The framework to this post is that here in the Pacific Northwest there is unrelenting heat. We’ve had no rain. Temperatures are in the high 80s and low 90s, which for some of us is unbearable. We are not an air-conditioner culture. The most we have is an AC sticking out of a bedroom window.

I don’t like extremes of temperature. I was born into what used to be a mild climate and that’s the way I like it. I’ve noticed over the years that extreme heat affects me in odd ways, ways that are reminiscent of PMS except without the uterine pain. Sweaty, headachey, nauseated, dizzy and unusually petulant.

This week I announced that I am in the running for being the crabbiest woman on earth. I’ve been annoyed at the amount of push back, which you’d think might appease me but doesn’t.

My neighbor Gwen, who I ran into (not literally though it might have come to that) at the grocery store said she could beat me in her sleep not that either of us are getting much.

“When the hell are we doing another movie night? I expect you this weekend if I don’t throw you out.”

“Oh yeah? Get out of my way. You’re blocking the aisle.”

Other friends have challenged me. My neighbor Bill said if I expanded the category to Persons, he’d win hands down.

I feel like snapping at all of them, “I’m not looking for sympathy. Are you looking for a fight? Because I’ll take you.”

Here’s some of the fallout from my heat-induced bad mood: On Monday I made what I decided was my last call to a podiatry clinic before I asked my doctor to refer me somewhere else. It had been 2 months. I tried their number 4 or 5 times, went through their menu, got put on hold for half an hour at a time. I left messages.

Finally someone called me back to say they’d been “having a little trouble with their intake.” This helpful and informative person suggested I log onto their website and go into the patient portal and create an account although he wasn’t sure I would be successful because I wasn’t yet a patient.  Then I could send them a message and perhaps someone would be able to respond to me that way.

I’m not sure why I even went through these motions. Probably because I was feeling masochistic—and this was before the heat. In any case, I created the account and sent the message. A month went by. Nothing came of it.

Which brings me to the hot weather and getting the new roof on my house, the dust and the disturbance, all of which I have already written about. The roof got finished and I reclaimed my life. While burrowing through a mound of neglected paperwork, I found the clinic referral and decided to try one more time. I was put on hold. Before I shook the dust from my feet of this referral, I let loose with a piece of my mind, detailing all the steps I had taken over the past few months and ending—right before I started to sob—with “Are you even taking new patients?”

Two minutes later, a friend called. “Elena I picked up the message you just left at the clinic. I’m the receptionist here and I can’t imagine what went wrong all the other times you called! Let me take care of this.”

This particular friend is one of the calmest, most measured people I know. She’s smooth and gracious and completely unflappable.

I cringed, “Oh no! You heard my freak out. I’m so embarrassed.”

“No, no, not at all. I can get you all booked in right now. The doctor is wonderful. You’ll love him.”

In some ways, her graciousness made it worse. One never says rude things or, let’s face it, is hysterical over the phone to people one knows. Answering systems are as faceless as comment sections. Real people aren’t affected by hideous remarks –or so we tell ourselves if we even think that far.

Anyway, that was Monday.

By Wednesday, I was even less in charge of myself.  In the evening the OK Chorale was coming to my house for a potluck rehearsal, always one of the highlights of the quarter. Everything that Tim, my head –gardener, also a baritone in the Chorale, and I had done in the garden for the past month and half had been with the tag “before the potluck.” As in, this doesn’t need to be done before the potluck or I need this moved before the potluck—you get the idea. God this post is taking forever. See, I’m cranky.

Anyway the day of the potluck it was 94 degrees. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time or I would have just hanged myself and had done with it. I spent the day trying to stay calm and cool. I didn’t make any irritating phone calls or do anything requiring a lot of exertion. Tim was coming at 5:00 to help set up.

At 5:10 I texted him to ask when he was coming. No answer. At 5:30 he rang the front doorbell. Tim never comes to the front and never rings the doorbell. I opened the door and took one look at him grinning in what was probably a cheerful and anticipatory manner but that I read as sheepish.

“Are you drunk?” I demanded.

He looked wounded. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Because you seem a little weird right now.” Textbook projection.

I was on the edge of exploding into a tirade of everything he has ever done that irritated me and the list is long because we’ve been working together at this garden for four years and neither of us is used to collaboration. I managed to grab hold of the axe head that was my current existence and keep it firmly attached to the handle that was 64 years of social conditioning and apologized.

We went into the kitchen. I yanked open the refrigerator door and dislodged a bottle of sticky red liqueur that broke open on the floor. Glass fragments under my bare feet. Red wine like blood in the St Antoine district of Tale of Two Cities. I was Madame Defarge.

However no heads rolled. One of the Chorale members arrived and cheerfully wiped up the sticky mess declaring that she liked to be helpful making me feel worse than I already did.

Thursday morning was when I started telling people up front without saying hello that I was in a foul mood. People are so damn nice. That doesn’t help.

When you are in the middle of certain milestones of life, people around you aren’t so much interested in what you are going through as they are in telling you the story of what happened to them. Labor comes to mind. Weddings. Menopause. Death of a parent.

