When You Feel the Wideness

Hygge may be the most important word I learned this year. It means a cozy quality especially in winter. One of my favorite students taught me hygge. See, that’s the lovely thing about tutoring. I get to be a student too.

But learning isn’t what I’m here to tell you about right now.

I woke up feeling like I wanted to create a little corner of hygge in my life right now. I realized that buying books, mugs, twinkle lights, and soft blankets for my people for Christmas, I was trying to send them that cozy feeling.

I’m still not well, still in pain, but I managed to take a walk yesterday with my nephew, Nick, and Mike. To watch the two cousins walking ahead of us and talking made me happy.

It felt like a trek, getting to the river from the dog park, but I heaved and walked my pace and found a log to sit on when I needed. I was glad I didn’t fall down as I crossed the place where people had thrown sticks and logs across a muddy place. I wobbled and leaned hard on the stick Mike had given me, but I didn’t fall in

And it rained on us. When everyone else complained of the rain, I felt relief that I could be comfortable in my jacket while little droplets touched my face. The mountain was shrouded in a thin fog, as if it was only a cloud. I love that kind of weather.

The last time I walked, at Thanksgiving, an elk had died and lay open in the field. Oh, I know it’s part of the life cycle we try so hard to avoid, but it had become a feast for so many. I tried not to think about what I had in common with this elk who had surely suffered before she died.

You must be asking, how is this hygge?

I’m sorry about that. It’s not your usual view of hygge. But as I walked, I looked at the life cycle. I often revel in what grows around me, even on the other side of the life cycle. It isn’t always pretty, the way predators kill prey, the way life ends and finds a way to begin again. Why not look at what is harder to examine, the life that is propelled when a death happens? Isn’t that an important answer to find?

I left my group of lovely solicitous people to look. They weren’t going to come any closer. Death is like that sometimes, a solitary examination. I knew it could be gross. When I looked at that poor dead elk again, it had become only sinew and bones. Many animals had feasted there. Bellies had been filled. That last segment of the life cycle had connected back upon itself. Without it, without bacteria, fungus, scat, scavengers, and even predators, the cycle of life would never connect back on itself, nutrients would never make it back to the soil to grow up into trees, flowers, and grasses.

This makes me think of the yin and the yang. I’m not well-versed in the culture that created yin and yang. But this seems like a perfect parallel to yin and yang, one not possible without the other. In order to see the bucolic elk grazing in this field with buttercup blooms in the foreground, I also have to see how a death in their numbers feeds the field and the tiny creatures who live there.

This elk didn’t have a chance to feed the mushrooms. When I walked away from the group to look at it, I saw that it had so quickly become sinew and bone in the four weeks since Thanksgiving. It had been picked clean. It didn’t even smell.

I could see how her hooves connected to her delicate ankles, how each vertebrae had a great knob to protect her spine. I got to look at her teeth, these great brown and ivory jewels set along her jawline. The brown parts swirled in the ivory parts like ungainly rings of a tree, you know, the way rings grow unevenly when something disturbs its growth. I pictured her chewing.

So, I stood there looking closely at these ground-down teeth, showing the wear, the nature of their gift to this creature that had blithely used them all her life, and I saw some little bit of beauty in the gore of her skeleton. I would never have gotten to look at the miracle of an elk’s teeth up close if not for the fact of her death.

And I wondered if the Danish had an opposing word to hygge that explained what was necessary to hygge to create it. Have you ever noticed that you have to make a mess to create something new? That meal you cooked made a great load of dishes, especially when you work all the way back to the source cooking from scratch. We work so hard not to look at that other end of our lovely meals. I tried to think of the hygge that the creatures felt when they returned full to their dens from their visit to the skeleton. I thought of the way my Teddy lies on the carpet and chews on an antler that I bought for him and how I learned that mice and rodents gnaw on antlers so that there aren’t usually antlers or bones lying around. I thought of the meals I made from meat and vegetables in packages wrapped by someone else. I thought of that feeling of a full belly and lying, cozy, on my leather couch, hygge.

Hygge is not free. It comes at a price. I wish a deep hygge for you, one that comes with an understanding of its source.

Thank you for listening, jules

I’m Just Like You

It’s been hard. Has it been hard for you?

I woke up early from a dream that I was surrounded by people who couldn’t see me and I couldn’t get back home to the people who could, the people who would. I dreamed of translucent glass walls, like funhouse mirrors, only cloudy and vague. It was awful, so closed-in and silent. I couldn’t even smell humanity.

And then I dreamed that there were millions of people in their walled-in dreams, waking to feel the same thing, millions of isolated people who didn’t feel like there was a soul who would see them, really see their loneliness. I dreamed I could soar away from my little room made of opaque glass with vague outlines of people on the other sides and look through all those opaque walls and see millions of lonely people sitting and wondering if anyone else ever felt they way they did when they listened to the blues.

I never knew. Did you? Did you know that there are millions of us who feel this same way? Is there any comfort in that?

I can come home. I really can. Can you?

Thank you for listening, jules

Small Goals, Small Joys

I had a bad dream. Don’t you hate the ones with people you love, only not acting like the people you love, when everything goes wrong? Mike was mad at me in my dream, and we were surrounded by armed white supremacist guys who I suspected had spit into my drink and would do more given an opportunity.

The dream still swirled in my mind as I stood in the kitchen with two clean plates in my hands. These days, I stack them two at a time. More is too heavy when I’m bending over. Strength is an issue. Bending over is an issue.

Mike walked into the kitchen.

“Doing dishes,” he said. “You’ll have to go lie down for a while afterward. Have you checked your heart rate?”

“It’s doing okay. I have small life goals, a load of dishes, writing, students.”

“I have meetings,” he said.

“Death by meeting. Want some tea? Water’s hot.” I put away two glasses. Endurance is an issue too.

“I have tea waiting in my office. Gotta go meet.” I hugged him. He hugged me back until the dream fell into a film, not quite as real. He shuffled out of the kitchen.

The good news is that my resting heart rate is finally normal, most of the time. That’s great, but I feel like I could sleep for a few weeks. My doctor says I should take lots of naps.

My goals these days are small. My life is small. I finished emptying the dishwasher, made an instant coffee instead of an espresso with extra foam. I haven’t made a real espresso since April.

I took a sip of my instant coffee. It was warm going down. My joys are small too. Now, I’m resting on the couch. I have a big day, two students back-to-back, two emails to write, four pages to edit for a friend. Maybe I can load the dishwasher if I skip cooking and we eat leftovers. Small goals for my new normal.

I have music playing, two cats within reach, and Mike just came upstairs to make some lunch. I have small joys too, small joys that fill me up.

Thank you for listening, jules

Separating Wheat from the Chaff

Do you know how weird it is to feel like you’re dying and then have to come back to chat with people who 1) didn’t know you were sick; 2) didn’t want to hear you talk about your medical problems; 3)couldn’t tolerate thinking of death; or 4) told you that it was all in your head, just stress?

It’s weird. There’s so much to say about death, even now that I’m farther from it than I was. I feel the fragile flower of my body, the fierce glow of my soul inside it. From my deck I watched my trees sway in the breeze and found them to be a touchstone. My trees were there with me. Mike and Nick fed me and answered every call. Teddy, Blitz, and Seth took turns sitting with me. Blitz began to knead my belly twice a day, a spot just below my sternum while he stared into my eyes.

They have stopped their vigil. I watched as they all slept a lot when I began to feel better.

Yes, I know it was just prescriptions gone awry that caused most of the trouble. My endocrinologist apologized more than once, saying that she was sorry her prescription sent me to the cardiologist for an angiogram. She said this powerful tiny pill could account for all my miserable symptoms. We are still trying to get the right balance. I’m still working to feel better.

But what do I say to all those people who didn’t ask me how I was for more than two months? Nothing, probably. They’ll never understand my path. They’ll explore death in their own time, one way or another.

