Last year, after I came back from Congo I felt weightless and changeable, and this year I’ve been thinking about that time, and times like it. When we moved to North Carolina. Just like that. Packed everything up and left, just me and Jesse and our cat and our mismatched stuff. The feeling of leaving the state where I spent my childhood, the feeling of living in a place where we knew no one and no one knew us. Right before we left Florida, I cut off all my hair. I came to North Carolina with a pixie cut and no one here knew I’d had long hair most of my life. My memories of that time are all buoyant and sunshine coming through star-shaped leaves. I have to remind myself I still live in that same town, and the beach has not changed, the weather has not changed (much, though I swear it’s getting hotter). It’s just me. It’s just me who has changed.

* * *

Flux:

I’m beginning to think I live in six-month cycles. That nearly everything that has been certain about the past six months is coming up for review. Maybe it’s just the new year. I said at the beginning that I felt 2009 was going to be a change year, and so far it has not disappointed. Perhaps it’s Africa, the fact of the Congo, its existence, the flowers there and Fiston’s clean shoes walking over the dirtiest roads I’ve ever seen.

I’ve felt isolated this year. If the second half of last year was characterized by community, the first half of this one has been characterized by its lack. Friends are a habit, and at times it seems our friends have fallen out of the habit of us. We’ve been sick, we’ve been out of town, we’ve been busy–and now that we are not sick and are in town and are not busy, we find that people have formed new habits and we are no longer among them.

This is probably melodramatic. But I don’t mind–I gravitate toward the melodramatic, the sad songs, the long movies.

Jesse and I went to an outdoor concert Friday night to see Third Eye Blind. It rained during the opening act, and we huddled together under our umbrella, and as the main act took the stage and the rain stopped, I listened to the words of songs I’ve been hearing for years, songs that meant something to me when I was 16 years old, songs from albums we listened to together when we were teenagers. And I felt like anything was possible. I could go home and pack my things in old boxes and we could load up and move to California, and we could walk through the Haight on sunny Saturdays and eat burritos and buy funky sunglasses. And we could live in a tiny apartment in Berkeley and sit under the redwoods and think about important things like what we would cook for dinner. And we could drive on roads lined with eucalyptus trees, watch Shakespeare plays in outdoor amphitheaters where strings of white Christmas lights glowed like little stars in delicate tree branches.

And it felt good. It felt lovely to be there, with Jesse, the battleship behind us and the river to our left, listening to music that stretches far before Wilmington, far beyond it. Sometimes it feels good to be in a state of flux. Sometimes it feels good to have roots, to feel connected. And sometimes it feels good when those roots wither, when I’m weightless and anything is possible.

In the next six months, odds are good that things will settle, return to earth. The rhythms of last year will probably resume themselves. We will not move to California.

But I think there are things set into motion that I will not understand until I get more distance on them. And I am changing. There is Congo, and the way it has creeped under my skin, the way going has provided more questions than it answered. I think in six months, in a year, in another six months after that, I will look back on that concert, and I will know that I felt the echo of a change that hadn’t yet happened, that I knew as soon as “Motorcycle Drive By” started that something was ending, I just wasn’t sure what.

All I can do is tell you a story. It was a Wednesday and we spent the morning at the church, running the seminar, playing games and talking about Jesus, or trying to anyway—we were never really certain what our translators were saying for us. But that’s another story. That afternoon, we piled into the van and drove to a feeding center. The road wound around the edges of Lake Kivu, so impossibly big, so impossibly blue, and as the city blurred behind us we looked at the lake, and I thought about the methane building beneath the surface. If it ever escapes, like it did in a lake in Uganda, it could explode above the lake and spread across the city and kill a million people. I turned my head from the lake and watched banana trees and mountains speed past the other windows. So much beauty here. I almost asked, how can you stand it? How can you stand to live someplace so beautiful?

We pulled into a village and stopped and we hiked past all these little falling-apart houses, we walked along narrow mud pathways, and I cursed the fact that I was wearing a skirt, that blasted skirt, and I wished for my hiking boots, but then someone would pause and help me cross a difficult part. We had a little band of children in hot pursuit, we were stared at by adults and teenagers, by girls who spoke to one another about us, not bothering to whisper because they knew we didn’t understand them, but you could look at their faces and understand enough. You could understand whatever it was, it wasn’t all that nice.

