Wild Willa

I have a wild kitty named Willa. Wild Willa. She's small and a little skittish and she's got a major attitude on her, has had since she was a tiny kitten. I am her preferred person, and I'm majorly flattered by that. In the little apartment where I live, when the weather is warm, I leave open a window for her, and she comes and goes as she pleases, sometimes bringing me 'gifts' in the form of dead mice or (the greatest sorrow) half-live song birds. I can't get mad at her, though I am mad; she thinks she's showing me her affection, her appreciation, her little black kitty love. 

This has been a shadowed month, because the little black kitty who prefers me has gone missing. She's plum run away, gone adrift, disappeared into the growing cold and falling leaves of Autumn. It's been about a month now, since I saw her last. I'm not quite sure how to react to this kind of loss; I've done some of the necessary things--walked the neighborhood calling until I'm hoarse; sent pictures and warnings to the animal shelters; prayed a good deal--to God, to the gods, to the universe, to the animal kingdom (whoever or whatever controls the impulses of wild things, of tame things). There is more I could do, I know, and I'll do it. I'll cover all ground. But there's something I've got to admit: I'm not sure how much good any of it will do. 

I'm not a callous person (though my callousness has certainly grown a bit, this year, for a variety of reasons). I watch the weather getting colder, I hear reports of snow, I pass Willa's waiting food dish and little blue blanket tucked in the corner of my bedroom a hundred times every day, and there is an ache in the deepest part of me. What's ironic is that that deep part--the place where the sorrow lives--is also where the toughness that carries me through resides. I have, in this single part of my soul, the capacity to disintegrate into a thousand pieces and the capacity to staunchly hold myself upright, to power through and continue on. Two forces. Totally different yet equally powerful. Contained in one corner of my being. 

I'm of the opinion that this is true for many of us. That the things we feel most earnestly--our grief, our determination--often dwell in the same part of us. Just as purely, as urgently as we can feel our despair, we can feel our doggedness, and the fortitude that is an absolute necessity in this world. It's a nice thing to think, really: our light living right alongside our dark. It can also be a damned confusing thing; a guilt-inducing struggle for power--who'll win out? The sadness that honors the loss? The toughness that moves beyond it?

A few people know about this missing cat. Not many. All who do are truly kind. Yet many more might hear the news and be practical about it, sorry, but pragmatic. It's just a cat. Cats run away all the time. They also come back all the time. They have second families, other food sources. They find holes where they curl up to heal. They have holes where they curl up to die. They're a fickle animal, of independent mind. All of this is true. I've accepted all of it. I can go entire days not thinking about Willa. I will be honest: she was such a wild thing, sometimes I hardly notice her absence.

But I am not a callous person. I'm just living out, right now, from those twin forces that take up the same corner: I go about my work and I enjoy it. I do the things that need to be done. I do things that make me laugh, things that make me happy. I do generous things, and selfish things. Most of the time, I am cheerful, and why not? I have a beautiful life. A blessed one. And then I pass the waiting food dish, and the blue blanket in the corner, and I'm full of the knowledge of the small, wild thing I've lost.

We can never control the lives of the creatures we tame, not truly; they're given to their own secret impulses, their own half-feral ways. And this is okay. We can love them fiercely, with a kind of toughness, because we must. Because they will undoubtedly leave us before we leave them. And this is okay. We can forget about their leave taking, and move on to new things; this is okay. And then we can remember them in a swift instant as we unlock the door at the end of the day, or latch the window at the first cold wind, or walk down the street where we live, watchful for familiar movement, for the sudden return--all dark days forgotten--of the wild things we've loved.



Thanks for reading. 


Beth

Rest When Needed.

Here's a heady mantra: 

let go. 

It's solid advice. Don't cling to your past. Release what no longer serves you up the good stuff. Cut that cord and you'll find yourself flung forward, all open air and open vistas greeting you.  I'm down with this plan. I've been working damn hard to do it. For a very long time, I thought it was the only solution, really, to a heavy heart. I learned well how to avoid people, places, things that brought up those deep snatches of memory, those currents of time tucked away. I've been getting good at letting go for a good long while now. Then I had a visitor come visiting. I didn't want to see him, at first. (Fear.) I'd gotten good at avoiding this reunion, and I justified the fleeing by saying,  

listen here, I'm letting go.

Ultimately, the visitor won out. And we drove through clear country and met on a street corner. Here's what I found: someone I knew by heart who I didn't know at all. And for the first time in a long time, I began to doubt this whole letting go thing. At least, the way I've been trying to do it.  

Could be: Letting go isn't about running or hiding. 
Could be that it's not about erasing. 
Quite possibly, it's not about clearing away the rubble.

I've been writing this little blog for almost a year now, and when I started it, it was because my heart was heavy. I had to write because to write meant to release, to let go. And it's true that I was holding on to a heady mess. (You've no doubt seen some of it, so bless you.) Funny how we get used to playing certain parts, certain roles. For a long time I let myself be heavy, because I was. I let myself do the 'broken' thing, because I was a broken thing. I did this for a long, long time (though never too long--no measuring healing in life; the time it takes is the time it takes). I played the part for so long that I started to worry when I began feeling light again (for surely, the lightness was a trick. Surely any steady step would only prove my overeager heart). Then I drove through clear country, and met someone on a street corner. And my heart was no longer heavy. But truth be told, it hadn't been that way for awhile; I just hadn't been ready to give up the role I'd perfected, the lines I'd long memorized. 

There is no great epiphany. There is not one single revelation. Not that I can see, anyway. There's only the even progression into new territory, so steady and slow and wide that it's impossible not to look back and take stock of what you've left behind. Look back and it's all always there, as you've left it, as you've known it.  

You don't have to let it go. 
In fact, please don't. 
Just keep moving forward. 
Rest when needed.

Maybe letting go should be about finding a way to love the rubble of our wreckage, to accept every shard stuck beneath our skin. Skin scars over, eventually. And people like to ask questions about scars; think of everything you can turn and look back at, even from a distance. Think of all the stories you can tell. 



Thanks for reading. 


Beth

Some of the Things.

It's getting cold in the night. Need to put the garden to bed. Need to put bulbs in the ground--tulip. Garlic. Need to write new blog post. Need to take dog for walk. Need to eat less ice cream. More green stuff. Need to put yoga mat on the floor more mornings. Get on mat. Stop staring into space. Need to grow hair. Get up earlier. Go to bed earlier. Need to drink less. Need to go through excess: clothes, food, books. Give up what's no longer necessary. Need to go shopping at thrift stores to find the new necessary. Need to balance the budget, spend less money. Need to buy things: blender for the green stuff to get healthier and skinnier and happier in body and mind and the in-between. Need to learn how to love more the stuff I have. Long legs. Skin tone. Full mouth. Got to stop boasting. Got to stop thinking boastful thoughts. Got to free up the thinking, no one can hear. Got to stop wondering if others can hear because then, they can. A window: access granted. Got to stop granting access, yo. Got to stop saying 'yo'. Got to grow up. Got to keep young. Got to stay steady. Keep steady; have fun. But don't drink so much. And don't spend so much money. And don't share so much.

Determine: circle of inner knowledge. A selective few. Avoid park path and supermarket and late night blunders, confessions and stories regretted because really, why do they need to know? Above all: do not feign affection. Don't need everyone to like you. You don't need to like everyone. But like everyone. Forgive and forget and let go. But hold tight. Hold close to your bones, to the soft animal of your body. Hold tight. And know that the holding won't go on forever. One day, muscles will loosen, fingers will unfurl. Know this. Know that in the morning, they will still be gone from you. Know that this is a shame. A damn too bad. A cutting, quick, and brutal thing. Know that there is no other way around it. Know what is around you. Know what is front of you as well as behind. Know that you know all of it well. By heart. By touch, by taste, by sight, by sound. Know that no one knows it like you know it. No one. Know that most people don't really care. Know that a lot of people truly care. Know that many people will listen, and will love you for letting them listen. Let them listen. Give them this right. Talk about tulips in the ground. Garlic cloves smooth and tough. Talk about burrowing. Talk about getting out of the burrow. Talk about the winter that weighs us over but carries us through. Talk about the winter, how you long for it to show itself because that's the way it's done back home. Talk about your home, how you miss it. Miss it. Go there. Come back again. Talk of your journey. Think of it in your mind, at night, when no one is around to see you doing nothing but being absolutely still. Absolutely still and thinking. Think. Don't hide from your thoughts. Own them. Keep them. Or set them loose, off on a course all their own. To God. To the dear and dark void. And then sleep. Remember that you do need to sleep. Remember that nearly every sorrow was once assuaged, healed, even a fraction of an inch, by sleep. Sleep. Wake up. Know your feet on the ground. And do some of the things that need to be done.

