We Hate November

Catman reading. Deb Marshall photo.

 

We hate November.

Grey. Cold. Freezing rain. Snow layered with freezing rain. Slippery stairs. Cold wind. Garden turned white. Stuff frozen in. The end of flowers. Continual woodstove. Dead furnace. 

Pissed off cats. Hairballs. Woodstove dust. Leaves buried under snow. Snow tires not on. Other people’s snow tires not on. Black ice. Overheated public rooms. Underheated public rooms. Overdue library books. Needing to sign up, again, for the ACA – guaranteed hours of frustration, completely incomprehensible, too expensive choices followed by throwing hands in the air and signing up for the cheapest option available because that’s all we can afford, anyway. Aches and pains. 

Nothing foodish appeals or is anything I want to be bothered to cook. I want one of the pears off my tree, which were so delicious this fall, and are long gone. I don’t want to get into a cold car and drive for 15 minutes before it warms up enough to be bearable. I can’t find a single pair of gloves that are warm enough, but not over-heating. Nothing is quite right about any of my winter hats. I haven’t won Publisher’s Central Bureau $2000 For Life sweepstakes, yet, nor the Lottery. Bills are mounting faster than I can make money. Dead furnace – oh, did I mention that already?

Ears in the radio morning assaulted by lying, ball-less, Republican minions being rude and not even slightly entertaining or creative as they twist and warp reality in an attempt to protect the worst so-called President ever. Immigrants still being trashed and tortured, just-barely adult DACA children who have lived all of their conscious lives here being forced to live in fear, endlessly, because of same, said, nasty, ball-less Republican minions and their satanic master. People dying because they can’t afford health care because we don’t have the national soul to man up and do the right thing. Children, amongst other people, dying because same, said ball-less minions, can’t bring themselves to vote against a noisy but actually unimportant NRA. People shouting vile things at other people, because they’ve been confused into thinking that’s an heroic thing to do. People doing vile things because their souls are lost. Let’s not even think about the environment – I daily reflect on how happy I am that I’m 63, not 23, and didn’t have children who will have to live – maybe just exist - all their lives through what’s coming.

My office is too cool. I put on a sweater, and then I’m too hot: there is no right place. Nor is there a right mental place. I need to take another continuing ed class before mid-December – a weekend-long process, time spent that can’t be shared with anything else, time I can’t afford. And then the more hours of filling out license-renewal forms, trying to figure out where to squirrel the money for the class and the forms out of a too-small budget. That’s what credit cards are for, but the balances grow higher, and they’re built of necessity after necessity, not out of fun things we did or got. 

Flu; pneumonia; stomach bug; strep; upper respiratory infections – all going around, waiting in hidden places for a slip in hygiene, an exhausted immune system or over-stressed body to stumble arcoss them. Year-end inventories that need to be taken. Bird seed to buy – are the bears in their winter beds yet, or is it too soon? Friends with worrisome, debilitating health conditions. “Health conditions” rather than illnesses because, in one case, no seems to be able to discover what’s causing it, and in another, there’s a perfect storm of many chronic diseases that the medications don’t work for, anymore. I miss my old office-mate, and don’t yet know my new one. How can almost every family gift-giving occasion fall within eight short weeks?  Are left-overs an acceptable  gift? End-of-year office hoe-out needs to take place. Before January.

Holidays coming…wondering what that will mean for a couple of troubled people I love. A few too many things to worry about, and not enough time to do it, or do anything about them. Has this “water cure” I’ve been swallowing been poisoning me? How’s the patient doing, who had a major operation last week? Will it snow or be freezing rain the day we have tickets for a Hatbox play I’m really looking forward to? Body hasn’t adjusted to early darkness yet: will I be able to stay awake to listen to a friend’s concert tonight, or will the conductor be forced, once again, to turn and conduct my snoring during pauses?

Sigh. Thanksgiving coming. Turkey? Really? I discovered several years ago that I actually kinda hate turkey. And most of the other things that are served at that meal. Worse, now that I seem to be sliding back towards the vegetarianism that was my happy eating place for 30-plus years. Except now, most vegetables, fruits and grains make my blood sugar do scary things. What can I eat? Food is no longer safe. Even water can be wrong. The evil store isn’t stocking the body warmers I need for me and my patients this winter, but an almost useless something-similar instead.  Dead furnace – still.

The garden, source of stress and pleasure, is over for the season. I have lengthy notes about what needs to be done first thing next spring, lists of what didn’t get done before frost in the ground and first snow, lists of perennials newly planted, possibly too late – will they survive the winter? Ditto the new peach trees and cherry bush? The garlic that’s only grown once for me in decades of planting it?  Will the parsnips that get left in the ground over winter to sweeten still be there in spring, or will mice feast on it over winter?

On Hallowe’en, I played the Dark Lady all day, frightening and mystifying adults, and had more fun than I’d had in months, maybe years. Last weekend I had a couple of hours to lie on the floor while Sherlock and Clare, a friend’s two dogs, attacked me and licked me and jumped all over me until I was screaming with laughter from being tickled and nibbled and dog-dog-dogged. Two days later I realized my shirt still stank of dog. I chose not to wash it right away. This week, I figured out how to sign up for Acorn tv – finally, the shows I loved are available again – my limited tv life will be full if I can figure out how to get it to play on the tv and not just the computer. I'm reading a couple of really good books. 

The milkman delivered a wedge of really fine blue cheese two days ago. The annual flower-whose-name-I-don’t know, which I moved into the kitchen, is covered with flower buds. My Christmas cactuses bloomed beautifully on Hallowe’en. The crows, cawing, wake me up most mornings, and I lie warm and sleepy in bed and think, oh, oh, how sweet. The full moon, shining on the new snow this week, made the outdoors a miracle of magic and mystery for two glowing nights.

