Living with Mononucleosis, part 1

It is a strange thing to wake up and realize that you’ve had enough sleep. I can’t remember when I consistently woke up feeling that way, but I’m pretty positive it was before I had kids. It has happened two days this week. Woo hoo.
I’m getting enough sleep because I’m getting over mononucleosis, and I’m resting. I’ve been telling people today that I am aggressively resting. After three months of living with mono, I have learned (finally) to respect the virus and am finally doing what I was told when it was diagnosed: resting. It helps. I feel a little better, and I am getting enough sleep – although under that refreshed feeling I have the deep, thorough exhaustion which I attribute to the mono.
I have had mono long enough to stop wondering when I’ll get back to being my old self, and to consider that being my old self is what got me into this fix. I am thinking maybe I should try to design a new life that’s more like the restful life I’m living now. Not that I’ll ever be satisfied with how I’m living life. I’m grateful to be in solitude and doing not much of anything but knitting and watching TV and reading right up until I have a major case of cabin fever and feel like running out of the house screaming. I never do that – one doesn’t, usually – but I do hop in the Honda and head off to dump some recycling, or check out the yarn supply up at Granny’s Attic, or see what’s in the post office boxes, or see if there’s anything for me in the library. Then there is the obligatory stop at the grocery store.
Then I come home and scrape together some dinner.
One of the things I’m not doing much these days is cooking, so meals are exercises in improvisation. My husband is enjoying more pizza than usual, which makes him happy, I think. Meals are interesting. Today for lunch I had a leftover artichoke and a piece of pumpkin pie. It seemed to be OK. I didn’t fall over or anything afterwards.
I watch birds out the kitchen window. I bought a “Birds of Seattle and Puget Sound” book a few weeks ago. I had noticed lots of birds in the yard – especially Steller’s jays in the Asian pear tree outside the kitchen window – and decided to put a little bird food out and see what happened. What happened was a couple of dozen little guys which I identified as dark-eyed, or Oregon, juncos. Cute little guys, and lots of them, all fighting with each other over the booty. One black-topped chickadee showed up, also, but didn’t make much progress against the many juncos.
The Steller’s jays showed up to say, “Hello hello hello, what’s all this, then?” and pretty soon the jays were in and the juncos were out. But once the jays left, the juncos came right back.
I guess I’m going to have to have a heart to heart talk with myself soon. Think realistically about what life has ahead. Right now I have to assume I may be semi-laid up for another three months; that’s not an unreasonable assumption, apparently.
And I think I’ll start blogging more often.

Sweet Old Bob

Dear Hearts and Gentle People,
It is essay & letter time again. All our time and effort and energy have been devoted to moving out of one house and into another the last few weeks, and to that I attribute my lack of focus. I ended up writing about the book I’ve been reading. Oh well.
Still, I hope you enjoy this modest offering.
We are gradually settling in here at Casa Tuel Nuevo. Day by day I uncover more floor space. I throw things away, and give things away, and move things around, and then it’s time for lunch and after that I start over. The process of going through each box, and looking at each scrap of paper in each box, is as slow and tedious as I expected and it sounds, but I’m getting on with it. Some days I think, “I need a break,” and go crazy and drive up to town and pick up the mail at the P O boxes. Woo hoo. Oh, and Reva, your toilet brush has made it into the trunk of my car and I will bring it by one day this week, I promise.
Yesterday my childhood pen pal, Judy, came by for a visit. Our correspondence began when we were both about ten years old, which would be, oh gee, almost 50 years ago. Yesterday was the first time we met face to face. Wow. She and her husband Mark (who is in Seattle for a business conference) came out and we did a walking tour of greater downtown Vashon and then came down to the house. They are lovely, down-to-earth people, and it was great to meet in person after all these years. Hope you had a good flight home, Judy, and that you get a little sleep tonight!
Sad news: Cathie Fisher, who was the organist at our church for about seven years, passed on last Saturday morning. Cancer. She was younger than I am and this was one of those, “God, this just isn’t fair,” situations. There will be a memorial for Cathie at our church at some as yet undetermined date. You can email Church of the Holy Spirit for that information at: office@holyspiritvashon.org
OK, back to work. Wishing all of you a Happy Halloween and a Blessed All Saints’ Day ~
Blessings, love, peace & grace to you
Mary


