The lemon tree, when just beginning to grow--
I stopped writing in this blog. I let it go for a while. I almost let it die--I almost deleted it. I did have Covid and then I had the "long" Covid after-effects and that was back in February of this year when the year first started, and by now I am starting to have more better days, but still have many that are laced with fatigue. I still spend a few days a week in bed for the most part; those are the days I manage only to do the dishes and the laundry and maybe just some light cleaning around the house. I tend to overdo it on my good days which then in turn exhausts me for the next day also. Like everybody else, I dislike this new "Covid World" we are living in.
Two things happened the other day that made me finally and for real come back to this blog:
1) I met a new friend on FB and we have a lot of similar interests and a lot of things in common besides just our work and it seems she and I seem to inspire one another to get to our work!
2) I had a waking dream the other night (a dream I had as I was waking up) about a dead spider and it seems it related to the dead lemon tree and the looming possibility of the death of this blog. So I decided then and there to get back to this blog.
A lot has happened since I have last written in here. Some of it I recorded in my dream blog I keep which is also on Google Blog and is called The Dragonfly Dreams. This does not mean all the dreams in it are dreams about dragonflies; it means that the dragonfly you see flying in the air or landed on a flower has dreams. If you go to that blog, you can read more about it there.
I mentioned also to my daughter that I thought this blog was rather hodge-podge and quirky with a too-personal bent and perhaps too informally done. She told me to go ahead and keep it quirky. In her opinion, that is what could make it interesting. However, she is one of the people in the world who knows me personally extremely well, so this is probably aligned with her ideas and interests in my interests already. It is the less personally-known audience I could wonder about in regards to this question. If I left it open for discussion I suppose I would get "slammed" by many and excused by some.
I barely know where to begin again. I guess I just did begin again, but how to go on with the daily life stuff now here?
I did want to blog for money. I had hoped to sign up for advertisers to come to this blog and want to advertise with me. I thought during Covid Time it would be good for me to make some money since I lost most all my work that had immediate pay to Covid (isolation). I have a conflict with that though because I do not want people clicking out of my blog when an ad comes up plus the technology did not seem to let me subscribe correctly to AdSense. I will get some tech help with that. I did lose my two websites because I could no longer afford "extras," especially since I lost my clients on one of my websites who also did not have extra money during the Covid isolation times to spend--many of us lost our day-jobs or regular gigs. My bf who is a musician also lost all his gigs that were cancelled for that year so lost out on some money too. He couldn't help me keep my websites.
So my mbenci.net writer's website is down right now. I hope one day soon I will get it up and running again; I still own the website address domain. My other website is down. I am also what I call a mythopoetic analyst--I studied depth psychology and received in that my masters degree, years after getting my creative writing masters degree. I had hoped for the PhD at the depth psych program but too many things happened to me there to make that possible. One was that I got sick; two was that there were many unfortunate misunderstandings there with me and a few others to allow it to work out. And the California fires made it too stressful for me to continue to travel to CA for my doctorate sine I was already having health problems and all this prior to Covid. My other website was my depth psych website concerning Jungian and Archetypal studies--and my writing and other arts activities often overlap with my work in Depth Psych. At first I was going to keep these websites and blogs separate as boxed compartments of my life, but I have since, in synch with the dead spider dream, decided to not keep them so separate so as to never mention them together or one within the other blog or site. Much of the writing I do is in depth psych and much of the work I have coming up to be published is in topics in depth psych/Jungian and archetypal studies. As a mythopoetic analyst or mythopoeticist as I like to call it, I analyze the arts and literature and not just a complex emotion someone has. They go hand in hand; I feel that when I did character analysis in my creative writing degree program, I was doing a form of depth psych but just without the Jungian concept theory tacked in. But in the poetry program I was in, one of my profs in specific, Dr. Richard Messer at Bowling Green State University, used to talk about archetypal images and symbols in the poems we read and studied and in crafting these in the craft of poetry.
It is all in the name of synchronicity that the lemon tree died when the blog died, or vice-versa, and that with Covid so many of us experienced the death of our lives as we knew it. But this lemon tree was not the World Tree to anyone but me--but to me it was at least distantly related.
But most of all, my mom died. She died on July 26. For the three months before her death, I noticed she was eating less and less and said her stomach hurt when she ate. I do not here at this time want to go into the details. I spent a lot of time with her--I was fortunate and happy to be able to do that after her and my isolation with Covid. She had Covid while in the nursing home and was isolated in a room by herself when at age 94 she had it; the whole care facility was on lockdown for a year with residents with Covid in it and some staff having to go home with Covid. I am so glad my mom could survive Covid and that I got to see her again so she was not lost for "good" or had to die in that type of Covid Fog. For a while her memory was not as good. I brought her memories back a lot by playing her old favorite music in her room there. It got to where I was spending nights there with her. I realized she was getting closer to death one evening when she asked, "Are you going to leave me here alone?" when I got up out of the chair beside her bed to leave. What she really meant was, "Are you going to leave me here alone to die alone?" and so I began then and there to spend the nights with there beside her bed in a lean-back lazy-boy-type chair. The nursing home was very good to us both. They were giving her pain meds and for me they brought trays and plates of cookies and other snacks and big pots of coffee and tea and water and juice.
What makes me so sad about the death now of my mother as well as my father who went before her, is remembering things about all the things they loved in life: coffee, chocolate, and certain music or cartoons or comic strips and entertainment, or the beach, or their lazy-boy chairs, and so on and so forth. It makes me sad that they aren't here to eat those pieces of chocolate they loved, to enjoy their morning coffee, and so often when I have that morning coffee I remember they are not here for me to visit to go have that cup of coffee with them, that they are not on earth with earthly things anymore to enjoy those things. I always say I hope there is coffee and chocolate and vanilla in heaven, and all the music I enjoy as the soundtrack of my life and that these songs include the soundtracks of my parents' lives.
Many people think I am too close to my parents and grandparents and family members in a co-dependent sort of way, but those people probably have not experienced Italian life or Italian-American life or a life similar to that when the families are that close-knit and close emotionally in general--plus there is the extended family and how big that was in my life not just size-wise but emotion- and event-wise. I do not see it that we were too close--I enjoyed my life that way. The lemon tree also took me to Italy where the lemon trees grow, to where my family roots are. The roots are still alive though, and after my mother's funeral it was good to re-connect with a bunch of my cousins.
Well, I miss my mom, and that is all I want to say for now, until next time.
Sad,
Mary Ann
mbenci.writes@gmail.com
