The Dance

Today I was awakened to the presence of a love affair that has spanned the duration of my life, in which I have been an unwilling and unconscious partner, fated to be stuck in the throws of this love/hate relationship for the remainder of my days.

But first, I did what any sensible gal does on a beautiful Spring day in glorious weather that is long overdue; I laid in the sun. Well, I tried. Today went like this...

First, I committed a criminal act. I slept in and, in my selfish slumber, missed the waking hours of perfection. On a sunny day that promises to climb in the mid 70's, there's nothing better than the anticipation of warmth, the eagerness to be outside and under the largest star in the universe. I like to be up around 9, with coffee (or green tea these days) in hand while my senses wake themselves. By the time I have a bellyful of oats, fruit, and honey and have showered myself clean of puffy eyes and body odor, the world is usually ready for me and my lawn chair. But today, having forfeited my rights to a leisurely morning, I waived myself of the duty to shower and proceeded straight to the deck, hair wrapped in a scarf, face shiny with a thick coat of moisturizer.
First order of business, repaint my toenails. There I sat with my supplies neatly arranged on the patio table. I dabbed polish remover on a napkin and took a single swipe at my big toe. I had only smudged a negligible hole in last week's polish when he came.
He dons a yellow jacket that isn't fit to stretch, never meats to cover his bulbous black belly. Nature's representation of Fat Man in a Little Coat. Despite his bottom heavy build, he hovers mockingly, effortlessly. He hovers and waits. What is he waiting for? I do my best impression of Mona Lisa; stoic expression, showing no sign of amusement, but with eyes that follow. He hangs there, gives a shimmy, then SWOOSH! A bombastic divebomb executed with the collective sum of the world's bravado and machismo. I knock over my bottle of nail polish remover while frantically calling his name. I have affectionately dubbed him $@&*!. I yell for Sean to show my visitor the door, which looks an awful lot like a rolled up magazine in a lethal male fist. Sean comes out with one heroic arm raised, and away floats my visitor nonchalantly over the rooftop, as if possessed by the birds in flight. Sean's arm goes down, "You ok?" "I guess." It takes 45 minutes to complete the first coat of polish. $@&*! and I continue on with our dance between brushstrokes, valiant Sean continues to step in, defending my honor.

I'm not unfamiliar with this dance. It's fearful, it's combative, ritualistic, animalistic, hedonistic. It is performed with fervor masking cowardice. The foot extends in a motion to decline promenade, my partner darts and blocks my exit, my foot retracts as my head takes its umpteenth nod of capitulation and I fold in to myself, paralyzed. My partner bows and disappears until the next act. In the past this dance has included props. Before engaging in foot work I reach for a plastic racket whose frame is an electric shade of dayglo, and with thumb depressing a little black button I swing my prop through the air hoping to introduce it's electrifying presence to my partner. I am in warrior pose. Calling my bluff, $@&*! accepts my advances and makes a literal bee line toward my face. Not willing to tango with the shocking ribs of my own weaponry, I resign my place on the dance floor. The day is young. There will be zapping.

Why do I engage in this dance? Why do I humor the hostility of my daily visitor with the flailing acts of terror he so obviously aims to elicit? Simple. A few swollen abrasions on one of my tender appendages, costly days of feeling drugged and defeated by Benadryl, cursing while hovering over the toilet to evacuate my stomach in nauseous rage. $@&*! has a close relative, smaller, favoring a striped costume to the snug fitting jacket. This nasty redheaded stepchild has stung me three times too many, rendering me sick and utterly useless for a full 24 hour period. The honey bee is venomous and vengeful without provocation, I dare not learn what this larger, more menacing cousin is capable of.

To be fair, it isn't just $@&*! for whom I have danced. The wasp also once knew the nature of my quick step, but asserted early on that, despite his long needle sharp tail, he was more interested in getting to his nest than wasting his precious time on me. Confession: I poisoned the nest, which is craftily tucked in the splintered wooden frame of this precariously high and weathered deck on which I perch. I poisoned them, family by family, nest by nest, until one day I was without poison and forced to notice the truth of a wasp's routine; the respectful nature of their flight, the dignity in their hard days work. The wasp occasionally leaves home for work, and sometimes enjoys the sensation of being suspended in the wind between his shifts. He doesn't come too near and he doesn't care to dance; when I jump up he promptly hangs closer to the ragged edges of abode. The wasp and I share the wind and the sunshine. We have an understanding.

