not like childbirth

Why do we have slow, dull days, weeks, months even? So we can store and then call forth saved energies for the other weeks. Like this one.

It could be that I'll have trouble posting this -- I came home to no Internet and so far as I can figure out from my landlord (Ed), I'm not likely to have it until someone comes to investigate the problem. My landlord is not sure when that may come to pass. I see myself driving around at midnight looking for a bar with WiFi. Perhaps I'll be posting from such a bar.

When the day began, I'm thinking we have finally switched to the lighter road: one with sparkles and smiles, without the anxiety that had been so evident in the farmhouse this past weekend. It is a cold morning, but hey, we're good with that. The farmhouse has a functioning furnace. It's on.





Still, Ed tells me we lost a good three-fourths of the tomatoes to overnight cold. On the upside? Finally! Diminished pickings! I am no longer beholden to the tomato harvest!

The sun bursts through the morning clouds and I am there to revel in the wonderfulness of the moment. Yes, finally, we're forging ahead!





Ed is terribly weak but he's slowly expanding his eating repertoire beyond Campbells chicken noodle soup. Slowly, but surely. I can see a future for us again. Thoughts of a wedding and funeral have morphed into just wedding. No funeral.

Life is is indeed golden.





Memories of this past weekend are erased. Like childbirth: you forget the pain when you finally get to hold the swaddled newborn kid. Fever? What fever? We are on the upswing!






But not trouble free.


I eat breakfast alone still, though I run up some mango slices to the once-sick-one who is feeling a tad too comfortable to come down.






As the day progresses, I note (from afar -- I'm on campus all day) that Ed is returning to tasks -- at a price. He's like a falcon that soars and then plummets for lack of strength. Up and sown. If you hit him at the right moment (and only then), you'd never remember that he was ill.

Evening. I help paste wedding programs at my daughter's place.


 


At home, supper has to be simple -- more roasted cauliflower, squash too, smothered in tomato sauce with kernels of corn.





Ed has a nibble and that's a good thing.

And now I have Thursday before me, a full and bursting with work Thursday so I have to say, that promise of a sun-streaked gold-paved easy path ahead? Misleading. Indeed, I just saw on my iPhone that we're in for storms any minute. Rains, winds and hail, to be continued, possibly through the wedding day.

Eh, not important. The tide has turned, that's for sure. We're well, surely we are and the future looks fine! And, the Internet just came on!

Tuesday

It's very nice to be in a crowd of sympathetic souls. I know you, friends of Ocean, will understand that there isn't much time (any time?) for writing this week.

The morning breakfast, usually a leisurely affair, is indifferently tossed indoors, hurriedly disposed of at the kitchen table. The cereal tastes terribly micorwaved and the fruit seem old news. Brown around the edges.

Ed has had a better night (even as I still stayed mostly awake, too caught up in the anxiety of the entire messy week-end), but I don't dare hope we're completely done with health worries. Ask me tomorrow, when we will have had two solid days of calm.


Later, in my office, I think -- tired. I am tired. Yes, Ed may  have been ill, but I am the one who is just barely keeping on my feet today. Like the guy I see outside my office window, out there on Bascom Hill...






Late afternoon. I finish teaching, I dash to complete and check off errand number one, number two, number three. Then home. I pull into the dirt driveway and I take a stroll around my flower beds. Surely there's an old Polish proverb that'll tell me - when you're tired, direct your gaze toward the flowers...






And, too, toward the tomatoes. Ed has picked a batch in the hours I was away (yes, he's up and moving!) and now I'm caught in the routine of sorting, washing, freezing, admiring them.





Of course, I want things to be just smooth as peaches again --  for us to return to the pre-worry routines where we were like kids, moving from work to play to work to play. It's as if I've already forgotten that only a short while ago, I would have given a lot to continue, even with imperfections, just so long as we could, in fact, continue and not be undone by events of catastrophic proportions.


