Hibernation

The baby had surgery last Thursday, so I took two weeks off (as recommended) for his recovery. Currently he is asleep and the cold rain is falling outside – and, oh, how I wish it were snow! We haven’t had snow here since early 2021, I think. Today I set a mental note: stay put for five more years, then find a small town with snow. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But it helps my homesick Northern heart a little.

We like to read the book The Bear Snores On – where the bear is snoozing in his deep dark lair and all the little woodland friends show up, stoke a fire, and “pop white corn and brew black tea”. So cozy in the middle of winter. There is a lot of complaining about this month, but I feel happy (except there should be snow). I feel like I’m in a resting, planning, anticipating moment and I like it.

In a way, January feels like advent for the natural world. We look at seed catalogues. We imagine new beds, fences, and landscaping strategies for next year’s garden. We wait for the first buds, the February crocuses, the March lenten roses. We are waiting, and it is okay. (Waiting can be brutal, but I think I am finally learning how to do it with peace.)

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January Cozy-ing

Unlike many people, it seems, I’ve never minded making New Year’s resolutions. I don’t feel stressed about them. Instead I tend to find them inspiring. I like fresh starts. I’ve always, for better or for worse, liked the idea of reinventing oneself. Or perhaps rather to allow a tucked-away part of oneself to blossom. Resolutions can help with the unfolding.

If I succeed, lovely, but if I don’t, well, I usually find I’ve forgotten about the resolutions and don’t even remember to chastise myself (heh). So it’s all right.

That said, this year I’m finding myself to be a funny paradox. On the one hand, I’ve been reading about and leaning into the idea that winter is for coziness, hibernation, rest, renewal, ease . . . and that SPRING is the natural time to begin new things. I love this. I am a gardener. I feel this in my bones, in the soil in the creases of my hands.

And ALSO: this is 100% my year to get myself into financial ship-shape. After years of dashed hopes, an aching heart, and infertility, I finally had my dream baby at the end of 2022. It took surgeries and IVF to find this little love, and he had a pretty rough start (but now he’s chubby and happy and trying so hard to walk!). As a single mama by choice, I am the sole provider and daycare-payer for our family. I do have some savings and investments, but I need to increase my income and tidy up loose ends in order for us to be solvent, or better yet, to thrive.

I also miss writing terribly. My creative self has largely been tabled while I threw my heart into my nonprofit summer camp community garden all-the-things job. There has absolutely been creativity within that role – gosh, so much, of another kind – but I miss the writer, the dreamer, the girl who posts all the pretty pictures and imagines how to spin beauty around her with words and things.

Luckily, I have two circumstances attempting to bring these opposite tugs back towards one another.

FIRST, my writing, multiple-income-stream-developing, financial-self-education time has to happen when my little one is asleep. So I sit down with a cup of hot chocolate next to a heater that has fake flames and fake crackles (I scoffed at this heater when I read about it and then the reviews convinced me and I actually love it – it’s the littlest bit of easy ambiance, ok? Here’s the link! Not an ad, everyone just needs one). I pull out my computer and I remember how I like to wend my way through words. I remember graduate school in the yellow Victorian house in Iowa, the smell of spices coming from the kitchen, my first golden retriever lying beside me on the floor, so many curly-haired boys the five clever women in our house were crushing on, the late night cups of tea with my dear Japanese friend.

SECOND, my sweet babe has to have a surgery early this month and the recovery is expected to be rather difficult. So I took two weeks off from my job and we will be home. I anticipate mostly holding him, at least for the first week. We are going to be extra, extra cozy. And perhaps in between snuggles and consolation I will find time to write. And if not, the wonderful thing about an imagination is that it works while you are doing other things. I can hold a baby and plan out a book proposal. I can kiss his little head and think of characters for a story. I can have a tired cry in the bathtub while he sleeps and then lean back and remember the hope of new ventures, of easier days.

We push ourselves through challenging things hoping for better times on the other side. Human nature? Optimism? In any case, here we go (again)!

Musings

2016 was my last entry and I’m amazed I sleuthed my way back into the back end of this thing.

Let’s NOT (for now) go down the path of everything that has happened between then and now, as most of us are inclined to do. Let’s just not, because there were many hard times, and right now is a pretty nice time. I miss writing; the old itch is itching. So here we are.

(Does anyone read blogs anymore?)

Bad News (Again)

When the bad news comes it seems to swirl around you, so thickly at first that you can almost feel the wind of it, the cold, and the rest of the world feels very outside as you sit in that circle of the white silent storm and try to comprehend.

Sometimes you peer through to the outside world at what was once normal. Sometimes you imagine yourself there. But very often all you can manage is to huddle in place, sometimes by yourself, sometimes with the others who have found themselves there with you. You find each others’ hands. You try to warm them.

All the loving people outside the circle want to reach toward you. This is so kind and wonderful of them but also, on your hard days, too much to ask. Just let me feel hateful and angry and alone! Don’t try gentle away the bitterness that is protecting me and do NOT tell me God is Good or (even worse) to Trust in His Sovereign Will (even if we don’t understand it – of course we don’t understand it, bc what is happening right now SUCKS and HURTS and why would You let that be okay to happen to children You supposedly love?).