As for the ones who told me I was just stressed out and going over the edge?

They can fuck off. They can fuck all the way off the edge and down into their own abyss, into the deep dark void. I’m going to go sit with my trees and feel the love that my true friends and family sent.

Thank you for listening, jules

Quiet Company

I’m sitting on my deck a lot today. Only one and a half more days until my angiogram. I’m waiting and resting. I get too tired to hold up my phone or my book for long. I’m bored with TV. It is easier to sit on my deck. I watch the light, the wind in the trees, chickadees, Douglas squirrels, even banana slugs. I’m here now with a half-eaten meal on my lap.

I have turned my lounge chair so I can watch my only visitor, a small barred owl that I think was born above the far side of the house this spring. I heard them when he fledged.

An afternoon about a month ago, there had been a racket of birds screeching and flapping outside our windows. I tried to catch part of the harassment on camera. They were pummeling him, screaming at him to leave. I felt sorry for him then. Tonight, he isn’t being harassed and the usual birds in the trees chirp casually.

So I sat in my lounge chair with my friend. He was quiet. I don’t have the strength to talk much anyway. He preened. He looked back at me. He scratched his head. He shat. But mostly, he sat quietly with me as I sat.

I wish he could tell me a story, maybe about the day he was attacked, how all he’d done was eaten an egg. I’ll look for him tomorrow. Maybe he’ll let me watch him as he sleeps, the way he watched me today.

Thank you for listening, jules

Bless the Guy Who Invented the Guardrail

I’ve been in pain before, I have, pain intense enough that I passed out. I have also nearly died. They’re different.

Before I had back surgery when I was twenty four, I couldn’t walk and while I was in the hospital, the staff tried to stand me up for a myelogram. They had injected dye into my spine and took X-rays. Sounds simple, right? But a nerve was pinched low in my spine , my right leg was numb to the knee, and every time they tilted the board with me on it to a vertical position, I would see a bright white flash of pain and my body would crumple into unconsciousness. I remember four people trying to hold me upright and more than one of them yelling at me, “Stay with me! Stay with me!” I passed out at least four times before they finally got the image. It was excruciating. To this day, white is the color of pain. I learned that indelibly.

But I knew I wasn’t going to die that day. I could feel death at a great distance. I felt potential to grow old, maybe in a wheelchair, but life in me was strong, despite the pain.

Another day, four years later, I came so close to death that afterward, I stood in awe at the side of a busy, icy interstate for twenty minutes or so and glowed in the joy that I got to live. I had skidded directly in front of a semi truck across the highway and hit a guardrail going 60 miles an hour. The railing was bent at least a foot and a train raced across a set of tracks about a hundred feet below me. My truck and I were fine, practically untouched.

Every time I think of it, I bless the thorough people who invented and refined that guardrail. You don’t think about guardrails much, do you? I just went down a rabbit-hole of looking on the internet for the the name of the guy who invented it: Samuel R. Garner in 1933. Then I read a technical paper about improving the function of a guardrail and came across this line:

Criteria for structural adequacy are intended to evaluate the ability of the guardrail to contain and redirect the vehicle.

…contain and redirect…

Yes! That kind of dedication to detail saved my life and no one except the people I called from my hotel that night in my complete and utter joy at finding myself alive would ever know it. Here’s the link in case you’re a nerd like me and can relate to the details of engineering and science that we take for granted every day.

My knees still tingle at how near I was to death that night. I even wonder about the driver of the semi truck, so close that if we’d been in a house, he would have sat across from me in a living room. Does he remember me, the girl in the red Blazer who lived? I think of him sometimes too.

Death came so close that night. I felt it. I wasn’t ready. Thirty one years later, I still don’t feel ready.

Yet with this odd pain I feel in my heart, this dull ache and a feeling of dropping, like that first descent on a roller coaster, I find myself afraid of death. Next week, I’m scheduled for an angiogram to see if I have a blockage or inflammation in my heart. I have autoimmune disease and heart disease runs in my family, so it could be either one.

Seven years ago, when Mike had his heart attack, we never talked about what death feels like when it comes near. I wanted him to deal with that in the way that he was most comfortable. Now it’s my turn to feel that nearness again, and not just for twenty minutes by the side of a wintry highway. I can’t be as quiet as he was.

I’m not in very much pain. I’m not. But I feel the nearness of death. Death might be easier than I imagined, but I’m not ready yet. I know I’ve lived a good life. I’m still not ready.

Would you pray for me? And would you also bless the person who developed the angiogram? I know I will. I guess I should bless the guy who invented the myelogram too. Who should you bless for the gift of your life?

Thank you for listening, jules

KNOW

I probably have twenty minutes before my breathlessness closes me down for the day.

Here’s what I wish for this day: that I can use these minutes to keep moving it forward, for my voice, my story to make your gut feel like you have to stand up and do something about it.

You KNOW what it is. If it makes you squirm, that’s it. If it makes your heart soar, that’s it. If you hear in the early hours a quiet voice in your soul saying words that you KNOW are true, you KNOW these are the right words, so you must make sure these words are heard.

We live in trying times. People are dying. We live in a time when people risk their lives to protest a racism that has existed too long in our history, racism that was hidden in plain sight, a racism that was made to seem like the norm. The stories of that racism are horrifying, but we also learned that we’ve been cruel in the myriad ways we spoke. We live in a time when women finally speak out against the hands that reached out and offensively grabbed us, against the voices that interrupted us, against the implication that we were owned, overlooked, and overcome. The stories we women tell make your toes curl. We live in a time when the disabled lie protesting at the Speaker’s door in an attempt to keep healthcare that keeps them alive. We live in a time when people can marry who they want and wear the clothes that represent them and no one’s judgmental ideas about religion can stop them.

We live in trying times, but we can do the work to make the world a better place. That is the quiet voice that I hear in the early morning when I can’t sleep. That is the story that curls my toes and makes me KNOW we have to do more even when I’m tired and feel hopeless. Sometimes, when I see thousands of us marching in the streets, when I see someone who shouts what is right, or whispers, my heart soars and I KNOW I’m on the right path.

Find your right path and march alongside me in making this the trying time in which we changed the world because we KNEW it was the right thing to do. We KNEW.
Thank you for listening, jules

A Mandala

Why is it that when I finally get my head together, that’s when I reach out to people.

I’m okay. Are you okay?

I’ve been looking at pictures of mandalas. They’re beautiful, detailed, and so delicate. I love their complexities and hate the moment when hands sweep the sands into one gray pile at the center. Yet, I have to admit that their beauty also lies in their vulnerability. Truly, despite my reluctance, I know it.

In response to watching them evolve and watching them die, I try to think of my purpose in my short life. I think my purpose is to tell the truth as I see it, even when I don’t look put together doing it. These past days, I’ve found that I’m not brave. I want to be brave.

It’s hard to put my real face on. Any of you who know me may not actually know me. Do you know what I mean?

I’m beginning to wonder if everyone does that or if it’s just me.

What do you mean it’s just me? I wanted to hear you say that everyone did that. I didn’t want it to be just me.

A friend of mine once told me that Facebook wasn’t real, that it was a curated version of our lives. That got me thinking: what part of my life is really exposed to people and what meaning can I bring if I only show a mask to them?

I’m like an onion. On the outside, I’m dried up, desiccated, bland. I seem so ordinary. When you peel that layer off, I’m still a little dried out, but I’m more interesting. I curse. I don’t smile all the time the way I’m supposed to. Sometimes, when I forget that my mouth is moving, I say something truly rude and I can make Mike laugh. He sees inner layers, but does he see all of me? Would he still love me if he saw my depth? By the time you get to my innermost layer, really inside, I’m sweet and too spicy and I might bring tears to your eyes. Sometimes I bring tears to my own eyes when I look for meaning and actually find it. Sometimes, I’m an ass. Sometimes, I’m lost in the abyss.