I cook up cauliflower, eggplant, tomatoes -- with a fried egg on top. (Ed makes do with chicken noodle soup... no curds yet!) The quintessential comfort foods. Yesterday was like this, today is like that, so let's eat and let the world settle down again.

I see that they're warning of a frost possibility tonight. Don't get stuck in summer thoughts. We've moved on to the next stage. Like it or not, we're in a new place now.

Monday

There are many hours between breakfast and night time. And without moving much, you can run through a hell of a lot of emotions in that time period.

Start then with breakfast.
Will you eat something this morning?
No.
Sure?
A slice of mango then.
Want to come down?
(pause) Maybe...
Don't. I'll bring it up. Along with mine.  Call it breakfast in bed. We've been together for nearly seven years, but this is a first.



(my portion of it)


Then comes the wavering, the shifting of the winds, the uncertain positioning of all that matters: will it be this way? Will it be that way?

It's cloudy and even a bit chilly outside. Ed stays put. In bed, upstairs. Wedged into a pose that at once he fell into but, too, he is now fashioning for himself.

I'm off to yoga. At the studio, I try to pick up those stellar moments of calm and yes, the stretches and poses are good, the teacher is quite excellent and after, I'm zipping home on Rosie hoping (and succeeding!) to beat the rain...


 
(just to the east of us)


... but at the farmhouse, it's as if we're on square one.

You okay?
Fine.
Need anything?
No.
Even as I see the eyes sag and the skin pale.
Can I suggest?... I ask this as if I were some neophyte. You, readers, know better: how effective was that last querie?


So I go to my daughter's. Monday is my day to work on classes and I surely have classes: I haven't taken any days off for the wedding -- not this week nor next, but the crunch is suddenly there: she needs help. I push off lecture work for the night and I spend a most lovely set of early evening hours folding, pasting and ribboning wedding programs...

...while the blue heron outside her window does his wonderful "curl into my own self" movement and I'm thinking -- I know that gesture. I've seen it. At the farmhouse, not too long ago.



(by Wingra Creek)


I return home. First the report from there is on the dismal side: he sleeps, wakes, offers an inconsequential comment, sleeps again,  but then, in a sudden turnaround, he speaks wistfully of chicken noodle soup. In a flash, it's there, he's eating it and I'm thinking -- maybe we'll pull out of this unscathed after all.

Maybe.

night frets

So long as there are tomatoes ripening on the kitchen counter, there will be fruit flies. That's just the way it is.

Ed, who once worked in a science lab with fruit flies reassures me that their life span is very, very short.

And so long as there is an ounce of energy left in Ed, he will persevere in living his convictions, some that I should think need a dusting and an infusion of modernity, but no, not according to him. They are his and they are what they are. This last sentence is really an answer to all those wonderful and kind Ocean reading souls who have urged me to urge him to go to the doctor. Indeed, doctor friends have urged me to urge him. But don't you see -- I can't do it. He takes chances that way. It is who he is.



hummingbird, for once -- resting


And so after a night of high fevers (Thursday), I have a night of relative quiet (Friday) and I think I am done with this illness of his, whatever it is and then boom! The third night (Saturday) he's hot again and I listen to him pant in his sleep and I gently and ever so quietly reach for his pulse and yes, it's high and yes, he's warm and then he wakes up and reminds me that he wants to be left to his sleep.

You can say a million things about the rightness or wrongness (probably the latter) of this approach, but I think I ought to warn you -- attempting to *change* someone is not likely a good starting point. He is determined to follow his own nose on this one, duke it out himself,  and if it kills him, so be it. This, from a man who loves science, fruit flies (or the study of such), loves innovation, loves clever and novel approaches to old problems facing the world. He's been too healthy too long to worry now about being in need of care.



the ever beautiful nasturtium and alyssum


If you're from the Midwest, you'll know that this was one beautiful day -- full of gentle sunshine and balmy warmth -- the last such day we are told and I believe it. It almost felt unreal now, in the middle of September when the leaves are starting to turn dusty greens or worse  -- dusty brown.

