{hello, goodbye: the story we know}

It’s been a tumultuous few days — we came home from our Christmas wanderings, which only were a few days away, to find that our house had been tossed by professional thieves — drawers dumped, shelves cleared, closets rooted through — everything slung about and flung around in a big, big mess. The worst mess was the lozenge-sized pieces of glass shattered all over my old office floor — the slider, through which they came. I lost tiny things probably valuable only to me — a puzzle box Tech Boy bought me early in our marriage, a tiny gold sword, covered with faux diamonds commemorating Wagner’s Ring Cycle, little bits and bobs that made up memories of things. It was also …beyond disconcerting to come home and see all of my tights and lingerie drawers dumped. I’m either going to need to reconsider how many pair of tights a single person needs, or… something… Suffice it to say, it’s been a less than peaceful end to a rather stressful holiday season anyway, and now comes the time of nailing the barn door shut after the horses have gone through and danced a gavotte in front of the farm — the motion sensors, the lights, the cameras. At least, that’s what we’ve been urged to do by friends and family, by the police. Most days I vacillate between feeling like we should just move to feeling like, “Meh, we didn’t have anything they wanted anyway, we’re safe.”

(Still also not sure if I know how to feel about not having anything anyone else wants. I mean, I know we’ve kind of opted out of a lot of social media and culture, and decided to spend our money on travel instead of tangible things a lot of the time, but I think we’re the only people I know who had stuff RETURNED after a robbery… a mile away, Tech Boy’s laptop bag turned up with a lot of odds and ends stuffed into it… and insurance papers with an address on them. The neighbors there returned them. So now I have my Bath and Bodyshoppe candle and my METRONOME back. Who steals a metronome? Seriously, thieves???)

So, the new year has come, and I feel slightly like I’ve been dragged through a log, backwards, and ended up sitting, blinking, and staring around.

…on the whole, that’s pretty much how I entered 2015, so all things considered, I guess this feels normal enough. We come into this world and leave it the same – completely bewildered, turned inside out. Goodbye and Hello, as says Martha Collins, end up often being the same story — the story of our lives.

The Story We Know

The way to begin is always the same. Hello,
Hello. Your hand, your name. So glad, Just fine,
and Good-bye at the end. That’s every story we know,
and why pretend? But lunch tomorrow? No?
Yes? An omelette, salad, chilled white wine?
The way to begin is simple, sane, Hello,
and then it’s Sunday, coffee, the Times, a slow
day by the fire, dinner at eight or nine
and Good-bye. In the end, this is a story we know
so well we don’t turn the page, or look below
the picture, or follow the words to the next line:
The way to begin is always the same Hello.
But one night, through the latticed window, snow
begins to whiten the air, and the tall white pine.
Good-bye is the end of every story we know
that night, and when we close the curtains, oh,
we hold each other against that cold white sign
of the way we all begin and end. Hello,
Good-bye is the only story. We know, we know.

While it’s all the same story, in a manner of speaking, the way we all begin and end, my hope this year is that we hear and honor new ways of telling the tale and telling the true, and celebrate the many voices telling the stories. Happy Hogmanay, Happy New Year, roll on 2016.

POETRY FRIDAY rolls on into a new year, hosted at Cousin Mary Lee’s “A Year of Reading” which celebrates ten years of blogging this year!