Tag Archives: photography

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You will be labeled

If you get sick
with something the doctors don’t understand
you will be labeled
unstable
mental
bipolar
crazy.

They will try to drug you.

How do you tell
when they are right
and you are crazy
brain on fire
and when you aren’t?

Don’t ask me.
I’m a Family Practice doc
and I’m rural
and I’m a girl.

I’m the one they make fun of
in the medical schools.
“The rural doctor
transferred this patient.”

Yes we did.
Because we knew it was something
different
that needed more
than we had
in our small town
in our small hospital.

Once a neurosurgeon says,
“You are transferring the patient
because it’s Friday
and you don’t want to work
on the weekend.”
“She needs an MRI,” I say
“and we don’t have one.”
and transfer her anyway.
I call two days later.
After the MRI, she is in
the operating room
for a tumor in her spine.
He doesn’t call me back
but I hope he remembers.
I certainly do, after years
and years.

If you get sick
with something the doctors don’t understand
you will be labeled
unstable
mental
bipolar
crazy.

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Sailing with my father

Sailing with my father
after I’m divorced
we take my two children.
They and I are small.
My father is frail,
55 years of Camel cigarettes
in his lungs.
“Papa,” I say, “How would we
pull you in if you went
overboard? We aren’t strong enough.”
Nor is he strong enough
to pull me in.
My father thinks. “You are right,”
he says, “We’ll make a Go Bag.”
A 3 to 1 pulley, with a clip.
We can clip it to the boom
and push it out over the water.
Attach the pulley to the life jacket
and I can winch nearly anyone aboard.
Maybe. We have it in a dry bag,
with towels and chocolate
and a set of sweats,
a space blanket
because the water is cold here,
45-55. My father knows, I’m sure,
that if he falls in, he’d be unlikely
to survive even if I did reel him in,
an unlikely catch. We wear our life jackets
and the kids do too.

One time we hit container ship waves
when my son is on the bow.
He is thrown up and drops, flat,
prone on the bow, holding on.
This boat has no railings
but my children pay attention.

We never have to use the pulley.

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At first my father said that we could unhook the haul down and use the boom, but I said, if it’s me and two little kids and I have to drop sail and get back to someone, that is too hard. How do we make it easier?

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Love sorrow

Love sorrow

There are a lot of people that I love

that don’t love me. The family that

believed my sister’s stories, about me,

my father, and her daughter’s father.

My sister died ten years ago.

I wait a decade, trying to repair it,

and now I give up. I do not want to

see them again, any of them, though

I still send them love. They may not

have my presence, after a decade of

cruelty or indifference.

Work, too. I am labeled malingerer

twenty years ago, after influenza.

“I don’t understand how you could be

out for two months from flu. I could understand

a heart attack or cancer, but not flu.”

Do you understand it now? I had

Long Covid before Long Covid existed,

after pneumonias: influenza, strep A

strep A and then Covid. Each time it

takes longer to recover. After the third round

and a year, I know that I have chronic fatigue.

I don’t bother my doctor as I am a doctor

and I know we have no cure. I can work

half time, see half the number that we are

supposed to see daily. I work anyhow.

The money ends almost meet. After a decade,

Covid closes me down. I go to work for The Man,

suspecting I’ll get pneumonia. I walk in rooms

to patients with their masks off. I react

with PTSD each time but take care of them

anyway. It only takes five weeks to get

Covid. I am on oxygen for a year and a half,

chronic fatigue magnified. How did I not get

it in my clinic? I masked everyone with a cough

or cold from 2014 on. My patients were USED

to masks and I masked too.

I am on oxygen and suddenly the doctors

who thought I lied, are pleasant and stop to

talk to me, while I think cynically, you’ve

disbelieved me and spread rumors about me

for 20 years. Do you think I forgive you now?

And one who said he’d be my friend forever

no matter what. And also said that when people

go over his invisible line, he never speaks

to them again. I think, oh, that will be me,

this is a set up. It is. But Beloved, Universe,

Earth, Sun, and Moon

why do I love them all anyway?

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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.

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Muskrat swimming

In Michigan, I was sent to the river trail, and that is where I saw this muskrat. Wikipedia says in one place on the muskrat entry that they primarily use their tails to swim and in another that they primarily use their back feet. This looks like tail, mostly, but I can’t be sure.

There was impressive storm damage, a lot of trees down or broken.

This is part of the North Country Scenic Trail, that goes from Vermont to North Dakota! Eight states. I want to read more about it and hike some of it.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: muskrat.

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Food needs

I am having a few friends over and am checking to see if there are any food needs. Since my March 2021 pneumonia, I can’t eat gluten. Weird, huh? But antibodies tend to rise as we get older, darn them. And there can be a rising baseline. Double darn.

Anyhow, I have some funny friends. My query “Is there anything you don’t eat?” got these responses:

“I don’t eat anchovies or dried fishies or grubs.”

“We eat everything in moderation.”

“shellfish, giant rubbery cooked mushrooms….”

“liver”

They crack me up! I think I invited the right people.

Now, let’s see, what is my menu, with no liver, gluten, shellfish, giant rubbery cooked mushrooms, anchovies, dried fishies or grubs? Tough, huh? Pretty narrow range left.

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I took the photograph at the Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race in September 2022. Pretty earnest discussion going on among an interesting group.

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Theme for April: Daily Evil

I have been thinking in a desultory manner or perhaps not really thinking about the A to Z April Challenge. I want to have a whole month of my mother’s fabulous art, but what is my theme? Mothers? No. Women artists? No. Discrimination against women artists? Sigh, no. Oh! I read an article yesterday about how the negative and nasty headlines get the major clicks. Today I read another very nice kind blog post about putting something nice into the world. So that gives me my theme! My mother’s art and daily evil impulses.

Impulses, not actions. Don’t we all feel those nasty impulses? Now I am interested in my own theme: how does that tie into my mother’s art? You don’t know? I don’t know either, but I know that many of us have complex feelings about our mothers. You might too. What does her art reveal or what does it trigger in me? And you get to enjoy her art, while you react with prim or gleeful horror at the Daily Evil Art Impulse.

Happy April!

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The first photograph is of one of Helen Burling Ottaway’s watercolors. It is signed, matted and shrink wrapped. Date: 1996. She died of cancer in 2000. I do not know the title, but this is Lake Matinenda, in Ontario, Canada. My maternal family has land there and I have gone there since age 5 months.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: placid. Heh.

Ooooo and later: