On the nature of house guests

I will have visitors this week. First friends, both old and new, and then family, both old and new.

Brief visits but that's ok. Being so far away means you take what is offered and feel lucky regardless. And I do.

It will be a slice of home. Not the place home, but the feeling.

In my house, they will be the ones to welcome me home. I love that.

What I call it

You've asked me for a name. I cannot give you one. Not for this place.

It is neither here nor there. While some might consider it no man's land, it is not. Not really. It is both path and destination. It is endless and brief. It is essence, no frills or swirls to be found here. It is scar and resilience, all at once. It is marked with life and destiny and has borne witness to both. It has worn and torn and seared and burned and ached and yearned and waited in silence and lived to tell all those tales. It is branded with the effort it took to heal, tattooed with an outline of what hides underneath the wave. It holds all the mysteries you seek in position, reminds you with a red hot whisper that your adventures have just begun, that you know nothing and everything and that this state of affairs is not a contradiction.

I do not know what others call it. I only know what it is for me.

If you get closer, I'll introduce you. I believe you actually met before but there was no introduction, you walked quickly by. How does that happen? How do you get so close and not realize, not recognize the honeyed scent? If you get another chance, it will call you to order. It will dare you to leave your mark on its landscape. Do you have that in you?

What time is it where you are?

Il ne faut pas chercher midi at 14 heures. Don't look for noon at 2:00 pm. Not because it will be too late but because noon is located at noon, not at 2:00.

It means don't make things complicated when they aren't. When they don't need to be.

The simplest answers are usually the right ones. No, the correct ones. Which has nothing to do with being right. Or doing what is right. Or, more importantly, doing what is right for you.

Choices we make, decisions we live with, behavior lines we trace - we color them and name them and qualify them and frame them and contextualize them. We make them 14:00 when they are really just 12:00.

It takes those two hours to get from reality to something we can live with.

Desensitization

For the past 5 years, Boy1 and I have been following an allergy desensitization protocol. We're both allergic to the same pollens - the ones that are out from mid-April to mid June, give or a take a few weeks depending on the weather.

I wasn't really very hopeful, at least for myself. These types of treatments seem to be more successful on children than adults, but the past couple of years have been better so I kept it up, trying to believe that my body could learn to assess those pollens as what they really are - just a part of nature - and not what it thinks they are - my lifelong enemies intent only upon my misery and eventual destruction.

I had to go to the allergy doctor's office last week to pick up some insurance papers. We chatted while she filled them out. I asked about the current pollen levels in this region, I hadn't even bothered looking them up, because I haven't been bothered - I just assumed they were really low.

Apparently not. Weird weather - hot/cold/hot/cold/rainy/not - has been just what my least favorite pollens needed to flourish. Mostly they're weeds and grasses so that's really no surprise. Why can't I be allergic to some really rare thing that only grows in extreme weather conditions on odd years during a Republican president's 1st and only term?

Anyway, I woke up with a start this morning. Actually a gasp and a start. A good gasp. Because I realized that some part of me - the smarter, wiser Nicole - had signed me up for a lot more desensitization protocols than I had ever suspected. And the accelerated kind. These past three months have left me with a lot fewer internal enemies than I could've thought possible, and all without me being aware enough to hinder the process. Because you know I would've.

Mountain over earth

You knew all along, didn't you? Knew you would end up right here, where you stand.

Stand up, stand still, stand off, stand alone.

How do we stand? Shoulders heavy with regret the mind refuses? It will take its toll, acknowledged or not. Feet pinned to the ground by guilt denied? It will weigh down, authorized or not. Head turned away by shame ignored? It will pull in the wrong direction, licensed or not.

The shadow cast by this mountain of slights will show you who you really are.

Take away

Tell me what you will remember, tell me what you will always know.

Just the shadowed outline, the context that confines. The title of each chapter of this work that is pure fiction.

So I can leave it here, to be buried in the ground. I will let time take care of the things I cannot. I will come back years from now and see what the earth has been able to do with it, the work I could not do. Listen to the stories the dirt tells about its petrification. Witness its transformation into the smoothest of river stones.

Lay me down

and tell me a story. A good one, with a queen and knights and rogues and stone tablets with the rules of the kingdom etched by a master carver's hand. Fill it with honor and integrity and universal truths. Make every character an archetype, their private tales told in a breath, resonance in the exhale.

Spin, weave, loom, entwine, curve, twist, and lace it for me.

Whisper to me and tell me to close my eyes so I can't look for the ending.

When the story is over, tell me the difference between the story you've told me and the tale you've told yourself.

