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!

Weather Update and Dragons

 

 

Wood Dragon

The snow on the front steps has covered the Buddha statue up to its chin and today it’s snowing again and making a mess of the roads, Tomorrow it’s supposed to get warm and rain all day – that’ll make more of a mess.

Last night, we heard a banging on the kitchen porch, and when we turned the light on and looked out, there was a lovely opossum, all white, munching away at the birds’ mealy-worm block and suet chunks. It didn’t seem to care that we’d turned the light on; we watched for a half hour or so, then we got bored and the cats got over being freaked out and had wandered away, so we turned the light off and let the ‘possum continue its meal in peace. Another half hour gone by and it had disappeared.

This morning I was disappointed to discover that it hadn’t been back after the snow started so the only prints in the snow on the exposed part of the porch were birds’. But tonight, after looking up ‘possums and discovering that they rarely are ill and their mouths don’t harbor bad bacteria, and that they don’t hibernate and need to eat, I’ll put out for the ‘possum an old cat bowl with some of the cat food my furries rejected, and hope he finds it, and enjoys it. Maybe a carrot, too, though my carrot supply from summer’s harvest is getting low.

My pile of year-end paperwork is still 6 inches high; circumstances have kept me from it the last few days, but today I start again, and need to labor on until it’s finished. My mental climate is frustrated.

Yesterday, I voted in the primary. I was pretty much the only person wearing a mask in our small town hall; and I was followed around by an unmasked woman hacking her brains out. I didn’t turn around and punch her; which would have been a civic duty, under the circumstances. I can imagine who she voted for. My mental climate was stormy.

 

Several Weeks Later

Since I wrote that, I’ve managed to injure my foot and leg (all I’ll say is that a cat was involved) so I’m limping about and not sleeping well. But finally, the sun’s been out the last few days and it’s been warm, so my driveway is a very long sheet of ice. And that doesn’t help much as I limp and slip out to the garage.

The birds, or some critter, has eaten up their seed and mealy worm bar, and I’ve put out a second, which will probably be the last for this season. And I bought what might turn out to be way too many suet cakes, depending on what the weather gods decide to slam us with over the next few weeks.

My high pile of paperwork has been cut in half, which still leaves a pretty high pile of paperwork.  Some of it disappeared when I made the seed orders for the garden; another big chunk went away when I delivered tax stuff to the tax lady. And more has  been added, but at least I’m down to about 3 inches, now. It keeps going up and down like this winter’s snow levels, and is just about as discouraging.

However: one of my orchids just bloomed, and it has four more buds on it; and my freesias have put out a fragrant branch of flowers.  The Buddha on the front steps is snow-free to just below his shoulders. The little birds have finally discovered the one hanging feeder I put out, so the big birds don’t scare them away so regularly. I haven’t seen the ravens this year, but I do hear them, so I’m thinking it’s time to put out a raw egg (in its shell) and see what happens.  I’ve finally almost finished a list of all the books in the house, and I’ve done some deeper hoeing out of ones I know I’ll never read again – I bring a box o’ books to the Free Bench about once a month.  I still have 46 books on my “haven’t read yet” list, and I’ve read 74 that were on the list when I first made it last year. A few of those 74 went to friends and relatives for presents, or were passed on to patients with similar tastes, but most, and more, have gone to the Free Bench (and I’ve picked up a few from the Bench that others have left). I LOVE seeing the books disappear from the Free Bench! Powdered cardamom in coffee is delicious, and almost makes up for seasonally gone eggnog. And the little tablet The Husband gave me for Christmas has made it possible to listen to 10 books while I’m driving to and from the Upper Valley, thus avoiding the news and partially saving my mind.

Metal dragon - incense burner

 

 

 

 So the end of the Year of the vile and malicious Rabbit hasn’t been all bad.

Saturday is day 1 of the Lunar New Year of the Wood Dragon. With any luck, the Dragon will take over from the weather gods and instill some sense of order so we can actually have gardens this year.

And adventures – good adventures!