We got to the feeding center, a little wooden church building, and waiting for us were a group of kids, all chosen for the program because they were in various states of malnourishment. They each held a plate, and at the front of the dirt-floored room was a table with three large buckets of food: one of rice, one of beans, and one of cabbage. It smelled good. We took their plates, one in each hand, walked to the food table, had the plates filled, and returned them to the children. And then we watched them eat. I don’t want to describe it, watching a starving kid eat, because it feels like a violation somehow, it feels too intimate. I felt almost embarrassed.

What happens, we asked Papa Jean, once the children are healthy enough to graduate from the program? They stay healthy for about two months, he said, and then they’re usually back. There was a little girl at one of the feeding centers whose parents refused to feed her because they thought she had an evil spirit. A kid like that, she’ll always be back.

Near the other feeding center, they’re finding parents in the village who won’t feed their kids because there’s a feeding center nearby to do it for them. And so there’s talk about shutting them down, the centers, because you can’t destroy a village like that, you have to think about fifty years from now, you can’t handicap these people with your attempts at generosity.

But, that girl whose family thinks is evil—what do you do about that?

How do you not feed a starving child? But how do you do it knowing you’re causing more harm than you are doing good? And is it good that you’re really doing? When they’re just going to be back in two months?

We went outside the feeding center and stared at the mountains. We could see the lake from a clearing, between grassy hills dotted with banana trees. There were clouds building over the lake, and we hurried away, knowing what the little mud path would become if it rained. My calves were burning by the time we got back to the van. My stomach ached, and I was trying to wrap my head around my own thoughts.

We drove toward Mudaka, the little village where last year we’d seen someone Bishop said looked like interahamwe. On the way, we turned off the road onto a gravel driveway next to a little thicket of bougainvillea, and Christie asked Bishop where we were going. I looked out the window and saw the trees, recognized the road, and my eyes lit up.

Bishop looked at my smile and said, “Do you know where we are?”

I said, “Yes, I think so. Are we at the nun’s place?”

He grinned.

“And ice cream?”

He laughed that quiet chuckle of his.

We all got out of the van and the sky was cloudy and the air was warm but not too hot and we ate ice cream out of Styrofoam cups, surrounded by gardens, by cacti and birds of paradise, in the hush of the convent, the peace an actual physical presence.

Then we piled back in the van and bumped over a torn-up road to a tiny one-room church. And later, as we left the church, the sun was setting and we were told that Fiston’s aunt had died and we drove back to Bukavu in near silence, Fiston nearly motionless in his bright yellow shirt, sitting in front of me like a tall skinny lantern, a faint glow as the lake darkened.

I was glad it was dark, so no one could see the tears in my eyes as I watched the lake again, as I watched the dark shapes of trees, as I thought about two months and the death of a mother’s sister and how the ice cream tasted so much better than it actually was because of the place where it was. How can you stand it, how can you stand it.

That’s why I haven’t found the words for Congo yet.

Until I realized, while reading about van Gogh’s life, that I now had the distinct privilege of explaining mental illness and suicide to a seven-year-old. I was kicking myself—how do you forget that van Gogh was probably schizophrenic, cut off his own ear, and later shot himself in a wheat field? I guess I figured the book (with a cartoon Vincent and Theo traipsing around France) would explain it for me or be a little more careful about the more unsavory parts of his life. Well, at least the author had the good sense to leave absinthe out of it (though I noticed a cartoon Gauguin drinking something a telltale shade of green).

I went into damage control mode as well as I could, trying to bring mental illness into the vocabulary of a (rather brilliant) first grader, assuring her that had he lived today doctors would have been able to help van Gogh, trying to use it as a teaching point (what should you do if you know someone who is very sad and never feels happy?). But I thought, and had the good sense not to say out loud, that the world might have missed out on something if he’d been healthy, if he’d been well adjusted, if he’d stayed out of trouble, if he’d had success while he was still alive. Can truly good art come without pain? Can a truly good story be told without darkness?

Needless to say, we never made it to the coffee table book. M. didn’t want to see the paintings and said she’d rather play something happy now. Later, as we were playing outside (having been transported there, by a time machine), M. turned to me and said, “Next time you bring me a story, will you bring me one that’s not so sad?” I smiled apologetically and agreed. And mentally crossed off the artists and the poets and the revolutionaries and the dreamers and the prophets. Because she’s seven, there’s the rest of her life to learn that suffering is just part of the deal, and she needs someone far smarter to explain that to her.

