ENUI OUI

Perch

"Perch"

Last week I sat down to write my Thankful Friday entry and it was like being tarred and feathered or maybe more like making cheese, pulling teeth, watching paint dry, walking through swamp mud. All of those things. Sometimes I'm like this when it's too hard to pull the thoughts and words out of my brain, but this time I feel like there are no thoughts and words to pull out of this brain. I bet if you looked inside my left ear, you could see your house on the other side. I wish my basement was as empty as the inside of my brain feels right now. I don't know if it has something to do with the allergy medicine I've started taking again or if it's just that I'd rather stare out the window. I sit down to write and my gaze drifts to the view outside my window or to some pretty dresses at an online store. I need to buy a new swimsuit. If I'm at home and try to sit down on the couch with the laptop, Josephine will put her paws up on my knees or the couch and nip at my fingers while I try to type or chew on the corner of my lap desk. It really only takes two minutes of this for me to put down the computer and pick up one of her toys for a came of tug-o-war/fetch. 

Let's talk about Josephine for a second. On Saturday we gave her a pig's ear and it was kind of like handing an iPad over to any child. She chewed on it all of Saturday evening and well into Sunday before we took it away because it had reached choking hazard size. Then she hunted all around the house for it, like she had just misplaced the pig's ear. In between all that chewing, she learned how to use the dog doors. We are still not sure if she knows to go outside to use the bathroom or if she's just going outside to bark at other dogs and chew on sticks, but we've been accident free in this house for four days. It's really nice to not hear her whine while I'm in the middle of a shower and have to quickly dry off, throw on a robe and let her outside. The bad news is that when you throw her back inside because she keeps getting into the paint while you're painting a chicken coop, she just comes right back out unless you block off the dog door. She is now sporting some new white streaks in her face and on her ear as well as a little bit of blue in her eyebrow. I'm pretty sure she's going to terrorize the chickens when it comes time to put them in the backyard. 

Now I will tell you it has taken me hours and hours to write that paragraph up there and that's without any proof reading or anything. There are lead weights on these fingers and molasses inside this head. I left work Friday and noticed that I could see color in places that had been brown and gray for what seemed like forever. Yellow wisteria and pink tulip trees. The grass was beginning to green and seeds I had ordered arrived. All of this on the first day of Spring. Now when I look out the window, instead of bleak nothing, the trees all have hints of green and white. It's kind of like seeing their auras.  I want to jump for joy for all of this, but the spring in my step that I thought would come with Spring hasn't happened yet. Instead I'm kind of like a grizzly bear fresh out of hibernation. I'm slightly disoriented and groggy and I will tear off your face if you make the slightest move towards my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Do not even think about it. 

These days, when the mental fog rolls in, I start to panic a little. I think I have Dad's disease and it's got to be progressing at an even more accelerated pace than Dad's ever did. In just a matter of days I am not going to know where I've parked the car or that the tag in underwear goes in the back. I can feel the plaques forming and to me it looks just like the plaque that forms on your teeth, though I'm pretty sure it isn't. But I just image thick layers of hard yellowish crust forming on my brain and wish for a dentist tool to scrape scrape scrape at it. Sometimes I picture Doozer like creatures doing things like popping tension bubbles in my muscles or rubbing out a twitchy nerve. It's a great thing to do while trying to do savasana. Now I picture them with pick axes, chiseling away the plaque forming on my frontal lobe. I've lost both grandmothers to diabetes and one grandpa to heart disease. You would  think those things were the genetic predispositions I'd fixate on.  All it takes is one parent to literally lose there mind to flip those genetic predispositions all to Hell.

That's just to say that if things get funky weird or quite around here, it's only because I'm too busy visualizing Doozers chiseling away at my brain.