After late dinner we took a walk. Us three. Husband in his T-shirt and pajama pants and new white athletic shoes, brotherB in his faded jeans and "Alturas" hoodie and heavy black leather shoes, me in my enormous green rayon fat-lady dress and bungie sandals. We walked the warm dark streets under the waxing gibbous moon. "Mooh," said Brian, pointing. Then "Boah" when we passed a fishing boat parked in a driveway. We walked fast, Husband and I fondling each others' fingers and palms, B falling behind and then moving ahead, wandering into our trajectory and then angling away. We cut across the high school athletic field where a pair of young people sat talking quietly in the grassy edgeshadows, drinking beer. When we reached the street beyond we turned west and made our way in the dark toward the cemetery on the top of a rise at the town's edge. It's fairly wild there. Maybe we would spot a coyote or a bear or an owl. After a while we reached the graveyard and opened the gate and walked a circuit, wary for vampires. On the pavement again I pressed on past the cemetery, drawn by a great hissss-ing, to where enormous robotic sprinklers crawled across a field disgorging water in a fine torrent that made a dim rectangular fog on the darkened landscape. A young couple walked past us there, dark forms leaning into one another in the moonlight, oblivious. I stood for a while with Husband and brotherB and wondered at the vast mechanical irrigators. These acres across from the graveyard were the dead empty area annexed for expansion, no? They were forcing water onto it all the dark warm night using unpeopled machinery, bringing the dead ground to life in order one day to bury their dead there. Perhaps. I shuddered. We turned then and headed home. A little chill was settling, finally. "Bahr," said B, pointing to a distant outbuilding. As we walked, moonlight on the broken glass along the roadshoulder sparkled like stars, but only if we kept moving. We never saw any wild animals.

***

Today I opened a random book at random. I stumbled randomly, then, on the perfect expression of the way I have been feeling for a long time.

The Other

I killed someone
inside of me.
I didn't love her.

She was a fiery flower
of the mountain cactus;
she was thirst and flames,
never stopping for refreshment.

She traveled a rocky way,
and pressed her shoulders against the sky;
she never descended
to search for the eyes of water.

The grass withered
where she rested,
burned by her breath
and face of incandescent coals.

With rapid resins,
her speech hardened
never to be set free
in a glorious cascade.

This mountain flower
did not know how to bend -
but by her side,
I bent.

I allowed her to die,
robbing her of my heart.
She perished like an eagle
left to starve.

The thunder in her wings
became silent;
she fell and withered
in my hands,
final embers ...

Her sisters still cry out
to me for her sake,
and a clay fire
claws me in passage.

As I travel,
I tell them:
Look through the ruins
and with the clay create
another eagle with wings of fire.

If you cannot, then,
oh! Forget her.
I killed her.
You must kill her too!

(Gabriela Mistral, trans. Maria Giachetti)

I could not have said it a fraction as well.

A little weirdness. A little anxiety. Don't know why. Free-floating.

The neighbor kids climbed into a U-Haul truck with their Mum & Step-pop yesterday and drove away forever. I had laden them with stuffed animals and glossy picture books and double-A batteries to keep their other toys going, a big plastic tub of scissors and paper and paints and brushes and glue in case the neighbor lady where they moved didn't have these things for them to borrow. A porcelain statuette of white doves on a branch for the eldest girl, grown remote from me in adolescence who was a nervous grinning whirl of energy when we met four years ago.

I cried a little, and then in the early evening in the front yard as I untangled the skeins of garden hoses I'd finally pulled out from winter storage I met the new neighbors - Samuel, Akyra, Freya, aged 6ish, 4ish, and four months, respectively - as they took a constitutional with their proud parents. Not the same, these guys, though cute as buttons all of them, but I feel a little better knowing they're there. Spent my whole life expecting to channel the grandmothers who did so well by me when I was small - wanting to pass on some of that - not understanding the vast misunderstandings that would intervene to prevent this expression to my own grandchildren. So the kids around me give relief in a way, accept what I have to give. I feel a little less pointless.

As for the hoses, they survived winter intact, and now the sprinklers are squirting the white clover and yarrow. Later I'll grease up the lawnmower and see whether it will start.

In the new New Yorker
I read the story by Bolaño
and swooned. I read the three poems
and felt envy and remembered.

Earlier I wrote a directive to myself
to remember to write an essay
about my deforming thumbs.

My brother's radio is loud with stupid music
and my language evaporates like steam
in wisps I grasp vainly for
like a dream I must remember
but which cannot be recalled.

***

The redhaired children, little neighbor boy and girl,
confusing their dates, stayed the night here
Saturday, and tried to spend the days on either side
as well. I spurned them before and after,
weary and dreary as I am now always.
So only the late afternoon and evening -
they drew pictures of my cats and colored them
orange and purple and green; they
watched the supper assembling
and exulted later in their full plates.

When they slept it was together on my brother's bed,
like diminutive angels curled into themselves
and somehow glowing, and the morning was all toast
and oatmeal and further drawings, more ambitious
projects using colored paper and glue - "Deaven's House"
with three upper-story window flaps that opened and shut
and behind each flap a sibling facing out,
and concealed in a corner at bottom
the mother
and the new stepfather
facing each other.

