There’s just this thing I’ve been turning over in my head for a few days: while people are talking about how he wasn’t a kid, not a boy, call him what he was, a man, because he was heavy, and tall, and talked about grown up things? Could we remember that he was actually a child in every single sense of the word? He was too young to vote. He was too young to join the military. He was too young to buy alcohol. His frontal lobe wasn’t fully developed. He was, perhaps most critically, too young to avail himself of Florida’s concealed-carry permit. He was unable to match George Zimmerman’s choice of weapons in this duel. Even if it’s true that Treyvon had turned around and was using Florida’s Stand Your Ground law correctly, defending himself against a perceived threat, he didn’t stand a chance. Because he was not old enough to equally match his assailant.

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The day slogged on, a horrible day filled with pointless doctor visits and rain at the grocery store, where while inside I managed to accost a man buying Mother’s Milk tea and corn syrup to put in the baby’s formula. Oh, I wouldn’t do that, I said while dispensing totally unsolicited advice. Like a boss an ass. One more interaction that seals it for me that I hate leaving my house. The people out there, I can’t take it.

It hit me while I wandered the store tossing ingredients for enchiladas into the cart: I’m doing this for him. I am here, even though he would and usually does take on this chore, because I need to do at least one thing today that tells him I love him. I know. So old married couple, right? It’s not that. The thing is that since I’ve been getting sicker when we’d hoped I’d get better, he does everything. The playing, the lunches, the homework. He does them and I don’t know how he feels about it because part of what we do is pick our battles carefully. For a while I thought we were this way because we didn’t like each other’s company, but now I begin to see that all the overlooking of quirks, faults, sick days, socks on the floor, dumb purchases-these are all expressions of deep love. I look at something that makes me angry and I slowly roll around to this thought: “nothing that happened here was designed to hurt you. We are not a couple who uses pet peeves or passive aggressive actions to hurt one another. Glasses on the nightstand are what they are and nothing more. Laundry in the dryer is just laundry to fold. A period of silence after work isn’t aimed at you. Maybe it’s not about you at all.”

I spent the day hating myself and what I’ve become as a person and a partner and a mother. There are just so many days like this. A little scrap of conversation here-a new TV show marathon there- that’s my fuel sometimes for days. He still wants to be with me. He cares.

What they don’t tell caretakers of the ill is that they’ll never be allowed to have a real problem again. I wish I could tell you how long and how often I dwell on this, turning the guilt over in my mind for hours. 

This holiday is so stupid. So commercial. So much fair weather love. I wonder...could it also be the New Year’s Eve of our love? A time for resolution?

Here is what I know: when you give another person any part of yourself purely out of love, be it actions, words, skin: the internal reward is an opening of a closed up flower. A dim light in an icy window. I wish I could remember this feeling all day, every day. There is so much strength in giving.

Whenever I feel the least loved, what chases that feeling away is stretching to the end of what I know, and giving love freely.

I don’t know why he is so good to me. This is not the trip he signed up for. Sometimes it hurts even to share dreams with each other, given our situation. Sometimes I think he might leave me, and I would accept it. I think back on how we were and want those things for him again.

But we are partners and I love him. I want to be better.

He watched Breaking Dawn with me. I mean, what more can someone ask of their mate?

 This new brand of depression, packaged with what they’re calling perimenopause, is cruel and hopeless. I often sense that nothing will ever be right again, and I notice that my family is slipping away. I don’t know how to fight to get them back. I just, every day, wake up and try to pick a few things that will make them happy, in hopes that little by little they’ll see that I am so very much trying to be here, even as I burrow under the covers for another day of research and budgeting.

I am loved. I am grateful for that. And apologetic, deeply sorry, for the love I haven’t been able to give. I promise to do better.

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There was an endless tunnel of suffering, days that broke suddenly with a cruel grey cast, the whole world bathed in shadows and the sticky, fermented smell of deep melencholy that has no purpose. There would be a moment here, an instant there. Silky cat fur, a tiny hand wrapped in a larger hand. The soft snore of a little body finally at rest after a fitful bedtime. These flashes of what regular people call life were to be the fuel that fed the combine that made the consciousness come to the surface every day, ever hopeful. Will it be this day? These slices of light unwilling to be contained by blinds, are these the healing rays of the sun foretold in the articles, the stories, the motivational page-a-day calendars?

