THANKFUL FRIDAY

Gratitude is tricky this week. I got absorbed with the horrors happening in Rafah and I’ve spent extra time contacting representatives and the President and basically anyone who is supposed to be representing my voice in the government to demand a ceasefire and to send aid not weapons. Then this morning, I got trapped in a conversation on Chinese/Taiwanese politics and had to send out a distress text to get out of it. The world is a tight ball of tension. It is really difficult sometimes to step out of the tension and take notice of the good things I am grateful for.

But I know that if I try real hard, I can come up with something.

I have on a brand new pair of overalls. They are navy blue and covered with daisies and I love them. They have been sitting in my drawer all week because I wanted to wear them today. Today is our Team Building event and instead of doing some activity that half of our group will complain about doing, we are volunteering at Harvester’s, a regional food bank that provides equitable access to nutritious food in the Missouri/Kansas area. I have been so excited about this since the idea was hatched a month ago. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, sorting canned goods or filling boxes, whatever, I’m excited and thrilled to be doing it. I’ve been thinking about it all week and it is the thing that is filling me with joy right now. Which tells me that I should be doing more of this.

So, while I’m at Harvester’s I’m going to talk to whoever I need to talk to about how I can volunteer on a regular basis.

I am grateful for my new overalls and all the pockets on my new overalls. There’s one whole pocket for my water bottle! I’m really grateful for this opportunity to help my community. Sure, this sounds cheesy and Pollyanna-ish. I hear it. I get it. I don’t care. I feed on acts of kindness and good works. I’m doing all of this for purely selfish reasons and that reason is that it makes me feel good. Not in a I’m-better-then-you kind of way or this-makes-me-a-good-person kind of way. It just feels good to do good.

Do good.

THE THINGS I SHOULD DO

I picked Nurse Jenn up on Monday morning and we headed to a yoga class that ended up being canceled. Turns out most of Waldo had power outages. So we switched gears and I drove us over to a local coffee shop for coffee and pastries and chats. We sat outside at a table tucked out of the way. It was perfect even though at one point Jenn gave me her sweatshirt to wear because I was cold. It was very romantic. We sat there and chatted about all the things that were happening or about to happen. I told her about yoga therapy school and she told me about how her youngest is getting ready to move out of the house. We talked about nothing important and then somehow ended up talking about something important: Living Wills.

Y’all…I don’t have a Living Will or a Healthcare Directive.

Yeah, I know. This sounds like something I would have taken care of by now, like something I should have taken care of immediately after J’s death. But seriously, how many people do you know had that kind of shit together in their (very) late twenties? I mean, that feels forgivable, but then even after Chris, I didn’t ever fill anything formal out. I have verbally said what I want, but verbal words are not legally binding. Especially if no one ever actually really listens to you. Jenn pointed out that a Healthcare Directive should be pretty detailed. It’s easy to say I don’t want to be ventilated, but in reality I should say I don’t want to be ventilated unless it’s there to make it easier for me to heal. All treatments should be centered around what sort of quality of life I would expect to have after treatment. We talked about limitations for treatments, like ventilation or life support for a certain number of days. We talked about about what ‘quality of life’ looks like for us both.

It’s a lot to consider.

Then the very next day, I opened up Facebook and Amani had posted a Death Doula PSA about living wills and advanced directives. I thought “How did she hear us all the way over there in Seattle?!?!” but she also shared that EForms was a very good place for creating these documents. So now I have absolutely no reason for not filling out all of this and storing it someplace where others can find it. But wait! There’s more. Amani recommends that you revisit these forms every year to keep them up-to-date. This is not a one and done adult task. This is an adult maintenance task.

Now, I hear some of you sighing and thinking “oh how depressing.” but it doesn’t have to be. If you are like me and want all the control, this is your opportunity to micromanage and control your very life. I find this idea very liberating and comforting. I get to define my idea of ‘quality of life’ and since I’ve been thinking about that, I’ve come to realize that I have high standards. I don’t want to leave a situation where I am left with nothing more than the ability to sit on a couch, watching TV all day. I don’t want to need a round the clock caregiver. If I need to be ventilated for treatments that are meant to save my quality of life, that’s fine, but after ten days, turn that shit off. Pull the plugs! I have a pretty high pain tolerance. So if I say that I’m in pain and want it all to end, then I’m serious.

