Sunday In A Small Town

and how wind chimes freak me out*

(reprised)

Sunday morning. Cold, grey, quiet. I love this morning. I also love how talking about my aversion to games started such a great discussion. I love how there is room for all of us; you can love games and its not hard to find friends to play with you; you can hate games and while it's harder to find like minded spirits, you can rub the dog's belly while others are playing. I am so satisfied with that!

I am really loving the Showtime show "The Tudors". It's true that there is way too much sex in it for me to be really comfortable, just as I suspected. Really no need at all to watch Mary Boleyn go down on Henry the 8th. I very much dislike Jonathon Rhys Meyers because he is such an arrogant actor (I've read interviews and he's such an asshole). However, I underestimated how much I love that time period, the history that accompanies it, the back drop, the costumes, and the fact that all these people had to operate without television news, radio, phones, or computers.

What I'd really like to know is, when will Jonathon start growing the famous red (unsexy) beard that Henry wore? And when will he start to wear the fat suit? Henry was NOT a skinny guy.

Sunday in my family was never about church since we weren't Christians. Sometimes my parents had us all sit in a meditative circle at their Buddha altar and "ohm". But mostly Sundays were about yard work and food. My mom always seemed to cook good food on Sundays. Sometimes after doing some weeding my parents would let us play with friends but friends were hard to find in Ashland Oregon on Sundays unless you went to church. Most of our friends were born again Christians. So Sundays came to symbolize emptiness in the afternoons. The whole town was steeped in an oppressive quiet.

It gave room for me to hear the wind chimes on every one's porches all across town in an eerie tinkling that sounded more like human keening. Sundays have always been a day of acute discomfort to me because of its emptiness filled only with the lonely aching longing of the chimes which sound like empty souls trying to find purchase on the banks of hell.

Most of my friends already know this about me and I have discussed it here before: my incredible aversion to wind chimes. Here in Mac someone very clever once left a little tiny wind chime near my front door. I sense that it was left there by a Christian person trying to untie my brain. Luckily it was so small it couldn't even really catch a breeze.

Wind chimes make me think of places where serial killers hide. Where bad things happen. Where humanity has deserted and all that is left is metal music in the wind. They are like ghosts whining about purgatory, caught in the metal tubes forever, like a pale recording of their shadowy souls. Tinkling tinkling tinkling away into the empty Sunday air like a persistent hammering in my brain.

I realize that chimes are just chimes. I am only telling you what they make me feel like and why they fill me with dread rather than delight, as they do for many people. My mom loves chimes. Many of my friends love them too. I respect that. They don't hear the same thing I do or have the same memories of the empty atmosphere filled with them. I never make a fuss about other people having them**. Even when they are tinkling away and unscrewing my head in the process. I just pretend I don't notice and then later I try to shake the sound back out of my head like water out of my ear.

I didn't really notice Sundays in Santa Rosa so much. Probably because no one I knew went to church. Instead it seemed to be a day for community, everyone out in their yards doing yard work but stopping to chat with neighbors taking walks and kids running around together in a great melee of shrieks and flying dirt. Sundays were for being home, or hanging out with neighbors close by. Sundays were for cooking, like they were for my family growing up, and then play. Filled with noise and laughter and friendly gossip.

Here it is the same as it was in Ashland. Most of my town is in church right now. There are even buses all over the place to transport you to church if you can't get to it on your own, which seems insane considering that there are churches within spitting distance of almost every house in town. We have a lot of churches here. I suppose there are a lot of spiritual needs that go along with all the teen pregnancies that seem to accompany very churchy towns. I heard Santa Rosa had a big teen pregnancy problem, but it can't compare to the rate here***!

Later we're going to go to a Slow Foods potluck for some good food and talk with other like minded people who relish cooking, the time it takes to make good food, and using as many local ingredients as possible. I have lots of food to make to keep it from going to waste.

I canned 15 pints of chunky spiced apple/pear sauce. I also canned five pints of grenadine. I worked almost all week. I have also finally propositioned friends to help write the magazine so we are all starting the great project of writing the thing. I'm very excited about it!

I hope you all have a satisfying Sunday, whatever it means personally to you.

*If by this time you are asking yourself "What the hell DOESN'T freak her out?!" then all I have to say is welcome to my world of anxiety. When people notice that I "worry" a lot, they don't really understand the half of it. Having generalized anxiety means that my experience of the world is fraught with both rational and irrational fears. I have a very long list of things that disturb me, freak me out, and depress me. Sometimes I even impress myself with it.

**Not to my awareness anyway. I know I've commented on them to people before but I don't think commenting is the same as making a fuss. I don't know, maybe I do make a big stink and I just block it all out? Only my friends and family can really say for sure.

***Actually, charts show that teen pregnancies are on the decrease here. That's good news.