Is today the day a tattered hand breaks through the ground at the feet of the goddess, clawing up from the depths my bloody, bruised, filthy and exhausted body behind it?

More often than you might think and still expect to find a living being under the ground, the answer was no. Is no.

A body can, as it turns out, survive for an eternity under there. Under here.

I wish I could write the end of this story: the wrap-up, the witty tie in to the first sentence.

There is a six year old child behind me working to top the last outlandish hairstyle she gave me. In this moment, there is only the mirror, the feel of a brush being clumisly yanked through my hair, and an uncontained giggle.

Fuel.

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But she is also the person through whom I have had the opportunity to know true awe and pride. (You might not know that Hannah fought and won a complicated lawsuit against the Nassau County School Board when they denied her the right to start a Gay Straight Alliance at her middle and high schools. The case went on for a couple of years and even when the high school case was settled, Nassau County intended to take Hannah to trial over her middle school discrimination case.

In the end, a settlement was reached. Would you want to go up against this woman on a witness stand?

You can see Hannah on Penn N Teller’s “Bullshit” in the following clip, starting at 1:44, putting it out there what attacking her on the witness stand would net those guys. Smart move, Nassau County.

On Saturday I watched my daughter bring her baby girl into the world free of painkillers, intervention, and most of all free of fear. She was a fierce warrior and at one point even exclaimed irritably, “I got this” when I tried to manage her.

Here is Celica Leigh.  She came into the world surrounded by love and Hannah’s chosen family, in the home that Hannah has made for herself and her family. She weighed 8 lbs and 8 ounces and was 21 inches long.

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I’ve been complaining for years about the alienation of affection issue I have with my cats. Moving across the country created a neuroses in Moses that rivals anything I’ve written about personally here, and my children ruined the Blue Cat (Blutus, if you must know)for lap cat status. Even though she is a tolerant cat, allowing Jack to rub his face along her (blue velvet) fur every morning and afternoon – he likes the texture of silky things – she is not, and will never be, a lap cat, a close proximity cat, a….pliable cat.

In short, both of my adult cats, through circumstance related to-caused by, I will admit-US-are standoffish to the extreme even beyond the usual cat nature.

So, I’ve complained. I’ve threatened halfheartedly to get a kitten whenever the Blue Cat stood up peckishly and flounced off just because I put my face at her end of the bed. Michael never tires of pointing out that she IS me: particular, hot/cold, black/white, and only interested in company on her own terms. However, she’s very loyal: If I’m inside, she is in the room with me. If I go out the door, she follows. If she’s on the wrong side of the door, she’ll sit near glass and peer through it until someone finds her there. If I stayed in bed for three days I’ve no doubt that cat would do the same.)

That’s why when the carrier containing kittens showed up outside the feed store a few weeks ago with the huge sign on it that said “free”, it felt like an omen that this was the one day my kids were with me on my trip to buy milk and eggs.

“OMG! MOM! Can we go see the kittens please please please!?” My daughter was jumping out of her skin as I entered the store, where Michael had quickly whisked the kids, distracting them with the baby chicks and rabbits.

I was already holding a kitten.

I’d forgotten a few things about kittens, and by saying “it’s your call, honey. You’ve been saying you wanted a lap cat for a long time!” With that one sentence, my husband effectively washed his hands of any responsibility for the duties associated with these things.

I’ve probably never told you all how, when we lived in Long Beach, I parked my car on a sketchy street to make an appointment at a free clinic and when I went to lock the car I heard faint mewling coming from beside a chain link fence? There were two little balls of fur huddled against the fence and each other, on the sidewalk side. Their eyes, which were barely old enough to be open anyway, were crusted shut. I left them there and started walking because I was late. But they’d already heard my voice, so they started walking toward me anyway, blind. Sigh. Of COURSE I missed the appointment and took them home. Of COURSE we didn’t know what flea dirt was back then, so when we bathed them we thought they were dying and took them to the emergency vet in the middle of the night, where they depleted our savings account. Then we stayed up all night drying them in the heat of our gas fireplace. Oh, oceanfront apartment in Long Beach. Take us back!

