Clean Carpets and Dirty Politics

 

With something on my schedule every day this week, it flew by, but not everything was social or fun. One day was devoted to getting my house ready for the carpet cleaners to come the next day. In recent years I’ve scheduled them to come the day after my monthly house cleaning day so I could get the cleaning service girl to help me stack and move furniture around, but one thing after another got in the way of that plan this year and I couldn’t keep putting it off. Boy, have their prices have gone up in the decade I’ve been using the company. They started out at $20 a room and now it’s $50. I suppose that’s to be expected but the rub comes from the fact that pension and Social Security checks have stayed the same. And young people wonder why old people start letting house maintenance go by the wayside.

This week also included Red Hat Society Wednesday and we had our second meeting at the brand new senior living complex, a very elegant and accommodating place but I was ready to dance on a table top when a vote was taken on staying there, or not. It was ten to one to go back to our old meeting place in the community room above a supermarket in the tourist town near where my husband grew up. I wasn't the only one who missed getting a Starbucks on the way up and a few groceries after the meeting. We also had a good time discussing tee-shirt designs. We’re all having trouble finding purple clothing so we’re looking into the idea of getting purple tee-shirts with the Red Hat Chapter’s name on the front and something like, “Wild and Crazy” on the back with a line crossing out the ‘wild’ part. We kicked around other ideas that had us laughing and talking about the last time we felt “Sassy and Bad Assy.” By the next meeting we should have some design options to vote on. 

Ohmygod, do I dare bring up the presidential election? I can’t take it anymore! I'm angry and disgusted over all things Trump related. He doesn’t have the temperament, knowledge-base, judgement, character or personal ethics to be the leader of the free world. Never before in my entire voting life have I ever feared that if “my guy” didn’t win that the country would be in extreme peril. I blame the obstructionists who have dominated Washington D.C. in recent years for bringing us to this point. There is no excuse, for example, for the Senate not to give Obama’s nomination for the Supreme Court---Merrick Garland---an up or down vote. That vote has been blocked for over a year now when the average length of time for a justice vote is 75 days. Mitch McConnell and his band of cohorts are no better than welfare queens; they collect a paycheck but refuse to do their jobs. People are rightly fed up with government, but the solution isn’t to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.

And now Trump is saying he’ll implement a nationwide Stop-and-Frisk policy as a solution to big city crime when a 9½ week federal trial in 2013 has already ruled that it’s unconstitutional. And from the other side of his mouth he supports the NRA’s push to make open carry legal in every state. How’s that going to work out? Stop and frisk the blacks for guns but let the whites keep right on walking with their AK-47’s slung over their shoulders? How’s that going to play in Peoria? 

For all Trump’s claims about loving America he sure doesn’t respect our Constitution. How many times has he promised to take free speech away from the media if he’s elected? Once is scary, Hitler-like enough but he keeps beating that drum. Presidents don’t get to cherry pick the Constitution like it’s an assortment of decadent desserts on a cart. Trump also has no grasp of American history. If he did he couldn’t stand on a stage and claim, “African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever!” Worse than during slavery? Worse than during the 100 years of Jim Crow laws and segregation?

And his running mate, Mike Pence, believes all schools should teach Creationism, says condoms are “too modern” and that the government should pay for gay conversion therapy. In other words, he’s a liberal’s nightmare. I need to quit writing before I bust a blood vessel in my head. It’s enough to say that I both dread the outcome of election and wish it could be over with tomorrow. The drama of this election makes me feel like barfing the way the dog did on the carpeting ten minutes after it had been cleaned. ©

Times Change and Husbands Die

 

Yesterday morning I watched my new 15 foot white pine tree get planted back in the area where earlier this summer I had to have three trees removed.  It wasn’t an easy planting because of all the tree roots underground that had to be cut out with an axes and the wooded space the Bob Cat had to work in was like a Chinese puzzle for the driver to solve. My new green friend is beautiful, though. It gives me back my sense of privacy and the tree was well worth the $600 I had to pay.

After the tree crew left I decided I need a new garden sculpture to use in front of a white decorative fence near-by and where some of my husband’s ashes reside. The two metal chickens I’ve been using by the fence are looking tacky so off I went on a mission to check out a country garden center, hoping to find a good sale. No such luck but I did manage to take a wrong turn coming home and ended up on a designated Nature Beauty road that wound around and up and down and finally brought me to a bridge where I could connect with a road I knew would take me home. I’d been lost in that ‘Bermuda Triangle’ before so I wasn’t too worried but it’s at times like that when I start missing my husband all over again. He was my GPS. He grew up in this end of town and knew all its secrets.

If I had a smart phone I could get an app to replace my husband’s knowledge of back roads and highways but sometimes it's a good thing to get lost. Life can get too hum-drum and predictable when we just go through the motions of living. We drift from place to place, from season to season without taking in the scenery that passes by. Then we get lost and we’re forced to take note of things like the ladder-like pattern of shadows on the road ahead cast by WPA trees planted in the 1930s, the sun-dabbled creek off in the distance, the sound of gravel crunching under car tires and an early sign of fall when you see a truck loaded apple crates leaving an orchard. Times change and husbands die and maybe using a GPS would be a constant reminder of those irrefutable facts? Maybe it’s better to get lost once in a while on a beautiful afternoon.

A couple of young guys came this week to clean my carpeting. I’m running behind. This is something I usually have done in the spring but back then I was a tad busy with my flooded basement followed closely on its heels by my broken arm. Life rolling along; there’s always something we can use for excuses for why we don’t do what should be done. The house looks and smells great again and the two cleaning techs had a real appreciation for art so it was fun seeing my house through their eyes. One of them was a college student, an aspiring artist, who stood in front a cowboy print for the longest time as fascinated by its detail as my husband and I were the day we bought the scratchboard.

It must be nice to be a college professor or someone in a career that brings them in contact with young people like these two guys. I fed off their enthusiasm and joy of seeing stuff they’d never seen before and I felt like they enjoyed hearing what I had to say. How cool is that! Old people are okay for me to hang around with---I am one, what else am I going to say? But septuagenarians don’t get excited over much anymore. Times change and husbands die and maybe I do really need to become a cougar after all? That is a JOKE, people. Don’t call the paddy wagon to haul me off to get my values tuned up at the local mental health hospital. What I’m trying to say is it’s been a long time since I’ve been around people who love to learn for learning’s sake. I was like that in my not too distant past and it was one of the things that bonded my husband and me. When kids come along like my carpet cleaners, I see myself and that makes me long to be young again.

On a different note May Sarton wrote something in a book I'm reading that speaks to me: “A life extended in a thousand directions risks dispersion and madness. A kite can fly only when it is held taut by a string in a hand and then catches the wind. Today I am a kite entangled in a tree and there is no one to free me for flight.”

Don held my string.
He helped me fly.
But times change
and husbands die.
I untangle myself
from tree after tree
but whether or not
I find wind again
remains to be seen. ©

* The frog up above is a garden statue I'm lusting after. The only reason I don't get it is because the place I need a statue is a little memorial corner of the yard and my husband wasn't into frogs, yoga or Zen.  Neither am I either but I love the silly expression on that frog's face.