Adah on the roof

Melancholy. An abidding sadness follows me home. I leave in sunshine, but the climb up the hill feels overcast and drenched. My mother’s absence? The house holds her presence in pictures, in the dishes that were her choice, in the way the two sofas have roles, one for humans, one for dogs. Except that I, the human, sit on the dog sofa with my pups who don’t understand that they can’t be with me on the human sofa. But it is not the remnant of my mother’s spirit fueling the realization of her absence that fills me with sorrow. It’s the thing that always bites, that is spoken or not spoken, but that makes itself known.

It’s the not being counted, not really. It’s the not being invited to the dinner with family friends I haven’t seen in a year, whom I would love to see again, whom I believe would be happy to see me. It’s the way he looks away, converses and laughs with Ruth May and leaves me in my role as silent witness. It’s the way I’m never quite right, never quite good enough. “Oh God,” he says, when he sees the dogs. “I hoped you’d leave at least one of them behind this time.” They are not badly behaved. They are really quite sweet. And I am there to help him, leaving behind my daughter and my dirty house and my laundry for another day. Still, he cannot accept me, cannot accept them, although he accepts Ruth May’s little dog.

It’s the way he condemns so much of what I love, so that I cannot talk to him of much. Politics, a little. How the others are doing. Polite conversation.

It’s the fact that all he can do is worry about whether Ruth May’s baby can get Irish citizenship (I didn’t tell you she was pregnant, did I?), when his eldest daughter is forever forbidden from her Irish heritage because of his disinterest in her. He doesn’t worry about my daughter’s rights to her Irishness. No. Just this new baby’s, yet unborn, because she is really his, unlike me, unlike my child.

A neighbor walks by on the path up the hill, sees me on the roof. “Adah,” she calls down to me. “On the roof? Again?

“More shingles.” I shrug.

“Come by later,” she offers. “We’ll be home all afternoon.”

Later she tells me I’m a good daughter. I was almost born on this beach, lived here my first year. She changed my diapers back then, knew my biological father. She was my mother’s good friend, had shared 40 years of history with Mum before she died. What does it mean to be a good daughter? Is it true? My complaining now feels dishonest, mean. I want him, just once, to include me when Ruth May’s around. To show interest in what I care about. To offer me love.

The truth is, he does. In his own way. I just want more, want too much.

Another moment of sadness, a quiet grief. A wave, that’s all, on the surface. Deep down in the lake, all is still.

I cry. It’s true. I don’t get mad or tell myself to stop. Seems futile, really, to hate myself for feeling second, third, fourth-best. Yes. Fourth best. The least of the four. The last although the first. It’s just what is. Not good. Not bad. Just the way life has measured itself out for me.

I remember the rock, the moon, the emu. I remember the hammer swinging and the sun on my arms, and being happy knowing I could do this, take the shingles off, put the new ones one. Make decisions. Figure out the ridge caps. Such a rhythm. At first I was resentful–I’ll be honest. I was cold at first. My fingers ached, pulling the old shingles out. I thought, “I’m not doing this again. He needs to get a new roof. I can’t keep running over here every time the wind blows, replacing the shingles because he’s too cheap to buy a new roof.”

Not nice, these thoughts. I looked out at the water, looked for the little white birds who had dipped into the water and out the last time I roofed, all bright flashes of light and joy-in-being. They were gone. My thumb bled. I sucked it, tasted blood and tar from the roof. Tasted grit and life. Swung the hammer. Reasoned. “It’s OK. He doesn’t have much money. If it happens again, I’ll talk to him about replacing the whole roof, and in the meantime I’ll just replace all the shingles that look too old or brittle, even if they’re not broken. Thank goodness we have so many left over from when I replaced the upper roof seven years ago.”

And the sun warmed me. The light sparkled off the patchworked shingles, snaked through the gutters, clogged with grit and moss. There would be time to clean them, as fast as the work was going.

