Thursday, June 30, 2016

Sometimes

Sometimes

it is so hard
to lift the wet sheets
out of the washer
and carry them outside
to dry
on the deck railing.
Not even on the clothesline.

But the only way though
is through.

Monday, February 22, 2016

My New AK Socket

Just got this last week after weeks of test sockets & adjustments. It's the best fit I ever had, and it's custom-finished with one of Perry's t-shirts. Well done, Hanger Prosthetics.  Hashtag lifeisgood, smiley face. Bring on  spring!
AK socket 2016


Tuesday, February 16, 2016

My 2016 State of the Farm Address

The state of Holy Crow Farm this winter has been (choose one) muddy, spring-like, frozen solid, snowy. Today, it's forty degrees, raining and soggy. However. we upstate dwellers at HCF are enjoying winter-lite, especially those of us who are amputees. (That would be me. The snow-boarding child is less enamored.) 

Our current population: humans (2), equines (2), felines (3), and--wait for it--galines (6). If you read my earlier SOTF address, you'll remember that vocab word. Award yourself a gold doubloon from petty cash. I had to look up the spelling of doubloon so I guess that's my vocab word.

Health & Welfare: One equine is new to the staff, as Rindle is now buried out back. You'll also note the lack of caprines. I don't believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, those old goats are girdling the celestial fruit trees and tearing out the heavenly flowers as fast as they can. We also lost our rooster and a couple hens in the Fox Serial Murders of 2015, and recently lost the junior rooster Martin to a hawk right in the chicken yard. Construction plans are underway to install wire overhead. Martin's sacrifice was his finest hour, as he had turned delinquent, crowing on my porch and nipping me. 

Immigration: The catfish seem to have crowded out all the other fish in the pond. The deer are in my garden less often thanks to new pasture fences, but the undocumented mice in the kitchen are a real problem. The cats are unwilling to deport them, while slaying all manner of wildlife (usually left on the doorstep or in the hallway). I intend to STOP the mice with traps or some kind of mouse-repelling mint stuff I've heard of. Either way, I will make the mice PAY FOR IT. 

Employment & The Budget: Always a sticky wicket. It would appear Disability is a job description I may be qualified for. Stay tuned.

Relations With Relations: Much improved! My therapist is always happy when I work through more anger at my parents but it's a tedious, exhausting process. Perhaps I'm actually leveling out. At any rate, I take my them supper every so often.

The Elderly: It's tempting to think of my father (93 now) as Older Than Old,  but Woozle (Senior Cat) and I aren't getting any younger, as the AARP mailings CONTINUE to remind me. Woozle is long past the days when he could have been a feline Calvin Klein underwear model, but aren't we all? Or something. Never mind. Soylent green is people.  At least we can rejoice: Day after tomorrow I get my new socket.

Outlook: Positive in a way I wasn't expecting after losing Perry last summer. He was an honorary member of HCF and a pillar of my life, though he's not buried with Rindle or the goats (his ashes are scattered at Cornell Plantations, where he worked twenty years, as well as in his home town). I feel him and his influence on me all the time. I'm hopeful about riding my horse and this year's writing projects. I know he's be proud of me. And my new socket will have one of Perry's Plantation t-shirts as its custom finish. 

Bring on 2016.


Sunday, January 10, 2016

Think-tank system Macbeth

I shall read from the book of Closed Captions. You know, the little CC icon one can click on in a YouTube video to generate automatic subtitles, if one is watching old, old movies late at night, many with British actors speaking at ludicrous speeds. 

You see, one is drawn into this alternate universe when one has no social life. And one easily forgives auto-title occasionally butchering dialogue along the lines of this email which promises me millions: 
Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent... 

One understands when auto-title mistakes "First of all--" for Festival, or "Just think," for Testing. But what situation in a 1930's film justifies the caption Think-tank system Macbeth? One is baffled when the blast of a cruise ship's horn translates to The moon. One suggests you watch movies like Cottage to Let or Ghost Train with the sound off to behold the abomination. 

Here we go. One has added only punctuation. 

That's not the way to lubricate my last statement, just minutes away.OK. Click on them for me. That's it. Baloney Department. Last month, Mom, I made the Eurasian beautiful. 
Thank you, ominous possibility 20. I'm at the Vatican, OK?

May we put one in the Yahoo group?
Paddington trendy pick from Pat the bat. You want static. No, no, no, he should've come home tonight. Yeah, I old.

Thank you, extremism up. You must spatter out to make room for me, because of me.
Missus Brendzen structures all that you want to consider yourself a guest.
I killed them, thank you very much indeed.

I might try to stay up six minutes and 42 seconds. 
Got tough, but what about men? Notably, no lunch.
28 couldn't look good enough
and has an assistant who is, shall we say, a little girl.

You get the gist. Really, I guess I'd like to find a hidden key to this secret language, some profound code.  After all, what's the answer to life, the universe & everything?... 42.  Coincidence? I think not. 