But that’s not the point of the story, which is that when you take in one kitten that needs rescuing, more will find you because God Hates People Who Take In Stray Animals.

After we found homes for these two kittens, a child tried to sell my genetically-programmed-to-care-for-sick-things daughter a kitten out of a backpack at the playground. Off to the playground I went, where I confiscated four very small, emaciated kittens. We kept one: Moses, who we later brought with us to Florida. I’ve often said he couldn’t be improved upon, so I wouldn’t take the chance with another cat. But he’s 10 now, and we see him very little, as he spends more and more time outside, preferring the cool privacy of the crawlspace to the frenetic energy of my four and six year old. His recent mouth infection and the oral antibiotics we were forced to give him may have been the deciding factor in his final exit from the house. (But, we live in the country. It could be that he’s doing what cats naturally do when they get old)

In the years since we lived in Long Bach, we’ve cared for several litters of kittens that, due to the horrible problem of unspayed/unneutered cats, are born each year..

And so The Universe said, “What the fuck, you’re the Great Complainer and there are all those plaques that say “Be Careful What You Wish For”, you dumb fuck, you REALLY should listen lest ye be smote.”

The day I walked through the door from taking the little kitten to the clinic for her free 78.00 surgery, my cousin walked in right behind me with ANOTHER FUCKING KITTEN, not even 1/3 as large, that had been sitting in the road being passed over by traffic that same morning as I’d been on my way to the vet. Here I am cheerfully waving at my uncle with his hand hand held high out the truck window and what he’s actually doing was holding a cat up in the air trying to get my attention before I drove away. Ah, family. Why bother using a cell number.

Things I would like to remember about small animals, and perhaps my experience will help another person out there who is dissatisfied with their current situation and contemplating a change:

Babies are babies in any language. Babies need care in any species. Small=cute but small also=touching. All touching all the time. Example:

This is how I sleep now. I’m not kidding

Small animals in the country=hawk food=inside=litterboxes. Very small kittens mean cleaning up kitten shit. Small anything alive means cleaning up shit. Please, for the love of god, remember that small things produce large secretions. And you will, mamas: YOU WILL BE THE ONE TO CLEAN IT UP. YOUR NOSE WILL SMELL IT. YOUR HANDS WILL TOUCH IT. AND YOUR BODY WILL BE THE ONE THE SMALL THING WILL BE RESTING UPON WHEN THE ACCIDENT OCCURS. BELIEVE IT. This is nobody’s fault. It is a law of the Universe and also a consequence of your greediness and vocal complaints about alienation of affection from your perfectly good if a little standoffish, accident-free, shitless pets.

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Not Shitting. Anywhere Near or On Me.

Babies PLAY AT NIGHT. BABY ANIMALS PLAY WITH OTHER BABY ANIMALS. Be they the other baby animals in the house, or baby insects, or baby frogs that they kill or nearly kill and bring into the room, leaving you with a moral dilemma at 1, 2, 3 a.m.

Baby animals, with the help of The Almighty, WILL find the smallest, loudest thing in the house, at the exact moment you enter REM sleep, and will bring it into the room where you slumber. This is a test, maybe. Perhaps this is a commentary on your housekeeping by the Almighty. Marbles don’t belong on the floor anyway. Yes. Noted. Neither do kittens.

Do you remember how, as a mother, you adjusted your sleep pattern so that any noise woke you in an instant and yet incredibly, everyone else in the house was able to sleep RIGHT THROUGH IT? Through bedding changes, through feedings, through laundry machines going off and on, through toxic fumes permeating the entire house?

YES. THAT. TIMES INFINITY AD NAUSEUM. That is God. Smiting you.

Even at this age the eyes look devious.

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My second week of the indieink.org writing challenge:

It doesn’t seem possible, but this man on top of her seems to have inadvertently synchronized his thrusts with the whomp-whomp-whomp of the misaligned, black lacquered ceiling fan blade currently raining dust onto their sticky bodies. She considers just for a second asking him if he’s done this on purpose. “By the by, sir”, she would whisper, whiskey perfume into his sweaty ear. “But is this a trick you perform by design, for all the whores?”

