stuffed

I was riding just the little nearby trail

always in between, mom cleaned and ensured and resting

Bess at basketball practice on a saturday, also fed and loved and listened to about billie eilish, listening to her music always when Bess in the kitchen

Riding down the same dirt path, where the houses couch us on either side, and the trees hang over the top like a leafy local amazon jungle

it's safe here, there's people if I need but no people in sight, people in my pocket on my phone if I fall

Under the trees I felt full of something, a layered fullness from my toes inching up from the dirt path, through the steady horse hooves, up to the top of my head

I felt full of happiness

This was right after the baby horse had leapt forward because sprinklers had gone off and she'd never seen water shooting out of the ground like a surprise party. She shot forward but she always only spooks the length of the rope, and then stops because Dewey is just plodding along contentedly so she looks apologetic and turns back and I laugh

The happiness came right before the guy on the horse rounded a blind trail corner at a run in front of us and appeared suddenly and the baby horse again leapt in surprise and turned to run but stopped because Dewey blinked slowly and kept walking

Today nothing scared me, it just seemed funny

Today was a full lucky day, lucky to have my mom, to get a daughter ready for one of only a handful of weeks of basketball left in high school. To have steady horses next to young horses and to get to let them carry me and be their burden for awhile, to be refilled with their peace on a regular boring trail on a regular boring day. That feels so rich

I come back to clean up poop, and get my mom up, and pat the dogs and see the family that is in and out, and dream about my dreamy projects, characters talking in my head, some beavers right now, of course still the 1800's explorers, Bob Fosse sometimes says hi, the lady from the steam bath who was exercising IN the steam bath and so I had to write about her.

It's a floaty life, floating toward Christmas, with three strands of popcorn on the tree, and the lights glommed on in one ball because we haven't really decorated but it couldn't be unLIT if it's in the house, right? We'll wait for Emma to decorate.

Mostly I wanted to talk about the lucky feeling of being full, when you feel so lucky you are full to the brim and you actually notice it stacked and stuffing your limbs and torso. 

Maybe I don't have everything but I do have everything. 

Write Here Right Now

I was telling my friend that all I needed was to sell my gay lewis and clark series, I had done everything else, I had had the kids I wanted, raised the family and I had the horses and I'd done all that I was put here to do except sell my gay musical that was all I needed.

And she was saying wait a minute. You were here to be a mother. You wanted to be a mother more than anything. You did this huge job. Your last one is about to be done with high school. She's about to start her life as a grown up ish. 

You don't have to do more. You CAN do more, you can make this show or publish a book or put all your writing into one big pot and save it for the rest of the world maybe your family at a later date. You have your blog and your novella and some scripts and some other scripts and some plays and some scenes and some poetry and some novels. You have it all, you wrote it all, you felt it all. It's all there, it's not going anywhere. What's the POINT of it, that is true. If the point was mothering, then the writing what is all that? Just the ice floe I'm floating around on?

I guess part of the point of writing is to take all the feelings and fling them out so they don't whirlpool me into their vast suction and suck me down and kill me. Like there is not enough booze or pills in the world to shut off all that noise. That's why I never even started with that shit. Too expensive and the upkeep is too boring. I don't want to waste all my time driving to liquor stores. I do like to drive to feed stores. So I do use horses to try and quell the feelings, and that helps. 1200 pound furry creatures that are intimidating at times unless you have a crop and not sore hips which I do have. But at core they are big blocks of peace. Peaceful and quiet. They are my peace and quiet, and I can see them and touch them. 

Writing has helped me get mad and fling pain at people who molested me or people who left me or people who didn't understand me. But more than that writing has made me laugh at what I think I control, who I think I am, what goes through my mind and leaks out as funny

Writing proves to me that life is ridiculous, that life is hilarious, that life is deeply touching, that life is tender, that life is soft, and life is thick and confusing. Life is a corn maze. It's so green in there and there's bits of yellow that taste good if you boil them, but when you're in the middle of it all you can see is confusion unless you look up and there's a blue sky. You are rarely ever going to know where you're going so you might as well go with good people so you can laugh while you're in there. Because there's really no chance you're going to find your way out by nightfall without a map and we're always always holding it upside down.

But later we see the map is shaped like a pumpkin and someone planted it that way, so the corn would grow a certain way, and they tractored it so it would be smiling. See people are funny. They know life is funny and crowded and full of sprouting corn. Under your feet.

I wish I had a whole farm for my feelings. Acres of land empty just so I could stop writing and pour myself out onto the land instead, the land that feels me and that I feel as well as these words. 