It dropped away, the resentment. Slipped out the door. It was just a little wave. Everything under the surface untouched.

This crying, it’s a wave too. He has his ways, his habits, like I do. Ruth May is the youngest, the beloved. Leah is the beautiful, the one who stands strong, the one he has never said no to. Rachel is just Rachel. She commands respect because that is her way. She doesn’t notice when it’s not freely given because she has learned the art of dismissal. He respects her for it. And for something else I cannot speak of yet.

And me. I’m Adah. Did I tell you that? Adah the bookworm. The cripple. The lover-of-words. The one who sees backwards. RC knew who I was the day we talked about The Poisonwood Bible a few weeks ago. Sometimes he teaches it. We were talking about using it in the classroom, and I told him why I’d not finished it (I have since then), because my mother said it was about the four of us. And he said, “Oh, you know which one of the four girls you are, don’t you?” And I thought, Is it that obvious. But it is.

So I am Adah again. Silenced. For her it was a choice. For me too. But in the end she found her voice, stood straight and walked again. I too can speak, can shake off the crippling sadness of not ever being quite right. Can walk up the hill, feel the tears drying, turn back to look down at the houses, at the patchwork roof of my father’s home, at the water beyond, refracting light.

Roofing, again

I’m at my dad’s house again. Yesterday I spent the morning on the roof, replacing more shingles that had blown off. This time it went fast. We had everything we needed and I knew (more or less) what I was doing. And it was glorious day, actually warm, so that I took off my jacket and swung my hammer in just a light sweatshirt. Afterwards, bouyed by the speed with which the shingles patching had gone, I cleared the gutters and then helped replace some trellis that had been blown apart by the windstorm. The wisteria and rosemary were out of control, and to get to the trellis, we had to prune, so I hacked and secatured and butchered both back to nubs. Dad, who had his back to me, turned once, eyes widening: “What have you done to my rosemary!” I assured him it would be back, and laughed inside. It was always Mum’s rosemary. She was the gardener, he the reluctant “fixer upper” when it was necessary. Now the rosemary is his, and he’s concerned about it.

There’s so much more to be done, and it’s clear he likes working with someone around. I’ll have to find a way to get over here more often, so I can help him patch up this getting-dilapidated place. Living in a little condo has eased the issues with time I used to have, thank goodness. I’m a bit sad that Aza doesn’t want to come down here since Harry died, though, even though I can understand her grief at losing the old dog.

Well, back to work…

Encounter

I felt lit the other day, carried, untouched. It was a good day anyway: Lively classes; interesting dicussions; and sunshine, a flood of light across a too-long gray landscape. The temperatures were above freezing again and A was hanging out at a friend’s house so I came home, grabbed the dogs and headed for the canyon. It’s been a while since I’ve been there, longer since I’ve been alone. A friend asked me a week or so ago how I could feel safe walking there alone. It never occurred to me to feel in danger. I looked at her, shocked. She’s got two big dogs, one partially pit bull. How could she feel unsafe walking in the canyon?

Regardless, I don’t, and it was sunny, and I headed out of town and parked in the melting ice of the parking lot, and picked my way to to the trail. Then I walked, and soon I was deep into the cliff-bordered space, in that land of rocks and spirits. They haven’t been talking to me much lately, the rocks, not since the Rite of Acceptance in October, and sometimes I’ve wondered what that meant. Is accepting Catholicism a rejection of the spirits of the canyon? Does the wooden cross my sponsor gave me that I wear around my neck chase off the gheists that used to swoop along the wall tops, no more than faintest hot-air twirls against the blue sky, but keening slightly at times?

I walked and looked about and waited. The rocks were still, withdrawn, as they are in the summer when the canyon is filled with hikers and hill walkers. I crunched over the icy snow, the dogs running about and sniffing joyfully, and then saw a small collection of rocks and a feathery fringe of foliage ahead of me, settled like an island to the side of the snow-covered trail. It was interesting, almost like a corpse, like a downed deer, or a big shaggy dog. No, rocks. Rocks and sagebrush perhaps, or the dead leaves of some other plant. Feathery, though. A rich brown. We got closer. The dogs stiffened, raised their hackles and growled low. “It’s just rocks, “ I said. “Silly dogs.”

