All posts filed under: Life

Always so surprising.

Numb.

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The leaves on the ground are red and orange and gold and wet in the rain. The air stinks of fall, of soil going to sleep and grasses falling into dormancy. The squirrels stash nuts on my hose reel, on the little ledges of decorative trim all over the house, in the compost heap. Hamish the Corgi races smiling through the fluttering heaps of leaves at top speed, he thinks the rustling noises make it seem like he is going faster, faster, faster. Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog stands at the back door testing the temperature with her nose, holding one dainty foot above the rain-wet stoop. Maybe, maybe not. She can’t decide if she really wants to go outside. I should feel something when I look at all this charm but for the next day or three or four I’m numb. Numb at best. A many-months long project finished up this morning when the grant proposal was submitted. I balanced working on it with other writing projects, other lab work, the start …

My work colleagues are dogs. And no, I’m not a sheepherder.

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Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog and Hamish the Corgi work with me all the day long. And they work hard on their dog chores. Miss Tibbit holds the cushion down on the chair. Hamish holds the chair in position. They sigh and stretch and mumble over their tasks. Every now and again, Hamish has to squirm into a better holding position, Miss Tibbit must squeeze herself tighter into her little dog-round position. Today Miss Tibbit worked in the window seat in the front parlor. Hamish occupied himself with holding down the old red settee. I was so lonely. The keys wouldn’t type right on the keyboard. The words wouldn’t come in my careful writing. The day was bleak. Now we’re back up here for the evening round of work. Sweet Tibbit is snoring and twitching with her full post-dinner belly and Hamish looks like he may have actually passed out. And, sure, the WideEyedSpouse is across the room, sighing and creaking around in his chair doing mysterious Spouse office things.  But he’s with …

…time is passing at an accelerated rate –

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I looked out my office window this morning and saw yellow maple leaves scattered all over the yard. The borage in the garden is barely clinging to abundant life. The bees are a little less busy in the blooms. It isn’t summer anymore. Time is passing. Normally I don’t think much about the seasons changing, except to contemplate on the untidy lack of straightness in our planet’s axis relative to the orbital plane. That bothers me kind of a lot. Things should be straight, not at weird angles making everything all tilty and awkward and winter and summer. But I keep noticing – time is passing. Yesterday was trash day. Our junky old dishwasher didn’t last even an hour out on the curb. And that’s fine, except that I would be willing to swear that it just was trash day the day before that. It only comes once a week so if every day is trash day in my mind, what is happening to the days in between? Time is passing in a blur of …

When deadlines physically manifest.

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When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall deadline grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the office wall, and she looks you crooked in the eye and she asks if you finished your draft yet, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ WideEyedFunk always says at a time like that: “Is your draft done yet, WEF?” “Yes ma’am, it’s uploaded to dropbox.” Misquote adapted from Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. Director John Carpenter. Twentieth Century Fox.

Chickens three ways.

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Chickens. The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me have any. We have the space for a microflock and someone has to eat all of those extra worms in the worm bin. Which, if you recall, was also forbidden by the Spouse. He believes he has some power over the goings on of the WideEyedHousehold. Funny. Chickens were in my life three ways today. The Caribbean chicken spends most days with me. I carried that one from his home rolled in a tube. I took the Caribbean chicken to a frame shop here in Buffalo and I’m pretty sure that when we unrolled the canvas, sunshine and cheer glowed out at us. The framer laughed, couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I worry that I brought only one Caribbean chicken home. There were a dozen or more – we were left in the back room of a little gallery to flip through the canvases and pick which chicken would be moving to Buffalo with us. Do the others miss our little red chicken? Have they moved to homes in Paris, …

what is now and what will be..

