Better

August 27, 2010 at 11:16 pm (Home, Light on Thrush Hill, Time, Water)

Things are mending.  There is hope next door.

Karl and I hauled large bags and five-gallon buckets to the dumpster at work this week.  The pile of broken plaster, cement marbles and fluffy insulation at the top of the driveway is somewhat smaller.

The katydids are calling their scratchy echo out in the woods.  Coming in from the big garden today, I saw the little woodchuck in my front yard — in the grass that’s three weeks grown.  I stood about 15 feet from him and talked to him until he turned and moseyed under the wild rosebushes.  Later tonight, as I talked to Dar on the phone, I spotted the brown bunny in the front yard nibbling away on grass.  The rain we had for two or three days running has made everything flourish again.

I had a long talk with Rose yesterday — I had to leave work early for a haircut, so went to her office after that.  “There has been a sea-change,” she wrote to me.  “I really need to talk to you.”  She was done with patients for the day, so we were uninterrupted.  I met the new doctor — Josh is on the verge of retirement and is there just as a go-to now, and not for long — and he seems very nice.  Rose had received an unexpected job offer last week from a prominent gastrointerologist in town, who wanted to hire her based on her reputation alone.  She was named Pro Health’s top nurse practitioner last year.  She could have written a little easier ticket, maybe ease the work load somewhat or rearrange her hours.  She was tempted but in the end said no.  I think it was enough that the offer came in, that she was recognized.  I think, though, that leaving her beloved coworkers — and an office already under transition — was a thought she couldn’t stand, on top of the thought of leaving Karl.  Everything had started to feel really crazy.  In the end she said to K, I can’t keep inflicting this much pain on you without allowing things to be different, without sincerely trying to make this work out.

They had a really long conversation about everything.  She gave me the highlights.  Both of them seem to have softened to one another.  Now that she’s clearer inside, things begin to clear outside.

So much work to do, but at least I’m not afraid my family is going to disintegrate.  As for BH, I know her heart aches at the thought of saying goodbye to what that was, what it meant for her when she felt spiritually and emotionally bereft.  But I see her heart going back to her husband, now that they’re giving each other hope.  Leaving him would have brought about untold emotional wreckage, and it would have been a horribly impractical thing to do at age 54.  After talking about everything else, she said to me ruefully, “I hate to bring the practical side into it, but do I really want to start over now, financially?  We’d take a bath on the house, and nobody has money to buy another one.  None of us would do very well, not me, not K, not Pearl.  BH is adorable, and dear to me.  But he’s 24 years younger than I am, and he’s poor.  I’d be crazy to run off with him, and there’d be no guarantee that that would work out either.”

Ah, the voice of reason.  Music to my ears.   BH will cry a river.  I stopped being mad at him a while back.  I’m rather hoping we can still be friends of some sort, if that’s not weird.  But I’m glad things are falling into place.  My rides in to work with K. were making me teary, too poignant to stand.  Better now.

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Renovation

August 22, 2010 at 1:18 pm (Fire, Home, Light on Thrush Hill, Water)

We demo’d the bedroom yesterday. Karl, Rose, two friends and I worked for about eight hours. We removed molding, took the bottom halves of three windows out, and set up a super-powerful fan at the front door. It’s the kind of fan whose wheels must be locked or it will push itself out of the room and across the yard. With the windows open upstairs, it created a very effective wind tunnel that blew plaster dust out of the room as we worked.

Then, masks and goggles on, we hammered and pried off wall plaster, taking care to leave the lath.

The ceiling was the hard part. We discovered a wire mesh inside the cement that was scrupulously nailed to a grid of furring strips. So first a layer of plaster had to be hammered off, then the cement, then the wire mesh with cement pushed all through it and hundreds of nails. Little cement balls rained down like marbles. The mesh extended down the walls about six inches, too, nailed to everything in sight. We used every hammer, pry bar and cat’s claw we had, plus some invented tools.

All the old insulation had to come down, so we poked it out with broom handles until the room was a foot deep in it.

Happily, one and a half walls stayed because they only have torn wallpaper but were intact.

We shoveled up debris and dropped it out the window into the tractor bucket, raised as high as it could go. Now there is a large pile of debris by the driveway that we will slowly take to the dumpster at work.

I went upstairs last night to put some Reiki into the room, and heard scurryings in the attic. Released mouse #6 today.

