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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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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Gate

July 18, 2010 at 2:02 am (Air, Home, Water)

What a lovely Saturday.  I let myself wake up naturally, which ended up being just before 7:00 anyway.  The morning was leisurely, with email and coffee just the way I like it and thinking about things.  I figured the family would come over at some point to tinker with the garden so I wasn’t completely relaxed.  We just sort of enter each other’s houses with a knock and a “Hello!”  Karl was planning to install the solar panel on the electric fence so I could have my long extension cord back (yay; which he did, this afternoon).  I managed to get something on besides skimpy pajamas, just in case.  Meanwhile I took it slow and thought about what I could possibly get done on such a hot, bright day.

The garden gate needed priming, so I located the primer we’d used on the house last Fall and gathered some supplies.  Rose called just then to see if I wanted to go to Kohl’s or anywhere else, as she needed clothes for her Africa trip coming up in two weeks.  Even down to the underwear.  She lost so much weight the last year, all her undies are too big.  So I said I’d go after doing the gate, and to come on over when she was ready.

The oil-based primer had separated so it took a good ten minutes of stirring to get it together again.  Such a pretty, creamy white.  I hammered four nail holes in the outer rim where the paint sloshes up, so it would drip back into the can.  Karl is a staunch believer in oil-based paints, but I find the whole process cumbersome and smelly.  The cleanup is ridiculous.  My parlor reeked for ages after priming the ceiling.  But this is what I had and it had to be weather-worthy, so I got my little foam brush and headed out to the gate.

Note to self:  Next time you make a garden gate, paint it BEFORE stapling on the hardware cloth and installing gate to posts.  Otherwise it’s just a stencil fest as you try to get the wood painted on the other side of all that wiring.  And it’ll save you from painting a certain amount of grass.

The day was blazing, my face was stinging from sunblock and heat, and it was a pesky job, but I primed as much of it as I could get to.  My final plan will be to cover the raised bed with a sheet or a tarp and spray paint the gate. No more of this silly brushing.

That done, I came in and did the hand wash, hung it on the line in back.  It dries in a flash on a day like this.  Presently Rose showed up, full of apologies about taking so long.  No worries.  We gabbed a bit and she helped me hoss a few things around the house — brought the little a/c in from the car, which they loaned me for my wee bedroom.  We installed it, very Three Stooges — the window comes right out because the molding has been removed on one side or else the window won’t raise, so somebody has to be holding the window in place at all times.  Plus there’s a sort of button on the side that has to be pushed in order to move the window up or down.  Then someone has to be holding the a/c in place.  Then someone has to slip a piece of wood under it on the outside.  Then someone has to go find the screwdriver and some foam and duct tape (while the window and the a/c are still being held in place).  Then someone has to remove the spring rod with the curtain on it because the molding has to go back in.  In all this time, nobody’s knees can bend forward and push against the plaster wall because it’s buckled and about to fall into pieces.

We managed to get it tidily in, and I ran the long extension to the basement and turned ‘er on.  (No grounded outlets anywhere in sight upstairs.)  Coolness!!  Wow!  Now this room is SMALL — there is about three feet of space between the foot of the twin bed and the opposite wall.  It doesn’t take long to cool off.  Anyway I turned it off til later.

Then we hossed the borrowed dehumidifier to the basement.  I ran it in the living room yesterday, and emptied the bucket three times.  But it creates a lot of heat so it belongs downstairs.  Finally, we took a big metal shelf unit downstairs to replace the rusty, broken, disgusting one that used to be in the mudroom and which I tried to throw out for MONTHS but Karl kept asking me, don’t you want to use this? and I’d say, No, it’s disgusting, let’s take it to the dump, and finally he brought it IN and said, This would work at the bottom of your basement stairs, for paint cans and such.  I gave it a nudge.  It was too wiggly to put anything on.  He said, we can shore this up with some furring strips and screws; I’ll do it.  It won’t take long.  We can even bolt it to the cement wall.  That was three months ago.  So Rose and I took that old, rusty, oily thing BACK outside and tossed it on the dump pile.  Again.  If he mentions it again I’m taking it next door and leaving it in his truck.

All those things being accomplished, we went on various long errands.  She managed to find a skirt and wide-brimmed hat for Africa, and I found some slip-on sandal type shoes that are suitable for the dresses I’ve started wearing.  Overall, pretty successful, and I didn’t spend too much of my precious cash (still no debit card).

