2 posts tagged “depression”
Good friends invited us to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. Our contribution, aside from our irrepressible charm, was limited to a few bottles of wine. It was my easiest Thanksgiving ever, and one of the best.
But that was yesterday. Today is another story.
Vermont's stick season (no leaves on the trees, no snow on the ground, just sticks everywhere) is in full swing. The clouds hover above the treetops, and the brightest color outside the window is the dull yellow of the dead grass.
It's stick season in my soul as well. No spark, no oomph, just existential dread clogging up my vitals. So oomphless am I, in fact, that after asking my husband's permission (I'll explain later) I decided to spend the day in my pajamas, in and around the bed.
Now spending the day in pajamas when I don't have a fever symbolizes a major abdication for me, second only to watching TV in the daytime. Spend a day in pajamas and before you know it, you've stopped washing your hair, then your teeth fall out (because you've also stopped brushing your teeth), then you stop going out (after all, you're in your pajamas) and instead you start keeping cats, lots of them, in the house and you stop changing the litter....
You can see why I had to ask my husband's permission before setting foot on that slippery slope. Since the man is utterly lacking in tragic imagination, he willingly gave me his blessing—heck, he even smiled. And later, when I asked, he took the dogs out into the field and threw balls for them to tire them out. I'm married to an enabler!
So here I sit, in bed, in my pajamas (hair and teeth brushed, however—noblesse oblige) trying to salvage the day in the only way I know: writing.
When it gets dark, I'll go downstairs and make a fire in the stove. Then, still in my pajamas, I'll walk through the attached garage to the attached chicken coop, say a few words to the chickens, and close them in for the night.
“The tropics,” our Vermont Public Radio weather man announces, “are active.” Which means they're breeding hurricanes and tropical depressions like the late-summer woods breed ticks.
And it doesn't matter if these depressions are as far as the Bermuda Triangle or the Sargasso Sea, every time one of them forms, I get depressed as well. Whereas the day before the sight of ripe tomatoes in the garden sent me into ecstasies of sauce-making, now, with a tropical depression hovering, nothing much seems worth the trouble. What is the use of tomatoes, after all? All life--specifically, garden, dogs, chickens, even husband--is vanity. Death awaits us all. In a mere 24 hours the active tropics have transformed me from fervent Epicurean to medieval theologian.
I look out the window, and all Nature echoes my despair. Vegetables and flowers droop under the downpour, trees drip. The dogs drowse. The birds are silent. The hens and their husband are the only ones out, hunting for God-knows-what creature that is out in this weather. They are soaked through, though, and look despondent.
But is Nature really in despair or have I fallen prey yet again to the pathetic fallacy? Just because a plant droops, is it necessarily depressed? Under those drooping leaves and branches, networks of roots are quietly absorbing the rain and its nutrients.
My mother used to say that a day like this--low barometric pressure, high humidity, driving rain--is perfect for darning socks. I can see her now, sitting by a window on the straight-backed chair she favored, needle and thread in one hand, a sock (with a wooden darning egg underneath it) in the other, mending what was torn, being thrifty, making us all feel tended.
Darning socks is not the most challenging or creative of tasks. The mender sits, head bent over her task, not unlike a drooping tree branch huddled in the rain. But who knows what is churning underneath, being reborn, energized, by the gloomy-seeming day?
I'm too impatient to darn socks, in any weather. But I'm trying to learn, when tropical or other depressions head my way, to droop gracefully, and take comfort in the thought that there is good work going on beneath the surface.
