Dogs, Creamsicles, Cows and Snow---Oh My!

I started writing this post on Tuesday when it was a bright and beautiful day here in West Michigan. The temperature outside was twenty degrees but the sky was cloudless and the only snow in sight was hugging the shadows. I wrote about my ‘To Do List’---ya, I know as boring as watching beach pebbles mate. The first thing on my list was dropping the dog off at the groomers after walking him around the neighborhood to make sure his bladder and bowels were empty for his three hour stay. The second place I had to go was to the pet store to get Levi a 15 pound bag of kibble and enough peanut butter and apple treats to last him until his next grooming appointment in six weeks. After that I had planned to stop at Starbucks for a tomato and mozzarella sandwich and chestnut praline latte. But the line at Starbucks was impossibly long---or maybe I had an impossibly low tolerance for sitting in the car fifteen minutes just to get up to the speaker. Instead, I skipped to the next thing on my ‘To Do List’, a stop at a small grocery store that carries Reddi-Wip barista Sweet Foam. Everything in my life goes better when I can start my day off with a good cup of doctored coffee.

I also discovered that if you spray and stir the barista sweet foam into Orange Crush pop it tastes just like a creamsicle from ye olden days of my youth causing me to run out of the stuff sooner than usual. I may not be much of a cook but I gave myself an A+ for creativity in concocting that drink. It makes me feel eight-ten years old again when I was willing and able to walk a four mile round trip to a country store to get a creamsicle. Can you imagine letting little kids walk that far by themselves today without someone claiming you were a neglectful parent? We didn’t have cell phones back then, of course, or even landlines at the cottages and our mothers didn’t even have cars to come check on us if we didn’t come home at the expected time. In all the years my cottage friends and I made that daily trip to the store we only had two scary encounters. Once when a man tried to get us into his car and we ran into the woods like it never dawned on us that the woods was a good place to kill us and bury our bodies.

The other scary encounter involved five or six Holstein cows that got out of their field Me, Allen---a kid who I’ve known since birth---and our siblings ended up in a tree to get away from them. We were up there so long that Allen had to poop. Yup, he did it, hung his bare butt over the branch of the tree and dropped his "little logs” down to the ground to the delight of the cows who all took turns smelling what fell from the sky. I thought we’d die up there in that tree but eventually, as all cows apparently do, they did go home at milking time. So now you know the backstory on why I love my vintage De Laval advertising tin cows that are grazing on top of the doorway molding in my kitchen. Cows remind me of summer fun, of having to walk past them every day in the summer to go to the store for pop and ice cream. That scene on the corner near our lake with the barns, silos, pond and cows hasn’t changed since I was three years old. My niece owns the cottage now and when I visit and pass by that field of milk cows I can feel myself relax. Once in a while I’ll stop the car and walk up to the fence and sure enough there will be a few curious cows who will come to check me out and I tell them I knew their great-great-grandmothers.

Today as I write this I’m looking out at our first major snow fall of the year which I’m guessing is five inched deep and it’s still coming down. The dog is still sleeping and my driveway plower just left. I’ve had the same service for years but this year he took on a partner and the changes I see are going to be fun to watch. For one, they added a sidewalk service to their menu---Hurry! I’ve never minded shoveling snow but I shouldn’t be doing it with my bad elbow. And now all I have to do is shovel a path for Levi to get to his dog pen. And the new partner is sending out emails about each snow event. The first event wasn’t deep enough to plow but having a husband who was in the business for nearly three decades I thought it was clever of my service to let customers know about the behind the scenes activities like how many times and where they checked the depth of the snow around town that night looking for the 1 ½” trigger point to call his crew in to work. It never came. With today’s ‘snow email’ the excitement that all plowers get when the first big one hits of the season was almost palatable. And he wrote about how many dry runs they made of the routes before we even had snow in our forecasts to make sure their drivers knew their routes so no customer got missed and how they'd gone over their equipment several times to be sure it was all working correctly. The email brought back memories of my husband and I doing the same things. Memories that warmed my heart on this cold and beautiful winter day. ©

