Hourglass Meloncholy

 This week is a melancholy mix. I had the approval to work from home for a few days because my son has spring break. Coinciding with that we have had some beautiful mild spring weather. I caught a slight whiff of spring flowers enveloping the air yesterday.  The birds fluttering among my bushes waving their friendly wings in a hello fashion.  Its been warm enough for the windows to be open, the awakening April air pushing out winters stale doldrum air.  

This time working from home has allowed me to rest, I'm driving frantically back and forth to work and school Its calmer and quiet.  I can sip my coffee from my favorite ceramic mug instead of the cold plastic to go cup.  

It has allowed me to look out the window and take a deep breath, it has allowed me sit with my feelings, it has allowed me to laugh with my son.

And wrapped in all those things I'm grateful for is a sad tearful melody that plays out from my heart.  A missing of a person I had started to get close with who recently lost his father. We haven't known each other long, we were not serious but I miss his presence. I miss the way time seemed to slow down slowly pouring its sand down the spout of the hourglass. The way his laughter was contagious and brought me out of my serious inner depths of thinking.  Its times like these that you wonder what the universe had in store with the whole thing. I keep being told to have patience. And so I wait..but I also wait with a sadness.

birthday happiness

 today was my birthday.  I had recently deactivated Facebook and I’m afraid to admit that’s how I remember a lot of my friends birthdays because me and numbers and math are a bad combination.. 

I’ve often found that Facebook fills your feed with birthday wishes, and I think it’s because people feel obligated when they see  it’s your birthday. it was different to have a year where it was no obligations, and just the true people in your life that have your birthday in their memory or their date book.. and to be filled with text messages from the people that I would say are my diehards, wishing me happy birthday, because they truly remembered. from the friends that live afar and drive over to give a present or a cupcake. The neighbors that take care of the night and order the pizza. The people from the past, and the people from the present that just make your day so special. when I picked ed Jack up tonight, he had made me a card and it was probably one of my most favorite things of the day. His OT teacher helped to make it and on the back he put a unicorn. as I sit here tonight, alone in this apartment, that has held my space for a year I feel so amazingly blessed at the souls that have been in my life. . and I’m happy to say if anything happened to me in my life was cut short today made me realize how blessed I am, and that I am so happy and joyful for the people I’ve met and that’s all that matters.

Allowing the Grief to Drip

 I recently got a tattoo on my arm, I have an ocean theme and my artist added a shell that has drops coming off of it. One would think maybe they are ocean drops, or blood dripping?

At first I didn't like the drops, I just wanted the hard shell, pointy and rigid. Structured, strong, able to bounce off the ocean waves and protect its creature inside. The drops seemed out of place.

I just found out that someone very close to me lost their father in a tragic car accident. I had fallen asleep when I woke up to the text, my sleepy mind confused that I was dreaming and this wasn't real.

The flashbacks to two instances in the last five years of friends that tragically lost their parents and the helpless pit in your stomach feeling that ensues.

I hadn't met my friends father but I felt like I knew him through the stories that were told.  He lived on a big property that adjuncts to a waterfall in southern Ohio.  Coincidently I had just gone to those falls a year ago and never knew they existed. My son and I took gorgeous frozen waterfall pictures, capturing a moving force like a waterfall in ice is a beautiful ethereal experience I highly recommend.

My friend had just texted me the morning of the accident to ask if I wanted to go hiking on this property my next free weekend.  I was excited for the invite and the possibility of meeting his father.

This same morning I had also had been thinking about the fore coming death of my father and ex father in law as both are in frail states with the future unknown.

All of these weird synchronicities tied together make for this labyrinth of understanding what this all means in my head. We always try to make sense of grief and its the one thing that doesn't make any sense.

Its eb and flow nature, its ability to consume us, shut us down, question our beliefs and the world we live in.

Thinking back to my dripping shell, I've realized that even shells shed tears. Whether its when its creature leaves it for a bigger shell, or an abrupt storm smashes it into pieces on a rocky beach.  We need to shed our tears, we need to soften into the unknown.   We need to allow the grief to drip off our shells.

Cardinals

 Wings of crimson

retreat my thoughts

pulling me out of my head.

grace of feathers

lost in illusions

stuck in storms of weather.

Valentine Sour

 a post from a year ago

Today is Valentines day.  Past years would have been romantic dinner plans and bouquets of flowers with fuzzy cards.  Instead I'm sitting under a fleece blanket in the morning room.  Sunshine warming me with hugs.  I see a pile of laminate flooring samples left over from a year ago when we thought about pricing flooring.

My stomach is tied in a million knots as we have our first mediator meeting.  The anxiey pit I fell in my stomach is devastating.  Its all so sad and so surreal.  Not rainbows and glitter like wedding planning.

My thoughts reel with having to give up endless nights with my children.  They grow so fast. I don't want to miss anything.

I don't want to scare them.  I want to protect them from all of this.

I hate that this is the reality.  I wish I was buying red wine and chocolates hoping to rekindle our marriage with a stupid American holiday.

I know I have to sit with this feeling.  This place of hard.  Hard like my stomach ( and not in a flat stomach kind of way lol)

I know things have to be done so that the future can be brighter but why do we have to have these hard seasons of growth? Why didn't I get to have the happy ever after marriage.

The unknown is scary but staying doesn't seem to be an option anymore as the muck keeps resurfacing.  I don't want to ever go through this again.

I take a break to pause The Handmaids Tale on Hulu. I just started watching it a few days ago and the similarities to our life right now our uncanny. 
They flashback during the show about their times before the government took over control and changed everything.  It shows them waiting at taco trucks, laughing at their tinder photos, talking about the days work at the office.


It seems so normal but also so long ago.  We are in the middle of a pandemic. Covid 19.  It started they say in China earlier this year.  It spread to the US (at least officially) in March. A few days before St. Patricks day a worldwide sweep put us all to sleep.  Work from home, business closed, restaurants hung up signs turning customers away.  Hair and nail salons, barber shops, and tattoo parlors turned into empty graveyards.  Never in our life had we experienced anything like this.  Fear ignited each and every friend of mine from California to Maine.  We hunkered down if we were non essential and those of us in essental jobs were given a crumb of normalcy still heading into work.

I believe being able to work saved me.  My gym and yoga studio were dark and forbidden.  They are the places that would help my demons escape through sore muscles.  My concerts tickets I had bought were refunded with no rescheduled date in site.  Grocery stores became a space of necessity as toilet paper and flour was rare to find and shelves sat empty and abandoned.  People no longer roamed the isles killing extra minutes and smiling.  You spent as little as time as you could, you may be asked to wear a mask and move down an isle in a certain direction.  All the while making sure to maintain the 6 feet social distance from another person.  The intercom music that I often would roll my eyes at the lack of good music choice was replaced with a message every 15 minutes stating if you are sick of coughing to please stay home.  It was like those shows you watch were the world ends and the store is full of bright lights and loud music. 

Bars are a thing of the past, being able to distract ourselves with a Green Tea shot and draft beer with a group of friends is a distant memory.  You are allowed to walk, as long as you distance, so we walk and walk and walk. My strava app collects the multitude of miles I have walked through Covid.
As with anything you have good days and bad days.  Today is a day where I have a multitude of thoughts pour through me, maybe I should repaint the living room? Maybe I should go on that new mountain bike trail, maybe I should organize my closet, or finally file all those bills.  Maybe I should paint the next Picasso or fill my bird feeders.  The maybes trail at high speeds through my brain until the fall like dead leaves on the floor beside my trunk. 

The kids seem ok with it, xbox and virtual worlds keep them distracted.  My youngest just yesterday looking out the front screen door at his best friends across the street and asked "Is the virus..the sick thing gone yet?"  I calmly say "No Jack, its still around".  I think of what a weird world I'm living in that I'm telling my 5 year old son he still cannot play with frineds two months later because a sickness has poisoned our land.  Marriage in the normal world is hard, we often make it through with distractions and vacations to help the ship sail to the next island or hiccup.  Currrenlty the ships are not sailing.  Being sequestered to the same living space with no one ever leaving causes a lot of strain on everyone. 

I do my dill diligence of putting things into place to help my mental space.  The walks, the half attempt at a dumbell workout, a few measly pushups. A phone call to schedule ongoing therapy again. When I walked out of her office two years ago happy and smiling of my progressive, I never thought I would be returning on this account.   Alcohol is great for numbing and providing fake laughs but when the Alice in Wonderland poison starts to wear off you realize that your right back in the land you started from.  They say its temporary, in fact a few things are starting to reopen.  But I do have to wonder what the new reality will be for all of us.  Mentally, financially, emotionally.  We have been imprinted with a change forever.  Only time will tell whether its a good change or a bad change.

Music

I grew up in an old 1900’s  farm house.  There was a room we called the living room even though many of the areas in the house were a maze of miscellaneous spaces. An early 80’s sectional couch, textured of tan vomit corduroy color decorated the corner of the room. We could often be found trying to run among the top of it until our mother would call from the other room, “No walking on the furniture!” Four tall old glass windows and a fake brick wall that housed an annoyingly every 15 minute chiming grandfather clock(ending with an on the hour GONG!) completed the decor. 

     The room was situated between the dining room and a walkway room (maybe once the main entrance of the house). It had two open walls so it was an inviting space.  Besides the couch, heavy curtains to block the cold drafty windows and chirping grandfather clock there was a meager old pie safe. Within this old cabinet was a stereo system with speakers on each side that would have made Alexa tremble. My father had a good ear for quality sound, we always had the best equipment to listen to records, tapes and cds through the years. 

     He didn’t sit in this room very often, he was usually seen in the black pleather recliner in the family room, remote in hand flipping channels and kicking us out of our regularly scheduled programs. But every once in awhile he would visit the living room. Sitting in an old and uncomfortable wooden antique dining chair that was positioned in front of the stereo cabinet. He would play a song, the beats blasting through the amped speakers. He would repeat it... over and over. 

     I was young, moving through the rooms on my way to toys and imaginary play oblivious to this routine. Years would pass and I would start to notice on a deeper level the practice of my father sitting there... listening.  The music would fill the tall ceilings, mahogany wood door

frames, soaking in the essence and bouncing back acoustics like a golden rainbow. I began to appreciate the beauty of those moments, in his own prayerful and meditative way. Submerging in those lyrics and notes, wrapped in a musical blanket. I learned the language of music and it’s healing powers.