Healing

 

Gorgeous sunset the other evening. If I'm out and about in the house, and see the light change, I rush outside to see what's happening in the sky. We don't often get the spectacular colors like this; more often than not, we have creeping fog occluding the sky at this time of day and season. 

It's very pleasant not to have my hand in a brace or splint. For a while yesterday, I even wore my watch. The freedom of movement has made my hand swell a little, so I left the watch on my bedside table today. But nothing hurts. I like that.

I talked to a woman who was at Radiology in the hospital yesterday when I was. I encountered her first in the waiting area; she tried to rearrange her body in the (very uncomfortable) chair, and yelped in pain as her left wrist contacted the arm of the chair. "Careful," I warned her, knowing just how a damaged wrist can hurt.

Encountering her again in the line for x-rays (more uncomfortable chairs in a different area), I queried, "Did you have a fall?" and held up my left arm with its stiff black brace. At her nod, I told her, "Me, too."

She told me she had just had her cast removed from her arm, and that it still hurt like hell. I didn't tell her it was going to hurt like hell for a couple more weeks, but we chatted about falls and breaks and getting older until I got called in for my x-rays.

That was the first stranger I've talked to since the start of the quarantine in February 2020. 

Her story was so important to me -- I would have gladly had the wait in line go longer to hear about her life. It's why the Piker Press is something I don't want to give up. What people's lives are all about -- that's the most precious thing I get to experience.

Tell me your dreams, tell me what last week was about. Tell me about the things you lie awake at night and imagine (skip the porn, though) about the world. 

 

Tell me the story of Who You Are.

My Dear Howie

I always knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye to him. From our first meeting, he captured my heart and took up residence within it. He left this world on Tuesday, the last day in September.

Howie was a shelter dog, although how anyone could leave such an adorable striped puppy behind, I could never imagine. But their foolishness was my fortune, because Howie -- as I've said many times before -- was the very best dog I've ever had.

He was a wonderful traveler, even when we had to drive for ten hours in a day, always cheerful, completely trustworthy, delighting in McDonald's for a breakfast egg.

And how he could run! We knew from the shelter that his mother was a German shepherd mix, and from his topline it was clear that he had some Queensland heeler in him, but whether the stripes came from a whippet or a greyhound, who knows? In a run with other dogs, there would come a point when Howie would just shift gears, and change from a rollicking mutt to a speed machine, leaving every other dog far behind.

When Alex and John brought Lillian home from the hospital, Howie carefully sniffed her, and then put the top of his head against her newborn feet. And then the cat walked in, and Howie ran him off with great roars of warning. Never was Howie anything but gentle and loving with the girls; as soon as Joan could crawl, Howie always cleaned her face as he passed by. (She loved it.)

He always had his eye on me, to follow me through the house, to keep me company outside. Even on his last day, he took up a station on the loveseat near my rocking chair, and every time I looked up, if he was awake, he was watching me. My dear, dear boy.

What I don't know how to speak of is how much I dreaded him getting older; he did it fairly gracefully, but the first time I saw him fall down, nearly two years ago, my heart started breaking. I knew that I wouldn't have him for very long after that, and was surprised that he made it into his fourteenth year.

In July he had a visit to the vet and she was impressed at how well he was aging, even though she managed to use the phrase "because he is so old" about ten times. But by then, he couldn't go for walks any more -- he could make it about a block up the street and back, and it would wear him out.

Over the past few weeks we saw him decline rapidly, falling down more and more often, sleeping most of the time, choosing to doze on our bed rather than keep us company outside. He began to withdraw, at night putting himself in the farthest location from us in our bedroom.

I miss him so much.

There will be other dogs in my life, I'm sure. I like dogs, and after all, my abuelita Grammy Palos always said that one should have animals around to let you know if there's anything evil about. But I strongly suspect that there will never be another one even close to Howie.

Howie Zimm   2001 - 2014

 

Yuck for Lent

I've said for years that if you don't decide on a path for Lent, the Powers That Be will choose one for you. I guess I wasn't clear enough about my path; I thought I'd sing a hymn a day, do some religious reading. But instead I was sent a variety of flu that my autumn inoculation apparently didn't cover. So this first week of Lent has been spent largely on pondering the Jesuit way of approaching life: you should neither want to die nor live, but accept what is given you.

I didn't really want to die, but this flu certainly did put a dent in wanting to keep on living like that.

