The black dog is running loose, toenails clicking on the pavement, jagged white teeth showing, hunting in this lightless thickening night...

I have an addict friend who calls his invariable bouts of crashing depression the black dog, as did Winston Churchill. My friend is sober now  and has been for 39 years but the black dog still stalks him, slavering and angry, howling in rage. Looking to eat.

My chronic depression is nothing so flashy. Ripping off John Irving, I call mine the undertoad: wet, clammy, blank-eyed and heavy, it squats on my chest and weighs a thousand reptilian pounds. It makes me stupid, uncaring, unwilling to do anything but sleep a dark sinking sleep. Awake, I can barely keep my eyes open, am likely to topple off my chair and crash to the floor, snoring. But it hasn't been on me with such malevolence, not for decades.

Although I've taken them twice in my life, mostly I stay away from antidepressants figuring as Goethe said, If my devils fly, my angels will also. For many years now, my depressions have taken on the milder guise of moodiness and insomnia. This is because I fear the undertoad so greatly, I live in a precise way so as to contain it. When I think of it now, I picture the undertoad inside an old shoebox, one with holes punched in the top for air; inside are a jar lid of water, dead flies for food.

I've discovered a whole train carload of causes for the undertoad. I come from a long line of broody people and in my extended family we number a few suicides. My childhood had its chaotic, sometimes terrifying moments. When measured, my body chemistry indicates a sharp lack of feel-good juices and hormones. But these bits and factoids have never provided enough heft to shift the undertoad one iota.

Rather, I learned sometime ago, I think in a way many people do not. It puts me at odds with most of the world and it takes a glacially long time for me to understand something. I arrive at my answers at an achingly slow pace, constructing my solutions out of a tidbit here, a scrap there. My depressions arise out of this process, a process I'm not always aware of, except for a single persistent, even idiotic thought.

When my husband had his massive stroke, I suddenly became obsessed with those motorized hover-chairs, free to anyone with Medicare or Medicaid. Seemed like I saw those fuckers everywhere, humming up and down the grocery aisle, sideswiping me at Walgreens. I hated them without knowing why, but watched every late-night infomercial that featured the happily disabled, zooming around their beige living rooms. Fat-asses, I'd hiss.

Then in November, I slipped on the floor and caught myself squarely on the hand. I knew it was a bad fall, so while I was still in shock, I got an elastic brace from the drugstore and put it on. By nightfall, the hand was entirely black with bruising. Still, in a lot of pain, crazy from my boy's latest death-dealing crisis, I managed to ignore my non-functional hand and wrist, while still counting hover-chairs. I remember spotting one zipping along in the middle of traffic on Peavy Road, ridden by grizzled-looking vet.

In March, heaving my boy or hefting his wheelchair, I suddenly felt my back muscles rip alarmingly, and with that tear, my undertoad lurched out of the box, thundered over and squashed me flat. Stumbling, panicked and full of bad thoughts, I discovered there was almost nothing I could do without agony and a constant stream of weak tears. Finally I called my doctor and asked him to send in a prescription for Percocet as he'd done for my hand. Instead, I got a call from his nurse, asking me to see the doctor that day "...to discuss your pain requirements".

"Shit!" I screamed, thinking about the I-am-not-an-addict-although-I-once-was-now-I'm-just-a-skinnyass-woman-in-huge-pain conversation to come and then being offered a couple of Tylenol. It had happened before and much too often. But when I got to his office, ready to bite him on the neck, he only said, "I just wanta know why you want a weenie drug like Percocet. What's the matter? You got something against Vicodin?"

Not a thing, I told him. Not a thing.

And so, that's where I've been, squashed by the undertoad, crippled up with my back, consumed with hover-chairs and lousy dreams, until, finally, like mist, all that stuff began to vaporize. Gradually, I discovered something floating loose and happily within me, something I could name as hope.

And thereby hangs a tale. Maybe many tales. So here I am once more, back in the world, imperfect as it is, black dogs and all.

And I've missed you all. So much.