The rest of the day has been about air management.  It turns out the little a/c will cool the bedroom and the parlor both.  I curtained everything else off for a while and it got quite comfortable in here for a change.  Then we had some thundershowers, heavy luminescent rain and orange-pewter skies.  Just beautiful.  At some point earlier I had heard some kind of horrible, screaming-punk-metal band sound checking down the street at some outdoor event, and went walking that way to see what the hell was disturbing the peace of this village.  Someone the other side of the library was having a party, apparently, and preparing to have live music.  Great, I thought.  I thought I left this behind at my old apartment.  But in here, with the fans and such on, I didn’t hear it at all really, and later it rained anyway.  Sorry to be glad it rained on their party, but I’m proprietary about my quietude.

Aprés rain, it was nice and cool.  So the air got all remanaged again.  Open windows, put in half-screens, open curtains on doorways.  Turn on window fan.  Voila: Night Air.

That’s my story for the moment.  I’ve eaten about a bucket of blueberries and cherries tonight.  Must employ floss and toothbrush and get myself to bed.  Dar comes down tomorrow!

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After Rain

June 20, 2010 at 10:23 pm (Home, Water)

I wish I had sensitive enough equipment to record the wood thrush that has been singing nonstop for the last hour.  It’s closer than I often hear it.  I realized I’d been missing some of its notes.  There’s a final trill after the “chk-chk-deedleDEE–” I hadn’t even heard the chk-chk before today.  But the air smelled so nice and it was so cool and refreshed after the hard thundershower, I opened the big front door and put a chair on the lip and sat there for fifteen minutes or so, just listening.  Watching the catbird and the sparrow scare up bugs from the lawn.  The sparrow landed at the bottom of the step just a few feet from me, plucked up a tiny bug from a blade of grass, and went off to its next meal.  I don’t often let myself sit still outside.  I’m glad I took the opportunity.

The forecast hadn’t really highlighted rain, so I went ahead and sprayed a lot of poison ivy JUST before the grey clouds rolled in.  Rats.  I heard the thunder as I was coming back up the driveway.  The sky was largely blue, with some puffy white stuff.  “Oh,” I thought innocently, “that distant truck sounds a lot like thunder.”  In ten minutes the clouds were visible, and in twenty I was in the bathtub washing my hair and the rain began.  As I finished up it occurred to me that Karl had probably left the truck windows open.  It took me a few minutes to get out there with the umbrella, and sure enough, they were gaping.  The seats were soaked several inches in at the edges.  Oh, well.  Karl was a bit preoccupied yesterday, trying to get nine things done before going to our gig last night.  He left the garden gate open and my bulkhead door wide.  Good thing it didn’t rain last night.  And the truck windows are usually open.  It happens to be at my house right now, so he’s not around to notice if it rains.   It’s not the first time it’s happened with one of his vehicles over here.  My windows stay closed so I’m not in the habit of thinking about it, but I’m starting to remember before too much soaking has occurred.

The gardens are looking nice, the drip irrigation is almost all in and working, the driveway has been regraded after heavy rains.  And –oh, it happens to be Karl who has been doing most of that work.

I’m in my last couple of weeks of pushing with rehearsals, recording and gigs.  It’ll be a little hairy, no days off for ten days, and I have to manage my sleep so I’m not wasted by Friday when we next record.  The happy part is that I’ll have a five-day respite over the July 4th weekend.  I hope I regain some of my outdoor-work enthusiasm.  The humidity and heat lately have daunted me.  I sure don’t have the energy I’d like to have.

Rose, Karl and I hit the farmers’ market this morning as planned.  What a feast!  I spent gobs of money, knowing everything was expensive but wanting to support the local small farmers, the bakers, the beekeepers.  I had gotten some local tomatoes and cherries and zucchini from the little country market yesterday.  Today I augmented my harvest with baby yellow squash, kale, beet greens, red lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, freshly picked garlic with the stem still on, spring onions, strawberries, some incredible seven grain bread, and some quite pricey and exquisite chevre with herbs de Provence mixed in.  My lunch, as might be imagined, was the stuff of legend.

Before long it will be us at the market, with our Amish Paste tomatoes and whatever else graces us with surplus.  Wow.