In the retelling she’ll have asked him for real, just like that.  But in her version, he won’t be twice her age and dripping Jack Daniels sweat onto her carefully airbrushed face.  She’ll edit him with broad strokes when she resurrects this scene for her writer’s group on Saturday, when she turns their meal into a bistro dinner with an excellent bottle of Chardonnay and this room into a bungalow at the edge of that village on the lake.

On Saturday that 80’s era muscle car with the pop up lights and faded blue racing stripes becomes something else. Lexus sedan maybe dark blue or silver, leather interior lit blue with digital instrument panel, thumping mp3s filling up the space while they rode instead of the scratchy skipping CDs that littered the floor earlier tonight. On Saturday, she won’t tell how she fumbled for her inhaler in the car, unsure whether it was the smoke or ammonia from old urine stains in the carpet that made her need it.

When she uncaps her tortoiseshell pen tomorrow she knows she can erase the weathered brick red face that now fills the sky when she opens her eyes. Pen to paper, she’ll begin her edits from the top of his head right where the first thinning hair begins to comb over the first pink spot of shiny skin.

Stubby fingers punctuated with worker’s nails ringed with black reach out to brush hair out of her eyes. He’d like her to look at him, but he is new at this she realizes with a start. The expression on his face is tentative, as is his touch-a question. He doesn’t yet know that he can command her to do so.

She harnesses the grateful heat that washes over her with the realization of that last, lets it flow from her eyes and mouth as, with one slow blink, she mentally arranges his features into those of her first lover.

Teresa was a sprightly, small breasted woman with the longest, reddest hair she’d ever seen. She’d aspired to look like Ariel, so much so that she carried a child’s lunchbox as a purse. In the best or the worst of times, the girl could conjure Teresa because she was quite possibly the most colorful person she’d ever known. Teresa was nearly covered in tattoos and wore her fuchsia hair in a different style every day. Conjuring her during sex is a delicious flashcard game: behind her eyelids is a different Teresa every time she blinks and she is never disappointed.

In the living room, “I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done” catches her ear and becomes the mantra for this scene. Hoarse, slurring raucous voices scream along with the music and she wonders how she stepped into this world where this happens and people sing these songs by heart; this place she, for shit’s sake, is lying on her side holding money while an old man, layering himself protectively in flannel and denim, looks everywhere in this matchbox room but her body.

When the words float across the room to her she is sure that she can see them: “Would you mind if I see you again?” Hanging in the air. Perhaps they are in a Trebuchet or maybe a serif font, is that a Georgia?

In the retelling, of which there will of course be several, she will have said lightly, with just the slightest wry lilt but not too mean, “Honey, did you ever even see me at all?”. It is true that only at this explosive moment of unadulterated awkwardness, stripped bare of pretense, money in hand, dead condom on the patched linoleum floor of a yellow diamond pattern she thinks, she only just this moment stops to consider what the man may have been looking at. Only right at this instant she considers, deflated, that she was quite possibly invisible to him, too.

“No” She says simply, and hopes that is enough, turning over in the bed to wrap herself up in the dingy red and white striped sheet. Who’s house is this? Not his house.  He’s leaving, and anyway he was wearing a wedding ring, embossed gold with a diamond if she remembers correctly but-no it was on his pinky. Maybe he’d gained some weight.

In the retelling, she has wrapped herself in white Egyptian cotton sheets and has posed herself gracefully against a padded headboard, smoking, while he dresses and makes his exit.  Maybe she carries a glass of champagne. She will hold her pose until the click of a faded gold tinted door handle releases her.

Whomp-whomp-whomp. She synchronizes her hops to the fan as she steps into her jeans. Then she simply gathers her things, sweeps bills off a dingy floral bedspread, kicks the dead condom in the general direction of a wicker trashcan, and mentally recomposes her evening on her way out the door. Like that’s just that.

When she publishes her memoirs, the story goes like this: Once upon a time, a high priced call girl met attractive wealthy business men for just a very few brief, luxurious affairs that paid her way through a quite respectable college career.