Maybe I’m not like an onion. Most of the layers inside an onion are all alike and they go all transparent in heat with butter. I can hardly ever go transparent, even to my best friends. I tried that a few weeks ago with the subject of my family’s status as high-risk to the Coronavirus. At the end of our conversation, I felt like a raw nerve and still felt like my family was disposable. I don’t want us to be disposable.

My friends and I were discussing the use of masks. They were resistant. I got mad that I meant so little to them, but I never quite showed my true self. I argued somewhat dispassionately. I argued in the realm of the hypothetical.

This connected straight to one of my inner beliefs: Never try to change someone’s mind, even a good friend’s. There are limits to friendship. I felt their limits and I left them alone. Maybe I’m not brave, really, but I still believe this in my soul, that I can’t change a mind that’s made up.

Since then, I’ve been walking around hurt and angry and thinking about the meaning of a true friendship. Two people outside my house have checked up on me. Two. One of them was my nephew. I think maybe my sister sent him after I wrote a broken letter and sent it to her. I can be more honest with my sister these days, but not completely. I still hide from her on the bad days. I don’t call when I feel I’m at my worst.

I’ll be honest. I’m a little better, more centered these days, but I’m still a mess sometimes. My family is still alive. We’ve managed to stay mostly at home with minimal contact with people who won’t wear masks. The cities have quieted down and hopefully, our country is getting down to the business of making change for the sake of Black lives. I believed in the protests, but I was afraid of the chaos. I’m a little more settled than I was during those weeks.

Yet, I don’t sleep more than four hours at a time. I wake to every noise. I might eventually get enough sleep, but it takes a lot of work to do it. I’m tired. I am deeply tired.

I’m less balanced, or maybe I’m just more worried about falling since I took that spill on Memorial Day. I’m still healing from that fall but at this point, I’m like the little kid with a boo boo who shows her heart-shaped scab to anyone who’ll put antibacterial ointment and new Band-Aid on it. I don’t heal as well as I used to. I feel the ache of that cut. I still feel the ache of the fall deeply.

And I just feel strange. Do you feel strange too? Does any of this feel normal to anyone yet? Do you question your mental health in all these continuing crises?

I do.

Nothing is permanent. I am not permanent. Even Mike and Nick aren’t permanent. It’s odd but it’s true to my core that I have an easier time thinking about dying that living through losing either of them.

I’m not doing a good job of letting go. I’m not doing a good job of living with their impermanence.

Yet every day, I’m reminded that their impermanence could come sooner rather than later. I’m too angry to sweep the sand of my beautiful mandala into the wind. I’m furious that I might have to let go. I don’t want anyone to see how easily I could turn, even in life, into a gray pile at my center.

There. That’s my secret. That’s how easily the beauty of my soul can be blown away.

Thank you for listening, jules

Growing Some Food

Okay, I’ll admit something embarrassing:

I had to replant almost my entire garden yesterday. I doubt that I’ll get anything from it because it’s so late in the season, but at least I’m trying. Nick and I had restarted some little pots with seeds in the house. The only thing that still grew in my raised bed when I sat down were two potato plants that Nick had put in. He came outside to check what I was doing. He was jubilant. Me? Not so much.

Cut worms had come through and mowed down a few of my starts, tomatoes and squash. I’d looked it up. Four plants had just been cut and not eaten. My Brussels sprout starts were tall, but I think the wet spring got to them. First, they laid down, then they shriveled and were gone. I’d planted a second set of seeds. About a week ago, I found two rows of little holes where someone had dug them all up. Squirrels. Or rats. My zucchini didn’t come up at all. The perfectly rounded hill I had built for them stood naked.

Mike finished mowing the last stripe of our pathetic grass and let the lawn mower fall silent. “Your sterilization box is amazingly sterile!” he said. Then, he waved at the green that surrounded it.

“There’s still a potato plant in there. See?”

He leaned over and squinted. A half dozen small leaves hovered in one corner at ground level.

“Didn’t Nick plant that?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“And his potato starts in pots here are growing great.”

I saw where he was going with it. He almost smiled, but held it in.

“And on the deck, my green beans and Swiss chard and parsley and sage and rosemary and kale in my pots are all totally gone, eaten.”

“You have green sticks growing in the pot that says green beans. They could grow more leaves.” He was starting to sound hopeful. I hated when he switched to hopeful. It was a sign that I was totally pathetic, too pathetic to tease.

Then, Nick walked outside.

“Dad, look at my potato plants!” he shouted.

And I listened as they talked about how the Irish lived almost entirely on potatoes as I stared at the empty places in my raised bed. I’d seen blight kill my tomato plants in years before I gave up trying. I knew I couldn’t even reuse the dirt that they’d died in. Maybe I had blight under my skin. If I so much as touched those plants, I could imagine the gray necrotic areas where blight would take them down.

“My family immigrated to the United States after the potato famine,” I said.

“Mine too,” Mike said and he looked at Nick then back at me.

“Mom, don’t touch my potatoes.”

“What if I see a cut worm or a slug eating them?”

And he rolled his eyes as if anything like that would ever touch his green, growing plants.

Maybe they wouldn’t. My grandparents could grow almost anything. I remember the year they tried peanuts. They lived too far north for peanuts and kept wondering aloud if they’d get any peanuts. Oh, they got plenty of peanuts. Everything else in their yard produced food.

That food was so delicious. I remember Grandpa tapping a watermelon and grinning as it split open to show the juicy red flesh inside. He pulled out his pocket knife and we ate that watermelon on the spot. There were onions so sweet you could eat them like an apple. There was corn, beans, pumpkins, beefsteak tomatoes, red potatoes, squash, raspberries, gooseberries, dewberries, apples, and persimmons.

My mother, brother, and sister are all gifted gardeners too. Gifted.

Not me.

Maybe it skips a generation. Maybe Nick would have that special something that allowed him to know and understand the plants as well as grow them. Not me.

Oh, I know the names of plants. I can even tell you about pests. I can identify exotic weeds growing in my yard and the best way to eradicate them. Here’s a hint: it’s usually pulling them up with as much root clump as you can. With blackberry, it’s easiest to cut them about a foot tall, wait three weeks for the root to weaken, then pull them up after a day of rain. Yet our yard is full of exotic weeds and few plants I’ve bought and planted have thrived. They either overgrow the space or whither away. See, I know how to do the gardening. I’m just not good at doing the gardening.

I sat on the edge of my sterilization box and pulled buttercup from around the edges. I’d lost track of Nick and Mike’s conversation. There, under the lip of my box, was a banana slug. She had a single dot on the back of her head and a bunch of freckles lower down. (Is that the top her head? I don’t know.) I found a big leaf nearby, grabbed her with it, and wrapped her in the leaf like a burrito. Then, I flung her up the hill as far as I could where I hoped she’d eat a bunch of weeds. I don’t kill banana slugs. They’re a sign of a healthy ecosystem. Plus, they’re native and my house if surrounded by forest..

I pulled up a few more weeds at the edge of the nearly empty raised bed. I grew buttercup, morning glory, and stinky Robert. Mike got Nick digging the trench for a French drain he was installing. The two of them murmured as I made my way around the box pulling weeds. Another banana slug. This one had the same dot above and plethora of dots below.

I’ve seen banana slugs with no dots. I’ve seen them freckled almost to a solid black. I’ve never seen two banana slugs with one dot on the back of their heads and a bunch further down their bodies. I wondered if they were sisters. I wrapped her up and threw her up with her sister. The Dot family that lived up the hill.

Then, I started working on clearing weeds from the retaining wall. Here in the Pacific Northwest, things grow so violently that they can obliterate the view of a retaining wall in one season. There, under the bangs of English ivy, was another slug just like the other two. Dot.

She too, could fly.

I wandered around the yard, looking on the shaded sidewalk. Dot. I looked on the back deck where the hummingbird feeder dripped. Dot. I looked under a pot or two. Dot. Dot.

