Category Archives: Personal

The Earthquake Theory of Karma

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by in House

≈ 2 Comments

By 8:58 AM, I had burned myself on hot oil, cut myself on a can, and stepped on something sharp, either a tiny piece of glass or a thorn. When I turned around too fast and hit my elbow on my vacuum cleaner, I knew it was probably time to go back to bed. But I have a belief that keeps me going on days like today — the earthquake theory of karma. Basically, when lots of little things are going wrong, I think it’s the universe’s way of bleeding off your bad luck, like the tiny earthquakes that can alleviate stress on a fault line and prevent a major earthquake from happening. So when I’m poking at my foot, trying to figure out what just caused that drop of blood and whether it’s still in there, I’m trying to remember to be grateful that I’m not going to get in a car accident today or drop dead from a heart attack or experience whatever big bad luck might have been headed my way.

Yes, I know it’s ridiculous. But it’s still comforting.

And I’m feeling the need of comforting. I keep reminding myself that this is my choice, my decision, and I can change my mind if I want to. But the fun part of my adventure is a long way away. I’m currently in the stressful part of deciding what needs to be done before I can put the house on the market and what I’m going to keep and how. I’ve done this kind of major purge before, but not nearly as extreme as I’m planning to do it now. When I moved from California to Florida, I got rid of everything… or rather, everything that didn’t have sentimental value. That is a really important distinction.

In the ten years since, I’ve gained lots and lots of stuff, some of it just from living, which is easy to let go of, if tedious to go through, but plenty of it from processes that give it sentimental value. So I look around my room now. There’s a LLadro centaur sitting on my bookcase. I bought it in Spain when I was 17 years old. It lived in my parents house until my mom died, but now I have it. Am I getting rid of it?

Next to it is the entire collected works of Lois McMaster Bujold, everything except her last book, which I have electronically. Am I keeping them? In the corner is a Beanie Baby hedgehog, one of the only stuffed animals left from when Rory was that age. He had dozens, of course, as kids do, but they’re all gone, except for this little hedgehog that’s been keeping me company for the past ten years. Can I say good-bye? In front of it, a tile with Rory’s five-year-old handprint on it. How can I possibly toss that out? And on, and on, and on, it goes.

But I’m basically choosing to re-purchase everything that gets stored. If I rent a storage unit big enough for some items of furniture, it will probably cost $100/month, for a 10 x 10 unit, for maybe at most 400 usable square feet. (I’m calculating 10 x 10 x 4 feet high, but obviously it could be taller. Equally obviously, nothing packs without some room for air, and I can’t just stack all my possessions neatly to the ceiling, so not all the space can be used.) Say I live in the RV for three years, minimum. (And I think those three years will fly by — it could be much longer.) Every item is costing me some portion of $3600. Would I spend $9 on my Lladro centaur? Sure thing. On my Beanie Baby hedgehog… hmm. $50 for the collected works of Bujold? A bargain, but if I was in the bookstore, I wouldn’t choose to spend $50 that way. For Rory’s handprint? Maybe I’ll just drop that on the floor and keep my fingers crossed that it breaks, heartless mother that I am.

I own three sets of china: my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my great-grandmother’s. The sentimental value is obviously enormous. When I use my grandmother’s plates, I remember Christmas dinners in Bethlehem, putting olives on my fingers, wiggling in my seat while I waited for a pause in the conversation before I could ask to be excused. When I use my great-grandmother’s dishes, I think of her and I think of my aunt, who sent them to me. When I use my mom’s china… you get the picture. But I hardly ever use any of it. Does it really make sense to put it in a storage unit racking up costs indefinitely? It’s not like R wants to inherit three sets of china.

Meanwhile, of course, I’ve barely managed to write a word of Grace because I’ve been so distracted. I write sentences here and there but the chapter I’m in is the hellish “time passes” chapter. I was joking to my friend Lynda yesterday that I should really just write, “Chapter Seventeen, Time passes. Chapter Eighteen,” and get on with it. While walking the dogs this morning I told myself firmly that there is no putting the house on the market until the book is done, so the longer I delay on the book, the longer everything will take. It’s a good mental promise, but instead of coming home and starting to write, I came home and started to clean out the garage. But I am making that commitment — I’m going to finish the book before I try to sell the house. I’ll just be doing all the stuff to get ready to sell the house along the way.

