Instrument

I took three days off work to go to Waldo lake and paddle my broken heart out in the week between Zelda moving to college and the start of the fall intensive. Then Aster got limber tail and I spent the weekend googling limber tail and laying in the bed and packing not at all, cleaning almost none. Sunday night, I gave up. 

You know that edge? Where the anxiety has nearly cancelled out your ability to imagine why you are doing the thing in the first place? I’m trying to reframe that edge. I’m trying to remember that the universe has a say in things. That Aster, a blessed beast who does not think herself with I pronouns, but rather as a body of hunger, curiosity, boredom, and pain, might be an instrument of the universe. I mean, obviously, is. All of us - all of this - eye gesture, arms spread - is an orchestra, or a thousand construction radios playing in the same city block, or a pipe flute on the wind, depending on the day, I guess. But Aster - in her cluelessness about my narrative, in her persistence and proximity, in her obtuse continuation, no matter how my emotional wheel spins - might be, especially, an instrument of the universe re: me. 

I of course have a list I am tending, mostly by making it and remaking it in my mind, and sometimes on paper, and sometimes out loud to someone who is foolish enough to ask what I’m thinking about. The gutters. The taped over vents on the roof. The busted subwoofer in the van, which has turned my stinky but sturdy mom-rocket/ city-truck from my favorite place to listen to music, to my least favorite. The van, in general. Aster’s seat. All the seats. The dog hair, the sand. The entry, where, once again, there is nowhere for coats. The garden. 

Oh, the garden. In May, during sabbatical when I was miserable and throwing money around, I ordered several rolls of 1/4” woven wire mesh, a clipper for said mesh, some landscape staples, and a $100 cream colored paper-thin coated steel garden bin, in a lot of pieces in a box. The box came, heavy as fuck, just as I went back to work, and I put it on the back steps. Between that box, and the increasingly loud equinoctal whispers - prune me, move me, protect me, ease my burden - I have to fight to see the garden as it is now: glowing, full of growth and movement, seeds and secrets, because what I mainly see is winter coming with everyone still in their silky summer nightgowns. Most of all, the whisper of the box: you made a push button purchase you can’t follow up on. And the bamboo, always talking, always growing their rigid and ceaseless underground plumbing, choking everyone else off, springing leaks of flouncy leaves through the peed on soil that I’ve moved every other rooted thing out of. Truth is, I pushed the buy button because I believed in what I saw: a little vegetable garden, again. Kale and beet tops and strawflower in rich afternoon light, with the bamboo as backdrop. 

The cards on Monday morning said: Hierophant, Emperor, 6 of cups. Be the authority of your lil land. If you are in charge here, if you know what to do, if you have vision, then do it. Make the hard choices, set the plan. Then you will be able to welcome everyone in. 

Aster’s tail was at half mast, but the edge had already been crossed, tipped over, fallen off of. I went out angry to the bamboo, a servant of the universe, pick axe in hand.