doing nothing

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I can’t remember the last time I actually sat and did nothing, mind emptying into the slowly drifting clouds and the muted chirps of birds of all kinds. The air smells faintly of marsh. The sun is warm. The breeze is cool. I am thinking of nothing as I lay on my back, doing nothing being in a place safe from stress and worry,

This is a panoramic view of the estuary behind our cottage at Moody’s Cottages in Wells, Maine. (I have an iphone app that “stitches” photos together to make a panorama. Love that iphone!)

Right now I am at the library, using its free wifi while the rest of the family checks out the local fire house and police station. My grandson is building a collection of t-shirts and patches from such places in every town he visits. He knows as much about fire trucks and ambulances as those who actually work in them. He charms them into giving him tours and explaining what all the equipment does. He also likes to throw stones in the estuary.

Last night I finished reading Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters. She is by far my favorite writer; no one captures the magic of ordinary things the way she does. Thunder storms promised for tomorrow means that I will immerse myself in Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet. I just discovered her recently, and I’m hooked.

It’s going to be hard to get back to the hard real world that awaits me, scheduled with a week’s visit to my mother’s. But for now, it’s time for me and lobster and the ocean and the vast sky over the estuary, where I can lose myself in the sounds of silence.

Delayed Gratification

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We were supposed to leave for Maine today, but my grandson had a stomach bug and fever yesterday. He seems fine today, but we gave him another day home just to make sure.

It’s been a while since any of us have been able to go away for a whole week, and we are all looking forward to the ocean and the nature preserves and the deck on our cottage that looks out over an estuary. My grandson and his dad will fish, and my daughter and I will just veg out.

Time is passing too quickly for my liking and taking with it too much of the physical capacities I’ve always taken for granted. Degenerative disc disease is not uncommon for people my age, but mine is worse than normal. There’s not much I can do at this point — eat healthy, stretch….

I remember that my mother had a chinning bar attached near the top of an open doorway, and she would hang from it by her hands several times a day. I think it helped a lot with her spinal problems, and now I have one here. When I hang from it, I often can hear the pops of my spine decompressing.

I spent a little time online last night searching for ways to decompress the spine. Hanging by your hands from a bar is one of them — one of the least expensive and easy to use.

I am lazy and things I wanted and/or wanted to do always came easy to me. Notice I said “things I wanted.” Maybe I didn’t want the things I didn’t want because they didn’t come easy to me.

I was never one to delay gratification — whether it was eating chocolate or buying a new pair of jeans. This is something I am learning to tolerate now in my elder years.

I think of my dementia-plagued mom, who seems to be able to be gratified by so little — a globular gourmet lollipop that she can suck on for hours, a simple song that I make up as I go along.

Tomorrow, Maine, and some gratification for me. In another few weeks, I make the journey to try to give my mother some little gratification. (I wish I could take another vacation after that!)

Meanwhile, I am continuing to see a chiropractor for thoracic spine therapy, since the muscles are still pretty sore and in spasm from my fall off the bed at my mother’s a little over a month ago.

I will probably never delight in Salsa dancing again. And that’s too bad, because I always found the movements and the music very gratifying.

singing mom to sleep

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My mom lives more than 160 miles from me. She is 94 with severe dementia.

When I go and stay with her (about once a month) I sing to her, old songs that she might recognize — “Over the Rainbow,” “My Favorite Things,” “Try to Remember,” “When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along…..” I have a below average singing voice, but my singing seems to calm her down.

Tonight, 160 miles away, she wouldn’t calm down, and my brother was at his wit’s end. So I started singing to her over the telephone, and it worked. Now I have to figure out how to record some of those songs and burn them on a disk or get them onto an mp3 player so that I can send them to her — a medley of old songs to ease the demented mind.

Hey, whatever works.

Uncle Albert

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The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #18 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.

We called him Uncle Albert before he was the king. He was a sweet, shy man, you know. Stuttered a bit in stressful circumstances and always deferred to his more dashing brother, who was supposed to be king but gave it all up for love.

I remember sitting at a corner table with the rest of the kids in the family during his coronation celebration. It was quite an pompous affair, and poor Uncle Albert looked so uncomfortable. I thought he was going to vomit right then and there. No one paid much attention to us kids, so I swiped one of the commemorative pottery pieces from our table just to see if I could get away with it.

It’s been in the family since, and my granddaughter has it now. Keeps sharpened pencils in it.

She asked once if my Uncle Albert was the one the Beatles sang about. I think my Uncle Albert would would get a big kick out of that. And the pencil holder, too.

torn by craft

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I’m a writer. I’m a writer. That’s what I am. I’m also a cutter and sewer and looper. I want to do it all. I’ve always wanted to do it all.

