It’s now the small hours of the morning of what will be the shortest day of the year.
The quiet time of the long dark is when I renew myself.
Solstice is the peak of my season and I will celebrate this day.
Poor Kitty
I just awakened Wesley, my 22 year old kitty, from a sound sleep in order to poke a pill down his throat. Pill poking isn’t something he tolerates well at the best of times. Being awakened from a sound sleep is not the best of times.
Wesley does not accept the notion that it’s these very pills which are helping him feel well enough to try to shred my hand. The fight he put up, however, tells me the pills are working.
Tomorrow I’m going back to making “kitty burrito” with a towel before I dose him.
Definition
Codependency: A horse put together by a committee from two different sets of pieces, resulting in a camel with no legs.
Just think about the potential accumulation of camel crap.
There’s a reason I refuse to go there.
A Little Slapstick
I don’t sleep late on the weekends anymore, at least not often. The older I get the harder I find it to force myself to try to live in violation of my body’s natural rhythms. Those are not of the early bird persuasion, so giving in just makes it that much harder to come back.
On Saturday I got up about the usual time, came downstairs and started on the coffee and breakfast routine. Because I am a slow starter I’d already been at it for awhile when my husband appeared.
As he headed for the coffee pot, I decided it was about time for my third cup. Since I am a creature of habit, I knew where I was in the routine. At least I thought I did.
I picked up my cup and, just for fun, decided to have a good stretch.
And dumped half a cup of lukewarm coffee on my own head.
We laughed even longer than it took to clean up the mess.
Child of the Cold War
I was born in 1956 and grew up near the port city of Philadelphia.
I had the good fortune to attend public schools where there was none of that nonsense about hiding under desks. We were taught what a first strike zone was, that we were in one, and what that meant. We were also taught to how to exercise a little dignity in preparation for the day when it would be needed.
What we weren’t taught was how to deal with a world in which the Cold War was over.
When it did end, I remember having a hard time visualizing a world in which I might live a full span of years. I also remember deciding that it was probably pointless to try to do so as something else was likely to come along which would foreshorten the time.
There were times when I would begin to wonder about that foreshortening, but then someone would come along and blow up part of New York and I’d slide back into my comfort zone.
Now, at 51, I’m no so sure.
I’ve reached an age I’m already not supposed to have lived to be, according to that early life script. I’m finding it quite uncomfortable.
Since My Father Died
I’ve lost 15 excess pounds. I’ve gone off anti-depressants. I seem to have quit engaging in “shopping therapy.” I’ve gone back to cooking on a fairly regular basis. I’ve started taking lovely care of my fingernails, even though that means seeing someone every two weeks for professional treatments.
Funny how these things work.
The Week in Review
Yesterday I saw Jimmy Carter. Today I was incompletely quoted in the newspaper published from our state’s capital city, and while what what they included was fine, they left out the best part. This evening, I had three “bar” shots of Tequila (which I haven’t done in quite a long time) , at home in the safety of my own kitchen and they knocked me on my virtual posterior.
I must say that I’m not much impressed with myself.
Electronic Children
Today I realized just how much electronics and small children have in common, both in their tendency to balkiness and in the step-by-step processes required for their remediation.
This does not mean that I feel in any way qualified to deal with children on a regular basis. It does, however, explain why I sometimes find equipment so tedious.
Free at Last, Free at Last
This morning I got up and grabbed the cell phone to clip on my hip as usual. Then I realized that it was not, technically, required this morning. I smiled, because it reminded me that, this morning, two people were free. My father died in the small hours yesterday morning. If there’s any mercy in this universe, he is free of the demons which plagued him all his life. I’m now free to remember the times they didn’t stand between us.
On Bristol Road
Neshaminy Warwick Presbyterian Church is one of those old pre-Revolutionary ones in Bucks County, Pa. It’s located at a curve on the Neshaminy Creek. Bristol Road, the one that goes by the church, takes a sharp turning as it goes over the bridge which crosses the creek. Various attempts have been made over the years to straighten and widen things a little bit, but although the bridge has been re-built for safety reasons its location hasn’t been changed, in part for historic reasons, but mostly because of the odd turning of the creek.
As the story goes, once upon a time, a long time ago, a young woman in a white dress was killed at night on the bridge. There may or may not have been a mist rising from the creek at the time, depending on the teller. She was either riding in a carriage which tried to take the turn too quickly and flipped, crushing her between the carriage and the bridge, or she was waiting on the bridge for a rendezvous with her lover and was hit by a carriage which didn’t see her. After a couple of hundred years, the story has gotten a little blurry. In any event, on certain dark nights, it is said that she can be seen on the bridge and her appearance has been blamed for more than a few close encounters between sides of the bridge and vehicles, even during my early lifetime.
Personally, I always figured it was a matter of careless driving or speeding and didn’t give much credence to it. That was before the time I was up there visiting my parents and had occasion to travel by the church one dark night–and damned near hit the bridge when I saw her.