This past weekend in Charlotte, Dad was sick, and we didn’t know what was wrong. And as he lay there on the floor of Joannie’s empty apartment, eyes closed in pain, I wanted to scream, No, you are not allowed to be sick. How cruel it is to have to see your father—someone so strong, someone able to do anything, someone who is never ill—how cruel it is to see him in pain, to see him weak. And sometimes when I talk to my sister, I think one day it will just be us, and we’ll not have anyone to tell us what’s wrong with our cars, to tell us how to get rid of dollar weed, to remember what we were like as babies.

I thought maybe this anxiety was just an only-child thing, or because my parents are older than the parents of most of my friends. But I mentioned this to Jesse last night as we ate the leftover waffles for dinner, and he said he feels the same about his parents, that he feels it too, the feeling of unstoppable, the quiet dread. I know all the right answers, the parts about worry, about control, contentment, all that, but there are days when I wish I could be nine again, protected and cared for, there are days when I don’t like this adult thing one bit, the knowledge that I might live to bury my parents and exist in a world without them, when there is nothing more I can say.

So, there’s that. There’s that.

Oliver has been impossibly cute these days. In the mornings, while Jesse showers I sit on our sink so we can chat before he rushes off to work. Oliver picked up on the pattern and now sits on my lap. Gracie sacks out on our bed (which is nice when I’ve already made it up, but poses a dilemma if I haven’t—do I move her to make it up? Oh, but she’s just so comfy!). I sit between our sinks, and Oliver sits on my lap, and Jesse showers, and we talk. The other day, I was getting ready to go somewhere and was putting on makeup while talking to Jesse. Oliver sat on the sink and meowed at me until I finished and sat down, at which point he quickly climbed into my lap and immediately began purring and licking his paws. He’s on my lap right now, as I type this. Making up for the fact that he was on the kitchen sink this morning, checking out the pan I’d left soaking from last night’s dinner, trying to see if he could find any morsels to supplement his diet-food breakfast.

I dreamed of Congo again last night. Jesse was there too, and we were eating Mama Lily’s cooking and I was showing him how to brush his teeth without using the tap water. Yesterday, I was thinking about electricity, how I have it whenever I want it, how it felt to sit around a living room with flashlights and candles, talking in the dark, about candlelit dinners that were born out of necessity rather than romanticism. Only ten percent of Congo’s population has access to electricity. That kind of blows my mind. And even the ones who do… Every day, we lost power at least once, and our compound had a generator. Bishop goes for days without power. He loves ice-cold soda. He apologizes to us when he has to serve it warm. Some days, it’s not war, it’s not rape, it’s just this—it’s just Bishop, looking embarrassed, handing his guests bottles of warm soda.

For days, I’ve been trying to write about Haiti, but it keeps coming out Congo. I have a friend who is tirelessly campaigning to get tents to Haiti, and she asked me to blog about it, and I’ve tried, I really have. I care about Haiti, and we’ve given money to relief efforts. But it’s not the same. Congo is more than a cause now. But what is it? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that I can’t write to you about Haiti right now, not with any real conviction or passion, you’d see right through me, you’d know my heart was saying Congo all that time, and while it makes me feel a little heartless, a little guilty, not to have enough room for both, what I really believe is that everyone has their Congo, whether they’ve found it yet or not, and we’ve all got to latch on and fight like mad to do something.

And there it is, the man who plays guitar until his fingers bleed, because he’s trying to say something. Something about life and about art, the way we couldn’t paint without dark colors, and there is a beauty about Bishop and his bottles of Coke and Sprite and Fanta that I will never find the words for. But I will not stop trying.

(If Haiti is your Congo, here’s one way to help: www.ahomeinhaiti.com. The rainy season starts soon.)

It actually starts on Thursday night, when Jesse showed me this short film about a three-legged dog who dies. The film (“Last Minutes with Oden”) was well made, and I was fine in the beginning, before I realized that Oden was a dog. The dog who loves and accepts everyone, no matter how outcast they are. The dog who loves his tattooed owner and his balding friends, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. A dog who has cancer and is in pain. I lost it when Oden stood, revealing one front leg missing. One thing you must know about me is that I will instantly bawl upon seeing an animal of any variety that is missing a limb. You know that two-legged dog they parade around on talk shows? Yeah. I cry like a baby.

“But why?” Jesse asks. “It’s happy! It’s triumphing over adversity!”

That’s just it. I don’t think I can fully explain it, but there is something about a creature who has never hurt someone, never been obnoxious or rude, who (probably) cannot understand what is happening to it, there’s something about a creature like that, who shouldn’t even have lived, hopping around the stage of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s something about it.

