Good Morning and Mourning

I stand at the kitchen sink in the mornings watching the birds at the feeder outside the window. I say their names in my mind: brown thrasher, nuthatch, wren, cardinals (husband and wife), a flurry of finches, blue birds (a young family), doves (husband and wife).  The tiny bird with a mohawk who looks like he just got out of bed. The big black-and-white stippled woodpecker with a red toupee that looks like a cartoon bird. One day, a neighbor’s cat caught one. I found its feathers in a pile on the ground beneath the feeder. The rest of the birds stayed away for days after that. All of us in mourning.

I watch cable news, so many shows, so much bad news. I can’t look away unless the president is on. He’s more bad news than I can bear. 

Before the pandemic, I had dinner on Tuesday nights with my friends at half-price burger night at a bar up the street. One night, coming back in the dark, my sandal slid off the raised edge of the new sidewalk, and I cut my head open and wounded my dignity. “I only had two glasses of wine,” I wanted to yell at the cars speeding past, “just two!” Then I realized that’s probably the kind of thing a drunk would say. 

When the light changes in late September just like a switch has been thrown somewhere in the sky, I become melancholy and conscious of how life is really just loss, like the poets say. But the poets always turn it into a beautiful lesson with a delicate punchline to the heart, and there isn’t anything to learn from an aging woman crying over a photo of a kitten in a fundraising plea from an animal shelter. I don’t even have a pet so it either means I’m highly attuned to little lost things or I need to restart my antidepressant. 

In January, I enter on my phone calendar the dates of the full moons for the coming year. It rises outside my kitchen window, and I stand there watching it at night just as I watch birds at in the morning. I say its names to myself: Selene, Artemis, Hekate, Diana, Luna, Chang’o, Epona the Horse Goddess, Cerridwen, Arawa, Wolf moon, Strawberry moon, Snow moon, Flower moon, Sturgeon moon, Isis, Kuan Yin, Rhiannon, Zirna. Incantations to recall some of the magic we’re killing along with the planet.

Love, Hate.

Things I hate: Bloody Marys that arrive with bacon, shrimp, celery, pickled okra, and olives hanging over the side. I don’t want to have to fight my way through a forest of kitchen odds and ends to get to the alcohol. 

True crime shows are my jam. Wives murdering husbands with sweet tea spiked with antifreeze. Home invasions. Serial killers. Abductions. Cheerleaders strangled by jilted boyfriends. Husbands choosing murder as a way to avoid alimony. As a feminist, I know my fascination with these shows is problematic, but I’m in it for the solve, the take-down, the satisfying perp walks.

I used to row three times a week. Then I started to think of it as a metaphor for my life going nowhere.  Painful exertion coupled with maximum boredom. Sweat, pain, panting and then getting off the machine and realizing I’m still overweight, still in the senior center gym surrounded by reminders that no matter how hard I row, there’s only one destination for someone my age. It was too depressing.

I miss the uncomplicated pleasure of childhood summers. My cousin and I walked to town barefoot, popping the tar bubbles on the road to make the water spurt out. I can’t remember wearing shoes all summer although I’m sure they were required for church. At night, we washed our feet before getting into bed. After hard play all day, washing off the dust of the road and the places it took us made me feel clean all the way through. I wonder if that’s how the beggars felt after Jesus washed their feet. 

Still Lost in My Dreams

On a rare visit back to my childhood hometown, I drove by the site of my old elementary school. The two-story brick building with its high ceilings, tall windows and scuffed wood floors was demolished years ago. It was the same school my father and aunts and uncles attended, and I still sometimes still dream I’m lost in the basement at night. It’s also where I learned the deep-down shame of being female, thanks to Maurice Williams. I’m sure he thought he was being helpful when he raised his hand in 6th grade and told the teacher I had blood on the back of my skirt when I stood up to work a math problem at the blackboard. I’m convinced that moment linked blood and humiliation in my mind with math. I never learned to multiply and divide fractions, calculate percentages or understand ratios. I had to take algebra twice in order to pass it, and then only because it was taught by the baseball coach who didn’t know much about it himself. It’s hard to hold onto Pi in my mind, but I’ll never forget that skirt.