I’ve been through a few of these. I don’t have a good menopause story but the deaths of both parents provided me with copy. I’m now in the midst of another milestone: getting a new roof. Not just a new roof on the main part of the house, but also torch-down on the cabin roof, a new sun room roof and skylight replacements in the kitchen and bathroom. On top of the noise, disruption, dust and debris, the roofer’s schedule has coincided with a heat wave in Seattle so I am doubly, triply, no quadruply miserable.

Let’s start with the falling debris: tar paper, bits of moss and unidentifiable detritus in the garden. Vibrations from the hammering dislodged toxic powder that had been sprayed into a crevice to eliminate a wasp nest ballooning next to the sun room door and right over my organic tomatoes. I had been at great pains to protect the tomatoes from the dust for several days after the deadly deed was done, congratulating myself on my rescue op, when a fresh load of white dust was dumped on the sun golds.

Two lengths of fence were removed in order to let the gigantic dumpster park itself two feet from my bedroom window. There was actually an upside to this. Not its proximity but its existence. Having that drop box sitting there for a week allowed me to dispose of a collection of oversized, awkward and/or broken possessions like the card table from which I had inadvertently wrenched a leg. I was sorry to finally give up on that table as it was one of those leather-topped ones from the 1950s. My parents used to set it up for games of bridge and my mother had printed “Richmond” on its underside in her first grade teacher’s hand.

Toxic powder and small roof droppings aside, the roofer has been good about heaving trash to the neglected north side of the house, away from the garden. In fairness the north side already looked pretty bad, but now it looks like a junkyard. I’d list all the junk out there but I try not to look at it. This is the same reason I’m not posting photos. I have a vague impression of ladders, tarps, roof shingles and limbs of a locust tree that used to be growing across the cabin roof.

My inestimable neighbor, Bill (architect, woodworker, contractor, carpenter, furniture designer) found me the roofer and has been functioning more or less as the contractor on this job. Every morning he comes over to see what’s happened and what’s going to happen and then he interprets it to me. He is also putting in the skylights. All for the price of me feeding his cat Suli when he is gone for months out of the year. Or so he says. He may need some of those tomatoes, triple washed, of course.

I’m not getting enough sleep partly because of the heat but also because I am getting up earlier and earlier in order to have a few quiet and cool morning hours to read. The roofer comes at 7 so he can work while it’s cool. He drives away in the heat of the mid-afternoon leaving me with new piles of refuse to maneuver around and the hoses to coil.

I didn’t realize there was so much hose work in roofing. He’s got hoses and cords crisscrossed all over the roof and into the sun room and garden. I had only just trained Tim, my gardening partner to not leave the hoses lying around after he’s watered. I don’t think I have it in me to train another man. I complained about the hoses to Bill who on top of everything he’s already doing for me, also listens to my complaints.

“We’re guys,” he laughed. “You’ve got too many guys in your life right now.”

In truth I don’t have many complaints (that I’m voicing.) I am just so grateful that the work is being done and it’s not costing me my entire retirement. But long ago, 9 days to be exact, after the roofer had been at it for exactly six hours, I said to Bill, “This is taking forever!” But that was a kind of joke.

My brain is squishy. I can hear it when I move my head. Between the heat and the disruption and lack of sleep, I feel like a brown banana. The other morning I got out of bed and saw that I had left the front door standing wide open all night. If that wasn’t worrying enough, my next thought was even worse: “Did I just open that a minute ago?”

As I write, I am sitting in the back yard of my friend, Andrea whose cat I am feeding this week. I had this gig last year when Rocket the whippet was still with us. Now it’s just me and the soulful Fang. The timing is propitious. The same week that Seattle is sizzling and a roofer has taken over my house, I have a place to boil eggs and potatoes for potato salad without adding to the heat in my house. There’s also a lovely backyard and a cat I love.

The only down side is that two houses down, somebody is roofing a house.

Most of you are used to me writing about my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything. Just to recap, Gwen knows how to take apart and put back together a computer, a Porshe, a dress, a suit and the upholstery of a sofa.  She can figure out a solution to nearly any problem one might put to her. That she sometimes stumbles with her Smart TV is, I believe, because I am sitting there, emanating confusion about technology and gumming up the ether. It’s not her fault. In any case the little story I have to relate is under P for potatoes, small, in the Gwen Book Encyclopedia.

It all begins with me swinging from being a yard sale aficionado to someone who is aspiring to minimalism. I am getting rid of stuff hand over fist, trying to consolidate my possessions. To that end I have gotten rid of carloads of stuff and extraneous furniture. The secret is to grit your teeth, don’t think too much, be ruthless and don’t look back.

The resulting room flow and livability has been gratifying, leading me to greater excavations of stuff and more discriminating feng shui. There was a dark, creepy little area at one end of the piano where I sit when I teach. (Note to piano teachers: always sit on the treble end. When you demonstrate, you aren’t rumbling down there in the bass and frightening the children.) I always have a little table in this dark area to put stuff on: pens, pencils, stickers, my cup of tea. More recently, I’ve been using the old piano stool that goes with my grandmother’s (over 100 years) old Haddorff and upon which I will let no child sit because children squirm and the stool creaks and squeaks and disturbs my equanimity. I am all about not frightening the children.

I got rid of the table/stool concept altogether by ordering one of those overarm pouch thingys that hang off chairs and sofas into which one can put a TV remote, knitting, cat treats, baggie of marjiuana, whatever. The item came and it was way too big. Half of it worked perfectly, the rest hung off the side.

