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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. 

qui-noape

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I started writing out the whole story of why I have so much leftover quinoa in my fridge but honestly, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that I have roughly two cups of cooked quinoa in my fridge that I need to finish, and a sudden, borderline violent, aversion to eating it.

With that context in mind, I present to you:

Things I Would Rather Do Than Eat This Leftover Quinoa (in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list)

– climb a mountain…wearing flip-flops

– catch up on the corporate compliance busywork assignments I have been avoiding at work for the last six months

– sniff week old roadkill

– put on wool socks and then scuff my feet all over the carpets in my house where the relative humidity hasn’t topped 35% in months, and then touch a lightswitch

– enter a space where two pounds of bacon has just been cooked to cripsy perfection and not be allowed to actually have any of said bacon

– go outside and roll in the snow (actually considering this one, as it would at least wake me up)

– have Joe Rogan show up and do running commentary while I walk on the treadmill for ten minutes

– cut the dog’s nails

– listen to 90 minutes of Yacht Rock on XM Radio

– try to explain the concept of corporate personhood to a gaggle of six year olds

– eat literally any other combination of things in this house to make up the equivalent of the nutrition my meatsuit would glean from that two cups of quinoa

I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be able to face it then.

get off my lawn

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This morning my husband told me a story from his childhood. He talked about how, when he was a kid, he lived in a place that didn’t have a lot of green spaces for the neighborhood kids to play and so they played stuff like rugby and football (soccer if you’re American) in the streets between homes, and in peoples’ driveways. He said there was an old lady across the way who didn’t like them doing this and would stick her head out the door or window yelling something like “take that ball away” repeatedly in an effort to try and get the kids to clear off. Then he said, “when you yell at the squirrels on the bird feeders, that’s what it makes me think of”. Like, literally his whole point of telling me about this formative memory of his childhood was to draw a comparison between that crotchety old lady…and me.

And I suppose he’s not entirely wrong.

You might remember last winter, when I was complaining about how the grey squirrels would launch themselves off the railing or the snowbank, trying to get up to the small bird feeder I had suction-cupped to my actual window, and how hearing them bodily hit the exterior wall over and over again was driving both me and the dog kind of bat-shit. Back at the start of THIS winter, determined to be a problem solver as always, I got two bird feeders and hung them up across from my office window. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to see the birds as up-close as with the window feeder, but at least I wouldn’t be listening to the dog scream-bark about the squirrels thudding and scrabbling against the wall all day every day.

I set the feeders up once the danger of bears had pretty much passed, and immediately had a flock of juncos (the birds, not the pants…you have to be of a certain age to get that reference) visit. The chickadees came shortly after, as well as the sparrows. Everything was pretty copacetic for a while. Then one day, I noticed a red squirrel at one of the feeders. It seemed very polite, sitting nicely on the edge of the feeder eating one seed at a time and dropping the empty hulls down on the ground while it quietly took in the scenery. I have no beef with that type of behavior and so I let it snack in peace. We went a couple more weeks with no issues, but the calm was clearly too good to last…

…because then came the grey squirrels.

Grey squirrels are cute, but they’re absolute birdseed hoovers. And worse, they’re destructive. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t get at the bird feeder directly, then bringing it down is their next most direct route to stuffing their faces. Within two days of the grey squirrels showing up, I went out to find the roof of one of my feeders pulled apart – the squirrels had been hanging upside down from the edge of it to get at the seeds because they couldn’t fit their fat asses onto the perches at the sides, and had ended up pulling the roof halves right off the nails of the piece holding them together.

I fixed the roof and decided the squirrels no longer got a free pass going forward. I might not be able to keep them out of the feeders entirely, but I could at least make them have to work harder for their ill-gotten gains, and be really fucking annoying to them in the process.

