Sleeping on Mom's hospital room floor

 In early December of my senior year, my mom got her second hip replaced.  After school I drove ten minutes to the Hood River Hospital to visit her.  She was almost recovered from the anesthetic by then, but she didn't say much to me other than, "You didn't need to come, I'm fine, go home and do your homework."  My sister was also there.  I felt unusually sleepy, so I laid down on the floor and dozed off for 10-20 minutes.  At the time I didn't know why I was able to sleep on such a hard floor, during a time in my life when I hadn't napped for well over a decade.  In retrospect, it might have been because the hospital room was warmer than anywhere I had been since September.  Our house was impossible to warm up with Dad and I gone all day, and my high school wasn't well heated, either.  When I got up, Mom urged me to go home.  She couldn't bare to be a burden.  Plus, it was starting to snow, and she got very nervous about people driving in the snow.

It's beautiful to drive while snowflakes fall.  The snow wasn't sticking so I wasn't nervous; I knew I had time to get safely home.  I was deep in thought.  When you get to the western edge of White Salmon, leaving town on SR 141, the road is flanked by oaks that arch over and form a sort of tunnel.  I was awe-struck by this picture, with the snowflakes pouring down, and I began to cry.  I didn't know the reason, but I was feeling something and it needed to come out.  Perhaps it was the strangeness of seeing my mother in a hospital, or the prospect of going home to a cold and empty house.  Despite how much I had hated the way my mom's anxiety had limited my options so much throughout my childhood, I think this is when I started realizing how dear to me she was.  This is when our relationship started shifting, when I started feeling anxious for her.  

Sunsets in the valley (CTTWWS)

 Sometimes the wind blew hard enough that I could sing as loud as I wanted.

My siblings and I called my mom a "worry wart."  There was so much that she wouldn't let us do because she worried what might happen.  Until I got near my teen years I wasn't even allowed to go outside without permission.  Every once in a while she would yell my name, just to find out where I was.  It's an eerie sensation, as an adult, to imagine I hear her call me.  

When I started "pushing my boundaries" successfully, I would run up the hill behind our house (barefoot, of course).  I kept at it until I could run to the first peak without stopping.  There was an incredible view from there, facing west.  I probably watched hundreds of sunsets from there.  I felt like royalty, looking down on my little valley, out at the mountains, the colorful light show.  Just me, my dog, the wind, and God.

I miss having that quiet, beautiful place to go and settle my thoughts.  Anywhere I go here, there are people.  Except my closet, and that's a bit cramped. 

Winter nights (CTTWWS 2)

 It was so cold on winter nights when neither Joel nor Kevin were living with us.  They knew how to stoke a stove.  I would stack as many as six blankets on top of myself, only to find I had kicked them in different directions by the middle of the night and I was shivering.  I dreaded showering.  I would swing my hair against the side of the woodstove to try to dry it faster.  Didn't seem to make a difference.  It was a dreary existence with no warm escape, no sympathy.  My brother was mean, my mother was in pain, my dad was at work.  The wood was always slightly damp.

There was one winter when the windows started freezing on the inside.  Beautiful patterns of thick frost covering the kitchen windows, parts of my bedroom windows and some of the other windows around the house.  Our house was built in the fifties.  Some of the window frames were wood, some aluminum, none were well insulated.  The frosted windows happened several times that winter; it was unusually cold.  After that it only happened a couple times in subsequent winters.  I think my blankets were frozen to the window one of those mornings.  I know that happened to someone else at school.  

Cattle Prodding (CTTWWS 1)

 I once saw a steer jump over a fence.

It's one of those images that is etched like a gif in my memory, even though it was well before gifs were invented.  It was such a strange sight, a hefty huge block of meat lighting up off its dainty feet and barely gliding over the slackened barbed wire.  He's smarter than I thought, I thought.  How are we going to fix this fence?  Mom is going to laugh so hard at this story.

I was about ten years old.  A family from church had more steers than they had room for on their property, so they were renting our pasture.  We raised a steer ourselves during this time.  My brother and I named him Pug.  I'm not sure I had ever actually seen a pug dog, but something about this steer's face said "pug."  

The fences around the pasture were old and a bit unreliable.  We reinforced most of the fences with twine cut from hay bales.  That was a huge undertaking, mostly done by Mom.  But every once in a while a steer would find a way through the fence  I don't remember how it became my job to find and chase steers back into the pasture, but I did find it satisfying. For a long time I had a particular old broom handle that was my cattle prod of choice.  I always worried that they would kick me, but they never did.  There was one steer that escaped more frequently, and was especially difficult to coax back into the pasture.  His name was Fruitcake.  If he was feeling frisky, I would need a second person to help get him into the gate.  He wasn't much afraid of me, either.  I had to hit him pretty hard with that broom handle sometimes.

I think I learned a lot about angles from this job.  I had to figure out the best angle at which to approach the steer so as to move him toward the gate but still be able to stop him if he bolts to the right or left.  My dad helped teach me this.  He would tell me right where to stand, halfway between him and the fence.  

