I'm haunted by the past and its linear opposite, the future.
It's not just that I'm writing a book now that has ghostly encounters. That's fun, and I delight in those spectral characters, but they have another message for me. And isn't that why those of us who are afflicted with the writing bug do it? Writing stories gives me a chance to sneak up on myself and eavesdrop on what I'm thinking.
When I was much younger and life stretched before me almost into infinity, I filled steno notebooks with angst and questionable poetry. The past was whatever someone had said about me at school the day before. The future harkened freedom from the bondage of obligation to parents and lessons. The present inched by with the creeping pace of an ant's attempt to cross our enormous stone patio. I didn't have the patience to watch it to completion and had to dance off to find other amusement.
Now I find myself in this day being showered by whispers from the past --- not my past, but further back, often beyond living memory. Every room in our house contains books, words written mainly by people who no longer walk the earth. Every time I have a new realization or insight, it seems, I find that a long-dead author brought it to life decades or centuries before I was born.
That doesn't diminish my own revelation. After all, no matter how many youtube videos I watch, I'm not going to learn how to fix the kitchen sink until I get down there with a wrench and do it. I bring my unique life experiences to each day, each thought. We all do. Right now I just have more time to indulge them.
Next month I have the opportunity to resolve a hip problem I've dealt with all my life. It never got bad enough for intervention before, but I've accommodated it since I was in short dresses and patent leather shoes. After 65 years I've worn it plumb out! Now I get a new one.
As I anticipate this event, it makes me think about all the women in my family who went before me. I do that frequently anyway, but this is especially poignant because I feel like I'm joining their ranks. Replacing a hip makes me feel old in a whole new way. I envision them, mother, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, aunts, and great-aunts. I've known most of them personally and have very clear memories and impressions of them. I can hear their voices and I listen to the admonishments and encouragements they whisper.
It's strange to me that what might seem a calamity to one person makes me feel like I'm part of the ebb and flow of life. I belong. I'm in the current, holding my place, fulfilling my position in the order of things. I'll get through this with its attendant pain and subsequent renewal, and it will amount to one more badge on my Girl Scout sash, one more milestone completed.
Permanence. Transience. What feels durable and constant today inevitably becomes mutable later. The tension between those states of being, finely balanced, is what keeps me set in the moment.
Thank you, Ava, Ida, Anna, Blanch, Mabel, Nancy, Margaret, Marjorie, Harriet, Phyllis. I love your company along the path.