They went home when I shoo'd them away midmorning
with smiles and hugs, and later in the day I slept three hours
and hadn't known how tired I was. They'll move away
next Saturday. Already their trampoline
has been dismantled and removed.

***

Last night I dreamed I saw my father's name
in a scrap of newsletter, as offering a class.
I traveled to North Carolina to the address shown.
I entered the home he shared with parents
and siblings' families. George Mills. Taught literacy
evenings to the underprivileged. He was quiet.
He wore glasses. He was respectfully distant
but not un-warm. Hurt, it seemed by my years
of absence. I didn't know, I didn't know my refrain
and my excuse. There was a pier and a ferry.
I embraced my father, held my lips near his, knew
it would be misconstrued, I just felt so loving
and grateful to have found this missing piece.

I'm always surprised by the fact that the more exhausted I am the less able I am to sleep. Dropping off is easy enough, but lately waking occurs not at my usual 7 but at 6 or 5 or sometimes 4 a.m., as today. It seems always to correlate with liver stress from heavy lifting, but what a drag. Still, it's nice to have some hours entirely alone - well, almost entirely. Cats and dogs welcome an early breakfast, and even the dimmest kitchen lamp will elicit the lovebirds' piercing It's-morning! bleats and shrieks.

The exhaustion sets in in the midst of a thorough reorganizing of the Friends-of-the-Library bookshop behind the donation and installation of nine large new shelving units. I can go no further alone. Today I put out the call for volunteers. It's risky - everyone seems to determine the difference between fiction and nonfiction via cover art - but it must be done. Or I just might fall over dead.

***

The hugs-dispensing chatty bright gorgeous neighbor kids, my beloveds since the day I first looked over this property four years ago and they clambered over the back fence to introduce themselves and welcome me, are moving away next week. I'm a little griefstricken about it. Strolled about the grocery store yesterday weeping a little (see exhaustion, above) to think of losing them. KierstuhnDeaven&Jewell ages 12, 9, and 6 will leave this remote little town next Saturday for a beautiful new home in a big city hundreds of miles away. And my life will be so much the poorer.

We have a tentative plans for a farewell sleep-over here on Friday night.

I'd better rest up ...

After snowstorm, after gustful & steelgray afternoons & mornings, after one last serious go at winter
yellow light the tender hue of piss or narcissus leaks past the sunfamished ficus & cagebird cage
via the eastward windows. I sit in a westward room observing. Drowsing after au lait & OJ
trying to remember/not remember the nightdreams I have yet to record: tricked into entering
the great gray monolith I found myself imprisoned, at the mercy of a grim tyrant.
It was very 1984. The dream went on for years. We lived in tiny cells. We left them only when summoned.
When summoned we strode the corridors escorted to a despot's forbidding offices.
We dared not attempt escape - such adventurers were murdered or else tortured & returned.
Yet we did attempt it. "We" - two or three of us acquainted via our common misery.
We shifted away from our watchers & sidled out to a walled yard ("just act natural")
to where a gate groaned open on a patch of thoroughfare. Our hearts raced to glimpse it.
But the opening closed again & we were reassimilated.
Without incident
& without escape.

Odd combination of pleasant and unpleasant morning. Spring has arrived – late compared to many places, but so very welcome – so outdoors the 25F degrees of sunrise will climb to 72 today and yard work will be addressed.

The pleasant part indoors, where I am, is the Saturday-morningness of it all - the freedom I have to stay in bed and surf, and read, and drink the only coffee my body will tolerate anymore (small part coffee & large part hot milk), and relax. The unpleasant part is the reason I indulge myself in the pleasant part: back spasms, the worst I’ve known since 2006, which lightningstruck blam as I reached across the bed to set my coffee glass down on the nightstand in the early a.m.

I’ve been hauling book boxes nonstop for months, and dragging/lifting great contractor-sized trashbags of dead books, and armloads/teetering piles of books to shelve or catalog, both here at home and at the two little Bookworm venues I manage. One would think I’d grow stronger. This is never the case, though. And yesterday I added the insult of shifting about the household furniture, exploding the office I’d kept in the livingroom to replace it with livingroom furniture. I brought in a loveseat I got from Freecycle and dragged the old kitchen table outside to give away. Then I dragged the maple table I’d used as a desk into the kitchen. And carried around hundreds of books books books in teetering piles and in impossibly heavy boxes.

But such happiness at the end of the day to see my house a home again, welcoming and open, and not the dark deepdusty bookcave it had become over winter.

And so now – spasms. Soon I’ll drag out the kidneybrace my bestfriendJane gave me years ago and strap myself into it, and then go about my day. But my body is telling me I must slow down.

Oh, but there's so much to do.

Much happening. Last week a day spent in transit to and from a city 100 miles to the north so husband could have outpatient surgery on his eyelids, which drooped so low he could barely see. Then (and ongoingly) the followup, treating his eyes four times a day with antibiotic ointments and moisture goop.

Last week also I was befriended in the Bookworm shop by a local person who is an alien abductee. His stories are hair-raising and plausible-sounding. He suffers frequent and severe depressions due to his lifetime of experiences at the hands of malevolent extraterrestrials. We also discussed eastern philosophy and he insisted on lending me one of his Native American flutes. I must only play it in nature, and then listen for the reactions of the birds. I may do this. If I can find some nature.

