May 18, 2025 by drkottaway

Taste

I am back in Colorado for another work stint.

I am in a different house.

I am in a neighborhood, of cul de sacs that don’t connect. My house is quiet in front but backs on a very busy road, an artery. The speed limit is 40 mph but people often go faster.

The house seems odd to me. There are curtains and shades on every window, all closed when I arrived. I open them, because I like light. There is a 3 by 4 foot television in the living room, another in the master bedroom and a third in a guest bedroom. There is a large kitchen with tons of shelves and cupboards, but a table only seats two, and there are two more chairs at the counter. This feels very odd to me. It seems as if the whole house is arranged to watch television.

I go for a walk in the neighborhood. There are many houses. There are beautifully trimmed lawns and there are flowers and some roses. What is missing? There are no people. Walking a mile and a half, finding the mostly hidden corridors from one cul de sac to the next, I see one man working on his lawn. Even though it is Saturday afternoon, I seen no children, no dogs, no toys. I see two garages that are open, one with a man and in the second I hear a child. Why are there beautiful lawns and no people? And many of the lawns have little flags saying, poison sprayed.

I do turn on one of the televisions after my first day of work. The living room one says that the antenna is not hooked up. The guest bedroom one works. I look on the service. Nearly every movie is about violence and conflict.

I do a little research on the internet. I go to the library and take out 8 books. One is Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD. Most of the others are fiction. Yet so much fiction is about conflict too. Good triumphing over evil. I am pretty good at nonviolent communication in clinic after 30 years: I want to meet each patient somewhere that is helpful. Sometimes they don’t like what I find, or don’t want to do what I recommend, but I have a deep and abiding faith that everyone can change, that they are smart, that I can make a difference and that they are capable. I think that belief helps daily in clinic.

I choose this book because I want to be better. Some of my family is estranged. I thought that was rare and horrifying at first, years ago. Now I think that it is horrifyingly common, much more common than I realized. How do we heal this? What can we change? I don’t want to be in a dark house with the shades down watching “good” triumph violently over “evil”.

There is a pond, man made, with a fence around it, half a block from my house. There are two male mallards, a female, and eight ducklings. They are fuzzy and delightful. I stop my car and watch the first time I see them, and I walk over too.

I haven’t seen anyone else there. I think we can change. I have hope. I have a deep and abiding faith that we can change.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: garlic.

May 24, 2024 by drkottaway

Dark red

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

March 14, 2024 by drkottaway

Solid

Elwha swears that he’s lithe. He’s not fat but he is solid. More of a brick house.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lithe.

Video January 18, 2024 by drkottaway

Back door

My back door, taken in May 2015.

For Dan’s Thursday doors.

March 1, 2022 by drkottaway

Take down

This is a beautiful living cedar.

Unfortunately, the trunk, twenty feet high, had split in half in high winds. So now it was a very dangerous very tall living cedar that is going to come down and is right next to a house.

An expert was consulted. He said the tree could not be taken down intact. Each of the four tall trunks would have to come down individually. This is terribly dangerous, because felling trees is dangerous enough, but when you are up IN the tree, it is worse.

There are four men and me. I am there with a camera. I do not help at all, I just try to stay well out of the way.

I am filming with a zoom lens from a nearby hill. They are trying to control the direction of the fall. Not on me or the house or any of them.

One down, three to go. When the top starts falling, it accelerates very quickly and crashes. He is trying to stay out of the way.

Going up to attach the cable high up to guide the fall direction.

The falls take out smaller trees, but are controlled. It is raining.

The last one is down. The trunk is still alive, with the split.

When the last trunk fell, it swung towards me and they shouted “Run!” It had slipped of the trunk and can’t be controlled as well even though there was a cable and a machine pulling in the desired direction. I ran and I am still here, thankfully.

Clean up on another day and the cedar goes to the sawmill.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: WAR. I wish we were all just working and there was no war.

No names or faces, because you know, those loggers are shy and wild, right?

February 2, 2022 by drkottaway

adult doll house

When mom leaves in the car with the kids, dad gets trashed on beer and destroys the living room. Yes, there is an enormous black panther in the background. Will it eat dad? Maybe it will wait until some of the alcohol wears off. He won’t taste as good drunk.

_______________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Tiger.

October 12, 2021 by drkottaway

A house for our lives

I wonder why we don’t design houses for our lives.

A family house could have everything on the first floor, with a bedroom, wheelchair accessible, and a full bath. The stairs could have an entryway that can be closed off. Upstairs, a sitting room, a full bath, two bedrooms or three and a pocket kitchen. Laundry facilities need to be on the main floor, but they could be in a mud room/entry that is part of the entry to the stairs.

The basement, if there is one, could be for storage or for another apartment.

A couple could buy the house, raise kids in the whole thing, then downsize to the main floor, rent the upstairs, perhaps rent the basement.

My daughter and son want less stuff. Neither has the packrat gene from me and they want to be mobile and have cleaning be very easy and moving be easy. I feel guilty that I have a big house alone, but it is full of stuff that I am slowly decreasing. It has a daylight basement, but there is no bathroom down there nor kitchen and the laundry facilities are there. Also the plumbing is 4 inch across 2 foot concrete sections from the 1930s and runs under the slab poured inside the 1930s garage foundation. The garage is built to the neighbor’s line in back and five feet onto the lot in the middle of the block at the side, so I have two lots. If I take it down, I could not rebuild there because of codes. I think that to do the basement as an apartment I’d have to redo the plumbing first, which is daunting. Also renting is tricky. That is, getting someone out if it is not working can be a challenge.

Friends are looking for a four bedroom house. They have three children so that is what they need now. But the eldest is 14, so it will not be long at all until they need less house. I picture bedroom modules that can be detached.

Our town is very short on long term rentals because now people can make more with short term rentals to the tourists for the many festivals. This in turn is messing up the traffic and increasing accidents, because there are two two-lane roads into town. And a ferry. The people who work in the shops and restaurants are having to commute. People own a fifth house that they may visit only twice a year. It looks like it will get messier, though we may have another housing crash. Right now houses are going up.

My daughter has been designing her future tiny house for a while. The second entry is to a mud room with laundry facilities and a tile floor and a shower so that she can climb out of swimming or running or mountain biking or sailing gear and have a place to hang everything before she goes into the rest of the house. She will want to be able to clean herself and her gear.

My grandparents had a house on Topsail Island in North Carolina. There was an outdoor shower under part of the house, to wash the sand off before we were allowed upstairs. Then another hose to wash our feet once we were up on the deck. Sand and the smell of the ocean, all the time.

Friends have a four apartment building. They altered the two on the top floor to make one apartment. The lower two they rent, sometimes to family. There are four bedrooms on top and two in each apartment. They have a big kitchen and a pocket kitchen in the top section.

Some of my patients need tiny houses, a place alone, even though they also need social contact. I hate the big ostentatious show houses, especially the ones with the play room on a different floor, let’s relegate the children to a different part of the house. Then the elders can also be relegated.

I wish housing were more about need and practicality and less about money and status. And still, we are spoiled….

____________________________

written 8/2/2017

September 16, 2021 by drkottaway

Introducing

Two kittens arrived at my house on Monday. They were named Riffle (the black one) and Paddle (the tiger) so now are named Riffle Sol Duc and Paddle Elwa. They were a bit groggy from the hour drive and cautious at first. That lasted for no more than an hour.