Sweet Old Bob

I’ve been reading Robert Benchley’s book, Love Conquers All (©1922 by Henry Holt and Company, and re-issued in paperback by the Akadine Press in 1999). I would like to thank whoever gave this book to whichever thrift store in which I found it.
Reading a piece by Robert Benchley is, for me as a column-writer, like listening to Malvina Reynolds’ songs as a songwriter. The works of either one make me think, “What’s the point? They did it so much better than I could ever hope to do it.”
They did, too, but I keep writing all the same. The reasons I don’t give up trying to write columns and songs are simple: (1.) I’m alive. My idols, Benchley and Reynolds, are not; and (2.) They wrote for their time, I write for mine.
During a week like this, when inspiration has blithely passed me by (inspiration thinks it’s a real joker), I read Robert Benchley and think, oh, it would be easier to call in sick and re-print one of his pieces. People would enjoy it, and I wouldn’t be stuck here trying to beat a column out of a brain which has hung up the “closed” sign.
Unfortunately, the heirs and assigns of Mr. Benchley still have the copyrights to his works, and I can’t grab a column and paste it in here. Too bad. You’d enjoy Benchley.
He wrote things like “How to Watch a Bridge Game” back in the 1920s. It isn’t really about bridge, of course, or watching. It’s about how cluelessly annoying people with nothing to do can be to people who do have something to do. Bridge may have passed its heyday, but annoying people and being annoyed never seem to go out of style.
Benchley’s gentle albeit barbed whimsy may be out of style also. It’s hard to be gently barbed when you’re contemplating the recent sanctions imposed upon Iran, and the further erosion of everyone’s civil rights in America. Nothing gentle or whimsical about either of those topics.
But he tackled tough topics with not a small bit of acerbic irony. He reviewed Darkwater, a book by W. E. B. Du Bois. That is the specific piece I wish I could reprint here, but I cannot. It is razor-sharp. I will take a chance by quoting this much: “Justice in the abstract is our aim – any American will tell you that – so why haggle over details and insist on justice for the negro?”
For all politically correct people who have lost sight of the fact that substance really is more important than form, I point out that this was written in or before 1922, at which time “negro” was the correct and polite term for what we were calling “African-American” the last time I looked. Please forgive me if that is not current. I don’t get out much. All I know is that racism is the cancer that rots America at the core, however you want to say it, and I believe that is the salient point.
Racism, war, the loss of our civil rights – these are not things I can write about with gentle whimsy. I wish I could channel Sweet Old Bob.
“My friends call me SOB,” Benchley said. “It stands for ‘Sweet Old Bob.’ They see me coming and say, ‘There’s that SOB.’”
I wonder what he would say about the current state of the world, the country, and the human race. I know it would be great. I wish I could say it myself, but we moved house a couple of weeks ago, and I have been sick, and to these things I attribute my brain’s total lack of cooperation with the writing process. Better luck next issue, kids. Meanwhile, you might try laying your hands on something by Robert Benchley. Trivia answer to question you didn’t ask: yes, it was Robert Benchley’s son, Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, and there wasn’t a teaspoon of whimsy in that.

Further notes: Rob Lopresti, Bellingham-based author (Such a Killing Crime), songwriter, and librarian, writes:
”If it's any comfort, back in the thirties when James Thurber and EB White shared an office at the New Yorker, one would finish a piece, hand it to the other and ask "Did Benchley already do this?" So that problem has been around a long time.”
You can read all about Rob, his book, his CD, his blog & MORE at: http://www.roblopresti.com/