Give me all the pills.

Micheal likes to joke about how I’m going to out live everyone. That’s possible except death is unpredictable, but if that’s true there’s not going to be anyone around to remember that I wrote this blog post, let alone verbally declared an end of life directive. This is all paperwork I need to have available for my future doctors so some Doogie Howser doesn’t try to play God with my tired, dying old lady body. Since it is officially summer, most of my chore list has been handed off to Michael and The Cabbage (band name). I’ve purchased a yoga class pass and I’ve made plans to meet a yoga friend for breakfast one morning. I might be interviewing for yoga teaching job for a studio in Lees Summit. Other than yoga, vacation, and another trip out to MBL, I don’t really have all that much on my to-do list.

Creating a Living Will sounds like a great summer project!

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Michael and I had the discussion on Monday evening about the possibility of Tuesday being a scooter day. His weather app had declared Monday to not be a scooter day when in fact it would have been a fine day for scooter riding. So he looked at the weather app Monday evening and declared that it would most definitely not be a scooter day on Tuesday. His app showed lightening bolts and clouds. He said “No. You will not be riding your scooter tomorrow.” and I sighed and said ‘okay’. But the next morning, I got up and walked Josephine. It was so nice outside. The sky did not have any hints of menace. When I got home from our walk, I checked my weather app and it looked clear except for a sharp peak of activity around 3:00PM that lasted an hour or so. I looked down at Josephine and said “I’m riding my scooter.”

The weather here has been unpredictable and messy. I feel like this time last year, I was riding my bicycle to work every other day and my scooter on the other days. Cold morning temps and rain showers have made two wheeled rides impossible. The most frustrating part is believing the weather report of rain and driving the car to work only to have a clear beautiful day. I was fed up and reminded myself of my rule of two wheels that I used to follow religiously.

The Rule of Two Wheels: If the temps are 40 or above and the sky is clear, I ride two wheels. If there is a possibility of rain, the two wheel vehicle is the scooter. No rain means bicycle. I only have to get to work dry.

So I rode my scooter on a day where there was one sharp peak of activity. What I didn’t plan for was that the sharp peak of activity was possible tornado weather and when I got to work, I got a little nervous. I sent a text to Michael to warn him that I had made a choice and that it might not have been the smartest choice, but I was prepared mentally for the consequences. Not physically. When I’d opened up my scooter seat that morning to put my lunch in the storage compartment, my rain coat that I sometimes keep in there wasn’t there. I shrugged, put my helmet on and scooted on to work without it. The storm rolled in at 3:00. Michael was trying to decide if he should bring my car up and ride my scooter home or go shelter in the basement and by the time he had made a decision the storm had moved past us. When I left work just after 6:00, the sky was completely clear. The temperatures were perfect with only a slight occasional breeze.

Perfect scooter riding conditions.

When I got home, Micheal had the garage door open for me. I walked into the house and he just shook his head and said something about how I managed yet again to ride between raindrops. Maybe this is one of my superpowers. But I must say, that taking the risk and surviving the risk was exhilarating. Sure, I’m grateful for making it to work and back home safe and dry. That’s an easy gratitude grasp. I don’t usually see myself as a risk taker. I’m sure there are many who would disagree with that statement, but I feel like most of my previous risky behaviors have happened out naivety. I don’t recognize a situation as a risk until I’m in the middle of it and then I might pause and say to myself “this might be dangerous.” But by the time I recognize it, it’s too late. I’m in it. I’m doing the thing. It’s sort of like the thought concept of how you could walk on water if you didn’t know you couldn’t walk on water. Technically I am of an age where people would say that I should know better. Gratefully, I have made it to this age without losing that naivity and that I still think I can do the thing even if it might be risky or a little dangerous.

Today was not a scooter day. It rained on us during our morning walk, cutting the walk short. But there were three good days of zipping down city streets, beeping hellos to friends as I passed by, and the joy that comes with riding a scooter. The risks are worth it.

