We Still Can't Flush the Toilets - Mercury Heading Retro

The Beauty in the City After the Rains

We arrived in Occidental, CA in October 2004 amid a severe drought. October falls at the end of the dry season in Northern California, and it was, dry that is.

“Don’t flush the toilet every time you use it until the rains come,” our new landlords counseled. We were getting our water from the private well on their property. The well ran dry two weeks after we moved in, as in no water came out of the taps. They trucked some water in to tide us over. On and off again throughout our time in California, we conserved water, even more so during the years of drought we experienced in Ojai.

“At least we’ll always be able to flush the toilets in Chicago,” Jon said as we were preparing to move.

Not so fast. I saw a notice from the city of Chicago the other day asking us to please hold off on taking showers, doing laundry, and yes, flushing our toilets due to the excessive rain we got and the fact that the sewer system was in danger of becoming overloaded.

Feast or fucking famine, in this case, both created the same result.

The night we left Ojai we stayed at the Viking Motel in Ventura. We could have found lodging in Ojai proper, but we needed to leave and be done, especially after dealing with our landlord and his going back on a promise to give us some money as a way to pay us back for things we’d done there that went way beyond our responsibilities as tenants.

Instead, he tried to blame us for his fifteen years of negligence, offloading his responsibilities on us once again.

We were done.

“Blessings to you,” he mumbled at me as he closed the door behind him, unwilling to look me in the eye. He’s not good at endings. When his aging dog was dying he left town for the weekend, leaving her in the care of someone on our property who was ignoring her as she barked and cried in the yard. His apartment was attached to the back of the house, and the backyard (which resembled the set of Sanford and Son) was all his.

Jon and I picked our way through the piles of things out back to see her together after he asked me what I wanted to do.

“If I could lift her myself, she’d already be in our house,” I said.

He picked her up, all 100 pounds of her, managed to get her in through the back door of my office, and somehow she found the strength to get her legs under her and walk up the three steps into the rest of the house. We situated her on our living room floor on top of a blanket. She died there an hour later surrounded by Izzy, Jon, and myself. The Smurf watched from the dining room table. She’s buried in the yard along with those sweet kitties. Their bodies may be there, returning to the Earth, but their spirits remain with us and all three have looked out for us over the years along with our very first kitty, Sneaky Le Boo.

We opted for the Viking Motel in Ventura that first night on the road as we left California, due to it being the one to tell me “yes” to three dogs and waiving two-thirds of the pet fees as I was calling around while the movers were emptying our house. It turns out it was another X-Files Motel.

Hold on, backtracking. On our move to California in 2004, we were trying to make it to Bakersfield for our last night on the road. While driving through the Mojave Desert, a desolate and hypnotic experience that left us altered, we realized by seven pm that we were not going to make it and instead pulled off the two-lane highway into what we later dubbed as the X-Files Motel. Mulder and Scully were always staying at motels that looked and felt as scary as the monsters they were facing.

“If we die tonight, it’s been fun,” Jon said as we got into bed after realizing we could barely take showers due to the condition of the shower head. It was our first night in California and somehow, it seemed fitting that we would stay in a place like this, one that felt as death-defying as our move out there with very little money in the bank and very little support.

Again it was fitting that our last night in California was the X-Files Motel bookend to the first. Again the showerhead sucked, and when I went out to find food I spied an ankle bracelet on someone in one of the other rooms, and I am not talking about the jewelry kind.

As Jon again drove us through the Mojave desert the next day, this time traveling East, I remembered what a hellscape I had found it to be. Two hours in, I looked over at him to see his eyes briefly close.

“Exit!” I shouted at him. “I am driving us next.” Hell can be hypnotic, this election cycle feels the same.

Twenty years ago, when we lived in the same building we are in now, Jon noticed the fire hydrant in front of the house was leaking. He called the city to get someone out here to fix it. A week went by and nothing happened so he called again and again.

A month later we came home and saw the word “Jerk” spray painted on the road in front of our house. We all thought that was a message for Jon from the city which created much hilarity. This was not an unreasonable thought knowing Chicago and its sense of humor. It turns out that “jerk” is a plumbing term. It had been left there for the workers who showed up a week later as instructions for what was needed.

Speaking of words being written on the road. While walking to the farmers’ market the other day this appeared etched into the sidewalk before me just to remind me that The Faries are everywhere.

The other night while out in the backyard with the pack our neighbor from two buildings over waved hello at us. The dogs had been talking to her every time they saw her and this was the night she asked their names. A beautiful young woman with purple hair and purple shoes, I then asked her what her name was.

“Nora!” she shouted over the sound of the dogs.

“What???” I exclaimed. “My name is Nora!” I shouted back. “Would you like to come over and meet the dogs?”

“Yes!” she replied as she immediately headed down from her third-floor apartment into the alley and over to our back gate.

She’s a teacher with an interest in teaching English Lit at the high school level and it turns out her mother’s name is Margaret (as is mine).

Two Noras whose favorite color is purple both with mothers named Margaret, this is perhaps a hint at what this Mercury retrograde bouncing back and forth from Leo and Virgo may present. We just entered the pre-shadow phase of the retrograde which will occur from August 5th through August 28th. I knew without actually knowing that Mercury was headed retro the other day when I tried to get cash and both ATMs I went to were out of cash then had to go inside the bank finding myself stuck behind someone with piles of cash depositing it into what seemed to be multiple accounts.

No cash to piles of cash, feast or famine again.

My biggest curiosity for myself during this retro is who I am going to run into from my past. I have been taking things very slowly socially and have only encountered a few people from my life here before California. I have yet to initiate any social contact.

“How is this happening?” Jon asked me the other day as we ate dinner at the table in the building we once lived in as if our 20-year life in California was just a dream. The question was not a bad one, meaning it did not indicate that something bad had happened, but the disorientation at times is still overwhelming to be here again in a place so familiar with people we love and yet to feel so changed from within. As I drive and walk this city, I still have sudden bouts of huge emotions that swing all over the place from joy to sadness to excitement to anxiety and everything else in between. I am constantly met by memories of younger versions of myself experiencing moments long past.

“Seems like you’ve all got a pretty good thing going here with your dogs and everything,” our twenty-two-year-old neighbor Nora said to me after she’d spent an hour sitting with us in our yard hearing many of our doggie stories.

Yesterday while walking with the dogs at our favorite city park I noticed some berries staining the path. I looked up to see the tree above me laden with mulberries. Jon had planted mulberry bushes a couple of years ago in our Ojai yard and we enjoyed their fruit last summer for the first time. Leaving those mulberry bushes and all of the beautiful work he had put into that yard was one of the hardest things for me.

This happened right after we’d run into the nine-year-old girl wearing a “Little Miss Bossy” tee shirt who made sure to tell us all about the faerie village in the park. For some reason, Little Miss Bossy was the personality from the book series everyone associated with me when I was younger.

He and I stood there, in Indian Boundary Park, pulling mulberries off of the tree and enjoying their sweetness reminded that what we plant always finds its way to us in one way or another.

This all also seems to hint at what this retro period will bring.

As always, please don’t let the superstitious or negative interpretations of astrology get to you. I am embracing this time of intense inner reflection, which is being magnified by Pluto, Saturn, and Neptune in retrograde, and going with the flow as much as I am able.

For more on all of this, here is a video excerpt from our Solstice event. Love and gratitude to

Shannon

for creating this clip for us.

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