The Week

Sunday, June 16th 2024

I wrote and deleted four different ways to portray myself as anxious in an entryway. First, I was an anxious pillar with indecisive hands. Later, I denied the anxiety, comparing myself to a rug collecting footprints and dust. Then, I admitted that I am not a pillar and I do not hold up a house. Lastly, I went with what really happened, which is to say that I had had it with the spiraling that happens in my head. I walked over to the table, picked up a book, took it outside, sun blazing, and read it.

I did later botanize with Brian on a trail in Duncansville. I thought slippery dogwood was ninebark. I thought mugwort was goldenrod. I laugh at my mistakes. Brian has had an ear infection for about two weeks now. It affects his hearing and he is in pain and so I walk on his left side, the side that hears me. Everything keeps its own tempo and we have been living in the staccato tempo of pain. We leave events early. We keep the miles short.

I later took Silas and met with Steve and his teenaged daughter, whom I’ve never met. She is her own version of her father which is easy to say without knowing her mother. We spotted smooth, rounded glass, ceramic, and industrial bits and pieces along the sandbar until the sun shifted its work elsewhere. At one point, I picked up a rock that glistened with golden pointillism, an imprint from egg sacs. I accidentally left it on a rock in the middle of the river. I wonder if it will be there when and if I soon return.

Rabbit-holing led me to The Church of the Sacred Whale--which I will need to read more about at a later date.

Monday, 6/17/24

I went to the gym and then read in the shade of a Norway Maple. The dogs pranced in and out of the house during this first day of a heat wave. I stepped on a sharp stone in the yard but it did not break the skin.

I then rode my bike three miles to the wetlands. After walking the grassy path, I walked into the shallow river. I found a round, dry rock in the middle and had a sit-and-think, but I didn’t think of anything important. I dislodged a leaf from a rock in the river and watched its path down the river’s surface. It will decompose, starting at a vulnerable hole or tear, just like anything else. Anyone else.

I put my palms down on the surface of the water, barely touching it. I wanted to see how long it would take before it felt like nothing was there. At first it felt like the iambs of blood pumping through the heart. I suddenly started to think about how I sometimes press my finger pads together and bend and stretch my fingers repeatedly until the pads of my fingers feel like they have a wooden board between them.

For the past two weeks, everything has been looking like a turtle. Debris on a road. A rustling leaf. A scummy rock on the river bottom.

Brian and I watched a storm creep in. The thick thunderhead clouds, usually a matte blue-gray color, rose like dinosaur heads on the horizon. The storm came and went, unlike the humidity.

Tuesday, 6/19/24

I finished Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Spring in which he spends the entire book recounting to his daughter--an infant at that time-- a day where they visited her mentally ill mother in the hospital. He has a luminous way of writing about absolutely nothing. I sometimes don’t know if I love or dislike a paragraph that goes on with examples or descriptors. I’m somehow pulled in while at the same time aware of time passing.

We are in the midst of a heat wave. Again, the dogs go in and out. Their herd mentality has them wanting to be outside with me. I watch for the signs--the panting that looks like smiling. Cosmo digging a dirt bed. Silas standing near the entrance to the house. To and fro I go, letting them in and then out when I hear their yelping inside the house. (Let me in, I want to come back out again! Let me out, I want to go back in again!) I tell myself it’s okay to spend time in the conditioned air, on the couch, watching “Anatomy of a Fall”. I did not quite take sides in the lover’s quarrel. I am not much of a side-taker in anything unless enough information allows it. Ignorance, empathy, or apathy are to blame.

It just dawned on me that in just one day, I absorbed situations where humans were holding their mentally ill spouses accountable for their actions. At what point is the demand for accountability going too far?  

Wednesday, 6/19/24

Some folks do not have a mind’s eye. They cannot visualize and this is called aphantasia (Greek for No Imagination). The opposite, which many people possess, is hyperphantasia. Not only can I visualize my husband in one of his favorite t-shirts standing in our kitchen, I can also see the pan of stir-fry sizzing behind him and simultaneously see our mud room aglow in evening light, some spilled bird seed on the black and white floors and oh also I can visualize bursting out the roof of my house, seeing old nails and planks and I can feel the hot, malleable roof bend over my head and up up up up up I go and everything is getting smaller, the catalpa flowers mere white specks, now too small to see, and the valley in which we live is just a vein and up up up up into the nihilistic black, because the higher we go, the less things matter. This is where I spend a lot of my time, in the black, whirling through ethereal darkness as people around me talk about shopping, what they might cook for dinner, and I don’t know what else because I’m up in the black. Someone please kidnap me and bring me back down, give me something mundane to care about so I don’t get too far gone. But also, leave me alone.

Thursday, 6/20/24

First day of summer. I took Silas to the river.

I sat in the heat and watched a bee drink from my watercolor pallet. How easily that bee could easily fall into the water and get swept up. It’s like humans with fire. We get near enough to it for the warmth, hands extended. What is the difference between touching fire and burning?

Friday, 6/21/2024

It is so hot, the inside of my car tasted sour.

We picnicked at Canoe Lake and then shot the breeze with the Starlight Astronomy folks as the full Strawberry Moon rose over the horizon.

I don’t take this sweetness for granted. To balance my privilege, I think of horrible things very, very often, and I feel these horrible things very, very deeply.

Someday it will be my turn again.

Saturday, 6/22/2024

Dead fawn on the side of the road. Pan upwards and there are people riding on amusement park rides and plummeting down water slides. Four minutes away from home, I fight the weeping I want to do. I think that my reservoir of tears is always full, always ready to breach. The poor doe, her poor baby.

My weekend starts.

Sunday, 6/23/24

Long weekend with my parents. After Brian and the dogs head home, I ride a new-to-me trail along the Allegheny River. I watched a storm travel upriver towards me. I hadn’t seen rain in about two weeks. It made me deliriously happy. So deliriously happy that I continued on the trail, straight straight straight, past some railroad tracks, past a bright burst of Swamp Milkweed, and to a grove of Autumn Olive where I stopped to look at their frosted-looking leaves. I got on my bike, going further, past another bright burst of Swamp Milkweed, and past railroad tracks that had a similar pothole to the one before, and hey, that path to the left looks familiar, and hey, how did I go straight along a river only to end up where I was?

Monday, 6/24/24

There was a small likeliness to see friends this weekend. I threw the bait out, and as usual there were small nips but no commitments to reel in. But I am also not a good fisherperson. Usually when I'm holding the line, I hope that the bait and the hook slip off so all that's left is a transparent, floating line that only a keen eye will notice. Then, I gently lay the line on the shore and step away into the invasive (evasive?) knotweed.

Stung by a honeybee. Stunned, I dropped my drink and rode the burning wave. My eyes poised themselves on the bee, stumbling in the blades of grass so dramatically, but of course it’s dramatically because they were dying. My dad, waiting for me at the car, stared at his daughter who for whatever reason dropped her drink and was hunched over the grass, telling it she was so, so sorry. Is she crying?

I later hiked with my parents’ dog, who is not used to hills and distance. We kept things short, sweet, shady, and hydrated. She slept for the entire feature-length time it took for my parents and I to play a game of Phase 10.

In the evening, I pulled the honey bee stinger from my toe. So small. I gently placed it on the dresser of the bedroom my parents have for me. My little stinger secret (not anymore, I guess). I want to see if it will still be there when I visit next.