I am so grateful for the space and the green and the words. Even in this congested world series winning Los Angeles where somehow I have made my own little farm and child filled life.

I'm just saying writing and mothering and loving and horsing around is I guess all one thing, aside from success or money or whatever, it's all jumbled into the corn maze called the life of Juliet Myfanwy. I guess I wish more people talked about it or wrote about it or bared themselves so I could paint them on my skin and feel like a tribe earth. I need all of us to feel whole.  I am always searching. 

But maybe now I can search knowing it's okay if I want to wear pioneer clothes and carry a lantern. And maybe a truckload of Mel Brooks movies, Van Gogh's paintings, all of LM Montgomery's books and some women comedians who explain the universe as undeniably vast, funny and in the palm of my hand.

 

Thanksgathering

I spent thanksgiving with people I don't know. Some ukranians that are extended to the extended family and do I know any of any of us really? 

Okay I do know them, they've been coming for a few years. There's a mom of someone and a boyfriend with a big hat that the dog always barks at cause he doesn't like hats or black people. Thanksgiving is good if it's family of family because there's no pressure to be perfect. They don't know you, they aren't slogging through muck of years together to drop their homemade pie on your table, they just skate right through with fresh eyes, still in the infancy of you, and they're glad they didn't have to cook.

I like hearing Russian at the table and seeing the kids barely eat anything because they'd rather play ping pong and I like the noise and the sharing of noise where nothing gets solved but there's cheer and old family cornbread recipes.

The lugging makes your body hurt, the before and after lugging of making the house nice. But after we ate and sort of cleared up some dishes but not all because some people were still sitting to talk and we wandered out because kids wanted to see and hold the one bunny we have left and then they wanted horse and pony rides because my little niece (who is 45 and delivers babies but to me still 15) wanted to ride bareback and work on her leg because she's a rider too. And wasting time with horses is my favorite way to waste time.

We don't have a nice arena or any arena just a basketball court driveway so that became our arena and people who wanted to get on the tall horse or short pony got on, and the horses were polite and careful, even the youngster Meriwether who can be a devil took care of the little bundles on his back. Everyone was learning, riders, young horses, and attention was being paid and I liked that. Everyone outside. Then the basketballers grew restless and kicked us off their court, even though the ukranian in the long skirt who brought the lavender dried into a bunch and looked like she had harvested it herself with her long hair and long brown skirt, she wasn't quite done riding in her drapey skirt on my old Dewey. But she slid off so the boys could play and the horses went back to eating hay and watching over the fence and the voices slithered off to find the pie and brownies and ice cream rumored.

Then everyone was gone, and the table was almost empty, just some decorations left, and you fall on the couch with the dog and the few kids left, the memory of the people gathered noisily and the sound stays in your mind and in the hard wood floor keeping us all company until next time.

It's in the Bag

I think I'm going to collect the nice things people are saying. I'm going to open a bag in my mind and fill it with nice things and maybe that will start overflowing and shoving out all the restless anger fear and anxiety that has been rooming in there trashing the place.

It would be weird to not have all that fear and anxiety and anger, that is the natural state after 4 plus years raising my mom to her ultimate death with dementia. That is the fallout, a little known movie playing in your mind from the daily care of someone you adore dying in front of you. 

I don't think it's bad to feel the whole thing. To use your hands to care for the person who is out of control of themselves. They need you. More than ever. To be cared for by hands that love you, that is why we are on earth. That is the real thing. 

I do know now that you need a whole big family to help hold you up. Mine is doing a a good job, it's just tattered, but we are a good unit. But there is not enough help to rebuild your insides as they are being shredded, there's no way to get ahead of that pain. Because it is real, and it's just a by product of doing a good job. You don't have to do the job with no fallout, you can't do it neatly. It's a wolf attack, and you can't be cleaning up while you're fighting the wolf. You have to do the job and realize that you also need to call FEMA in to help you manage the effects of the job on your soul. Because like any good job. It takes tending to the tender. 

I'm going to concentrate on relieving the bag of anxiety, yes. If I can. It is overflowing and it is tiring. I do fill it with beauty from outdoors, the horses and creek, and chickens pecking around my feet and dogs always always walking me everywhere, to every chore. They walk with me, and they lie at my feet. They look at me resolutely, and hopefully. Every animal on this property is holding me up. And chickens are pretty fragile. But they are dinosaurs so they have some staying power. 

