Happysad

It's alive

If ever there was a time to believe in magic, it's spring. 

I don't mean in a miracle-of-life sort of way. But in the way that you can positively feel the earth waking up, all the long-dormant sounds and odors, the birds chattering with the pure joy of feeling the sun on their feathery heads and the moist loamy earth soft and giving underfoot. For the first time in a while, I felt a dreamy,childlike wonderment and curiosity about THINGS, a gentle vibrating tumult all but buried under layers of silt and fear and bone weight. 

When I was a kid I was obsessed with secret passageways. Probably a combination of some key Babysitters Club books and The Secret Garden made me singularly fixated on the possibility of stumbling upon some forgotten, moss-covered stony door that would open up into an overgrown ramshackle place with a tree bent like a seat or some dark, cool clay-smelling corridor between places that might reveal a story of a distant love affair or some other ancient drama. 

Now that we're making cheese thrice a week, there are things to be done on Sundays. Toni was away this weekend so today it fell to me to rinse the cheeses that had been salted yesterday and take them out of their forms, remove the pecorini from their briny baths, turn the Roccos, massage the bouchon. I never mind being in the dairy alone, especially when it's light outside and there's still a hope-giving amount of coffee coursing through my veins. 

All of a sudden without warning I got socked in the face with the memory of my pals Shifty, Quincy and Annette, the three does we lost at Lazy Lady my first kidding season. It's been almost two years and still the recollection of that horrifying week seizes my chest. I can remember so vividly overhearing Laini tell Abby in the cheese room that Shifty had died, and shuffling myself off to the cave to weep against the cold stone wall so that no one would see me. Coming across the vet doing an autopsy on poor Annette just minutes after she died, weighing her organs, trying to get to the bottom of what was cutting down our girls so viciously. 

These bizarre, extreme vacillations between joy and melancholy have been afflicting me more than usual lately. I take it as a sign of progress, because before, the joy was absent and the shifts were between deep despair and a sort of numb, grim middle-ground. I am emerging. And simultaneously trying to make sense of this most recent experience as it draws to a close. Here, as elsewhere along the cheese journey, a lot of my deepest fears about my own shortcomings have been confirmed. I don't know exactly what to glean from this, or how to temper it with affirming epiphanies. Without really intending to, I've placed myself unrelentingly in a self-imposed exile, part penance for a heretofore substanceless life, part defiance at the suspicion that I was weak or unloveable or worthless, and just the littlest, green-shoot-coming-out-of-the-ground tendril of wonder. It wasn't really a thirst for adventure that set me on this path, but a desire for escape, a search for some resolution to the restlessness I felt. 

I have dwelt in extremes and in contradictions for the last three years. I am tired. It's time to find a middle path, even though contemplating the possibility of fulfillment and happiness brings forth its own set of anxieties. (Isn't happiness for stupid people, or those who've given up?) 

I think I've decided that the only way forward is to find a way to consistently access that wonder rather than the fear. 

Or whatever.