Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Doe

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The Doe

When I see you in the late afternoon sun,
Folding your legs under you to lie beside my pasture fence,
Your ears pricked for the slightest sound,
Your large eyes staring to the south

I forget for a moment
Your depredations against my garden
Your devouring of my tulips, lilies, roses—
All those now abandoned as a fool’s dream–
Your nibbling of my acuba, hostas, and Solomon’s seal,
The tender buds of the white azaleas—

And now for this moment
See only your gentle beauty
In the shadows of this spring day.

April 30, 2018

Red Kite in a Blue Sky

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March 19, 2018

I am lying in the Lafuma recliner that my older brother gave us years ago, my head pointed toward the floor and my feet pointed toward the ceiling.  I have put this outdoor recliner into service in my living room, because a week ago today I had total knee replacement of my left knee and this recliner does the best job of elevating my leg and minimizing the swelling. I have an ice pack wrapped around the knee and am covered from toes to neck by a soft red blanket that my friend Tanya gave me. The first time I used this chair for surgical recuperation was in 2004 when I was recovering from foot surgery. Then I had Bill to help me, and a little bell on the side table to ring when I needed him. I need him now.

Total knee replacement is not really an accurate term; it is more an enhancement of what is already there, plus a plastic disc in place of the missing cartilage. I prefer not to think of what the surgeon and his helpers did to my knee, but I know from the operation on my right knee three years ago that ultimately this knee with its titanium parts will be an improvement. Right now the knee hurts. The whole left leg hurts and has turned shades of blue and yellow, with bruises from thigh to ankle bone.

I miss Bill. He was there when I became violently ill with food poisoning at my mother’s apartment. He commandeered a wheelchair from the lobby of the senior high-rise, loaded my helpless self into it, put me into the car, and once home, drove the car onto the lawn and right up to the back door, where he unloaded me and got me into the house and into bed. He probably should have taken me to the hospital, but he got me home.

He was there when our family doctor stitched up the deep triangular cut made by the recalcitrant overloaded wheelbarrow I was trying to get through the pasture gate ahead of the thunderstorm. He was there, letting me hold his hand in a death grip while the foot surgeon removed the stitches that had stayed in a bit too long. He was there for me, all the many times of sickness and hurt.

And I was there for him, as the cancer laid waste to his body.

Now I am alone in our house, and I miss Bill. He was my rock, my anchor. After his death, one of his friends wrote a thoughtful note, making the point of Bill as my rock, though he did not know us well as a couple. I guess he read between the lines of the long letter I wrote every Christmas. He said I was like a kite, and that Bill held the string that kept me on the earth. I did not like that image very much at the time, but I have grown to appreciate it.

I turn my head to look out the large picture window. It is an overcast day but I can see a red kite in a blue sky, with the string held by a brown-haired boy with warm brown eyes. A red kite in a blue sky, tethered by love.

Clogged Toilets and Other Domestic Disasters

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February 18, 2018

Yesterday the toilet in my principal bathroom got clogged, and there was no one to blame but me. And there was no one to fix it but me. When Bill was alive, I would find him and deliver the dreaded news—“the toilet is clogged!”—and he would fetch the red rubber plunger from the tool room and go to work. And eventfully he would have the problem solved. Like removing dead mice from snap traps, clogged toilets were on the list of Bill’s household duties.

In the seven years since Bill’s death, there have been perhaps a dozen times that the toilet has clogged. Early on I went out and bought a bell plunger for the toilet, having read that the our old plunger was for sinks and tubs, and in fact I bought a short-handled plunger for sinks. It took a little muscle power with the plunger, but I normally could fix the problem.

Yesterday, however, plunging did not help. And flushing the toilet brought the water level dangerously high. I shut the lid and let the water seep down the trap, while I consulted YouTube. If you have not turned to YouTube to find instructions, you are not living in the 21st century. You can find help for anything on YouTube. I have used it to learn how to remove lightbulbs that have broken off at the base (needle-nosed pliers or a raw potato) or how to snake out a sink pipe in the wall (a good quality auger and patience) or how to replace a pull-out kitchen faucet. A woman friend used YouTube to learn how to replace a garbage disposal.

So yesterday I watched a number of YouTube videos, some by professional plumbers, some by amateurs. There were directions for using liquid soap and hot water, for plungers, for toilet augers—and I feared that a toilet auger would be my next Amazon purchase. But one YouTube video by a professional plumber gave me hope; he explained the need to let the bell plunger slowly fill with water before beginning to plunge—and he had the toilet in the video cleared in 11 seconds. And with that guidance, I did the same.

