Being mortal

When the Fogies were around the age I am now they announced that, when they got too old, they would sail into the Bermuda Triangle and vanish from this dimension. They never actually defined “too old”. Nor did they ever acquire a boat, or learn how to float one. But as far as I can tell that really was pretty much the full extent of their planning for the final stage of their lives.

As it turned out, they downsized a couple times, and eventually moved into a tiny apartment in a senior housing complex. It was more cramped than it needed to be because the Olde Buzzard never actually retired, and although his clients (he was a PR consultant) drifted away one-by-one, he refused to give up his gigantic desk and related paraphernalia. So, to the Marmeee’s enormous frustration, his “office” occupied about half their living room space. But that room opened onto a covered stoep, where the Olde Buzzard spent many hours building the framework for Marmeee’s garden. Beyond their tiny garden there was a common area – green lawn, and trees loud with the birds that used to bum off them when they sat out on the stoep to eat their lunch. A pair of plovers raised a family nearby every year, and toward the end of every afternoon the hadedas would fly overhead, shrieking. And they had lots of friendly human neighbors, too.

It was only after Marmeee died that we had to move the Olde Buzzard into a facility specializing in Alzheimer’s patients. That place was also quite homey, and although his room was small it also opened directly onto a garden. Not that it mattered, really. He didn’t have to be there long; he moved on just a couple months after she did.

Anyway, maybe not having much of a plan wasn’t such a problem for them. I mean, maybe the Bermuda Triangle would have been more interesting … But on the other hand they may have ended up being vivisected by some otherworldly mad scientist … Or even being passed over as unworthy of interest, their little boat eternally becalmed in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Instead, they got to watch their plover neighbors and grow flowers, and I think, by the time they got there, it was enough.

Between them – supervised and assisted by passing wildlife – Marmeee and the Olde Buzzard created gardens everywhere they lived. And this didn’t change just because they got old and had to downsize.

Sometimes, when I get mad at the Hubbit for glomming down more than his share of pie or ice cream, I threaten to put him in a home the day diabetes eats his legs and dumps him in a wheelchair. I wish this were an empty threat, but realistically he’s too heavy for me to lift. I end the threat with, “And don’t think I’m going to live in some crappy little studio apartment so that you can afford to go to a nice home!” Again realistically, even if he went into a cheaper facility, this is America, the Land Of Fuck-All Is Free, and I’d probably end up sleeping in my car. I’ve always been pretty easy-come, easy-go with money, and the Hubbit refuses to think about it at all … so, yeah, not a lot of late-life-stage planning happening here.

Mind you, sleeping in my car is sort of part of my game plan for after he wanders off into the Great Workshop In The Sky – assuming he does so (a) before I head for the Heavenly Library And Chocolate Shoppe and (b) before I achieve an extreme level of decrepitude. I’ve thought for a while that the best way to see America – which is something I’ve not done enough of in the quarter century I’ve lived here, the Hubbit not really being one for travel – is from the (admittedly questionable and probably over-romanticized) perspective of a van. So … the plan is a van, and then we’ll see. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s what I’ve got. And after all, if there’s one thing I learned last year it’s that you can’t depend on life to follow a plan. So, you know … why get hung up on making any?

I have a friend who’s a bit older than I, and in way better health, frankly, but she’s getting forgetful, and that scares her because her parents both developed quite advanced Alzheimer’s before they popped off. She lives alone – that is, her son inhabits a room in her house but he really lives inside his gaming computer. In any case, he’s not the nurturing type. So her plan is to off herself as soon as she feels she’s seriously lost the plot. She used to have an actual deadline to do this, but then the deadline year came, and she was busy, and her forgettery wasn’t actually interfering with her quality of life. Plus when I mentioned it a little while ago, in a spirit of friendly mockery (because how else does one respond when a friend is chatting about her suicide plan?) she’d forgotten ever having had a deadline – and since I don’t particularly want her to do herself in so long as I’m capable of fixing us a couple of mugs of rooibos tea, I changed the subject.

I really don’t think she’s ever going to get worse than moderately dotty. She’s healthy, active and energetic, involved with friends and volunteer activities, engaged in caring for a huge menagerie – horses, dogs, cats and birds. She’s conscious of the need to take care of herself, and she’s far too bloody-minded to tolerate anyone trying to tell her how to live. Also, she has me to hassle her to Write It Down, and Use Your GPS, and Remember The Last Time You Did That? Yeah – You Have Done It Before And This Is What Happened So Maybe Do Something Different This Time, Okay? But nonetheless there’s a flaw in her plan, in that she’s relying on her brain to tell her when her brain doesn’t work any more.

