Weathering It

On a recent Saturday evening, we had come home a bit late from a splurge dinner out with friends to celebrate our sixth anniversary. My November funk had persisted and, after weeks of going through these work and family motions feeling disconnected from Sam, I had a hard time shaking my literal and psychological fatigue. “Are we even in love any more?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied, “We are. That’s what gets us through the times when we feel like we’re not in love.” Sam will go long periods of time without saying anything at all, but when he's down to the wire to avoid disaster, he usually says just the right thing. I went to bed willing to put a seemingly "inevitable" divorce off for at least a bit longer.

When I woke up the next morning, on our actual anniversary, the world and the house were still dark. My thoughts were too, but less so. I tried to clear the sleep from my head as I approached the stairs to take Quinn down to the kitchen for her glass of warm syrupy milk and my coffee. We were feeling our way from step to step, and long before I reached the island light switch, the smell of the storm ahead reached my nose. I put Quinn next to the tree post and told her to stay there while I tread carefully around the first floor, turning on lights as I followed my nose to the smell: a literal shit storm was about to begin and it started with a cold pile in the middle of the living room rug.

This is the third November in a row that’s found me feeling depressed; by now I recognize it as a pattern, and patterns are meant to be analyzed. So why, in this month that marks my birthday and my wedding anniversary and my favorite of all holidays, Thanksgiving, why now would I feel so persistently sad? Add to this the fact that in November I am largely relieved of my teaching duties as kids ship off to points west for ski training, and it all seems so illogical. As I scrambled around in my pre-coffee haze, trying to clean up the mound of fecal matter, a few answers started to come to mind.

First is that without the structure of school, Sam and I often flounder. I especially need the sense of purpose that my job provides, and without it unproductive days and hours pass and I feel dissatisfied, at best, if not completely unhappy. I love my job and I love to work. So, while I expect to enjoy the bit of extra time “off,” I haven’t yet managed to find a rhythm for myself in that undefined time. But, this is a fixable problem…

What I do end up doing in that available time is scheduling all the things that are hard to otherwise fit in: doctor’s appointments, tire changes, etc. And this brings me to the second challenge of November. In recent years, my doctor’s appointments haven’t been as uneventful as they used to be, nor nearly as uneventful as I’d like them to be. This month, still trying to solve some early skin cancer spots on my face, I had to do a 14 day topical chemo-therapy treatment. My face looked like a pepperoni pizza and my vanity was equally inflamed. What my still-not-annual physical turned up, ironically, is that my vitamin D level is insufficient, explaining my low energy and moodiness. (And here I was thinking it was just the result of being a Scorpio!?) My skin is telling me too much sun, and my blood is telling me not enough! Fortunately, this is fixable too…

Finally, November brings Vermont fully into the throes of hunting season. While I appreciate the notion of truly fresh meat, and the New England self-sufficiency that informs the hunting tradition, I hate knowing that each day there are beautiful wild animals being hauled from these acres of woods in the backs of pickup trucks. On our little horseshoe road, we rarely see anyone pass by most of the year; in hunting season there is a steady stream of slow driving, broad scanning hunters. I hear gunshots from inside the house. And, worst of all, our dogs manage to find gut piles and bones left behind in the woods. And when they find them, they eat them. And when they eat them, they regurgitate them and then eat them again.

I put the dogs’ orange vests on that morning and sent them outdoors into the predawn dark while I resentfully cleaned the rug. Some time later, when I had forgiven Moses for his dastardly deposit in our living room (Boone would have barked to go out), I heard them return to the front porch and went to let them back in. Boone almost made it past me into the house when I spotted the green-brown sludge on his shoulder. While I don’t know what he rolled in, I know I didn’t want it inside so I sent them back out. When Sam eventually woke up, I told him about the shit storm that was well underway. He was determined to have his coffee before going out to scrub Boone in the cold. That was until I spotted Boone eating something over by my vegetable garden. Sam must have seen Moses throw up there because when I drew his attention to it, he panicked. “No! Boone! No!” He grabbed his jacket and ran out the door. Quinn and I opened the upstairs window to peer out just in time to watch Boone throw up some sort of fully intact organ. By the time Sam finally cleaned Boone and came back inside, it was Moses’ turn. Without even getting up from his bed, he threw up a green slime that was so pungent, I ran to the window to gag.