A Dichotomy of Epic Proportions

The concept of living in the moment has many benefits for health and happiness but I’ve never been able to sustain the activity for very long. A day or two at a time here and there at the most…unless I’m under a lot of stress like after my husband’s stroke. Then, I lived in the moment for months on end by intentionally concentrating on what I was doing, whether it was chopping carrots or shoveling snow. With the latter, I’d note the way my face is entirely covered over with a scarf and hat with only a narrow strip in between for my eyes and sometimes the hat slides down so I can’t see at all. I’d focus on using my leg muscles and not those in my back when I throw snow off to the side. I’d pay attention to my heart rate so I won’t power through when I should be taking a break. But even when the living-in-the-moment technique is applied to snow shoveling---which is the smart thing to do for your health---my mind wanders and I obsess about building a snowman once more before I die.

Growing up I spent a lot of time outside in the winter building snow forts and snowmen, ice skating, sledding and tobogganing, even ice fishing with my dad. In my twenties I took up downhill skiing and in my thirties that gave way to snowmobiling every chance we got. Nothing was better for living in the moment than parking our Skidoo on a hill top with a panoramic view of a snowy, rural landscape under a midnight moon. We’d turn off the snowmobile, pull out the thermos and enjoy the silence of the night. Michigan, even back then, has great trails for people who love winter. Don and I even tried cross-country skiing but it was a short-lived interest. While it’s a wonderful way to enjoy the great outdoors it was also exhausting! 

In my forties and fifties I was outside during the worst weather Michigan can throw at its residence because my husband had the bright idea that if I learned how to plow snow I’d get over my fear of winter driving. Not to brag but I was very good at it, so good that Don started hiring and trained more women to plow. He said women didn’t waste time trying to re-invent the wheel like the guys often did. At first glance that could sound like a backhanded insult to women but it wasn’t. On mall parking lots if we didn’t stick with the established plow patterns it could screw things up for the adjoining sections or cause other problems I won’t take time to explain. The bottom line was women listened, guys didn’t.

Now, I’m an inside chick---or more precisely an old hen who is still afraid of winter driving. But I would be very brave again if I was the only person on the road and I still had a four-wheel drive pickup truck with an orange flasher on top and a C-B radio to call my husband if I got stuck. I could do controlled, purposeful skids with the best of them. Wanna see a 180 turn on an icy parking lot, I’m your man. My truck had a fifty gallon gas tank on the back, so in addition to plowing snow I was the mobile service station. I don’t miss those nights of standing out in the cold, pumping gas or holding a flashlight while Don was flat on his back in the snow fixing a hydraulic hose on a plow. Being the first female plowers in the city did have its perks. The guys had to fix their own broken lines, but the girls had Don to do our dirty work. 

That was then. Back to now. So what’s stopping me from building a snowman? I’m afraid if the neighbors see out in the cold that long, they’ll think I don’t need them to run their snow blower across my front sidewalk. I really do need their generosity. Even with their help, I still have to shovel across the front of my two-stall garage where my plow service can’t reach and from my front door down 25 feet to where the walk connects to the driveway. I also shovel my dog’s deck and yard plus I make sure my two back doors aren’t blocked by snow in case I need to escape an axe murderer in the dead of night. Shoveling takes a lot of my time! Still, I debate the idea of building a snowman on my back deck where no one can see me and if I do I’m building a cat snowman that looks in the window to torment my dog.

Christmas time and fun in the snow have always gone together like a right glove with its left. After I out-grew some wintertime activities I still spent the next fifteen years being the aunt who got to take the kids outside to play in the snow while my mom and sister-in-law cleaned up after Christmas dinner. Where does the time go? Those kids are now all grandparents. Looking back at my best wintertime memories is like looking at an iconic village in a snow globe. From the distance of time, the winters of yesterday were sweet and carefree and it was so easy to live in the moment back then. Now, I have too many memories of the past to enjoy and not enough future to build new dreams around to maintain living in the moment for long. The bitter-sweetness of aging is a dichotomy of epic proportions.  ©

After writing this blog, I built this snow "creature" on the back deck..
The photo at the very top is of Levi meeting his new friend..