So I’m her backup plan. In her mind this means I’m named executor in her will. Once she’s “taken care of business” I will be responsible for selling her house, providing for her animals, and handing whatever is left in her estate to her son so he can find some more convenient place to set up his computer. (He doesn’t drive, so if she’s not around to ferry him he needs to move closer to town.) In my mind it also means I get a power of attorney, so that if she wakes up one day and can’t remember how to wipe her own bottom I can sell her house, provide for her animals, set the son free to follow his dreams, and pay for her care in the best place her money can buy. (She’s a good friend, but I’m probably not going to be the one doing any butt-wiping. And I’ve also firmly rejected her suggestion that I remind her that it’s time and hand her the pill bottle, pistol, or whatever.) So that’s her plan, and I think it’s a good plan … provided I outlive her.

It just occurred to me, dear reader, that I might owe you an apology. I really don’t mean for this to be a Grow-Old-And-Die Blog, and I’m sorry that’s been so much a focus here lately. I do think about other things – in fact I mostly think about lots of other things – but what got me writing about this today is a book I’ve just finished reading that’s set me to pondering the Important Stuff. I want to tell you about it, because I cannot recommend it too highly for anyone who expects to get old and/or die, or who is closely involved with anyone who is likely to experience getting old and/or dying.

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, is a doctor’s thoughtful discussion about how modern Western medicine has lost its way in terms of meeting the needs of aging and dying patients. And he talks about how we might choose a different way.

For starters, he questions our assumption that doctors are the people we should be turning to for much of this care – because not all aspects of one’s hoary decline are medical. The problem with Western doctors, he says, is that they’re focused on fixing things. And when something can’t be fixed they don’t really know what to do with it, so they get stuck in a cycle of flinging fixes at the unfixable, often to the great detriment of the patient’s quality of life. Even when they want to recommend that a patient pass on further treatment, often they don’t know how – and the patients don’t get it; they think the doctor doesn’t care. Add just a soupcon of scare politics – dire warnings about “Death Panels”, for example – and any suggestion that people should, at some point, be allowed to quietly lie down and, you know, die … well, “cruel and unusual” doesn’t begin to cover the standard American reaction.

Or, when the doctor says a treatment might give them “a little more time”, they don’t understand that the doctor is thinking in terms of months, for which they will likely pay dearly in suffering. So they embark on suffering expecting years, and the end is heartbreak and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that doctors don’t have a role to play in keeping us going, of course. The guy with the scythe tapped me on the shoulder a year and a half ago, as you know, and then again last August, because – according to my doctor – custardy blood is “one of those things that happens as we age”. So, thank you, Western Medicine, that I’m here now and writing this instead of … not. And thank you also for putting the Hubbit back together each of the many times he tried to take himself apart, and for keeping him trundling along despite rusty joints and creaking organs.

But one can think of this kind of care as being on a spectrum – and over on the darker side of the spectrum is the case of my old friend Gummy. He was in a home when I met him – one of the better ones, but it still smelled of shit and boiled vegetables, and the residents spent most of their days scattered about the place in their wheelchairs, staring at the walls. Sometimes they sat in rows, side-by-side, but you never saw them talking. An hour or two before mealtimes they’d start working their way to the dining hall, and they’d sit around tables, staring sometimes at the tablecloth, sometimes at the door to the kitchen, still not talking.

I met Gummy outside church one holiday weekend, when he was slumped in his wheelchair waiting for the facility bus to pick him up. I chirpily asked him, “And what will you be doing tomorrow?” and he dealt me a withering stare and said, “What do you think I’ll be doing?” So I, shamed into being real, started visiting him, and that progressed to occasional outings and invitations to holiday dinners, and for a while he was pretty much part of the family.

He was slow, soooo sloooowww, and as the years passed he got slower. Sometimes, at first, and then later most times, he’d fall asleep mid-conversation when I visited him. We had the same conversations over and over again… I was so sad when, at last, I attended his memorial service and his older friends and colleagues shared their memories of him. I’d known him for years by then, but there was so much I hadn’t known, because we simply didn’t have those conversations.

Anyway, back to the point of this post … I used to accompany him to medical appointments, and one day … I forget the details, but I think he was having difficulty swallowing. The doctor, like most of them, tried to insist on talking to me – because waiting for Gummy to ponder a question and then, sooo sloooowwwly, whisper the answer, cost money, I guess. Or maybe he thought he was stupid as well as slow. In any case, as always, I glared and told him, “Just give him time – he’ll get there. He can speak for himself!”

Only on that occasion he couldn’t. And I quickly realized I was also out of my depth.

Or maybe it was the doctor who didn’t explain his options properly. The doctor, a middle-aged Asian man who kept his firm body packaged inside his smooth skin as neat and tidy as pork sausage in its casing, was clearly uncomfortable with the conversation.

He explained that difficulty swallowing was “one of those things that happen when you get old.” He said Gummy had two options: to continue eating as best he could, or to have a feeding tube surgically inserted into his stomach. He warned that there could be complications with feeding tubes … I don’t remember what the potential complications were. What I do remember is that the doctor really, really didn’t want him to have one. The doctor clearly thought it was time for him to just … let … go. To go gentle into that dark night.

But he couldn’t say that, especially with me glaring at him, so he talked about the feeding tube and potential complications and no longer being able to enjoy food.

