Category Archives: memories

geranium

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When I was a kid, my mom had a spell of growing red geraniums. She even had my dad mount window box brackets inside the south-facing windows in the kitchen so that she could keep her geraniums alive through the long, harsh Vermont winters. Crimson flowers and ruffly dark green foliage were cheerful to have around during the months when everything seemed endlessly white and grey. In the spring after the threat of frost had passed, she’d bring the window boxes out to the exterior brackets and set them up, then spend all summer tending to the geraniums out there. Watering, dead-heading, fertilizing. She could make most green things grow and she often had flower beds around the house every summer as well, but the geraniums were her pride. She loved how the bright flowers popped against the light grey siding of the house, how you could see them from Route 5, glowing in the afternoon sun. At some point she got over the overwintering geraniums phase – probably because they made a mess and she had enough to do without also having to clean up drifts of shed flower petals every few days. Even after she gave up having them inside, she would still get a couple of large baskets of red geraniums to hang from brackets on the front of the house every summer. 

Dad built a porch on the front of their house a few years back. He built it from the ground up, exactly to his and mom’s specifications: tile floors that could be swept clean of the road dust that accumulated from living close to a busy main road, sturdy wide trim around the top of the balusters so that friends could sit or lean comfortably if all the seats were taken, plenty of room for a table and chairs to accommodate outdoor dinners in the evening sunshine. And big sturdy hooks installed along the beams to hold heavy hanging planters overflowing with frilly green foliage and crimson flowers. The porch was their happy place in the warmer months – they had meals out there every chance they could, and company was always directed out to the porch to sit and visit when the weather was good. 

After mom died last spring, my dad went and got two huge hanging baskets of red geraniums to hang on the porch just like always. He didn’t know how to take care of the geraniums except to water them, but he wanted that reminder of her for the summer. He would often send me pictures of the view from his seat at the porch table: his drink in front of him, his reading glasses sitting off to the side, a citronella oil candle burning to keep the bugs away, early evening sun beating in from the southwest, and always one of the baskets of red geraniums in the background. One time he sent me a picture of one tiny, forlorn, broken egg on the tile floor amidst a scattering of red geranium petals. A little song bird (we never did figure out what kind) had made her nest right in the middle of one of the hanging baskets and laid at least one egg. Whether by mistake, misadventure, or by some plan that made perfect sense to the bird but wouldn’t to us, the egg had fallen out of the nest and ended up on the floor of the porch. Dad left the nest in the basket hoping that the bird would come back and try again but she never did. 

At the end of the summer dad started asking me if I’d take one of the baskets of geraniums home. He wanted me to take them both but they were huge and my 1100 square foot house is not compatible with such monsters. I finally relented and agreed to take one of the baskets. It was so big that I had to clear everything off the top of my dresser in order to accommodate it in a spot that would get enough sun. I’d never taken care of geraniums either, aside from occasionally helping mom water or dead-head hers. Crucially, I also did not inherit her green thumb – where she could make most any green thing grow, I was continually finding new and innovative ways to kill just about any plant that came into my house. Even the “bomb proof” standards like pothos and snake plants have had some close calls in my questionable care. So, I took this hulking geranium in with a healthy amount of skepticism, along with a promise to myself that I wouldn’t beat myself up if it croaked. 

The first couple months of having the geranium went fine. I had to water it in my bathtub because it wouldn’t fit into my kitchen sink, and every watering session resulted in a trail of blood red petals being shed from the spare room to the bathroom and back, but I swept them up and did my best. As we got into the dark months of winter my brain took the predictable downturn that being trapped under feet of snow for weeks on end tends to bring on for me. Terrible things going on in the world didn’t help, nor did the grief that I was still learning to ride the waves of. Which is all to say, I got really fucking depressed and could barely take care of myself for a while there, let alone go into the spare room to drag this massive plant to the bathtub to water it, let it drain, then drag it back to its spot, THEN clean up the mess it created. I would go in and pick the dried-up leaves off it sometimes when I had the energy, and I’d promise myself that maybe that coming weekend I’d water it, especially since the flowers had all died off at that point and there would be no petal mess. I don’t think I managed to water it from December onward, though. 

Around late April, probably close to the anniversary of mom’s death in fact, but I can’t track it exactly to then, the snow had finally mostly melted in the driveway so that I could get over to the makeshift compost pile again. Not so much a proper compost pile really as more of just kind of a graveyard for previously green things. I throw gone-by cut flowers out there, corn husks, the remains of whatever annuals I’ve had potted up on the patio for the summer, stuff like that. But I don’t go so far as to actually get out there with a pitchfork and turn it or water it or anything. I’m not looking to get compost out of it. I’m just pitching stuff back to Mother Nature and letting her do her thing. Anyway, around late April, I decided it was time. The geranium wasn’t fully dead – it still had some leaves – but I didn’t think there was any saving it and I was sick of feeling bad whenever I went into that room and saw it. Plus, even if I COULD bring it back, I truly didn’t want to deal with the mess the flowers made. Geraniums just aren’t the plant for me. So, I gathered up the whole mess of crispy leaves and scraggly branches, wished it well on its journey, and rather unceremoniously heaved it over the stone wall into the plant graveyard. I sent up an apology to my mom at the time, though I know she wouldn’t have faulted me a bit for the decision. She could make most things grow but she also understood the value of not making life harder than it needs to be – especially in a housekeeping capacity. I cleaned off the top of the dresser and put some other stuff there to fill the void that removing the green monster had created. 

Fast forward through a spring and summer of various dramas big and small. Today is the last day of August and we’re on the precipice of another round of darkness. The smell of autumn is in the air even though it’s 78 degrees out. The dog and I tootled around the edge of the driveway in our normal manner earlier: him with his nose to the ground and me with my face to the sky, both of us enjoying the sunshine while we could. As we came along the side of the stone wall I noticed a very out of place flash of crimson in the otherwise solidly green underbrush. A cardinal maybe? We had scarlet tanagers most of the summer but they’ve headed south by now. The red wasn’t moving at all though and that’s not the way of most birds. I leaned over so I could get a better look, then gasped. There in the middle of a tangle of wild blackberry brambles, oak, and beech saplings, was a single blood-red geranium flower head sticking up proudly. It was small but it was unmistakable, with several of the tell-tale frilly and fuzzy bright green geranium leaves right next to it. 