Kurt congratulated me on being a horse trainer and doing things in slow easy steps, and feeling success with the new young horses we have. He said I'm proud of what you're doing. It's really amazing to watch. He said nice things. And Linette called me on Halloween to wish me a happy anniversary of our long ago beginning of our relationship. Maybe it didn't work out exactly the way we expected but it did work out in the mothering and laughs department. It's nice to be remembered, and to remember happy things, and to remember you still are that happy thing.

It's good to build a chicken house and shred your hands because your hands come back together if you use enough lotion and give them a rest. And it's good to hear your friends' voices and know they are out there and thinking of you with respect and happiness. You cheered their days, and they told you. I like that we're all on this floating planet thinking the same things and feeling shredded and too full of pain and scared and also buoyed and too full of busting love and safe. It's such a rocky boat. The simple things are the hardest things, aren't they. 

Ice Ice Baby

As some of you know cause it's been in all the papers our ice machine broke over the summer. It didn't break all the WAY just was barely giving any ice so when you went to the freezer and looked in hopefully you were like the little match girl dressed in rags, face dirty, looking up hoping for salvation and there were like two broken cubes. 

It happened at a point in the summer where I gave up trying to fix stuff. You know, the austrians had just been here and I had worked really hard to make sure they loved america and left knowing they'd never have it so good ever again. I saved our country's reputation, singlehandedly, so when the ice machine gave me the finger and laid back on the couch continuing to give me the finger while flipping channels, I just divorced it. I divorced that whole side of the freezer. 

Cut to four months later. I'm sick of having no ice. I call the fix it place we bought the fridge from, a used appliance store where you when you walk in there's like a cloud of comforting 70s cigarette smoke. I love that place. Anyway at first there was never any answer and I assumed oh man it finally shut down. Cancer had finally come for Judy the lady who never gave up on used refrigerators. But then I called a few weeks later thinking maybe, little match girl, maybe you can have ice again. And she answered! She wasn't dead at all!

So this was yesterday. She sent Luis to come out and fix the ice machine. I could have done some trouble shooting. Tried to figure it out. But like I said, I was full up on trying to figure anything else out. I'm still shocked that I can't fix dementia. So fuck it. Luis can do it. 

A tiny man with a dirty navy tshirt and some bags of tools arrives on the porch seven hours after his appointment time. I lock the dogs in Emma's room to destroy that while he checks into his assignment in the kitchen. I go outside to clean up horse poop. My mom is watching Gunsmoke in the living room or really she is looking at her lap while Gunsmoke is on. 

Cut to Luis is packing up his tools. He is smiling. He needs a shower. By the way. So here, look, he says. He disconnects the little tray top of his tools and puts it under the water nozzle like a trough to get a cup of water on the freezer door. He presses it. Water comes out fine into his little tray. Then he puts the filter in at the bottom of the freezer and does the same thing, pressing the lever for a glass of water. The water barely comes out. It's your filter, he says, pulling the filter out again and showing the nice stream of water again. 

I knew it coulda been the filter. The filters are kind of expensive, like 60 bucks and I just got a new one in April, I didn't want to pay again. I so much didn't want to pay that I decided to pay Luis to come out and tell me we needed a filter so that I could now pay for the filter AND pay Luis. I think I just wanted someone else to do something while I looked surprised and then nodded my head understandingly.

Luis was reattaching the lid of his tools that he'd used as a water tray. He was wiping  up the water that had been on it with the cleanest white towel I had ever seen on a fix it guy in my life. He opened the freezer door and said so it should work better with the filter. He gestured around at the let's call it disaster of haphazardly packed in food in the freezer. It's not that it's overpacked in the freezer, it's that it's packed stupidly and badly. Like if you took a rubic's cube apart and then jammed them in whatever place you could fit inside your shoes. I live in a youth hostel, I'm about to say to Luis. So much of my life is out of my control, including how things are stuffed in here. But he says first you just can arrange things differently so the temperature can be more regular in here. I'm like Luis, the temperature is not making the ice not work. The ice is still frozen. But I appreciate you freezer shaming the fuck out of me. Do you know who I live with? Do you know that a counter would never be wiped if I wasn't taking up space in the kitchen every day. Also Luis, let's talk about the shave you need. And let me go to your house right now and look in your closets.

Cut to today I ordered a new filter. It should get here before I ordered it because it's amazon and it's like they're outside just throwing shit at your house the second you order it.

I didn't even need Luis to fix it and I didn't need Luis to tell me my freezer is like the wilds of England before Christianity. The freezer looks amazing compared to the inside of my brain. Have you looked in there man

By tomorrow the ice will be flowing and it will be newly filtered Alaska in there. By Christmas I will have organized my freezer which will stay that way for ten minutes. 

