Morning Pages Saturday October 7th 2023
It all comes down to choices. My husband says, who was choosing to spend his time among the trees. They don’t care. He says. About everything I was missing. You just get to start to see what they need, which one needs water, which leaves need to be trimmed. Which ones were beginning to drop their leaves. Because despite the heat, fall was here, and they knew. The spindly walnuts beginning to curl and yellow. Catching the light in the morning and in the evening. The citrus trees heavy with fruit that had yet to ripen.
I was falling into the familiar touch of depression. August’s perpetual heartbreak bleeding into September’s grief bleeding into October. My birthday coming and the heat cooking up my longing. Staying for weeks.
I hadn’t lost myself becoming a mother, but I outgrew myself. The one I had grown most to identify with - half dressed, and always sandy, and filled with poetry. On my way into or out of a movie. I had loved her. Now it was my daughter who was filled with sand, who was dragging my mother down to the shore line, who wanted to go into the ocean. Any body of water In! In! she will cry. Until I take her.
I didn’t want to scare you. I say over the phone to a girlfriend who just had a baby. Hearing the recoil in her voice. Hearing the water. The undercurrent of new motherhood, you will feel like drowning. I say. What nobody warns you about is the flooding. That you will have to go under. That you will have to start swimming sideways and hard. That at some point you will have to be okay with all the grief, and the unknown, and the what was. It helped to walk. I tell her. That I began to be able to identify pear tree from apple from peach. That I fell in love with a neighbor’s magnolia tree. With all the gardenias turning their heads up as we walked by.
I laugh and tell my husband I did think this would be the year of my garden. Digging up the rose bush that didn’t survive the heat. We had both been reborn, once, from contrary action.
What I want for my birthday is to go for a hike. I tell him.
And on the body, I no longer recognize as my own, I begin to spread some oil, dutifully, with the promise that maybe the other one would return. Smelling of the sage I would pull up by the handfuls while leaving the Prairie, that I would let dry and hang to the wall, gathering dust, again a different life.
I think of the great Charles Olson who began his stanzas of The Kingfishers (which I can’t claim to understand but love and return to any way) writing
What does not change / is the will to change
and
when the attentions change / the jungle leaps in
and
Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change