Wall of Truth.

This year is the year I have dubbed Mortality Lessons. I've joked that I think I'm ready to take the quiz now, I'm ready to stop immersive study practices and show I've learned the material, maybe even mastered it, I think I will ace it, enough already.

However.

I'm not sure that's how Mortality Lessons actually works.

My sister E had not one, but two strokes this summer. She has been recovering ever since, doing all sorts of therapy, and making impressive strides. Her friends and family are ardent supporters. My sisters--there are three of us--were and are the squad (SQUAD!) for my dad as he has recovered from his own brain events.

At the moment, though, E has to make getting better, recovering, her main focus. This is one of the statements on her Wall of Truth. The Wall of Truth is my younger sister's invention, and it is genius. These statements are written on pieces of white paper in Sharpie, and taped to the wall opposite the bed and chair. Other statements include the dates of her brain events; the location of her two daughters, and the fact that they are all right; and other pertinent facts about E's here and now, which can feel a little elusive sometimes. The Wall of Truth is supposed to help in making the here and now a little bit more stable. More confirmable. Look up, and there are the bare facts of the case, the incontrovertible, the inarguable.

Truth: the inarguable here and now are sometimes unbearable. 

Truth: the people who love us are infinitely precious. 

Truth: the burdens we bear cannot, for the most part, be made easier to bear through better thinking or better organizing. We just have to bear them. 

Truth: still, sometimes we can use a little help.

Some of the sweetest conversations of my life I've had this year, with my mother, my father, my sisters, my brother. My therapist pointed out that one of the reasons the sweetness, and the grief, both feel so sharp is that these conversations--these circumstances--are sacred. That rang true to me. The sacredness--the way this year has felt set apart, a steep swerve into another realm--intensifies both the grief and the grace.

Today I came home from a long but good day, feeling like I had done a pretty good job at all the job things that were on my agenda. I told the historian so, and he offered a kind word, affirming what I felt. It's my habit to simultaneously hold this kind of praise, and to demur.

"Thanks for saying that," I said to him.

"Well, it's true," he said. "Maybe you need a Wall of Truth."

Truth: the end of the day Friday is the sweetest moment of the week. 

Truth: I really, really love my family, all of them, in an infinity of times and places. There will never be enough words for this. 

Truth: there is also never enough time. 

Truth: I need to arrange to get a CT Angio, stat.

Adjustments.

I don't know if anyone noticed this at all, but today it was very cold outside. Also, super snowy. I noticed this from all the windows in my house whence I checked out conditions whilst waiting for it to be safe for me to drive, or for the approaching hour of my first meeting, whichever came first.

Meanwhile, a mouse ran up and down the corridor, considering with apparent interest the humane mousetrap with a fresh peanut butter-coated saltine in it, without ever actually crossing the threshold of it. Without becoming "trapped," as it were. Running up and down the corridor, in plain view. All, "I love this corridor with its fresh scent of peanut butter and saltine. So much better than that cold-ass field out back!"

Meanwhile, I checked all the humane mousetraps every twenty minutes or so. I have so much faith in them! And so many mice to trap!

I'm still getting used to going outside again, after my long confinement in the House of Contagion. Very cold, for one. Snow-packed. Disorientingly bright. I need a pair of those Victorian sunglasses, the kind that protect your illness-addled brain from The Brightness.

Meeting, meeting, and the drive home. I came home to find that we had caught the (a?) mouse. I made dinner for the second night in a row, so that's something. We ate the very last one of the Chad-procured tomatoes. I let it sit quietly nestled in its bag for days and days, which turned out to be the optimal condition for it ripening to absolute perfection. We ate it with our baked penne and it was a last lucky hit of summer. The ne plus ultra of tomato, in December, on a snowy night.

Meanwhile, another mouse has been running up and down the corridor, disdaining the humane mousetrap while admiring its fragrance, congratulating itself on its excellent taste in shelter.

Meditations.

The historian went home today, so it has been nothing but me and my own brain, a situation that is ripe for contemplation.

1. working on poems uses a different part of my brain than working on movies.
2. I love to see the sky, and the sky here is wonderful--mercurial, moody, huge.
3. when there is a shortage of foods from the salty/crunchy food group--as there is, indeed, now such a shortage at my lodgings--it leads me, ineluctably, to the conclusion that we need more salty/crunchy foods close at hand. Soon if not immediately.
4. If I could be a kind of weather, I would be rainy.
5. leftover noodles? delicious.
6. no matter how well you think you know a place--a place you've been coming since your infancy--there is more to learn and more to see. More to know.
7. riding with the wind is excellent. Riding into the wind reminds me of things I would rather not consider about my physical condition and age.
8. with no one here but myself I can think more steadily about these poems.

But I already miss the historian.

Here are some things we saw yesterday: