Early autumn

I have a positive love affair with September. I love the cooling off, the slight change in leaves, the dying freshness to the air, the slight tang of vinegar that precedes falling apples. One of my favorite Saturday autumn activities is loitering in my apartment looking out the windows with a candle burning in the background while I attend to the basic chores of housecleaning.

I cleaned out my refrigerator today, which wasn't as terrifying as I thought it would be, and am now gearing up to swab the deck from stem to stern.

MP and I have begun, with our friends Joan, David, and Peter, to have Sunday night dinner. It inadvertently began last week with a casual invitation from MP to enjoy a simple (simple?) meal of spaghetti with mussels around her table.

Sundays are usually bittersweet, the dregs of the weekend and the brewing of unpleasant anticipations of weekday duties. Last Sunday I found, to my utmost delight, that a sit-down meal in the relaxed company of good friends, just before the close of the evening, almost obliterated the doldrums. There was good food, good conversation, and a smattering of football. Lovely.

So this week I'm hosting, and in celebration of the cooler weather I think I'll make this excellent garlic and chickpea soup I found in a couple of my cookbooks. It will also be a lovely opportunity to use my new red dishes (which are just enough of a deep pink shade to complement the dishes I already have, which is excellent for dinner parties, since the new dishes only seat four).

Recovery from my black Monday has been slow, but a fun party last night at Joan's helped top off the week, and a lot of sleep did some good as well.

It's no fun sometimes to realize that a chemical imbalance that I was born with will cause bad episodes, regardless of medication, three or four times a year for the rest of my life. I mean, how marketable is that? "Hi, attractive man. I'm slightly insane and for perhaps four days out of the year I will turn into a sobbing, hysterical lunatic for no discernable reason, which will draw out into a full week of dazed exhaustion before I recover what you and I know as my personality. So how about dinner next Saturday?"

When I have a bad day I can't disguise it. I spent all of Monday going about my normal work duties crying -- just like the mother in About a Boy. I couldn't stop. What am I going to do when I have a family, so that I don't scare the bejeebers out of my kids and wear out my husband? My boss's wife has had similar difficulties, and she takes care of it by going away by herself for a weekend, which may be necessary but I'm afraid it will freak the kids out, Ya-Ya Sisterhood style. Or I could try to make sure I live close enough to one set of grandparents to pack up the kids for the weekend, so they'd have some fun while I get some rest.

I know I'm putting the cart a bit before the horse. I don't even have a boyfriend. But I like to have strategies, plans, so that the bad head days don't catch me unprepared. I guess another problem too is that when times like these roll around, I can't be strong. I can barely keep myself together. I'm always strong; I've always been. But these things completely break me down.

I suppose they're a blessing, in a way. That thorn in the side which I've begged to have taken away, but which shatter me to the point where I don't have to be strong, because I can't; and in those moments I'm able, in ways I'm usually not, to rely more heavily on the love of Christ. The last episode I had, Scripture verses yanked out of my memory at random were all that saved me; this time it was prayer.

I would rather not suffer. But if I must, at least I can know it's going to produce something good. And I confess that I look forward to the day when I can lay my head on someone's shoulder and have a pair of human arms around me. No one can fix me, but human touch does so much to heal. In the meantime there are my friends, there are candles and tea and fuzzy slippers and hot baths and George Winston, and there is Simon in all his sweetness. And there is God, who suffers alongside me and who "daily bears my burdens" (Psalm 68). And for the time being, it's enough.