The Hammock

It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. For, well, good reasons. Listen to my journal from August, 2008. (Maybe the memory of summer will help warm you, too.)

***

Beautifully warm in the shade of the willow, sherry on the side table, Sophia the cat lounging in the grass beneath me as I drift in my slowly swaying hammock. She plays with my fingers when I let my arm drop over the edge. A breeze sings in the cottonwoods; monarchs tack left and right in the shade. Summer is as it should be. I’m warm and lazy and feeling the experience. And feeling this is life.

During the past year, I struggled to make changes in my life, my work, my passions. I started off not bad: I took advantage of an opportunity to teach horseback riding at a local community college. Certified as an instructor, I began teaching private clients on a borrowed old school horse, Ben. That was the first half of 2008: so far, so good, but teaching riders isn’t a living wage, and I’m not making any progress with my painting.

Then the world tires of my whining, I guess. Change forces itself onto me.


It began when my mother-in-law, Barbara, became very ill, an old cancer metastasizing into her very bones. My husband and I spend ten days at a time with her in Colorado, a day’s drive away, several times, once me alone, helping her cope with treatments and then hospice. I don’t know how long she has to live. It is a privilege helping her – she is stalwart, kind, and loving even in her pain. She even laughs, sometimes.

But her far-flung sons can only tag team so long – she’s unable to manage the multiple drugs hospice provide, much less feed herself – so we convince her that it’s time for assisted living in a lovely facility not three blocks away. We travel down on a Thursday to help her move, with help from an Idaho-based brother.

On Saturday, with most of her belongings placed in the new home, she tires, takes a long nap, and dissolves into incoherence. As if, in her heart, she has decided assisted living is the beginning of the end, so why not end now?

Slowly confusion gives way to comatose under the loving care of hospice, until a week later there is a day of labored breathing, erratic and irregular, one long last breath, and she who is Barbara slips from the body.

It was hard, but gratifying, to help her through the transition – she who, in only a few short years, was kinder to me than my own mother. Already I miss the idea and the reality of her kindness and generosity.

Exhausted, my husband and I drive home on Monday.


That Friday, my office building burns to the ground.

The fire destroys all of my writing – electronic and hard copy – from the past 40+ years. And virtually everything I’d collected in my life: artwork by college buddies and family. Windup toys. Childhood trains. An antique desk. A 1950s school map of the US with Wyoming’s features impossibly situated. And hundreds, hundreds of books – nearly every one I owned.

I shut down that night at the bar. The next weekend we drive back to Barbara’s for the funeral. Another week of denial, and then reality hits.

Thursday night I cry, Friday I am on the edge, so I take my horse DJ to the mountains, up the Middlefork trail, for a long, four-hour ride.

I love riding, because it engulfs me completely, body and soul. Not today. I begin to cry, to mourn for Barbara, for my lost work, my lost life, my “wasted” efforts at writing, destroyed with very little to show for it. No fame, no fortune, marginal success. What, then, had it been for? And I finally, finally realize – accept, experience, grok – that life is in the living.


We are not what we used to be, what we aspire to be, even what we want to be. We are – our meaning – is in what and how we do. Not in terms of other people’s reactions to us, to our work, or to our results. Life is how we experience our actions. All the stuff around us, even the things we create, are merely the residue of that experience.

I stop crying. I enjoy the ride: the miracle of a thunderhead, the joy of the one being that is DJ and me. We truly are linked – one soul in two places. Pretty, talented, goofy, neurotic. Yep, that’s us. I begin to sing, finding old songs, singing the parts I remember, to DJ and the mountains around me: “Born in East Virginia,” “Eddystone Light,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Cool, Clear Water.”

I talk openly, to DJ, my partner. His head nods serenely as he carries me home.


I arrive to the usual conflicts with my husband – the daily things that rub both of us the wrong way. But now, I just want one thing: to be joyful as much as possible.

Leading to today. Now. Cat time in the hammock. The wind rises, the shade moves, and suddenly I’m hot in the sun. Even Sophia has moved to the shadier part of our willow. It may be time for a new hammock location.
A cloud puts off the decision. Finish your sherry, Cat. Go from there.