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My dream self is a deadly street fighter. My dream self can speak 4 languages fluently. My dream self has several published books, can fence (with a sword, not stolen merchandise), and has a Nobel Prize. She has a tattoo of a stately oak (Quercus coccinea Muenchhausen) scribed on her back and joie de vivre on her arm. My dream self can drive race cars and ski the triple black diamond trails. My dream self is smart, she is confident, she never eats too many potato chips in one sitting. She is perpetually 35 years old, young, fit, lovely, and doesn’t need reading glasses. My dream self is kind, mature, and gracious. She never has too much or too little to say and never, ever makes a fool of herself. She has never disappointed people, or been disappointed by them. She doesn’t fail or falter. I have, I do. I’m old. Accomplishments are things past. Regrets, disappointments live long in my heart. But Dream-Self reminds Me-Self: dreams are not what was. Dreams are what is …

Dark energy and love.

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Yesterday evening I was reading about the form of the visible universe in my new backyard astronomy book. The WideEyedSpouse was doing something involving dinner while I sat at the awesome vintage kitchen table. Wiggins the Ancient Cat kept trying to put his butt on the page. Tibbit the Useless rested her chin on my knee. She was bound for disappointment, as I was reading not eating. Hamish the Corgi sat looking at me, learning about the universe through our mental link. Stars. Planets. Constellations. Yeah, yeah. Nothing new there. (Except that I discovered that I should be able to see the Milky Way directly above my house right now and all I can see is the glare of my neighbors’ anti-thief lights. Annoying, but what can do you? Cities are creepy.) Then, I looked at a photograph from the Hubble that captured hundreds of whirling galaxies. They face every which way. They are different colors. Big ones, little ones. Galaxies all over the place in every direction. There are billions of them. I felt …

A Stranger At Home

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The WideEyedSpouse and I grew up with tens of thousands of strangers joining our city every summer. For years I served them, working jobs at the drugstore, a campground, doling out aloe vera and firewood to heal sizzled skin and provide happy vacation memories. It never occurred to me to wonder what they thought about, what they talked about, what they were like. They were just people filling cars, filling the roads I needed to travel, filling lines at Wawa where I bought my coffee and American cheese with mustard and mayo on white bread sandwiches. Now Spouse and I have joined them. We left town by 1990, we didn’t know it was forever. College, grad school, jobs here and there. We’ve walked beaches far away – other shores on continents on other oceans. In places where no one has heard or will hear of our home town and few people speak our language. Yet, when we think of going to the beach, The Beach is the north end of our home island. Everywhere else …

Ten reasons not to buy a used car.

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The plan was simple. Hop in the car. Scoot over the Canadian border to hit the closest Costco and back home for lunch. What? Why Costco specifically? Because friends, they sell Kirkland Signature peanut butter filled pretzel nuggets. And our laboriously imported supply from an Alaskan Costco ran out. Needs must. No other peanut butter stuffed pretzel nugget will do. As the mighty Pathfinder heaved itself up and over the arc of the Peace Bridge, the WideEyedSpouse and I witnessed our doom. Cars. Cars as far as the eye could see gleaming in the summer sun, filled with hopeless dead-eyed passengers, lined up in two endless highway lanes out of Canada. On our side the border lines were short, but leaving…leaving was going to be bad. Once you are on the Bridge there is no turning back, no way home that doesn’t include two border crossings. I looked at the Spouse. “Well,” I said, “I guess we can take our time putzing in Costco.” What we didn’t know? Saturday marked the start of a major Canadian holiday weekend. I …

I dreamed of flesh eating beetles.

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I dreamed of flesh eating beetles and mortifying tissue and woke with the sense memory of the smell of decay. I blame the Turdus migratorius from yesterday. It wasn’t his fault, poor little robin, that one of the students found him dead on the road and collected him for the lab. It certainly wasn’t his fault that a skilled graduate student showed me how to skin and eviscerate a little songbird using his carcass. We recorded data for science and the permits, and plucked and skinned and removed blobs from inside him using forceps. We wrapped him in cheesecloth (did the cheesecloth company ever imagine such a use?) and put him in the lab fridge to dry out for a couple of days. It made me think of dry aging a nice roast. Might have to hit the butcher later. The dermestid tank, the flesh eating beetle habitat, was right next to us while we worked on the bird. Did they watch us prepare their supper? The larvae will creep through the cheesecloth and snack …