DREAM

Chris came back and we had sex. “This is different. You’re different. Were you even enjoying yourself?” he asked me. “Yes…sort of. My head is preoccupied with thoughts. You’re here. And my life is different.” I replied. “Would you rather I didn’t come back?” he asked. “Absolutely no. I’d rather you be here. I just have to figure out what that means and looks like in this current life. You’ve been gone for a while.” I replied with these words still in my mouth as I woke from the dream. I laid there, blinking at the ceiling trying to decipher it. I tend to wake from such dreams with various emotions, mostly sadness..some times anger. This time I am filled with sadness and fear. I think about how maybe if he came back it’s him that wouldn’t want to be here with me.

I’m not the person I was when he was here.

There seems to be a growing trend with friends and acquaintances where sometime between forty five and fifty years of age, the male in the relationship decides he doesn’t want to be married anymore. They have up and left to be alone or (most often) to be with another woman. They’ve left marriages that at least from everyone else’s point of view look like perfectly happy marriages. I know at least two women who never saw it coming. They thought all was fine and then Bam! The spouse tells them they’ve been unhappy for years. Years! So there’s a part of me that wonders if Chris would have grown weary with me. I can’t imagine it, but there’s a lot of situations that I couldn’t have imagined that I am now living. I look across the bedroom at a picture of the two of us when we were in Oregon and the look on Chris’s face tells me that he would never, ever leave on his own accord.

But….

There is no What-If game to play here. There is no possibility of “coming back” for Chris. Yet I still have these dreams that hint of the possibility that one day, he’s going to just walk through the front door with the expectation that everything is as it was when he left eleven years ago. So much is so different. The walls are not even the same colors that they were when he left. His office has been taken over by another to be used as a bedroom. Though it is just as cluttered and messy as when it was his office. The dog is different. There’s a cat now too and two humans. It is no wonder I was preoccupied with thoughts because I would have to figure out how to reorganize all of this, how to tell the other people living in the house. I am sure that this is what I was thinking while dreaming. I’ve learned to live without him. I’d have to relearn how to live with him.

“Would you rather I didn’t come back?”

My answer remains the same because I know that when he asks that Chris is not speaking about the physical real world. He is talking about the worlds that exist behind closed eyelids in that space of deep sleep. If this is all I get, then yes, yes, a thousand times yes, don’t ever stop coming back. If I cannot laugh with you on this plane of existence, let me laugh with you in our dreams. Let me kiss and touch you. Let me argue with you and get frustrated with you. Let me be filled with joy as I see your face. If this is the only way, then this is the only way. Next time I promise to not be preoccupied or hesitant. I promise to be fully present in your visit with a full knowledge that they are short and fleeting.

But hopefully, never ending.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I put Michael and I on a cleansing diet when I got back from Woods Hole. So for the past two weeks there has been no alcohol, gluten, sugar, and no animal products in our meals. Mostly. I haven’t been a food police. I left in caffeine because I only drink one cup of coffee in the mornings and Michael has a thing of tea. Michael usually makes chicken salad to eat on crisp bread for his lunches and he’s kept that routine. I ate a bagel on Wednesday because it was work birthday treats and the bagels came from Meshuggah’s which is the closest to a New York bagel that you will find in the midwest. I don’t hate myself. I ate the bagel, but my food intake with the bagel exception, has stayed within the guidelines.

And it hasn’t been all that hard to do.

The reality is that for the most part, we tend to eat a vegan/vegetarian diet through the weeknights anyway. My lunch is leftover dinner. There’s a night that includes shrimp or fish. Taco nights include soyrizo and cheese. Those things have been easily replaced or left out. I think the idea of a ‘cleansing’ diet makes people focus on the things on the list they cannot have instead of seeing all that they can have. That’s what makes it so daunting, but when you already mostly eat that way it’s not a big deal. I think back to the very first time I put myself on a cleansing diet and how truly awful the experience was. Chris and I were still in Oklahoma, living with his mom. Oklahoma was not a place for vegetarians, let alone vegans and I got really bogged down by the things I couldn’t eat. I read so many labels. Grocery shopping was a full day adventure. I knew so little about food and nutrition then. I am actually surprised by the amount of stuff I didn’t know about the food I was putting into my body. Doing the cleansing diet changed the way I eat and think about nourishment.

