Happy Anniversary

September 3, 2015

Today would have been our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. In my heart, it still is. The last one we celebrated together was 34 years. That seems so long ago. At the end of December I will observe the second anniversary of Rick's death.

I couldn't understand why it was being such a lousy week. I was so depressed - felt like I was under a huge sack of wet sand. All I could do was watch TV and play solitaire. 

Then yesterday everything set me off. This computer, which has so many quirks and seems hellbent on living a life of its own regardless of what I want it to do, opening windows and moving the cursor away from whatever I was typing for no reason I could see, was making me apoplectic with rage. I was so angry with it. I even banged on it with my fist hard enough that I hoped I hadn't broken it. Everything was going so wrong.

Late in the afternoon I came down with a migraine, which I seldom have these days. After missing so much of my life to migraines over thirty plus years, I have been pretty happy not to have them so often any more. Once in a while, though, I'll get one.

At the end of yesterday's perfectly awful day, I felt one blooming within my unhappy cranium. I ended up taking a couple of pain pills and going to bed for a while until the pain receded. Sometime in there I remembered what day of the year it would be in the morning.

Oh.

Thirty-six years ago today we woke up at my mother's house on Wilkie Street in Watsonville, and we got up and got dressed and drove out to the Corralitos Womens Clubhouse and were married on the lawn in the yard by Father Charles Moore, a maverick retired Catholic priest who had started his professional life as a lawyer and got into some trouble - thereby hangs a tale. He did a great wedding sermon.

He said this was the third day of our marriage.

The first day was the day we met and recognized each other.

The second day was the day we confessed our love to each other - something we had struggled against saying, it being so serious a thing after all.

The third day was this day, the day we were wed. 

Charlie was a pretty smart guy.

He talked about what a lot of trouble it was to get married. Man, was that the truth. I have said since then that weddings and funerals bring out the best and worst in people. The day of our wedding, my mother's sister, whom we called Sister, was not speaking to my mother because my mother and I had invited my father's sister to the wedding. Well, we invited both of his remaining sisters, and they both came, but Sister really hated the older sister and was furious that she was at my wedding. I had to have a separate picture taken of me with Sister and Uncle Mike because she wouldn't be part of any family pictures.

My father's sisters, by the way, hated each other and had done from childhood. When the older one died and my cousin Nancy called the younger sister to let her know, the younger sister said, "What do I care?" and kind of tore Nancy a new one for bothering to call. Yeah, that aunt was a piece of work. But I digress.

Today, thirty-six years on from our wedding day, has been a day of sad and sweet remembrance. I sat in my chair on the kitchen porch and thanked Rick for marrying me: you made my life so much better than it might have been, and you were such an awfully good sport.

I could swear he then thanked me for marrying him, giving him the life and family he had despaired of having. So the words formed in my mind.

I do remember how desperate and angry he was in the aftermath of his first marriage. His first wife cheated on him, which for him was unforgivable, and he was still angry. Maybe even apoplectic with rage, if he allowed himself to fall into brooding on it.

Rick was one of the most stubborn people I've ever known, and once he made his mind up about something, he would not un-make it. So even though I know he was angry at his first wife for the rest of his life, it wasn't one of those keeping up the relationship by being angry things. It was a Rick being angry that she had wasted his time and broken his heart thing and he'd never forgive her.

He was a good guy, my Ricky. He didn't live long enough, but if he'd taken better care of himself over his lifetime, maybe he would have lived longer. Sometimes I think that, but I don't know, and what does it matter now? I just miss him so much.

In between the wistful bouts of sadness, there were adventures today. When I went out to use my car, it wouldn't start. I managed to jump start it with Rick's truck. Later this evening my friends Harry and Leanna gave me a jump start in town so I could drive home and Harry said he thought it was the starter, from the sound of it. Sigh. After I drove home and turned the car off, I tried to start it again and it wouldn't start, so I think Harry nailed it.

Drove up to the mailbox today and it was full of ants and their eggs. I had noticed them in there a couple of days ago, and bought some ant traps which I was going to put in the mailbox, but yesterday because of my migraine I didn't get around to it, nor did I pick up the mail.

By this evening when I stopped to put the traps in, the mailbox was fully colonized, as was yesterday's mail. Hundreds of ants, thousands of ants, millions and billions and trillions of ants.

I picked up a brochure and a few hundred ants and eggs fell out of it. 

I took all the mail out and waved it around and smacked it against the mailbox post trying to get all the ants and eggs out of it. Ugh. When done with that, I used a piece of cardboard to sweep as many ants and eggs out of the mailbox as I could, and set the new traps in. 