Gummy said, “I don’t really enjoy eating any more anyway. My smeller stopped working years ago.” But then he said that he was worried about possibly dying if he kept losing weight. He wasn’t conscious of being hungry, you see, so he wasn’t afraid of starving – but he could read the numbers on the scale. I tried to ask him if he was sure, but ran out of words in the face of his puzzled stare. How could I ask him if he really wanted to keep living? How could I suggest it was time for him to die – that that’s what his body was trying to tell him?

Well, they inserted the feeding tube, and there were issues, and after a few weeks he ended up back in the hospital, where someone inserted the tube at the wrong angle and his food went into his abdominal cavity, and that was that, although it took a few days.

I don’t think he suffered, but really I don’t know, because to my eternal regret and shame I wasn’t there. I visited him only once during the week he was in the hospital. For a few years I had been his closest and most faithful friend – we had fun together, going on outings around town. But then the Hubbit and I moved to our farmlet some distance out of town, and visits were harder and became less frequent (although I still did the necessary stuff, like doctor visits), and one day he’d forgotten my name and I had to write it down in the little notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. So by the time we reached the end I didn’t know what to do about him dying … so I pretended it wasn’t happening until it was too late.

In Being Mortal, Gawande discusses a different, more honest, more accepting way of approaching our mortality. He discusses different ways that seniors might live – alternatives to the typical modern old age home, designed and planned to allow us to have agency right up to the end. He discusses ways that communities might be set up to enable seniors to continue living in their own homes. He describes one place where residents had been like the ones at Gummy’s facility – sitting around waiting to die – until a newly-appointed doctor in charge brought in several cats and dogs and 500 caged birds, as well as a forest-worth of living plants – and all those old folk started living again, invigorated by having something to care for. In other places he describes, seniors have freedoms unheard of in conventional old age homes – specifically, the freedom to make poor choices that might shorten their lives but that make life sweeter (like pie and ice cream for diabetics).

Then, moving on to the subject of care for the terminally ill, he offers an approach free from medical “cures”. The priority, he says – and this is precisely the priority I have for my dogs, so why not also for my two-legged loved ones? – is quality, not quantity of life. Rather than asking, “Do you want this treatment or that treatment or simply to die?” he says we should ask, “What constitutes a good life for you, from the perspective of what you’re capable of right now?” That determined, the question becomes simply how to accomplish that goal. It may be freedom from pain. It may be the ability to enjoy a dish of chocolate ice cream. It may be a clear head and time to spend with the people one loves.

Looked at from that perspective, it will almost certainly not be months of pain and nausea chasing an elusive, all-too-temporary “cure”.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

Since reading his book I find myself looking at my own life from a different perspective. I’m still at the early stage of my slide into decrepitude, and as far as I know I’m not terminal – except in the sense that we all are. But I am creakily, crankily aware that three-score-plus years of poor choices about diet and exercise are demanding a toll. I make plans but not promises; I write to do lists, but I forgive myself if I can’t fulfil (or, some days, even start) them. I’m increasingly conscious of the need to cross things off my bucket list – not because I’ve achieved them, but because I’ve run out of time.

But I still have choices – so many extraordinary choices! I can still make a garden … acquire new skills … save a few more dogs … write stories. I can still pour myself out; I’m not yet reduced to a trickle. I can go to new places and ask questions and find answers. I can read. I can pray. I can love.

It’s not what I thought it would be. But, as it turns out, now that I’m here, it’s enough.

Breathless

I bitched so much that they hung this on my door, and after that people tiptoed in and apologized for turning on lights even at midday. And, yes, keratoconus does mean sudden bright light hurts my eyes … but actually the spirit of my bitching was more along the lines of Proverbs 27:14 – “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.”

Today didn’t start well.

There was a thump at the door, the rattle of a trolley full of sharp implements, a hurting blaze of lights. I yelped and clamped a pillow over my face. With a trill of merry laughter my tormentor took my hand, stuck a needle into it, and plundered my blood, then made her galumphing departure.

I wanted to go back to sleep, but – of course – I needed to pee. I disentangled my legs from clutching sheets, hit the call button, disconnected the wires attached to my chest, and tottered all the way to the bathroom without tripping over my IV drip. I assumed the position. Released the flow into a little plastic stetson-shaped thingummy positioned at the top of the bowl, because they measure my bladderly essence. And woke abruptly to the wet and horrible realization that it hadn’t been emptied after my last visit.

The toilet hat – can you see it? When you’re being pumped full of fluids, they have to make sure what’s going in is finding its way out. But if you have a capacious bladder, you don’t want to use it twice in a row without someone emptying it out first.

By the time I’d swabbed myself down and had been tucked back into a freshly made bed by a sympathetic nurse who managed to control her laughter until after she’d left my room, I was wide awake. And I was irritable and feeling sorry for myself – in short, completely over the sense of euphoria I had been feeling for the previous few days.

I should probably tell you about those days.

