This One Day

Most days in recovery are nothing special, yet every day in recovery is a gift – a chance to practice what gave us a second life: acceptance and gratitude, honesty and self-respect, faith and love.

Sep 15, 2024

The skunk odor lingered this morning, wafting in the open kitchen window, acrid and shifty, holding onto the story we barely knew the half of. Around midnight, we heard the squeals. Not birds, not this time of night. Not an owl and its prey. Babies, baby skunks, we finally guessed. Threatened. What came next, not more than a few minutes later, was the smell. The bedroom windows open, I pulled the covers up over my nose while my husband, who can’t smell and is a keen sleeper, returned to the golf course of his dreams, and I lay awake picturing carnage. I hope the mama skunk got the racoon good.

It's 8 a.m. and we are due at the auto repair shop over at the airport to deliver the second of our ailing cars. The first went to the shop earlier in the week. Today we will be down to one car again, with four appointments between us (bad planning). We are running late for all the usual reasons, not the least of which is my hay-fever hangover.

My head feels like an overstuffed kitchen trash bag that someone keeps pressing down on to make room for more trash. My ear canals itch, my nose is surly. So far the new allergy shots don’t seem to run much interference between me and the ravages of histamines. And I’m not having any luck making friends with the over-the-counter antihistamines, which make me a) pass out and b) feel like the world is coming to an end. Neither of these things contributes to my well-being. I’d rather sniffle my way through the day.

While I am down the hill opening the hoop house – and talking to the guys who are installing our big new deer fence (hurrah!) – Farmer does a disappearing act. We know he’s gone into the woods, but which way? Neither one of us wants to go looking for him, because both of us are already suffering from itchy bites caused by lone star tick larvae. (It’s as bad as it sounds – actually worse, since the larvae cluster in “tick bombs” which explode when, say, you brush up against them. Hundreds of larvae. So gross. It’s a new late-summer thing on the Island, thanks to climate change.)

Also, we are not too worried about Farmer, because he never goes far anymore. We call his name and pretty soon he saunters into view, looking a little sheepish (and looking for all the world like Bagheera the panther from The Jungle Book with the way he swings his skinny hips). We chide him, but he knows we’re not too mad, because this is a sort of game we play. We let him exert his independence and doginess for a few minutes, so he feels like he is on an adventure and spreading his old wings. But not only can he not go too far before getting tired, he also doesn’t actually want to be too far from us. Inside the house he follows one or both of us from room to room every time we get up.

Farmer inside, we caravan to the auto shop, drop one car, and circle back home. I immediately get back on the road to race down to the hospital for an appointment at the family practice. I get stuck behind a tractor with a hay baler, heading back down-Island after a morning mow. It doesn’t bother me. This is September traffic, the best kind.

The hospital scheduler email tells me this is a “follow-up” appointment, but I don’t know for what! But I wasn’t about to cancel it, because I’m supposedly going to meet my actual primary care provider for the first time in the year since she’s been assigned to me. I love the family practice at the hospital, love all the nurse practitioners and all the nurses, but since we have a doctor shortage and a housing shortage on the Island, we get passed around a bit and I never know who I’m going to see.

Not everyone loves our hospital. But I do. It’s the only one on the Island, of course, so it is “the” hospital, like “the” ferry, and “the” cliffs, and “the” museum, and “the” roundabout (there’s only one – and still no stoplights). Built from scratch to replace a 1950s era airport-hanger-meets-army-camp style hospital, this light-filled modern building with world-class art lining the breezeways is the place I go to get virtually all of my health care, from mammograms to blood work to flu and covid shots to annual check-ups. The familiarity feels safe and comforting, and when I’m there, I always see someone I know.

This morning, I walk into the family practice waiting room and see a friend from “the” program, as we call it (that anonymous 12-step group I may or may not belong to – ha!). She smiles and I smile, and as I hurry past her to catch up with the nurse who is waiting for me, we exchange a few words, sotto voce, about going to a meeting.

When I’m out and about, running into someone from the program is uplifting. Whether we just lock eyes and nod or stop and have a few words, we’re communicating support to each other. We’re acknowledging that we’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got – but that sometimes that’s kind of rocky. The relief of honest imperfection. Or sometimes the encounter is truly an opportunity to ask for help.

These angels are all over the Island.

From the hospital, I race home to pick up my husband and take him to the golf course. I am happy he is allowing himself the joy of playing more than he ever has this year.

Then I head straight to the home of the woman who cuts my hair. She is not just my hair stylist but my ex-cousin-in-law and my friend, so she is like family. She is a wise woman and this is a good day for me to be talking with her as I shape-shift around in my new work limbo – trying to figure out how my part-time “job” fits into my full-time work, when my writing and gardening is added in.

I arrive with a cheery bucket of flowers, which has been riding around in a milk crate in the way back of the jiggly 2007 Ford station wagon. The car belonged to my spiritual mentor, and I like to think she still hangs out in the car with me. Someone is keeping those flowers from tipping over! I’m happy I can share flowers. I look at them and am so grateful that I followed my gut to the garden when I arrived on the Island and am reaping the rewards of that now.

That gut instinct – we talk about that while I’m in the chair. It gives me goosebumps when we both agree that every bad decision we’ve ever made has gone against our gut feelings. Amazing when you think about it. We are innately stronger and smarter than we know, if we just have faith in ourselves.

Later on, after I manage to squeeze in a few hours of desk work, I run back to the golf course to pick up my husband. He tells me how he played; he’s happy with his score. I say to him, “Hey, would you like to see the first place I lived on the Island?” It just so happens that this little carriage house is on the grounds of the golf complex. I’ve told him about it before, but I haven’t been back to see it in 16 years.

Even with Google maps I have trouble finding it at first. Finally we turn down the right dirt road and there it is, nestled in the woods. I laugh and tell my husband, “Imagine how much trouble I had finding it on a dark stormy night after a rough ferry ride, on an Island I’d never driven on, in a scared, sorrowful, confused state of mind, 13 months sober, alone. That was the last Friday of January, 2008. I had separated myself from my (former) husband and from my life as I had created it, to come out here and write a book and take a break from the world. I had no idea if I had done the right thing.

And now here I am, still on this Island. I had to write some more books, get into and out of a bad relationship, become a farmer, go back to an office job, and generally get a little more sober before I could know, when I met the person who I would love forever, that I deserved to be with him and that we could create a wonderfully normal life together without the drama I expected life to constantly deliver.

Now it is 8 p.m., we go out on the deck to look at the stars. Thankfully, our owl is back on duty, the crickets are in harmony. No dust-ups tonight, I hope. I apologize to my husband about a moment during the day when I had been agitated and bossy. (He accepts, with hugs.) Some habits die hard. I am still in recovery. I know I need a refresher course every once in a while, too. But I look down at Farmer at our feet, look up at the Big Dipper, catch the sparkle from a green glass jar of apricot nasturtiums on the kitchen window ledge, chuckle about the Christmas lights still hanging in the breakfast room and the fate of the dead geranium on the deck. And it is all good, so good. Just for this one day, at least.