when the air moves inward toward a silent core of waiting

Home early today, after my accomplishments were lauded at the home office. It felt good to be recognized, but better to sit in the back garden.  The clouds make a tapestry of the sky, layer upon layer of cumulus puffs, and the sun creates shadows and pools of light.  Boo sat beside me on the patio, sniffing the air as a breeze ruffled his fur. 

I sprayed myself down with deet, ever fearful of mosquitoes, but humidity has fled for other locales and insects went with it.  I wasn't directly in the sun, but who cares when it's warm and gorgeous and sliding toward evening?

Now I long for a nap, but I slept yesterday for three hours before waking to a thunderstorm.  My head was fuzzy all morning, and I wished for inchoate things.

My hands stray to Alpha Dog's fur at every spare moment, scritching behind his ears and rubbing down his torso.  I want him always to know how much I love him.  There's a litany of praise I sing to him, telling how I fell in love the first instant I saw him, telling him how brave he is, and smart, and precious.  Much as I want him to stay with us forever, I know that cannot be, and I never want to come home and regret wasting an evening not reassuring him of his place in the household. 

He's my baby.

Boo is too self-assured, too certain of his specialness to need the same, although I tell him he's sweet and silly often enough.  Alpha Dog gets jealous and pouty when Rabbit coos over Boo and ignores him (as well he should! Rabbit makes me so mad sometimes). 

None of that really matters tonight.,  It's glorious out, and my headache eased after lunch.  I sat in the sun, in a garden full of flowers that I nurtured, with my dogs by my side. 

A good day.

--Tony Hoagland

Remember this: lack of response does not equal lack of caring.  And your self-worth isn't wrapped up in other people.

It would be nice to have attention paid to my words, though, every once in a while.

I cried this afternoon.

I don't know why.

I'm lonely.

Beset by fits of malaise, dragged down into exhaustion, unable to accomplish anything meaningful.

Nothing helpful from the doctor.

Maybe it's the heat? An inferno made worse by commuting woes. No energy, no initiative. Just the desire to nap days and nights away.

There was a migration on Tuesday, just from one metro station to another after lightning and thunder and trees across the tracks and power outages. The shuttle buses were woefully unprepared for the numbers of people and so I, and other adventurers, set off on foot, trying to get home. We walked the W&OD trail through Falls Church, and other than the power lines overhead you'd not have known we were in the midst of civilization. The trail is lower than the surrounding land, a canyon of asphalt in the midst of honeysuckle and other greenery. Every so often, a road would intersect the trail and drivers of cars peered, astonished, at the flood of people.

It made me think of articles I've read recently about how humans left Africa and spread over the globe, one footstep at a time. My shoes began to rub blisters, so I took them off and walked with bare feet (not a good idea, as the blisters decided to shift location to my soles). A new line of storms were approaching, and the grass on the verge of the sidewalks was wet.

A forty minute walk, that takes less than five on the train. I prefer wheels to feet, especially when rain starts to pelt down and thunder moves closer and closer. I tried to remember lessons from the days before I became a Brownie dropout, about counting seconds between lightning's flash and thunder's boom, and avoiding trees, but really, the trees were everywhere on the final approach. I ran the last little way, short strides but quicker than walking, and miraculously didn't incur an asthma attack.

My clothes were damp and my hair sopping by the time I reached home. I snarled at Rabbit and grumped my way up the stairs to my room.

I didn't go into work yesterday. It hurt too much to walk in the morning, and it's a hike from metro to my office. Instead, I called in, went back to sleep, watched a bit of tennis, and snuggled with Boo and Alpha Dog. Then I napped, hours and hours, still trying to recover.

The blisters have gone down and last night I wasn't sleepy but still had to try to find a way back into slumber.

Tens of thousands of years, the industrial revolution, the information age, and sometimes you have to go back to basic forms of locomotion.