Anticipation

Which is not the same thing as waiting. Waiting is what I did this morning. They called to tell me the technician was at my house at 8:30 and that they would call me as soon as he had found the problem. At noon, I still hadn't heard anything. At 2:00 I called and they informed me that he had just finished. And I will openly admit that I was imagining the worst. Mechanically mysterious, unfixable things. You should know that it's -2°C (27°F) outside and snowing.

I will go home to a warm house this evening after work. The heater has been repaired.

I can imagine, already know, how good it will feel to walk into it.

Some things are like that. You know it will be exactly what you want it to be before you even get there. So that when you do, it feels more like a sigh of relief, a confirmation of what you inexplicably knew in advance. Which does not diminish the joy you feel. On the contrary, you've been feeling it all along, the whole journey home.

Solstice with me

It is winter.

Which is not a transitional season like autumn or spring. Winter is a destination season. The cellar of the year. A time when you bring into the basement what you've evaluated and sorted out during the heavy justice of fall. To preserve it and keep it safe from the cold.

Darkness dominates and we live muffled and huddled lives. And those of us who like winter, do so both because of and in spite of that.

I had a winter dream last night. In it I saw a lake, pure and clean and cold, sitting upon the heavens, the light shining right through the surface of the water. I watched it all from my cellar window.

What I believe

I believe most of the rainbows I see are signs.

I believe St. Anthony helps me find things.

I believe my 2008 will make beautiful sense to me one day.

I believe I must be where I'm supposed to be because here I am.

I believe the man who was supposed to win the election won the election.

What do you believe?

Republicans I love, I don't want to hear it.

The locks I follow

I'm living, again, in a river town. I haven't only lived in river towns but almost. And where there haven't been rivers, there's been water and always locks nearby.

You might be thinking, so what? And you might have a valid point.

But it doesn't feel like that. They are something to me. Not like friends I chose, but like family members that came with the territory. I currently live two blocks from locks, I walk or drive by them everyday. And when I'm paying attention to where I am and not where I'm going, they tell me things.

Things about that effort made to bring two elements together in a way that facilitates, allows even, the flow - the passage - being able to wholly and with integrity (and by that I mean not splitting apart or tipping over) move from one of those elements to the other, finding safety in the mix.

Again, so what?

Well, from where I'm standing, it looks like the physics of Temperance. Not temperance as in self-restraint. But Temperance as in the blending or synthesis of opposites. High mixed with low. Hard mixed with soft.

And I, as un-temperant as I am, have managed to live my whole life next to them. I was born to a father who built them, have always lived in places where I could see them, and now, am a neighbor to them.

Does this mean I'm getting closer to Temperance or just that I'm destined to live in water towns?

I don't even want to know

It's been an odd week.

First, there's been the whole no kid thing. Then there's been the whole restaurant thing. I swear, I've eaten at my house maybe twice this week. Well, aside from breakfast, which I always have at my house. Mostly white peaches because they're in season and they're amazing. 3 or so, peeled and sliced. Eaten with a coffee with a spoonful of ganache because white peaches prefer mochas to lattes. Who knew? Anyway, I keep running (gently) into various people I haven't seen in a while and they keep saying, 'Hey, let's have lunch/dinner,' and I follow.

Then there's the whole kitchen thing. A friend, and a new friend, and some friends of theirs are at my house right now, being whimsical fairy like and overwhelmingly generous and transforming my very sad kitchen into something bright and cheerful. I'm not even allowed to return home until 4:30 because apparently all that iridescent fairy magic would blind me - kind of like the eclipse - you can't look directly at it and all that.

And then there's the odd piece of advice from the oddest source. I informed someone of some recent changes in my life. Someone actually said, 'Nicole, keep a stiff upper lip.' Really, what else does one do with an upper lip?

And then there's the whole sweet thing. The universe is being very, very sweet to me this week. Not that it's usually mean but you know, sometimes lessons are given with shoves or pushes or elbows in the ribs. This week? Not at all. Starting with the mechanic and ending with the most hilarious scheduling comedy of errors (but not really, apparently) I've ever encountered, I've been taught things, brought around to truths with the gentleness of butterfly kisses and cool whispers.

Why? I don't know.

In the trace

As you walk out of the very small room, you see a mirror, framed in river stones, calling out at you to have a look. And when you look into that mirror, which is nothing more than the reflection of your life, you see the brutalities you've inflicted and the violences you've committed.

Something new, you search not to deny, because despite the dust covering that mirror, you can still see the traces of what has happened. You do not seek excuses, there are none. Or reasons, do they matter? Or even redemption, you're not there yet. You take a deep breath and exhale, hard, sending a cloud of sparkling dust flying into the air. And as it settles you see, are relieved to see, the imprint of softness in the brutality and sweetness in the violence.

Nothing, despite your attempts to prove the contrary, will ever be exactly and only what it is. You receive it as the blessing, the kiss it is: there is no category for this.