Unmoored

I awoke at some indecipherable hour on our first morning here and had no idea where I was. I’ve experienced this sensation before as a fleeting disorientation, quickly fixed by reviewing clues and fragments to properly insert me into time and place. But now there was a lingering absence of all anchoring facts. I was floating, unmoored, lost in a sea of angled light and shapes of white and finally the hum of an electric fan and a small ensemble of bird sounds, but I could not summon up my location; my internal sextant remained dormant. 

And then I began to appreciate the mystery of it. Was this feeling of floating, undefined by geography or circumstance, the undiluted experience of existing? Was I nothing more than my consciousness, now set adrift? I rode along with it. I think I briefly went back to sleep, but this strange interlude of being intensely alert and utterly confused somehow altered my perception for the rest of the day and beyond. I am seeing the futility of always seeking sense.

The location, of course, was the upstairs bedroom in the house in Oxford where Monte and I will be staying for a month in order to have time with our grandson, and this is the bisected pattern of our lives these days. The trip is not getting any easier, and I always underestimate the toll it takes on the body, mind, and pocketbook. I seem to be acquiring new aches that don’t abate, my luggage is laden with worries, and I was wistful for home as soon as we began to drive away. I don’t know why, but I tend to fall more deeply in love with my life at home right before we embark on a journey, and this time, for many reasons, was among the deepest fallings and hardest of leavings.

But as I said, there is futility in trying to make sense of it. Our daughter forged her own trajectory long ago, and this is what we must do to have her in our lives, and we certainly know there are far worse places. Once we are here and I have figured out where here is, a new pattern emerges, and I find my footing and invent my role and look gratefully to Monte for assurance and stability. 

And then, as always, the reasons for everything begin to appear. If they were poems, they would be tiny ones, barely couplets, if they were songs, they would be mere fragments, but fragments that infuse and fuel, glimmers that I might have missed if mired in self-absorption.

There is my daughter paused at a sidewalk vent above the basement of the Bodleian Library, saying, with visible pleasure,  “I can smell the books.” Suddenly she is my little girl again, the one who sniffed books upon opening them, read everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, then led us on a mission to find the author’s home and burial site, which in retrospect may be part of how this whole England thing started, although it is a fool’s quest to try to find some linear narrative in this long meandering journey with its many detours and serendipities. 

But the master of all ceremonies is Felix. Felix, who transformed his bedroom into a campsite with the flick of a large quilt and a fathomless imagination, and implored his Nonna to join him. I obediently lay beside him beneath a ceiling of stars and the lamplight of a moon for a five-minute night that seemed to encompass many hours and yield zero sleep, awakened by the imagined crowing of a rooster in the garden.

“It’s time to get up and explore!” announced Felix, and here I should add that all of his announcements are decrees, issued with an enviable certainty and authority, and all I can do is marvel and accommodate, even to the point of physical exhaustion, which seems to be my normal state now, but with punchiness as a consolation prize.  

Suddenly we must brush our teeth, a crucial part of our morning ritual at camp. Felix had been so enamored of Nonna’s cool travel toothbrush that we spent part of the previous day going into toothbrush stores to find one for him, preferably in green, but they only had folding ones, which are not the same as Nonna’s, a two-part tool that tucks smartly into its own plastic carrying case. I gave him my purple one and ordered a green one from Amazon, but they only came in groups of three, so now there were four colorful toothbrushes to choose from, an embarrassment of riches, but nothing is too fine for an explorer, rescue worker, and all-purpose guy-in-charge like Felix.

So here we were at the campsite brushing our teeth while the rooster crowed and the forest beckoned. And off we went, again and again, and the world keeps expanding into infinite possibilities. There are hills to ascend, trees to climb, and emergencies around every bend. There are sounds of the sea to listen to and the silly songs of cement mixers. Nonna is tired. Very tired.  But also honored and elated to be Felix’s chosen assistant. This is why we’re here. It isn’t even a matter of choice. 

And it’s my daughter again, spotting a necklace of aqua-colored beads in the Oxfam charity shop, decisively buying it, putting it on right away, and striding along looking pretty, even a bit fancy, so reminiscent of that little girl I used to know.

But she is also the woman who goes off for a cycle and a swim at night while I can barely drag myself back to the rented house with the bedroom upstairs where I will float, unmoored, until the pale light of daybreak and blackbird harmonics remind me where I am.