The Moving Experience

So. We moved.
Thirty years in one place, and we moved.
Our first-born son was born in that house, and we moved.
All the work we did on that house over 30 years, all the life lived in that house, all our children’s growing up years, the waterfall you can hear through the bedroom windows, the view of trees and water, the neighbors who are also friends, the squirrels and raccoons and occasional bear, all left behind, as we picked up everything we owned and moved it about seven or eight miles, depending on whether you take the Westside Highway or the Main Highway.
I came down with mononucleosis, and we still moved.
Why? Oh, it has to do with money and surviving in retirement. That sort of thing. Even knowing that it might all be in vain, we’re trying to lighten our load and reduce our financial demands.
In thirty years we accumulated several truckloads of stuff. Because the opportunity to move and the need to empty our house arose so fast, we did not sort and toss before the move. We tossed everything loose into boxes, including some things I wanted to leave there, and moved the boxes to the new house. Now we’re living in what feels like a warehouse full of furniture and books. I know it will get better, one box at a time, and we’ve made incredible progress in a few days, but most of our stuff is waiting to be re-discovered and put back to work, or culled out.
I have no idea where the remote controls for any of our electronic items are located. It’s been OK – as I write, Laurie, the Cable Woman, is hooking up our televisions (yes, plural) to the outside world, so tonight we won’t have the peace and quiet I’ve kind of enjoyed the last few nights. It’s OK. I don’t think my husband could bear missing another week of Bones and House.
The dog is beginning to calm down a bit, but still doesn’t like to let us out of his sight. He follows me from room to room with a worried expression on his face, and when I sit on a couch he curls up next to me and snuggles in. He is feeling secure enough now that he has stopped stress-panting, so the overall air quality is better, although my grand daughter let me know this morning that my own breath could use a little work.
I lived in Burton back in the early 70s, and it’s nice to be a Burtonista once again. I love the drive along the water south of Burton – it soothes the soul, and brings back memories of being a young hippie, swimming in the harbor with Ed and Boo and Nina and their Great Dane, Cossack. Cossack did not especially like swimming; Great Danes are short-haired dogs who like to be close to the woodstove, and the cold water of Puget Sound was not his idea of a good time. He did go in, though, and I remember holding on to his sides as he pulled me through the water. He didn’t enjoy that as much as I did. Ed always said that when the tide came in over a sun-warmed beach the water was warm, but in my perception “warm” Puget Sound water meant that it took a few more minutes for the hypothermia to set in.
I have to thank people, from the bottom of my heart, who lent their hearts, hands, and vehicles to the move: Kate, Tara, Mary Beth, Steve and Julia, Deborina, Roy, Becky, & Maggie, the loving and generous people of the Church of the Holy Spirit, and especially Sonya, who saved our sorry exhausted butts by showing up and cooking dinner for us for a few days on top of packing, unpacking, and directing the placing of furniture. Gracias to Lenin and Luis (“Let go and let Lenin”) who did all the heavy lifting, and huge thanks to Reva.
The old house is for sale; the best deal on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, stick-built house on Vashon Island. For heaven’s sake, somebody buy it.
Oh, and I’ve started a blog, and realized I’d probably get more feedback if I actually told someone it existed.
Here’s the address: http://spiritualsmartaleck.blogspot.com/
You can email me at: mary.litchfieldtuel@gmail.com and I wish you would. I’m up here surrounded by boxes and would love to be distracted from unpacking.

