Sylvia's Journal

I woke up this morning with the word ‘otherwise’ on my mind. I was reminded of the poem by Jane Kenyon with the same name. I am acutely aware this morning of the other reality that we escaped by a hair last July, the it-might-have-been-otherwise reality as I look at the sleeping Axel. My heart fills with tenderness and I touch him softly, my fingers walking down his spine. He stirred for a moment but kept sleeping. He has no idea of the tender place I am in.

I am no longer thinking daily of our miraculous survival but today I am. I am even revisiting the last minutes or seconds before the crash when everything went black; and once again my body is trying to create another outcome – a successful go around – as it did nearly every night last July and August. I wonder why this is all coming back now.

Maybe it is because summer is arriving and today looks just like the 14th of July: a stark blue sky that makes me look upward and think of flying. Or maybe it is because Ann Lasman showed up with her family yesterday as she did so often last summer, to take care of the garden. Or maybe it was Anzie reminding us that there will be a 14th of July party again at her house and this time she expects us to be there.

The gardening yesterday was hard on the body. I am as stiff as a plank this morning and in some pain; that too reminds me of last fall when I sometimes wondered whether we would ever be normal again. Might I have recovered too fast and here is finally the backlash? I am hovering between acceptance of my phsyical state (as if it is a premature old age) and wanting to fix the various problems that most everyone assures we are fixable. What is clear is that something has shifted and something needs to be done. Maybe it is finally time to join a yoga class again, as Abi has told me for months now.

Of course the pains may simply be a commentary on my rather busy day yesterday. I brought out most of the plants from the house which required some very heavy lifting as the pots grow bigger and heavier each year. Without the plants the sitting arrangements in the living and dining room made no sense anymore and thus I got into moving furniture around which then exposed parts of the room that needed to be vaccuumed. Axel calls these self-generating tasks. I also filled the window boxes with the plants we bought last weekend.

And then there was the asparagus bed planting. Although Ann’s husband and boys did much of the moving of dirt from one place to another, Ann and I contributed our share of shoveling. We now have 12 asparagus crowns that Ann assures us will provide us with an abundance of fresh asparagus a year from now and forever. It is hard to imagine. The crowns look like withered octopus tentacles, brown and brittle.

In the middle of the afternoon Tessa called in tears from London. It is as if the place is infected with a depression virus. I am beginning to suspect that fnishing her program there, one more year, is not going to happen. I told her that Jim and Sita are moving out this summer and that she and Steve are welcome to take their place if they can stand the cat shit smell that is clinging to the inside of the studio. The cats express their disapproval of Sita’s and Jim’s nights away (negligence they call it I am sure) by shitting all over the place.

I never heard from Sita anymore and can only hope that she is no longer with the bedouins on the top of Mount Sinai but in the plane to Frankfurt or already there and waiting for her connection to Boston. We are looking forward to having her back, even those it will be only a couple of weeks before she flies out to London again.