Earthquakes, love, food, and dreams

It's cold again.

In February, three days in the mid-fifties will be a heat wave. Now, it's...an awakening, of sorts. Right up to Thursday of the past week, it was in the mid-eighties and humid. Summer weather. I went skating at lunch on Thursday and I got all sweaty. Today, I don't think it got above 57. The sun hasn't been out since Thursday, either. Friday it rained some, downtown, but not where I live. It's sprinkled in a misty sort of way a few times since then but no real rain.

This weather is like me. It runs hot and cold.

This kind of weather makes me feel like cooking. Last weekend I felt so awful, I felt...that everything I tried to do was worthless, that cleaning the garage was a waste of time because it would just get messy again, that finishing painting the bathroom would take more mental energy than I possessed, that I might as well not pay the bills because I'll just go to work and earn more money and pay more bills with it and never, ever get ahead. That all my ambitions were dead. This weekend, I did so much. I finished the bathroom. I did the grocery shopping. Four loads of laundry. Took the dogs for a long trek through farmland. Cleaned the kitchen. Did some drawing. Went through the pile of bills and paperwork that had accumulated while I felt like too much hell to do anything about it. Yesterday, I made a giant steaming pot of chili spaghetti, and today tried something I've never made: crepes. Damn they were good. I didn't have all the exact ingredients I needed, so I made a few things up on the fly. Everything came together. Voila: crepes. Stuffed with mushrooms and rice and all kinds of spice. And some garlicky-herbally spreadbly delicious cheese I bought today. And covered in mozzarella and gooed up with sour cream.

The cold makes me cook. My fridge is full of copious amounts of food. Maybe I will get fatter. I feel prepared for winter, like a squirrel squirreling away acorns. Only I know where all my food is. And my food will not cause oak forests to grow.

I can remember for almost every year stretching back in my memory the first day when the air smelled different, in the fall. This year, that day was today. When touching warm things feels good instead of stifling. When three blankets seem like a good idea. When the air feels clean, all the way to the bottom.

I feel apprehensive in some ways. I can remember how nasty things got last winter. How cooped up I felt. How much I hated the house, the walls, the rooms I lived in that got smaller each day. I want this house to be clean. I remember feeling as though it was never clean enough. That no matter how much scrubbing or vacuuming or mopping or dusting I did, it was never to my standard of what a clean house should feel like. That feeling has gone away somewhat, since I've spent so much time outdoors over the past five or so months, but soon, I'll be back to only going outside to go places, or to walk restless dogs. This house will be a skin again, instead of somewhere to sleep and keep my photos. I don't know if I'm ready for that yet, but I don't have a lot of choice; winter is inevitable.

This year, there will be much more skiing. And, hopefully, no dislocated shoulders.

---------------------------------------------------------------
On to other things--last night, I dreamed a lengthy dream about love. The person with whom I shared this love was younger than me, and able to move the earth with his thoughts. He was not old enough to understand how to control his emotions enough to keep the earth from quaking around him. Sometimes, when he saw me at a distance, the earth would shake underneath him, tumbling rocks away from him, tilting hills into steeper angles. We agreed to meet on a mountain top. I trekked up the steep rock surface of the mountain. He had arrived before me and saw me coming. The buoyancy of his desire cracked the stones underneath his feet, so that chunks of granite (I remember the particular color of this granite, its sharpness when it cracked into brick-sized bits, the way it caught the light) flew up around him. A hunk of rock the size and shape of his left shoulder hit him full in the face, leaving his mouth a wrecked mess of blood, his teeth strewn out over the broken ground beneath him. When I reached him he kissed me with his broken mouth and I tasted bitter iron. I wrapped my hands around his upper arms to hold him steady, to make him settle, to make the earth stop quaking underneath us so we could make it the rest of the way to the summit.

When we made it to the peak, there was a...there was something like a gazebo there, only it was also a chapel. With white pillars, open to the wind tearing through. I held the boy's arms still, and his love was so strong that it was pulling the mountain sideways, so that the lantern-shaped bell emanating light from the ceiling of the chapel tilted, started pushing us harder together, down the side of the mountain. I could still taste his blood in my mouth. He had become tangled up with gravity somehow, so that he was gravity, and along with everything around us, I was being sucked into him. The earth shook and shuddered like it was a dog and we were water it was trying to fling from its body with the force of its shaking. I woke up.

And got online, and read about the earthquake in Pakistan. So many dead. And the number grows. And here I am with my American fridge full of food...

I wonder what exactly it will take to make me stop thinking about it and just do it. To make that decision. To leave this place. To go where help is needed.