This House

It is an auspicious moment in our personal history. After thirty years in the same place, we are moving, to a bright and airy manufactured home up on a hill south of Burton.
This has not been an easy decision, as you can imagine, and we’re doing it for several reasons. It’s time, apparently.
When we moved into this house thirty years ago, it was not really a house. It was a wreck. The roof leaked, but the floor had sagged and separated from the bottom of the wall on the south end, so the water had a way to drain, and that was good.
Rick says that the first time he went into the crawlspace to jack the floor up level and reattach it to the wall he put a hydraulic jack on the ground under a joist and began cranking it up. When it contacted the joist, it began to sink into the mud.
So then he got out from under the house and dug drainage channels to dry out the crawlspace. After he’d done that he was able to jack up the floor.
He got here in January, 1977, and I came down to visit him in his new home. The front door was a double door that stood open and when I walked in it was to a large room full of old lumber, old doors, windows, chairs, boxes, tools, cobwebs, and garbage.
“Oh, my, God,” I said. And I hadn’t even encountered the large population of rats that were in residence yet.
That was my introduction to the house I would move in to the following December. Later, when our older son JD was small, he called this room, “the room that looks like the attic.”
The living space was the other two-thirds of the house. The kitchen was located to the right of the room that looked like an attic, and took up the rest of that half of the house. In the other half was the bedroom, roughly the same size as the kitchen, and then the living room, roughly the same size as the entry room.
The building had been the mess hall of the Danish-Methodist Conference Beulah Park Chautauqua grounds. It had also hosted the Epworth League.
The original owners and builders had followed the contours of the land when they built. There was a large field in front of the church. On either side of the field there flowed a stream. These two streams fell into a deep ravine and joined into one creek at the bottom. The Chautauqua hall and church was a rough-hewn building, clearly built by volunteers, and it sat on the point of land between the two Beulah Falls.
The church building is long gone now, but the land and the streams remain.
In November of 1977 I did a three-week tour in British Columbia, playing concerts in the interior of B.C. It was cold there. I learned what it was like to use an outhouse at minus 12. Cold, that’s what it’s like. I was leaving a bad boyfriend, and it was an emotional time, and the cold suited my many moods. On the plus side, I found my first Lynn Johnson cartoon collection, David, We’re Pregnant, in a bookstore in Smithers, I think, and I’ve been enjoying her work for the last thirty years.
When I came back to Vashon, the day after Thanksgiving, I came home to the oh-my-god broken down, leaky, dirty, dark, windy wreck of the old mess hall in Beulah Park. I’m sitting here almost thirty years later in that same building, writing this.
I have said more than once that I was young when I moved in to this house, and it was living here that made me old. When I arrived, there was that room full of clutter to walk through to get to the real house, and once inside the walls were dark brown, and the fireplace, which must have been a huge focal point of the old mess hall, smelled of creosote. Rick had plugged a cheap metal woodstove in to the chimney, one of those oval-shaped thin metal ones that you had to replace every year or two because they burned through. That kept us warm, at least when we were close to it.
There was no bathroom in the old mess hall. The toilets, and the shower, were in the other building, the old dormitory building, up the hill from the mess hall. I became adept at peeing into coffee cans, and walking up the hill for serious business.
The shower terrified me. You had to walk through a doorway from one of the two bathrooms into utter darkness, and feel your way to the stall which was located a few feet in. There was a light once you got to the shower, and the hot water heater was right next to it, and I was always afraid of getting electrocuted because I could see electrical wiring dangling around the shower stall. In response to my whining, Rick put a bathtub and hand sink into the house in 1978, and it’s a good thing, too, because I don’t think I would have taken a shower for years if he hadn’t.