So you can imagine my state as the tattooed man carried the three-legged Oden to the car, as his friends said goodbye, asking the dog to tell Jesus hello for them, as they drove to the vet’s office. As a grown man covered in ink, his hands looking worn and his face gently lined, sobbed on the floor of the vet’s office, sobbed as the needle went into one of the remaining legs, sobbed as the dog closed his eyes, as his head sunk in the man’s hands.

I was a mess.

That was Thursday night, just before bed. Friday started early, because I had the Pampered Chef party to prepare for. The day was normal for about twenty minutes. The sun wasn’t up, not because it was too early for that, but because the sky was a stubborn mess of clouds. I got a phone call with some bad news and spent the rest of the morning a complete mess again. Finally I pulled it together and went to my babysitting job. At which I whimpered again, looking at a precious blond two-year-old and telling him he didn’t need to know about the sad parts of life yet, that he could wait longer for that, knowing he wasn’t understanding what I was saying.

At naptime, I took the boy upstairs and we went through the nap-rituals, and I sang “Old MacDonald” to him as I rocked him, as his head fell back onto my shoulder, heavy and tired. I sang until I ran out of barnyard animals, and then I kept singing, adding things like monkeys and, when I became really desperate, cheese. Finally, I put him in his crib and went downstairs.

The house is a lovely older home, eclectically decorated, with a large window in the kitchen that overlooks the backyard and a series of birdfeeders and squirrel feeders, which are densely populated in the mornings. The neighborhood is nice—no, more than nice. But a couple weeks ago, the boy’s father told me to keep the doors locked if we left for a walk, as there’d been some incidents of people looking for open doors, looking for easy targets for a burglary.

So, after the singing and the sleepy baby, I tiptoed downstairs, a dirty diaper in my right hand to throw into the trash can on the back porch. I walked into the kitchen. Where the back door stood open.

I instantly freaked out, spinning around, sure I would see someone standing behind me. No one was there, so I spun back toward the open door, and then stood frozen in the kitchen, the diaper raised like a weapon. If I were in my own house, I would have grabbed a kitchen knife or a broom or something. But, there, in a house that wasn’t foreign but also wasn’t my own, I just raised the diaper and turned back and forth, from the open door to the rest of the house. The sky outside was still a slate gray, the sun hidden, and the house was dark, except for the weak light from the windows. I listened for a moment, then finally became conscious of the diaper, which I quickly threw away before searching the downstairs for the intruder I thought was surely there.

But the dog was in the playroom, asleep. And I found no one in the house. I pushed the door closed, and locked it, hoping it had opened because of the wind. And for the next two hours I stayed very still and very quiet, listening, watching.

After that, the day was a shocking flurry of errands, which I performed without excitement or drive, my mind preoccupied with the news I received that morning, with the open door, which seemed like an omen. The sky never brightened, the sun having given up at some point in the afternoon, the clouds staying the meanest shade of gray, so that the whole day felt like the morning had never ended, that time was not really passing.

Little things that would normally be annoyingly amusing got under my skin. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, the trunk of my car kept slamming shut, so that by the time I turned to my cart to get another bag, it would blow shut, and I would have to open it again. I finally propped it open with one hand and loaded it with the other, which given my back injuries, the weight of the my trunk lid, and the fact that the remaining purchases were cat litter, soda, and other heavier items, meant I could add a backache to the festivities of the day. When I unloaded the groceries at home, a two-liter tore its bag and landed on my foot. When I went to move a bag of cereal to the pantry, it came open and spilled generic Golden Grahams all over my clean kitchen floor. Oliver took the opportunity to jump onto my clean kitchen counters, and when I chased him to put him into the master bedroom to keep him out of trouble, I skidded onto the carpet next to the dining room table he had run under. Only then did I remember the jeans I wore had holes in the knees. (Knees which, therefore, were rug-burned.)

The evening went on. The house was cleaned, the kitchen prepped, the carpets vacuumed. The party was fun. It wrapped up late and a few girlfriends stayed and we talked some more, and the conversation turned to child predators, and it felt fitting somehow that the day would end there, that the sun would not in fact ever show itself.

And today the sun is out, and all I want to do is go outside in a bathing suit and soak it up, all I want to do is be in warmth, to be internalizing the sun. But I know it’s far too cold for that. I know it will be months before I will warm up. But I also know that summer will come, one day when I’m not expecting it, and I will go to the beach by myself, and I will lie flat, face-up, and spread my arms and feel relief.

