Old Foe Returns

The trees cried leaves today, mournful of their own passing. Never one to be shy, the wind made it's presence known and the branches clicked and scratched at the window glass. Grasses fell to the weight of frost and shivered under their new coats of glass. I am mournful today and see nothing but sadness reflected back from earths still life. But people appear happy, their smiles plastered under exercising brows and fluttering lashes....cheeks pink with chills blush. It is days like this when I know it is simply chemistry in my head. I have nothing to be sad about, but still it comes like a hurtling sled full of nostalgia, regret, sorrow and wistfulness.

My depression always makes a showing during the holidays, though never a place set for it. A party crasher that must be bounced to curb where it will wait for the next opportunity to make an entrance. Sometimes grand, sometimes stealth. Lethal none the less. I tire of my battles because they are always the same. I never seem to take hold, stake my flag, and conquer. A circular pattern of fight, retreat, fight, retreat. What happens when my troops are thin and old and tired? What of the battle then? I fear that, but it is not today.

Today I rally, chin up, shoulders back, prayers ushered. "No more sugar, you!" Confections make my depression worse, and I can never never NEVER stop exercising for the seratonin it affords. I continue to fight my foe au naturale. So far....I win.

Thanksgiving Photo Highlights

*Sigh*

To Be Me Tomorrow

Tomorrow I shall make a pig of myself with a turkey, mouth salivating even now in expectation. There will be no self control, no calorie counting and little care to fat content, salt, or carbs. Bring on the gluttonous feast! Pour the wine, carve the bird, mash the spuds and may gravy pour from heaven like torrential rain. I will eat myself into a coma, which I will conceal as a short nap while the football game rambles its white noise in the background. I will rouse myself just in time for pie. "Just a sliver of each please" which everyone knows turns out to be a larger portion than the choice of one...but who can choose? Pumpkin or Apple? I cannot discriminate and gladly indulge in each.

My niece will cradle her very own bowl of cranberry sauce, unable to share...her love all consuming for the gelatinous can-shaped beast. Each nephew, under legal drinking age, will have individual Martinelli's placed before them and drink straight from the bottle to quench a thirst that builds all year. Rolls will be stolen, sleuthed, and returned. Someone will inevitably sneak a pea into Uncle's beverage glass, convinced the blight gets funnier every year. The fire will blaze and smoke will fill the room because the damn thing never did work quite right. So we will open the windows and alternate the freeze and the fire.

We will gather to take pictures for Christmas cards and it will be an impossible task. The cousins will bump and grind, screw up their faces, think they stealth with peace hair. The ladies will suck in guts, tuck our rumps and stand at a forty-five degree angle for optimum thinness. 50 pictures: 1 perfect, 49 special....like a frame by frame acknowledgement of the fact that there is nowhere else we would rather be. How I love those crazy pictures.

Oh, bring it on. I cannot wait. another. minute!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Black and White in a Technicolor World

Is it the wind, or do the trees breathe?

Is it a flower, or a weed in drag?

I am used to a black and white world, a right and wrong world, a legalistic set of ideals by which to measure self and others. I understand ying and yang...this and that....yours and mine. But I am slowly entering a new world painted not only in shades of gray, but showing itself in full Technicolor. LOUD it is, like being thrown into a kaleidoscope of bells. No longer can I differentiate up from down, as focal points move, shift, disappear.

It was easier to chose between two, a fifty-fifty chance at correct. But easier and correct rarely make a solid relationship, though they might engage in a one nighter or two. I believe that pigeon holes are a result of surface thoughts that cannot fly beyond their experience, cannot walk in the shoes of another, cannot imagine the worst and best possible outcomes of things...preferring to hover just above getting dirty and messy in the understanding. I am filthy now, and finding it fascinating. As each thought challenges understanding of the previous moment, I am bejeweled in tones that have no place in black or white. The confusion is somehow heady...a shiver of anticipation, an open book, first note of a song unheard. I feel strange. I feel colorful.