I have tried to reach the same plane of perception and acceptance with $@&*!. On many a warm day I have let that screen door slam with the express determination to look my visitor in the wings with earnest welcome. As expected, he comes and he hovers. First near my feet, a safe distance, one that makes me believe he senses my acceptance and is willing to approach with timidity. With my guard down I go about my task du jour, forcing a stubborn and deliberate calm to overcome trepidation. I relax in to this new relationship. On this day we won't dance. Ahh..... ZZZZZZZZZZZ! ZZZZZZZ!! ZZZ ZZ! I am attacked, assaulted, brought to reckoning by a pair of ferociously beating wings. $@&*!! $@&*!! I call his name. It is the white flag of acquiescence to his insect ears. We are at it again.

Today I woke up with resolve. After determining that today was to be spent outdoors, I planted that seed of willfulness and naivete in my mind that today he would not bother me, today I would lay perfectly still and be perfectly at peace. His buzz was to be my song. And, in one of my prouder moments, I have to say I accomplished that sense of peaceful security for exactly 19 minutes. I probably could have gone longer but the anaesthesia of sunlight was not enough. My scared inner child quickly turned to palpable irritation and it bubbled over without warning. "Sean that's it! THAT! IS! IT! Kill him! Kiiiiilllllllll him!" My voice has never taken on such malice. "I thought you were doing alright out there?" "KILLLLL!" "Alright." We were back on script. Sean came out wielding a magazine looking far more exasperated than militaristic. Clearly, this damsel's drama was wearing thin. I laid down and closed my eyes, this time I wouldn't retreat, I wanted to be there for his demise. I heard the lunging of Sean's weight and the cylindrical tool of eradication cutting the air, but I didn't hear a thud. Then I heard nothing. "He flew over the roof." "UGGGGGH!" Sean went inside but emerged five minutes later and began reading.

"Male eastern carpenter bees are curious and will investigate anyone, including humans, that comes near their nests. The curiosity is often interpreted as aggressiveness; however, the males are only aggressive to other male carpenter bees. They do not have stingers and cannot cause any real harm."

Huh? He goes on...

"They sometimes attempt to mate with other insects or small birds. An interesting trick to use to "move" a male carpenter bee out of the way is to pick up a small pebble (roughly the size of the bee), then toss it past the bee. They will attempt to chase it, distracting them for a few moments, long enough for a human to get by. However, since they cannot sting, and rarely accord any attention to humans, this is unnecessary."

He went on to read a passage about a carpenter bee's tendency to bore holes in wood to build their nests. They "tend to hover for hours on a sunny day." They sure do. I erupted in laughter. Fits of laughter. The kind that comes from so deep within that it stretches the diaphragm to explosive proportions. It hurts and causes you to choke, the kind that forces tears from your eyes. This dance, this ridiculous, clumsy, persistent, neurosis building dance that I have been suckered in to for 27 years is not the battle I perceived. Some dumb, bumbling creature looks at me with amorous curiosity, not bloodlust. It wants to mate with me on a good day, and protect its nest from me with stingerless imposition on a bad day. It will sooner extinguish me by boring the final hole in this rickety wood, sending me plummeting to a three story death, than it will inflict direct physical harm.

Even now, after having enjoyed dinner outside and armed with this knowledge, I flinch in its path. No longer troubled by the thought of imminent sickness, now I'm just thoroughly annoyed. Who wouldn't flinch at a giant flying insect that darts indiscriminately at your face or hangs within earshot boasting an ominous buzz? Now I look at my suitor, the carpenter bee, and I feel deep-seeded loathing. The years spent frightened and hiding at the pool, in the backyard, on a hike, getting sun. The stupidity of the creature; can't he smell that I'm the same non-threatening, non-bee species, unmatable blob of moving flesh that he just checked out ten seconds ago? Must he respond to my every insignificant gesture as a sign that I might want to have his bee babies? And isn't it just like a man to be off sizing up the potential when he has a perfectly devoted bee spouse dutifully collecting pollen somewhere in a little burrow of the deck? Sleazeball.

And then I am reminded that we are both creatures of suffering. Spring Fever has a grip on both us equally; it lures us from our homes, breaks the spell of hibernation, and casts a sun-induced trance. My bewitchment is expressed through hours and hours of turning in the sun, losing track of the minutes in favor of warmth and a healthy glow. But this poor dumb creature, this sad sap, listens to his biological voice and can only perform his dance. He dances for pleasure, for courtship, for bravado, for blind instinct. It is not my love song, it is not my disco. The carpenter bee's own Inferno, to zip and twirl and admire superfluously. Confusion and preoccupation for the unknown. Unrequited love. We will never dance the same way again.

Are You Lightning?

