Marching On

 

The Buddha yesterday

Overnight, one day last week, the snow almost totally melted; and moved instead to my cellar in the form of 3 inches of water. Out my window it was grey and brown like November, with plowed-up piles of dirty snow, and in the house it was black and cursie accompanied by the groans elicited by aching backs, bailing, and fans blowing. No windy purr of dehumidifier – it took one despairing look and decided to die, almost immediately.

Last night it snowed again, about 4 inches, apparently in an attempt to replace the 3 inches of water we’ve mostly bailed out of the cellar. Out my window, it’s all white again. There are two bright dashes of cardinals in the lilac tree, which are playing some kind of touch tag, a herd of 6 red-winged blackbirds have taken over most of the porch railings to gobble seeds, and two or three bluejays are surprisingly politely staying at the far edges and eyeballing the herd warily. In the distance, the very loud sound of a woodpecker busily at work is rapping through the air. 

The Buddha today

The cats have asked to go out, about 9 times so far this morning. I open the door and they rush to it then put on the brakes, and stand in the door sniffing, sniffing, sniffing; then, giving me an accusing look – apparently I’m refusing to turn the switch that makes the ground dry and warm – they back up and stalk each other for a bit, then settle into an unhappy winter-ish nap until the call of the wild hurries them to the door again to consider venturing outside. It doesn’t help that they have to negotiate a wet cellar floor with surprise puddles to reach their litter boxes. At least today it’s just puddles, and not the in-house lake that was there the past two days.

The Husband just got over one of the nasty stomach bugs that’s going around and that, along with the other interesting pathologies making the rounds this season, has put him and a number of my patients to bed with headache, fever, and all the accompanying nastinesses; which so far I haven’t caught. Handwashing, face masking, disinfecting!

Lynxie Bob in basket

I’m still feeling sorry for myself, however, because I’m nursing a sore foot from an injury I gave myself almost two months ago, in a spectacularly complicated move I couldn’t repeat if I tried, attempting to extricate myself from a dining room chair without disturbing one of the cats. Essentially, no one knows what damage I did to my foot and leg or why it’s taking so long to heal; maybe I developed a syndrome my MD says only people with fractures or who just had surgery sometimes develop; maybe the arthritis in my low back and hips and ankle have something to do with it; maybe I slightly tore a muscle or overstretched a nerve or sprained or broke something small in my foot or ankle that the xrays couldn’t pick up and my chiropractor can’t locate…no telling. For almost 6 weeks I was able to sleep only 2-3 hours/night before either a massive muscle cramp woke me up and kept me awake; 2 more weeks I finally could sleep 5-6 hours/night before an aching aching aching woke me and kept me awake; for the past 3 nights, no cramp, no aching, just general discomfort after about 6 hours. Needless to say, I’m beyond exhausted and having a hard time making myself do the things that need doing, especially dealing with the remaining pile of paperwork that taunts me from my desk.

And then I remember that this time last year I was in F-FL with Cousin Paula and Deb the caregiver, moving my F-FL hoarder friend out of her house into assisted living, emptying the house, and selling it. And it was 90+ degrees down there every day and humid and kept raining, just to keep the humidity up. The only really bright notes that entire time was talking to the black bird who sat in a tree, near its usual perch on the telephone wires that the moving van managed to take down, and shouted “Fuck Fuck Fuck, Oh no Oh no Oh no!” every few minutes until the wire was put back in place; and seeing the peacock that haunts the downtown on almost the last day we were there. 

Tchatchke from F-FL

In the year since, the owners of the assisted living place have changed and the entire staff left and has been replaced, so none of them know us (Cousin Paula lives in IN). She’s on vacation right now, and on her way back home through F-FL, she’s going to stop at the assisted living place and try to put the Fear of God, or at least the Fear of Paula, into the new staff and my F-FL friend, who is still hoarding her way into homelessness in about 7 more years, if she doesn’t snap out of it.

I am so very glad not to be part of that expedition that I have moments when I’m not feeling sorry for myself!

