Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Collapsing onto the bed, he moans
“I don’t feel good.”
Every night he doesn’t feel good.
What would Good feel like? I want to ask.
The absence of pain?
A month of snow days?
Maybe this Good lays a path and clears debris,
one smooth downhill grade.
Or better still, buoyancy
as if weightless
on water cooled by twilight
and the wings of loons
dipping low.
Petals from nameless tress, blossoms pink as sisters
edge sidewalk, gutters, stairs
drawing a perfect pillowed frame around everything that separates us.
With a form to cement the end
of a project that’s kept her here eight years,
she stands at the threshold
of my office. Her offering of gratitude
a satchel of lotions and oils, heavy with the perfume of peach flowers.
The girl in me feels the kiss of a sundress on her calves. Remember
grass? Body paint, sun-streaked boys,
pennants stained with soot and crushed blackberries,
gymnastic arcing bonfires,
bare arms in pas de deux with dusk.
Continue reading “Office Hours”
I take a deep breath and add another 2-1/2 lb weight to either end of the chest press bar. These “graduation” days are bittersweet. Each crossing of a threshold puts the lie to the comforting narrative that I’m only so capable, only so strong. If I keep surpassing my own limits, I might start to believe that most of them are self-imposed. How in the world can I avoid living my full life under those conditions?
Image: Mary Ellen Mark’s Photograph of Shavanaas Begum, the Indian Circus Strongwoman, 1989
The friend says the pressure to love her body is too much. “Isn’t it enough to not hate it?” This is what we are supposed to do as women. It’s yet another thing to add to the list. Love ourselves. Love our bodies exactly as they are.
That word, love. It covered my notebooks in junior high, markers and hearts. As a teenager, those four letters grew far too big for crushes. They became like currents sweeping the earth in a gusting flourish, ecstasy and aspiration with a peace sign woven into the O.
The tropospheric ribbon of script I tattooed across my days was a declaration of protest. It was a way to give voice, unformed as it was, to an infant movement. A confederacy of truth was gathering, and it was growing skeptical, maybe downright mutinous, of the dogma that ordered my inner life.
We ink our wishes into night’s unfurling wing.
Harmony calls out a greeting from behind the geraniums. She folds a bookmark into a paperback and steps off the patio. Noodle leaps all over her. She chuckles and pets her then asks about my knee.
“Still hurts but I guess that’s normal.” My recovery is slower than I’d like, in part because of an overzealous gym visit 3 days after surgery. I’ve since re-discovered ice and moderation. I bend it a little and show her. “The boss has let me work half days from home, and walking at the pool has helped.”
“Oh, you go to the pool? With your son?” Noodle is now snuffling in around the mulched shrubbery so I pull her in closer. After retiring, Harmony and her husband moved here from the Midwest and within two months, they had new floors, bathrooms, and bird feeders. With a tidy patio set on top of a red striped outdoor rug, their condo is one of the most welcoming in the complex. The kiddos in the neighborhood have already knocked loose two of their solar lights playing soccer on the sidewalks, and I don’t want the dog to add to the damage.
“Sometimes we go together.” I wave vaguely in the direction of our small community pool where the kids are squealing. “Mostly I’ve been making myself go to the rec center, though. I can swim laps there, and there’s usually a free lane during the day.” As I say this, a family ambles by. The toddler carries an inflatable swim ring as big as her, and the mom lugs a bag of towels. “It’s nice to have a place to get together here in the summer, though. Have you been yet?”
“Oh!” She laughs, steps back, sort of half sits down on her patio chair. “I guess I have a swimsuit packed away somewhere that hides most of the awful parts.”
A beat.
My stupefied gaze.
Did she really just say that?
I stumble over my astonishment and laugh along with her. “Oh, geez, come out! Everyone is welcome.” She says she has another friend in the complex – a friend her age, she makes a point of mentioning – and they haven’t done it yet, but they’ve talked about going swimming.
So they can. . . what? Band together? Protect each other from the forces of evil?
“You know how you get a beach body, right? You take your body –” I gesture towards her and then to me, “ – and go to the beach.” We smile at each other. “Just come be with your neighbors,” I say. “The pool is for everyone.”
But she’s not giving an inch. “Well, I never had a body like yours, even when I had the body I felt good in.” She laughs again. It’s a strained laugh this time.
Are we still doing this? In 2016 at 60-something years old, she’s still doing this? Will I be in 20 years? Who is going to tell us we can’t be at the pool?
This is what I need to say to her.
To all of us, tucked inside our soft and hungry bodies.
We want you.
As you are.
We want you in our community, just like we want the kids in their swim diapers, the lady in the wheelchair who zips around walking her giant black dog, the folks who grill out at the picnic area. This pool is the closest thing we have to a common house. Three months a year, this is our town square.
