Who I am

 

I live in a ten story building with 13 apartments per floor. I've been here nearly three months now and yesterday, for the first time, I went out and walked around the building. 

There is a lovely little hidden nook with a bench back in the corner and a large patio with a gazebo in the front. Yesterday was the first time I was in either place.

I see people down on the patio, or in the gazebo from my windows. I see them in the elevator and occasionally in the halls. I've been to two community dinners in our big room upstairs by the library and games area. I nod and say hi. We are all cordial, but I really don't know who anyone is yet, except for the maintenance people and a couple people at the other end of my hallway.

Of course I recognize faces I've seen and one woman has always intrigued me. She is tall with long gray hair that ends just at her chin. She is a large square woman who wears no make up and reminds me a lot of Stephanie Cole, a British actress on Waiting for God and Doc Martin.

Today I ran into her for the first time. We were in the laundry room and she recognized me! "You live on two, right?" She asked. "I love your curtains."

Now I have a place. There is the woman with the long haired dachshund, the man who takes care of the library, etc. I am the woman with the curtains!

They really are lovely curtains, a sheer pale green with long green vines that allow the light and the beautiful scenery outside to be seen inside while still giving me privacy.

Breath

I was there when my son took his first breath.

I held my granddaughter in my hands as she took her first breath.

Those are precious, memorable moments I will never forget.

I was there when my friend took her last breath.

In fact, I was the one who gave her the final drops of morphine that helped along the way.

I did not realize it at the time. I was only following Hospice directions by counting her breaths to know when to administer the drops.

Someone's last breath isn't quite as easy to pinpoint as a first one.

My friend took a few shallower breaths and then I waited, but when there were no more I knew I had seen the last.

It is a powerful thing to know the person in front of you has just left this life, At first it feels unreal. I waited for that next breath then I studied her. She really didn't look different at all, but I knew she was gone.

I will never forget those moments sitting next to my friend as she passed through the veil. It was much less chaotic than those babies' first breaths and yet the mystery and the wonder of it will never leave me.

 

The brain

 

When I was a child I wanted to be pretty like my sister. That was her nickname, Pretty. 

She was always the pretty one. I was "the brain."

She was popular and adored by my mother and grandmother who valued pretty above all else. Grandma still simpered and wore matching stiletto heels and purses well into old age. If you were pretty people liked you and it was important to be liked. It was equated with being listened to and valued.

Except the pretty people I know often do not really listen to other people. They just make assumptions based on their own experiences.

Once they dressed their beautiful daughters like dolls, did not really push education, had a hundred excuses for that, and tended to pay less attention to their non-pretty children. Even years later, the grandchildren of the "pretty" child take precedence over their other grandchildren.

Imagine what it must be like to be one of these "pretty" people today when people don't have quite the same values?

Suddenly you find yourself older and in a world where your actions are coming home to haunt you. You become even more desperate to "be liked."  You try harder and harder, but with all the wrong ideas and your world begins to crumple around you.

It's hard to feel compassion for these people, especially if you were not one of the pretty ones, but they need it more than anyone. Imagine living just to be liked.

Fly away home

 

October is now in full swing around Illinois.

There are brown cornfields, orange pumpkins and little red and black ladybugs everywhere.

I walked into my living room yesterday and the walls were alive . . .

With the fluttering of hundreds, maybe thousands of little fluttering ladybugs and big brown stink bugs.

The windows were closed. They seemed to be coming in through my second floor air conditioner and distributing themselves throughout the apartment.

I tried spraying surfaces with bug killer, but it didn't seem to bother them at all. They just spread out, crawling into lampshades and over pillows, clinging to the ceiling and cracks like little red and black bubbles coming out of an ever running bubble machine.

Finally, in spite of the cool air, I turned on the air conditioner and set it low enough so that it would run. That slowed them down enough that I could begin swiftering and vacuuming up bugs, but it didn't end them.