No sound is more synonymous with a Southern day of thunderstorms than the screen door slamming. Gusts of wind catch our back door, whose rusted latch never quite catches, and rattles it in the frame as if someone is locked out, shaking the door in frustration. From the bathroom come echos of this rattling, as a century old window pane vibrates in the millimeter of space that has worn in to the wood in its lifetime of weathering wind and storms. From the bedroom one can not decipher the rustling of the tree tops from the whir of traffic on wet pavement. I'm not one to romanticize the rain, but I have to admit, I covet days that demand nothing of me but to sit in PJs and storm chase from my couch. Fascinated by the radars, the viewer photos, the firsthand accounts, and the breaking news of damage; my attention reanimated by buzz words like rotation, squall line, wall cloud, funnel, wind gust, and rain wrapped tornado; I am in the crow's nest, centered indian-style on the sofa, glued to a busy weather team on television. Every Spring brings a day like this one.
I can feel the cushions pulse in the same quake that shakes the walls and reverberates as the thunder rolls over the sky. Flashes of heat lightning draw my attention back to the backdoor windows, though the view is obscured by a screen door beaded in rain drops. I recall the many sounds of rain I've encountered; how it tinkled on the tin roofed back porch of my childhood home, how it was muffled by canvas flaps of the platform tents at girl scout camp, how it sounds like it'll flood us and sweep us away when Sean and I are camping in a nylon tent, the way it beats against the thin windows of a log cabin or filters through tall trees in the woods, how magical it is dancing against a body of water. My cat watches with horrific magnetism as the branches that usually house her bird friends sway wildly, as pots are blown over and the grill cover bucks against sheets of rain. She's just like me, she can't peel herself away from watching, until the danger gets a little too near, at which time she bolts from the door with her tail in a fluff.
Today, the threat of any severe weather seems to have passed us. Some spontaneous grumbles of thunder and a heavy dose of rain are battling with the wind for the title of Most Menacing Weather Element, and that's all that's left to worry about in the Ohio Valley. As the disturbance winds down, the weathermen abandon me in favor of day time programming, and I'm left recalling my favorite stormy day memories...

As a little girl my mother instilled a fear of storms in me that surpassed a Pentacostal fear of God. The fear was so deeply ingrained in my child psyche that at the first sign of thunder I was sure I'd be swept up like Dorothy, certain that my destination would be far less magical than Oz. My memory busily retrieved stories of the '74 tornado that I'd extracted from my mother's phone conversations and mentally cataloged under Holy Moly; her pristine, white painted oak double-seater swing being splintered by the funnel cloud, the Highlands being torn apart, coming out of the basement to find the other side of her street clearly indicating the tornado's destructive path, fearing that my dad was dead when he was really riding around on his bicycle taking photos of the damage, my God Mother watching her neighbor's possessions churning in its own little cyclone.
When storms hit, our household followed a script so predictable that we were more like characters in a play than people living our lives. It was inconceivable that we would ever go out to dinner during a storm, or work on homework, or even take a bath. Daddy was always watching television, unimpressed by the brewing disaster afoot. While he happily ate his pizza (we always ordered in on rainy nights) Mother and I would color. With the blinds drawn in the family room we sat with a tub full of crayons, each selecting a book from our extensive collection. These were no grocery store coloring books, they were purchased from the craft section of the bookstore, and boasted intricate lines and artful images on cardstock paper. Our collective fear was channeled in to the picture, Mom and I fully concentrating on a world of colorful wax. A jarring clap of thunder might rattle our attention, but with heads still down Mom would whisper "We're ok." Usually the storm would subside right around the time that we were each faced with a completed masterpiece. Relief meets relief. But occasionally an unmerciful Mother Nature would send the tornado sirens screaming, and within 2 seconds all crayons were dropped and Mother and I were unfolding my dad's old army cot in the basement. We would yell in unison through the air vents, "Tom, get the animals!" "Daddy, find my pets!" And one by one, my father, with a look born of tedium and boredom, would dutifully deliver the animals down the basement stairs. Two wiggling cats. A cage of mice. A birdzerk cockatiel. At least one hamster. At least one lizard. A frog tank. A box turtle. An 80 gallon aquarium with a 4 ft long iguana whipping violently against the glass. "Tom hurry! Get down here! The sirens!" "I'm trying, Pat!" Poor Daddy, an unwilling Noah on a preemptive ark. And right on cue, as the last critter found a secure place on the cement floor and the first to be rescued were finally settling down and unruffling feathers, the sirens would stop. "Jefferson County is in the clear. You may come out of your basements." That announcement over the weather radio was the bane of my Father's existence. A cleansing sigh, irritation burning behind tired eyes, my dad looked down and lifted the aquarium. We survived again.

