Now, honey, it has gotten really, really late.  Honestly, the night slipped away from me so fast, I almost went to bed without writing you.

Remember the nights when I used to call you after I got settled into the hotel? At the time, I wouldn’t have admitted it helped me as much as it helped you – but it did.  I never got the hang of feeling at home in those rooms.  I knew people who’d bring splits of champagne, figure out how to make brownies in the microwave and spread out across the beds and tables, like the place belonged to them. But for me, it was your voice – not comforting, not reassuring but like a grounding wire, taking me down to solid bone.

Sitting on the edge of the edge of the bed, watching the clock while we talked – I’d let you ask me again if you could call me on my cell phone from your landline.  “Yep, honey – it doesn’t matter.  It’s just like a regular phone.”  I know just how you felt – I’m equally mystified by all the layers of alleged connection that intervene between talking to someone anymore.

I’d close my eyes, exhausted from driving, from insecurity, from figuring out how to eat nothing I really wanted, and listen to your aches of the day.  Maybe sometimes I’d have dinner with Deb or someone else fun, and we’d have a little story to tell you.  But alot of times, I was practically asleep when we were talking.  Did you know?  Of course you knew.  I couldn’t fool you about that.  You’ve been tucking me in since day one.

This picture will be 9 years old tomorrow.  I don’t think I’ve ever re-posted an image before, but everything is here.  Our mutual prayer that we could somehow accomplish practical magic.  My conviction that leftovers of the past could be re-shaped into a mystery that would allow me to understand you.  A clearer voice now, still a grounding wire.  Taking me down to solid bone.

“Oh, bother!” said Pooh. “I shall have to go on.”

Well, honey, yesterday did not go As Planned.  Because as I was tra-la-la-ing on my daily walk, enjoying a visit to the Kenilworth of Madison, an invisible drain cover – lurking sinisterly below the level asphalt – grabbed my ankle and twisted it in a Very Uncomfortable Way.  Ironically enough, my tra-la-la-ing thoughts just moments before had been:  Walking Around is the Best Thing in the World.

So today I missed my walk for the first time in almost 2 years (June Oneth 2018).  But, piloting around on these crutches (yes, I got crutches) takes enough out of my arms, I really think I am almost walking around on my hands, like a disoriented acrobat.  That’s got to count for something, right?

I worked recumbently, at home, and  I did get quite a bit done, once my friend pointed out that if she could make coffee with a broken leg, I could do it on a sprained ankle, FFS (that’s a quote).  All I needed was my back pack, a little shopping bag and a mason jar.  I swear, whatever you are imagining I did with those items – YOU ARE WRONG.  I drained the first pot and felt my humanity return.   Then I made a second pot, and I was almost myself.  Then my roommate came home from a grocery run for me with the biggest jug of cold brew coffee I have ever seen.  She really gets me.

The butterflies I imagined are definitely grounded this week.  Yesterday, I couldn’t bear any weight on my foot, and I can’t stumble around on crutches with the camera – yet.  But, I’m not ready to say I can’t make any butterflies at all.  Because I really had some things I wanted you to see, and that’s how we always do together, dear.  We’ll just see.

Hello, night owl!  I didn’t write you last night – unless I did in my dreams?  I conked out at about 8 pm, cozied up in my big sweater and new shawl.  You know how we’d say, “Just five more minutes–I’m resting my eyes?”  Well, I rested my eyes — until it was almost 7 am!

Today was better.  I got the positive feedback I sorely needed.  My job is hard.  We spend all day untangling misunderstandings.  It’s an effort to remember the difference between an uncomfortable problem and the person deconstructing it.  I do need people to remember, though.  And today, they did.

I have other quandries weighing in my heart, of course – agonies to be relished for their umami tenderness.  I don’t want to let them go.  My perfectionism drives me to grasp at all the uncertainties — certain I should be able to pluck the right answer from the pile.  But the right answer is almost always just, “Try.  See what happens.”  Maybe perfectionism is simply the fancy suit I put on over my naked fear – instead of standing there, quaking in nothing but my boots.  The things I’m waiting to say won’t even fully form themselves in the safety of my imagination.  Because waiting seems better than the answer I don’t want.  This strategy is the worst sort of plan:  relying on time instead of the truth to bring us the portion we want from life.

