I walked on Marrowstone Island yesterday, south from East Beach. There was a super low tide, to -3.38 at 1:07 pm. When the tide came in, it was at +8.76, so that is a huge difference.
There were almost no people, but the group enjoying the low tide were the great blue herons! I counted 14. At one point they all alerted, and a bald eagle came down and perched on the rock that a heron had been on. There must be some very delicious food for the herons with the low tide. The eagle seemed to be considering heron to be a delicacy.
Here is the eagle (and the great blue herons moved!)
He likes to be the smartest. She doesn’t care and anyhow, people don’t like smart women mostly. Men show it off. Women mask it. She can only partially mask with her professional degree.
He’s pleased to walk on the beach with her. She is withdrawn, down. He can feel that. He does not ask why, ever. She slides neatly into the space his wife’s dementia left. His wife who was also depressed. He does whatever he wants, he’s not available, he won’t be trapped. Control.
She is withdrawn, down. She has a difficult task in a year that might kill her. Closing the clinic and working elsewhere. Maybe she only gets pneumonia when a loved one dies. Or maybe COVID-19 will kill her. There, the range is from make a lot of money to dying. It is hard to explain and people don’t believe her.
Tendrils from her time in the ocean brush him. Then they are longer and lit in the sun. They wrap around him, very slowly. The first after a year. Where the tendrils touch, he has scales.
Neither sees. They are too busy laughing. They are small children, wordplay, in the woods, on the beaches, talking, singing.
She thinks her mermaid self is separate, her dream self. She is safest in the ocean. Her microbiota, gut bacteria, are all from the ocean. Symbiotic. He has land bacteria, at least, he starts with them. They change the longer they are together. He says, “I can read your mind!” But he can’t read emotions, since his are locked away. They bang on the dungeon doors howling but his heart is locked there too. His head can’t hear, can’t feel. Only when the small child is out playing.
He is slowly turning green. Now he has a few small leafy tendrils too.
She goes in the sea, the ocean, the unconscious, daily. Unworried, free, happy, healed.
The year goes by. The clinic closes, she has a job.
“Why are you afraid?” He says.
“I am afraid I’ll get sick,” she says.
He has tendrils running all over from her. Half his skin has designs, stripes and patterns. The earliest ones have thickened and spread, rooted wherever they touch him, scales edging the roots. She is fully scaled, with the tendrils from fins and tail and hair. She smells of the sea.
She goes to work and is sick after two months. Very very sick with all it entails.
“You didn’t tell me about this!” he says.
“Why would I?” she says. “No one believes me.”
“I am watching and I don’t believe it.” He hates that her mind is unmasked. “I can follow you and it makes sense but you jump topics so fast!”
She shrugs. “Well.”
He tries to cut ties. Once. Twice. He can’t see the tendrils, so how can he cut them? But now she looks from the ocean and sees. The third time he tries, she grabs a shell and slices through the tendrils and dives deep. He could come in the sea. But he will have to choose.
He chooses not to. He thinks she is calling him from the sea. Every day he drinks a little more, smokes a little more, trying to drown the call.
But it isn’t her. The tendrils are his, now. The dungeon is flooded and the monsters and the small child swim in an ocean, fully scaled. They call him daily, to open the door, to let them out, to join them.
All of the Long Covid information is pretty confusing, isn’t it? I’ve read that most of it resolves at nine months. Another article says a year. The conference last week says that 96% are clear at two years if they are treated. What percentage are being treated? The US defined Long Covid as symptoms lasting over a month at first, while Europe said three months. I think they have now agreed on three months. This will continue to change and evolve.
When viagra first came on the market, women complained that there was not a drug for them. Pharmaceutical companies were working on it, but you cannot treat anything unless you establish a diagnosis first and women’s sexuality is more subtle then men’s. Anyhow, I wrote this silly poem making fun of the whole thing.
Little Blue Pill
Little blue pill Little blue pill Help me help me I’m over the hill
Don’t wanna have sex Nope nope nope Little blue pill Gives my husband hope
Can’t make a pill Til we define the disease Doctors would you Hurry up please
Little blue pill Little blue pill Help me help me I’m over the hill
Thought them hormones Would make me hot Doc was right They did not
Hot flashes make me Sweat and moan No help from that Testosterone
Little blue pill Little blue pill Help me help me I’m over the hill
Doctor this Is really no joke My husband says He’ll slit his throat
Can’t make a pill Til we define a disease They’re trying hard Those drug companies
I think we’ll know If they define a disease Drug companies will plaster it On tv
Doctor I found Just the thing A brand new stimulating Clitoral ring
Don’t wanna have sex Nope nope nope Little blue pill Gives my husband hope
I took the photograph of the old drug bottles today. I like that the potassium oxalate just says POISON on it and gives antidote instructions. Also, no guarantee on the clitoral ring, ok?
I thought Excelsior! was something that you shout! Onwards! Upwards! Apparently Henry Wadsworth Longfellow thought so too. Perhaps the youth in the poem really needed packing material. And then the State of New York adopted it as a motto, meaning higher rather than packing material. Though the wood shavings to pack things were named Excelsior after the poem was written.
Now that I have confused myself and you, I will just say Excelsior when I see all the goldfinches at the feeder. Higher! Wood shavings! Birds!
I was trying to think of a debacle. Oh. Getting my fourth pneumonia, March 21, 2021, Covid-19. This is the first pneumonia that put me on oxygen. The fast heart rate, dropping ten pounds, and feeling anxious were familiar from the other three. This photograph was from December 2021, visiting Maryland. We did a bike ride. I was pretty happy that I was able to do it, though the last mile had a sloping uphill that made me think I was not very strong. Oxygen helped.
And Covid-19 is a debacle that we are still trying to understand and absorb and avoid and heal and recover from. I am reading an article that entirely denies viruses existing. I guess it’s like porn on the internet: they say if there is a story, there is a porn version. Every possible idea of what has happened over the last three years is out there, though this article doesn’t make any sense at all.
I don’t remember who took the photograph of me. It may be a steathie. I needed oxygen at night and whenever I was being active, but not at rest. Ok, at rest talking.
Things and people were lost and found and lost during Covid-19. I spent a lot of time on our beaches. I am so grateful for the beaches.
The network of mycelium can be enormous and there is increasing evidence of communication between species: mycelium to trees or rhizomes to trees or trees to other trees. But it isn’t infinite, is it?
Funny how our brains work. I think of going to the other computer and then think I will look in this one for a moment. I have photographs from years past of the New Old Time Chautauqua. I open the file of Nikon photographs. There are 28 subfiles. I go to July 2018. At the end of the file, here is this motley parade. The New Old Time Chautauqua with our local Unexpected Brass Band and Other Friends.
I didn’t “know” that these photographs were even on this laptop. At least, not consciously. These are taken at the fairgrounds, August 11, 2018, in Port Townsend, Washington.
The New Old Time Chautauqua is the last one on the road. They are fundraising to go work and play with the Blackfoot Confederacy in Canada and the US. There are too many people dying from fentanyl, so the Chautauqua is part of the healing process. They are fundraising as they hit the road. I wish all of them the best.
And here is the Unexpected Brass Band at THING last year. You can hear them even if you can’t see them!
Discover and re-discover Mexico’s 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 - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete 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.
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