Things I Might Know About Corner Turning.

1. There isn't only one. The 'one' corner that will deliver us does deliver, but into territory that seeks new deliverance, other changes, other compulsions overcome. It's okay, no work lost. Keep turning.

2. We turn them when we least expect it; four a.m. and sleepless, wandering the household rooms. We turn them when we're not looking. They come upon us at ordinary moments. Do the dishes. Weed the garden. Chop onions. I think, perhaps, the corner wants to take us by surprise, it's own little game.

3. The new life? The new stuff after the turning? It might come rushing, a tumbling and earnest collision, been waiting for entrance and knocking. Or it's the slow leak that's finally run dry, no more to let out. 

4. I am still sad after turning. I'm still apt to get jealous and desperate and cut to the quick with sorrow, but it looks different over here. It looks different over here. There's the hardened self, the thicker skin. The suffering of fewer foolish things. Quicker recovery. Better love.

5. No sorrow in growing that skin. The hardened self, she just knows better what the real shit might look like. She just lives out, and gives out, from a place more certain.

Lake.

I've been missing lately. Out in the world. Up on a lake. Safe in a cabin, holding my breath under clear water, at a stained picnic table beneath a Buckeye tree with green Buckeye shells--they prick you to protect themselves, but when they fall we collect them and proclaim them treasures.

In this place: there is a hard hat in a shed with a spare key. My two keys are the best keys on my chain; I treasure them; they grant me access, allowance, to this place. Lucky soul. Lucky fish.

A few times it has frozen over, the whole body of water, but not in my remembered lifetime. (The sound a freezing lake makes, do I know it? Like ping ping ping. Out and out. All directions. Sheets of crystals wedded, married, holding on tight, relentless.)

The care given is relentless because: us, too. We're married to the place. We've given it our solemn promise. Much as it makes us snipe and gossip. Much as it makes us work. We'll work for it. I'll work for you. Promise, promise. Mow your orchard grasses, grown tall. Pluck your fruits with stained fingers and bless you, thank you, for what you offer. Sweep your floors, wipe your counters clean, move away your old growth, burn it up and tend the fire until my lashes are singed and my cheeks hold your heat. For you, this I will do. I promise.

In a good winter you let us in. Waters wild and moving. No freezing. Just churning cold. When I am with you, I am a girl alive. Every single limb alive. Every single cell getting deliberate about living.

We walked your road, slick with ice, dusty with summer. Then, our footsteps matched. We wanted them to match, then. Now I walk the road alone, but beside me there are other people, there are all the people I've ever walked beside. They're talking still and they don't see me, but I see them. They walk your road. They'll be walking there forever.

You couldn't have told us what was coming. You couldn't have said: careful. You could only have said: keep walking. And that's enough.




Thanks for reading.


Beth

The Susa Stories #3: The Children

#3 The Children

The children are three: Polly, Adelaide, and Lawrence, called Laurie. They are getting older now: Adelaide has gone away into her adult life. Laurie and Polly are still at home—Laurie going to the college, Polly a senior at the high school. They come home to claim their mail and their meals and to sleep, most nights, in their same narrow, childhood beds though Polly’s gang have countless study nights and slumber parties, and Laurie has his fraternity and sometimes, too, a mystery girl. Susa has stepped back from this situation; she has, more or less, laid down her weapons in her battle to keep her children. When they were small, they would gather around her on the bed in the master bedroom, clamoring for the next chapter in the chosen book, begging Susa to read the parts in funny, high-pitched or stuttering voices. They wore soft pajamas and clean socks; their cheeks were rosy from the bath. This is how Susa recalls it. She fails to remember their exhausting energy, their fighting words, her own weariness and fantasy of escape.