Also I appreciate you Luis, because you showed up, with a tool belt. I know I sound like an asshole, but really anyone who comes to help, like our welcome mat says

YAY you're here

please stay forever

applause

Getting ready for a new horse I musta made some sort of pact to destroy my body as I moved the chicken house, and sawed branches off to fit the chicken area over there in the corner, and when I wake up after two days of immigrant hard labor I feel my body like a dead fat Marlon Brando tied on my back in the morning, I swing my feet over, get out of bed and I feel mortal

Like I can actually feel that the body I tote around and the sparkling clean me inside are two TOTALLY different things.

I was so mad the first day doing all this lifting and moving of heavy fences that I first yelled at Bess as soon as she got home to show me her new sweatshirt of Billie Eilish and I said BUT COULD YOU FUCKING HELP ME WITH THIS FENCE and then she looked sorry for coming outside but she did help and we didn't fall in the pool lugging heavy shit together

and did I mention that I got on ebay a little sound effects toy because I decided my life is crumbling a bit, I am over the limit with solo dementia care and so I bought this little toy and every time I do something like make dinner or build a chicken house I press the button with the little clapping hands and I get applause.

It is so nice to be taking a bow in your kitchen with a smile on your face, and to know that people are clapping for you

You know it's for you cause you pressed the button

the applause has really cheered me up it's almost as good as the ice cream I share every day with my mom around 4 damn that's now, I better get going. I eat all the nuts and chocolate off the ice cream and give mom the ice cream by pre biting it a tiny bit then feeding her. I am going to miss sharing ice cream, it's a really good excuse to have ice cream everyday at 4.

So today I finished the chicken house and it's only Phase One, because my hands were too shredded to make it perfect yet, so it will keep coyotes out for now but I have to still dismantle a little section, but give me a break, I'm 58 and there are no men here to do this work, I had to prairie up

I did get to use Nathan's saw and this was so fun I want to saw everything. I also want a see saw. I like anything you can ride.

I want you all to know that my days are all horse work, writing, swimming, dementia, love boat at 1pm, cleaning, laundry, couch, old pizza, needlepoint, caretaking, ice cream, Bess history and research homework (actually interesting) reading worrying resting and now applause

applause 

helps me release fat Marlon Brando off my back and back out into the universe. Ice cream coats my insides for the day coming tomorrow. I think about all those people in the hurricanes and I'm worried for people floating on roofs of houses in swollen rivers. I want everyone safe, with their family and warm socks.

no small thing

ice cream. safe feet. applause

so I'm in a pickle

Seems like what I do when I have a crisis of feelings, I buy a horse.

I don't actually need another horse, or any more poop out there. The poop is the hardest part about having a horse in the city, you have to scoop and lug and battle dragging two ton trash cans on gravel roads for trash pick up. 

But having the face there. On a daily basis. The little red face. 

Sometimes when I'm changing my mom's diaper, and she's turned over in bed, and she's never mean, she never says anything but I'm sorry, and thank you

But sometimes I'm in the middle of my job with her and I have to go outside and I leave her on her side, she's safe, and I walk right out the door and I go to the horse fence and I stare at the horses. Because I feel sad or horrible or terrible for her and for me, and I take a break right in the middle and stand at the fence to look at horses. And they look up at me, the shape of their faces, the biggest eyes on any land animal, and those eyes are always gazing at me like you're okay pickle.

So I go back in and finish my mom work. And tonight I kissed her all over her face and pretended to bite her chest and arms like you would a baby and she was laughing so much. Her face all lit up. Love matters. Even if she doesn't know who I am. She knows she's loved and cherished. How is that not like the whole red carpet.

So there was this little red horse out near Emma in Colorado. I think I woulda rather had Emma come back and live in the living room and I could keep her in a glass case and only take her out when I needed her but instead she's having a good life, she's having a better than glass case life and I'll see her as soon as I can. In the meantime there is this little red headed horse, and she's one year old, and she could do some damage to our hearts, with her gentle face.

She's coming here. 

