Me--reflected in the night window of my kitchen in Florida.
Honey bee on the blossoms of the Key lime tree in my Florida yard.
Great blue heron at the lake where I walk the dogs.
Sandhill crane smooths his feathers in the driveway in front of my home.Let me tell you about yesterday, 2nd of March 2010. It was one of those super filled, uber weird days with just about everything in it: sorrow, danger, joy, panic, creation, and death. It was a Tuesday. That morning I went in to take notes for Nathan in his American History class. I learned about the Bill of Rights and Madison's Promise and George Washington and the Constitution and James Pickney and indigo dye and yeomen farmers. Like most lecture classes, it was a fairly calm affair.
The teacher is cool and tells good stories--though he tends to talk a little too fast, which is probably a reaction to years of students about to lose interest in what he is saying. I do the same thing when I am speaking to a group and I sense that someone isn't following the point I'm trying to make. It's almost as if by putting out more words, there is a bigger chance that somehow I'll include the magic words to help my listeners understand better.
After class, Nathan took his car and went to walk dogs for a friend. Just as I'd gotten home and found something to drink, put the bunnies out on the porch and sat down at my computer, I looked at the clock and realized that I had about an hour and a half before I needed to be out the door to go to a funeral--THE funeral of the sister who owns the dogs that Nathan and I walk most afternoons. Realizing that my time was limited, I decided to look at what bills were due.
At that moment, Nathan called me in a panic. It was like one of those 911 calls that you hear the TV news replay when something awful has happened and everyone is all terrified about what's going on because no one can tell exactly what IS going on. Nathan was bleeding . . . there was so much blood . . . he couldn't drive . . . he had the dogs in the back of the car . . . there was blood everywhere . . . the dogs were barking and trying to jump from the back of the Jeep into the seats between them and Nathan . . . "No! Get back you two!" . . . can't drive . . . blood all over the place . . .
I listened for perhaps 30 seconds, until he took a breath. "What happened?"
"I hit a squirrel on the back leg and it was still alive. I got out of the car and tried to pick it up and it bit me. I'm bleeding all over. I can't stand it. I can't drive!"
"Where are you? Are you at the park?"
"No. I'm not there. I've stopped by the side of the street."
"Are you still in the subdivision? Is the squirrel still alive?"
"Yes. I'm just a block from the house. Yes. I have him wrapped up in my windbreaker here on the front seat."
"How close to the park are you?"
"I'm just a few blocks away from their house. I can't drive. There's too much blood everywhere."
"OK. OK. I'm putting on my shoes and getting the keys and going out the door. Just stay where you are and I'll be there in just a few minutes. Just stay where you are and I'm coming."
"OK, mom. OK."
At this point I pull on some shoes and grab the car keys, going through the garage toward the car parked in the driveway. I realized that he will need to rinse off the blood so I run back into the house and pull a case of bottled water from under Nate's bed--left over from the hurricane season supplies. I also look around for some towels--glad that the ones I find the quickest are some of the oldest we have. I open the trunk and heft everything into it--slamming it and jumping into the driver's seat.
Now I am in the car, driving. I take a big breath and let it out slowly. My cell phone rings.
"It's me, mom. I got the bleeding stopped. I drove back to the house."
"Are you OK?"
"Yeah. Just get here as quick as you can, OK?"
"I'm on my way. I'll be there in a few minutes."
"OK. I'll be waiting."
When I get to the house, his car is in the driveway, driver's door open and he is half standing/sitting in the front seat. The dogs have jumped from the back into the middle seats. There is blood on the driveway and he is holding a huge wad of tissues around the fingers of his left hand. The dogs haven't been walked, of course. Nathan is in no state to walk them or to wait for me to take them to the park for the half-hour walk. We decide that I'll take the dogs up and down the sidewalk until they are able to relieve themselves and then we'll take the squirrel to the Wildlife Refuge about 15 minutes from where we are and then I'll go with him to the Urgent Care Center down the street from our house.
The dogs get short shrift that day and Nathan follows me in his car to the Refuge.
Brent calls me and tells me that the funeral is at 3pm instead of 4. He'll leave from work and go straight to the service. I will miss it--the final celebration and farewell to the sister of a dear friend--into whose home I have just returned her dogs, whose front door I have just quietly pulled shut.
