Our plan was to take the week he was unable to work and go for one last hoorah before this kid causes me to become the biggest party pooper ever. So we got online and began google traveling, vacation planning, finding flights and beach lodging...and got so discouraged over the cost of a last hoorah we have pretty much decided to not take one after all. Then we pictured all the driving and flying we would have to do to get to a beach, and started to feel the blood pressure rise. Honestly, what we would most like to do is a mountain bike vacation in the desert, but for reasons that become more obvious by the day, it is probably safest for me to limit my risk of falling by biking on even surfaces for a while. So apparently our last hoorah will be a staycation, perhaps several small road trips, one to Denver, maybe, to do a bit of resupplying and stay in a hotel for a night and pretend we are in an exciting location. After all, it really is relaxing for us to hang out together in this lovely house with it's lovely memories in this lovely, peaceful valley, watching the mist lift in the mornings and the sky tuck us in by throwing blankets of color over us in the evenings, watching the pheasants strut through the yard and man the revolving door for the dogs and laugh at the nervous antics of the chickens and the kittens who think life outside the patio door, rolling and flopping and stealthy attacks on the big cats, it a pretty good time. At night, when we walk outside into the crisp night air, coyotes sing to us and cows bawl in the distance and stars wink brilliant specks of white light. Honestly, a week in Ladder Creek Valley, hiding from normal life, isn't the worst thing. We no longer have a life in which, in order to be able to not get called into work, we have to physically remove ourselves from the vicinity of work. Now we can leave work at work and just be home when we are home.
And home is such a comforting place right now. I still feel Grandpa and Grandma here, I still feel their happiness in the fact that I am loving this shelter they built. I love that, eight years later, a few things are still exactly as they left them. The community around me, the area, the towns, the wind and weather, there is much I would change if I could. But this 80 acres of grass and homestead, house, shop, and barn, it's peaceful setting embraced by arms of bluff and valley, dotted with scattered groves of trees and happy cows and horses, emerald in the spring and brown in the summer and down in the bottom where the wind is less severe, this place I love and this place is what my soul needs right now. Maybe not forever, maybe someday we will find this feeling someplace else- who knows? But it was waiting for me to come home to it and now that I am here, it loves me and I love it and neither of us wants to see the other go.
I have to be honest, I miss so much about the mountains- the healthy people, a mindset open to change and progress, a lack of judgement and an understanding that each person must find their own path. I once lived in a place people escaped to while they found their own path, a place people went to gain perspective, and a place where process was more important than result. I used to be surrounded by people who embraced diversity and thought not taking one's self seriously was an essential life skill. People who ski in speedos, bike in snowpants, and above all, want to get above it all. Where Saucer Boy Shane McConkey (RIP) is a loved and much emulated hero, still mourned by many, as are the other well known and loved athletes who took their sport seriously, themselves less so, and who went too far and sacrificed life for adrenaline, embodying the mindset of those who believe growing old is inevitable, but growing up is optional.
I miss living where cabin fever giving way to spring fever generates bizarre cures.
And where bicycles are revered, well loved, well used, lovingly decorated, and people actually ride them, as opposed to letting them rust in the backyard or garage.
I don't miss the vacationers who also populated where I used to live- I do, but I don't. I miss the ones who came to enjoy the beautiful place and play hard and enjoy life there during a break from their own normal routines, but I don't miss the entitled mindset of people who did not understand the mountain mindset. I don't miss the angry teenagers with something to prove, endangering others on the mountain with their cocky arrogance. I don't miss the superiority of those who feel they have earned special rights by living there. And I don't miss the things we had to do to make the amount of money it took to live there.