That is the goodish news. The sadder news is that Rose and K. have begun their difficult conversations. He’s consistently blaming everything rather than considering that there might be something they can do to make it better.  You can’t play victim and work something out at the same time.  When he’s gotten past the initial reaction, he’ll have to decide which of those things he’s willing to sacrifice.

It’s very anxiety provoking all around.  I feel simply awful, knowing they’re going through such pain and turmoil next door.  At the same time I am glad I’m in my safe space.  Her troubles have never hit so close to home.  I wonder how we’ll even get through the workday tomorrow.

In other news, Dar had to go to the emergency room today because his knee swelled up.  He’s had some trouble lately with bursitis in his elbows, and though this looked the same, they said it was cellulitis and put him on IV antibiotics.  He has to stay overnight, which is the longest he’s sat still in about 25 years.  He brought his script for Nicholas Nickelby, thankfully, as he has about eight characters to learn.  Still, he’s bored and unaccustomed to being motionless.  I told him to enjoy his enforced rest.  We made a lot of mouse jokes around his incarceration.  He’s never had anything wrong with him until this joint stuff lately.  Lucky, really; still lucky.

#6 mouse was a feisty one.  I got a little movie of when I let him go in the woods and sent it to Dar.  I hate that they’re in the house and I know they’ll keep coming in because there are plenty of entry holes outside.   I know where some of them are, but probably not all.  Until I can deal with that, I just have to keep getting them once they’re in here.   I don’t mind relocating them.  I just mind if they keep me up at night.  Lately they’ve been quieter.

There were plenty of mouse holes in the insulation we took out of the bedroom.  Based on that, I now have traps in the big, upper attic. Those floorboards are pretty far apart over the bedroom, in places.  No wonder they get everywhere.

I watched some of Treasure Island tonight.  Kind of badly acted and lots of painted backdrops, but it has a certain charm that draws me in anyway.  And the point is to make me forget my troubles for a while.  To this end I also started J@sper Ff0rde’s newest book, Sh@des 0f Grey, which is a hoot.  I’ve loved every one of his novels.

And the dreams, lately!  Not very interpret-able, but varied, emotional, charged, important in the moment.  Something is certainly going on underneath.

That’s all I have, except that I made a 2nd batch of marinara sauce tonight.  So many tomatoes, now.  I wonder what will become of the garden as the relationship falls apart next door.  I have so many conflicting thoughts and feelings about it, I can’t stand it.  I can hardly stand to be in my own head about it.  It is almost impossible to imagine what they would do about their property, in this difficult financial time.  It’s too painful to think about.

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The Final Object

August 18, 2010 at 9:50 pm (Water)

After the dreams came the mice, in the walls, and I have resorted to sleeping with earplugs while I catch a few more.  #4 went out this morning.

Tonight, the dinner, where Karl invited guests from out of town without asking Rose first.  She’s just back from Africa and three days into the week from Hell where Josh is away on a trip, she’s overbooked with patients, and they’re trying to prepare for the new doctor starting next week.  She was livid to find out twelve hours before landing at the airport that she’d have to entertain tonight.

Sigh.

I think I am starting to separate my very negative, angry reaction to BH’s mention of the word love (especially when it is surrounded by the words I am totally in and with your sister) from the two people involved on that end and place it more or less in the vicinity where it belongs, such as my hard-won belief that “love,” in the romantic sense, is a) a happy but temporary delusion leading ultimately to all manner of disappointment, and b) not for me.  Accepting their feelings for each other as legitimate and valuable means I wasn’t right; I have simply lost out, made the best choice of my options but traded the possibility of any more passion for myself.  I considered tonight the notion that romantic love, infatuation, whatever one wants to call it, is offered to us for learning and growth, for the opportunity to care and cultivate compassion, to become cooperative, to nurture and encourage another.  Those are reasons enough for it to occur.  No, it has nothing to do with long term compatibility.  Maybe it’s not supposed to; maybe our version of relationships needing to be long term, exclusive and excluding is narrow minded.  But I don’t know how to do another option, and frankly I’m not much interested in trying to figure out the best way for humans to be intimate without hurting anyone else.  If I talk to myself enough, affirm gently and persistently enough, maybe I can simply be happy for her if this is what makes her happy.  She certainly would do for me.  Of course, she is still interested in love, and I am just disgusted with it.  I have been curious about BH, to figure out what it is she sees in him (I’m still not entirely sure, only intellectually informed) and where he might fit into my life if they end up together.  Could we be comfortable as friends?  Would I be okay with him as a brother in law, if it came to that?  Would I stop feeling somehow competitive, would I stop resenting him?  In numerous ways I’m comfortable with the possibilities, yet my gut says he’s not the last guy for her, he only looks better now because she wants to get away from Karl so badly.  Ben is making up for what Karl lacks, emotionally.  If Karl were more in touch emotionally, would BH even have caught her attention?  If they split up, then a year from now, or two years, what will the “It’s not enough” list of BH look like?

