Two days ago I fell through the ceiling with a black cat under one arm, screaming and shouting "shit, shit, shit!" as my left leg shot through pink insulation and chalky sheetrock.
The Old Year had not ended well nor the New Year begun well.
Just as last year, I celebrated the Christmas season feeling very unwell. Last year, it was ear problems, this year a very nasty cold that led to fever, chills, and weird dreams of Mama cows and baby calves trying to escape a flood in Papa and Grandma Benton's East Gate prairie farmyard . Both the Mama cows and calves sank beneath the muddy waters of that dream, just as I was sinking in a depression of illness.
But perhaps like March, a year that begins ill and blustering will transform to zephyr breezes and happy health.
Two days ago, for the first time in over a week, I felt as if I might actually get well. Then Pluto followed me up into the attic, where I was storing Christmas decorations, and instead of closing the cat in the attic until he was ready to come down of his own accord, I determined to catch him. Fortunately, the hole I knocked in the ceiling is where we might put in an attic fan, and also, fortunately, I suffered only from the first initial fright and later a little tenderness in bruising.
Every New Year brings lessons in life, some of which I have to learn over and over again:
- Allow a cat his way, for he knows it and he's determined to follow it.
- Don't travel at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Enjoy the seasons in one's own small circle, in one's own local community. Traveling is for business, leisure(!) vacations, and emergencies.
- Don't read melancholy biographies of people who suffer from depression and illness when one is depressed and ill.
When Tom and I were looking at used books at The Eagle's Nest in North Decatur just before Christmas, I found a pocket-sized, Oxford University Press World Classics, 1919-reprint of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, for $33, and I asked Tom to purchase it for me as a Christmas present--which he did, glad to have his shopping decisions so easily made. Elizabeth Gaskell is one of my favorite nineteenth-century writers, and I had been wanting to read this biography for quite some time. Also, I had just purchased for a gift for Mary-Margaret a book which contained novels by the three Bronte sisters: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.
But a book on the lives of the Brontes--no matter how wonderfully written--does not make for cheerful reading, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the literary merit of the biography and the voyeurism of reading extracts from Charlotte Bronte's letters, the sad details of the lives of these promising young women who died so young deepened the melancholia I was feeling already from my own illness. Unfortunately, fairy tales don't interest me at this age, anyway, so there was no hope for the melancholia until the fever lifted and the cough dissipated. ("Is this how a consumptive feels?" I thought as I hacked and coughed and heaped covers over my shivering body, night after night.)
But now I've arisen from the invalid's bed, I've fallen from the ceiling, and I've captured the black cat who sometimes does indeed come when his name is called. I've spent a few leisurely minutes today reading poems and essays from Mary Oliver's Blue Iris: Poems and Essays and have recorded from an essay my first quotation for the year: "For flowers, like people and birds, are travelers, and will leave a garden if they can."
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