And here, I love how days drip past like molasses, oozing from future to past slowly enough for us to watch their metamorphosis- sunrises and sunsets become days, days become seasons, and somehow, suddenly they come around again without any clear differentiation- just one day we notice they are gone and replaced by another. Days are long and full and exhausting, and the fact that every day is the same is both wonderful and depressing. Wonderful when we remember the mad rising tide of anger and demand we were always only a step ahead of, how easily the smallest missed detail could cost our company thousands in lost future bookings, how the words of our guests cut us when they accused us of trying to rip them off on a daily basis no matter how well we thought we were doing our job. How our faith in humanity suffered by constantly feeling taken advantage of by guests wanting a vacation but not wanting to spend the money and constantly looking for reasons for a refund. How between ice dams and icy walkways and moisture-damaged decks and steps we could never stay on top of and snow-loaded roofs, we always feared we were just one incident away from lawsuit. All things that Ladder Creek Valley knows nothing of. Instead of worry and constant pressure to do better, we just do. And live. Long hours of doing and living. The cows and their manure do not make demands on Bobby, and in a year, only two farmers and one dusted-out homeowner have gotten irate. Those incidents have caused all of his stress reactions to go through the roof because of his former life of being yelled at on a daily basis, but three bad days out of 365 is really not so bad at all. The rest of his time, he is either bouncing through fields or broken down, and either way, he just deals with it and moves on. He refuses to grow his business beyond what he can do on his own because the memory of managing employees is still too fresh and he is enjoying the luxury of being a one man business. Sure, the money is less, but so is the headache, and right now, we are enjoying living in the moment, being comfortable and happy and managing our sources of stress.
Some of us manage it more efficiently than others...
The end of the day is my favorite time, because not only do we get an almost daily light show, I also get a stinky, hungry boy home from his long day in his truck.
And in Colorado, I would have had to pay for my produce with actual money instead of my own hard work, and would have had to eat food that someone else had grown. Which has started to feel incredibly wrong to me, as I have begun to feel empowered by the fact that we were fed this summer by the work of my own hands.
Plus, a benefit of a slow life are the impromptu and random things one finds one's self doing- things like a plein-air lesson in sketching multi-angle perspective and vanishing points with two little aspiring artists.
As the seasons change and in my old life, I would have been waiting anxiously for the snow to fall, to feel the crunch of it under my boots, to be whisked to the top of a mountain to glide exhilarated turns down to the bottom, in my new life I draw blankets around me and sip hot liquids and do dishes and procrastinate turning the tomatoes ripening in my basement (where several hundred of them were taken just before the first frost last week) into tomato sauce and do a double take every time I pass a mirror and a pot-bellied stranger flashes through my periphery. I don't feel very pregnant right now, so I tend t forget that I definitely am beginning to look it. I forget that my shirts do not willingly meet my pants in the front anymore and several inches of pasty skin tends to fall out. The nausea and food aversions and crappy energy levels are a thing of the past- I feel myself buzzing with good health sometimes, the extra blood in my body oxygenating me, making me feel light and bubbly and awash in the best energy. Years of yoga and focusing on feeling the blood course through me, feeling the tingle of it just under my skin as I focus on how my body moves and adjusts has me vaguely aware of the sensation constantly now that it is heightened- my fingertips tingle and throb and twitch with ready reflexes. The veins and arteries in my head, neck, stomach, and legs throb with life and energy and I really feel like a million bucks. I know this is the honeymoon phase of being pregnant, when my body is coursing with tough-girl hormones, relaxin is making me extra flexible, and pain signals are being muted, while my heart and lungs have yet to be crowded to the point of making me feel weak and easily exhausted. Mentally, I am still panicking a bit over the fact that I am housing a developing life that is not promised me, that nothing in life is ever a given and that the things we love the most we sometimes lose the soonest, and the awareness that she who has much also has much to lose, but physically, I feel like a million bucks. I have to admit, I did not see that coming. I feel as though there is nothing I cannot do right now, at least until my body recognizes it's own limits and shuts me down. Which is why I find myself forgetting I am pregnant and imagining things for this winter that do not involve being great with child, things like road trips and ski trips and bike trips, that I suddenly remember won't be happening for at least a year, when my body, and then my boobs, are my own again.
