On the porch this morning I listened to the wind moving through the trees.  The occasional flutter of my two flags joined the squirrels calling through the stillness.  With my arms wrapped around my shoulders in lieu of the shawl left inside, I pushed the rocker and thought about song lyrics.

Somebody sent me a link to a Joni Mitchell song and that got me scrolling through her lyrics in my mind.  I got stuck in the chorus of Blue  before finally moving to Little Green and settling on A Case of You.  I got on the internet and played them over and over, thinking of the seventies, of my innocence which I had lost by then assuming I had ever had it.

Lately I have been bumping against people who seem to know my next move better than I do. I listen to their advice and gauge my own instincts against their knowing looks and disconsolate shrugs.  I stand around at gatherings wearing flowered leggings and a plastic smile.  I carry a pocketful of proverbs, pulling out lyrics whenever someone pauses in front of me.  Everybody’s saying that hell’s the quickest way to go, I don’t think so; I’m going to take a look around it though.*

People move away.  They glance down smug sight lines.  I can tell we agree that they’ve lived a better life than I have.  Look at them: With their wedding bands and their perfect teeth.  I’d rather be them, too, and I know that’s what they’re thinking.  Good God.  There, but for the grace of God, go I.  They scurry off, wallowing in gratitude that they have been spared the life I’ve led or the chromosomes which drive me.

But the graceful few linger.  We swap lines of poetry, Cummings, Teasdale, and maybe even Plath.  They tell me about the crystals with which their paths have been clumsily lined.  In wistful voices, they talk of their own  crinoline petticoats hung in cedar closets all these years.   I whisper that I put mine in the grab bag for somebody else’s prom.  But I folded it as I handed it over to Miranda. I gave it one last gentle touch.  I didn’t wear it under a high school dance dress.  I walked down a makeshift aisle in it, two decades ago, when someone loved me.

I’m not complaining about my journey, nor do I excuse my own complicity in its strange meanderings.  But still.  But still.

It’s the sixth day of October, 2017.  The long strange trip on which I’ve been for the last forty-five months continues into its forty-sixth.  My life, in fact, continues.

 

 

The Last Time I Saw Richard, Joni Mitchell

*Joni Mitchell, Blue.