Cardamom and Caledonia

I was supposed to get my h1n1 flu shot today.

I left work at noon with that intention anyway. The flu clinics have been packed but Bing had talked me into going. I take meds that have pretty much sliced my immune system to bits and she worries that I will catch it and not be able to fight it off.

So, I promised her that I would go. I drove to the school and saw the line snaking around the building and knew that it would be a several hours wait.

I looked around at the faces surrounding me. They all looked grim and frightened.

Basically, I sort of think that we should be giving those flu shots to children first. Get all the children taken care of and then what is left can be for the rest of us.

So, I turned around and went home.

And I had an incredible afternoon. All by myself. I baked. Yes. Me.

Baked.

And I had a grand time of it. I am not a half bad when I set my mind to it. As long as I don't get caught up in a book, I'm okay.

This time, I turned on a Leon Jackson cd and decided to make pepper cookies. That is what Sven, our neighbor, and Liv call them. Actually they are cardamom pepper cookies. They are spicy and fragrant and since Bing only buys organic flour, sugar, everything...well, I knew that they would be good.

I lost myself in the mixing. That is something that I rarely do, but when it happens, well...it is fantastic.

I whisked the flour and spices together, taking deep breaths, feeling the scents settle into my nose. How lovely it was.

I creamed the butter and sugars, added the eggs and vanilla and then the flour. I stirred and listened, closed my eyes now and then and lost myself in music.

I thought of my childhood, my life now, where I want to be in ten years.

Pretty simple. I want to be with Bing and Liv. In our nest. And then I realized that in ten years, Liv would be 20 years old and long gone. I looked out the kitchen into the back yard, wiping my hands on a towel, sticky from forming balls of cookies. The oaks in the back yard were finally on their last legs, just a few small leaves hanging on, toughing it out. It made me shiver, made me feel so melancholy and even weepish.

I love Autumn but hate Winter.

All those reds and golds all over the grass in spite of repeated rakings. We had put up the lawn furniture last weekend. The grill, the adirondack chairs, the picnic table. All in the shed. The patio looked so lonely.

The sun was bright, so I went out on the back porch and let myself sit while the cookies baked.

When I came in, I checked the cookies, took them out and put another batch in and then I listened to a song that Leon was singing. His voice was plaintive and yearning. I eased into the buttery brown leather chair and listened. It was a song that I hadn't heard in years, an old Scottish love song about missing home.

I thought of Bing, of how I went for years without her until one day it suddenly hit me that she was my home, what I had been aching for all those years. And I finally came back to her. I listened and choked up and was so full of love and pain and yearning and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to just talk to her, hear her voice.

But, she was teaching. And I had cookies to finish. So. I completed my task.

The phone rang soon after. I checked caller id. It was Bing. I picked it up quickly.

"Are you back already?" she asked.

I had to think for a moment. Oh. Yeah. That.

I hesitated and then told her that no, I had decided not to go. That I had decided to go home and bake.

Silence.

Finally, she said one word.

"Bake?"

Yes, I said. Sometimes, I need to just be by myself and bake.

"But, you...you..." her voice broke.

"You promised. You promised me that you would get that shot, Maria."

I know. I told her that. I tried to explain, about how I just couldn't bear to stand there in that sad, scared line. About how going home and baking had been just what my soul needed today.

She wasn't buying it. Wasn't happy with me either.

"Do you know what it was like for me," she finally started. "Do you know what it was like for me to watch you caring for Liv when she was sick, refusing to wear a mask or gloves? Maria, you don't have a working immune system! If you catch this flu, you could die."

But, I didn't catch it, I told her. I laid down in Liv's bed with her and I DIDN'T CATCH IT. I figured I must be immune.

"Do you EVER think of me?" she sputtered. "Do you ever think about what it would be like for me if something happened to you? I would not only lose you, I would lose Liv too. She would go live with Tinton. You know that. My life would pretty much be over, losing you both," she said, her voice quiet now.

I tried to explain, realized that I couldn't. I didn't know how to explain about how that line just felt...wrong and being home just felt....right.

I wish sometimes that I could share with Bing about how I feel sometimes. How the smell of cardamom and the feel of shaping cookies and looking out the window and listening to a song that tears out my heart just takes me away somewhere. She loves music but she is a very pragmatic person. I asked her once if music moved her and she said that of course it did, but that she rarely listened to lyrics, that it was the music that she centered in on, not the lyrics.

She would never understand how I could look out the window, see the empty patio and the leaves on the ground and then hear a song that made me want to double over with emotion. With love and pain and warmth and freezing cold and softness and toughness and birdsong and chipped paint and all of it sliding together to pull me down on the leather chair and make the tears suddenly roar out of me.

I went up to her later, when she had cooled off a little bit and told her that I wanted to play a song for her. She nodded. I pushed her into the leather chair and put Leon on.

"This is how I felt when I finally decided to come back to you," I told her. "You are my Caledonia."

She listened without commenting and when it was over, she let me curl up in her lap.

"I will never in a hundred years get you," she said. "But, we belong together. Just....please...the next clinic??...."

I said I would go. Promise.



What moves you?