I have this crow call I bought a couple years ago, thinking that I’d bring crows to the yard with it and finally get to live the Crazy Bird Hag In The Woods With Pet Crows life of my dreams. As it happens, that didn’t pan out because crow calls are actually quite difficult to master. If you don’t have the right technique, the thing basically just ends up sounding like you’re blowing through a glorified kazoo…but it’s a loud, sharp sound that is very startling if you’re not expecting it, so I started using it to scare the squirrels off.

Again, I will give credit where it’s due: grey squirrels are smart. The first maybe 20 times I blew the crow call at them, they dove for cover and would stay away for a few hours at a time. Eventually they got used to it, though. Not so used to it that they completely ignored it, but used enough to it that they’d just retreat to a nearby tree branch and sit there staring over at me like, “Bitch, please. The second you move away from the window, we’re going right back to that feeder”. Which they did. Repeatedly. I switched it up on them and started either banging on the window or opening the window and hissing or yelling at them when I caught them on the feeders and again, that worked for a few days, but now they just hop off a little ways and wait for me to go back to my desk. My next plan is to try Slinkies on the shepherd’s crook that the feeders hang off of, but that will have to wait another couple days because said Slinkies haven’t arrived yet.

I’m fairly sure it’s all for naught at this point, as the feeders are close enough to the propane tank that I believe the squirrels could just jump from the top of the tank on to the feeders if they wanted to, and the ground is frozen with a bunch of snow on the ground at this point so I can’t easily move them until spring. But I have to keep trying, just out of principle.

Plus, you know, at least I’m yelling at rodents and not actual kids, so I’m not QUITE as bad as that old lady my husband (rather un-generously, I feel) compared me to. In theory. I’m sticking with that.

“You know you don’t even sound like a crow, right? Like, you don’t even sound like a BIRD. You sound like a middle aged woman with a little bit of disposable income, an internet connection, and too much time on her hands. I’m just saying.” – that squirrel, probably.

snoozeberries

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I bought some weed gummies last weekend. They’re called Snoozeberries and they’re a 5mg 1:1 THC:CBD situation that’s supposed to promote restful sleep. Yes, I am the boring person who buys cannabis products not to get high, but just to try and sleep better.

Look, I’m no stranger to weed. It was often easier to get than alcohol when we were in high school, especially since I grew up in backwoods Vermont and basically every third classmate’s dad had a plant or two growing in their basement or garage or back behind the barn at any given time. It wasn’t fancy weed – there was no like, Apple Pie Gonzo Balls or Purple Hazy Headwrecker, or any of the other stuff you can get now. All the weed we got ahold of came in crumpled plastic baggies and usually looked a lot like dried oregano (side note: we smoked actual oregano once by mistake. Very much do not recommend). There was just one flavor profile available in our backwoods weed: an unholy mixture of roadkill skunk, gasoline, and those pine tree air fresheners everyone had in their car in the 90s. It was pretty weak stuff for the most part, which suited me fine because I am generally not one who enjoys the feeling of loss of control. I would go from “oh, this is a nice floaty feeling” to “SWEET FANCY MOSES, I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS, THIS IS THE END BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS, TELL MY CAT I’LL MISS HIM” very, very quickly. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have been Too High, and those all involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol in addition to the weed I smoked.

Point being: I’m not a total n00b, but I also was never a heavy user to begin with, and I’m not generally looking to get high anymore so much as I am interested in whether cannabis can help some of my chronic issues (no pun intended).

I’ve never slept well, even as a kid. Over the years I’ve learned some things that help: taking a magnesium supplement in the evening, for instance. Eating less refined sugar. Not firing up TikTok after 7pm if I can help it, because otherwise I’ll enter a time warp for three hours and only be able to hear snippets of Doja Cat songs on loop for another two hours while I lay there watching the flashing lights on the insides of my eyelids. However, there’s always room for improvement, and I felt like adding a little THC to my existing CBD regimen (I have taken 25mg of CBD oil daily for years, I find it helpful for some of my pain and anxiety) to see if I could dial the sleep in a little better.

Enter: Snoozeberries.

