Still LIfe

Warning: Mutiple Mixed Metaphors Ahead


Although they don't come around as often, I still get those pangs for my old life. Yesterday, the whole day was basically a pang. Actually it started on Friday night when I was at a friend's house for dinner and we were all listening to music. Jimmy Buffet. Kenny Chesney. Beaches, Bars, and Booze.

My friend said, "Some nights we just drink and put on the music and dance the night away, just the two of us."

Pang! The cap'n and I used to do that.

Yesterday I drove down to Chelem to spend Easter with my friends there. I have a house in Chelem, I used to call it home, but this year I've been a gypsy traveling back and forth across the Yucatan while strangers pay money to live in my houses so I can pay for them.

Anyway, I arrived here in the late afternoon and another friend was here and they were all sitting around the pool having drinks.  Little pang.   Then they got to talking about a recent overnight trip a whole group of them took to Merida. Bars. Booze. Laughter. Stumbling into the hotel courtyard at 5:30 am singing so loud they woke up all the other guests.

Big Pang!

I  used to be in that group.

"I'm just the boring old sober person," I told my friend later. "I can't think of the last time I did something wild and crazy and...fun."

"Sober is not boring," she said.

She wasn't very convincing.

Mexico is party central during the Easter Holidays, the locals use Holy Week as an excuse to go to the beach, rent a one room house for themselves and their 36 closest relatives, sling hammocks, and stay up all night laughing and playing loteria and drinking vast quantities of tequila.  Pang! As I made my many sojourns along the outside verandah to the bathroom through the night last night, I could look down at  my friend's neighbors yard next door.  Tarps were tied up and lights were strung, and kids were chasing each other through the sand while their adult counterparts milled about eating and drinking until 5 am.

This morning, I was up before anyone else. I sat out on the verandah with my rosary and put on Pachelbel and watched the sun come up over the water.  Listened to the birds stir and sound their first notes.  I often listen to the Canon in D and wish I could give the world something as beautiful.  A legacy. A piece of me to leave behind in remembrance

As I sat listening this morning, I realized, I don't want that old life to be my legacy. I never did. When I was living it, I kept trying to convince myself it was beautiful.  I tried to wedge the beautiful parts in where they would get more notice.  Tried to make the ugly bits prettier than they were. The dark swaths more vibrant. The unsteady lines look as though they were intentional.

Maybe it looked beautiful to others. But it didn't to me.

And, hey, I'm the one that gets to choose.

So I took it down and stuck it in a closet somewhere and decided to start over.

My life now is a Still Life.

Simple, burnished days.  An open window. Sweet, sun-warmed fruit.  A dappled window seal.

I never get tired of looking at it.  From every direction, it fascinates, yet soothes, me.

It's a legacy I can live with.





Happy Easter! Happy New Day! Happy New Life!