But long bony projections to the side looked like legs. A deer? Half a deer? A deer with feathers, a deer the size of a large dog, with long, narrow legs, but just two?

No. An emu. An emu in the canyon. Headless, I thought. A mound of feathers and two long straight legs with three-toed curled claws at the end. I looked to see what had happened, and saw why it appeared headless. It had curled its head back under its body, perhaps seeking the warmth of its small wing, and had died like that, frozen in the snow.

I wanted to drop to my knees and carress it, whisper some prayer over it that would set it free into the energy of what Is. Except it was already there. I was the one left behind, between the high dark walls of the canyon, alone.

I bowed my head over it for a moment, whispering some wordless prayer for it. I felt its story gather around me: Escape from home, at first the exhiliration of freedom, then fright and frantic running, till it had sunk down here, on a bed of snow, and tucked its head, and let the spirits take it.

Then I kept walking, calling the dogs who wanted to sniff about it, deeper between the walls, for a while in a state of silent stillness, not thinking, not looking around. And then I rounded a corner and there was the rock, fully alive, red as sunsets and coursing live blood, two deep eyes on either side of a broken nose, a mouth quietly straight. I’d seen the rocks high up laugh at me, or wink, or frown, but never had the spirits dropped so deep into the canyon, so purely life-rich right in front of me, feet away, those dark eyes fathomless and gentle and implacable all at once. I stopped and stood transfixed. No words. No words for the way the world fled, for the way the rock opened itself to me, for the way its light streamed around me and drew me forward. I lay my check against the side of its nose. The cool flinty stone felt lit up and alive. I stood for a long moment, listening to the rock’s deep humming, the voice of the earth drawn up and released into the silence of that moment. And then I sat on a flat-topped boulder by the rock and simply waited.

I felt no desire, no restlessness. Everywhere I looked the world was suffused with color. The rock walls were ochre and russet. Beyond them the hills rose a tawny yellow specked with the white of melting snow. The sky arched above, pale blue at the rim and deepening at its centerpoint to an azure so bright it was impossible to gaze upon. Silhouetted against it I saw bare winter trees, each branch a saturated red, shedding light. These were colors of peace and rest, of waiting, of stillness at the very center of life.

And then the dogs barked. I looked up, following their line of sight. Someone was climbing down a narrow trail on the other side of the canyon. I remembered my friend’s words. “Aren’t you afraid to walk there alone? I’d never go there.” I was a mile or more into the isolated space of the canyon, out of range of human habitation. There was nowhere to go. If the man meant me harm, I was vulnerable. Two small dogs will bark but can’t do much damage, and no one would be near to hear their cries, or mine. With my asthma I wouldn’t be able to outrun him. In the midst of all those thoughts, I wondered that I wasn’t afraid. I felt nothing fearful, nothing that disturbed the sense of peace the encounter with the rock had brought.

After a moment I stood. The man had descended far enough now to be within a moment’s walking distance. I called the dogs and headed home. As I passed him I waved. He raised his hand back, nodding his head, then turned to look in the direction I was walking. I looked too. The crescent moon hung in the V created by the canyon walls, a curve of white light at the center of deepening blue. Dusk fringed the edges of the world, but there at the center, at the place I was headed, the light held steady.

