Healing: It's not just for breakfast anymore

It's been about a month since I had surgery.  The stitches are gone, the the adhesions no longer adhere, and physically Im in better shape than I have been, literally, in a year or more.   However, I was a lot sicker than I realized, and was putting it down to the aging process, which is a kind way of saying, 'you gettin' OLD, lady...". 

 I would start a project (otherwise known as housework) and then think, nahhh.  Tomorrow.  I would plan on washing my hair, but since I was using the sink in the kitchen, I couldn't do that until I washed the dishes.   Stalemate. So I would take my rapidly aging body into the kitchen, prop my feet up on the oven door, and read another book.  The house needed vacuuming, and that was often scheduled after I didn't do the dishes I wasn't doing, and the hair I wasn't washing.   You see where this is heading.   Oh, let's read another book.

Once I got straightened out,  mid March I was stitched up, and sent home.  Over time I've learned to listen to the body, and this time it paid off.  After the discomfort disappeared, I was finally aware that healing also happens in the head, too.   And as with stitches, you don't push.  Over the past month I've been doing more and more of the physical stuff;  bringing in wood, doing laundry, all that stuff.  and now, today and yesterday I dragged out the vacuum and have been vacuuming slowly, steadily.  Dishes got washed, bread has been made.

The body has healed, the head is catching up.  Happy Easter.

Mother's Books and how they resonate

My mother, may the saints preserve  her soul, was a difficult woman;  incredibly self-centered,  narcissistic,  but she--and our whole family--loved card games, board games, jigsaw puzzles, and books.

I was reading by the time I was around 3 1/2, as near as I can tell, probably because, as she put it, she had read the books to me so many times I had them memorized.  I don't recall anyone teaching me to read, nor do I ever remember asking anyone what "that word says".   My all time favorite Golden Book was Mr. Bear Squash You All Flat.  Miss Manners would have approved.

There were no visible restrictions on what I chose to read, meaning, if I could get it off the shelves it was fair game.  It was only years later that I accidentally found her carefully hidden stash of  1940s Mickey Spillane books, and when I was about 16 the "Decameron" suddenly appeared on a side table beside two other matched mates.   To that end, I read everything on the shelves, from "Gone With The Wind" to "Song of Bernadette" and "Mister Roberts".  Comic books were 'allowed'. 

I overheard a convo she was having one day with a friend, who was shocked that I was allowed to read 'such trash'.  Mother  quite calmly answered, 'she's reading.  that's what counts."   The fact that I was at that moment reading musty old WWII comics that we had swept up from someone's attic  did not escape me.  I also was deep into Mary Jane and Sniffles and  "Nancy and Sluggo."

I don't know if a love of reading, of books and words and how they fit each other is learned, inherited, or a bit of both, but I do know no family visits were complete without rousing games of cards, words, and language, and even at home when the neighbors showed up, we played Hearts and Poker and Monopoly.

My high school English teacher, a proper New England lady, was stunned when I gave a book report in my Junior year of school on "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn".  She quietly took me aside after class and asked me if my mother knew I was reading 'such things".  I said, of course, she's the one who gave me the book to read when I was 10.  I could just see her mentally erasing the letter she was constructing for my mother...


The irony in all of this is, the man I married had never played a game of anything in his life.  I had to teach him how to play Monopoly. He was not impressed.  Maybe...Parcheesi?  nah.  Cribbage. No. Just no.
However, to be fair, he has never fussed about my adventures with online games, possibly because he knows it's me and Worlds of Warcraft or he and I and Monopoly...

March Winds

Yesterday morning, to celebrate a Day Above 45 deg., I decided to do a wash.  Yes, I knew it was going to rain later, but sometimes a pre-rain day lets the clothes dry faster. No idea why, I'm sure 

 there's a huge explanation, but it does work.

Hung out a line full.  Blue jeans, sweats, a  jacket, work clothes. 

Couple hours later I looked out and it was pouring, that thin, cold rain.  Ah, well, I said, they'll rinse well.   At suppertime the Mister looked out and said, erm, there seem to be gaps on the clothesline.  ON with the boots and the coat, and by the time I got there half the clothes had been yanked off the line by a vicious wind and deposited in the rosebushes on the other side of the wall. Oh THANK you wind gods.  

And the clothes, of course,  were wetter than when I hung them out. I managed to get them all in (by this time all the clothes had been scattered   across the lawn like the street scene out of Gone With The Wind and all those dead soldiers)...all of them drippy and cold.  I decided it would make no sense to bring them in so I set up a clothes rack in the woodshed where they could drip in peace...

Reluctant Spring, Shoddy Hopes

Just about  the time you give in to the weather hype and the man with the map  pointer has shown you just where the warm April is about to burgeon out all over everything, you realize that no matter how many robins are marching across your lawns, and how many woodpeckers and doves insist on it,  there are no leaf buds, no swelling of the lilac bush flowers, not even a damn crocus, even when you dig out the snow and find more snow down there.

Just about then you realize that the next season is not  spring, but late mud season, with a serious clenched fist promise of snow...and by that time it's nearly May and you've missed the whole performance.

Once May shows up and you really really WANT to get out there and practice Pilates in the garden, you have a choice of chilly and really chilly, or mud.  June is spring. July is summer.  August is deciding where the wood goes in the shed for next wintah.

However, to be truly fair,  I feel I have no justification for any of this, considering the atrociously vicious weather the rest of the country seems to be having.  Tornadoes and blizzards and cyclones, oh my...

And as a tease, if you squint as you look out over the lawn, there seems to be a faint haze of green; and right now we seem to be having our first thunder storm of the year.  It's all good.

Is it me? Or thee?

My husband's second cousin called a few nights ago to see how we were doing, and of course at this point I seem to be the family poster child for the Aging (ageing?)...and since he is only in his mid 30s,  I think he had visions of me slowly recovering from major surgery, being helped to the bathroom, fed nourishing broths and custards (oh, bleah) and it was summed up in one question:  "How you doin'?  are you able to be up and about yet?"

We have been invited to 'brunch" (hell it's only a 90 minute drive...) and I'd be totally unsurprised if he had a walker ready for me as we got out of the car...

Sigh...

How to Have Fun in the Summer T13

Projects for the coming months

1: clean out the junk around the water tank, and pump, in the cellar

2:  replace both, which are sorely in need of replacement (right now they are sitting in our kitchen, patiently

3: rebuild the 'housing' around them, both as a noise reducer and a way to keep them from freezing in the wintah.

4:  oil burner, and storage tank, and the attendant fist fights over where the radiators should go

5:  get the piano out of the parlor and decide what to do with the wood and how to finish off the harp, which can be lethal if you do it wroong

6:  get the remaining (old)wood inside to make room for the new wood

7:  convince him that we really don't NEED that old TV (oh, yeah, yep, right)

8:  putting in the radiators/thermostats

9:  maybe, just maybe, reconfigure the garden

10: cut up the rest of the wood that we never got to last year

11: finish the curtains upstairs

12:  insert project here (the surprise one we don't know about)

13:  rest from our labors =)

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