I come back to this diet every once in a while as a reset. Michael has been all on board and rather a good sport about it, even suffering through a tofu vegetable stir-fry. He has incentives though for doing this diet with me. The last day of the cleanse is the day he has to have bloodwork done for a checkup and he will be going in with three weeks of clean eating. My take away from this round of a cleansing diet is how we deal with the weekends. When I made up the first week’s meal plan, I got to Saturday and Sunday and Michael said “what about lunches?” More often than not, we eat lunches out on the weekends and we buy rich, fancy ingredients to cook for dinners. There’s also a fair amount of booze. This cleansing diet has placed a spotlight on how our weekends can be so unmindful both nutritionally and financially. While I might be spending a teensy bit more on groceries, we are saving more than that in eating out fees. This is good practice for when we get back from our moose hunting trip because we plan to go on a financial diet and tighten up our spending/budget.

I want a new drive way. They are not cheap.

In the past, I would probably (and have probably) used my Thankful Friday post to be grateful that a cleansing diet is almost over. This time around is different. I don’t feel like I’ve made a great sacrifice or that limiting my meals to a strict vegan/gluten free foods has been a hardship. At the end of week two, I don’t think I can say I’ve lost any weight. There are no drastic physical changes. I’m less puffy maybe. I feel physically the way I should feel, which is good. I know from previous experiences that my body feels better on this kind of diet anyway. My gratitude this week comes from the insights I have gleaned on how we spend our money and the crap we eat on weekends. I am also grateful for how I have treated myself during the past two weeks. I’ve been able to set an intention for clean eating without guilting myself or binding myself. I’ve given myself some grace (see above about a bagel). I’ve treated myself with kindness and this is a big thing because I’m my own worst enemy.

But I will say that our diet ends on the day we have reservations for Le Fou Frog (a famously popular KC French restaurant) and I am very much looking forward to the escargot in herbed butter. Especially the butter.

CHARGED PARTICLES

The northern lights are an atmospheric phenomenon that's regarded as the Holy Grail of skywatching. Stefanie Waldek, Daisy Dobrijevic from Science.com

I’ve never been interested in seeing them.

It’s not that I would not want to see them; I just never thought about going out of my way to see them. The thing is, I’ve never really been all that interested in the night sky. Chris and a gaggle of friends would spend hours out on the oval at night, gazing up at the sky during our time at USAO. I think I tagged along a couple of times, but I found the whole experience to be uncomfortable. Laying on the ground with the night chill and swatting away mosquitoes while trying not to fall asleep was just not something that appealed to me. I’m not good with late night things. The Jenny Lewis concert I attended recently was a rare event and a struggle since she didn’t hit the stage until around 8:45 and my bedtime is 9:00. I’d pay extra for my favorite bands to put on matinees. To truly experience and see the night sky, one must wait until the sky is at its darkest and that happens well after 9:00.

When word went out on Friday that there was a possibility of seeing the Northern Lights in the Kansas City area, I was mildly interested. Then Chad sent me a screen shot of an email from the ham radio weatherman group he follows (of course he does) and it was all about the solar storms that were predicted for Friday and Saturday. So I replied to Chad with “ask the ham nerds about times.” and started to think about digging out my tripod. Friday evening rolled around and Michael and the Cabbage went to a school lock-in for the night. I FaceTimed with Amani and futzed around the house. I stepped out onto our front porch to look at the sky and my view was blocked by trees. I shrugged and went to bed. Then I woke up the next morning and my social media was filled with pictures people had posted of the Northern Lights.

Photographer Cindy experienced some serious JOMO.

Michael and the Cabbage came home from their lock-in and slept most of the day away, leaving me to my own devices and I just kept thinking about the pictures I had seen of the auroras. It was such a rare event to happen this far south, not that I’d consider Kansas City as ‘south’. I was just under the impression that if I were to ever see the Northern Lights, I was going to have to travel to Alaska or Iceland. I knew from Chad’s ham nerds that the solar storm would be even bigger and the auroras even stronger that evening. By the time Michael got up I knew that I wanted to go out and try to photograph the auroras for myself. The latest aurora map predictions said the peak time for seeing the lights would be between 11:30 and midnight. It didn’t take Michael much convincing to drive us an hour north to Smithville Lake. We started to set up in a parking lot, but the view wasn’t great. Also, as soon as I opened the truck door, my weirdo magnetic attracted another lights viewer who made a direct beeline to us with unsolicited advice. We quickly took a short hike to a more isolated area near the water.

Then we waited.

