Mamie Morgan writes about May making her yearn for a rich, more well-matched interior life
Recently, my husband Alan and I traveled to a couples-only resort in Mexico for our wedding anniversary. Upon arrival, the staff greeted us with the popping of champagne. At check in, a representative upgraded us (for no reason we could discern) to the owner’s suite, which spanned an entire floor and boasted five balconies plus a private pool.
“Why are they being so nice to us?” I hissed more than once to Alan. They brought fruit trays. They brought cheese plates, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, all while I stood in a wrinkled Target cover-up and flip flops I’ve worn as shower shoes since college. I did what I always do when people are incredibly kind: I assumed there had been some sort of terrible mix-up. I also did what anyone who’s used to bad luck might do in the presence of marble floors and plush robes: I called my mother.
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Our family likes to say I have either very good or very bad luck, depending on the day. My sister Molly once offered to make a reversible t-shirt that read I’m in jail! on one side and I won the lottery! on the other. (They call this foreshadowing) Last winter we visited Skyline Lodge in The Highlands and a woman in reception put us in their nicest room. I spent the hour afterward nervous there’d been some mistake or another, that a fancier family would soon arrive to find out their room had been rented out to us hooligans.
Our first full day in Mexico was fabulous, if not also eerily reminiscent of that television show The White Lotus. We drank mango caipirinhas, swam, and I got to indulge my favorite pastime of people watching: the arguing honeymooners, the influencers who carried out entire rooftop photo shoots, two German triathletes in their 60s who ran on the beach while holding hands.
But then, around 3 a.m., I developed food poisoning. Since we’re all familiar with the myriad of sexy ways in which said ailment manifests, I’ll spare the details. But let’s just say that this particular bout held on for dear life, and by dear life, I mean the duration of our vacation. Luckily Alan is a very attentive Special Forces medic, so what help there was to be had, I had.
For the most part, though, I stayed in bed, with nothing really to do. Thinking of food only made me feel worse, and I’d packed a single book: Stanley Tucci’s culinary memoir, Taste. The one time I tried to read, he began a description of preparing beef-shin ragu. I did not make the mistake of reading again.
In desiring nothing whatsoever, I began noticing that much of my daily life is driven by appetite, an exchange of gifts between the external and interior world. Coffee, wine, food, literature (okay, fine, some days the closest thing to literature I devour is Us Weekly), exercise, affection. And here we were, in a land of appetite aplenty, without any. My interior life seemed paltry, a bit wanting, without its engagement with the exterior world.
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In “Onset,” one of my favorite poems about spring, Kim Addonizio writes, “how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.” Here comes May again, with its abundance of things, both in the natural world and in our lives, which we manage to fill up and pack in tight. The May page in my day planner is always vaguely daunting, and densely populated, and most of me is quite grateful for that, these last few years considering.
But, too, it makes me yearn for a rich, more well-matched interior life. A buddy of mine, Rossi, is a practicing Buddhist. Every year he participates in several weekend-long meditation retreats. I like to imagine him sitting perfectly still for hours on end when I can barely stay in one room for more than a minute (hence Alan’s nickname for me: Skeeter). I’d like to try, though. I’d like to begin somewhere small and patient, grace-filled, inside of myself, where the spiritual fauna of spring might reside. It’s a promising season, I like to think, if also a nerve-racking one. Addonizio closes the poem this way: “I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring / and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.”
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Last Train Out- Mamie Morgan yearns for a rich interior life
