snowed in

So I used to just visit the kingdom of Illness, long forays there like intermittent layovers,
but in recent years it has become clear that I live there. There are no real spaces in between.

When I feel that thing I call happiness, I can tell it’s just a function of not being in pain.
A miracle.

I try not to look at my face too often because it’s like looking at a to-do list.

I have maladies for every letter of the alphabet. It’s like an Edward Gorey story.
A is for allergies, anemia, asthma, anaphylaxis.

As for the photos, enough snow?

It is like I am snowed in, in the body.
Talk about cabin fever.

(But I don’t want you trapped here with me, even though I will make you some tea and bake some chocolate chip pecan cookies for you.)

Trying to write the novel provides some relief. Instead of thinking about me, I think about the cast of characters, what they’re doing, their plans and hopes and dreams. They have their health and I hope to keep it that way for them.

As for blog plans, maybe each month will be a new theme.
January was accidentally illness, bleeding, and snow.
What will February bring?

willow bark

I don’t like horror movies and I think it is because my body is too much like a horror movie, like a haunted house.

Some days the body is the thing that follows me up the stairs.

My mate says I look sad. I am not; I am just pale from pain. It hasn’t occurred to me to feel sad. I am still in the desperate throes of looking for something to bite down on. Where is the anodyne?

Feeling sad? That would be a luxury. I am just on a teeter-totter of pain and avoidance.

And the blog? I am talking to myself out loud, in a public space. Pain and madness hold hands.

The leather punching bag of the body.

Remember the theme of surfacing? I ask myself. How to surface, without getting the bends? February may be about seeking some more assistance as I come up for air.

Here is the Catch 22. On the few days I feel well, I want to live and get things done. I want to enjoy life. Not having a migraine is like being released from jail, or a medieval torture chamber. I can think, I can breathe.
On the days I am ill, I am actually too ill to call doctors and do research and track down labs and pore over them and make plans of action related to finding a cure.

I envy addicts in that they must have found something that will work, for at least a little while. I would be an addict too if I could find something that relieved my pain.

I believe we eat partly because we are looking for medicine. Not just that satisfaction of fullness or the opiates or endorphins brought on by sugar and carbohydrate, but than in the animal world we would have found our medicine in plants and roots and bark and leaves and so we are simply tasting everything, looking for a cure. Looking for our willow bark.

red cross

I am fighting off a migraine, as usual. I know it’s a migraine because one of the symptoms is that I think I see cats out of the corners of my eye. And that happened this afternoon on a walk and so I thought, ‘Oh I guess the pain will be arriving soon.’
If my suffering would help a trapped Haitian earthquake victim then I would suffer all I could. I wish all the suffering I have known would have helped someone, but I feel and fear, just like the gallons and truckloads of blood that have flowed out of me over 29 years, its all just –waste. Futile, fruitless, waste.

So we donate money to the Red Cross. It’s all we can do.


**

It seems this year at least, I will be reduced to writing about illness for it is what consumes me. And contains me. (I contain it). There is an existential aspect to the migraines-like there used to be when I had seizures-(E is for epilepsy).

I would be confounded as to why a chair was there, why did something exist at all? But now with the migraines I am very startled by the body, very me/not me about it.

I was driving to the train station and suddenly I was scared and claustrophobic with the awareness that my neck was simply some bones and tendons, so easily toppled, such a frail piece of architecture, and that’s all I had to rely on.
Two days later I touch my hip or shoulder, and I am shocked to find that I am encased in basically what seems like a bag of leather, a cow costume.

The enormous endometrium

Oh baby, isn’t the modern wired world a wild one? I began clicking through the “next blog” pages to find I was surrounded by lovely Aunt Donna and her lady friends at the beauty salon, and ab bearing men referred to as “Shirtless Perfection.”
This makes me wonder who I am! And who are you?

We are something between naked musclemen and old ladies in beauty parlors.

The mate is in Boston and I am alone with a cat and a dog and thing in the attic that chews and chews.

**

Am I like the pre teen who gets a diary and the first thing she writes is about her menses and crushes on boys with angelic eyelashes? Well how can I not? How does one tune out hell? Each month, since childhood really (and isn’t eleven childhood in our culture) it has come and sacrificed me on its altar, dragged my body out onto its altar and demanded the blood sacrifice.
The apples and rubies and pomegranates, the iron of the body.
And then afterward, the commandment to rebuild.

