"Everything in Life is Divided"
by Cortney Davis
from Leopold's Maneuvers. University of Nebraska Press.
(Reprinted with permission by NPR.)

Everything in life is divided:
twenty-four hours that fade from day to night,

the sand at Martha's Vineyard, where we vacationed
last year,
separating us from the ocean

where we swam, then returned to our blanket,
the two of us making one marriage,

sharing the apple sliced to reveal the identical
black seeds of its surprised face.

Even our bodies can be halved, although less evenly:
lungs partitioned into lobes, the heart's blood

pumped from right to left, the brain's two hemispheres
directing our arms, our legs,

our lives into the two possibilities of the Greek mask.
My life's work, too, is divided--

one side of my desk, unfinished poems;
on the other, nursing books with dog-eared pages.

Aren't we all somehow divided?
Like when my daughter was in labor, my first

grandchild emerging into the room's blue air,
suddenly entering new territory,

and how, when after the delivery my daughter kept bleeding,
I couldn't look at the newborn in the incubator

but stood fast beside my child, the woman who once
slipped from my life into her own and now had divided herself
again

while I balanced in my hands Joy and Fear, cradling them both
until the bleeding stopped.

It's the birthday of the great food writer and food lover James Beard, born in Portland, Oregon, (1903). He said, "I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around."

I had my overnight sleep study last week at the Royal University Hospital's Sleep Disorders Centre. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to sleep after being hooked up to various electrodes, wires, etc. The results, which were extremely detailed, showed that I did manage to sleep and that I have sleep apnea. However, it's only borderline sleep apnea. (I've always suspected I was "borderline"!) The doctor who went over my results with me on a computer the next morning said that the CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machine that they give to people with severe sleep apnea (so they don't stop breathing many times during the night) would probably cause me more discomfort than it would be worth. My oxygen level decreases at times when I'm sleeping, but not to a dangerous level. If my problem gets worse, I can get a CPAP machine without another long wait for a sleep study.

The doctor recommended forcing myself to sleep on my side and losing about 10 pounds, although he said (and it was nice to hear) that I weigh a lot less than most of their sleep apnea patients. He also said that part of the reason why the quality of my sleep got much worse in recent months could be stress. Given that I had taken on a lot of temporary extra work and had fallen on ice--affecting my neck and back--this makes sense. I'm sure that a lot of my stress came from worrying about having untreated sleep apnea.

At first, I was disappointed that there wasn't a clear and quick solution to my problem. After thinking about it for a bit, I realized that I'm glad I don't have a severe form of sleep apnea, which can cause problems such as heart damage if it's bad enough. I definitely feel less anxious now when I go to bed at night.

In the last 15 years of her life, May Sarton published a series of journals about aging: At Seventy and After the Stroke. She said, "If I were in solitary confinement, I'd never write another novel and probably not keep a journal, but I'd write poetry because poems, you see, are between God and me." She said, "My cat likes to go out at one in the morning, so I have to let him out. And at two he meows to come in. [During that time] I make notes for poems. And then in the morning, when I'm all there, as much as I ever am, I work at them. I would not still be a poet without the cat."