If only I could get some sleep…

 

 

 

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com             8 February 2024

All photos Deb Marshall

Dragon painting on wooden purse by Tattia, Windsor VT

Window dragons

Just for a little context: Asian Dragons live in water, usually lakes, streams or wells, until they’re 1000 years old, at which point they grow wings and can fly. The ball you see carried by some Dragons indicates the dragon is male, and the ball is his Pearl of Wisdom. In ancient China, only the Imperial family could have dragons depicted with 5 toes; all others have 3 or 4 toes. There is a famous tea called Dragon Well tea (Long Jing Cha) which is grown near a well in which a dragon resides; it’s expensive and delicious. The Chinese also say that the Earth is a Dragon, traveling through space: mountains are its scales, trees are its hair or bristles, streams and rivers are its blood vessels.

Earth dragon

 

 In the Asian Lunar calendar, each lunar year is represented by one of 12 animals, and that animal’s characteristics will be dominant during its year. Last year was a Rabbit year; next year is a Snake year; this year, the Dragon year begins Feb 10 and ends Jan 28, 2025; the Snake begins on January 29, 2025 (Lunar years are based on the new moons). Each animal also has associated with it 5 elements. This year is the Wood Dragon; there are also Water, Fire, Earth, and Metal elements, and the element changes each time the animal comes up in its lunar year. The elements have characteristics that modulate the basic nature of each animal – as you can imagine, a Fire Dragon is going to be much more energetic and unpredictable than a Water Dragon, for example.

If you want to see a 5-toed Imperial Dragon, come into Suite 230 some day – WEAR A MASK – and take a  look at the dragons embroidered in gold thread on the man’s riding over-gown hanging on the far right wall in the waiting room. 

Old fart dragon - oops, The Husband!

 

 

 

 

Weather Report

 

It’s snowing. First real snow of the winter.  

The Lunar Rabbit is doing its best to rip up whatever’s left of my 2023 and early 2024 world, before it’s replaced by the Wood Dragon on February 10. Let’s hope the Dragon is kinder to us than the Rabbit has been, which seems to have grown fangs and long, sharp claws in its old age.

Inside the house, I’m cold. Our 35-year-old woodstove got leaky beyond repair, and the next to last day of 2023, I got up and announced that we were putting our lives, and those of our furries, at risk, and we would not be using the old woodstove any longer, and we would be going woodstove shopping that day. It’s been 35 years since I last bought a woodstove --- it was kind of a shock. What used to cost $500 now costs many thousands of dollars, and that’s for a simple one of about the same size as the old one. And the firebox is shorter, so The Husband has until January 17 – delivery day, weather gods willing – to cut all the logs down by 3 or 4 inches.

You remember: a woodstove will warm you up when you cut up the wood, when you split it, when you stack it, when you haul it in, and when you burn it. And, this year, also when you cut it up and stack it the second time.

In the meantime, we’re using the hot water baseboard heaters, fired by the gas furnace, and we’re not cranking the heat up much, because – money. Especially after buying a woodstove that costs as much as my first brand new car cost.. And the Chapel, where the plants live, including the bay tree and kafir lime tree, have a plug-in radiator on at night and my fingers crossed that they don’t freeze to death in the meantime.

Last last year, The Husband gave me, for Christmas, a polar fleece wrap that I’ve enjoyed a lot. Even in a woodstove-heated house, there are days and rooms in which you need some extra covers. I liked the thing so much, that this year I gave myself for Christmas a similar thing, but this one’s longer and has a hood and you can snap parts together to give yourself sleeves of a sort. I’ve used it a couple times, and sat outside wearing it on one of the warmish days in December.

So I should be warm enough until stove delivery day. As it happens, the Husband has a similar polar fleecy cover-up, as well.

But here I sit, dressed in flannel pants, leg warmers, a polar fleece turtleneck shirt, two sweaters, a scarf, wearing wool clogs and fingerless mitts so I can type with half-frozen hands and fingers stiff with cold and arthritis, with a body warmer attached to my undies for extra warmth on the back, looking longingly at my polar fleece soft fluffy cover-ups --- upon which the cats, who come with full-length whole-body fur coats, are hibernating.

They snuggle in during the day, on the dining room table, next to where I’m typing on my laptop. They snuggle in during the night. In fact, they rarely leave the nice soft pile of polar fleece warmth. If I steal the polar fleece back, one of the cats sits next to me and uses his claws to catch my hair and yank my head over close to his mouth so he can make quite clear his issues about his warm blankie having disappeared; and the other one sits on my keyboard.

