Yoga greed

The yoga studio is stylish: stripped wood floors, exposed brick walls, ambient music playing in the background. Among the comfy sofas in the waiting area, a wide selection of expensive yoga clothing is displayed for sale. Burlington has a lot of yoga studios, but I can’t name this one in case they sue me. I know that wouldn't be very yogic behavior on their behalf, but underneath all the window dressing they’re not a very yogic place. 

The receptionist was sipping something beige and gloopy out of a see-through plastic cup. We’d met before. She wants to be a yoga teacher but hasn’t completed her training yet. If she hadn’t already told me how passionate she is about holistic health and how much she believes in maintaining the purity of the human body, I would have sworn she had a hangover.

Ideally, I wanted to see the finance manager, but the finance manager doesn't have a fixed schedule and hasn't been returning my calls. The studio prides itself on upholding a laid-back approach to the work place which, the receptionist had explained in one of our earlier conversations, counters the relentless, insidious corporate ethos of so many other businesses. It's possible this makes the staff happy, but it doesn't contribute towards excellent customer service. 

I smiled, said good morning, and explained I’d like to talk about the bills I'd been sent; and the receptionist winced slightly - which could have been hangover related, or might have been her reaction to me speaking about nasty materialistic money-type stuff.  

‘What exactly don't you understand?' she asked, flicking back a strand of her unbrushed brown hair and fiddling with the edge of one of her big silver earrings. 

'I don't understand why I owe you several hundred dollars when I paid for all my sessions up-front,'  

'I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that you'd paid,' she said.

'But I did pay,' I interrupted. ‘You swiped my credit card, I signed, and you took money from my account.'

'Actually, that doesn't mean you paid.' She scowled at me. 'We don’t know how much to charge for a session until we've contacted your insurance company.'

Medical insurance in the US is complicated:

1. The majority of people pay into some kind of medical insurance arranged by their employer. 
2. If you can’t pay for medical insurance, you’re screwed. (Iola’s school in Cambridge hosted a fund-raiser last year for a family whose 8-month old baby fell ill and died within 2 months. The family were about to have their home reclaimed and to declare themselves bankrupt because they couldn’t pay their dead child’s medical expenses. When I mention this to American friends, they can all think of similar scenarios with people they know). 
3. Some insurance providers operate 'co-pays', where the individual pays a flat rate up-front for each medical visit; other insurance providers have a 'deductible' which means the medical provider bills the insurance company who then bill the individual. The amount of the 'deductible' varies from insurance provider to insurance provider, from employer to employer, and from individual to individual. 
4. Once the 'deductible' amount has been met, a greater portion of medical costs are then covered by the insurance provider. (It has taken us several years to pay the deductible and other bills related to Maya breaking her leg nearly three years ago; it will likely take us several more years before we have paid all the costs associated with breaking my neck. Illness and injury in the US are comparable to taking on an additional mortgage.)
5. Different medical providers charge different amounts for the same services. So, for example, a mammogram might cost several hundred dollars with one hospital but several thousand dollars with another. 
6. And the same medical provider might charge different amounts for the same service depending upon the client's medical insurance provider. 

It is all very incestuous and almost impossible to untangle, and nobody likes talking about it very much. In the yoga studio in Burlington, the receptionist stared at her computer screen, as though hoping I might go away. 

'If I hadn't shown you my insurance card, would I owe you money? ' I asked. 

‘No,’ she answered. ‘If I hadn’t contacted your insurance company, the amount you'd paid would have covered the service.’

‘So it’s like going to the general store, and buying a gallon of milk.’ I began. ‘I pay $4 for the gallon of milk, but mention that Fred has given me the money to pay for the milk, at which point you decide to charge me $6.’

