It is not possible, I thought, that the dead could be resurrected. This February proved me wrong. He died in September 2002. As his DNA decayed, his seed brutally planted in a child, blossomed. I do not know how beauty can be birthed by brutality. But I know it can. I met it recently. It looks like me. Resurrection is no small matter. Complicated grief mixed with new life is a sticky sort of sorrow, a residue of ruin that is resistant to the normal course of laundering.
I visited beauty recently. She lives as far as the land goes west in an equally beautiful part of this country. She is beloved, bright, and bashful. She now knows, but she has never known. For this I am grateful. Gratuitous gifts.
Speaking of laundry… I recently did two sets of sheets in the same load. They tangled around each other and thumped abnormally loud in the washing machine. Since that time, the wash seemed to get stuck in a spin cycle that took hours to complete. What should have been quick and clean became prolonged and unduly heavy.
This week found me in a seriously stuck in the spin cycle. The unbalanced load of life just about did me in. I had fallen ill; had a serious health threat; a devastating blow from a close friend; I read the comments (NEVER read the comments) on a scathing article about me, and my youngest turned ten (the age I was when my unbalanced/shaky world fell apart). I am still collecting myself.
Incidentally, my washing machine was torn apart this weekend by the man in the work boots. I love the feet in those boots, those hands, and that man. A full twelve hours of dissection and he found that at the very back of the machine was a bracket that broke from the unbalanced load. The lack of stability was what caused the malfunction of the regular rinse and spin cycle.
Look, I’ll tell you, this recovery journey has times when life throws at you an unbalanced load that you try to wash, but something inside, something small, something stabilizing, something deep, something out of reach, snaps, and lo and behold you are stuck in the spin cycle.
It takes patience, skill, time, and a careful technician to set things to a stable spin again.