Midsommar Kate’s Moon
Jon’s house deal in Aurora finalized. He takes possession on September 7th. That will put him much closer to his school, within a long bike ride. The ride to school is how he got his exercise before moving up here so he’s looking forward to that. It also means that the custody arrangement will revert to 50/50, which will be a dramatic change for all involved.
He’s finishing up some projects here in the meantime. He installed the living room air conditioner last week. The benches that will surround half of our relatively new dining room table are under construction. He’ll finish those, I hope, this week.
This also means that after September 7th, Jon will no longer live with us; he’s been on Shadow Mountain a little over a year. It will be sad. Jon moved to Colorado 14 or 15 years ago and our time with him diminished to little, only on visits. Now we’ve had a chance to reconnect, to resee him and for him to resee us. That’s not a chance parents and children often get when the child is 48. His move also means our three times a month weekend time with Ruth and Gabe will end. We’ll see all three of them, but much less frequently. So there will be grief, as well.
We plan to use the fall and maybe the winter to finish our move, which has been on partial hold while we hosted Jon, Ruth and Gabe. There’s art to hang, furniture to relocate, maybe some painting and flooring, some bits of this and that left over after our kitchen remodel.
It is time though for Kate and I to complete the changes we want to make to our home and property. It’s also time for our lives to slow down a little, to have substantially less stress. It’s been a complicated year with the sturm und drang of the divorce, my knee surgery and recovery, Kate’s gradual coming to grips with Sjogren’s Syndrome. A year or so with no medical or family drama would be pleasant.
If you’re an alcoholic like I am, you learn early in treatment that the geographical escape won’t work. Wherever you go, there you are is the saying. It’s true that the addictive part of my personality follows me from place to place as well as through time. Even so, this move to Colorado has awakened me to an unexpected benefit of leaving a place, especially ones invested with a lot of meaning.
While it’s true, in the wherever you go there you are sense, that these memories and social roles, the feeling of a continuous self that lived outside Nevis, in Irvine Park, worked at the God Box on Franklin Avenue remain, they are no longer a thick web in which I move and live and have my being, they no longer reinforce themselves on a daily, minute by minute basis. And so their impact fades.
This is obvious, yes, but its effect is not. This unexperienced territory leaves open the possibility of new aspects of the self emerging triggered by new relationships, new roles, new physical anchors for memories. Evergreen, for example, now plays a central part in our weekly life. We go over there for Beth Evergreen. We go there to eat. Jon and the grandkids are going there to play in the lake this morning.
The birthday girl is here. 11 years old now, officially (I learned yesterday.) a tween. She’s a reader, an artist who now works a lot with wire, a double black diamond level skier, a gifted student, a good friend, a thespian and our granddaughter. Ruth.
We took them both to Wildgame, a restaurant and entertainment place in Evergreen. They have an arcade (see picture), a bowling alley, a pool table, bocce ball court, ping pong tables and a stage for live music. The counter guy told Kate to come before 5 pm because, “It gets pretty crazy after that.”
There are shifts and changes going on, movement in my soul. When we moved here, I left behind relationships precious beyond words. Not entirely, no. I’ve stayed in contact through facebook, e-mails, occasional visits, especially from the Woollies, but the day-to-day, go to lunch chances for nourishing those relationships has disappeared. I was lonely here atop Shadow Mountain.
But it was real and significant. It manifested as a sense of yearning, a desire for companionship like what I’ve had with the Woollies and the docent corps at the MIA. I think, had it continued, that it would have become corrosive, perhaps even damaging to those core aspects of my life that remained solid.
Been experiencing an unusual phenomenon, at least unusual for this period of my life. I’m getting all kinds of anxiety signals from my body. My feet rest on their balls when I sit down, not flat on the floor. My gut has this hollowed out and tense feeling. My jaw has small aches as my teeth grind unconsciously. This also makes facial muscles twitch. When lying in bed, I’ll notice that my legs are tight, again an unconscious contraction.
When we had our couple’s escape at Tall Grass Spa, I first noticed these physical manifestations. It was during the relaxing, 80-minute massage. As certain parts of my body felt calmer, others, like my legs and my gut, began to call out to me.
A follower of gestalt therapy in my younger days, I learned to pay attention to and interrogate a jumpy stomach, a twitchy foot. These are not disconnected from my psyche, to the contrary they reveal things occurring in that inner world hidden from view to my Self.
