mind trauma

Down to final hours, we will be here overnight then get up Monday morning, load car, make a stop downtown, head to Panama City. Here, I have either felt or truly been back home these ten days, concentrated psychic existential trauma, and’ve been examining myself regarding what’s good and what's other. 

Emotionally, physically, spiritually far beyond “old home week.” With exceptions now gone who were beloved favorites those years, people look and interact the same, same smiles, same sound of voices, same warmness. In church. Knocking on the rectory door. In the sacristy visiting, vesting, prepping for service. During worship, same feel, same room, same furniture, same chair, same me, same pulpit, different Altar, same congregation with mostly other faces, 15 at eight am, 61 at ten-thirty. Sitting here by the window at the kitchen table, rectory, Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola. What happened? When, Lord?

Sitting up in the bed and looking down the hall past my life. Remembering. It’s been, and for a few more hours still is, a Twilight Zone where You Can’t Go Home Again but did anyway and have distressingly mixed feelings and confounding confusion. Half the people I knew and loved here are now named on inscribed bricks in the memorial garden. Even my mother, these folks I’ve loved for near half my life put a brick honoring my mother. 

I’m going to send money and ask them to inscribe a couple more bricks, several. You Can’t Go Home Again and if you go anyway you wonder how that tree got there, where in creation you were and what happened the past two decades, lost that like Sleeping Beauty you never left here. Introspective, musing, working through it, trying to understand, but perhaps beyond me.

It was an eerie Time in a Twilight Zone. As in, "I left My Laughing Place at the old family homestead, only to discover I have a Twilight Zone." Though on calendar to come back next month to officiate a wedding, I’m not sure I ought ever return, falling dominoes, something triggered something. Just as we were due here, my sister had a heart attack, was hospitalized, coded during a procedure, was resuscitated, restored, drive to Apalach and move in, category 5 hurricane, Irma, headed this way, scared everyone into action, NHC updates every three hours, town evacuated, nearly bare church services 9/10, we weren’t ready for wind so had to return to PC to prep 7H for Irma, back to Apalach, oysters while strangers at Hole in the Wall sang Happy Birthday, dinner and birthday cake with friends old and renewed, Gina to have procedure after all and also open heart surgery, so back to PC, return to Apalach, my Kristen texts me "I'm leaving" to drive to Atlanta to see Emory classmates, fear, nightmares waiting for late night “I’m here,” Funeral memorial service Saturday, TJCC here with sweets to celebrate birthday with me and sleep in T's old bedroom overnight, dinner Gormley at the Gibson where  chef Brett’s late grandparents were friends in The Old Time, Sunday early service, chat vice sermon, phone call between services to inform me my brother Walt had gone upstairs in his house in Denham Springs, Louisiana to talk about omelets and church with his wife and found Betty died during the night, officiated and preached ten-thirty service somewhere farther up and farther in Twilight Zone forcing self to focus while wondering what the hell is going on, lunch with beloveds Up the Creek, Kristen texts she’s on the way home from Atlanta, I know it will be slightly more than five hours until the text “I’m home” where the hell is my gardenia nitroglycerin, is this the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord the prophets warn against? Mused and typed Sunday evening from somewhere far away and long ago. Gina phoned Sunday night to ask about us, welcome call and thankful for.

While I'm outside snapping pics, Kristen 7:03 PM, “I’m home.”

Monday breakfast coffee black and two exquisite French macarons. 

DThos+ 

Thinking of my sister, doing well
Gina Weller Webb

Thinking of my brother, grieving
Walt & Betty Weller
Sunday, September 17, 2017