An Autumn Evening

My studio in the garage is already starting to get chilly in the evenings, already too chilly to want to work out here in the mornings. In another week, I'll be swearing about having not laid out the cash to insulate the ceiling over the summer as I promised myself last January that I would.

There are so many things I keep saying I'll do: finish those novels, put my finished novels up on Amazon Kindle Direct; finish the six oil paintings hanging around the studio, continue with some colored-pencil sketches I was really having fun with months ago; make a comforter from an old polyester blanket and a deliciously-textured cotton duvet cover someone gave me, sew a couple baby outfits, hem the veils that cover my mouth, cheeks, and ears while I'm riding during fly season and hot sunny days.

Everything takes time.

I did manage to get a winter garden planted, with seed onions, spinach, beets for beet greens (I already ate a few of the tiny leaves and they are wonderful), chard, lots of snow peas, and yesterday I finally saw some of my lettuces sprouting -- it's red-leaf lettuce and the tiny dark leaves were nearly invisible against the soil. Planting the garden took a couple days, working the soil, sowing seeds, weaving a twine lattice across the south planters so that cats would stop digging in it (had to replant the beets after that), weeding out the rogue nasturtiums that insist on popping up to strangle all the other plants.

Today I caught up on the last of the laundry to be folded, went out to the ranch and exercised the horse in the arena, then dunged out his paddock. After a shower, I began making braised lamb shanks (time-consuming but well worth the time spent) and gorditas (fat little tortillas) for dinner. John made tzatziki (cucumbers and stuff in Greek yogurt) to accompany the lamb.

Good work, a feast, and a long autumn evening to watch NFL football and ponder the paths life takes and to question the decisions of coaches.

Projects can wait for a day or two, I think.

Mortality and Monitors

A week ago last Thursday, I had an interesting day. While at the supermarket, I walked past a woman wearing a particularly vile perfume. Even though I never got within 15 feet of her (Bernie hustled me in the opposite direction as soon as he caught the first whiff), my eyes began to burn and tears welled up, my nasal passages and lungs burned, and I began to cough. Twenty minutes later, I felt dizzy and sick, and couldn't draw a full breath.

By mid-afternoon, I still couldn't eat or drink anything; my stomach felt tight and bloated. I felt like I was running out of air, but couldn't draw a deep breath. Couldn't. I seriously began to wonder if my time on Earth was up.

Fortunately, by nightfall, I was able to take full breaths again, and I am alive to tell about it. Being alive and not dying made me think about things I've been putting off, things I've been Not Doing Because They Are Silly.

One of the things I've been Not Doing is getting a TV for our bedroom. Why would we need a TV in the bedroom? Oh, maybe because we hog the living room TV watching Food Network most evenings, or DVDs that only Bernie and I watch; and sometimes I just don't want to watch Lillian's choice of cartoons. Another of the Not Doing things is replacing my desktop computer monitor. My little Sony has been a workhorse since 2003, and it still works, but truly, technology has made some advancements since then.

So since I actually had the money stashed away in my Other Shore account, why not use it before some random perfume-reeking cow does me in? On Saturday I killed two Things with one purchase. For the living room, I bought a monster 50" TV so that we can see every high-definition booger and crumb on our favorite football players, and put the 37" TV on my desk in the bedroom. We get cable back there, and a high-def TV isn't awful to be close to.

Oh, my goodness, Photoshop has taken on a whole new level of fun-ness. And you would be surprised how very quickly one can get used to having a monitor that size.

And here I am, alive, and enjoying the Silly Thing.

The Good Life

I think that this is my favorite picture of me in the past ten years.

Just looking at it reminds me of how pleasantly cool the water was on my be-sneakered feet after a two-hour ride; how sweet the air was off the reservoir, carrying the sound of water-birds and distant motorboats; how good it feels to ride a clever and intrepid horse.

Bernie asked me the other day (as we were sitting out under the delicious shade of the eucalyptus tree on the front lawn) if I hadn't wanted to be rich and famous when I was a kid. My honest answer was that I hadn't. By the time I was eight, I'd already had it up to the eyebrows with childhood snobbery ("My daddy makes more money than yours does!") and anyway, if I was rich, I wouldn't be spending so many hours playing in the creek ("crick") or around the town's landfill, which was across the street from our house, and I wouldn't have given those adventures up for the world.

What I did want when I was older/grown-up was to have a horse and to ride as long as I could as often as I could.