I was growing a garden to feed the Dot family.

So, I had to fight cut worms, rodents, blight, and banana slugs.

Maybe Nick could grow us some food.

Thank you for listening, jules

News Fatigue and Failed Resolutions

What about the Black Lives Matter movement and the effect of fatigue that happens around the news? You know what I mean, don’t you.

What? You need an example?

What happened regarding the news before COVID-19 that was about…

You know, I seriously can not remember what was in the news the days before COVID-19 hit. Can you? The impeachment was overthrown by Mitch McConnell in the Senate. Remember that news? Before that, there were children in cages. Do you remember that our government separated children from their families and put them into metal cages with concrete floors? And before that, our government denied aid to Puerto Ricans, aid that would have been given to any other Americans. Remember the lack of aid to Puerto Rico? Those were different days, another era. We’ve moved on. We’re post-COVID-19 now.

As much as we would want it, COVID-19 won’t stand to be ignored for long. We can try to ignore it, but it keeps killing people in the thousands. Every day, a few thousand people in the world die of it. So, it keeps returning to the news although I can even feel a resistance to more of that information. If you had told me in March that every single day, more people would die in the world than the number that died on 911, I would have told you it would be catastrophic headline news. Now, it’s the norm, repetitive.

But what about the Black Lives Matter movement? After three and a half weeks, protests are still going on, but the news about them has decreased despite new cases of police brutality and even lynchings. The news seems to have reverted to political gaffes in the White House and the effects of the virus on states that reopened.

I get that news has to roll with current events, but what will happen to all that important momentum regarding change against institutional racism?

I feel it in my own gut. I feel myself moving on to other events. My own news cycle is shifting.

Yet I don’t want to lose this momentum. It’s an opportunity for real change in our country. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ people could not be fired based on their gender or sexual orientation.

Is that viewed by people of color as a win in the name of intersectionality?

I believe so but I’m not ready to let go of the problems of police brutality. I’m just not. The work has only begun. I can’t stop now, can I?

It’s just like that sense, two weeks after any New Year’s eve, when I realize that wonderful resolution I made is slipping out of my consciousness. Eighty percent of all New Year’s resolutions fail. I don’t want to let the changes that the Black Lives Matter protests initiated fall flat at my feet. And I know that I’m not the only person who feels the fatigue that I’m feeling. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for unintentionally letting go of a good resolution over time. The term I should put on this is white privilege. Bodie Thoene said that apathy is the glove in which evil slips its hand. There it is. Turning away from this problem of racism in the United States after three and a half exhausting weeks of protests and riots and renewed police brutality is a racist act in itself. So is forgetting the children in the cages and the maltreatment of people in Puerto Rico. My outrage is tired.

Oh no, I am that person.

I don’t want to be that person. I want people to be treated with humanity, respect, and care. My spotlight needs to stay on the fact that black lives matter.

Why is that so important?

My own humanity depends on it. Does yours?

Thank you for listening, jules

I'm Still Ridiculous

Our country is burning. People are marching in the streets.

For George Floyd.

For Armaud Arbery.

For Breonna Taylor.

Even for Christian Cooper.

All I can tell you is that it’s about time. It’s not just about George Floyd. How many black people have to die before we make changes?

You don’t really need me to tell you all this, do you? You’ve been watching the news too. I’ve been glued to it. I wanted to leap up and join the people on the streets, but my family is still in the high-risk category for COVID-19. Remember the virus? I still have to think about the virus.

The virus was the awful news last month. It’s still bad news, but despite the risks, people are out protesting. I’ve felt it was important for me to keep watching the news. Sometimes, I think the biggest mistake people make is to stop watching. I’m not black. My home isn’t at risk. It’s quiet on my street. But that’s the whole point: I have the privilege to stop looking when I get tired or annoyed or frightened or angry.

So, I’ve been trying to examine my own racist bias. I hate that. I do. I’d love to tell you that I am completely free from bias.

But I’m not. It’s in there, an ugly wormy thing that I don’t want to recognize as me. I don’t want to tell you it’s there, but it is.

Good God, that’s hard to admit to you. I’d like to think I’d make different choices, but I think I could have been Amy Cooper in that moment in Central Park. I could have been afraid. I could have reacted. I will tell you that when I’m out with Teddy, I always put him back on leash whenever anyone is around in case they’re afraid of dogs or are one of those by-the-rules people. But my reaction to seeing a black man wearing binoculars around his neck in the woods? What would that have been? Honestly?

Years ago, I got lost driving in New York city. You laugh that I was in my car instead of on a bus, but I’d recently moved from Indiana where my baby blue Granada was the symbol of my independence and safety. If I didn’t like what was going on, I could get into my Granada and leave. If I wanted to move across the country or back, that car was the means.

So, my car was the way I felt most comfortable going to an interview I had in Manhattan for a research position. The job was a wash. That guy wasn’t prepared to take me seriously because I was a woman who looked like she was sixteen years old. He refused to ask me about my education at Purdue but instead shoved a simplistic test at me asking me to prove my intelligence. Maybe it was arrogant, but I refused. I’d just finished four years of studying and testing in a challenging area of study and if I couldn’t talk about that experience and prove my readiness for the job that way, I didn’t want anything this man had to offer.

On my way out, I was angry. It felt as if I’d have been taken more seriously if I were a man. I was angry that he didn’t believe I could have graduated from Purdue. I was furious that he said my transcripts could have been forged.

When I got back into my car, I should have taken a moment to look at my map. That was back in the days of the Thomas maps, when you basically carried this book of maps that allowed you to see roads in a couple of counties.

In Indiana, you could use a one-page map to see the roads for the entire state. Moving to the east coast was an entirely different culture. And their maps were huge.

I got lost in Manhattan. Yes, it was too difficult for me to look at the map and drive at the same time and I was lost. I’d learned to drive in Indiana too and this was the next level of driving skill. I went the wrong direction. I ended up completely turned around. I missed the road for the George Washington bridge at least twice as I circled around. It was a hot July day. I didn’t have air conditioning. My interview suit was wrinkled. I began to stink.

Finally, I realized that I’d driven into Harlem. My friend had told me I shouldn’t drive through Harlem or Newark. He’d drawn big circles on the map’s pages all the places where I shouldn’t get off the main roads. But there I was, in Harlem, lost.

I realized I was just one block west of where I wanted to be. One block. I pulled off into a small road that I thought would connect me to the road that went to the bridge.

It turned out to be a narrow alley.

I drove down it anyway hoping I could get through.

It ended at a brick wall.

I stopped to take a breath. I rolled up my windows despite the heat. I realized if I didn’t get moving, I could cook in my car like a forgotten dog. Sweat poured from my forehead and my hair went limp. I was hungry. It’s never good when I get hungry. I pulled a half-melted Snickers bar from my purse and ate it in three bites. It sat like a lump in my stomach.

Finally, I put my car into reverse, reached back, and twisted around to slowly back out of the alley. I wasn’t good at backing. I’d get too close to the brick wall on one side and have to pull forward to straighten out. Over and over.

Suddenly, people blocked the exit to the alley. It was three or four black men. They were tall and wore new sneakers. They stood still, looking in my direction. I couldn’t get out. I was trapped.

I frantically drove my baby blue Granada back and forth making very little progress. I took a breath and twisted around to look back again.

The men burst out laughing.

When I finally got my car to where they stood, they casually moved out of my way. But they were still laughing.

I was so ashamed. I was still nervous, but I was so ashamed at how I’d assumed they would try to get me.

What does the worm of racial bias do when you shine a light on it? There it is, one bit of my racial bias, for you to see.

I’ve never been hurt by a black man. I’ve never been threatened. I’ve never even heard a cross word from a black man. I have seen them laugh at me. At the exit to that alley.

But I have to admit. I looked completely ridiculous.