I stayed indoors cleaning the farmhouse. Not much of the wedding centers around the farmhouse, but still, it must be ready as we all must be ready, just in case.

And I went to yoga. I had to.



trying on the wedding shoes after slipping into yoga stuff


Child's pose: clear the mind of this undefined menace at home, clear the soul of anxiety, forget about the hours at night listening to that rapid pant next to me, ease into a stretch, inhale, exhale.

The ride back on Rosie is splendid, but as I zip past the tennis courts, I csn't help but think -- wow, how quickly patterns can change and life can take off in odd directions.





In the evening I cook chicken stew (with garden tomatoes!)...





... the young couple arrives -- the last Sunday meal where they are together but not married. Ed comes down and joins us because it is such a happy time right now that even he cannot resist being part of it.





And then he is upstairs and I am downstairs and Isis is with us and I wait for the night to see if finally the fever has disappeared for good and we can return to normal again.

Saturday

A lovely reader from far away writes that she has a problem opening Ocean. And then another writes  and now it's not even breakfast time and I have four people and they have one thing in common: they all use Internet Explorer and they can't read the most recent Ocean posts. So this is the puzzle: Why is Ocean corrupt for them?

Five hours (yes, that long) later, Ed and I locate the issue. I would have felt better if I could have blamed Blogger or Internet Explorer, but really, the problem was me and the way I write my posts (in Word, then I snatch and drag them over to Blogger). It’s much much funner to blame someone else.

But, here’s the good thing. Though I’m still eating meals alone...

...and Ed is still wrapped in a quilt down here on the couch, nonetheless he’s not burning and he’s lucid, lucid enough to work with me on my blogger problem.

And sweet enough not to give it a second thought.

So you take this guy in his rich and varied colors – not much into seeking help from anxious traveling companions or the medics, not much into weddings either, but here, stubbornly functioning under his own set of imperatives and yet... would you deny it? I will not: he is such a good soul.

I go to yoga late in the afternoon – the class with the fast paced instructor who nonetheless lets us pause at the end to think about the people in our lives. And I do.

I do.

denial

At night, Ed is hot, chilled, flushed – in other words, he’s fighting something or other and believe me, it is very odd to see him this way as neither he nor I are especially prone to viruses, infections, fevers and the like. I cannot remember the last time either of us burned like crazy from within.

In the morning, I eat breakfast and listen to his words of denial (Do you feel sick? No!)

That is his approach to most anything that stands to weaken him. And so I leave him smothered in a quilt (on this lovely and sunny day) and go to yoga where I attempt to shake off the feeling of anxiety that always comes when someone I care about is not well.

The ride on Rosie is delightful, the sun is dazzling, the fields are in that stage of golden brown that you come to accept at this time of the year, just as you accept the fact that you’re never going to bend and twist and balance as perfectly as all the young nymphs around you. And you accept that sometimes, people get sick.

At home, Ed tries once or twice to get up from underneath the quilt (I’m going to pick tomatoes!), each time retreating to another long spell of slumber.

A friend with a great deal of medical wisdom comes and looks him over and nudges him to shed his reluctance to be cared for, but he’ll have none of that. 

She leaves. I sit, watch, listen. The farmhouse is suddenly not the focal point of all weekend activity. I water a few flowers, but without enthusiasm. There are projects -- some half started, some yet to be initiated, but suddenly this isn't the time for them.

I reheat soup and mostly eat alone. I’m hoping the medicine called “denial” works wonders and that this whole period of heat and shallow breathing comes to an end just as fast as it came upon us.

vegetable soup

I did warn you, right? On Thursday, here, on Ocean, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. There are no quirky ideas festering, no time for creative thought, not even a handful of minutes to take the camera outside for a photo or two. (How easy is that: go outside and shoot a photo of a flower! No? No.)