I haven't seen the squirrel itself yet. We park and I walk back to where Nathan is just opening his door. I have an old towel and start to transfer the wounded squirrel from his windbreaker into it. Nathan then realizes that he hasn't looked to see if the squirrel is still alive. He carefully opens the cocoon of coat fabric back farther from the tiny nose and mouth. It does not move. We both shake our heads and carefully unwrap and the rewrap the squirrel into the towel. I take the small bundle and drive with it in my front seat to the Urgent Care Center.
We park our cars and walk together into the Center. He signs in and I help fill out the paperwork. They get to us quickly. The nurse is so sympathetic. Her husband once brought back a wounded bird for them to take care of. After the bird healed, they released it back into the wild. She quietly admires Nathan for having a tender heart.
He doesn't need stitches. They give him a tetanus shot and a prescription for oral antibiotics to prevent any infection. While we wait for the pharmacist, I get some zucchini and chicken to saute for dinner. I also find some British ginger lemon cookies that I open and eat as I drive home, Nathan just behind me.
When we get home, it is time for me to leave again.
On Tuesday evenings, the photo lab is open at school. It is the only chance I'll have to make some images for class next Monday. I usually love leaving the house and heading to the local college campus in the evening. It is easy to find a parking place. It is cool outside. It feels like I have been invited to a very select event--in a place where I am able to finally see the photographs I have taken during the past week. I can, and do, develop my black and white film at home. I do not have the enlarger (nor do I even want to look for one for myself--next semester I can take a more advanced photography class, using my digital camera.) at home. I can hold the negatives up to the light and squint at them or use a light board and handheld magnifying lens to peer at them--but there is no way I can tell exactly what image I have captured. Fuzzy, out of shadow, blurred edges, sometimes sharp and crisp--I have learned more patience that I ever wanted this semester.
Usually I go to use the lab with a feeling of excitement for the discoveries that I will be able to make. Today, though, I haven't seen Brent since he prayed over me and left for work that morning. Nathan has had a traumatic, stressful day--with mid-term exams coming in just a few days that he needs to, but can't, study for, when his mind and spirit have been stretched so tightly with blood and death and disappointment. I didn't have time to prepare dinner for Brent. He will come home to a place where Nathan is still uneasy and there is no one ready and waiting just for him after a long, emotional day at work and then a funeral and then back to work.
The lab is quiet--only three and then four and then three of us in the dark room. Out of three hours work and dozens of prints made, I get 4 or 5 good images to take home with me. I call to tell Brent that I am on my way home.
I pull up in the driveway. Nathan and Brent have both had full, stressful days. There is a dead squirrel wrapped up in a towel placed in a quiet corner of the front porch. Animal Control might want to see the body if there is any possibility of rabies or sickness in animals in that area--so the tiny corpse awaits burial (and me) at home.
I open the garage door from the car and gather my supplies to go inside. As I get close to the garage, Brent comes out and gathers me in his arms and lifts me up, carrying me inside. He is so glad to see me, so glad that I am OK and that I had a good time at the lab. I wonder that he doesn't resent me--him having to work all day and then come home to an empty kitchen and a son still slightly dazed by the events of the last 12 hours. He tells me that he is so glad that I have found something that I love doing--especially something that doesn't endanger my health. He reminds me that usually my hobbies include falling from horses or falling over my roller blades or falling out of trees. Finally I have found something that lets me enjoy myself with my feet "on the ground."
It was a full day, yesterday.
And then today . . . no blood, no death, with time to make dinner, time to run errands. From a few hours over-filled with so much emotion to a day filled with a long, easy walk around the lake park with two familiar dogs, calm study with Nathan, quiet petting quiet bunnies--a slow go around the block with Nathan in roller blades--during which I do not fall or bleed or hurt.
It is late. Much later than I wanted to be up. Tomorrow I need to be at the Volvo dealership at 7:30 am so that they can replace the oxygen sensor that was ordered and arrived two days ago. Then I will need to go and take notes for Nathan in Chemistry--and I still need to see what bills have come due. Today seems like yesterday couldn't have been all that it was. But it was. And now it is past.
That is why I write . . . to remember yesterday's events that, today, appear so impossible. It is like the pictures I take--images from yesterdays that I will never be able to see unless I take the time and make the effort to develop, preserve and protect what surrounded me--if only for (and from) a moment.
