Busy Week of Firsts

I couldn’t decide what to write about for this week’s post. I had narrowed it down to two themes. 1) About all the ‘firsts’ that happened in my life since I last wrote or, 2) how busy my week was. After mulling it over in my mind I came to the conclusion that if I wrote about the ‘firsts’ that would, by nature, include a lot of the stuff that kept me so busy. I kid you not, every single day I had at least four things on my day planner. I don’t like being that busy but sometimes you have no choice.

I’ll start with a day when I drove a 40 mile round trip (which is a LOT for me to drive) up to the electronics recycling station near where I used to live to dispose of my old printer. There are closer places if you want to pay to drop electronics off but I was invited to have lunch with a couple of old friends at a place nearby, so it was easier to go up there where I know my way around than to cart printer through Best Buys or Staples, assuming I could wade through heavy traffic to find the places. I had boxed that old printer up in the new printer’s box and have been riding it around in my back seat for three weeks, hoping someone would steal it but either I shop in an honest part of town or car pirates of opportunity know that trick.

I used to have lunch with these women twice a month when I lived up in that neck of the woods. Long time readers might remember we called ourselves The Gathering Girls and it sure felt like old times being back at the Guyland Cafeteria. They and the place hadn't changed a bit. This was the first time since I moved that we all sat at the same table laughing like we used, we even ordered the same specials we always did in the past.

After lunch I swung around to the cemetery where my husband’s and my tombstone is located and half of his ashes are buried. I had come with a shovel, whisk broom, garbage bag and gallon water all prepared to dig out the quack grass that usually is attempting to cover over the inscription in the marble, but for the first time since Don died in 2012, it didn’t need my help. I couldn’t help wondering if it died out because the last time I was there, I sprinkled the ashes from my dog, Levi, closely to the footing of the stone. Maybe he killed the quack grass by marking the stone with magic, ghost urine.

Also close by was the house that I designed and had built in 2001 and was sold before moving to my continuum care campus. It was my first time seeing it since the day I moved out and I wish I hadn’t. When I lived there the lawn and yard was the best on the street and it was the best kept yard I’ve ever had in my life. But the new owners let the grass burn up and it looked like a kid with no clue for how to mow grass was doing the job. It’s never seen a weed wacker or an edger and the shrubbery hadn’t been trimmed since I left. I doubt they can even see out the library window anymore. And the back yard where my nature strip should be blooming with wild flowers is completely overwhelmed with invasive sumac. I had my lawn care guy take it out every year. I looked the house up on Zillow to see if it’s changed hands since I sold it but it hasn’t. They place a value on it that is $69,000 more than I sold it for! Anyway, it’s true that you can’t go home again. I’ll never drive by the place again.

Another day I had to take my car in for its thirty thousand mile servicing which included a tire rotation. The dealership is new to me and they had trouble getting a lung nut off because it was cross-threaded so they had to drill it out and replace some stuff on the wheel and it ended up costing me an extra $150. What was supposed to be an hour job ended up being  all afternoon because they didn’t have the part in stock, and they said it wasn’t safe to drive the was it was. So the next first time I have to write about was they gave me a loaner car to drive and it was the kind with a button to push instead of a key. Took me awhile to figure out how to start the silly thing and it beeped warnings and was a zippy little thing t drive. The service department manager told me to contact my old dealership to get reimbursed for the $150 and I’ll let you know how well that works out. 

Another day I had an appointment for my annual eye exam. I’m two years out from my cataract surgeries and I thought for sure I’d need the laser treatment to remove a new cataract forming over the fake lens they put in one of my eyes. Turns out that eye changed enough that I need a new prescription for the left lens while the other  eye remained the same. That’s the first time that’s ever happened in my life. I felt good leaving the office after ordering just one lens and more importantly, after hearing that my macular pucker hasn’t changed significantly. That sound you're hearing is a sigh of relief. I've been worried about that pucker.