Here's the irony: last year when the ants invaded the mailbox, I put ant traps in. They were using last year's expired ant traps as the base for this year's new colony in the mailbox.

I don't know why ants set up housekeeping in my mail box, but they've been doing it for years. Ants, and spiders, and occasionally paper wasps. Does everyone's mailbox get this buggy?

Well. So today was our anniversary. Tomorrow I'll make an appointment to get my starter replaced. With new tires and a battery, I felt all set for winter. Not quite. Life goes on, my dears, regardless of grief and dead car parts and ants in the mailbox.

Happy Anniversary, Ricky.

The Sunday Afternoon of the Year

Photo by Mary Liz Austin of Vashon. I don't know her, but I sure like this picture of a summer sunset from the island.

We’re coasting into late summer. I figure that after the Strawberry Festival, there are a few weeks left of wearing shorts and tank tops and going to the beach, but you might as well acknowledge that fall is coming.

Not this year, maybe. Between El Nino and Climate Change it seems that the climate of Central California has moved here. I can’t decide if it makes me less or more homesick for California, “the Golden State,” as it calls itself. It was only after I lived here a few years and went back to visit the state of my birth that I realized that all that gold was grass that hadn’t had any water lately.

Now California is the “Parched as Beef Jerky State.”(Motto: “When we get dehydrated, we elect Jerry Brown.”) I’ll be going down there in September for my 50-year high school reunion, so I’ll get to see their drought up close then.

I hear that we are suffering from a drought here in Washington, also. I reckon it’s true because I had to start watering my yard in early May, and have had to keep it up every other day or so all summer. For most of the years I have lived here I didn’t have to water the garden until sometime in July. This having to water for months instead of weeks has me thinking of planting truly drought-tolerant plants, as in, if I don’t water for five days, they’ll still be alive. I’m open to suggestions for possible plants.

In France, I’ve heard, everyone goes on vacation for the month of August. I always thought everybody saying to heck with work for a month was a great idea. It has never caught on in this country, and would be a tough sell – God forbid any American should find something preferable to WORK – but August is a popular month for our vacations, as well. The kids have all been to camp and had their swimming lessons and there is a lull before everyone gears up in September for going back to school or away to college or simply concentrating more on the job because summer is over. We fill this slack time with vacations, or we stay home to paint the house or some other chore we think we can do in our vacation time because we are workaholic boneheads.

August is like a month long Sunday afternoon, rather drowsy and directionless if left to itself. You could read, or take a nap, or take a nice drive somewhere in your solar oven/crossover SUV, go camping or hiking, or visit Disneyland or some other entertainment mecca if you’re the kind who likes or needs to be entertained, or (sigh) you could paint the house or do repairs or mend all the old jeans or otherwise be virtuous and productive.

Americans like to be virtuous and productive, most of them. I consider it a shortcoming in the national character. I think if you get time off and spend it working you have missed the point.

Although, if you’re having fun doing the work, I suppose that’s not so bad. I am enjoying cleaning paper clutter out of my house, for example.

My idea of a great August is swimming, napping, and sitting around a fire (real or electronic – c’mon, you know I’m not the “I never watch TV” type) in the evening, then tucking into the nice clean line-dried sheets of my own bed and reading a romance or mystery novel. Ah.

I did not reference mosquitoes in that paragraph because they are pests that infringe upon the romantic dream, nor do I mention that those line-dried sheets had to be laundered and hung up by yours truly. Laundry and mosquitoes, both tedious and persistent in August. Hey, nothing’s perfect.

I hope you are enjoying this slightly imperfect August. I hope you get to be a little lazy, and feel guilt-free if you’re doing absolutely nothing. I hope you smile, and relax, and feel how much you are loved and how important you are to this imperfect world, and how wonderful it is to be living your imperfect life. Take it easy, because if August is the Sunday afternoon of the year, September is the Monday morning, and we don’t need to be in a hurry to get there, do we?

I thought not. Peace, you all, and resist that urge to do something useful.

Even Smart Alecks Need Days Off

 Photo by Laurie Shepherd Heath

Folks, it pains me to rerun an old column, but your smart aleck has been ill this week, and my brain has put up a “closed” sign. While out watering my nasturtiums and hollyhocks today I felt a bug on my arm, and it was an earwig. It reminded me of this column. So, from 2013, I bring you:

The Icebugs of Grylloblattaria

This has been the most beautiful summer I remember in years. Day after sunny day dawns, and we put on our shorts and tank tops and sandals, those of us not restricted by bothersome things like jobs, and go out to meet the delirious, delicious summer day.