Joy arrives unexpectedly.  There are little pleasures; there are big, rollicking soul-shining grand delights. 

Be ready, because you can’t guess when they’ll arrive. Be ready. 

Even if you hate turkey.


A slightly different version of this blog was published in the Concord Monitor, November 26, 2019, as "Stay alert - there's joy to be found in the November gloom"

A Little Weird

 

We’re just a few days into November, and it’s already weird. Weirder. The last three years have been pretty darn weird, and getting ever weirder, but I’m talking about my personal life here.

First, I got up one day just before Hallowe’en and discovered a witch in my yard: the DitchWitch, and the guys who run it, who dug a shallow trench, put some cable into it, and then covered it all up again. Fun to watch – one of them walks beside the machine and steers it with what looks a lot like a big joystick, and the machine digs the trench and poops out cable into it; and on the trip back, fills the trench in and covers up the cable. The Witch is a heavy-looking thingie, and it’s also really accurate, which amazes me. It was kind of like watching the driver walking next to a gas-fired ox. Cool.

The Witch was there because the company that provides our Wi-Fi service has been insisting for months that if we don’t switch to their new cable-based system, which is supposed to provide much faster computer power, they were going to cut us off October 1. So, since mid-September, we’ve received, and responded to, at least two calls per week from them offering dire warnings and saying we need to sign some sort of approval form, which they hadn’t actually sent to us. About half-way through October they emailed it, The Husband e-signed it and returned it, and thereafter, every couple of days we received a phone call from the company saying we need to sign the form and return it to them, blah, blah, blah.  And calls from someone else in the company saying that now they have the form, the Witch would arrive November 5 to put in the cable. 

Communications company is clearly having trouble communicating with itself!

While all this calling was going on, someone came half-way through October and sprayed bright orange markings on the ground, after determining where our telephone and electric wires (which are buried) run. Then the next week, someone else came and spray-painted white markings on the ground that didn’t correspond to the orange ones. Then just before Hallowe’en, the Witch arrived and dug the trench and laid the cable somewhere in the vague vicinity of the white marks, except where they didn’t.

Now it’s November 7, and we’re still using the old Wi-Fi they were going to cut off Oct. 1, and we’ve stopped getting phone calls from anyone in the company. Hmmm.

Hallowe’en day I wasn’t working, so I filled up my plastic Jack-O’Lantern bucket with rubber snakes and centipedes and spiders, and eyeballs and skulls and star anise, got out my staff, which has lots of trailing, floaty cloth scraps, vampire teeth, bones the First Hound had buried in my garden, a bag of skulls and two chains of skulls and a bag of star anise, and some dried Love Lies Bleeding attached to it; and then put on the Dark Lady costume, which involves long black velvet gloves, a long black skirt and jacket, and lots of veils that you can’t quite see through, and went to run errands.  Everywhere I went I offered whoever I encountered the opportunity to take “a trick for Hallowe’en luck” from my bucket. 

I went a lot of places: the library, post office, quick mart, café, farmstand, co-op, grocery store, veterinarian clinic, dog beauty parlor, farm supply store, garden store, garage, pottery shop, another café, Dunkin’ Donuts, the other co-op, and round about. It was fascinating to see how people reacted: some pretended not to see me; some peered deeply through the veils trying to see if they knew me; some shrieked and ran; some giggled nervously, some refused to put their hands into the bucket because the contents freaked them out, some followed me around to see how other people would react, some tried to pretend there was nothing weird going on, some took photos when they thought I wasn't looking, and several thanked me for coming in and making their day more fun. 

The reaction I liked best was the older woman at the post office who laughed and laughed  and shrieked and asked me all sorts of questions and told me she loved my costume. By the time the kids came out in their costumes at dusk, I was home, with an empty bucket. Next time the Dark Lady gets to go out, she needs to bring more spiders, skulls, eyeballs and star anise (I give those to the people who are too scared to reach in and take something), and some bats, and no centipedes and snakes. 

I haven’t had so much fun in ages!

In my garden, I finally yanked out the fava beans and started cutting out the spent raspberry canes and putting down hay. I stored the bird bath and brought in the solar lights; and cut the sunflowers the birds have emptied of seeds. One morning last week, I counted 11 goldfinches and three chickadees all working at once on the sunflower plant just outside our bathroom window.

I put in two new short paths; and I’ve planted the perennials that have come, and cussed out the company that still hadn’t sent the rest of them – they arrived yesterday and today, just in time for our first snow, and are now living in the vegetable cooler until I can do something about them this weekend.  I can’t convince these plant companies that I live in zone 3, not zone 5. 

The calendula, and pincushion plant, and mints and catnip are still blooming and looking lovely in the garden. I can’t bring myself to yank out the annual calendula, it’s so happily doing its’ thing, in spite of the wickedly cold weather we’ve been having.

One last weird thing: last weekend, after getting our electricity back that the windstorm had crashed for about 36 hours, I spent a day in the kitchen cooking up some stuff that I worried had been not quite cold enough for too long, and also made this week’s soup. This week’s soup was a French onion soup – but I didn’t check first to be sure I had a bottle of red wine to put in it. When I had the soup ready except for the wine, I discovered that all I had in the pantry was a bottle of sparkling moscato in a blue bottle. 

OK, that’s a little odd, but the sparkling would cook out, and moscato would taste ok, it’d just make the soup a little sweeter than usual. I pulled the cork and poured the wine into the soup, and discovered that the wine itself was blue – and the blue didn’t cook out. This week I’m eating a lovely blue-green onion soup, which tastes fine but is doing a number on my brain whenever I take a bite.

Weird.

 

Deb Marshall photos

7 November, 2019