One Morning in Maine

snowfall, art, Salvador Dali's quiche, a broken shoelace and a frightened little girl

It is early morning in Maine. Yesterday, three inches of snowman-rolling snow erased the tiny signs of spring a few warm sunny days had birthed. I am sitting on my green couch purchased years ago when I rested comfortably and innocently in all my assumptions about “my” life, experiencing this morning what millions of people have experienced before me: the fall of their government to a dictator and the rise of evil and betrayal in the cabal that follows the dictator.

On the face of things, my world hasn’t changed. When I wake in the morning, my coffee cup sits out on the kitchen counter, left there the night before by my husband, who, before he goes to bed, takes out a brown paper coffee filter, places it inside the red drip funnel and fills it with my favorite blend of coffee, a small act of care I treasure. The white pine outside the window still waves good morning to me in the soft wind; the wooden nesting boxes still wait in the field for the bluebirds to return.

But I wake this morning, as I have many mornings in the last few months, to a feeling of strangeness and disorientation. Nothing is as it was. Money and power at the hands of evil narcissists and without the guardrails of law are hideous monsters loose on the world, roaming the streets, the woods, my dreams.

The very worst part is the recognition that most of our government’s leaders have walked out the door and not left a note about when they’d come home. The slimy Republican Congressmen have capitulated, while the majority of the Democratic Congress mouths limp words of dissent, no sound emanating from their throats. The evil forces pick up steam and, in the silence, break more things.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yates wrote these words In 1919, a year after the cataclysmic destruction of World War 1. I never imagined I would live to see those words mirror my own experience so accurately.

Sometimes, on dark mornings like this, I feel like a small child, abandoned and alone. I was called Kitty when I was little. I chose the name because I wanted to be like Kitty on Gunsmoke. Tough, funny, afraid of nothing. Until I was five, I had a childhood John Bowlby, a researcher in early attachments to maternal figures, would have described as optimal for a sense of security in the world.

But then I lost her. She didn’t die. She disappeared into a fog of depression following the birth of her third of five children and remained in that fog for the rest of her life. That’s when I changed my name to Kitty and went on about the business of growing up the oldest child: competent, in charge, Kitty.

What I know about trauma is that it leaves hidden tracks on the brain that aren’t erased by time. Those tracks take the form of feelings and states of mind. You have doubtless, reader, heard the word “triggered” bandied about by people in my profession. You may have used the word yourself. An event in the present that the brain recognizes as similar to the old trauma triggers the long-ago feelings and states of mind.

I’ve never much liked the word. It felt violent and I’ve seen people use it too blithely as if by saying they were “triggered,” it allowed free rein for hurtful behavior. But now I have to say it. Triggered. I am triggered. My small five-year-old self feels abandoned and alone.

I look up and there, across the room, on the windowsill, is a small oil painting of a red barn, a pond, a bridge, trees, a white house. My grandfather painted it. Pop-Pop we called him. Pop-Pop was the kind of man who made quarters appear from behind his ear and told funny jokes about cemeteries where people were dying to get in. Earlier in the week, I fetched this painting from a cardboard box in the basement and put it on the windowsill. For consolation, for accompaniment.

My grandfather was a sweet man with a twinkle in his eye who himself was crushed by forces of greed and rapid modernization that swept New York City in the 1920s. He quit his job as a safety engineer charged with the impossible task of saving men from dying in construction accidents in a city that had no OSHA regs and went home to his modest bungalow with a wide front porch and turned his attention to small things: small paintings, small carvings of chairs and small children, one of whom was me.

It’s seven in the morning and very quiet. My husband is still sleeping. But soon I hear him get up and come into the room. He is shaking and looks distraught. He’s a man who processes his emotional life in dreams, powerful, deeply resonant dreams filled with the stuff of Jungian lore: crumbling buildings, plane crashes, dying mothers, lost children. He joins me on the couch, and I put my arm around him and hug his shaking body. I coach him. Breathe, slowly. Relax your chest. I tell him he’s safe right this moment beside me. In all our over fifty years together I have never seen him so distraught.

Later, when he can string words together, he tells me the details of his dream. Everything is falling apart: buildings are crashing down, machinery is broken, parts are unavailable, men wearing the same uniforms are fighting each other, Hammond Lumber has no source of supply for rebuilding homes. The unconscious tells us truths about the instability and violence of this moment.

He too is the oldest of five, he too lost a mother to the gray shades of depression. I make him tea. He stops shaking. We acknowledge how grateful we are to have each other to share these experiences of foundational shattering because, without the kind of mirroring of our emotional realities, we would each feel so much more alone and frightened.

“We better get going on that quiche,” he says after a while. We print out a quiche recipe we are making for our son and his three artist friends, who are coming over in a few hours to install an amazing piece of art on the wall in the study. The work is a large, complex, Hieronymus Bosh-inspired creation painted by one of those friends, Kate Hargraves, about a subterranean world filled with symbolism and mystery. The title of the painting is “The Supper Guests.” Art critics who recently saw this work at a gallery show here in Portland gave the work rave reviews!!

The quiche recipe is from a book of recipes Salvador Dali published years ago. It is as strange a recipe as his paintings were. It calls for two pounds of cream cheese and 10 pieces of bacon and all the leftover fat from frying that bacon. One bite and we will consume all the fat we need for a month.

After the painting is hung we sit down together and toast Kate and the work of all the artists at the table and art itself. We make a plan to meet at this table once a month and invite friends to share a meal and see this painting. The meal, the laughter, the celebration, the connection: all is medicine, is antidote to the cruelty and brokeness of this moment, is landing place, is stability.

Kate and her friend wash the dishes after we’ve finished our meal. Colin and his friend help us move furniture in the basement, a task Bob and I are too old to safely accomplish on our own. We make a plan for a weekend a month from now when we can all gather again. On the way out the door, while Colin’s friend is putting on his boots, his shoelace breaks. “Just a minute I think I have a pair of leather shoelaces stashed in a box, let me go look.” I find the shoelaces and he threads the them onto his boot. It is a small act of care. It is a metaphor. Things unravel. Things break. Together we mend them.