LIVING THE LIFE THAT WAS MINE

Don't these look like a gaggle of geese?

A better morning ear worm, For No One:
 
Your day breaks, your mind aches
You find that all her words 
of kindness linger on ...

Not exactly Oh Happy Day but certainly better than some others I have come up with.

This early-and-sober-to-bed-early-to-rise thing is pretty good. Oona comes in to bang on the window around 5 or so, yet I manage to sleep until about six. It is still overcast, which immediately sets the excuse generator to high so that I can wriggle out of swimming in three hours. Hopefully, I will be a bit more chipper and productive than I was yesterday.

Eldercare is so damn hard. Just sifting through one's own emotions and staying responsive rather than reactive is a moment to moment challenge throughout some parts of the day.

The next day.

Perhaps I should retitle this blog, In Pursuit of Sleep, as that is one of my main threads of complaints and musings. For the record, it did not go so well last night. I didn't take any medication at all and I just never really hit the sweet spot. But hey, after some errands and getting a haircut for Janet, I can take a nap. In the meantime, there is laundry and final stages of unpacking to be accomplished.

Yesterday was Anne Sexton's birthday. A while ago, many years really, I was obsessed with her. I read her (amazing) letters. I don't have much of her work here with me, but I found this one in a collection and it seems damn apt.

THREE GREEN WINDOWS

Half awake in my Sunday nap,
I see three green windows
in three different lights—
one west, one south, one east.
I have forgotten that old friends are dying
I have forgotten that I grow middle-aged.
At each window such rustlings!
The trees persist, yeasty and sensuous,
as thick as saints.
I see three wet gargoyles covered with birds,
Their skins shine in the sun like leather.

I'm on my bed as light as a sponge,
Soon it will be summer.
She is my mother.
She will tell me a story and keep me asleep
against her plump and fruity skin.
I see leaves—
leaves that are washed and innocent,
leaves that never knew a cellar,
born in their own green blood
like the hands of mermaids.

I do not think of the rusty wagon on the walk.
I pay no attention to the red squirrels
that leap like machines beside the house.
I do not remember the real trunks of the trees
that stand beneath the window
as bulky as artichokes.
I turn like a giant,
secretly watching, secretly knowing,
secretly naming each elegant sea.

I have misplaced

the Van Allen belt,
the sewers and the drainage,
the urban renewal and the suburban centers.
I have forgotten the names of the literary critics.
I know what I was,
living the life that was mine.
I am young and half asleep.
It is a time of water, a time of trees.

— Anne Sexton, The New Yorker, June 6, 1964