I figure Meriwether is almost all used up, now that he's getting ridden a little bit and slowly learning what he'll be doing as an adult horse. As soon as I did the terrifying thing of sitting on him, my first baby horse that I ever raised, for the very first time, a few months ago, I sat on his back and felt suddenly like oh my GOD I can do this! Maybe I'm stupid I'm old and I don't want to break every single bone, but I am learning I can start from the ground up and make a decent, kind, easy family horse. So I immediately wanted to try again. I had lifetime enough to try one more time. But start at a yearling, so it's not so long til they're ready to work. By the time she's ready, in two years, to have a person on her back, Meriwether will be solid on the trail, and ready to have her come along. Dewey and Mags will be getting older and I will have yes too many horses, but what does that even mean. If the work is bringing me joy. I remember as a little kid all I wanted since I was three years old, according to my mom, was horses and babies. 

Seems like all the good stuff in life does come with trash cans full of shit. It is not as clean as it looks on instagram. Life is alot of reckless hell. At times. Although these last four dementia years have been a treacherous muddy swamp of thick shit. 

But I've had her face. My mom's face. That's the whole red carpet.

So I spent the first part of this year reading all about Bob Fosse because his life was funny and broken and his dance the same. Because my heart is funny and broken and my writing the same. And he called his daughter pickle, and he was a bad dad but he still got a pickle and I feel like a pickle most of the time and we will name this horse Jane, Calamity Jane Austen

but we will call her pickle

because we are all in one

and now it will have a face

a little red face with a white star

Girl On Fire

Lately I just feel broken.

Like we were driving after 10 AT NIGHT on the 405 and there was just a car on fire right there, and people were barely even slowing down to look at it. I think cause we're all in our cars going that's me man

I already got that

Living in LA sometimes feels like you can't navigate the city anymore. Like you cannnnn do it, you are capable but the joy of living you have to fight very hard for like one salmon left in the stream and you and thirty bears, and they are built for it. That car was just blazing. And that's not even the first time I've passed something out of control on fire on that freeway. And even though the fire dept guys were scurrying to handle it there didn't feel like any relief there like there's no hose big enough. Frankly.

It might be that I was in the barn earlier cleaning up and resting on my shitrake (little known japanese food) and I felt for once like I'm too tired to keep outrunning my need to be loved. And then that felt funny, like this might be the year I just decide it's okay to allow people to actually love me, and to fuck it up even, and I will get up the next day and still want to eat frozen yogurt at the beach, like I won't be destroyed. I don't know actually how to do this simple thing. Is anyone else like this? Have I made a new little known channel into humanity that no one else felt ever not even like the guy who invented capezios or some dude picking coffee beans in Ecuador cursing his own heart, or some physicist studying the sun at a giant telescope in Hawaii, with a white collared scientist coat, isn't she sometimes squinting at herself and saying this is good but why do I feel so sad

I thought maybe I was just more broken than others, but I look around and there are way more broken than me. People in the paralympics are running without legs

But emotionally broken no is maybe not broken, it is maybe just as B says, so much feeling

I could be a scientist of feeling, I have fallen into that deep end since very small and splashing around in there makes pretty good writing but it is always threatening to drown you because it is VAST and churning. The ocean makes sense. The ocean doesn't care about you but you can't stop thinking about it or wanting it to be part of you. Maybe this is the drawback of being a writer. Immersion in uncontrollable feeling.

When we saw the car fire we were on the way to a bad horror movie, a screening at a theater in the farthest reaches of earth, across the 405. B and I both had terrible anxiety leaving an empty house what if my mom dies the house catches on fire the dogs die of lonely confusion it's dark out we hate people

But his niece needled us to go, the whole family went mostly, his side of the family the one that likes to gather even though they also hate people mostly. We got to this theater in the city one amongst many cities in LA where there were cars not on fire but so many cars and you could smell the beach even though we were about 15 minutes from there, I guess the air doesn't count in mileage, the air just brings the beach right to your nose. The air was comforting even if the cars were not and the marquee had the movie name of the shitty horror movie b had made and Aela had been 5 years old in, and uncle donny had starred in, and little furry balls of hell called critters rolled around eating people's legs off and killing the guy who would later star in Titanic.

Sitting in a theater with your family and two handfuls of weird sci fi horror fans scattered around like popcorn for flair is a good way to remember who you are. It ain't complex like it feels in your head and heart. You show up and see smiling faces and you smell the ocean for a second and the world feels smaller and understandable and you feel relieved that you're not alone.

And the movie was good

The best part was everytime b's brother was onscreen, b would just laugh quietly, like a little kid. Seeing his little brother makes him love the world.

Let's just chalk up the lesson here that writing is your diploma into a lifetime of terror, immersion into feelings that you then can't differentiate between yourself and your work (maybe there is no difference), and living in a big city when you are a tall girl with a large heart is like living at high voltage, battling your surroundings for emptiness in your eyeline you can fill in with yourself, all flooded out and relieved.