The problem

I couldn’t figure out a way to work with it. Then I got pen stains on it so I couldn’t send it back. I thought about just cutting it in half and duct taping it together so it would match the other side of my classy teaching chair.

The heretofore classy end

I knew, of course, that the solution was across the street, probably watching the cooking channel. I am judicious (or so I tell myself) about what I ask of Gwen because, well, you know, she is from Wisconsin. If her clothes caught fire from your lit match, she would apologize for being such a flammable person. She doesn’t say no easily although she has gotten better about it in the 17 years we’ve known each other. It’s also difficult to return a favor in kind because she can do everything better and faster than I can. This is the difficulty with living across the street from Wonder Woman.

After a week of deliberation, cursing the thing and threatening it with a utility knife, I took it across the street. I outlined the difficulties I was having and asked Gwen if she could do something about it.

“I can do anything,” she said.

I put that in as Gwen stating a fact, that’s all. Plus it delighted me. But she wasn’t saying she would do anything. I am keenly aware of these nuances.

“Just cut it in half” (she could even do that better than I could) “and stitch it up on one of your industrial-sized sewing machines.”

An hour later, she called to say it was ready and I nipped across the street. I said I wished she were the huggy, kissy type because words were inadequate to express how grateful I was for how beautifully she had taken apart the pouch and put it back together per my needs. This alarmed her so I controlled myself.

“Oh please, the hardest part was matching the thread.”

That wouldn’t have mattered to me. I’d have grabbed the first spool in the box or the one with the least amount of thread on it so I could then get rid of THAT piece of household detritus.

My new pocket-pouch made me so happy, I showed it to the next five people that came to my door, including the guy delivering my Imperfect Produce box.

The solution

Not frightening the children

Here I am, equanimity in tact, in my feng shuied teaching corner, futzing around with pens in the pouch. Since I don’t know how else to thank Gwen and since I am already watering her plants for the weeks she is at Lake Pewaukee, this post is my thank you. I hope it’s not too much exposure, her being from Wisconsin and all.

My neighbor Gwen read my previous blog The Solstice Zone, which ended with the teaser to stayed tuned for part two. She wrote me “I look forward to your next post to find out What Actually Happened at the Ocean.”

This alarmed me because nothing actually Happened at the Ocean. I thought about 1) making a bunch of stuff up 2) elaborating outrageously on what little happened 3) not writing a follow-up post.

I have chosen door number #2.

Kay and I were almost to the beach, decidedly punchy after being on the road for 4 hours longer than we expected to be, when, for some reason, we got to talking about gin. Odd because Kay drinks vodka and I drink Scotch.

Kay said, “What are those things?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Those little pickled round things that you put on salads.”

“Capers?”

“Yeah, capers. Aren’t those Juniper berries?”

“No, capers are— well I used to know what capers are. They’re some kind of plant. Which I guess Juniper berries are, too.”

“I think capers are Juniper berries.”

“They’re not.”

“I’m going to text Lisa and ask her if capers are Juniper berries.”

Lisa who is Kay’s daughter, came through with the laconic “pickled flower buds.”

“What flower?” Kay texted

“Capparis spinose.”

This got us no closer.

“I’ll ask my guy, Eric,” Kay said. “He knows everything.”

“Just ask him if capers are the same as Juniper berries,” I said.

Meantime, I took the correct turn off 101. There was an arrow pointing west that said “Ocean Beaches.” So, hard to miss. I didn’t tell Kay but now I had to negotiate the spot where I got lost with Nina when I was here once before. Did I or did I not turn left at Humptulips and what exactly did I do at Copalis Crossing? And is that what I wanted to do this time?

I had time to get my bearings at Copalis Crossing because that’s where the goats were. See reason #4 for why this two hour trip took six: The Solstice Zone.

“Tell me another Violet story,” I said.

Violet is someone we both know. She’s a world class whiner. I think she has a microphone in her nose; the whine stands behind it and bleats: my back is bothering me, I have this pinched nerve, I have all these papers to grade, I’m terribly busy, I have family staying with me. She hasn’t a single excuse that all the rest of couldn’t easily employ except we don’t. We either don’t volunteer to do stuff or we get on with it and make it work.

So she’s not fun in a meeting but she was great fun to have along on our weekend getaway.  We invoked her continually as in,

“Kay, will you reach over and turn on the blinker for me? I have a pinched nerve and it hurts to move my hand.”

“Of course, Violet. Let me just get this arm out of its sling so I can reach across the car to accommodate you more easily.”

We got to The Sandpiper whining like Violet. At reception we were given one key by Heather who was in her Eighth hour of Day One on the job as the new manager.

“Can we get two keys?”

“There’s only one,” she said.

This was odd since our cabin (Cabin A better known as the A-frame and my favorite place at the resort) could easily sleep eight people.

I looked at Kay. “Are you planning to go anywhere?”

“Nope.”

I turned back to Heather. “We’re good.”

It was all moot, however, because the key didn’t work. Violet and I tromped back to reception while Violet and Kay lugged things out of the car to the bottom of the twelve steep steps required to get into the cabin.

Heather came back with me and we jiggled and pulled with the correct combination of huff and puff until we the got the door open. She said she would send someone over to fix the lock.