And I still cannot bear to hear him say he loves her.  It’s not that I don’t want her to be happy.  I just don’t trust this version of what she sees as happiness.  AND, I know part of me would like someone in MY life to be head over heels with, to feel those things again with.  I don’t know how something like that would not be a detriment to the attention I pay to Dar.  I don’t know if it would be tantamount to cheating.  I don’t know if he’s had any lovers these last few years.  I don’t know if he wants to be again, with me, or I with him.  I don’t know if I want to bring it up.  Things go on quite well as they are.

And I don’t know how to assuage the loneliness that crept in unexpectedly and will not leave.

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Night Flights

August 13, 2010 at 1:37 pm (Home, Light on Thrush Hill)

The dreams are starting to come, intense and vivid.  Two nights ago I was escaping from dangerous pursuers through a Being-John-Malkovitch-type tunnel, while one of my coworkers (Eric, the grump) stayed behind to draw fire so the rest of us could get away.  I don’t know who “the rest” were, because when I came out the little door at the end, I was alone and had to latch it behind me whether anyone else was coming or not.  (Also shades of “Coraline,” which I saw last week.  Great movie, by the way.)

Last night I was with the band staying at Jason’s.  Jason and his girlfriend own the canal boat where we’ve stayed a couple of times in England.  We were hanging out talking, and I was leaning on my elbows on a table or counter or something, and I was naked from the waist up.  I realized this and tried to be covering myself with my arms, casually, strategizing how I could move away and put on some clothes without being noticed.  Then Jason leaned over to me and said, “I was noticing your beautiful breasts!”  Gack!  Caught!  Feigning perfect surprise, I said, “Oh!  My God, I didn’t realize!” and moved away directly.  I think I managed to get a bra on before being distracted by something… I dropped some small object and it landed in a big spiderweb.  I didn’t want to pick it out, so Jason came over and was getting it for me, when I noticed there was a sort of ghostly animal, I mean transparent, caught in the web.  I thought it was a mouse.  “It’s a ghost mouse,” I said to him.  I carefully pulled it out, like catching a moth, and it turned out to be a turtle, solid and real.  There were two caught in the web.  I took the first one outside because there was water nearby.  It nuzzled me as I cradled it in my hands.  I was surprised that a turtle would show affection.  I walked onto the edge of a grassy/marshy area and let it go into the water.  It swam away, happy little turtle.  I was going back for the other one when I woke up.

(sighing through lips like a horse going “pbbbbbbbbb”)

I hate those naked-breasts-in-public dreams.

I’ve been writing in my private journal mostly, feeling I needed to go underground.  I’m doing okay.  Made peace with a few things.  Sometimes I’m big enough to embrace anything; sometimes I’m small and mad and tart like a rose hip.  I no longer feel like the guard dog at my sister’s door.  Maybe more like a guide dog, when she can’t bear to open her eyes.

Chris’s son is here setting up for the shoot upstairs.  I’m more prepared.  I french braided the sides of my hair, I’m wearing pants that don’t make me look like a sack, and have put on a modicum of makeup.  The weather is sunnier than Son hoped — the diffuse, overcast light was marvellous — but we’ll work with it.  He’s so dedicated to this project.  His ideas are deeply thought out and clear and his photos are great.  Even with as little brain space as I have been able to devote to the whole thing, I’m appreciating how it’s turning out and looking forward to the final object.

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On a Jet Plane

August 12, 2010 at 10:33 am (Air, Earth, Trading Time for Money)

Rose travels, with the group of 25 or so, to Accra.  They closed the clinic up yesterday; tired, satisfied with those they saved, sad for the ones they had to turn away.  She texted that two more of the volunteers had gotten dysentery and she’d gone on C1pro just in case.

