What's been going on

There’s so much life going on, it’s hard to find time to blog about it.

I spent the summer in Hamilton, Ontario. I had some financial and some legal things to take care of – the legal depended on the financial. Life is what it is, and the money moved on the day I was leaving Hamilton, so none of the legal things is even begun at this point. There was nothing I could do about that this summer, and it was frustrating. There were other things I couldn’t do anything about either – I tried applying for jobs, all kinds of jobs. Receptionist, shoe sales, Tim’s, housekeeping/dining room staff in retirement homes … There’s a lot of things I’m good at, and I learn other things fast, and I’m not too proud to clean toilets. Done it for income before. I was lucky – I have friends who had occasional, temporary work available, retail, filing, child care – they knew I needed work and sent it my way when they could. My dad helped some with finances too. And when it all looked like traveling to Iowa for the wedding Labour Day weekend, and then getting here, were going to be impossible, some lovely, lovely friends lent me money.

And I was lucky about housing. My sister Jane and niece Tegan met me at the airport at the end of April, and I stayed with Jane's family for several weeks. Friends were going to England for a month. I’ve cat-sat for them before, many times, and they asked if I’d stay in their condo, look after the cat, and pick up the mail, etc. It was great. First time in years I’ve lived anyplace where I didn’t have to think twice about what I did (or didn’t) have ON when I woke up in the night and had to dash across the hall to the bathroom. Luxurious, to have a whole place, with multiple rooms, to myself, and to have a cat I like, who’d come in and sleep with me.

My nephew had rented, in May, a place in west Hamilton to live in for the university school year, but he couldn’t live there until September, because of his summer job. I found that out Mother’s Day. So I lived in his place, and (eventually) covered the summer rent. He got it in time to buy textbooks, anyway. It was student housing – a place where several students have bedrooms and they share the kitchen and bath. But for most of the summer, there were no other students there. Just me, and the owner’s mother, and the two of us got along fine. Her cat slept with me too.

The summer was odd, in that I made contact with a lot of people I haven’t seen or talked to in years. Decades. FaceBook helped with that. I’m in touch now with people I’ve known since elementary school. We all went to middle and high school together too, but some of them are people I really never talked to after we left the small elementary school. So – people I haven’t talked to since 1967, or 1974, or a little later. I had meals with some, and coffee with some, and phone calls with some – that was all great. A lot of fun.

It was all tiring though. It is very tiring to have four months and two purposes, and not be able to make any progress with either. It’s very tiring to be broke all the time. To know you have work tomorrow, and wonder if you have enough change for bus fare to get there and home again. There weren’t days when there were no meals, but there were days at a time when I ate the same thing. I’d look at protein at the supermarket with an eye to how many servings I could get for the amount of money I had, and I’d buy cabbage, because I can eat it raw or cooked, and I like it, and they sell it by the each, instead of by the pound. So, you always buy the biggest cabbage, cuz a four-pounder and a siz-pounder cost the same. There was surplus bounty from other people’s gardens, and meals with other people sometimes – that helped a lot. There were a couple of people over the course of the summer who’d slip me twenty bucks once in a while, a friend who sent $5 in a card from Saskatchewan, and it arrived on one of those days I didn’t know how I’d get to work tomorrow. Really lovely.

Mark Twain said, “Lack of money is the root of all evil.” Well, maybe. It’s just grindingly tiring though. Feels like everything has to be evaluated. Can I go have coffee with so-and-so Thursday afternoon? No. Because, it’s not just coffee, it’s bus tickets, and anyway, there isn’t enough to go somewhere for coffee. Coloured pencils for drawing? Nope. Want to start a new knitting project? Nope.

Then there was the time I got sick. It was a middle-ear infection, but it felt like a three-week long hangover. I got up Friday morning, rolled over in bed, and it made me so dizzy I threw up. The stairs kept shifting as I was trying to find my way down them to the bathroom. Eating was impossible. Hell, I didn’t even want to; sips of water were impossible. My brother-in-law drove me to the on-call doc on Saturday afternoon, and she prescribed something for vertigo, a cortisone inhaler to reduce the swelling in there, and some pain killers if I needed them, and fortunately, it was one of those times I could just take the prescriptions to the drug store and buy them. But it was over a week before I left the house again. Another friend brought me SF ginger ale and crackers, bless her. I could hold those down, most of the time, and I needed to, because the anti-vertigo drug causes nausea. How does that WORK? What help is THAT? I stopped taking it as soon as I could. I hate being sick when I’m living alone too – between Saturday when my BIL took me to the doctor, and Thursday, when I had another doctor’s appointment, I saw the friend who brought the crackers, and that’s it. She didn’t stay either, and who could blame her? I didn’t want to share it around.