This is why we have oceans.

 

Nice Knowin Ya

Kurt and I were leaving the trail one morning, crossing around the big tree at the bottom of the hill that is the last stop before reality, before the street and cars and life moving at a hectic pace. The tree is still peaceful, because you know you have a whole big hill to get your balls up for riding the civilization part that's coming up, you still have those fragments of quiet minutes so it's like a calm breath.

We had the dogs with us, and only our two horses and I could see around the bend behind the tree that there were two riders coming. So trail etiquette is you gather your dogs back in case their horses are afraid of dogs, and you make sure the other riders are safe. So I'm calling the dogs and I see the first rider round the bend of the fat tree and it's a dude, a rather jolly bearded older dude that's probably my age, and someone behind him on a horse so I say, friendly heyyy you want me to get the dogs?

He answered cheerfully, no that's okay! I think they're fine.

Around the corner behind him comes what looks like his thousand year old grandmother on a tall, shiny chestnut thoroughbred. Both Kurt's and my eyes pop out of our heads, alarmed. That's like seeing a blind man about to merge onto the 405 driving a Maserati. 

Uhhh  I say  Are you sure...?

The dogs are always a wild card, you can never be sure how new horses will react. My dogs are tongue slobbery trail wet, poking all around, the younger dog is going happily RIGHT UP to the fiery chestnut carrying the strong but bent over from the weight of time gramma. 

The gramma was calm and unflustered, I don't know if he's ever seen dogs before, he's just off the track

Kurt's and my eyes pop even bigger

The bearded guy is chuckling like he's sitting around a campfire not hosting his gramma's death here, his hands on very loose reins saying yeah this is his first time out!

I need to freeze frame for a second. There are four horses, two going one way into the wilderness, two going home, passing close enough to touch boots with each other, there are three dogs bounding around obliviously, and in the middle of this is an ancient human who looks like King Tut's grandmother with the back shape of a backpack, but whose arms and legs seem to be working correctly, on top of a huge young horse who has never been outside of a stall except to run full speed around a racetrack. Until today. Right this second.

Kurt and I would have been yelling OKAY OKAY OKAY I THINK IT'LL BE OKAY NO PROBLEM JUST LET US GET AROUND THIS CORNER HOLD YOUR DOGS!! HOLD THE DOGS!! I DON'T WANNA DIE JUST FOR A LITTLE FUN!!

I sat on my horse heading past them, Kurt behind me with his eyes as wide as hubcaps but acting cool, admiring the lady who was obviously a lifetime rider just stuck in an old body, with the balls of King Kong but the craziest part was they had the spirit of two people on a Sunday drive. Nothing but a meandering stream and their toes in the water, in their minds, they were laughing and just riding by all casual.

The bearded guy was well past us now and Kurt was just passing the old lady and her hot wired steed and the bearded guy said it's a perfect day to be out and the old lady said glorious

and Kurt looked at her bent over body as he passed and said nice knowin ya

And then we were on the hill and they were gone

I was laughing so hard at what he said, we just kept staring at each other and laughing and shouting  whatthefuckwasthat??! and the whole ride home felt hilarious but in the end it was so inspiring, really because goddammit, that lady was a GODDESS, relaxed, happy and old! Years of confidence, curled majestically in an orthopedic ball on the back of some horribly inappropriate horse, with complete happiness and faith, with the bearded friend who was not even worried, he was just along for the ride because you  know what it was a beautiful day

How was that young horse was just OKAY?! He was so calm. I kept thinking all day, and later at night. Because even though she was the crypt keeper, she balanced herself up there, with knowledge and years of skill. Maybe at some point as a rider you eventually sputter out of the crippling anxiety, and the world just gets funny, and then even though your body is completing the circle of life, the horses are still opening up the whole world of rides in empty wilderness. What a lucky life, I decided, that new horse landed in, in the hands of that talented gnome. Peaceful walks, and dogs and first times are no big deal maybe

It is nice knowin ya

Passing Wave

I had one perfect day at the beach this summer.

I had two regulation other ones, the one with the dogs and the teenagers where I felt like their server and invisible, and the one with the visiting Austrians where I was hosting and making sure they went home loving America. Usually we go once a week. In a normal summer. But 

This summer was too busy for long beach trips and also we never do long beach trips we do beach visits between yogurt, french fries and tacos surrounding the two hours at the beach.

Only Bess and Nathan and I could get to the beach. We thought it'd be cloudy. Or choppy or freezing. Like it was the last time. But this day was like a little triangle prism of light into a busy nonstop summer. 

