Hands in the distance.

It has been raining for days. Streams flow from the mountain tops and flood the roads. So far, Shekina Garden (next to the river) hasn’t flooded again. There was a mini flood earlier in the season, but now it is just soggy and slippery with mud, and the stove and fridge and everything else are on the countertops, just in case.

I am ready for the sun. This has been a very very long rainy season. But clearly, the weather is not up to me, and I am thankful that we haven’t had the flooding other places in the world have. 

Over a week ago, my hands and feet broke out in something called dyshidrotic eczema. This followed a fall, a wound on my foot, and a round of antibiotics. I clearly overwhelmed my system. Poor body. Poor girl.

Of course, I go into contemplation of what is actually happening to me. I find it interesting that this situation makes me need to distance myself from my hands. My hands! My own hands. Do you know how you normally pay attention to something sore? Like, I won’t use that part of my body because it hurts. But with this, everything I do with my hands hurts, but it’s not like I can’t use my hands, so I do it anyway, and I have to put them at a distance. 

Sorry, hands. 

I was at the vegetarian festival here in town, telling Naomi and Ro about this particular thing I’m noticing, and our friend Michael, who was sitting with us, nodded. Michael’s in his eighties and has pretty bad arthritis, so he understood.

“When I do things, I have to say; I am not the pain.”

I am my hands. But I am not the pain in my hands.

Anyway, my hands are healing. I have cut out sugar and gluten to help. ALL SUGAR, EVEN FRUIT. This is not good timing— our rambutan tree is going off for the very first year. I should say, my landlady’s rambutan tree on this property that we are so blessed to rent. And I cannot eat rambutans right now.

All of it has me thinking about chronic illness and my normally okay skin, which is getting a bit more wrinkly with a few too many patchy freckles joining together, but I’ll take it! I’ll take the non-itchy, non-hurting skin! I’m also thinking about how quickly things can change, and how I should really declutter my things in case I die suddenly. Normal, normal person thoughts.

I think it’s all a symptom of sensing the brevity of everything. Especially now, as we leave one season and enter another, with our friends and dear heart companions, Naomi and Josh and their kids leaving Thailand. (Perhaps you will think this is a seventeen-year-old blog about people leaving. Perhaps it is.)

But I find I want to capture everything, to go back to all the days I didn’t write and write those moments down. There were years when I felt I couldn’t write about our normal life, and I needed that time, time to be quiet (and write fiction), but now I want to remember, to pore over every photograph, to stare into our eyes from five, six, seven years ago. I love you, I love you.

Kenya and I have spent a few evenings sketching and painting side by side under strange orange light that lies to me about which colors I am using. We paint outside, at the “dining room” table, in quotation marks because the room is a carport with only one wall. Large beetles fly overhead. The painting settles me in a way that nothing else can. I am looking for new ways to see, especially with sorrow ahead. Some of that sorrow will be in the shape of children leaving home. (This is a blog about people leaving, after all.)

But Kai, our twenty-year-old, has come back for a time, and he and I drove home together the other day. We were having one of those surprising conversations that goes deep and needs more time, causing us to sit in the car in the driveway to finish talking. Isaac was at home waiting for us, and he wanted our attention. He kept opening the door and dancing or singing silly songs to us, and when I asked him for more time, he stood in front of the car, in the light of the “dining room,” and kept dancing.

“I know you have been through this several times before,” Kai said, “but can you wake me up in four years?”

He meant after the most annoying parts of the tween years are over.

“But isn’t it amazing, how much he adores you?” I asked.

“It is,” Kai said.

“Hold onto that.”

As for me, a lot of life hurts right now. And I know that it hurts for a lot of people, people everywhere are going through so much, so much. But I also know that I won’t be sleeping through it. It is so, so beautiful. I might sketch every single frame, keep it close, let it sing through my itchy, rashy hands.

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