We water our gardens, we admire the blooms of our flowers, we revel in the sweet juiciness of our homegrown fruits and vegetables. I have five tomatoes on my single tomato plant, and if the weather holds, they may have time to turn red. Meanwhile I love to touch the leaves and smell the tart muskiness of tomato plant, a scent that says “summer” to me.

The sun discourages, but does not stop, the slugs. I got some of that “safe” slug bait and while it may kill slugs, and I’m not saying I have any proof of that, it is apparently a tasty treat for mice.

Our son told me that every time he went out on the kitchen porch, he heard the scurrying of little feet and saw mice bailing out of the slug bait container and running away. I never saw these mice, but a quick check of the slug bait stash revealed a liberal sprinkling of mouse turds among the few remaining pellets.

Rather than trying to trap and kill the mice, I figured that when the slug bait was gone, the mice would forage elsewhere. Let the problem resolve itself, I thought.

NOTE: this benign neglect method may work with mice, but I have been informed it does not work with raising children. Little tip for you young parents (although nothing you do or do not do will forestall the day 10 or 20 years from now when your adult children will tell you the mistakes you made as a parent), be of good heart. Taking the blame for everything is a little service that parents provide for their adult children.

Where was I?

Another feature of this long hot summer is that the spiders are spinning early. Usually I don’t run into spider webs until August, but this morning I had to clear a web before I could walk out the kitchen door. I can only imagine the size and extent of the webs we’ll have in September.

The mosquitoes have been numerous and hungry this year. Eh, that’s usual here on the edge of the woods.

Speaking of hungry creatures, the deer have stripped the leaves and buds off of my roses three times this year. I don’t begrudge the deer their need to eat. I only wish they wouldn’t eat my roses, then wait long enough for the plants to recover and begin putting out buds before stripping them nekkid again. It’s the repetitive dashing of hope that gets me down.

Lastly I mention earwigs. Earwigs comprise the insect order Dermaptera, according to Wikipedia, which also says, “Many orders of insect have been theorized to be closely related to earwigs, though the icebugs of Grylloblattaria are most likely.”

The icebugs of Grylloblattaria!* Isn’t that glorious? Doesn’t that sound like a science fiction novel?

Earwigs like to inhabit crevices. We all know this from experience. Quite often earwigs will inhabit crevices in flowers I bring in from the garden and a few hours or days later I find earwigs crawling across the kitchen table, or the kitchen counter, or the living room rug. I have an irrational dislike of earwigs, and will usually crush them without hesitation or compunction. They give me the creeps.

So it was extremely creepy when I opened up my bedside CPAP machine the other night and found an earwig inside. Ugh. I walked it into the bathroom and sent it for a quick swim in the bathroom sink. Beats me how or why it got into my machine. The darn thing simply showed up. I guess that’s why I don’t like them – they’re always sneaking up on me. Give me the oogly-wooglies.

Even the most wonderful summer is bound to have some down sides, but all these critters aren’t stopping me from enjoying this summer. Hope you are enjoying your summer, critters and all.

*”Grylloblattidae is a family of extremophile and wingless insects that live in the cold on top of mountains.” – Wikipedia. Now you know.

The Rotten Part of Life

Everyone understands the importance of cleaning out the refrigerator on a regular basis. Granted, sometimes the motivation is a certain something in the air that turns out to be leftovers from three weeks ago.

Yesterday I cleaned out the condiments and containers in the refrigerator door. They’ve been in there a long time. That jar of pickle relish? I don’t eat pickle relish. Rick loved it on sandwiches. He’s been gone for a year and a half. This is both a math and a logic problem.

I pulled out a couple of virtually empty mustard jars, some highly suspect yogurt – it made a little “pfff” sound when I opened it – a container of apple juice which I remember bringing home a year ago, and other interesting archaeological finds.

I’m not sure if Worcestershire Sauce has an expiry date. That’s the trouble with condiments in general. Let’s see – barbecue sauce, salsa, soy sauce, blackberry pancake syrup? If it’s not growing mold, is it okay? If it’s the kind of thing that tastes a little expired when it’s fresh and new, how do you determine if it’s spoiled?

Maple syrup: I keep it in the fridge because if it is not chilled, it starts to ferment. It stays.

In the vegetable drawer, the appearance of the food can be the deciding factor. I am aware of the sensible advice that a little brown on your lettuce leaves won’t hurt you, but when the leaves have gone all the way to black and the texture has become slimy, I return lettuce to the wild.