Give it a try. (Your results may vary.) If you need me, I'm at the Vatican, OK?



Thursday, January 7, 2016

The View From January

On mornings when I can, I drink coffee by my kitchen window. In warmer weather, I drink it on my deck, with a view of my little pond. I have a rickety, cushioned reclining lawn chair I found for free on the way to Perry's a couple years ago. It's so comfortable, I keep it in the sunny corner of the kitchen all winter. I call it my Titanic deck chair. This was the view, last weekend.

The temperature was in the sixties F on Christmas day. My pond didn't freeze across until January 2, a new late record. I worry about climate change, but selfishly, I'm happy there hasn't been brutal cold and snow so far. I don't like mud, but it's easier to walk in it than on ice with my prosthetic leg. 

My leg's attachment mechanism (the lock that keeps my stump cinched into the socket with a lanyard screwed onto the gel liner) is currently broken. This means the leg can pull out of the socket, gradually, but enough to slow my walk to a cautious creep. This is on top of the increasing layers of stump socks I have to wear since my stump's been shrinking for months. I've started the process of getting a new socket, but I took the leg in to Hanger yesterday hoping for a new lock now. None on hand. Ordered, expected next week. 

So outside, I creep. Inside, the coffee's hot, the deck chair comfy, and the ship isn't sinking right now. The sun is even shining, today. Happy New Year from Holy Crow Farm.



Monday, December 21, 2015

Dream of the Long Walk: Solstice, One Year Ago

This is a dream I had one year ago last night, taken verbatim from my journal:

It was the End of Things. Society had broken down. There was lightning in the sky, and a cross between a comet and a bombing. There was an ongoing struggle against shadows. Fear shadows, pain shadows.

The choices: cower in the ruins of our homes in the woods, apart from everything we couldn't remember. Or start walking. Walking was an act of faith. Of surrender. 

At first, there was a veneer of camaraderie. Once you started walking, you found others to talk with as you walked. But as the stream of walkers grew, you lost touch with some, then forgot and met others. Then we just walked in silence.

We walked until we reached covered walkways like markets, but they stretched for miles. Some had people selling eggs, bartering. Then there were concrete paths, stairs through structures with objects on either side, on tables or just heaped. Clothing, watches, phones, shoes, for sale or barter. And also assembled in hopes that one of our steady stream of walkers passing by would see something they remembered.

When we were too tired to walk, we lay down next to the walkway. People gave us something to eat, and a blanket. Then when we woke, we'd start walking again.

As I walked, I realized I had a real left leg, though it should have been an above-knee prosthetic. I began to understand that the people at the sides of the walkways had already remembered, and, more importantly, had found objects that were clues to themselves and what they needed to do now. Gradually, I realized some of them were resistance fighters. Guerrilla warriors fighting for memory, fighting amnesia, on missions to fight the shadows. I identified with them. I wanted to help them. I knew I should have been too old (fifty-three!) and an amputee, but I was neither.

The farther I walked, the more patient, knowledgeable people I met waiting beside the tables to help us remember. I knew the ones who were afraid to remember and discover were still outside this place, clinging to the ruins they couldn't identify anymore. You had to be willing to walk. Everyone walking was ready to consider and confront what they might find.

Then I saw forks in the walkway that led to woodsy, rural areas with animals. There were bears in some enclosures along with cows, and I think the bears had forgotten too because they weren't especially dangerous. There was the potential for us to find the animal we needed to be paired with, like a totem, or an actual individual animal. These people who identified their animal-partner could join with the animal and go fight the shadows, understanding that you both could be obliterated in that battle. Then you'd have to start the walk again.

I found a table of t-shirts, I I shuffled through them. One said Tioga Park [where I exercised racehorses in the 1980's] and I said, This means something... At another table, a phone rang: an old, black phone with a curly cord. Whenever this happened, the person closest had to answer it. It was my boyfriend, Perry. But he wasn't sure where he was. I wasn't sure whether he was walking yet.

Then I passed through a building built on a pillar. To clean it, everything was secured and the whole structure tipped on its side so the wind could blow through, then tipped back.

Then I reached a farm with ponies and cows and pigs in a field. I said, THIS IS ME! We crawled under the fence and I put my hands on a chestnut pony that looked like Cupcake, the Shetland I owned for twenty years who taught my daughters to ride. I started to cry. The people helping me said, Good! This is good! 

They took me to see more horses. I remembered Laredo, and I fell down in the grass and clover and sobbed. I saw an appaloosa that looked like her, but wasn't, then another that could have been her just as I was different, with my real leg. I put my hands on this Laredo-mare, and I sobbed. The people with me said, This is your spirit partner! You'll both join the fight when you're ready. You don't have to walk anymore.