In the winter when you walked through the house, you could feel the heat being sucked right out the bottom of your feet. The winds blew right under the house, unhindered, and there was no insulation under the floor.
We lived like that for almost ten years, with no toilet in the house, and the wind blowing through. I put up plastic window seals on the windows in the corner of the bedroom, which slowed down the breezes, and I painted the living room white, which brightened it up considerably. Rick built closets for our clothes, and we had cantaloupe crates for our kitchen cabinets. We had an old wood-burning range we could cook on when the power went out, which it did more often in those days. There was a sign written in felt marker next to a round brown light switch on the kitchen wall that said, “DON’T USE THIS SWITCH.” Next to that Rick had written, “Ignore this sign.”
The house had two electrical circuits. They ran from a square four-socket plug with two circuit-breakers on the kitchen wall. The two sockets on the left were one circuit; the two sockets on the right and the entire building were the other circuit. You couldn’t have the stove and the burners and the lights on all at once; a circuit would cut out and leave you in the dark. We limped along with that system for ten years or so. Early in 1986, the winter after our second son was born and we spent most of the winter nights walking the floor with him and his ear infections, the breaker clicked one night, and when I went to snap it back on, sparks jumped from the box.
That’s it, I thought.
There was block grant money available from King County, and we applied, and got it, and in the fall of 1987 we moved out and the entire place was gutted right down to the outer shell. Our contractor was Lotus, and her helper was Kate, two right-on womyn who did beautiful work. Other contractors did the solid foundation on the east side of the house, and Lotus sank piers down to bedrock on the ravine side. The crawlspace was sheathed, and insulated. Wiring contractors came in and put new wiring in the whole house. Insulation went into the walls and up in the attic over the ceiling. Two guys from Seattle came out and sheetrocked the whole space in one day. Two island guys did the wall taping and mudding. My friend Velvet’s son Lance sealed the walls, and we painted. I think I did some of the painting, but Rick and others did more. We got it done.
We moved back in at the end of January, 1988. The old mess hall was no more. We had a new floor plan, two bedrooms, a kitchen and dining room where the attic room used to be, and, centerpiece to the whole shebang, a FULL BATHROOM with toilet, sink, and shower/tub right in the center of the house. I could turn on two lights without blowing a circuit. It was warm for the first time. Hallelujah. We were home.
That was almost twenty years ago, and it has been a wonderful home for us. It’s warm, and dry, and everything works, mostly. OK, the dishwasher’s a little wonky. In 1993 I received a family inheritance, and we made the attic into a room with a second bath.
JD was born here. We have lived our adult lives here, raising the kids, welcoming the teeming masses of cats, dogs, rats, mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits which came to us. I sit here and remember thirty years of tears, laughter, song, anguish, joy – this house has been the container for our lives, and it’s not easy to leave.
But we are leaving. This week, now, tomorrow, we’re packing up and getting out. Or at least someone is packing up and getting us out – I have mononucleosis, pneumonia, bronchitis, and sinusitis, sort of a bacterial-viral grand slam, at the moment, and am not up to doing all the actual moving. The last time I moved, in 1977, I packed all my worldly goods into the trunk and back seat of my ’58 Chevy, and drove down here. Kind of a bigger proposition this time around.
Come back to my blog again. Maybe I can write up the Rat Wars that Rick conducted when he first moved in here. Stay tuned.
Blessings.

