her able hands

We’re home. Have been for a few days and I’ve hunkered down to try to knock the nasties that took me over Christmas day. Ty got it too, and had to cancel his trip to see his dad. I think the idea of flying again with sinuses and ears clogged like this terrified him. The descent back into Akron took about 40 minutes, each and every single second of which we both worried that our skulls would burst from the pressure. I’ve never felt such pain in my head. My ears are still partially blocked. Both of us had shooting pain radiating all over our faces and up into our brains.

I thought I was better, but yesterday it all moved down into my chest and now I have a constant burning and a nasty, green cough. And I threw out my lower back somehow, so I’m not exactly a happy camper right now. Will likely have to cancel our New Years Eve plans, and I feel like I’m wasting my 4 days off. (I lucked out and only had to go into work for four hours on Thursday.)

On a happier note, it was lovely to spend the holidays with my family. A very relaxed, mellow time. I got to hold the happiest baby on earth, Mr. Santo. This kid. Wow. What a gift. My sister and her husband make the most amazing kidlets. Lila and her cousin Violet played together beautifully and Grandma revelled in the joy of having little ones around her tree Christmas morning. Boy did she have fun playing Santa. We managed to bring everything back with us, an amazing feat of packing genius.

Hope you all had a sweet holiday, and enjoy ringing in the New Year! I’ll be raising a toast to you with hot lemon and honey before I hit the sack at around 9pm. Long gone are the days when I would party my way through the flu with the expectation that the alcohol fumes would kill any wayward germies. Nope. Now it’s flannel sheets, NyQuil and a good book dearies.

And a special New Years Wish to dear Kate who moves again today. May this place be a cozy nest where you can rest and be in between all of the doing.

Love!

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I’m offline until Wednesday. Until then may your days and nights be filled with soft light, warm cuddles, sweet smiles and yummy food!

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I’m going in late this morning because the daycare is closed and I’ll have to drag the bean and a bag of tricks along with me, so we slept in a little bit. My dreams when I fall back to sleep in the morning tend to be much more lucid and visceral than my nighttime dreams.

This morning I heard Chris get up at 5:00 and take a shower, and then I drifted back into the clouds forming around my head. I dreamed that the house we live in (not this house, but a giant, sprawling Victorian house with many levels and rooms with built-in cabinets and bookcases with glass fronts, long, bright hallways, tall windows with luminous draperies and plush furniture) was once owned by Robert Downey Jr.

I didn’t know it until we threw a party—a huge costume party with a Celestial Beings theme and everybody wore wings and glitter and halos and had a diaphanous aura around them. Robert Downey Jr. was in the family room with me and a few other women. He went up to a blank wall that had a dial on it, something I had never noticed before, and turned the dial and the wall turned into fifty TV screens, each showing the picture of a single person or thing.

He began a game where he told us to each take turns finding things on screens that began with the letters in our name. Every time we called out a letter/picture, he touched that screen and it grew brighter. We did this until all of the screens were lit and the entire room glowed so brightly we could see through each other.

I didn’t come out and ask how he did it; how he knew the TVs were there when we had no clue after living in the house for almost a year. But I sat down in a deep couch next to him and sipped my Champaign and watched the wall. He watched me. I tried to pretend that I couldn’t feel him looking at me, to ignore the growing vibration of energy between us that was like a third person on the couch. He said, “This was my house. The first house I bought with my own money. I got a little lost though, and forgot how much I loved it here.”

I tipped my head back into the cushion and said, “We can’t believe how lovely it is here. This house is perfect.”

“I miss it, the love.”

“Maybe that’s why it feels so good here, maybe you left your love behind.”

“I think I need some of it back.” He looked away.

“If it’s yours it’s there for you, right? You just have to acknowledge it.”