The dogs and I went on our last walk to the park last night.  Not our last walk, just that the park is being remade into something closer to the Civil War battlefield it once was. Trees have grown up in the past century, a thicket unmatched when it comes to sniffing opportunities.  Squirrels dash about the undergrowth and birds warble from branches overhead.  But now trees have been felled and chopped into giant rounds, and a trench dug in the ground.  Poles are there, outlining the width of territory to remain untouched.

I'll miss its current state.  I don't know what it will look like when finished. I hope the wildlife can relocate to suitable quarters. Away from the park last week, near the pine bridge, I found two birds dead in the grass.  I suspected West Nile, yet saw a dead chipmunk yards away the next afternoon.  Poison?

Rabbit is gone off to the beach; I am plotting how to lure Alpha Dog and Boo to my bed instead of Mama's.  They both prefer to sleep with her, but there are few delights to equal waking to snuggly puppies.

Today is bright and sunny and warm.  I ate lunch in the courtyard and basked, trying not to worry about what my doctor will say. She drew blood yesterday, in an attempt to discover the cause of my constant exhaustion.

And now I want a nap.  Typical.

"A Moment Ago"

We were out on the deck talking with mother,
watching the line of shadow climb the foothills,
intercepting the peaks around us one by one
as if the valley were a bowl being slowly filled
with darkness. She wore the blue cloth hat
with a flower, having just given up therapy.
We asked what she remembered of "little"
great-grandma and others we never knew.
It was hot. An afternoon storm had splotched
here and there the laurels, startling the swallows;
a dusty trickle had formed briefly in the throats
of the gutters. Mid-recollection, she paused.
When the day wears, she said, or when I begin to feel
too much for myself, I think of a song I heard
my mother sing I don't know how many times
over the sink washing dishes, a child's song,
and it lifts me.  It was some minutes later
that the leaves of the poplar began suddenly to rattle,
exactly as the leaves here in the darkening yard
ten years and two thousand miles away just did,
a harsh, dry sound like seeds shaken in a pod.
It is a brittle world. Over and over dusk
wells up in us; birds fly uncertainly overhead.

-- Philip White

So tired all the time. 

Exhausted.

And my head aches.

No energy except for brief periods.  Know I should get things done, contact friends, be a functioning adult, but.

I want to nap instead. Pull Alpha Dog and Boo close and succumb to dreams.

They were strange last night, all beaches and wandering on access roads and Alpha Dog leashed with medical gauze that got shredded in a turbine. I woke up at 4 a.m. and had to go find him and make sure he was okay.

It's rained all day today, and yesterday.  The flowers will like it, but I long for sun.  Maybe my skin will soak up solar rays and transmute them to energy?  I don't produce chlorophyll, yet seem to wither in the dark as much as any plant.

A day where I walked around in a fog, trying to wake up and find sharp thought but could never quite manage it.  Woke up late, stumbled into work, meeting of disaster, came home and fell asleep almost immediately. Congested when I surfaced again, and blew my nose only to find it was blood.  It's been a long time since that happened.

Boo wanted a walk desperately, but the gardeners were here and that's a recipe for hysterical barking and lunging and I knew I couldn't take the stress.

Yesterday was a good day.

I'm so tired of feeling bad all the time. I can't get enough sleep, alertness eludes me, I want to curl up in bed forever.

Is it allergies? Something more nefarious?

Rabbit was home when I woke up, and complained about her day.  She never asked me a single thing about mine.

Mama's worried about me.  Maybe once this one project is done I'll find serenity again.  Maybe.

The cherry blossoms are fallen into confetti on the ground, but the dogwood's are starting to open.  Tulips line the courtyard at the office, brilliant primaries of yellow and red, and secondaries of peach and purple.  The sun shone down, not veiled by clouds, but I was buried alive all day.

My mirror shows me a strange reflection, a woman with wide eyes and a clean-lined jaw. I'm trying to decide if this is better or worse than my flapper self. Not that there isn't room for more than one me.  I am vast, I contain multitudes.

Even if I don't know exactly who I am right now.