In the retelling, over flights of red wine with the closest of friends one night, she admits tearfully that her book contains a few lies, some embellishments that were her editor’s idea. It’s that single admission that changes everything.  She can see it in his face  when she makes the reveal, the man who one day will become her husband. She knows right then, sitting at the table clinking glasses tearfully expressing gratitude to her friends for their unconditional acceptance of her fallibility, that she has made the perfect edits.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Indie Adams challenged me with “Sometimes truth is fiction” and I challenged Sherree with “That is the ugliest baby I have ever seen”.

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Ed Note: As I was writing this piece, my daughter knocked on the door. She walked in, sniffed the air and said “something smells amazing-banana bread?” (it was two loaves of banana pumpkin.) Then she said “I bake all the time now! I don’t know why!” I showed her this piece, and said “this is why.”

It’s the mindfully simple act of cooking that saves me from slipping into the abyss of seasonally triggered depression in the fall, I think. Finally I can throw-ok, wrestle-the windows open some days, rainforest-like mornings of Whippoorwills and train track repairs I hear off in the distance.

After the furious routine of our pre-dawn school frenzy, I stand in the kitchen bleary eyed, performing tasks by muscle memory: a zombie brought back to humanity by pumpkin spice syrup and caffeine. This act is the opposite of mindful. This act is pure mindlessness, and sometimes I meditate on that fact alone. What is this mind body disconnect, which allows me to grind beans, measure grounds, boil water, remove a cup from the shelf, prepare the press, pour boiling water into a tube, perform the vacuum extraction in order to get coffee, flavor/sweeten coffee, milk the coffee, and clean up- all while planning the day’s kitchen tasks in the forefront of my mind?

It is this sort of half living/double living that I am working to avoid by practicing working meditation in my kitchen, yet a small, rebellious voice in my head sips my perfect cup of coffee and says “fuck that shit. CLEARLY all that advice was aimed at people who are shitty multi-taskers.”

In zen, part of the practice is working meditation. On the perfect days, I consider these tasks in the kitchen mine, often working in complete silence, arranging my bowls restaurant line-style so that I can work multiple projects at once.

I love my dishes so much, am so connected to this process, that practicing mindful cooking meditation is very difficult for me. Each recipe contains a wealth of stories, each dish springs to life as my hand touches the surface. My things don’t match; we never registered for dishes, so everything I touch reminds me of someone. Even as I type I’m thinking Oh Kaile, I ate last night from that green flowered plate you gave me! My prep bowls, nothing special, remind me of my best friend because she’s right, you can’t find any thing better for small measures and eggs. I’ve long since lost the covers.

Now sometimes you won’t need this much orange juice in the bread, Mary Jane’s voice echoes inside my head as I mix ingredients for cranberry loaves. Because the humidity sometimes makes this bread over moist. My eyes, now filled with tears, wander toward our bookshelf, scan the spines for the children’s book where the recipe lives. I wonder if my daughter can read us this book tonight. I learned to bake this bread when I was seventeen years old and every time I make it, I am in her kitchen again. I think everyone I know wishes I would really just stop knowing how, already, but I know I’ll do it at least one more year.

Wait. Mindful. Back to my task.

Dabbing vanilla on my neck, I wish I had the page from that magazine where I learned to make apple pie from the essay that reminded me to always dab vanilla on my neck whenever I made one, just because it smells so good. It was the same torn out page I carried for years that reminds me, now, to put on my grandmother’s apron. Burying my hands in cut apples I’m back in a tiny trailer in North Carolina, alone and pregnant, clad in my grandmother’s apron, smelling sweetly of vanilla and cinnamon. Baking pies for my last Thanksgiving dinner as a single person, my last holiday as an unencumbered adult. By Christmas I would have a child. Goddammit. By this Christmas, My child may have a child. Wait a minute Universe, can we chat a time out? She’s still just a baby, so.

It’s not working. I sift the apples through my fingers, I concentrate on the grit of brown sugar, try to BE the silt cinnamon and imagine that my daughter’s baby is born on its due date which is identical to the due date predicted for my daughter 18 years ago. As if on a separate track in my head I remind myself not to make out of town plans for Christmas even as I feel myself beginning to notice that the kitchen is 150 degrees and I have started breathing incredibly fast. Why are the FUCKING windows open when obviously the air conditioner needs to be on.

