Notes from Margaritaville, Pillville, and The Love Shack

the love shack a.k.a. my bedroom

It is big deal to sleep next to someone you love when that someone is in pain. Somehow you are asleep and somehow, simultaneously, you are awake. You hear the moans and winces and whimpers, and you are sorry and disturbed, but you realize until that moment you have been sleeping pain free while the person next to you has not been so fortunate, and you ponder life's big questions until...you don't. You wake long enough after the next moan to wonder if you should wake him and ask if he needs a pain pill or the heating pad or should you try digging your fingers under his shoulder blade, but you think better of it because he's silent now. You hope he realizes how completely happy you are that he's next to you despite the way things are currently because it's pure comfort to know what is going on first-hand and not have to imagine him in his own place alone and guess at how that's going. When he sits up for a second sometime in the middle of the night, knowing you're awake too, and he asks you if you're sleeping okay, you want to try to explain what comfort he's providing you by being there and how it doesn't really matter that you've been waking up between stretches of sleeping quite well, but it might be too long of an explanation and then maybe neither of you will get back to sleep, so you just mutter something positive. But later when you are in the middle of a nightmare in which your mother hands you an bloody apron and a pair of gloves and says, "These are the ones that were used in the murder," and she gives them to you like you are supposed to do something--what, you don't know--wash them? Bury them? You don't know, so you scream and scream. Then he wakes you so your terror can stop. You thank him, and you think about terror and pain and how they're alike and different, and somehow you both sleep again.

Readers, you may feel that you have missed a blog post, but you have not. I have been rendered silent (for about as long as I have ever been silent here on this blog) by the fact that the man who loves me has lung cancer. There will be surgery. There will be chemo. Right now there's pain. And in as much as this man and I have endeavored to maintain our separateness throughout this love affair we've been having for the past 5 years, I cannot say how much I will write about the part of this story that is happening to him. But it is a fact that some small part of it is happening to me. So, I will go back to silence or write about that part.

And as for the regular proceedings of life in Pillville, my mother has a stronger pain pill that required giving up her martini for a few nights. That dream recounted above--well, I think it was probably me she murdered and just to really let me know how much she detested my delivery of the no alcohol tidings, she not only murdered me, but also asked me to clean up the mess. She had terrible back pain after returning home from the hospital, but it has abated and tonight, due to the tapering off of the meds, there will be a martini, she has just informed me. As for me, I think a glass of my favorite cheap red will go nicely with this.

And in Margaritaville today the sky looked like a pile of cotton balls.

The fishing was easy. If you were a heron.

Due to my inept photography, you can't see that the heron has a large fish in its beak. The seagull wants it.

And the guardian of the neighborhood was in her usual place, watching over all of us. Or at least the rodents in the empty lot. Blessings upon all of us is what I hope for. Even for the heron's fish. Even for those rodents as they feel the prick of talons as they are swept skyward.