calling up from the valley of strangeness

It rests in the valley of strangeness. I am tossing brightly colored bell peppers stuffed in a thin plastic bag into the cart and he asks, "Is that for your house or mine?" I pause caught off guard.
It's not only our new reality bursting through that throws me, it's also the oddity of us shopping together at all. If I can help it I don't shop. When it became clear that BC's job was happening I had 3 worries, #2 "shit! who's going to do the shopping?!".

I would dare say the grocery store is the one place I show the most lasting of the damage. The last place I think to take back control of my life. I can't cover the emotions and/or impulses that arise as the last of the ceiling of my old life breaks off exposing blue sky above me.
Like the day I suddenly realized I could buy jello if I wanted to and there was nothing he do about it anymore. It was later at home placing 15 boxes of lime jello in my cupboard that I thought to ask the most obvious of questions, do I even like jello?

I understand it is not normal for a grown woman to walk into a store and have to remind herself she can buy whatever she wants as long as she can afford it. At first the thought makes me smile, then I see the stupidity in it and the guilt and embarrassment creep in.

If I can recover form that we have food, if not I turn around and leave the store empty handed. So for years BC has been our shopper. He doesn't ask why and he doesn't question my sporadic contributions to the household or the way I cling to buying food from alternative sources like the co-op and the farmer's markets.    

But BC asked if I would come along shopping and knowing he was leaving again I agreed. In fact I agreed twice. But I should never be allowed in Costco. I am completely useless among the giant isles. There is just too much there to make any sense of any one thing. I follow him and stand looking lost as he asks me questions: do you need bread? cheese? chicken?

I don't know, do I?

It's the same muteness produced by the damn of words lodging in my mind when I am asked a question I can't answer.

BC asks me to get laundry detergent. I stand in front of the row of boxes looking for something I recognize. Then I watch the other customers picking theirs and I look in their carts and wonder about their life based on packages of pre cooked chicken and frozen ready make potatoes. BC circles back for me, picks out the detergent he asked me to get, and we more on.

I watch him watching me. I know he wants to say something to me about all this but he doesn't know what. Honestly neither do I.

When we are done he lets me surf on the back of the charts while he runs dragging it full sprint through the parking lots. People younger than us stop to give us dirty looks.

And after I had spent most of the morning in bed with a horrible headache, and I shopped with him twice, he took me up the canyon. We hiked in the shadows. Across ice. Over mud. Up through the scrub oaks until we broke out onto the ridge. There we could see straight into the twisted valley below us. He stood. I sat. And separately together, listened to the calls of the search and rescue teams combing the mountain for the lost man they were sent to search for.

me? I believe I know exactly where they should be looking...

excuse me officer, could you hand me my shirt?

excuse me, officer, could you hand me my shirt? 

(hiking without happy meals April 13, 2011)

If your neighbor who has six kids, no job, is on food assistance, yet has an unending supply of disposable money lying around she might not be in the PTA.  Or she might, but she has a side job with the government. 

Well not exactly with them but if you think about the War on Drugs is a huge employer in the USA. It might even give old mighty Walmart, aka the Devil’s playground, a run for its money. 

Also when your neighbor's place ‘gets’ a home invasion robbery & you are told the well-armed thugs had the wrong house, spending a few months worrying about why they had not double-checked the address before kicking in the door might be pointless angst. 

The other thing to note about said drug dealing neighbor she might actually become one of your best friends.  

Wow.  That’s really strange because I’m sure I think most synthetic street drugs are bad.  It's all pretty black & white & green to me. Bad guys are bad guys.  

Unless they cook really great Mexican food, braid your kid’s hair, save your dog from being hit by a speeding car, and sit in your back yard with you all summer sipping lemon aid and watching the kids play in the grass.

Slowly over the warm months, she began to admit to me what her boyfriend was doing over there on the other side of the fence.  Hum. Now what? 

You like her, no not just like her you care about her.  You love her children.  For hell sakes, you are practically raising the youngest two as if they were your own. The middle two listen to you when they won't listen to anyone else.  It's a giant mess.  Instead of a nice little Movie of the Week, it's a pink Valentine's day cards with a real bleeding heart glued to it by a paste-waster. 

She wanted out.  She wanted a good & normal life for all of them BUT... 

When we returned home from a camping trip & the house sitters told us about the raid on the house next door, we can’t say that it a surprise or that it was sad; she was breaking the law, endangering her children, endangering other people's children, & all the other bad stuff. 

If your neighbor is a drug dealer don’t lend her your best muffin pans unless you can part with them for 20-life Federal Time.  

And certainly, try to avoid garden topless on the morning the pack of DEA agents silently creep through the backfield to remove the phone tap.  

Possibly consider a new name for your dog Kilo.  Especially if he is going to corner the officers with your 'history of taking off your shirt' on display and you're going to have to call your dog... "Come here Kilo. Good boy."  