That mostly-dead plant had survived being upended from its pot and left to fend for itself in one of the wettest springs, followed by one of the driest and hottest summers we’ve ever seen. It had not only not croaked, but it had BLOOMED. Those near-neon red flowers bobbed lightly in the breeze as I stared in disbelief. 

I do not believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that my loved ones are smiling down on me from any kind of heaven. What I do believe in is energy. All matter is, at its most base level, energy. Rocks, plants, people, even plastic or glass…it’s all just energy holding various forms. When something living dies, its energy doesn’t just disappear. It gets slowly absorbed by myriad other life forms, as well as getting released back into the world as heat and light. I also believe energy can, to a certain extent, sometimes “stick” to things. I don’t believe that geranium IS my mom, but I do believe that enough of her energy was around those plants last summer while they lived on her porch, while they witnessed her loved ones repeatedly laugh and cry and share memories of her, that a little bit of it stuck. It came home with me (like other bits of her did in other forms – pictures, clothing, etc). It hung on through a long dark winter of neglect, it allowed me to let it go when I took the plant outside to the compost pile, and it stuck around all summer so that I could see it today and think about my mom again in yet a new way. 

Because I think that’s what most of grief is, after all – it’s a process of thinking about the thing you lost over and over again but in subtly different ways. It’s like a stone rolling back and forth on the beach through wave after wave. Some waves knock a little of the sharp edge off. Other waves are so strong they push the stone far up on the beach out of the reach of the waves for a while until an especially high tide comes along and pulls it back in to be rolled back and forth some more. Eventually, after much rolling, much thinking, you’re left with something smoother. It will probably always be a little bit hard – you wouldn’t want to walk a mile with it in your shoe – but it’s not really sharp enough to cut you anymore. 

I could make analogies about that geranium plant being tough like my mom, or tell myself stories about how it surviving was some kind of sign from her and then try to interpret what it means on a deeper level…but that’s not really me. The reality is that it was an interesting coincidence, it made me smile, and I am grateful to have seen it. I am grateful for the chance to remember my mom in another way and to recall some of the energy she shared with the world. 

measuring time

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My mom had a stroke on April 10th. 

Everything was measured in hours at that point: how many hours she had been off her blood thinners, how many hours since the surgery to remove the clot, how many hours since the second clot was found in her leg, how many hours until that could be operated on to be removed. 

Once she got through those surgeries and was put into the neuro ICU, things started being measured in days. How many days until she would regain consciousness. How many days until she could swallow on her own again. How many days she would be stuck in that bed unable to move in any meaningful way, losing what little mobility she had left. 

When we got to the ten day mark, the hardest question I’ve ever had to consider came up: how many more days do we keep her there, trapped inside a failing body with a brain that would no longer let her express herself, that would likely never regain the ability to swallow enough to allow her to breathe on her own? 

The doctors couldn’t tell us to what extent she was aware of anything or whether there was any of her personality left in there somewhere. She was very clear in her advance directive and during many conversations we had throughout the last 20+ years of her ongoing serious health problems: a life with no independence, a bed-bound life beholden to tubes for air and nutrition, was no life that she wanted to lead. 

And so we decided to let her go. Time was back to being measured in hours at that point, as no one had any idea how long her body would keep going once she was taken off meds and the breathing tube. 

“She might not even make it to the hospice facility”, one nurse told me right before they were getting ready to move her. 

If there’s one thing about my mother though, it’s that she was the most stubborn person I’d ever known, and that apparently was not just a personality trait but something deeply programmed into her physical body as well. She made it to the hospice facility and we were back to counting days. “Short days”, the hospice staff called it. That was the expectation. They were confident that she had a couple days at most. 

She went into hospice on a Friday evening. My husband and I went in to see her that Sunday thinking she was probably close to the end. I spent a couple hours there with her, holding her hand when she’d allow it, telling her over and over that it was ok to go, that we’d all be ok and we’d figure things out, that she didn’t have to hang on for us. I told her to go find various loved ones that had long passed. I told her to relax and think about drinking margaritas on the beach. I told her I loved her and that all I wanted was for her to be at peace. 

I was both hopeful that she’d pass while I was there, and dreading that she would. Every hitch in her breathing, every twitch of her body, would set me on edge thinking that maybe that was it…maybe it was happening. But it didn’t happen that day, or the next. Or the next. I followed along with the nurses’ notes on her medical chart online and called in to talk with them daily. She just kept hanging on despite all signs that her body was ready to go. Ready, but not willing. As always.

On the afternoon of Thursday April 25th I got a call that I had been expecting. Dreading. Hoping for. Her hospice nurse said she had spiked a massive fever and was definitely very near the end now. I notified the people who needed to be notified and I waited. Half an hour later they called again to say she had passed. 

All those hours, all those days, the absolute longest two weeks of my life, were finally done. A month shy of her 69th birthday, my mom was gone. 

The days afterward were a blur of highway miles and phone calls. So much to do and no clue where to start. I have no siblings so it’s just me, my husband and my dad now. And the dogs, of course. Always the dogs, who were forever her biggest concern. But chihuahuas can’t help explain estate law and I wasn’t about to tell my dad that he was on his own in terms of trying to make arrangements, so I put my business pants on and got to work. 

Having the arrangements to focus on kept me relatively calm. It kept me from being the gigantic asshole that I was sorely tempted to be a few times, from burning bridges and saying things I couldn’t take back. Time was back to being measured in days. How many days until she was cremated, how many days until we had death certificates, how many days until we needed to make financial decisions. I remember having the realization that two weeks had passed since her death, and thinking “that’s all? It seems like we’ve been at this so much longer”. 

