Honey and Brine

It smells like coffee from where I sit, old coffee. I don’t usually sit here but here is closest to the plug and furthest from the one tree that could fall and end my life. I’ve quietly suggested over the years that this tree be taken down but have also been not so quietly enchanted by this giant in our backyard. A great white pine, it has no business ruling our land. Despite its grandeur, its root system is shallow and unreliable at best.

An October Nor’easter is here, with what name I do not know but decidedly mid to late alphabet I bet, maybe Manuel or Octavia. I’ve seen a few Nor’easters here and all I know is that the type of storm that gets a a name will interrupt electricity at best. It has already taken a chunk of our pear tree, the one that survived the last Nor’easter attack when I jokingly told our neighbor it was a metaphor for my marriage when half of it was gone and half remained. I have often looked at this tree symbolically, admiring how it returned year after year, growing stronger and defying odds. Pear trees mustn’t have very strong limbs though, no other tree seems to be so weak to wind.

I spent the dregs of Saturday night on the new floors of this kitchen, called into action by another “situation” that presented itself without warning as they always do. I held Mom’s head, as it drizzled out blood, and wondered if my cream colored sweatshirt was absorbent enough. I went into that crisis mode I have entered so many times, I am the woman you want when shit goes down. I will throw on tourniquets and lay next to you at your worst, I have Civil War blood in my veins I once told Mom as I debrided a wound.

She’s fine now today, more wounded in ways that are invisible though she does have seven staples on the left side of her head. I told her that she can be “Massive Headwound Mary” for Halloween (see below—we like our humor on the sicker side). How many of us have had a bobble or two, a time when gravity wasn’t our friend? “Growing old gracefully” is not how I would describe Mom’s approach to aging. She’s more of the “rage rage against the dying of the light” variety. Respect. To be “comfortable” alongside that process takes a certain amount of brine and honey, the salt and sugar of my soul helps me dance with discomfort. I had french fries fried in tallow, oysters, and breakfast buns for lunch yesterday and thought “this is my definition of soul food.”

Through writing, I shape this clay of life before my hands into meaningful prose for you to digest, this being my 300th attempt at that. For someone who has never stuck to a diet or an exercise regime, I am proud that I have, at the very least, stuck to this. 300 times, I have shouted into the void my experience living here among the growing up, the growing old, and the in between. By writing about everything, yes even the stuff that makes you cringe or blush with sympathetic shame, I have learned to savor even the most difficult of moments as precious. Today I am faced with the task of figuring out how to drag an enormous branch into the woods behind our house and watch nervously as that great pine seems to lean further to the right. I release this week’s folly with all its honey and brine to you in the hope that it makes you smile, appreciate, and maybe even laugh.

A plea to those who read—as I am no longer sharing my work via social media, please feel free to share this near and far:)