So last week I had an epiphany about chickens.  Rose once in a while asks me if I’m going to get any, and I’ve always said no, mainly based on being away touring and also THEY have chickens right next door; what do I also need chickens for?  Fresh eggs are merely steps away.  But:  Touring is ending next June. I’ll be home.   And the eggs, while plentiful, are rarely available because the demand keeps surpassing the supply!!  They are so popular, they go out the door the day they’re laid, with a paying customer’s name already on them.  I go in on a Friday and sneak an egg or two straight out of the coop if no one is home, leave a couple bucks now and then in the jar, and am content meting them out like this.  But try to get a dozen, or six — almost impossible.  Believe me when I tell you they are extraordinary eggs.  So… if I had just four or five chickens… enough eggs for me at any time, and then some.  And chickens are… well, they’re soothing, there’s no doubt about it.

Building a coop could be the Fall project.  I’m liking the idea very much; very much, indeed.

However, getting a rooster is still up for debate.  I don’t want one in my yard.  It would drive me nuts.  But a good rooster guards and guides the flock, makes sure they’re in at night, stands sentinel and takes the fall if need be.  And, of course, if you want to hatch more chicks you gotta have the rooster.  Short of fencing my entire back yard into the woods (ugh), I don’t know how else to ensure that the silly birds stay on safe ground come the end of the day.

When I was at MacDowell (the artist retreat in New Hampshire), they had a wonderful flock of hens with a rolling coop and moveable fence.  Every month they’d just relocate the whole kaboodle to another part of the yard.  Now I’d rather my chickens be able to roam all over the place, eating bugs and ticks and plants from all around the house.  Fencing them in doesn’t seem like a good option.  But I don’t want to regret inviting a crowing cockadoodle into my quiet space here.  Don’t know how that’ll go yet.

Meanwhile, this week Dar heard an On Point broadcast on NPR about beekeeping and got all excited about having bees.  It turns out Karl’s dad grew up keeping bees so he knows a fair amount about it.  There’s something to it but it’s not a lot of work, really, not constant work, and you can get a lot of honey out of a hive or two.  And beeswax.  And man, those beeswax candles are expensive.  Might as well make your own.  It’s kind of a mitzvah to nature to keep bees, too, since so many hives have been destroyed in recent years by mites and whatnot.  And, hey, my strawberries would probably cross pollinate.  So we’re considering that for next year, too.

Hee hee.

I don’t know if you can get drunk on food that just came out of the dirt, and ideas that just probably also came out of the dirt (at least the fertile compost of my brain), but I feel rather euphoric about it all.  All in good time; so much to do, and all the wild stuff I cut back last year is exploding again, the bittersweet, the forsythia, the weeds and poison ivy, the rampant honeysuckle-esque thing (which I’m convinced now isn’t honeysuckle, as it has no scent whatsoever).  I’m itching to get something done indoors.  Just finish painting the parlor.  Choose a color, move all the furniture, put down a tarp and paint it.  I need something to look really different, finished.  Soon, love, soon.

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Mackerel Sky

June 9, 2010 at 10:54 pm (Earth, Home, Water)

It’s a rare sight.  I stepped out this morning to go pick greens from the raised bed, and was greeted by an entire sky of this.  How lucky I felt, overcanopied by such beauty.

I have borrowed two longish tables from the warehouse at work.  Once I’ve cleaned up the back bedroom upstairs and tipped my mattress up against the wall (back in plastic, I suppose, as when I moved), I’ll set up a sewing area.  I’ve been so eager to make pants and shifts, since Snow gave me the beautiful linen shifts.  It seems convenient to keep sleeping in the tiny room downstairs until the upstairs is renovated.  Since we’ll start with the front bedroom, which is in worse shape, I figure I have most of the summer to play in the back one.

I also found a few sewing projects that have been lying around for a year, so perhaps I can take those off the list too.

It’s rainy and chilly and Fall-like tonight.  Chilly enough that, a couple of nights ago, I was able to burn off what pellets remained in the stove and shut it down until Fall.  It still needs cleaning out, and I’ll have to disconnect the pipe in back and see what kind of sooty stuff built up in the bottom where it curves to horizontal.  That’ll be a nice, messy job one of these days.  But once it’s done I can use the top of the stove for something useful, like… a vase of flowers.  Or an art project.  A painting of a Mackerel Sky.  I could cover it with a magnificent fabric and call it a table.

********

Snow is depressed.  “I’m quiet today,” she’ll say.  Or, “I’m grumpy as hell; I apologize in advance!  I just don’t know what to do with myself.”  When I first met her, she described herself as a glass-half-empty kind of person.  I see that’s true.  I recognize shades of myself in her, myself from before.  I know what that feels like, that half empty worldview.  I haven’t had it in a long time.  She makes me realize how far I’ve come since the days of pining for Will, of pining for Home, of never knowing what to do with the restlessness.  No one understood me, nothing was enough.