I don’t need my Superwoman cape, just access to the Internet and YouTube.

Praise Be for Small Things

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February 2, 2018

Bill and I put our bird-feeders at the back of the house, outside the kitchen door. There Bill mounted the large pole feeder for the sunflower seeds and hung the tube feeder for the thistle, and I hung the bluebird feeder which Bill at first laughed at, and then conceded that yes, it did attract bluebirds. We also suspended a large suet feeder from a branch; it has a long wooden tail and even the pileated woodpecker is attracted to it. Two years ago my cousin Carla gave me for Christmas two wire spheres to hold suet pellets, and I hung one outside the kitchen window.

In January I hung the extra wire sphere filled with suet pellets outside the living room picture window, from the hook where in the rest of the year a hummingbird feeder hangs. And now this late afternoon, with the sun light slanting low through the willow oak, the small birds are busy, clinging one at a time to the sphere, or scrambling on the ground in the flower bed searching for suet bits — Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, hairy and downy woodpeckers. The cats are mesmerized and so I am.

Praise be for small things.

“Single Girl Oh Single Girl*”

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January 31, 2018

“So, how do you like life as a single?” Sue my water aerobics instructor cheerfully asked me, as I sat in the hot tub, my arthritic left knee bent to receive the warm jets. She was standing above me, ready to take the next class, my 8:00 am class having finished.

I was so gobsmacked by the question that I do not know what I answered. I babbled some reply, and Sue went back to the pool to teach her class. She had commented to me once or twice that I seemed strong and independent. Perhaps she admired that. She is ten years younger than I, and married.

Bill died over seven years ago, and I never have thought of myself as single. I am a widow. I am on my own, but I did not choose to be this way. Maybe those who are single do not choose to be so, either, but I think they have more say in their situation. Bill and I were married for 45 years, and his death from cancer ripped the fabric of our married life in two.

On most forms that ask for marital status there is a box for widowed. Except on the income tax returns; there I have to check off Single, and I resent that.

So how do I like life as a single? I get to do what I want, when I want, without consulting my husband. I get to hold a holiday open house by myself, without consulting the resident introvert.  I get to stay up late and watch a movie, without Bill saying, “Are you still up?” I get to plan overseas travel to suit myself. And I get to worry about the woodpeckers drilling holes in the siding alone, and worry about my upcoming surgery alone. I get to pay all the bills, and worry if there will be enough money. I get to celebrate my birthday alone.

And I miss Bill every day.

*Title of American Folk Song

Sweet Betsy from Pike

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Sweet Betsy from Pike

November 29, 2017

Happy to say that Old Betsy my 17 year old Toyota Tundra is running again, after a jump start last Saturday from my USAA road service. I came home from a trip to find that Betsy’s battery was dead and that her trickle-charger had been unplugged by unknown agents. I was very annoyed. My son had rigged up the trickle-charger because I drove the truck so seldom that the battery frequently was dead. This time before calling for road service I bought a new battery for Betsy, but it was not needed on Saturday, so I have it on stand-by for this winter.

Bill bought Old Betsy in the fall of 2000 on our return from England, pretty much on his own with no input from me. He drove her to his part-time job, and used her for hauling fence posts and other supplies for our little country home.  He was not always careful about dents and scratches to Betsy, and when I complained, he would answer, “She’s a truck!”

I remember Bill’s driving Old Betsy to Richmond to the VA Center for the clinical cancer trials that last winter 2009 of his life. In fact, that is the memory I have every time I put my foot on the running board and swing into the driver’s seat, remembering Bill behind the wheel, me in the passenger seat, going down I-95 to Richmond. A lost cause for him, but he was hoping it might help someone else with cancer. So he put up with drinking that awful chalky stuff and all the blood draws and those drives down 95 to Richmond and back.

Tomorrow I will drive Betsy to the car wash and get her scrubbed clean of the leaf droppings of the summer. Then I will drive her, fresh and shining, to the Lions Club stand and pick out a Christmas tree, the way Bill and I used to do.  And Betsy and I will bring the tree home.

They Were Just There for the Music

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October 3, 2017

They were just there for the music.

On Sunday morning, the first day of October, I went to church. And we sang. We sang “There’s a river flowin’ in my soul” and later “Blue Boat Home.” The children’s choir, lined up on the edge of the platform, sang “It’s Possible” from Seussical the musical.

And the congregation sang “This little light of mine” as the children and teachers left for their classes. I went, too. In my third grade class, we sang “Swimming to the Other Side,” with its wonderful chorus, “we’re all living neath the Great Big Dipper, we’re all washed by the very same rain.” Music unites us, music binds us in community.

