Sides of the Road
When summer began, it came in with a series of blows destroying the crops in their wake. Looking back it paints like a series of farm stands, succulent and fruitful from afar but upon closer examination, the wells of fruit have wilted and rotted under the sun's eye waiting for the next unsuspecting onlooker. Well, technically that was the end of spring and beginning of the upcoming season. A couple of months later I'm waking up front the jolts, gasping for air, and--as usual--looking at the changes, carnage, and circus of it all.
The summer began with learning a cousin died . . . Another one this year. This one, one I was fairly close to for years and years died at 49 . . . On his bathroom floor, I hear. Lessons of the past I don't have it in me to go into, he and I parted angry ways half a decade ago. Addictions and misgivings left a lot of the be said. A lot to be desired. Damage was done, to everyone and especially me, and with his death, I didn't mourn him per se. Instead, I found myself regretting the lost memories and the emotions long fizzled I thought I had dealt with years ago. So, with that my summer began awash in a maze of memories I would have rather kept dusty and forgotten.
Then the pharmacy opted to sell me the wrong steroid, even when I said (more than once) it wasn't what my doctor ordered (or what I had been taking for two weeks). Three days later, after my body revolted, I finally got said steroid and I may or may not have told the pharmacist that I hoped she got an autoimmune disorder and had an idiot withhold her medication causing extreme pain. I was so puffy that day. So red. In so much pain. I remember the world felt like it was in slow motion and each step up the block felt like I was carrying cement blocks.
A relationship I have no designation for, that a few who know the details all say it was odd and I was in the right, shifted. I've probably spent more time aching about it than I should, but life is what it is. That basket fell. I still don't know what the fruit was. My closest friend tells me it's not over, and she is certain he'll circle in my life again. As to what that next circle will be I do not know. All I know is he pushed to me to the point of yelling and demoralizing myself in public. I'm still shaking and shocked. There's a clear bullet hole there.
Then, in Tampa, the world turned me out so to speak. Friendships come and go. Years stab as they depart. I stood on the canal wondering where my life was. I still wonder. Other friends are always there, so by week's end the shocks eased, but the memory still remains. I found myself on a SUP, and the week's stress and misgivings weighed down on me. Even the water didn't cleanse me that day.
I came home from Tampa to find my orchids overwatered. I was gone for a week, and my house sitter wasn't supposed to come by. She did. In retrospect, it was a sign. I left instructions, again. I was home for a night, and then I hit the road with a suitcase of dirty clothes for the Midwest. I-80 through Pennsylvania was single lane and construction city. A small number of friends got a video of me losing my mind in my car, and then I stopped in Toledo for the night. Yeah, Toledo . . . I saw you. Your art museum has impressionist that I love. Other than that . . . I captured my picture better than a postcard that I then made into a postcard if you follow. AS I left Toledo to head back to Wisconsin, the Midwest roads were the same endless, banal green of my youth. Passing Hammond, IN--the town of my father's youth--the stench of the oil refineries and dying steel mills still hung in the air. Southside Chicago still awoke me to my youth of summers on bikes, swimming in the now old government docs, the odor of Wisk laundry soap being made at Lever Brothers, the cheese fries from Arnies in Whiting, and taste of Green Rivers and innocence.
Wisconsin was me and a rented bike and a conference. I was supposed to do a book signing, but my book was forgotten, and other actions of inaction left me more than glad to leave. I did enjoy rides along the lake each night, fueled by the sidecar of drugs I take. So this Marilyn was Marilyn on a bicycle as we say. The mosquitos still wore helmets, and the air was still thick and humid. The university docks were still bustling with life, as even in my solitude one evening a gaggle of coeds came with their fishing poles and hopes for catches. Perhaps that is what we all do along the way. Hope for catches of release. Sometimes the roads give it to us. Sometimes they do not.
A week later I wandered to Indiana, worn and worse for the wear, to see an Aunt and spend some time with a cousin I haven't shared elongated hours with in far too long. We ran like kids, with the literal wind in our hair, and found two afternoons to idle away some hours in the chilly waters of Lake Michigan and let the sand nestle between our toes. We visited her mother, in a nursing home that has been her temporary home longer than any of us imagined it would, darted from cornfields to the sprawling halted traffic of Chicago, and made pork chops from maj babcia and drank by starlight wondering how and where life and turned and changed us along the way. Her thirteen year old found us kooky, and we found him petulant. Cycles of life. Cycles come and go. There's a sweet relish, that can't be fully captured, of swimming in the cold waters of the Great Lakes. Those waters, and endless summer days, bouyed us both in ways we didn't realize until the miles took me down the road and her back to her daily routine.