Tomorrow I pick up R in Sarasota for spring break. While he’s home, we’ll go through all this stuff and see what tough decisions he wants to make. I have a feeling it’ll be easy for him and he’ll say “toss it all” but I’ve still got lots of his toys so there might be some serious nostalgia happening first. The Playmobil train is definitely going to be hard to say good-bye to. I might have to set it up and play with it a little first. And somewhere there are some Thomas the Tank Engine pieces that I really might simply not be able to let go of.

So, decisions, decisions. It’s not going to be easy!

Water

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in House, RV

≈ 2 Comments

Last night, I walked into the kitchen to get a snack and found water on the floor. Not a lot of water. A tiny trail in the cracks between the tiles.

Two years ago, I would have said, “Huh, must have spilled something,” or blamed it on the dogs. I would have wiped it up with a paper towel and forgotten all about it within ten minutes. Not anymore!

I crouched down on the floor and examined that water like it held the secrets to the universe. It didn’t touch the walls, so it couldn’t be coming from a wall, thank goodness. It didn’t touch the refrigerator, which halfway makes sense, since I never hooked up the water to the fridge again after the debacle of July 2014, where a pinprick hole turned into a major remodel, but also ruined my hope that maybe I’d spilled from the filter water without realizing. It did not appear to be connected to the dogs’ bowl, so it probably wasn’t them being messy.

Finally, I opened the cabinet under the sink and damn it, damn it, damn it, everything was wet. My faucet has a flexible head — the kind that you can pull out to spray water, like a shower hose — and I’d noticed before that it had been leaking. Apparently, the head was loose enough that when it was sitting in the stand, water was draining into the faucet and out below. I’d washed a bunch of dishes earlier and the whole time, water had been drip-drip-dripping into the cabinet. Argh!

I pulled everything out, mopped it up, tightened the faucet, watched for drips, (none, whew), and grumbled. But by the time I was done, I felt like it was the universe saying to me, “yes, really–sell the house!” and I felt joyful again.

Over the course of the six days that I’ve been contemplating this idea, I’ve gone from “well, maybe sometime” to “in 2017, I will” to “perhaps by September I’ll be ready to list the house” to “how soon could I have the house ready to put on the market?” At the moment, I think the answer to that question is May: I have some work scheduled to be done in May that should really be done before I try to sell. But May feels awfully far away. I know it’s really not — I’ve got plenty to do between now and then, including finishing writing Grace! And September still probably makes a lot more sense. But I already want to start planning where I’ll be going & how I’ll be living, not keeping a wary eye out for puddles and worrying about whether I need to get a plumber.

Today the realtor comes and this afternoon, if I manage to write some good words, I might take myself off to an RV lot to see if I can test-drive the model I’m thinking about. Good times!

Ten year blogaversary

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in House, Personal, RV

≈ 13 Comments

I mentioned this on Monday, but I started writing this blog ten years ago today.

Time is strange.

Yep, that’s my deep, profound, thoughtful cliche on this anniversary of a decade gone by.

I would not have expected this day to be particularly meaningful to me. My blog has always really been more of a way for me to save my memories and talk to myself than any sort of grand project. I’ve never made any money on it, never intended or tried to, and I don’t pay much attention to whether people are reading it, except for trying to make sure I say hi when people say hi to me. For a long, long time my only reader was me, and when a couple of you started reading regularly, it took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that you were there at all. (Hi, Judy! Hi, Carol! Hi, Barbara! Hi, Other More Anonymous Readers!)

It’s sort of like remembering the anniversary of buying a journal, or maybe buying a kitchen appliance. Like, “Whoa, this is the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle — I sure have made a lot of tea over the years.” I will not notice the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle and I honestly have no idea why I remembered this anniversary, except that I noticed the archive list last month and realized March 2006 was the earliest date in it.