Some hours later, when rugs and floors and orange vests and dogs and their beds were all cleaned, I felt my November funk fully dissolve as Sam and I gave in to laughter and hugged in the kitchen, commenting on the very unromantic nature of our sixth anniversary. I never tire of these metaphors: life is a shit storm sometimes, and you’re lucky if you have someone to weather it with. I felt a new appreciation for my partner that morning, thanks to those ridiculous dogs. 

And in the nearly two weeks since, as I’ve studied this recent November pattern, I’ve been reminded of some important facts, about my life and my relationship with Sam. 

Sam’s mom and dad sent us a card for our anniversary, one that in a supreme irony pictured a dog sleeping between two people in a bed. What they wrote inside brought me back to one thing that’s especially good in our relationship:

In these recent three years, we’ve been forced to be constantly connected to each other in a way that isn’t quite natural for us. We haven’t been able to truly function independently in a long time, save for a couple of brief outings each of us has had in the past year or so. And that’s the thing: we need more of those, in order to more fully appreciate our time together, and continue "forging forth in all of the essentials." Acknowledging this might help us feel a renewed commitment to the vows we each wrote six years ago. Looking back on them now, I’m as surprised as I was on our wedding day, by how they are almost exactly the same, even though we wrote them separately and unveiled them to each other only just before our ceremony:

For me, Sam wrote this: “I promise to keep alive our desire to explore the world--from what is in our backyard to what is overseas--and to keep seeking out adventure and experience, whether it is traveling to new places or building a house or starting a family...I promise to give you the space to walk away when you need to be alone, to be your own person for a moment...I promise to love you and support you unconditionally, in good times and bad…”

And for Sam, I wrote this: “I promise to honor you each day as best as I can, by being near you when you need me, and by letting you go when you need that of me. I promise to be a partner who encourages your dreams, one who supports your personal adventures and who gladly participates in those you want to share. I promise to love you unconditionally, in good times and bad…”

In spite of my tendency to see life in absolutes--as in: because we are not, in this specific moment, enjoying one another’s company, we must, absolutely, be destined for divorce--Sam and I have not really had any truly bad times. I forget, sometimes, that there can be a third or fourth or fifth category, other than good or bad. The weeks spanning October and early November, for example, seem to fall somewhere outside of both good and bad. And, as Quinn would say, "that's just the way it is!"

Fortunately there is Thanksgiving to help me put things back into perspective and take stock of all the things I’m truly thankful for. This year, among many things, I’m especially grateful for this guy:

And the warm house he built me, and the beautiful sunrises he made sure I could see each morning.

And I’m grateful for this kid, my hero, who woke up on the day before my birthday and, before saying anything else, told me: “Mom! You need to show up for your family. You need to show up for your life. And you need to ‘make the world more beautiful.’” *

I’m not kidding, or exaggerating, or writing fiction...she actually said that. And she’s right. So that’s what I’m trying to do right now...trying to show up and appreciate all there is to appreciate: my family, all of them, on both sides, and those dear friends who are family too, my "voluntary kin," and the adventures that have made me who I am, and those I have yet to experience, and this beautiful chunk of Vermont woods that is my church. 

I’m thankful for all of it, and you: thank you for reading my stories. Happy Thanksgiving.






*If you haven't already, you should read Miss Rumphius too, a wonderful book given to us by wonderful people: Roni & Matt & Megan and Ben Luck. It's made an important impression on Quinn, and us. 

The In-Between

We’re just coming off a nearly seven week stretch of continuous work days. Some of my “work” is just participation in school-related events, and some of those events are really wonderful occasions: the engagement of two former students (one a young woman who backpacked on the Long Trail with me for almost three weeks, and the other a young man who lived with us when we were dorm parents for a group of kids), the celebration for another former student who is beginning medical school, the annual fall musical, the boys’ soccer team playing in the state championship game. It’s all good stuff, and I love what I do, but when I add to this the actual work, whole months can go by without me stopping to notice, without getting any exercise, without any dinners with Sam that aren’t pressured by reading or grading that needs to get done. A whole seven weeks of Quinn have passed in a relative blur.

