My upbeat got beat up

Boy, I sure am ready for a New Month. I love new beginnings and here we go! One coming up! Groundhog Day, Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day, a slew of birthdays, and maybe something green poking up from the earth somewhere. Ok, probably not.

Today I was taking a platter of chopped up pears, apples, bananas, and grapes out to the birds when I tripped and took an impressive fall into the snow. There were those moments when none of me was touching the ground at all.

The confetti of fruit flew and dotted the landscape like rainbow sprinkles. It was beautiful.

But I was not sure I was not hurt. I still popped right back up, adrenaline style, and tried to figure out what had happened. A misstep? We try to learn so we don’t repeat our mistakes but I am not sure this applies to falling down.

There was the sharp end of a holly branch sticking out and I was relieved that I had not impaled myself. That branch is something I dragged home weeks ago when it lay curbside covered in bright red berries, a victim of a storm or someone’s chainsaw.

Except for some scraped wrists and a very heavy feeling, I was not hurt.

I just felt so dense. It was like I got the gravity knocked into me.

I hit the earth like a giant water laden snowman.

Foompf.

I must have tripped on a stone at the edge of the buried garden. I don’t know. In recent months I have taken to falling sometimes. Clumsy? Brain damaged? Just getting back in touch with the earth?

It is true that I was feeling irritable, distracted by a rude message from a woman at the boro hall regarding pet licensing.

“Walking with anger?” Eva asked me.

And yes, that is what I was doing. Walking with anger. Danger. Danger. Not in a rage but just distracted perhaps, some part of my mind on that topic of the rude woman.

I realize part of the function of this blog was just to help me cope with suburbia. I have loved cities and I have loved countryside and I have loved villages, but suburbia poses a lot of troubles and challenges for me.

I am not the calm, kind, non-judgemental, loving person I am when I live other places. Suburbia brings out anger in me.

And it is a strangely isolating place.

While now I love my privacy with all my heart, it used to feel we lived amongst ghosts, or that we had become ghosts ourselves.

I have a letter to deliver to my neighbors who share our fence and therefore the feral cats, and here it is five years since we arrived in January 2006, and I do not know their names.

And they do not know mine.

And you may recall that even my favorite neighbor, the lady on the corner, scared me this summer when her appearance changed so drastically I suddenly did not recognize her at all, as if my neighbor had suddenly been replaced and was being played by a different actress.

When people go get their faces botoxed all I can think is, ‘People, there are starving children in Africa!’

And Trenton and Camden and Newark.

So the blog was partly to help me cope and navigate, to help channel rage and judgement, to keep me off the streets where my chances of interactions going awry are increased exponentially.

The blog was to keep me out of jail.

So far, so good…

Tune in next time...