The day starts early... So early! I read email, I go downstairs and think -- this is the time to make do with a quick picture, as requested by one of my commenters. There you go – dry Chinese lantern. Note how it looks a tad pale after 14 months on a sunny windowsill. Note, too, how gloomy it is outside. Dark enough that I have to turn on the lamp.

It’s cold, cloudy, dreary -- all of it. And wet. I take the donkey car. There’s no other way. Yesterday’s bike ride seems like it was from another era.

And when I drive home it’s even colder and darker and grayer. If the corn fields are golden now, you wouldn't know it.

The farmhouse is chilly enough that we consider putting the heat on. Ed is (vicariously?) tired. I make a pot of minestrone soup and he tells me it’s good to have hot soup on a cold day like today.

I clear the dishes and sit down to write. Ed dozes on my shoulder. It’s rare that we’re both so zapped. Worn to the core. Tomorrow will be better, brighter, newer, finer... it always is.

late

I always complete work on my first class of the day before I even leave the farmhouse.


 


The final task before scooting off is to print the finished product.

Today, the printer stalls, then goes into overdrive, then completely malfunctions and with that little act of defiance, it nearly ruins my great desire to bike to campus.

I had not biked on any of my work days thus far this semester. Rosie has been my ride of choice. I hadn’t the time for a slower commute. But today – well, today is REALLY the last warm day of the season and I am determined.

When the printer fails, sucking up precious minutes, I curse. Loudly. Then I call in Ed to help.

(That same Ed, who has been gently and continuously scraping, priming and finally painting the grate that covers the AC unit outside.)

My printer is fixed, the lecture printed, I am off, speeding, because I am also late.

(Though not so late that I would not be able to take a photo of the goldenrod en route.)

To my surprise, Ed catches up with me by car. I think – how wonderfully sweet! Later, I find out that he was actually on his way elsewhere, but no matter: he gives me a two mile boost and with that, I can pedal my way to a timely arrival on campus.



I finish work. I have before me a late afternoon bike ride home: those are at once the best and the worst rides. The best, because the landscape is beautiful and golden and the time pressures have receded.

The worst because the last mile to the farmhouse is hilly. And I’m tired.

Ed is out biking tonight and so I eat my Nicoise alone.

And I think uncomplicated thoughts, like how warm it is today and how good it is that I got to bike on this last day of the warmest summer season ever.

fall day

A cool morning, a Rosie ride, a pause to admire and to breathe in, breathe in, so deeply, no yoga necessary, deeply, the beautiful early autumn air. I remember a day just like this slightly more than a decade ago.

Corn husks are turning yellow, soy, too, is golden now. The warm and blustery air makes me want to stay all day on the rural roads.  I look around me and think -- nothing should change, nothing should be repositioned. 

But, on this day (and on some other days too)  I have three and a half hours of lectures and believe me, there isn’t much that I can give to this world after I’m done with my time behind a podium.

I take Rosie to Paul’s for an iced tea and meet Ed there just before Paul's closes for the day. It’s funny that there, Ed should sleep and I should do more work for tomorrow, but we are in this pattern of odd cycles and it often comes to be that we aren’t in sync. As in so many small details, in matters of when to sleep or not sleep, we do not automatically key into the same patterns.

Later in the evening we play tennis. I'm hardly dressed for it but we play anyway and the game is good which only goes to show that being good is not an altogether predictable thing.

At home I scramble eggs and grill a few remaining chicken brats and toss a salad – one with many, many tomatoes –  and I say:  that’s it, I can do no more.

And then Isis starts his meowing routine again.

Cat issues. We surely have our share of them. Isis is no dummy – he’s figured out that if he meows loud and strong, he’ll get Ed to pay attention. What Isis wants is for Ed (or me, but he targets Ed) to follow him to the sheep shed and stay with him there.

