Lemonade at the Japanese Garden

Thursday I got up at the crack of dawn to go to an early appointment at my orthopedic doctor’s office. I’ve been doing daily shots to build up my bones from the inside out and I’m supposed to get a bone density test yearly while I’m on that medication. When I got to the office, the girl at the window said they’d been trying to call me for several days because they had to change my appointment---to June of 2016! “You couldn’t have tried very hard,” I said, “I have an answering machine and caller ID. What number were you calling?” She told me. Right number. Check. Then I asked why they would re-schedule me when I’m supposed to get a bone scan every year, and when I told her that, she said and I quote: “Oh!” So now I have to go back next week and next June both.

Since I was in the area of the Garden and Sculpture Park I decided to make lemonade out of the basket of lemons the incompetent and/or lying girl at the doctor’s office handed me. The park was having a members-only grand opening to see their new Japanese Garden section of the park. Three years to plan and three years to build, the Japanese Garden covers eight and a half acres, has Zen, moss and Bonsai sections, five bridges (including one very cool zig zag bridge), four waterfalls, three islands, two gazebos and a tea house. I walked the entire three quarters of a mile path that circles the lake, leaving the side paths to explore another day. I completely missed the tea house but I’m sure the line to get seated would have been too long for me to wait anyway. The garden is truly a beautiful place with plenty of sweet scents and brightly colored birds, a tranquil place even with the distant sounds of live Japanese music coming from the amphitheater at the other end of the sculpture park. One of the docents said that for the past two weeks they’ve been hosting large groups of people from the orient along with other donator parties. I’m glad I was able to go today before the garden is open to the general population. It felt good making lemonade out of my bag of lemons, and the perfect ending was the rain held off until I was driving out of the park to go home. ©

Below are some photos I took today.

I just realized I didn't take any photos of flowers. And there were beds of iris and many flowering scrubs I don't know the names of.  The sun was reflecting on my camera lens so bad I couldn't really see what I was taking pictures of and then I decided you couldn't take a bad picture there if you tried.

Two Doctors Plus Honoring and Surviving the Sadiversaries

It snowed off and on Wednesday and we even got some hail but nothing stuck to the spring landscape. According to the local weather guy we’ve gotten snow this late in April before but I don’t remember the last time it happened. Mother Nature, I guess, wanted to let us all know who rules the earth. Still, it’s disheartening to see snow so late after the robins had moved back to town.

That day I had an eye doctor appointment and I was sweating the encounter. My eyes have been bothering me all winter and since I’d just seen him in June of 2014 and got a new prescription back then, I was sure he’d find a dreaded disease or at least want to rush me into the cataract surgery rat race of follow up appointments and eye drops. My sight had changed a lot, he said, and I have to start seeing him once a year now instead of every two years. Oh, goody, another sign that I’m getting old. As if I didn’t already know that. He pronounced my eyes free of macular degeneration with no glaucoma or retinopathy---and my cataract, although cloudier than he normally sees, is still too small to remove. I do have extremely dry eyes (who knew) and vitreous detachment which is causing some distortions that glasses can’t help but eye health-wise that’s not considered serious. Once the detachment is completed, I should see better. In the meantime I’m to start using artificial tears throughout the day and wait a month to get my new glasses made. It got lost in translation why I have to wait, but he’s the boss of my eyes, so I'll do it. I’m just glad I won’t have to add a white cane to my shopping list.

Also on the day planner this week was my final follow up for the shoulder surgery I had last October. What a long haul! I’m 98% pain free but I can go back to the bone doctor any time for follow up shots, should the pain not stay at bay. I should be good for a year, though, if I mind my p’s and q’s. In the process of giving me a list of do’s and don’ts the orthopedist asked me what kinds of hobbies I like to do and when I rattled off the list they sounded so stereotypical old ladyish that I threw in skate boarding. The look on his face was priceless. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him speechless. He likes me and probably thinks I’m smarter than I am. That’s because I’m usually reading a nerdy magazine like Scientific American when he comes into the room. I don’t understand much of what I’m read in that magazine but he doesn’t need to know that. This time, however, I was actually engrossed in an article about experimenting with using electrical shocks in the brain to control pain associated with chronic diseases and it had several paragraphs on how the history of strokes fed into this path of study. It was quite detailed and mentioned precise speech issues I know about because of my husband’s stroke damaged brain. You just never know when something around you will trigger flashbacks to your pre-widowhood days.

On the way back from the orthopedist’s office I was on the belt line that skirts the city when I got behind a 2015 Corvette with its top down. I was in my Trax, the heater turned on and I was wearing a winter coat. I kept pace with that car, remembering all the good times we had in my husband’s Corvette. That old car and this new model both have such beautiful lines. Reluctantly, I had to turn off the road at the sculpture park; I was enjoying my Corvette related ride down Memory Lane. 

