morethanenoughtruth

The best thing of all is to be alone.  Just add up the fantasies: 

Farley Mowat hied himself to the arctic, there to subsist by eating only mice, all to prove that wolves were good creatures not begging genocide. 

What’s better than a tree house where a person is free to think and be whatever?  Ask any squirrel. 

When there is no other to circumscribe reality, a being can be all that it truly wants to be.  My poet’s year in the Appalachian woodlands said it all for me.  As long as I could remain cabin-secure, steering clear of other humanity, the local fauna and I celebrated a gentle peace.  Whenever human society overstepped its bounds, and intruded on the safety of my soul, I ran.  Far— and far away—I went to where there were no others so close to me as to assume I should be like them, think like them, define beauty like them—that was the place to be.

My side of the mountain is elegantly described in the book of that title: A young naturalist runs away from home and goes to live in a hollow tree with his raccoon.  He finds and trains a peregrine falcon so they can hunt for food.  It’s the best of fantasies until it isn’t.  Like COVID19 which makes of every person an insular recluse, anything that drives a person to hide wrapped only in the solace of his own company is a problem: 

When my Uncle Wesson, chewing on his unlit cigar, undertook to find me, where was I?  Hiding under a bush of course—a good place where adult and frightful discussions couldn’t be heard. 

When Sister Rose Marie recoiled from my aggressive cuddling, where did I go to hide and heal?  The attic of the convent was the perfect place, wrapped only in quiet cobwebs that cushioned consternation.

When my husband, Larry, and I wanted a respite from stupid corporate politics, it was waiting in a winter campground, where there were no insects and no tourists.  There we found only silence and a place to remember why we had found each other in the first place.

Now Larry waits to die a continent away in Washington State.  The surgery that would place a stent and might save him is held hostage by the virus.  It falls under the definition of elective surgery, and as such, cannot compete with others dying this very day of COVID assault. 

I hide in my Oakley apartment, picking up comestibles once a week from masked grocers and visiting a library that is oh-so-hesitantly re-awakening and lending books.  Without the food and the books I too would be a-dying.  As it is, I am like the near-sighted bibliophile in the Twilight Zone, who wakes to a world where all of humanity save he has succumbed.  He is left alone—triumphant—mounting the grand front steps to his town library, and he drops his glasses.  They shatter.

Larry and I, matched introverts, adored our solitude, even with respect to each other.  It is a cruel and petty irony that we suffer a continent apart, in our separate sterile spaces, waiting for the virus to give up its singular and collective tiny ghosts.  Perhaps it is we too—separate and alone—who will die. 

Absence makes the heart grow fonder is a wise old saying.  It knows all about Larry and me.  The same truth holds for all three of my long-suffering husbands.  I loved them better having left them, all the more perfectly now that they are dead or dying.  Memories of shared happy times gather to remind me to value their sweet friendship and affection.

The best lesson of COVID19 is specially designed for those of us who idealize solitude.  It is better wished for and ideated.  Experienced it leaves much to be desired.  My favorite wall art features a ceramic oval that says simply, “PEACE.”  In this dead quiet place, un-jarred by any voice but the empty nattering of TV and Alexa, I haven’t been inspired to hang that lovely plaque advertising the romance of silence.  Best it should stay behind the couch on the floor where it cowers in the dark and leave me to my fantasies of rambunctious family gatherings, wishing for at least a furry coated cat to warm cold feet and purr away the bittersweet silence of alone.