Friday FedEx brought me a (very) used laptop computer. This changes everything, and soon I can clean out Sylvia the writing trailer and get back to work, and this time finish my projects.

But my joy in finally receiving the new-to-me tool was tempered by grief: when I went out last week to give my surely thawed-and-hungry goldfish their first feeding of spring, I found to my horror that a crack (or something) had developed in the great Rubbermaid tub, and when the thaw came the ice in the crack must have liquified and allowed the water to run out. I found a dry trough and my beloved fish dead and dry on the bottom of it. I ran away, sick with shock, and wept all morning. This was our fourth winter together and I had looked forward to greeting my babies again this spring. The 200-gallon trough had still been full only a few days before.

This is the second mass fishkill I've endured here (the first due to poisoning from raw blackrubber hoses). I told husband I will get an aquarium now, instead.

Abductee recommended I use the flute in ceremony for my deceased fishes. Maybe I will.

What a sweet Sunday morning. Outdoors the air is bright and still, with some frost at the edges. I'm back in bed nursing my carrot-orange juice and tepid cafe-au-lait (ole!) and cold gruel-with-blueberries-and-goat-milk.

This is the last week goat milk will be available here at the supermarket. Stocking it was a bold experiment that didn't take. It was in my own budget too rarely to convince their accountants it was worth keeping, I guess, so it's been discontinued, and I bought up what I could of the shelf stock and froze it.


Yesterday I put together the heavy white corner desk and chair that came in a kit from some online close-out sale, the perfect birthday present for brotherB. I've never seen him as happy as he is this morning, hard at work there with his stencils and pens. Meanwhile in the livingroom a mountain of coats and sweaters, the storage for which had to be eliminated to make room for B's new desk, looms dark and enormous. I will scale it anon.

From my spot on the bed I can see through the door and out the livingroom window our little herd of deer in the vacant lot hungrily cropping the green furze. Winter's far from over here, but this past warm week or two brought some tender tips of grass out.

It's been a week of frustration and annoyance at the Bookworm shop. I was out ill until Thursday and then hit it on all cylinders Friday. But the shop will falter and fail: The steady stream of donations that keeps the shelves filled must first get past the head librarian, who steadfastly refuses to release them. All she'll let us have are the boxes and bags of tatty romances that go straight to the landfill or storage shed. For a month her sorting table has been heaped with gorgeous like-new biographies and histories and travel books, cook books, CDs and videos, and the shop is starved as all the good stuff has been bought and fewer and fewer customers return for the fresh stock that consistently is not there. It's as though she wants to starve us. But really, she doesn't understand the marketplace, and how deadly such games can be.

I'll draft an email, yet another plea, explaining how the flow of volumes must be constant to keep the shop alive, and this time I'll cc some Friends-of-the-Library brass.

So much to do today. I can hardly keep myself from getting out of bed. I'll make a list of everything I must address - outline my PSA presentation for the FOL meeting in 9 days, send out the announcement for the first monthly brown-bag workshop in the library conference room (where I'll orient volunteers and teach them how to examine and describe books to post for sale online, and how to clean and repair them, and how to pack and ship them, and so on), keyboard and print labels for the shelves and new pricing signs, and then finally my personal goals for the week month and year (and even lifetime) - and then I'll lay out the tarot as I used to those years of Sunday mornings when all I could do was lie here and convalesce.

Then I'll get up and tackle that mountain.

So here I am, up and about. Yesterday I tried actually to stay put in bed, and I managed to do so most of the time. Today I have made it as far as the livingroom bigsoftchair.

But soon I must shower the film of illness off my skin and out of my hair and dress myself in layers of black turtlenecks and heavy denim and make my way to the Bookworm to try to catch things up there. The LibraryFriends have sold a book and I must track it down in their storage and ship it. The sweet developmentally challenged couple who volunteer for the Thursday four-hour shift in the Buck-a-bag Book Trailer start work at noon and usually need some reassuring.

And I'm sure there's sorting to do.

Yes, I'm still coughing a little, still filling great bandana-handkerchiefs with nasal effluvia, but I can't stay in bed forever.

So here I go. In a minute.

The world out there for several days has alternated moments of sun with longer moments of gray and snow - dry graupel snowpellets that sublime quickly into the cold-desert arid air. We had some pleasant windbluster and naked trees tossing and bending. Soon it will be too late, too warm, to gather balsam poplar buds for salve-making. It may be too late already. I'm sure the balsam is thick and heavy on the buds this year, because this past January gave us so many weeks of below-zero temps.

But I don't even know where to find balsam poplars on this side of the Warners, here on the plateau. I had a whole forest of them around my little house on Little Dream Farm, but that was long ago, in the SurpriseValley over the mountains 30 miles from here. When I bought this little house, I bought two saplings to plant in my back yard, from the ForestFarm catalog. But hungry towndeer persistently gobble them to the ground. So.

I have 20 minutes now to pull myself together. OK then. Nice visiting with you.

Several weeks of foolish common viral illness. Flu, then head cold, then almost well but not quite, and so then bronchitis and some days of fearful bedrest imagining a lurking pneumonia (an old enemy from a former life). Now the lingering cough and return of the headcold double-blast. How much phlegm can the body of a stupid poet generate? Gallons, certainly, by now.