But ten years is actually a remarkable amount of life. Ten years ago, I lived in Santa Cruz, with no intention of moving. I am fairly sure that we were living in a run-down, mold-ridden, rental house where my bedroom window was permanently cracked to let an electric cord through (to the sump pump under the house), and if we weren’t living there, we were about to be.

Ten years ago, my son had recently been diagnosed as having severe, even profound, learning disabilities. Ten years ago, I had a job that paid me well for work that I was very good at and very stifled by. Ten years ago, I had an adorable puppy who I already loved with all my heart.

If you had said to me ten years ago, “What’s your life going to be like in ten years?” and then, “What do you want your life to be like in ten years?”, I would have answered with, “I have no idea,” followed by “I have no idea.”

But if you had said to me back then that in ten years, I would be living in a cute three-bedroom house in Florida with a window seat and French doors to a patio with a swimming pool; that my son would be in college, with multiple scholarships, on the verge of presenting at his second academic conference; that I would be eking out a precarious living by writing fiction; and that the adorable puppy would still be as adorable and would have an adorable companion, I would have laughed at you. That set of fantasies would have seemed as unrealistic as they come, with the second dog pushing the whole thing over the edge into haha, ridiculous.

And yet… here we are. Here I am. That is my reality, or at least a little window on it. For some reason, it makes me want to cry. I wish I could go back to that self, who was always tired, and often depressed, being made sick, sick, sicker by the mold in that horrible house, and tell her what the future would bring. Not that it didn’t bring plenty of bad along with the good — these ten years have held more grief and loss than I could have handled knowing about back then. But it is amazing to me to look around at my life, to think about the friends that I hadn’t even met yet, the knowledge that I didn’t have, and realize how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed.

But the thing about looking back on ten years is that it also inspires me to look forward. Where do I want to be ten years from now? What do I want out of the next ten years of my life?

I got here by taking chances. By doing things that seemed impulsive and scary. Moving to Florida was huge, quitting my job even bigger, dropping out of graduate school terrifying (and yet still the right call, I think). What terrifying things do I want to do in the next ten years?

Five days ago, I thought, “Maybe I should sell the house and buy an RV. It could be my tiny, mobile house. I could live in it with the dogs, write just the way I do here, cook in my tiny kitchen, and drive around the country looking for beautiful sunsets.”

Four days ago, I started telling people — my dad, my brother, my friend Tim — that I was thinking about it.

Three days ago, I started researching RVs.

Two days ago, I stared cleaning out my garage and closets.

Yesterday, I called a realtor.

Today, I’m making it real. I’ve decided. I’m going to embark on the biggest adventure of my life. It’s exciting and terrifying and exciting again. Getting rid of all of my things is going to be hard and painful and take forever; selling the house is going to simultaneously be enormously freeing and agonizing; the process of buying an RV frightens me like nothing I’ve done since buying a house; and it will be ever so strange when Rory has a school break and I offer him a tent to sleep in, not to mention holidays.

But ten years from now, I want to look back and think, “Wow, you might have been crazy, but you sure were brave.”

Meanwhile, of course, I’m going to finish writing Grace. And even before that, I’m going to walk the dog who’s been gazing at me ever-so-plaintively for the last thirty minutes.

Grace as needed

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Depression, Food

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

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I’m not sure why I woke up in a bleak mood this morning. Nothing went wrong, nothing bad happened, and yet my old enemy depression grabbed me by the throat and started beating me up.

To this level: I opened the cupboard to get the coffee and somehow knocked a glass out. It shattered on the granite countertop and I sighed and decided to finish making coffee before cleaning up. And in the 90 seconds while I scooped the coffee and ran the water, my brain kept cycling around the question of whether I could kill myself with the broken glass but still somehow make it look like an accident. I’m not suicidal. I have no intention of killing myself. But that thought process is known as suicidal ideation and it’s one of the deepest and most frustrating symptoms of depression for me. I finished making the coffee and I cleaned up the glass carefully and I fed the dogs and I tried very hard not to hate myself.

