Mother visiting at hospital

My mother visited me every night after work for the two weeks that I was in the hospital. Nevermind that we had a screaming match in the street hours before I was admitted, nevermind that originally I had blocked her from being able to talk to the doctors, she still came. Occasionally she would bring her friends or my friends, but usually she came along, bearing August-in-Maine surprises. She brought me gazpacho from the tomatoes that I planted in her garden, she brought me her famous chocolate zucchini cake, she brought me my nana’s tomato hamburg soup. Once the staff trusted her, we were allowed to go outside and pick blackberries from the patch behind the hospital. I was still so out of it, but my mother was determined to bring me back, to ground me.

I was the only one who had a regular visitor during visiting hours. Everyone else said their family lived too far away or would never come. Yet, for some reason, I was lucky. The white hospital walls were soon covered in cards from friends and family, bouquets of flowers adorned my bedside table, and I would frequently be called to answer the phone. Granted my head was inflated at the time, but I felt truly loved. Everyone treated me as I just had a bad bout of the flu, and this was a “minor blip on my radar screen”, as one family friend said it.

I would return to college, and graduate, and work, and own a home, and raise a family. I may have been burdened by a sickness, but I was blessed by my socioeconomic class and loving family and friends and safe home state. For so many, this diagnosis meant homelessness and substance abuse and an inability to work or have a personal life. This diagnosis wrongfully
sentenced them to a lifetime of dependence on the government.

I met many whose lives did indeed turn in those dead-end directions. I dimly remember them, dimly remember the woman who showed me her bandages and said it was her third suicide attempt, dimly remember the man who claimed to own a construction company and offered me a job. Yet more than that, I remember a woman in her seventies who shared my love of flowers and only recently found out her diagnosis…

things to be happy about, circa 2004

bare feet in the garden, peppermint lotion foot rubs, uncontrollable laughter, children who have lost their front teeth, rosy cheeks and noses, sinking into a hammock, not understanding why you make children laugh, dressing for the first snowfall of the year, a warm bed you never want to leave, braids at any age, the fog and salt air confirming yes indeed you are home, speeding off in a car with a sunroof, the Milky Way, after-dinner walks with your mother, running for no reason except the wealth of open space, being kissed to the point f shrieking and laughter, having someone find your sweet spots and spoil them, walks during mud season, warm cookies dunked in milk, hugs from behind, semi-conscious conversations in the wee hours of night at sleepovers, sensitive knees, endless possibilities.

the limits of my gratitude

thank you for replacing the carnations with chinese lanterns from your friend’s farm, and hanging them up all over the house.

thank you for bringing me breakfast in bed morning after morning, eggs exactly the way i wanted them, cheesy and filled with kale and sprinkled with nutritional yeast.

thank you for barreling through the snow up the driveway, you ever fearless and confident and sexy.

i want to know that i noticed, that i so appreciated every sweet gesture, every cup of tea, every time you tickled me, and i wish that were enough.

i wish that were enough to buy land and have chickens and babies, and still be madly in love like your parents still are.

having found everything i thought i wanted, i need more. i need what i hate most in the world, and i need someone who is going to work for it as hard as i do.

i will not demand that you acknowledge that i helped you through the winter, but i will say thank you, i know you made the season shorter and more tolerable for me.

yet now it is spring, time for growth.

Why I Am Still Running the MDI Marathon

Over the past month or so, I had started to feel like running the MDI marathon was a bad idea. Sure, I am registered, but I have fallen off my training wagon. I am the heaviest that I have been in my life. Maybe next year…., I was thinking.

Now, in the wake of yesterday, I have to say, “No, silly pants, this year.” Life is too precious, and I have no way of knowing when it will be over. I do not care if I have to walk or crawl to the finish line. I do not care if I feel mortified in front of the more experienced runners. I need to “carpe diem it up”, as I used to say in college.

Wish me luck, but send all your prayers to those in greater need…

My Most Irrational Love Affair

I think about leaving. I think about the insanity of waking up in the middle of the night to drive forty-five minutes from the northernmost tip of the county to the southernmost. I think about the ridiculousness of sleeping pinned between a wall on one side, my lover on the other, and a bookshelf at my feet, so that whenever I enter or exit, I must roll over a enormous pair of feet. I think that I am inconsiderate to peel out of the long driveway, and leave that lover stranded at the cabin in a landscape that I love, half mile from the pond, a mile from the general store, and nowhere near his friends.

To most, these are not minor inconveniences. These are deal-breakers, and a saner person would have found somewhere else long ago. Yet I have been too in love to look, and I am in love for the worse reasons, in love because of moments that do not happen often or last long.

I am in love with sneaking into the blackberry patch in the overgrown field across the street, a patch where I follow paths trampled by critters and humans. There, I have as much self-control as I did at the age of five in deciding whether to put them in my mouth or the basket.

I am in love with stepping out of my car and looking up at a clear sky of stars. It is the same sky under which my father would carry my sister and me, roused out of sleep and wearing coats thrown over our pajamas, to admire a meteor shower or aurora borealis or a constellation that he and my mother found for the first time.

I am in love with waking up to heavy rain pounding on the metal roof. For an instant, I still think I am in a lean-to, happy I did not camp out, wondering what the trail will be like in the morning.

I am in love with lifting up the carpet in my first deep cleaning of the winter, and finding sand that I tracked in from swims in the pond, and not regretting my carelessness.

I am thinking about leaving, but I am not ready.

Fit but Obese…

I was weighed twice during a long-overdue physical, once by the nurse and again by the doctor. After the doctor weighed me, she told me that my body-mass index (BMI) fell in the overweight category. Then she corrected herself: actually my BMI was considered obese.

“You know, obesity is more inheritable than height.” She launched into a well-rehearsed weight-loss spiel. “Even if you can just walk a little bit every day and reduce your portions…”

Perhaps her advice would be helpful to a sedentary person, but I tried to explain to her that I go through periods of exercising every day, day after day, for months at a time, and then tire of it. I tried to tell her that I thru-hiked the AT, but not even all doctors know what this entails. I tried to mention that I was a binge eater, but this was a new doctor in my life. She was not as interested in listening to the complexities of my situation as she was in lecturing me.

Yet thankfully the numbers acknowledge the complexities. After she preached to me based on my weight and BMI, she finally looked at my other vitals. I am most proud of my pulse: 52. Granted it has been lower when I was in better shape, but even 52 is considered a “runner’s pulse”. I have the blood pressure of a normal person, and despite my junk food habit, my blood sugar level is not even at pre-diabetic levels.

After looking at this, the doctor said, “Wow, you’re fit.” She sounded as surprised as day hikers were when I was overweight and told them I was thru-hiking. At the time, I hated this. I wanted people to know how far I had come just by looking at me. Yet I have spent my entire life concealing an exceptional core within an ordinary shell. Why should my health be any different?