Now, I’m here in Texas. I’m blogging, but not as much as I thought I’d be. And it’s because I’m tired. I got here exhausted. Well, there’d been a 20-hour trip on a Greyhound bus to get here from Des Moines. That wasn’t too bad. The seats are roomier and more comfortable than planes, and there are stops every couple of hours so you can stretch your legs, buy diet Cokes and bags of wasabi soy-roasted almonds. (Don’t knock ‘em if you haven’t tried ‘em.) When I get tired, I work my way backwards through lonely and angry, and I’ll get hit with crying jags out of the blue.

So, here, we’re in the Central Time Zone, but we’re really living on Hawai’i time. We stay up late,and sleep in late. There’s tools for wood- and metal-working; there’s the computers to play with; there’s cameras. My beautiful, beautiful cats are here. There are little girls – my hosts’ great-granddaughters, 8 and 4, and we see them often after school. My honorary grandkids. We have made a home for little witch dolls I knit, out of cardboard boxes, chopsticks, a plastic bowl, and glue. The oldest one’s written a book, and is illustrating it with my (new) coloured pencils. I knit sometimes, read sometimes, cook a lot, because I like it. I nap A LOT. I lie in the hammock and look at birds and the trees A LOT. I’ve been making wooden spatulas because I want them, and it’s fun and noisy. Today we went for a long walk in the woods, got lost, and I took about 40 pictures of mushrooms growing in the forest floor. We got home, and the four-year old saw us coming down the driveway and ran to meet us, to get scooped up for a hug and (slightly sweaty) kiss. Then I weighed out and nuked leftovers from last night’s good supper, for our lunch, sharing treats with all four cats – they got some fish, some chicken bones, and some pieces of a cheese that is too full of carbs for human consumption. I showered and read in bed with the littlest cat til I woke up. I finished today’s wooden spatula, which is too thin, and it’ll break soon, but that’s okay. I’ll just make another. And now I’m going to go put the third meal together. Might be a good night for scrambled eggs with onions, jalapenos, and pepper jack cheese in them.

I’ll try to post about the rhythm of life here in the next few days, with pictures. And my Mushroom Series will get published here soon too.

I know exactly where they are!

This afternoon, we did shopping. Hobby Lobby for stuff to make little people dollies. Brookshires for groceries – I didn’t remember to take the list in, but I did remember what was on it, because everything started with C:

Cokes (diet)

Coffee (espresso beans, and Community with Chicory)

Cream (half-n-half)

Cat litter

Card (birthday).

So, that was okay. After that, we drove to Noonday, to Marcus’ antique store. Bob W is doing metal sculpture these days – he’s in his Praying Mantis period. Here’s a picture of the first one, about two foot tall, and sold and living in Tennessee now (I THINK it’s Tennessee). The current one will be about six foot tall, when it’s done, and will hang on a gatepost. We needed to find something for eyes (we were thinking doorknobs) and something to make wings out of. Well, we didn’t find anything we wanted for those, but he did get a new sawmill blade to make knife blades out of.

Marcus has two big, sweet black dogs and lots of fun stuff at the store, and I wish I’d taken my camera around his place. I wasn’t sure of etiquette about doing that, and we were home before I thought, “You coulda ASKED, you dummy.” But I didn’t. He has little steel armadillos, and the bodies are made out of something that looks like springs, about two or three inches in diameter. They’re all rusty, and they’re funny and I liked them. But I didn’t know what I’d do with one at the moment, so I left them all there. He was showing me other things – a dreamcatcher on the ceiling, that’s knotted out of sinew in a five-foot square frame, and a violin he’s having evaluated (I don’t believe it’s a Stradivarius though), and some pottery and jewellery.

Mostly, for aesthetics, I don’t much like glass. It’s hard and it’s cold. But I love blue and green glass – I like those glass things that we called “transformers” from hydro poles, and I like the big blue and green glass balls that the fishing boats used to use to float their nets in the oceans with. Marcus has big bowls and watering cans and baskets full of marbles – green, white and blue glasses, opaques and clear, big ones and little ones … I couldn’t resist. After all, I lost all my own.

I was looking at a milk bottle to put them in, and carrying it around with me. Then I found this bowl, and I knew it was what I wanted instead. It was dusty and sticky because there was a big rust-coloured candle in it, but I took it home. And, three pounds of marbles to put in it. Oughtta take me a long time to lose all those. Marcus took a few minutes to calculate the price – he said, usually people by them by the twenty, not by the pound. These are good for nothing at all except joy, you know. I can’t think of a sunny spot in the house to put them, but I’ll try.

We came home and had lunch, and while I was washing the bowl and marbles in the sink after, Aubrey, one of Bob’s great-granddaughters, knocked on the door. Very quietly. She’s the quieter one of the two sisters. She wondered what I was doing, so I told her to look on the table – most of the marbles were clean and in the bowl by then. Yes, she was allowed to play with them, and they were so warm because I’d washed them.

I’d made a lemon-garlic sauce to go with roasted chicken legs for lunch, and was putting that away, and licked my fingers before I washed that bowl. She wonder what I was eating, and I late her taste the sauce – she liked the lemon-ness, but it was “too hot” because of the raw garlic. I’d made black tea yesterday that has dried raspberries and raspberry leaves in it, and put it in the fridge for iced tea. I put some of the sugar we keep here to feed hummingbirds with, in hers, and lots of ice in both of ours, and we took the iced tea (in blue glasses) and the bowl with the marbles and the camera outside, and she took some of the pictures.

