We didn't have that when I was a kid

Note hiking shoes and jacket.
It's all over from here. 

This year I've become infected with CHD:  Compulsive Hiking Disorder.  It's sort of strange that it took me four years to contract a highly contagious disease for which the majority of NW Arkansans seem to be carriers, and is endemic to the environment. But this spring I got it.

It started with a few innocent half-hour walks on the trail near a local spring.  Then I graduated to longer hikes in the nearby wildlife management area, then to trail hikes in a state park half an hour away.

Then I bought a pair of hiking shoes and a Gor-Tex jacket, and everything went all to hell.

Now I find myself poring over trail maps and guide books, looking for the next fix. My car is covered in mud and gravel from the unpaved roads, the back floorboard littered with empty water bottles, and my Flickr account is full of photos of moss-covered rocks and waterfalls.

I've never been particularly "outdoorsy."  The outdoors, as lovely as it is, is also full of bugs. It gets too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and I'm allergic to red cedar (rampant in Oklahoma) and most grass pollens. But I also spent a good part of my childhood at my godparents' 140-acre "farm" in St. Louis, Oklahoma (population 158 at the last census).My godfather was a weekend rancher: he lived an hour away from the farm, so he raised cattle and grew alfalfa and otherwise just let the land run wild; and my parents pretty much let me run wild over it.

For me, an introspective and imaginative only child, that 140 acres was my personal fairytale world. Each stream, pond, forest path, and red sandstone outcropping had its own special magic to me.
I explored every nook and cranny:  collecting fireflies in the meadow, catching tiny frogs on the sandstone falls, following cattle trails through the woods and crawling about through the fort made of hay bales my Godfather built me each fall as he loaded the barn with winter fodder for the cattle.  It was a maze of tunnels, room,s and windows that grew gradually smaller all winter as he used up the hay.

Hawksbill Crag, probably the most
photographed spot in all of Arkansas.

But we didn't have anything like this back in Oklahoma!

Everywhere you turn in the Natural State you're looking at clear, running streams, springs pouring out from under rocky ledges, towering trees and even more towering bluffs, caves, hollows, and waterfalls. The kid in me is entranced all over again. It's good to be reminded of the magic in the world!

The Cruellest

April is the cruellest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire,
stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

                                              --T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"


I have argued that T.S. Eliot was wrong:  that March is the cruellest month, with its false starts and bitter remissions. I almost always jump the gun: plant my garden too early and have to run out as the sleet falls, covering the beds with sheets or plopping plastic bottle-halves over tender pepper plants. I want to believe in spring... that this time spring won't let me down.  This time, spring will be true, right from the beginning. There will be no misunderstanding, no heart-clutching doubt, no failure.

Sometimes it turns out that way. Other times my gentle basil plant is blackened by frost, or the spring rain pounds all my just-bloomed tulips into muddy mush, or the cut-worms nip my pepper plants off at the ground, leaving them  fallen like tiny forest trees, limp and lifeless. Why?

Lately I ask myself the same thing about love, and I realize now, more than I ever could have as a young graduate student, what Eliot was talking about: that dreadful return of a need to love that we experience after losing it or failing at it or being horrifically scarred by it. You want to turn your back for good: just climb into your treehouse and close the door, watch it all pass below you as if it didn't involve you. But it does. Your heart sends out grasping tendrils, craving connection, and it beats a little Morse code message into your brain:  maybe ... maybe ... maybe ... maybe...

So Memory and desire get mixed:  Memory telling you you have no luck, you're not good at this, you're unlovable, you're set in your ways now, you don't want to give up your freedom or share your space or pick up anyone else's socks off the bedroom floor. But desire is there with its big, sad eyes, staring forlornly at happy couples in the grocery store, thinking "why not me?"

When I was a kid, I loved stuffed animals. They were one of my favorite toys. And when I was allowed to pick out a new stuffed animal, I would go through the entire pile or shelf or bin, looking for the one that was imperfect. I looked for eyes that were out of level, ears that were wonky, fur that went the wrong way...for missing bits and broken bits and stains... I sought out the unlovable. I knew that only I could love them as they should be loved. (Maybe that's why this book, and this one, wrench my heart)

It took me years--decades--to figure out that my choice of imperfect stuffed animals was like a prayer that I, too, could be loved. That someone could and would see past my weaknesses and quirks and fears and manage--somehow--to love me anyway.

Today I still take in the unlovable. I bring home problematic pets who have been rejected or abandoned or who are just too much trouble for most people to take on. I know only I can love them as they should be loved. And I do my best. I give up a lot:  money, time, the freedom to run off on a moment's notice, a clean house and the ability to wear anything that doesn't have a sprinkling of dog hair. But I trade it easily for the sense of security I gain. Here, at least, among these misfits, I am loved without question, and I love without regret. I gather them to me. They are my furry equivalent of the bedclothes that protected me from fear in the night as a child.  With them pulled up around me, I am safe. Nothing can get me.

