Facing the Opposite Way

It was the kind of weekend I haven’t had in awhile: the kind where everything goes wrong.

Things have gone fairly well for several months. Not spectacular, always a little anxious, but well. 2024 hasn’t been bad. I’ve been happier than I’ve been in years. My stalker is gone; my daughter is thriving at her new school; my garden is beautiful; I’ve finally got a little circle of friends in the neighborhood. I like writing for the paper when they can use me, and I am working on a new book that’s great fun. I’m even beginning to make peace with my Catholicism, which has been very complicated. I felt like I was finally starting to have a life I like. And then June happened.

This month started out with the scary health episode and an appearance by The Lost Girl, whose children I care deeply about but I know there’s nothing I can do for them. That was hard. Then I was sick from the antibiotics instead of from the colitis for another week of June, which was hard. I’m still not very healthy and I’ve been looking for a good probiotic. When the sickness finally started to let up, I had my anxious trip to Robinson and then the heat wave, and heat waves always make me sick. I’ve been sick with one thing or another for just under thirty days.

Then I got my notification that my student debt had been consolidated ahead of the great big account adjustment, making it eligible for the new program with no more interest. And then the federal courts started meddling with the new repayment plan, making that anxious as well.

That brings us to Saturday, when I got my letter that our Medicaid, the only government safety net program we still have, had been automatically renewed for twelve months, and I was relieved. But then I got the second letter saying I had to notify them within ten days if any of the information they had for me was wrong. And, of course, some of it was wrong. I made a bit more money than they thought I did just in the past year.  I’d have to bring my tax return downtown to show them their mistake, which might ruin my chance at another year of insurance (Adrienne will still be eligible). I told myself it would be all right. I’d make a fun day out of the hated trip to such an anxiety-making place. I’d print the tax return off at the library Monday, and then drop it off at the drop box at Job and Family Services, and then take Adrienne to the lake to go swimming. Swimming would be free because I’d filled my car with gas just before it broke down, and the lake doesn’t cost money like the pool does. We would celebrate officially being more or less middle class, even though being on the bottommost tier of the middle class deprives you of all government assistance and is worse than being poor. We’d have the car by Monday, for the first time since it broke, and we’d take a trip out. The fuel injectors came in Saturday night and Jimmy was going to pop them in on Sunday morning. Everything would be fine after that.

When Jimmy came to the door Sunday, a little after noon, he didn’t look happy. He was holding a piece of bent black rubber in his greasy hand. “It’s still running like crap.”

I usually find Appalachian frankness appealing, but just then I wanted to run away.

He explained that this rubber hose, which has something to do with the fuel injectors, was cracked clean in half. He probably had one to replace it in his jumble of car parts back at his house. But that wasn’t the whole problem. “In a day or two,” he’d be by with a pressure tester, and no, he wouldn’t take any of our money to defray the cost of renting it. The pressure tester would tell him if the pressure was building up properly. I don’t know what pressure because I don’t know a thing about cars. If the pressure didn’t build up, he would know for sure it was the motor as he suspected. If not, he’d start examining all the rings, whatever they are, and spraying them with some kind of cleaning spray. But he’d call the junkyard right away so he could get a new motor quickly if that was the issue.

“How much would a junkyard motor be?” I asked feebly.

He quoted me a high and low estimate, a three-digit number which happened to be between half and all of the amount we were about to be overdrawn when the landlord cashed the rent check in the next few days And then rent would be due again in two weeks, because we have to mail it on the fifteenth and he cashes it with his other checks at the beginning of the month. We hadn’t been able to stay ahead, not with my being sick. And now this. Everything was going fine, up until everything was ruined like a house of cards.

We couldn’t go to Mass that day, because we had no way to get there.

All I wanted was to go swimming. Swimming in the lake and hiking in the woods are the way I process my anxiety. I need repetitive exercise in nature or I shut down. But I didn’t know when I’d next see the lake.

That night, I couldn’t sleep a wink.

Sometime just before dawn I dozed just lightly enough to have a severe night terror and woke Adrienne, instead of falling into real sleep.

I gave up trying to sleep at seven in the morning. After breakfast and a big cup of coffee, I went out to look at the garden.

I am always up so late at night writing, and I do my social media catch-up on the news when I do wake up at ten or so. I never get out to the garden before noon. I wasn’t used to a garden in the early morning.

All of the sunflowers were facing the opposite way.

When I see them in the afternoon, they’re facing west, inland, away from the Ohio river and the Appalachian mountains, towards Columbus where I was born. Just after dawn, they face East, towards West Virginia where my ancestors were born, towards Greenbrier County where the family farm used to be, towards the place where everything is alive. Most of the sunflower buds are still shut tight, but there were a few open. The volunteers that grew out of the compost are opening first. All of those are surprises. I have no idea what they’ll be until they bloom. Most of the blooms are ordinary yellow, which is beautiful, but one is my very favorite variety: a red and orange Autumn Beauty with one bud open and at least seven more getting ready. And all were facing the opposite way.

That volunteer pumpkin that grew out of the compost from last year’s jack-o-lantern was blossoming as well. There were five or six brand new bright orange five-sided stars open in the morning light. Yellow stars, similarly shaped but smaller, dotted the cucumber. The cool grass was alive with white and purple clover. Everything was clean and cool and bright, as it should be.

I came back in and fell asleep until after noon.

After I finally woke up, Adrienne sat on my bed and joked with me.

Later that day, the mother of the Baker Street Irregulars consoled me by sending a video of a preacher man invoking a blessing on the week, promising us good things now and for the latter half of the year.

I have a daughter who’s happy, a life I’m beginning to like, and most of a working car. I have a driver’s license, which I didn’t get until I was thirty-six. I have friends, including a stalwart Appalachian neighborhood mechanic who is properly horrified at the thought of giving a car less than twenty years old up for lost, and he does have the ability to rebuild a car from junk parts.

Somehow, I think it’ll all work out.

I didn’t used to feel like that, but I do lately.

I guess my mind, like a sunflower at dawn, is facing the opposite way I’m used to.

It’s going to be all right.