Skip to main content

Hitting The Bottle

Hitting the Bottle

First thing in the morning, I think about it. Last thing before bed, I turn to it. It gives me comfort, warmth, and a feeling of well-being. I’ve started hitting the bottle. I broke new ground yesterday when, for the first time, I smuggled the bottle into the car. I stashed it beside my driving foot as I taxied to 2 schools. I felt naked, staggering from car to school gate to retrieve my flat mate’s daughter, minus my trusty bottle. Bottie awaited my return to the car. “She’s not hurting anything,” I rationalized. “I’m sure other people drive with their bottles, too.”
 
15 minutes later, we arrive at Fiona and Finley’s school. Once again, I leave Bottie next to the driver's side door in the Honda. “She’ll be fine without me. Or rather, I’ll be fine without her. I can survive another 10 minutes without Bottie.” The muddled thoughts of an addict. Am I addicted? I do feel a quiet pull, an urge -the need for Bottie. 

Back at the house, I cradle Bottie and lovingly set her on the bench (Kiwi for “counter”). I can top her up later. Right now, I’ve another addiction to feed: The Pumpkin Thing. Oh, yeah – a quarter chunk of fresh, orange pumpkin rests in the fridge, begging for transformation. Total gourd makeover. “What shall I be today?” says Pumpkin. “Fairy princess? Barack Obama? An All Black [NZ’s rugby team]?” Hmmm… I consult cooks.com for inspiration, maybe even for a recipe I’ll obey (I rarely follow recipes, regarding them more as kernels of ideas than a fully-popped bag ‘o corn). I microwave the pumpkin wedge into submission to soften its hard flesh. The kitchen starts to smell like American Thanksgiving, like Christmas, like comfort. I discard the stringy bits, then scoop and mash as Amy’s 5-year-old daughter watches from the other side of the bench. I separate rind from orange flesh, flicking bits of green into the sink. How a country as civilized as New Zealand can fail to provide residents opportunities to buy canned, pureed pumpkin is beyond my grasp.

I make a loaf of pumpkin-oat-chocolate bread and a batch of pumpkin-raisin muffins. Now, I can return to Bottie. I fill the jug (electric kettle), boil water and refill the rubber reservoir. Accompany me to the couch, my hot, sweet one. The Boyfriend, Pete, would later ask, “Am I being replaced?” Uh, not yet. There’s a fly in this warm-water ointment:

I visit my physiotherapist (physical therapist) friend the next morning to treat the source of my Bottie addiction: a badly sprained ankle - injured more than a week ago while running at The Mount. Michelle examines my bloated “cankle” (the melding of an ankle and a calf- last seen 6 years ago, when I was pregnant with Finley) and says, “It actually looks worse than when I saw you last week.” I disclose my addiction - I’ve been hitting the bottle. “Oh,” she says. “Since it’s still swollen, I wouldn’t recommend heat. Apply ice until the swelling goes down.”  Great. I’ve been decimating my already-munted ankle, inflamed capillary by inflamed capillary.
Farewell for now, old friend

Sexy, eh?

I return home and drain the water from Bottie, leaving her cold, blue and flaccid. Sorry, pal. I’m sure we’ll rendez-vous another day, though I hope not too soon.

I have a new couch buddy: She’s cold and bumpy and makes the blood vessels around my cankle constrict with icy pleasure. She looks like a half-used bag of frozen corn, but she’s much more than that: each of her kernels harbors a tiny therapeutic aid. Come here, Cornie – we have a date.

Comments

  1. Sorry Dawn I must correct you...in classic Kiwi vernacular your bottie should really be referred to as, yes, hottie...

    ReplyDelete
  2. thats a good point Amy "bottie" could be interpreted as having a bottom on your ankle :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Murder House

Murder House (MUH-dah House) The deed is done              “I don’t wanna go to the dentist. It’s gonna hurt,” says Fiona. I can hardly deny my eight-year-old the truth, but I can tiptoe around it.             “They’re going to rub medicine on your gums to numb them,” I tell her. “And they can put your tooth to sleep with a needle.”             Fiona gasps, “I don’t want a needle! No!” Oops. I shouldn’t have used the “n” word. Fiona starts her high-pitched screeching if she thinks a needle exists in the next room. When I got the kids immunized in preparation for dragging them round-the-world, Fiona cried as the nurse swabbed her upper arm with iodine. You would’ve thought someone was whacking off her limb with a rusty saw, yet the needle lay feet from Fiona’s body. New Zealand is not the place for dental work for a squeamish, sobbing little girl. I learned after bringing Fiona to a dental clinic during the Christmas school vacation (otherwise known as summer holidays) that sch

Ten Years On

Ten Years On Our ten-year wedding anniversary, Dec 3, 2009 Scattering ashes in Michigan, August, 2010 January 23, 2010 is a date I'm afraid to remember and scared I'll forget. It's the day Sean died. I wanted to write about the weirdness of marking ten years since Sean’s death, but it’s almost too big a task. It’s like straining to hear what my kids are asking from the other room while the kettle is boiling in front of me; like trying to figure out how to build a bookshelf when the instructions are cryptic pictograms.  How to talk about a decade of living, loving, grieving? It’s like a trip to the moon and back ten times and also like a walk to the corner store. It has been a long odyssey and a quick jaunt. What no one can tell you about the years stretching between death and this-new-normal-kinda-life is how your perspective will change. What once seemed important now seems trivial, and the person you were back then is different from

The Affair

The Affair Ohope Beach, NZ I had an affair last week. I’m not ashamed to tell you, either. It was sweet and sad. It made me laugh, cry, sigh and dance in my chair to James Brown and Rupert Holmes. My Kiwi PAHT-nah, Pete, even facilitated the tryst, though neither of us knew what to expect beforehand. Pete watched the kids while I was gone for five nights. Five whole nights.  No kids. No TV. No partner.  I enjoyed a dalliance with my late husband, Sean (though I should write instead, ‘dead husband,’ because Sean hated being late). It happened in a wood-paneled house across the street from the ocean, in Ohope Beach, New Zealand. I attended a writer’s retreat to work on the memoir. I revised six sections totaling more than 40,000 words. In the course of revising- subtracting old text and adding entries from letters Sean had written me when we first started dating, plus journal entries he wrote around the time Fiona was born - I fell in love again. With Sean’s openn