Mortaine’s Blog

I’m going to be offline until Monday. Thanks for everyone’s good thoughts and wishes– my left wrist still hurts, I feel like I was in a car accident, but hopefully nothing’s broken.

Moving was not just emotionally painful today.

I woke up sore, especially my knees. Ankles were a little touchy, too. I nearly tripped on the steps going down to the bedroom, but saved myself a fall.

While packing, I had to take my shoes off because my left toes were chafing and getting blisters.

I dropped two heavy wooden shelves on my left fingers, crushing them between the shelves and the bottom of the bookcase. A small bag of ice for the fingertips, which hurt enough to make me cry out when I tried to close my hand.

Then, less than thirty minutes later, I was trying to bungee a chair into the moving truck. Naturally, I lost my grip on one end of the bungee cord and it snapped up and hit me in the face. Good news: it missed my eye. Bad news: my entire right cheek looks like someone slapped me really hard. Add more ice to the bag and hold it to my cheek.

And then, the parking lot.

John and I went out to Erik’s Deli for lunch and I dropped off my sewing machine at the repair shop at the same time. On the way back out to the car after lunch, my right foot hit the curb wrong and I tripped. Normally, this would be a stumble, maybe with me flinging my hands out to catch my fall, but no. Oh, no. I had to miss on the stumble and trip my left foot as well. I faceplanted into the asphalt.

I swear, I thought I screamed, but it turns out I was silent going down. John wasn’t looking at me when it happened, so he just noticed I hadn’t answered and he turned and saw I was on the ground.

For several seconds, I did that quick “oh my god I’m on the ground” and then I thought “FUCKING HELL” and kind of sobbed a little. John by now had realized and come to me, and since I was in my own personal whirlwind of self-pity, he got that horrible “oh my god my wife’s unconscious” sound in his voice as he said “are you okay?”

Well, I wasn’t okay, but I could hear in his voice that he needed to know the basics. “I’m okay– I’ll be okay” I mumbled. At this point, I become more aware of my body. My left wrist, which has bent at an angle that wrists probably shouldn’t bend, having taken the majority of my falling weight. And my right hand, which is underneath my left cheek, keeping my head from smacking into the pavement. Damn, those are good reflexes. “I didn’t hit my head or anything,” I mutter, and hear one of the women who was sitting at the outside tables eating lunch say “She hit her head?!” with the kind of alarm that you know is gonna be followed by a 911 call on a cell phone soon.

John reassured her, and I slowly rolled over and got up, wiping the tears from my eyes. See, he’d gotten so worried so fast, it derailed me from crying, which is what I really wanted to do right then. So anyway, I hand him the keys and hobble around the car to the passenger side. I look up and the other lunch lady says “Well, you got bonus points, but blew it on the dismount” or something. It made me laugh. Which would have been nice, if I hadn’t fallen apart sobbing as soon as the car door closed.

I am… okay. Sore. I feel like someone slammed me into a concrete floor. Oh, wait.

John is my hero. After getting me home and putting more ice in my bag and setting it on my wrist, and me washing up a bit, we headed out to the house, where he, my HERO unloaded pretty much the entire truck, including the 7 bookcases and the 15-20 boxes full of books so I wouldn’t have to put too much on my wrist. He is, truly, my hero.

I love that man.

Oh, and then I left the rather full bag of ice on the bathroom counter on accident and it melted cold water all over the bathroom counter. We thought we had a leak!

Moving is not just a process of packing things and moving them. It’s also an emotional process, and a very jumbled one. There’s the joy of the new house, and the disappointment as you finally get the buyer-glaze off your eyes and notice things like a rotten wall in the second office which now requires your husband’s office belongings to be put *somewhere* and, since there are no stairs to it, the den seems like a good place “for now.” (He also wants to set up his desk in the den, but I pointed out that he would probably not actually fix the wall if he did that…. I am steadfast.)

And then there’s the process of moving my own office. There’s been this large plastic thing in the corner of my office for a long time now, and I’ve been emotionally unprepared to move it.

I am, of course, talking about Hammer’s crate.

John had the dubious wisdom to put the milk crate of Hammer’s toys inside it, so when I looked at it, I’d see: 1) no doggie, and 2) no space for doggy because of doggy’s unused toys.

Heartbreaking.

Today, I took apart the crate and put it in the living room, along with the box of toys.

I cried the whole time. I’m crying right now, in fact. It’s not the kind of broken-hearted bawling that I experienced before he died, but it’s more of a catharsis. A release of these emotions that don’t stop just because you have a life to live.

I saw Jesus last night.

In my dreams, dolt. Here’s the snippets I remember:

The new house had an attic which was huge and spacious and even had a second finished room with a fireplace. There was a rocking chair with an old lady’s lacy shawl (which was a kind of dark rose color). I knew there was an old lady who had lived in this room, and wondered how she’d gotten up and down, since there was no ladder and no bathroom in the attic space.

I was a vampire in a society of vampires working to bring back the old ones. I somehow found Jesus, hanging in a tree which he was, not surprisingly, nailed to. He looked like a refugee from the 1960’s, but that’s neither here nor there. I suspect the tree had sprouted from the original cross, but again, that wasn’t super-important to the story of the dream.

What was important was that I found him, and knew I needed to jealously guard him against the others, because he was weak and could be used by them for whatever purpose. Jesus did not really know he was a vampire, either– he was kind of clueless in that regard.

I took him back to the house and kind of protected him from being touched by the others by just shielding him with my hands (he was very small and weak). We went to another house, where there were robes outside, crumpled on the ground. They were the robes (blue and green and red, but the red was missing) of the female rabbis who lived inside. Jesus told me that no self-respecting rabbi would treat her vestments that way, and that there must be something wrong. We went inside and found one of the rabbis lying in bed in the room in the attic, feverish. Another of the rabbis was there, having just returned from the doctor. I held Jesus in my hand and pressed him against her torso. She screamed and her whole body convulsed, but the fever left her instantly, and although she was still weak, she was going to be all right.

I finished the application. It’s all ready to turn in. Whee!