And last but not least, the best first time of all makes me very happy. It was the first time an ex-president was indicted in a criminal court and on espionage charges and they look like they will stick.

 Until next Wednesday….  ©

 * The photo at the top is of my old back yard before the new owners let the sumac take over.

 

Dew Drops and Tear Drops

I used to be a night owl before the pandemic. Going to bed at 3 AM was not unusual and a throwback to my working days…or I should say working nights. I did a lot of writing after midnight and I like the quietness of the neighborhood when everyone is tucked into their beds. No little kids dominating the sidewalks, no barking dogs. No lawn mowers or snow blowers filling the airwaves. You learn a lot about your neighbors in the middle of the night. The young couple across the street, for example, are afraid of the night. They leave their porch light on from dusk to dawn. The neighbors next door are very trusting. They leave their garage door up all night, confident no one will come along to steal the guy’s fancy tools and medieval gear---they run renaissance festivals across three-four states. And, yes, I’ve seen more than a couple of sword fights out my bedroom window. They’re interesting people and if you want to weave your own fabric, spin your own yarn or make your own chainmail, they’re your go-to couple. 

When the pandemic first started I couldn’t fall asleep and when I did I’d wake up an hour or so later then worry would take over my mind and not let go. So I got into the habit of taking sleeping pills and sometimes even that didn’t work. Long story short now I’m falling asleep at midnight and waking up at seven and I’ve almost weaned myself from taking the Ambien bottle out of the drawer except on full moon night which is why it was prescribed in the first place. Seven o’clock in the morning has a lot in common with the middle of the night. For the first hour anyway and I have to admit it’s a pretty time of the day. The dew on the lawn before the sun tops the trees to burn it off is the stuff poets write about. 

"How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity

under roses and violets and morning dew!"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

Rabindranath Tagore

When I was in my twenties I wanted to be poet when I grew up. I never felt like a grown up until my husband had his stroke. I had adult responsibilities—the job, the house, the car---but not having kids made me feel like a kid looking for the next great learning experience as I waited for my ‘real’ life to begin. I can’t say I didn’t go through a mourning period for what never happened, but it was short lived on the missing parenthood front. Of course, the dream of being a poet had no medical excuse holding me back. I held on to that dream a lot longer although now I acknowledge if I have any writing talent at all it’s not in the poetry genre. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe as Lord Byron once hinted at, maybe I can make my wordsmithing mark without having to rhyme. 

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."

We might not all want to reach thousands with our words but the desire to communicate with our fellow man, to be understood and to understand others, is rooted in our prehistoric past. How exciting it must have been to develop a language when there was none. I visualize a caveman grunting out the word ‘hunt’ and being understood for the first time like Helen Keller at the well when she first made the connection between the letters w-a-t-e-r being spelled out on her hand to the water running through her fingers. As she wrote in her autobiography years later, “That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away."  

If you’ve read the introduction at the top of this blog you know my husband lost his ability to speak and write after his stroke. When you lose that connection with someone you love you mourn a part of your relationship. Family caregivers know all too well you let go in stages until the final moment comes and you mourn one last time. I went to the cemetery to visit my husband’s grave this week. The pandemic lock-down prevented me from going in April when I’d normally go to dig up the quackgrass around the stone and for the first time ever, I sat in my car crying. I cried for him. I cried for me. I cried for the whole bloody world. I cried like I haven’t cried since 1983 when my mother died. And I cried because I really, REALLY wanted a Little Miss Debbie Swiss Cake Roll to fill the emptiness I felt. ©

Ordered this tee shirt the next day, figured I needed the reminder. Thanks to the Boomer Girl's Guide blog for the link.

