strike that

sowing

I got a text this morning that said: just read blog for first time in a while. Damn. I miss happy / fearless jenn.

As do I. It has not been the best couple weeks, neither happy nor fearless. And what I can say is that I’m ok with that; that ninety-five percent of the time I feel well above average on the happy-fearless scale, so it’s only fair that some weeks go like these. It’s unavoidable, and in any case it’s also sort of exquisite. Residing way up on the other end of the scale thrills me with its fullness, but this, too, overflows. I feel very clean from all the crying. I’ve written some things I like. I’ve spent a lot of time awake, and the middle of the night is beautiful, even when you’re sad.

Did things not work out with the idiot boy? wrote Talley. Alas, they did not. So here I am again at the beginning of a summer that I somehow let myself have specific ideas about – simple ideas about bluegrass and breakfasts. And I am reminded of the long drive last year from Quebec City back to the airport in Portland Maine after the failed Frenchie Adventure, and how I sat in the passenger seat with my foot out the window and the music playing loudly, and how I thought, Really? Really you don’t just want to forget all this silliness about not liking me and instead drive to Montreal and sit at a café and feel filled with luck? Because it always seems to me, at times like these, that the joy is so ready and waiting, and that one has to go out of one’s way to miss it.

And this time around I'm staring at Disaster, thinking Really? Really you don’t just want to revel in the pleasures of a Portland summer with me? What would be difficult about that? How would it be better otherwise? And the answer, I guess, is that I’m just not the person he wants to revel with, and I recognize the conceit of finding that so strange. It’s just that I feel such joy at sharing good things with him when he’s not being Disastrous, and sharing them with him is to me so clearly preferable. But I suppose we do not love people in order for them to love us back. We just love them if we do, and it comes with no other promises, and it is in itself Enough.

And likewise we do not garden just for the eggplants (though if they come it is near as marvelous as being loved in return) so this afternoon I pulled the weeds from the pea trellis and cleared a spot for the cukes. This will not be my harvest but I was happy for the quiet and the smell of the dirt.

Emilee emailed me my horoscope and it said that I should radiate faith in all directions. I think I’m up for that again. I’ll likely still cry a few more times, when I’m packing and when I have the first Sunday paper all to myself and when I have a good bike ride and think that would have been more fun with the boy. But one can hardly write off a summer that’s not even started yet, celestially, and here I am again saying What Would I Have Done Differently? Nothing I can think of. All of it was worth the possibility, all of it was new and grand.

posted by tortaluga @ 8:11 PM