I seem to be in a very emotional way as of late. An old man riding off in the passenger seat of his daughter’s car, baby ducks tumbling down the grassy slope into the pond, a Mother’s Day card from two years ago, the ache in my back – all of these things cause an upwelling of feelings that, while familiar, are hard to hold. It’s like melancholia, like any day I should be starting my long lost period to make me all better. But menopause came and went 10 years ago and now this is just the way I am sometimes. Emotional.
As a little kid, I think I was also pretty tender hearted. I remember watching TV upstairs and a woman on crutches hobbled to the front of a massive room of people. She was old and I could hardly see her body as it was covered in scarves so it appeared more as though a pile of clothes was shambling up to the pulpit where a shiny faced man in a suit beamed down at her. Music was playing and he was asking her if she believed and the pile of scarves agreed that yes, she did believe and he told her to throw away her crutches. Something burst in me as she heaved off the scarves and the crutches and stood up to her full height and then everyone in the room was singing Praise The Lord and I was crying and I ran down the stairs to get my mother and tell her what happened.
“There’s this woman and she was a cripple and then she believed and she threw down her crutches…”
“Oh that’s just Oral Roberts,” my mother said, tumbling chicken parts in a bowl of flour, “he’s a fake” and I felt like I had been shot down out of the sky.
I can be like this all on my own these days.
The up and down of things makes me hard to live with, at least on the inside. And it makes it hard to write. I come back to something I wrote the day before (like the first four paragraphs of this) and it doesn’t feel the same anymore. Something has shifted in me or in the phase of the moon and now I don’t care about the baby ducks and good riddance to the old man and my back feels much better after a hike up Maiden’s Cliff. Mother’s Day schmother’s day I say. Time to get going and do something.
Where did all that passion go?
So I write this – my marching orders for the morning – list making as my poetry du jour.
laundry
emails
repair screens
get glasses fixed from when I sat on them
unpack boxes
clean litter box
And then I think about my kittens that did not make this move with me, about how they looked like a Monet painting when they curled up in a sun circle on the living room floor; gray and orange kitten fluff framed with blue carpet. And the surge returns and I don’t know how I can do chores in a mood like this, that I miss Celeste and Ramelah and I am sad the weekend is over.
So I write some more. And I imagine spending the rest of my life this way, chronicling my own private roller coaster, and then I wonder if this is how it is going to be with me. Somewhere between Oral Roberts as a 6 year old and my dream life at 58, I have gone through all this stuff and now I’m inclined to go back through it and feel my way around. And whether these are my 6 or 15 or 30 year-old feelings just waiting for me to come back and get them or whether this is the emotional landscape of 58 year-old retrospect, I write about it.
On days like these, it seems as though that is all I can do – feel it and write about it.