The Grave Digger

I had a blog post due soon and I didn’t have a single idea rolling around in my head. I guess it was too early in the morning for inspiration to kick in from looking out the window at the dwindling patches of snow along the cattail bog and the unwelcome red squirrel munching my at woodpecker feeder. Still, I dutifully sat at the computer. I’m from the school of belief that if you want to call yourself a writer you have to spend a minimum of an hour a day writing. Others set their daily writing quota in terms of a word count but that seems like a rule tailor-made for cheating. I mean it’s really, really, really, really easy to cheat when you’re using a word count to judge your productivity. Having a propensity for redundancy or worse yet, powder-sugaring all your nouns with too many adjective might be tempting tools to use in college but I’m too old to step in that bull poop.

As I sat there I was totally wiped out physically from all the work and shopping I’ve been doing to redecorate my bath and bedroom. I was so thorough, I even used Bio-Clean on my toilet, shower and sink drains and I vacuumed out the heat ducts before putting the caps back on. And I waxed the drawer runners in my chest-of-drawers and I used toothpicks on the tiny crevices around the light switches before putting the plates back on. There isn’t a surface that hasn’t been painted, washed, shined or lemon oiled except the ceiling fixtures which I hope I can get my cleaning service girl to do next week. Obsessive? I think not. Those rooms haven’t been deep cleaned in a couple of years…since I started using the cleaning service. They just do a lick and a promise---looks nice when they leave if you don’t examine the corners and look under stuff. What gets me is they do offer a deep cleaning service but they charge ten dollars an hour more to their $32 an hour normal rate. I’ve done too many deep cleaning projects in my life to believe a low skill job like that is worth $42 an hour. Call me stubborn because I won’t pay that when in my daydreams I’m still willing and able. Well, willing for sure but the able part just might kill me. 

Later that day I ran some errands---one to return a blanket and another to get yarn to knit a sweater vest with a John Deere tractor on the front. On the way home I stopped at Culver’s, my favorite fast-food place. Usually I use the take-out window but I decided to go inside instead, thinking I might find someone to exchange a few words with. You know, like: “What can I get you?” “A North American cod sandwich and a small chocolate concrete mixer. Oh, and a cup for water.” “That will be $9.36.” “Put this number on your table. Have a nice day.” Yup, I got my conversation for the day…or so I thought.

A woman at drink dispenser machine was vexed because she couldn’t find the water. I showed her the lever and she said, “Jean! I’d know your voice anywhere!” I looked at her face, drew a blank and it must have shown. “You don’t know who I am, do you,” she stated. After an embarrassingly long pause I guessed ‘Sandy’ only because I knew she lived in that neighborhood but I hadn’t seen her since my husband’s funeral. She is the wife of a guy my husband went to high school with and at their class reunions we’d keep each other entertained. Sandy invited me to sit with her and her sister and I got the conversation I’d been craving. 

You’d think after knowing my husband for 42 years I’d know every detail of his life, especially a guy like Don who loved telling stories. But that afternoon I learned something new: my husband once dug a grave! It happened in his teens and it all started when three guys got in trouble for taking a picnic table from the riverside park and putting it in the river. Sandy’s husband was the fourth guy in the caper but he didn’t get caught and the other boys didn’t rat him out. The town judge sentenced the kids to cutting the grass at the cemetery for the entire summer. I knew that part. I didn’t know that one day their supervisor gave them some hand axes and told teens to cut down a couple of trees. Don---a farm boy who grew up cutting firewood in their sixty acre woods---went home, got his chainsaw and they had the work done in no time. When the supervisor found out they’d escaped the manual labor and had taken the easy route he made Don---the ring leader---dig a grave with a hand shovel.

If teenagers got in this same kind of trouble today, I wonder what a judge with do with that. Make the parents pay a fine? Listen to the parents make excuses? “It was just a silly prank!” Send the teens to juvenile detention? I don’t know but I have a new trinket to shop for and glue on my husband’s cemetery stone…a tiny shovel. I’ll bet some random kid won’t be as quick to steal that like they do every summer with the Snoopy trinkets I leave Don instead of Memorial Day flowers. But I’ll bet others passing by the stone will wonder if the shovel was there for the deceased to dig himself out. ©