Oh, if I write too late at night, I do start to sound a little ProFound, huh?  So we’ll leave it there with the butterfly glow for a nightlight.  We’ll make some new pictures tomorrow, honey – and see what you think the answer might be.  Brave enough for both of us.  Love you, dear. B.

Alright dear, we’ve gotten to Wednesday so that’s some sort of accomplishment.  Today really wasn’t the best.  At the moment, I have a lot of people telling me mostly all the things I’m doing wrong or that they want me to change – and I’m really not good at that kind of stress.  I can never take “Just do it” for an answer.  I went for a hot-blooded walk on campus to let off some steam, but it didn’t help.  I was so frustrated, I did finally cry on the way back.  When you only hear about the bad things you do, it’s as if the good things never happened.  It’s too much like being married to someone who doesn’t like you.  And I was not really good at that, either.

But then tonight, I did something else – bellydancing!  For a while I could only find one bellydance teacher in Madison, and she was impatient with beginners – so I didn’t go back.  But a friend at work told me about this place, and it was FUN!  The teacher was zaftig as a bowl of peach ice cream, and very encouraging.  At the end of class, she danced for us, with a look of amused suspense her face – as if her body’s rolling, snapping rhythms were beyond her conscious control.  The fat dancers really are the sexiest.  I couldn’t look away!

I’m thinking about something my friend showed me, to find some way to come back to my heart, irrespective of my head.  I wish I had remembered it today.  I felt so alone, cramped into a boxy little meeting room, dissecting my inadequate file naming.  What he showed me isn’t the same as mindfulness or meditation.  It’s much harder.  Protecting my heart is the whole reason my thoughts take the form they do.  Showing this love has meant a lot.  I really didn’t expect it.

And there we will leave the Stream of Consciousness, honey, for the Land of Nod. Boy, I miss you tonight. I would have liked to talk to you today.  And now, I guess we did.

Sleep tight, dear.  I will write you tomorrow.

Oh dear, I did write you a letter last night, and even one this morning, too.  But here I am  – winging it.  I was hoping for a story to tell you.  I did go to a little workshop on plain language writing today.  Plain language is one of my favorite discoveries from learning how to write again – for the lawyers at school and for the health advocates at my old job.  Plain language writing is the only word puzzle I’m any good at -finding ways to say things so people can actually understand you. I never had a class in it, though. I taught myself from websites.

All the high-performing attendees flexed their language muscles, and I nodded along.  They really were very smart.  I’m surrounded at work by people who believe in Knowing Things, and the class was no different.  I have had to relinquish Knowing Things, since finding out conclusively that I Don’t.  One thing I do know is it is much easier to let other people know things such as “what is a cognate?” and raise their hands and supply the answer and impress the teacher.  My brain has lots to tell me, but I have found that – on balance – most of it is of questionable authority.

One of the kids where I take my car has gone back to school, and now we commiserate on how to finish homework while practically unconscious.  I told him my trick.  Some nights I used to set my timer for 5 minutes.  Lying in bed with the lap top open next to me, I would close my eyes.  When the timer went off, I opened them and for 5 minutes, I’d type some sort of answer to my assignment.  The timer would ring again, and I shut my eyes for 5 succulent minutes.  Back and forth I’d go – study/snooze/study/snooze – until I had something ready for the homework deadline.

In any case, darling, my sleepy self will not take no for an answer tonight.  I’m not like you, dear.  My ambition has never been any match for the enticement of rest, and the liberation of dreams.  Nighty night, honey.

Well, dear, the coffee is made, sausage and eggs, too.  I’ve settled into my Sunday chair by the window in my room.  It’s March 1, a good day to be a Sunday – and a fine way to begin the countdown of our last few Sundays together.  Nothing too fancy, but all the light the day can promise is waiting for our ordinary pleasures to be remembered and enjoyed.  Our first decade apart is almost over.

