Summering

I thought about using AI to give this a title (I didn't, never have, never will) but really this is just an update about this summer and what I am encountering.

I pulled up to this park that I’ve known about my whole life and sometimes sat in and I sat there again and watched beetles crawl between granny squares on my crocheted blanket that lives in my car for these sorts of occasions. 

I walk every day in the heaven verging field. (Mary Oliver said this, not me)

Across the park there is a dad and a little daughter juggling with hot pink bowling pins (?) and they don’t drop a single one. They’re standing at either end of a seesaw on the sitting part. 

It’s kind of bizarre and I think the bumble bees in the clover agree with me because suddenly a lot more of them are over here in my patch of clover far away from the juggling instruments. Is anyone else seeing a lot more bumblebees this summer? Does anyone else feel like this section was a little trite? Did anyone else think you’d always be afraid of bumblebees until one day you weren’t anymore?

My future is wide open and yawning and I’m scared to death all the time and as I start to travel down those familiar, ugly pathways I look up and see a girl with long, straight, dark hair wearing a blue t-shirt who is probably a little bit younger than me and she is staring at the clover pensively, probably like I just was, probably like neither of us should have to. Nagging anxious subtlety is hard to get rid of even on a beautiful afternoon. She dropped down to her back, so I did too, and I think we’re both feeling better this way. 

Two older women just got up from where they were sitting behind me. I wasn’t listening to much of their conversation but one of them yelled, actually yelled, that she wants to take care of herself full time, which is a sentiment I can understand and it’s nice to see I’ll probably still feel that way when I’m old. 

I’ve taken a lot of good and bad things for granted.

I’m learning to not get knocked out of alignment so easily. The physical part of that learning feels great because I do yoga every single day and I love my body for allowing me that and I’m not too scared of food anymore. In my head it’s a little harder because sometimes in not permitting myself an irrational overreaction or in calming-down-and-going-to-work-and-caring-for-the-sick-kid-anyway I feel I am losing something of my rebellious spirit. 

My phone is drowning in donation requests, different people begging me to vote blue, stay blue, and can we have twenty dollars? So half the time I feel sick and scared and even more sick and even more scared when I watch family members identify their dead in Gaza. For the first times in my life I have been unable to move because these videos freeze me in place and in fight, flight, or freeze I become freeze for a second and sometimes I freeze so completely I have to call my mom to help me unstick myself and walk to the bathroom and drink some cold water and unroll my yoga mat and continue. No one wants to be “freeze,” least of all me, that one feels pathetic in the face of wide cruelty.

And yet this morning it was sixty five degrees and I got to do my yoga in a beautiful room and when I drove home the sun was high and the breeze cool and I was cheerful and open without much thought. I’m trying to be joyful and sometimes it is really, really easy. That has to count for something. 

I’ve been enjoying being in love inside of or in proximity to a body of water. Small currents remind us that nothing can stay still but maybe your hand can stay in my pocket for a good long while yet. Two swallows on a rail ask a rhetorical question and fly away, weaving in and out of each other’s trails, before answering it. Last night we went fishing and I wished for thousands of dollars to buy us an unpretentious boat and build a beautiful cabin in which to move slow and stay curious. 

I’m knitting a scarf out of beautifully dyed, cheap-ass synthetic yarn and I can’t wait to wrap it around my head and wear a pair of sunglasses and visit in the fall. 

I’m lucky to be here among old friends and friends who feel old. I’m lucky to have my little blue car and my loves to drive to. I’m lucky to have two old cats around now who sometimes eat mice and don’t get along. 

I’m lucky to have met one family with a giant old dog and a sweet little son and I’m lucky that I got to take him to a playground and walk him home and listen to his excited shrieks about water and plants and then to listen to them slowly die away and discover it’s because he had fallen asleep in the stroller. 

I’m lucky that the sick kid napped for a long time and let me finish two books, getting me two closer to closing my five book deficit and getting back on track to my yearly reading goal. 

It doesn’t feel wrong at all being in my childhood bedroom as it often has since I started college. I am doing a few more dishes and cooking for myself every day and my room is a hot fucking mess. I’m finding it easy to clean up everybody’s room but my own. But I don’t feel terribly fractured and am existing comfortably in the room of Annas ages three to twenty-one. 

My family is kind and flatulent (mostly me, yucky) and patient with me. My friends are brilliant and wise and beautiful and I miss the faraway ones right now. My love is gentle and kind and bespectacled. Clover is wildly blooming. Minnesota has been rainy so the water is high. Today it isn’t blazingly hot and I got to wear a sweater. 

I’m thinking the girl with the long dark hair might actually be a woman who is much older than me. She’s still laying over there, but I’m getting hot and antsy to publish.