They started last Tuesday, when I visited Wonder Woman and caused both of us some perturbation by almost collapsing when I reached the top of the flight of stairs leading from her garden to her living room. “Dang I’m unfit!” I wheezed, mopping my sweaty face. “I have got to quit talking about getting more exercise, and start walking! Just as soon as I buy a Fitbit!” Well, it turned out she had a Fitbit that she’d bought for herself before she realized that setting it up would take at least half an hour of technological tinkering. Wonder Woman is nearly 90; she figured she didn’t want to spend one of her last remaining half hours that way, so she gave it to me. And although that’s somewhat peripheral to this story, if I were writing actual Literature it would count as Dramatic Irony, which proves that sometimes life does indeed imitate art.

Anyway. To get back to my point.

Wednesday I was draggy. I spent it trudging through the bare minimum of chores, yawning over my news feed, and wishing the black dog would just damn well let go and let me breathe. I didn’t feel especially depressed – just so, so tired, and when I thought of all the things I wanted to do -happy things, like gardening and writing and giving the horses a bath and taking Argos to the river for some training time and baking bread and even shining my little house – I felt overwhelmed and weary. I’d felt that way for a while … but on Wednesday just breathing felt hard. And late in the afternoon, when I went outside to feed my chickens, I had to lean quite heavily on my cane, and when I came back inside I was staggering and I had to sit down and just quietly pant for a while.

While I was sitting I consulted Dr. Google about Reasons To Be Short Of Breath. His insights were disturbing.

I told myself to quit being stupid. When you’re lazy and obese, of course you’re gonna be short of breath, I said to me. This isn’t rocket science! No further research is required! I got myself up on my hind legs and moved laundry around and was going to swab down the kitchen counters, but … first I needed to take another little rest. I chatted a bit more with Dr. Google. I decided that if I didn’t feel better by Thursday morning, I should probably call my doctor.

This isn’t something I do lightly. This is America, the Land of Hell-no-it-ain’t-free, and I don’t have health insurance, because the Hubbit and I inhabit that awkward gap between people who qualify for subsidized (and therefore affordable) insurance, and those who can sniff judgmentally at the Affordable Care Act. That is, the Hubbit has Medicare and supplemental insurance, which is just as well given his penchant for dancing with heavy machinery, but I pretty much just keep chugging along and trusting God to keep me going as long as he wants me around. It’s worked for me.

I’d been looking forward to Wednesday night, because we’d been promised a spectacular show by the Perseids – no moon, clearish sky. In 20 years of trying I’ve never actually seen the Perseid shower, and it’s become a bit of an obsession – so this year was definitely going to be The One. I planned to go out into the backyard with a blanket at around 11.00PM and just lie and watch them.

Only, between an increasingly insistent Dr. Google and sheer lack of oxygen to the brain, by 11.00PM it was dawning on me that maybe this shit was real. So I texted the Hubbit from the bedroom (he was in his study) to tell him I was worried … and waited for him to come busting through, brimming over with husbandly concern (and maybe a hug or two), to insist that it was only money and drag me off to the hospital. Only he didn’t, so I sent a couple more texts phrased to make him feel like a heel, and then I went to get dressed so I could drive my own damn self to the hospital, and found his phone lying on the floor of the closet.

He does this. He scatters his phone in his wake like one-at-a-time confetti. It drives me completely insane.

Turns out you can’t stomp and shout very effectively without breathing, but I did my best, and after delivering his phone to him I went and got dressed, stopping as needed to inhale. Then the Hubbit wandered into the bedroom and said that of course he would take me to the hospital because that was his responsibility as my husband. So I came a bit unglued and broke my phone, because it doesn’t take that much breath to thump things.

On the way to the hospital we stopped so I could hang my head out of the car window and look for meteors, but I didn’t see any.

I don’t remember much about the ensuing 20-or-so hours, which is a pity, because the whole time I was blogging about it in my head, and it was hilarious. But I couldn’t write it down because I had to keep my arms straight on account of the IV drips inside my elbows, plus the persistent interruptions by people with machines that needed to interact with me, and other people who kept sticking me with needles and taking more and still more of my sluggish, unwilling blood. I remember snapshots…

Did you know that getting an MRI is almost exactly like going through a wormhole in space? You lie down and someone injects you with a magical substance that uncoils a delicious heat in unmentionable places, and the world moves and you’re inside a giant halo, and lights flicker and the voice of God tells you “Stop breathing” and then, just at the moment you absolutely have to, “You can breathe”.

I asked for water and they told me I was “nothing by mouth” while the doctors decided whether or not to do a procedure to blast the blood clots out of my lung, and I thought that was strange because I’d thought my heart was failing, but it turned out my heart was fine but one of my lungs (I’m not sure which one) was all clotted up and icky, and this was sort of a good thing, relatively speaking, because if caught in time it will heal, whereas a failing heart can only be helped, not healed. And then after a while someone brought me a menu and told me to order lunch, and that’s how I found out that they’d decided the procedure wasn’t necessary, which was also good news, especially as I was hungry enough to eat a doctor by then.