Last week marked two months of her being gone and again, it feels so much longer…but it also still feels like she could text me at any moment. When I go to my parents’ house it feels like she’s still in the next room. I know that feeling will eventually dissipate. I know someday I’ll recognize just the anniversary of her passing rather than the anniversaries of all the various steps in the process that led up to it. But for now, the After Corinne era is still being measured in days and weeks in my heart. 

happy appendicitiversary

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A year ago yesterday, I was sitting in the ER waiting on a CT scan to see what might be wrong with my guts. I hadn’t felt great the night before but had blamed it on some really greasy pizza I’d eaten. My main symptoms were bloating (omg, so much bloating) and discomfort in my lower right quadrant, but nothing so bad that it made me feel like it was any kind of emergency. I had taken some Gas-X and walked about 50 laps around the house to try and get the bloat to shift, took some tylenol for the gut pain, and had given up and gone to bed. I was uncomfortable all night, especially since I normally slept on my right side.

I should note here that appendicitis was always one of my greatest fears. It’s such a common thing that can go Big Wrong so quickly, and cause so much pain, and you hardly ever hear anyone telling stories about how their appendicitis was no big deal, you know? I think years and years of hearing all those stories just compounded with my already rampant control issues centered especially around my health (or lack there-of), and boom: appendicitis became my own personal medical boogey-man. So that night and early the next day, I was doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to try and avoid the reality that what was happening was probably appendicitis and I was probably headed for emergency surgery.

After a whole day sitting around waiting on tests, a nice doctor came in and confirmed that it was in fact my appendix causing the issues. They gave me the option of going home with a whole heap of antibiotics to see if that would calm things down, but at that point it sort of just felt like kicking the can down the road, you know? Like, even if the antibiotics had worked, who’s to say that the appendix wouldn’t eventually get inflamed again, possibly even worse? As it was, I was super lucky because my appendicitis really WASN’T that big of a deal, comparatively. I never got sick, I never had a fever, and while I had some pain, it was certainly nowhere near the worst thing I’d ever felt. So, rather than put off surgery and then always be wondering even more than I already did whether or not every pang and pain in my lower right quadrant was my appendix fixing to try and kill me, I said we might as well just take it out. 

I waited for the doctor to leave and then I had a pretty thorough breakdown while my sweet husband tried to comfort me. I’d had abdominal surgery before (to remove a similarly cranky gallbladder many years ago) and even with the magic of laparoscopic technology, it’s not a super fun ride. Plus, I think anesthesia freaks out even those of us without major control issues. And those of us WITH control issues? Well. The idea of someone forcibly putting you to sleep with no guarantee that you’ll wake up is pretty fucking dicey to say the least. 

Realizing that I was probably going to be waiting around a good long while for surgery, and knowing that Mark would eventually have to leave to go home and feed the dog and himself, I finally wised up and asked the nurse for something to help with the anxiety. I can’t remember the name of the stuff she gave me but it was definitely helpful. I went from like an 8.5 on my personal panic scale to about a 3. Which, given that my baseline is what most normal people would probably consider like a 4, that wasn’t too shabby. 

Mark did end up having to leave, I think around 8:30 or 9pm. They eventually got rolling on surgery prep after 10pm, and I apparently spent a couple extra hours in recovery because they didn’t have a room to put me in for a while afterward. When I woke up in the morning, I realized that the room I was in looked SUPER familiar but I couldn’t figure out why for a few minutes, then it dawned on me: it was a room in the cardiac care unit that my mom had spent quite a lot of time in a few years before when she’d had some heart problems. Like, the exact room, the same side of the room, even. Waking up there and realizing that, before anyone explained the room shortages, was pretty nerve-wracking. I kept feeling around my chest to make sure I didn’t have all the actual cardiac monitors on me, and there was no small amount of concern that perhaps my own heart issues had cropped up while I was under anesthesia. I must have looked kind of deer-in-the-headlights when the nurse finally came in, because her eyebrows shot up and she immediately asked if I was ok. I asked why I was in the CCU and she said, “oh yeah, sorry about that! We got you because they had nowhere to put you after recovery last night. That’s the only reason, I promise.” So that was quite a relief. 

I was sore but didn’t feel super bad after surgery, which had also been my experience after my gallbladder eviction. And, as with the gallbladder surgery, things took a real nosedive once I got home and the good drugs wore off. I was pretty miserable for about a week, and I kept crying to Mark about how the recovery pain was so much worse than the actual sickness had been and why didn’t I just take the antibiotics instead, etc. Core strength and mobility are so easy to take for granted. You don’t realize just how much you rely on specific muscles to do, well, everything, until those muscles are no longer available to use or really hurt when you use them. Also, I’m one of those people who doesn’t get physically sick from anesthesia but it does a fucking number on me mentally. Like, super big sads and hopelessness. Being unable to move easily and having your brain trying to eat you at the same time is not a good combo. Zero stars, do not recommend. But, as is usually the case, I got better bit by bit, day by day, and a month later we managed to go on a trip we had planned to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (Mark won the trip through his work. Trust me, those are not places we would be able to afford to vacation in otherwise) with a minimum of woe on my part. 

Today all I have to show for the whole thing are three tiny scars, each less than half an inch long, on my lower belly. One is actually right in my belly button and is hard to even see unless you know where to look. And while, like I said, I’d give the whole experience a zero out of 10 on the fun scale, at least I no longer have to worry about every pang in my lower right abdomen being my appendix anymore! 

A piece of ginger root in a jar was the closest thing I could find in my house to non-grossly represent a human appendix. I didn’t get to see mine so I don’t really know what it actually looked like, but I’m going to assume this rendering is way, way off base. Please don’t email or DM me images of actual human appendices, infected or otherwise. Neither of us needs that.

undeveloped

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I found an undeveloped roll of film the other day. It was in a bag of random stuff that has gone through at least three house moves with me. I’m pretty sure I haven’t used my non-digital camera in close to 20 years, so this sucker has been around a while.

Exhibit A: ancient technology unearthed from the depths of a bag of junk.

There’s a place in town that still processes film and prints pictures, so I’m going to drop this off to be developed soon. I fully realize that it’s so old and has been stored so disrespectfully (for real: it has been banging around kitchen junk drawers for many years), that it likely won’t even turn out. But I’m curious enough about what’s on it to want to spend the money anyway, just on the off chance.

