Respite Care

It is so hot here I have to dump ice cubes out of the plastic tray into a plastic bag and hold it on my neck. My head breathes heat from the inside out; if I hold my hand up to my face, I feel the heat from inches away. A space heater. I heat the space I am in.

The gulls squawking sound like a passel of sweaty children forced to take an afternoon nap they don’t want. They don’t flock together on our metal roof like they would on a balmier day, choosing instead to fly and swoop and complain constantly. There is no settling down for them or the sweaty children I think I hear.

We are just back from our little adopted town’s 4th of July parade – the one where the fire truck and ambulance and a dozen decked-out cars, ATV’s, and towed speedboats circle the town square twice, the paraders throwing candy to kids whose parents drove in from even more rural towns. Everyone is waving American flags but the waving seems different; I never noticed before but now every nuance has meaning. Is he one of them or one of us? It doesn’t matter even though it does. We both think the other doesn’t love our country enough.

A young brown woman – maybe Hispanic – walks by with her boyfriend who is white. I smile at her reflexively and I both notice and am glad that it is, in fact, a reflex and not a conjured up obligation where I have to remember to be nice. I wonder for a minute if she knows that but in the wondering realize that I am not at all reflexive. I am conscious of her being different from the crowd of small town white people and I worry whether other people will have the right reflex or correct themselves if they don’t. It isn’t my problem but it is. Everything is my problem these days.

The constancy of things not being right and there being so many things to be righted is making me scattered and jumpy like I am missing a big demonstration that everyone else is attending, like I am late to what is most current and pressing. I feel all the time that I should be watching and doing, using my energy and mind to make things better, influencing people to act. But it feels like a million rocks to push up the mountain; I have trouble choosing my rocks. I push all the rocks and none of them moves much.

Outside on the porch, the book I started this morning lies baking in the sun. We are spending five days here on Lake Superior and it is my mission to read all 530 pages, every word, every page before we leave. My goal is to stop flitting for just a few days, shed the ever-present cloud of doom and urgency, and read this book as if nothing else matters. I want to remember what it feels like to be lost in something outside of myself, outside of the news, outside of terrible policies and impossible crises. I want to hear no calls to action nor issue any. I just want to sit still and read this book.

And let things cool down for a while.

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Originally published July 2018