Then she found the old compressor that Grandaddy Bob had put ears and a tail on her for big sister to practice trick riding, when SHE was six. I took the trick riding pictures, and I got a good new one of the Tiger-Kitten, who’s about seven months old now. Then her Nana came to get her, and I walked them home, and kept going down the road to drop off a birthday/thank you card to the young woman who’d left the Tiger-Kitten here (“Just for overnight, til I can take her to the shelter, cuz I found her in the road.”) on Maundy Thursday. Except, I needed a new kitten that day, so she lives here still. I put a photo of her, little, in the birthday card.

That’s my fun day so far. It’s almost 7 p.m. We had lunch late, and Bob’s napping. There’s kick-ass chicken curry I made yesterday waiting to be microwaved when we want to eat later. It’s been really hot and gorgeous today. I’m taking my book back out into the hammock for a while, til I can’t read any more, assuming the cats let me read at all.

Why I 'Druther Be Here than Anywhere Else

Derek (www.dockofkingslynn.blogspot.com) is here. He took this video this afternoon, and put it on YouTube so I could post it here tonight. Too big to have e-mailed it.

Earlier this afternoon a box full of lovely teas and a teapot (MOST necessary for Hobbits) arrived from www.specialteas.com. I highly recommend them. Little kids and cats NEED cardboard boxes, so I gave them this one.

The black cat is my Yeshua. He was born a year ago yesterday, and his mother abandoned him when he was a few days old. Bob fed him kitten formula with an eyedropper for three days, then I got here, and I became the Mama Cat. I fed him, bathed him when he was dirty, taught him how to dig a hole in the sand and dripped water on him so he'd learn what to do with the hole in the sand. He is the most beautifully natured cat.

The little one in the box is the Tiger-Kitten. She was brought here by a neighbour on Maundy Thursday, after she'd been found in the middle of the road. The plan was she'd stay here overnight (the girl who found her has allergies and bad dogs) and be taken to the shelter the next day. Somehow, she never made it to the shelter. Yeshua is most definitely mine, and Tiger and Yeshua belong to each other. She's an Egyptian Princess cat, with the kink in the end of her tail to hold rings on, while the princesses bathe.

Starting Over

I’ve blogged before, but not for a year, I don’t think. So, this is starting over.

And, life is starting over too. At 54 years old, I’ve left home. I have lived my whole life within a 20-mile radius of the hospital where I was born. In a small town. My dad taught for a while at the high school I wound up attending. I’d go to the office for an aspirin and the secretary would say, “Can you take aspirin? Your FATHER can’t take aspirin!” And I’d tell her I could, and she’d give me two. My teachers knew my father too. It’s not that I got into trouble – I was a good girl and got good marks – but there were disadvantages. My sister went to the same school I did. When my Mum remarried, my new stepsister and stepbrother had all been to high school with us. My son went to the same high school as all of us, and even though it was more than 20 years later, he had some of the same teachers. At parent-teacher nights, as a parent, I saw mostly people I’d gone to school with, as other parents, sometimes as teachers.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of that. Lots of people have lived like that since the beginning of time, and lots of people do it happily. Things happened in my life though, in the years since I’ve turned 50, and I changed a lot. I don’t want to do the things I’ve always done. The people who love me celebrate my changes, for the most part. And at the same time, there’s a subtle pressure not to be TOO different. I found it that way. Your mileage may vary.

The other thing is – I was always timid. I didn’t strike out and do things on my own. I used to be terrified of heights, and now I climb on chairs, ladders, countertops, windowsills, piles of rocks, to do what I want to do. I’m learning how to drive a car for the first time in my life. I want to try things I haven’t tried before, find out what I can do by myself. It won’t be by myself, really, I’ll have lots of help.

A friend of mine suggested recently that I’ve been a respectable hobbit all my life. Bilbo Baggins was a respectable hobbit, who never did or said anything unexpected, right up til he was 50 or so, it says in the book. And then Gandalf put a sign on his door saying he was a burglar looking for employment, and the dwarves took him at his word and hired him on Gandalf’s say-so. Bilbo resented the whole thing, Gandalf and the dwarves and the expectation he’d go with them. He was frequently afraid, and lacked the resources it looked like he’d need. And he resented the dwarves’ belief that a timid hobbit couldn’t be of any use to them, and decided he’d show THEM. Somehow, he got through his adventures, and he came back a changed hobbit.

The analogies all seem apt to me. I’ve spent a lot of my life being a respectable hobbit, and now I’m going off to have adventures. I don’t EXPECT to meet any dragons. Bilbo did. But I do believe that like Bilbo, if I do meet one, I’ll find I’m equipped for the encounter, in ways I don’t have to know yet.

The road goes ever on and on …