They asked me questions about my family medical history and I did sums in my head and realized that my father was about the age I am now when he had the heart attack that turned his life around, so I decided I could turn my life around too.

The tech who did the echocardiogram helped me look at the screen so I could see inside my own heart, and it was working so, so hard! It didn’t flop helplessly like the sad, sick heart of the transplant patient I told you about, and nor did it rat-a-tat like the young, new heart that patient received. My heart is like the little engine that could, and the sight of it working with such steady determination to take a too-heavy load up a too-steep hill made me weep with gratitude and shame.

Eventually – it was Thursday evening by then – they brought me up to the room where I’m writing this. It’s a spacious private room, and even has a small sitting area with a recliner and a view of the hills. They tucked me into a real bed and fussed around asking what they could do to make me comfortable, and all I could think to ask for was hospital socks.

Hospital socks – conceivably the greatest achievement of medical technology.

At some point during the ensuing days I learned the name of what had happened to me. I had a pulmonary embolism, and it probably happened because I spend too much time sitting and feeling sad instead of getting up on my hind legs and living my life. I let the black dog harry me into the Valley … but I skirted the Shadow, and I’m coming back out into the light, and as God is my witness that dog is going to learn to walk to heel.

I haven’t had much experience of hospitals. Prior to this adventure, the only times I’ve stayed overnight in a hospital were after I was born, and when I was 10 years old and had my tonsils out, and when the Girl Child was born. But I’ve heard enough about hospitals from other people to have learned that they’re dehumanizing places, where one becomes a patient rather than a person, where the food is awful, where a good night’s rest is less important than the staff routines. So my own experience has been surprising.

The fact is, I have felt cherished. Protected. Provided with a refuge where I had one job and one job only: to heal – first my body, but it’s also given me a quiet place to begin healing my soul. Little by little my breath has come easier. On Saturday I had an actual shower. Yesterday – Sunday – they said I could go home, and disconnected the IV and taught me how to inject myself.

Now I’m just waiting for my final visit with the doctor, and then I can peel off the sticky pads that keep me connected to the heart monitor, and they’ll remove my last IV port, and I can take off the hospital gown and put on my real clothes. They’ll wheel me down to the main entrance and the Hubbit will come, and we’ll go buy me a phone and swing by Yokes for a supply of fresh vegetables – because mealtimes in the Took household are getting a radical makeover. And then we’ll pick up Argos from boarding and we’ll go home.

*****

A little over a week has passed since I wrote this post. It took a while to get my computer hooked up again and download the pictures, and I’ve once again been spending way too much time just sitting. I think about getting up and moving … I think about how I’ll die if I don’t – not right away, because I’m on drugs that keep my blood safe and runny, but I’ll come off them in a two or three months, and then if I haven’t changed my habits … Well, I have to change my habits. That is all. I’m putting it in writing. And I have a Fitbit. Surely that will make a difference!

There’s this guy in our hay barn

After the last time, the Hubbit and I promised each other never again to invite someone to share our home. For years we had (irritably and messily) shared an office, while the spare bedroom just sat and looked pretty for months on end until I succumbed to guilt and suggested to Himself that some or other lost soul really needed it … and he never bloody said no! And, despite my best intentions, almost every attempt at sustained hospitality ended with all parties seething.

There was Sewerbreath, a close friend whose marriage broke down a few weeks before we were due to leave on a prolonged visit to South Africa. “Come stay at our house!” we warbled. “Bring your dog! You can look after our animals, and it’ll give you three months to get on your feet!” While we were gone she fell and broke some necessary bone or other and wasn’t able to work. We returned home jet-lagged and unfazed. “It’s Christmas! You can’t be homeless over Christmas!” we caroled. “You’ll soon be back at work, and meanwhile you’re welcome – it’s fine!” She got a job at a grocery store early in the new year. “Congratulations!” I trilled. “No need to pay rent – save up for a deposit on your own place! And don’t worry about the food – three is as easy to feed as two! – just check in before you leave work to see if we need anything – save me making a trip to the store in between my regular shopping days!” So then I learned that expecting a grown woman in her forties to “check in” was offensive, and things pretty much went downhill from there.

I kicked her out the following April, seven months after she’d moved in. I forget the specific reason, but I think it was either because she refused to clean her bathroom (removing the crunchy toothpaste from her sink after she left was an exercise in archeology!) or because I got fed up with her attempts to allure the (blissfully oblivious) Hubbit.

There were the teenage daughters of old friends of mine, who wanted to leave the Pacific island where their parents were missionaries and start life in America. They didn’t have work permits, but were going to find jobs under the radar as tutors, nannies, house cleaners – you know the sort of work – to cover their personal expenses while they studied at the local community college, or maybe online – they were going to figure that out. Only … they were so tired after years of missionary life, they felt they deserved a little vacation. So for eight or nine months they lolled around, not studying, not working, not volunteering. I tried to engage with their parents via email, only to learn that these delightful young ladies had access to the parental email account and were deleting our messages as fast as I sent them. When their parents quit the mission field and returned to South Africa the girls decided to go home, and we sang the hallelujah chorus and waved them away.