Last night I left a lamp burning in the living room to draw the bugs away from my bedroom and it worked pretty well. This morning there were piles of them all around the floor by the lamp, but there were also some on the ceilings and walls.

I called maintenance and they came to commiserate with me. I really did feel a little better. Misery does love company, but that was all they had for me. It seems when the farmers plow the fields around here it stirs up the ladybugs and people begin scooping them out of their homes until either they go away or a frost comes and kills them.

He made conversation and futile little attempts to repack the insulation inside my air conditioner, then advised me to vacuum and let him know how it worked. He even stopped by later to see how things were going. They are so conscientious around here.

It seems most of the swarm has moved on. I keep my vacuum out to get the last little hangers on, but there have probably only been fifteen or twenty ladybugs today and one stinkbug.

Ladybug, ladybug fly away home . . .

Unkind

 

There are real horror stories all around us that no one wants to admit to seeing.

Imagine the so called sickly child who has emotional asthma. Everyone walks around this child on tiptoe, afraid to upset it. When it does cruel things people make excuses. When it wants attention, it gets sick.

This child is allowed to torment a sibling, chasing it with worms and laughing! Had the sibling chased this same child with a mouse no one would have thought it was funny.

When the father gave up smoking to help the mother quit, this child passed her  mother cigarettes over the back fence and laughed because they were pulling one over on the father! The mother died from heart disease.

When the brother could not trim his toenails, this sibling offered to do it for him, accidentally nipping his toes and laughing, but he ended up losing those toes to infection.

This helpful child is a hazard to everyone, Unvaccinated because the shots supposedly make it sick, it carries the flu germs to the vulnerable people nearby.

Nobody ever confronts this person. Not as a child, nor as an adult. It would be too unkind, so it goes glibly through life not paying attention, not listening, not being careful and never having a clue.

Horror

Tis the season for horror movies, but then, for me, it is always that season. I love horror movies, especially those that include haunted houses, or ghostly abodes of any sort.

I've seen so many horror movies that when I try to find a new one, it is difficult. Partly because I cannot remember the titles of those movies I have already seen and partly because the unfortunate truth is so many are really not memorable at all. 

It makes me wonder what horror is. I am not interested in blood and gore. They may be horrifying, but they are not supernatural. To me horror is something terrifying, but not explainable in any sort of understandable terms.

Time. Whatever it is it seems to be unstoppable. Time passes and things change. Are they changing due to time, or some other unseen force that forces changes? Whatever it is, family albums are shrines to horror, watching faces dehydrate and wrinkle up like apples left too long on a shelf, slowly yielding their life force to some inexorable force they have no control over.

Time and space. Look at the ocean. Given enough time and space creatures grow into immense whales or bizarrely shaped squids.Creatures  who don't evolve on dry land. Imagine the gigantic contorted creatures that may evolve here given enough time and space.

It is horror that fans science as it tries to control the uncontrollable. 

Horror that breeds religion as it tries to explain the unexplainable.

Horror that turns our faces away from the dark in a futile attempt to think light means good, just because we can see it.

Lucky

 

I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?

That quote was from Napoleon Bonaparte, but it has stuck with me ever since I first read it.

I think luck is something you are born with, nor not.

I used to think I made my own luck and to a certain extent that is true. Making good choices and taking advantage of good situations makes luck less necessary.

Still, having those good situations show up requires a certain amount of luck.

I think I was born lucky.

My parents gave me many advantages in life and life, itself, gave me many abilities,  but maybe that is not the blessing it seems like. If the gift table is very large, or the candy bag very deep, then perhaps a child never learns who, or what, they really are. Instead they become a jack of all trades and master of none.

Everything is possible to some extent, but it is in the honing of one particular thing that one gains a mastery that is both satisfying and life sustaining. 

Learning to rely on luck makes life a crap shoot.

Western North Carolina

 

The news is full of Hurricane Melton and the devastation is truly terrible, but what about the people of western North Carolina?