I used to take tons of pictures, often with the aim of wanting to be artsy, but I wasn’t very good at it. So, more than likely, this is a whole roll of pictures of branches or a cornfield or something similar. There is one other possibility: I took a trip to Kentucky to spend time with a boy circa 2000-ish (don’t quote me on that date, I’d have to get the scrap book out to confirm). I shot two rolls of film while I was there, but only one ever got developed. This may very well be that second roll of film. That was a weird trip and quite frankly, a weird time in my life in general (although, when is life NOT weird, honestly), and I have mixed feelings about the possibility of having that little time capsule available to examine. The boy doesn’t matter—he’s long gone and there were no deep feels there anyway. But I’m equal parts nervous and intrigued at the prospect of perhaps getting to see a glimpse of myself, or at the very least, of my perspective, from so long ago. Aging is such a mindfuck in that, the older you get, the more sure you become of yourself in some regards, but the more you (or a lot of us, anyway), tend to understand that the only constant is change. We are somehow always the same person we’ve always been in a general sense, but there will have been tens or even hundreds of versions of us from year to year, day to day, sometimes even minute to minute. And that’s fine—that’s completely natural. But it can feel very odd, especially if you’re an overly sensitive, always-in-your head person like me.

Anyway. If the pictures come out, I’ll post some of them. If nothing else, they should be good for a laugh at my complete lack of photography skills.

20 years

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Twenty years ago on September 11th, I was just getting settled at my desk at work after returning from the trip of a lifetime. I had just spent two weeks exploring jungle caves and Mayan ruins in Belize, and wasn’t quite sure how I was going to re-adjust to my tech support gig after being out in The Actual World for basically the first time as an adult.

As I was signing into my email, my phone rang.

“Are you watching the news?” Becky sounded slightly breathless.

“No, I just got to work, why? What’s going on?”

“Bring up a news site. Something is happening. A plane just hit a skyscraper in New York.”

I pulled up a site and saw a picture of a plane hitting a building, with a little blurb about breaking news, but the internet was a much different place in 2001 and it was actually fairly hard to find much as it was happening. Becky was home and had the news on so she was relaying information to me as it was reported. We watched the second plane hit in as close to real time as was possible at that point.

A couple minutes later, someone down the hall from my office yelled that everyone needed to come watch the news. They had a TV set up and CNN or something was on. It was a small office, only a handful of us. We stood around, fixated on the set, still not understanding what was going on. Cell phones started ringing, then office phones. People wandered off to take calls and then came back, sometimes with wet eyes, sometimes with pale faces.

Our little office in Vermont was a long, long way from Manhattan, but some of my coworkers had family down in that general area, and we were all booked to go to a trade show in the city at the end of October. I had just flown in to JFK on my way home from Belize two days before. The friend I had been travelling with was still there, spending time with other friends for a few days before his flight back to London. They were staying just a few blocks from the towers. We had walked by them one night on our way to dinner before we left for Belize.

Nobody in the office really knew what to do with themselves. Someone said that the local Catholic church was doing mass shortly and several of us decided to go. I don’t think a single one of us was Catholic, but it was more about being with other people and trying to wrap our heads around what was going on.

Mass was surreal. I had never been to a Catholic church before and had zero understanding of what to say or do. I mostly just sat and cried on and off as waves of emotion washed over me. Everyone else was doing basically the same thing, although most of them knew when they should be kneeling, at least. When it was over, my coworkers and I wandered back to the office in a daze. We were greeted with the news that two more planes had been hijacked – one crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside and the other hit the Pentagon.

I don’t remember if we got sent home, if we just left, or if I stayed the whole day. I think I probably went home early. I was still living with my folks at that point. My dad would have been at work still, and I think my mom was still working nights then, so she would have been asleep I guess. I honestly don’t remember a thing about that afternoon or evening at all. It’s just gone. All I remember is being very worried about my friend in the city and not being able to get through to his cell…which was understandable, of course. I know I eventually did get an email from him a day or two later and he said they were all fine, aside from some breathing issues from all the dust in the air, and of course some mental trauma.

After the attack, I remember weeks and weeks of almost every channel we had showing the footage of the planes hitting the towers over and over again. They did finally stop showing the clips where you could see people jumping / falling out of the windows, so that was a small relief, but still. Looking away felt like dishonoring those people in some way, I think…so we just kept watching and watching. Trying to see where it all went wrong, maybe. But it’s pretty hard to learn from mistakes when a country can’t admit that it actually made any.

We did end up going to the trade show at the end of October. My mom was worried. She kept asking what if it happened again while I was there? All I could do was shrug and, with a wisdom well beyond what my 21 years should have afforded me (and which I since have seem to lost the vast majority of), say “life has to go on”.

The venue and our hotel were a good three miles or so from the footprint of the towers. One night as we were getting into the elevator to head back up to our rooms, a guy in a hard hat and orange vest waved at us to hold the door for him. He was maybe 25 feet further down the lobby and walking very slowly. When he got closer, we saw that he was absolutely caked with dust and dirt. When he got into the elevator he apologized for making us wait.

“I would have walked faster but I’m kind of beat,” he said half-jokingly.

“Are you working down there? Where…it happened?” one of my coworkers asked.

He nodded, keeping his eyes trained studiously on the ground. My coworker silently put out his hand toward the dusty guy, who reached out and shook it with a quiet “thanks”. It was a long, quiet ride up to the 20th floor where my group were staying. When we got off the elevator, we turned back to wish the guy good luck but he was leaning back against the wall of the elevator, eyes closed, chin tipped like he had nodded off. We didn’t disturb him.

I hate what the anniversary of 9/11 has become. I hate that it has been co-opted by the ‘Murica crowd with their These Colors Don’t Run t-shirts and their Terrorist Hunting Permit bumper stickers and their racism. I hate that they refuse to learn history, to understand context, to grasp nuance. I hate that they can’t see that this cycle will continue to play out over and over again because this country keeps making the same mistakes, keeps voting for the same wrong-headed politicians pushing the same wrong-headed ideas. I hate that we can’t seem to find a way to honor the lives of all the people that died in the attacks and the aftermath without turning it into some kind of garish, jingoistic, self-masturbatory political spectacle. Those were real people, with real families, real lives. They deserve better than some bullshit parade full of rednecks waving Don’t Tread On Me flags. They deserve better than a country that continues to vehemently deny it bears any responsibility in the way the world is crumbling around us.