There is a particular facial expression some people use when they think they're talking to the village idiot; it tends to combine a tight plastic-y smile, clenched teeth and narrowed eyes. The receptionist put on her 'talking to the village idiot' face and spoke very slowly, 'You paid the amount it would have cost if you didn't have medical insurance. But you do have medical insurance. So you now owe this much money,’ she pointed at the bills I had put on her desk.

When I tried to explain I didn't think it was fair, the receptionist lost interest in our conversation. It's possible that, before trying to become a yoga teacher, she aced an assertiveness training course.'I'm not sure what you want right now,' she said. 'Some people like to vent because they feel bad about something, and if that is what you would like to do right now I am willing to listen. Other people want to understand a problem and, if that's what you want, then I have explained it to you and I am willing to repeat my explanation.'

I tried to take a slightly different tack. 'For my first session, I booked a yoga therapy evaluation. I was told it would cost $140. I paid $140. The session took slightly less than the hour I was told it would take. You have now sent me a bill which states I also received 'Therapeutic Exercise' for $110 and 'Neuromuscular Re-education' for $40. I did not ask for those services and, until I received this bill, I did not know I had received them.'

'How would you know?' she asked. 'You are not a medical expert.'

I still like yoga. I used to be able chattarunga with the best for them and my corpse pose is an absolute killer, but most yoga poses are more difficult for me now that I’m metal-necked and nerve-damaged. I'm pleased the receptionist and the finance manager benefit from working in an anti-corporate environment, even if it is funded by their extortion of additional funds from unsuspecting insurance providers. And I hope the finance manager returns my telephone calls one of these days. I haven't paid the bill yet because I still don't understand what I am paying for, so I'm sure she'll soon track me down with a reminder. While I’m waiting, I’m going to download a few yoga lessons from Amazon and set up my yoga mat in the corner of my bedroom. It's not a particularly stylish room, it lacks some of the atmosphere of the studio in Burlington and I'm sure there are ethical issues associated with using a large corporation like Amazon, but at least I'll know exactly what I'm paying for. 

Faith

I've been reading a lot lately: Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies; Barbara Glasson's I Am Somewhere Else; Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, and a heap of memoirs besides - accounts of misspent childhoods and voyages towards self-discovery. There's been a lot of 'God' on my bedside table and piles more on my desk: there's a half written letter to one of my closest, oldest friends who is being admitted into the Church of England as a Reader later this month; there's a little pile of gifts for two other, more recent but also very close friends, who are about to return to Australia - one to head a parish and the other to continue his academic career writing about Christianity. I've also been watching a slew of Netflix documentaries on Christianity, my favorite of which is 'For the Bible tells me so...' which includes the following film sketch (helpfully annotated here by Gay Star News).

My understanding of the Bible is similar to my understanding of Coronation Street - I grew up dipping into occasional episodes, and I have some understanding of the main characters, some memories of the main story lines, and a fascination with the more outlandish twists in the plot. I used to watch Coronation Street at my grandmother's house, glancing at the screen while sucking mint imperials and leafing through horse magazines; I used to sit through endless episodes of Christianity at our local church, half-listening but preoccupied by the village doctor snoring at the back of the choir stalls. By the time I became more interested in what was going on in the Bible and why, the village vicar had decided I was somewhat - ahem - "troublesome" and tended to avoid answering my questions on the rare occasions when he hadn't successfully managed to avoid me.

I don't watch Coronation Street anymore - in fact, I probably wouldn't recognize half the cast these days. The Bible has the advantage because their cast hasn't changed for centuries (except for the addition of a new saint every now and again), but rather than being reassured by the familiarity, I am increasingly frustrated. Primarily, I am frustrated about the absence of female characters and the awful behavior of those few women who have been written into the Bible's pages - Eve accidentally brings about the downfall of the entire human race; the only career advice Naomi thinks to give her recently widowed daughter-in-law is to sleep with a wealthy distant cousin (which proves the old adage that it's not what you know, but who... in the Biblical sense); Mary gives birth without a midwife (Really? The town was packed to the gunnels with females but none managed to help? Virtually every other birth in history is attended by females but not this one??!); Delilah gave Samson a bad haircut; Martha complained a lot about the housework; and Mary - the other one - gave Jesus an expensive foot massage.