        

Now they come and go as they please, leaving beds unmade, dishes unwashed, their pajamas (no longer soft, rarely cleaned, faintly sexual) strewn on bedroom floors. They read beauty magazines or thin volumes of poetry and fashionable philosophy; they assume Susa has no understanding. Only Laurie will still sometimes read with his mother—now he is the reader, she the listener. He reads to her from his perch on the kitchen stool; she listens while stirring pepper into sauce, while grating cheese onto the casserole for their dinner. She half listens to her son, half marvels at his presence; he seems too large to have emerged from her. Here he is before her: Laurie, in his worn Dockers and plaid shirt, his skin finally clear, his face a handsome, slightly sorrowful face. He reads to her from his history and political science books; Susa half listens, half struggles with every single moment from her life as a mother, each memory crowding in, interrupting until she is here, until the memories combine to create this: her twenty-two year old son with unshaven face and baritone voice explaining the complexities of the Bolshevik Revolution to his mother. This is Laurie.

              

This is Polly: seventeen, uncaring, a few pounds overweight, loving in random snatches and rushes of affection. Polly is her father’s champion. Once, in the aftermath of the worst fight, Polly found Susa on the back porch, cigarette in hand, attempting to talk herself back into function. Polly sat beside her mother. “Daddy doesn’t like you smoking,” she reminded in her little girl voice.

            Susa watched the cigarette in her fingers. “I know,” she said, bringing it to her lips. Polly sidled closer and tucked her hand in the crook of Susa’s elbow.

            “I won’t tell,” she said. She laid her cheek, still cushioned with baby fat, against Susa’s shoulder. “You said you were going to leave,” she said.

            “I was fighting,” Susa said. “I was angry at Daddy.”

            “I love Daddy.”
            “I know.”

            “But if you leave,” Polly said, “I won’t love you anymore.”

             Susa studied the top of her child’s head.

             She studies it still, when Polly isn’t looking, when she’s fallen asleep in front of the television, or when she’s bent over her school books at the dining room table. She thinks, no matter how long she tries, that she won’t be able to get to what’s inside this head. She will always feel a slight alienation from her youngest child. She will always watch her a bit more closely than she watches the others, prepared for what, she cannot know, but prepared nevertheless, cautious.

             

And Adelaide. Adelaide was the first born, and the first to leave home. She went 100 miles away when she went, to live in a city, in a downtown studio apartment with her lover. This was Adelaide’s word, not Susa’s. Lover. It was the modern word; no one dated or went steady anymore. So they lived, Adelaide and the lover, in a fifth floor walk up on a cobblestone street, walking distance from the university they both attended with other children and their lovers. At least, Susa comforted herself, there was that—there was learning along with the loving (or the sex, which was what the situation was mostly defined by. And later of course, the lover would change his mind and one day walk away for good, and this would be part of Adelaide’s learning, along with the lessons about grocery shopping, housekeeping, modern art and medieval females writers).

             

To her oldest daughter, Susa could offer nothing but checks sent through the mail and a sympathetic ear, pressed against the phone, when a crisis occurred. They happened often; the lover would leave in a fury only to reappear again with a paper bag of rose petals or Indian takeout. Their love was always in doubt, yet it seemed to always reappear, given enough time apart. There were grand plans made with the lover: a year in London, a jaunt to Mexico, a plan to cut all wheat and dairy from their diets. Money or ease of execution was rarely considered, and the plans rarely came to fruition.

             

They lived in a one room flat, Susa’s daughter and this man; they slept together on a mattress on the floor. How often did Adelaide change the sheets? Susa wondered. Did the man wear pajamas when he slept? Or did they fall to sleep naked, the both of them, after bouts of love making? Susa imagined the man to be dark-skinned, with long, slender limbs and a full mouth. She could imagine his body amongst the clean or unclean sheets, but she could not imagine Adelaide’s body there beside his. This child she had birthed and bathed and comforted—she could not place her in bed beside a man. 

Adelaide was tall; she had knobby knees and a strong jaw line. When she was at home she hummed show tunes while she did chores around the house. She was a gentle soul, and the lover, Susa feared, would slowly wear away this tenderness. 