And here I am, riding my little horse into the lake, splashing and getting my shoes and pants and chaps wet, playing with good friends who are almost always up for a ride.

I've had a great life, thanks to Bernie, who never minded that I didn't want to be rich and famous, or powerful and privileged. The other thing I wanted in my life came to me when I was about sixteen, and was a junior counselor at a 4-H camp. I was in charge of a cabin of nine-year-old girls and helped with all the youngsters with songs and crafts and hikes. A very sweet little boy decided I was his favorite counselor, and I fell in love with taking care of him. From then on, what I wanted to be was a wife and mother. A home-maker. I've had the delight of doing that with Bernie, and though it sounds a bit unreal, I savor ironing clothes, and folding laundry, and love love love being able to sit under the shady tree in the front yard with my husband and watch the world go about its business while I rejoice in mine.

I'm riding that horse into the lake again tomorrow, too!

P.S. Photo by Aggie Smith, taken from aboard her beautiful mare, Sis.

Light and Shadow

In the early morning hours of June, my Japanese maple reproduces itself in shadows on the back of the house, a dark replica.

The charcoal-colored stars move and dance in the morning breeze that blows in from the Bay Area, but you can't touch them; it's only a trick of the light, only real to the eye. The actual tree is as high as the roof, with red leaves in the spring turning green as summer approaches. We watch carefully to see the first tiny red buds in February, lament the scorched edges of the leaves during July's inevitable 110 degree heat wave, stroke the graceful branches when we walk past it on the pool deck.

Nearly three years after my mother's death from Alzheimer's, I'm still working on coming to grips with what the disease did to her. Nothing about Alzheimer's is fair; plaques of a protein begin cutting off brain function, nerve by nerve: memories go, and recognition, and body function. As the nerves are cut off, they die of starvation. The victim is tied into an ever-decreasing circle, populated by ghosts and strangers. What are they saying? Why have they come for me? Is it any wonder that Alzheimer's patients are so aggressive, so angry, so determined to fight? All that's left is that fight or flight response, and there's nowhere left to run.

My God, my mother got so mean when the disease began to take her. She said things that hurt me so badly that I'd cry afterwards -- not even things about me, but just hearing such viciousness coming from her now-husky voice was like a serrated dagger slashing at the figure I'd known and admired most of my life.

I look at the shadows on the wall, the outline of the Japanese maple given a manner of shape by the absence of light. That was what my mother became: not a reality but an illusion. And illusion is not what I should remember. The illusion changes and disappears within an hour; Alzheimer's tormented us for years, but in the end, Alzheimer's need not last. For Mom, it's gone and done, and it can never touch her again. She doesn't need to be a shadow in my mind.

She grew that Japanese maple from seed, for me. The tree is a reminder for Alex of her grandmother's prowess at gardening, and a tangible connection with a woman who was brave and bold. Her daughter, Lillian, has never known life without that tree being there. Four generations of our lineage have touched it.

I want to see the tree first, not the shadows. The living, not the illusion. The creature, not the absence of light. And just as the shadows of the Japanese maple are beautiful in their darkness, maybe someday I'll see the precious glimpse of human frailty in my mother's death.

Dia de los Muertos, 2012

Today is the feast day of All Souls.

Or Day of the Dead. Dia de los Muertos.

My mother never would have considered honoring the day, except to say that we should pray for those who have died; if she could have hidden from the general public that she was Mexican, I'm sure she would have. However, in Central Pennsylvania, which was in her time so very white and genetically homogenous, her dark-tanning skin and classic Aztec-ian features stood out so that she might as well have carried a billboard on her grand broad shoulders that said "FOREIGNER!!!"

Culturally Mexican (though without the benefit of the secret language) and outwardly white (my cousin Susu and I were the only ones in our generation who turned out with reddish-blonde hair and freckles) I can totally sympathize with people who have a hard time identifying themselves within their populations. I never felt "at home" in Pennsylvania, and when we moved to California, and I began attending Mass in Spanish, I cried, because everybody looked like my cousins.

In spite of Mom's denial of her lineage, Alex and I cling to what Mexican customs we can. Today, Alex decorated the hearth in honor of the day, and it's truly beautiful.

We had the neighbor's kid in the house until evening, and Bernie and I were seeing the first showing of a movie in order to do a review, so we didn't get around to dedicating our midday meal to one or another dead relative. We'll get around to that, in the not-too-distant future.