Also, The Great Calendar Hunt of Twenty-Ten. I thought I’d be clever and wait until after New Year’s to get my calendar. Thought I’d get a good deal. Ha. Apparently, in a recession, everyone waits until January for their new wall calendars. The selection at Barnes and Nobel consisted of Betty Boop, Playboy, and Twilight. None of which I want on my kitchen wall. So, after a day of searching in what apparently were all the wrong places, I went home calendar-less. Which, for me, means: disoriented and slightly panicked, with no idea what she’s supposed to be doing the next day.

After much lament, I decided to give my computer’s calendar program another whirl. In the past, I just haven’t warmed to the digital calendar. But this year might be different. Twenty-ten, you know, it’s the future. Right? And of course, since deciding this and taking the time to set up my recurring appointments and obligations, I found plenty of calendars, all half-off, just lying around waiting to be bought by me. But I still want to give the (free) iCal a chance, a really fair shake this time. And paying six bucks for a wall calendar when January is practically over (okay, fine, almost half over) makes me feel I just won’t be getting my money’s worth. You don’t just get those two weeks back.

And there’s the Pampered Chef party I’m having next Friday. (If you’re in town, come over. If not, order kitchen stuff here: http://www.pamperedchef.biz/amydegler — just put in “Erin Bond” and buy stuff! I want free kitchen accessories! I’m poor!) Sending postcards and setting up online invites and realizing I really have to have my house cleaned up by then. Just tonight I finally did the last load of laundry from the holidays. Said load is still in the dryer and must be put away, but I’m nearly there…

Tonight was nice—easy, calming, a late dinner of bone-in chicken breasts roasted in garlic butter, and one or our favorites, corn maque choux, a creamy, buttery, tangy mess of deliciousness. Corn maque choux is comfort food at its ideal—even making it is comforting. Chopping the onion and the red pepper, slicing the kernels off the corncobs, stirring in the cream. While the chicken roasted, I prepped everything on the enormous butcher block that came home with me over the holidays. It’s so nice and big that I could push each veggie off to the side while I chopped the next one. When it was time to make the dish, I just scooped each new ingredient into my hands and dumped it into the waiting pan. Like a cooking-show host, just without the cool glass bowls.

The slow evening was the perfect follow up to a blissfully productive day. I had a meeting with Sue, who has agreed to mentor me in leadership, and she’s just a brilliant woman. Girl knows her stuff. I’m doing this for the pod, because I want it to be incredible, because I want us all to grow, because I want twenty-ten to be transformative, to have an unstoppable momentum. And Sue was perfect; I left her place charged up and ready to go. We talked about vision, about leading with the end in mind, about scheduling, about communication, about flowers. (More on that later.) I came home and made a master task list and got to work, not allowing myself to get on Facebook until this evening. Tonight, before bed I’ll make my “six things” list for tomorrow, the six things that must get done (and no more, so I won’t get frustrated if I don’t finish the list).

Until today, twenty-ten has felt busy without being particularly productive, freezing cold with no snow, time passing both quickly and slowly. Is January not over yet? Memories of a rough January last year. But it’s supposed to be sixty-four on Friday, and tomorrow I’ll have six things that will get done, and disappointments will eventually fade into memories, and there’s a whole year of changes still in this story.

We had plans to spend Thanksgiving in Florida and Christmas in North Carolina but at the last minute things got switched up and so we find ourselves in North Carolina, all by our lonesomes. Everyone’s going out of town, it seems. Or having family come in town. The city feels empty, regardless.

I think up until today, I’ve been in a bit of denial that we’ll be alone for Thanksgiving. I even bought a turkey and the stuff to make a green bean casserole (it was on sale). For the Thanksgiving dinner I won’t be making this year. (And how am I going to con our friends—who will likely be spending the weekend eating so much they won’t want to even see another turkey until next November—into coming over to help us eat our eighteen-pound bird?)

I remember Thanksgiving in college, when Marianne would pass up invitations to join us in Titusville for Thanksgiving dinner, her parents being all the way in Japan. I couldn’t understand it then—Thanksgiving with non-family was better than no Thanksgiving at all, wasn’t it? But now I totally get it. I’d rather just cancel the holiday altogether and skip right onto Christmas.

Tomorrow we’re going to John and Michelle’s “Thanksgiving for the people who don’t get to be with family” party, and I’m sure we’ll have a nice time. And people have been really sweet to us, inviting us over and everything. I’m just ready for the whole thing to be over. I don’t want any more reminders. Ungrateful much? Yeah. And during the holiday where the whole point is gratitude. Don’t think I don’t get the irony. Ha. Well, I promise the wallowing will be over by the time everyone gets back in town.

So, anyway. Here’s looking forward to Friday.