Primary Colors

Brown. Not espresso, or beige or caramel or sienna or any of those lovely shades. Just brown. Dead. Dry.

That's what I observed as we drove to Fort Worth on I-20 Tuesday. Bleak and dusty brown. So brown that the primary colors of the road signs were vivid beacons against the landscape -- red and blue Interstate markers, green mile markers and "Next Exit" signs to Strawn and Gordon and Stephenville, yellow yield signs and caution signs. Even the orange warnings that "traffic fines double when workers are present"were a welcome visual break as I calculated whether 70 or 75 was a safer risk when said workers seemed nowhere to be seen.

I know. Green and orange are secondary colors. Still, all the signs in a road sign coloring book could be colored using just the eight crayons in the basic Crayola box, with the purple left untouched.

When I was growing up in Colorado I thought of January as a white month. We didn't always have snow for Christmas, but we always had snow in January. Not sleet. Not ice. Not a wintry mix or freezing rain. Snow. Snow we could play in, snow my parents could drive on without sliding, snow my friends and I could ski through and stop in spraying glittering powder against the bright blue of the sky, and the vivid green of the pines. White.

In West Texas, the white signs announce the speed limit, and black and white state trooper trucks enforce it.

Michael slept all the way to Fort Worth. The pain of the migraine that had plagued him for nine days, and still remains today on day 13, only eases while he sleeps. Every waking moment is marked by pain. And so with no radio to keep me entertained I passed the time by searching for colors in the landscape and mentally reciting the hymns of prayer that have soothed my soul on other brown days.

"Father and friend, thy light, thy love, beaming through all thy works we see."

Really, even in these brown, dead works?

"Father hear the prayer we offer, nor for ease that prayer shall be."

Good thing. Ease seems hard to come by this week.

"Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways . . . . Take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy Peace."

Please. Peace.

No Tears (or algebra or migraines) in Heaven

School is hard. I can't imagine at this point in my life having to master history, English, Algebra, science and who knows what else all at the same time. I'm so glad I'm not 14, or 17. The beauty of college and then graduate studies is that we gradually narrow our focus more and more -- it gets easier. One part of me enjoys helping my kids with their homework because I relearn things I forgot years ago. But another part of me says, "I can't believe they have this much stuff on a history test in the 8th grade!" Tonight, I relearned the Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan and Madison's compromise. That was fun, and not so hard. But algebra is hard. For that, I hired a tutor.

Life is hard, too. Those T-shirts that say, "Life is hard, and then you die," have always annoyed me. Of course, they're right -- maybe that's why they annoy me. Life IS hard. And then we die. But that's the good news. The next life is better. Believing that makes all the hard parts of this one more bearable. Life is hard. Algebra is hard. MIgraines are hard. When the pain analogies alternate between sledge hammer and vice grip, even the metaphor is hard. When the vertigo hits, the tile floor is hard.

I've never been a weeper. But I still love that old song, "No Tears in Heaven." In part, because the alto line is great.

"No tears in heaven.
No sorrows given.
All will be glory in that land.
There'll be no sadness
All will be gladness,
when we shall join that happy band."

"No tears in Heaven fair.
No tears, no tears up there.
Sorrow and pain will all have flown.
No tears in Heaven fair.
No tears. no tears up there.
No tears in heaven will be known."

( Lyrics by Robert S. Arnold [Public Domain])

Aside from the irony of how many times I sang that song in churches that would have no part of any happy band in this life, that old song still says something important to remember about the next one. No algebra in Heaven. No migraines in Heaven. No vertigo in Heaven. Sorrow and pain will all have flown. Praise God.

What a headache

Literally, and figuratively.

My son suffers from chronic migraines and migraine associated vertigo. Despite a very good 12 or 13 months in a row, they returned in mid-December with a vengeance and he's had 13 migraine days in the last 30. That's the literal pain -- in the head for him, and of the heart for me. I once tried to explain to someone that the maternal bond is such that a mother with a child in pain can never be free of that pain herself. When he hurts, I hurt. When he is confined by the pain, I am confined by it as well, literally and figuratively.

Figuratively, this blog is a bit of a headache, too. But I'm determined to play out this experiment. Two years ago when I applied for the professional development leave I wanted to explore narrative journalism, and included in my proposal the writing of a major narrative feature. One of the possible topics I conjectured at that time was a story about children in pain. We were in the middle of a three-year marathon of dealing with the migraines and I longed to write about it but was too physically drained and time stressed to think about it. Now that the leave is here, I find myself struggling to write and no longer longing to. And I have no desire to write about children in pain. Don't want to go there. Spend too much time there. Can't bear the thought of jumping in any deeper than I am.

I do feel a need some days to write about the experiences of this past year -- separation, divorce, single parenting, financial crises, and all the little daily crises that went with them. Through the course of it, many friends asked me if I kept a journal, and I never have -- other than the journal I've kept about the migraines. My emails to and from close friends have been a journal of sorts, and in the past weeks I've gone back and read again many of those missives. Some days I feel no need to write, no desire to write, and I'm mystified that something I've enjoyed and felt confident about throughout my life brings me no solace.

I don't want this to become a journal of my personal traumas -- for one thing that's boring and tedious for everyone, and for another I'm often struck by the personal nature of things some people include in their blogs that just shouldn't be out there for the world in general to read. But a colleague of mine in the English Department who also has an interest in narrative writing did encourage me to write personally, to explore that genre and experience, and so I think this blog will be a melding of my search for narrative, for story, and for a new place of peace in life. You're welcome here.