Scrambled

What's on the plate

Dear Starlight, 

Recently, I read another writer mention framing each of her weekly newsletters through one question. I've been wondering if I should do the same for continuity. I could make a routine Sunday Circle breakfast by breaking my eggs into a bowl and serving you scrambled.

What am I afraid of, questioning, noticing, loving, grieving, changing?

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I have a long weekend coming up without a plan. I want to go home. Home to Martha's Vineyard. This is the first summer in my life that my childhood home is not mine to return to. I don't know how to be there now. I don't know if I can maneuver the costs as a tourist, nor am I sure I can spiritually maneuver being there as a tourist. A part of me has already overridden the depression and desire by suggesting we work on figuring this out this winter for next year…dot dot dot…MOVE ON! Someone shouts from the director's chair in a cavernous theater inside myself.

I hate Martha's Vineyard and all her blood-sucking parasites, ticks, cunts, and SUVs crawling around. 

But I love Martha's Vineyard sunsets and summer naps on the stony beach, where I smell salt, sunscreen, and Rosa Rugosa. I slumber under the stars, and some nights, I reach up into them and grab my sister Summer's hand. We remember all the times we laughed when we lived there. When we lived there. When we lived there. When we were both alive, there, together, there, together. We'd eat wheat thins and rock on rocking chairs barefoot with cheeks sunburnt red. Some days, we'd hitchhike home from the beach, and it would take a season to travel from up-island to down-island. We'd jump into strangers' truck beds with the wind whipping our long hair or squeeze with our legs touching into Subaru's that smelled like wet labradors. Nights were created for fire and fireflies, which we stoked with secrets and whispers and danced wildly. Embers swirling with our whirling. Some nights, we'd stay on the beach, sleeping in each other's arms. We'd wake to mosquitos biting our dewy faces.

It's overrun. It stinks. Dead skunk around every bend. Dead people bounce up after diving off shallow bridges and driving drunk. I hate it there, but I miss it there.

I drape my lumbering limbs over the plastic-sprinkled donut that's too small for my full girth; it must be a childs floatie. I float in my princess pool, close my eyes, and feel the slightest wave wobble my legs back and forth. I almost fall asleep. I want to show my mother, my sister, my brother. Look at me. I'm having fun in the pool. I take a selfie and send. I receive shame in return. Not from my family but from part of me that tells me to keep it a secret. The joy, the beauty, the abundance. "Don't let anyone see," It says.

It's strange. It feels like the same part of me that had me stand at the back of the elementary school lunch line so no one could see that I was the girl with the "free lunch," the green ticket giveaway. Poor me.

This week, a consignor asked me for a bio, which I sent. One I recently wrote describing me as a woman who mushes clay between her fingers. She replied by sending another bio she had written that describes my professional accomplishments within a contemporary lineage of social artists and interdisciplinary changemakers. Oh!! Yes, that's a description of me, but not from a narrator's voice I'm familiar with. 

I don't know why the girl from the back of the lunch line is still hiding? 

Maybe because she is both afraid she cannot afford health insurance and simultaneously that she has more abundance than she should.

I told my son this week, "You will need to begin making your own breakfasts now. I am writing in the morning, and it's important that I have that time for myself." Sixteen years of breakfast over easy and sunny side up done. Service complete.

I need to add to my bio that I'm a retired breakfast cook specialized in the scramble with a one-star rating. My steady customers told me I always do the same thing over and over and should really do something different someday.