I have had to get substitutes for my this-week's shifts at the FriendsOfTheLibrary used book shop I coordinate so I can concentrate on really getting well. Although of course I spent every day here catching up housework put by in my bookshop frenzies elsewhere. On the weekend I drove to a remote ranch and bought many near-new and vintage volumes for my own business, and another canvasbagful from a sale in town. I had a fever but went out anyway - such opportunities are rare hereabouts - and I have paid for my folly healthwise while benefitting in terms of business: every purchase was a gem, worth its weight in dollar signs.

I've got to get well, though, and so today I'm back in bed with cough drops and lomatium tinctures and my trusty Vicks Vapoinhaler. And every cat and dog in the house, and brotherB frantically crayoning his colorbooks across the room. Last night as I got in bed he said, "Sore throat? Drink water ..." motioning at the same time with his big flat fingers in his peculiar pidgeon-sign language. His concern is worth worlds. And I take seriously his health advice, always. His instincts are good.

I do have a book to mail today, but maybe husbandSkip can take it to the post office for me later. Meanwhile I try to lower the flame on my hyperactivity and keep still, keep still, drink water, pet pets, read Robert A. Johnson's Inner Work on using dreams and active imagination, keep Eno on the headphones, and daydream that soon I will resume writing, soon I will make a garden.

New Year's day

I move about chill digs in hungry morning,
feeding four-leggeds, feeding small
retarded brother, feeding me
too, porridge, & black faux coffee,
carrot and orange together juiced and diluted.

Out the big windows ice glitters on dazzlesnow
& morning temperature is 1 degree.
While water comes to kettleboil I try
an old routine on the yoga mat. Ugh.

My old body, long accustomed just to sit or lie,
incredulous. Just what, it wonders, am I doing?
I wonder it too - nothing stretches, nothing holds.
I shudder at shoulder, wobble at knee, I bend halfway.
I stand. I still stand pretty well.

Cagebirds mutter & peck. Old fed terrier snores in the corner.
Brought-in potted plants array glad leaves
receiving a.m. windowlight.

Out there, ice, ice.

At last the opportunity, but pretty tired now. Just a note. Typed on the iPhone, so lots of typos probably.

Fine cold snow has fallen all day and falls still, now, well after midnight. Ted the cat is out in it somewhere, huge he is orange and alpha, doing reconnaissance on behalf of his clan before he can rest inside for the night. ... There he is now at the front door. Back in a minute.

... Skip and brotherB and I went into town to see Skyfall tonight, afterward crunching home in the old Mercury slow down the sparkleice white sidestreets all by ourselves in the frozen night and sifting snow.

***

Watched The Shining recently, my new official SamMills Christmas movie instead of the Wonderful Life of ignorant and innocent times when I thought we'd all love and respect one another forever. Now in these years post-personal-apocalypse it's strictly murder movies for the holidays, and so I dreamed last night of JackTorrance, deranged and relentless, pursuing me through a great house from room to room, and then through streets and parks and apartment buildings. People tried to help, hiding me, distracting him, but he stayed on the scent and never stopped, until at last I came to a dead end (ha! the punnings of dreams ...) in an elegant clifftop apartment with its glass far wall overlooking the sea, and waves crashing on rocks far far below, and I turned just as Jack rushed and embraced me and we crashed through the glass and down down onto the stones and were broken there and dead. And then we went at it again, like a video game - could I run faster? should I turn this way instead of that this time? and so on. But I could see it would end the same no matter how many times I changed my strategy. No escape. Clearly.

So, you know, I turned 60 years old two days ago, no biggie, but I guess some part of me wants me to start getting ready for the big finish.

***

I've been working hard at the Friends of the Library used book outlet, changing it all about, cleaning, gleaning, removing dead volumes to make room for titles a little more vital. It's fun and arduous and slow - slow because the main storage unit is unheated, and days lately start out near zero degrees. Ugh. But I've also been acquiring decent titles at rock-bottom prices (the semi-annual buck-a-bag sale lasted the whole month of December). We'll keep them bills paid.

Cats Lobsang, Ted, and Piffle, and dogApple, are here on the bed ready for lights-out. But where's Greta? I've saved her spot. Leo prefers the silence and solitude of the living room's comfy chair.

Many days, many many dreams later, I creep back in. Not knowing why.

Christmas and birthday and solstice and massive shift in world consciousness taking place all at once.

Over the weekend I tested for UPenn editing. An in-house position in Philadelphia. As if! such a miracle could happen. Husband tells me it's very humid there.

It was 7 degrees F. here at 7:30 a.m. They predict minus-9 for Sunday night, maybe sooner.

Attended my first Friends of the Library Board meeting last night in my capacity as Bookworm Coordinator. Acquitted myself well, I think. More and more work to do there - maintenance and PR/marketing issues, shelving shifts and shifts in mission. A lot of educating.

Work to do here, as well. Books have been selling at almost an alarming rate, 3+ per day average (which means that some days I sell seven or more), all or most in two digits (and a recent one in three). Bills are being paid. I had a tooth pulled. BrotherB gets a pair of reading glasses.

And today, for the first time in many years, I will bake Cow Cookies for Christmas and mail them to my loved ones.

Finally, 'tis a season I can hang with.