Vermont has relatively recently allowed the sale of cannabis for recreational use and new dispensaries have been popping up all over as a result. We happened to be near one last weekend so we stopped in. It was nice and the staff were very friendly, which was good because their menu was totally overwhelming. A huge blackboard ran the whole width of the back wall of the shop, listing all sorts of different flower, edibles, and other cannabis products. I stood there blinking at the board for a couple minutes before the large jovial man behind the counter asked if I needed help. I told him I wanted something edible to help me sleep and he said, “ok, you want Snoozeberries then”. He handed me a jar with a cute little sheep on it, fully of little bitty purple cubes. I handed over my $55 (which, I’m sorry, but $55 for 20 5mg gummies seems like A LOT, doesn’t it? *shakes cane*), and went on my merry way.

When I was ready to test the gummies out that night, I cut one in half to start with. They’re only 5mg each, but I fully subscribe to the “start low, go slow” doctrine, especially since edibles are absorbed differently than smoking. I don’t want to end up one of those “I ate too many gummies and ended up plastered to the bed for six hours having hallucinations of emerging from my own womb over and over” cautionary tales. So, half a Snoozeberry went down the hatch. I sat around watching TV for a bit, then went to bed and read for a while. I was maybe a little more yawn-y than usual, but otherwise felt no noticable effects. My sleep tracker didn’t indicate that I had slept any better the next morning, either.

I did the same thing the next night, and the night after that, to the same result. Tuesday night I finally bucked up and decided to take a whole dose. Tuesday night is game night at our house, and that’s not a euphemism for anything, you perverts. We literally play a board game or card game most Tuesday nights. I took the full Snoozeberry right before we commenced with game night. We played 4 or 5 rounds of Exploding Kittens and then it was time to get ready for bed since we had to be up stupidly early the next day. Mark took Keppo out for the last walk of the evening and, as usual, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

That was just about the time my brain entered the Snoozeberry Zone apparently, because I…could not brush my teeth. Like, I COULD, and I DID, but I had to think so, so hard about how to hold the toothbrush and move it around in my mouth the whole time. I kept having to stop and adjust my grip on the toothbrush to try and get a different angle because it would start to feel all wrong. And just to show you a little slice of how my brain works, I stood there wondering if I was having some kind of stroke or seizure for like 30 seconds before I realized it was probably the gummy. It was so weird though, because I truly didn’t feel the least bit high otherwise. I felt totally normal, except that my fine motor skills had apparently fucking left the building. I had the same issue with my water-flosser after brushing, and it’s a genuine wonder that I didn’t end up blasting myself in the face with that thing, I swear.

I sort of just shook my head at the whole situation and headed to bed. I checked the CPAP tank, fluffed my pillow the way I like, got my little battery-powered candle turned on and shut the light off, and laid down. At that point I did notice that I felt markedly more relaxed than I usually do when first laying down. I sort of just melted into the mattress, in a good way. I laid there enjoying that for a couple minutes before I cracked my book open, when suddenly the whole “struggle-bus tooth brushing due to weed gummy consumption” thing actually hit my brain and it. was. HILARIOUS to me. I mean, I laid there laughing like a fucking loon for probably like three minutes straight. I will admit that I did feel a tiny bit high at that point, but it really didn’t last long. And, again, no discernable difference in actual sleep quality or duration.

So in summation, I believe I paid $55 for some cutesy-named weed gummies, a brief lapse in my dental hygiene, and yet another confirmation that I may now officially be too old to hang…but it was a weirdly good time in its own way, I suppose.

On closer inspection, that sheep does actually look kinda high…

blame Britain

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My dear sweet mother-in-law sends us a calendar from Wales every Christmas. I always look forward to them because I enjoy scenic landscapes and trying to guess how the Welsh words printed on the calendar are pronounced. My husband enjoys them because occasionally there will be a month with a picture of somewhere he’s been and he can point to it and say something like “it’s really nowhere near as nice as that in real life”. I don’t fully understand how castles and fields full of sheep could ever be construed as not nice, but I generally take his word for it. 