             

One day in a springtime Adelaide called Susa up around the cocktail hour. Susa was in the middle of fixing supper. “I’m done with this city,” Adelaide declared. “I’m done with him and all his moods.” 

             Susa imagined a long-limbed, dark man combing the streets, a bag of Indian takeout in hand, inexplicably moody. “Well,” she said, grating cheese, “your father and I would love to have you home.”

            “Oh mother,” said Adelaide, sighing, “the world is wide.”

            Susa nodded and listened, though she was unsure as to what this statement might mean. For Susa, the world then was a three-bedroom house and dinner to be served at seven; it was a husband watching golf in the den; it was a sullen daughter studying Algebra in the dining room; it was a stolen cigarette on the back porch, after the kitchen had been put away for the night. Susa was stirring cheese into sauce for scalloped potatoes. This was her world. But while she stirred, she listened, and she let her daughter teach her this lesson. 

Thanks for reading. 

Beth

The Susa Stories #2: Shrapnel.

#2: Shrapnel. 

 For one season, a springtime, Susa lived by herself. This was before she married H. She lived in a small studio apartment on the ground floor of an old house. She got a patch of yard, a front stoop even. And every single morning she was alone. There was both beauty and danger in this independence. She sometimes wondered: what if she would never feel as happy with someone else as she felt with herself? This was the threat, the lurking worry that she pushed away but felt like a piece of shrapnel buried deep in her skin.

Susa’s father was a veteran, an old, silent man; he contained more pieces of shrapnel beneath the skin of his chest than he could count, although as a child Susa had sometimes asked him to try, and he’d begin, touching his chest through his t-shirt as he stood half-shaven before the bathroom mirror, Susa standing on a stool next to him. He’d try to count the way one tries to count the stars; you’re lost before you’ve begun. He felt the pain of the metal shards still; they were almost like living things when he became overheated with work or worry, suddenly taking it upon themselves to find a way out. Her father called the shrapnel ‘prisoners’ in his joking moments, his own prisoners of war from his time served. The pieces didn’t want to be in him, his native body; they hated being in him as much as he’d hated being in their homeland, too. As a child, Susa couldn’t understand, and would live most of her early life envisioning rebel armies of human-sized bits of shrapnel (for she’d seen some of the pieces up close—those that did manage to work loose and be pried free, sharp and thin as shards of mica) until her high school history book set her right.

Like shrapnel, she envisioned her own secrets: loving being alone more than being with other people; a distrust of powerful women and Europeans; a daydream of becoming a famous singer; the threat that one day a nerve ending would snap and she'd lose all composure, wiping a restaurant table clean with a single angry sweep of her arm. The secrets tried to surface now and again, and she’d feel their attempt at freedom, and again stifle them until they were hidden safely within her. 

Living alone, Susa never got lonely; there was no one around to forget about her, so there was no attention to long for or feel insecure about. Living alone, she felt that she became a powerful woman herself, and out on the street she walked a bit differently; she felt less guilty about answering no. Living alone, she could sometimes drink too much wine and sing in the bathtub, pretending a concert. Her waking moments were colored by a feeling of greatest luck. She painted the small bathroom in her apartment a sunrise orange, brought home a small spotted cat, bought herself seeds and flower pots for the windowsill where the slowly strengthening spring sun came through. She cut poems from the papers she read and pasted them to the cupboards in her kitchen. She played records loud or soft, went out when she felt like it, came home to sleep heavily, sprawled across her bed, to wake to boil water for coffee, take in the morning news, ready herself for the day, taking as long in the bathroom as she pleased, and all of it alone, alone, alone. Nothing, she felt, could equal freedom more than this, and when Susa thought the word ‘freedom’ she thought war, and with war came her father, and with her father, shrapnel, caught and fighting beneath the surface. 

Her father wanted that shrapnel free; he would sometimes cry, during a bad spell, though he tried to keep this hidden. Some pieces did get free, slowly, and as a child Susa envisioned them traveling back to their homeland, pulled there by some magnetic force. Freedom, she wanted to write in a letter to her father in that season of living alone, freedom is what everything wants. Her mother would have sighed and asked her if she’d met any single men, but her father would have understood. He would have sat beside her on the front stoop of her apartment on a dark night, looking up and trying to count the stars.