Maybe French onion soup. I hate onions, the mess, the aroma, all that slicing and peeling. I can lose myself in the task of caramelizing onions and the payoff is arguably worth every cursed second. But a burnt onion does not forgive you, and neither does a Christmas dinner table full of hungry family that’s been promised World Famous French Onion Soup.

The onions act almost as well as a tranquilizer for me. Here we go: sliced onions cascade into my thrift store cast iron dutch oven, doomed to roast into a pitiful show of my labor, but sweet, so sweet. Now back into a pan on the stove with red wine to reduce; I want them sweeter. This is where sometimes the onions and their company calm me down even more, if you know what I mean.

In the meantime, I’m using every excuse to fire up my workhorse of a blender. My vita mix emulsifies spices and vegan beef flavored broth base with boiling water. I get lost in the pulse function. Back and forth between my reduction pan and the blender I go and by now, January is a million miles away because I’m sneaking spoonfuls of onions and sips of wine.

One day, will she call me for these recipes  like I called my mother when I was ready for a truce?

There I go again. FUCK.

I get out the flour and consider making several loaves of bread.

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We live in crazy times, you know. I mean you really just never know. There was that one lady, she took away the rapist’s gun and shot him with it? A story like that sticks with you. So when my husband died, hell yeah I did. I put his gun right under my mattress and told my kids I’d tan their hides if I ever found out they touched it. Ever. But I damn well felt safer knowin it was there.

Even with all those no trespassin signs we still get scrappers. Like I said, it’s crazy times. Desperate times. Nobody cares about dogs in your yard or signs. I got No Trespassin, I got Private Property, I got No Soliciting. My yard lights up like a damn ball field you take one step into it after dark. Makes me feel a little safer, but damn if that don’t set Leon’s rooster to crowin all hours. He’s lucky I don’t shoot that nasty bird.

Desperate people don’t care. They gon’ try and get what they can get. Soon as they sniff out it’s just me and the kids, we look weak to them. I can tell. I knew it was just a matter of time so I called those alarm guys. Cost me a pretty penny, too, with the window sensors and everything.

That night when it happened? That damn alarm didn’t even go off. Damn teenagers. Dumbest thing I ever did, givin her that code. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

What saved us though? That new kitten we picked up at the feed store, no shit. She scared shitless of a man. She took off like a bat outa hell down the hall when he came in, all spits and growls, hissed like a rattlesnake. She sounded like a little herd of elephants, slidin every whichaways into the walls on her mad dash to the first open door. Soon as she came barrelin in there I clicked that door shut real soft and I scooped her up along with my babies and shoved em all three out the window onto the deck. I figure that jackass was probly standing still as a statue in that pile of broken glass in my living room, hopin the kitty didn’t wake anybody with her train ride done the hall.

Best thing we ever did, puttin in those custom windows in the master bedroom. Low to the ground, extra wide? So expensive we couldn’t afford the custom screens that went along with ‘em. You can climb right through onto the deck furniture, and don’t think we didn’t do it a time or two back in the day, in reverse, when we been drinkin a little too much out by the fire. Right in through the window and collapse in a heap onto the bed, we did. Hell, that’s how we ended up with a baby 7 years younger than our middle child! Girl, but I guess I won’t be tellin stories like that much anymore though will I.

My kids, they not much for reminiscing lately, not even the oldest one. One thing I can say though is they got tight like a little knot after their daddy died, somethin I’ve been wantin for a long time. Those girls don’t go nowhere without their little brother and I know that’s real hard for em too, what with him bein such a carbon copy of his old man. Maybe they talk to each other, I don’t know. I get sad in the late night, even with em all piled up in the king sized bed with me keepin me company, all gangly arms and legs up under my gramma’s oldest holiday quilt. I can’t sleep if I don’t have my babies in there. My therapist, she said it’s just fine, me havin my kids sleep there in that big ole bed with me. She said it’s real common after kids lose their dad. But I didn’t tell her yet it’s mostly my idea.

