Pre-Florida

January 31, 2011 at 10:16 am (Dreams, Home, Time)

Back again, and now three days away from leaving for Florida for 12 days.  Rose has suggested bringing Smidge over to their house for these long trips.  I agree, wishing she’d brought it up early enough that I could have acclimated her to their house (and other cats) before I had to actually abandon her for nearly two weeks.  But they are weary of dealing with the wood stove in my absence, and no stove means a cold house, and that’s only acceptable if Smidge isn’t here.  It is causing me a great deal of stress.  Upside is that I will save a lot of wood, maybe still have a couple of pieces left when I return.  There is no hope of cutting any more here, with the several feet of snow everywhere and the mountains of it thrown up by the plow.  I will end up ordering wood.  We ran low on wood and pellets at the same time; I have to pick some up today.  Tractor Supply has them for cheaper than CJ’s, who isn’t returning my calls anyway.  They don’t deliver, though, so I have to get them, and then transfer fifty bags of pellets to the pallet on the back porch.  I’ll borrow Rose’s chainsaw to trim some pieces I have that are a mere inch too long to fit into the stove.  The cord on mine isn’t pulling right now for some reason.

In prep for that I moved the last 14 bags from the old batch into the mudroom last night.  Three on the bottom had been chewed into by mice.  Not surprising.  I duct-taped them closed and brought them inside for immediate use.  Not much loss.  I wish there were a more secure way of storing them, though.  Anyway, between the shoveling and the hossing of fuel, I’m getting some upper body strength that I’ve missed.

My hands are flaring absolutely horribly, and I’ve found little patches of eczema on my arms and legs as well.  They wake me up in the night, itching.  This sometimes subzero winter is cruel to my skin, my lungs, my sinuses. I’m still highly congested and allergic, following the virus I had a month ago.  The snow is like an enemy that won’t leave the yard.  I’ve gotten snowed in here twice; if Karl hadn’t had machinery I wouldn’t have gotten out til Spring.  Even after the plow came last week, I could barely get out into the street, there was still so much at the mouth of the driveway.  He says I need my own tractor.  I’d kind of LIKE to have my own tractor, actually.  That’s kind of an exciting proposition.  We’ll have to keep our eyes open for a used one we can afford.  There is also the matter of wood storage.  I need a woodshed that is closer to the stove than the opposite side of the house.  I am imagining bumping out the pass-through room, where I’m currently sleeping.  It’s right off the living room.  Take out the window, put in a door (French door, windowed, so there will still be some light) and create another room beyond that opens to the back.  Put a window in it so the pass-through won’t be dark as night.  Stockpile wood in there and it’s just feet from the stove.  This will work best when the upstairs room is done and I can move up there to sleep.

And, dreaming as if money were no object here, if there’s a room THERE, we might as well build up and extend the little bathroom upstairs off the master bedroom.  Create a dressing room/bathroom, a little boudoir.  I love it when a bathroom is big enough to put a comfy chair in it.

Of course all this will wait until K’s shop is built, and I don’t even know if we can afford it any time soon, and do I really want to take on chickens with these projects looming as well?  (Probably.)  Last night as I first wrote about this I was so discouraged and weary, I could only think of the downsides.  Touring is taking its toll this winter, as I knew it would.  Things will look more hopeful as the days get longer and there is SOME hope of this snow going away.

I got home late yesterday afternoon.  Smidge didn’t leave me alone for five minutes all night.  She jumped on my shoulders a dozen times, put her paws up against my legs, sat on my lap, sat on this little table looking at me for 45 minutes, watching me eat dinner, her eyes blinking sleepily.  I love her desperately.

I deal with the resentment of touring, go back and forth, maintain gratitude for the money coming in.  I feed the stove and stay warm.

I’m going through a lonely phase.  So bored with no flirtation, no interest, no romance, no sex.  It’s been 3-1/2 years since I even kissed anyone, let alone had sex.  I think, who would want me now anyway?  Oy.  Sure, honey, I’ll sleep with you.  Let me just get my mouth guard, my breathe-right strip, my earplugs, and my A&D ointment.  BRB.  Last month my body had the nerve to menstruate.  Just menopause already.

