Light, Trails, and Physical Therapy Fails
Particularities Of A Week In Smoggy January
January 5: The sun breaks through after who knows how long a time of grey skies. In the morning, cleaning up breakfast, I glance at the wall and see bars of sunlight. I go and stand in them, turning my arm to the soft haze. It laps at my skin; it is a gentle incoming wave.
This sunlight is reflected weakly through two sets of doors at the back of our house, but it is still sunlight. And it grows brighter.
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As the snow melts, the perforated ribbons of our cat’s paw prints grow larger, bolder across the yard. Where once she stepped and left inch-long dainty marks, the holes widen and broaden. They yawn, revealing dead grass beneath. I wonder if she is appalled looking at them. She did not foresee such a bold reach of her small paws. She did not foresee these clear paths of where she has gone and what she has done.
Stepping reluctantly into the biting crystals of icy days, she left a story, melting, reaching, shining in the sun.
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My four-year-old son spends hours on the living room rug with his magnetic tiles. Clicking and stacking carefully, he creates multi-colored boxes, triangles, and prisms. He builds kennels for his Paw Patrol figures, garages for his cars. One morning, he builds a long triangular tunnel. He yells for me as I’m in the other room, trying to complete some task on my phone: “Mommy, look! It’s so pretty inside! Look!”
I yell back: “I know! That’s so cool!”
I want to finish what I’m doing, but he doesn’t let me. “Come on, look!” And then I remember reading something written by Breanne Rodgers, how her family resolved that if one of them saw something beautiful and asked the other to see it, too, everyone would drop what they were doing and take a moment to witness.
I put down my phone and walk to the living room.
Bending down, I peer into the tunnel. A smooth strip of rainbow-colored light stretches across the carpet. It’s vivid, glowing, but gentle. My son is right, it is pretty.
It’s no magical experience—my day isn’t a hundred times better. But just for a moment, I’ve stilled my breath. I’ve stepped out of the speeding utilitarian spiral I get trapped in most of the time.
To notice and observe and take joy in beauty is one of the most important tasks of all.
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January 7: My fingers are cold. Poor circulation. My feet are cold, too. But my legs are not cold because I have on my thick fleece sweatpants that are good to wear even in thirty degree weather. My back is not cold because I have the heating pad on it. I woke up this morning barely able to move my neck. There is a muscle in my back knotted up again. I have been working with a physical therapist for a month now to relieve this pain, and she taped a large X across my back to help brace my spine in a straighter position. This plan backfired; the muscles I’ve relied on to take away the pain were suddenly gone, and the weak muscles screamed in protest.
When I text her, she replies: “Take the X-tape off. It was too much at once for you.” I obey, asking my husband to slowly peel off the strips while I screech through clenched teeth.
At my first visit with this therapist, we talked about cycles and patterns. The tense muscles around my thoracic outlet squeeze the nerves of my arm. Angry, those nerves release a neurotransmitter1 telling my muscles to tense up even more. And so on and so on it goes, until I’m miserable.
The therapist said, optimistically, “You’re stuck in this cycle, but you just need a little bit of help to get out of it.”
I drove home, thinking about metaphors, thinking about all the disastrous cycles we get stuck in, all the patterns of thinking that dry and stay hard like cement. Just a little bit of help? Doesn’t it take more than a little bit of help to change what’s established itself for years?
But maybe she’s right. Too much change at once caused collapse. A gentle massage here, a daily exercise there, and I’m not in as much pain (at least on a regular basis) as I was a month ago, or a year ago.
I am relieved that I will never again, out of desperation, visit the chiropractor who cracked my neck like a defenseless twig.
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My daughter proclaims: “Done! Done! Done!” Pulsing her hands six inches apart from each other, she looks like she’s holding an invisible dowel rod, a drumstick. The word becomes a march, a game.
Her brother prefers: “Done won won!” He says this phrase with the intonation of a ringing bell.
These children riff on words like guitars, strumming the possibilities, humming new tunes. They play and sing while I worry, hustle, snap, rush them on to the next thing, feel my own nerves like taut strings of their own, an instrument much more solemn.
Today, I stop for a moment. I ask to borrow the skill to play a different instrument—perhaps a mandolin?
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January 9: An email from the seed company I order from slots into my inbox, containing a list in bold type. The seed packets being shipped to me sound like a poem:
New Kuroda
Merveille des Quatre Saisons
Gustav’s Salad
Blue Curled Scotch
This poem will sprout from the earth.
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I may or may not be getting these terms correct.