My next stop was Cincinnati, well Northern Kentucky for the most part. One Skyline Chilli dog, since I said gluten be damned and washed it back with a beer at the stadium, vitamin D, paint fumes from helping a college friend redo a dresser for her tween, helping said same college friend chop her poke weed back, lunch with two high school friends, dinner with college friends, a trip to the Cincinnati Market for the food studies I've been sculpting . . . All in a day and a week of buoying grant money and recharging memories and meanings. On college brochures what they should really show--instead of young, strapping co-eds in college gear appearing to soak up knowledge--is mid aged chumps covered in paint, glitter, and dirt. That's the real legacy those thousands of dollars get you. Friends twenty plus years down the road.
I stopped in Charleston, West Virginia for a couple of days. Partly as I'd never been and I'd long heard about the mountain storybook town, and as you probably already guessed I planned the stop to let the Lupus catch up and rest. Rest and Lupus are perpetually odd categories, but in the end, that is the best destination to call it. While there, I nearly melted into the coal mine asphalt, and my straw hat barely kept me upright. I did find some fruit wines in those mountain stalls, and the stories and legends that ramble about the sweetness of mountain wine surely scribbled those tales from the West Virginia fruit fields.
I stopped and had lunch with an old friend, as we relished knowing that there's someone else who worries and aches about things the way we do. Vegetarian plates and fizzy drinks, twenty plus years of memories, twenty plus years of life, and air conditioning on an afternoon that the thermometer bellowed over 100 idled us along.
I stopped at my parents for two nights, and then I shuttled via Amtrak back to NYC for a night. There, I found my orchids dead, scorched, and one missing. My pansies and daisy from Earth Day gone . . . Replaced with half dead, ill planted blooms. I stood there in shock, feeling an emotional blow I wasn't expecting. There's a comfort in caring for a plant, a self-care as we say in 2018. They are all gone now. One day I'll recover, but until then I hide my eyes from orchids as last week a display on the street felt like a knife in my heart. I would joke and say that is a matter of age and Lupus catching up with me, but it is not. My heart is fine, as I have a bill of health on that one. Instead, the unpinnable attachment and emotional love we develop for objects, plants, and people stay with us. Hours of reading, dollars of destroying, and messages across the Atlantic until I honed my orchid thumb via the help of my ex-pat friend William. His notes from the German countryside finally took, and I found orchids in bloom. Now . . . Now. . .
Among that, I started Benlysta, and then after infusion one, I revisited the old friend of the LIRR and headed out to Long Island for a long weekend to watch a friend's cats and endlessly swim in her pool. The side effects are what they are, but idling them away in a pool, in July heat, to the sounds of crickets out east wasn't so bad. And then I shuttled back, down to Dixie, spent a night in the Shenandoah Mountains, a couple more at my parent's house, and then to Duke for a week.
Research notes and the daily heat, the rolling grasses of the Duke campus, the NC State farmer's market . . . A few more days in Dixie, I sewed with my mom and came home a day later than planned. The traffic was brutal, a 6 to 7-hour drive turned into more than 12 when I stopped counting. I might have stopped counting, but I kept the videos of my losing my cookies up I-95. Six or so people have gotten them all summer, as they are portals into my soul, portals of a woman alone with her thoughts, and portals of hell on wheels.
At home, the next day I had infusion two. Two weeks raced by. I battled side effects, I tried to sleep. I nearly got through all of my mail. I tried this comedy called dating again. Several failed attempts later, leaving me wondering why I bothered and didn't just do something more productive like dye my hair purple, I met up with a man a few days before flying again. In two weeks at home, I had two infusions, one date, several odd dating scenarios, a refrigerator calamity, and endless hours of sleepless nights. I did my annual venture to Port Jefferson to see T on her yearly voyage home. In the stagnant heat, we wandered our well-worn streets, that we both know so well. We hadn't seen each other in a year, and it was a day well needed.
Now, in stagnant, thick air I find myself tinkering along. Swiping left, swiping right. In the course, finding more often than not a flittering ping who assume that I've got scores of messages and choices of dates and such. In reality, as it always is, I do not. Instead, I've got the occasional message from someone. The man who says he wants to write a book of porn and have me star in it, I unmatch and move on. The one who insists I'm lying about only chatting with him and demanding to know what my dating bucket list is or asking what I like to do outside of work. When I say things, like respectable humans do, concerning hiking, writing, museums, parks, and city streets instead of declaring I foresee hours and days of rapid and vivacious sex from the man I've barely been chatting with for five lines I get called a prude--or something worse--and unmatched. Saved me a virtual button click I presume. These are the markers through the night and another day.
These are the notes from a summer on the road. Two months on the road.