I was in my 30s before I heard about Veronica. She's in that episode when Jesus is struggling to carry the cross to Golgotha and everyone is wailing and sobbing and gnashing their teeth on his behalf. Veronica steps forward and wipes his face with a damp cloth. I like that. It's something I hope I might do in those circumstances - to step forward and try to make a bit of a difference, even when there is not much anyone can do. Because I was excited about finding an admirable female in the Bible, I chose to sit next to a Jesuit priest later that week on a train journey from London to Scotland. He told me people normally choose not to sit next to him because they're put off by his religious habit. I think he might have preferred to sit alone, but I wanted to talk about Veronica and it felt like too good an opportunity to miss.
'What do you know about Veronica?' I asked as we drew out of King's Cross.
'Nothing really,' he answered.
'Really? Nothing?'
He shrugged and explained she wasn't an important part of the story.
We talked a lot over the next 4 hours, but it appeared there was really very little to say about Veronica.
Ten years later, I asked the Professor of Liturgical Theology at Harvard the same question. He's about as far removed from a Jesuit priest as you might imagine two people to be: one wears a brown habit, the other wears jeans; one has dedicated his life to obeying the Bible, the other one to deconstructing its message. But the Prof's shrug was similar.
'She probably didn't even exist,' he said, 'I suspect she might be a metaphor.'
The only woman I've found in the Bible who makes me want to encourage my children to read Bible stories, and she's probably just been made up by someone wanting to make some kind of theological point? Great.

I don't believe the Bible is the word of God, as some of my friends do, and I can't accept that every word contained on its pages is a great unquestionable Truth. In fact, if God was going to do the whole thing again and wanted my advice, I'd recommend he or she demanded a greater degree of editorial control.

But I'm not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater, either. I'm not willing to reject my sense of wonder and amazement, to neglect my faith that something beyond humanity makes the world a better place and offers help in times of need (even when we don't or can't or won't listen). I'm wary of people who interpret the Bible literally and use it to justify their prejudices, but I also know that some of the most amazing people I have ever met are guided by a profound sense of faith - to name a few, I'm thinking of Anne Shumway and her dedication to vulnerable women across Massachusetts, of Pastor Rick and his peace work in Jerusalem, of Rev. Sekou and his determination that the voices of the people in Ferguson, MI will be heard because that is the only way the conflict will be fairly resolved. There are many, many more. In fact, I'm sure that for every bigot who uses the Bible for their own means, there are far more people working within religious communities to make the world a better place. And I am glad of them.

I don't know where any of this leads me, or leaves me. But I've been reading and I've been thinking and God has been on my mind.

Words, faces and electric shocks

Some things seem inevitable: the stiffness in my neck and shoulders; the constant low-level pain; the restrictions in my movements; the itchiness around the area where my scar is healing (my scar, by the way, still looks spectacular - a kind of hybrid between bad-ass zombie war wound and Zippy's fastened shut mouth in the 1970s' tv show, Rainbow.)

But there are other things besides.  

1. Words

Because of the shattered bones in my neck and the real fears of paralysis, the medical team gave little attention to the lacerations in my scalp at the time of my admission to hospital. By the time they'd operated and I'd recovered from the anesthesia, the holes had mostly scabbed over and the nurses were unsurprisingly reluctant to poke about at my head when it was only connected to my body by a few bits of metal and a screw or three.

I began to notice my word confusion during my time at the rehabilitation center. Very specifically, I noticed my relationship with words had shifted when I spent an entire morning trying to find the word 'anatomy'. But this was during the 'hey, be grateful!' part of my recovery: a period where anything I noticed or pointed out about my condition merely emphasized how fortunate I was to not be (a) dead, (b) severely brain-damaged, or (c) in a wheelchair. (I am still exceptionally grateful for those things in a way I cannot easily put into words, I just don't use the exclamation mark as frequently.) 