We sat on the ground, eating popcorn and swatting away little bugs while looking at the sky, all the things that are unappealing to me. Every once in a while, I would snap a picture and then look at the image to check my exposure times. It was around 11:10 and we hadn’t seen anything yet. Michael asked me what I wanted to do. I looked at the time and said “I want to wait. It’s still too early.” So we waited. We listened to the tree frogs and the murmurs of conversations happening around us. We watched a flat bottom boat hug the edge of the water on the other side of the lake and complained about the fisherman’s spotlight that he was using. Then I noticed a very faint green light. I pointed it out to Michael and said that it might be something, but most likely a cloud. So I snapped the shutter and we both gasped at the image. The camera captured a streak of green and purple dancing across the sky.

There are many many myths centered around the auroras, not surprisingly related to the afterlife. Japanese folklore spoke of the auroras as messengers from heaven. Native Americans believed the auroras were recently deceased loved ones, carrying torches on their way to heaven. This was a theme in one of the scenes from Almost Maine. In the scene, a woman has traveled to Maine to see the Northern Lights so she can say one final goodbye to her late husband. She’s carrying her broken heart in pieces in a paper bag and she meets a man who ends up taking that bag, dumping the pieces on the ground, and starts to fit those pieces of her heart. When Michael asked me to read this play with him, this was the hardest scene for me to read. Just the act of reading scenes itself brought up the memories of countless of hours of running lines with Chris. Mix those memories with that scene’s story line and it’s surprising I made it through it all alive. The aurora myths are easily believable if you don’t know anything about charged particles.

We were almost home when I said “Hey..remember that time we saw the Northern Lights?” as if it had been an event that happened years ago. I am almost uncertain that it even happened at all. The whole thing feels unreal, unbelievable. We never saw the auroras with our eyes, only through the camera and I had my camera set to a long exposure time. Our eyes just don’t have enough light sensors for seeing them at this latitude, but maybe in June, when we travel north for the moose hunt, we’ll have a better chance of seeing them with our eyes.

Maybe then I will change my mind about seeing ghosts.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Sometime around the beginning of April, I posted a picture of a goose who had decided to set up a nest on the rooftop outside my office. She laid five eggs and then settled in for a month, not moving but to rotate around every once and a while. We saw the goose’s partner only briefly in the beginning. The female goose sat all alone on the rooftop through dropping temperatures and downpours. At one time we even had a camera set up for a live feed of the goose. Then Jeff went to adjust it and accidentally broke the camera. Not just my office, but a number of people became fully vested in the survival of these geese. We worried and fretted over the dangers like our resident hawk and what happens when the eggs hatch.

I was scheduled to be at MBL when the eggs were expected to hatch. So I would check in every once and while to see if any of the eggs had hatched. No babies was always the response. One coworker even went in on Saturday to check. Finally, sometime on Sunday, the eggs hatched and when I got to work Monday morning there were five baby geese poking their little heads out from under their mother’s protective wing. Dad finally reappeared and the family was complete. Then we all started to fret over how these little geese were going to get down from the rooftop. Maintenance installed a ramp, which the geese avoided like it was hot lava. We would stand at the window and watch as they would all get close enough to the ramp to think they might give it ago. Then they’d dart off in the opposite direction. Finally, when the window washers made it to that area, we were able to convince them to toss the babies to the ground. Which they did. Like tossing a beanbag for a game of cornhole. They all landed safely and the family waddled off. We haven’t seen them since.

It does not go unnoticed that these eggs hatched so close to Mother’s Day. For this past month, this mother goose was a daily reminder of the struggles and hardships of motherhood and so many women do this every day alone. They get the kid up and ready for the day. If they’re fortunate, they get this kid fed breakfast before dropping them off at daycare/school. They’re the ones that show up when the school nurse calls. They’re the ones baking cupcakes at midnight for a last minute bake sale. They are the ones most often showing up. My dad did his best to help out with raising me. He volunteered for all the extracurricular activities. He was often in charge my evening meals and Sunday mornings he made mom and I breakfast and served it to us in bed. My dad brought me a tray of breakfast every Sunday morning like I was a gosh dang princess. I think he did pretty well for being raised with patriarchal ideas on gender roles.

