Me and the Solonely Sisters

home alone with a clean driveway

The storm that walloped the Maritimes left a carpet of slush covering the considerable driveway here at my Antigonish home. Not enough to write home about, but enough to blog about. I pushed it aside with a nice blue shovel my landlord kindly provided, ploughing from the house to the side of the driveway, probably thirty or forty times. It wasa lot like using an old fashioned typewriter, rather than swimming lengths in a pool, because I kept walking back to the house to start a row rather than shovelling from the side where the last row ended. Not very efficient energy-wise but i didn’t want to pile snow against the house, because i didn’t want it melting and running over the driveway and freezing. My friend is driving up from the South shore on Tuesday and I wanted the drive to be as safe and ice-free as possible.

I liked shovelling the slush. It was warm and damp and envigorating, and not too much, just enough to prime me for a walk up to Cathy’s to put some poetry in her mailbox. Two boys next door to her were building a snow fort using buckets to shape the blocks like sand castles. It should have been a sign to me, that they were able to do it– that they weren’t building a slush fort instead. As I continued walking briskly around the block, it got cooler and drizzly and I felt the lack of mini windshield wipers on my glasses. I was glad to come home and put mincemeat pies in the oven!

A good day is one in which I don’t eat too much, get some exercise, and write some. Today was one of those, a three star day, the kind of day I hope most days will be. A four star day would be one in which I manage 500 words on the novel (not much I know but it seems to be my limit at one sitting) as well as a bit on the other projects I’m working on… and go for a long walk or a swim (still waiting to try the ST FX pool) And the much-coveted five star day… well, I will leave that to your most fecund imaginations.

I have been enjoying the solitude, when not lamenting the loneliness. Actually, just yesterday I learned to shake hands with both of them. They are like conjoined twins- the Solonely Sisters- you can’t have one for tea without the other. Solitude and loneliness are two faces of the same being, an entity that has become like a companion to me. What I mean by that is that it is something that exists outside of me, whose needs I need to think about, pay attention to, attempt to address. When solitude is talking to me, loneliness faces the other way, staring out the window. But when solitude turns away, loneliness is there, ready for a tete-a-tete. Over Christmas I didn’t like loneliness, tried to avoid conversing with her; but I am beginning to appreciate her, and not just as the price I need to pay to enjoy the company of solitude. Embracing loneliness is on the way to my becoming a free-standing, free-wheeling, neuroses-free, and just plain free human being, or so I like to think.

Still I would like to try to live with other human beings again. That time may be coming sooner than I thought, and what it will do for(to?) my writing I am not sure. I won’t be ale to sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and a huge mess of keys, books, paint brushes and pill bottles in front of me. Will I be able paint in the kitchen, talk to myself in the shower and use the bedroom floor as my desk? That remains to be seen. I once thought I could live with anyone, but I am not sure that anyone can live with me… me and my mess, me and my soloneliness.