What I'm thinking about on a Friday night:

The way reflected light in the marina can make the water look like it's burning.

This book:

And what Ingersoll says about happiness: "Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so."

My friend Paula's latest blog post: Better, Worse, or the Same? I think this way of looking my mom's discomfort over her various ailments will help the two of us communicate more clearly.

These thoughts from poet Liz Kay's blog: Her thoughts about Complications and rage and desire have been rolling around in my head ever since I read her post yesterday.

Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair

I crave water. I want a boat to take me somewhere I've never been with him. A boat to the island of myself. Boat on water rocking me into some new satisfaction. Rocking me until he is washed away, washed under.

I have a disorder. When I travel to a place I like, it's never long before I tell myself I'm moving there. Here's my street. My house. I will paint the door red. Redo the flower beds. Down the street is my bookstore, my favorite coffee. Around the corner--that's my bar. The bartender will mix my drink when he sees me step through the door.

This weekend I  found the place where I will move to. Really move. Not pretend. There is water. There are boats.

I haven't yet found my house. At night while I sleep, I move my furniture into one house after another, trying them out. Sofa here facing the water. Table and chairs facing the water. My bed facing the water. Me facing the water. A baptism into my new life. Every last piece of my divorce floating away from me, floating out so far that all of it is just a speck on the horizon. A speck between land and sea. Between him and me.

It's coming for me

I heard water running this morning, and in the recognition of that moment, I simultaneously realized that I'd been hearing water running too long. I have a history with water. This time it was my powder room toilet. Pulling the heavy porcelain lid off the tank, I saw the water was well above the water line etched inside. In fact the water was just an inch or so from overflowing. I jiggled the handle. No effect. I flushed. The same scenario unfolded again. I flushed once more. This time the water stopped, and I laid an "out of order" note on the lid.

The plumber left a couple of hours ago after installing all new "innards" in the toilet tank and a new shut-off valve. My refrigerator has been giving me trouble, too. The in-door water dispenser goes rogue once in a while. You fill a glass or a water bottle and come back to find a pool on the kitchen floor. It's been a long time since I trusted my appliances. They're like wild teenagers waiting for me to leave so they can throw a kegger. I try to outwit them by only using them when I'm home, one ear cocked for misbehavior. But they're devious and don't respond well to correction either. The repairman has been here three times for the fridge, but by the time he arrives, the dripping has stopped. The toilet in my bathroom has a handle that has been repaired twice that still gets stuck every few weeks or so--usually in the middle of the night--so that I leap up in a panic, certain that my feet will land in water.

Last night the farmer who farms the land I own in Nebraska called to tell me that the dam in the crick (that's how we say it in the Midwest) is being undermined by the rushing water. I will have to spend five hundred dollars to fix it--or let the water gnaw away at the land.

The first house I remember, where I lived between the ages of one and five, had a front door that faced the Mississippi River. I lived for five years in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and still go there regularly to visit. I've wanted to live by the ocean ever since I heard my first Beach Boys song. Water, are you listening?  I love you. Really. You had me at the first burble or lap or crash.

The river of grief that was my divorce is narrowing. Filling up with silt. Being squeezed to a trickle. But still there are issues (scroll way down the sidebar to the timeline.) I'm going to say that when everything is resolved--all of the last annoying drips of detail--that my water problems will dry up and reveal sheer beauty.

And, Water, just so you know, you're where my ashes will go when I die.


Photo credit for the photo of me: The Awesome Amazing Unparalleled Luminous Katie Jo Emanuel Heller Le'Rawk Mattson

Another Drenching

I'll have to call Debbie from the ambulance, I thought, and tell her I'm going to miss the book club dinner I was supposed to be hosting.

The bottle fell from the top shelf of my fridge, and the explosion of its carbonated contents was so loud when it hit my granite floor, I wondered if my neighbors would think it was a gunshot. It would probably be good if they came running, because the blood is going to start any second, I thought. Palm sized hunks of glass lay on top of my feet, smaller pieces were wedged between my toes and between the soles of my feet and my flip-flops. I knew the phone was behind me on the kitchen counter just a little more than an arm's reach away. But the blood didn't come. Not even a scratch. Just organic peach cider streaming down my bare legs and pooling on the floor. Little green bits of glass peppering my kitchen the way sand glints at the beach on a sunny day. After the sigh of relief I swore for at least a solid minute as I dropped my apron and two dish towels to stem the expansion of  the sticky lake.

I had 10 dinner guests arriving in less than an hour. My kitchen counter was lined with scrubbed zucchini and  mushrooms waiting for the grill. The soup was bubbling in a pot on the stove; sweet potatoes were lined up on the bottom rack of my oven while two loaves of  bread, a pat of butter between each slice, waited their turn. I lifted each foot and removed the flip-flops to shake out the loose pieces of glass, and put the shoes on again to get to the sink. I felt a little guilty about kitchen hygiene as I rinsed them, but the food prep was done, and it seemed like the best way to be sure about the glass.