By the time my 6 week check-up came around (starring the beautifully made up physician's assistant and the blue-eyed surgeon), I knew something was wrong. My words were addled and my short-term memory was shot. The beautiful physician's assistant pouted at the computer screen and scrolled through some of the CT scans which had been taken on the night of the accident, but she seemed unenthused - as though they were part of a soap opera episode she had already seen. By this point we'd also moved into the 'Let's Wait and See' part of my recovery, so her response to my concerns was, inevitably, 'Let's Wait and See' - delivered with a smile, before she went to touch up her mascara.

I've been obediently doing a lot of 'waiting' and 'seeing' lately, but I've also been talking a lot of nonsense. 

The typical morning in our house involves me chivvying the girls to get ready for school:

'Come on, Iola. You need to get your school sandwich ready.'

'I'm on school dinners, mmmmy.'

'Not your school sandwich - your school bag. Obviously, your school bag. Have you taken it out of the kitty litter yet?'

'The kitty litter?'

'No, not the kitty litter - the boot room! Have you taken your school bag out of the boot room?'

The girls are now so used to their mother being linguistically inept that they either laugh or try and guess what I really mean. It's more difficult when my words get messed up in front of strangers. 

For example, yesterday afternoon I'd arranged a play-date with another mother and her two daughters. We don't know one another well, but I enjoy her company hugely and I was looking forward to her visit. A few hours before her visit, she sent an email explaining the complexity of her day but saying she would probably be on time. I replied, telling her it wasn't a problem. Or I thought I'd told her it was 'no problem', until I opened the email later that evening. I had actually written that I was sure there was 'no probability' of her being on time. Hmmm, charming. I don't know if she thought I was rude or existentialist, or a mixture of the both, but I'll apologize next time I see her... if I remember.   

2. Faces

My accident happened two weeks after moving to Vermont. My children attend two different schools which means I need to know the names of about 15 new teachers and school staff, as well as smiling vaguely at more than 50 parents as we stand around at the end of the school day waiting to collect our little darlings. We also have new neighbors, I see new faces on dog walks, and I smile somewhat hopefully at the same people who serve me in the local shops, the post office, the library etc. It would be challenging enough to remember everyone's name even if I still had a short-term memory.

I have clearly offended some people - asking several times which child is theirs, or forgetting to acknowledge someone whom I was talking with only a few days earlier. Other people find it hilarious: Dan - who might be called Dave but seems to answer to both - has offered to write out name cards for people to wear whenever they speak to me, and Iola's class teacher suggested I might make a set of flashcards with people's names and faces on them. My concern about this second is that it risks ending up becoming a completely inappropriate version of Happy Families!

3. Electric Shocks

I've never been a fan of shopping, but nowadays it hurts. The worst culprit is the local organic supermarket which is all craft-beers and organic cotton yoga tops and homeopathic medicines. This morning I suffered 18 electric shocks between the kale counter and the kombucha bar. At the customer services counter, a young woman with enormous deer-like eyes, long hair and long silver earrings smiled as I approached.
'Does anyone else suffer shocks when they shop here?' I asked. 

'Shocks?' She nodded, but it seemed an involuntary movement - the infinite action of a nodding dog toy sitting on the parcel shelf of a car rather than an indicator of human agreement. 'Like what kind of shocks?'

'Electric shocks,' I said. 

'Hmmm,' she put her head slightly to one side, but continued nodding. 'Electric shocks.'

'They hurt,' I said. 'And it happens every time I shock here.'

'You shock here?'

'No. Obviously I shop here because that's why I'm here with my shopping cart and my collection of reusable shopping bottles, but your store gives me shocks and I have this thing with words right now.'

