Check Engine Light

I have several beginnings for a blog post in my head this week, and no middles or ends. Truth is, my engine isn’t functioning very well at the moment.

1. My check engine light came on Friday. Again. It’s probably nothing. Again. But I will have to get it checked out. Again. It is very likely that I have written about this before; but it seems one such reminder to check in with my engine is not sufficient. Either in my car or in my life. It all comes back to the spiral: we spiral in and out, it is the way of life. Significant moments and learnings and experiences return over and over, allowing us to harvest insight.

2. For the first time in at least 16 years, I did not plant pansies this fall. In North Carolina it wouldn’t be too late, perhaps. Well, maybe it is. But I don’t live in North Carolina anymore, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s too late here. The rains and the gray have begun; the warmth is done. Unlike North Carolina, once it’s gone here, it’s gone for the duration. There isn’t enough warmth to give pansies a chance to establish themselves before winter. And I don’t really care that I didn’t plant them. And maybe that is the real issue.

[For what it's worth, the folk lore about the width of the brown band on the wooly bear caterpillar, when you mix science with lore, is that if it says anything at all about the severity of winter, which it doesn't, it is more about the one past than the one coming.]

3. The rains and the gray skies seem to have settled in here in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe I will get tired of it; I am not going to claim that I won’t. To make such claims, too often means eating one’s words. However, I love the weather over the valley; and I have not longed for the 80 degree sun that North Carolinians were still enjoying earlier in the week. I really have not. I am, however, longing for a fire in the fireplace, a cat on the blanket over my lap, candles on the mantle, and birds at the feeder on the deck that I can watch from my spot on the sofa, maybe a pizza or a bowl of pasta or popcorn-for-dinner while watching a movie on TV. None of that is going to happen this winter. So what is going to happen? How do we breath life into what is in front of us, rather than dying inside for what is gone?
 

4. I got from yoga to South Sound shopping center without consulting Phoebe or getting lost, for the first time this week. I was tempted to make one or another of the same wrong turns I always make, but I didn't succumb. I forged on, trusting that the right road was going to come up eventually－and that when it did I would turn the right direction onto it.



And three notes about the mixture of spiraling into new life and regret for the one I left behind:

1. Tuesday’s local paper contained a story about being gay in Lewis County; or more specifically about R-74, the marriage equality referendum on the ballot. The first two columns were an interview with my sister. The facing page was an interview with my mother on the referendum and the similarities she sees to the discrimination she grew up with in the deep south, and included a picture of my mother and sister. A previous page included a guest commentary by me, tangentially on the same topic. The Staebler women are taking on the world, or at least the city. My father would have said that we are locally world famous. The best part was a guest commentary in the next issue, by a man with a transgender child. If the out and honest stories that we were a part of, helped him not be afraid to tell his story, I am especially gratified. How many others, whom we will never know about, found their way because of us?
 
2. I need to find a new coffee shop, and it pisses me off. I miss my Cafe Carolina. The guy who sleeps in a tent and lives the rest of the time at Santa Lucia, it seems, and who talks non-stop to people at other tables, picked me as his target today. Maybe because I was the only one in there. Just as I was about to either leave or be more forthright than simply ignoring him－which wasn’t working－someone else came in and sat down with me, at my table. I know I should be more open to the possibilities that come from unexpected encounters, but I really wasn’t in the mood. And I was trying to get started on this post; and the thought train screeched to a dead stop, just as the did the one on the tracks beyond the window. The problem is, the only other coffee shop in town is Starbucks, which is not an option.

3. My new grandson is being baptized today in North Carolina and I am not there. Emma and Wynne came to visit last night, and we are going to brunch with my sister and a birthday-celebrating friend this morning.

New life and new opportunities and missing the old one spiral together, passing each other as they burst out and close in.


And that is what has been swirling in my head as I try to come up with a topic for this post. At the bottom of it all, is the sure knowledge that my check engine light is on. And I really don’t know, yet, where to take it for repairs.