Tuesday, July 31, 2007

HP, Butterflies, and Mourning

The Big X was a drug dealer before I met him--nothing hardcore, just marijuana, but the fact is he used to be a drug dealer. He was also Italian and would occasionally start talking about his friend from high school whose family was in the mob, and how he could have gotten involved with them if he had wanted to.

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Last night and this morning, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will forever be the book I read after my mom died. It's not such a bad book to have holding that place; it touches on a lot of things I have been sort of subconsciously thinking about. No, silly, not witches and wizards, but life and death and good and evil, and some other really deep things. You know, for a children's series, it really is quite intense.

My mom died on Friday, the 20th of July. On that Saturday night, my dad and I were sitting in the dining room of my parents’ home. There was a bang, and then he said, “Oops, there’s mosquito blood on your copy of Harry Potter now.”

“So you’ll be buying me a new one,” I said, only half joking. But last night I was contemplating that mosquito blood. The truth is that it is human blood that the mosquito had taken. It was maybe thirty-six hours after my mother had died. That means that there is a chance—slim, I grant you—that the blood on my book is the blood of my mom. Macabre, I admit, but I still find comfort in this thought. I won’t get a new book.

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This is a taste of the randomness that my thoughts have been following lately. I think about the most bizarre things, flashes from my past, twisted ways of looking at the present.

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This week has been a humid one, with the weather forecasters predicting scattered thunderstorms most of the week. I love to sit on my porch and watch the flashes of lightning, feel the splashes of rain, hear the claps of thunder. So I waited all day yesterday for the storms to come. I watched the radar. It was here, all around me, but it never came.

Finally, around 2 AM, I went to bed. I was watching a few minutes of television before I would doze off, when out of my window I saw a flash of lightning. Finally, the storm was here. So I took my Harry Potter, poured myself a half a glass of wine, and brought Ginny out onto the porch.

We sat there watching the storm for a while and I let the cats out. Since I am on the second floor, they can wander around the porch and the roof of the first floor without escaping. I love the rain, but I especially love a good summer thunderstorm. Just before one occurs, the air is so humid it’s practically like going swimming to walk outside. The sky is so ominously gunmetal grey, and the summer cacophony of birds, tree frogs, and so on seems hushed, as if everyone and everything is holding its breath.

And then the skies open and the thunder shouts, the lightning slashes and illuminates all for seconds at a time. The water pours down and cleanses everything. The humidity gives up the fight and lets the rain break its back.

I sat on my porch and thought of all these things, thought of how I have always loved these summer storms, thought of how when I was a child my mother would even let me go outside barefoot and splash in the puddles, soak my hair, run a toy sailboat in the gutter water at the street edge. I suppose some people would say that was careless of her, but she understood me, understood my wonder and need to be out there among such wondrous things as they occurred.

In the middle of the storm, the cats came off the roof of the downstairs porch and sat on the porch railing watching the ceiling. I looked up and saw what was either a very large winged bug or a very small bird. It was taking refuge from the storm on my porch, pressing itself against the ceiling to keep away from the hunting cats, and in the process knocking down old paint chips. I went inside and got a flashlight, and it took me awhile to decide what it was. I was going between a hummingbird and a very large moth when it finally rested for a moment. It was, in fact, a butterfly.

The wonder of that moment made me cry: The renewal of the summer storm, the elegant butterfly seeking shelter from that storm, all of it just welled up inside me and I broke down.

And that is what it’s been like. Most of the time, I am surprisingly okay. Not happy, but okay. Getting by. And then some event that would otherwise seem small, even insignificant, becomes momentous to me, and I break down for a while. And then I am okay again.

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There is the story of the crazy boyfriend and the story of the wedding with the Big X which I must share as well, but that is for another post.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Irony

My Aunt Mary's mother-in-law sent a get well soon card to my mom since she had been in the hospital last week. Trouble is, it came in the mail yesterday afternoon. My mom died yesterday morning.