Monday Musings

Monday is the start of another work week for most. I have been avoiding the news, hearing my team and I painted with the same brush as everyone who shares the same employer, labeled as overpaid, lazy people who spend their days surfing the internet for cat memes while doing "no work."  In my experience, like any employer, there are slackers, and I have carried the load of more than one in my career. However, we are not all of the same cloth. I think of a day where I spent 14 hours straight in a HazMat suit in 100-degree weather, walking grids through a cornfield looking for the smoking gun amidst the body parts, not just one day but several, then went home to burn my clothes and quietly cry in the dark.

Just a sound, a specific smell, can take me back to that furious history, where sometimes all that is left of the battle is jagged metal twisted into living ground, annealing into that which it drove into head-on. That is often a path as swift and narrow as glory itself, until glory is gone and all that remains is the weeping earth. It has broken lesser men and women, but we do it because it needs to be done, no matter the hours or the weather, laying aside our own griefs to tend to the griefs of another. 

So, I just shake my head as I pat the separation papers from HR on the antique teacher's desk where I write. Perhaps someone else would like to take on that load while others throw stones, but I don't have enough years left on this earth to carry it.

For I'm no stranger to hard work, whether it was with Uncle Sam, the airlines, or that little County where I served as coroner. I learned about hard work early on, facing it like a battle in which you carry ancient wounds. You can’t live on a farm or a ranch without learning about hard work. I spent ten years as a young bride living such a life with my former husband so long ago. I know the signs of impending birth in a heifer. I know how to cut a single longhorn from a herd of fifty with nothing but an ATV and a dog, all while avoiding the pointy ends. I didn’t compare nail polish colors with my girlfriends, because long fingernails sort of get in the way when you might have to grease a cupped hand and naked arm with Betadine and lubricant to help a breached calf make its way into the world. I’ve fallen face-first into stuff you don’t want to know about, and cried like a child to find a calf still and cold after I spent two days nursing her after her mama died.

It wasn’t Green Acres, though I think we had their house. It had nothing to do with Norman Rockwell and everything to do with the hundreds of different ways a heart can freeze.

It was a valuable life lesson. Hard work, hard decisions, made on evenings like that one years later as I worked away at my home, listening to the sound echo in an empty house, learning about life and love with all the salt and truth one can expect from the swing of a hammer. It taught me more than how physics and your thumb meet; your thumb will lose. It taught me about budgets and planning, as well as the basics of working with wood, nails, and drywall. It taught me what I am capable of, and it taught me to dream the dreams of a child again.

As Partner in Grime and I worked to clear out some flowerbeds, finding bits of an ancient lattice, I had to stop and sort my words as memories came unbidden—color, movement, shape. The first was of my mom bending over the garden, helping my dad weed; a good woman over whom death had already cast its shadow as surely as the apple tree shading her that day. Our rescued wiener dog mix Pepper pranced around her in play, barking joyously. Standing there in that barren flower bed a lifetime later, I could still smell her perfume on the air; I could hear that bark, and the remembrance of the fluid movements of her hands in the soil was as tangible to me as a tide. Gentle, measured, certain.

I think back to the days on the farm, to another house, and I remember not the hard times but the good. I remember the last winter there, when I helped a neighbor pull a reluctant calf from his mother’s womb. If I close my eyes, I can relive that next moment in which I ceased to breathe myself as the calf did not. In that moment, all I could hear were the tiniest sounds, the fairy feet of barn mice, and the creak of a rafter. Then, in a rush of indignation, came the mighty and protesting bawl of that newly born bull calf, his cries from a birth-wet mouth awakening something in his weary mother, who lay so still there under the dark moon, both of us totally spent from the effort. I still can picture his trusting eyes fixed on her as she rose up to sniff and take him in with that remarkable snuffling devotion of a mother.

Today will be another long week. When I next return home after work, it will be dark. I will replenish supplies, taking out an empty dog food sack to the trash. The driveway will lie in a placid, warm slumber, silent under my feet. I’ll pull closed the back door, looking at land that holds neither corn nor cows, seeing the rise of another old house in the distance as I begin a clog-stomping run back onto the porch. The chill Spring air whistles through my shirt, tickling my skin, scorching my bare cheeks, and the back of my throat.

