Seeds of August
July is when heavy summer starts in Richmond. It pestered me, just beneath my notice, hanging around like a least loved neighbor’s wet dog, overly familiar and annoying, the air as heavy and dank as wet fur. The seeds of that fetid August appear with the first wash of heat in mid-May. School was not out before I began to feel that there would be no end to the heat of the day and it was true, one hot day bled into hot evenings. Unbearable evenings bled into the next humid morning. I could no longer conceive of winter.
I started a habit of getting up earlier than usual to begin the hour long commute to work in my old Volvo station wagon. I had no air conditioning in my car. Even with every window down the vinyl seats were hot to the touch by the time I arrived at 9 a.m. at the clinic where I worked as a therapist in the only mental health center in five counties on the Northern Neck region in eastern Virginia. Most evenings I ran groups and so stayed until well past sundown, driving home as the sky darkened and heat lightening tortured the skies. Lightening danced in my head, too, a dark energy that latched on and held sway over the rooms full of people talking about pain.
I know now that I was watching for a sign that summer. My life was deeply dug in. I felt buried alive most of the time and at times so miserable that I longed for the clots to fall in and suffocate me, my grave dug but not filled.
Strangely there were brief moments when I felt exhilarated. Seven years of careful planning and very hard work had come to fruition early that June when I passed the clinical licensing exam for social work. I had reached the end of a series of hoops and finally, the next step was to establish my own fledgling practice. Imagining being solely responsible for dozens of clients weighed heavily though I had confidence in my clinical skills.
I was unbelievably happy at the birth of my wonderful, miraculous grand daughter in February.
Unbelievably saddened at times, yet still happy and proud as I watched my son pull away from me and turn to his new family. I knew it was only right, but it left me with a heartache that remained and throbbed often like a poorly set bone on cold rainy days. He is my youngest and has been a mix of tenderness and steel. His wife began with me as a mystery I was determined to puzzle out and then as she bore their daughter, she turned to her own family and I felt our relationship became written in a foreign language that was undecipherable to me.
Other factors added to the waves of sadness that sometimes overcame me. My husband and lover of seven years turned fifty-five that summer. The ten year age difference between us had never mattered to me. Most of the time I could believe that he was the sexiest, smartest man I had ever met. Other times I doubted his love for me and wished that I could fall in love with someone who could easily comfort me, who would cuddle, coddle, wipe tears and give hugs. This man did not do those things. Ever. How I longed for tenderness. How I dreaded growing old and never having the chance to feel like I really mattered enough to anyone to take time to hold me and give me words I wanted. Even in the face of the longing, I remained, and I could not imagine anything changing how I felt about him. But he was a near three-pack a day smoker whose COPD had eroded his lung tissue and he had been diagnosed with emphysema the previous fall. The specter of lung cancer was never far from my imagination when his rich laughter at some foolishness turned to coughing, or when he could not catch his breath for a few moments after mowing the lawn, sweat dripping into his eyes which always looked puzzled, as if “How could I feel like this?” His answer was always to sit down on the back deck and light up a Kool Mild. Followed by a second and a third before he returned to his task.
Fear had been my very loyal companion over the years, more loyal than any dog or man, never stepping far away from me for more than a few minutes. My fear was a chameleon and could fashion itself a disguise that always fooled me until I noticed its long zebra striped tail whipping around my ankles. “There you are,” I would say, while beneath my skin the anxiety rippled, familiar as my bones. “Let me find my axe.” So often those days axe was found in at the bottom of my purse in a small brown bottle labled Zoloft, 50 m.g. Sometimes when fear roared in my head and breathed a death scent in my face I would reach for the other weapon, the bludgeon, my Xanax, .05 m.g. This, the last defense, was used only when I felt cold jaws closing about my throat. The tiny orange pills could melt fear into a sticky puddle, its black hat peaked and useless, the flying monkeys dancing to “Kool and the Gang” at the edge of my vision. But there was a catch. Use it too often and you could become dependent. “Beware Dorothy” appeared in the sky in my minds eye each time I tumbled the bottles through my purse, searching for a lipstick, or car keys. I used them only when I knew panic was close. The other thing is that Fear’s Disneyworld is insomnia. For that even, I kept Ambien, a miracle drug and a secret weapon if ever there was. Except for the strange thoughts that could overtake you on top of a parking garage seven stories in the air. I left Ambien to her own devices.
Most therapists knows fe ar intimately, and are very familiar with at least two of its faces; denial and anger. Leachy. It sucks away the joy of the easy moment and replaces it with the imposter and the lie of the disaster “what if.”