 

Several days later: Outside, the weather is snowy, cold, and blowing, and inside, my brain is tempestuous. And no, I still haven’t gotten my polar fleece wraps back from the furries.

First of all the year-end paperwork is more complicated this year, for EIDL reasons and more. Also, two days after Christmas, I was informed by Social Security that I’d lost my “extra help” for prescriptions because, somehow, in 2022 we earned $2000 too much, and I had ‘til Jan 1 to find new insurance to fund Part D. If you count the days, that left me three work days to do it. And one of those days I couldn’t be home because I had a middle-of-day eye appointment 40 miles away.

I never had insurance prior to Medicaid, which then became Medicare with extra help when I turned 65. I have no idea what all these Parts are, how to choose a new insurance company – literally, I mean I don’t know how even to start – or what makes sense or doesn’t. I just know what I did: after noting that the old extra help insurance co. was going to cost me more money than I have in monthly payments and a huge deductible before they paid anything for me, I aimlessly wandered the internet and eventually, holding my nose, jumped in. I talked to an unknown insurance agent located, it turns out, in Ohio, and took her advice because there wasn’t time to think about it,  and now I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it wasn’t a mistake. And trying to let anyone who needs to know, know that they have to bill someone else – which turns out to be more complicated than I could have guessed, especially at the beginning of a new year. And I’ve noted that I need to be sure not to run into any moose on the way home from the office at night, because this new insurance plan won’t pay for the first six days in the hospital.

Secondly, the Husband’s insurance company got changed too, but not for the same reason, for reasons I don’t understand, but some of the same stuff has to be accomplished about this change.

Third, the F’ing FL assisted living place we moved my F’ing FL Friend into last March, unbeknown to us was being sold to an assisted living company out of TX, which took over – and things pretty much fell apart – during the summer. During the summer they sent out one of the worst pieces of trash I’ve ever encountered and called it a new contract, which they wanted us to sign. I sent 50 pages of NO back to them, going over their 80-page mess page by page and making extensive notes, corrections and commentary, which took me most of a week. The exiting Director sent it on to the Corporate people, along with my suggestion that for their next try they actually hire an actual lawyer to write the thing. I should have charged them for my time.

This week we got back their second attempt. It’s shorter, and they took a lot of my suggestions, but not enough of them. It’s still not something anyone in their right minds would actually sign. After I spent twelve hours reading and making notes and writing yet another 6 pages of detailed notes about what’s legally wrong with the 27 pages they sent – I didn’t include the spelling and punctuation and spacing errors this time, though I did point out that they had to use actual English words in a few places where they made some up - they finally sent the 2^nd half of the so-called contract this morning, so I have another 13 pages to critique today. It wasn’t signable without the second half, and the second half can’t, because of the nature of the problems in it, correct the fatal issues in the first half. But in order to save (their) time, I’m going to do it anyway, because it looks like I’ll have to eventually. Yes, I started out life as a paralegal, so I’m not just blowing hot air at them.

So – how much time do I have to waste on this before it would be cheaper and easier and actually safer, to move my FFF to another facility? The only eye-witness report I have about what’s going on down there once the original staff quit or were fired, before the new staff was hired - and they’re still making do with temporary med-techs - is from my FFF’s PCP, who says it’s a godawful mess. Not what one wants to hear about a facility where someone I’m partially responsible for is living.

One more day before the new woodstove arrives, weather gods willing.

One more day of long hours before I can send Cousin Paula my legal notes about the second half of the contract, and then she can put it together with my notes about the first half and send the FF Facility another NO. I told her it was ok to remove the part where I called this so-called contract a heap of steaming diarrhea from hell and the morons at Corporate as dumb as a kettle who needed to be slapped upside the head, and threatened to sic my flying monkeys on them.  Not sure they’ll get the point without my legally accurate, descriptive language, but they aren’t returning my emails at this point, so, whatever.

One more day before I can get back to my own 6-inch-high pile of paperwork that’s only partially started.

Twenty-four more days before the vile Lunar Rabbit gives way to the more fortunate (I hope) Lunar Dragon.

Three more months before spring.

Which reminds me – I’ve got to order seeds in the next couple of weeks, too.

 

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

Photos by Deb Marshall