But life has to go on.

chasing ghosts

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(Let’s just pretend I haven’t posted in six months, mmkay? Mmkay.)

I believe in ghosts. Living things are made of energy and I believe some of that energy can cling to places, objects, and even people. As long as you invest your own energy into carrying the memory of someone, they’re living on in you, even if only a tiny bit.

We’re all haunted, for better or worse, by the people we choose to put energy into remembering, then. I am haunted by my Nana on the daily – whether by seeing a bird or flower she liked, smelling a scent that I associate with her, or thinking of a specific time I was with her. My paternal grandmother, Marion, haunts me often by way of my love for fiber arts and textiles. She was an amazing knitter and seamstress, and had aspirations in her early days of becoming a fashion designer. When I see a beautifully made piece of clothing or I sit down to knit for a while, her energy is there in my hands, if not my head, making me itch to create.

Can you be haunted by someone you’ve never met, though? Someone you have no memories of to feed your own energy into? I think in some cases, yes. Maybe you visit a place where someone’s energy is still clinging for whatever reason, like in a classic ghost story of a grisly death or unrequited love, where someone’s spirit can’t leave. Their energy might not even be trapped there due to bad circumstances – maybe it was a place that person loved so deeply or made it so much their own that they willed part of themselves to stay there long after their body had left. Perhaps there’s an item that was so important to someone that it ended up absorbing some of their energy. Whether a cherished object or a utilitarian one, the things we surround ourselves with and use on a daily basis can certainly carry echoes of us far into the future, I believe.

If you’ve gotten this far you’re probably wondering why I’m even blathering on about this woo shit. It’s not my normal LOL-fest, after all (please read that with the intended sarcasm. On no plane of existence would I have the audacity to judge my own writing an actual LOL-fest. Apparently I DO exist in a space where I refer to things as LOL-fests now, though? I’m not sure I’m ok with that, but I’m quickly sliding headlong into a black hole of parenthetical digression and I need to back away from that particular event horizon before it sucks me in and disintegrates me. I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about space lately, can you tell?).

Where was I? Oh yes, explaining why I’m talking about ghosty woo things.

So, the reason I bring all this up is that I’m being haunted. The spirit of one of my great-great-grandfathers, Harlan Godfrey, has been all up in my grill for quite some time now.

I’ve always been really interested in old stuff. I was never really great in history class in school because that involved a lot of memorizing names and dates, which put me right to sleep. But old STUFF? Stuff you can hold in your hands, or at least see in the context of the time in which it was created / used? That’s always been my jam. I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an archaeologist, for most of my childhood. Eventually I figured out that both professions a) spend a lot of time doing very physical work in some pretty inhospitable places (or worse, are in academia), and b) are not known for making big bucks. Or any bucks, really. Being physically uncomfortable and being poor have both always been pretty high on my Do Not Want list, so I eventually moved on to other dreams (none of which I have actually achieved either, but at least I learned to be more realistic? That’s a useful skill, surely). My love of old stuff and old stories never really went away, though. Eventually I started channeling it into genealogy. This was especially satisfying to me because it combined my love of old stuff with my ridiculously strong life-long urge to know other people’s business.

For a long time my genealogy fixes came from my Nana. She had lots of old pictures, lists of names and birth dates, and she knew where most of the bodies were buried. Literally. Her husband, my Bampa, was long gone at that point – he died when I was 11 – but she had stayed in close touch with that side of the family and had a lot of knowledge of their ancestry as well. My mom has always been interested in family history too, and with the advent of sites like Ancestry, being able to build an actual family tree and show her all kinds of cool stuff like census records and draft cards got her sort of sucked into my project as well. We ended up going to a family reunion together a few summers ago – NOT something that either of us would normally volunteer for, as we’re both card-carrying introverts – but several very elderly family members were going to be there and we were interested in seeing if they could confirm some details of some people for us. At the reunion my mom’s aunt Jan (my grandfather’s youngest sister) mentioned that she had some books I might be interested in, and that she’d get them to me eventually.

The following summer, Jan showed up one day with a smallish clear plastic tote bag – the kind that gift sets of shampoo and body wash come in. Rather than bottles, it was filled with small books.

“Here’s something to get you started. I want these back eventually, so please be careful with them,” she said, handing them over. I pulled out the first little book, smaller than most peoples’ cell phones today, and flipped open the cover.

‘Diary of Harlan F. Godfrey, 1910’

I went home that afternoon and lost at least three hours reading. The entries are all entirely utilitarian. Harlan was a subsistence farmer in turn-of-the-century Vermont. He used his diaries to keep track of weather, which heifers were bred and which ones were sold, when he bought feed and supplies and how much he paid for them, etc. Not exactly riveting reading for most people, but for whatever reason, I was hooked. I read through all the diaries over the space of a few days, then proceeded to bend the ear of every family member who showed even the remotest inkling of interest about them.

Jan’s words kept bouncing around in my head – “I want these back eventually”. But…but what if I some day had a burning need to know how much Harlan had paid for a hogshead of cracked corn at Chase’s store in Bradford in September of 1910? She wanted the books back, but I couldn’t handle the idea of losing that resource. I needed to preserve my hoard of the most banal treasure imaginable. So I decided to do the only reasonable thing, given the situation:

I decided to transcribe it. All six books worth.

It should be noted that, like with most plans I come up with, I decided I was going to do it and then immediately started four other things, which lead to three further projects, which in turn brought on an avalanche of roughly 17.6 million additional tasks. Before I knew it, a year had gone by. And then another one. That is 100% how I’ve made to to age 39, by the way. I swear the last time I looked, I was 27. This whole ‘time compressing as you age’ thing is pretty fucked, especially if your brain was pre-wired to have no real concept of time passing like mine is.