Dream from this morning: I lived with my brother on a property up a mountainside, a sprawling acreage littered with debris and machinery. Two roads passed through the place: one came through my neighbors' property and ended at mine, an easement we used to come and go. Another road came across from right to left out of the woods, passing through and continuing up the mountain. Heavy machinery used this road at all times of day for some development going on up there.

It's funny - early in the dream these properties were simply adjoining rooms with double doors closed between them. They evolved into neighboring acreages separated by a fencewall and great solid double gate.

Anyway, once a day an old maroon convertible full of town thugs drove up the easement road/driveway, turned around in my yard and drove out again. I thought nothing of it the first time, but when I realized it was a daily thing I knew they were thieves scoping the place out for antiques and machines to steal. I chased them out at one point.

Among the discarded items lying on the ground all around were file cabinets on their sides and backs, drawers open or missing, contents blowing about. Earlier I had given a heavy tall filing cabinet to a friend. Now a truck arrived to deposit one exactly like it in the weeds with the others, stout greasy delivery guys fiddling with chains and pulleys to lower it off the flatbed. I ran to stop them - I thought it was the cabinet I'd just given up - but they continued unperturbed. I realized it was a gift from someone to replace the one I'd given away. Perhaps it had more value than I'd thought.

Atop a shelf or dresser pushed against the shared wall or fence between properties (or rooms) was something like a spice shelf in which several lizards were living, including a bearded dragon (again with the dragon). They weren't very large, and a little bird had befriended them and was nesting there, too. At one point I gave the shelf and its lizards to my neighbor on the property below, opening the gate and carrying it to to his porch, trying to keep the reptiles from running off. This was a large family and several members stood about watching as I handed it over to the indifferent old patriarch. Only then did I remember the bird and its nest, and peeking in I saw it standing panicked over an egg just hatched and two tiny pink moist nestlings bobbing about beneath her. I didn't know how to take the shelf back - did I manage to carry it home with me again? I worried about whether the mother bird would keep the babies alive after having been disturbed.

11.28.12 Wednesday

Day of gloom and wind - lovely day. Black clouds glower and lower, lower and lower. Wind hollers wild and fraught with extremity - respite from the nothingness and blah we have confined ourselves to. Glory! it is, a day such as this. I miss the woodstoves of yore, but the brave little propane flame does its best.

I made turkey soup yesterday from the boiled Thanksgiving carcass, most honored feast-day animal sacrifice in this mostly meatless home. It was the best soup I ever made and I ate too much, and then carob-blueberry mug cake after that, so that I awoke every hour on the hour all night for no reason at all. Flitting bits of tatterdreams escaping.

Misunderstandings and miscommunications among the LibraryFriends I'll soon be "coordinating" with have started already, and I haven't even taken up my post. The week's been rife with confusion, and today I must spend 2 to 5 p.m. in their midst struggling to keep my emotional keel even. I don't get how neurotypicals think, even the relatively higher-on-the-spectrum-than-most-NTs folks likely to be involved with such library stuff. Everyone clings to their bit of perceived power and works it to prop themselves up.

I say one thing, another is heard. I don't know how to bend myself to the sideways-speak that communicates little but makes others comfortable. And because what I do say is so precise and information-laden, it is not heard by them, and so sometimes sounds to their ears like something untrue.

So there it is. I finally understand the mechanism. I'll adapt as far as I can. I'll try to become stronger. Maybe I'll even learn to keep quiet.

***

In dreams - from the other night:

I lived at the far eastern edge of the L.A. sprawl in a small calm desert suburb. In central L.A. my mother was dying of cancer. I decided to pack up the car with my two little sons and move to be closer to my mother. By the time I got there, though, she had died. (She did die of colon cancer, 1999.) I was hunting for a place to live, looking at apartment after apartment. I made friends with a hippie couple who were homeless, also. They wore their hair in dreadlocks. The man was bearded, the woman blonde, both were mindlessly jolly and affectionate with one another. Their clothes were colorful gypsy patches and tatters. Somehow I encountered JoeW, a man who in real life had been my mother’s lover. (He was, in real life, a Harvard-educated prosperous corporate lawyer from New England aristocracy, one of several lovers my mother took from the Los Angeles law firm where she worked as paralegal - all of them married. Joe was a practicing Catholic who had not divorced his first wife, who lived in Chicago with their son. He was thin and tall- 6-foot-4 - and wore horn-rimmed glasses and nice suits. He was even-tempered, witty, and colorblind. Recently I've learned he's been placed in a Massachusetts care facility because he has Alzheimers.) Perhaps, in the dream, he'd taken care of things after my mother’s death.

Joe allowed me to stay in his apartment, with my two little dream sons, while I searched for a home. Going up the steps of the spiral staircase to Joe’s apartment my sonJesse climbed and swung on the wrought-iron railing. I whispered urgent reprimand in his ear and he stopped fooling around and went to play quietly or perhaps watch TV. I found old newspapers strewn on a table. They had articles cut out of them and were riddled with rectangular gaps. The mastheads were intact; one was dated 1947 and the other 1938. I tore a page from one, and then I realized 1938 was Joe’s birth year—these papers were keepsakes—and I was embarrassed. I had to stop Jesse from wrecking them, as well. I raised my voice at him and then noticed Joe meditating in a chair just inside the doorway of his room (there seemed to be no actual doors). I felt awful about having disturbed him, but he gave no sign that it was a problem.

