For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: wholesome.
Helpers
Category Archives: Beloved
People at the Farmer’s Market
These were taken at the Farmer’s Market in Port Townsend in 2014.
I hope the Farmer’s Market is back this summer. I will still be masked in crowds, but I hope I get to dance!
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: people.
daily changes
Some days this beach is mostly sand. Yesterday it is rocks and more rocks, pebbles, stones, sand, beautiful. We are having lots of cliff collapse and new rocks are washing down. I was walking on North Beach last week when I heard bits of cliff fall. I turn and look and a nice one foot by 8 inch boulder falls from the top and rolls towards me, very fast. I stumble backwards and trip over a big boulder in the sand. I don’t hit my head and get knocked out and I don’t get hit by the falling rock.
I start back a little and another section of cliff rains rock. The tide is fairly far out, so I walk near the water until I am back where there is no cliff. Scary. Sometimes large sections collapse all at once. Death occurs by blunt trauma rather than suffocation.
My emotions are like the beach. Some days clear and sun and sand. Other days LOTS of new rocks. Other days stormy and the tide is very high and pulling at the sand and clay cliffs.
I receive a valentine from my daughter. She says she loves me. She says she misses the beach and the water most of all.
I find agates and they are beautiful. Some are clear and some are not and new ones keep arriving.
Let the light shine through, in spite of the weather.
________________________
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: pebble.
Illusion
I knit this lovely striped scarf. It is just brown and pink stripes. No tricks, right? Two rows of pink and two rows of brown.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: wool.
abuse, enabler style
I am raised by a family of triangulating enablers and enablees.
The enablers are my mother and two uncles. They are very very smart. Let me qualify that: they are very very smart intellectually. Emotionally, not so much.
The two uncles have PhDs and are professors. They marry wives that are lessor in their view. One tells my mother that he wants a woman who is not as bright as he is. I don’t know if she is less bright, but she is a hella better athlete. I also have the impression that she had a time where she drank too much.
The other uncle marries a woman who tends to be a hypochondriac. He takes her to India, where she gets polio while pregnant. She is then a sick hypochondriac, which is very difficult. The ill can control their families by planning things and then getting sick at the last moment. On the other hand, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are very real and we are on the edge of figuring them out. That uncle divorces his wife and I instantly like both of them better. They stop being a weird unit and are suddenly individuals.
My mother tells me, when I am in college, “I wondered if your father was an alcoholic when I married him.” I want to hit her. She won’t leave him, she won’t stop enabling him, they scream at each other at 2 am often. Now I wonder about that and conclude that either screaming at someone was something she needed or she was an alchoholic too.
After my mother dies, I ask my uncle, what about his parents? After all, the three of them learned enabling somewhere and it pretty much has to be at home.
My uncle tells me his parents had a PERFECT marriage and that my grandmother LOVED being the wife of a physician and professor.
Um, so, then, why did she pay my tuition to medical school, uncle?
And I think about my mother’s stories. Once, she says, your Uncle Jim bet his friend Dick that Dick was too chicken to shoot a cigarette out of Jim’s mother’s mouth. Ooooo. With a rubber band shooter. Yes, my grandmother. Bob took the bet and succeeded. My grandmother roared with anger and the two boys ran like hell and hid.
And someone in the family tells me: your grandfather helped your grandmother control her temper.
There it is. The enabler/enablee.
The enablers die first. My grandfather of cancer at 79, my mother of cancer at 62. The cousins are all angry at me because I won’t follow the family rules and triangulate in a satisfactory manner, and I don’t care any more. I am ignoring them. I got my father’s banjo back and I am done. The two cousins I own land with jointly are not the worst triangulators.
I have to remind myself: for them, this is love. For some people, controlling or being controlled is what functions as love and intimacy. Fighting and tears when person A talks to person C about person B and person C then lets person B know, that is how they feel close. It is not only families, but communities. Clay Shirky’s description of a group being it’s own worst enemy describes the same patterns: identify an enemy inside or outside the group and then everyone comes together against the enemy. The enemy says the wrong thing, doesn’t worship the right god/desses, wears different clothes, looks different. And the group feels safer once the scapegoat has been killed, the guy has been burned. It would be nice if we could burn a ritual guy instead of torching each other.
The real anger is in the enabler. They control it by having the enablee express it. Then it is not “theirs”. They can feel superior to the enablee who is out of control. Sadly, the problem is only fixed temporarily and they will need their anger expressed again and again and again.
The cycle can be broken. It is a lot of work.
Blessings.
______________________________________________
apprentice
Am I his apprentice
or is he mine?
Neither, love,
all is fine.
He says he’s not
in love with me.
