My back hurts. It’s because I’m an aging biped, according to almost everything, but it’s also because of the long car ride. Given that I continue to age and will hopefully be walking on two feet for the foreseeable future, there’s not much relief in sight. It seems like a midlife thing, but I was in my 20s when I first experienced back pain. Working at a museum, where I maneuvered giant drawers of pre-Columbian textiles all day, I tweaked something and couldn’t move. It got so bad, I went to a doctor who talked about posture and gave me exercises. It improved quickly and seemed like a blip, but it was a forewarning.
I secreted a tiny, loose red thread from one of those textiles into my pants pocket and felt a nervous thrill about it for years. The most criminal thing I’ve ever done (except for drugs and everyone does that). It was a whisper, nearly dust, and sat on the tip of my finger like a slim thread of blood. I kept it, along with some road glass from a shattered windshield, in a little metal box that my ex-husband found in a dying man’s house. I used to visit the ancient thread regularly, wondering about the women who touched it thousands of years ago.
Perhaps my theft offended gods and now my back hurts, but my tiny metal box seems no worse than the dark drawers of that basement museum department: The Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Several floors soared above, bathed in sunlight, all for the art of Europe. Everyone else in the basement.
Anyway, the back. It hurts low and in the hips, especially the left one. The one born bad. It feels sometimes like pregnancy hip pain, something about hormones and ligaments, only I’m not pregnant. Just barely post-menopausal and therefore something always hurts. At 3 a.m., suddenly everything hurts and I’m connecting dots that probably aren’t dots at all. That angry red coin on my leg. My reddening face. A grumbling gut. The ghost aches and the weakness.
Everything hurts + Can’t sleep = Dr. Google
In the night black, with my face bathed in phone light and the husband snoring next to me, I decide it’s either lupus or the Teri Garr thing (the name is lost in the night brain). The 3 a.m. bed can be terrifying, past and future tangled up in demons. It can turn a bad back into an autoimmune disease. Now, in the morning with my first cup of coffee, I think it may have simply been a long car ride and too much cheese. The daylight provides some comfort and clarity, but things still hurt. It’s either because I’m old, or bipedal, or I offended gods with youthful rebellion. Unless it’s lupus or MS (the Teri Garr thing, thank you morning brain).
I can’t find the red thread. Perhaps it’s finally turned to dust, a forewarning to us all.
Happy spring!
Lisa
Things to share:
Hilma af Klint, a Swedish mystic, invented abstract art and is only recently catching my eye. My head was deep in the sand for decades, but this woman was never mentioned when I studied art history in the 80s. That’s her at the top. I’m intrigued.
Really enjoying Aileen Weintraub’s memoir, Knocked Down, about a high risk pregnancy and so much else, and also her take on peri/meno. More, please, about the vagaries of a woman’s body.
I wrote a thing in the winter about digital rooms and am now looking at spring rooms and, yeah, it’s still fun. There’s a gray chill hanging on here, in the northeast, but I’m dreaming of a spring room. This one has a nana vibe.
This little film is such a sweet, charming way to spend less than four minutes of your day. There’s spring in it and a reminder of our humanity.
April is National Poetry Month, so here’s a good poem:
Naked
by Jennifer Michael HechtThe reason you so often in literature have a naked woman
walk out of her house that way, usually older, in her front garden
or on the sidewalk, oblivious, is because of exactly how I feel right now.You tend to hear about how it felt to come upon such a mythical beast,
the naked woman on the street, the naked man in a tree, and that makes
sense because it is wonderful to take the naked woman by the handAnd know that you will remember that moment for the rest of your life
because of what it means, the desperation, the cataclysm of what it takes
to leave your house naked or to take off your clothes in the tree.It feels good to get the naked man to come down from there by a series
of gentle commands and take him by the elbow or her by the hand and
lead him to his home like you would care for a bird or a human heart.Still if you want instead, for once, to hear about how the person came to be
standing there, naked, outside, you should talk to me right now, quickly,
before I forget the details of this way that I feel. I feel like walking out.