Ginger Snapped

It's early, much earlier than she usually arises. Work first, then a promise to keep. She tiptoes out of her office after the words are written, and steps into the first Gingerbread Boy's room. He's sitting in the armchair in the dark, wide awake already. "It's time, honey." She tiptoes down the hall to the other Gingerbread Boy's room. He's zonked. She hates to wake him, but she promised she would. She pats his arm, rubs his cheek, whispers into his small ear. "It's starting soon." His eyelids flutter while his brother watches from beside the bed. They follow her to the family room, where they wrap up in blankets in the chill spring air and watch the festivities over blueberry muffins and orange juice with pulp. So many questions they have for her, about queens and castles and cathedrals, about priests and promises, as they sit there snuggled up by her side. She answers them as best as she can, plunging into her memories of her...

Sadness spreads like a sower scattering seeds. The seeds find fertile ground in her and land there, burrowing into her skin, into the deep down places where they sprout, nurtured unwittingly by blood and bone. Shoots spread forth growing both inward and outward, and she wonders if she will ever be able to root them all out. It is like pulling at a dandelion only to have stem detach from root and downy fluff fly off, enabling dozens more dandelions to take root. There is no cause for the sadness; it just is, like cold in winter, like leaves in fall, like rain in April. It sits there, within her, growing bigger each day, a pregnancy gone horribly wrong, and she feels the shame of it. But a breeze blows by, bringing different seeds, renegade seeds, hopeful seeds. They sprout in the midst of all the sadness; they choke it out. When she looks out the window today, she realizes that the world around her is greening. She decides that she will too. She will choose joy.

I eat my sadness for breakfast, Spread it on my bread like butter, I drink it down, a bitter juice swilling in my soul Cutting a hole. It hovers over me, smothering. No welcomed guardian angel but a constant comrade nonetheless as I dress. I bind it with letters, written in round loops of ink Sink it under an ocean of crossed t's  and a dotted i I sigh. But it slips away Smoke and fog swirls And I breathe it in morning and night And it weighs me down  A corpus frown I sink my feet into it I put on my vest It holds me like mud  or quicksand or water. Its enduring daughter.

Jessica Leader has generously offered to donate $1 to the Louisville, Kentucky library for each comment she gets on her blog this week. She asked me to guest post there today. You can see the post and comment  here .

She realized today that she very well might be in the middle of her life. Not the mid-life crisis middle--just the middle. One-half. The mid-point. The watershed. The thought makes her pause. She calculates quickly, numbers flying through her mind. Could she have already passed it? What if she was already on the other side of the hill? If she already passed it, what had she been doing? Was it something important? What if she had passed her mid-point doing something mundane like laundry? Or filing her nails? Filing her bills? Making spinach ravioli? At what point was she halfway through? Last week? Or last month? She knows that there's no answer here, that no one knows the length of her days, but still. The thought that she's already passed the mid-point stays with her. If the average life expectancy is 78, she's already there. But maybe she comes from hearty stock. Maybe she's got good long genes in her. Heaven knows, she didn't get good long legs from her gen...

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