what is a flight nurse

Now that I cannot walk my life has changed. I am so tired of lying on the pull-out loveseat in this basement apartment, looking up through the window at the tip-top green leaves of my neighbor's trees.

At least I can see trees.


Poor Hanna is bored and I do not blame her, so am I, in my fourth week now and still I can't stand on my own two feet.

How quickly the illusion of independence is shattered. How frightening to realize I am one bad step away from being completely dependent on the generosity of others. For nearly a month now I can't cook, or shower, or step out of this basement apartment and into the world without someone else by my side. I am simultaneously shame, knowing that I need not feel shame, frustration, despair, perseverance, and gratitude.  


I have lost all of the muscles in my right leg. Yes and I cried about it. I remember acutely coming back from my lung's collapse, retching on the side of the road the first time I tried to run. I told myself then I would never stop running, so that I would never have to come back again. Well here I am.

The black brace that has become my constant fashion accessory gapes around my atrophied calf. My right thigh spreads across the seat beneath me while my left quad holds firm. I know that it's just muscle, and I also know what it meant for me to build that muscle in the first place, after they told me I would never run again. And so I despair, and I know that there is no need for despair.


I am scared of camping amidst the throngs this weekend. I had been looking forward to it all year and now I find myself shrinking from it. Already I have pushed my comfort zone so much, teetering on my crutches into spaces and groups I do not know. Can I do it again, this time when porta potties are involved?

Of course I can do it again. Of course I can, and I will, because they told me I could not, and here I am. And here I will be, again and again, because even when my leg is atrophied I always have strength within me.

This conversation is so good I need to put the link somewhere I will remember it

https://tricycle.org/magazine/understand-realize-give-develop/

whiskey ginger (part II)

I don't think I'm pretty, but I know that I am beautiful.


I thought that adopting a dog would save me, but in reality I think I am saving her.


The divorced woman with the dyed red hair is establishing her independence.



I am familiar with the changing of the seasons, but here the environment changes by the hour. This morning it quickly rose past 80 degrees. This early afternoon it became cool, and cloudy, and pebbles of hail dropped from the sky. Later in the afternoon it thundered and rained. Then it grew sunny again, and Hanna and I took to the trails. There we found a pond, nearly four feet deep and at least 15 wide. It was not there last week and, I suspect, if it stops raining for a few days it will be gone by the weekend. Here, you are forced to understand the constancy of change. Here, you are forced to confront that everything is fleeting.




If you could only see how big the squash and the cauliflower and the arugula have grown. The squash died back twice in the early season, the result of unpredictable mountain frosts, and I firmly believe that me telling them I believe in them, over and over again, is what brought them back to life. You are free to disagree but I know belief manifests miracles. For weeks I have been dining on salads and kale sauteed in coconut milk, walking home every night from the garden with bouquets of greens.


We named her Hanna for the river, Big Suskie, forever one of the places I can call my home.


I do not miss as much as I thought I would, and for that I feel both shame and understanding. I didn't even realize how much I was not myself. I have started pronouncing my name differently when introducing new people into my life.

There is a feather tattooed on my ribs. It is temporary, a test. When I find the right artist--a woman who specializes in watercolor designs, who believes that belief manifests miracles--I will know where I want it and what it will be. So far I am considering my rib cage, my left forearm, and the inside of my left ankle. It will be a great blue heron or Maine meadow lupines or a lodgepole pine or the V with the calla lily I designed when I was 23. Cast your votes.


In BUTI yoga I hesitated to strip down to my sports bra, and then I remembered I'm 30. I don't have time for this shit. I pulled off my shirt and I twisted and sweated in front of women I know and women I don't. I did it again the next time, and the next. In September I will show up to the training in short shorts and a blue-strapped sports bra, and I'll just let 'er rip.


I spent months after the election in a state of abject despair. I had never felt that hopeless or defeated in my life, except for maybe when I was trying to kill myself. Now I am seeing the horror and I am calling its bluff. It will never be as big as I know my love can be. Maybe we only have a few more years but mark my words I'm going to be a force of nature for as long as I'm here.


My family and I played a lot of poker while they were in town. I didn't win very often, but I think my brother appreciated my bravado--bluffing to high heaven and tossing in all my chips--and the merest hint that he might like or appreciate or even respect me is enough for me to have won. I don't know if my siblings will ever Know how much I love them, and I will never stop anyway.


Every night a different doughnut.

Wilson sits at the window staring, alert to each movement and sound. He is braver with Hanna here: staying in the living room when it thunders, walking up to the fan pointed at the wet-drying rug and pressing his nose against the slats, his 50-pound pal right behind him.


On days like today all it takes to shake me out of a bad mood is a clump of bright yellow wildflowers growing up out of the high desert trail.

I am so grateful to get to be alone. Oh it feels good to be back.

"On the Beach at Night Alone" by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.