There was Peter Pan. I call him that because when I met him he seemed joyous and wild and a little bit magical … but in truth he was more of a Lost Boy. He arrived one day with Wonder Woman’s teenage protégé, to spend a few days helping out, camping in a grassy corner of our farmlet, and canoodling like bunnies. Less than 24 hours later the protégé roared away down our driveway, and I went outside to find Pan standing outside his tent and looking forlorn. Well, we needed help and so did he so we invited him to stay, and that year was pretty good. He was a hard worker, giggly and zany (he was high a lot of the time), the animals loved him, and I fell a little bit in love with him myself – nah, don’t be stupid; he was sort of like a beloved nephew. Since my actual nieces and nephews were all clear around the other side of the planet, and my grandchildren-by-Hubbit were by then not speaking to me, I felt the lack of a young person to love and mentor and indulge. And as someone who had been severely abused and neglected by his parents, he lapped it up. After a while he went off with a girl, but he kept in touch and it was all good.

Verruca arrived shortly after Pan left. She showed up with someone who’d advertised on Craigslist, looking for temporary accommodation for her pet chickens. I’d invited the chickens to rough it with the flock of not-pet-but-very-happy chickens hanging out in my veggie garden, so she came to take a look and brought Verruca with her. They arrived just in time to distract me from a full meltdown caused by several hours spent trying to sign up with WWOOF because the Hubbit and I desperately needed, but could not afford to pay for, help on the farmlet. Only the WWOOF website kept crashing, and I was brimful of angst, gloom and fury. Well, Verruca looked around, and gazed longingly from the river to me, and said, “I don’t suppose you need someone to help you out in return for a place to stay, do you?”

The Olde Buzzard and the Hubbit, down at the river near where I met Angelo and Charlie (see below). The Fogies also spent a year with us. Memories built despite some stormy weather, and kept close to my heart.

So Verruca moved in, and for maybe a week or two it was great – we were like sister wives (only with certain duties allocated, not shared). And pretty soon she started educating me about how the world really works. Like how the government is using contrails to rain down poison upon us all, and how Nibiru is going to destroy us all, and … oh man, she believed so many things! I wrote a lot of them down to share with you, but now I can’t find the list … It was a while ago. Anyway, I was enthralled! I was fascinated! Sometimes I asked questions, but that just annoyed her. I learned it was better to shut my trap and listen.

And then … I don’t know, I guess she had a revelation. She realized that our water was contaminated. She stopped eating anything we raised, and would consume nothing but energy drinks and canned soup. (Of course I bought them for her – I’m a sucker!) But she just got sicker and sicker, and eventually I took her to the doctor, who diagnosed Hepatitis A. “Yikes! That’s contagious!” I said, hurling myself at Google, where I learned that it’s common in homeless shelters (she’d lived in several) and among addicts (she’d lived with her addict daughter and son-in-law prior to moving here). Then she announced that she was going to sue us for making her sick. Testing our well water (clean and sweet) and ourselves (ditto) had no effect. The situation got ugly and depressing and – as I read up on Washington State law pertaining to eviction (not good for property owners. Not at all) it got scary.

But one day she up and left, and suddenly peace was restored, and the Hubbit and I agreed “Never again”. Only then Pan came back and of course we figured he’d be okay. We knew him. He was practically family. It was a bit stressful that this time he had a bunch of friends who liked to hang out in our shop or my kitchen, and often some stayed over, but I loved Pan and kind of enjoyed having a houseful of youngsters, and the Hubbit tolerated the invasion. Only pretty soon it became clear that Pan had … changed. I’ve done some reading since then about mental illness that emerges in young adults and … well, I don’t want to write about that. I already told you how it ended.

So after that the Hubbit and I agreed never, ever again under any circumstances for any reason to invite anyone to live in our home, double pinky promise. To reinforce that promise, while he was in rehab for the months following his altercation with a tractor I transformed the spare bedroom into a Hubbit Hole just for him. It’s inconvenient not to have a spare room when the Girl Child or the Young Bull come to stay, but a lot easier to tell myself “We don’t have room” when, in fact, we don’t have a spare room.

And then, a few weeks ago I was down at the river with Argos, and there was this guy with a Chihuahua. Conversation ensued. The Chihuahua – a cutie who occasionally answers to Charlie – needed to be spayed and vaccinated, so I got that done, which led to more conversation. In the middle of all this conversing we had the mother of all windstorms. I pulled together some food and a tent and went down to the river – did I mention they were living there? Under a bush? Well, technically, under a piece of tarp, but shrubbery was involved … Ugh, sorry, I digress. My point is, I went down to check on them, and Charlie came hurtling out of the bushes and leaped into my car with a look of the most profound relief, which was followed by a look of bewilderment when her papa didn’t join her in this comfy place out of the wind, and then plummeting dismay when he took her in his arms and disappeared back under his bush as I drove away.

We really don’t have a room.