Thank you for listening, jules

Looking for Any Little Bit of Good News

So it’s going to be some work to think of something good for the happy side of my blog..

I know that Mike, Nick, and I are relatively safe. We are so careful when we go out. Other people may not be wearing a mask and gloves, but we are. Nick hasn’t been out at all and Mike only goes out for exercise. So, I’m the only one running errands. It’s actually hard to talk to people because I feel so awkward hiding behind my mask, looking a bit different than other people, announcing my fear of the virus when other people may have more bravado. No one has said anything yet, but they’re unsociable around me. I am more invisible than I usually am.

But my family and I are relatively safe. We are.

I keep telling myself that. We’re safe until businesses begin to relax and open up.

Right. Looking for good news.

I sewed a bunch of masks. I’m mostly done sewing masks now. I made ten of them. I feel qualified to make masks now. I also feel qualified to make bras and bikini tops. That’s good news, isn’t it? If you need a new bikini top with a pocket for a filter, I’m the one to see.

Plus, I’ve moved on to converting hospital gowns to PPE gowns for nurses. I’m not entirely sure how good cotton is for protection, but they asked me to and I’m doing it. It’s for a nursing home nearby who has had many cases of COVID-19. For every patient they get from the hospital, they ask for fifty gowns. Then, the plan is that I convert fifty short-sleeved gowns for patients into twenty-five long-sleeved gowns for nurses to wear. Actually, I can get more than that because I’m efficient with the material from the gowns I cut up.

It’s Tetris, if you want to know the truth. Tetris is great practice for packing for vacation and for being efficient with the fabric you cut for patterns. I love Tetris.

I had to redesign the pattern too. The last person who was doing this made freakishly long sleeves. No wonder she could only make one gown out of two. I put this sample onto Mike to check and the sleeves were four or five inches long for him.

(It felt like very bad luck to put a gown from a hospital onto my husband, even for modeling purposes, so I worked quickly and got it off of him as soon as I could. I also washed every single gown before I touched any of them even though they said they were just washed. They’d come from either a nursing home or a hospital that was totally infected with COVID-19! I used some good bleach for those gowns and dried them on high to kill germs.)

Mike held his arm out for me and this sleeve fell off the tips of his fingers and hung two inches slack. So, unless this nursing home was staffed by nurses six feet two or taller, I knew I could shorten the sleeves.

The only thing was that when I asked, the nurse I was working with suddenly became dubious of my skills. Then, I had to risk getting COVID by going back to the place I knew was infected and leaving them a freakishly long-sleeved gown and one that I had redesigned to have normal human sleeve lengths. They sent me an email while I sat in the car. They agreed but they also wanted to leave me another likely-infected sample gown. What did I need with another infected gown? They even told me that I could take five more inches off the sleeve length. So in fact, their nurses don’t have freakishly long arms and are not six feet two inches tall.

But that meant I had to redesign the sleeve again. See the width of the shoulder of these gowns is very wide. I had to taper the added sleeve off to a relatively narrow elastic cuff. I didn’t want any of those viruses to climb up into the sleeve and infect their nurses so the cuff needed to be relatively tight.

But that took time, so I lost almost an entire day shuffling back and forth to drop off samples and redesigning the sleeve so that it didn’t have a bump in it where it began to taper off.

See, this has been good for my mind. I spent a lot of time on Sunday solving the freakishly long sleeve problem and not trying to solve the impossible problem of how to keep my family safe from an invisible virus and people who just want to get out of their houses and back to normal.

See, that is relatively good news, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Thank you for listening, jules

My Kitchen Smells Like a Pool

I’m here just hoping that existing in my chatty mode will help. It’s hard for me when I wake up in the morning. I lie there then remember that the world is locked down and waiting to know who will die and what hospital will become overwhelmed today. The other bad thing is that I cough, sneeze, and essentially wonder, every morning, whether today is the day when the symptoms will finally appear.

I sneezed twice this morning. And my nose ran for a minute.

Here’s what I thought:

I bought groceries yesterday. Did I forget and touch my face? Did someone sick touch a box and did I forget to sanitize it when I got home? Did I forget to sanitize the counter well enough after putting down the box? Did I step on that spot on the floor, accidentally touch the bottom of my foot, then touch my eye? Did I…

Ew.

Okay, I didn’t fucking touch my eye after touching my foot. I don’t want to get some kind of foot disease in my eye.

But what did I touch yesterday? I can’t quite remember.

Do I need to start the quarantine clock again between Mike and me? Oh no, not another two weeks in quarantine without hugs because I got home with bags of groceries and couldn’t remember what I touched.

See, when all this started, I’d been sick for three weeks and so I hadn’t hugged or kissed Mike for three weeks. That was back at President’s Day. It was a nasty cough. I didn’t want to give that to Mike.

Do you remember then? Everything felt normal then. Some people say this is the new normal. I can’t think about that right now.

So, we’d gone to see Nick. I was mostly better by then, but not totally. I have a good immune system so I was probably throwing germs all over the place. I made the mistake of hugging Nick because I was so damned glad to see him and hadn’t been properly hugged for two weeks. I remember the moment, because I lingered a bit too long and Nick, being the teenage boy that he is, said, “Really, Mom?”

After that lovely weekend, Mike and I had just begun having contact, but I still felt behind on human contact. You know, when you need to catch up? I needed to catch up.

Four days later, Nick got sick and I had to go collect him at school. Damn. I had hugged the boy. It was my fault. And I still had that nasty cough. Shoot, I still, to this day, have the remnants of that cough.

As the main caregiver, I hugged sick Nick as much as he needed, but stopped hugging Mike in case I became the carrier of yet another bug.

See, we really did have this social distancing for colds and flu down before the world blew up with it.

Just as Nick began to feel better, COVID-19 happened right here in the Pacific Northwest. People died. It blew up in China. It was coming.

Then, I went on this shopping trip that took so much effort that I couldn’t quite keep track of what I touched and who I spoke to. It freaked me out because I ran into a friend who was terribly sick and I wondered if she’d come too close and I would catch it. She coughed and I actually wondered if I was downwind of her. But back then, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I could catch it by touching the boxes and bags and cans I bought.

I didn’t come down with anything new, but I did mentally count the days until a week had passed before I kissed and hugged Mike freely. He’s in a high-risk category. It’s funny, odd not humorous, that I express my love for him right now by not hugging and kissing him when I could have been exposed.

Home life settled in. I took a very careful trip to the grocery store and wiped down everything and the counters when I got back home. Five or six days passed and I didn’t get sick.

Then, we had to move Nick out of his dorm. That was an exhausting mess of a day and by the end, I had no idea what I had touched. So, a week of internal quarantine passed without contact with my husband. We each had separate hand towels. I wiped down counters after I used them, and I thought about the parts of my jacket that might be infected because I had coughed into them. Finally, that ten days passed and I didn’t get sick.

Two days ago, I had just relaxed my internal quarantine began to hug Mike again.

But yesterday, I went to the grocery store.

I don’t know if it’s getting freakier to go to the grocery store or if I’m creating a phobia about it. What is this fucking virus doing to our psyches?

I picked up each item at the store with a gloved hand. I pushed the cart with a gloved hand. imagined that everything in my wallet was filthy, so I used gloves to pay too. The cashier wasn’t allowed to put anything into my reusable grocery bags because they could be dirty. I had just washed them, but he didn’t know that. I bagged my own stuff, with gloved hands. When I got to my car, I peeled off the gloves, slathered my hands with hand sanitizer, and drove home.

When I got home, I put my bags on the floor, pulled out a Chlorox wipe, and wiped down each thing I’d bought. I didn’t buy fresh fruit or vegetables or I would have soaked them in a vinegar and water solution. I wondered when I was simply smearing COVID-19 germs all over the other packages as the wipe began to dry out a little. I used three wipes before I’d finished with all four bags. Then I put the groceries away and wiped down the counters and the floor where the bags had been. Did I miss anything?

