Elsewhere

I bring Christmas presents to the post office this morning, stopping along the way to recycle some glass jars and the first batch of aluminium that has been piling up forever because my husband and I, for all of our different virtures, share many of the same faults: procrastination, disinterest in many simple household matters, an out-of-sight-out-of-mind tendency and we do have the lovliest storage space for rendering the recyling invisible. After the post I visit the neighborhood organic butcher and buy beef for soup tonight; then to the whole food store where I pick up locally grown carrots still dressed in the dirt that nourished them. At home I feed Boychen lunch and do some laundry – bibs and face cloths, I am forever washing bibs and face cloths from the Boychen – and hang it outside: it is cold but there is sun that might bleach out the pureed carrot stains. I strap the Boychen into his Three-Wheeled-Bike-on-a-Stick and we head to the storage room where I gather an armful of Small Boy hand-me-downs. The Boychen is growing, I need the next size up. I am once again grateful that my boys are both winter babies and so sizes and seasons change in step. I throw the darks into the laundry, just a short cold wash to freshen them up, and vacuum, pushing the Boychen in his trike with one hand and the vacuum cleaner with the other. When he naps I make the soup, beef barley and the smell is filling the house now.

I try to find some virtue in this day, in the making of the soup at least, but I cannot. I am elsewhere today and these small domestic circles frustrate me. I think of a life in which I work a job – staff at a bookstore or waiting tables at The Three Bears in West Yellowstone, Montana – and return home to a little apartment where I pull on an over-sized fisherman’s sweater and read and write with a bowl of soup – yes, beef barley, I’ll carry the beef barley forward – at my elbow. It’s not hard to imagine. I’m a loner by nature and the simple chatter with customers would be, most days, enough to satisfy me.

These are the days that exhaust me, the days when alternate lives seem to step out from behind every tree; these days when they look good to me. Even with the smell of the soup, the soft hair of my sons, my husband stepping through the door there are days when those lives look so good to me. Then I feel like an animal in the zoo, pacing back and forth, and I look for the things in this life that would look so good if it stepped out from behind a lodgepole pine in West Yellowstone, Montana, and whispered to me as I walked home to my fisherman’s sweater and my soup.

But the truth is, I am elsewhere today.