There was a lot more I was about to say but a look, midway between alarm and fear, crossed her beautiful deer eyes and, for a brief moment, she stopped nodding. It seemed like a good point to shrug and leave.

On the positive side, I won't recognize the long earring-ed customer services person when I next go into the store, which will give her plenty of opportunities to avoid me. On the less positive side, it means I'm no closer to a solution of how to buy my organic carrots and ethnically scented candles without repeatedly electrocuting myself. I had wondered about trying to find a home delivery service, but the combination of my tendency to use the wrong words and my inability to remember what I want could make this a very expensive mistake. Instead, I'll put on rubber-soled shoes and do the old-person shuffle around the store in the hope that it might make it less shocking. I can console myself, at least, with the knowledge that I won't remember the humiliation in too many details by the time I've driven back home. 

The mountain

No longer broken but not yet quite whole, I accidentally climbed the mountain.

Sunday was a good day for a walk: the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the mountain was at her most fetching. A little tall, perhaps, but not ridiculously so.

The higher you climb, the smaller the trees. Here's a photo of Nathan being a Wood-elf King (we live in Underhill, for heaven's sake, and need to reference Tolkien and hobbits at least once a day...)

After a while, the trees gave up completely. On a camera better than mine, you'd see New York State and the Adirondacks spread out on the horizon beyond Lake Champlain. But look at the sweat on Nathan's t-shirt. See? We'd earned that view and it looks like we're at the top, doesn't it? Mountains are like that. Deceptive beasts, leading you on, pulling another challenge out of the bag just when you think you've won them over.

I learned a lot on Sunday. First, you know those thin pale gray lines on maps? The gradient ones? This photo shows what happens when they're really, really, really close together. And, second, when the Appalachian Mountain Club describe a walk as 'extremely challenging', they're not kidding. (It was around this point on the walk that I made the decision to believe every single word of every single thing I read from this moment on). Third, I learned how much my broken neck has affected my entire upper body strength. Three months ago, I could lift any of the boxes our removal men hoisted around; now, I'm significantly weaker and the nerve damage to my hands and arms means I don't always know where my hands are gripping unless I can see them. I managed to scramble up after Nathan (and follow him up a few other similar climbs besides), but it was not pretty and it was not elegant.

The trail was made in the 1910s by some free-thinking creative Vermonters. In the places where the gradient was too steep to scramble, they drilled tunnels. Perhaps they were as tired of climbing as I was by this point in the trail's design. Standing up there at silly-thousands of feet, I could hear their voices from over a hundred years before...
"Damn your eyes, Fitzgerald, there's another scramble here."
"Might I suggest a little dynamite, sir?"
Whatever. I like tunnels. I really like tunnels. Tunnels mean you don't have to scramble up near vertical rock faces or leap across 5ft ravines. Regardless of how many times Nathan banged his head (because even free-thinking Edwardian Vermonters didn't build tunnels for men who stand 6'7'' in their socks), I will not have a bad word said against them.

I'm not sure if I expected an easier walk because we started from our front door (there's always that strange psychological glitch which suggests something is only truly adventurous if you have had to make a journey to get there), or because my broken neck is stopping me from thinking straight. And I'm still not quite sure how I hadn't understood that our path was taking us to the top of the mountain. But we did it, and the fact I cried twice, bit through my lip on one of the ascents, and could barely move for a few days' afterwards is neither here nor there.

The true testament of the walk is in this photo. It's taken me nearly 2 years, but - look! - I finally wore out the dog.

And this is what I look like after climbing a mountain with a broken neck. You'd never know, would you.

The problem with history

It was Iola who started the conversation with the man at Shelburne Museum. We were in the museum's printing shop: a real-life museum exhibit with an authentic assortment of large cast iron presses, printing materials, and an elderly man with half-moon glasses, a large printer's apron, and a face filled with carefully tended facial hair. 