ANYWAY. 

So, there is one small problem with the Welsh calendars Mum sends us: they’re printed in the British style, where the weeks start on Monday and end on Sunday. I suppose it’s not the calendars that are the problem as much as my brain, because OH MY LORD, I CANNOT GRASP THIS CONCEPT. You would think, especially many months into the year, I’d be able to make that mental adjustment and hold onto it, but you would be wrong. So wrong.

The calendar gets me at least once a month. I’ll think I’m on top of things, I’ll be so proud that I looked at the calendar and, gasp, PLANNED AHEAD, even…and then I’ll realize that no, I’m a day off AGAIN, because I don’t actually look at the names of the days on the calendar, I just look at the…I don’t know, spaces, I guess? I CAN read, I swear. It’s just that my brain memorizes shapes and patterns way more easily than it absorbs actual alphanumeric data, so if I’m looking for Friday on the calendar my brain will always look at the second to last square on the calendar grid. Except on a British calendar, that’s Saturday, not Friday. Can you see how that might become an issue? 

The latest casualty to fall to my inability to visually process the British calendar is the vacation we’re leaving for next week. It’s not a big trip, just a long weekend in Maine, but it’s something I’ve been super looking forward to because work sucks and life is meaningless and I really like eating lobster while listening to the ocean. Mark booked the hotel, wrote the vacation on the calendar and drew a line through all the days we’d be gone, so that we had the visual reminder. I then did the admin stuff I needed to do: I booked the time off work and I booked a reservation for boarding Keppo. I did my stuff with the understanding that we were leaving for Maine on Wednesday 9/13, because the big thing that said “MAINE” on the calendar was written in the 4th block of the calendar grid. The one smack in the middle of the week. You know, Hump Day. WEDNESDAY. 

You are smart and I’m very predictable, so I’m sure you can see where this is going. 

Mark and I were texting today about some other stuff that needed to happen next week before our trip, mostly that I had to reschedule a chiropractor appointment and I did it for Tuesday next week rather than my normal Wednesday, because, YAY, we’d be on our way to Maine Wednesday! That was all fine and good, no problems. Then this afternoon Mark texts me again saying that something I had said earlier kept niggling him for some reason and he finally figured out what it was: it was that I said we were leaving for Maine on Wednesday when, in fact, our trip starts Thursday. I was like “no no, it’s written on the calendar for Wednesday, I swear! I booked the dog in for Wednesday! I took Wednesday off! We’re going to Maine on WEDNESDAY!”

Then I went out to the kitchen and looked at the calendar. There, in blue marker, were big block letters: M A I N E, written across the 4th block of next week. The middle day. WHICH ON A BRITISH CALENDAR IS FUCKING THURSDAY. 

This image belongs to Disney, by way of some random site that gave it to me when I googled it. I hope Disney never figures out how to sue for pirated images playing in our brains because I’ll be honest, I am the Angry Stitch gif in my head about 17 times per day.

I hate being wrong. Even more than being wrong, I hate an already too-short vacation being shortened by a whole entire day because I read the godsdamned calendar wrong. I feel like I’ve been cheated out of a day of staring at the ocean for hours and I’ll tell you what, I blame the British on a very deep and personal level. 

I also hate that I think I need to ask my mother-in-law to check if the calendars she’s sending us are Dumb American compatible going forward.

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.

things I re-learn every time my husband goes away

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An incomplete list, in no specific order.

1. The correct order in which the Morning Things and Bedtime Things must be done in order to satisfy the dog. Mark usually handles the Keppo stuff when we first get up and when we’re getting ready for bed. There’s a certain order to these routines and Keppo knows it. If I make the mistake of trying to make myself a cup of tea before we go out for walkies, for instance, I’ll hear about it. And gods forbid I take too long in the bathroom before bed, because the whole valley will hear about it. Keppo should just about have me re-trained by the time Mark gets back to resume these duties.

