Somewhere over the course of this unbelievably crappy summer, I gave up entirely on just about everything. I stopped going outside, and I surrendered the Park to the spiders and the heat. I never got anything edible from my vegetables that I tried to grow, and I've barely even touched the herbs in a month. I stopped clipping the suckers off the stump from the Bradford pear, and now it looks like a chest-high bush. This week the rains finally dried up, and intense heat baked everything. The few containers of flowers that had been holding on are now looking limp and some of them are downright crispy. Inside wasn't much better, with gray clouds of shedded cat hair rolling down the hallway like tumbleweeds, and six months worth of utility bills and mortgage statements obscuring an entire counter, waiting to be thinned and filed. The wall of plastic tubs holding rugs has closed in my living room, making my visual space more confined and oppressive. My mental state deteriorated as the housework fell further behind, a sort of death spiral of depression and clutter, feeding on itself.
It's time to change all of that. I've started to take back some of the ceded territory. I am trying not to think about how much is due to the loss of Cricket and Carlotta, but between them, I've been able to reclaim my master bathroom and the first eight feet of the deck. I put energy into cleaning like I haven't been up for in weeks. The giant stack of paperwork is almost completely sorted and filed. The projects I put off are starting to get scratched off the to-do list. I even found the motivation to start scrubbing baseboards and trim work, so that the paint gleams bright white again. I completely ignored them for months, and although you really don't see them clearly from a standing position, once they are brightened up, it really makes a visual difference in a room. It's like slouching just slightly, not so much that you are slumped over, but just enough to constrict your breathing. Once you stretch and throw your shoulders back and stand up straight again, you realize how much more deeply you can fill your lungs, and you wonder why you let your posture go, even for a moment.
I'm also ready to think about traveling again. I couldn't consider leaving town for the last two months, once Cricket was on the final stage of her illness. I shouldn't have left in June, as bad as she was, but I didn't realize it would be such an awful weight to lay on my friend who came by to feed the cats while I was gone. For months I didn't know whether I would be tied to the house this fall, or even beyond that. For the first time I can begin to look at things that I want to do away from home, and make real plans to go places. I have two short trips in mind, one my annual football pilgrimage and one a chance to see old friends in my favorite big city (DC). Getting out and about would be healing, I think, and I need that after the last year. My world was starting to get too small, and it's time to expand it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment