Today, it hailed. Yesterday, it snowed. Incessantly. Burdening fresh daffodils all over town with a cold wet blanket. What a winter epilogue! I was hoping that this week would be a good one to finish sculpting our lot—to finish moving the mountain of dirt in the backyard into the sort of perfect flatness that my husband so admires, so that we can figure out irrigation, and I can begin planting. But the lot is a swamp once more (which makes irrigation seem irrelevant), and it will be another week before it will bear heavy machinery. As the hail splashes on the ground in tight little pellets, I realize it is apt. Pertinent, germane, apposite. It falls uninvited, despite my best wishes and intentions. Here it is, and so am I. I didn‘t plan for it, or orchestrate it. And I certainly can’t prevent it. It just is. Here and doing its hail-ish thing, while I do mine.
Two days ago, before the snow, I bought a lemon tree at Home Depot. It is in full bloom, and it smells divine, like lilies and honeysuckle. It can’t live outside, at least not permanently, and certainly not at the moment, the air full of various forms of ice. I will keep it artificially alive by potting it and setting it near my south facing windows. I will breathe in its fragrance while I sleep. In the summer, when hailstorms are less likely, I will roll it out into the summer sun on the patio. I wonder if I will have to pollinate it myself, by hand?
Last night one of my older daughters cried herself to sleep over a broken heart. Though I stayed up late, drawing on every thread of maternal compassion and wisdom and intuition as I listened (and as my patience threatened to unravel), and though my heart was breaking for her and almost all my words were gentle and hopeful, she still cried herself to sleep. After (or despite) all I could do. This afternoon my other teenage daughter rocks herself gently (in a non-rocking chair) as she listens to music and waits for her friends to show up. (Normal behaviour for someone with Aspberger’s—but when I first encountered it, I thought I’d slipped into the Twilight Zone). She is happy, and I have almost nothing to do with it. My little girls, under the pretext of room-cleaning, have jumped on their beds, searched for kittens, and danced to the music. Now they’re playing hide-and-seek (Nora skips from seven to twenty one as she counts), and my son, tired of solitary tormenting and spying, has brought a friend over. An ally. He made his own breakfast and cleaned his own room before I could ask him to. He likes to stay below radar in this house inhabited by women. It is Spring Break. My children would all be just as content if I were oblivious in the gallery, lost in paint.
Frank is gone for the day, interviewing (three interviews today!) for jobs in Salt Lake. I am beginning to suspect that for some men, losing a job approaches the pain of being left by a wife. He feels rejected, abandoned, unwanted. Frank and I have been through unemployment together once before, ten years ago, and I saw how it permanently changed his perspective, even after he was happily employed again. How it left him a little more vulnerable, a little more cautious, definitely less likely to protest. And now, I can empathize and love, but there is so little else I can do to help him. As a matter of fact, I think that when I focus too much, when I hope and pray and want too much, I heighten his pain. Aggravate his angst. So I stand back, and hope and pray from a distance. Try to forget that his outcomes impact the world we both share. Perhaps this isn’t healthy, perhaps it isn’t the best perspective. But right now, for me, it simply is.