Moving Maybe and a Plan for Next Spring

Dear Hearts and Gentle People,
Just when I think life is settling down it throws me another curve. Our friend and former neighbor Reva and I were talking last year, and I was pissing and moaning about how tough it was to find a place on Vashon that we could afford, and she said, "Why don't you buy my house?" We talked some more -- she was on the waiting list for low-cost housing; we were not ready to sell and move yet. Yesterday she called to say that she got into the low-cost housing, and were we still interested?
Well, yes, we are. We just have to figure out how to swing it, and we weren't expecting to make this big a decision this week. Of course I don't know if we'd ever be truly ready to make such a decision. It might work and we're talking to people who know how to swing such deals and have given ourselves a deadline of Monday to let Reva know one way or the other. So that's our weekend.
Other than that, the war is still going on. But you knew that.
It is Indian Summer (I think). It's September and it's sunny and warm, anyway.
Our older son is coming out this afternoon to spend tonight and tomorrow with his daughter, and our younger son is headed for the Gorge over in Grant County with five other metalheads to see a band called Velvet Revolver. Velvet Revolver consists of guys who formerly were in Stone Temple Pilots and Guns'n'Roses. The bass player, Duff McKagan, was the bass player for Guns'n'Roses, and Slash, who was the lead guitarist for GnR is the lead guitar for Velvet Revolver. These are pretty legendary metal guys. Even I know that.
Why am I telling you all this? Because a couple of years ago when I took Drew shopping for an amp, we went to Emerald City Guitar in downtown Seattle. Drew ended up buying a Fender Twin Reverb. That's what his fogey mother advised, but he didn't listen to me because he wanted a monster Crate stack, but the guy at Emerald City talked him into the Twin. I smiled and said nothing. Later Drew got the Crate stack, and it currently resides under our stairs. Well -- anyway -- this Twin Reverb amp had written on one side in white paint, "Property of Slash." The guy at the music store told us that the bass player for Guns'n'Roses lived in Seattle and when they finally broke up, he disposed of their equipment, including this Twin Reverb, which the store had reconditioned.
The amp had obviously had a lot of hard travelin' and usage -- the black cloth covering it was worn off in spots, and many of the black control knobs had been replaced by scavenged brown knobs. We weren't sure whether to believe the Slash story, but yesterday when I read a feature article in the Seattle Times about Duff McKagan, the bass player for Guns'n'Roses and now Velvet Revolver, who does live in Seattle, and was the organizer/go-to guy for both groups, I began to think, wow, the story was probably true and we probably do have a little bit of rock history sitting in our living room, and our Drew is playing guitar with Slash's old amp.
Why am I telling you all this? Because a couple of years ago when I took Drew shopping for an amp, we went to Emerald City Guitar in downtown Seattle. Drew ended up buying a Fender Twin Reverb. That's what his fogey mother advised, but he didn't listen to me because he wanted a monster Crate stack, but the guy at Emerald City talked him into the Twin. I smiled and said nothing. Later Drew got the Crate stack, and it currently resides under our stairs. Well -- anyway -- this Twin Reverb amp had written on one side in white paint, "Property of Slash." The guy at the music store told us that the bass player for Guns'n'Roses lived in Seattle and when they finally broke up, he disposed of their equipment, including this Twin Reverb, which the store had reconditioned.
The amp had obviously had a lot of hard travelin' and usage -- the black cloth covering it was worn off in spots, and many of the black control knobs had been replaced by scavenged brown knobs. We weren't sure whether to believe the Slash story, but yesterday when I read a feature article in the Seattle Times about Duff McKagan, the bass player for Guns'n'Roses and now Velvet Revolver, who does live in Seattle, and was the organizer/go-to guy for both groups, I began to think, wow, the story was probably true and we probably do have a little bit of rock history sitting in our living room, and our Drew is playing guitar with Slash's old amp.
It makes me feel like there aren't really six billion people in the world, because if there were these things wouldn't happen so often.
So that’s it. Autumn is here. Oh, we’ll have some more good weather – I trust we will, based on past experience – but summer has definitely kicked its flip flops into the back of the closet and headed for the Southern Hemisphere.
There is more happening, but this letter plus essay is already long enough.
Happy Autumn, all --
blessings, love, peace & grace & hugs
Mary

The Plan

Last week I opened the front door, and there on the porch was one large maple leaf, one of those platter-sized babies, the first of thousands to come. This morning I opened the door, and a half dozen brown tinged maple leaves were there. I walked out to water the plants in the yard, and everywhere I went I ran into spider webs.
So that’s it. Autumn is here. Oh, we’ll have some more good weather – I trust we will, based on past experience – but summer has definitely kicked its flip flops into the back of the closet and headed for the Southern Hemisphere.
School has started, and we’re all geared up for the bustle of fall, the stresses of winter, and the relief of spring. This is my 60th circuit around the seasons.
Yup, I will turn 60 next May. A couple of my dearest pals, who, all evidence suggests, are complete maniacs, have decided that I should go to England and Europe for my 60th birthday. The hardest part of a trip like that would be getting me on the airplane. To say that I have a fear of flying is an understatement.
The idea of this adventure has left me gobsmacked, as the British say. In my lifetime I have traveled up and down the West Coast of the United States many times. The only foreign country I’ve been to is Canada. One time the boys and I took the Empire Builder across the Country to visit relatives in Ohio, and took the Super Chief back to visit relatives in New Mexico, and I got to see some of the country east of here on that trip. But that’s about it for my travels.
I think about Jane Austen a lot: she lived a rather small life. She didn’t travel far or have exciting adventures, but she studied the people around her and in her spare time sat down and wrote a few of the great classic novels of English literature. Read a Jane Austen novel and you will meet and laugh at people you know and have put up with, although these fictional characters are set 200 years ago in England. Jane did all right for someone who didn’t see the big wide world.
I do not expect to produce any great literature, but I figure I can write a column every couple of weeks without having to go far from home. I am content.
Is this really going to happen next spring? Right now the leaves are falling, and this winter when the wind storms come I’ll be studying Trip to Europe 101, what to pack, how to get a Eurail Pass, how to say, “please,” and “thank you,” in several languages, wondering what it will be like, how it will change the way I see the world, and if my friends and I will make it through the trip still friends. You never know.
You never know what will happen in the world between now and next May. A lot can happen in nine months. Ask any mother.
I think I’ll have an early 60th birthday party before we go. You’re all invited. I’ll get back to you with details. Meanwhile, it’s autumn. The war goes on. Winter will come, and then spring, and then, apparently, I’m going to have get on a damn airplane. That’s the plan, anyway.

