I had sorta been hoping that the backward-looking retrograde Mercury energy would motivate me to work on memoirs. Except for the little kindergarten anecdote, I've been unmoved by inspiration. Today, my mind drifted off to a series of events that were disturbing enough when I experienced them one at a time. I suppose their coming back at me now, with Mercury and Chiron retrograde, means this is a good time to process them as a bundle and move on.
Summer, 1985 I broke up with my son's dad. Things had been headed down the drain for years. Splitting up was a wrenching experience, but better than facing any more of our dysfunctional communication and his control games.
Spring, 1986 After months of sinus infection, antibiotics, yeast, and various opportunistic infections, my internist referred me to an EENT surgeon and I had sinus surgery. That interrupted Doug's kindergarten homeschool work, so instead of completing it, he got a certificate of participation.
Summer, 1986 My mother died, and the message telling me of her heart attack got garbled, so that I thought she was dead a week or more before it happened
.
I had been saving up for 3 years for a rebuilt engine and transmission for my old VW van -- hadn't had a functional vehicle since Charley moved out. Then --
Summer, 1987 New engine, still in break-in period, drunk made an illegal left turn in front of me, totaled the van and trapped my legs between the front wall and my seat. I spent the summer on crutches, when doctors had ordered me to stay off my feet completely. The garden needed tending, kid did too. I couldn't stop working the festivals, because we needed the income. It was a rough several months.
Fall, 1987 Doug, having decided he wanted to be in school with other kids, started first grade. I was still on crutches and had to walk him almost half a mile to the bus stop, and meet the bus again in the afternoon. We lived at the end of the line, so he spent over 3 hours each day on the bus. His blood sugar went unstable because he wasn't eating regularly, he started having nightmares, and the only thing that kept him going was knowing that if he didn't go to school I would be his teacher again.
Winter, '87-'88 Needing year-round income, I asked a psychic friend who was trading me a reading for a reading for ideas and the first thing that popped out of her mouth was, "Can you do absent readings." Some girls at a fair the previous summer had asked me to read a comatose friend of theirs, and when I gave it a try, it succeeded, so I told Nancy, "yes." She suggested advertising and doing readings by mail. In addition to an international clientèle and several good friends, those ads brought me chain letters, death threats, and, eventually, Greyfox.
Spring, 1988 My older daughter, Marie, died. I'm not sure when. She had phoned me in December or January, and I heard nothing else until her adoptive mother's sister, who had been my friend in the early 'sixties, called to tell me she was dead, and had been for a few months. The official cause was heart failure. She had been using cocaine.
Some other events around this time, for which I can't pin down chronology right now, included a flood that cut off all roads into our area, so that National Guard helicopters were our only link with the world for weeks. That washed away one local lodge and the ice cream shop up the road. Down the road in the other direction, later on after the bridges had been rebuilt, the other local lodge burned down, putting an end to our social life and my regular Jane Fonda workouts with my neighbors and friends.
A client's abusive boyfriend made a series of phone calls to me, waking me in the night, threatening to kill me because I had advised her to go to a women's shelter. My best friend, Mardy, entered the witness protection program and went incommunicado, after having heard details of a murder from the men who committed it. She had recently been diagnosed with liver cancer.
Winter/Spring 1989 One morning in March, I got up to get Doug's breakfast and get him ready for school. I turned on the radio and the first thing I heard was, "...supertanker Exxon Valdez... hard aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound... leaking oil." That began the nightmare. Neighbors went out on the cleanup and came back with toxic skin conditions, eye disorders, and PTSD. Lots of people had stories like the one Chuck told about having to clean otters' corpses out of the suction hoses to keep the cleanup going. My friend Mardy's daughter, Shanda, 19 years old and like a daughter to me, went to Valdez to work, and died of an overdose of cocaine. Mardy came back for Shanda's funeral, and to give video depositions of her evidence because she wasn't expected to live long enough to testify at trial.
The following winter, snow around here was about 12 feet deep. Snowplows gave up on many of the back roads because there was no place to push the snow where it wouldn't just tumble back on top of the plow. People gave up trying to keep their paths and driveways clear, and started wearing snowshoes. Starving moose became a threat to everyone. I had to shoot one that charged me. I don't know anyone who lived here through that winter who didn't have at least one traumatic encounter with a moose. We were like a population of disaster survivors or war refugees: jumpy, hollow eyed, and sleepless. Breakup that year was bizarre as the snow started to melt. Days of high wind and cold temps put a thick, polished crust on the snow, then tore the crust off and threw plate-sized pieces of it at us. Windows broke, and people caught out in the wind had cuts, bruises and broken bones from flying ice. When the snow was gone, all we could smell around here was rotting moose.
Then, I met Greyfox, married him, (Mardy died while we were on our honeymoon.) and things got really rough for the next decade or so. Now it is lots better.
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