I’ve never traveled with Kay. In fact, the six hour car ride was the longest amount of time I’ve spent with her at one time. So it was delightful to find out that she wears well and, when we got to the cabin, she is as much a nester as I am. We fell all over ourselves getting everything tidied away.

Kay urgently needed to know what meal and what day we would have the little steaks she had brought. We mapped out our meals as we assembled all the food we had brought: we had enough to feed the entire resort. We were sitting down with mango Cosmopolitans when the answer came through from Eric that capers are not Juniper berries.

“I used to think capers were fish roe,” I said.

We did not have the little steaks that night. We had potato chips, chocolate and vodka. Wait, I seem to remember something healthy in there. Avocado slices? Some cheese? Yes, I think so. But principally Cosmopolitans and chips.

I prefer whisky for many reasons, one of which being it’s not sweet. Sweet plus alcohol and I feel dizzy and nauseated almost immediately. I knew this when I started in on the Cosmopolitans. I was already tired from lack of sleep for three nights. Add the alcohol and the Violet factor and I was in bed by 9:00. Kay was no doubt glad to see my whiny butt ascend up the steep stairs of the A-frame to my favorite room overlooking the ocean.

At 10:30 the next morning I finally felt like I entered back into my own body. I had slept til 7:00. Kay and I had already had one session of what we had come here to do: watercolors. I had gone for a walk on the beach and was settling back down to paint until lunchtime. A little bell went off. Ding! Here I am!

A rap at the door. Lupe and Luis. Lupe wanted to know did we need towels and Luis was here to fix the lock. I found out their names because I asked but in a fit of white privilege, it didn’t occur to me to introduce myself. I rectified that when I walked after painting session #2.

“Luis. Me llama Elena.”

Luis looked confused. Then he smiled uneasily.

I pointed upstairs. “Se llama? Te llama? Elle llama? Kay”

Now he looked alarmed. I guess he thought I was trying to quiz him as to who was upstairs whereas I was trying to say I didn’t know how to conjugate Spanish verbs, which didn’t need to be explained.

He backed away. “Sí, sí. Kay.” He pointed to me. “Elena. Gracias.” He started up the twelve steps to the A-frame.

After a few seconds to think, I said “de nada.” I didn’t think it was appropriate to repeat the one Spanish phrase I remember from grade school Spanish. “Pablo está bien, pero Luisa tiene catarro.” Who the hell cares? Luisa has had that damn cold for 55 years.

I told Kay.

“How did he take it?” she asked.

“I think he was just trying to get away from me.”

She nodded as though to say, “I would, too.”

The painting day was lovely. The sun was bright and warm though the wind was cold. The sea was bathwater warm. I walked three times, barefoot, in the surf in between our painting sessions.

I discovered another thing Kay and I have in common: the day we go home, we are like horses pointed toward the barn. We had the car packed in record time and were on our way.

The evening before we consumed everything we could manage so as not to have to lug it down those stairs—at least not in a box held in our arms. We had done our best with the flat of strawberries Kay had bought at the Farmer’s Market in Hoquiam and the two bags of lettuce I had picked from my garden the morning we left. All the avocados. Four bars of chocolate. (I bought more in the gift shop when we checked out.) We never did get to the little steaks.

We broke out the lunch: hard-boiled eggs, Cheetos, mango and peach nectar when we stopped for gas. We both needed to pee.

“You go first,” Kay said. “And bring back some paper towels.”

A woman who looked like a prison warden watched me go into the rest room and come back with wet hands. I held them out to her, palms up.

“Do you have a paper towel?” I asked.

She handed me a napkin from behind the counter. The kind that disintegrate upon contact.

“They have a condom dispenser and a needle disposal but no paper towels,” I reported to Kay. “And keep your hands in plain sight around the woman at the counter.”

Kay came back with four little lottery pencils, new and sharpened. White, brown, green and red. “Here,” she said. “Pick two.”

“How’d you get these past the warden?”

“I stole them while I was waiting in line.”

That was when I realized why this trip had been the most fun I’d had since I could remember. Fun in a child in the 1960s kind of way if you had still been of pre-consciousness-raising age. It was like a road trip with my Aunt Frances.

“We have to do this again,” I said as we got on the buzz-kill that is I-5. “Let’s rent a Winnebago and go somewhere for a week.”

“We’ll stuff it full of food,” Kay said.

Maybe we’ll have those little steaks.

The summer solstice can be a fuddling time, what with the veil between the worlds and all.  It’s really mid-summer, you know, not the beginning. But I don’t need to rock on that horse for this post. Much better to just relate the adventures of the past few days.

My birthday is solstice adjacent, which puts me in the solstice zone. It’s that period when the days in the Pacific Northwest are so long that it stays light until 10:00 PM.  Theoretically I love it but it messes with my sleep.

This year the zonal days gave me additional hours to obsess about what is happening on our southern border.  I had been living at a low news level since my week on Whidbey Island at the beginning of June. On the island I watched one hour (Ari Melber, he’s from Seattle) of MSNBC a day and came home determined to adhere to that practice.

I was so determined that I even told my neighbor Bill that one hour was the new normal.

“Uh huh,” he said.

Bill’s news consumption consists of the New York Sunday Times.