Inside the door, where the mailman pushed it through, lies a postcard from Partner in Grime's latest trip. The handwriting looks almost like him: slender, strong, and focused. I can practically smell the tonic water as I tear open the envelope and drink in the words. Those short words are water to me, the paper a quiet pool, myself merely one of those little water bugs that lie not quite on the surface nor beneath it—but in that quiet line of demarcation that is neither water nor air, earth nor heaven; exposing to the outside world only what is necessary to draw breath and hope.

Soon, in that house I never expected to be, it's time for bed. There on the nightstand is a dried maple leaf, a candle, and a couple of framed photos. I lie back across the edge of the bed, naming off each vertebra, looking upward as my body stretches downward,  red hair trailing to the floor like a line of fire.  I smile up at stars that glitter like mica through the window, at unheard poetry that hides on the dark side of the moon, at the sun that warms another pillow far away; thankful for the journey here, the labor, the defeats, and the small victories that came with it.

Our memories are not the house we live in. They are inside us, all those memories —the laughter and sharing of friends, all the fun and adventures that will follow us home.  Home is the pillow on which you lay your dreams, brought out with just a word, a sure and steady, gentle touch.

Brigid

I could Soooooo. . . . .

A girlfriend in the Southwest made me this keychain, and with all the cards I got when I came home from the hospital, it made me smile.  

Thanks for all your kind words, texts (thanks, Mr. B.), and cards.  I'm feeling pretty good, but I can't lift anything heavier than a bag of flour for a couple more weeks. My BFF (retired Army, firefighter, and armed secret squirrel, basically a redheaded female version of PA State Cop) lives 15 minutes from me with her husband, so she's been making sure we're taken care of when Partner in Grime has had to be out of town.  I should be back to work in a couple more weeks, then a couple of weeks of catching up before retirement. 

  - Brigid

April 18, 2014

Eleven years ago on this date, Good Friday that year, he left me without saying goodbye.

I had just been out to visit him.  My brother had moved in with Dad some months ago.  The doctors told him he was in remission that last fall, he said, for how long, we did not know. But he had no job to return to with Defense cuts and couldn't afford to keep his home.  It was a good move, though, for Dad, relieving us of the expense of a full-time home health provider, as Dad couldn't live on his own, even as he still refuses to live with a family that would welcome him.  He'd outlived two children and two wives and said he would only leave his home when he ceases to breathe.

I visited as often as I could, using both vacation and sick time, there to provide for their care. There was always lots to do, meals to prepare and freeze, cleaning, flowerbeds, gutters, and the stocking of supplies. We made no trips but for short drives; he planned such overnight outings with the whole family for when I was away, but it was OK, those dinners with just he, my brother, and me. My brother and I could do things that needed to be done, and he liked having the time with just the two of us, sharing the memories of that home when Mom was still there. Between us, we got Dad's bills paid, the budget drawn up, and taxes completed, even if we ended up finishing it over the phone.

But my brother had concealed a secret.  Not being able to get insurance under the Affordable Care Act as the State's Exchange was having issues, too young for Tri-Care, and not being able to get into the V.A., he stopped treatment when cancer returned. It was a death sentence he didn't wish to burden us with, as there was no cure, just perhaps, a delay of the inevitable for a few weeks or months, at significant cost.

I understand now, in retrospect, knowing him as I do, yet I so wish he'd been able to share his burden with me.

But had I been able to talk to him one last time, I wouldn't have asked him about doctors or insurance care, where Dad's insurance info was, or what Dad did with the phone and cable bills, or even where the spare keys were. I would have simply told him I loved him and how much he meant to me, one more time.  But we never knew our last words would be just that. Our last words are often not said, our lives always coming up short for those measured statements which, through all of our brief utterances, were our lone and enduring hope. There is never enough time for those last words, of love, of faith, of fear, or regret.

The words not said hung in the air the days after he left. They were days that seemed like a lifetime, and yet seemed like only moments, perhaps because I don't know if I ever really slept in that time, or if, for a moment, time itself shifted, holding me down at the moment, as G-forces did long ago in a jet aircraft in a steeply banked turn.  Time held still for me, but for my brother, it had overtaken him and moved ahead. All of his things, placed into Dad's house, now to be moved again, to charity, to our homes, to our hearts, medals and coins, and books, and I probably don't want to know why he had a loaded flare gun hidden alongside his concealed carry piece. There were laughter and tears, there in so many pictures, of early days, and the freckled face of fatigue, memories of a strong, reliable man, the simple kind of man that is the cornerstone of great reputation, even if the world at large would not observe his passing with tears or trumpets.