We can’t let scars and bellies and imagined impossible ideals keep us from being neighbors.
Things are not so great in this country of ours right now. We have some tough battles to fight. But we’ve already fought some and we shouldn’t have to keep revisiting that scarred ground. For nearly 100 years, women have had the right to vote. We can work. Serve in the military. We can pursue scientific research, write and paint and dance and sing. We can sleep with any consenting adult, marry whomever we please or not marry at all. We can write laws. Change laws. Have babies without men. Ride motorcycles across the country. Play professional sports. Design rocket ships. Run companies. Run for president.
And yes, wear whatever the hell we want to the pool.
So put on a swimsuit. Or a caftan. Or a clown suit or a business suit. Or a veil or fishnets or scuba gear or culottes or Go-Go boots.
But please.
Come to the pool.
Or sit here on your sun-dappled flowery patio and read all summer if that’s what you’d prefer. Of course. That’s totally cool too. Because being a 60-something retired gal in the suburbs of an American metropolis means you can follow your bliss.
But please let go of being wistful or lonely when you can hear the chatter and cannonballs from that pretty patio, when you see your fellow residents flip-flopping past with their sun hats and iced tea.
We want you.
We need you.
As you are.
Let’s put to bed the notion that we live in a world populated by sylphs and Veelas, and that you are some mutant monstrosity. You are a human in this neighborhood and you live in your body. It is strong, it is weak. It is the same body that installed the stone sculpture and refills the birdseet. The same body that greets my dog, my son, me. The body that has grandkids up the road who love you. The body that filled years of a career leading art programs at a children’s hospital in Wisconsin.
You belong here.
We all do.
As we are.
We have to start showing up. Pasty hips and jiggly arms, acne, wrinkles, spider veins, all of it. We all have to show up in the bodies that carry us over the earth. Because what’s the alternative? What purpose or good do we serve by staying home?
I can’t promise you that everyone will think kind thoughts. The cellulite will be visible, and some of us – present company included – have indulged petty comparisons. I can promise you, however, that neither the stretch marks nor the judgments will matter one lick to any outcome or relationship that matters. Here in the everyday world of our neighborhood, the distribution of wealth, luck, friendship, leadership, respect, and opportunities for love has no correlation to flab. The only thing the size of our backsides influences is the size of the underpants we wear. This is a pretty flimsy standard upon which to base any decision of consequence.
I understand you want to lose weight. I do too. I fight this damned fight every day. This body you say you envy? It’s packed on nearly 15 pounds in less than a year. Stress, depression, thyroid problems. Scoliosis, chronic pain, disordered eating. Acne, bunions, insomnia. And now? A bum knee.
This body here houses all these things. These are features of my physical form much like the roar of freeway traffic outside my balcony, the windowless shared walls, the claustrophobic 8-foot ceilings. Sometimes focusing on the flaws becomes an addiction all its own, and those dark patches press in like glaucoma narrowing the vision. But then I remember that this is my home, and it is the place where this full, loving life of mine is being written. Then I notice the art. Then I thrill to the blessings.
I live with these things also here in the home of my body because this body is like a physical address. It holds the scars and all the rest of it, too. The emotive poetry, the sketching, the puttering in the kitchen with garlic and oil and greens. This body is hiking, friendship, sex, tinkering, and books. It carries the late-night cuddles with my kiddo, the volunteer work, the advising sessions with students, the adventures, the confusion, the kaleidoscopic memories that comprise the narrative I believe is me. The whole twisting, unfinished, colorful, at times plodding, and always character-rich story of me lives here in the home of this body. All of me.
Inside your body, you.
I want to know you. You have so much to contribute to this place, so much you already have.
When you show up, good things happen. The connections between all of us here grow stronger. You have already helped us grow from neighborhood towards community.
When you show up.
You have to show up.
You are my neighbor. I am yours. I want to know the you who is unfolding within your skin. That skin that holds glorious, kind you.
Your neighbors want to know you.
Please come.
As you are.
Image: Leon Oks, “New Friends III”
The injury aligns with the breakup, a window sash in its jamb. One smooth slide to a perfect seal. In stays the still air. Out there, bees and dew and all the fecund detritus of summer.
This forced meditation is only welcome because it came in with its trunk and has evaded any attempt to pin down its schedule for moving on. All I can do is make it feel at home. I fold myself in beside it and listen to it breathe. Continue reading “Injured and Alone”
Less than 24 hours ago, Jasmine was checking my vitals and Jolly upping the saline. Sexy Surgeon had autographed my left knee in purple marker. An unscheduled emergency bumped my mundane procedure to the bottom of the queue, so I was the last patient of the day. A little after 5:00pm, the two nurses heard the buzz, flipped up the side rails, and wheeled my gurney toward operating room. On the way, Jolly grabbed two warm blankets and apologized as she unfolded them over me. “The room is a little chilly.”
