WWHOHD?
What would Hestia or Hera do?
Oh, these H-gals are on ON MY MIND. It turns out that Hestia, not Hera, is the goddess of hearth and home. Hera is the goddess of marriage, motherhood, children. But I am grooving hard on both of these goddesses, at the moment.
I realize I have not cleaned the cat litter box for some time. Some kitty litter is scattered beside it, and the trail extends into the hallway outside the bathroom. I swallow the unpleasant conclusion: Eli has been, er, helping me keep it clean. Ugh. Clearly, I am no goddess of the hearth and home—not yet—although I love home with a passion, and I pine for a hearth with the fervor of Hestia. I yearn for a lasting marriage like Hera, even with a husband that tosses a lightning bolt now and then.
Have any of you trusted a tarot card reading at a low point in your life? Did what you hear make sense…or do you think it did only because you wanted it to?
I do not need to eat because
I am no longer here. The kitchen
ghost is happy to have the
abandoned room all to herself.
She rolls out her biscuits
and tries to ignore
the still earthly 21st-century
table detritus that interferes,
the kaleidoscope mess that
makes her squint and rub her
eyes with floured fingers.
Two words. Liquefied poop. Blockage. My luck. My basement. Men came. Men tromped. Slimebugs flew. Men screamed. Hammers pounded. Sewage everywhere. On pants. On shoes. In kitchen. City wrong. Mr. Rooter wrong. Cleaning, me. And friend. Made call. “$1200 to $1800.” Nope. We’ll do. Tears out. Friend in. Shop Vac in. Sewage out. Vomit, plentiful. [...]
“Only the dead don’t make mistakes,” my friend told me, as someone had once told her. I found this reassuring. She said this before we realized we had sat upon her blueberry muffin and crushed it.
Yesterday, because Carlita speaks some Spanish, the girls sang, “Hola, Hola, Amigos,” to her, and then we had a Pablo Neruda poetry reading. I read words of love and longing to our kitten in butchered Spanish. I have never studied Spanish. But my aunt left me an ancient copy of Neruda love poems, and Carlita purred appreciatively as I stumbled through the original Spanish. The girls, too, settled as we read and listened. We didn’t bother with the English translation. The sound of the Spanish—no matter how far from Carlita’s rough, licking native tongue—pleased us all.
Today, Mary Magdalene offered me a cat.
I took the cat home.
Who says no to Mary Magdalene?
“I can’t work on that kind of faucet,” says Keith the Plumber.
“Sure you can!” I say.
Keith gives me a peculiar look. “Nope, that fixture is about forty years old. I’m not insured to work on that. It’s not scald-proof.”
I mull this over. “I’m almost forty. I’m not scald-proof either. But my doctor works on me! Ha! Ha ha!”
If I am officially a loon, I’m really going for it.
The vision receded in time. It took its leave for good when the girls arrived on the scene and rewrote my life plan in crayon scrawls and lipsticked walls and princess squealing. Still, sometimes I wonder who those little boys were, who was on the phone, how I knew I was alone, that my sons were solely my responsibility. I wonder whom they went to, which mother has those handsome little guys now. I do feel like they are out there somewhere—change of plans, sorry, fellas, you’re headed to Cleveland—although this is a silly thing to admit. But my charm lies in admitting the silly things. Someone has to. So.
Pushing the curtains aside I saw white. Snow everywhere. Power out! The terrible succession of thoughts, collapsing like Dominoes and crushing a Candyland route of brain cells:
No furnace!
No heat!
No stove!
No coffee!
No DVD player or TV (this one made me gasp aloud as I heard H-Bomb stirring in the next room and thought MY GOD SATURDAY MORNING WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE CHILD)!
No email (another gasp)!
No phone (okay, not bad).