It was actually perfect timing for my friends from Portland, Don and Rochelle, to bike through Kansas on their way from Oregon to Virginia. I met them in eastern Colorado, and we biked together for a day through cool breeze and bright sunshine on the shoulder of Highway 96 for 52 miles, back to my hometown of Leoti. I had only committed to a few miles, a wait-and-see sort of thing, but a few miles came and went and fifty miles later, I was still feeling strong. Of course, I had no gear, while they had many pounds of gear, but they had 2,000 miles behind them, so my weenie legs and their steely ones kept up with each other. It was a good, good day, a highlight for me because I felt more like my old self than I had in a year- just three good friends, bikes and breeze, peaceful solitude and a leisurely tempo. Of course, that night, the tendons connecting my kneecaps to my quad muscles announced themselves in the form of burning pain at the slightest movement, pain I have never felt before, and I remembered the way things tend to stretch unusually far during pregnancy and had to wonder if that might have been the cause. I have never had the experience of not feeling even the slightest twinge of pain while active, only to have it all hit at once several hours later. I felt a bit betrayed by my body, because I had already had this chat with it- I will stop as soon as you tell me to. I promise. Just say the word, give me a signal, a twinge, a pain, a contraction, and my word is my bond, I will not ask more of you, but will stop and call my ride. And it still let me feel on top of the world, out there on top of my bike, only to have me writhing in pain later that night, the slightest movement sending burning bolts up my legs. Finally, about 3:00 a.m., I got up and dug through the medicine drawer until I found two free IcyHot patches given to me as a free sample, stuck them to my legs, and lay there shivering as they cooled and numbed. And then finally slept.
And by the way, before you judge, I have done my research. Asked my physician. The only physical risk of biking while five months pregnant is the fall risk. Trust me, I wouldn't be doing it if there were significant risk involved. But because I have spent so many hundreds of hours on a bike saddle, I actually feel more confidant there than on my feet, believe it or not. My feet stumble and trip and send me sprawling more often than I care to admit, but my bike almost always performs just the way I ask it to. Perhaps I am more alert on my bike and this is why I feel safer there, I don't know. It also eases the pain on my joints and lower back caused by a shifting center of gravity. In America, the land of desk chairs and cars, doughnuts and TV, we see biking as a bit extreme in a lot of areas, but there are places in which it is the only form of transportation and considered safer for a pregnant woman, with it's slow pace and helmets, than freeways in which cars hurtle 70 mph, missing each other by mere feet and split seconds. Someday, I will live in one of those places. I will bike to the grocery store and our kid will bike to school and we will speak the language of bike, not car. Someday. In the meantime, I have tilted my handlebars up on the good old Bianchi, which makes my shoulders and back sigh with relief, and ride the dirt with my puppies, who nearly turn themselves inside out with joy at the mere mention of the words, "bike ride." I hope this kid loves our lifestyle as much as our dogs do.
And speaking of, this kid now has a gender. He is, in fact, a he. We have been trying not to refer to him as a "he" all this time, even though we were convinced that there was nothing that felt feminine about him as he kicked and tumbled, and even as we felt better equipped to handle ruffles and dolls and an eventual hormonal roller coaster than a tendency to engage in self destructive behavior, climb on things and smash small animals...he was always going to be a boy. And now that we know that he is, I have to admit that it is a boy who will fit our lifestyle the best. And that even as I imagined a girl, I always saw a girl like myself and most of the girls I get along with the best- the more masculine ones who, while soft and pretty, kick butt and scare the crap out of insecure men and women alike. Play hard. Play dirty. Work hard. Don't mind some mud and grease. So perhaps all I wanted was a little me, and may have spent a lifetime shaming a girlie little princess into total confusion and self doubt to make her that way, in spite of who she really was. At the same time, I am aware of the fact that being a boy may not mean this child is a frog-smashing hellion- he may be into dance and music and keeping his nails clean. And that is okay. More than okay. Whatever he loves and whatever he is about, it is important to me, above all, to make sure that he sees the world and accepts and loves all who are in it and learns that causing others pain is unnecessary. I dream of raising a son who respects life and others and is confidant enough in himself that he never feels the need to hurt. An that is your daily dose of idealism...may we never lose it.
No comments:
Post a Comment