great river of crows. For most of June and July they've been haranguing their parents, caterwauling in the yard. J. is in his room, heartbroken over Snake. Last year in June we had to say goodbye to Mr. Bill, dog of my divorce, days before his 17th birthday. 

I have cried more for Snake, and last year for Mr. Bill, than I did for my father. When i got the call that he died, I cried and then fell numb. I have been numb abotu that for years. Sometimes I pick up the phone to call him, ask him about oil changes or spark plugs or how to tell if tomatoes have a calcium defecit, and then remember oh, he's gone.  Oh.

Oh.

He was a gardener too, coming home each summer evening to his vegetable garden on the south side of our house. He must have cared about blossom end rot and squash bugs and powdery mildew and soil health. We never spoke of any of that. I wish we had.

I have been listening to the music I listened to in 2007, the year my new life began. I am transported to that 30 year old woman and then look in the mirror and I am 48. Will you still love me when I am old and grey? I asked R. ont he porch the other night, when a woman with the most spectacular grey hair walked past. I'll be dead by then, he said. I wanted to cry. But I'm going grey, I've got grey temples, I said. 

I do not want this life taken away, and there is a large part of me that is deeply afraid to say that I love it, this life. That this is what I was building. Because then it will be taken away. Because then I will get what I deserve, which is nothing.

Oh, I do not rationally believe that. But old habits die hard.

I have been thinking about this space too--why i came to it 18 years ago. How I felt crazy, unable to believe my gut, unable to believe what I felt. If I write it publically--my life, my working through it, my deeply cringe vulnerability--and even one person relates, then maybe I'm not crazy. Then maybe I am worth something.I don't feel the same compulsion these days to share my life, perhaps because I genuinely care about protecting those in it--J and R and D--but fucking hell, perimenopause has also made me feel crazy. My cousin sent me a photo of me from anywhere between 2000 and 2007 and all I could think was jesus christ I'm fucking old and I found my old headshot the other day which my ex took in our back yard when I was at most 23 and thought how did I not believe I was beautiful because youth is always beautiful and also WHY IS THAT WHAT I CARE ABOUT WHEN IT IS NOT IMPORTANT AT ALL but of course I do because I am a woman in this fucked up society--

When I was thirty, I didn't want to integrate my life. I was a singer, a writer, a divorcee, a mother, an English professor. The twain did not cross except as a mother because I've almost always been a single mother and therefore J came with me to everything. Today I talked with my choir people about a poem I'm being commissioned to write for a song. I have no idea how to slice my life into pieces anymore. I do not want to. It is all messy. 

Embar

Me, 2002?

rassing. 

Me, 2025

When he came home from work today, I was sobbing about Snake and he came over and pulled me into a hug. My head tucks into his armpit. When I was thirty, he wrapped his legs around my waist, and his head fell into the crook of my neck. When I came home and R. told me what the vet had said, he simply said, softly and low, sorry love  and took me into his arms.

Most of the light has gone out of the sky. The crow river has emptied, and only a few call back and forth from the trees, stragglers, remnants. I need to go inside and make dinner. I need to wake up tomorrow and go to work and come home and walk through the garden and hug my people, my cats, my life. 

I am so lucky. I am so terrified: the world is on fire. The world is terrible and beautiful and the only one we've got.