Wednesday, the longest day in the year but one, I made myself hoarse screaming at some poor staffer in Patty Murray’s office. The news footage of migrant children being smuggled to some jail in New York City under cover of night and with black blankets over their heads had just come out. I knew that if they were sending children to New York, they must be sending them to other states. I demanded to know where they were in Seattle –the exact street address, mind you. I wanted names of contact people and exact hours when I could personally go down there to hold them and listen to their fears and try to comfort them.

Bill came over as I was hanging up from this highly unsuccessful call. My cheeks were wet, spit was jumping from my mouth and my eyes were probably spinning around in my head.

“Do you know what they –babies –Have you heard about—Fuck trump–nursing –a three month old—all over the country  .  .  .”

“How many hours of news have you watched today?” he asked.

“You’re right,” I said. I snorted snot back into my nose and turned off the TV. The images stayed on the computer. I closed the computer.

Bill returned a lovely wooden cookbook holder that I had purchased for two dollars, not realizing that the reason it had been marked down from $35 was because the ledge at the bottom that actually makes it a book holder was missing. He took it to his shop, added the ledge with a gorgeous piece of wood and sanded, stained and buffed the entire item until it might have been priced at $50.

We chatted and Bill mentioned he would be out that evening. After he left my house I watched until his car pulled away from his parking strip. Then I turned the news back on and watched it, becoming increasingly agitated and upset until he came home at 10:00. Bad sleep and not enough of it. This was the Midsummer night’s eve.

The actual long day was balancing. I had a splendid tea and conversation with my friend Anna. Nancy and Scott came over for our biannual Scotch evening, the other one being on the Winter Solstice. We stayed up late (for me.) They left after dark. Another restless night and not enough of it.

The next morning my friend Kay who shares a birthday with me—this was her 80^th— and I left for a weekend at the ocean. The normally 2 ½ hour drive to my favorite beach resort, The Sandpiper, took us 6 hours for the following reasons:

1) A tie-up at Joint Base Lewis McChord (When did they start calling it this? Since I was a child it was just Fort Lewis. Period.) The tie-up was expected.

2) Not paying attention on the road and ending up in Matlock, which I only know as a TV show but turns out is also a town 30 minutes off Highway 101, which should have easily taken us straight to the Pacific Ocean. I’ve been to the ocean a hundred times in my life and I seem to manage to get lost someplace different every time.

3) Stopping at the Hoquiam Farmer’s Market to look at all the stuff for sale and to have lunch at Deirdre’s Café, Deidre being a talkative woman with a black eye’s worth of false eye-lashes and dark shadow and a Pierrette mouth painted on with black lipstick.

4) Stopping at a sign: Goats for Sale and coochie-cooing eight baby kids. The billy had a beard like Confucius and though he looked as fierce and mean as most studs, he was a big love who pushed his head against mine and licked my nose.

Back to Deirdre’s Café for a minute: I ordered an uneatable-because-too-spicy salad. Kay got a scrumptious looking sandwich of bacon, ham and cheese and dripping with sauce, which she was kind enough to share with me. I took a bite and started chomping. Immediately I coughed violently, sneezed twice, coughed again, almost choked and coughed a third time.

“You okay?” Kay asked, calmly munching.

I drank some water and when I finally found my voice, I asked “As we age, is it normal to sometimes have trouble swallowing?”

“Yup. You need to take smaller bites and chew everything really well.”

I looked at her, bacon hanging out of my mouth.

“Oh, and don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

Before I started to protest with dignity (although I really have nothing to protest,) she added, “I have to watch that, too.”

All right then.

Standing up to leave I looked at the uneaten salad. “I meant to ask her to leave out the spices but I forgot.”

“That happens when you age, too,” she said.

Read about our adventures at The Sandpiper in the next episode of The Solstice Zone.

I had a lovely birthday, thank you. I am now 64. There’s no more “when I’m.”  My friend and college roommate, The Very Miss Mary-Ellis Lacey who is actually now a Mrs. Adams, sent me a birthday card just before she and her husband left on a Rhenish cruise. (Yeah, look that one up.) Mary-Ellis said she hoped there would be a blog post awaiting her return. This is my receipt of that birthday card.

The morning of my birthday I sat in the garden on my chaise lounge amidst the hummingbirds, finches and crows, and one cat, and received visits and flowers and cards.  I was just out there to read the paper but still they came. One at a time, the way I like it.

Late morning Mai took me for brunch at Swanson’s Nursery. If you can avoid spending all your money as you thread through the plants, their lovely café, Barn and Field, has a superb menu.

We were sitting with our frittata (me) and our Portobello sandwich (Mai) when I had an urgent need of the waitperson who had stopped at the next table. I can’t remember what I wanted from her; that’s been eclipsed by my ensuing gauche and disgraceful performance. I wildly waved my hand at her and she easily resolved whatever I was about to erupt over.

I looked at Mai, quietly eating her Portobello sandwich, and was visited with a horrifying awareness of myself. Next to Mai, quiet, slight, soft-spoken and shy, Mai who I have known for 35 years, I suddenly felt like a kangaroo next to a turtle—the small pet kind, not the large snapping kind. Or a Great Drooling Pyrenees next to a middle-aged cat.

“Mai, am I a loud, bossy American?”

