Life in the trailer park shadows

 

Howdy, Blogbots, all seven of you. How is it going? It's Sunday again. I don't have much to report on the Occupy an Apartment front. I'm still waiting for more data before I initiate Operation Freakout. Meanwhile, I take each day as it comes. Daily, it seems, I'm gobsmacked by some new Tucson experience. 

Last week I mentioned I saw a tarantula crossing the road. (There's a joke there somewhere, see if you can find it.) Two nights ago, around midnight, I had the front door open to entice cooler air into the trailer after a heavy downpour. I heard footsteps crunching in the gravel outside. I thought, who would be out on the gravel at this time of night? Some creepy neighbor, perhaps? I peered out the window and saw a shadowy creature moving between the trailers. Hmm, I thought, is that a dog? As the animal moved slowly across the path by the front porch, I saw the unmistakable outline of a javelina strolling next to the neighbor's carport. 

This monsoon is apparently already one for the record books. We have received over five inches of rain since June 15; monsoon officially ends September 30. These almost-daily thunderstorms are unsettling. As long as the metal roofs and awnings hold, we'll be okay, but the clamor of wind, rain, and thunder is deafening. I keep dreaming a freight train is coming through the living room. 

Up till now, I've learned to keep the blinds drawn to ward off the desert sun. My mole-like eyes are adapting to life in gloomy shadows. Today's gloom, however, was because of an enormous rain cloud sitting over much of southern Arizona. This cloud emitted a purposeful drenching downpour from a pure white sky. Being from the Pacific Northwest, I'm used to that sort of sky. It's the kind of sky that makes you think, Wow, the mothership is squatting over me, dumping buckets with no end in sight—guess I'll stay indoors today. I have the local NWS radar bookmarked in my browser. I check it more often than I check email. Today, on the radar, a huge solid splat of green obliterated Tucson. There it sat, for hours. 

The desert mantra is turnaround, don't drown. Some roads in outlying areas cross normally dry washes. During and after rainstorms, those washes fill up with fast-moving water, which flows through various channels toward the Rillito River, which flows west to the Santa Cruz River. Almost the entire state of Arizona has been under a flash flood warning for a few days. After particularly violent storms, my phone lights up with obnoxious emergency alerts, day or night.

This morning I checked the radar and during a lull, I walked over to see how the Rillito River was doing. Meaning, how much water was flowing along its wide tree-filled channel. I saw more water than I did the last time I looked a couple days ago but not close to full. The sound of the rushing water was eerie, though. The water is the color of milk chocolate, that cruddy stuff you eat only if you can't get ahold of any 85%+ cacao. Medicinal chocolate, yum. I don't buy chocolate of any kind, because I can't eat only one square—I'm an all-or-nothing kind of chocolate eater.

Anyway, the floodwater is an unappetizing brown, but that's not the memorable part. That water moves fast. It is not fooling around. It would transport you into the next county before you could catch a breath. It would probably take your car too, if you were stupid enough to drive through one of those washes. Which apparently drivers do quite frequently. I saw it happen in Oregon, too. There's some sort of magnetic attraction between Jeeps and mudpuddles. I once saw two teen girls weeping in a Jeep that they had managed to mire in a mudpuddle to the top of their big-ass off-road wheels. I'm guessing the hankering to drive your vehicle through fast-moving floodwater is probably similar to a jaywalking compulsion. Sometimes you just gotta do it.

Back to my nocturnal visitor. I read up on javelinas and learned that they tend to travel in small packs. The one I saw seemed to be alone, although in the dark, I could not be sure. It crossed in front of the trailer. I grabbed my little flashlight and stepped warily out onto the side deck, keeping close to the back door in case the critter should decide to mince up the steps on its cloven hooves and come at me with its tusks. 

That desert creature couldn't have cared less about me. It was busy nibbling on little succulents and green weeds that have sprung up in the gravel. I remembered reading that javelinas have a keen sense of smell but their eyesight is poor. I shone the flashlight on it and saw small red eyes peer in my direction. I was clearly of no interest whatsoever. I got the feeling I had perhaps met the real manager of the trailer park.

 

Stuff in the here and now

Welcome to monsoon. At any moment the sky can rip apart and dump buckets of rain on your head. You walk along the road toward a lovely pink and orange sunset, basking in the soft desert air. Don't look over your shoulder, though, because an enormous soggy gray cloud is sneaking up behind you. 

A couple nights ago, I went out for a walk around the trailer park. I've got a route now, thirty minutes of mindless walking. At the point furthest from the trailer, the deluge began. Raindrops are big as plates here. I was drenched in short order and slogged back to the trailer with my cotton knit (pajama) pants clinging like saran wrap to my thighs. Plus, it was almost cold. I'm not used to being cold anymore. It was shocking to shiver. 

