Water

Photo copyright Aji, 2015;
all rights reserved.

What you see above is what we've been doing all week.

Mostly, Wings has been doing it. I've been helping directly here and there, but for the most part, my job is to pick up the slack when it comes to other tasks, freeing him to make sure that the water you see flowing in that ditch eventually makes it across pretty much all 25 acres of land.

It's all done by hand.

We're both exhausted.

This year, we hired his niece's husband to use his ditcher. There have been years past when Wings has dug them by hand himself, although in more recent years, it's usually hiring a couple of guys to help, or (as this year), hiring someone to do most of via tractor. But all of the waterflow management and diversion is still done by hand: shovels and sandbags and earthen dams, all changed periodically to ensure that the water gets where it needs to go.

Yes, I've done that, too.

I'm having a tougher time of it this year. It's hard to do sustained physical labor, especially in the heat of the day, when you feel, every moment, as though you're about to pass out. It's hard when you're in pain, sure, but I've been dealing with that for decades, and I manage, for the most part. This is new. And everything — everything, everysingledamnthing I do now takes me longer than it used to, and takes more out of me. 

Doing the bare minimum of daily chores and tasks leaves me, quite literally, with no energy for things like conversation. Recent events in my life, now coupled with crap dredged up by the latest instance of high-profile fundy abuse, make me even less likely to have the energy to engage.

This is survival-level shit. Basic and baseline and fundamental in ways that, if you've never been there, I can't make you understand it.

The week will be over in a couple of days. A few days after that, and we'll be caught up from the immediate physical strain (and, no, the answer is not to have people come to "help"; they can't and don't and the disruption does far more to hurt than help anyway). It does not appear, however, that my other issues are going away any time soon. Or maybe at all.

I'm getting my head around that. It's not easy. I'm also dealing with the past, with things in place before I was even born, with my own past and present all rolled into one big ball of generational damage that leaves no room for contemplating my future. 

In the meantime, expenses accumulate and bills need to be paid. Food. Electricity. Basic stuff. So there's no rest from the business; there can't be. It, too, is chasing survival, if in another form, one more accessible and comprehensible to most people.

So understand if I don't have the wherewithal for being "sociable." I'm not a social butterfly at the best of times, and I'm even less so when all my energies have to go to such basic tasks. I get that people don't understand our circumstances here; why would they? They live in ordinary houses, with ordinary cars and ordinary accoutrements of ordinary life. With any luck, they have ordinary health, which means no constant all-over pain that is unresponsive to treatment. With any luck, they also don't have a past filled with ghosts that damned their existences before they were a gleam in anyone's eye. In other words, an ordinary past, not one overflowing with generational trauma and dysfunction and pain. But all of these things mean that I'm not here, at the moment, for chatting and conversation, and I don't have enough resources of any sort right now to permit me to center other people's privilege.

None of this, by the way, is some sort of sin or flaw on my part. But I've learned that I am supposed to be "on" at all times, another legacy of what is expected of someone like me. Always available. Always centering everyone and everything else. Always taking care of everyone else.

I can't do that anymore.

And I'm not.

They say the water heals. I hope so.

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All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.