What We Do

I'm cheating a little here, but I'm very caught up in the present and not quite ready to organize my thoughts into anything new or coherent. This is something I wrote one summer about seven years ago while Monte, Miranda, and I were traveling in Vermont and Canada. I just unearthed it while scrolling through my "bits and pieces" file, and I remember with deflating specificity the response of someone who read it. "I don't quite get it," was all she said, and back it went into the realm of homeless words. I concede that it's a little overwrought and self-indulgent, but it still makes sense to me. I was depressed. Okay? And I'm not depressed right now, but trying to make sure I stay steady.

Anyway, it's my blog -- right?

So without further ado:

I woke up to realize that I’d vacated my brain and taken up residence in a white clapboard house by a muddy puddled field and a yawning barn whose swollen sagging sides were collapsing into its barren core, just as empty as myself. We were driving south from Canada past Thetford Mines, a town entirely based upon the mining of asbestos. Yellow dozers moved earth around in a vast pit, and man-made mountains loomed against the sky, the ash gray landscape of daily routine.

As always, I wondered what my life would be like had I been deposited in such a place. Maybe I’d fall in love with a third generation miner, or marry the proprietor of the hardware store. I would hang my laundry from a line across the yard, eat crème glacee at Dairy Joy, and acquiesce, perhaps, to the purchase of a snowmobile. I would bring my rusted car to the garage for reparations, and my heart to a bathtub Madonna in whose lovely blank face I would try to read comfort. Would I hear the song of another life that might have been mine? And if I did, would I leave my wooden house behind, or cave in like the roofs of those barns under the weight of decades of wet snow?

I knew well the feeling of being misplaced. I had done my time in winter places before, places where you heated up your key to unlock the car door and ran the engine for awhile to warm it up, teeth chattering over your coffee cup. I’d seen icicle stalactites growing from the sills of frost-paned windows – one of them supposedly tumbled down in a sudden thaw and killed a young woman who was hurrying to work. And I’d had my share of shivering at bus stops, and pulling my frozen feet from wet boots in mud rooms, dreading the transition from numbness to sting. I had spent many years inhabiting sunless, unsuitable places, ill-fitting jobs, or dissonant marriages, often all three at once.

But lately I had become a stranger even to the life I‘d finally found waiting for me, the life that I was meant to have. I was distracted and uninspired, obsessed with loss and the senseless tossings of fate. On luminous mornings when the sky was white silver, I would walk up the canyon to feed the grateful horses, fill the water trough, give a glance to a gliding hawk, and apologize for my lack of joy. I live at the place where heaven’s skirt brushes against the sea. But within me was a desert. The events of my own minor life rolled by in mundane progression. Various crises emerged and were resolved. I fretted over distractions, searched listlessly for meaning, and even feigned my old enthusiasm at times. But my dreams told the truth each night …and by day, the weary wanderings of my heart.

This vacation trip was a hopeful statement. Time with my family, a visit with friends in Vermont, and a drive into Canada, where we would stay in Quebec for a few days before returning to Vermont. Quebec City, with its narrow streets and spires of blue-green copper, had been a pleasant setting for our walks. We wandered along the wall that surrounds the city, looked down upon the St. Lawrence River, strolled past shop windows crammed with candy and toys, hats and coats, mugs of moose and maple leaf motif. Rainstorms washed us.

Trying on other lives has always been a favorite pastime of mine when I travel. But here we were, heading back to Vermont, and all the lives I conjured were coming up dreary. Lodged in a stupor, heavy eyed and thick of tongue, I saw the world through a smudged lens, imagining mostly misery and sleet. Summer lay behind me and in front of me, still fat and ripe in its moist torpid splendor. Fields of corn edged the road; handwritten signs announced the sale of blueberries. This would have been enough to cheer me once.

Our friends live just outside of Middlebury, and on this particular day, the hot gold sun of late afternoon burnished the grassy hills and meadows. Roma walked toward us from the garden, a wild kind of creature with long corkscrew hair, wearing a sundress and carrying an armful of tomatoes. I know it sounds cliché, but she was the kind of person who spoke in earnest of spirits, auras, and crystals. She meditated, practiced yoga, and knew the healing properties of herbal tea. She even believed she could change herself into animal forms, which somehow didn’t sound crazy when one thought of it metaphorically, and considered, as she did, the interconnectedness of all life, and how the barriers that make us separate selves might thin as we evolved. Roma seemed to dance through the cosmos, oblivious to time and space. But she, too, had been sad once, and she recognized it in me.

After dinner, we stood and talked in the kitchen as women often do, and Roma shared a story. She had been learning meditation and circle breathing (please don't roll your eyes, dear reader), seeking entry into a state that somehow seemed inaccessible to her, repeatedly falling asleep, and waking up to try again.

Maybe I was asleep, she said, and maybe not, but my Indian grandmother appeared before me, my grandmother from seven generations back. I knew who she was. I knew it in my DNA, in my soul, in every knowing that I have. She sat with a mortar and pestle, pounding corn. She was a broad, ample woman, sturdy and brown, and her motherly presence nourished me. I figured she had great wisdom to offer from beyond the tunnel of time, and I didn't want to let her leave without our having spoken, but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t think of what to say. Finally, I formed words. ‘What should I do?’ I asked. That’s all I could come up with. ’Pound corn,’ was her response. ‘Pound the dark kernels into light.’

I asked Roma if she had any idea what that meant. Maybe I was humoring her a bit. It all sounded sort of sketchy.

I think it’s about finding the light, Roma said, even when this means trudging through the hopeless dark. Work your way to the light. Pound away the dark, and light will appear.

For some reason, I thought of a friend of mine who had been so paralyzed by the torment of depression that sometimes he could hardly bear to leave his house. I would meet him in the mornings, and we would walk up Alegria Canyon together. One stark, sun-bleached day, the mad wind of the ranch howled incessantly as we walked – it was the wind that got away from God untamed, the wind that makes you crazy. Our hair was tossed and tangled about our heads, our ears were ringing, and dust and sand blew everywhere, but we trudged like two soldiers up a road that seemed as steep as a wall.

“Why are we doing this?” he asked in his anguish.

“Because it’s what we do,” I replied.

It’s what we do, I realized once again. Put one foot in front of the other and walk up the miserable hill. Pound corn. Keep going. It’s what we do.

And if you find yourself in an old wooden house by a muddy field and a sagging barn, pull the curtains open. Stock the cupboard, sweep the floor, and trust that summer will return.