What Soothes, Stays

Once I was sick. Really pretty sick. Noone ever figured out what was wrong, doctors offered anecdtodal purviews about "others with a similar virus, things going around" but it was never for sure. I was down for the count for at least a week, then on and off. But that's not my point here.

My point is, for several days I really couldn't eat. And when I finally started to feel like I needed to eat again, I was scared to. Everything, including being upright, felt precarious. I could lose ground at any moment. But I was hungry, and I knew my body needed something. I looked in the fridge and found a big container of Brown Cow Farms Maple Yogurt. The whole milk kind. I took a few spoonsful, right from the big container, and I just felt so much better. And that day and probably the next, that's about all I ate. In small and then bigger servings, but that maple yogurt. Right from the container. My whole body, but somehow particularly my nervous system, rejoiced.

And now, that Brown Cow Farms Maple yogurt still does it, just for a fraction of a moment, each time I eat it. My body remembers what it did for me, and that alloverwonderful, this really is going to be OK feeling-memory remains. And I'm grateful in a way that is hard to reach in the everyday humdrum, sped-up rpm of life. And that slowed down, singular moment gratefulness is a wonderous thing.

10/2014. I realized if I google my name, this blog comes up. (yikes) I guess if anyone is really looking for me, they might find it. Not that they would.

But re-reading this post made me think of something similar. That summer, when I worked at the Learning Center, and still lived on Palfrey St with Marjorie just behind, and every almost day we would meet after work at Walden for a couple of hours to sit and read and swim and decompress. And that ride out Trapelo Road from Waltham to Lincoln on the increasingly treelined freshairfilled, cooler than the city road, my body would relax, slowly realizing that the day of screaming kids and passive aggressive bosses and managing difficult people was done until tomorrow. And that feeling apparently got learned by my body after doing it so many times, and even now when I drive out that road my body relaxes. I've thought more than once that I should move to Lincoln for that very reason. As if.