Pug tasted fine.  Mom would say, "We're having Pug meat for dinner."  I didn't watch when they shot him.  I'm not that tough.  There was blood in the puddle by the feed trough for a long time.  The following spring, that whole area was solid chamomile.  

Happy Easter!

 I forgot about my writing.  I'm picking it back up again.

This weekend I have been watching our church's General Conference.  It is a wonderful time of instruction and peace.  Because it is Easter, most of the talks have been about the Atonement of our Savior Jesus Christ.  These talks are especially aimed to comfort due to the difficult times so many of us are facing.  I love General Conference weekend, it reminds me where my focus should be, not on things of the world but on things of God and eternity.  I always hope that this focus will last.  I don't know how long it does.  Taking care of the temporal needs of my family gets me so distracted and frustrated.  

I hope my children know I love them.  I hope they know I love our Heavenly Father.  I hope they understand someday what sacrifices were made for them.

Firefly

 Over the past couple weeks I've been watch Firefly with my husband.  It's okay.  I'm not in the "crazed-fan-would-kill-for-a-second-season" camp, sorry.  It has been funny hearing their cowboy dialect get better over the season.  Well, somewhat better.  Jayne sounds natural from the beginning, but Kayley still doesn't.  In the first episode, the way most of them said "ain't" sounded like they had never said the word before in their lives.  

The Cure for Crazy Dragons

 When dragons get very old, they go insane.

It's worse than senility or dementia that is found in humans.  The older dragons get, the better they get at producing and aiming the acid that gives them their "fiery" breath.  Eventually some of this acid leaks into their skull and damages their brain.  This causes agitation and insanity, which in turn causes them to breathe out more acid.  Thus their brains become more damaged.  The cycle can eventually lead to death.  Some experts postulate that dragons could be functionally immortal if it weren't for this flaw in their anatomy, or if they would simply refrain from spewing acid.  

In more recent times, somewhat of a remedy has been found for draconic insanity.  In a far northern land, some humans got the idea to make a dessert from mixing cow's cream with mashed fruit in a bowl made of ice.  They continue stirring until it is of a partially frozen texture, then they eat it.  It has become so popular that they transport huge blocks of ice to southern countries just so more people can enjoy this dessert.  By some chance, a crazed dragon managed to get some of this dessert in her mouth one day, and she almost immediately calmed down.  Word has spread, so now any town that has insane dragon problems is sure to keep blocks of ice and chubby cows close at hand.

Where do photons go to bed

 When you turn off the night light on your bedside table, where do the photons go?  Do they nestle into the nuclei of all the atoms around, waiting until the sunlight returns?  Or do they fall into your fluffy blankets, slow down to a softer pace, until some electrons get excited about the blanket folds rubbing together?  That is, if you didn't use a dryer sheet.  Certainly they wouldn't have a "Photons Only" meeting inside the light bulb, where they would discuss fashion, politics, and how annoying neutrinos are.  

 When to get out of an investment seems like too difficult of a question for me.  I prefer questions with cut and dry answers.  If I lose out on an increase, I feel like I did it wrong.  But that's my dad talking in my head.

My muscles won't stop hurting.  Even muscles that I can't quite tell where they are.  I can't figure out what causes it, or what abates it.  Such mystery.  The worst part is, if it doesn't have a diagnosis, it seems fake.  Like no one will believe me.  

I am not writing anything great today and it shows.

Humming Hymns

 We aren't yet allowed to sing in our church meetings.  I said to my husband, they didn't say we couldn't hum.  So I have been humming along under my mask, following the words on my phone (the hymnbooks have been taken away as well).  I am surprised how well I know the alto line on a lot of these hymns.  Over all my decades of singing these hymns, the harmonies have sunk into my memory and become natural to me.  

About the Pandemic

 One year after the pandemic began, I got an email from my doctor's office saying that I now qualify for the vaccine.  No explanation why I qualify.  When I went to schedule the shot, there were no appointments available.  Still I wait.

How would I describe this year?

Painful.  Divisive in some ways, yet unifying in others.  Worsening all my nightmares.  Worsening all my failures.  Lost opportunities for my children.  New opportunities to learn about humanity.

I walked past an elementary school today.  I heard children playing on the playground.  That's something I had taken for granted my whole life, children going to school.  How strange it is to feel deeply grateful to hear them back at it again.  

Something New

 The idea now is to Write Something Every Day.  I have been wanting to get back into writing for a long time now.  They say that the best way to get better at writing is to just write, so I'm going to just write something every day and hope this becomes a habit, hope something good comes out of it.  

Here's a picture.

It's a bunny!!  The kids were wanting another bunny for a long time.  I saw some for sale yesterday, so I brought one home.  He's a sweet little zoomer; they named him Pepper.  Biscuit is fascinated by him, though I'm afraid he might just want to eat him.  I haven't let the two into the same space yet.  Pepper thumped a lot the first several times he got near Biscuit.  Heehee, baby bunny thumps.

That's the news from the House of Funk.  More to come tomorrow, if I keep up with this.