Been There - Done That

She sat with her knitting, gnarled hands having within them still the capacity, the inherent memory to move without much thought. Needles clicking a dance taught century after century in the knitting circle. She knit with love, for the boy...soon a man. Laughing, she could picture his face when she gave him the sweater. He would make a minimal attempt at gratitude with no intent of wearing a handmade garment. Didn't fit in with his rags, his colors, his half pants which he cinched around his thighs to accentuate his plaid clad ass. Yes, she thought...ass! She could say it, she's seen more than her fair share. Little did they know. They'll read her diaries when she's gone. That oughta make for some interesting dinner conversation!

Oh how she loved that boy, hiding behind all that bling and bother, thinking he "all dat"... individualising himself. To her, it just made him all the more invisible behind a full body costume. "Style my ass" she thought, and giggled at the reference yet again. She understood, though it was assumed she disapproved. He could wear pink feathers from head to toe and he would still be her grand baby...the one she spoiled rotten three evenings a week for ten solid years, while his momma worked the late shift. The boy who asked for pigs in a blanket every single night for dinner, the boy obsessed with Shark Week, the boy she held close when he missed his daddy.Now he's all 'growed', talking like a gangsta and dressing like a thug. He sports his tats like badges of courage, like he is the only one, like it's something new. Hell, she hid her markings for sixty years, no longer proud of what they represented. Only her husband and her doctor knew where they were, only she knew what they meant. Now, there would be one more.

She put the final touches on the sweater, holding it up and breaking out into a fit of laughter with the strength she had left. It was....perfect. She grabbed her diaries, full of photographs, mementos, a hard life outlined on brittle pages. Sorry now, that she kept it all under wraps. This memoir of sorts would all have to speak for itself now, and perhaps ... help the boy find his way. Well, no point in wondering. She wrapped an earlier life in a present day sweater, sure the careful stitching on the front was straight, and packaged it for shipping. That done, she placed yarn and needles into the basket beside her chair with a final sigh of satisfaction. What was hidden in life, would be known in death. With a final giggle she slid her sweater off one shoulder and set the first image free. As light faded she imagined her epitaph...."Here lies grandma, who thought it right, to hide the fact, she thug fo' life."

Boys to Men

"Tommy threw a pencil at me in class...and, and...it hit me in the chin and...and...Miss Thompson got Tommy in trouble cuz she said that wasn't nice and the lead, you know the thingy part of the pencil that writes, is like poison. I was almost poison Mom!"

Where once I heard you, now I must read you. The set of your shoulders, the curve of back. A shift of eye. I read your happiness in green shod feet with a springy step. Your sadness expelled in short temper or darkened expression. I highlight your passages and mark your margins, trying to understand the things unsaid.

You were line of site as a child, always narrating your life in sequential monologues. Now I must study you...weigh carefully each word, as they are few. Focused attention must be given to the subtle nuances that are inherent in sparse conversations. "Shhh" is never spoken, and speech is what I crave. Yes, I read you now....my latest mystery. I cannot skip ahead, but wait patiently for dropped bread crumbs, inviting me to know. Wishing for loaves.

Wrong Keyboard

Thirteen years of practice and recitals. Days of musical inebriation, three sheets to the Steinway. I liked it, I did. Defined me for a time, ebony and ivory footnotes to an ordinary life. Birthed ninety-eight babies which died in infancy, leaving an afterbirth of lyric....melody still-born. Ah yes...the lyric, I saw them tightly ensconced in the dusty baby book and blew back their origin, digging for the organic matter prior to the vehicle, the keys.

Months of practice. Days of literary inebriation, three sheets to the story. I love it, I do. Defines me now, memoirs to an ordinary life. Birthed one hundred and seven babies which live in ways I have not, cannot....little legacies growing of their own accord. Tightly ensconced in a virtual book where dust has no reach. The keys to me...they are here and I have gifted some, others were borrowed, pressed in clay and molded beyond my invitation...even more welcome for their effort. More unlocking of late, preparation for recital.

I sit, hands poised above the keyboard...a tense vibration running digit lengths in heady anticipation. What child will be born this day...male, female, healthy, disturbed? And with exquisite release, fingers fly, sight unnecessary. Eyes closed, head back, I free that which has knit itself together in life's womb. Today the birthing is easy. Tomorrow may require Pitocin. Perhaps I will hemorrhage with dams burst...skin tearing, as life claws its way to surface.

No matter. Once labor begins, even I cannot hold it back.