That's how I have felt when I've been in love: like love is that magic blanket and nothing can get me. It's a strange way to feel, I guess.  In reality, nothing is out to get me. The world is not out to cause me pain or sorrow. But lying in the arms of a beloved, I have heard myself say "nothing can get me now."

But it did.  It does get me. Love is lost, or broken, or illusory. Love is impossible, or hopeless, or mean, or toxic, and it either fades away, turns its back on me, or I realize that my love is ill-adapted to the environment and can't survive there, even if it wants to.

So that's the "dead land" Eliot speaks of.  And while the quest for love may be a positive thing, at the same time, it requires that I open myself up yet again to doubt and discomfort at best: with the real possibility of failure and pain, or worse, the illusion of success and crushing loss.

So yeah. I get it now.  Me and my dull roots...

The Secret They Don't Tell You When You Agree to Grow Up

The thing about being an adult that they don't tell you as a kid is how roaringly, howlingly, utterly demoralizingly BORING it is most of the time. What I would give for an hour of all-out, all-consuming imaginative PLAY, the way I did when I was a kid. The real world is an utter drag at least 90% of the time.

That was my facebook post this evening. And its disgustingly true.  I don't know what I expected from adulthood, but it wasn't this. My life is sometimes little more than a loop of letting dogs in and out, washing the same damned dishes and clothes over and over, driving, and worrying over money. No wonder I stopped keeping house. What's the point?  Really, it's just going to get dirty again. 

What if I entered a life of complete surrender to entropy?  What would happen if I just failed to do any life maintenance work at all?  

I'll tell you what, besides homelessness and starvation....even more boredom. Maintaining the little buggery buggeries of life is sometimes the only thing that keeps me sane... and I barely manage those. 

Once in a while I pause, look around myself, and realize that my life is completely going to shit.  In some cases, as noted in an earlier post, this is quite literal.  And even now, with my not-house-trained pup, shit continues to be... not a figurative expression. But it's amazing how I can KNOW there's dog poops on the rug next to the laundry room... and just not give a damn.  It's not going anywhere. I can pick it up any time. Entropy. 

When I was married I became convinced that my husband's body somehow manufactured bits of paper and small coins.  They were everywhere;  every surface seemed to have a little pile of wadded or folded up paper and change. Now I look around and must conclude that my person is manufacturing books and small toiletries.  Within eyeshot at present I see a bottle of hand creme, a tube of yeast infection cream (in the living room, yes, but not for the reason you're thinking.  It's also used to treat ringworm on Lucky's paw... which I'm beginning to despair of ever curing and I've started referring to him as "zombie paw"), a dog brush, an empty tissue box with a wad of black dog hair in it, one sock, a tube of chapstick, and a nail clipper. And god only knows what's in my sofa.  

Sometimes I want to scoop everything up, put it in a box, and shove it out to the curb. Would I miss it?  Really?  I'm not sure. And imagine coming home to a room empty of all objects except furniture and a stereo. Hell maybe I could opt out of furniture as well and just revel in the empty space.  IT would be like being Japanese.  It would be like coming home every day to a new house:  you know, that New House feel, where everything is clean and empty and feels bigger and more hopeful than your old, dirty, crowded house that smells like wet dog?  LIke that. 

Things.  Things and chores.'

And dogs.  Okay. 

Actually, I shouldn't complain. This year is off to a glowing start.  The ex is moving back to his hometown, with his babymomma and family, more than 900 miles away. This in itself is cause for joy. I may actually not set eyes on him again for four years, until our son graduates  high school.

I will soon have an actual OFFICE at work, no more gray cubicle corner, but an actual office with walls (which, granted don't go all the way to the ceiling, but hey) and a WINDOW.  Like human people. THIS is my year.

So things are good.  But this week has been an unhealthy one. G got strep throat, which I remember from when I was a kid and I know how awful it feels, like you're trying to swallow a bundle of needles; and Scipio got some sort of infection that has made one side of his little ratty face swell up and has given him a red rat-snotty nose and a really miserable wheeze when he breathes.  A sick rat is a really pitiful thing. So I took the kid and the rat to the doctor.  No, separate doctors... and now I'm administering antibiotics twice daily to both of them. I am Florence Frickin' Nightingale. Angel of mercy.

I of course do not wish my child to be ill, ever.  But now that he's 14... well, it's sort of nice when he really needs me, and wants to snuggle up and hold my hand, and lets me smooth his hair back and put my hand on his forehead. I guess I will always want to do that. So I take my little pleasures where I can find them before he feels well again and jacks back into the Matrix.

Leaving me alone... in this utterly boring and eventless adult life I've been sentenced to. I see more blogging in my future.