How can anyone know where you are right this moment? Your own emotions are so everywhere that you can go from laughing to weeping to fury in moments. The emotions don’t do any good of course. They don’t change a thing.

You want to be your old self, to try to be funny, to swing your ponytail when you walk, to watch happiness come into people’s faces when they see you, rather than the recognition of One In Need of A Hug (still you take the hug and almost always gladly).

The new and terrible news means that everything is going to change, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly, perhaps kind of both. You know this from the sad things of before. You dread it and yet part of you wants to drag it towards you, because everything must be torn apart and made over, and it’s going to hurt; hurry on up so that it gets over with and life figures out some sort of normal again. Acceptance vs. resistance are fighting a pretty fine battle in your mind/spirit/heart/soul/whatever you want to call it.

Still. When you can draw back from that battle – or can push off the dullness of resignation that you’ve pulled like a blanket over your whole body so that you can sleep – and you look at oh this aching creation, you know that puppies will still wriggle and woo you into feeling an old joy. So will babies, even if they still are not your own. So will the smell of horses and hay, the slant of afternoon sun while you lie in the grass. Coffee, so blessed on cool mornings in a favorite mug. You will still thrill in the deep rumbling rain and the water running off the leaves of the trees. These things have done it before – tricked you, reminded you, charmed you into wanting to keep living with gladness despite everything, after all.

And that table of laughing friends – the ones you know have grace enough to walk with you, even when you might offend them on occasion with your kaleidoscope of reactions to this Horrid, Terrible News – there is comfort in knowing that their table will still hold a place for you.

Muddy water morning

Summer is so much intensity. Heat, people, pouring sunshine, gardens demanding water and weeding, animals thirsty and shade-seeking.

There is great fun in summer – brightness, discovery, and a raucous kind of play, play, play outside! But it also comes with a push that, for some of us, needs to be ducked away from now and again.

Sunday mornings become the place to find cool and quiet.

This one was a slow walk in tall boots, a slight breeze, moss and muddy water at the lake’s edge.

Sometimes you have to look for what you need, to remember your right to it, to find the space and the time somewhere in the week for a place beautiful and damp and cool and still.

Having a jar of coffee in hand doesn’t hurt. A companion happy to splash in the water doesn’t, either.

This Sunday prayer seems to be hanging in the air around me. A Creator’s creation offering what I need: trees bending in the breeze, scattered sun over the water, and the soaking-wet, frolicking gladness of a good dog.

So you carry on

When your father dies out of the blue, in the darkness of a cold barn during a late-April ice storm – when he is found in the hay meant for the cow and calf, and when no one can say for sure what even happened – then you might curl into what remains of your family and stop reaching out in trust toward the world. (It was a hesitant trust to begin with.)

You might go in secret to the desperate places of grief. You might stop writing the happy stories of life for fear of the ultimate sadness that must come along and scribble itself into them. You might decide to not have feelings at all and give it a real go (you might fail). You might ask a million questions to and of and about God, and when that does nothing you might stop talking to Him completely — unless someone else can offer you their words to use instead. You might turn to liturgies and the prayers of saints and hope that’s enough.

Sometimes you might be so angry you are seconds away from throwing a tantrum, full-fledged arms and legs kicking, like any competent two-year-old.

You might create some kind of strong outer self that still acknowledges what is worth being grateful for, that greets and welcomes people, that manages to laugh out loud and love much of what happens all around. You won’t understand how this outer self goes along with the unsightly mess that is inside, but it doesn’t seem entirely fake, and you decide to go with it because, after all, what is the alternative?

The days keep happening, as they must. Emptier than they should be. More things ache in different ways. But as the months spread themselves out you might, more than once, come across something that makes you pause, that makes your chest swell in that old real wonderful-world way, that tricks a smile into place and stirs the idealist you can’t completely tamp down. A meteor shower in the middle of summer, while you lie on a tarp spread over the wet grass. Lively delicious dinners with friends (even if it takes jump-starting two trucks to get there). A jog through the woods and a chat on a footbridge. A plot of purple carrots and children who practically hop up-and-down in the discovery of them. Fires snapping and glowing. A beautiful painting, unexpected. Riding a chestnut horse in the hour before dusk.  A hidden swamp for you and the dog and decent muck boots. Babies and giggles and dimples and freckles. Little gifts handmade and hand-selected, surprises that say, gently, you matter to me.

So you carry on. Nothing will be the same, of course. You will have to cling to the memory of the sound of your father’s voice, the crinkles around his eyes when he smiled, the knowledge that the nose you are not-so-thrilled to have inherited came, actually, from him, along with your long legs and your need to be close to the dirt oftener than not. You will have to imagine rather than see him walking through the pasture with you and when you have a question about livestock or trucks or gardens you will not have his answer, unless you can find it in one of his books. Your family will seem small and split and only heaven will make it completely right again after a very long time. But you can feel the prodding of whatever good has shot through this broken world, the good that wants you to fight for it and be a part of it and hold it and increase it.

And you might reach out.