And then I opened Facebook and read this post from Anne Lamott. And you should absolutely go read the whole thing, because it is so worth it, but this line — “The author might mention in passing that we get to start a new, sillier, more self-forgiving day whenever we want to.” — that line is the gift of grace that I needed this morning.

(Really, go read the whole thing. I want to quote it all. And then read the comments, because many of them are lovely and moving, too.)

Today, I am going to be silly and self-forgiving. And I’m going to write a lot of good words, and maybe I’m even going to hunt down some Valentine’s Day chocolate (or other chocolate, I’m not picky).

And on a totally unrelated note:

stuffed acorn squash

Acorn squash stuffed with stuff

Yesterday’s invented recipe was acorn squash, sprinkled with ginger and cinnamon and roasted, then filled with a mix of apple, red onion, cucumber, dried cranberry, and diced chicken apple sausage. I think it would have been better if I’d used celery instead of cucumber and heated up the filling, plus the addition of some toasted pecans and goat cheese would have been amazing, but I want to save it for future reference anyway. Delicious, healthy, filling, and even AIP.

Friends and food

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Food, Personal, Pets, Randomness

≈ 6 Comments

A friend dropped by the other day around eleven and we walked the dogs together. When we got back, I invited her in and offered her lunch. She did that polite demurral thing, but when I said, “Really, I’ve got plenty,” she accepted. I made us salads — mixed greens topped with chicken apple sausage, sautéed onion, apple, and toasted pecans. And on mine, a little goat cheese. She doesn’t eat dairy. Plus, balsamic vinegar. That’s a normal lunch for me, and it was no big deal to make more, but she raved about how delicious and healthy it was.

That evening, another friend stopped by to show off his new purchase — the batmobile of motorcycles, a Victory motorcycle, I’m going to say this one. It was gorgeous. I’d been in the middle of cooking dinner, so I invited him in. He said, “Are you sure you have enough?” and I said, “You might have to eat something more later, but I’ve got extra.” He came in and I chopped up some more squash and made salads that I hadn’t been planning to make, so we had steelhead trout marinated in soy sauce (gluten-free), sriracha, and lime juice and sautéed, with yellow squash sautéed with ginger, plus a salad of mixed greens, celery, radishes, and a peach honey mustard vinaigrette. He said it was probably the first salad he’d eaten in a month and the best meal he’d had in a while.

Yesterday, my same dog-walking friend came by early and walked the dogs with me again — she likes the exercise and B is much, much better at walking when there are two of us for some reason. Maybe because I can really leave him behind when someone else is holding his leash and so then he hurries to keep up? But I had coffee already made, so invited her in and made us breakfast. (She again said, “Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” to which I answered, “I have bacon.” :)) We had eggs, scrambled with onion, spinach, cilantro, and avocado and cooked in coconut oil (to avoid the dairy), with the bacon on the side. The eggs were actually seriously delicious. Great combination of flavors, and the coconut oil worked really well. It’s a different flavor than butter would give, but a tasty flavor.

Anyway, that day — well, or 24-hour period, since it was really one day to the next — that day was once my fantasy. When I started learning how to cook, it was mostly so that I could feed myself, but there was also a wistful daydream associated with it of being able have someone drop by and whip up a meal for them in the kitchen like it was no big deal. To have a friend over and feed them without having to plan, without having to run to the grocery store or buy ingredients. To open the refrigerator and say, “what can I make with what I’ve got?” and have the meal turn out as delicious and interesting as if I was in a restaurant.

It’s taken me seventeen years or so, but I wish I could go back in time to my younger self, the me that was going through a divorce, alone in a dive-y apartment with a three year old, feeling overwhelmed and grief-stricken and angry, angry, angry, and thank her. The decision she (I) made to learn to cook was made out of frustration and financial insecurity and loneliness. I knew that if I was ever going to be the parent that R deserved, I needed to be able to feed him more than pasta and fruit. But what a good decision it was.

Edited to add: my friend Tim congratulated me on this moment by saying, “Congrats on adulting to the extreme,” which made me laugh. It is the perfect summation of how I feel.