Anyway. Jan still hadn’t asked for the books back a couple weeks ago when the second anniversary of me having them whizzed past, but I know Jan and she is as dragon-esque with her hoard of precious old things as I am, so I know she won’t forget and I won’t be able to put her off for long once she decides she wants the books back.

So, last Friday when I had something else I really needed to be doing and thus was fair gagging for a procrastinatory escape hatch, I pulled up a Google doc, cracked open the first diary, and started transcribing. It’s going faster than I originally figured it would – it takes me about 30 minutes to get through a month of entries, provided I don’t run into any super scrawly bits that I have to try to decipher. Harlan’s penmanship was pretty decent but he wrote with a pencil, the point of which wears down periodically, making things harder and harder to read…to the point where I’ll find myself muttering ‘sharpen your god damned pencil, Gramps’ like he could somehow hear me from 110 years in the past. His grammar is also pretty suspect, which can be kind of amusing at times. He wrote very much how he would have spoken (must be genetic?), so there are entries like “Done choars this F”, meaning he did the chores this forenoon, and “drawed wood all day”, meaning not that he’s drawing pictures of wood but that he’s dragging it out of the forest with his horses. My favorite is that, almost every Sunday, his entry is “here to home”. Sometimes it’s accompanied by notes of people having visited that day, but mostly it’s just that one simple statement that sounds so…content. Like he’s taking a well-earned day off after a week of hard work. I mean, for all I know he spent his Sundays beating his kids and kicking the chickens…but I’d find it quite surprising if that were the case.

What used to be Harlan’s farm, and then his son Floyd (my great-grandfather)’s farm, is about a ten minute ride from where I live. It’s a spot I have been inexplicably drawn to for many years – since way before I knew which property my ancestors had owned, since before I stopped to look at the gravestones in the little cemetery tucked up on the side hill and noticed many names I recognized from my family tree. All that energy, all that love of place that three or four generations of my ancestors worked into the side of that hill… it’s like someone strikes a kind of cosmic tuning fork and the bits of those people that live on in my blood start singing that haunting note and I have to go back to harmonize for a little while.

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Mmm, so old. Very book.

I look just like Buddy Holly…

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…and you’re Mary Tyler Moore.

When I was a kid, personal computers weren’t a thing. Well, I guess they were for some people, but not really out in the sticks where I lived. We got three Macs at school when I was in 4th grade (circa 1990). By the time I got to 6th grade, the school had built a little computer lap with half a dozen PCs and we had “computer class” regularly, but almost nobody in my school had their own computers at home. I remember our high school computer teacher, Mr. Waste (that was seriously his name, I’m not making that up), showing us all how to use Netscape Navigator to access something called The Internet, and all of us scoffing about how it was interesting enough but we’d probably never USE it for anything. We then all went back to competing for who could program their computer to play the most annoying sequence of MIDI tones and make Mr. Waste yell at us the fastest. We called that (highly unsanctioned) activity the Waste Race. I’m sure it will shock you to learn that none of us ended up at MIT.

Anyway.

We got a PC at our house around 1996. I’m pretty sure my mom got it from Sears. We didn’t have Internet at first, just the computer. It was meant for school work you see. None of that electronic mail or chat room nonsense. Even back then companies had started putting junk on computers that nobody really needed, though. On my model there was a folder called ‘Fun Stuff’ that had a bunch of sample photos, music clips, and much to my interest, several full-length music videos.

One of the videos that came pre-loaded was Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’.

bh

It was set in the diner from Happy Days and they made it look like The Fonz was jamming with the band at one point.

I swear, I must have watched that video about a thousand times…not necessarily out of any deep love of the song or band, but more just out of desire to somehow be connected to what was going on in the world outside of back-woods Vermont, maybe? Plus, in retrospect, at 16 years old I was really starting to hit my stride when it came to my talent for procrastination. Having a computer, even one without the Internet, offered a whole new universe of opportunities to fuck off and not get my algebra homework done. When I got sick of Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’, I could always drill down level after level of folders and files in the guts of Windows 95, building a mental map of where things went and why. I also got really good at Minesweeper and Solitaire. Best of all was the Encarta encyclopedia CD that came with the computer. I could load that up and read all about…well, everything. And I did. Often. That CD taught me how to say “my name is Michael” in Greek for instance. You wouldn’t think that a teenage girl in rural Vermont with no Greek family would need to know that for any reason, but you’d be WRONG because my dad’s name is Michael and he actually did some work for a guy who was married to a Greek lady back in ’97 and I TOTALLY came through in the clutch when my dad came home one day talking about how he wished he knew something in Greek that he could say to the lady.

smart

All those hours of trawling through Encarta instead of doing homework definitely paid off in the long run.

(This post brought to you by a) knowing I haven’t written in a while and feeling like I really should but not knowing what to write about and b) Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’ popping up on the playlist I was listening to an hour ago.)

origins

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I started this blog three years ago today.

cake

OCD brain is annoyed that there are more than three candles in this picture. Calm your tits, OCD brain. We’ll just assume those blurry, far-away candles are for future blogiversaries off in the misty distance. Or past ones from other blogs. Who cares, just make like Elsa and let it go already. Gahd.

It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal to me because I’ve actually had a blog of some sort for close to fourteen years now. My original blog, which technically still exists but is pretty hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for, was started on 1/13/2004. I finally gave up posting there in  2009, then started my half-assed cooking blog in 2010. The half-assed cooking blog also still exists but I haven’t posted on it since July 2015. It was starting to feel like a chore, and it was also making me feel really inadequate in a lot of ways. Like, food blogs are all about good photography, and I had neither the time or the inclination to teach myself how to be a food stylist. I’m also really not good at measuring when I’m cooking, and I don’t always think in a linear fashion, so recipes are pretty hard for me to write…and that’s pretty much what people read food blogs for. There are only so many times someone is going to want to read about how good my meatloaf is before they’re like “OK, prove it. Either feed me meatloaf, give me your recipe so I can try it, or STFU”. In the end, I opted for S’ing the F.U.