And try not to miss her too much, even if the way she says certain words makes you laugh so hard you might pee your pants just thinking about it.  

she was my sister

He watches me go to my knees and pull the box from its hiding place under the east slope of the house's low eves.  I drag it out.  He watches me as I circle the box a few times then open it.  I pull out two frames both of which the glass has been shattered. I set them on the lid and circle the box a few more times.  It is over flowing with photographs and papers- none of which are mine.

He breaks, "Are you going to be able to do this?"

"Yes, of course."

 I'm not feeling anything. There is a dull remembrance of a time when feelings were all I knew. The world of reason and logic silent and the chaos of lose, of regret, and of something else I don't have words for, took over.


People who know me now may not have any idea. And as much as I don't want to out myself not having any idea is a big part of what killed my sister. So the truth is after my sister died I suffered a complete mental collapse. I sank so far into depression I didn't even want out. 

The trigger for destabilization was PTSD.  Although I might have been the "good" well, the "better" sister of the 2 of us, I was not as smart as we thought I was. 

I thought all my medical knowledge, all my time sorting through the dead of others, all my time in the OR, my success in the ER, all my book smarts, that they would protect me from any of the gruesome reality of my own sister's death. I foolishly thought I was untouchable, mentally and emotionally. I knelt in her blood, cleaned her apartment, identified the 4 day old rotting corpse and thought I would be okay. 


I wasn't.       

"Will you be able to be honest with her?" He asks.
"I can answer any question she asks but...." and the stammering takes over. This is disassociation a coping skill that turns disease. 

However I managed to climb out of the darkness of those couple of years, I paid a price. And I don't mean having to walk away from a career in medicine. I am at peace with that decision.  What was hard was I had to give up all my words about it. I can see them lined up down a long alley and as I try to read them doors start closing- leaving me wordless. An ironic event only witnessed by those asking about my sister, life with my ex husband, or about love & commitment. 

My niece, her daughter, is coming over to talk to me. She has questions for me about her mother. I am the person most willing to be honest- me and this box. 

For better or worse I am the keeper of her mother's soul. And too many things have been left unsaid.

Driving in the dark (excerpt from Taming Venus)

October

How do you explain the slow descend into madness?  What words would you choose to describe the world as seen though my eyes?  Would it matter?  I mean, how anyone who has not been there themselves could possible be made to understand just how I came to be here not knowing which direction I was running.  Whatever reason stops you, you will find a world crashing to a halt carries casualties in its wake. And when you dare to open your eyes you will find that this is the bottom. Maybe it isn’t so bad.  Maybe around the next corner you will find your way.  Standing alone beneath a ceiling of grey branches stabbing out the sky one by one, walled in by thick knee-high under brush threatening to over take the trail.  The road, worn with deep troughs, long ago weathered and dried.  It is as if summer has forgotten this place, sentenced to an endless winter without snow.  At every corner there is another turn, no spots from which you can view your progress.  In shadow there is an ominous feeling of a mountain high above you but no sight of it.  Do you continue up hoping to find your mountain or do you ascend hoping to find you home?    

I often believe it all still there.  The apartment intact, her body underneath me as I straddled her width, reaching into the bathroom greedily grabbing the most out of reach, most hated, most prized of all, the thing I believe she saw last- the photo of her children.  I see the currents of evil and hopelessness circling the rooms as I waded through them.  I see time over lapping.  I see my sister walking to her death.  I see her.  Was she scared? Did she know? 

Related Blog Posts:

Taming Venus, mlb  (A real life, firsthand, unedited, often graphic, diary-essay of the time surrounding my sister's death and the aftermath.)

Seven Years, give or take, mlb
     

Hello Baby!

Baby Jessie <3

5 lbs 14oz 19"

Mom and baby and proud Papa Conner are all doing well.

Yep, that is a grandbaby!

A beautiful message out to the world from Lexi last night:

"Can only go through Conner's Facebook tonight.
Haven't slept since 5:00 am last morning. 
Gave birth to a beautiful healthy amazing girl♡♡
Sleep deprived ha. 
I'm just staying up with her, and holding her. 
Every painful moment and scar, was worth it." ~Lexi~

 Aunt Alex

 Grandpa & Grandma, well, I suppose that is how it works 

when you have 2 kids before you turn 21. 

 What a sweet baby girl <3 

We love you Conner and Lexi <3 !!!

watching the sky

It's not unlike a cloud burst. The skies darken, edges first. Light slowly softens to hues of faint blue. Then the clouds let loose the rain... 

Just as BC picked up a fantastic in town job for a beloved client and the lawyers fired the opening shots in the developing custody fight to help Fisher (the step son) stay in Utah for pending school, the financing for the Moab job suddenly went through.

I am near speechless at the complications. None of this was in the forecast. 

A custody fight over a 15 yr kid who has already decided (power to make the choice backed by state law and the existing custody decree) his education is better served here, not there.   