This is the Sunday of a very good week, honey.  You don’t have to worry about me.  Whatever hurts, I seem to be able to hold on until one of the smarter people calls me back.  And they always do.  Wendy laughed me out of several imagined catastrophes, and back to my ridiculous self.  I was just scared – but the unknown turned out to be beautiful.

The most important thing about Sunday is I have a chair that rocks and swivels – covered with cream cotton and humble little posies twining over the arms and back.  And it has – a matching foot stool!  If you were here, you could sit in the chair, and I could pull the footstool up to the side of the bed for my backrest.  Then we could both stretch out our legs and think things through.

Jen’s beautiful painting is here, shining yellow love over everything.  Otherwise, it’s books everywhere – and perched among the stacks, all the familiars I seem to need to make any magic at all.  Blooming glass trees, teapots, figurines of courtly dancers – and a recently added clown who is my very favorite.

I did not have to choose between whiskey or wine today, as things turned out.  I had both.  At lunch, I walked the antique mall with our Chicago girl, and at dinner, a beach dog from Puerto Rico licked my toes – to my squeamish delight.  If I told you how good the pot roast was, you wouldn’t believe me.  Later we watched sciencey fiction, and the dog fell asleep next to me on the couch, belly up just in case I might pet her.  It did make me feel special, but the truth is, she’ll do this for anyone.  It’s a solid life-strategy.  Why not be ready in case there’s a soft heart and a tender touch just waiting for a chance to tickle your tummy?

I’ll try to write you everyday, dear –  just the somethings we would always talk about.  And I think I can scramble together enough pictures to keep up with your butterflies.

I love you, dear.  Write soon.

It’s Chicago and I’m meeting Pam in a few hours.  This place where I’m having coffee, facing the 1600 block of Milwaukee Avenue, didn’t exist when I lived on the 1600 block of Damen, just a drunk stumble away,  ever so briefly one winter, in a 3 room apartment over what I remember as storage and studio for the only other tenants, a couple of married “artists” who I saw maybe three times at the top af the perilously steep stairs during that cold, centrifugal winter.

Also, though it’s a cliche I’ll point it out anyway – not one person in this bright and well appointed cafe existed that winter.  Not the red head with his carefully coiffured chin and peachy skin, who looks like my ex-husband.  Not the tatooed girl who brightly took my order and gently disputed with the oldest person here – a barista of at least 30 – about whether I wanted my heavy cream on top of the espresso or on the bottom of the cup.

At that time – which was 1983 just in case you doubt my reckoning of birthdays and the antique geography of Chicago – I didn’t know there was anything but Chicago.  Each block and bus stop was a self that lived in me as embodied as my gait, my appetite, my clammy sweat on the green leather bench seats of elevated train cars that I swear were launched straight out of a time machine to hurtle us around and around a dangerous fun-house track between office windows and apartment blocks until our bones shook back into some pre-historic order.

I lacked the imagination to dream of anything really, really different. But she didn’t.

And not only lacked her imagination, but lacked her courage.  And really I think the courage comes first, like a fierce friend who says, there is more to you than this.

I have tried really hard not to cling to the self and the city that used to be me.  In that, we were almost perfectly calibrated opposites as well. She wore the self she believed in like, at the very least, a balding, bespoke mink coat, rubbed to the skin but still better than that ghastly thing you’re wearing.

And, to come back where we started, everything’s changed now anyway, whether I trot out my bona fides or not.  We listen to Talking Heads and Grateful Dead in the same over-amplified mix and no one understands how wrong that is, except a few people I don’t have to explain it to.  I don’t know whether I’m here today or not.  But I actually think she is.  She would understand this dream of casual, carefully understated affluence.  She’d definitely want to visit the custom perfume boutique next door, and show off her taste. And I really, really think I should do that, too.