There was so much to do, to organize, to communicate. So many people stopped at the house or church to pay their respects.  There were church friends, my brother's best friend, who came to the service even though he lost his own mother the day prior, high school friends, Submariner friends, and Don and several of the guys from Electric Boat. Then, before I knew it, a service, a eulogy I remember writing, but could not utter, the minister reading it instead of his own message, there as the Easter Lilies on the altar drooped towards him, as if listening.  There were words of Easter, of remembrance, works that will give us a sense of what meaning can be gained from pain and suffering, death and eternal life. Things some of us ignored for years, then, in moments of self-awareness, truly hit home.

It hit home for me when I looked out the window of the little memorial structure where he would receive his military honors before interment and saw the uniforms outside, just before raising their guns to the skies.  I heard the guns before they were ever fired, not as sound, but as a tremor that passed over my body the way you will see a flag unfurl, before even the wind that moves it is felt.

We often go through life with our eyes half shut, brain functioning well at idle, senses dormant, getting through our days on autopilot.  For many, this sort of life is comforting, welcoming.  Then, for some, not the incalculable majority, but many of us, there is a moment, a flash, when in a moment we truly know all that we've had, held there in the moment of its loss.

All that week long, it had rained, never really ceasing, only diminishing to a gentle mist now and again.  Yet as we arrived at that place, where guns would be raised, and taps would be played, the clouds moved aside as if paying their own respects.  The rain stopped as we pulled into the gates, and when we gathered, the sun came out.  As the officers stood at salute, all was silent, no rain, no wind, only stillness, the sunlight on the pooled water, now sleeping,

The guns fired their salute, taps were played, and the Lord's Prayer was uttered.  Then, one by one, hands were placed on a stone urn, one final goodbye that we could not bear to end, a moment of immobility that accentuated the utter isolation of this hilltop in which valor is laid to rest.

The moment I drew away, warm hand from cold stone, walking outside, the skies opened up again with heavy rain.  It was as if the heavens themselves wept, the rain enfolding us all the way home, mingling with our own tears. My hands clutched the three empty rounds that had been placed there, holding them so tight my nails dug into my flesh, not wanting to ever let them go.

Since that day, I have returned many a time to that hill, to the comfort of his ground, where the final stone is placed, to remember, the memorial being but the echo to his sound.

All around, I see the dead; in the small memorial at the spot in my hometown where two trains once collided,  in a sign erected in the memory of a local killed in a long-ago war. There's the little cross by the side of the road on my way home from work, where another young soul left us. How important these undistinguished little memorials. Every death is a memory that ends here, yet continues on, life flowing on, sustained by love and faith. Such is the lesson.

How thankful we are for these memorials, for the spirit's smoke that stays with us after the candle has been blown out.  As I heard the taps, I realized that they signified distance, heard there in that first echo. The dead were not sleeping; they were gone. When the final taps were played, I no longer heard the echo, but I will never forget it, for the memory helps us hold on. After a while, an echo is enough.

His was a death that arrived on Good Friday, and it was a life celebrated there and remembered here now, in the week of Easter. For that is what Easter was, and is, to our family.  It's remembrance. It's the remembrance of a death that brings us life. Of sacrifice, of knowing that we will not be forgotten. Of the hope that after darkness there is light, inky comfort in the unknown.
 - Brigid

Dare to Try

Just an update for those of you who aren't on my Facebook (I keep FB to people I  have known for many years or actually hang out with off of social media).  I had surgery last week for a tumor that was not supposed to be where it was, and the doc was concerned about cancer (which runs in my bio family).  So, several months of various tests, bloodwork, and specialists, and the surgery was done on Thursday last week.  I had a great doctor to perform the procedure (she ensured she would use only non-sale Harbour Freight tools), and I kept all original parts.  The 8.29 cm mass was removed and was benign, and the surrounding tissue was clear.  So THAT is a load off my mind, especially with retirement (and a change in insurance) coming up in June.  

So hopefully, in the next 3 weeks while I'm off to recover, I'll actually do some writing :-)

 With that, I'll leave you with some photos and a quote for the day:  

 Palma non sine pulvere.

 

Brigid

Range Entertainment

$108 for dog toys at PetsMart  - yawn

A shipping tube dropped on the way to the recycling bin

 - SCORE!