God and the body are all wrapped up together.


I liked my period until five or years ago. Maybe ten years ago.
At least I told myself I did.


Maybe I always had Stockholm syndrome.

**

When I was fifteen I lost half the blood in my body.
Through my womb. Out between my legs. I was only Not Dead because it had taken days and not hours and so I had adjusted to the shock.

Before that, the first few years of my period, I marveled at the power and beauty of it and thought it was the god and goddess of fertility flowing through me. That the body belonged to nature, that girls were special vessels chosen to endure and procreate the magic of life.

In my middle perimenopausal life, I am pretty certain that the period is pathological, left over like belief in a vengeful god or patriarchy.

god is in the stem cell

Sometimes I think about things like the nutritional content of menstrual blood.
Don’t be squeamish; let’s try to be scientific, though I confess there is not a quick link to any such topic on Google so maybe I am alone in my curiosity. But it seems one more resource possibly going to waste. Menstrual blood does apparently contain stem cells. It is my belief that if there is a god, a god for people, then that god lives in the stem cell.
.
If a woman’s menses is rich enough to feed and cushion a developing embryo, aren’t we overlooking it as a source of something life affirming? What about the blood pudding and blood sausage and blood soups of the world? And the brave and enduring Maasai who have lived in challenging conditions successfully for a long time by utilizing the blood and milk of their cows.
Maybe I think about these things because I am childless and have been bleeding monthly for almost thirty years.
Taboos. I am also someone who loves cats and dogs and wish I could adopt all homeless pets, but who thinks that if we as a society are just going to euthanize thousands of these mammals a month, it is truly shameful that we not use their meat and fur.
Wastefulness.

There is an artist, Ingrid Berthon-Moine who did an interesting series of portraits in which she had women wear their menstrual blood as lipstick.
It’s art. It’s a start.

Meanwhile, if I reincarnate as a mammal, please sign me up next time for covert menstruation, where the uterine lining is resorbed at the end of each cycle instead of hemorrhaged out. I would like to do fieldwork with animals in Africa. Especially the beautiful hyenas.

Bulgarian Cherry Cheesecake

Each day I face pain. I know I am not alone in this. Many people face this too, and even worse perhaps. I don’t want this to be the pain blog, or even the pain avoidance blog, but today* the music is playing so loudly I can’t not mention it. I figured the blog could be one more way to get away from myself, get outside myself, as contradictory as that may seem. Anything to take my mind off me is good. Tiny snow is falling. It had melted off this morning but now has resumed. As if it missed itself.

In the meantime, a baker’s dozen of red-winged blackbirds appeared at the feeders, followed by a small sharp-looking army of red finches. The backyard was filled with starlings.

My primary accomplishment this morning was to prepare a beef and gravy dish for the crockpot, so that my hardworking mate will have a hearty meal when he arrives home after dark. To be eaten over biscuits, and accompanied by fresh crispy raw veggies with a homemade buttermilk dressing I got out of The Pastry Queen’s Christmas cookbook.

Nancy Mairs has been much on my mind. I first began reading her in my early twenties. I was nannying in NYC and raiding the library with the lions out front as often as I could. “Remembering the Bone House” was my introduction to her, and even then I knew she spoke for me, and I sympathized with her, though I did not share her MS diagnosis and challenges.

Will this blog be a Search for a Cure? A celebration of all for which I am grateful each day? It is still taking shape, finding if it has a voice, if it has a leg, what is this thing all twisted and wrapped in on itself?

Yesterday I made a cherry cheesecake, topped with gorgeous pale purple cherries all the way from Bulgaria. They floated in their glass jar for weeks and neither my mate nor I could open them. He sprained his hand. I felt I herniated my head. The jar went back in the cabinet. For whatever reason, we did not give up. Yesterday, after a month of trying, they opened almost without resistance. And the Bulgarian cherry cheesecake, sprinkled with brown sugar and cherry juice which made it shine, was delicious.



(*Today is a misnomer, I wrote this perhaps around the seventh, still figuring out blogtime.)

