For the past several weeks, I’ve had to take down the bird feeders as soon as it gets dark because the raccoons have taken to dining here each night. Not only do they dig out the rocks that were holding the bird feeder pole in place in its hole; one night when I was running late, I caught one climbing up the pole and swatting at the feeders, trying to knock them down.
Every night I took the feeders in. Every night the raccoons would dig out the rocks looking for stray seeds. Every morning I would straighten the pole and hang the feeders. And every night……
Last night I forgot to take down the feeders. This morning, not only was the pole down on the ground, but one feeder was totally destroyed and the other was missing. The darn varmints must have decided that they felt like “take out”.
So, today he cemented the pole into the ground. One problem solved.
But how do we keep the raccoons from climbing up the pole once we replace the feeders? They manage to climb right over the baffle that keeps the squirrels out.
Barbed wire wrapped around the pole, I suggest. He doesn’t want to hurt the ballsy critters. I figure that they’ll get pricked once and they won’t try it again.
I haven’t found anything online that guarantees to keep raccoons out or away from anything.
At least, for now, I’m reprieved from my Sisyphean task.
I still think barbed wire is the answer.

I can’t believe it! He mowed down my lush stand of foxglove that was growing (well, they were mostly alreay spent) along the back of the house. I know that it’s his house, and he told me two years ago that he doesn’t want stuff planted alongside the house. But at least he could have warned me and given me a chance to move the plants. I had a huge and healthy melissa officinalis that I brought here from my last garden. Gone. Mowed down. I had some plants that I wanted to dig up and take to my daughter for her garden. Gone. Mowed down.
If he had warned me that he was going to mow, I would have told him that I was waiting for a day with less than 80% humidity to go out there and move a lot of the plants. The rest he could have mowed down.
I suppose they’ll come back next year.
Buit maybe I won’t.

Yesterday, I cut and filed her fingernails and soaked her feet so that I could cut her toenails. It’s true, you know, that both finger and toenails get thicker and harder as you get older. There really is nothing physical that gets better with age.
I’m looking at her left foot — big bunion, hammertoe, mangled other toe. Funny, but her right foot is not that bad. I think, like me, her left foot is wider than her right. Unlike me, she always bought shoes to fit the narrower foot instead of the other way around.
My mother once had racks of expensive pumps — pointed toes, high heels. I remember, back in the 50s, when I just couldn’t wait to wear a pair of shoes with heels, I would try on my mother’s pumps. Eventually, we wore the same size, at least in length, and that was when I realized that the only way pumps would not slip off the heels of my feet was if they were tight across the toes. Apparently, the same held true for my mother, but that didn’t stop her from buying those Ferragamos.
So now I spend hours online trying to find her shoes that do not hurt her left foot. I think I found a pair that might work, and I’m ordering two pair in two different widths. We just might have to buy both pair, the wide for her right foot and the double wide for her left foot.
I wonder if there’s anyone out there who has the opposite problem, ’cause we will have a right shoe that’s size 8.5 double wide and a left shoe that’s 8.5 wide.

Now I can add to the heretofore mentioned list of varmints eating their way through my plantings Japanese Beetles and little reddish brown moths. Both are so plentiful around here that you bump into them just walking down the driveway to get the mail. They careen into your legs, land on your head. You unknowingly bring them into the house and then have to chase after then with the dollar-store flyswatter. Yuck. Yuck. And more yuck!!

No Ordinary Ordinance
by MYRLN (guest poster)

In Utah, a 70-year old woman was handcuffed and tossed in the slammer.

Why?

‘Cause she wouldn’t tell a cop her name.

What?

Yeah, honest. This cop was trying to write her a ticket but she wouldn’t give her name and then she decided to go back into her house.

And…?

And the cop must’ve figured she was trying to escape, so he grabbed her and cuffed her. Then she tripped on her steps and fell, scraping her nose and elbows. And the cop took her to the slammer.

You’re kidding!

Nope, and there she languished for more than an hour before police higher-ups heard of the arrest and had her released. (No, her name wasn’t Hilton.) And the arresting cop was put on administrative leave.

Huh? Wait, wait…what was he ticketing her for in the first place? Speeding? DUI? No license?

Well…no. It seems the woman had violated the town’s “nuisance” ordinance.

Ah…playing the t.v. too loud! Or too many animals?

Uh…no. It’s an ordinance against neglected yards. The woman had refused for a year to water her lawn.
HUH? And they…?

Yeah…they did.

But it’s HER lawn!

Yeah…there’s a town without a lot on its collective mind, huh? Much like the rest of the country which insists pukey, manicured grass you have to water often is superior to nature’s own hardy, self-tending menu of wildflowers, dandelions, weeds, berries, new trees. Nope…we can’t have that stuff. That’s…well, natural. The last thing this country wants to be. ‘Cause in our twisted logic, natural’s not…well, natural. It leads to violating the nuisance ordinance.

Back in the days when I was only responsible for myself and had a job that paid well enough, I was able to indulge my attraction to mysticism.

Mystics hold that there is a deeper, more fundamental state of existence hidden beneath the appearances of day–to–day living (which may become, to the mystic, superficial or epiphenomenal). For the authentic mystic, unity is both the internal and external focus as one seeks the truth about oneself, one’s relationship to others and Reality (both the world at large and the unseen realm).

