Breezy Thoughts

I’ll have a café-mocha vodka-valium latte to go, please.

The sarcastic quote stares back at me where it sits on the windowsill. It brings a smile every time I read it, especially this morning where I face the back pasture and process my thoughts, scattered as they are. A storm front is blowing through outside, clouds traverse a vivid blue sky, and a symphony orchestrated by the breeze wafts through the screen door as your favorite wind chimes sing in concert with the swaying of the trees and the sound of laughing children next door. And I think of you. How much we loved days like this, especially when they were lucky enough to land on a Sunday so you could chew your fingernails off and watch football while I curled up beside you on the sofa, your free arm wrapped around me, the smell of you filling me with comfort and safety.

All the memories. They’re all I have left of you. The painful, recent ones clammer for my attention and have been the focus of a fair amount of counseling so I can allow them to co-exist in my soul. But I need the happy memories to stand up and be counted more often. Finally they’re doing that. Last night I stood at my granite island in a new kitchen like you always wanted me to have and reminisced with your sister and her husband about the way you and I could laugh together until we couldn’t breathe, Which, of course, made us laugh, too.

Until we turned off the lights and went to our separate rooms where I cried. Memories. They confuse me. They make me miss you. All those years that you and I put our squirreled away resources into vacations with our children, weekend romps in the mountains, camping creekside with friends, I always told our less adventurous acquaintances that we didn’t care about the big houses and late model vehicles we couldn’t afford—we were making memories with our family and they’d be a treasure to me someday. A comfort if ever I was left alone without you. I’d read your cards and poems and feel your love for me again. And I do.

But I didn’t know how much aching, excruciating longing all those memories and mementos would carry with them at the same time. They are no substitute for you, my love.

Recently my counselor said to me that there’s nothing wrong with being sad. As a woman with a melancholy temperament, I know sad but I prefer laughter. I’ve avoided sad like the plague, you could say. You’re not really allowed to be sad in our culture anyway. You can’t go into Hobby Lobby or even Walmart without being bombarded by wall art and t-shirts and jewelry all telling you to be grateful, or thankful, or announcing that you’re blessed. You never see encouragement to be sad.  It wouldn’t sell.

“Being in a valley is an important part of life,” my counselor told me. “It shows the depth of our emotion. We wouldn’t recognize the mountain tops unless we’d been in the valleys.” I guess another thing about being in a valley, for me at least, is that I don’t want to be here despite what a few people think. Remember how I avoid sadness? Sadness hurts. I’ve been criticized for being here, which is unkind and ignorant. Maybe when some people look at me right now, they fear seeing their face in my place. I understand. I used to be that person, too.

That’s what sadness teaches you. Life and death are givens. When sorrow comes to stay, suffering pulls up a chair and the classroom of life has begun. The things I’ve learned since I lost you, the depths of insight that pain has given me, all of it has revealed things about myself that I never knew. They’ve unmasked things about God that I never knew. For years I feared being in this place of grief and did everything I could to learn about God without having to personally discover the intimacy that only arrives disguised in suffering.

I’ve learned I can survive terrible things. I can hear painful words and recognize the ignorance behind them. I can listen to my own wisdom and acknowledge its strength. I can hear the voice of God. I can sit with discomfort and allow things to work out the way they’re going to. I can even let things be. Let things go. I don’t have to be in control. Sometimes.

Still, all of this feels like a basic course in being human. And yet I started out describing the paradox of how painful and helpful the memories are since all the photos and random videos of you that make it so hard to believe you’re gone remind me that you aren’t going to come home again. I guess it all flows together. The very things that bring me comfort arrive packaged in pain. In longing. In a little more acceptance of what is. And a long sigh as I recognize that, while in time I will see you again, be with you again, it’s one more thing I must sit with in expectation and patience and heart aching longing, knowing I have no control over when that will happen.

I guess all of this sounds very sad. “You’ll be companioned by sadness,” my counselor also said. It was validating to hear considering how much toxic positivity flows through our culture. I guess the thing about sadness is that it tells the truth. It doesn’t let me shove difficult feelings out of sight to make others feel more comfortable or to avoid my distress. After all, I’m learning to sit with discomfort until it works itself out.

Still, when the memories roll in like a tsunami and I find myself flat on my back again, I’d rather be anywhere else but here. You know what I think about in hard times like that, though, seeing your beautiful, photographed eyes and that loving expression on your face as you look back at me? I think you know something I’m not allowed to see yet. And it will make up for all of this pain. Someday. Somehow.

Can I still have that vodka-valium latte while I think about that? 

Conspiracy Theory

3:30 a.m.

In the morning.

Asleep. By myself. In the dark. Oblivious to the haunting sound of heavy breathing, I ignored the CPAP machine running at full speed on my nightstand, choosing instead to remain unconscious. Unaware of any movement outside, I was immobilized by melatonin and serenaded by the mechanical droning of my white noise machine and a box fan set to Hurricane in the corner. My plan was obvious. I was determined to shelter in place in a medically induced coma for at least as long as my bladder could hold out.

