The central Maine mud-season artist at work.
It's 17 degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, the coldest it's been for quite a while. But the sun is supposed to shine, and temperatures are supposed to rise, and perhaps the plants will get less crabby.
Yesterday I washed floors, packed up some stuff for Goodwill, cleaned out a couple of closets, read the Aeneid and James Baldwin and Wendell Berry, and went grocery shopping. I made a delicious dinner for myself of spaghetti squash, spinach, and chicken breast marinated in lemon and garlic. I drank tea and ate Icelandic yogurt for dessert and watched a pre-code movie called Hot Saturday starring a very young Cary Grant as an incorrigible roué.
This morning I'll do a bit more spring cleaning, a bit more reading, endure my exercise class, and such, and then in the afternoon I'll drive downtown and meet up with my high school poet and we will spend a couple of hours trying out different ways of ordering her book manuscript.
This new life as single-woman-with-long-distance-romance has a notably different pace from the life of married housewife. I am not used to simply pleasing myself. Cooking what I want for dinner. Eating that dinner when I want to eat it. Such a little thing, but it feels so self-indulgent after so many years as the family cook.
It's a funny thing: I am gleefully independent and self-indulgent as a reader and a writer, but in the household I am always thinking about what everyone else will thrive on: clean clothes, good food, a welcoming space. I like those things too, but my psyche addresses them as caretaking, as mothering, as doing chores. When I'm the only beneficiary of my caretaking, life feels strange.
Of course I can't help but compare my state of mind now with how I felt during my last year in Harmony, when I was alone and so incredibly sad. Tom and I have swapped places geographically: now he is back up north, and I am in the south. We are both focusing on our art. We are cheerful about the separation, and the separation has a distinct end point. But I also think about the longer, inevitable, permanent separation. The final divide, that one of us will need to weather alone.
1 comment:
"But I also think about the longer, inevitable, permanent separation. The final divide, that one of us will need to weather alone."
Yes. That thought seems to be everpresent these days as our bodies (and brains) sink into small betrayals.
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