Jane is 11. Her 11 feels like 13. This morning in the car, she puts on a song she likes. It’s 7 am.

“Oh”, I say, drawly, not yet awake. “This song is really drummy.”

“What?” Jane scowls and scrunches her mouth all to one side.

“It’s a lot of drums. I dunno if I like the drums.”

She snaps the music off and folds her arms. I continue, so stupidly, coffee in my mouth.

“I like the song, just not sure about the drums?”

“Mom stop. You’re being really mean!”

The rest of the drive should be silence but instead it is me trying to explain that I didn’t mean to be rude and she is silent and mad and collapses out of the car into the school lot w her huge bag and massive water bottle.

Vibes are so off in our house. This morning, I wake up and am not at all sure what to do. I jot down a schedule in my phone notes - stuff I could maybe work on, none of it worth anything at all really. Dumb things to keep me busy and make me feel like I’m alive. I don’t do any of the things. I decide that I should wash the camp pillows (I shoulda thrown them in the trash) and I spend the morning padding back and forth to the coffee machine and moving laundry and pillows around. I mow the lawn, because I’ve asked everyone to do it and no one did it, and a little bit bc I CAN do it (sort of, probably oughtn’t) and there’s so little that I can do with the dumb elderly heart I have. Jacob wakes up at noon and immediately asks me to take him to a friend’s house bc they’re playing tennis at 4 pm. I pull weeds out of the brick paver driveway most of the day, talk to the dog, wash a pot. I turn on music and I hate it and I turn it off immediately.

Vibes are off. The noise from the air conditioner is driving me crazy. I pick up 13 cups scattered around the house. Lilly and Abigail are at college now, both. Because they were at the junior college for their junior and senior years, they were mostly home with me and now I have Jacob, who moves, sleeping, somehow, from his bed to the couch and back mostly. Henry still likes to hang with me, but he’s working on learning Stop This Train on the guitar, and it’s the very saddest song for an empty August. That odd, uneven time.

What a weird and lonely time. I think of my mom, always wanting us to stay over, and I get it more than I ever did before. Something about this feels like spinning on the Gravitron at the fair. It is scary and nauseating and sickeningly fast. Stop this train.

Stephen is working a ton because, college, and I think, you can have companionship or you can have your bills paid, but you cannot have both. Bills, I guess, and I must learn to enjoy my own company more. I try to draw and can’t. Maybe I read more. Planning future things is a little strange for me - I feel prematurely old and have lost most of my “one day maybe we could”. I don’t think ahead very far these days. Tonight I download “Living with Mitral Valve Disease” and “Understanding Your Vascular Disease”.  I read both and both are so bad, awful to read, not at all funny. Maybe not reading. Maybe I try to like tv more. Maybe I try to like soap operas. I bet I could like them.

Lilly Facetimes this evening from a beautiful spot on her beautiful campus, and she is with her new roommate who is a good match for her, and her best friend from home. She has been there a week tomorrow and feels like she’s been there forever. She saw the new architecture studios today and says they’re gorgeous and not “all new and modern looking” but cool and old. She looks happy and at home and like herself.

I tell her the vibes are bad here and that she needs to come back, that no one here likes jeopardy much at all, that they just talk right over it, and that they don’t seem to understand family hang time, that they don’t want to watch Hallmark. I tell her that it’s super hard to make family feelings happen here now without my older girls and that it’s very dull and lonely and that I even made cookies and it still didn’t feel family-magical. I don’t really - I don’t tell her any of that. I just write it down here.

Here’s a Linda Gregg poem that seems to fit not at all and somehow very well (“a plate of olives that are olives”). She’s a favorite of mine. She lived on a Greek island with the poet Jack Gilbert for a while and also in Suffern, NY, where I lived for three months. I’d be very much interested in the Greek island and the poet.

You have been away so long I have stopped asking visitors if they have seen or heard of you.

For years I tried to learn the best to show you when you came back.

What hour and what path for going to the beach. What week to gather oregano and in which field.

But the world is just what it is.

A plate of olives that are olives.

Fresh bread that is bread.

The world of this island where you left me. The sound of the sea's constant breathing.

All of it together the music around the silence in my heart.

- Linda Gregg

There is no one who will feed the yearning.

Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.

- Gloria Anzaldua