(written June 2021)
I can get really moody around my birthday. Quiet, withdrawn, achey. It’s like some piece inside me has just decided to be broken and grow from an ache to a throb to internal bleeding. Instead of growing curious about it–wondering what that ache might have to tell me–my curiosity is turned outward. Who is noticing? Who seems to care about me and my pain? Who has noticed that MY DAY is approaching? Who is going out of their way to shower me with love, attention, and gifts?
It’s toxic bananas. Always has been. It peaked at age 13. I’m relieved that it seems to be on it’s 4th half life now. I hope it fades away entirely with time, but I don’t know how much choosing there is to be had with this one trend.
This year, my birthday snuck up on me. Tanyia (fiance), Bert n Ernie (son), and I made plans to join some friends who would be camping at a state park. The week leading up to departure was busy, enough so that we left disconnected from ourselves and each other. When I got to camp, my busyness just shifted to entertaining my son. With constructing the tent. With setting up sleep mats. With swimming. With showering and cleaning off lake goo and searching for ticks and leaches. With playing with matches. With making grilled cheese pudge pies to replace the dinners he wouldn’t eat. The goal was to replace the IPAD, which is a bit like replacing oxygen or sunlight for him right now. So, on and on, busy, busy, busy.
Saturday morning, Todd was working to prep breakfast. And, I felt like it would be a decent and interesting thing to try and engage Jonah, his son. We played catch, and I asked him everything I could think of: school, teachers, friends, summer plans, age. Only after I asked him about birthdays did I realize that we were born on the same day. And, that it happened to be tomorrow.
Hours later–after a group hike and an air conditioned cheeseburger and beer break–my pod returned to camp and nestled into hammocks. My son fell fast asleep, and I wasn’t far behind. Before sleep caught me, though, I marvelled at the tree tops 40, maybe 60 feet above me. Skinny ash and birch trees with little leaf coverage had stretched to find sunlight above their peers. They were completely stable and boring to look upon at eye level, but here, looking up, I could see they were dynamic. They danced. They reminded me of one of my favorite pastimes as a youth–lying on a porch swing on my grandparents’ deck, staring up at a canopy of old oak trees. It was the most serene, most private, safe space in my world at that time in my life, and I was grateful to be transported back there through this hammock.
When nap time was over, Tanyia and I began prepping dinner. Sometime after lighting the campfire and before wrapping the last salmon packet, we heard a large crack. We looked over to see the top of a tree falling straight down like a spear into the middle of our space. Had the tip of the spear struck anyone, it might have proved fatal. Emergency room and an urgent care trip was guaranteed. Had one of the children been nearby–been caught in the branches that accompanied the spear–we would have tears and trauma and empty first aid kits. It just happened to fall in the right place at the right time where no one and no tent structure was harmed.
The next morning after breakfast, Jonah opened his present. It was perfect–a device for loading and tying 100 water balloons within seconds. Tanyia, feeling bad that she hadn’t gotten me anything, ordered me something perfect for motorcycle camping soon after we got home. Unlike past years when the day had been forgotten by others, I didn’t feel particularly hurt that she had forgotten nor saved from any inner tortue when I understood a gift was on its way. For myself, I felt like the tree was the gift.
Witnessing the peace, movement, and energy that can coexist with something that is deeply planted and fixed, that was a gift. Receiving a stark reminder that things are not what they appear and that it can all change very quickly, that, too, was a gift.