Iola looked around at the alphabet posters which decorated the walls of the shop: 'O could be for Owl too,' she suggested

The man studied her for a moment over the top of his glasses, sniffed slightly and replied, 'Here O is for Oven.'

He is, I soon discovered, a man who does not like the possibility that things might be different from how he thinks they are. 

Iola had started the conversation, but he looked over her head and began talking to me. Together we admired the black iron hand press which he had used to produce the alphabet posters. It was his favorite and had, for many years, been the only one in the world. The corners of the man's mouth drooped suddenly. 'Then somebody found another one in New Jersey.'

I offered my condolences.

'There have been historians...' his face contorted slightly as though the word 'historian' tasted bad, '... who have looked at this hand press and the one in New Jersey. They said that this one was built in Boston, then the shop burnt down and the press maker moved to Philadelphia where he built the press which is now in New Jersey.'

I nodded, half-listening. 

'But!' His shout made both Iola and I jump, 'If that's the case then how can the New Jersey press have been built in 1826 when the Boston shop didn't burn down until 1831?'

He raised his eyebrows towards me, as though expecting me to answer. I couldn't. 

'Exactly! So, the historians go away for a while. Then they come back and say that means the New Jersey press was built first in Philadelphia, and the press maker moved to Boston afterwards.' 

'OK.'

'No, not ok!' He placed his hand flat against the press. 'This is obviously the older of the two presses - look at the shape of the handle here? At the way this part is engraved?'

I looked but, to be honest, neither thing meant much to me. 'What do the historians say now?' 

'They don't.' The printing press man pushed his spectacles up his nose slightly and smiled. 'They've gone away again and won't talk to me anymore.' 

While Iola wandered around the shop, I continued chatting to the printing press man. I enthused about the developments in technology which had enabled Mormons to carry small mobile printing presses on their travels in the early 1800s; how each new gold-rush settlement would somehow manage to set up a press and establish a local newspaper, even when the town had only appeared seemingly overnight. I thought he was interested, I thought we were having a conversation, until he interrupted. 

'The real problem is the patent office burnt down in 1836.'

'Oh.'

'So there are no printed records.' He traced two fingers along the engraving at the top of the machine, as though caressing the hair of a favorite child, and then leaned forward conspiratorially. 'I've got a theory,' he said softly, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. 'I've traced back her owners to 1860 and I''m not going to give up. I don't think she was made by the man they think made her!'

'Oh.'

Iola reappeared and tugged at my hand. I wished him success with his hunt and said goodbye, but he didn't answer because he was already telling another museum visitor how the hand press used to be the only one in the world. 

We made up other alphabet posters as we walked around the museum grounds: W was for Walrus because of the size of the man's moustache, U was for Unique, in case the hand press really was the only one in the world, and O... Well, O is for Oh because sometimes there is nothing else one can say. 

The Start of the Fall

A series of days when the sky is paintbox blue and the breeze is soft among the trees. I'm regaining some of my energy and can stay awake long enough to see the sky packed tight with stars and the harvest moon making moon-shadows across the grass.

Our mornings begin early: Maya's bus collects her just over a mile from our house at 6.50am and Iola's school starts at 7.30am. We wake before the darkness silvers into dawn and hurry through our breakfast, while the kittens weave around our ankles and the hens cluck about their yard. The dog, with the wisdom he has gained from no longer being a puppy, hides beneath the covers in the warmest bed he can find until we are ready to leave the house.

My mother is staying for the next few weeks and I'm seeing our area through her eyes. She's been driving to the village and back, braving all the Vermont trucks which meander along on the 'wrong' side of the road and slaloming between the potholes which mark the point where the road repairs began earlier in the year and then abruptly stopped when the State funding was cut. In the UK, I am sure, the road would be considered unsafe and either closed completely or signposted extensively to warn drivers to slow down or take a detour. Here, there are no warnings: only a subtle change in the color of the tarmac. One minute all is well, the next moment the car's suspension bucks and jolts. The grin on my mum's face makes me suspect she's rather enjoying the excitement of the Vermont roads.