Towels

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Boring, Personal, Pets, Zelda

≈ 8 Comments

I did laundry this weekend and actually washed ALL the things. Sheets, towels, tablecloths, clothing — by the end of the weekend, all the fabric in my house was clean. Go, me!

Except it turned out to be a terrible idea. I was also freezing all weekend long, wondering whether my heater was broken. I didn’t have two feet of snow, but the temperature was down in the 30’s and 40’s, which for us is cold. It was only on my last load of laundry that I realized that my thermostat is on the wall outside the laundry room. With the dryer running all weekend, the thermostat thought the house was lovely and warm. In my bedroom, I thought socks under the covers were barely enough to get by. Grr… or maybe I should be saying Brr…?

Post all the laundry, I needed fresh towels in my bathroom. I went looking for my favorites, the ones that belong in there. They’re blue, soft and thick, and big. Bath sheets, really, not towels. I’ve got plenty of towels, of course, but those two are the best. I couldn’t find them. I checked all the places towels might remotely hide. The other bathroom, the cupboard, the linen closet, my closet… no towels. I hadn’t seen them for a while but I’d just been assuming that they were somewhere — in a laundry basket or in the laundry room — but no.

And then I remembered — before R went back to school, he asked if he could take towels with him.

I told him, sure, of course.

He asked whether it mattered which ones he took.

I told him to take whichever ones he liked.

He pushed, said, “Are you sure? Any of them?”

I said, “Yeah, we’ve got plenty of towels. Take the ones you want.”

He started explaining to me how he really didn’t like the towels he had, because they weren’t absorbent enough and they didn’t dry fast enough and he liked softer towels, and I, frankly, tuned him out, because a) towels, not the most interesting subject, and b) I was in the middle of getting ready to have people over and thinking about food and cleaning.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have paid more attention.

There’s a part of me that’s annoyed — if I had not thought that MY towels were safely in my bathroom or laundry, I would not have told him he could take whichever towels he wanted. But mostly, I feel a mix of pleasure — I have raised a boy who is aware of the importance of quality linens, ha — and amusement — that teaches me to not pay attention when R is talking! He might even have specifically asked about the blue towels when he was telling me why the towels he had at school were not good enough. Oh, well. I do have plenty of towels, so I’ll survive.

Have I mentioned how much B loves the blow dryer? I don’t usually use a blow dryer but I’d gotten it out recently when I had to leave the house and it was cold and my hair was wet. B danced with delight. Up on his back legs, which he does not usually do, to tell me how excited he was. He knew exactly what it was and he loves it. Since then, I’ve been blowing him dry after his bath. It’s his favorite thing. Z watches us from two feet away, a little jealous of the doting attention that B’s getting but also really reluctant to come near the thing that makes noise. She’s not fond of noisemakers that might be vacuum cleaners.

Anyway, the other day we went for a walk in the rain. Typically, B refuses to walk in the rain. That day, he thought about it at the door and decided to come with us. I was surprised, but when we got home, he went straight to the spot where I’ve blown him dry (a floor outlet) and sat down. It was a very clear demand. My dogs have me so well trained.

Filing

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Boring, Personal, Randomness

≈ 5 Comments

I decided today that it was time to tackle the filing that I have let pile up for… ahem. A while. (I have no idea how long, but if I ever make it to the bottom of the pile, I will probably be embarrassed by the answer.)

It was a strategic decision: when everything needs to be done and cleaning is feeling overwhelming, start with one corner, then move on.

I got maybe halfway through. Maybe. Could be closer to 1/3 through. Then I decided that I needed to go do something else for a while, because it was causing sensations of impending doom. Do you have ever that feeling that life is completely out of your control and that your feeble attempt to keep track of stuff is throwing rocks at the incoming tide? Yeah, not my favorite feeling. And the reality is, who cares if the filing is done? I could take that entire pile of stuff and pitch it in the trash right now, today, and nobody would ever notice or care. Except maybe me when it came time to do my taxes and I didn’t have any receipts.