I'm off again, to Denver again. Last year--aside from the cellulitis in my jaw and allergic reaction to the antibiotics--the Rockies and Denver did my soul well. I've always been a mountain girl and a city girl. Last year I made one hike, Deer Summit in Rocky Mountain National Park, and my friends were horrified that I tackled such a brutal one while so far down. It is what I do. This year I'm hoping for a few more, particularly Hanging Lake and Twin Sisters (that's in RMNP). Hanging Lake . . . je ne sais pas, as it's a three-hour drive from Denver. I ponder. I inhale. I place one proverbial step in front of the other.
The summer began with learning a cousin died . . . Another one this year. This one, one I was fairly close to for years and years died at 49 . . . On his bathroom floor, I hear. Lessons of the past I don't have it in me to go into, he and I parted angry ways half a decade ago. Addictions and misgivings left a lot of the be said. A lot to be desired. Damage was done, to everyone and especially me, and with his death, I didn't mourn him per se. Instead, I found myself regretting the lost memories and the emotions long fizzled I thought I had dealt with years ago. So, with that my summer began awash in a maze of memories I would have rather kept dusty and forgotten.Then the pharmacy opted to sell me the wrong steroid, even when I said (more than once) it wasn't what my doctor ordered (or what I had been taking for two weeks). Three days later, after my body revolted, I finally got said steroid and I may or may not have told the pharmacist that I hoped she got an autoimmune disorder and had an idiot withhold her medication causing extreme pain. I was so puffy that day. So red. In so much pain. I remember the world felt like it was in slow motion and each step up the block felt like I was carrying cement blocks.
A relationship I have no designation for, that a few who know the details all say it was odd and I was in the right, shifted. I've probably spent more time aching about it than I should, but life is what it is. That basket fell. I still don't know what the fruit was. My closest friend tells me it's not over, and she is certain he'll circle in my life again. As to what that next circle will be I do not know. All I know is he pushed to me to the point of yelling and demoralizing myself in public. I'm still shaking and shocked. There's a clear bullet hole there.
Then, in Tampa, the world turned me out so to speak. Friendships come and go. Years stab as they depart. I stood on the canal wondering where my life was. I still wonder. Other friends are always there, so by week's end the shocks eased, but the memory still remains. I found myself on a SUP, and the week's stress and misgivings weighed down on me. Even the water didn't cleanse me that day. 
I came home from Tampa to find my orchids overwatered. I was gone for a week, and my house sitter wasn't supposed to come by. She did. In retrospect, it was a sign. I left instructions, again. I was home for a night, and then I hit the road with a suitcase of dirty clothes for the Midwest. I-80 through Pennsylvania was single lane and construction city. A small number of friends got a video of me losing my mind in my car, and then I stopped in Toledo for the night. Yeah, Toledo . . . I saw you. Your art museum has impressionist that I love. Other than that . . . I captured my picture better than a postcard that I then made into a postcard if you follow. AS I left Toledo to head back to Wisconsin, the Midwest roads were the same endless, banal green of my youth. Passing Hammond, IN--the town of my father's youth--the stench of the oil refineries and dying steel mills still hung in the air. Southside Chicago still awoke me to my youth of summers on bikes, swimming in the now old government docs, the odor of Wisk laundry soap being made at Lever Brothers, the cheese fries from Arnies in Whiting, and taste of Green Rivers and innocence. 
Wisconsin was me and a rented bike and a conference. I was supposed to do a book signing, but my book was forgotten, and other actions of inaction left me more than glad to leave. I did enjoy rides along the lake each night, fueled by the sidecar of drugs I take. So this Marilyn was Marilyn on a bicycle as we say. The mosquitos still wore helmets, and the air was still thick and humid. The university docks were still bustling with life, as even in my solitude one evening a gaggle of coeds came with their fishing poles and hopes for catches. Perhaps that is what we all do along the way. Hope for catches of release. Sometimes the roads give it to us. Sometimes they do not.
A week later I wandered to Indiana, worn and worse for the wear, to see an Aunt and spend some time with a cousin I haven't shared elongated hours with in far too long. We ran like kids, with the literal wind in our hair, and found two afternoons to idle away some hours in the chilly waters of Lake Michigan and let the sand nestle between our toes. We visited her mother, in a nursing home that has been her temporary home longer than any of us imagined it would, darted from cornfields to the sprawling halted traffic of Chicago, and made pork chops from maj babcia and drank by starlight wondering how and where life and turned and changed us along the way. Her thirteen year old found us kooky, and we found him petulant. Cycles of life. Cycles come and go. There's a sweet relish, that can't be fully captured, of swimming in the cold waters of the Great Lakes. Those waters, and endless summer days, bouyed us both in ways we didn't realize until the miles took me down the road and her back to her daily routine. 
