Doctor Happy and the Bunnies and Butterflies

Easter Sunday was noisy here in Levi-the-Mighty-Schnauzer Land where he spent the entire afternoon in voyeur mode watching and barking at four rabbits trying to mate in the back yard. The lady rabbit/s were playing hard-to-get. Every so often I’d let Levi out on the deck and when the rabbits ran by he’d bark and they’d freeze in place like plastic toys on a cake. It was probably the only rest they got all afternoon, it was a regular rodeo back there. I can’t tell the bucks from the does, so in three weeks we could have one, two or three new mom’s making nests in the neighborhood. Most years I get one under my pine trees just 6-7 feet from the dog’s pen. Crazy momma. She’ll sleep in that nest all night long even when Levi goes out to pee and to bark at her from the other side of his white picket fence. In the daytime she’ll leave the babies on their own so she doesn’t draw the attention of predators. I always have to make sure my lawn care guy doesn’t disturb the nest when he puts down the new Pacific Northwest pine needle mulch in May. I know what you’re thinking: Who buys pine needles to put under their pine trees? I’ll try to remember to take a photo when he’s done. It looks so much better than bark mulch under those three trees and along my near-by cattail bog.  

For Easter dinner I grilled a steak, steamed some asparagus and had strawberry shortcake and, yes, Levi got a little plate of his own of everything. He especially likes strawberries and when I make protein shakes in the mornings, he’ll come running to the kitchen when he hears the blender where he knows he’ll get a few bites of whatever fruit I’m using that day. I expected my big Easter dinner to show up on the scales Monday morning. It didn’t. I’m saving the traditional Easter ham I bought for later in the week because I didn’t want the salt to show up at the doctor’s office in the form of a higher blood pressure reading and added water retention. 

My bi-annual appointment with my internist was Tuesday. The doctor was pleased. I was pleased. Even his young, tag-along student doctor was…well, he couldn’t have cared less. I think he was bored with this old lady with no real problems to solve. I did get permission to go faster on the treadmill as long as I don’t let my heart rate get over 135 on my Fitbit---like I could actually go faster than the 1.35 miles in 30 minutes that I’m already doing. I was glad the doctor thinks doing the treadmill a half hour 2-3 times a week is ideal, that I don’t need to walk longer, just a tad faster, if I can work up to it, using my heart rate as my guide. He also said that strength training and exercise is more important at my age than at any other time in our lives. 

The day before Easter I got to spend time with eleven members of my family---me being the oldest person there and the youngest one is just a few months old. We met at our local sculpture garden to see the Butterflies are Blooming exhibit in the tropical conservatory. We were there all morning and the baby woke up just once to nurse but otherwise slept contentedly in one of those baby slings that keeps babies close to their mother’s stomach and chest. Why did it take so long for those slings to get popular in modern society? Indigenous people all over the world have been using them since way back when the earth was still thought to be flat. The two, two year olds with us took quite an interest in the butterflies. It was fun watching their faces light up and it was heart-warming when Little O held my hand for the first time. Until now, he’s been standoffish to me, the little girl is just the opposite. I don’t know how to interact with children anymore like I did back when my nieces and nephew were young, but I don’t see these kids often enough to re-learn. Big sigh of regret here.

I started going to the butterfly exhibit after my husband died as a life-affirming pilgrimage around all of my April sadiversaries, then last year when my youngest niece heard that I was going she wanted to meet me there. Five of us went last year and that grew to eleven this year. I’m hoping we’ve started a tradition that will last a while. The park is huge with lots of things for kids to do as they grow older. For me, I don’t think I’ll ever lose my fascination of seeing thousands of butterflies all in one place and I still haven’t gone after dark to one of their butterflies and flashlights events. The exhibit has the power to slow us down to pay closer attention to our environment---the sun patterns through the foliage, the kaleidoscope of colored flowers that draws the butterflies to land and the warmth of the conservatory that previews what’s to come outside as April creeps forward into May. And of course, the amazing and mysterious cycle of chrysalises and cocoons that turn into beautiful creatures that live for such a short time but while they’re here they do their work in making sure their species continues. Life affirming. Oh, yes! ©

My great-great nephew and niece. I don't like to post pictures of kids without their parent's permission---adults either---but since no one can see their faces here, I'm making an exception. In the one up above Little O is taking a close-up look at a butterfly and the photo below was taken in the children's garden at the sculpture park.