Mom also volunteered. She made sure I was up and fed and ready for school each day. She made sure there was a responsible adult around at the end of a school day whether it be a neighbor or instructions to get off the school bus at one of the many church ladies that took turns looking after me. Mom spent countless hours lying on the sewing room floor while I struggled with sewing projects. She listened to me when I said I wanted to play the cello and made that happen by buying me a cello and finding me a teacher. She tolerated my goofiness whenever we were shoe shopping. She was the one who discovered USAO first and told me that this might be the school for me. We visited that school together and the moment we turned into the circle on campus, we both knew she was right. My mom made sure I stayed focused and was prepared for a successful future.

So for today, because it’s Mother’s Day weekend, this Thankful Friday moment of gratitude goes out to all those mothers who diligently sit on those eggs and protect those babies under their wings.

And my mom.

CHANGE

Years ago, my yoga teacher told me that people both fear and crave change. There are a lot of emotions wrapped up in changes, not unlike the memory balls in Inside Out when touched by Joy and Sadness. Then there is the complexity of change itself. It something we can choose or sometimes chosen for us, often without warning. Those without warning changes that are thrust upon us often send a body into fight or flight mode. There’s trauma involved, but the changes we choose for ourselves comes with its own set of anxiety feelings.

Mostly doubt.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about mobility, the aging body and how this plays into my yoga teaching practice. As I was putting together some slides of shoulder anatomy for a yoga strap workshop that I want to do, I had to resist turning my strap workshop into an anatomy/physiology class. The more I thought about the shoulder joint and the things we task that joint with, the more my idea of teaching shifted. I feel moved to teach others to move their bodies in a way that supports their joints and overall mobility. This does not include teaching a student how to wrap their foot around their head or other such pretzel poses that most westerners associated with the term ‘yoga’. This thought planted a seed in the back of my brain. What if I got certified in Yoga Therapy, supporting healthy body movement by working with a patients health care provider? What would that entail and how would that change my current career? I’ve been sitting quietly with this planted seed and all of these questions for some time.

Then I asked these questions out loud and that seed sprouted.

I have found a program (thanks, Shannon!) that offers a Master’s in Yoga Therapy and is taught by MDs, which feels more legit than a lot of programs I have looked at online taught by other yoga teachers. No offense to yoga teachers, but most do not have doctorates in anatomy and physiology. Many 200hr teacher credit courses don’t really even teach anatomy beyond the basics of this is an arm and that is a leg. I have opinions about that, but that’s another ranty post for another time. This program would basically be like going back to graduate school and when I told those around me about this, I was hit with a wave of support. I still have some questions and planning to do. There are things happening at work that may change how I do my job in the future. It’s the reason I’m making a quick return to MBL at the end of June. That change comes with a lot of uncertainty and may or may not even happen. The potential of it happening has me stepping back and slowing down on the return to graduate school idea. I think I’ve waited too late to apply for the Fall anyway, but I think this is good because it gives me time to carefully fill out financial aid forms and the application. I intend to apply for the next Fall enrollment.

I talked to Michael about this and the possible work changes last night and when I had told him every thing, he said “How do you feel?” I sighed and then said “I feel anxious and scared and little bit like I’m going to throw up.” Then he reminded me that I could always say no to the work change. He is supportive of the yoga therapy thing and told me that I am probably the only one he knows who has stuck with the same job/career path for as long as I have. I’ve been a research scientist for twenty four years! Becoming a Yoga Therapist would not change that. It would be something I would do part time that I intend to transition into full time when and if I retire. The other thing would change that and I have yet decided on how this would make me feel. Both of these changes are of my own choosing. Both of these changes are not or will be quick and drastic. These are long game changes. This does not me that I am not feeling a bit buzzy right now. Just keeping up with my calendar right now is making me want to breath into a paper bag. I think I have jury duty this month too…but have forgotten to add that to the calendar. Anyway, I told someone recently that things were going to slow down for me in May. I was wrong.

Things are going to slow down for me in July.

Maybe.

ADDRESS UNKNOWN

I’m going to tell you about the dumb thing I did recently. I ordered a gift through Amazon for my sister-in-law and since I was in a rush and on my iPad, I wasn’t paying close attention to where I was shipping the gift. I have a list of addressed in Amazon of family and friends who I may decide needs a coloring book or nectar rings for feeding hummingbirds. I just selected the address for James R. Graham and placed my order. It was only later after I knew it had been delivered and I never heard from Katrina about it that I started to suspect something. James R Graham is my brother’s name. It’s his son’s name and son’s son’s name. I’m pretty sure if that son and his wife decide to have a baby and it’s a boy, that kid will be a James R Graham. James R Graham was also my dad’s name.