I just wrote a long ramble about things that pile up and then deleted it because it was possibly the most boring thing I have ever written. That’s a tough bar to reach, frankly, because I have written some boring stuff in my day. I used to write press releases and while one tries, of course, to make every word scintillating, a press release is only interesting if you have some intrinsic reason to care about the topic. For most people, they’re barely skimmable. My thoughts on dog hair (as a substance that really piles up amazingly) were about the same. But writing a blog post is my current justification for not returning to that pile of filing.

In my other writing, I seem to have gone colon and semi-colon crazy lately. I’m blaming Uprooted — I noticed on my third reading that Naomi Novik was quite profligate with her punctuation and it did not in any way impair my reading enjoyment, so I guess maybe it rubbed off. My run-on sentences are all my own fault, though.

*sigh. This is the kind of post that involves much staring into space and the eventual realization that I’m just procrastinating. There are so many useful things that I need to be doing — laundry and dog walking and yes, filing — that I might as well get on with them. But I think I need to reward myself. No food rewards and nothing healthy pretending to be a reward … Ah, I know. But I need help!

What movie/television show, preferably on Netflix or Amazon Prime, should I watch as deserved entertainment when I finish the filing?

 

 

Resolutions

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Personal, Randomness

≈ 6 Comments

My list of things to do feels terrifyingly long and filled with the sort of annoying stuff that could take forever or could not.

Example: I’ve been hearing weird noises, which at first I attributed to the dogs, or visitors, but yesterday all visitors were gone, the dogs were with me, and I still heard weird noises. I’m thinking animal(s) living in my walls, and probably not mice. It’s not little skittering noises, but banging and thuds. So somehow I need to find out what’s visiting me and get rid of it. Could be a big job, could be a little job.

Second example: I took down the Christmas tree but I haven’t put away the ornaments. I left them all piled on the window seat and the chairs and the floor. So they need to get put away, but I have no idea how long it will take and it probably depends on how carefully I put them away.

Third example: writing a book. Oh, wait, I know that one’s a big job. Bigger than it should be because I started over again right before Christmas and am back on Chapter 3. Bad me. I’m not throwing everything out, though, just… well, just a lot of it. I am so appalling impractical as a writer. So adding a fourth huge job, find a real job that pays me money so that I can continue to be impractical when it comes to writing, without letting the dogs starve. Well, or me starve either, but I fell in love with CostCo’s dark chocolate sea salt caramels in December and it was not good for me. I’ve got some room to go before I’m starving.

Meanwhile, though, my entire face hurts because my jaw has locked up. I’ve had Temperomandibular joint problems since I was a teenager — and ugh, that wikipedia link is depressing. This is the worst pain I’ve had from it since I was seventeen and I’ll probably be headed to the doctor later this week, when I’m sure my new health insurance is active. But maybe not since wikipedia tells me that there aren’t really any effective treatments, other than what I’ve been working on myself already — trying to relax and lower my stress level.

Ha, and I just realized that I’m missing yoga because I got distracted by that long wikipedia post and my phone’s in my purse so the alarm didn’t remind me that it was time to go. How’s that for irony? R would point out that I’m misusing the term, or rather using it in today’s conventional (yet non-dictionary approved) meaning of an unfortunate coincidence. So yeah, it’s an unfortunate coincidence that I was too busy thinking about feeling stressed and reading about the physical consequences of said stress to make it to my life’s best de-stressor. Alas.

But that brings me back to my resolution: to take one thing at a time. How’s that for a nice straightforward resolution? And the current next thing will be to finish this blog post and go find some breakfast that doesn’t require chewing.

The Longest Night

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in House, Personal

≈ 6 Comments

On Saturday, I decided I should hang Christmas lights. I don’t get serious about them — I am not one of those people with decorations on the roof and lit-up lawn displays of Santa and all his reindeer — but I do have a few strings of blue and white danging icicles that stretch across the front of the house. I also have incredible scratchy hedges that protect the front of the house from people wanting to do stupid things like paint or hang lights. But I dragged out the ladder and the step-stool and the lights and tried to find the nails that we put up last year.