Jump Ropes, Book Club and Flowers

Next week is my bi-annual appointment with my internist and it’s been the driving force in making me go to the YMCA to help me lose the weight I gained recently. When I saw him last fall I was up five pounds since spring, then I added another four over the holidays and I knew he wouldn’t ignore that kind of weight gain two appointments in a row. Well, guess what! He’ll never know. I’m back to the same weight I was a year ago. He might even praise me for the five (really nine) pound loss and I will light up like a jar of lightning bugs on a warm summer night. It’s not that he’s a tyrant of a doctor, quite the opposite. He’s so nice that I hated the idea of disappointing him with a broken promise. I have a ton more to lose so I’ll try to ride the Diet & Exercise train for as long as I can. Picture me with “Iowa Blackie,” the wandering hobo poet---him with his paper and pens and me with a set of dumbbells.

Going to the gym is fertile ground for people watching and maybe that will keep me going, like Blackie writing about the people he met as he rode the rails across the country. For example, I haven’t seen people jumping ropes since grade school but they're a common sight at the Y. The ropes they use aren’t like the clothes lines we used back in the good old days. They come in different materials: plastic beaded, "licorice" whips, clothe, vinyl cords, cables, leather and with lights embedded---$5.00 to $80.00. You pick a rope by the surface where you’re going to jump and the speed you want to do it at. Lighted ropes are for night but they would be good in public places. Those wire-thin cable jump ropes are so hard to see when in action that I didn’t even realize that’s what people were doing the first few times I saw them used at the gym. I thought they were just jumping up and down. Online there are plenty of directions for how to jump rope and for picking the right length rope. (With one foot standing on it, you lift the handles and they shouldn’t go past your armpits.) How did we ever manage to learn how to jump rope before the internet? 

A good jump rope workout, according to what I’ve read, is ten minutes which burns 135 calories. How depressing is that? A scoop of vanilla ice cream is 137 calories. You’d have to jump two hours for a banana split. Still, I wanted to try. How hard can it be? I thought, remembering my days on the playground where we 'Double Dutch' jumped. (Two girls twirled two ropes while two other girls jumped in unison.) Fast forward sixty-five years to this week when I tried jumping rope again and I couldn’t propel myself up in the air more than a half inch off the floor! I was glad no one was around to see my feeble attempts. And I felt ashamed of myself for laughing in my head at Boxer Boy, a kid in his early twenties at the gym who wears a baggy hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head and so close around his face that no one could ever pick him out in a lineup. He couldn’t keep the rope going more than six-seven times before missing the rhythm. He’d alternate his jumping attempts with shadow boxing using five pound dumbbells and he must have been boxing with a pretend comic book character because his verbal sound effects echoed around the strength training room, “Wham!” “Bam!” “Pow!” 

This week my book club met and we discussed Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. With 531 pages, at first I dreaded reading it but it was easily polished off in a week because it was so good I couldn’t put it down. It was set during WWII when the Nazis occupy France. The two main characters were: 1) A blind French girl whose family took part in the Resistance by broadcasting coded messages to the Allies, and 2) a German boy who had a talent for working with the new-back-then radio technology and he was assigned to a unit that tracked down where the radio transmissions were coming from so they could be destroyed. Half the group didn’t finish the book but we still had an interesting discussion void any of the disagreements we’ve had with a few other books. And for the bonus round, I got a chocolate rabbit from the facilitator of the book club for having an April birthday. Even when I try to avoid them, temptations keep finding me!