Inside the tchatcke

Tired tired tired doesn’t make it easy to read, but besides treating patients, that’s all I’ve got energy for. And during this long-seeming time, I’ve fallen head over heels in love with Brian Doyle’s novels. Brian Doyle was a journalist who wrote a lot of books before he died, in 2017, of a brain tumor. He was my age; and I’ve read two of his books so far, Mink River, and Chicago. I fell in love with him when I read Mink River – it’s a book I wish I had written. I don’t know where I got the book, it wasn’t from my F-FL-F, might have been from the Five Colleges Book Sale last April, or maybe I picked it up off the Free Bench at the Tiptop – it was used, so it was a serendipitous acquisition, and it sat in my basket o’ fiction on the floor of my bedroom for months until I decided to tackle it, knowing nothing about it.

I was hooked. I was more than hooked. I immediately ordered Chicago, Martin Marten, and The Plover from Thriftbooks. I sent Mink River to a friend who I think will also love it; I’m 20 pgs from the end of Chicago, which I’ve promised to another friend; and I just ordered, omg, seven more of his books from Thriftbooks (for less than $50, I should mention).  I expect to stay bedazzled; the man was a wonder. His books are wondrous.  Finding them is wonderful. It will be hard to take a break from him to read some of the other books waiting for me, which may or may not be entertaining, but it would be hard for the good ones to live up to Brian Doyle!

On the shelves

Reading about his Chicago, I realized that I know nothing about the city except from reading Sinclair’s The Jungle, which is about the stockyards. Doyle’s Chicago is much more varied and interesting. I think I was in Chicago about 100 years ago when I was editing either computer magazines or ham radio magazine, for a tradeshow. All I remember is that the show was in a hotel near the airport, and we also stayed in that hotel; I vaguely remember that one or two of the other folks I traveled with went into the city for supper one night, but I didn’t go because I had no idea where to go or whether there was anything worth seeing in Chicago – turns out there’s a lot to see in Chicago! And I missed a chance to explore some of it.

I don’t think the trade show was the show in which an Asian someone vaulted over the table, where we had magazines on display, and landed on his knees in front of me, begging me to move home with him to Alaska because he’s been looking for me all his life, because I was his wife in a past life.

He’d put me through grad school, he’d build me a house, I could bring my husband and all my critters, he just wanted me to be near him; and over the next few days, he continued to plead, and he brought his current wife and daughter to assure me that he was for real and it was safe and they also wanted me to move to be with them.

I think that was in Rapid City, Iowa. I didn’t go.

Also on the shelves

Thinking about Chicago reminded me of a friend I’ll call Cliff, a computer techie who lived near or with the Husband and me, prior to our marriage and for awhile afterwards, until he moved to Chicago to become a richer techie with a job that was more techie than computer magazine techie.

Cliff was an interesting character: a total geek with a love of cars and motorcycles, who built a race car from scratch, rode a big motorcycle, and at one point owned a Land Rover. He had a cat named Agravaine (one of the Knights of the Round Table) who would  come when called and take a pill from Cliff’s hand and swallow it down, when he was sick.

Cliff was stocky and muscular and bearded; we once watched him pick up a motorcycle and lift it over the side of a truck to put it in the truck bed. He tried to date a friend of mine – we all worked, in our 20’s, for computer magazines, all in the same small NH town, and knew each other even though we worked for competing publishers.  My friend, who I’ll call Cat, was an artist for the publisher who owned the magazine I edited, and also loved cars and had a little racing car; we all hoped that Cliff and Cat would hit it off. On their first (and only) date, Cliff picked Cat up and put her on his lap. Cat was not amused.

“I thought women liked that sort of thing,” Cliff said, after the fireworks ended.

One early spring week Cliff disappeared. A week later, he called to let everyone know why he hadn’t been home, and hadn’t been in to work. “I couldn’t stand the winter anymore,”  he said, “so I got on my motorcycle and headed south to find spring. It was warmer in Massachusetts, so I kept going. It was snowless in Connecticut, so I kept going. It was even more like spring in New York, so I kept going. Before I knew it, I was in Florida.”

It took him another week to get back to NH and late winter, and by the time he arrived, he’d had to replace several of the rocker box tops on his motorcycle that had blown up, by wiring on Coke cans in to replace them.

I wonder how he likes Chicago, and if he’s still there.

Someday maybe I’ll see that Lake which is more like an Ocean. I bet I’ll like it better than the one in my cellar.

Ya never know…

 

 For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com       10 March 2024

All photos Debra Marshall

 

 

Window tchatckes with winter behind them - again!