My next stop was Cincinnati, well Northern Kentucky for the most part. One Skyline Chilli dog, since I said gluten be damned and washed it back with a beer at the stadium, vitamin D, paint fumes from helping a college friend redo a dresser for her tween, helping said same college friend chop her poke weed back, lunch with two high school friends, dinner with college friends, a trip to the Cincinnati Market for the food studies I've been sculpting . . . All in a day and a week of buoying grant money and recharging memories and meanings. On college brochures what they should really show--instead of young, strapping co-eds in college gear appearing to soak up knowledge--is mid aged chumps covered in paint, glitter, and dirt. That's the real legacy those thousands of dollars get you. Friends twenty plus years down the road. 
I stopped in Charleston, West Virginia for a couple of days. Partly as I'd never been and I'd long heard about the mountain storybook town, and as you probably already guessed I planned the stop to let the Lupus catch up and rest. Rest and Lupus are perpetually odd categories, but in the end, that is the best destination to call it. While there, I nearly melted into the coal mine asphalt, and my straw hat barely kept me upright. I did find some fruit wines in those mountain stalls, and the stories and legends that ramble about the sweetness of mountain wine surely scribbled those tales from the West Virginia fruit fields. 
I stopped at my parents for two nights, and then I shuttled via Amtrak back to NYC for a night. There, I found my orchids dead, scorched, and one missing. My pansies and daisy from Earth Day gone . . . Replaced with half dead, ill planted blooms. I stood there in shock, feeling an emotional blow I wasn't expecting. There's a comfort in caring for a plant, a self-care as we say in 2018. They are all gone now. One day I'll recover, but until then I hide my eyes from orchids as last week a display on the street felt like a knife in my heart. I would joke and say that is a matter of age and Lupus catching up with me, but it is not. My heart is fine, as I have a bill of health on that one. Instead, the unpinnable attachment and emotional love we develop for objects, plants, and people stay with us. Hours of reading, dollars of destroying, and messages across the Atlantic until I honed my orchid thumb via the help of my ex-pat friend William. His notes from the German countryside finally took, and I found orchids in bloom. Now . . . Now. . .
Among that, I started Benlysta, and then after infusion one, I revisited the old friend of the LIRR and headed out to Long Island for a long weekend to watch a friend's cats and endlessly swim in her pool. The side effects are what they are, but idling them away in a pool, in July heat, to the sounds of crickets out east wasn't so bad. And then I shuttled back, down to Dixie, spent a night in the Shenandoah Mountains, a couple more at my parent's house, and then to Duke for a week. Research notes and the daily heat, the rolling grasses of the Duke campus, the NC State farmer's market . . . A few more days in Dixie, I sewed with my mom and came home a day later than planned. The traffic was brutal, a 6 to 7-hour drive turned into more than 12 when I stopped counting. I might have stopped counting, but I kept the videos of my losing my cookies up I-95. Six or so people have gotten them all summer, as they are portals into my soul, portals of a woman alone with her thoughts, and portals of hell on wheels.
At home, the next day I had infusion two. Two weeks raced by. I battled side effects, I tried to sleep. I nearly got through all of my mail. I tried this comedy called dating again. Several failed attempts later, leaving me wondering why I bothered and didn't just do something more productive like dye my hair purple, I met up with a man a few days before flying again. In two weeks at home, I had two infusions, one date, several odd dating scenarios, a refrigerator calamity, and endless hours of sleepless nights. I did my annual venture to Port Jefferson to see T on her yearly voyage home. In the stagnant heat, we wandered our well-worn streets, that we both know so well. We hadn't seen each other in a year, and it was a day well needed. Now, in stagnant, thick air I find myself tinkering along. Swiping left, swiping right. In the course, finding more often than not a flittering ping who assume that I've got scores of messages and choices of dates and such. In reality, as it always is, I do not. Instead, I've got the occasional message from someone. The man who says he wants to write a book of porn and have me star in it, I unmatch and move on. The one who insists I'm lying about only chatting with him and demanding to know what my dating bucket list is or asking what I like to do outside of work. When I say things, like respectable humans do, concerning hiking, writing, museums, parks, and city streets instead of declaring I foresee hours and days of rapid and vivacious sex from the man I've barely been chatting with for five lines I get called a prude--or something worse--and unmatched. Saved me a virtual button click I presume. These are the markers through the night and another day.
These are the notes from a summer on the road. Two months on the road.
I'm off again, to Denver again. Last year--aside from the cellulitis in my jaw and allergic reaction to the antibiotics--the Rockies and Denver did my soul well. I've always been a mountain girl and a city girl. Last year I made one hike, Deer Summit in Rocky Mountain National Park, and my friends were horrified that I tackled such a brutal one while so far down. It is what I do. This year I'm hoping for a few more, particularly Hanging Lake and Twin Sisters (that's in RMNP). Hanging Lake . . . je ne sais pas, as it's a three-hour drive from Denver. I ponder. I inhale. I place one proverbial step in front of the other.
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