Retrieval

There comes a time, every now and then, when you have to wonder how to be happy. From day to day, from year to year, the answer changes, floats, twists, turns. It's strange to think how very different my answer would have been only this time last year, and whether the change is a result of collected wisdom (if only), or perhaps from some variety of jadedness (though I am yet so young that it seems strange to offer myself that), I cannot say, I daren't fathom. But indubitably, beauty was the first thing, my first obsession (although to say that is perhaps to really say nothing at all). It had its natural attraction to a child often alone, the wonder, the abstraction. There was too little in the moving, bustling "real" world to attract me; for a time, I did not speak the right language, and when I did, I was too shy and impatient with social niceties. I kept to the world of my young mind, contemplating words and colours, bright skies, languid streams, tulip trees in bloom. I was quiet, I tried to succeed, whether it was in finding the first bright-orange eft on the weekend hikes with my father, or rescuing the squirming, helpless earthworms that littered the school's blacktop after rainy nights. It could have been finishing a chapter reading first in the class. I would snap my textbook closed crisply, fold my hands and look down, down to my feet, not smiling but secretly thrilled by the springtime sound of the clicking fans above and the flipping pages all around.

I admit, I lost sight of that early, childhood sensibility. Hard times came, and the life that I knew began to crack, fracture, shatter. When the world turned too dark, I turned my back on it and stepped away. I could not find the light in something that had been reduced to darkness and shadow, and it was light that I needed, light that spread the world thick in bloom, light that rendered the colours that danced behind my eyes full and jubilant. Like a seedling in a closet, I searched, I faltered and failed. It was far too long that all I knew was bitterness, that I could not have recognised joy if it had bitten me on the shoulder. My happiness then was in letters and marks, in comments from teachers, in books read. In success. I could not waste time, in the early days of the darkness, for there was no cheer in contemplation, in solitude and thought. (I sound melodramatic here. It is the disintegration of a family that I speak of, a family that my faraway daydreamer of a childhood self did not realise was dissolving until too late. It was a disillusionment, it was a loss of something too great to describe.) I read textbooks, I read novels and papers, I turned to music and sound, anything but give myself time to reflect. At the falling apart, I drove myself as deeply into work as I could and huddled there, afraid to peek out to see what the world had become. But when the dust settled, it settled atop my nest as well, and the new world forced me to learn, to forgive, to understand. (Forgiving those that you have tricked yourself into hating is no small task, but the forgiveness taught me that nothing is worth the hatred. It is not a paltry breed of dislike, it is the formation of a falsehood.) It's strange to think of those times now, as I stare out of confining, yet frosty windows and wish to be in some other world, high in a sun-dappled tree with a novel or field guide, or else simply wandering. I scarcely knew how dearly I missed this joy.

I spent last week almost entirely in the garden. I can hardly say how it calmed me, the sunlight and the swift, Midwest winds, the tending to rosebushes, the friendly coolness of freshly turned soil. I laughed in surprise at the scurrying isopod colonies, the garter snakes coiled beneath the stepping stones, indignant and wide-mawed as I pulled away at their shelters (I replaced them later, although I think they were mightily displeased with the whole affair). The squirrel social dynamic was something quite fascinating to observe, although the losers in the fight over the birdseed comforted themselves with the young buds from the long-suffering magnolia. Was I happy? I could not have been simply distracted, for I have scarcely felt closer to that connection I missed so than when I stood barefoot in the newly turned vegetable patch, wistfully watching robins tug away at the unfortunates of the earthworm population. It makes me wonder how much I missed when the world went black, but it is too much of myself now to regret it entirely.