“You should use a word other than ‘chilly,'” I slur, “when someone has been fasting for 18 hours.” Jasmine grinned and kicked open the door.
Less than 24 hours ago, drifting in a fog of anesthesia, I offered up my torn meniscus to the doc and his team.
Less than 15 minutes ago, I walked the dog around the neighborhood.
It was a slow walk, sure, and a low dose of Percocet smoothed the way. Yet there I hobbled, pooch patiently ambling at my side. Just a blink earlier, I was lounging in pre-op, rehashing family lore with my mom. They had yet to jab my joint open debride the meniscus with a pair of miniature tools that clearly need more oblique names than “the biter” and “the shaver.”
Medicine is magical and magical is art
This is a terrifying time to be alive. It’s hard to ignore disasters both present and imminent, and impossible to quiet the urgency for action in so many corners of the world. Innovation births drone warfare and the venom of dictators screaming instantly into our pockets. We celebrate each new decade by inventing a thousand novel ways to die.
Also, this is a time of marvels. Someone found their way through the call of hunger and greed. Someone tinkered and played and eventually conjured up arthroscopy. Now we head home from the operating theater with absolute faith in the next dance.
The way we look to us all
Even knowing the work ahead, even wide awake to the call to clean up these messes and respond to the surging need of our neighbors on this planet, I’m grateful.
These are the days of miracle and wonder
It’s a blessing to be alive on this bit of rock in this moment in the story.
The dog is pretty happy about it too.
Lyrics: Paul Simon’s Boy in the Bubble
What young self didn’t know was that cool is a lid that screws down tight on the swelling delight of yes. From the edge of her ancient eye, older self notices women in the dark corners of the bar bouncing in their seats. Girls titter near a post trying not to sway — girls who are surely women but seem so far from their fullness.
The dude in an oversized plaid suit and orange ponytail hollers into a microphone while the bassist ducks his eyes under his fedora and yanks on steel strings. Two spaghetti-armed boys blow brass right through the back wall.
Older self stands and strips off her sweater. She steps toward the unnamed sister, the one in a cherry red tank top and spiked gray hair. She touches her arm and draws her onto the space in the center of the room. The worn Persian rug there is a far cry from a welcome mat, but carpet is no great challenge. Years earlier, she sent her young selves scurrying off to road-test every surface. Concrete, rooftop, mountaintop, pier. Boardroom, waiting room, snowfall, bed. Every floor is a dance floor when it’s time to dance.
It’s always time to dance.
She pops her hip and snaps her hand, beckoning to the one across the room who’s been having trouble sitting still. They are three now. Soon they are five. Soon nine.
Low ceilings press in on the battered cafe. Amateur pencil sketches hang crooked the walls. Light shifts and a gleam slices across the bowl of the saxophone. Soon it’s a glittering ballroom. Soon the pulse of the Cotton Club on a Saturday night.
The wall of dudes collectively holds confines itself to straight faces and non-committal postures until one man, pushing 70 easy, steps into and sheds 10 years. The young women form a ring of cool, turning their taut backs out for protection. The rest shimmy and grin knowing there is no outside and no in. Guarding one’s soft parts is a survival skill for certain, but the older ones have learned the taxonomy of danger. They can differentiate battlefield from playground now. It wasn’t always so clear.
Here, the belly is free to roll towards the snare’s smash and crack. That’s lightning for sure, but older self unfurls anyway inside the grounded body of her scars. She twists the lid loose and drinks the song’s bright rain. She is growing older still. Time is running out, so she runs out into it. She fills her bones until they spill over with dance.
my tongue craves skin, my skin
tongue. how to eat when the only flavor
is salt? too poor for the extravagance
of a meal served to me, i recall the logic
of giving the beloved what you want
for yourself. this woman
is her own again, my only lover
here. In the kitchen i peel
off my clothes and wrap around my hips
an oceanic gust from the cotton bolt
i brought from Zimbabwe
half this life before
and gave to a dear one who returned to me
one yard in thanks, tiny stitches,
this skirt. heat tears through
onion silk. with the long blade
i slice gold threads of ginger. oil pops
as punjabi mc strips the carapace
and wings unfold from my hips.
roil and scrape. peanut, coconut, turmeric, cumin.
cabbage, tomato, cauliflower, honey.
masala dust clings to raw arms, ribs
sweat red clay heat. mouth gorged
with song, the feeding precedes
the eating. my tongue thrills at the naked
steam curling into its hidden cells, my skin
tilts towards the kaleidoscope
of scents. i serve my beloved
a dish and she returns to me
one birth in thanks, tiny bloodbeats,
this night. the only flavor
is never the only flavor. the body can taste
every texture of loss. the body can learn
to boil sugar
from the heart.
Shannon E. Williams 