Tag Archives: home

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Spin and twirl

Swinging by the Sound started yesterday afternoon. A dance weekend, with dancers traveling from all over, teachers and students. This is collegiate shag. I am not very familiar with it, I’ve done much more 6 count swing. I wish I were doing the weekend, but my shoulder is not up to it yet. Maybe next year!

The weekend started with Johnathan Doyle and friends playing at Vintage. They were fabulous. And some of the dancers were already there and warming up. I want permission to put some of the dance photographs up, but did not talk to anyone last night!

I love to spin and twirl and so does my daughter. She has been learning collegiate shag in another state.

Here is a shag routine sample. Shag can range from really bouncy to smooth, smooth, smooth. This one is choreographed, not the spontaneous partner dancing happening last night!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: spin.

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Who would I be?

If I have had PANS since birth, who would I be if I had not contracted it?

No one knows. We are still arguing about whether PANDAS and PANS exist. But, my daughter says, we make up all the words. The definitions of illnesses CHANGE over time, and what an illness MEANS. Tuberculosis was an illness of poets and people too noble for this world, until microscopes became advanced enough to see the tiny bacterium, and then it became an illness of the crowded unclean poor. Medicine and science continued to study it. Once we recognized that it is an airborne illness, tuberculosis sanatoriums were set up, to quarantine people. My mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis when she coughed blood 8 months pregnant, so I was born in a sanatorium and avoided contracting tuberculosis as a newborn.

Antibodies cross the placenta, even though the tuberculosis bacterium does not. Usually infants contract tuberculosis and die, at least when I was born. The antibodies can trigger PANS or PANDAS.

The antibodies prime the fetus’s immune system. This makes sense, right? The fetus has a sick mother and best if its’ immune system is ready to fight.

Did my younger sister have it? I do not know. Not as badly, would be my guess. My mother said that as kids, we’d both get sick, but I got sicker. We both had strep A many times. My sister got mumps, off from school for three weeks, and I did not get it. But I got everything else.

Now the estimate for children with PANS or PANDAS is 1 in 200. This is enormous. A high prevalence. Antibodies, that I suspect are adaptive and lie in readiness for a pandemic or a crisis. And now we have had another pandemic, with the last really world wide bad respiratory one 100 years ago. Is the prevalence rising because of the pandemic or are we figuring out some of the cause of behavioral health illness or is the definition of illness changing or all three? I think all of them.

My cousin’s mother had polio either during her pregnancy or very soon after. My anthropologist uncle took his family to Bangladesh, where he was doing linguistics. So does my cousin have PANS or PANDAS? I do not know.

And what of my children? My pregnancy with my older child was fourth year medical school and went well. My pregnancy with my second was very complicated. I was in my first year of work as a rural Family Practice doctor and working too hard. I ended up on bed rest for three months and on a medicine. Is labor at 23 weeks an illness? Does it affect the fetus? I was on medicine from 23 weeks to 37 weeks. What effect does it have?

Medicine is still changing and changing quickly. We don’t know. There is so much we do not know.

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PANS/PANDAS: https://www.pandasppn.org/guidelines/

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The photograph is me and my sister, in about 1967ish. I do not know who took it.

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Food needs two

Ok, so what menu did I choose for my friends with food needs, as listed in the previous post.

First course: Sweet Pea soup. The color is vivid and almost lurid. My guests look worried until they taste it. It tastes like spring! Butter, onions, broth and frozen sweet peas, just cooked. My guests go from worried to asking for seconds.

Second course:

Lentils baked with sausages. This is also not a gloriously pretty dish. Again, my guests love the taste. Lentils, a little red wine, butter, onions, bay leaf, sausages, thyme and baked. Yum.

As well as:

Roasted Ronde de Nice Squash with California rice and Early Girl tomatoes. Except I did not make the rice, I couldn’t get farmer cheese and the tomatoes were varied and from the store. And a different kind of squash! This is from a cookbook new to me: Community Table, Recipes for an Ecological Future. The sweet pea soup is from a cookbook that I’ve had for forty years and the lentils are from memory, a recipe a friend taught me in the 1980s.

Dessert is fruit salad and chocolate. With tea.

No liver, gluten, shellfish, giant rubbery cooked mushrooms, anchovies, dried fishies or grubs.

Voila! Food needs satisfied!

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puppets

My sister Christine Ottaway died in 2012 of breast cancer.

I took this photograph at Christmas in Alexandria, Virginia in the late 1970s. I am three years older and made her stuffed toys and puppets for years. The first one was a stuffed snake that I sewed by hand, of brown flowered fabric. My mother was very unconvinced about it, but Chris and I had both longed for the giant velvet snakes at the County Fair. We failed to win one. The snake I made her was only two feet long, but she loved it.

I made the puppet on the left and bought her the one on the right.

It’s lovely to still have the photographs and memories.

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The cliffs erode

The cliffs erode and trees fall. This tree is still alive, but not for long.

Chunks of clay and rocks are washed by the tides. Is the water rising?

I find beautiful rocks, as a consequence of the waters that seem to be rising.

Confidence and cliffs eroding.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: consequences.

Taken on Marrowstone Island, March 8, 2023.