I wrote two things earlier this morning and here they are 

Thing Number One: In response to a prompt that asked “If you were to write a book today, what would you want it to prove?” I thought,

 1. Ice cream is heaven sent and will heal most things.

2. When ice cream doesn’t work, try forgiveness

3. If you can’t forgive, then write about it.

Thing Number Two:  In response to my friend, Regina’s, blog post about New Zealand people and weather, I wrote,

I walked by a lady in the park yesterday who was sitting at a picnic table eating something from a large Tupperware container.  She was bony armed and had long flat white hair, goo-goo eyes and a fluffy calico cat on a leash spread out underneath the table.  I tried to get small as I passed her (a habit acquired from many years of seemingly having “please talk to me if you are cuckoo” emblazoned on my forehead) but no, she jumped up and came at me.

“Nice breeze,” she hollered in my face.

Silence.

I was somewhat relieved and turned in her direction.

“Really nice,” I answered.

“Except for the fuckin humidity – cat’s swelled up like a toad,” she said next.

“You’ve got a point there,” I agreed and moved on as quickly as I could without breaking into a sprint.

I guess we need to talk about the weather.  In fact, it seems to me that the worse, the harder our lives are, the more we talk about the weather.

Which brings me to my point; talking about the weather, unless you are the weatherman, might be a holding pattern for what we really need to say.

“Nice breeze,” could be code for “I’m lonely and pissed off and all I have is a fat cat and this lousy tuna salad.”

“Hot enough for ya” or “too wet to plow” (New England favorites) says, “here we don’t know how to let people know how hard it is be a farmer in New Hampshire so instead we take pride in how tough we are.”

“Lightening scares me,” translates into, “come over here and hold me” while, “if it weren’t for the humidity” means, “don’t touch me.”

We probably need help with our feelings. 

Even with therapy, self-help books, acupuncture, polarity therapy, meditation, counting to 10 (20, 100…), and creative visualization, I still struggle when it comes to managing hurt, anger and fear.  And I don’t think I am alone in this.  Otherwise, I don’t think there would be so much talk about the weather.

There were many years when I proudly clung to the notion that I was unaffected by the weather.  I hung out in bars and scoffed at snowbirds and their ilk; “I take it as it comes,” I would say.  But it was only true that I ignored it; that I stayed mostly inside.  

And now, a lot older and a little more at peace with fragility, it’s more okay to admit that I’m like everyone else in this way – that I plump in the winter and sweat in the summer and sag in the rain.  That I brace for the cold and I feel the coming of fall with a melancholy that is as predictable as day and night. That weather rules and I lose if I forget that.  I could only be more tied to nature if I lived in a tree.

I think the same thing is true about my feelings. Hurt, anger and fear show up and within milliseconds they slip and slide around and morph into stories about what somebody did (or didn’t) do to me.  And eventually, if I haven’t been able to locate the epicenter, they come out like something else entirely.

So I’m working on the forgiveness thing.  Whether I need to forgive somebody else for whatever I think they did (or didn’t do) to me or whether I need to forgive myself for falling short, forgiveness breaks down the chunks of coalesced darkness into bite-sized pieces.

And that, along with ice cream, can make for a patch of fair weather.