2. It doesn’t matter that I’m off work and don’t have to wake up early, don’t eat chocolate or sugary ice cream in the evening. Just because I don’t HAVE to get up early doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to get myself jacked on sugar or chocolate and then be unable to sleep for half the night. Also, my body is programmed to wake up at 6:30am regardless of whether I’ve fallen asleep at 10pm or 2:30am. Fighting it does no good. Going back to bed after waking up at 6:30 does no good.

3. If I buy a box of cereal and a carton of milk, that’s 3 meals a day for 3 days, at least, that I don’t need to cook. And if I get the puffed oatmeal squares that have a bunch of fiber in them, I don’t even need to worry about not eating vegetables! I’m not proud of that, but I’m nothing if not pragmatic.

4. The dehumidifier tank is heavier than I give it credit for when it’s full.

4a. I am perfectly capable of schlepping said heavy dehumidifier tank up the basement stairs to empty it. Is it fun? No. But I can do it.

5. It’s nice to have extra room in the bed, but it’s nicer to have company. Specific company, I should say. As in, my husband. I’m not interested in fighting just anyone for the blankets, thank you.

6. I will get bored after two days off by myself, and rather than converting that boredom into useful activities like cleaning the house, I will instead become a toad who only wants to read books, play video games, and eat cereal (and chocolate). All the to-do lists in the world can’t help me after day 2 home alone. If I’m not getting everything crossed off that list by sundown on day 2, it’s likely not getting done any time soon because I’ll be way too busy in Mediocre Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel Land or Shoot Colorful Bubbles To Help A Cat Get To Space Land. I might switch it up a little and sit at my desk to try and struggle-bus through writing a blog post (ahem), but that’s about it.

7. I am braver when he’s here. I’m also funnier, smarter, less prone to bouts of extreme weirdness, and more responsible. I spent a large portion of the first half of my life alone. Not just unpartnered, but pretty literally alone. I don’t want to make this sound like I shouldn’t or can’t be alone, or that I think there’s anything wrong with being a solitary person, because that’s not it at all. I was often a very functional  person whilst living alone, and there are still plenty of times when I really enjoy my own company. It’s just that I got quite used to existing mostly just inside my own head, and even after almost 14 years of cohabitation with another actual human being, it’s still SUPER easy for me to slip right back into that space, that rut of believing that I’m basically a ghost just flitting through everyone else’s lives instead of a tangible human being living my own tangible life. Mark grounds me. He’s the weight at the end of my balloon string that keeps me from floating off into the atmosphere, eventually landing in the ocean, and choking some poor unsuspecting turtle. Or something.

This is what I wake up to most mornings when Mark is away. I like to anthropomorphize and say that he’s laying in Mark’s spot to keep me company, but in reality I know that he’s probably been hotboxed out from under the covers by my constant flatulence because I’ve been living on Oatmeal Squares for the past three days.

white noise

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I am the type of person who can’t sleep without some kind of white noise. I mean, half the time I can’t sleep anyway because my brain is a dick, but still. With the white noise, sleep may happen. Without the white noise, sleep will definitely NOT happen.

The source of the white noise isn’t super important. A fan blowing, the A/C unit running, even a white noise track playing over headphones will usually work if I’m travelling.

In our bedroom, we have one of those round twist-top white noise machines like what you often see used for noise cancellation in doctor’s offices. We’ve had it for many years. It has two speeds (white and…whiter, I guess?) and you can twist the top to change the size of the openings the air comes out of, thus changing the tone slightly (regular white, off-white, ecru…ok, the joke wasn’t great to begin with and I’ve now officially ruined it). I am so in the habit of turning the white noise machine on at bedtime that I still turn it on even when we run the A/C at night. I literally cannot hear the white noise machine over the A/C, but turning it on is muscle memory at this point.

Taking that into account, you can then imagine that when I woke up yesterday morning after the A/C shut off and there was no white noise machine going, I noticed immediately. I figured I must have just been out of it when I went to bed the night before and somehow forgot to turn on the white noise even though, like I said, it’s muscle memory at this point. Last night when I went to bed, I was very deliberate in my turning on of the white noise machine and my acknowledgement that it was, in fact, ON. I turned it on before the A/C, even. I KNOW that sucker was on when I got into bed.

