Retired

We rattle around in the house like the dice in a gambler's hands. Separately we travel from room to room, each of us on a private quest, compelled by inner urges. He's in his usual arena, the treehouse (also called the media room), for a couple of hours, until without warning he changes floors, settles in a new spot briefly then charges down to the basement or up to his treehouse again on a mysterious, undisclosed mission whose meaning escapes me as he whizzes past, leaving me alone again with my thoughts and my armload of dirty clothes that I am lugging to the washer in the basement, thinking of much earlier laundry days (not mine, thankfully) that necessitated tubs of boiling water and feeling grateful that Maytag and its pals do the laundry for me, allowing me the freedom and the time to run back upstairs to work on the book I'm constructing by altering another book. In the meantime, he moves to the kitchen for a surreptitious handful of almonds, then we continue to meander through the house, connecting seldom after that first long morning hug but when we do connect it warms us both unless, shaken too vigorously by the gambler's hands, we strike sparks from each other which sometimes, fed by the tinder of old hurts and remembered slights, catch and blaze into an intense conflagration that can only be extinguished by time, cool wisdom, or wet tears.

All day we tumble past each other on our personal missions, breaking for lunch (I fix it, we eat it, he cleans up the debris) during which we are allowed to read, exchanging amazed words over errors, typos, or a particularly vivid or apt turn of phrase that we find in our book or newspaper or magazine.

After lunch it's back to the same routine of endless activity as we shoot from one level of the house to another, east end to west end, filling the time and the rooms with pursuits appropriate to our individual temperaments.

And if we're lucky, at the end of the day (and I really mean at the end of our day, not some metaphorical and vague cliché) we come together on the couch, my feet in his lap, and we drink a little drink (his is wine, mine is my vitamin supplement that I pretend is sherry) and then—with still fifteen minutes before the dinner in the oven will be ready—we dance. We put on "I'm All Shook Up" (Elvis, obviously) or a big-band version of "Why Don't You Do Right?" or "Cherokee." Our dance moves are limited, not by space, because we have lowered the leaf on the drop-leaf dining room table and have placed all the chairs around the perimeter, from where they watch us like so many envious wallflowers, but by our own nascent skill as dancers. We have now mastered the basic swing step, though don't ask me to talk while I'm executing it. The little extras with names like "fall-away, come-away" or "peek-a-boo", are in the process of being learned. As we dance, I am transported to my teenage self. I didn't know how to dance like this during my high school years, when everyone else was doing it, but now I do know. And my sweetie and I dance to the music with joy, with greed for more dancing and more laughter, and with the promise of love that is the very substance through which we will rattle and dance for the rest of our time together.

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Slinging the Carpet over the Railing

Let's get the demons out of the way right off the bat. Demons are filling my room today: black despairing demons spiraling down, down.

 

Myself, I blame it on the weather. They told us warm (or perhaps it was just wishful thinking that made me hear that) and yet it's cold. I knew it would be. I knew there'd be no spring for us this year. "Warmer" is a dying concept. "Colder" is what we'll get, over and over.

 

All right. Get a grip. Remember that cold is simply a sensation. Your lifelong fear of cold is based on some frozen childhood memory, not on any kind of reality. Re-read that line above: cold is simply a sensation: a sensation like that of warm water running over your hands as you wash them; the sensation of smoky chocolate squares melting between a hot tongue and a hard palate. Cold is just another sensation. Enjoy it.

 

After all, what will happen when it does finally get warm this spring? It'll be time to clean the house, won't it? Time to take the area rugs out to the back porch and sling them, one at a time, over the railing. What we really need, of course, is to string a strong clothesline across the back yard so that we can sling those carpets over the line and beat them with the carpet beater. Air them out. Release the fleas and mites and dust bunnies, all the indoor winter creatures. Shake them out, beat them out so that you can carry a cool, pristine carpet back into the house and lay it on the newly washed and polished floor.

 

And what a pipe dream that is, eh? There may be a day or two, once the air is fresh instead of freezing, when I'll actually open the windows, wash a few of them, and empty out a closet or a drawer. I've always admired a woman who spring cleans thoroughly, setting aside a week to revive her home and make it ready for a new season. I've admired her, but I haven't aspired to be her.

 

Right now I'm trying to adjust to the new slant of the sun as it lowers in the afternoon. It streams through my front windows and spreads light all over the living room and dining room floor, illuminating, with its low angle, every single crumb, every bit of dust on the floor. So these days I find myself daily with my little brush-and-dustpan set,  crouching to sweep up what the sun has uncovered. I assume that the floorboards beyond the reach of the sunlight are equally dust-affected, but that really is not my business. Out of sight, out of mind.

 

Let's go back to that sturdy clothesline over which one might, in spring, sling one's carpets. I want one! Not for carpets but for my overheated, over-tumbled clothing. It is probable that I'll only use it in the summer, but I want to hang towels outside and let them dry to a rough texture that will buff my showered skin. I want my sheets to whip in the wind until the cotton fibers go weak and soft and carry the outdoors smell into my bedroom. I want real feelings to surround my clothes, not the stale lump-thump of the dryer.

 

I remember carrying bushel baskets of laundry outside and pegging the wet, wrung clothes to the line with wooden spring-type clothes pins. Shirt-tail to shirt-tail to shirt-tail. The economy of overlapping each garment with its neighbor, using three pins instead of four to hang two garments. Socks pinned in pairs if they were thin, pinned singly if they were thick, to avoid damp toes. Sheets folded in half so as not to sweep the ground in their swinging. And everything hung so neatly (although without the controlling persnicketiness of those who said you had to hang sheets first, then towels, then kitchen towels, then skirts—or whatever the order was supposed to be). My joy and pride was simply to pin the clothes precisely at two edges instead of pegging them with one central pin that left the garment to float like an abandoned rag from its single anchor. My standards weren't high, but oh, I was proud of my clothes line.

 

Lacking a clothesline, on very hot summer days, I lug my collapsible wooden clothes rack to the back yard and drape my washing over the wooden rungs as efficiently as I can. The sun dries everything eventually. But the wooden rack prohibits flapping in the wind, and space is too limited for me to display the washing beautifully for all to see. It's better than the dryer, but it's just not the same as a real clothesline.

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Sitting in the Garden

I sit in this garden. I see the line between sun and shade. I listen to the robin: insistent and not particularly musical today, but as cheerful as can be. Kind of like listening to a tone-deaf child who sings idly and happily while he colors.

 

Now the robin flies away and I'm left with my thoughts.

 

A stone shrine dominates the garden. In front of it is a grouping of old stones. They've been there for a while, you can tell by the grass growing up between them. And in the midst of the stones is what looks like a large, hollowed-out rock about the size of a truck wheel. The sun just touches an edge of it, but the sun cannot penetrate the blackness of the hollow in its center. The hollow can not be larger than the stone itself, I know, but it looks as if it contains all the darkness of the Universe. Here is where you go to find what you need. You descend into this hollow. You stay there. And when you leave, you bring with you those murky, damp elements that are such an integral part of you, but that you would never even know about were it not for the dark hollow of this stone.

 

And as you sit in the garden, as you descend into the deep dark, the stone shrine guides you, watches you, and protects you.

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com