But it’s a damn good thing though, right? Cause if they couldn’t of got right to the window? If they’d of had to get all the way across the hall with that man somewhere in the house, looking’ for them? Well I just don’t even want to go there.

Anyway. That window seen a lot of action, ain’t it?

My kids landed right on the couch and I told em run! Run to your uncle Grady’s house! Lucky for the full moon that night, all bloated and orange from pollution I’m told but I don’t care, I’ll write a thank you letter to pollution then, because it’s dark as hell out there most nights. Lotta nights those kids would’ve been twisted up in the vines not twenty feet off the yard, squealin for their mama.

You wanted to know what happened that night? Why they had me up in there all that time and why every-body’s trying’ to talk to me now? Well. I’m no’t especially proud of it, but here’s what: I just got so mad, you know? To invade my house like that, scare my babies! You feel violated is what you feel. If you never been in that situation, you don’t know, you see? You feel violated and this instinct takes over. First it’s all about protecting your kids, and all that. But I did that, you know? I got them out the house and sent them away. So I hunkered down on that deck couch, aimed my Glock right through my favorite window and waited for that motherfucker to open my bedroom door.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Lindsey challenged me with “Look Up from your computer. Now. Right now. Fall in love with the first thing you see.”> and I challenged Toby with “Look around you right now, pick an item and write a story around it”.

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Looking through a fucking glossy catalog of ways to display his dead wife was beginning to make him feel like he was on the world’s longest, worst mushroom trip. The whole experience sucked and he wished he could have been drunk all the way through it but they weren’t Irish or whichever denomination allowed drunken funerals. They were the sober kind of mourners, with the white flowers, boring food, and white music. And tears.

He felt embarrassed to admit that he forgot about the ring until summoned down to the Armenian jeweler’s shop to pick it up. The jeweler, a stocky, sweaty man with enough hair for both of them wanted to make conversation with him based on the sheer novelty of it. It was the first time the Armenian’d ever crafted a ring from a dead person and he was excited to share the process with ring’s spouse. He felt sick from the smell of jewelry cleaner, whatever greasy shit those fuckers had for lunch not to mention the beer he smells on this guy’s breath. He just wanted out: away from this pathetic row of shops in this anorexic downtown, obviously struggling to survive despite the story laid out by the commercials and gentrification nearby. The curb littered with potholes, beer bottles. The usual cast of stinky characters occupied the vacant doorways around him as he made he way dazedly back to the car with his hand pinkie finger concealed carefully in his pocket, hot with promise.

He’s not a pinkie ring guy, but he wears this one because by now he misses her and this is a little humiliating to admit, but you know- he MISSES her. For a while he slept with a photo of her pinned to the pillow but then he started to feel a little crazy, especially when he began telling the pillow good night and asking it what he should pick on the tivo. Then, when the housekeeper saw it and called his daughter that was it for the pillowspouse.

The ring is white gold, a manly width and fairly gaudy if you want to know the truth. He wanted it crafted into a wedding band, but those sadists only offered the pinkie style. So he walks around with his right hand in his pocket a lot. Understated can only take you so far when you’re wearing a pinkie ring. The stone made from his wife is a lovely, preternatural, shade of blue reserved for colored contacts, photo-shopped pictures of vacations, and one little girl he sees around town. It’s not a human color, is his problem and he knows she would have hated it. As soon as he slips the ring on he believes he hears her laugh softly. His shoulders relax, he cocks his head to the side and he is right where he wants to be.

Alone with his wife.

Which is how he finds himself addicted to masturbating thinking of his dead wife, seeking therapy, and wondering if he’s finally falling off the misanthropic deep end from which is there is just no fucking return.

At work he is Gollum, nearly helpless to resist the temptation of the flashing stone. He’d been nearly caught in the office bathroom, lost in a memory of the two of them pulled over under a bridge during a rainstorm when the windshield wipers were broken on their fist car, an impossibly dinged up Chevrolet station wagon with a bench front seat. He stumbled back to his desk on shaky legs wondering how long it might take him to pound his way through twenty-three years of lusty memories. He wonders if he’ll do this without getting arrested or injuring himself, and will the ring then finally lose its power? Does he even want that? He not so shamefully admits to himself that he enjoys the fantastical idea that she exists inside this ring and that he can summon her ghost with his cock.