Inscape

Yesterday at RCIA class we were asked when in the last week we had felt the presence of Christ. We were supposed to think about it as the lead team member read the week’s scripture, and then to share with the members of the smaller group into which we had been organized. I had a hard time answering the question until I reframed it to mean the presence of “God,” which I wrap in quotation marks because for me the term is so loaded. The presence of “Recognition of what Is,” I suppose, might fit my sense of what God is more aptly. Or G.M. Hopkins’ term “inscape.” No, his word “instress,” the force, or energy, that allows one to perceive the inscape of an object. There’s a flow of energy implied in instress, I think, that separates it from inscape. All objects have inscape. When we see them, really perceive them as they are, seeing them as more than the sum of their parts, seeing them in the light of God, we see their inscape. The energy that allows us to do so, an energy that is the grace of God opening up in us the ability to perceive in such a way, is instress. So I reframed it in my head and then, when we were broken into small groups to discuss our experience, I avoided speaking. I didn’t know how to say that for me, it wasn’t about Christ. Not that Christ isn’t a nice fella, really. Not that in the end it isn’t all the same (I call it instress, you call it Christ’s presence). I just didn’t want to deceive. But then one of the team leaders, an older woman and a cradle Catholic, mentioned her own difficulty with using the language, because, she said, saying “Christ” so clearly ties it to one tradition, a fairly narrow view. It seems to draw a distinction between Christians and unbaptized Africans and Hindus and so on, she said. “And we’re all children of God. It doesn’t matter if you’re not baptized or if you’re’ Hindu or Buddhist. We’re all children of God.” I saw her as acknowledging the difficulty of trying to use words to name a universal concept (and concept’s not the right word either).

It occured to me then that all through this process, every time there’s been a moment of difficulty (except during the one speech by the one guy who filled in at the last minute and enraged everyone in the room with his black-and-white inflexible childish thinking and for whom the team leaders apologized the following week), someone has anticipated it, has dropped something into the conversation that calms my concerns. How many times have references to Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, other Christians, become part of the conversation? Way more often than I’d expect in a group of Catholics. Not dismissively. Not condescendingly. Just as different ways to worship, acceptable, reasonable, filled also with grace.

There’s a risk of oversimplifying in talking of these matters in such a short space, but what’s becoming more clear to me is my feeling that I could be comfortable in such a community. Week after week I’ve indulged my propensity to hold Catholic ritual or doctrine up the a yardstick of multiple other religions, to compare, differentiate, find commonalities, but until recently I’ve never spoken. I said nothing at all at first, a year ago, when I first started this journey. I just listened. But the more I listened, the more I felt drawn in to a group of people who might not necessarily say, “Yes, and this is how Catholicism parallels Hinduism” as part of the lesson, but who would acknowledge their own difficulties with exclusive language, or who would nod and agree when I finally spoke up to draw a comparison, and then branch out to make comparisons of their own. Last night my friend noted that of course they would be inclined to agree with me. After all, the goal is to draw me in as a member. But I’ve heard them mention, without my contribution to the conversation as a starter, enough to realize their own openess to other ways of framing an experience of “God.”

And then, as I began this entry, I found myself using the language of inscape and instress. Hopkins was, of course, a Jesuit priest. Catholic. For a moment that didn’t occur to me. I was just looking for language that would suit, that would fit what I was trying to muddle my way through. And in the end, I landed on the language of Hopkins, a Catholic.

I think Kuan Yin is laughing again.

Reminders: Breasts and recognition

Being breastless has advantages. The most obvious is that one feels lighter, unencumbered. Activities like riding a horse aren’t accompanied by the need to find tight sports bras or experience one’s breasts bouncing up and down in time with the trot or the canter. And my breasts were small. Imagine DD-size breasts in the midst of rigorous activity? I’m not saying that for some people, the advantages don’t outweigh the disadvantages. I’m just saying that for me, I’m rather partial to the feeling of lightness and freedom that accompanies being without breasts.