I was desperately torn trying to decide whether to leave my job. While money would be made in private practice, I had a sense of purpose at the clinic where I was the sole therapist treating uninsured clients. I needed something to jar me out of the sense of obligation I felt to the eighty plus souls on my caseload. I was tired, deeply worn through and through with a parade of sad and angry people through my office. And so one evening driving home through a storm of dry lightening that forced me to pull my car off the road, I prayed for a sign.
Days passed and I forgot my prayer, as I often do. God catches them, though, and sometimes He opens them up, the edges wrinkly like crepe paper and holds them up to the light to see my soul’s crampy script.
First the flies came. They were identical, the size of gooseberries, bodies a dull black. Thirteen in all. Snarled up into the spare bathroom from some place deep below the house. In three minutes all of them had arrived, whirling and bashing themselves into the clean walls and mirror, smearing the ivory sink, their fat black bodies clinging to the glass door of the shower. The hair on my arms stood up, my stomach grew icy and I wanted to gag. In every horror movie I had ever seen flies are the harbingers of the boogeyman. But always symbolic of death, of stagnation, of putrification, and the cycle of life as their larvae broke down the old and helped make way for the new.
An unpleasant reminder at the midnight hour that I was home alone for a month. Even before my husband left for a month long stint of work in Longview, Texas, I sometimes felt I shared the house. As for the flies I murdered every one of them with a red flyswatter and without batting an eye. They were as big as the end of my thumb. Then I piled their bodies in a heap and left them there for morning to make sure I had not hallucinated them. In three years of living in the house near the James we had often commented about its tightness; we’d never seen a flying insect inside its walls. I fell into an uneven sleep and dreamed of old cars on sliding into muddy ravines, white faces and palms pressed to the glass.
The next morning walking to the kitchen, my living room seemed dark. The morning sun usually fills the spaces between the furniture with a soft welcoming grey light. This fact must have grazed my consciousness, enough that I walked to the back door after I poured my coffee to look for storm clouds.
The second sign was waiting for me. My beauty of an apple tree was gone. Half of it was crumpled against the side of my house, its limbs contorted and twisted against the glass and obscuring the light from the living room window. On the other side of the yard, the scene repeated against the house of my neighbor.
Voluptuous, precocious every spring with her blossoms and fruit she rival Eden’s apple tree. My cats often nested in her gentle arms, even Moe, who feared everything.
It was if some great axe had fallen from the sky, took aim and severed her. Even the earth that held her roots had split and buckled up. Something had ripped her apart.
I put on my robe and walked outside.
The apples were pooled around her, dragging her limbs against the ground. It was the fruit she bore, the very thing that she nurtured and grew and that which she gave her essence whose heaviness had pulled her to the ground. A second sign.
I recognized the metaphor immediately. How often had I felt the pressure at my throat? Most days everything in my life felt like it weighed on me, pulled on me, drained every ounce of energy I had to offer.
I knew that God was telling me that I could either shake loose my fruit, green though they may be, or be shattered under their weight.
The third sign came when my dog of thirteen years walked through a dusting of Crepe Myrtle blossoms gracing our back porch, toenails clicking on the stone walk and out of the back yard through the hole in the fence I kept meaning to fix. She’d been sick. It was dusk on a Sunday night the week after the tree fell. We searched the quiet neighborhood above the river, calling her name until the early morning hours. No sign. Tacked her photograph onto telephone poles. She never came back. She was my best friend.
Third sign. The metaphor was lost on me. She spared me the witnessing of her death, of putting her down? She’d been my dog since I was 32 years old. She’d stuck around longer than husbands, jobs, houses. (I discovered in June of 2006 that this was my preparation for living through and assisting with and witnessing the death of my step-father).
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Psychotropic drugs are most amazing things. They are plaster to the human soul. You can cover up so much with them, smooth out the pits, the holes, the broken places. Thing is when you stop them, the veneer can crumble and all of the unhealed places rear up, less attended to and even more raw than before. And the driver has forgotten how to read the map to find a path to even quiet down the everyday pain. Much less the yesterday pain.
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They name hurricanes way in advance of their birth. Katrina is a Russian name I think. It sounds like the name of a ballerina. Or a twelve year old girl buying a CD at the mall. It is not the name of a monster. I watch the footage on CNN for ten days. I visited New Orleans in 2004. April. Mostly the French Quarter, but the bus that transported us to our Swamp Tour drove through the 9th ward. The poverty was familiar to me and not shocking. I knew the smell of the houses. I knew the way the women wore down so early and how the kids were never really children. And the way of the men, something about them hard and something so cotton candy and light. Light in the soul but heavy on earth.
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