Nick came into the kitchen just then. “Food?” he said. I’d forgotten to pick up some Arizona tea for him when I was out. Fuck. So, when Mike and I took Teddy for a walk, I ran back into the store to get some.

Where was my little baggie of nitrile gloves? No gloves. Was I careful enough when I opened the door to the refrigerated section? Did I get a germ on my hands when I touched the cans? Was my grocery bag infected? When I got back to the car, Mike opened the car window and poured handsanitizer for me so I didn’t have to touch the car first. He gave me another squirt of it after I got into the car. When I got home, I went through the whole process again of sanitizing the cans, wiping down the counter, then washing my hands, twice.

Today, I’m wondering if I should go back into internal quarantine mode. I’m wondering if I need to wait a week or two before I hug Mike.

I don’t do very well when I can’t hug my husband. It was hard enough before COVID-19 because I didn’t want to give him some cold I had caught. But now, I have to worry for fourteen days after every single time I go to the grocery store?

Yes. Yes, I do. It’s worth it to see him shuffle into the room in the morning and say, “Why are you up so early?” It’s worth it. If I have to get OCD and germophobe characteristics to keep Mike alive, I’ll do it.

This morning, I saw that I’d accidentally bleached a couple of places on the jacket I wore to the store yesterday.

Thank you for listening, jules

Clean Out The Fridge

I’ve been looking at the new trend of prepper meals. The other day, I made chicken-beef pasta rice with VegAll and other odd vegetables from the vegetable drawer the other day. I was trying to use up what was in the refrigerator. It wasn’t that great.

This isn’t a time for wasting food, people. You need one more thing to think about, but if you, like me, were properly and gently trained by your grandma who lived through the depression, you should pick it up just fine. Don’t waste food.

The rest of you: Listen up. We’re going to go through the back of your fridge and you’re not going to wrinkle your nose at me.

See that leftover cauliflower, there in back behind the mayo? Yup. Pull that out. You steamed that, what, four days ago when your kid turned his nose up at it despite the butter and lemon pepper you were going to put on it? You’ll use that.

Now, look at the salami that someone put back into the deli drawer without using a silicone container? I know that the reduction in Ziploc bags in your house is a bitch, but it’s fucking good for the oceans to use less plastic, and I know these reusable silicone bags are a pain to use, but use them anyway. Get with the program.

So, that salami is mostly okay except for two slices near the opening that dried up and turned brown. Grandma would have said that you could cut the good part off those two slices and use that. The rest is great. Cut some of those slices into quarters and put the damned package into a silicone bag and put it back into the deli drawer.

Now, look in the vegetable drawer, there’s a handful of chopped onion that you used in the wraps two nights ago. When you used these things you find in the fridge is important. If you can’t remember, it isn’t worth using for the most part. Sour cream and yoghurt are the exceptions. They last almost forever. Look at that itty bitty container of chopped onion. There’s a reason we have all those tiny little Tupperware containers. That bit of chopped onion will rescue a tasteless meal.

There are also a handful of only slightly wrinkled cherry tomatoes in the vegetable bin. You know your husband won’t use those in his salad. Those are still pretty good, except for that one. Don’t use that one. It’s mushy. Grandma won’t be proud of you if you make yourself sick.

Throw out that Portabello mushroom you brought home in a paper bag and never used. That is just sad.

See that chicken broth in the back by the pickles? You can’t use that. It would be so good if you used a bit of that in this concoction you’re making, but you can’t remember when you cooked the chicken tortilla soup that only called for a cup and a half of chicken broth. Two weeks ago? Eleven days? It isn’t worth it. Throw that shit out and fucking remember to write the date you opened it with a Sharpie next time. Or better yet, throw that carton into the freezer for when you need a little soup and don’t want to open a 32 oz. container. Damn.

See the avocado you cut last night? It’s still good if you cut off the slightly brown part. You can see that the rest of it looks bright and green and not too squishy. Protect yourself against ‘avocado hand.’ Don’t use that dull blade with your hand on the other side of the avocado. Those pits let loose and spin at the worst times and none of us need to be walking into the ER these days holding a bloody kitchen towel. Remember the knife skills your son taught you when he took that cooking class in ninth grade. Better yet, store your half-used avocados in a teaspoon of lemon or lime juice so they don’t turn brown overnight. I know you’re hoarding the lime juice for your gin and tonics because Amazon was completely sold out of lemon and lime juice the other day.

Now, you still have eggs don’t you? That’s because you help support the petting zoo down the road. They have fresh eggs available on the honor system at the end of their driveway. Beautiful eggs. Way to eat locally.

Next, you need sea salt and pepper. You know that sea salt that has bigger grains? That stuff, because it sort of pops in your mouth when you eat it.

And there’s butter. Don’t tell anyone that you hoarded butter. You NEED butter.

Now, wash out your nonstick pan. If that’s the only fucking pan in your house that ever gets dirtied, then get into the habit of washing it right after you cook. It’s easier to clean that way. Don’t expect your husband or son to do that though, so you’re still stuck washing it almost every time you want something to eat.

If you caramelize your onions in butter, the house will smell nice for the rest of the day. Then, add the not dried out parts of salami, the onions, the slightly wrinkled cherry tomatoes. Then whip up your locally laid eggs, happy eggs, and pour them in and cover. When the eggs are cooked, slide that sucker onto a plate, sprinkle it with sea salt and pepper, and garnish with your half avocado.

It’s a clean-the-fridge omelette!

Then, your son will wander into the kitchen and ask what there is to eat. Reluctantly, you’ll hand over your mini feast and start over.

Ingredients:

hoarded butter

not quite week old steamed cauliflower

not the dried out part, but the salami that was put into the deli drawer without a wrapper

a handful of chopped onion from wraps two nights ago

three or four slightly wrinkled cherry tomatoes

not the old Portobello mushroom

not the chicken broth because you can’t remember when you opened it

chunky sea salt and pepper

a half an avocado, trimmed

two locally laid fresh eggs (Locally laid sounds a little bit pervy if you think about it too long, so now is not the time. We’re cooking here.)

I’m sorry I didn’t use any canned meats or vegetables. Maybe I’ll be a better prepper in a couple of months.

Thank you for listening, jules

Send Messages of Love

I’m learning again.

I used to think that sixty-year-old people didn’t need to keep learning. Now that I’m there, I find that the world is changing faster and I need to work harder to keep up.

But I am in the business of learning. This week, my homework involved

• the use of meeting and file-sharing software,

• the large-scale properties of a novel influenza virus,

• the moment-to-moment thought process of an OCD germaphobe,

• the multiple definitions of the word ‘novel,’ especially in the area of infectious diseases,

• the interpretation of logarithmic graphs, especially in the area of global pandemic,

• the gratitude of gregarious people with dogs who are glad you’re willing to even talk to them,

• and the most effective method of washing your hands.

That feels like a lot of learning.

Dammit! I just touched my face. Are you finally aware of just how many times you touch your own face? I hate having to worry about that, and what surfaces I’ve just touched, and who I just touched.

My nose has never been itchier than it’s been this past week. It drives me nuts. I need a little nose scratcher. But I would keep it in my pocket and it even feels like everything in there reinfect my hands when I do what I always do. I love my pockets. I have things I carry. When I’m nervous, I shove my hands deep. I like to touch a rock I keep in my pocket. It may be time to disinfect the rock.

Governor Inslee has closed our schools. The rest of you in our country will be able to watch what happens here to see how ready we are. We have good hospitals. We have a medical system that, like the rest of the country, is stretched.

When I read about Italy, I was afraid. Doctors there have to triage, as if at war. Anyone who is older than sixty-five is not treated because the effort won’t be as productive as if they chose to care for someone who is younger, more likely to survive. Think about that, all those seemingly youngish 65 year old people that you know and love.

I’m afraid.