I do get it. The sheep shed (not the farmhouse) is his real home. He has his food, his in and out door, his litterbox and, most importantly, he has Ed’s messy desk which abuts the corner windows and there Isis likes to recline and watch the world go by.

Yes, I get it. But it means now that not only nights but evenings, too, are interrupted by the great meowing routine. Until Ed gives in. And Ed always give in. (To Isis, not to me. We’re still “talking” about his involvement in my girl's wedding.)

Isis has considered and rejected most anything that we offer him. He leaves, the room grows still. I like still. And, for this hour at least, quiet. Farmhouse quiet.

goldenrod

Just tell them you can't help it, you’re in the middle of harvest! – a comment from Ed, as I groan about a pile of tasks and too few hours to get them all done.

breakfast

And he's right. Harvest. That means picking, washing, sorting, and storing. It takes as long (if not longer) to do this as it did to water flowers on hot hot summer days (and it’s not as if that task is over and done with – we’re rolling into a week of warm sunshine and the cosmos is already showing signs of distress).

next door farmer harvests melon, child in tow

But I’m not a farmer or even a home maker of the type who can pause with life because there is a harvest. And when I think I have caught up with what Ed has brought in, he’s there again, picking, picking...

Despite the time squeeze, I take a noon hour pause and go back to yoga class. Out there by the prairie fields.

The meditative, stretched out peace doesn’t really spill much into the rest of the day. I imagine church may be like this for some – you go, you listen to all that good stuff about forgiving your neighbor and loving your enemy and then you step outside and you scream at your kid and curse your co-worker. Resolutions have a way of fizzing out, as if someone punctured the balloon of good thoughts the minute you turn the other way. Pfffft! Gone. But I do appreciate having a brief minute to indulge my inner peace. And mostly, I love feeling a wide range of movements again. I was never a kid who could do contortions and odd twists of the body, but I was nimble and sprite and it’s nice to reach for those motions again. So I indulge in that hour of yoga which means that I now have to stay up late and arise early to meet my work goals for the day.

At least dinner is mean and lean: yesterday’s spaghetti and shrimp sauce is fortified with some dozen more new tomatoes and garlic and all that’s very easy and it makes use of some of the newly picked bruised tomatoes so in all – life is very wonderful.

Sunday

Breakfast.  Porch. It's cool outside, but so very lovely.

Every flower that still blooms is special. Every lily is beloved.

You want to come with me and lift boulders out of the field? You may think that’s a quaint sort of invitation, maybe not up there with dinner and a movie, but I like it, because it has more to do with a quiet walk on a gorgeous morning than anything else.  It’s not about the boulders -- Ed does not ask for help with much of anything.

I hadn’t been out there, behind the barn, where Farmer Lee is preparing the soil for next year’s crops for quite a few weeks. My attention is so focused on the farmhouse that I forget about what happens out back.

When did we come to have a meadow of goldenrod??

So Ed picks boulders out and I watch the farmers to the north do their work...

..until he gets to the biggest boulder of them all...

 

... and this one he does need help with and we put all our strength behind it so that we can slide it onto a wheelbarrow and push it elsewhere...

Where? Ed asks.

Oh, by the tree where some child someday will play and maybe pretend it’s a table, to serve pretend tea, or maybe hide behind because sometimes you just have to hide when the world gets tough and mean around you...
Ed groans at the thought. Or maybe it is that he groans because the boulder is so heavy to move.

In the afternoon, I come outside as Ed untangles string and Isis looks on...

I pull him away to bike to the tennis courts and we put in a decent game there and after, I bike to yoga. A bit ambitious, all that biking, tennis playing and yoga, but it’s Sunday and how many days will we have that are this good, this bright, this delightfully energizing?

In the evening the young people come to dinner and one can’t really keep up with young people, but we try, we try...

The tomato seafood sauce – Ed asks later. All from our tomatoes?
Well of course.

He grins, proudly I think.