But that is not the biggest advantage for me. The other is the relative absence of pain. I was reminded of that today, when I woke and stretched and felt a sudden stabbing in my right armpit area. Here’s the deal. Breast flesh is not limited to the fleshy rounded objects we usually think of as the breasts. It stretches around the body, into the armpit area, even up the arm a little. That’s why a bilateral mastectomy does not guarantee freedom from re-occurance of breast cancer. (My mother got inflamatory breast cancer on both breasts a year and a half after her bilateral mastectomy.) And breast flesh is subject to fibrocystic condition (or disease, depending on the era). I could have been the poster mama for that unpleasant condition. My breasts were so dense mammograms could barely penetrate them. And they were so lumpy a practicioner would have had a hard time finding a really dangerous lump. I was lucky my cancer was found as early as it was.

But lumps and dense cancer-prone tissue (yes, they’ve just figured out there’s a correlation between dense breasts and cancer) are not the only problems of fibrocystic breasts. Another problem is pain. Sometimes severe. There were months when I was in pain for three out of four weeks of my cycle. And not just mild tenderness. I’m talking “Don’ttouchthatithurts!” reactive screaming at any slight pressure. I’m talking holding my breasts with my arms (and trying hard to be discrete about it, which isn’t always easy) as I’m walking. I’m talking going to the doctor to see what I can do about it because I can’t do what I love, ride my horse. The doctor said, as is standard, “Take Vitamin E, and stop drinking caffeine.” Which would have been fine if I didn’t take Vitamin E and I did drink caffeine. Back then, I drank only one cup of weak tea in the morning, and no coffee. And I even gave that up for a couple of months with no luck. Now I drink the occasional latte in addition to my morning tea, and sometimes I drink two cups of tea, but I’m still pretty light in my caffeine consumption. And you know what? I still get that signature pain, only now it’s in my right underarm only in a good month. That’s right. I can tell that my surgeon was more careful to get out as much of the breast flesh as he could in the removal of my cancerous left breast than he was in the prophylactic removal of my right breast. If I come up with breast cancer in my right side, you know who to go after!

Ever since my surgeries almost eight years ago (wow!), I’m reminded monthly of one darn good reason for being without breasts. Some months the pain is a hardly-there tenderness that lasts for a day or two. But others, like this month, it’s more than two weeks of obvious discomfort in my right armpit area, and a slight tenderness in my left. And when that happens, I’m thrilled-and-delighted to be without those objects that long ago served their purpose in breastfeeding my daughter (with much difficulty, I might add, and interestingly enough the cancerous breast never did yield much milk. Coincidence? Or early warning?).

That doesn’t mean it was easy to lose them. It was excruciatingly hard. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel insecure about myself sometimes in this breast-obsessed culture. I do. I wonder how many men might accept a woman without breasts, since those fatty globes seem to be such objects of adoration. But I’m happy to be reminded of the advantages of being without them, and to be able to recognize that now, most of the time, I’m without pain, and that when I have pain, it’s not what it once was.

Perhaps even more significantly, the monthly tenderness reminds me that life is short and nothing is guaranteed, a reminder to live well and to love.

Worn down by technology

I may have made a mistake, a huge one. Blog-City is finally up, and despite my frustration at the ongoing “Members’ Only” site and the fairly frequent glitches, at least I more-or-less knew how to use it. WordPress is proving to be more challenging than I had hoped. The template is not very modifiable, and so yesterday I decided to try hosting it elsewhere. Wordyblog was my choice, so I signed up, got going there, and discovered that though the templates are supposed to be modifiable, you have to know something about code to do so. So that’s a dead end for me. I don’t have either the time or the inclination to worry about code. But WordPress is giving me fits too. I can’t seem to find a widget that will allow me access to the administrative portion of my blog from the site when I’m logged out, which means I spent too much time last night trying to figure out how to get back on. I’m just not computer literate, or at least blog-site literate.

The whole situation has been a little frustrating because I had finally found myself on a writing roll. I’d found a way to blog every day. I generated ideas for new blogs every few moments. It was finally possible for me to think of myself as a blogger, given that I knew I had loyal readers and a community that reciprocated my admiration for their blogs by linking to me. The frustrations with Blog-City were manageable. And then the site got hit by a meteor or a dog ate the software or someone’s grandmother died and suddenly it just wasn’t working. I had blogs I couldn’t publish, ideas I couldn’t share, and it was mildly irritating, and then more irritating, and then just too much. I’ve spent well over a week now touring blog-host sites, settling on WordPress, messing around with templates, and so on. So finally I had a template that was OK, was getting used to a system that seems to have some advantages over Blog-City–and of course some disadvatages–and making the transition.

