The snow is beginning to thicken.
When I got up, there was already some snow on the ground, but none in the air. Not even, really, out over the horizon and the strip of ocean I can see beyond the tree tops. I sat down to meditate, thinking, before I did so, that I should go for a walk first thing. Have breakfast and just go. I thought, “Maybe this will be a March miracle and just graze us for some reason.”
During meditation, I asked myself the question (“Who or what are you resisting in your life right now?”) and I realized it’s my aimlessness. Just before that, as I was “settling in” and observing physical sensations, including sounds, I also noticed how quiet the damn road was because, obviously, on a blizzard-warned day like this, people weren’t – miracle of miracles – idiotically driving all over the fucking place. And I noticed how much I enjoy that quiet – the corollary being how much I hate the traffic noise.
I was reflecting on my resistance to my aimlessness, and again again again that hellhole [xyz-village] came to mind. The shitty childhood, the dysfunction, the undirectedness, the neglect, the abuse – and I realized, “I’m resisting EVERYTHING.” It was almost overwhelming. How can you build a proper life if you’re aimlessly flailing and resisting everything? You can flail and resist simultaneously if you live in a mean little brick house in [xyz-village]. Maybe winter always kills me because it reinforced the confinement to that wretched, sad house? In better weather, there was the garden, and the fields, and trees to climb into with a good book. Even the barn – converted to my father’s paint factory, pronto gone bankrupt – was interesting. Actually, it was always interesting with its powders, dyes, chemicals, machines, gears, tools, gold and silver leaf in special drawers, but in winter, when the house was even more dank and frigid than normal, the barn was impossible.
So – better weather, some warmth, even fall with its change-over to woolens and the warmth of a kitchen set to holiday baking (I’m not sure my mother kept this up all the time, every year, but I have at least one fond memory of her going all out on a Christmas cookie baking spree: it was cozy) – these things brought joy and pleasure. The inevitable post-holiday crash, relieved only by B.’s manic – truly manic – carnival preparations, a huge communal effort in that part of the country, but forever associated in my mind with late winter rain and mud: the damp, the soggy and soaking wetness, the post-holiday crash was crushing. And even though we weren’t religious, Lent was an absolutely appropriate shitty season. “Relieved,” ha!, by Easter, a holiday I never understood, even though my father, an ex-Catholic eternally beholden to fecundity, made a point once or twice or three times of hiding Easter eggs. Once, the weather was good enough to hide them outdoors. Usually it wasn’t and he hid them indoors. My mother wouldn’t touch this frivolity, although she did supervise dyeing and decorating the eggs. That was food-related; the fact that the eggs needed coloring first was simply another ridiculous whim foisted on her by my father, like those seven daughters she never wanted (so she told me, Number Seven).
I am so sick of being aimless. It almost feels as though now, growing old, I’m returning to the darkness of my childhood – and that’s what so many, too many, of these entries have been all about. And I don’t want to return there. I asked, toward the end of the meditation, for my “guardian angel” to “return” to me, at which point I began crying profusely. When I opened my eyes, the sky was thick with snow, a strong wind blowing it nearly horizontally, great clouds of it wafting through the settling, lowering sky.
(I haven’t touched on yesterday, which was crazy-rushed because we got A. to his post-surgery checkup and packed and set off for Logan Airport afterward. He changed his flight from today to yesterday. The KEF-SXF leg was rerouted to Hamburg, though. Still haven’t heard from him. Winter travel…)