Snow left California a year ago to get away from a lose-lose relationship.  “He was the love of my life,” she claims.  But he was married, and after years of broken promises she realized he was never going to leave his family.  She’d left her former lover, a woman whom she describes as “my wife,” for this man.  The woman later committed suicide.

So there are reasons why life’s libation looks meagre.  Her ex lady died four years ago.  She held out another three with Mr. Married, and then up and came across the country.  She had a good friend in Connecticut, who helped her buy a house.  (She tried to buy mine, but we outbid her in the second round.  No end of ribbing over that; it was something we only discovered upon meeting a few months ago.)  (It also turns out that the used fridge and dishwasher I bought on the cheap from the local antiques guy were hers!  This only came to light last week.  How we laughed.)

And she does laugh, that big whoop that ends in a girly giggle.  I try to keep her cheered.  But in between I know she’s struggling.  She met a guy here last November, and by December was really hoping he’d ask her to marry him.  By now, of course, she rolls her eyes and realizes how premature that all was.  She has broken up with Guy, not without sadness.  He’s not at all right for her, nor she for him.  But now she feels even more alone than her own reclusive nature imposes.  Evening is for wine and sorrow.

She works on the house; she likes it here.  But much of her conversation still begins with, “In Napa, at my old house, I used to…”

I write about her, I guess, because I’m holding her in the light tonight.

Rose, Snow, and Me.

********

I go next door for dinner tonight.  My friend Red from Texas sent me her knitting books; I’ll take them to show Rose.  She’ll want to make all the socks.

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Mixed Bag

May 30, 2010 at 2:59 am (Water)

Yesterday was such a funny day.  It started out beautifully — I was a few minutes early for picking up soil, which they appreciated.  I’d gotten a load of laundry started next door first and got the truck back here by ten past ten.

Then I had some errands to do about half an hour away.  I’d asked K. to alert me well in time for when he was coming home from work, as he needed the truck in the afternoon and we had to get all the soil out right away.  I did not get the message in time.  He texted me about ten minutes before he got home, then again when he got here, and I got both messages about ten minutes after that.  Half an hour later when I arrived here myself, he’d already scraped the dirt out of the truck with the tractor bucket, tarp and all, and taken off.  I didn’t know if he was miffed at me for not being here, or I at him for not giving me enough of a heads up so I could help him.

The rest of the day was like that.  I went to Savers — our favorite second hand clothing shop — to look for shorts, as I have none that fit now.  Savers is a big store, like the Goodwill of your dreams.  There wasn’t a pair of shorts in there that fit me.  And sizes have gotten so arbitrary, even among shorts of the same “size,” some would be too big, some too small.  The perfect way to affirm my expanding waistline and how it doesn’t fit in with my life.  Sigh.

I did find a few light summer blouses that I liked a lot, so it wasn’t a total loss.  And there’s always Goodwill, I suppose.

After missing Karl I felt guilty and scattered and couldn’t get back on task.  I had lunch and went out again, for groceries and I can’t remember what else.  I made mental notes of certain other things that went awry, but by now I don’t know what they were.   Surely there were some things accomplished but it seemed that more went askew.

We, the band, were pretty productive today.  Our list was ambitious.  We didn’t get through it all but I did lay down a bass part and harmonies on two songs.  Then we revisited one that we’d pretty much finished, except we all agreed it needed a lift at the end, so we added more vocals.  I think it’s just going to shimmer.

Next weekend we have a rehearsal, and the following weekend we’re in New York state for a couple of gigs.

I’m glad it’s a holiday weekend.  I was feeling like I lost a day today.  Dar comes down tomorrow (he’s so excited about using the lawnmower again) for maybe four hours and then he’s off to Boston again for rehearsal in the afternoon.  I will bake stuff for a pot luck Monday which follows the village parade.

Oh!  Speaking of pot luck, we had one at work last week.  Snow and I suddenly decided we’d like to do one, and we managed to get everyone else on board.  Dave the semi-Big Boss actually cooked burgers on the grill at the loading dock.  I brought a huge salad, and there was a nice array of other things.  We set up two long tables in the hallway (the kitchen was a little small for everyone at once) and it was really fun.  People are getting used to the way Snow and I tease each other all the time.  We’re like bad school kids.  She’s right on the other side of a partition from me, and we’ve taken to occasional note-passing and joke emailing.  It makes work really fun.  We need some extra fun, because our respective tasks have been very repetitive and tedious lately.