The night before the rain storm I met a tarantula crossing the road. It did not speed up or slow down. I watched it move at a measured pace. I wondered what I would do if a car approached. A few yards away I saw what was left of a lizard that hadn't been quite fast enough, flattened on the asphalt with its little claws frozen in a permanent oh hell no pose. It would have made a nice addition to my pressed lizard collection, had I such a thing, which I don't.

I met a trailer park neighbor on the bike path. We were both peering over the edge into the Rillito River after a downpour, trying to see if the river had water. We couldn't see any where we were on the bike path next to Sam's Club. Later I discovered if we'd walked about twenty paces to the east, we would have seen that indeed, the Rillito River was alive with flowing water. Sally is a ceramicist who recently had a falling out with some hoity-toity gallery owners and is taking a break from making art. Southwestern ceramics sell well here, she said. Anything Southwestern sells well, I'm coming to realize. For example, the artist I met who lives out in the desert apparently sells quite a few drawings of round-faced indigenous children dressed in native costumes . . . for some reason, those images appeal to tourists. Why is that? No idea. As if kids on reservations don't wear sneakers. Whatever. Anyway, if I want to make money making art, I better learn to draw saguaros and maybe tarantulas.

Yesterday I visited my possessions at the storage unit. I was looking for my APA manual. I couldn't find it. It's in a box or bag, somewhere in that dark closet. Boxes are stacked ten high. There is no room to maneuver, open boxes, and see what is inside. Finding anything on purpose is impossible. Finding things at random is the only viable strategy, not that useful when I'm looking for something specific. I ended up buying an electronic version of the book when I returned to my laptop. I won't miss the print version. 

What really got me was seeing my stuff. Seeing all the boxes with their optimistic hand-lettered labels: paper, paper, paper. I saw like five boxes labeled paper. What the heck, Carol? Looks as if I paid a fortune to ship a bunch of paper to Tucson. Clearly I was not in my right mind during those last few weeks in Portland. 

I've heard people say it's okay to look back at the past. Just don't stare. I don't regret my move to Tucson. I certainly don't want to stare at my past. I just miss my stuff. I know it's silly. I don't have much stuff, and none of it is important. But it's all I have left of my previous creative life. I don't know who I am without my stuff. I feel ridiculous saying it. I see the news. Many people around the world don't have stuff. A lot of people recently lost a lot of stuff, including people they love. 

I've heard people say suffering is optional. Maybe it is true I have a choice about how much I miss my stuff. Maybe I can decide what meaning my stuff has for me. Stuff is impermanent, I am temporary, and life can only be lived in the here and now. All that may be true. I don't know. I still hope to be reunited with my stuff someday before I get dementia and forget where I stored it.  

Still homesick for something

It's been six months since my mother died. After her death, I was busy helping my family wrap up the estate. Then I was immersed in the process of buying a car, packing and shipping my stuff, and driving to Tucson. Then I got busy finding a place to live. For the past two months in Tucson, I've been rolling with the weather, from warm to hot to blazing, and then to wind, rain, and thunder. I guess I could pat myself on the back for being in the moment, but at some point, don't we have to stop and reflect?

I spent the last five years of my life drawing inward toward my mother in a tightening orbit. Now she's gone. It's as if someone moved the sun. Like, there I was trotting around her, fetching, carrying, singing, showing up for whatever her moment looked like, and suddenly, there's nothing in the center anymore. It's just blank space.

You might be thinking, well, Carol, you didn't have to lose yourself so completely in her life that you lost your own. Nobody asked you to do that. It certainly wasn't on the daughter-duty list. Do I sound like I'm complaining? I think I'm reflecting. I woke up this morning and realized I'm orbiting a black hole. It's an unsettling realization but sooner or later, necessary.

I store an image in my mind of my dead mother lying in the ER bed, eyes shut, mouth just a little open. In that image, to me, it's not really my mother lying there dead, it's an unpainted papier-mâché sculpture of my mother. That's because this fake pale mother has no teeth. Her dentures are in a plastic bag on the counter. That means her face is sunken and misshapen, like the balloon inside popped and the newspaper strips are sagging with gravity. It isn't my mother's face at all. Not the mom I used to visit and talk with and sing with. Some cartoon body with a blanket pulled up to its chin. Nothing to fret about, nothing to miss. 

I talk to her every now and then while I'm stuck in stasis (indoors in the heat and monsoon) waiting for my new home to appear. Ma, I say. Sometimes that's all I say. Ma. Ma. Ma. I sound like one of those kids that frazzled mothers drag around grocery store aisles. You see them yanking on their mothers' jackets and demanding candy. Ma! Chocolate! Ma! Pay attention to me. 

I miss what she used to be, not what she became. I would not want her back. She would not want to be back. Likewise, I don't miss Portland but I'm not home yet in Arizona. I don't know where I belong, or if I ever belonged anywhere. When I think of "home," no place comes to mind, no place I can say, yeah, that place, now that place was home. Home for me has always been about people. I always came or went because of people. Now I'm alone and I have to put myself in the center of my orbit if I want to create my next home. Conceptually I know how to do that but I'm not feeling it yet in my body or soul.