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.