Out on the street the next day with the folded up classified ads. JoeW is with us (my family and the hippie couple), also looking for a new home. The three factions compete affectionately for a single vacancy in a fourplex, an upstairs apartment. Its rooms have no doors, and the bathroom is surrounded by a low wall you can look over into the home of the downstairs neighbors—specifically, an elderly gentleman with a white mustache lying in a reclining chair. I"m a little uncomfortable with this, but the place overall is very nice and we all want it. Downstairs I find that at least one of the four apartments belongs to the stout motherly landlady who keeps busy in her kitchen concocting meals for the residents, as in a sort of assisted living. At the other end of the kitchen I see people sitting at little tables as though it were a cafeteria or diner.

We all took a break from househunting and rested at a coffeehouse, like a Starbucks, located near a little recessed amphitheater surrounded by a low wall (much like the one near the creek at Chico State where I went to school in the '80s). I sat at an outdoor table with my snack but noticed JoeW sitting on the top step of the amphitheater: I could just see the top of his head on the other side of the wall. I got up and approached him, chattering happily, but when I stepped into the aisle and turned toward him I saw that he was deeply engaged in chanting namyohorengekyo with two robed Asian monks, young men with shaved heads, seated near him on lower steps. He held wooden prayer beads in his hand. Yet again I was mortified to have disturbed him. He got up then and walked with me, still even-tempered and unperturbed by my thoughtlessness, infinitely patient. I said to him, “I had no idea you were involved with Nishirin Shoshu.” We sat on a bench in the growing darkness. I straddled his lap and sat gazing into his eyes, which avoided mine all through the dream. Suddenly I realized something. “You’re grieving, aren’t you?” I said. “I’m so sorry. You’re still grieving for my mother." I said, “I have Asperger’s syndrome. We process grief quickly. Death doesn’t mean much to us.” I got up and stepped back from him respectfully. He stood and I embraced him with great love. But oddly somehow at that moment I was very small, like a child. ...

I decide then that JoeW should join us - we should move in together and share a big house somewhere. Then he would have family around him and it would be good for him, and maybe feelings would grow between us. (I thought he might feel love for me but was too shy or polite to express them.) He didn’t reject the proposal. ...

The following day, or perhaps later that same afternoon, we negotiated the downtown L.A. streets thronged with people and food carts and distractions. I was trying to keep up with the wild hippie couple and keep hold of my sons' hands, but then I lost track of Joe. I searched the crowd in panic. I spotted him standing perhaps 20 feet away watching me serenely as the crowds gradually engulfed him. I think I still could see his face when the dream ended.

Day of gloom & wind - lovely day. Clouds glower and lower, lower and lower. Wind hollers fraught with wild extremity - respite from the ongoing blah we have been confined to. Glory it is, a day such as this! I miss my woodstoves of yore, but the brave little gas flame is doing its best.

I made turkey soup yesterday from the boiled Thanksgiving carcass, most honored feast-day animal sacrifice in this mostly meatless home. It was the best soup I ever made and I ate too much of it, and then carob-blueberry mug cake after that, so that I awoke every hour on the hour half the night for no reason at all.

Flitting bits of tatterdreams escaping.

Misunderstandings and miscommunications among the LibraryFriends I'll soon be "coordinating" with have started already, and I haven't even taken up my post. The week's been rife with confusion, and today I spend 2 to 5 p.m. in their midst struggling to keep my emotional keel even. I don't get how neurotypicals think, even the relatively higher-on-the-spectrum-than-most-NTs folks more likely to be involved with library stuff. Everyone clings to their bit of perceived power and works it hard to prop themselves up.

I say one thing, another is heard. I don't know how to bend myself to their sideways-speak that communicates so little but makes them feel comfortable and safe. And because what I do say is so precise and information-laden, they can't hear it at all, and so sometimes it sounds to their ears like something untrue.

So there it is. I understand the mechanism. I'll adapt as far as I can. I'll try to become stronger. I'll learn to keep quiet.

Nearly midday, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Up since six, as I do nowadays, because in this period I am sleeping immediately and well. Night before last I fell asleep to a Youtube lecture by Gary Snyder at a Berkeley féte in his honor. Last night I slept to one by Robert Hass on Czeslaw Milosz. He preceded it with some tangential remarks about Tomas Tranströmer, who had won the Nobel Prize that day (“His poetry is drenched in Swedish weathers,” Hass said).

Ah! Husband is awake. The water runs in the upstairs sink, and now the TV comes on: horseraces are in progress. An announcer shouts with adrenalined urgency as the horses approach the wire. Next, the post-race commentary and analysis, a lower pitch and more considered velocity. Then a repeat of the race or maybe another race from a different track, narrated in excited chantrhythm as the animals pound the turf and vie for position around the turns.

He’ll want coffee. I’ll put the water on. But then I must turn here to last night’s dream. These dreams anymore seem like increasingly severe writing assignments, the challenges greater and greater - now see whether you can put this one into words, or make any sense of it ...

***

Okay, so here it is. Sort of cleaned up.

It was like several dreams stitched together badly, with figures common to each segment. I lived with a character played by turns by John Malkovich, by my most recent ex, and by a local poet of comically humorless and perfectionist personality who was briefly an acquaintance of mine when I had my bookstore. Mostly by Malkovich, though, channeling his sadistic dilettante persona from Portrait of a Lady.

