Some days are hard days, lost days where I feel I belong nowhere. They usually occur the day after I go out and visit my mother, who has Alzheimer’s. The push with which I begin the week stops still that day I visit, and the next day is hard. I sat out in my back deck recently, feeling things that don’t feel good, straining to remember various spiritual mantras, this too will pass, etc., and I remembered the one about finding things to be grateful about. This day, it seemed there were only things very small: 7 limes on the lime tree, a slit in the agapantha pod promising the purple blossom would show eventually, and carpenter bees, who love the cedar trim on the garage, and every spring lumber in and drill the perfect little holes in which they live. I like watching these bees. They’re big, but they are peaceful. They remind me of sightless helicopters when they come home to their hole, humming around it, many false forays before somehow they climb in.
False forays, like this day when I can’t find meaning in my life. I can’t find the entrance to my inner home. I can’t summons passion, but counting the limes, seeing the agapantha, the bees, quietens discontent enough to go inside and sit down to write at these stories I make up about a family that lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Joy cometh in the morning, the prophets say, and by afternoon, the mood has passed. There isn’t joy, but there isn’t despair. I guess our lives are designs only seen later. My mother’s life has impacted many, her pebble thrown into a pond, the ripple outward. Does the ripple stop? For I am impacted by her, and I impact others who impact, on and on it goes. The hum of bees comforts enough to bear all I don’t understand. And I know joy comes some mornings.
Karleen Koen — writing life 