By the time we got to winter it already felt like spring in the Pacific Northwest. A few things bloomed and the Christmas bugs returned, those gray, floppy, mosquito-like creatures that come every January. I don’t mind the bugs but it’s odd to see them in winter.

Our yard and patio looked battered from the recent rains. Temperatures were well over average with the Pineapple Express style weather systems blown in from Hawaii, the atmospheric river stalled out over the region. Photos of cars swallowed in river water and people evacuated from their homes. The most damaging rains in our state’s history. All the water looked like chocolate milk.

I took a pause from my daily walks to take up a new yoga routine and try meditating again, a good segue as the seasons changed. What if I meditated every day for 90 days, what then? Would I feel any different?

But how hard it is to sit still and think about nothing. How my mind bucked me like a wild horse. If I could reject the idea of judging myself maybe that would work. I lasted no longer than five minutes, couldn’t wrest myself loose.

Sitting with yourself like that forces a confrontation like no other. The mind wriggles and runs, Harry Houdini style. I’d practice every day and see what happened.

(Later)

I baited the traps with peanut butter and put on the disposable haz mat suit, my gloves and mask, headlamp. I kept thinking about contaminating the peanut butter by touching the traps and tried to remember everything before I got in the crawl space. The flashlight and plastic bag for the rat corpse. My mask.

There was standing water in the trench between the little door to the crawl space and the foundation beneath the house, the very earth, covered in black plastic. Every time I went down there and shone a light it was like a horror movie, the end of The Blair Witch Project. Legacy traps, ominous-looking wiring and queer shadows, bits of insulation pulled down as bedding for rodents, feces, that sour urine odor I knew from our first house in West Seattle.

There was that scene in the basement from 20 years ago I could not unsee, the realization a headless rat was being eaten by other rats; they were fixed on the head. Seeing that, removing the bodies with a plastic bag, is a kind of loss of innocence. Welcome to home ownership. Black greasy footprints on the sides of the walls like scuff marks, tire tread.

I don’t know what inspired me to finally get down there, probably the sound of them scratching beneath the Christmas tree in the den, knowing they were nesting, but it did make me feel like a man to crawl around in the dark, to confront the unthinkable. Who does that?

Halfway in though I decided I was turning back and calling a pro. I laid a few traps and got the hell out. And immediately felt relieved when I shifted the responsibility to someone else.

When I end my yoga practice I always give thanks to one of my teachers and often it’s the English guy, my favorite. His whole demeanor, his warm voice as we lay on our backs and he had us imagine we were melting, from the skin to the tissue to the bone. We did, and it was blissful.

And the thing about him, he was not your typical yoga teacher. I got to know him decently well, and he was a bit broken like the rest of us. He smoked, got into street fights, had relationship problems. But he’d studied with some great teachers himself and carried their lessons forward. Like helping his students get out of their heads, stop trying to be perfect. To Charley: namaste🙏.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, mindfulness, pacific northwest, yoga