trying

I was up until two in the morning, staring and worrying on the couch with the cat curled right up against me. His steady, even purring was the only thing that kept me from pacing, from breaking things.

I got word last night that my brother yells, at himself, alone in his apartment, at all hours. In a sense, this is not strange. After ten years on the street and a lifetime of struggling with schizoid personality disorder, one might yell. At oneself, or at another person one feels is present. Or perhaps even at god. Why not? Why not yell at god? I am often tempted to.

And so he yells, and it sounds scary. And it happens in the middle of the night or early in the morning. And the people in his building don't know what to do. And you know what? I don't know what to do either.

I lost my brother for a long time. He was my childhood friend; he was, in many ways, my childhood. And he absorbed, let's say, a special amount of the darkness of a wounded family system. And this propensity of his--to absorb damage and grief--led him, as it has so many millions of human souls in this broken country, to a life on the streets, in and out of dysfunctional institutional settings, to nearly die I have no idea how many times.

And then after 10 years we spoke again. And he told me parts of his story; the rest I could imagine. My brothers and sisters and I--still struggling in our own ways to pay the bills, to keep it together--wanted to help him. We felt that this was what a family was for. And we had love, as well, in our family, underneath everything. Love, but no money.

So for the last two years we've been trying. Trying to find my brother the things he needs, trying to keep him fed and housed and warm and safe. We've been trying imperfectly, and with an edge of desperation, too. Because, strangely, the system that nearly killed him still has so little to offer in the way of help.  You would almost think they were trying to kill him on purpose.

And they say he's paranoid.

The streets my brother slept on all those years are the streets of the city where Kurt Vonnegut was born and grew up. Vonnegut loved to quote his son Mark, who documented his own personal experience with a schizoid break in the book "Eden Express," and the quote of his son's that Vonnegut returns to is this: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

So, we're trying. Be patient.

better today

I think we have become so used to being mistreated, disrespected by property owners that we have come to expect it.

Turns out the situation is not that bad. All we have to do is hook certain pipes into the main system and the problem will mostly go away. A misunderstanding, soon corrected.

And yet, is it surprising that anyone in this country, any working class renter in this excuse for a culture, would assume anything but the worst of a landlord? We are trained by unbelievable experiences to be mistrustful, wary.

And yet, today I feel better. At least for the moment. I'm packing some things up for a night at the new place. We'll build a fire, have some hot food, look at the stars, plan our garden, then curl up on the futon mat on the floor for a long sleep. In the morning, buy parts, do some digging, and fix our problem.

septic and antiseptic

My sister reminded me yesterday that when we around 11 and 12 years old, respectively, the septic drain field at our house rose up, turning the yard into a wretched marshy swamp. I believe I had blocked this memory but the smell of that time is undoubtedly the smell of this house we're supposed to be moving into next week. And that explains why my heart felt so heavy in my chest on Sunday watching J try to fix things. There is a very old wound there, a fear that no amount of effort by anyone will ever fix anything.

Septic tank disasters comprise one variety of disaster familiar from my childhood. There is no question that it was always something with us--clogged pipes, broken-down cars, holes in walls, children falling through attic ceilings. A steady stream of expensive damages we could never afford to address. My father had a gift for dramatic despair, a way of making each fresh challenge seem totally insurmountable. Oh my, how such an attitude sinks into a developing child's personality. Hopelessness is wired into my bones. Bless his heart, as they say, it was wired into my father's bones too.

J calls with an update from the landlady. She is of the hands-off variety; lives out of state and has ignored our communications about the septic system problem for three days straight. At last, a casual message advising us to put a bucket under the kitchen sink and re-direct the overflow from the washing machine into a drain we're building in the back for rainwater from the gutters. We like a project but this is infuriating advice. Unsanitary, illegal, and no kind of long term solution.

Just over a week ago, we saw this house and felt so happy, felt like we belonged there. It meant at last we had found our escape from town, a town that increasingly holds nothing for us. We want only a little piece of land to cultivate, to work hard all day and sit by a fire at night looking at stars. This is not poetry or fantasy. It's a simple, concrete, sincere wish. And it is the birthright of human beings. Some dignity. Some dignity.

Now, the familiar old septic smell permeates everything, tugging on the barbed wires of defeat laced through the joints of my body. These are old feelings, these are perhaps not even my feelings, but they live in me. They are me, it seems.

My mother has developed over the years an increasing need to sanitize her surroundings. She is a delightful person, with a warm bubbling laugh that infects everyone near her, and she applies this laughter to herself freely. Even as she reaches for the hand sanitizer for the twentieth time in an hour or insists on hitting the chair you are about to sit on with a quick spritz of Lysol, she laughs at herself. She knows this is absurd, but she can't help it.

I am sure my mother's mania for antiseptic spaces is a reaction to the messiness and chaos of her young womanhood and middle age--the childhood I remember of constant impending disaster, mess and wreckage. Insurmountable problems. And I wonder too if it is not some kind of expression of hope--of a belief that what is worthless or useless can in fact be wiped away. That we can give ourselves a new start a thousand times a day.

I am nervous about this move. How could I fail to be? Strange old echoes surfacing. My anxiety could overcome me, as it used to my father, but what would be the point? Bless his heart.

Bless mine.

back to the beginning

Moving. Back to the country after more than twenty years of mostly avoiding it. As an adolescent and teenager, I and my several siblings and mother had all felt stranded in the country. We lived a mile from the nearest convenience store, twenty miles from school and church. We could never walk or bike to our friends' houses. My socially adept mother's gift of gab was wasted on a house full of resentful children.

I have spent my adult life in towns and cities, have never had a driver's license. I have to get one now, in my mid-thirties, so I won't be stranded far from town. But don't I want to be stranded, away from the things of man? Isn't that really what this decision is about?

I watched J plunge the overflow for the septic tank for half an hour yesterday, and the water from just one load of laundry still wouldn't budge. It poured out the top of the pipe and oozed into the surrounding mud, finding its way into the dug-out basement. The basement smells of the dampest things.

Later, we struggled to lift the toilet off of the insecure platform from which it wobbled. I had leaned against the tank briefly while cleaning that room and the whole thing lifted off the floor. Wasn't expecting that. Missing bolts and rings. We had to pull it out and set it on top of some cardboard in the bathtub. As we hunched over the floor plumbing, determining sizes of parts we needed, J tapped a plastic ring to show where the problem was and sent a shower of definitely unclean moisture spattering over my bare leg.

One day we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

We came back to this house, in town, where we're still living for the next week. Everything is different. I hear a car zip past every few seconds. I feel the presence of people as an invisible weight all around me. All their grief and confusion and need. My own grief feels heavier here, and I can't release it through the labor of my hands.

Two nights ago we built a fire in our new front yard. We sat there, watching it, saying little. Moment by moment I could feel the anxiety leaving me, like a candle melting. The red wax ran from my chest to the earth around me, which so easily absorbs everything.