I'm not sure how many times I swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed my floor. Bucket after bucket of water. Windex. Granite cleaner. I got rid of the stickiness just in time to change my clothes and get the veggies onto the grill before the first guests arrived.

The food turned out very well; the patio was lovely in the early evening light--just dim enough to appreciate the candles, but not too dark to marvel at the hydrangeas, the golden bougainvillea, and the yellow, orange, and peach colored roses. In addition to my big teak table, I'd hauled my upholstered dining room chairs outside and set up a folding table. Tablecloths and place-mats, china and crystal (since the divorce, I have no "everyday" dishes.) What a perfect night after all--a great book (Invisible Man) and good conversation, I thought, slicing into my portobello. We'd just agreed that we'd start our formal discussion after the dishes were cleared. I was loading the dishwasher. People were setting out the New York-style cheese cake and the ice cream. "Oh--and there's bourbon!" I said.

Then it started to rain. Not just a mist or a drizzle. Rain. Thunder and lightning.

I used to worry a lot about dying. A car crash. A plane crash. Slipping and falling while hiking in the mountains. Being eaten by a bear or a shark. I'm not much of a worrier any more--but something tells me I should be more careful around liquids.

That didn't keep me away from the bourbon while I cleaned up after the party. But I was very careful while pouring my two or three little shots from the glass bottle.

My local neighborhood market had a nice selection of bourbon, so I chose a brand called Bulleit--"Kentucky Frontier Whiskey." My dad's grandfather came to this country from Scotland and settled in Kentucky. My dad was a Scotch drinker himself. I like gin. I wanted to buy some sloe gin at the market because the "invisible man" mentions in the prologue that he likes vanilla ice cream with sloe gin poured over it, and book club dinner menus reflect the food in the current book. But I couldn't find any sloe gin on the shelf. They had a lot of highbrow stuff--my two favorites--Hendricks and Boodles. But no bottle of the red stuff I remember from high school era evening drives into cornfields. "Do you have any sloe gin?" I asked a six-foot tall blond who looked like she should be a super model instead of a grocery store clerk. She laughed. I laughed. "Too low-brow?" I asked.
"They don't even have that stuff at Vons or Ralphs anymore," she said. "You have to go to BevMo." Some things just escape me. Ooohhh. BevMo is the low-brow booze place? You couldn't have proved it by me. Sometimes I feel like the invisible woman here in my kinda swanky neighborhood in the big city.    
Nobody knows who I was. Or who I really am.

Holes. Islands. Families.

There's a hole in my kitchen ceiling. 
A hole in the ozone layer. 
One of my favorite short stories by Alice Munro is called "Deep-Holes". 


The kitchen ceiling hole was opened up on purpose by the emergency services and restoration guys who are dealing with the aftermath of my washing machine disaster. So it's a good hole. A hole that will let the inside of my ceiling dry out and prevent the growth of mold in secret dark places. The hole in the ozone layer is not so good. Skin cancer, cataracts, the depletion of plankton are consequences of the increase in UV radiation now that the buffer of the ozone layer is thinning. 


In Alice Munro's story a geologist takes his family on a picnic to celebrate a career accomplishment. Sally, the wife, has to chase after their young sons through the pocked terrain toting a baby and a diaper bag, "She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage."  Of course one of the boys falls down a hole. He breaks both his legs, but survives only to disappear years later after six months at college. A metaphorical hole. When the young man finally writes to his parents, he doesn't apologize or ask about his brother or his sister. “It seems so ridiculous to me,” he said, “that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean, like the suit of clothes of an engineer or doctor or geologist, and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can’t ever get them off." A decade or so later--after the father's death--the prodigal son resurfaces. He's called Jonah (a whale's belly is a sort of  hole) now, and lives in a condemned building with a community of others who survive by begging and scavenging. Jonah agrees to see his mother, but there is no tidy resolution, and it seems unlikely, by the story's end, that Sally will see her son again. "And it was possible, too, that age could become her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen that look of old people, now and then—clear-sighted but content, on islands of their own making."


Holes. Islands. Families.  
My phone rang all morning. First the man who loves me, then my mother, then my daughter
M. A few freeway exits away, Midwest, East Coast. Like all we wanted was to close the gaps between us. The guys called about the restoration of my ceiling, too. They'll come to close up the hole later this week. M. and I called each other back and forth a half-dozen times. Gaps in  phone coverage, and then a flat tire for her (another hole,) and what should she do about that? But the main topic of conversation was how to get my mother to my daughter C's wedding. Four generations of us at one table before there's a permanent hole in that possibility. So I'll be working on getting my mother to consider letting M. pick her up and ease her towards Maine a few hours at a time. "It's hugely important to me right now," M. said. And she said that it just seems silly to not let the people you care about know that you do. And that she's just going to put her good-will out into the world. And now I'm picturing it. Generations of us like links in a chain, holding onto one another on a rocky coast, nobody falling. 
And of course there will be me and the person I am legally restrained against mentioning--on islands of our own making.

Not Waving. Drowning.