We wrestled on wetsuits. There were no dogs to worry about. For some reason I had to get right in the water. I even took the huge surfboard. I don't surf. But I do apparently.

I don't like being cold. That water is cold. But I walked in. I like any sport where you're barefoot and you can pee at any time. 

The water tossed us all around, but who cares. This whole summer has tossed us all around. This whole summer we couldn't get our footing, There was no time to sit still. We had stuff to do. 

The ocean was telling me this. As it tipped me over. I got on the huge board. I saw the surfers on the olympics. They made it look they were water waiters. Like walking on glass one second let me refill your ice water. I'll be right back. 

I flopped onto the big board and felt wobbly like I was suspended 3000 feet in the air on a manhattan highwire act. you can't even slightly shift your weight or the board tells you hey you're a shitty surfer. Already. not even standing, just lying here flat. Just sayin

Ok I realized. Just lying on the board is the main step here. For me. At 58. In the ocean. I can lie on a tippy surfboard in these waves. Let's practice that.

So I practiced stabbing my board into the waves and letting them crash me in. I especially liked when the nose of the board would dip down and I'd fly off the front. It's so shallow in Ventura it's like surfing on a slip n slide really, but for some reason just lying on the board and feeling how insecure it is even at this basic level, that felt somehow amazing. Like just getting the very first step - impossibly hard! To feel confident.

But there's no one looking, I'm not in the semi finals, I can just enjoy this weird new thing. I did stand up on a board in my 20s and I did a few years ago for a few seconds. so I'm revisiting a sport that I know by passing wave, like I do with people at stop signs.

The day wasn't about trying to get better, really. It was about feeling released, in that water, with my two kids bobbing  bobfosseing nearby. We were laughing and talking about our frozen hands, and looking for the next wave to surf or bodysurf. We were screaming and making bad jokes and bouncing and it felt like the real summer, like the water was our momma and we were lush in her wide trampoline body. We were safe. There was nowhere to be, until frozen yogurt. No one needed us. We could play, and learn things. This seems like the point of life.

I did get better at hoisting onto the board, tho wobbly, and I did get my knees up but didn't stand up yet. 

We stayed in that water a long long time. The whole time. When we got out, we hung out on the sand only a bit and then made our traditional stacked up pyramid for a picture and then packed up and left. 

I liked feeling like I belonged to some water and some kids, and some new skill. I liked that we were nowhere, and not good at it, and the sky was patient and no one was waiting for anything. We could just be until we were too cold to be being anymore and had to go do. We weren't a whole book, we were just a bookmark. That day. That happiness stayed with me for days. 

I want to go back and I want to feel the water again like that. It's so hard to find the time, to clear the hours for doing something that makes no sense, no practical sense. I think that might be caretaker burnout, when you have a 24 hour job, you think you must always be on the job. Someone is needing you. That day helped remind me. I want to feel free and happy and idiotic. I have been feeling so impossibly lonely, for the life I love, that feels like this, feels like myself and my life.

And I want to try to stand up, even just for a second.

What If

Today I didn't ride with Kurt, I took him out yesterday and he's been having trouble with his body so we had to do a trail that involved no bending under trees or breaking branches to get through. Hmmm, I thought yesterday, I have to do another trail tomorrow to make up for this one.

I probly wouldn't ride as much if I didn't have a little horse to pony out alongside us to get him all trained up. And I barely go out to the creek much by myself lately cause I've been too tired to do a longer ride alone. But I got up early to see Bess off to school, then I'm already up and it's beautiful out there so I say to myself c'mon let's hit the trail.

I take Dewey, the sturdiest ship in the fleet, the tall black commander of our horse army, he is mellow and steadfast. Except don't walk over anything that wiggles he can't stand that. 

We pony Meriwether up over the hill, down into the dam, down into the creek. I saw on instagram how you can retrain your brain when it starts thinking what if I die  what if the horse freaks out what if a homeless rapist pops out of bushes waving a loud weedwhacker  - I listen to my mind and then I say what the lady online said 

what if everything's ok   what if we have the best ride ever   what if your kids are happy   what if you live a long life  what if this is one of your best memories

So as we go through the creek and I have to get down to break a branch out of the way, and I have to try and get back on my huge horse by standing him next to a log or mound of sand, I keep saying what if this is the best ride ever

We go down the deep water way, where it's South Carolina lush like we're in the home of the most secluded and merriest ducks, they paddle along near us so satisfied with the morning. The water is clear and splashy and we duck under branches. I have to get off another time to clear some bushes out of the way for Dewey who dislikes stepping into anything that might, well, wiggle freakishly. I don't mind helping make it a good ride for him. He's making it good for me, with his gentle, quiet eyes watching us, and also mildly studying the ducks and which plants might be good to eat along the water's edge.