A winter start for an out of town job, evidently delayed even longer now by the need for BC to be in 3 places at once.  

If you are standing on the higher ground the rain is not what is to be feared- it is the lightening. And in the  near distance an electrical storm is brewing. 

I have felt it moving towards me for about a month. I tried to ignore it but I keep returning to the realization it cannot be out run. 

I honestly thought in the moment our son graduated from high school the last ties between me and my ex were gone.  You can laugh at how short sighted that was of me, I've never claimed to have emotional intelligence.  And I see now that you never truly get to walk away- no matter how fast you are running.

Our son C-Boy is all grown up and expecting a child of his own; a little girl. 

Being together again as a family is unavoidable.  That day in June I honestly thought I was walking away for the very last time.  Holding my high heels in one hand. The other the hem of my dress so as soon as I was out of sight of the crowds mingling on the lawn of the graduation, I might run the rest of the way to my waiting car. I wish I would have understood it was only a reprieve. I would have savored my time away more carefully.   
      

the last stand of the gimpy chick

It is hard to count the moving carpet of speckled chicks moving noisily around the yard but if I were to guess I would say there are 15 medium, 14 small, and 14 extra small. 
Beach loves and knows only one. 
She has been complaining for days about its not quite right leg demanding we do something- but what she wanted, she didn't know.
BC offered her a life shut up in a safe pen where she could learn to sit for us be the mother of all the eggs we pull to raise.... like in the Giver.

Beach hated the idea. "You need to do something." she whined after trying to fix it a perch with a Frisbee so it might safely roost in a low fruit tree "like the others". 

Do you want us to kill it, we asked. 
Of course not, was her answer.
For now it keeps up just fine, we would tell her but to this she strongly disagreed. 
It struggles and is always far behind them plus it falls all the time...."

In the dark before the rain the skunk that had been circling came back. And in the dark before the rain BC, the good farmer that he is, once again walked the farm yard at 3 am counting heads. 

"I found the victim," he said sitting heavily on down on the bed. "It was Beach's gimpy chick."

By morning August rain had washed most of the skunk smell away. In certain corners it still lingered mixing with sweetness of the river and wet grass.

I watched the chickens grazing the lawn as I waited for coffee to drip.  Most of us have survived July.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to do nothing. 
To sit back and let time pass...

Wendi M. Brown- Bevan, born May 2, 1970 to Jon and Julie Brown, in Slat Lake City. In the pouring rain, on August 1, 2006, long after her spirit had left this world, the body of Wendi M. Brown-Bevan was laid to rest.  Wendi leaves behind a family she loved most of all two beautiful children, Chloe and Jonah.  Wendi loved her children more than word can say, she existed because of them.  She will be remembered for her kindness and compassion, and her love of animals. Her gentle loving spirit may have been no match for this world.  Wendi, we know your sight was often unclear, your path mostly unpaved, but whatever life may have held for you and all of us who cared for you along the way, we want you to know that you were, and forever will be truly loved by us. 

May you find the peace you were seeking…

She was my sister.

waiting to wait

I came home from work to a silent sitting house. The math was wrong; all the cars and the bikes accounted for yet there was no reply to my calling. 

Before I left BC had asked, "What do I do with her?" her, meaning Beach. He sounded like a new father. Had it really been all that long since I had left them together, floating, without structure or task?

I filled the waiting time with cleaning. It was like the slightly too long last chapter of a book. Stuff to do, answers waiting.

Eventually the dogs gave them away. I caught sight of them while hanging laundry. Moving slowly out beyond the lawn, pass the structured garden space with its fences and rows, coming from the wild backfield. Walking with big weaving steps through the tall grass. Buckets and berries and butterflies- left to his own devices he casts an unmistakable air of New England. Penciled drawings, rolled up jeans, bare feet, and summer bounty.

It is the second time in 2 days I have thought with my heart "I'm not sure I am capable of letting him go..." and yet my head knows he will have to go do what he dreams of doing.  I am being to understand what lays before us. A novel of waiting for him to return. 

out

Inside my head it is oddly quiet. Almost unnervingly so.

I needed to get out.

This time of year especially I lean towards the foothills.  It is where my heart lingers. Where my mind drifts. The shoreline trail.

It is where BC and I really fell in love. Where I took my sister for the last hike we would ever take together. Where my dogs run free. Where for the first time my best friend let his guard down. Where weather and season change nothing. 

It is my measure of how I am doing. 

Here I have stepped on a rattle snake, pet a tarantula, hovered over a huge wolf spider without freaking out, followed a bobcat, ran over a squirrel, split open my knee because I was distracted by a rabbit, and wandered into a herd of deer. 

I have run these trails sick, well, angry, in love, in the rain, the snow, in 110 degrees...

And in my dreams I walk the paths seeking their mountain shelter.

Even the fictional characters of my writings visit here.

It is the place where I find myself.  

Because sometime you have to go out to to be able to look in.