Argggh. Cold, cold, cold. I haven't even gone out to the garden to see if we lost all the tomatoes and peppers. I surely hope not. What were we thinking, planting those things before the pecans began to leaf? Don't we know anything? Haven't I learned a thing in the past thirty-five years of gardening?
No. I have not.

I can't write. I don't know what's wrong with me. This day is half gone and I haven't even let out the chickens. I've been on the phone and I've googled gut bacteria and depression. According to Esquire Magazine, there may be a link. I'm not depressed today or overly anxious either. I'm swirling, though, thoughts and the dreams I had and the sleep which was so deep. We've taken to sleeping in the guest room, abandoned our bed for the magical one in the Panther Room and I'm sleeping now in a corner under an open window and it's wonderful, it's the best. I'm cozy and cool at the same time. I have a tiny table with my fan, my water, my phone. Not even a clock. No neighbor's light beaming in like an alien space-ship ready to come and take us or the TV's glow where my stepfather watched in a room where the light could shine into my room (he's still up, he's still up, there's no lock on my door) and I literally have cloth diapers covering up all the LCD lights in the room and it's so dark in there and I can sleep.

Am I crazy? Who cares?

I can't write. I want to write about it all. About marriage and Jesus and dogs and weddings and social anxieties and fears and families and gardens and childbirth and nursing and sex and the tiny wren on the back porch, looking for a place to nest. I want to write about the first time I ever made fig preserves and the way I had to stand so still when my mother or grandmother pinned a dress on me they were making. I was too fat as a child to wear regular clothes and those pins were like the pricks of shame.
The pricks of shame. Good name for a band, good title for a book.
I want to write about Billy and Shayla being married for eight years yesterday and how love is all it is and also how when I took my dress to the alteration place yesterday to get it hemmed, there was a girl there getting her teeny-tiny jeans taken in and I felt like an orca, but the also-tiny girl who pinned up the hem did not prick me at all with her pins and it was fine, it was okay, she barely spoke English and when I walked into the shop, the first thing she said was, "Try it on," before I'd even told her what I wanted. She knew. "Try it on." She squatted on the floor and pinned that hem, she didn't shame me she kept the pins to the cloth.
I want to write about how fast life is spinning by, my god, you have no idea. You birth your baby, you give it a breast, you blink, you nap, you blink again, it is thirty years later. You still don't know how to garden.

I want to be Bob Dylan and write A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall and get it all said in one big blow, and then live another million years and write it all again and again but from this corner of the life, from this mile-marker down the path. I want to write about how everything changes, EVERYTHING except it doesn't. It does and it doesn't. Both. I want to write about the way eggs feel in the palm of the hand, especially if still warm from the hen and how even though I love living in the middle of a nowhere village so much that I can barely stand to leave, sometimes I still do dream of living in an apartment over a store in big city where the breath of it all is dense and charged with the very electrons of life and I am thrust into it over and over again just by stepping out of my door but oh, no, I'd rather be in a cement-and-rebar shack on the beach in Mexico, who wouldn't? What a cliche, that glorious color of water and sky, every night the sunset a gift of gods still worshipped in the jungle where the snakes and iguanas sun on the ruins of civilizations come and gone but still there somehow, their blood the blood of ancestors spilt for those gods, their faces the same ones painted on the walls of the rooms not lit but in darkness for centuries untold.

Aw, hell. It's an hour later. The chickens are out, the beans are on the boil, the boys are coming over this afternoon, good morning, good morning. I want to talk about all of it but some I'm too shy to talk about, some I'm too old, some I'm too young, some I'm too ignorant, some I can only see in the tiniest drawer in my mind, shut away like a jewel or a glittery rock hidden in a velvet box and have I told you? No. I have not. Here is how I think of my mother these days- like she was the mother I wanted, like she was the mother I think she could have been if this or that hadn't broken her somewhere.

"You understand," I say to her in my mind and she says, "I do, honey. I do. I love you."

Good morning. Barely.

More later.