I’m taking some Prednisone to Florida with me, and will decide whether to knock back all the inflammation for a few days.  I haven’t had to do that in a long time, so I won’t feel hesitant if this continues to be agonizing.

Meanwhile it’s going to be a busy day and I have my list ready.  Might as well get to it.

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Little Brown Deer

October 20, 2010 at 7:07 am (Home, On the Road, Time)

I go out in the early dawn to the top of the driveway, to shovel a bit of what’s left of demolition detritus (insulation plaster) into five-gallon buckets for disposal.  On the way out I startle a deer in the back of the garden, who crunches off into the woods.  After a few shovelfuls I hear more rustling ahead, and look up to spot another one twenty yards from me, watchful, wary.  I sing and talk to her a bit, then continue with my business, looking up every few seconds.  No longer concerned with me, she also gets on with her grazing.  There isn’t much out there now.  Things must be getting twiggy.  I have unspoken thoughts about sneaking next door over the winter and bringing back buckets of fuel corn from the silo, broadcasting it in the meadow for the deer.  Just once in a while, maybe.  I could offer to pay Karl some money for occasional use of his corn.

The deer moseys off.  I like that it doesn’t run.

Two nights ago we had a righteous brush fire in the fire pit.  Cleared out everything since the Spring, when Rose pulled the giant grapevine out of the dead hickory with the tractor and chain.  It was bigger around than my arm, and a mile long.  This was the first fire in the ring of cinderblocks, and we cleared the whole big pile, including brush I cut last weekend from behind the house.  Three people working on a brush pile is a good number.  After, we had manicotti Rose had made earlier and warmed in my oven.  She really wanted to talk to me about her session with the therapist last week, but Karl was there and he ate with us so no chance for girl talk yet.

I’ve had two episodes of congestion-related dizziness recently.  It happens every so often and it’s inconvenient but not scary; a little Sudafed usually clears it up in an hour or so.  Last night after dinner one of these things came on and it was the worst I’ve ever experienced.  The vertigo was so bad I was weaving back and forth trying to walk across the room, thought I was possibly going to be sick. To add to the spinningness, Carol and I had a phone appointment to talk about what else she has on the books til June.  I had requested no more gigs unless we discuss them first, as the schedule is quite full and my job and life are plenty inconvenienced already.  (I didn’t put it that way to her; tried to stay positive.) She proceeded to give me five or six more gigs that weren’t on the website yet but which she has booked, and then several other possibilities that aren’t confirmed.  I managed to put a cap on it, but not as soon as I’d have liked.  It’s unfortunate that the only time we have to do business like that is often just before I go to bed.  It leaves me roiling and unable to settle down.

Anyway, as it turned out I couldn’t settle down anyway, because the moment I became horizontal, my head spun so bad my eyes were going back and forth.  Eventually I managed to get a little sleep, waking at 12:30, 1:30, and then at 3:00, after which I did not sleep again.

When people will say to me, “I can’t believe you’re breaking up!  Why are you stopping touring?”, I will want to say, “A million reasons… and only one.”

I must get ready for work.  There is so much more to say; moments I want to remember, like the deer, and the fat woodchuck trundling away over the yard, and how the morning glories are still blooming profusely.  I keep telling myself, there will be time, after the touring is over.  There will even be time in December, when we only have two holiday gigs and I managed to refuse booking anything else that month.  And if I subtract December, it’s really only six and a half months.

How is it that a mitzvah feels so much like a penance?  It’s a hard decision, whether to do what feels best for me or give over my comfort for the best interest of the band and risk resenting them.  I remind myself that everything is my own perception, and that it’s possible to get myself into a place where it’s not only tolerable, but still valuable as well.  The Shadow Self isn’t much fun to explore.  But I suspect that is the opportunity I’ve been given here.