The flights are tomorrow, so they have a day to rest and shop at the big market where she supports as many local artisans as she can, given the room in hersuitcase.  Beautiful mudcloths, cheap and sturdy, paintings and carvings and toys.  She asked if I wanted a hair stick, the kind that is put through to hold a bun together.  My hair’s not quite long enough for that, but I said yes for future.

I just turned on my phone and she’d texted an hour ago that they were on the bus to Accra.  How did she get wifi on the bus, I wonder.  Anyway, she’s jubilant.

Thursday is my Friday, and thank God.  K. had to leave early yesterday and since we carpooled, he officially gave me 45 minutes off so we could both go.  The final hour of work was crazy — an emergency shipment to a customer, and we kept not having everything we needed to put in the box.  Ten patch cables — there were four in stock.  K. helped me scrounge six more from people’s offices.  One CD with instruction manuals — we don’t keep many in stock because they keep changing.  Did we have any?  No.  I had to make one, but the files had been moved so I had to call Eric, who was on an install somewhere, and ask him where to find them.  Oh, and the color printer is dead, so the labels had to be black and white.  All of this took a little while, and meanwhile K. is trying to figure out why the server isn’t running the inventory software any more since the upgrade we did in the morning.  We left almost on time — maybe fifteen minutes late — and rushed out the door before anything else happened.

Then, once in the car, K. got a phone call that cancelled the thing he was leaving early for anyway.  We looked at each other, shrugged, and continued on home to pick tomatoes.

Aaaaaand, the tomatoes.  It’s safe to say we’ll have gobs soon.  We picked quite a few, tossing them to one another over the overgrown rows.  It took quite a while, and after that I finally mixed up the Mexican Bean Beetle Death and sprayed the squash.  This stuff is supposed to be not terrible for the environment, but I’ll tell you, it smelled like condensed paint thinner.  No wonder they don’t like it.  I tried to avoid spraying bees and spiders but may have gotten a couple by accident.  But so much of the squash is decimated now, we had to do something or lose it all.

Apart from that, the unstaked-tomato chaos and the rampant grasses and weeds out there, things look pretty good.

I tried hanging the new curtains I made for the built in shelves in the living room.  I hadn’t counted on there not being room outside the cafe rod brackets for the actual ends of the cafe rods.  There is no place else to put the brackets unless I invent something with pieces of white-painted wood.  I could either do that or invent a different kind of bracket, one that sticks out farther.  Well, that would work on one side but not the other.  Some cleverness must ensue.  I sent a picture of the first effort to B.H., and looking at it I got a great idea for a sort of false hem at the top that would make a higher ruffle in front, thus hiding the gold clip rings AND taking up the 3″ of length that presently drags on the floor.  So it’s all fixable.  I hope to finish it this weekend, in between more photo shoots and other organizational business with the band.

Nights are cool now.  Sometimes windows must be shut, screens removed.  But the jasmines have been blooming beautifully — the scent arrests one, passing a doorway, like the memory of a secret lover — and I got the latest catalogue from my favorite nursery where I get them.  They specialize in tropical container plants.  I may have to get out there this weekend and adopt a few more fragrant interlopers.  They seem to have a lot of good low-light plants now, which I could put in the back windows.

And, time again to go to work.  K. is coming with the truck so we can remove a bit of trash from my upper driveway and put it in the dumpster there.  Maybe work will be more placid today.

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River City

August 6, 2010 at 3:23 pm (Fire, Home, Water)

…where there is trouble, with a capital T, and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool.

Conversations with Rose from Africa, where she is weeping, grieving over her “joyless life.”  It is a whole, subterranean ants’ nest of trouble.    In the last three days I have been shifted over into this parallel existence where everything is about to break down.  I miss the old universe, but will go forward in this one and try my best to help on all sides.

She’s been having an affair with BH.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaghh.

What a morass.  I gave her all the tough love I could, feeling for her every moment but asking all the hard and incredulous questions.  I hope to God they choose to go into counselling.  Breaking up this family and this family compound is inconceivable…  I know anything can happen, and things can heal and be happy again after major trauma, but this really shouldn’t happen again.  Please.