I started How Bad Can It Go because a friend drew some casual similarities between my then Facebook-based rants about being a little touched in the head and the way Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) wrote about her own experiences with mental illness. The comparison was wildly flattering. I immediately started envisioning how I’d blog hilariously (but also earnestly) about my struggles with anxiety, depression, and ADHD for maybe a year or so, then be ‘discovered’ by some publisher. I’d be given a book deal and afforded the opportunity to tell my day job they could shove off.

Let’s just say the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in. Or trickling, even. Nary a drip. Not even the merest hint of moisture in the air. Dry as a 5,000 year old Egyptian’s desiccated, mummified femur buried under 47 feet of sand, in fact.

mummy

Ramses was the worst peek-a-boo partner EVER.

But that’s OK. I’ll keep on keepin’ on, because hey, how bad can it go?

inventory

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note: sorry, I know the formatting is fucked up. I don’t know why WordPress does this sometimes, and I don’t know how to fix it without inserting break tags between paragraphs, which makes the spaces between them gigantic. Sorry, sorry. Please forward all complaints to the first person named Janet you have in your address book. She’ll love hearing them, I promise.
Hi, Hello, Guten Tag.
I haven’t jumped off a bridge, been abducted by Sasquatches (Sas…quati? Sasquaron? Sasquatillia? I could Google it but where’s the fun in that), or launched myself into space via the power of my own ass (YET). I’ve just been busy with getting caught up at work after vacation, trying to mentally adjust to no longer being on vacation, pining for more vacation, and wading through the daily struggle of trying not to think so much about why I exist. Those all take up a lot of time and mental energy, so I haven’t had much left of either to write.
BUT I’M HERE NOW!
There’s a post about GenCon coming, complete with discussions about the games I played, I swear…but this is not that.
This, amigos, is an exhaustive inventory of my purse. This post is being brought to you by the literal five minute struggle I had to find my work keys this morning as I pulled handful after handful of random fuckery out of my purse. At one point during the process I actually thought to myself, ‘maybe I should get a smaller shoulder-bag just for my work essentials. I could tuck it here into the bigger bag and everything would be contained right where I need it’.
Let that sink in for a minute. My bag is so big, and so full of shit, that I was seriously contemplating GETTING ANOTHER BAG to segregate the things I need to find easily, and putting it INSIDE THE TOO-BIG, TOO-FULL BAG.

nevermind_nathan_fillion

Exactly.

Here is the bag in question. It’s sitting on my size 11 shoes, which I didn’t actually do for scale, but feel free to make that connection if you’d like.

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It’s sort of Tardis blue, but it’s not really bigger on the inside.