But in the mean time ... Mom, I read a cartoon strip series last week that had the son begging his mother not to show up to talk to his creative writing class. His mom's friend says to her, "Would you have wanted your parents in one of your high school classes?" The mom answers, "No -- of course not!" Huh, really? Mom, I would never have said that. You were one hell of an entrepreneur, and though we butted heads from time to time, you had my back, and made me confident, and I would have loved to have you in my high school classes. You were da bomb.

Dad ... I miss you so. I miss all the stuff I wanted to wheedle out of you about your childhood, your family, your military service. I wish I could have wandered around the mountains with you more, I wish you could have snuck down to the river with me to fish and catch crayfish.

Jan, you taught me so much in the last weeks of your life. I have this memory, when we had to remove you from Mom's house, because she was forgetting to feed you, of you telling the staff of the group home (in a commanding voice) that you were working for the CIA. They thought that was just cute, but I knew you were telling them that you were not a person to be messed with. You were right. They didn't understand. You were epic.

I love you all, my dear beloved dead. Rest well, pray for me. See you when my time has come.

Dead Body

Under the bright lights of my work table, I take a morgue photograph of Dragonfly, who was found dead on my husband's work bench.

Time of Death: Unknown. Bernie's work bench has been a shameful landfill since the last time he shoveled everyone else's detritus off it, which would have been about the time of our kitchen remodel (could that only have been a mere year and some ago??) -- unfortunately, the work bench is right outside the door to the garage, and whatever doesn't fit in the house ends up piled on. My work table is along the wall in another area of the garage, and since I am known to be annoyed (go freakin' ballistic) if stuff is plopped in my work area, Bernie and his bench and his mild, sweet ways get the random dumps.

Anyway, how long had Dragonfly been there? Don't know.

Cause of Death: Unknown. Aside from deterioration of the wings, which could have been caused by having detritus piled on top of the body, or battering against a solid object, the cadaver is intact. No bites have been taken out of it; no breakage of vital exoskeleton is evident. It was not, then, caught by a large praying mantis, which would have chewed the head off, or a crow, which would have eaten the whole bug.

Place of Death: Uncertain. In 15 years of residency in this house, we have never had a dragonfly zoom into the house or garage. Did Dragonfly sneak in to make his death a last statement of ferocity, so that when he was found on the workbench behind some burnt-out lightbulbs and jars of long-collected miscellaneous nails and screws, he would make the hairs on the back of Bernie's neck jump up in startlement? Or was it more likely that any ambulatory member of this family might have brought dead Dragonfly in for a closer examination on a whim, forgetting where Dragonfly's remains were temporarily interred? (I say "ambulatory" so as to completely exonerate baby Joan of any complicity in Dragonfly's demise.)

Even in death, the head and abdomen preserve a remarkable gloss, as though polished and buffed, even in this dusty clime; even after months, if not a year, the framework and seemingly fragile panes of much of the wings are intact.

If Dragonfly were a vintage car, the joints of the wings on the thorax might have been detailed and waxed at a high class car wash only hours before the discovery of his corpse.


The leading edge of the wing is reinforced, but what shall we make of that single dark pane? Identification? A distance gauge?

My father used to aggravate my mother to near apoplexy now and again, by telling her that when he died, he was going back into the earth like a dead dog, that he neither expected nor hoped for any afterlife at all. I don't actually know what he really believed, because Mom would never have tolerated an open religious discussion. The best I can do is argue with him from a distance of years ... and death ... and say, "Well, Dad, this is just a damn bug, and I still admire the life that was in it. Don't you think that I still wish I could hear you buzz and get into things and hear your crazy wild laugh?"

Dragonfly, find my dad and bite him on the nose and tell him it's from me.

Nitpick Worries

Lots of challenges these days.

Having been officially given ownership of the Piker Press, I find there are a lot of things that ought to be done: revamping of the Forums, a long, cold look at the "Swag" page, a purging of articles that make no sense without the pictures that once accompanied them, back at the very beginning in 2002 and two webhosts ago.

And that's just maintenance. There are submissions to be read, accepted things to edit; there are emails from contributors that need to be answered, and contacts to keep up because I love the authors.

Every contract I mail out costs me at least $1.50; our webhost costs $20/month. Printer cartridges -- well, you know they are not cheap; with no income, every dollar counts, and I wish I had the acumen to make even a teensy profit. But I don't.