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Tinker, Tailor

September 22, 2010 at 6:47 am (Air, Time)

There is so much to learn and so little time to get around and into it.  Like fixing up this template so it does what I want it to.  I am considering taking more time to just sit, or to tinker with things like this.  I consider it briefly, a few minutes before having to leave for work, or just before going to bed.

Rose and I had “Walkies and Talkies” last night.  She got out of work blessedly on time for a change, called me all excited about 6:30 and asked if I wanted to go for our half-hour brisk walk up the little hilly streets on the other side of the village.  I was just dishing up takeout Indian food and said I would love to, and just come over when she was ready.

Some time later she drove through the woods in the new (used) Quad they got last week.  This is a little chunky vehicle that originally was made for racing, but over time folks realized it was a very useful farm vehicle, so they made sturdier ones that went more slowly and could plow a light snow or tote stuff home from the field.  Last weekend she and Karl worked on the stone wall that separates our properties in the woods.  The opening we used to walk back and forth was just a tumbled-down place, and a little precarious.  They widened and cleaned up the opening, squared off one side with a big, lovely capstone they dug up with the Dynahoe, and Karl brought about three yards of soil in the giant bucket to smooth out the ground which slopes down from the “gate” towards my house.  Rose then took her Chick Chainsaw and cleared some little saplings to reinstate a perpendicular walking path from there to the side yard and the garden.  It’s the beginning of loveliness and order in that neglected part of the woods.  I want to put art back there, statues and birdhouses and things to surprise explorers.  There is a huge flattish rock there too, on which the boys of the previous owners used to play, back in the 60s.  I found an old metal toy truck there.  There is a certain amount of poison ivy back in that area that I’ll have to do something about.  R0undUp doesn’t work so well in the woods, as it needs sunlight to penetrate.  Otherwise it’s the perfect solution, because it disappears from the environment in a day or two, but it really does a job on poison ivy.

Anyway, here came Rose on the Quad, and I hadn’t seen it yet so she showed me how to work it.  It gasses kind of jerkily, so I went bombing around the meadow, rounding the big tree whooping as she took a video of me on her phone.  I bombed around the garden (having to slow down and duck around the compost pile because of hanging grapevines and whatnot, which grabbed at my clothes and hair) and then didn’t turn fast enough and ended up at a dead end behind the burn pile.  Reverse is a whole different operation so she had to come over and explain all the buttons and levers to get me to back out.  It wasn’t so different a ride from our old snowmobiling days in upper Michigan.  Lots of fun and noise, and it’ll be quite useful during moderate snowfalls.  That will save us probably hundreds of bucks on hiring the plow guy.

The we walked in the falling dark, and she told me about making vacation plans and how they’ve pretty much decided to go to Costa Rica (after much deliberation and a tense moment or two) and she’s at once psyched about going and worried that buying tickets long in advance would end up being a painful mistake should anything erupt between now and then.

I talk to her about choice; I’m reading this book called the A rt 0f C hoosing, and wrapping myself around the knowledge that we have what the author calls an Individualist Ideology.  We’ve been brought up expecting to make our own choices about almost everything.  But it’s not the only way to live, or the only way to live happily.  Likewise we expect that our partners will give us as much of everything as possible — not just skills and stability and friendship and a good chance of survival, but love and passion and delight and all the emotional extras we can imagine.  Yet for many, many people, it’s more than enough to have everything from List A.  List B is just bonus material.  One could do worse than a stable, arranged marriage.

Having choices brings a tremendous responsibility.  We feel we have to make ourselves “happy” on top of making ourselves well situated.  Often we fail.  But what if our expectations were different?  What if there were a different definition of happy?  Or, more accurately, a different definition of unhappy?

Too much to tease out now.  I just know I want to sit more and tinker with these ideas… but I have to get to work.  🙂

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Turkey Walk

September 13, 2010 at 6:59 am (Home, Time)

I heard the unmistakable yulping of turkeys and looked out the window just now.  Sure enough, they were in pageant across my front yard.  All the little weenies have grown up into life-sized turkeys now.  Well, not all; some fell prey to creatures through the summer.  But there they are, Mr. And Mrs. and the Turklets, stabbing at grass and bugs, measuring their paces back to the forsythia and into the woods.  Now a bluejay complains about something in the distance, and another.  Makes me wonder if Linus is about.

