The New Normal (Dry Bones and All)

I used to write by looking straight ahead. But on Friday our computer crashed, gave a wheezy little gasp and then a soft almost apologetic ping! And it would not turn on again. So Bryan spent the weekend twisting thick cords and blah blah blah until the laptop connected to the big monitor (the big monitor connected to the--finger bone. Oh, hear the word of the Lord!) and now I am sitting in front of a small screen that has nothing to do with what I am writing. If I want to re-read something I have to turn my neck to the left and look at a different monitor which is counter-intuitive and different and just plain wrong.

I keep waiting for things to return to normal. I keep waiting for when. When I get a job. When the house sells. When we move. When I can look straight ahead and recognize and make sense of of what is right there in front of me. But here I am, looking left to see what I think.

On Friday after the computer died and Bryan was in the office trying to resuscitate the situation with mouth-to-modem fuck you's and what-the-fuck and a few straight shots of FUCK! I went out to the front yard to garden. Growing up my mother would lead me around our yard and point out plants to me: Nasturtiums. Those are snapdragons. Petunias--you can just as easily over water a plant as you can under water one! For a long time I thought it was boring, gardening, her hand hot on my arm, dirt under her nails. Bulbs gave me hives. Still, she would pull me around the yard and show me flowers. LI-LAC, she would uncurl my hand and trace the letters into my palm like Anne Sullivan with Helen Keller. It became our joke, her pushing my fist into a Mexican Sage and me repeating the name slowly and clumsily as if I were deaf and blind, my mother playing the Anne Bancroft to my Patty Duke, both of us playing actresses playing a role playing at discovery. WA-A-ATER. My mother is the type of woman who absentmindedly crushes foliage in her hands and then smells her fingers as she talks to you, wipes the waxy leaf of a lemon tree across the soft of her neck and suddenly, without ever really realizing it, I am, too.

Image here.

Our old house had a lemon tree. A large beautiful garden with a lemon tree that produced over-sized warty lemons with thick, yellow skin. In the spring, just as we left, the lemon blossoms made the whole yard smell like my mother. There are no lemon trees at our new house and it does not smell like home, but there is a large camellia bush, ferns, a kumquat tree and a lush night-blooming jasmine that has crawled up a hose that a previous tenant left on top of the house while cleaning out the rain gutters. I sat out there on Friday and arranged my potted plants, cleaned up my succulents and tried very hard not to think fuck you and what-the-fuck, any variations of fuck really. (I mean, everyone knows that when life gives you lemons you are supposed to make lemonade, but what about when life takes away your lemons? What are you supposed to do then? Garnish your drink with a kumquat?) I couldn't hear Bryan inside with the computer, our neighbors have wind chimes, nice ones. Not all high-pitched and ting-y but more of a monastic low clohng that calms me. And then next door, there is a family with 7 year old twin boys, and somebody in that house plays piano like a virtuoso. Rapid fast Mozart and Beethoven, and as I sat there on Friday afternoon the music moving over me, the chimes clohnging deep in my throat, surrounded by plants and flowers, the warm air turning cool with fog, Nacho taking a joyous dirt bath beside me and I thought that maybe this it it: When. I mean, what was I waiting for anyway? For things to return to the way they were with me always worried about losing it all, paying toomuch% of our income on mortgage and working at a job that I hated? Was I waiting for rote, for numb, for that? Or was I waiting for this: Me in a garden listening to Mozart, nowhere to go but here. And here is just fine, better than fine, really. Here is the feeling of it all. So maybe this is the new normal: A broken computer, not enough closet space but vintage vaulted ceilings so that we can breathe, the smell of jasmine climbing up a simple green garden hose, my neck cricked from looking left because there is nothing in front of me anyway. It is all here, and it will smell like home soon enough.