After a single sexual encounter with him I become pregnant with a son. He became very excited about it and insisted I stay with him in his mansion. There was a dicey moment when it occurred to him that the child might not be his - why should he take my word for it? I was desperate to convince him I’d had no one else in many years. Because it was true.

The Malkovich man had an older friend, played by someone like ArminMueller-Stahl combined maybe with OssieDavis, kind, mature, concerned. This friend was always nearby to correct or repair or soothe anyone or anything that might have been harmed by the impatient Malkovich character’s outbursts of violent temper.

I was intimidated, almost cowering, terrified lest I trigger Malkovich's rage or even his disapproval. (In this respect it actually was quite like living with my ex ...)

There was at this point quite a bit of bleed-through from a simultaneous dream about Cleopatra. She was pregnant by Caesar and was confined to a slab-bed where she lay gestating a child while keepers watched. She was kept drugged lest she escape. It occurred to me that the historical Cleopatra had given Caesar a son against her will.

In the dream I was trying to resume my freelance writing career - was working on several articles and finishing them in good time. I was happy that my mind, no longer buffered and baffled and wrecked by kidney ailments, worked well and thought clearly. A woman phoned to give me further instructions about an article I couldn’t remember having been assigned. There were adjustments to make in my approach to the “dissection article," she called it, and how was it coming along? I thought I dimly remembered starting such a piece, but I’d forgotten all about it. I lied my cheerful response and then hung up. Panicked, I began a search through the premises for unfinished pages that might provide some clue. The work was due the next day.

An older woman servant or friend who stayed near and assisted me made a good-natured joke. The Malkovich guy turned on her and demanded to know what she meant by it. I cowered quietly, sensing the unfairness and grateful I wasn’t the victim this time. I almost spoke to defend her, but his angry glance silenced me. Then, to shift the energy, I abruptly handed him a pen. He became angry with me for interrupting him. I tried to defend myself, but he wouldn’t hear it.

He kept two monitor lizards as pets, one of each species - Komodo dragon and Nile. They were permitted to run freely in the house, and I was always trying to keep my bare feet away from them. At one point we rode around town in Malkovich’s fancy car, all of us, plus a housecat and the two dragons. M parked the car and left me alone in it with the animals. I tried to keep the reptiles from eating the cat. I tried to keep my bare feet out of their sight. The Nile monitor was very black and leathery and primitive looking, like a small fierce hungry T-rex wearing alligator skin (nothing like a real-life Nile monitor).

We returned to the house, where some children had left the back doors open, and I feared the lizards might run away. What I actually feared was Malkovich’s anger - at me. The older Armin-Ossie man quietly collected the reptiles, who hadn’t escaped after all, and closed them up in a small room. He carried the creatures lovingly in his arms, like babies.

Source:www.travelblog.org/Photos/245895.

It had been raining for days, the area flooded, chest-high in freezing gray water. The Armin character went out to explore a protected place near the standing foundation of a washed-away building, a sort of porch. He leaned to look underneath, and I called out to him to see whether my missing pages were there.

Two fat ruddy beerboisterous shirtless older men swam and hollered happily in the floodwater. One had forced his two small children or perhaps grandchildren to swim with them there. They were miserable and cold and frightened. The boy was hardly more than an infant, just able to walk. He was naked in the icy water, splashing and gasping in panic. I pleaded with the oblivious granddad to let me bring this one inside, and he finally agreed. (I stopped myself from feeling concern about the little girl, who was maybe 5 or 6.) I leaned from the back step and gathered up the naked baby and held him hard against me. He sobbed and shivered. His flesh was slick and cold in my arms. I found a puffy white blanket to wrap around him, and soon he was quiet, and I could feel him relax against me in relief.

Oh, the long slow descent is exaggerated, I think. It only seems long and slow. Don’t depressions always seem that way? Even the little ones. Anyway, yesterday I noticed that transiting Saturn, having finished up its second return to my own (these conjunctions with our natal Saturns happen only every 28-30 years or so, and are life-changers) - I noticed it had advanced to my Ascendant, is conjuncting - conjoining - currently, my Ascendant, and has been for a while, and will continue there for a while, and I realized it had brought on my heavy restless and despairing mood. Not so long, maybe. I felt better then because I knew it would end. It would be a period of soul-searching and hard work. And because I expect to see yet a third return, I don’t consider this period to be an end-of-life summing-up Saturn return, but another phase instead, a leveling-up of spirit.

I had some dreams. In one, Wednesday night, my elder son walked around with a big fat belly hanging over his belt. I called to him to please care about his body, that the imbalance would ruin his back, but he only rolled his eyes, as he is wont to do in my dreams.