So, why was it not running again this morning when I woke up? Did my husband shut it off, maybe?

Me: “Hey, did you shut the white noise machine off in the night last night?”

Him: “Nope. I noticed it wasn’t on this morning, too. I figured you just didn’t turn it on last night.”

Me: “No, I definitely turned it on. I made extra sure I did, because it was off when I woke up yesterday morning too, and I figured I must have just forgotten it the night before.”

Him: “Hunh. Weird.”

And for him that was the end of it, because he is not insane. My brain, on the other hand, immediately took the How Did The White Noise Machine Shut Off By Itself torch and RAN with it. My first three thoughts were exactly as follows:

1. Maybe someone has crept ultra-silently into our bedroom the last two nights and shut the white noise machine off while we sleep. Nevermind that I have the world’s most attentive watch-dog, who can hear mice farting in walls three houses away, who can smell traces of the last podokesaurus who stomped through proto-New-England 145 million years ago, and whose most favorite thing ON THIS VAST GREEN EARTH is to bark, specifically at strangers.

2. Maybe a mouse was on the desk that the white noise machine sits on, and maybe they walked by and brushed against the power switch, thus shutting the machine off. We’ve never had mice inside this house. Also, see above references to dog who hears / smells everything ever and would raise the unholiest of rackets immediately if a rodent was present. He wouldn’t chase and kill the rodent because he’s not useful a savage, mind you. But he’d sure as shit let us know it was there in no uncertain terms.

3. Maybe one of the rather large wolf spiders recently spotted in our basement (OH GODS WHY) came up the stairs (ACK), got into our room (PANIC-FLAIL), and hit the button with one of its extra long, extra hairy, EXTRA FUCKING CREEPY AND WRONG spider legs. I am convinced that at this point, my brain was just taking the piss, just trying to see if it could send me into an actual nervous breakdown, because I am super, SUPER anti-spider. I mean, in the house, anyway. Outside? Fine. Spider on with your bad self. Build all the webs, eat all the bugs. And honestly, small spiders in the house aren’t generally a problem either as long as they don’t do dumb shit like TOUCH ME. Big spiders in the house, though? No. Big spiders in the house make me want to move out…preferably without packing a damned thing, because fuck only knows where those hairy bastards are hiding at this point and OMG WHY AM I STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS, UGH.

Basically, my brain now won’t stop coming up with increasingly disturbing and/or convoluted ways in which the white noise machine may have gotten shut off in the night. At one point I was even wondering if maybe I had started sleep-walking and had shut it off then. Our bedroom is kind of cramped though, and I am large and klutzy, so I feel like even if I WAS sleepwalking, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the white noise machine without tripping over something and waking myself up, or bashing into something and doing myself noticable harm. But as far as I know I’ve never sleep-walked, so maybe that’s not how that works.

So, I guess there’s only one thing for it: we have to set up a night-vision camera pointed at the white noise machine and see what’s going on. Except I can’t do that either because I’ve watched one too many episodes of Ghost Hunters (read: I’ve watched exactly one episode. Not even a whole episode. I watched like ten minutes of it once, eight years ago), and I know that all the poltergeists show up as weird flashes and blobs on night vision in the middle of the night while you’re asleep. IT’S SCIENCE, BRENDA. You can’t argue with science.

And I’ll tell you what: finding out that there are poltergeists flitting around my bedroom all damned night isn’t going to help my sleep issues AT ALL.

“Hello, PETA? Yes, this is Keppo. Again, yes. Could you please send Sarah McLachlan to come pick me up? My human has finally lost it for real. Also, they haven’t fed me in weeks. MONTHS, even. Maybe years. I’m a dog, time works differently for me. But seriously, could you…hello? HELLO? Man, maybe the poltergeists got into the phone, too.”

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.