The Plan

Last week I opened the front door, and there on the porch was one large maple leaf, one of those platter-sized babies, the first of thousands to come. This morning I opened the door, and a half dozen brown tinged maple leaves were there. I walked out to water the plants in the yard, and everywhere I went I ran into spider webs.

So that’s it. Autumn is here. Oh, we’ll have some more good weather – I trust we will, based on past experience – but summer has definitely kicked its flip flops into the back of the closet and headed for the Southern Hemisphere.

School has started, and we’re all geared up for the bustle of fall, the stresses of winter, and the relief of spring. This is my 60th circuit around the seasons.

Yup, I will turn 60 next May. A couple of my dearest pals, who, all evidence suggests, are complete maniacs, have decided that I should go to England and Europe for my 60th birthday. The hardest part of a trip like that would be getting me on the airplane. To say that I have a fear of flying is an understatement.

The idea of this adventure has left me gobsmacked, as the British say. In my lifetime I have traveled up and down the West Coast of the United States many times. The only foreign country I’ve been to is Canada. One time the boys and I took the Empire Builder across the Country to visit relatives in Ohio, and took the Super Chief back to visit relatives in New Mexico, and I got to see some of the country east of here on that trip. But that’s about it for my travels.

I think about Jane Austen a lot: she lived a rather small life. She didn’t travel far or have exciting adventures, but she studied the people around her and in her spare time sat down and wrote a few of the great classic novels of English literature. Read a Jane Austen novel and you will meet and laugh at people you know and have put up with, although these fictional characters are set 200 years ago in England. Jane did all right for someone who didn’t see the big wide world.

I do not expect to produce any great literature, but I figure I can write a column every couple of weeks without having to go far from home. I am content.

So I did not dream of traveling around the world. A few weeks ago I decided, with a sigh, that I was never going to make it to Paris in my lifetime. I didn’t regret it; I am happy looking at pictures and hearing about it from people who have been there.

But now, these two friends – did I mention they are maniacs? – are telling me, make your plans and pack your bags. You’re going.

Going to see the Magna Carta, and Hadrian’s Wall, and Stonehenge. Going to Kent, where the Litchfields came from. Going to London, Canterbury, and Bury St. Edmond, and Wales and Scotland. And Paris.

Is this really going to happen next spring? Right now the leaves are falling, and this winter when the wind storms come I’ll be studying Trip to Europe 101, what to pack, how to get a Eurail Pass, how to say, “please,” and “thank you,” in several languages, wondering what it will be like, how it will change the way I see the world, and if my friends and I will make it through the trip still friends. You never know.

You never know what will happen in the world between now and next May. A lot can happen in nine months. Ask any mother.

I think I’ll have an early 60th birthday party before we go. You’re all invited. I’ll get back to you with details. Meanwhile, it’s autumn. The war goes on. Winter will come, and then spring, and then, apparently, I’m going to have get on a damn airplane. That’s the plan, anyway.

Cleaning the Lint Trap

I wanted to grow up to be Malvina Reynolds, a singer-songwriter whose goal in life was nothing less than to change the world for the better, one song at a time. I have written many songs, and sung them, and am told that they have made a difference to some people, but I spend more time feeling like Lucy Ricardo than like Malvina Reynolds.

Let us consider the case of the lint trap.

A little red light on our clothes dryer came on the other day, and when I looked closely at it, I saw that it was next to the words, “Clean lint trap.”