I'm at girl scout camp for the very first time. It is no small feet for me to go away from home. I am young, and shy, and terribly attached to my Mother. She's chaperoning, but still, we're on foreign soil. We embark on a lovely day of hiking and crafts and retire to our canvas flapped platform tents. I am full of enthusiasm for this new thing called camp. I slide in to my troll doll sleeping bag and delight in the idea that I'm going to bed and I'm not at home. Slumber finds me quickly. I am so content and cozy. And then a trickling rain wakes me. Just rain, no big deal... This is a real adventure! Then the thunder. There are no coloring books. Daddy isn't here. Mom reaches over and says, "It's fine," but I don't think she believes it. I'm determined to settle in to this adventure. I am determined to conquer my fear. I say, "I knoooow." There is thunder and lightning all night long. Heavy rain. I hear some of the other girls scream when the thunder claps, or cry to go home. I hear mom rustling in her sleeping bag. I think about the Mayans, and the Incas, and the Native Americans, and every other primitive culture I learned about at school and reminded myself that they must have lived through many storms without a basement. In my child's mind I resign myself to Mother Nature's will. I lay with my eyes closed and let myself really experience a storm for the first time. I kind of like it.

In fifth grade each kid in my class had a pen pal in San Antonio, TX that was learning English as a second language. We were in a Spanish immersion program, and used one another's letters to perfect our second tongues. At the end of the year we visited our friends in San Antonio at their elementary school. A couple of months had elapsed since several of us received letters from our pen pals, and some of us had gone through two or three over the course of the year. It was my first lesson in the cruelty of immigration policy. I sat at the lunch table with a girl I'd never corresponded with, but was paired with nevertheless. I wondered what happened to the girl in my letters, who couldn't understand why mis padres allowed tantos animales in mi casa. My new friend looked out the window and commented on the particularly unusual hue of grey in the sky. "My father works on a farm. He says when the sky looks like this it is going to be bad storms." Terror struck and I began to resent this girl who I did't know, who wasn't my pen pal, who had the audacity to scare me instead of making me feel welcome. We finished our lunch and nothing happened, but still I couldn't settle in to the visit. Bad storms? Why was everyone else so happy and at ease? This sky meant bad storms. We went back to their classroom for a group photo and still, not a single rumble of thunder. I finally dismissed my fake pal's diagnosis of the weather. What did she know? I smiled for the photo, hugged the Mexican students adios, and started thinking about dinner. It wasn't until we were filing out of the front doors of the school in single file line that the ominous grey fulfilled its promise. Sheets of rain came down in perfect lines, almost horizontal in the wind, to this day I've never seen more geometrically perfect sheets of rain. I sat on the bus with my nose buried in a Baby Sitter's Club book, attempting to ignore the giant bolts of lightning, but really, I was cursing that Mexican girl. She summoned the rain.

Fast forward 15 years. I am 20 years old spending a stormy day in my first apartment, much like today. Planted on the couch and glued to the news, I watched a line of solid red doom move across the radar screen from northern Indiana and Illinois, down across too-familiar towns in Southern Indiana. The Marengo Cave area was decimated. Trailers blown in to oblivion, schools now piles of brick, cars piled in heaps of twisted metal. People crying. As a wall cloud formed on the Indiana side of the river I became certain that Louisville was to meet the same fate. Even in a state of frantic alarm, I could not be persuaded to step a pinky toe in the cellar of my building. I lived in a nearly 200 year old brick building with way too much history and square footage to trust what may lurk below. The few times I attempted to open those double cellar doors in the backyard, I was met by thick matted cobwebs and clusters of leaves, dirt, and creepy indiscriminate matter. No. I could not trust that cellar to protect me from the wall cloud. I decided instead to heed the weatherman's advice and seek shelter in the inner most room of the apartment. I had a tiny hallway that led to the bathroom with only doorways to the foyer and living rooms on either side. Quickly gathering cushions from the couch and chair I lined the walls. Then, perhaps in an embarrassingly weak moment of humoring my own terror, I dragged my mattress in and blocked off the foyer. I kept the living room doorway open so I could keep an eye on the TV, but secured a hatch door out of an old futon cushion. In my little bunker I made sure to stockpile sentimental essentials; my letter box, my photo box, my favorite pair of jeans, a couple of trinkets belonging to my grandmommy, and my thoroughly unamused pets. I'm pretty sure I forgot to provide myself with food rations or water. To be fair, at some point the tornado sirens did go off, but I didn't take cover until the last of my prized possessions was safe. And sure enough, just as I'd placed the final pieces of nostalgia against my cushioned wall and got the animals calm in my lap, there was stillness. Is this the calm that my mother described before a tornado hits? I listened for the characteristic train whistle. Nothing. And then, almost mockingly, the weatherman said it, "Jefferson County is in the clear. You no longer need to seek shelter." I got up defeated, not by a disaster, but my own irrational fervor. The animals and I emerged. A storm had hit, alright. The one I created. And so, with the same cleansing breath my Father drew before heaving 80 gallons and a thrashing reptile in to his arms, I began loading my arms with trinkets.