"Go ahead; unplug the blender." When you hear yourself utter those words, you know things have run amuck in Margaritaville. But what do you say to the man wheeling the giant fan and even bigger dehumidifier into your kitchen when it's almost 10:00 p.m. and you're still finishing dinner? All I could think of was my morning espresso--and when he made a move for the coffee maker, I panicked. So the blender is unplugged, the kitchen nearly impassable, and my kitchen sink with the plastic hose poked down its drain looks like a patient that's been intubated. But it's nice they brought a red dehumidifier, don't you think?

Water and I have a rather tempestuous relationship. I'm not afraid of water the way I'm afraid of bears and sharks. No. I love the ocean (unless it's shark infested.) Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, is my home away from home. The Mississippi River conjures my childhood. The Aegean, my idea of paradise. But water--the way it pipes and drains and rains and pools in relationship to my house is a ANOTHER STORY.

Last night water launched its latest attack through my washing machine. Exiting my bathroom, I found myself standing in a pool of water as more water cascaded out of the washer. Several throw rugs and a pile of towels later, in a brief hiatus from swearing, I heard the burble and splash of the little waterfall that had found its way through the laundry room floor  to my kitchen ceiling.

Have you ever slept in a wind tunnel?

Really, I was so tired by the time I closed my eyes last night the noise from the upstairs dehumidifier (which really should be orange, don't you think?) and fan outside my bedroom didn't keep me awake. But I awoke with my heart pounding and raced downstairs certain that the dishwasher had flooded the downstairs while I slept. (The refrigerator attempted this trick the morning of my last trip to Baltimore and had to be repaired while I was away.) But all was well on the first floor-- or well enough for the man who loves me and me to make our breakfast and take it outside to the patio without being drowned by the sprinklers or strangled by the garden hose.

And I was going to write about tomatoes.

Or about how I think my grevalia tree might actually be god.

Or dispense divorce advice. Check back next Thursday for "It's Turdsday! Shit I've Learned About Divorce!"

Water

I don't know what it is about me and water.
There are sandbags outside my back door and it's been pouring so hard for the last couple of hours that it's like looking through a scrim.
I can now claim that two men have crawled around in the water to rescue my abode. Mr. Ex was the first one. Several  years ago after a pipe burst in the middle of the night and flooded our downstairs, I walked into our kitchen to discover him on hands and knees, wearing only a t-shirt, sopping up the mess with pool towels. Then came an invasion of mold that required a re-do of our entire downstairs, and we ended up moving out--or, more accurately, our daughter and I ended up moving out. Mr. Ex elected to stay at the house. Which I find very interesting in retrospect.
This morning the man I love lay on his belly on a tarp on my sodden patio in the drizzle, a hammer drill sheltered in a plastic bag as he bored holes into my patio wall so the water could find its way to the slope on the other side.
It was water that called my name after the divorce when I thought my life should end. Bridges were so enticing that I kept my curtains drawn during one entire stay at the St. Paul Hotel. At night when it was quiet, even with the windows closed, I thought I could hear the rushing of the river. The sound of the water was like a voice asking me to come to its side.
I love the water. Traveling by boat. Swimming in a pool or a calm sea.  I recently purchased a travel snorkel that curls up into the size of a bagel. I have a special bath mat with a pillow for soaking in the tub--but I love long showers so much I hardly use it.
I'm just not sure how water feels about me.

Reflections

This is the pond in the woods and it's lovely. When I stand there I see possibilities. A deer may appear for a drink. Mallards could paddle by. That large long-legged bird I haven't yet identified might clatter up out of the cattails and fly right over my head. There's a sturdy bench under the trees and if I have the patience to sit there (which I almost never do) maybe more than one amazing sight will present itself.  I keep wondering about that bench. It's a ways in from the trailhead and it's made of metal and wood.  Who carried it in there?

Stacked Stones

When I walk in the woods, I pass by a rocky outcropping that looks like a low wall. Some of the stones are embedded in the earth and others are lying loose next to the trail.  I started stacking the stones into a cairn on the day I took my first walk--one per day. Then  a few days into my stay,  I discovered half of the tower had fallen over and I began rebuilding, once again at a stone per day. A couple of days ago, I noticed someone had started his or her own cairn.

This morning, I had a discussion with a fellow writer about structure and order.  She had a flashback in a piece that was so long it distracted from the present moment of the story. I had a story that I'd recently revised and in the course of the revision, I told her, I'd used almost every sentence as it had originally been written, but the order of the sentences was now so rearranged that it was as if I'd put them all in a bag and shook it. I didn't even know it was possible for that to happen, I told her.

That's how things seem for me right now--out of order, knocked down and stacked back up in some new precarious way and maybe someone else is doing a bit of the stacking.  I'm "boy crazy" at a time in my life when I should be savoring everything  I've built. A time when I imagined love would be indistinguishable from commitment. A time when  passion and comfort would have the same heft.

Instead, I'm estranged from a huge chunk of my own history, walking in the woods and wondering who the hell moved the trail.