I keep thinking about a room full of one hundred friends who I know. I know that my hundred people shouldn’t congregate in a room right now. But in an imaginary room, twenty of them will need to be hospitalized for this virus. How many will need to go to the hospital because they have a kidney stone or appendicitis? That’s not part of the statistics here.

Can you say Puerto Rico? Remember all the extra deaths that occurred as a secondary effect of the hurricane after federal help was not sent?

So, let’s just assume that of the one hundred friends in my imaginary room, at least half are going to fight COVID-19. Some estimates are 70%. At least seven of them will need to be hospitalized. Experts now believe that millions of people in the US will need hospitalization to care for COVID-19. We only have about a million hospital beds available and about three-quarters of them are occupied most of the time. So of those twenty of my friends, doctors will need to triage who to treat, who could die without treatment. That’s seven of my friends who face that dilemma. Then, if the global statistics stay consistent, and they have been consistent or worse, 3.8% of those who are infected will die. That means that, of my hundred friends in a virtual room, at least two will die even if they can get treatment at a hospital.

Can you tell I’ve been thinking about these numbers? These are not good numbers. When they throw out these numbers and percentages, it seems vague, but when I put one hundred of my favorite people in an imaginary room, I don’t want to think about which two or three or four people I’ll lose by this time next year. And if I’m honest, I’m in that room as well.

It makes me want to send out letters, to call people, to send hugging GIFs on my phone to people I love. Social media has never been more important. It makes me wonder, during my self-quarantine to protect my immediate family, who I will never see again.

I can’t quite get my mind around all of this. I keep going over the numbers in despair. My message to you, from the middle of King County, Washington, is to wash your hands thoroughly and to send out messages of love.

Thank you for listening, jules

Dear Susan

Our family didn't get our act together to send Christmas cards this year, so I decided to send a real letter to you instead.

Life has changed since Nick went off to college (he's studying engineering like his Grandpa Roy) and we haven't been on any life-altering vacations, so if I wrote a year-in-review letter, you'd either put it down or laugh at all our bodily foibles. Don't worry. We're basically healthy except for the gas.

I'm sorry to hear that Brenda is in a nursing home. I still imagine her laughing out loud at something you said. I love that enthusiastic sound. You know, my happiest memories of being a child were in Grandma Millie’s house when you two would stop by. We were usually eating and the food was so good. Sometimes, I make gravy just to make my house smell like Grandma's. All of you laughed and talked about everything under the sun. I wish I remembered more of those stories. These days, I can almost conjure the sound of Grandma's voice. She never sat in one place very long unless she was telling a story.

"Let's go see about the yard." Do you remember her saying that before we'd go look at what she and Grandpa grew in their yard? The corn came from him and the dahlias came from her. By the time we wandered back in, she carried dinner in her apron.

Do you still wear an apron? I only do when it's going to be messy. And I don't grow much either. I have mostly volunteer Western red cedars and moss in my pots this time of year. I usually grow some greens and bright annuals to brighten up my deck though.

Do you remember the stories Grandma used to tell from the front porch as we rocked in chairs or banged the window by swinging the porch swing too high?

Sometimes, it surprises me how much life has changed since then, how busy people have become, and how reluctant to listen to a whole story. I hope you aren't stuck in that busy, busy mode and that people stop and listen to your stories when you tell them.

I miss the sound of Grandma's screen door and cicadas. I miss that people stopped by for a bit. Sometimes, they just stopped their cars right on the road and leaned out to talk for just a minute. That's how most clearly I remember Bobby. I miss pumping up water from the well in their yard. I miss beefsteak tomatoes and persimmon pudding. And I miss you too.

Give my love to Brenda.

Thank you for listening, jules

Connected

Do you believe in life after death?

I have no proof, but I do anyway. I talk to my dead. How can you stop talking to those whom you love after they died?

A tone of voice will bring my dad to mind, a tool I’ve used for forty years, the memory of an ridiculous straw hat with colored pompoms on it used for camping. You can’t fry bacon and pour fresh coffee without bringing my grandma into the room with me.

I wonder how these departed souls are affected by quantum entanglement. I love the concept of quantum entanglement, two crystal particles whose link isn’t a response, but one movement bound by the other, a dance with an eternal partner, faster than the speed of light. It’s one more mystery humans haven’t completely solved.

So what happens when I ask my dad to keep an eye on his grandson, a boy who follows in his footsteps even though they never met, even though I haven’t seen my dad since 1973 when I was just a girl? Is there a linked movement on the other side of reality that I could never sense? Is there quantum entanglement that exists between us?

What happens when I sing a song that was written by a musician who has already died? What flutters around ideas in books written by those I can never meet, but whom I love for their words delivered across time? What about the inner space in front of a painting that stuns the viewer. I still remember the effect on me of a drawing by Van Gogh that I saw in 1984 at the MOMA in NYC. That moment is not dead, but still vibrates in my soul. Does it vibrate in his?

What about evil and cruelty? Do they also have links to propagate into the future? I learned today from a TED Talk by Annie Murphy Paul that starvation and stress are learned by a fetus in the womb, that they are born and grow up with reactions to that starvation and stress that continue for a lifetime. I read that it takes five generations for a family to heal from a trauma. I wonder if it’s even possible or if the trauma is passed on from generation to generation to generation and on into the future.

It’s strange how entranced I am about staying connected with the love of those who have died, but I don’t want it to be equally true about evil. But if I’m willing to feel the love across the divide, shouldn’t I I have to look at the pain as well? I have to imagine that the equation is balanced between good and evil, don’t I? No. I might look, examine the nature of good and evil, but I can hope the balance weighs on the side of love. I can hope.

Or maybe I’m just throwing ideas into the air and hoping they’ll spin a particle in a different direction than anyone expected.

Thank you for listening, jules

Stalking and Sliding

I had a hard week of trying to be cheerful and productive. I didn’t do very well.

Nick went back to school on Saturday. After he left, they closed the mountain pass he was supposed to traverse. There were accidents they needed to clear. Accidents. Plural. Suddenly, I felt paralyzed to do anything else but wait, so while Mike played video games, his Saturday morning ritual, I employed my stalker app, watched Nick’s movement, and filled the interstices with Solitaire and quiet talk about Nick’s progress.

At first, he waited at the library with a friend who was also going back to school. That part was okay. He could go tomorrow. The weather up there might get better in the afternoon. I wanted him to come back home. Mike texted him that he should wait there to see if they opened back up. They did and Nick was on his way. I watched him move at a nearly normal speed up the mountain. When he was about thirty minutes away, he stopped. We could still go get him if there was a problem, I reasoned as if we were superhuman and would be able to traverse where others had failed.

I knew my folly. I’d seen men in trucks slide sideways down a hill right after someone else had failed to get traction.

Somehow, that seemed to be the thing for me to do. I moved from Solitaire to YouTube. Videos on ice. I found what seemed like a slow-motion video of two buses, a truck with a ladder on top, a police car, and a tow truck all sliding down the same hill and piling into the same four cars at the bottom as a growing crowd watched. I repeated it three times and showed Mike one more time. It was funny. It was too slow to be too dangerous. If I had to imagine Nick doing poorly on the road, I wanted to imagine this kind of damaging but relatively painless icecapade.

“He’s moving just a little,” Mike said.

And I went back to the stalker app.

“Blip,” I said.

He was still only thirty-five minutes away on a clear day.

Then, I found a video of spinouts on a curve on an interstate in Charleston, West Virginia. The videographer stayed with each car as if he knew their fate. I could imagine a wintry Saturday night at his place, the television replaced with a row of recliners in front of a deep window where we could watch and maybe hold up little cards with a score, a ten reserved for those who spun and recovered facing the right direction without hitting a jersey barrier. It looked almost elegant from that distance.

“Blip,” Mike said. So, Nick, if he was in trouble with the interstate, was only moving at a snail’s pace. I tried to imagine walking faster. I watched another video that had many of the same clips as the Charleston one. Apparently, it was a notorious stretch of road.