I remember her every day, dear.  The body of her dream is as close as our fingers, aa tender as wings, and breathing fully on the sky over Milwaukee Avenue.

The summer came on early, raising our May temperatures into the 90s, and soaking every hopeful twig and root with zone 5 rainfall.  The tomatoes and I love it.  The trees don’t know what to do with themselves, pouring out leaves like the sky’s the limit, and there was an inflorescence of spirea this year like nothing I can remember.

I invited myself into someone’s backyard to take this picture, while I was walking around my old neighborhood – a curlicue of streets that go nowhere, lined with unremarkable ranch homes gussied up by their young, trendy owners with all the midcentury touches the previous generation was too tight to bother with.  The neighbor seemed suspicious of me as I stalked across the grass toward this glorious, disheveled creature draped behind the garage.  Introducing myself only made it worse.  She furrowed her eyebrows at me and retreated to a safe distance, not eager to make friends.

I suppose I am an odd duck, in my orange floppy hat and long sleeves, sweaty and smiling for no apparent reason.  But I’ve become so accustomed to invisibility – as every middle aged woman does – that I’m sure I can go anywhere, really, completely unremarked.  “Oh, I just thought she was your grandmother!” they’d surely say, as I make off with the loot.

I have been making this picture over and over again, ever since spring broke out along branches and side streets and the green open edges that meet every human habitat here.  Any backyard will do. I suppose I am looking for the open place where you can see into the heart of what’s growing.  Yes, that is it.  The open place.  I’m sure of it.

Yesterday was the First of Magnolia, but as it turns out the magnolias couldn’t wait another minute.  They began their celebration on the Endth of April, giving the coldly snowy spring a big, pink “F*ck Off” so loud you could almost hear the buds breaking open, all over town.

You think magnolias don’t use salty language?  Magnolias invented salty language.  They’ve survived dinosaurs and human beings and even, so far, 45.  But 6 inches of heavy snow on April 12th (or whenever)…that’s more of a challenge.  Holding back, when everything in you wants to go.  Saying no.  Saying, “Wait.”

But they’re here now, seizing the time that belongs to them.  Telling the world, in fact, what time it is.

The sidewalk outside the supper club was icing over when we left – a slick layer of damp left by snow that slid off the roof and awning, worn down by sunshine that didn’t do much to raise the temperatures all day.  I’m careful now about walking on ice, but it wasn’t quite there yet – still crackly and slushy and easy to see in the parking lot lights.

Tonight, it was two glasses of wine, a hunk of medium rare beef –  and I even ate some onion rings and some of the fancy sundae that Delaney’s serves the birthday guest, no matter if it is a little belated.  And it wasn’t just us three at the table – there were emails from friends out of state, read as part of the conversation – and the lives of passed away parents, and the riddles of children now irrevocably grown.

“Don’t let me forget, I’ve got some bacon in the car for you.  You think it’s cold enough out there?” “It’s 35 degrees.”  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”  You know – this isn’t even the first time we’ve had this conversation.

So I hug the friend who tolerates my hugging, and I don’t hug the one who doesn’t, and we walk to the van and she gives me the bacon and some leftovers from the flea market space we shared – old linens as soft and thick as cream, coming back to me unwanted, just like they were when I rescued them from who the hell remembers where.

“Thank you for making it a festive birthday!” I holler back over my shoulder as I cross to my car, parked on the darker side street. I settle inside, my purse and good-as-new camera taking their place as passengers, perched next to me on an accumulation of library music and my embroidery project bag, which I always keep in the car in case of stitching.

It’s truly dark in here now, a welcoming darkness inside this car that I bought from a boy I like, and yeah, that is Thunder Road on the cd player, So What?  I’m going home to books I needed with no place to put them, and thoughts that do not include any professional ambitions, and a tangle of unmade covers on the bed.  And I have nearly everything I need, and maybe that’s how I come to be thinking “…I am no more grown up now than I ever have been…”  Just salty and warm, sharp and sour, sweet only on you, and happy in my little white car.