In Transition

It's going to harder and harder now to stay inside, to pretend to be an adult making money, pulling my economic weight. I am blaming solely the close sunshine, the air laden with the odor of blooming dogwoods and the yellow pollen. The cool, green grass subtracts years off my age back to about twelve, when I was still rolling around in it and clothing myself in it and in the meantime discovering womanhood.

The dogwoods remind me of it especially. They smell like menstration when fully bloomed, just like I did. I wore white jean shorts that day. Some boys I didn't know pointed at my crotch and cackled at me when I walked to my mom's car after school let out. But I only found out when I got home and went to the toilet. I told my mom I had chocolate in my underwear, but when I showed her she gave me the ultimatum.

"That's your period," she said, after deliberating then smiling like she'd discovered a lost secret, "You're becoming a woman."

The words tugged at my chest, as if someone was taking something away from me against my will.

"I don't want to be a woman," I said, and I cried for an hour, burying myself in the blankets on my mother's bed.

Later I walked out the front door into the summer heat of the South that can't accurately be called air. Down the road lived a horse named Lobo, whose owner had told me I could come brush it and pet it whenever I wanted. My size 5 Nikes took me straight to Lobo's gate, and I cried for awhile longer, explaining my newfound crisis to him and wiping my face on his mane.

When I saw in his silver-dollar brown eyes that he understood, I patted him and walked to the old Civil War graveyard overrun with ivy and anthills across the street. It was the only place in the neighborhood - the only place in town, I was certain - where you could get a cool breeze on a 92 degree day. In the summer, the atmosphere of the graveyard was damp and mossy, calming and reticent. It was only in autumn, nearing Halloween, that the neighborhood kids payed any attention to it and it became somehow ominous and creepy.

Of that day it's all I can recall. I'm sure I walked back home, ate supper with my family, returned to business as usual, as much as a little girl can with blood leaking from her vagina for the first time in her life.

The dogwoods, the tiny white flowers clustered, turning pink with bleeding edges as they age, will fall off and lay their backs on the hard brown earth in a few weeks. Spring seems to be the most short lived of the seasons, the adolescent season of transition. But it's the most florid and langourous, when things rise with new life and shed a bittersweet husk.

Airing out

First order of this post: Note to all, do not drink hot English Breakfast tea and then eat anything chocolatey, or vice versa. It is a a very nasty tasting thing, with a fish-like earthy taste when the two are blended. I was eating a chocolate chip granola bar when I took the first sip of my morning tea and almost gagged. Also, doesn't the concept of a chocolate chip granola bar cancel itself out in the health department? Whatever, it tastes good.

Now I've gotten that very important alert out of the way...I'm playing soccer tonight, a coed practice at a YMCA downtown. My coed team began our new spring season and had a game last night (for which I was sorely ill-dressed as it was ass-cold and windy), and the winter season ended with us in the playoffs which took place Sunday. Needless to say, after two months of relative physical inactivity, I am really sore.

I got up to running several miles three or four days a week last fall, and had to stop because of a bursitis flare-up in both my hips. Basically, I put on too many miles too fast and ruined the buffers called bursa between my hip bones. So when I'd run it felt like I had stones rubbing together for hips. I've had to stop running and rest to recooperate. Me playing soccer is quite a less energetic picture than one last year around September because my endurance isn't near what it used to be.

So, finally, after a long rest period and a couple weeks of just stretching and lifting weights off and on, my hips aren't giving me hell when I run anymore. Now, running around at soccer games feels so amazingly freeing. I never realize how much physical activity really helps me keep even keel until I'm not doing any. My old counselor told me - in one of our talks a couple of years ago when I was on Lexapro - that being athletic is one of the best things a depressed person can do. If nothing else (i.e. the fresh air, the flora and fauna, the vitamin D) doesn't boost your mood a bit, your endorphins are sure to give it a nice lift.

That's not just for people in serious depression; anyone having a bad day, or bad set of days in my case recently, can benefit from a lively jaunt outdoors or a good jog around the block. It'll air you out in all the right places, giving your mind a chance - along with your body - to let go and just drift along. Other times, you might choose to push your mind and body more, seeing what they're capable of. Physical activiy is, after all, a task that involves the mind as equally as the body. Even if my body posseses the endurance and capabilities to perform, my mind will always keep my body tied up if I let it. And everytime I decide to let go of misgivings or emotions, I always surprise myself with what I can be capable of.

I knew I was going to do a physical activity post when I started this blog, and it just seems natural for me to talk about it right now, at this sort of new beginning I feel I'm having with being active.

I'll end with a challenge: Now that it's spring and getting nicer outside, seriously try to get out there at least three times a week for thirty minutes. Ride your bike, go for a run, get in a pickup game with some kids, go LET GO. Trust me, it'll do you some good in a few different ways.

A Word's Worth

It was the first time this year I walked into work from lunchtime not wearing my coat. Come on Spring, just a little faster now!

I actually got to listen to Writer's Almanac this morning, I was so happy. Recently I haven't been able to because either someone comes to my desk to talk to me or the NPR application on my iPhone won't cooperate. Today, I narrowly escaped a lady who was headed towards my desk to talk to me for - and only for - the five minutes that Writer's Almanac is on. Since a bad incident on Thursday of last week when my boss decided to come to my desk and explain something to me right when I heard the piano intro to the Almanac on my earphones, I have decided to take my phone to the bathroom to listen. Nobody's ever dared bother me when I'm sitting on the toilet. My husband jokes that I need my daily dose of Garrison Keillor's voice. I think that's about right. But I really enjoy the different poems too.

Usually Garrison reads a poem on the segment from a current or contemporary writer, but today he read a literary classic and one of my favorites - an excerpt from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth. Actually, I found it interesting to come across this poem again today, because I've recently been contemplating the exact feeling that Wordsworth describes with his verse. See, I always wondered - until I really sunk my teeth into Wordsworth's poetry - if I was the only one that felt like some brightness and crispness in the scenery was somehow lost with innocence and childhood. It sounds silly, but I remember that colors and dimensions looked somehow fuller and more defined at one point in my life. Now, I still see beauty in things like the poet says "The rainbow comes and goes,/ And lovely is the rose;", but without the same sort of halo of hope they all had when I was younger and less experienced in the world.



"The Voyage of Life, Youth" by Thomas Cole

I do miss this view of the universe I seem to have lost. But, I would not be able to identify so closely with Wordsworth's words if I had not known this loss. And the understanding of poetry is something I wouldn't give up for anything.

Thanks, Garrison Keillor, for making good poetry more accessible to us all.