Between horse, house, and homelife, and the Piker Press, I don't really have any excess time. (Unless I give up my Sundays and NFL Football, of course, but I think I do need at least one day OFF a week.) That means that the hours for painting, or writing, or the papier mache masks I was poised to do in August ... all fall by the wayside.

I'm not really complaining. It's cool to have all kinds of things to occupy one's time.

It's just ... having no income, and running out of time, daily and in life-span ... why, there's so many things I still wish I could do.

Here in the Central Valley, pansies are winter color. I need to stop clinging to the passing of summer and look forward to the rains of winter. I need to stop worrying about the dollars going out the door and look ahead to a chance to write, paint, draw, create.

Yeah.

Damn Right I Love My Dog

Here he is, bemusedly enjoying my new carpet in the studio. Howie, my good little dog.

Yesterday morning I was hosing down the front of the house, and the porch, walk, and driveway, getting the accumulated dust washed away. The dust is from the almond harvest, which begins in August and runs through October. The air is heavy with dust; hanging about fifty feet above the ground is a yellowish curtain that looks like smog, and coats your skin, throat, nose, screens, and everything else around.

Howie helped me with the hose. He bit the jet of water, leaped through it, barked loudly if the water wasn't spraying him. He dove for the jet, roaring a growl, danced when I made the water nip his toes.

I let him play until he started falling down; his hindquarters get tired long before his sense of fun does. After I dried him off (mostly), he plowed onto my new carpet and had a luxurious rub. The amount of exercise he got was sufficient to make him sleepy for the rest of the day.

In the evening, I rubbed along the sides of his spine with a massaging motion. He seemed surprised, and when I stopped, he backed up against my legs for more. How I wish I had thought of doing that before! I'll be glad to massage him again tonight -- anything I can do to alleviate his stiffness is wonderful.

He turned eleven last March. This poem is for him.

This Dog Follows Me

This dog follows me

perfectly at heel

through the whole house

kitchen to bedroom

from breakfast to bedtime

This dog follows me

ears interested

in what I do

front yard to back yard

gardening to sweeping

This dog follows me

with his sharp focus

with friendly smile

eager for kisses

with wide wags of his tail

Will my dog follow

when I leave this earth

will my spirit

find his doggy soul

on life's new next address

This dog follows me

as I carry him

to the next life

this dog is my friend

pressed against me in trust

This dog follows me

his mortal essence

recreated

if I can only

believe God loves me so

Even so much as I love this dog

One morning last week I was putting away the dishes, and noted that the light was catching my largest stainless steel bowl -- just so.

I can remember buying it -- it's huge, and I use it when I toss two torn loaves of bread with simmered celery and onions for turkey stuffing; Bernie uses it when he makes meatloaf; we employ it when we pick grapes or pomegranates.

None of those scratches were there when it came to our house. Each silvery line, each dark line represents the touch of a potato masher, a fork, a wide spoon, a mixing blade. Thirty-five years or so of beloved use.

Far from accenting marring marks, the light made the bowl more beautiful, made me remember all the many delightful foods that had collected in its embraces.

All of us, in aging, have these scratches and mars. We get scraped in life, we get used for work at jobs and at home, we sprain muscles and find ourselves so tired some days that we tremble ourselves to sleep.  We think ourselves wretched, but in reality, every wrinkle, age spot, ache and lameness, we're being made into something even more beautiful, more unique, than that spotless stainless steel bowl.

To be useful, to be used for good -- what higher calling could anyone ask?

I want to be like this bowl.

Crammed Days

John and Alex put together Joan's crib today. It's lovely, and soon it will be inhabited by a howling Joan-like creature.

I have fabric (a dusty blue flannel and a light cotton beige floral) cut and washed for baby blankets -- tomorrow or Monday I want to sew their hems and have them ready.

Time is so compressed -- Alex is scheduled for a C-section next Thursday, but from her energetic cleaning the last couple days, I would not be surprised if she went a few days early.

A friend of hers offered a loan of a baby swing (you can see the stable legs of it in the pic), a carseat, a baby bathtub, some baby gym equipment, and many other things that poor Alex didn't have the advantage of when she was born 36 years ago. (Alex had to tough it out and listen to me read to her, rocked in my dad's best friend's grandmother's rocker. No wonder she turned out odd.)

Between digging up the potatoes (OMG they are so tasty) and exercising the horse, and keeping up with the laundry and the Piker Press, days have been nuts.