Ha ha!  I just glanced out to see if there was a cat, and saw a turkey walking down the path from my front stoop to the driveway.  Three more are lined up at the edge of the drive, as though waiting for a ride.  I think they’re playing at being me.

And being me has gotten more complicated again.  I don’t know why I feel so cheerful this morning in the face of change.  Maybe it’s the bright yellow ragweed that’s blooming profusely among the wild rose at the top of the wall.  Maybe it’s just that I’m letting the universe do its flow and I’ve gotten myself open enough to accept what it delivers.  Things are very hard right now.  Still, I have an excited feeling like Christmas is coming.

It’s not so good next door.  There continue to be more incidents.  My only sister lives on the verge of tears.  Whatever I think about events, that’s not acceptable.  It may be time for her to live outside the box for a while.  Once again, I switch my worldview to include the possibility of family breakup.

I pray, “May the outcome be the best possible one for all concerned,” pray this with all fervency, while being grateful that I don’t have to figure out what that is.

********

We had a festival gig this past weekend.  Sound was hard and I couldn’t discern the bass, though it was certainly loud enough.  Apart from that it was a pleasant enough gig.  The weather was just gorgeous, I saw some really excellent mushrooms in the woods, and found a rock that looks exactly like a baked potato.  And I made a few hundred bucks, which I am celebrating, since last week I had less than $50 in the bank.

In a bizarre turn of events, Carol and I have been asked to sing at a memorial service this weekend, without Chris.  Someone who heard us at the church service earlier this month (when Chris hurt his back and couldn’t make the gig) wanted us to sing, and even when she sent him mp3 files of the two songs in question which include Chris, he still just wanted our two voices.  We had a laugh over it.  I told Chris we should charge more if he doesn’t come.  He gets paid more not to sing than to sing.   Anyway, it’s another chunk of found money, thank goodness.

Meanwhile my raise kicks in this month, so I’ll get a bit more at the day job, too.

Dar and I had a wonderful conversation last night.  I was telling him about the news from next door, and he was taking it with difficulty.  The thought of them splitting up is bad enough, but when I said they would probably just have to sell the house at a loss and start over, he became very passionate and said he absolutely would not allow this dream to die, this amazing situation that came about so magically.  Rose and I living next door to each other after all these years of dreaming about it.  “Every time I hear you talk about the house, how happy you are,” he said, “I know beyond a doubt that I did the right thing.  To  make that much difference in one person’s life, that’s all you ever need to do.”  He can’t stand the thought of somebody else living next door.  It would be weird.

I think the turkeys have caught the bus, and I must go to work, too.

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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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Time

July 23, 2010 at 3:02 am (Home, Time)

The thing that continues to surprise me about getting older is that it doesn’t reverse.  For a while it reverses; you can get back into shape, you can heal your heart back to youthful optimism, you can pick up where you left off when you got distracted.  But at some point you cannot do any of those things again; you can still change, but you can’t change back.  You’ve got this body now, this mind, this set of experiences.  You can only go on with the tools you have, or have left.

And there are still surprises.  I don’t know, for example, what to do about the fact that for most of the last three years I’ve exulted that I didn’t have a lover coming around pestering me, that all that time I used to spend having obligatory sex was now my own — and just this week, after the conversation I had with Normandy about my cherished autonomy, all of a sudden I could just fuck anything that walked.  Anything.  Look at something long enough in the right way and it starts to look attractive.  Note to self:  It is VERY bad policy, during these times of heat, to watch Adr1en Br0dy movies.  You might as well just call in the gravedigger and exhume all those lost chances again.  Aaaagh, Frankenlover!  Run away!!

Seriously, it’s been extremely challenging to keep my mind on my work.