But we have a row of horse stalls, and the end one – where we keep hay in winter – is empty. Or was. It now has a tent in it, and a random assortment of other stuff, much of it rather smelly. When the heat gets unbearable (right now it’s 108F out, and the heat wave is only getting started) they come inside and cool off. (They’re watching Penguin Town on Netflix as I write this.) Lying in bed the night after they moved in, I started feeling guilty that I had a comfortable bed and a house, and they have so little. A better person, I thought, would invite them inside. But then I slapped myself upside the head and counted their blessings. They have shelter from the weather, a fridge and freezer, drawers for storage, a place to cook, and food any time they ask for it. They have electricity and wi-fi, and the use of our guest bathroom. They have walls and a door and privacy. Cops don’t hassle them to move on. Bikers don’t roar up and start a middle-of-the-night party a few feet from where they’re hiding under their bush. They can ask for a ride into town when they need one. And that’s as good as the Hubbit and I can make it and still be okay inside ourselves and with each other.

I wish I could say “It’s all good,” but really it isn’t. The thing about most homeless people in this country is, there are reasons they’re homeless. There are reasons Angelo has been kicked out of most of the places he’s lived in. A few days ago I got so mad at him I was ready to dump him back at the river and let the damn heat dome cook his skinny ass! I didn’t because of Charlie, and a little bit because that’s not who I am, and mostly because I heard my hectoring voice getting shriller and angrier and … I was ashamed.

The thing about not being homeless is, you hold all the cards. You have all the power. It doesn’t matter how broke you are, or old, or sore, or disappointed in yourself or your life … if you have a piece of this earth you can call your own, you have everything. And if you have the power, you can’t use it against someone who is powerless and still feel good about being you. So the next morning I sought Angelo out.

“Hey,” I said. He looked at me warily. “Can we agree to a truce?” I asked.

He sighed with relief. “Oh,” he said. “Yes please.”

Charlie – never so happy as when she’s with her papa.

He is a good man – Charlie told me so. He is also a profoundly annoying man, moody, often irrational, desperately needy, and not very clean. Keeping my temper in check is going to be hard. But we promised him a place through the summer, until we need the stall back for hay. In return, he helps out – sometimes with begrudging carelessness, and sometimes pouring his heart into making our lives so very much better. I’m hoping we can make it work.

I might have to come on here to vent occasionally. I hope that’s okay.

Plum boozy

Well, on Monday the north half of the planet tipped over to the Dark Side – and no, I’m not referring to the day’s usual bucket load of news crud. I’m thinking about the arrival of autumn, and with it the frantic last weeks of harvest time for lazy gardeners who have been neglecting their veggie patch. The Hubbit trundled next door with a large bucket swinging from a sticky-out thing on his tractor, and brought it back full of plums.

Okay, full disclosure: He did that a couple weeks ago, when I was inundated with dogs, and the plums in the bottom half of the bucket (we’re talking a 20 gallon bucket here, okay? Nothing small about the Hubbit!) went squishy and oozy and … Well, I sweetly requested more plums, and while he was off getting them I tipped the first lot into the sink.

They had started to ferment. But dang … that many plums was way too many for my few remaining hens. My flock has declined inexorably over the summer; two more fell to a visiting husky last week, and I’m now down to seven. Twenty gallons of fermenting plums is way too much for seven hens, even aided by a large roo.

Plus, I’d been googling plum preserving recipes on various websites, and some people intentionally ferment their plums. Meanwhile, regular fruit canning recipes demand juice. Long story short, it went against nature to waste these organically fermented remnants of juiciness, so I didn’t. I washed them off, picked out the pits, squeezed and massaged, and after adding water and straining off the chewy bits (for chickenly delectation), the resulting juice was quite pleasantly plummy. I put it in a large pot, added a couple cups of sugar and a generous slosh of lemon juice, and let it boil while I got busy halving and depitting the nice firm plums the Hubbit had brought me following his second trip to the neighbor’s tree. (Only half a bucket this time, thankfully!)

I filled seven quart jars and topped them off with the juice. Oh – I should mention, before adding the juice, I made it even more delicious by sloshing in about half a bottle of witblitz, aka mampoer, which the Hubbit insisted on buying on a visit to South Africa about 10 or 15 years ago, even though neither of us is an especially enthusiastic drinker. Witblitz (pronounced vitblits – it means “white lightning”) is the Boer answer to moonshine. It claims to be 50 proof peach brandy but it also works quite well as rocket fuel. Also, turns out it tastes not too bad when it’s been sitting in the back of a kitchen cupboard for 15 years.

In any case, the plum juice is bitchin’, and I know this because one of the quart jars didn’t seal properly during the canning process, so of course ice cream was acquired and … yum-meee!

Juicy plums and ice cream, with a hint of witblitz. Can life get any better? I think not.