Wasn't I supposed to have two novels done by this time?

Volunteers

 This happy face was the first of the cosmos to bloom.

None of these plants were planted; they came up on their own from their parents' cast seeds or bulbs.

The cosmos' parents were from a six-pack that our local hardware was giving away last May; every Thursday, any woman shopping there could have a free six-pack of flower plants. I chose cosmos one week, and their seeds fell to the deck around the pool and were subsequently swept by Bernie to the no-man's land beneath the grape vine. This spring, the cosmos children leaped up in joy to have their own planting in the earth.

I gathered all the freesia bulbs from the disintegrated wine barrel that used to sit under the Japanese maple ... but missed some seed that opted to grow. Who could bear to tear them out? If they proliferate,  I can't deny them. One tiny stalk, yet they perfume the air around for ten feet or more.

 This creature is the image of its parent plant from last year, which was in itself a volunteer. I love nasturtiums, with their zesty smell (and you can eat them in salads) and bright colors, but they can get out of hand in their second and third generations. Red Splotch here has already traveled six feet in multiple directions, looking for optimum sunshine. I do admire its purposefulness and ingenuity, but am keeping a close eye on it so that it doesn't kill the Japanese maple or rip out the foundations of the house.

Life, in its beauty, does not have to be ordered, or orderly. Sometimes it is crazy productive, other times just has a little stage time to wave, do its tiny dance, and be  gone, committed to memory by a few fortunate admirers.

I try to remember that I'm one of those volunteers of the earth, too, that I was not cultivated to specially produce great super-market sized fruit or florist-quality proliferation of out-sized blooms. (Maybe my mother would stamp a foot in her failure to make me an astronaut, a neurosurgeon, or a Nobel Prize winner, but oh, well, Mom, I didn't want to sit in the fertilizer in the hothouse, after all.)

These poppies, which I never planted, but were on this land before I bought it, survive and grace our Springs each year with their gaiety, their color, and their will to survive, year after year. They produce seeds, and let them go; they don't worry about whether the seeds will get to the big garden, or just sprout from cracks in the brick deck.  I love them, and take heart in them, and call them sisters;  no one knew what I would become in my life, and maybe what I have become is simply a drifting volunteer, changing from season to season, what the climate decides is right.

My volunteers shout to me not to worry about the future, because what will grow in the earth next season is likely to have some tremendous beauty in it.

This year, each morning, I walk out into the back yard and take inventory of the plants. Been a long time since that was a high priority, and I'm enjoying how my heart feels when I take the stroll from the double-blossomed red geranium beside the door, to the neon pink cyclamen blooming under the suddenly dark red leaved Japanese maple ...

I see some volunteers: a freesia getting ready to bloom where its parent planter used to be, some yellow nasturtiums already sending out long streamers, ready to conquer the world.

Then the troubling cucumber planter, where the seeds have not sprouted, and I don't know if I just planted them too early, or if the jays watched me, then dug them up and ate them.

The snow pea tub comes next, with more snow peas than you can shake a stick at, lush and green, the blossoms pure white. From there I wander to the tomato barrel, where "Bush Goliath" has set its first tiny tomato in spite of the chill nights.

I say hello to the first California poppies blooming nearby, nod smiling to the new pale green leaves of the grapevine and the temperamental avocado. The volunteer cosmos are growing by leaps and bounds, and look! -- there are potato leaves poking out of the soil in Potatoland! Behind them, flanking John's menacing artichoke, are two Roma tomato plants, looking smug in their little cages, begging for their booster of epsom salts.

Stopping to poach a spear of asparagus, I cast an eye on the space I hope to house a couple Big Daddy tomato plants in the not-too-distant future. The golden euonymus gets a warning as I pass: Stop harboring bindweed and rose-root bastards or we will dig you up and turn you into compost. (It's seven feet wide and has a trunk the size of my wrist, so it doesn't take me seriously.)

Loaded with buds and new blossoms, the Stella cherry grows sedately, sparklingly white blossoms in the morning sun. By the time this tree sets fruits, we'll have swathed it in bird netting so that the mockingbirds and the jays don't destroy the cherries. They take a bite out of each cherry, the greedy things, spoiling them for us before the cherries are even fully ripe.

I shake the hand of a branch of the fern pine we planted to provide summer shade for our bedroom window, salute the indefatigable alstromeria flowers that have colonized most of the bank, and avert my eyes from the obscene number of lemons hanging from the branches that stretch far over the birdbath from the back patio.

