Give Me A Break

Ghostly freesia

 Day 2 of sitting here grumpily staring out the window at White: white trees, white ground, white driveway, white porch railings, white air, white white white. In this, our second surprisingly nasty late spring snowstorm, there was rain and sleet and hail and freezing rain and wind wind wind first; and now the short trees and bushes are bowing down with heavy snow and ice, the tall trees are snow-free because of the wild winds, the Buddha on the front porch is covered to his chin, again, with snow, my cats are grumpy and fighting with each other, the birds which are trying to fly through all this – lots of them spring returns and not at all prepared for this kind of weather - are freaking out; and the humans are all also freaking out about potential and real electric outages and can we get out of the driveway – no – and when will be able to get out of the driveway, anyway? 

Not that we could go anywhere today, since there hasn’t been a sighting of a snowplow yet, though we did see neighbor Eddie Bear going by on his tractor a couple of hours ago. We’ve filled pitchers of water for drinking and buckets of water for flushing, just in case the electricity does more than just flutter on and off. I’ve warned my tomorrow’s patients that it might not be happening. 

I’ve sent cranky emails to the nurse at the assisted living place in F-FL, where I’m told it’s 85 degrees for heaven’s sake, who I’ve been emailing all week with no response and with whom I need to speak because my F-FL friend’s PCP told me it’s time I get more involved with her healthcare, again, whether she likes it or not; and I’ve had a cranky conversation with a local nurse who works for a group that seems to think their patients can make last minute plans, no matter what else we need to do, to fit their procedure schedule. I am not amused, and have made that abundantly clear. 

Wasted most of yesterday waiting for a return call from the F-FL nurse, looking bleakly out the window, napping, and listening to one of the worst audio books ever. Libby, the NH State Library’s system through which one can borrow kindle books and audio books and I don’t know what else, using your local library card, downloaded onto your digital device, is a wonderful system. I know VT has a similar system and I assume most states do – now we have digital devices this has taken the place of the “order it through the mail” system we used to use many years ago when we lived in Maine, where a thick, waterproof zippered bag would arrive in our rural route mailbox regularly, stuffed with books from the state library, postage and return postage paid. 

This current system is saving me, during my hours of driving north to treat patients every week, from having to listen to the appalling news on the radio.

The most recent book was so very ghastly it turned funny. It was a Gothic bodice-ripper placed in the “modern” time of post-war 20th-century Britain, read by a very British-accented reader. It was about as formulaic as can get – every theme from bodice-rippers and gothic novels was there: impoverished young female from a good family but whole family dead, courageously trying to make her own way in the world, is contacted by the law firm of an unknown-to-her distant uncle and is his only heir. She inherits his estate but she has to live in the house, which is an ancient Abbey set in the country amongst moors. There is a gruff and secretive housekeeper and her almost silent husband the butler, a hard-bodied impertinent driver and man of all jobs, who smells “like wood and smoke and trees and the fields,” a looming massive house with strange noises, locked rooms, hidden passageways, a haunted library, mad evil ghost of a monk, sweet gentle ghost of an anchoress, mysterious headaches that cause memory loss, haunted books that, when opened, cause the things they contain: bee swarms, monsoons, plague…to manifest in the real world. 

There are things that fly through the air, horrible dreams, footsteps outside doors, a nobleman who seems to be a nice guy but is actually evil, the evil society he and his more evil father belong to who want to get their hands on the evil ghost monk’s hidden manuscripts, which turn out to be written in a secret code that only the heiress can break. Evil lord drugs her, pretends they married, she’s stuck because she’s a woman and what can she do?? She has to obey her husband, of course, that’s what women do. Gag. 

The driver tries to save her but on the way out they stop for a cup of tea (!!!) [actual sentence in the novel: There’s always time for a cup of tea!] in the kitchen and get caught and imprisoned, she sets fire to the Abbey and escapes and frees hard-bodied man, housekeeper and butler, but they only go as far as the housekeeper’s cottage and again, stop for a cup of tea; then hard-bodied man goes back to the Abbey to try to find the manuscript which she’s left behind, but needs, giving her firm instructions to stay put. Which, of course, she doesn’t, as soon as he’s out of sight she also goes back to the Abbey and takes a nap in the haunted library (!!) while the evil lord and his more evil father and their evil society are hunting for her and the manuscript. 

Hard-bodied man finds her just in time and carries her into the anchoress’s hidden cell where she falls asleep again and confronts the ghosts, then she and hard-bodied man dig up the evil monk’s grave, which is conveniently in the achoress’s cell, and destroy his bones, which breaks the spell on the Abbey and library. But that’s not the end! 

Evil society and lords don’t know the spell’s been broken and heroine and hard-bodied man still want the manuscript, which it turns out the anchoress had actually written and is full of healing recipes lost to time, but the monk had perverted them seeking immortal life; so they go hunting for the manuscript and come across the society in the Abbey foyer with a huge vat of human blood, gathered from killing the kind servant (there’s always one and it’s always a female) and a bunch of local commoners, and into which the evil lord is about to submerge himself despite warnings from our heroine. He does, and drowns, and his more evil father pulls a gun, heroine kicks him and grabs the gun, and then shoots him, but not until she’s spent some time thinking about it and fighting her angry impulses. 

Evil society can’t decide what to do and consider threatening her, but then hard-bodied man shows up and they all run away, and he disposes of the bodies. For some reason no one ever reports the dead commoners and servants, the heroine discovers she’s long loved the hard-bodied man but can’t remember what they’ve done together but her bodice rips every time he gazes at her or brushes by her, finally they admit they’ve fallen in love and go into the moor to repeat their first kiss that she can’t remember but he does, somehow lots of money becomes available, they rebuild the burned Abbey and the Library and turn it into a revered site for academic scholarship, hard-bodied man discovers who his parents are, heroine becomes good friends with housekeeper now the spells are broken, they all live there happily ever after, everyone calls our heroine My Lady, and whatever.

At that point, I puked, it was all too ghastly. 

For the blog, 4 April 2024: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com 

Photos Deb Marshall