I’m almost done with the inventory switchover — putting bar codes on everything — and then maybe I can build something again.  The bar code assignments are easy, but the inventory system has been so screwed up that things are mislabeled, misassigned, not standardized.  Some things are in banker boxes on shelves, but some are too big for those boxes, and some are on reels or in other kinds of storage.  I’m devising a strip magnet system for the larger things where the bar codes and labels can be stuck to the metal shelves near the item, and moved if the item gets moved.  Other things, like the small boxes of resistors, are too small for a sticker and the boxes get changed out every time they’re ordered anyway, so in that case a bunch of bar codes will go on a sheet that hangs in a plastic sleeve from that shelf.  I know, terribly interesting, but there has to be a way to find the code for everything easily.  I’ve been given license to make up the system by myself.  I like working on my own, though I get sleepy at this kind of task and I tend to go slow and have to take little walk-around breaks.  But it’s kind of arts-and-craftsy, making labels and cutting stuff with scissors and making everything look more or less the same.

Such excitement at a telecommunications company…

I read over all that and smile, because I wouldn’t trade this job opportunity for a life on the road.

It rained here today.  Bloomfield, where I was recording, didn’t get much of anything — at least it didn’t affect our recording — but there were puddles at home and the driveway had a bit more rutting.  Karl has been storing one of his cars here (the town is fussy about how many vehicles are in their driveway, because of the shop) and I noticed the front windows were down.  Uh-oh.  Yes, it was soaked inside.  I called to let him know and he asked how the tractor was.  He always tries to tarp it before rain.  I told him it was right where he’d left it — at the top of the driveway.  Uncovered.  Two for two.  I hadn’t even checked the weather, as I wasn’t going to be outside today.  Should I feel guilty for not knowing to raise his windows and move the tractor?  I suppose not.  Still, I hate it when I don’t come through.  He must have been in a big hurry yesterday.  That’s when things get left undone.

Anyway, I shake off those mixed up feelings and think about tomorrow.  I really want to straighten the parlor.  This little table has layers of history on it so deep I don’t even know what’s at the bottom.  I think there are a couple of bills in there.  I’ll look tomorrow.  Really I will.

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Starting the End

May 19, 2010 at 10:38 am (Water)

Everyone was too tired to burn brush last Sunday.  We were all happy to eat leftover pasta shells and go to our respective beds and sleep.

An owl awoke me in the wee hours that night.  I think it’s a Barred Owl.  Its call is spooky in the pitch blackness.  All those mice in my walls, frozen with fear.  Something got a squirrel and left fur in the garden.  It’s a hard world out there in the woods.

And the world has gotten a little more complicated in here, too.  I worked for a couple of days on a letter I ended up emailing to Chris and Carol, as a way to open the conversation in earnest about finishing up touring.  I’m giving it another year so we can have a plan.  The main sticky point is England, because we have a lot of stuff there.  Chris wants to try to “go out with a bang,” have our agent book us one last tour and try to get higher fees because it’s the last one.  I’m skeptical that it would actually work out that way.  We don’t know if we’ve made our nut until it’s too late to cancel everything.  That’s what happened last time; there was a big hole in the middle of the tour that she couldn’t book.  Then the travel expenses were so much higher than we expected, the car was thousands of dollars… and he says, “Maybe we’ll go for a shorter time, like four weeks.”  Um… no.  And Carol says, “Maybe we can ask her if she can book us for September of next year instead of May, so the garden season will be over.”  That’s almost a year and a half from now.  I’m going to be firmly rooted in home soil by then.

We don’t know yet what we’ll do about the two or three hundred CDs that are there.  They have to be shipped back, which is not only very expensive but something we can’t ask our agent to do.  I could let go of my personal stuff that’s there, clothing, toiletries and whatnot.  We have to sell the old bass and the clamshell that goes on top of the van — unless our agent wants to keep it to rent to other artists, which might be useful.

Things got slightly testy at one point with Chris and I was left with an uncomfortable feeling, the like of which I haven’t felt around the band for a long time.  Still, it brought up some stuff I really hate about dealing with him (though I love him in other ways) and, sadly, I thought the thought, “Good thing I’m getting out of this.”  That’s not exactly how I want to leave.  I guess there will be bumps.

We’ll talk in a couple of days, anyway.  Friday’s house concert only has three signups, so it will probably be cancelled.

My turn to drive the carpool today, so I must run.