He turned his face to me again and tears had cut wavering tracks through the glittery pancake makeup he had powdered his face with. We looked into each other’s eyes in that bright, bright room for a long time, hearing each other’s thoughts about our own lives, not speaking. It sounded like a chorus in my head and I couldn’t tell which thoughts were mine, which were his. It all gets away from me so quickly. How can I get it right? I don’t know how to make myself feel better. Why is it so hard? I miss feeling adored. I don’t have the energy to take care of anyone anymore. I miss the newness. Who am I? I wish the feelings stayed the same. Who are you? What does this here, right now, mean?

Then we kissed and all of the tension I’d carried inside of me my entire adult life drained out of my body. I felt every self-imposed expectation pop and fizzle up and out like the airy carbonation bubbles dancing onto my hand from my glass of Champaign. Chris stood in the doorway watching us. He smiled and nodded and I heard him thinking Thank God, she’s letting go.

***

All this to say that Chris and I have been at each other’s throats a bit lately, and it’s such a gift when the dreamtime tells me to stop holding on to my position so tightly. And it’s a super big bonus when it throws in a little necking with Robert Downey Jr.

Hot damn. The man can kiss.

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Christmas cards will not go out until after I return from our trip East. Our tree will not have a glitter star on top. I’ll make Pistachio Ribbon Bars for the New Years dinner. Friends I normally (and oh, so happily) send care packages to won’t see those until some time in the New Year.

We’ll have the annual solstice dinner in a restaurant because Ty gets his braces off today and it’s his celebration pick. (I’m hoping for Mexican, a Margarita and Enchiladas Verdes sounds like heaven.)

I’m staying late and bringing work home. The supposed days off after Christmas are a joke on me and a dozen other people, they have packaging that has to go out, and I’ll have to work because I’m the only proofreader. So I surrender. If I can get the laundry done, the bathrooms cleaned and the house tidied before we go, it’ll be enough. There’s only so much a body can do. I may have reached my ceiling.

Happy Solstice to those who observe. May you find time to step outside and feel your feet on the chilled earth, to tip your head to the spinning bowl of night sky and enjoy the vertigo. I’m glad to know you.

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I’ve had the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man sitting on top of the piano, holding up the Netflix queue for a week now—and while I should have been wrapping presents to box up and mail to Mom, I was beat last night and wanted nothing more than to escape into inspiration.

What a pick! Even Lila sat mesmerized by the singing, especially whenever Rufus and/or Martha Wainwright stepped in front of the microphone. And when Antony came out with his strange internal beat playing across his body, opened his mouth and released the sound of I don’t even know what, an angel? Is that too corny? Well, we all fell into such a hush and my eyes burned hot and teary, Lila leaned back into her daddy’s chest and smiled and didn’t move her gaze from the screen.

The artwork and poetry made me long for an analog artisitc expression again. I went to sleep thinking about this one poem I wrote about 6 years ago. How I worked at it for a very long time, a total of maybe 50 words, crossed out and reapplied on other lines until I reached the destination, how it had 50 incarnations. I was satisfied with that poem in the end, satisfied and even proud of the work I had put in to write something that had no unnecessary words. But I lost the final version with the edits, only have my first electronic draft left. It only has one phrase that rings solid and true—the one phrase that I recall stayed in the final.

I wonder if I worked with it again this year if it would be an entirely different poem because I’m mostly gone from the place of loss I was in when I wrote it the first time. Would it become a piece about gain?

Listening to Leonard speak about why he writes, and the many layers of reasons he’s travelled through over his life, I felt compassion for myself as a writer for the first time in such a long time. Not sure what that means for me, but for now I’m just going to enjoy the warm glow. I have to think my little prayer yesterday, my nod to the beat up Buddha in the garden, brought me to the place where I could hear last night. So good to notice when I’m flowing in the circle, when I’ve stepped out of the fight and just let the current carry me to the right place.

I’m thinking now of my lovely friend Kate, who is living with the loss of a very dear member of her family. I’m wishing this kind of softness for Kate, for her family. I’m sending you love my friend.

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