He moves the ring to his left hand and finds to his dismay, and shamefully excited surprise, that he is an ambidextrous mastubator. He thought ambimasturbators were legend- in the seventh grade when he broke his arm that time skateboarding down the 18th Street hill and he truly needed to be one, he could not master the skill.

While at the therapist’s office he learns that there is a support group for people who whack off to their dead spouse’s memory. Wait, what? If Marla Singer is there, he will pay his therapist ten million dollars because he’s sure at this moment that she is also a psychic and knows he would absolutely be able to fuck Marla Singer even with a ring made of his dead wife on his hand.

At the rec center he takes a seat in the circle and checks out every hand in the group. No one has a ring like his, which makes him feel unique just like that time he was forced to attend A.A.meetings (in his ear his wife softly whispers, “like how you decided you weren’t an alcoholic because of your special drinking rules, except you were an alcoholic after all and we almost got a divorce?” and chuckles) so he sits there quietly cursing his wife, contemplating hurling the ring across the room. Then when he reaches over to take it off he feels that telltale warmth spread across his chest and crotch, so he stops.

After an hour be believes he’s picked out the support group junkie in the room and he plans to confront her because even though she’s not Marla Singer she’s pretty hot. Otherwise the group seems to be just full of pathetic people who are jacking off to photos taped to their wall.

They are amateurs. Nothing more. Nothing compared to him, his ring, his wife, his needs. There’s nothing for him here. He arranges his features into a vacant smile and carefully folds his naked hand over the hand containing his wife and waits for the clock and the closing prayer to tell him that it’s time to take her home.

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It started here, and I’ve been walking in the subdivision across the street every morning at sunrise ever since.

Then this happened, and it caused me to climb out of bed one day and make pizza with my kids and I’ve been slowly transitioning back into mealtime ever since. Then I bought bento boxes for my kids’ lunches because I also decided to remove gluten from their diets so bye bye hassle free poison industrial complex lunch!

Now now my kids and I pack their lunches every day except when we forget and my husband ends up having to do it at the last minute in the morning, which he loves.

A body in motion stays in motion. So it is with a body, the same is true with my mind. My therapist asked me for notes so what we can make an action plan for when this happens again,so that we might shorten the lifespan of the next horror show of inactivity. It wasn’t until after I left that I made the connection between arthritis and the last several weeks of cozy bed time, but I don’t want to talk about that now.

Right now, I have a list. Everybody likes lists.

Sometimes, I feel like two people. There’s an urban Summer, who loves delivery breakfast, sidewalks, structured runs, multi-plex, manic panic, kitten heels, customer service management and power suits. Then there’s the me that lives here, now. Petulant, anti-grocery store me that wants to get her food from somewhere, anywhere but that place with those tubular lights and that cold white tile. The me that craves, all year long, the season that isn’t here. Cold in the summer, just want to shed my damn coat already in the winter. The me that tries so goddamn hard every year to turn this sand dune into something that will give us edible crops but this year is ready to give up and let the animals eat it and trade their milk to the locals who do a better job.

Today I wandered around this house full of other people’s cast offs and wondered where I fit into the world we live in, the life we’ve created, and my family’s world. Their life largely functions fine without me, by necessity of my illnesses, but the hole left when I’m absent is undeniable.

My hope is to create a different set of values for my family, and below is a partial list of the reasons why.

Because we care what’s in that biscuit, my kids should be able to pronounce all the ingredients.
Because it matters what happened to that animal before it died and ended up on our plate.
Because I was curious and I forgot, for so many years, the scent of a properly canned jar of pickles
Because after enough days in a row, kids stop asking for the remote and begin complaining when you call them inside.
Because video games and streaming movies are only for rainy days when there are no cookies to bake or fun books to read and even then, uno is a pretty fun game.
Because as far as I know, there’s never been a paper on whether severe mental illness can be treated with extreme homesteading but perhaps it’s time for one
Because who can be sad when GOATS.
And also GOATS
And also someone has to milk the GOATS.

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