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Rain and Green

April 28, 2010 at 1:27 am (Home, Water)

It was a fine service, in spite of them being SO laid back and slow that we were sound checking during the prelude.  But D.C. really knows how to “do church.”  The minister’s message contained the same stuff the meditation instructor in West Virginia was talking about, with shades of Ekhart Tolle and Sri Chinmoy thrown in for good measure.  I love how, in a predominantly African-American church, the congregation will talk back to the minister in affirmation during the sermon.  My eyes teared through the whole thing, even when I was laughing, and then I had to keep getting up and singing.  Their music director had been out for a while with a mini-stroke — he was the one who originally hired us — and this was his first day back in a few weeks.  He stood up to introduce us and the whole, huge congregation immediately shot to their feet and gave him a standing O.  It went on and on and on, until he was nearly in tears, and so was I.  Can you feel the love?

If there were a church like that nearby I might even go even if I weren’t getting paid to sing, and even though I’m not a Christian.

Anyway, Chris went on to Chapel Hill to visit a sister, and Carol rode the eight or nine hours back with me on Sunday.  It was the first opportunity we’ve had in years, really, to talk by ourselves for a long time.  We solved many of the world’s problems and a few of our own.  I voiced my ambivalence and stuckness around recording, and she noted that, as I already have five songs on the new album, I’m not really obligated to write any more.  She’s struggling with a couple of new ones, and Chris wants to find a cover to sing.  If they can just pull their weight a little more, she said, we could have our song list and I would really only have to come in to put down some harmonies.  That lifted an indescribable burden off my shoulders.

It took me a day or so to shake off the blues I struggled with all weekend, and today I went back to work.  Builds are slowing down, so I’m doing something with the inventory which will eventually make picking parts for kits a lot easier.  I divide my time between making lists of components in the warehouse and doing stuff with the lists on my computer.  It’s pleasant enough and leaves me time to let my mind wander a little.

The huge locust tree is starting to leaf.  It takes its time, waiting for the wild rose and the honeysuckle to leaf out first.  There are white bell-like flowers on the autumn olive that will turn into the speckled red berries that taste so good in late summer.  The dandelions have grown ten inches since I mowed last week.  The crows are plodding around under the feeder wondering why I haven’t bought any more bird seed yet.

Yesterday I planted my new hanging planter with petunias and alyssum and attached a bracket outside the door.  Pots of marigolds were placed on the stoop.  In spite of the peeling paint and the broken moldings it looks cheery outside.  I’ve brought them back in tonight, as it will get near freezing again.  I’m longing for warmer nights.

In other news, my family gathered around a new ritual a few nights ago.  I got really curious about absinthe after hearing an NPR podcast about it, and Karl sprang for some.  It’s an anise-flavored spirit with distillate of wormwood and some other botanicals.  (“Like Good ‘n Plenty,” Rose said.)  It was banned in 1915 because a hysteria arose about it making people psychotic, which was bunk.  Now it’s legal in the States again, and very expensive.  You pour a bit into a glass and then suspend a sugar cube over it on a slotted spoon (or, in our case, a slotted pie server — any implement with holes in a pinch) and dribble very cold water through the sugar to melt it.  As the water drips into the pale green liquid, it “louches,” or turns cloudy.  It must be highly diluted because it’s terribly strong.  You can get looped on a shot of it.  After the anise flavor, it gets mysteriously woody, or herby, or something.  It’s really lovely and special.  Anyway I used some of my gig money this weekend to buy my own bottle — a big luxury, but it’ll last a very long time.  I’m a lightweight.

There is a whole culture around drinking absinthe.  I found an interesting website here, in case anyone wants to read up.

I watched a bit of Netflix tonight and lingered over dinner.  More rain tomorrow. I do love these nights off.  The weekend will be very busy and fun — in between gardening and so forth, Snow is coming to visit Saturday night.  We got invited to a ’20s-themed dinner dance thing that’s a benefit for something or other, but neither of us has the $25 to spare (oops, blowing my money on hard likker) or a flapper outfit.  So we’re just going to hang out and choose paint swatches.  She’s been depressed over the “terrible failed relationship that changed me forever” in her past and I told her we could trade stories.  It’s been a long time since I talked about Will; I wonder if it will sting or just be part of the journey at this point.  Then Sunday Dar is coming over and we are talking to the neighbor about the parcel we’re selling to him — just under a quarter acre.  It’ll be a relief to have navigated through all that.  Other than that we’ll just mouse around like we always do, and I’ll keep him here as long as he can spare.

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