This my current favorite new holiday song. I didn’t get it until halfway through, because I wasn’t listening quite hard enough. And then! So, is this a carol? Hmmmm. Doesn’t quite meet the definition but it’s still a fabulous and creative song. I got to hear Vance Gilbert at the Nowhereelse Festival in Ohio two years ago. I did get this CD and really really like it.
I have not heard this one in the grocery stores yet. Maybe I should encourage them?
I am in my post-pneumonia phase where people say, “Well, you LOOK great.” This is round four, so it’s not a surprise. It just took two years this time, instead of two months. In 2003 it took two months.
There are various things feeding in to this. A friend my age has had a stroke. “NO!” I think, “TOO YOUNG!” The death of the actor from friends bothers me mostly because he’s nearly a decade younger. Drugs and alcohol shorten the lifespan by quite a bit. A study checking for five things: inactivity, drugs, tobacco, alcohol and very heavy weight showed that the people with all five tended to die 20 years sooner than the people with none. That study was at least a decade ago if not two. So cross off about 4 years for any of those, sigh. A cardiologist recently said tobacco is worse than alcohol and now I am wondering how much worse? And how do they measure that? Tobacco kills more but serious alcohol use is a lot faster at killing people. Both of them affect all body systems: GI, heart, lungs, brain, bone marrow, liver, kidneys, and so forth. Even skin.
Also, the last lung test was still abnormal even though I am off oxygen and feeling mostly good. I am having muscle trouble though. Every morning I wake with really bad pain in both thighs and whatever muscles I’ve been trying to build. This has been going on since at least August. Since I think that this is an antibody disorder, it implies that the antibody baseline has risen to the point where my muscles are grumpy and hurt. Alternatively it could be a Long Covid issue: microclots could be clogging the capillaries in the muscles when I exercise and causing hypoxia in muscles, which means they can’t build. Muscle cells are fascinating. When you exercise the cells need more food and build new insulin receptors in the cell wall. So exercise changes the individual muscle cells! How very amazing. My muscles are resisting the build and it is very annoying. There is research going on re the microclots, but there is bleeding risk from the anticoagulants including strokes. So, um, well, I seem to be stuck. It is not stopping me from hiking and dancing and being active but boy does it hurt in the mornings.
This is not very bucolic, is it? I am still attending the Long Covid talks and it is really fascinating and quite scary. It’s just a very very nasty virus. I wish it would calm down. The 1918-1921 influenza really calmed down after three years, but there are no guarantees. Anyhow, at least I can dance!
I wrote this thinking about the increasing number of homeless because of housing costs and that incomes aren’t keeping up. And even if the income has kept up, a lay-off and an illness can put people so far behind that they can end up homeless. In Denmark, they rent rooms to students in nursing homes. Part of the payment is that they have to spend time with some residents. When will we set that up here?
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Volunteer
A man I know slides into kidney failure. He’s already there when I meet him, care for him for a number of years. He’s a really nice man. Over time a bit more disheveled unkempt dialysis twice a week. Even so, once on dialysis, people die younger than the rest of us. Over time he is in and out of the nursing home. loses touch with friends, in the home so much that even when he isn’t there he goes there and volunteers. They have become his family and home. At last he is so tired he stops dialysis and goes to the nursing home for the last time. The staff call me, crying. “He is hurting,” they say, “Do something.” He can’t swallow. I see him and place a fentenyl patch. He mostly sleeps then but is no longer in pain He dies a few days later. I haven’t seen this before: The nursing home staff cry for this man this volunteer this friend and I do too.
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One reason that he did well at the nursing home was that they understood how frail he was and that he couldn’t do very much. They gave him very gentle volunteer jobs and enjoyed his company. Sometimes when people are very frail or ill, others avoid them or just do not understand.
This is a brazen water vessel that belonged to my grandparents. My maternal grandmother was born in Turkey, because her parents were Congregationalist missionaries to Turkey, my great grandfather running Anatolia College. They were escorted to the border in 1915, when my grandmother was 16 years old. Thrown out.
I have a picture of my mother, dressed in a Turkish outfit, with it on her shoulder. I wish I had more of the story!
Is longing evil? I don’t know. Rumi writes that all longing is longing for being reunited with the Beloved and is a form of prayer. I think that is gorgeous.
L is also for Lake. This is a 9 by 12 inch watercolor, dated 1991. I don’t know the title. This is Lake Matinenda in Ontario, north of Michigan. My grandparents bought land there and we went up in the summers year after year. I have not been there since 2018 because of Covid and distance. I do know that stretch of shoreline.
F is also for Final. Death is frustratingly final. I can keep talking to the person, but they don’t talk back, except maybe in dreams. Even then, it’s my version of them.
F is also for fine art and father. This is a drawing of my father in college by my mother. My mother did art all the time and carried a sketchbook around nearly all the time. Every so often she mislaid it, searched, and started a new one until the old one surfaced. I was two when she did these drawings. My impression of fine art was that it involved continuous practice. My mother thought about art most of the time, as her diaries confirm. I love the sketch books.
These two drawings are on notebook paper. My mother sent them to her mother with letters when I was two. My grandmother was in Europe.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt stable, because maybe love is the only stable thing in an unstable world.
The bones of the great blue heron are so light, that I think it is standing on the floating kelp beds. I’d wish my bones were that light, but that would be osteoporosis. Maybe I could come back as a heron.
An old friend died this morning. She was a college friend of my parents and has known me since birth. I will miss her quite terribly.
She and I took a road trip in September. She had lost thirty pounds, not on purpose. I thought I had better do the road trip while we could. We went from Michigan to visit five households of old friends in Wisconsin. I lived with her and her family for a year during college in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1980s. She is a beloved mentor.
She also introduced me to all sorts of groups. She has an amazing record collection.
I went with her to see Warren Zevon in Madison.
The painting is my photograph of one of her oil paintings. It is about 3 by 5 feet and gorgeous.
I am not good at stopping loving people, because I kept losing people as a very small child. I wanted to be loved and have people stay. So how to deal with people who leave now? Well, I talk to my dead in my head all the time, so if I think of the person as dead, then I can just continue on. The friendship is certainly dead, love or not.
I am also thinking about poetry forms. I am enjoying writing sonnets, but after all, I’ve written limericks and haiku for years. Not to mention enjoying the brilliant rhymes of Dr. Suess.
mad bad sad
You are dead and I am glad It makes me sad that I am glad that you are dead you make me mad when you are bad and make me sad as well as mad you sad bad dad not my dad who was bad as well except when good as I can tell bad angels fell but there’s no hell hells angels tell that heaven’s swell and you are dead and I am glad it makes me sad that I am glad that you are dead makes me so mad you were bad and made me sad as well as mad you sad dead dad
You’ve joined my silent dead: doesn’t matter whether you speak or not. You’d like this song and be jealous of the skills. I yammer to my dead, the number rising strong. At sixty I declare that I am middle aged Mom dies at sixty-one which feels unfair. My sister dies at forty-nine, cancer rage. I watched them both as chemo takes their hair. You too are dead no words across the breach. I yammer to you daily in my head. Agates gleam, treasure on the beach. You refuse to look, I mourn that you act dead. You sit stubborn in a rocking chair alone. You don’t believe your dead will call you home.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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