Our garden is beautiful, and I'm delighted to be enjoying it again.

Once inside, I visit my tomato seedlings in the windowsill.

Life is good.

Seven Swans A-Swimming

On the seventh day of the Christmas season, which is also New Year's Eve, we went to the vigil Mass at sundown. (Not only is tomorrow Sunday, but also the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God.)

Thus I had the opportunity to reflect on the past year, the successes, the failures, the itchies that plagued my skin, the absence of bad colds, the times that made me feel good about myself, the aimless days that made me think I was a waste.

2011 was not the worst year I've ever experienced, by far. But there are things that I could improve upon as regards my own well-being, mentally and physically.

I'm not making a resolution, per se, but rather making an attempt to live a better life. Once again, I want to try to draw or paint something every day. I want to write a little every day, be it on the novels that need to be finished, or short stories, or blog entries (or poetry -- who can resist crappy poetry?) I want to sing something every day, even if it's just an Alleluia from Mass music. I want to exercise five times a week, be it riding my horse, taking a walk, or limping my way through a workout video that has sat unused on the bookcase for five years.

I'd like to do what Bernie has been doing, taking some time each day to read something in a spiritual vein, just a few paragraphs, enough to make thoughts occur that aren't just what I have to do, or what I'm going to eat at the next meal, but things about what is most important and real in life, the relationship with the Most High.

Noting that my voice, as I'm aging, is getting a bit rough and creaky, I'd like to read a paragraph aloud every day. My Pennsylvania accent is overtaking my spoken word, and I don't like that at all.

Finally, because I now have no health insurance and the only thing "wrong" with me is that I'm too fat for my little frame, I want to try to lose about another ten pounds, which means cutting back on carbohydrates -- oh, dear, that means my delicious Almaden Mountain Chablis.

There you go. Seven things, seven beautiful swans on the river of life, bemoaning that most of the time they'll be swimming upstream, hoping that they won't be taken by currents and flung off a precipitous waterfall.

How lovely they look at a distance, but when I approach them closely, will they hiss and bite?

Portrait

Yep, that would be me.

I hate having pictures taken of me, have for years, since I quit smoking and got fat and unhealthy back when that jacket was new. But this one says a lot about me, if you know what to look for.

The 20-year-old jacket, for example. I think Alex was about 14 when I got it, on sale at the now-defunct Mervyn's chain of clothing. Alex got one in beige, I got a green one. Thick and oversized, it has five pockets: four on the outside, and a nifty deep pocket on the left inside. No cold foggy weather can touch me in this jacket, and though Alex wore hers to shreds, mine shows wear only on the cuffs. The jacket tells that I prefer utility to looks, and comfort to style. Also that I like pockets. Deep pockets.

That's why I don't wear women's jeans, either. Those baggy beasties are from Target, with nice deep pockets and lots of room where leg meets torso, which an old woman needs when she clambers up on her old horse. Again, utility and comfort.

The deerskin gloves I got at the hardware store, principally for riding, but the original pair is still in use, stained with horse sweat and slobber. This is the backup pair I finally took the tags off to wear on days when the sissy polyester gloves just won't keep out the cold. Men's deerskin gloves. The women's gloves, again, were stitched to make fingers look slender, not to make holding reins, or a dog leash easier. There was a time when I bought only Sullivan gloves, but those sweet babies cost nearly $45 once you pay for shipping, and the hardware deerskin in my portrait only cost $12. Utility and reality.

The sneakers? Well, they actually suck, and I'm still in the market for replacements. They're Payless sneaks, inexpensive ... and menswear again, as the women's athletic shoes just aren't wide enough for my pudding-like feet. It's funny, I can get summer flip-flops wide enough in ladies' wear, but athletic shoes? Forget it. Of course, the spread-out feet are probably a result of refusing to wear anything but flip-flops if the temps are above 60 degrees.

The shaggy gray hair: well, it keeps my head warm without a hat on all but the coldest days, and I don't intend to spend money on having it cut until swimming weather comes around again. My hair won't style, so there's no point in throwing dollars at having some stylist pretend that mop is something it isn't.

So I'm cheap and utilitarian, with a heavy dose of comfort-loving.

And I also get so lost in looking for birds in the trees I don't notice my husband sneaking in a picture of me.

And I love him so much, I'll forgive him for it.