I’m not actually a purse carrying type. When I’m leaving the house to run errands or something, I just grab my wallet, which is a checkbook clutch thing. I don’t like leaving my wallet hanging around unattended at work though, and I like the idea of it being unattended in my car even LESS, so I’ve always maintained some kind of smallish bag situation in order to tote the wallet, my keys, and my lunch back and forth to work. Sometimes it has been an actual purse, sometimes a messenger bag, and for a while I used one of those reusable bags you get for like $2.50 at the grocery store.
When I first got this blue bag many years ago, the intended use was as a carry-on for air travel, as it was big enough to fit even a large knitting project, a 1-liter bottle of water, my wallet, and my Kindle or a book, with a bit of room to spare. I’m not really sure quite how I ended up transitioning it from a carry-on to my daily lug-shit-around bag, honestly. It was probably after some trip we took where I was too tired and brain-dead to transfer my shit over from one bag to another the morning that I had to go back to work. That sounds like me.
Now, if you have ADHD or are close to someone who does, you may be able to see where this is going. The Second Law of ADHD Life is that The Mess Will Always Expand To Fill The Available Space. Get a bigger kitchen table because your old small one is always covered with piles of stuff? The mess will expand to fill the available space. Clean out the trash in the back seat of the car to build the illusion that you are a functioning adult? The mess will expand to fill the available space. Switch to a bigger hand bag for whatever reason? The mess will expand, blah blah blah. It’s like gravity, or my husband’s willingness to eat Taco Bell even though it makes him sick every time. It just IS. You can try to fight nature, but nature always wins. It doesn’t matter what kind of bag I end up with. I will always, ALWAYS, end up filling it with weird junk. I did it as a child, I did it even worse as a teenager, and I will likely continue to do it for as long as I have a bag that I leave the house with daily.
SO.
With all that said, here’s the full and truthful inventory of my bag as of this morning:
  • one ballpoint pen: click style, orange, emblazoned with the words ‘Riverbank Church’, which I have never attended and don’t know the actual location of.
  • lipstick: three different shades. I had a lip color phase which I have long since passed, but for some reason I still carry these around. Just in case of a pale lip emergency, I guess?
  • small bottle of tylenol: because ibuprofen doesn’t work on my headaches, and headaches make me anxious, which makes my headaches worse. Welcome to my world.
  • empty plastic bag from local grocery store: I think I might have used this to wrap a potentially leaky lunch container one day, and then felt bad about single-handedly ruining the environment if I threw it away, so back in the bag it went. I didn’t actually un-crumple it and check whether it contained remnants of leaked lunch. I haven’t developed a case of bag-ants, so I think it’s probably ok.
  • work keys: ironically, these are all keys to the old office that I haven’t given back yet, but there’s also a security token on the key ring that I need to do some of my daily functions, and is therefore about the only thing in the bag that I ACTUALLY need to have with me on a day to day basis.
  • small container of dental floss: having stuff stuck in my teeth makes me twitchy, so I like to have floss just in case.
  • three barrettes: pop-style metal ones. These are for keeping my hair out of my face at yoga class. I only use one at a time, but I carry backups because they’re small and very lose-able.
  • wallet: where all my plastic money access cards live. This is a hot mess too and could merit its own inventory post, frankly.
  • two copies of a bill I need to pay: I brought the first one to work with me to argue with them about the charges, realized I was wrong before I even called them (thankfully), stuffed it in my bag, forgot about it, and didn’t pay it. The next month they kindly sent me a reminder copy. I thought to myself that the best place to put it in order to remember to pay it would be my bag, so in it went two weeks ago. Sidenote: I threw away the older copy while doing this inventory. Remind me to write a check for the newer copy when I’m done with this.
  • Microsoft Office suite software box, empty: I have a semi-reasonable excuse for this one. It came from when I bought our laptop a couple years ago. All it has in it is the serial number for the copy of Office that I bought. I set up the new laptop at work so that my IT guy could do his VPN voodoo on it, entered the serial number for Office, then tossed the box in my desk drawer and forgot about it until we started moving the office and it came time to empty my drawers out. At that point I wasn’t sure whether the serial number was something I should keep a record of, so I saved the box to be on the safe side. Granted, that WAS like eight weeks ago, but still.
  • small bottle of ibuprofen: because tylenol doesn’t work on my period cramps.
  • passport: the last time I traveled internationally, I used this bag as my carry-on. That was April of 2017. Passport’s still in there.
  • brush and comb: because sometimes I try to make my hair all travel in sort of the same direction, just to see what it looks like.
  • sugar free honey lemon Ricola cough drops, half bag: these are another cleaning-out-old-desk holdover
  • 2016 W2 tax form: I think I had this with me to validate my 2016 adjusted gross income so that I could file my 2017 taxes online. I did my taxes in February. It is now almost September.
  • 2017 W2 tax form: see above.
  • 2017 W2 tax form of my husband’s: see above.
  • small tube of refill erasers for a Pentel mechanical pencil: I bought these through work with the intention of using them in my clicky pencils at home. Haven’t gotten there yet. I still use the pencils…I just erase with a different eraser. Guess I didn’t need them that bad?
  • broken claw-style hair clip, small: it’s not completely broken – just one tooth got snapped off. Still totally viable in a hair emergency, which I feel the need to always be prepared for.
  • my copy of my mom’s advance directive paperwork: my mom got really sick for a while back in early 2017. They made her fill out advance directive (living will) paperwork and since I’m her only kid and I’m named for everything in it along with my dad, I had to be given a copy. It doesn’t have any sensitive information on it or anything…it’s just a super weird thing to have been carrying around for like 18 months.
  • letter from a friend, postmarked May 2017: When I went to renew my driver’s license in December 2017, I had to bring some pieces of mail with me to prove that I really do live where I say I live. Because, you know, that shit totally couldn’t be faked.
  • 2017 car registration (now long expired): I THINK this may have been related to the last item, but I’m not positive.
  • pay stub circa 12/2017: possibly also related to the license renewal thing? I get all my pay stubs electronically now, so at least I don’t have to worry about accumulating large piles of them anymore.
  • receipt for coach tickets dated April 2017: this was from our trip to the UK. It was actually tucked into my passport folio thing but must have worked its way out during one of my many pawing-through-layers-of-shit-to-find-keys sessions.
  • little card from flowers my husband sent me for our anniversary: which anniversary, I can’t be sure. Which number, I mean. I know that they were for our wedding anniversary, not like…the anniversary of that time I thought it would be a good idea to put raisins in the sweet potato mash (because trust me, that was NOT a celebratory experience for him).
  • job application for local grocery store, blank: this was given to me to give to my husband when the owner of the local grocery store was trying to get him to come work for her. The fact that it’s still in my bag like four months later should tell you what he thought of that idea.
  • book, entitled ‘Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself’: I bought this from Amazon and forgot to change my shipping address from work to home, so it got delivered at work. I took it out of the box, tucked it into my bag with the intention of starting it after I finished the book I was working on at the time. This was in January (I just checked Amazon). As you can clearly tell, I’ve not yet gotten over myself enough to actually crack this book.
  • reusable plastic carrier bag from Asda: this is circa April 2017 when we were in the UK. We went to Asda to stock up on British candy before we headed home. I had my usual guilt over trashing a plastic bag once I got home, and then realized this was actually a pretty decent reusable bag. Why I felt that keeping it folded up in my purse was an appropriate use for it, I couldn’t tell you.

There you go. I’ve now wasted just over 2,000 words telling you about all the junk in my bag. 2008 to be exact. Well, before I wrote that. And that. Ok, I gotta go.

hair today, gone tomorrow

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To say my partner is a good guy would be a profound understatement. He is truly one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met…and I’m not just saying that because I have to share a bathroom with him. For as long as I have known him, he has always made a point of giving to others. Whether it’s his time, his money, or even his most treasured belongings, he’s always happy to step up and help someone in need, and to do it with a smile.

Mark’s most outstanding physical trademark has always been a very long ginger ponytail. He’s always been into heavy metal music and long hair tends to come with that territory. Plus, having a long ponytail was something polite society didn’t really want him to do in the time and place that he grew up, so maintaining it was always kind of an act of defiance for him, a little way of flipping off said polite society and all it stood for.

 

After 30+ years of maintaining the long hair, he’s now ready to give it up, all in the name of charity.  Because, like I said, he has a habit of taking being a good guy to a whole different level.

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He was watching sports on the TV above us. I guarantee it.

The charity he’s choosing to support with this endeavor is the National Immigration Law Center. Unless you’ve been living under an actual rock for the past couple years (is there room under there for me? Seriously, I can bring snacks), you understand why NILC has become so important to so many people. Even so, I still encourage you to click the link above and read more about what they do and how they are helping some of the most vulnerable among us. They are a vital resource in these days of seemingly constant shifting interpretations of immigration law and, quite frankly, human rights.

I’m going to throw up the link for Mark’s GoFundMe campaign below, but I’d like to  point out here that NILC is a four star rated charity and has a direct funding agreement with GoFundMe, so any donations made to Mark’s campaign will go DIRECTLY to NILC, not to his or my bank account. I don’t want any ambiguity on this – we will not personally be benefiting financially from any donations made. Which, of course, is as it should be.

Here’s the campaign link.

If you want to throw a few bucks at it, we’ll love you forever. If you don’t have any money spare but you want to share the link around to get more eyeballs on it, again…undying love. If you want to shut your browser window and forget you ever heard of the NILC, well…you do you. I don’t have the time or energy to be mad about it.

Thanks for your consideration!