I’m not afraid to sleep in my house alone. After all, I took karate for three years thirty years ago. Relying on a backward donkey kick would blow out a knee if I tried it now, but if I learned one thing from that scary sensei teaching me to count to ten in Japanese, it was how to yell really loud. Some talents never fade.

I was confident about the layers of protection I had in place, too. All my doors have dead bolts, I live in the country next door to my daughter’s home where nothing bad ever happens, and there are those karate skills I mentioned. There was no reason to behave like the paranoid city girl I’ve been all my life. So, when the neighbors suggested I tone down the LEDs in my front yard so they could enjoy some slumber, too, I was glad to oblige. We all need our sleep. Every night.

At 3:30 a.m.

In the morning.

Most of us.

Just not that guy who tried to pry open my garage door in the dark.

I’m not really a suspicious person except where the government is concerned. In that case, endued with an abundance of caution and some uncommon good sense, it doesn’t hurt my feelings at all when people laugh and call me a conspiracy theorist. That’s what they called Noah, too, right before it started to rain. I think I’m in good company.

Still, when the repairman said the only explanation for why a cable that’s supposed to be on the inside of the garage door now lay on the outside was that I’d been victimized, I thought he was a conspiracy theorist, too. I didn’t mind having something in common with a new friend, but I was shocked to hear that an opportunistic low life had tried to invade my sanctuary. I even tried to pretend it wasn’t true. For a minute.

Then I did the only thing I could think of to protect both my home and my person without blowing out a knee.

I bought a Ring doorbell. And had a second security camera installed high up under the eaves. Finally, I replaced all the outside lightbulbs with motion detectors. So I could sleep peacefully again. Alone. In the dark.

At 3:30 a.m.

Knowing that thieves are camera shy.

That was the theory anyway.

Right up until the alarm on my phone went off and woke me up out of a delicious dream where I was sharing a hot fudge sundae in a canoe with Harrison Ford, trying to locate its missing cherry. I was so startled by the terrifying sound of wind chimes in my ear that I nearly capsized my canoe and landed on the bedroom floor. If not for that CPAP hose keeping me tethered to the bed, I’d have blown out my knee anyway.

Instantly, I was wide awake. On high alert. Ready to dust off those karate skills and yell really loud. Or dial 9-1-1. Just as soon as I identified the intruder in my front yard where the Ring doorbell and security camera and motion detectors had caught the guy in the act and overruled ten milligrams of melatonin just to tell me about it.

Frantically, I scanned the live shot out the front door via Ring’s camera. Nothing. I switched to the security camera near the roof. Zilch. What the heck? There had to have been someone in my yard. I knew that windchimey melody by heart. Every time I walk outside to throw a bag of trash in the dumpster, it plays that theme song for the entire trip because it thinks I don’t know I’m the one who opened the front door.

Then I remembered. When I set the security camera recently to recognize only people (ignoring passing cars and pigeon-stalking cats,) it takes a video every time it spots someone, and this morning it did not disappoint. Sitting in the dark on my bed, my heartbeat set to fight or flight, I squinted at the recording showing a faintly lit driveway at the far end of my camera’s screen where, high in the eaves, the lens was focused.

“What is that?” I muttered, turning the camera sideways to get a larger view. Expecting to see someone with a crowbar jacking up the garage door again, I stared in confusion at the image. The bright outline of a lanky figure, illuminated by the blinding light from the security camera, seemed to move awkwardly across the driveway toward the garage door.

“I knew it!” I whispered, so the prowler wouldn’t hear. I’d been waiting for this to happen. That creep had come back and was going for it again. What nerve! But I was ready this time. After all, I was practically watching him in real time. There were lights above the garage, a spotlight from the camera, and a highly skilled karate expert’s eagle eye trained on his treachery courtesy of a seven second video delay. He didn’t have a chance.

But, his gait was so weird. For a split second I thought he was walking on stilts, right up until he disappeared. Into the dark. Against the house. Near the camera attached to the eaves. Where he was spinning a web.

My high-tech security camera set to capture the movement of “people only” lit up the night sky with a flash, and jingle-jangled me out of a chocolate escapade with Indiana Jones so that I would know that my home was being invaded by the notorious criminal better known as Daddy Longlegs. Unaware of his place in the spotlight, he ambled along in the foreground while his mug shot was overlayed against the lit driveway in the distance.

At 3:30 a.m.

In the morning.

When intelligent people like me should be sleeping instead of hyperventilating over spider invasions and stilt-walking aliens.

I don’t know who to believe anymore. I can’t trust my security camera to sort out fact from fiction. I’d turn off those chimes on my phone so they don’t wake me up, but what if I do need help remembering that I'm the one who opened the front door? I’m not even sure I still need to know how to count to ten in Japanese.

It’s like Indiana Jones told me in that canoe while we tried to locate a missing cherry, “X never ever marks the spot.” 

And if you think it does, you’re probably looking at a spider anyway.

Lots of thanks to Rob Young for permission to use his clever photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: LEGO Indiana Jones in Grass | Indiana Jones gets lost amongs… | Flickr