I watched her face, reserved and a bit sad. I watched her Chinese-ness struggle against 35 years of, well, me. I’ve never known her to say anything even remotely unkind.

“Yes,” she finally said, apologetically

“Does it embarrass you?”

She went all Chinese again but finally said, “It depends.”

It was a funny, touching little exchange. I could see her point of view and I felt loved. Still it had darker echoes of an exchange I once witnessed between my mother and one of her church friends.

“Am I abrasive?” my mother shrieked incredulously.

“Well, Mary you do come on strong at times,” the mild mannered Lois said.

There are days I console myself with knowing that no one currently in my life had enough exposure to my mother when she was alive, to accuse me of resembling her. But the exchange with Mai got me thinking about a cleavage within my personality that has unsettled me all my life (and did I mention I am 64?)

I am, at heart, an introvert: quiet, reflective, sensitive. I can spend not just hours, but days alone. When I was younger, I forced myself to be social every few day, treating the occasion like bad-tasting medicine necessary to basic health—kind of like exercise.

On those occasions, unless it was a small, safe group, I over-compensated. I became the life-of-the-party, spotlight whore, stage monster Great Drooling Pyrenees. Or so I felt as I cringed with shame on the way home. It was as though I had some crazy relative living inside me who I let run amok a few hours a week so she could get all the wiggles and shouts out of her and maybe pee in public for good measure.

I didn’t understand how uncomfortable I was maneuvering a crush of noise, people and social expectations. Nowadays I recognize that my ability to be among humans caps at about three hours a day, less if it’s a large noisy situation. Then I need 21 to recover.

A few years ago I forced myself to attend a friend’s Christmas party because throwing a large holiday party is her beloved tradition. The Christmas season can be a nightmare for me. I like the lights, the music, the gifts and food but there is such a glut of it that I want to cower at the base of the front door and not open it from Thanksgiving til after New Years. After all the choral rehearsals, concerts and holidays craft sales, the last thing I want to do is party. (I actually never want to party within the usual meaning of the act.)

Anyway I walked into this party a little late, indicative of how much I didn’t want to be there as I am usually constitutionally incapable of being late, ask anyone who knows me. The house was packed with brightly dressed people who had already gone through the buffet line and were sitting on sofas and chairs, chatting animatedly, smiling, laughing, squealing. Guests milled and pooled at the food table. Wine flowed. Jewelry glinted and gleamed in the lights. Music blared above the chatter.

I hung up my coat. I looked bleakly at the festivities. I was tired. I had just finished the teaching quarter, four choir performances and two weekends of art and craft sales. I circled around the house smiling insincerely, saying hello to a few people until I found my friend, the hostess, in the kitchen where the gleam of her earrings ricocheted off the toaster. I gave her a hug and said what a great party it was. Then I quietly threaded my way back to the hall, got my coat, drove home and got in my jammies. I had been there for all of 90 seconds.

That was the night I decided I wouldn’t even go through the motions next time. I can do what I want when I want. I’m 64.

It’s my last full day on the island, my least favorite day in the weeks I spend here. It’s the day I clean the Buddha House. That’s part of the deal, leaving it as clean as you found it. In my case, it’s usually cleaner than I found it because I have the standards of an earth type, not the air and fires who come to meditate and don’t seem to notice rice crusted to plates and soy sauce smeared on the table. When I got here a week ago, I told Tommie that I had never seen the Buddha House this clean. She said no one had stayed in it since I was last there.

Windhorse, the retreat center and the Buddha House in particular, feel like a second home. For the past three years I have come for a week four times a year. The drive is familiar, the routine comforting. The sounds and smells evoke a quiet joy.

The sounds are principally the wind and the birds with occasional barking of dogs and braying of goats across the road as well as the sound of piano and singing. I contribute to the singing because I usually take two voice lessons in the weeks I am here and because I sing to the deer. I sing “V’adoro pupille” from Handel’s Julius Caesar. I want the deer to recognize me as the being who sings and doesn’t frighten. (Except for the time I tried to take a pan of water to the fawn I thought was wounded.) (Or when I get fixated on wanting to make friends with them and end up behaving like a stalker.)

I haven’t seen much of the deer. Four very young deer have made their home here. These would be the four fawns from last September, including the one I frightened with a pan of water. The retreat is pretty much their oyster.

I had one sighting of a tiny new fawn the day Tommie and I drove into Freeland for groceries. We were still in the woods a mile or so from the highway when we startled the doe and fawn by the side of the road. We stopped and watched the little one take off down the middle of the road, staggering like the toddler he was while the mother divided her attention between him and us. The fawn—not more than a foot high—finally crashed into the brush and the doe joined him.

The goats win the aroma competition, acing out the fragrance of incense and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day lavender dish soap. Two new kids bring the number of babies across the road to seven. They bring me across the road several times a day. I have designated goat clothes this trip since after my last visit, every piece of clothing I owned had goat poop on it.(I should explain how this happens: the goats poop in their straw. They go about their lives without discrimination as to where they put their hooves. Then they jump on me.)

Family Photo

The five kids born in March have doubled in size but they still jump on me. I notice the weight difference because they would knock me off my feet if the one in back wasn’t a force against the one in front. I grab their legs when they jump on me and sing “Dance with me, I want my arms around you” and add my favorite part of the song:

Heaven, I’m in heaven
And the cares that hang around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak
When we’re out together, dancing cheek to cheek.