What a luxury that seems to me now, when day-to-day living is all that I have the energy to accomplish.
I think of this now because for many of those past years, I often joined a close friend of mine at workshops, seminars etc. that were based in the processes of the mystic, particularly as they attract creativity and artistic inspiration. Married and childless, she has gone on to teach some of these processes on the college level. Without responsibilities to any dependent, she can continue to explore the ideas and philosophies and spiritualities that well-known modern mystics such as Matthew Fox and Jean Houston continue to publicize. I think of this now because I had lunch several weeks ago with her and her husband as they passed through town.
I am at times envious of the luxury of time that she has – the luxury of being able to place a priority on her psychological and spiritual development, of not being the one grounding factor in a dependent person’s life, of having time to contemplate…..
I wonder, when I am done with the physical and emotional requirements of caregiving — after I have done with confronting, every day and night, the struggles of human life on its most elemental level, if I will again have that hunger for the expanding horizons that mysticism has to offer.
When I think of my life after this difficult piece of it, I think of moving to live near my daughter, spending lots of fun time with my grandson, doing the creative homey things I don’t have enough time to do now (sewing, knitting, cooking what I like), sitting under a tree and reading well-written fiction, visiting my women friends in Albany for days at a time. Getting in my car and visiting people I know up and down the East Coast. Spending February with my cousins in Florida.
I don’t think about taking workshops or mind-wrestling with the unknowables or mining more of my sub- and un-consciousnesses.
But, of course, you never know. The mystic in me might just be biding her time, waiting for the luxury of freedom.

The weblog doesn’t give any information about who is behind the site (and I wish it would), but the informational posts provide very useful information. I know that there are caregivers who read Kalilily Time and who might appreciate this relatively new blog.
This is what the site says about itself:

CareShare Network is primarily a platform for caregivers to communicate with each other, but every voice is welcomed in the dialogue. It provides commentaries, original articles and abstracts of caregiving- and related-news stories for its visitors. The platform is not just for news briefs and alerts but also for sharing, discussing and analyzing this important issue that affects an estimated 34 million people and their families in this country.

I planted at least a dozen asiatic lilies, the majority of which became snacks for the various squirrels, chipmunks, racoons, and groundhogs that populate our acres. There are three lilies in the back that are just beginning to bloom, and the one pictured above, which actually made it through to fruition.
But the battle for survival still goes on.

On this country’s most important holiday, I celebrate by sleeping. No independence here, as we are all imprisoned by my mother’s dementia.
Be sure to celebrate by going here and reading or listening to Keith Olbermann’s latest documentation of how our nation’s independent soul has been mangled by those who are supposed to lead us and protect us.
Next, think about this poem, from Jim Culleny’s daily poetry email:

And, finally, enjoy this reprint of Monday’s guest-poster MYRLN’s latest email to the White House.

Sent To: president@whitehouse.gov
Subject: July 4
Date Sent: 03 Jul 2007 08:24 PM

Dear George,

With Independence Day here tomorrow, I would like to report to you two people whom I believe are the most serious threat to our democracy in decades. I would report them to local authorities, but they couldn’t do anything about these 2, so I figured I would go straight to the top in the hopes you will act against them. Please do something to rid us of them both. The two of whom I speak are you and your vice-president.

There are lots of fireworks going on all over the country tonight. I’m hoping there will be some even more explosive fireworks soon that will blow those grifters out of the White House.

The following post is by non-blogger MYRLN, who guest-posts here every Monday.

The Power of One

And so we come to Independence Day — that anniversary of a nation’s freeing itself from the tyranny of an absolute monarchy. America threw off the English shackles. And that was that. No more subservience. Freedom reigned supreme. Forever. Period.

So we celebrate that day every year. We have parades, picnics, fireworks. Some even mention the Declaration of Independence. Some even read it, a few do so aloud. And that’s that. Then the next day, everyone goes back to work in service to the great god Economy and its co-deity, Government. Feeling good. We’ve just celebrated Independence Day. We’re Free.

Hm-m-m. Fought for once, Independence is ours forever. Hm-m-m. In the greater world, such has remained pretty much true for America. But what about WITHIN America? Are we, each and every one of us, free? Or have we forgotten that freedom must be protected individually, asserted regularly, or it will be lost…or taken away? We have those two greedy deities all too willing to strip us of our individual freedoms — those freedoms far more important than an entire nation’s freedom from tyranny. The freedom of ONE. The Individual.

And that freedom — the Individual’s — is the one which the dual deities of Economics and Government have sought to strip away. (Think cost of living, think taxes, think health care, think privacy, think outsourcing, think union-busting…oh, you get it.) Spying, detainment, surveillance, seizure, threat, fear — all sanctioned these days by the Dual Deities. And too much accepted without question. Resistance, after all, could be dangerous, lead to prison. Well…over a hundred years ago, the great individualist, Henry David Thoreau, was thrown in jail for refusing to pay taxes, refusing to recognize the right of Government to levy a tariff on his existence. Afterwards, he wrote (in his “Civil Disobedience”) how the punishment was totally ineffective because the only thing Government jailed was his body. His spirit, his sense of INDEPENDENCE remained free. It could not be jailed. Government, he wrote, “can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.” And he continued, “There will never be a free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power.”

But only the Individual can ultimately cause that recognition, insure its presence.

So this year, as you superficially celebrate Independence Day, take stock. Read the Declaration of Independence. Read the Constitution. (Don’t have copies? Why not?) Then take a good hard look at your individual independence, remembering that the stripping away of each individual’s freedom means that eventually the entire nation’s independence will be gone. Taken away by the hands of those like Dumbya Bush and Darth Cheney and Wall Street moguls who think only in terms of their moneyed interests. All individual freedom gradually lost with our meek and subservient individual compliance.
But you have the power to make this a real Independence Day again. If you use it. As the forefathers did 231 years ago.

Make it happen.