I take aging vegetables and other moldy or slimy carbohydrates to the compost heap, where the raccoons and other scavengers trundle up from the ravine to browse. 

Now, this is not an upper middle class tragically hip compost heap. This is a circle of wire that mostly keeps the dog out and the compostable garbage in, and that's all. It's not a plastic drum that can be rotated and fussed over. Nope. This is simply a place to toss expired food. I even sometimes throw in cooking grease, gasp. The compost predators never complain.

An awful lot of expired food has gone in that heap over the years, and most of it didn’t stay there for long. When I go out every day or two to toss the compost bowl from my kitchen, all that is visible in the heap is a lot of coffee grounds and filters, plus a few things like melon rinds and corn cobs and shucks. And clam shells. FYI, clam shells do not compost, at least not within your lifetime. I would like to think I wasn't the one who threw them into the compost, but I might have.

Despite the paucity of actual vegetable matter that stays in the heap, I know that if I removed the fence and dug in, I would find a huge writhing mass of worms doing what comes naturally, and around, under, and beyond them, lovely black compost. I know this because I’ve dug in a few times. I like to throw a few shovels of compost into the hole when I plant a rose, for example, to get the plant off to a good start. Don’t want the deer eating inferior roses.

What I noticed a few years ago was that the compost was leaking out the fencing at the bottom of the heap. It radiated out in a circle. I also noticed that plants near the heap benefited from that creeping black soil. They were flourishing.

Then I heard about keyhole gardens. A keyhole garden is a circle with a compost heap in the middle, and a little path from the edge of the circle to the compost heap so that adding compost is easy. This central compost heap has wire fencing, like my compost heap, and the compost leaks out the bottom, same as my compost heap, but in a keyhole garden the compost is going directly into your garden soil, so you’re enriching your soil with compost from below while growing things in the garden on top.

I have seen keyhole gardens with walls built out of stone, and cinder blocks, and empty bottles, whatever is on hand to build a wall.

I’ve wanted one ever since I saw keyhole gardens online, but have never got around to making one. I don’t have enough stones, cinder blocks, or bottles.

I suppose I could start drinking.

Just kidding.

It would be great to have one of those gardens. I’d feel so righteous every time I emptied the compost bowl, or cleaned out the refrigerator and fed the compost heap.

Nice to participate in this upside to rot. Go, worms! Go, bacteria!

Ah, the circle of life.

Testing

Trying to figure out how to to get some paragraph breaks into the text.
Does this work? Hard to tell from only two sentences.

I only have eight or nine years of blog entries to revise.
Yikes.

Relief

One of the feelings which is part and parcel of grief but seldom is mentioned is relief. The relative silence on the subject is perhaps due to the guilt a person might feel admitting that he or she feels relief that someone has died. “What kind of person does that make me?” you might ask yourself, and if you were asking me now, I’d answer, “You are the normal kind.” There are a lot of reasons to feel relieved when someone dies, and some make more sense than others. When my uncle who had molested me died when I was sixteen, I felt nothing but relief. I did not question my feelings. No guilt there. Years later I made a special trip to the cemetery to dance on his grave. I wonder how often people do that. When I got the news that my father died, my first thought was, “I am half an orphan,” and then a sentence arose in my mind unbidden: he’ll never be able to hurt me again. I always thought my dad loved me, but he had a temper. He did not hit me often, but when he did, he hit for distance, as the joke goes. When he died, I felt a little relieved. I was surprised. I felt guilty. What was the matter with me? I told no one. When my mother died, again I felt relief. That, I understood. In talking to other people I have learned how common being hit was in the 1950s. Some parents hit without a moment’s compunction, and nobody thought much about it. A lot of children were slapped and hit regularly. My mom was a daily slapper and hitter, but probably more hurtful was the emotional and verbal abuse that also occurred daily. I could not get anything right for her. My mother was usually angry and wasn’t much fun, and I had to be hyper-alert and on my guard around her. I loved her, I hated her. You can imagine how confused I felt, or maybe you don’t have to imagine if you had such a parent. When she died, I felt enormous relief. My deepest condolences and sympathy to those of you who had that kind of parent. For about six months after her passing, I sat on the couch every night wrapped in a warm blanket and watching John Edward talking to dead people on television late at night. I grieved the loss of my mother. It was a year and a half before, one day, I felt I had turned an internal corner and was able to begin living my life in the rarified air of no parental potshots. I have spoken with various counselors and friends and have realized that relief is not an uncommon feeling when someone dies, especially if they hurt you, but sometimes for other reasons. During the last weeks of Rick’s life, it was clear that he was not going to get better. His vital organs were failing. All the drugs and machines that were meant to keep him going weren’t enough in the end. You are never ready for someone to die no matter how ready you think you are. I would like nothing more than to have one more night lying next to him in bed, talking as we often did about anything and everything, but I was relieved when he died. The long losing battle was over. He wasn’t suffering any more. One relief I felt after Rick died that is tough to admit is that I was relieved that I was no longer annoying him. For example, when I drove him to medical appointments he freaked out if I became distracted while driving. After he spoke to me about this, and it wasn’t in a calm voice, I did try to focus when I drove so as not to upset him. Once he was gone I didn’t have to worry about annoying him anymore. Once he was gone I wanted to stay home and be alone forever so I wouldn’t bug anyone ever again, but it turns out that it bugs some people when you don’t leave the house. You can’t win. So you see, there are many reasons why you might feel relief when someone dies. It’s normal, it’s common, and you’re not stony hearted or defective if that’s what you feel. So don’t add guilt for feeling relieved to the burden of your grief. You are feeling bad enough as it is. Tell you what, though. It would be a RELIEF for me to write about something other than grief. Maybe the next column will be about dogs and cats. People like dogs and cats.