She's also enjoying the amazing array of foods. We ate our way around Montpelier Farmers' Market on Saturday: kimchi and burritos, clay oven baked pizza slices and pan-fried heart, pickled everything and maple syrup creemees and apple cider. The farm stall between our house and Maya's school is banked high with squash, sweetcorn and this season's apples and many local homes have produce stands at the ends of their driveways. I'm sure we should be canning and pickling and filling the cellar with things to get us through the winter, but we're too busy eating a lot and smiling.

We're also walking a lot. This morning, after the girls were at school, we headed up into Underhill State Park. The park is open until the middle of October, but there was no-one there this morning except Linda, the warden. She was pleased to see us: it had been a long evening with no campers and only her dog for company.

We climbed up through the park and headed South along the CCC road, feeling particularly grateful to Ruth who has loaned my mum a pair of walking boots. This lower slope of Mount Mansfield is heavily wooded: the birch and beech trees slowly giving way to coniferous forest as the elevation increases. A couple of miles from the trailhead, a firebreak has been cut through the forest and the view is, to use the local parlance, awesome! My mum and I sat for a while, looking out all the way to Burlington and Lake Champlain and to the Adirondack Mountains beyond.

We would have stayed longer but we needed to get home: we needed to plan what we were going to eat for lunch!

Life Lessons

My stiff upper lip English-ness, which tends to keep chin wobbles firmly in check, has taken a bit of a beating recently. I have cried through a variety of teen movies and go all misty-eyed at the slightest touch of movie manipulation: a shift in the soundtrack, a close-up of the heroine's face, an allusion to parent-daughter relationships. This past week alone, I have cried through LemonadeMouth (a saccharine Disney Movie), Mamma Mia (a raucous comedy) and one of Iola's episodes of My Little Pony when the other ponies were being mean to Fluttershy! There have been tears of rage - when my old-person-fingers couldn't peel the lid off a yoghurt pot, when I got trapped in my sports bra; and there have been tears of exasperation - when the physical therapist wouldn't listen to what I wanted to do, when I couldn't knead the potato bread I wanted to make. I've also cried quieter tears of loss over the letter from an old school friend about the still birth of her son, over the news from another friend about the loss of her pregnancy when her ongoing journey towards parenthood has already taken so many years.  

My courage has been battered too. As many of you know, Nathan experiences night terrors which send him careening out of bed in the middle of the night. In the past, I've cajoled him, reassured him, shouted at him, pleaded with him to get back into bed and go back to sleep. Now the sound of him moving around our room in the dark leaves me coated in cold sweat. I have fastened a child gate to our bedroom door and have three torches on my bedside table, because once I've got the lights on I can coax Nathan back to bed and he'll sleep through the rest of the night with no memory of what's happened. But I find it hard to get back to sleep these days.

Laughter comes easier too though: I couldn't tell you what started Maya and I giggling as I put the pasta on to boil this afternoon, but we were still snorting and wiping tears from our cheeks as I dished out the cooked food. Laughter shifts our reality by altering the way things respond to us. These days I laugh when the dog starts growling and huffing at strangers, and he soon gives up on his pretend aggression and asks to play ball instead. 

This evening the hens escaped as I was putting them to bed. Ordinarily, I would have been irritated. Locking up the hen house is a straightforward chore when the hens are inside, and an exercise in futility when they're not. It wasn't what I'd planned and they had no interest in going into the hen house when there were bugs to eat and cut grass to scrat around in. After a few failed attempts to round them up, I took out my deck chair and sat down to enjoy the view. It was a beautiful evening: the mountain piled high with storm clouds to the East, the setting sun making the air heavy as honey, the hens striking picturesque poses among the weeds. Maya joined me. For a while we sat in silence, then we laughed. Sometimes there is nothing else you can do.