Surfacing

The theme of my inner season seems to be “surfacing.” When Alice was lost in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts yelled, “Off with her head,” Alice escaped by simply waking up. I think my own ascent involves facing a lot more dirt. Somehow years of deaths and relocations and personal health issues have left me unemployed, carless, without local friends, in a state of what feels like permanent pre migraine, in suburban NJ, and yet I count myself extremely lucky. I am warm, well-fed, and loved. And I have a computer. I have learned to keep myself company. So, I talk to you like you exist. You are reading this!

I do feel like I have lost my head, but that my head was overrated at best.

Do you know the earthworm’s skin is covered with light sensitive cells and that some worms have five hearts, or aortic arches? Oh behold, the five-hearted earthworm. Earthworms are also hermaphrodites with complicated love lives. With their muscular contraction they are essentially swimming through the soil, making friends and composting.

When I was a child my mother and I raised earthworms in a giant bed we kept covered. They lived in a luscious darkness and we fed them scraps from our table, bread crusts and orange peels and coffee grounds, and they made beautiful soil for our garden which grew tomatoes and greens and cucumbers and melons and flowers.

So I woke up and realized I am deep underground, but rising, slowly, and so I identify with the bulb aspect of self, and not the flower, not even the root. I am planted with bulbs. We all are.

Right now the bulbs are sleeping.

I am working on writing novels. It prevents me from writing more poems, though not a blog apparently. Thanks to a friend Nita who back in October nonchalantly sent me a link to NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month) saying we should do this, she had once before and she was going to do it again, I found myself writing my first novel in November 2009. It had no plot but I achieved the goal of 50,000 words and then some, officially uploading 67,218 words though more floated in the computer, and it kept me out of the hospital by helping me tune out my bizarre migraines which make it so that sometimes I don’t recognize my own elbow.

I highly recommend Nanowrimo. Don’t say you can’t. Just do it. Start and continue.
I had so much fun that now that the New Year rolled around I decided, ‘Well, better write another one.’ And so here I am, at 3000 words, and this time I have a plot. No outline and no real skill, but this time I have a plot, a thing which proved elusive in November. In November I learned that I could sit in a chair and do the writing, and I began to learn how and when to use first and third and even second person perspectives more effectively, like a child with her first three fat red, yellow, and blue crayons. This time I am learning how to order events so that they make some sort of sense to the rational mind.

The bulbs are storing their sugar, dreaming sleep. Dreaming awakening. I raise my cup of tea to you.

In The Beginning

About ten years ago a friend suggested I start a blog/a weblog and I thought, “Why on earth would I want to do that, to talk at people? How rude,” I thought. And now here we are. A new decade, fresh at the start, and a blahg now seems like a good way to spare my family and friends the ten page missives I was flinging at them through the air. Apparently I do like to talk at people! Who knew? My preference is still dialogue, which is why I respond to myself. How about you?

Facebook is for Scrabble and looking at people’s photo albums. It is hard for me to not start each status update with, “”Oh come now, who on fb isn’t thinking me, me, me, me, me I, I, I, I, I.”

So here I greet you on a frosty morning in the suburbs of the world. New Jersey where I look over a frozen pond which yesterday was covered in skaters and today rests idly in the sun. Winter light blasts through the window, illuminating a crystal I had forgotten was there, and casting dizzying rainbows all over the wall in front of me.
The mate has left for a new job. Here we go.

Isn’t coffee a dream? Apparently my mate brewed a new pot and then ran off with it, but how can I blame him? One needs such a fortifying friend for the wee hours of the frigid morning. I try to coerce the cat to join me. In his sleigh the mate will likely be listening to Rebecca, the Daphne Du Maurier classic which irks him with its lily-livered main character as much as it thrills him with its atmospheric language. When we were rushing about on a brief stop at the library neither of us could think of the author of Fahrenheit 451 (We no longer have access to our own brains. What we cannot think of scares us.) and so he is finishing Rebecca before he moves on to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Red Badge of Courage. He now refers to listening as “reading.”

So this is just forming. It’s two cells, me and you. And you may even be imaginary!
Let’s see what we have in nine months. Or what kicks us in the belly or causes our heart to flutter in the meantime. Elephants and angels all.

Let us praise small things. Today, coffee, sunlight, warmth, and libraries. Also new jobs, bosses who communicate and advocate, and the utter convenience of email. Any day we are not in pain. Or moment. Our friends. You.