1. The Anger Stage, and 2. A New Computer

All right, class, we have discussed the non-linear properties of grief. Non-linear means that the stages of grief which Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described for us do not happen in order. You don’t work your way through them like lessons from a textbook. More like they work their way through you, at unexpected times. Last night I tripped and fell into the anger stage. A friend posted online that after twenty years of marriage, he and his wife had been talking about which of them might die first, and each of them expressed the wish to go first in order not to be the one left behind. “Isn’t that romantic?” he said, making a joke of it. This is not funny, I thought. Because my husband was so ill the last five years of his life, it looked like he was going to die first, but when we talked about it we both acknowledged that You Never Know. I could have a car wreck or a heart attack and be gone in an instant. He expressed his wish that we both go at the same time. I said, speak for yourself, buster. I might not be ready to go when you are. He then said that if I died first, he would stop dialysis and die himself. That made me angry – what about the people here who would need you? After he died, though, I understood his thinking. It is so hard to go on without him. Occasionally I have to decide, again, to go on living. Unless you’ve lost someone as close to you as a spouse or a child, you cannot possibly imagine how much you long for the life and the person you used to have. If I’d gone at the same time he did, there would have been no grief, at least not for me. I can’t get my old life back. Sometimes it’s harder than other times to keep walking into the new life. It sucks, and it blows, and it tears the rag off the bush. It ain’t fair, and it ain’t right. It simply is. If you catch my drift. My friend and his wife were talking about the inevitable end of their life together. One will die, and no one knows who or when or how. This is not a subject that people can talk about easily. I understand that you might want to joke, to keep the specter of your own death or that of your spouse at a distance. That makes perfect sense to me, but I was not in the mood last night. Joking about spousal death ticked me off. You want to know how you’ll feel if you’re the one left behind? Stunned. Destroyed. Devastated. Crazy. Numb. For a long, long time. It is not “romantic” not to want to be the one left behind, it is self-defense. Do have a plan: make your will. Live as fully as you can, let the people you love know that you love them. Be kind. Have those discussions about death as you are able. Or don’t. It’s the love and the kindness that matter. And that’s all I have to say about that. PP Now I shall speak about the death of a machine. It was plain that my old computer was going down, so I got a new computer to replace it. Two weeks after the new computer arrived, the old computer went from quirky to non-functional. Non-functional is when nothing you try to open will open, not even the clunky old solitaire games. Sigh. Good-bye, old Paint. My computer needs are modest. Here’s what I do on computers: play solitaire and online games, write in Word, get email and check Facebook. I look up every stray question on Google, and I shop online. Sometimes I look up houses and used cars. When I was young I used to fantasize about men, but now it is more fun to fantasize about real estate and Subaru Foresters. I wanted Windows 7, but got Windows 8.1. Remember when you got your first computer, and you sat there and stared at it and wondered how the heck to do anything with it? First time I started my Windows 8.1 computer, I felt that lost again. I had heard that 8.1 is designed mainly to telephones and tablets, and that there was a steep learning curve. I heard right. Fortunately, the computer came with lots of tutorials and information. When I found the desktop things started looking more familiar. Took me a week and a half to find the Office 365 software I downloaded, but I’ve got it now, so that’s all right. So here I am working on a Windows 8.1 computer, and it’s not so bad, but I had to download solitaire, and I will never understand why Microsoft keeps fixing things that aren’t broken. I guess they have to make a living.