Yesterday and the day before

This poor neglected blog. It's been an awfully long time.

I do an exercise with my drawing class that goes like this: Think of something that's happened in the last 48 hours. It could be anything: a walk you took, a dream, something you ate, a movie you watched. Write for five minutes, paying attention to the memories that arise. Then spend five minutes drawing yourself in that story. Think of a time in the past when you were doing something similar; something that looked or felt the same. Write about that memory and then draw about it. I love this exercise. It puts things in order, it untangles the past and the present, the reactions that don't make sense in the moment.

This morning we woke up to a kitchen that looked like a murder scene. Our fridge had quit in the night and a couple of bags of the freezer full of huckleberries Rob spent August collecting had melted everywhere. We had seafood rapidly thawing and pastry turned to mush. Rob's eldest daughter is getting married tomorrow, we have relatives staying with us and a general chaos has pervaded that last several days, so a part of me felt ridiculous about crying and another part of me understood that this is a fairly normal response to being overwhelmed. When I started drawing about it in my class tonight the memory that came up was of being in Halifax in 2003. My (now ex) husband had been in Bosnia for months and because of a clerical error his paycheques weren't being deposited. Our first baby was not yet a year old and I had been living for a long time off very little money, so my mother had offered her condo to me as a place to get my bearings until we could sort through the financial mess we were in. Mike was scheduled to come back to Canada about three weeks later, I had sold a small painting for a pittance and had spent the entire princely sum of probably two or three hundred dollars on groceries. I had cooked and frozen so much beautiful food so that we could relax and get to know one another again, and then Hurricane Juan came along. Our power was out for eleven days. We had no phone, nobody had a generator, I was using a wind up radio to hear the news. Trees were down all over the city and it was days before we could have driven anywhere if we had even had a car, which we did not. I remember wrapping the freezer in blankets and piling clothes and towels on top of it in a doomed effort to preserve all that food. It was hopeless though, we lost it all, and it felt like the end of the world. I never think about it, but when it came up today I remembered completely the sense of total loss, the waste, the hopelessness, the hours and hours of useless effort I put into trying to make something good.

I don't know when I last felt that way. I don't think that hopelessness has reared its head since I left that marriage. Even in times of intense grief I haven't felt that futility. And this morning when I couldn't stop crying it wasn't the feeling itself but the echo of the feeling, the realization that the old life is still in there somewhere, the loss and the terror of those years, but it's all been healed over, a raised scar I don't notice til I bump into something. I made muffins with the huckleberries and they were delicious. I made chowder with the thawed fish and we had it for supper and it was gorgeous. We are safe and we are happy. We mend our nests and wait out our storms as they come.