She is deconstructed in a way I have never heard before.  In a way it is good; she’s getting down deeper, to the bottom layers of something that should have been examined long ago.  “I thought this time I could be a bigger person,” she said, “that I could love better in spite of differences.”   I understand why she’s feeling this way, but… “You knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up.”  K. is not a scorpion, of course, but she married him knowing he was not silly, that he was obsessed with the stock market and politics and everything wrong with government; that he didn’t feel compassion towards creatures (Asperger’s) and had a really hard time expressing emotions.  And all the wonderful things that he IS.  I tried to gently talk to him about the rooster incident this week, hoping to encourage him towards an apology when she got back, and he was very defensive and angry, still blaming Pearl for it all and showing no remorse whatsoever that a family bird got severely wounded.  I did all I could without breaking any confidences.  Now there is this tense waiting, another week before Rose returns.  BH is falling on his sword hourly.  My budding friendship with him got hit by a truck.  We are all limping.

And this morning, with a crying hangover (that’s from actual crying, not crying from a regular hangover), I am spinning plates in the air.  Texting with BH, trying to make things not be ugly, hilarious pun-filled texting with Dar (who knows about the unrest but not about BH; I couldn’t bear to “tell” on Rose that much) to banish some of the trauma and grief; taking a call from the band and listening to a new mix so I can make decisions about percussion on one of my songs.  Everything goes along in tandem.  Life is leaking at the seams.

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Living Room

August 1, 2010 at 12:39 am (Air, Home)

It is a hummingbird, and now I have a feeder.  I wait for the next sighting.

Bumping up against loneliness tonight, though it’s been a pretty good day of clearing the living room bit by bit, and getting shelves cut for the big bookcase.  New friend BH and I texted much of the afternoon, laughing, but now I’m feeling withdrawn and like nobody understands me or really wants to know what I’m about.  Resentful, sorry.  But still, delicious to be home alone in the dusk, hearing crickets.  Soon the katydids will start to sing.  I will go back to the living room in a moment and continue working on each box, each object.  It’s a slow process, this clearing.

I discovered that the ceiling has fallen in in the bedroom closet upstairs.  I was going to store some things away from mice there, but there is a new mess.  Later it occurred to me that I can poke the rest of the plaster off the ceiling in there, let it crash down, clean it all up and then use the closet.  Nothing wrong with the lath, and there will be nothing more to come down.  Problem solved.

Yet another project, but it will provide an eventual solution to the stuff I’m removing from the LR that has no other place to go yet.

I really need an armoire.

BH was feeling really sick last night (as we were texting) and I ended up sending distance Reiki to him.  Today he was feeling much better.  I hadn’t sent Reiki in a long time, and I felt the surge after invoking the symbols.  The power isn’t diminished.  Part of my motivation for clearing half the LR is to set up the table and start doing more on myself.  I need to get it back into use.

Then last night was charged with dreams.  I’m not sure if one was a lucid dream or an OOBE, but I was flying at night, flying charged, supremely awake and aware.  I don’t remember many details but I haven’t been that lucid in many, many months.

In another I was telling Rose that BH was like the character of “Q” in Star Trek.  I was ardently explaining that Q was a highly evolved being that would show up unexpectedly in Picard’s life, and force him to reevaluate the way his world worked.  And yesterday I mentioned to BH that Rose appreciated him more than he knew, and he kept wanting to know what I meant by that.  I told him that she appreciated laughing fit to bust, in the midst of so many commitments and being so busy.  In truth, the way she put it to me before she left for Africa, was that she missed that kind of unbounded silliness in her relationship with Karl.  I wasn’t about to spell this out to BH.  He doesn’t need to know any details of the trouble in River City.

But the dream – it seems that, indeed, BH is the one who comes along and shines a light on her significant relationship and illuminates what she does not get from it.  It doesn’t mean it’s not a satisfactory relationship.  It’s just something that makes her aware.  He makes her reevaluate the way her world is put together.

And then today I found the notebook in which I had written down Turtle (shaman in training)’s predictions about House – nearly a year before I bought it.  I should invite him here to look at it.  Lezley and I thought he was a well-meaning but misguided guide, but maybe he was hooked into something after all.  It might be interesting to hear his impressions of the place while walking around here.

Well, I had more to say than I thought.  There is more underneath, unrest and sadness and a wishing to be held.  But there is no one, so I will go work on the living room for now.

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