Perhaps there will come a year when it does not matter to me what younger people think of me.  My problem is that I have always looked at middle-aged and elderly people with some hubris, like it could never happen to me.  They’re slower, they’re less beautiful.   They must matter less.  Now, instead of mending my ways and taking it all back, I seem to be turning the same judgment on myself.  Did all those people older than me feel the same helplessness about aging?  Can I find them all again and apologize?  No.  Most of them are DEAD already.  It doesn’t help that Middle-Aged Mind is getting worse.  That thing where you get an idea, walk into the next room to execute the idea, and completely forget why you’re in there.  It happens almost daily now.  And that itself is not so bad; it’s just a marker to something much more somber.  We’re going to die.  Okay, so what?  If fortune allows, not today.  But it’s a hell of a lot closer than it was when I looked at 50 year old women and thought their fun must be all over.

I can’t help wondering a little if my fun is all over.  I am not talking about laughs; I will always have laughs.  I am talking about sex.  And why do I care about sex?  Because this is the week I am in heat.  In the long run I think laughs are more important.  But I laugh almost every day; I laugh hard and long.  I am not laugh deprived.  Last time having sex?  August of 2007.   And I still don’t want a lover coming around pestering me.  Add to that the fact that you can’t just go out and have sex with someone when you don’t know where he’s been.  Top that with, I’m no longer on the pill and I’d rather abstain than suffer the discomfort of condoms.  So… you got your three-year abstinence, your middle age, and your next thirty years (if you’re lucky) going through menopause and then not being attractive enough to go pick up the cute young bank teller who has learned your name and tries to hide his wrist tattoo under his long sleeves when he’s on the job.  The tattoo he apologized for today and which, later, you wish you had dived over the teller’s counter and LICKED.

Got the idea?

********

In other news, work has been busy and sometimes difficult, and this week Thursday is my blessed Friday.  Rose and Karl are having a little rough patch on account of K. nearly killing the rooster by banging the screen door open so ferociously that the rooster got injured against some unknown thing and today had to have stitches and an I.V.  All this because Karl hates the chickens pooing on the porch and was annoyed.  Yes, there should have been a fence by now, and that’s Pearl’s fault; but K. is refusing to a) take responsibility for his action and its consequences, and b) show any remorse for having injured an innocent bird.  Understand that he has Asperger’s Syndrome and compassion is something with which he’s not well acquainted.  Add to that an unpleasable mother who was never satisfied with an overachieving child, and you get someone who will immediately get defensive if he feels anyone is challenging his performance — and who denies any proximity to feelings like remorse and guilt.  My brother in law is exceptional and likeable in so many ways, but this is a terrible sticking point between him and my sister.  He’s not mean.  He just doesn’t have language to interpret emotions.  He’s disconnected in ways that normally-wired people can’t fathom.  He doesn’t always realize where the boundaries are.  Rose had to stop by here on the way home from work just to have a glass of wine and vent about it before seeing him.  It will be all right.  But right now it’s sticky and the rooster is at the vet and Karl is still blaming Pearl for the whole thing, and Pearl is teary for being away from her rooster.  There is so much dynamic going on over there, I am grateful I am here alone in the peace of my home.  There is nothing going on here at all except the lack of SEX, which I may have mentioned, but at least there are no hurt feelings, dodging of responsibility, or tense hours between people who normally sleep entwined in each other’s arms.

********

So after all that, and a conversation with Chris and Carol about the album cover (which we are no closer to figuring out), I had dinner and went upstairs to continue putting coats of paint on chairs.  They’re coming out so beautifully.  I didn’t use any palette like this at the old apartment.  These are Spring pastels, green and yellow (“Sweet Corn”) and blue.  I put on a CD I haven’t heard in a long time and leave my phone downstairs.  I am not on call.  I paint until there is a natural stopping point, and then I come down and wrap up the evening.  Things are calm here.  We saw the bunny as Rose was leaving; she got a couple of pictures before bunny hopped away.  This morning a deer ambled through the meadow beside the garden and did not try to go in.  Last week, a pair of turkeys with eighteen babies.  Linus came for a brief visit, and the thrush has been singing every day.  I guess overall things are pretty magnificent.

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