I sent Katrina’s gift to my Dad. In Collinsville OK. To a house that we no longer own because my dad is dead.

After some interweb sleuthing, I tracked down the young man who bought the house when Mom sold it and messaged him through Facebook. He was very kind and had been trying to figure out how to contact the family because he recognized the name. I don’t think he opened the package and I’m pretty sure it’s weird to receive a package delivery for a man who has been dead for almost then years. Mail is not so unusual. I still get mail for Chris all the time. But a large box containing a glass hummingbird feeder is an unusual gift for a dead man. I was able to connect him to Katrina and she was able to retrieve her gift.

My dad had an almost zero online presence. He appeared in pictures that we posted, but he didn’t have a Facebook page or Twitter account. He never sent texts and had the most basic cell phone he could possibly have. Dad was not tech savvy, but also did not require a tech savvy person to ‘fix’ something like a printer connection or run a software update. Because of his lack of online activity, it never really dawned on me that there would be internet things of Dad’s that I would need to clear out or download, like what I had to do with Chris. There’s a whole external hard drive in my file cabinet that contains all the content of Numskullery.com, as well as pictures and word documents of started projects. I weeded out so many domains that he had purchased but never used. I still have Dad’s phone number saved in my phone (as well as Chris’s).

Apparently, I still have his address stored in my gift list.

In my explanations to the young man and Katrina about my shipping snafu, I said “I don't know what happened.” I also called myself a ‘dope’, but to be honest, I’ve had Dad lingering around me ever since I started planning our moose hunting trip. His silly jokes just randomly bubble up out of my own mouth. It is not unlike Whoopie Goldburg’s character in Ghost where she plays a medium for spirits to speak to the living. I keep thinking about how his prize for anything was always a fifty cent piece. Always. Inflation had no effect on this. Sort of like the five dollar bill Grandmother put in my birthday card every year until she died when I was in my twenties. I have a small stash of fifty cent pieces, but they were not won by being the first to spot anything. The Tooth Fairy left those and I have saved them all these years.

And I can’t believe I am just now realizing that the Tooth Fairy was my dad.

I haven’t been back to the house where we lived since Mom sold it. I almost asked Katrina how the old house looked, what had been changed, what was the same. I don’t think I want to know. One of the ways I figured out I had tracked down the right person was through his photos. He had a photo that had the old scary shed in the background. That shed was so full of old tools and crap. I don’t think I ever really went in two steps past the entrance. It smelled of dirt and old oil. There were always wasps. But it was something I could still recognize. I don’t know about the rest of the place and I prefer not knowing. I prefer to think that the front brick entry way looks exactly the same as it did when we all as a family would stand there to pose for Easter pictures, Mom’s irises blooming all around us. That place will be forever in a state of Spring in my memories. Maybe summer too when it would be so hot, tar in the road would bubble up. We’d ride over the bubbles with our bicycles and laugh at the popping sounds.

If I delete the address, do I delete the memories?

That address was one of the first things I was forced to memorize and I’ll remember it always, burned into my brain deeper than any password or anniversary date. So, I will be going in and cleaning out the old address list and at the very least remove those who are no longer with us. Oh, and I’ll warn the guy living at the old place to keep an eye out for a second package.

Yeah… I sent two packages there.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

If I go over to the gym at a specific time, I can use the yoga classroom for my own practice because there are no classes going on at the time. If I miss that timing window, I end up rolling out my mat between the windows and the exercise bikes. The exercise bikes are not the most popular and usually no one is on a bike while I’m moving through suryanamaskara. It’s not a big deal to me to have a possible audience because I have my headphones on and the volume up loud enough to drown out other gym noise. I’ve gotten adept at putting a mental bubble around me and my mat, but getting to use the yoga classroom gives me easy access to the yoga enhancers (props) and a bit of privacy.