I believe I’m on firm ground in stating that goats weren’t what Irving Berlin had in mind with that song.

The two new kids are about three weeks old but are already so big it takes a minute to sort them out from the pack. A male and a female, they both have white spots on brown and black hair like dog markings. The spotted bull in another pen is clearly the sire. The long-suffering nanny with the wondrous udder impeding her every move and seven kids pestering her is the mother.

The new kids

The loveys

This nanny in a yard full of adorable babies is surprisingly the first animal I think of when I get up in the morning, maybe even more than the staggering toddler of a faun. She and I have forged a bond that touches me deeply. It started the day I was trying to get a decent picture of the fast moving kids with a slow moving camera shutter. I felt something rubbing my back, up and down, over and over. When I finally gave this sensation my attention, I found the nanny wanting to put her long neck on my breast, push her face close to mine and gaze into my eyes. Every time I visit, she and I have the intimate exchange of two old souls.

Mama

The goats have stripped every tree limb they can reach—they like alder and maple leaves—so I pull down the higher branches and let them munch. They climb all over each other, the nanny and me to get as much as they can for as long as I am willing to stand there. I noticed the first time I did this, the two littlest kids wanted to join in but weren’t quite sure what we were doing. When they figured out they could eat these green things, they held their own with their older siblings.

I’ll miss them.

Now I need to clean the Buddha House.

Following the Leader

Looking for greens

Up, up, up

Where’s the leaf?

Here they come

I want to tell you what Jesus has done for me. We’ll have to wait a moment until those who know me regain consciousness. Now say “hay-soos” or for the linguists among us: “xe.sus.” I know I am being juvenile about this but I love it that I have a gardener named Jesus. He has cause my yard to be born again, creating something between a labyrinth and a London park.

It all started when my electric lawnmower died and did not resurrect. At the time I couldn’t afford a new one and after a season or two without one, decided I didn’t want a lawnmower. I liked the wild field design, otherwise known as the lazy homeowner look. One of its drawbacks was having to tromp through wet grass a foot high to get across the yard. Over the years however, paths formed like ancient elephant thoroughfares. Last fall I covered the paths with cardboard to make it easier come spring to scoop out the turf.

Easier for whom was the question. It was too hard for me in any case. Tim my friend whose presence in my garden is chronicled in Burn Before Weeding could have scooped out the paths but he had other things to do in the garden and the paths were really my project.

Jesus came into my life just when I needed him most. He shoveled slowly but steadily and the ancient paths are now reified until a developer buys my property over my dead body and builds a condo unit. The heaps of sod formed mounds that my neighbor Bill said made the yard look like a burial ground. But I planted wildflower and butternut squash seeds in them and eventually it won’t look as though something nefarious is going down in the garden. Jesus emptied six huge garbage bags of sawdust, another contribution from Bill who is a woodworker, into the paths, smoothing out a four inch padding of orange chippy dust which now gets tracked into the house by people and elephants.

My students love the paths. A few of them make a regular pilgrimage to Winston’s grave, now marked with a trillium. My resident crows, Bert and Zelda, strut along the paths and climb onto the mounds to rob me of earthworms and the occasional butternut squash seed. Neighborhood cats wander the ancient ways. Artemis, of course, poses.

Jesus has showered me with blessings. He has made straight the narrow paths that lead to green pastures. He healed the crab grass and weeds under the camellia and the tree peony. He cleaned up the mess around the mock orange. This is critical because this is the part of the garden I stare at when I am teaching and need to take a deep breath and not say something ugly like “Two counts, for fuck’s sake, how many times do I have to say it, can’t you see that note is not colored in?” That sort of thing.

I saved Jesus’ number to my phone so when he calls I can tell anyone in ear shot that Jesus is calling. If my mother were alive, I could tell her “Jesus is coming,” she would happily agree and we could have a conversation about religion without yelling at each other.

The spring usually brings me a surge of energy and this year I am more than grateful. It has been such an awful winter what with the cold and the rain here in Seattle, the darkness of the season, our precarious political situation and probably more than anything, the death of my kittens. After months of trudging through the dark, I feel restless and ambitious.

I was in the garden seven days in a row. After the second day, I was in a semi-permanent condition of being able to hold different positions: standing, sitting, kneeling etc. but the getting to and from those positions was enough to make me scream, certainly enough to make me curse.

I’ve been thinking about travel.

I’ve been thinking about the next 25 years of life. The same day the kittens died, the roof leaked. These two events converged into my considering the certainty of my own death and where I wanted to be living when that happened.

May I free associate to an exciting conversation I had with the caretaker of the cemetery behind me? Beyond a disreputable old common fence in my back yard is the cemetery yard and garage, which houses mowers, gravediggers and old headstones. My cats crawl under the fence and jump onto a stack of slabs; from there they jump to the roof where they like to hang out during warm summer evenings. I asked Philip at the cemetery office if they were doing anything with those headstones?

“I would love to get rid of them. And what you see is only the tip of the ice berg.”

By the time we finished discussing it, Philip had decided this would be a good time to replace the fence. When they took the old one down, they could slide all the headstones over onto my property. I, well not, I personally, but someone can bust them into smaller pieces and I’ll have flagstones for all the paths I want all over my yard. Stay tuned.

