A Day Of Remission And Recovery

As you can see, the weather has changed again and we have gone from gray to blue overnight. Even before it got light this morning though, I woke up and searched my feelings and felt like perhaps some emotional fever had broken. When I got up, I was still crying but then it was as if a faucet had been turned off and I was done. 

This has been the strangest, most sudden bout of darkness I think I've ever experienced. It absolutely has been almost physical in its nature and today I feel as exhausted as if I had truly had a physical ailment. I feel that shakiness that comes after a flu or even a surgical event. 
I really do not understand what happened. 

Last night after supper, I talked to my husband and told him honestly how I was feeling and for once I did not apologize. "I don't WANT to feel this way," I said. He knew I didn't. And he held me and he told me he loved me and said all those sweet things and I guess that helped. That and a whole lot of hours of sleep.
One of the things he said last night was that perhaps we could drive to the coast today, just for fun, and although I said that maybe, yes we could, I couldn't imagine getting up that much energy only to cry all the way there and back. But around noon he asked me if I maybe wanted to do that, or just go out for lunch, and I said, "Let's go out for lunch."
And we did. We went to a Mexican place near here where neither of us has ever eaten and I seriously doubt we'll go back. It was underwhelming. But then we went to the Bad Girls Get Saved By Jesus Thrift Store and I found some treasures. Lily had asked me to look out for deviled egg platters for her and I found two.

I sent those pictures to the kids and Lily wants one and Rachel the other. I have one identical to the second one pictured and almost everyone I know has one too. The first one is a bit different though, and I like it. I think it comes from the sixties. 

I also hit a sort of jack-pot when I found four nice clear pyrex bowls. My weakness is bowls, for sure. They are nothing fancy but just nice bowls of different sizes. So I bought those too. 

It was, I have to say, a little cheering. 

And then we drove home the back way on a road that I lived on so many years ago. The house is gone now because it burned down years ago but I think of that house often. I've spoken of it before. Entirely made of pine, a shack, really, It looked quite a bit like this house.

It had electricity but no running water. An outhouse and a hand pump out back. 
My ex and I lived there with baby Hank and it wasn't easy but there were parts of it I loved very much. It was almost-adequate shelter from the storm, although not the cold. Or heat. Or bugs. 
The weathered wood simplicity of it was beautiful somehow though and we had hippie neighbors including Chloe and her husband and a child or two. They were building their own house which was rather magical in my eyes. 
So. A drive down a memory road. Some things familiar, some things so very changed. Someone has bought a huge number of acres where there used to be nothing but pine and oak and scrub and scraped the ground raw. We have no idea what's going in there. Something hideous, I'm sure. I told Glen, "I really sort of hate humans," and I meant it. He did not try to dissuade me from my opinion. 

Here's a sweet thing that happened today- I had seen a picture on FB of a slender piece of wall where someone had created a system for hanging cast iron skillets and pots. When I saw the picture, I was feeling so bleak that although I admired it, I had no energy to even try and imagine something like that. Too much work. Who cares? What the hell? But today I realized that there's a place in our pantry where the wall would be the perfect place to do that. I did not have the picture but I looked up other ones on google and showed them to my husband and he said, "Sure, sure. We can do that."
And I know he can. 
I already keep my cast iron in the pantry which is great because I don't have to bend down to pull it out of the lower cabinets in which it used to live. That stuff is heavy! But it's taking up a lot of space that I could be using for something else. 
Like...food.

And I'm sure he could build me something to put the iron pot lids in. 

This wall ain't doing a damn thing except holding up the ceiling or something. I do like that admittedly tacky picture but I can find another place to put it. 

It felt so very good to ask my husband if he would do something for me and to have him respond so readily and enthusiastically that of course he could. It's hard for me to ask for things I want as I am sure it is for many of us. But the honest truth is, sometimes asking someone we love if they could help us in some way is a gift to them, I think, because if they do truly love us, they want to help us. 

But my god, learning to ask is hard. 

One last picture. We went to the garden to try and figure out where we want to plant the potatoes and then I did a little weeding and Mr. Moon fixed some sprinkler heads and then the garden looked like this.

And the miracle was that I could not only see it in the lowering light of the sun, but I could really feel it. And it felt very good. 

Love...Ms. Moon