My son has not worked at a paying job since Hurrincae Helene hit. He and his friends have spent twelve and fifteen hour days helping the people in the mountains around them. Yesterday FEMA finally arrived in one of the small towns they were in. It brought water and food, which was nice, but the people of the mountain had already managed to supply some of this for their neighbors, or people would be suffering even more than they are. 

They did finally receive a supply of insulin, which was desperately needed.

The towns and homes of people in western North Carolina are buried under tons of mud. Railroad tracks are washed away. Roads are chasms of empty space. Trees are down, brick walls washed away, bridges gone, everything is contaminated by the mud and water that brought it.

Imagine seeing water twelve feet deep in your downstairs and two hundred pounds of mud in your kitchen island when the water drains away. The woman who lived there was a widow who desperately needed help.

Imagine being 98 years old and hearing the water rush up under your house, then coming up into the living room another three feet! All of her canning jars, which she relies on for food, were covered in mud or washed away.

These are just a few of the stories that are still very real up in the mountains. The people there are used to supporting each other, but watching the dogs sniff through tons of debris looking for bodies is not something you ever get used to.

People are avid watchers when hurricanes are on television, but once those hurricanes pass, it can be weeks, months, years, before life resumes with any quality.

Listening in

 

I just hosted my first party in my new apartment, a birthday party for my sister attended by her son, his wife, and a grandchild. 

I was so excited.

I planned everything out from the seating to where I placed the napkins by the plates.

But I was in agony from my back the entire time and eventually ended up in the bedroom, curled up in a fetal position trying to find some relief.

As I lay there listening to them laugh and talk in my living room I remembered all the similar occasions when I had spent a social occasion curled up on a bed in the other room and I was amazed at how often that has happened to me.

Beginning at age twelve and moving right along through Bridge parties, Christmas parties, my birthday the year my mother died and on and on. Each time some physical difficulty left me on the outside listening in.

I am never asleep, because the pain prevents that, but if I were someone else I might wonder if there wasn't some kind of emotional problem linked to it all. It happens so frequently.

I get excited. I am over the moon happy. I am prepared to the nth degree. I am there when it starts.

And then some part of my body fails me and I end up in the other room listening to everyone else enjoy themselves.

Peace keepers

 

Women in my generation were encouraged to be chameleons.

I cannot tell you how many times what I wanted to do was countered with, "but a woman needs to be able to follow her husband's career."

Some women outgrew this upbringing. Others did not.

After so many years trying to please everyone some women honestly do not know where they want to go eat, or what they want to see on their vacations. 

I know women who are so bent on pleasing everyone that they cannot even train their dog for fear of making it unhappy.

They honestly believe this is the way it should be. They think they should be the yes men and keep the peace no matter how much havoc it wreaks in the lives of their children or the world. They never see how much damage it does.

It may not matter where you go to eat, but it does matter how you think.

Home again

 

Hurricanes in landlocked Western North Carolina, who'd have thought that could be such a big deal?

My son has lived in western North Carolina for many years. He used to have a house high up on a ridge that was safe, but the rest of the town is in a valley and all the water runs off the mountain, flooding it regularly.

This time he was with friends during the worst of the storm. They had no electricity, except for generators and those didn't run the water pump, so they put out five gallon buckets to catch the rain for flushing toilets. Those buckets filled right up!

Afterwards he and friends went down into the town to help remove trees and see what else they could do. The town had water up to the drive through windows in local businesses and one place they had bailed out a few years ago completely collapsed this time.

The second night he spent helping other friends and they had a sort of hurricane cook out, but the next morning he made his way to his present home higher up in the mountains. There was still no power and no cell phone service, so no internet either, but the only real danger were the washed out bridges and roads.

Little did he realize that his biggest problem would be a lack of gas! As of this afternoon there was still no place he could buy gas, so he is stuck at home not working. He has power and cell and internet. He knows where the safe roads are.

He just doesn't have enough gas to go anywhere and get back home again. Sometimes it's easy to forget how reliant we are on all these different conveniences that seem so ordinary on a regular day.