And much later on that first day of October, that night after the children were home and in their beds, and I was home asleep in my bed, far across the country in a city that glittered and sparkled with lights at nights, while guitars played and the crowd applauded, a gunman high in a hotel that shimmered like gold in the night aimed his weapons from a broken window and fired at the crowd. Over and over. And the music stopped.

Now I look in my newspaper at the faces of the dead, who were just there for the music and who now are gone, and my heart aches. But I think we must start singing again, and marching, and making changes in this country. 

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMCyYgVDERY

On the Brink

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July 18, 2017

I had not planned to step backwards into a void when I boarded the ferry from the mainland island of Orkney on the north coast of Scotland to the island of Hoy, but that is what I did.

I had climbed the stairs to the open deck when we boarded the ferry and sat on benches with the other seven from my small tour group until the cold wind and the ocean spray made me think better of the decision and decide to find a drier place to sit for the thirty minute trip. 

Coming down from the sunlight to the dark and into a crowd of passengers trying to go up the stairs to the open deck, I stepped backwards to give them room, into a void.

As I fell, head first, backwards, down the flight of stairs that led to the passenger lounge below decks, my brain registered what was happening, and I screamed for help.

We take our lives and these soft bodies for granted, most of the time. It is not only the young teens who think they are impervious to death, it is all of us. We know in one part of our brains what a slim line separates us from death, but most of the time we are able to shrug it off. There might be a moment in a plane, our seat belts fastened, our bodies pressed back as the plane begins to climb, that we silently acknowledge to ourselves that we live on the brink between life and death, but most of the time we delude ourselves that we are immortal, or close to it.

In that moment of falling, I knew that death was possible, that we are always on the brink.

And then I felt a hand grab my hand, and a voice say, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” and I looked up to see a small brown haired woman with glasses staring down at me, gripping my right hand, keeping me from sliding any further down the stairs. And then other hands were there, below me and above me, helping me down the stairs where I could get to my feet, and then helping me to climb the stairs to a quiet spot where I could sit down, offering me tea, asking me who they should find. All of them were strangers.

The metal edges of the stairs had branded me from the top of my shoulders to my thighs, but I had not broken my neck or cracked my spine. I was very lucky.

As I sat there, breathless and shaken to the core, I remembered the words of the brown-haired stranger: “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”  

And I was back from the brink.

A Love Song, on Mother’s Day

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May 12, 2017

It is Mother’s Day, and instead of thinking of my mother, as I should by popular tradition, I am thinking of you, the father of my children. Perhaps it is because I am sitting in the corner of the couch closest to the picture window, your favorite spot to sit and read. I used to sit opposite you, in the black leather chair with my feet up on the ottoman, and every now and then look up from my book and say something to you, although often I was out at a meeting and you read alone.

Now I sit in your spot on the couch because it is easier to get up from the couch with its higher seat and arms and I am older, and if truth be told, I like this view of the garden better. I have snagged the ottoman, so I can put my feet up, and although I began reading the latest book group selection on my Kindle, I have stopped to listen to the Carolina wren outside the picture window. He is singing away, so big a song for his tiny body, and perched on a branch of the lilac shrub that we tried to kill off because it was so massive when we moved into this house forty years ago, and when the lilac persisted and did not die we let it be.

I look out the window with your eyes, seeing the wren in the lilac shrub, the wren house swaying from the eaves where this little bird is building a new nest. We bought that bird house on a vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. You put up the hook the wren house is hanging from. And when the original cording broke, you strung new cord, and that cord is holding still.

Beyond the window your eyes must have seen the changing light at this time of day, when the sun dips lower in the west, lighting up the spring green leaves of the willow oak that we planted together so many years ago. The willow oak and her sister have so shaded the bed by the picture window that I replaced the struggling plants you would remember. Now ferns, hellebores, native geraniums, and astilbe grow there.

But inside, this living room is not much changed at all. You could sit down in your favorite spot on this couch and pick up from the side table the last book you were reading before you became too ill to read: A Team of Rivals. There are other books stacked on top of it, but I have not found the heart to move it.

There is a new basket for kindling on the raised hearth, and a new hearth rug. There are two new Siamese cats sitting on the rug: Jasmine and your sweet Blueberry have passed away. And there is me, not all that different after almost seven years, but perhaps stronger for this journey, sitting in your favorite spot on the couch, listening to the Carolina wren singing his love song in the lilac shrub.