When so much time passes like that, I start to get run down, worried that I’m missing important things or wasting precious days. And then, when I’m out of practice being mindful, or I’m out of any potential routine of eating well and exercising, I worry that I’ll be so far gone from healthy that I won’t be able to ever get it back. I sit down to write and don’t have anything to say. I look in the mirror and don’t have anything to say. I stop sleeping.

But in the nearly two months since I last sat down to write, some wonderful things have happened. I went to my twentieth college reunion with my three best friends. We had a tiny little hotel room for two nights, with two tiny beds for the four of us, and we were happy and without complaint. When everyone arrived, we fell immediately into old patterns. Each set of former roommates gravitated automatically to sharing a bed. We laughed for hours, told and listened to stories, retraced some of our old steps: running a morning 5k together, climbing to the top of the fire escape that looks out over the lake, sitting at the bar, four in a row, at the brewery where we used to always go. I still live near our old stomping grounds, but for some reason I never go to the old places we went. College was a pretty magical time; it’s just not the same without them. 

Still, none of us would go back if we could. Life is too sweet right now, with all of us still living in the happy here and now--no divorces so far, no cancers yet, no teenage crises or traumas to endure. It’s all just stories of trying to keep it all afloat, stories of funny moments and the shared insanities of the little people in our lives. For now, it’s all just a looking forward to more brightness still to come.

Quinn has been wearing her coon skin cap a lot these days; often with Mardi Gras beads.

And there was a lot of brightness with Quinn in this past month and a half too. We've made continued progress treating each other kindly and dealing with the meltdowns--hers and our own. One tired morning, after barely getting out the door, Quinn called to us from her car seat. When she points, she uses her middle finger. She wagged that middle finger at us from the back seat and lectured us all the way to school: "Mom! Dad! I do not like those angry faces. I want you to work on making happy choices today, okay? I am so serious about this. Happy choices! OKAY?" By the time we arrived at her school, she insisted we needed to hug each other and make up, even though we had never been fighting. We're just spreading the love around it seems, around and around and..."Mom! That will make Dad so happy right now, okay? Go ahead...give him a hug." 

Quinn is also starting to take ownership of some "chores" around the house these days, like plugging in all the white lights when we come home to a dark house, setting the placemats and napkins on the table for dinner, crumpling paper to start a fire in the wood stove. She's in a "big girl" bed, with the front finally off of her crib, and she's quite proud of that. She went to see Shrek the musical with me at school, which she loved and still talks about, and she went trick-or-treating for the first time on Halloween (just to one house, my friend Meg's across from Quinn's school). Quinn chose her own Halloween costume of course--she wanted to be a butterfly--and she made suggestions for ours too: she thought I should be a "scary tiger mom," which I thought was ironic, and she wanted Sam to be "a scary princess," which I thought was, well, hilarious.

Quinn and Ansley were Meg's first trick or treaters in her new house.

This is the slightly more put together outfit Quinn wore for her school Halloween Party.

These are the things I need to remember when the malaise of early November starts to set in. After the leaves have fallen, and the cold has settled, and the clocks have been turned back to add more darkness, I have to carry the bright spots with me as I enter the nebulous transition to winter. It is undefined time, a place I’m not good at being, and if I'm not careful I can lose track of myself in these grey days.

Driving home from a friend’s the other night, after a much needed break, a gigantic owl dipped down in front of my windshield and glided in front of me over the dark dirt road. I hadn’t seen one in a long time. At four o’clock this morning, I woke suddenly to the yip and howl of a coyote in my back woods. I haven’t been able to write anything in weeks, but peering out into darkness, the coyote in one ear, Quinn’s sleeping breath nearby in the other, I wanted to open my computer right then. Finally, I thought, I feel awake.

At six o’clock I came downstairs to let the dogs out and was happily surprised to be greeted by winter--three fresh inches of beautiful white snow. I watched the first spot of light begin to grow on the clouds over the ridge. Quinn padded quietly down the stairs. 

“Hi, Mama.” 
“Good morning, sweet pea.”
“Wanna know how many times I love you?”
“I do.”
“I love you like crazy…”

The syntax is whacky, but that’s the beauty of it, of course. 

“Mom? Wanna look at the mountain with me?”
“I do.”
“What colors do you like best?”

All of them, thanks to you Quinn; I like all of them.