Mary Ann Hayes

It’s six a.m. and as dark as the time we got caught in an underground tunnel in the middle of the night and suddenly all the lights went out.  So dark it makes no difference if the eyes are open or closed, the sense of touch will find the light switch long before sight will. Yet this won’t last forever; just until this coming Sunday when daylight saving ends.  It will still be dark at six in the  morning, yet not quit as dark. Things change.

For example, I used to have a full set of eyebrows. Not anymore. Now I have half-a-brow. They start out just fine but come to an abrupt halt at the half way mark. I’ve no idea where the rogue halves wandered off to, but they are gone. Now I take the eyebrow pencil and pick up where the originals left off and fill in the blanks. It drives me crazy. No one ever prepared me for half-a-brow.

But then I never knew I’d be one of those people who are overheated all the time. I’ve spent most of my life freezing to death. But now, I find my coat coming off before making it even as far as the car. I crawl into bed and under the comforter one minute only to throw one leg and one arm out into the cold night air the next. I shove the window open and dream of putting a bed out on the porch, just for now, just while my body is doing it’s thing – whatever that may be. You never know how long this will last. Things just keep on changing.

There was a time in my life, long ago, where I struggled to gain weight. Yes, it’s true, a skinny little waif I was back in the day. Just a little meat on my bones, I prayed, so people wouldn’t say I was invisible when I turned sideways. Not complimentary, especially coming from a sixteen year old boy to a sixteen year old girl standing on the end of a dock in her swim suit. Self conscious enough, let alone…yet, things change. No longer the least bit invisible, I look back to that time and find that taking up a little more space than I should is no better or worse than taking up no space at all. It’s not a perfect situation either way, yet at least back then I still had my eyebrows.

So, here we sit, in the dark, morphing into moles. It’s seven thirty now and still black as coal. Have the windows been painted with tar? Did my husband play a joke and cover the outside of my office window with a black tarp? Even the dogs won’t wake up, yawn and stretch and ask to go outside. They’ll wait it out, hunker down until the sun shows up one way or the other. Behind a layer of clouds, through a slit in the gray, over the horizon. It won’t be like this forever, I remind myself continuously, all winter long. Go take a nice hot shower, draw on those eyebrows and have another cup of coffee. It’ll be daylight soon, the darkness behind us, and a whole new day ahead. See what I was telling you? We have no control over it, everything just changes.

Next thing you know I’ll be missing something like my hearing or maybe even my… mind! The good thing about that is at least it will take the sting out of missing my eyebrows.

Later,

Mary Ann