“Blip. Well, he’s moving anyway,” Mike said.

Then, I watched as people spun their tires and turned their steering wheels as far as they could go in the desired direction while we, the observers, could see how ineffective that was for gaining traction. I actually laughed out loud.

“He’s made it to Hyak,” he said. It flattened out at Hyak.

We stalked him for the entire eight hour trip, Mike on an extended video game mission, and me watching YouTube videos then pretending to read and putter around the kitchen. When Nick finally, finally pulled into the parking lot of his school, I texted him: Good job, honey. Welcome back to school.

Then, I let out a long hot breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I was exhausted and went to bed early.

The next day, Mike left for a business trip to Missouri. In between sparse obligations, I spent a snowy week periodically employing the stalker app to imagine how Mike was doing as he worked half-way across the country and watching Nick as he walked back and forth to class. When I was just hanging around, I switched to watching animals on ice. It was funnier.

On Wednesday, I got into my car, despite a sheet of ice on the driveway, and slid sideways toward the highway. Somehow, I remembered how those pinned steering wheels were useless and in slow motion, I turned my wheels toward the skid and managed to come out straight and stop completely at the bottom.. Thankfully, there was no one around to record my blooper for YouTube entertainment.

Thank you for listening, jules

An Old Lady's Way of Playing in the Snow

My heart is still thumping from shoveling snow in the driveway. And a bead of sweat rolls down my back inside my shirt. I’m hungry and I want hot chocolate. With marshmallows. And soup.

I didn’t go outside until mid-afternoon. Yet, it was hard to stop once I got going.

I don’t go sledding anymore. I don’t fall backward in the snow and swish my arms and legs or even press my face into a smooth place in the snow to get that creepy reverse sculpture that I’ve been seeing on Reddit. I don’t make snowmen. I should. Playing in the snow makes me feel like a kid, limitless, my hands and cheeks stung by the transition from the heat inside my body to the frost outside it. But, since it maintains my old-lady decorum , I like to shovel snow.

I pulled my trusty snow shovel out of the garage and plowed it down the hill in a one-lane rut that a tire could catch. Then, I trudged back up the hill, picked a spot approximately the width of tires and did it again. Then, I began to shovel in front of my car at the bottom of the driveway so I could get out in an emergency.

I really like the snowplow method of shoveling snow, but after the first run to the road in front of my car, I realized that if I didn’t lift the heavy scoop often enough, hunks of snow fell off the clean side that I’d just finished plowing. So, I crossed back and forth in a square pattern toward the road, tilting the full shovel up to make a neat wall at each edge of the driveway and eliminating the need to lift pounds of snow over and over. It wasn’t nearly as elegant or smooth as the plow method, but I made messy walls of snow on either side of the driveway that I hoped would keep the UPS guy in the right place on the asphalt.

Midway, I got hot and had to take off my hat and gloves and put them into my pockets. I unwrapped my scarf to cool off even more, but it kept sliding longer on one side than the other and tangling with the shovel. Twice, I found my hat lying in wet snow after it had fallen out. So I shoved it, sloppy and wet, deeper into my pocket. I felt cold and wet on my hip as its snow melted. I hoped I wouldn’t find it later, frozen to a rut, driven over, and dirty beyond recognition. That was my favorite hat. My sister knitted it for me.

If I wanted, I could have been done then. That was the least I needed to do. Everything else was gravy.

That was the joy of it. By then, I’d scattered nuts and dried fruit under the brush away from the house because this morning, a fluffed up bird landed on the windowsill in hopes of finding a tidbit where the snow had been protected by the eaves. Snow is hard for the birds, so I feed them when I think of it or they remind me, but I was acutely aware that the rats, the ones who did so much damage in Mike’s garage, would also find what I scattered about.

After the serious stuff, I noodled around. Once, I finished the minimum, the rut and place in front of my car, I could have gone inside. I could have.

But it was truly hard to stop. It always is.

By the time I was done, I’d scooped a nice line out for the mailman and the garbage truck to swoop by. I’d stepped back and waved at the snowplow who lifted his plow a bit and moved to the center of the road to keep from undoing the work I was doing. I would have told him not to alter his plan for me, that we needed to work in tandem to move all that snow, but the way he lifted his plow and the wave he gave me was kind.

I cleared my windshields and the top of my car. I’d even considered shoveling in front of the neighbor’s car. Her shovel was leaning right there on a tree. But just then, someone drove down an adjacent driveway and I felt like an interloper. Isn’t it funny how you can feel guilty even though you aren’t doing anything wrong?

I used to have this great, but old, REI rain jacket that they still sold in the store. Every single time I wore it to shop there, I wondered if anyone would think I’d shoplifted it, even when I knew it had a burn hole covered in duct tape from a close encounter with a fire and faded places on the shoulders.

Yeah, so I got that feeling, loitering around the neighbor’s driveway after I got my mail, so i went back to my own yard. I shoveled a line along the walkway instead. I kicked snow off my boxwoods and looked for other plants that might break from the weight of it.

By then, Teddy was sitting in the snow waiting for me. He’d zoomed back and forth and was done since there were no other dogs to wrestle with. Teddy’s starting to get old. So finally, I decided to put away my shovel and come inside.

Just now, Mike texted me that we’re expecting four more inches of snow in the middle of the night.

I’m glad I didn’t bother with the neighbor’s driveway.

Thank you for listening, jules

Singed

I singed my eyebrows at the bonfire last night. They’re not all the way gone, but they’re definitely short. I wasn’t drunk. Really. I was just cold.

Early in the evening, I watched as our host lit a bonfire with kerosene. I watched at a distance. I don’t like the smell of a bonfire made of kerosene. Later, it smelled like a good wood fire and it seemed that all the spilled kerosene would have either flamed up or been washed out by the rain. I’m not stupid. I’d expected the kerosene to surprise us the way it can sometimes. I took video just in case. Thankfully, it didn’t.

Later, I sang in front of a crowd full of mostly strangers. I’d like to tell you that’s not a bad thing, but you wouldn’t believe me until I did it. Why is it that ugly old women aren’t supposed to be able to sing? I want to know. People were surprised and kept asking me questions about my voice. You know, a voice is a voice. God gave it to me. I didn’t have anything to do with creating it. I felt so awkward. Why were people so surprised? Lots of people can sing. I know that somehow I’ve let this gift I was born with lie fallow for most of my life. What I don’t have in great quantities is courage, even when I do have the desire.to sing out. If I had more courage, that would be a thing to be proud of. But I don’t sing out very often. Ours is not generally a society in which people encourage people to sing in public. Maybe I’ll actually find the courage to sing to a doubting crowd in my next life.

Near midnight, they handed out sparklers. I lit mine from the middle so that it burned in two directions and died twice as fast. People kept lighting theirs from one end as if that were the rule. Who made that rule? Why can’t I have my sparklers lit in two places? Why do I worry about what people think of the way I light my sparklers?

Last night, I remember leaning into the fire to light a new sparkler and it was a bit too warm. I could feel the sting of heat on my hands and face. These days, I don’t get a bit too warm very often so it was a rather pleasant sensation until the wind dropped a large invisible hand down on the top of the fire and ashes swirled all around me like strange music formed in lights. I slapped at ashes that landed on my cotton jacket, but I didn’t see any holes. How could I be so lucky, I wondered? I didn’t realized I’d singed my eyebrows until later.

At the countdown, I leaned past someone to kiss Mike. I still wanted it to be him even after all these years. I’m still surprised sometimes that he’s stuck with me. Lately, I haven’t been easy. Insomnia sucks. Old people shouldn’t sing in public. Sparklers are meant to light from one end. If I singed my eyebrows, I must have been drunk. I woke up still feeling as if I’m doing it wrong, but Mike is still with me and I still have some of my eyebrows.

Happy New Year!

Thank you for listening, jules