Every April since Don died I’ve made a pilgrimage to the sculpture park and gardens where the annual butterfly exhibit reminds me of the cycle of life and how fragile yet beautiful that is. The pilgrimage is meant to offset all my April sadiversaries. While I was at the park I wandered through the exhibit of ‘treasures from Japan’ and I also hiked back to where the oriental tea house and gardens is taking shape for its June debut. Then I walked deeper into the woods. Daffodils and hyacinths were in bloom everywhere and beds of tulips looked ready to do the same. I took a bench overlooking a pond and listened to the Red Winged Black birds calling back and forth as they took turns sitting on cattails. The air was so crisp and clean, the sun was bright and warm and it made me as toasty as a Ball Park Frank in a steamed bun as I sat bundled up in my winter coat. My widow’s heart although tinged with memories of better times was accepting of my past and the present. The future? None of us can know what the future will bring but I did know that a slice of brown cow chocolate pudding cheesecake at the sculpture park’s restaurant would make a good ending to my April pilgrimage so I left the bench in search of a widow’s best friend: chocolate.  ©

A Widow's Bones and Winters Past

The sky was ash-gray and accumulating snow is predicted for overnight but the snow that was falling this morning was so light it rose up in tiny whirlwinds as the car in front of me went down the highway.  I was on my way to my orthopedic doctor’s office for my two week post shoulder surgery appointment. I’m doing well. He offered me a shot for pain. I refused it, don’t need it. He offered me another round of Prednisone for swelling. Oh, boy! I took it. I love that stuff. It makes my bones feel twenty years younger and like I could take up bench pressing in my spare time. He showed me before and after photos of my shoulder joint taken during surgery and I asked him if it’s like playing a video game when he’s moving a camera and two gadgets around inside a person installing a labrum tear patch. “Sort of,” he answered. I have to go back in a month and then he’ll order some physical therapy. Bummer. I don’t like having appointments in the winter.

The photo above is of me and Don and that was the smallest of three front-end loaders that he used to stack snow on the malls we plowed.  We called them Poppa, Momma and Baby. He did his best to get me to love operating Baby and I did try it a few times but I figured if I didn’t put my foot down I’d be running it all the time and it didn’t have “central heat” or a radio and back in those days I listened to books on tape every night we plowed. At one point in time he had four women (and three guys) working for him and a couple of the women really loved running Baby. I’m talking 20 years ago when it was more unusual for women to be driving heavy equipment than it is now. 

He liked having women snow plowers for several reasons, one of which was he claimed it was easier to teach women to plow because we followed instructions and didn’t try to re-invent the wheel. Another reason he loved having women plowers was for the shock value we brought to the table. It was pretty funny. From what we heard from the snowplow repair places Don was the first person in town to hire women to plow snow, and it put a dent in a few male egos of guys who didn’t believe a woman could or should do that kind of work. He was probably the only guy I ever knew who read Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique back in its day and he took it to heart. But before that, he watched how hard his mother worked feeding and washing clothes for four sons, a husband and two hired hands. She had a hard life. Her garden put food on the table. She raised chickens, sold eggs to the local grocer. She canned and did all the other things expected from a farm wife and with no daughters to help.

I think back to my snow plowing days and I wonder how I got to be such a chicken about driving in Michigan winters. Since Don died, I pick and choose the days I drive and it makes me nervous as all get out when I can’t avoid going out on unplowed roads. I was a good wintertime driver. I could do control skids and bank snow at the end of a runs without even stopping which is hard to master and I won more rat hockey matches than anyone else. Yes, real rats that would venture out on a parking lot in the middle of the night got escorted across the lots with two or three trucks chasing them, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat fly across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other when it was sliding and we’d score if you were the one to run it into a snow bank. Rat hockey didn’t happen often but it sure was fun when it did and it’s a wonder none of us ever collided with our silly game. But I lost my wintertime driving confidence after Don died and I sold our four wheel drive Traverse. Cars feel so wimpy after decades of driving heavy, four wheel drive trucks and SUVs. Maybe having physical therapy appointments to force me out on winter days when I’d rather stay home is just what I need to get my confidence back, says the lady who always tries to find the up side of any given situation.

After the doctor’s appointment I went to the first of a series of classes on genealogy research that I signed up for at the senior center. I really don’t need a class but for only $3.00 a session I figured I can get something useful out of them. There were sixteen there today and we all shared funny stories about oddities we’d found while poking around the family bones so I got my money’s worth in laughter. ©