Garden Paths Phase 2
(Phase one was smothering them in cardboard all winter. Hideous.)

Back to my restlessness. There not being any immediate plans to pack for a trip, re-roof or sell the house, and having used up my back’s allotted hour per day in the garden but still wanting something new to do, I went to Target. Two people, independently of each other, have told me recently about something available at Target. I wandered around Target for 45 minutes, trying to think why I was there, before I remembered the store they had referenced was T.J. Max. I related this to Nancy when we walked around Green Lake.

“You wanted to do something new so you went to Target?”

Put like that it sounds pathetic. I’m not saying it wasn’t. There’s more:

I took some forms to a bank to be notarized. I haven’t been in a bank in fifteen years. It was odd. I remember being in banks with desks buzzing, tellers busy, the line five deep and the complimentary coffee fragrance making me start to percolate when I opened the door. I counted ten empty desks in the bank the other day. One teller was on the phone with someone named Bernard who sounded like he needed reassurances beyond what the teller could give him about an account that wasn’t at that bank. She mouthed apologies to me. The other employee was helping an elderly woman with her safety deposit box. Of course, I thought, the only people who go into banks anymore are the elderly.

Once the elderly woman got settled in her private room with her box, the second employee (Bernard was still gamely on the phone with the first) asked if she could help. I told her what I needed.

“Oh, that’ll be Dustin and he’s around here somewhere. I just saw him.” She shot out of the room texting and scouting all at once. Then she shot back in. “Do you mind waiting? He should be back any second.”

“I’ll just get my book out of the car,” I said.

A book. That locates me with Bernard who has the wrong bank and the elderly woman who was probably there to retrieve a library card from her safety deposit box. I sat down and read until a second elderly woman arrived with the help of a cane at the same time as the recalcitrant Dustin. The full trio of bank employees greeted her as though she were their grandmother. They asked about her arthritis and hugged her.

And there I was. I was uncharacteristically patient because I was kind of in awe that a trip down memory lane (and I want to travel!) was to be had right off the street like that. There was something soothing about the whole experience.

I’ve seen a lot of springs in my life. Spring is still a miracle.

I should never have named them Hamlet and Laertes after two literary characters who died young. I thought those were clever names. But one shouldn’t mess around with archetypes. Archetypes are serious stuff. Both Hamlet and Laertes died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. They were nine months old.

Hamlet had been sickly from the start. He had come to me skinny and underfed and scared of everyone and everything except Laertes. I fed him off my finger those first couple of weeks, moving my other hand closer and closer until he let it touch him while he ate. The entire process had to be repeated whenever trust was shattered as it was when I tried to pick him up and later after every tortured trip to the vet.

Laertes came around after the first few weeks. He stopped running from me. He let me pet him. He let me pick him up for a few seconds. He let me pick him up and hold him. He purred. Hamlet watched the progression of intimacy with Laertes for months until the day came that he tentatively curled up on my lap and dared me to push it any further.

Meanwhile Artemis glowered from afar.

A few weeks before they died, Hamlet started losing weight. I bought baby kitten food and fed him off my finger again. Both Laertes and Artemis gained weight. Then both kittens stopped eating while Artemis remained in caloric heaven. I made the awful decision to not treat Hamlet but see if his little body would heal although he was so weak he was finally letting me hold him. I took Laertes to the vet.

The news was a shock. Laertes had a liver disease not uncommon in feral cats for which there was no known treatment. The vet recommended euthanasia and in a fog, I agreed. I whispered goodbye to Laertes.

That night I put Hamlet alongside me in bed. Through the night, whenever I awoke, I reached for him and felt his purr. He had rarely purred in his whole life. Occasionally I felt him move and re-position himself against me. He was so light he was barely a wrinkle on the sheets. Finally I felt his little body spasm and emit a piteous cry. I felt him. He was gone.  I put him in a little bed that had been his safe space when he first joined the household. By morning rigor had set in.

During the awful next day I imagined Hamlet and Laertes sauntering across a bridge. Waiting on the other side were Freudy, Winston, Eugene and Edith, other cats who are still a part of me. The kittens are in good paws now.

Here’s my eulogy for the boys of Elsinore:

Laertes the sunny orange kitten, often slept on the back of the sofa. When I was on the sofa, he would wake, yawn and reach his paws towards me. I’d pull him onto my lap. He would rub his face against mine. I’d tuck his head under my chin. He would purr. We could sit like that for fifteen minutes at a stretch, both of us in a state of bliss. His purr was a song.

Little Hamlet I can see walking through the hall into the kitchen. Cats don’t move in a straight line unless they are charging at something. They saunter: a little bit to this side, a little bit to that side. Hamlet was a long-legged, long-tailed but exceptionally skinny black kitten, a miniature of Artemis, my big black 14 year old cat. Frightened of everything, he had learned to move with embryonic bravado through the house as if his name was on the mortgage in imitation of Artemis who actually does own the house.

Since the disease was not treatable, they were going to die anyway. They might have died on the streets of Yakima, cold and scared. They might have died in the shelter after being kenneled for five months. Instead they got to have brief, bright lives with me.

I know that is worth something. It is worth life. It’s what life is. Brief.

I am still sad.

Hamlet and Laertes