And then…. silence. A world of silence. Whoa. People don’t know where I am now. I mean they might check Blog-City and then come here, but what if it’s too much bother. I couldn’t even put links on the Blog-City page to make it easier for them. They might drift away.

I guess that explains my blatant, craven, pathetic plea for attention the other day (right, Loren!?). But you came through. Thank you.

Transitions are hard. I get used to routine, to the familiar. When A was a baby and young child, her father and I had to package every transition in a particular way to make it manageable for her. We had to warn her to give her time to shift modes, and then we had to be gentle with her during the moment of the transition, to accept her crankiness and sometimes her howling. Even small transitions needed a little warning: “OK, A, in 10 minutes we need to get in the car and go to Granny’s.” Big ones like moving house needed monumental patience. It took three years for her to get used to the farm after we moved from our little house, more than a year for her to accept the condo. She is getting more comfortable with transitions as she gets older, but I imagine she’ll never be the “Let’s pack up and leave on a whim” kind of person.

Now I realize it’s at least in part an inheritance from me. The shift to WordPress discombobulated me. I’m still a little worried that it might have been the wrong thing to do, but I’m willing at this point to just wait and see. And in the meantime, I thank those of you who have been willing to make the change with me.

Lost in a new home

It’s like moving to a new house, this blog moving. I’ve gotten used to Blog-City, the way it looks, the way I can navigate it. And here I am, moved to a new town, living in a new house. The rooms are in different places. I wake in the middle of the night, disoriented, remembering the door in one spot and finding it in another. I stumble over sills of unexpected heights, reach for light switches that aren’t there.

I begin to think I’m shouting into a void. On Blog-City I had readers. They commented, left little marks of their presence. If I felt like it I could go check Site Meter and say, “Yes!” that guy from New York is still reading (picture him, in a high-rise apartment, looking out at another high rise, at the street far below, tiny pedestrians, tinier dogs, the flow of the city like blood cells, moving always, always busy). I could be happy that I wasn’t shouting into an empty valley, unheard (if the writer writes for no audience, is she writing at all?). But here I’m in an alien home, peering around corners to see a surprisingly long hallway, a sudden arching ceiling.

I will get used to it, like I got used to my condo after the farm, like I got used to the farm after my first little home with its post-and-rail fence and its flowering cherry outside the wall of windows in the living room. It will be fine, to be here.

Speak, though. Let me know you’re out there. Please.

Moved…

I am moving to WordPress. Blog-City has been impossible for days now. There are windows of time when I can get into it, but most of the time I’m locked out. I can look at my writing, but can’t write new blog or edit old ones. The pictures don’t come up. And I can’t even get a hold of support to find out what’s going on. So it’s time to tear my hair out over a new system again!

Considerations

It seems odd to be considering moving again. I’ve been with Blog-City for almost a year and have enjoyed it, especially the support system, which is overall quick and personable. I just don’t seem to be able to get a “member’s only” link going there, and I have some problems with odd little glitches, so I think I’m ready to try something new. I just don’t know how easy it will be to transfer across all my info. And can I get PDF files of my work, as I can with B-C. I’ve just discovered that feature, and I love it. I’m just rambling, as this is really a placeholder posts.

Grandmother joke aside

Any of you who are teachers know the inside joke about the dead grandmothers, of course, and those of you who aren’t might need to know that multiple dead grandmothers are often the reason why students are late, don’t turn in papers, don’t show up, or otherwise melt down in the middle of the quarter. (Umm, this little aside is also a chance for me to check out how to make links on WordPress. Carry on…!)