Anyway, that took care of most of the plums. This morning, I processed the last of them while chatting with my bestie, Twiglet, via WhatsApp. Dang, I love technology – don’t you? Forget all the nastiness and spying and manipulation … I just love being able to sit at my dining table, sorting and slicing plums, while chatting to someone I love even though she’s clear around the other side of the planet. I ended up with a little over five pounds of sliced, still firm plums, which I dumped into a large bowl along with some cinnamon sticks, a slosh of vanilla, a sprinkle of cloves, a couple cups of sugar, and about five cups of non-witblitz brandy. (You’ll find the actual recipe here.) That’s now in a couple of jars, hiding in the back of a cupboard and waiting for the holiday season.

So much for plums. Tomorrow I tackle the tomatoes. And oh, holy cow, do I have a LOT of tomatoes! Well, one tomato at a time they will be peeled and cooked, and then canned or frozen.

I’m really not good at the domestic goddess thing, generally. Or the farm wife thing. But for all that, I find this work immensely satisfying. It will be so good, in the chill dark of January, to eat food that I raised myself in our good earth under a summer sun.

Do you find yourself feeling sad as the days start to get shorter? Or do you welcome the change in seasons? Would a dop of African moonshine make you feel better about it?

Start with a gasp

I’m a shower-before-bed person. I’ve never been able to understand how a person can get between the sheets all dusty and sticky from the day, and actually sleep. Even if I haven’t done much to raise a sweat and I feel cleanish and I’m tired so I don’t bother, as I lie there I can feel the gross stickiness of skin ooze and air crud. Ugh! Gotta get up, shower it off, rub dry, and then I can sleep.

Well, sometimes. Insomnia is a thing. But that’s a topic for another post.

Returning to the topic of this post, there’s this blogger that I sort of follow, by which I mean that I receive her posts in one of my many extra email accounts – the one dedicated to efforts at self-improvement. I believe in having lots of separate accounts because I wear different mindsets when I’m trying to be a better person, or farming and gardening, or dealing with our finances, or writing, or blogging. If all my emails go into a single account the result is a mess worse than the top of my desk, and I can’t find anything and nothing gets done.

On the other hand, I don’t check all those accounts every day, and as for the self-improvement one … well, I read the email topics as they come up as notifications on my phone, but usually that’s about it. Self-improvement is something I aspire to wanting to do, but most of the time it’s hard enough just to be as good as I already am.

Anyway, this blogger – she calls herself “Dr. Stephanie” and she writes mainly about keto and fasting, and she offers various courses, none of which I’ve actually done – wrote a post about how effective humans kick-start their day. It happened to land in my inbox on a day when I was lying in bed, hating myself for lacking the energy to get the hell up and do something with whatever was left of my pathetic life … and I read it.

Most of her suggestions I’ve forgotten. They were things like “feel gratitude” and “journal”, which are lovely feel-good ideas, but in the moment didn’t feel sufficiently like the kick in the butt I was craving. The cold shower, however … Now that sounded like a punishment worthy of the name! That I deserved.

So I dragged my bloated, sweaty (this was back when nights were hot) almost-corpse from between the sheets and into the shower. And I turned the faucet on to cold. And wailed.

It was so horrible!

Oh. My. Word. It was so horrible.

But then a strange thing happened. First, my eyes – clenched shut against the bright light of the bathroom – popped open. Then my skin stopped cringing from the rush of icy water, and I found myself intentionally exposing places like my armpits and the back of my neck and the crack of my butt – not exactly enjoying the rush of cold, but welcoming it anyway.

She recommended five minutes. I didn’t time myself but I doubt I lasted that long. I simply rinsed all over, rotating and bending to let the water get at all my less accessible spots. I didn’t use soap or a cloth, just cold water. Then I stepped out, found a fresh towel, and scrubbed myself dry.

I felt … Amazing. Invigorated. Energized.

Fun fact: this insanity is actually good for you. This morning when I went poking through Google in search of funny free images of cold showers, I found any number of articles touting cold showers as a solution to obesity, depression, low sex drive, bad skin, low energy – in short, pretty much all the ills that might beset your fleshly self.

Plus it was kinda magical, actually, how it made me feel.

Irrelevant photo of a happy memory. That’s another kind of magic. And being able to enjoy a happy memory … That’s the magic I really want to flow through me.

So I did it again the next day. And the day after that. And again a few more times. Then came a day when I had to rush for an early appointment and didn’t have time, and I felt icky all day, so the next day I made sure to shower again. Every now and then I skip for a day or two … but I keep going back to it.

It is always horrible. The only way to do it is to drag myself out of bed and get under the shower before I do anything else, because giving myself time to think about it – for instance while I put in contact lenses or brush teeth – just makes it worse. And now, as the nights get cold and the early mornings are chilly and I’m waking up before dawn as often as not, it’s really, really hard. Frankly, given my record for doing really hard things, I’m not that optimistic that I’ll keep going when winter really sinks its teeth into us. But … I hope I will. I intend to try.

Because that moment when my eyes pop open? When suddenly and with no effort of will going back to sleep is not only impossible, but also not remotely desirable? Holy cow, it’s a rush like no other!

Hey there – talk to me! What’s your favorite way to mortify your flesh? Does it make you feel as good as a cold shower?