I came home from book club to find a bouquet of flowers on my porch from my oldest niece. She is so thoughtful and loving, not just to me but to everyone. The arrangement has miniature pussy willows in it and I’m hoping I can root them to plant outside. We had them in our yard and at our cottage when I was growing up and if there is such a thing as comfort flowers (like comfort foods) pussy willows, lily of the valley and lilacs would be mine. All and all, the week ended so much better than it started and it’s not over yet. Friday I’m having lunch with friends I’ve known for nearly fifty years. They’re in town from out of state and I always feel honored when I’m included on their list of people to see while they’re here. ©

 

World Champions with Jump Ropes

Where Do I Go From Here?

“No more running. It’s you and me, that’s the way it’s going to be, and pretty soon you’ll see it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be.” Jack Wagner of General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful fame wrote and sang those lyrics in The Wedding March, a 2016 Hallmark Channel movie. The storyline of the film reunites college sweethearts, twenty years after they parted, when a venue owned by Jack’s character is booked for his ex-girlfriend’s wedding to another man. Each has a teenaged daughter who helps engineer them back together. Do things like that happen in real life? If someone said to me, “Pretty soon you’ll see it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be,” I’d worry that he’s a psychopath who’s going to lock me up naked and cold in an underground bunker. On the Lifetime Movie Network or in a James Patterson thriller that would be a logical next step.

But for a widow like me who has a predisposition toward melancholia during the month of April, hearing “...it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be” so near my husband’s birthday was a queue to turn me into Sarah Sadness. This is all there’ll ever be. Yup, my time has passed. There’s no do-over to make me feel loved and needed again, no lost love out there to rekindle. That’s not exactly true. I had several serious romances before I met my husband but---jeez, I’ve evolved since my twenties and I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams ever being attracted to same people I was back then. And that, dear readers, is why movie plots like that in The Wedding March brings out the cynic in me. Thomas Wolfe got it right when he wrote, “You can’t go home again.” Did you know that title, that phrase was suggested to Wolfe by the widow of another writer? Ah, yes, another bit of useless trivia to clutter up our brains.

Since Mr. Wolfe used that iconic title it's become a metaphor or shorthand for stating that once we’ve moved forward into the more sophisticated world of adulthood with all its ups and downs, heartaches and headaches, joys and disappointments any attempt to relive our youthful memories will always fall flat and fail. Nothing ever stays the same and we all have to acknowledge that with a blending of sentimentality and longing or loathing---depending on what the world has brought into our lives or we left behind before our coming of age.

In Wolfe’s book is a passage that speaks to me as strong-but-aging woman and widow: “The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, ‘Well, where do I go from here?’”

Where do I go from here? What widow has not asked that question of herself? What widow gets a clear road map in her head that answers that question? And when do we quit asking ‘where do I go from here?’ Thomas Wolfe had some wise words that could help: “Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.” 

Not freezing up is the secret, isn’t it. Even if we have missteps after losing a spouse like me spending a year volunteering at small town museum only to learn it wasn’t a good fit for me. Even if I spent an entire summer looking at condos only to learn I’m not ready to pluck myself up from the known and plop myself down into the unknown. Even if I’m in a perpetual state of unrest. I may not know where I’m going but I’m moving forward, didn’t freeze up. I try a little of this, a little of that and I take away a better understanding of myself and the world around me. And sometimes in my search I leave behind a trail of crumbs in the dust in case I want to back-track to something that intrigues me more than another…like my copy of You Can’t Go Home Again. This is the fifth time I’ve written about Wolfe’s can’t-go-home adage in the five years I’ve been keeping this widow’s blog. This is the fifth April since I met Don in 1970 that we don’t get to celebrate our birthdays together. I don’t know what all this means in the grand scheme of things but if the past can be used to predict the future it’s a safe bet that I’ll be quoting Thomas again same time, next year.  ©