So I’m writing. Mapgie Tales for one (a new one in the works). Entered an essay contest about death for another.

Pinned on my wall are pieces of what eventually will be a wall hanging for an online craft exhibit.

Maybe it’s because I started in therapy again, and that always gets my juices going.

Or maybe it’s because I’m cutting down on my anti-depressant.

Or maybe I’m getting manic in my old age.

Or maybe I’m avoiding thinking too much about the awful state my mother is in.

Or maybe all of the above.

So much to create. So little time.

the last of Lot’s wife

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The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #17 visual prompt of a female head. Go here to find other writers’ responses.

Lot's wife

She was my sister before she was Lot’s wife – Irit, my older sister, who was special to the goddess, although that was a fact only known to the women of Soddom. For it was the men who ruled our town, our lives, our destiny, burrowing into the soils along the edges of the town, along the shores of the salty Dead Sea, bringing up the dark thick substance that held together our walls and our dead. “Mumiya” it was called. You call it “asphalt.” Sometimes a man would fall into a firey pit and drown in it. He would become mummified – forever preserved in a column of stone.

Irit was a good wife, and Lot was one of the better husbands, although that is not saying much, given the place that the new god of men designated for women. That is why many of us kept to the old ways in secret, gathering over our shared cauldrons of stew, rich with the yieldings of the fertile lands we also shared beyond the smokey shoreline. We would give our thanks to the Mother of All, ask for her blessings and prophecies, look to her priestess for guidance.

And that is how Irit came to be caught in the fires finally sparked by the greed of some of our men. She had a vision, Irit did – a vision of the earth quaking and burning, a vision of a darkness billowing out from the underworld. And she told her husband, who was one of the better husbands, who respected the wisdom of women and their ways, and often took his wife’s counsel. But when Lot tried to warn his fellow townsmen to watch for signs, they would not listen, for it was not their god who spoke, and they coveted their riches.

And so when the earth began to tremble and red fires erupted along the shoreline, when the land began to melt and fold in on itself and stony shards shot up into the air, Lot and and his wife, Irit, gathered their family and began to flee north to the olive groves — until Irit heard the screams of a townswoman whose husband held her down on the ground so that she could not run. And so Lot’s wife turned to help her friend.

“No!” I cried to my sister. “No!” cried Lot to his wife.

“No!” cried Lot’s wife as a great dark wave erupted from the earth, engulfing her and leaving her hardened form to withstand the next rain of sulphur-spewn stones.

And that’s when her head broke off and rolled toward me down the slope, landing with her face looking into mine and still calling “No!”

I carried her hardened image with me through all of our long journeys north to the land of Hatti, where I finally settled with a band of women who called themselves “ha-mazan.”

We kept the mummified head of Lot’s wife, Irit, on the altar where we sought the guidance of the Great Mother, whom we all knew by different names – Ishtar, Astarte, Innana, Lilitu — to remind us of Irit’s last word.

I don’t know what happened to Lot and his children. But I do know that what everyone thinks happened in Soddom is not the story I know about Lot’s wife.

[writer’s note: details about Bronze Age towns along the Dead Sea gotten from here.]

Memorial Day is for the Dead

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I invite you to link here and read my son’s post, entitled as above, which begins thusly:

It says so right on the tin: “[Memorial Day] commemorates U.S. soldiers who died while in the military service”.

The key word in all of this is “died”, not “served” or, for that matter, “serves”. This day isn’t for anyone who ever found themselves in the military of the United States, or for those who find themselves there today. None of these truths dishonors living veterans (who have a day) or active duty personnel.

Death is different. Death is singular. Death is separate. Death is final. The point is to set aside a day in which we remember those whose service took them all the way past that final line. Whether or not they died for a just cause, they died in our name……..cont’d

And while I’m on the subject, I offer for your illuminination Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.”

a sad shoe story

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Magpie Tales features a weekly visual writing prompt, and this is my response to Magpie #16. Click here for more.

shoes

I sit on the floor and massage her bony feet, carefully avoiding the hammertoe and bunion that distort her right foot, although both bear assorted signs of 94 years of wear. How she once loved her stash of Ferragamo pumps — slim pointy toes, even slimmer curved heels. In high school, as the size of my feet caught up to hers, I would jam my feet into those Cinderella slippers, wondering if the price of pinch and pain was worth it. Decades have gone by since she chose to suffer for style and status, and those Ferragamos have long since gone to Goodwill. She has no choice now but to shuffle in soft slippers, her frivolous fling with vanity long forgotten. I sit cross-legged and barefoot on the floor and massage her hurting feet, delighting in my straight and polished toes and thankful that I had the good sense to choose otherwise.