And this morning I dreamed I was with Noam Chomsky and Malvina Reyholds and we were organizing a movement of some kind. People came to our venue, a social hall in one wing of a sprawling motel, to get literature, hear lectures, take part in discussions. One night the regional leader came to speak and the place was thronged with screaming fans as though he were a rock star. He was only a speaker, a middle-aged intellectual in a suit, but the crowd was wild. Part of the event included a sort of halftime entertainment. A flock of Monarch butterflies was released and they fluttered skyward in exquisite murmurations, beautiful rhythms of coalescence and dispersal, until, exhausted, they landed all together in a gorgeous pulsing swarm on a rafter and were gathered up again. Then the motel management descended and evicted us because they were hostile to our political views. They were angry. Soon low-flying Korean bomber planes filled the skies dropping bombs everywhere. I fled with two small children, helping them escape. Then I circled back to gather some belongings from my home. A large red fox bounded out of some woods and ran alongside me, fleeing also. At home I stuffed the front of my pants with books hoping to look pregnant and so smuggle them out. I was going to have to walk out with a child, a little dark-haired girl, and I was going to have to abandon my pets—my five cats and my little black dog. Mr. Chomsky told me to take books of information about our movement with me so its message wouldn’t die. I chose three from the shelf - volumes 1 and 2 of its basic precepts and a third about Native American rights. These were large heavy books I would have to carry everywhere in my arms. I understood I was going to be very tired carrying on this work. I decided to leave a big bag of dry cat food open in the garage for my housecats, and to crack a window open so they could get used to going in and out and become wild again without me. I was griefstricken to leave them. Mr. Chomsky said he would drive me out in his car. I begged him to let me take at least my little dog. He agreed reluctantly, fuming as he drove.

***

In this waking world we had a satisfying Thanksgiving day. Husband worked upstairs until 4 o’clock. I was alone in the kitchen all day and felt a little lonely there. I baked three pies and whipped both potatoes and yams, steamed asparagus and sauteed Brussels sprouts in caramelized butter. I’d cooked up the cranberries the night before. Roasted a small birdbeast and made the gravy. Thanksgiving is just a vehicle for gravy, in my opinion. I made one emergency trip to the store for a baster and some buttermilk and a new oven thermometer. We had some organic wine with the meal, a little on the young side but very nice. Then we took a walk in the twilight and blue chill. TheAlturas streets were empty and quiet. Hawks came home from the fields, soared low into the great trees around the football field, settling for the night. The three of us arrived back happy to be too warm in the oven-heated house, and then we had our pie together in front of the TV and watched The Last of the Mohicans.

Husband went upstairs after that to watch his TV alone, and brotherB was happy to go to bed and he fell asleep right away, full of Thanksgiving food, and I watched his beautiful face for a while as he breathed. It seemed every bit as angelic as it had the day he was born. He glows with a holy aura sometimes, especially now that he’s becoming healthier. I had an anxious thought about how he might die from his defective heart one day, just like that, and leave me. Caught my breath to keep from sobbing. The Saturn conjunction, remember. It’s a sad planet.

So I made up my bed with newlaundered ivory cotton linens and down comforter and crawled in after a hot scrub in the shower, sat up in bed so clean, in my T-shirt and flannel pants, trying to stay awake until my hair was dry.

Better today, as long as I don't think about writing projects.

Outdoors the weather is still grim. Still gray. And drizzly to boot.

But I'm paid today, and soon brotherB and I will shop for feastfood. In the afternoon pumpkin and pecan pies will be baked, cranberry sauce concocted, to prepare for tomorrow. Just us three at tomorrow's table, and the creatures, but I am so thankful for us. So very very grateful.

For heat in the stove, propane in the tank, gas in the car. House payment covered.

For online friends. For flesh-and-blood humans - they exist - who listen to my words and attribute no sinister subtext, but understand them for what they mean. Which is all I ever mean.

The world at large gets better and better, it seems obvious to me, even if my own puny world collapsed long ago. I love this world very much, and I love the vast vibing void we drift in.

blessings

I have resisted writing sort of stubbornly these past days and weeks. I think it may be impossible for me, for my mind, to focus, when in a relationship, on anything but the relatee. Even in Beloved Husband's considerate absence he is ever-present to me, as my attention fixes on encounters and confrontations past and to come.

I find myself, for three-and-a-half years now, in a slow, steady descent into a soft, shallow, nonclinical depression - a resignation. From time to time I fight it, I rise up and toss off a flurry of verbiage, but it all goes nowhere. As do I.

It's no one's fault. It's the byproduct, I suppose, of my ADD - which requires an unnatural and absolute isolation for any project to approach completion - and our poverty, which renders impossible most obvious solutions - separate residences, a retreat, help with housework and meals.

If before my 58th year I'd known about my neurology - my high placement on the autism spectrum and concomitant attention deficits - I'd have avoided most of my life's pain and suffering, avoided inflicting most of the pain and suffering others endure because of me. No marriages, no children, no partners. I might have known better than to risk them. For all the joy and wonder I have known because of these, I have given joy to no one - not intentionally, but because I only perplex. Strange person in an alien world, a creature everyone misunderstands. Especially myself.

I whine like a teenage girl today. Must be the weather. Grim, gray, with ferocious winds.

Dim memories of dreams from overnight. I do remember that the worlds were vast and acutely detailed, as they have been for several such vague nights in a row. I lived on a mountainside, in the midst of evergreens, under snow. Children ran about. Eight-year-old neighborDeaven was there. He stood at the side of a busy road and peed in the shoulder snow.

In real life, book sales have been booming. As an adjunct to this business, I volunteer at the local FriendsOfTheLibrary thrift outlet. Most of my stock comes from there. It's heavy work. My health seems to be holding up, though, although handling so many books aggravates the arthritis in my hands. For this, I find quercitin-and-bromelain supplements sovereign.