I took this photo yesterday afternoon, just before mincing, as I was prepping the soup I was craving in this cold, unfriendly winter.
The onion, in its weirdness, was speaking to me. At first, I saw a heart shape – a heart that had been mashed about, swollen, reframed and recast – akin to what the human heart sustains in our lifetimes. But then, I saw the ridges that suggested two parts fused or a single unit doing its level best to separate. But still, the swollen heart remained, shaped by its environment, whatever that had been, before it was the fragrant basis for my soup.
I’m not sure why it held my attention and spurred me to capture it. It’s been a weird week, and weird shapes in vegetables are somehow symbolic of the changes in life; contemplated for a moment only to be chopped up later for consumption. And, just like that, it’s gone.
Last night I dreamt that a tooth fell out while I was flossing it, then the one next to it. I held them in my hand, curiously; they were hollow – there was no blood, no nerves, nothing to them but a shell – and a big-ass gap in my recently straightened teeth. Freaking out, I showed my husband, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “I guess you’d better call the dentist and get a bridge made for that gap.” And that was that. I remember nothing else but the feeling of panic – how could I show up on Zoom calls with that big-ass gap in my lower jaw? My greatest concern was the image of my now-not-nearly-perfect mouth on people’s screens. When I woke up this morning, I Googled “meaning of losing teeth dreams.” That was a weird rabbit-hole. The interpretations were so wildly different from one another that there was no one thing that stood out. So I abandoned trying to make sense of it, and chalked it up to another weird thing going on in my subconscious.
Yesterday afternoon, after I folded and organized my daughter’s plethora of clothing, I read a book! An entire book in a single afternoon – something I’ve not done in more than a year. I found it amongst my daughter’s things and gave myself the afternoon to become immersed in some world created by someone else. A murder mystery, too, my favorite. And then, last night, after dinner, watched an entire movie. Another murder mystery. Maybe that’s why I was having weird dreams about hollow teeth and gaps in my smile. A lot of murder for one day.
Today, it is cold and windy, and the vultures are soaring and gliding in the sky just behind the house. They love it when there’s strong wind – they just open up that ghastly wingspan and let the wind take them wherever it will. While the little birds that crowd around the feeder next door puff up and huddle in the shrubbery, the vultures take to the sky, wheeling and whirring, before they roost in the tall pines across the way. I’m not entirely sure that soaring vultures are weird, but I hadn’t seen them in quite a while, so I am adding them to the list of weird things I’m seeing and experiencing this week.
In another 50 days, we’ll be at a full year of this staying at home business, while the virus that keeps us here just keeps on killing people. We lost so much time ignoring science and being complete jackasses about what it would take to get things under control. It’s insane. Not weird, but stupid and insane.