***

So this was my Walking Dream, solstice 2014. My journal entry ended, I'd like to put a photi of Laredo  **HERE**   but tonight the blog just gives me a frowny-face. Alas. You'll have to use you imagination. Happy Solstice. Tomorrow the daylight starts to increase.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

The Stories We Need to Tell

This week I heard storyteller and writer Regi Carpenter speak about her craft & upcoming memoir at a Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators meeting in Ithaca. The most powerful moment for me came when she described how her bother died and she realized many of his stories could never be known.

Then she asked, "What story are you not telling?"

It pierced me in two ways. While I've been writing down events in my life I used to be unable to even think about, other topics still make me hesitate, though I know that's one characteristic of interesting writing. To meet the hardest, most personal stuff head-on is to share elements commonly hidden at our core.

The other part is that I've been grieving the unknown stories of my boyfriend, best friend, lover and partner, Perry, who died last August 9 after a week on life support. It still seems impossible he's gone. 

I helped write his obituary, which seemed ludicrous, impossible that I was doing it, even as I did. I never used to understand why you would write, "passed away after a brief illness." But that was the line I used. Everything around his death was impossible. I included the basics (grew up in Blauvelt NY, educated at New England College & came to manage a rock back in Ithaca in the early 1970's, before managing a grounds crew at Cornell Plantations until his retirement) but I had to leave out the details that made him so complicated, funny, resilient and fair. How he married a millionaire, flew planes, drove race cars and traveled the world, but eventually divorced her. His heroin addiction in his late twenties and the arrest that probably saved his life. How he and I drove around various Finger Lakes in his '62 Corvette or his Porche, discussing families, love and breakups, depression, religion and atheism. On weekends, at his house twenty miles from mine, he grilled steaks or salmon, steamed vegetables and baked potatoes, and we watched NASCAR, golf and horse racing. With our gang at a pub called The Rose, we watched American Pharoah win the triple crown. Now every memory is a push-pin in my map of our last months, designating a decreasing distance to the end of my time with him. 

We were fixed up by a mutual friend the summer after my amputation in 2007. We hit it off, and spent weekends together for eighteen months. Perry called me almost  every single night, though I told him I knew he'd start slacking off the routine...but he didn't. After a year and a half, I was struggling with our age difference (he was 60 then, I was 46) and what I felt was a class difference. I was very aware he was semi-retired, and divorced from the millionaire; it struck me as a different world from my starving-artist/homesteader scramble of a life. I knew his background involved chainsaws and backhoes, rural as mine. I just couldn't quite see it.

I broke up with him. I call this my Three Year Brain-fart. But we still exchanged birthday cards. (He was a Gemini, like my horse.) I turned fifty in January of 2012. Got over myself. Got Perry's  birthday card, and decided to take up his offer of having coffee.

The last three and a half-plus years were wonderful. Solid, dependable. The kind of adult partnership I've never had. Even if conflicts twitched me off balance, I reveled in it; it was part of the relationship. I kidded him he might be too young for me. We talked about traveling to Scotland someday. We joked about trying to see if we could live together. We were happy. I feel like I let my guard down. Me, of all people, usually expecting disaster. I was content.

Perry hadn't felt well in a long time. Yeah, he was a lifelong smoker. He'd been seeing doctors for various symptoms, awaiting test dates for CT scans, MRIs. He kept playing golf, but we never did rent a houseboat in the Thousand Islands like we planned. It was impossible that his shortness of breath worsened so suddenly that I drove him to the ER, where he was put in the ICU, then on a ventilator by midnight. A "spot" on his lung x-ray two weeks before had massed into a hurricane filling the picture. Perry stayed on the ventilator for a week. This is what they mean by "life-support," by "medically-induced coma." Then it was removed. They gave Perry morphine. He was too weak to speak, semi-conscious. He died the day after. He was 67.

Going through his belongings with his relatives, we found a stash of photographs, the ones Perry had told me about, assumed lost in various moves.  My puzzle picture of Perry had been filling in gradually, with big empty hollows. Some  gaps filled in when his family arrived at the hospital where I'd camped out all week. Then a flood of photos in the hidden boxes... Some matched stories I'd heard from him in detail. Other offered questions and incidents. Except I can't find out now. I can't ask him.

 Death is still new to me. Rindle, the pony I raised, owned, loved and eventually put down, described on this blog, has been my only preparation. She taught me to grieve. It helps now.

I've deactivated my facebook account for now. I'm trying to sort things out in my head as I work on my fences, give some smart-lessons to my new mini-cayuse, write another novel in verse, pursue publication. And sort things out in print right here. It's been a strange lesson, losing Perry after I'd finally relaxed into a relationship with no more restlessness. When I took him to the hospital, I was sure there would be time to discuss and approach the events, good or bad. When they were about to put Perry on the ventilator, I was afraid of being over-dramatic, but I was also just plain afraid. I said, "Wait--" and slipped his oxygen mask down so I could kiss him and tell him I love him. 

I'm so glad I did. I miss him so much. It's hard when the phone doesn't ring each night at ten.     

Perry's obit is here, if you're interested. Perry Huested