Okay. After five years I could believe that there might be a little lint lurking in the crevices and crannies of the machine’s innards. I got out the vacuum cleaner, pulled out the lint screen, and first vacuumed that. Then I got the crevice tool and pushed it into the slot where the screen fits, and vacuumed that. After that I opened the little door on the slot and peered in with a flashlight to see if any more lint needed to come out.

Holy mother of Martha Stewart. It looked like an unshorn gray sheep had died in there.

I always like to use the right tool for the job, so I went and got a chopstick out of the silverware drawer, and started fishing lint out. I managed to pull out several wads, but reached a point when I realized the chopstick just wasn’t long enough, so I looked around, and my eye fell on my knitting bag. A knitting needle! Of course! They’re longer than chopsticks and have little caps on the ends that would hook the lint! I grabbed a long blue plastic #9 needle, and went back to the dryer to scoop lint. One scoop: it worked great! That’s when I let go and it fell into the lint trap.

This is when my troubles began.

I could see it down there. I thought of trying to get it out with its mate, but was spooked at that point and didn’t want to chance dropping a second needle in. I knew exactly what I needed to get it out, but I don’t have one.

What I needed was a little grabby-thingy that you used to be able to get at True Value for years. It has a plunger on one end, a long narrow spring tube, and teeny tiny little metal claws on the other end which you can use to pick up teeny tiny things that you drop in small inaccessible places, such as a dryer lint trap. I knew if I had one of those, I could get that needle out easily.

So I went up to True Value, and asked Bob Kueker where to find such a thing. We walked up and down aisles, looking. There was an extension rod with a magnet on the end, but that was no help with a plastic knitting needle. Pretty soon hardware guy Eric Peterson showed up, and Eric is an absolute terrier about finding what you need, so he looked around and made suggestions; then hardware guy Jeff Astle showed up and got involved in the search, and pretty soon we were all talking about the grabby-thingy, and then the two of them went off looking for it. None of us knew the proper name for this tool, and I had only one name for it, and I was resisting saying it.

Back in the early 70s, when I first arrived on Vashon, I dallied for a few months with a long-haired young man named Robert Wallace. He made dope pipes out of lamp parts for a living, and was always dropping little things on the floor and picking them up, and he decided he needed this grabby-thingy. He said, with a gleeful smile, “I need a mouse castrator.”

Excuse me?

He explained what it was, and we went to the hardware store and got one, and he was happy and I was forever stuck with that name for that tool.

As Bob at True Value began paging through the tool catalogues looking for this item, I finally said, “The only name I know for this thing is ‘mouse castrator.” “Excuse me?” said Bob. I told him the story of Robert Wallace.

Eric and Jeff came back, reporting that their searches had not turned up the grabby-thingy. The only name I had for it came out then. I don’t think the guys were able to concentrate on selling any hardware for the next twenty minutes. Something about the expression was like throwing a large rock into a pool of emotion. It caused a certain excitement and a lot of comedic riffing, which I enjoy, but the fact is we still didn’t know the right name for the tool and couldn’t find it in any catalogue. I bought a dryer lint trap brush and went home.

Back home I used the lint brush to pull out more wads of lint, but when I tried to put the lint screen back in the dryer, it wouldn’t go all the way down because the needle was in the way. Poop.

This morning I put the screen in and it went all the way down. I figured the needle was lying flat in the bottom of the lint trap, safely out of the way, so I threw some wet clothes into the dryer and turned it on. Arrgh! It sounded like a tiny little machine gun as the needle was sucked into the fan. Quickly I turned off the dryer.

The noise woke my husband, who was home sick. When he came shuffling out of the bedroom, wondering, what the heck? I explained the story so far.

He got in touch with his inner Mechanical Person, and ended up taking the dryer apart and fishing out the three separate pieces of the knitting needle, plus the cap. Then he cleaned out the lint trap thoroughly, put it all back together.

I threw some towels in. I turned it on, and nothing caught fire and it seems to be running fine. The knitting needle and its mate have gone to their final reward. My husband is a prince. I still don’t have a grabby-thingy, but maybe I can get back to saving the world one song at a time now.