Hanging lights is one of those chores that reminds me how my life has not turned out the way I expected it to. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, I don’t even think about being single. Solitude doesn’t feel “alone” to me, it feels normal. But hanging lights and putting air in the car’s tires makes me bizarrely resentful. Where is the partner who is supposed to be taking care of these chores? How come he never showed up? This year, I tried to convince R to help me but he was so passive-aggressively hostile to the idea, in the way that only a teenager can be, that I gave up on him. But I grumbled as I hung the lights. An extra ten inches of height and another pair of hands would have made it so much easier.

And then I kicked a hole in my wall.

I was trying to balance on the edge of the window to reach a spot that I couldn’t get to on the ladder because a dying tree is in the way. I feel guilty about the stupid tree because the lawn people write me notes telling me that I need to treat the trees because they are sick. The notes are nice notes, they point out that trees are expensive and that treating the trees is cheaper than replacing the trees, but I can’t afford to treat the trees and so I ignore the notes. And I ignore the tree. But when it’s in my face while I try to get a ladder past it in order to hang Christmas lights, it’s tough not to notice the yellowing leaves, the brown spots, and the white spots that are probably hatching bugs.

I was doing a good job of not noticing the tree, though, or at least of only thinking of it as an inconvenience, as I tried to squeeze past it to reach the corner of the house, so I could hang the lights. But it meant that I was balancing precariously on a very tiny ledge of brick. When I leaned too far, I… I don’t even know what happened. I am trying to picture it now, but mostly, I think my foot hit something that should have been solid and it wasn’t. The wood just crumbled away at the pressure. It wasn’t really the kick that did the deed — the wood was waiting to go.

After that, my interest in hanging lights declined to nil. I draped them across the other corner and let them hang. It is the most half-baked light hanging job ever. If light displays were graded, I’d get points for showing up, but a C for effort and a D- for execution.

But yesterday I went to church. I think I was thinking that if I can’t find the holiday spirit with lights, maybe the music of my childhood would do? It didn’t — largely because the music was not the music of my childhood. Even the offering song wasn’t the same. But the church is having a service today, this evening, a longest night service. The minister introduced it as a service for people who find the holidays hard, a moment to remember those we’ve lost and a time for quiet meditation. I’m not sure if I’ll go — I missed yoga all last week because I’ve been sick, so I’d like to get some exercise today — but I love the concept.

On this, the longest night, I remember my grandparents. I remember my mother. I remember the friends I’ve lost. I reflect on my worries — houses and trees, money and health — acknowledge them, and let them go. I think about my loved ones, with problems that I cannot control or fix, and I remind myself that those problems are not in my hands.

On the longest night, I remember that dawn will come, and that tomorrow, the night will be shorter.

Yin and Yang

16 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Personal, Pets

≈ 5 Comments

2015-12-14 16.08.41

Z’s attitude to B has been, from Day One, an appropriately regal, “You are invisible to me.” This is infinitely superior to her attitude toward M, which was a wary, “You might be dangerous. Do I need to defend my person from you?”

The latter led her into some very painful behavior. Painful to both of us — breaking up dog fights is not fun and has generally involved damage to my person, except for the one time where I scooped Zelda up and threw her into the pool. I read something about Jack Russell terriers once that said you should never own two of them, because if they fight, they will fight to the death — they are incapable of giving up. M had every advantage over Z but when Z decided she needed to fight, she would not let go, and M, quite sensibly, defended herself. Anyway, I think that book was probably silly — plenty of people own two JRTs without trouble, but Z has a stubbornness and a focus that is innate. She would have been good at catching rats, I suspect. Put her on the job and away she goes.

Her job, however, at least as she sees it, is me, the care and keeping of. Her focus is on reading my mind, delivering her interpretation of my wishes, keeping me safe. B has just been a peripheral creature, innocuous, not threatening, not interesting. Lately, however, I’ve been leaving the house a lot more often than I used to, and leaving the two of them home alone. Gradually, slowly, tentatively… well, you can see the photo. R called them Yin and Yang. I call them adorable.