Play, love,
climb a tree.
He’s traveled and home
and doesn’t come by.
No worries, love
you won’t die.
I am sad and I miss him,
I long for his face.
It’s just the tide, love,
it will leave no trace.
Why, Beloved, is love
not for me?
Because, darling,
you chose to be free.
______________________
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: apprentice.
his steady light
Dreaming of the Sun
whose warm rays surround her
and caress her
daily
she orbits him
and he pours his love on her
steady
constant
joyous
occasionally he flares up
and that might hurt
some of the small cells
on her surface
but she sheds
dead cells
they are reabsorbed
and she basks
in his warmth
with joy
ecstatic
orbit
she is alive
turning
whirling
so her small children
are not overcooked
like mercury
are not frozen
like uranus
mars is a rival
but the seas are dead
at least
her small children
think so
and venus
swelters
and is clouded
all the time
toxic
she turns
dancing
full of joy
in his steady light
___________________
written January 8, 2022
Rhodies in mist
On top of Mount Walker, taken in 2014 on a hike with my aunt and uncle.
We need tea afterwards, so this is for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: teapot.
Dinosaurs got colds too
Dolly the Dinosaur shows evidence of a respiratory infection: aka a “cold”. And a chronic cold. She died at age 15, about half way through her lifespan. I suspect a little guesswork there. Do old dinosaurs turn grey?
There are dinosaur bone changes in Dolly from chronic infection. The scientist posted photographs on the internet and other bone experts said, that is infection. That is evidence of respiratory infection. “A lot of the times when any disease or trauma is found in a dinosaur skeleton, it’s often in limb bones where you expect it to happen,” Dr Poropat said. “Seeing it where the air sacs penetrate the vertebrae in a sauropod is quite unusual.” Also, she didn’t die of volcanic ash: “Inhalation of volcanic ash can cause a disease similar to mesothelioma.” Who knew? I haven’t kept up on my dinosaur medicine. The pattern of lesions also didn’t fit with lung cancer. Instead, Dr Woodruff and his colleagues think bacterial or fungal infections such as chlamydiosis and aspergillosis are prime suspects. These respiratory infections are common in birds today. “We don’t know for sure if the infection was bad enough to ultimately do Dolly in.”
Dolly, with her long neck, had neck arthritis from a chronic cold. She thought it was allergies.
Coronoviruses are colds. We are have a pandemic of a really really nasty killer cold and a cold that is doing long term damage in way too many people. That seems hugely ironic to me. I thought it would be influenza. After flu nearly killed me in 2003 I read about it and have enormous respect for it. And influenza is endemic and is always circling the world, in the colder regions.
My ideas about allergies and asthma are changing. We define asthma by whether people respond to albuterol. I do not respond to albuterol so I do not have asthma. However, I respond to other adrenaline like molecules: coffee caffeine and terbutaline. So do I have an asthma like illness? My allergy testing in 2014 was resoundingly negative. I tested for celiac in 2020, because I just did not feel well. Negative. I have not retested yet, but even if that antibody testing is negative, it was gluten that flared up diverticulitis in me. The thing is, there could be other antibodies. Loads of them. We all make different ones.
I am thinking about tubulin. Tubulin powers our muscles and cilia and flagella. It is mitochondrial. We inherit mitochondria from the mother only: it is in the egg but not the sperm. Mitochondria is matrolineal. My son and daughter both have my mitochondria. I have a photograph of my maternal grandmother’s mother. Her expression is amazingly like my daughter’s expression when she is thinking. My daughter has my poor spelling skills, my attitude towards work, and her father’s muscular endurance. During college, her father’s goal was five sports a day. In high school my daughter said that she “just didn’t feel good” when the pool was closed. She was used to swimming 3-5 miles a day and lifting weights. Her father can get on a bicycle and ride at the speed of talking all day. He also has pioneered “jog golfing” in his area. When the golf course is empty in the winter, he plays golf and jogs from one hole to the next with his bag. Yes, he is nuts, I agree. I am jealous of that endurance.
The inheritance of antibodies would be from both parents, because they are made by the white blood cells. Do parents and children make the same antibodies or are they entirely different? I do not know that. I took an immunology course when I worked at NIH in the 1980s. I also had some immunology in medical school, but not nearly to the level that I am interested in now. I think I am hunting for a really good immunology course. And maybe more information about dinosaur medicine.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: thread. This post follows the thread of my thoughts this morning
warm hug
Bun gets cat hugs and I do too. Warm and purring.
Today is my father’s birthday. He died in 2013. I am missing him this morning. I would like a hug, even if it smelled of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Hugs to all.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hug.
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