I get back on, path cleared and we we go as far as we can up this little section of creek. There's a log jam at the end so we turn around and head back, now knowing what the hazards are since we came this way. I go through the deep water and then say hey c,mon, we're here, let's do it one more time for fun. So I turn them and make them go through the sloshy part once more. I'm videoing so I can look at it later and be proud of Meri's progress. He loves everyplace we go, he generally is well behaved, but he is 3, so there is 20% underlying tension that he will murder us. 

I'm videoing him and we go under a big leafy branch so I have to duck and then Meri stops but Dewey doesn't and my rope is running out as Dewey keeps walking and I have no hands to grab it, it's like a fat kite string unraveling I try and grab it hard with my upper arm against my ribs but because I have a camera I don't have the hand to stop Dewey and I drop the rope.

This is never good because you don't want to unleash the 700 pound toddler in the creek, but I just have accidentally. I cram my phone away and turn Dewey around back under the heavy branch and there is no Meriwether. 

We are in the creek, everything is the same and beautiful, but Meriwether is invisible, crashing around up on the bank, disappeared into the dense trees and brush. Dewey holds his head up a bit alarmed by the disappearance of the world's biggest brat, and I aim him over to the opposite creek bank, and get off, in case Meri comes busting out of the bushes like superman. I stand next to Dewey. I'm scanning the woods across the water, hearing him, my mind is running ahead as a good rider's does assessing the odds here  well there's nowhere he can go   he won't leave Dewey   Dewey's his mom  those woods go for miles  I can call a ranger  

In my body though, I use my eyes looking for him, I use my voice calling him like I do when I'm at  home at the fence with a carrot  Cheerfully "Meriwether!"

My mind is looking at the woods still hearing him in there somewhere and I'm thinking I can't go in there, it's so thick, what am I gonna drag Dewey in there we'd be tangled in an instant I can't leave Dewey here then I have two horses loose, Dewey doesn't tie well, he's a free spirit

I do what I always do in emergencies. I think all these things. But I do what my body says

I wait. 

I stare vigilantly at the woods, I stand next to kind Dewey, I call happily out for  "Meriwether! Come on Meriwether! Where'd you go? Come on boy!" But what else can I do really. I'll wait. 

After listening and listening and crashing tromping underbrush noise I finally see his white head. He is so happy. It's SO COOL up here, he's saying. He is a thinker, though. He comes to the edge of the brambly woods, but can't see a good spot to get down to the creek. There's sort of a bushy tangled ledge to get back down. I call to him happily. "That's a good boy. Good boy Meriwether. Take your time. Be smart."

He picks along the bank, and decides to try and go down in the worst spot, where there are three skinny fallen logs that look like an excellent spot to put a leg in and then break it half in three places. "I don't think that's the right spot there buddy" I'm saying happily. Meriwether stops to reassess. 

Dewey is just standing next to me, happy for the nap. He trusts that the little fella will come back, he never gives Dewey a moment's rest, why should this be any different. I'm watching Meri, I'm counting on that bond, and all the time and carrots we've spent nurturing it. 

I think  He's RIGHT THERE I could go over and grab his rope, but I don't think I could climb up through that giant mess of brush easily and I don't want him to go farther back into the woods. 

So I wait. 

I wait and hope that he wants to be with us more than he wants to not be with us. He likes adventure. But he loves us.

Meriwether slowly doubles back and finds the safest spot to angle down the creek bank, carefully through all those bushes and shitty loose footing, and he dips back into the water, and comes walking right back through the creek, all the way up to us, all the way up to my hand. He hands me back himself. 

that was awwwwwesome, he grins, shaking his head happily. Dewey looks at him like you're a fucking idiot

I get back on my horse. I decide maybe not to video on the way home. Maybe just be glad I'm going home with two horses just like I left with. 

I feel very good on the ride back. I realize that I've been stressing about where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to be doing next, what do I do about money or working, where do I go next, from this bog of sadness and dementia with my mom, and the honorable yet daily work to make her and our lives and days as gentle and satisfying and peaceful as they can possibly be

And I realize Meri and Dewey showed me very accurately, today, exactly what to do. When you're in fear, or panic 

Just wait

and think

what if this is the best ride ever

what if it's all gonna be okay