She has Dove chocolate for eyes and a nose, and pine needles for whiskers.

Levi's view looking out the window. 

Forging Ahead While Glancing Behind

Back in the days when I worked a lot of overtime hours around the holidays---Easter, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas---I’d get to work at 8 AM and didn’t leave the flower shop until 8 to 10 PM. With a quick lunch out of a sack and dinner brought in by the boss we never left our work stations. It was a wholesale/retail operation so holiday schedules dragged on for several weeks. Decades later when I worked for my husband we’d be out on parking lots plowing snow for long hours. And during a notable, record breaking blizzard we didn’t get out of our trucks for anything but bathroom and gassing up breaks for three days straight. We’d take turns sleeping in two hour shifts while slumped over in our seats. Where on earth did all my energy and stamina go since those days? 

The past two days I’ve had four things penciled in my day planner with three other events on tap for the end of the week and already I’m dog tired and wishing it was Sunday so I can sleep in. Monday it was to the dentist and The Gathering at the senior hall. As I drove the long trip to a dentist in another county south of town, I made a decision that I need to find one closer to home. Heck, I probably go past 100 others as I drive the dreaded S-curve through the city. I’ve known my dentist for forty years, before he even went to dental school. But on the way back home I made another decision to postpone the idea of leaving my tooth guy. Being around people who knew my husband and me before and after Don's stroke makes me feel good.

Though I have to admit at The Gathering (for people looking for friends) I came close to feeling that same way with some new acquaintances. A woman in the group who has an extensive background in dealing with deaf people got us all sharing our life experiences with disabilities. I was able to talk about my husband’s and my experience going to speech classes with future speech pathologists. For six years, two days a week, I sat behind a one way mirror with a college professor and her class as a series of student clinicians worked with my husband on the other side of the glass. Even though his vocabulary never got above twenty-five unprompted words), my husband often had all of us laughing so hard it was hard to stop and he could intone a single word in a dozen ways in an effort to be understood. The professors kept him at the college for so long because, they said, he taught their students to see their clients as more than just textbook language disorders; that real people with unique personalities are underneath the disability they’d be treating out in the field.

Most widows who were caregivers to our spouses have our battle scars and war stories to tell. Some fought the revolving doors of medical clinics and treatment changes. Some witnessed the slow decline of the mind and/or the body. We caregiver veterans recognize kindred spirits and we seem to bond over being “valued and understood” in that context. I was a daughter, a sibling, an artist, a wife, a florist, and a snowplower and people everywhere understand what those labels mean but somehow summarizing the last twelve years of life with Don up with the single word of “caregiver” seems like it lacks clarity to anyone who has not-been-there-done-that. One woman who was at The Gathering talked about how the local widows group helped her with that. I had been invited by mail to join that widow's group in my first year out from Don’s death, but going meant I’d have to go through the dreaded S-Curved after dark so I passed on the opportunity.

Tuesday I was back to the senior hall for the Matter of Balance class and a luncheon where a Korean violinist entertained us with Bach and a few hard rock pieces that he arranged himself. His talks in between sonatas (or whatever they’re called) made me wish I could find a music appreciation class. That guy could make his two hundred year old instrument sing and he had a wonderful sense of humor as he answered our many questions. Someone asked how long he'd been playing and he took out his phone and said, "About ten minutes." Someone else asked if he could play The Devil Went Down to Georgia and he answered that he can play it but he won’t, adding that all violinists hate getting that request. He didn't explain why but he did explain the differences between a fiddle and a violin—the same instrument held in a different way, one featuring finger work, the other featuring bow work. Being a long-time fan of blue-grass music it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to thoroughly appreciate this solo act. Lunch and a great floor show for $6.00. It doesn’t get much better than that and he made it worthwhile to be dog tired this week. ©

I love this two minute video with its upbeat message about love, death and looking at life. If anyone knows who this guy is, please clue me in. I should know but I've been drawing a blank for days.