That being said, I do not treat the space as my own personal space. I leave the doors open or at least partially open and I leave the sign outside turned to ‘open’. I want others to feel free to use the space even though I’m in there doing my own thing. It just feels selfish of me to claim this whole space for just myself. My schedule has been so wackadoodle that I’m struggling to carve out time for my own yoga practice. So when I do get the opportunity I make my practice really challenging. I’ve added hand weights to my suryanamaskara and mix in some dynamic movement, but I also leave time for a good long savasana (final relaxation). The end part of my practice is truly the most important part because I don’t get a savasana when I’m teaching classes. That’s twice a week where I’m doing and teaching without reaping the full benefits of yoga. My classes are not my practice.

This week, I was in that space doing my thing and I had just settled into final relaxation. I heard some other people in the gym, but quickly tuned them out. There was a singing bowl playlist playing through my headphones loud enough to feel the vibrations without damaging my ears. It was a good final relaxation. I wasn’t fidgety or crying (that happens). I sunk right in and landed in the space between awake and asleep. I was there for a good fifteen minutes and when the timer signaled the end, I peeled myself up to a seated position. When I opened my eyes, I noticed that someone had closed both doors to the yoga classroom. They had even turned the sign around to read “in use”.

My job and my service as a yoga teacher is to protect my students during their savasanas. I am the time keeper and on high alert watching over my student to ensure they are comfortable and feel safe. I take this job very seriously because I feel that savasana is (especially in our current lifestyle/environments) the most important thing a person can do for themselves. Not only does it allow the body to recover and adjust to the physical changes that happen during the moving parts of yoga, but it gives a body time and permission to just rest. I have taught at studios where I have had women tell me that they pay me so they can rest. It is their only guilt free moment and they need the permission to ‘indulge’. I think having to pay someone to give you permission to rest says a lot about what is happening in our society.

I did some investigating and it didn’t take much to find out who closed me up in the yoga room this week. I haven’t had the opportunity to thank them in person yet because they’re on vacation, but I want them to know how very grateful I am for their simple little act. By closing the doors and turning the sign around, this person gave me permission to fully relax in the space. Their actions were very much like having someone watch over and protect me during my own savasana, something I rarely get.

And this is a prime example of how small acts of thoughtful kindness has big impacts.

SAY CHEESE

My theme for my weekend at Heather’s was Cheese. We made a ridiculous recreation of the Milk Bar Bakery’s Cheesy Puffs cake. We ate fancy grilled cheese sandwiches at Cheese Bar and then bought cheese at the store that owns the restaurant. Their pimento and cheese is my mother’s and I ate the last of it when I got home in the same way I’d eat it as a kid, sandwiched between two pieces of Wonder Bread. With the first bite, I started singing “Let’s do the time warp again!” After I left Heather’s, she and a friend attended a cheesecake class and were in the middle of baking as I passed a Sargento cheese truck.

I’m planning a cleansing diet for the month of May.

This trip to Des Moines was my second trip to the city and my first trip on solo with Josephine. Here’s what I learned. It takes no time to get from Kansas City to Des Moines. If you’re lucky, along the way you will spot bald eagles. I saw two! There’s an opportunity to see covered bridges and shop at an Amish store filled with homemade canned goods and crafts. You know you are leaving (or entering) the state of Missouri when you see all the giant firework warehouses next to the highway. I-35 is very much like the section of I-35 that runs through Oklahoma, meaning it needs some work. The cheese shop with the most wonderful cheese is right next to a French bakery that sells all the best flakey pastries and baguettes for the cheese you just bought at the fancy cheese shop.

There will be many trips to Heather’s in the future; one of which will be for the State Fair.

This trip was also a test of how well Josephine will do in the car without being able to sit in my lap for most of the ride. I fixed her bed in the front seat with a towel in the floor. There was a little bit of a dance in the beginning, but she very quickly settled into her bed. Then she split her time between the floor and the bed. She was the perfect copilot. She let me listen to whatever I wanted and didn’t talk while This American Life was playing. We made one stop for potty breaks for both of us and she didn’t request anything from inside the gas station. She never acted nervous or anxious. This is all very important because I have some solo camping adventures I want to do and it feels safe to have Josephine with me for those. She’s a little dog, but she’s got a big bark.

There was a particular song that kept popping up on the radio last year, This Year by Emily King. It’s catchy and felt like a good morning theme song. It’s the song that played in my head when I was writing out my plan/flow chart for 2024. It’s not a self absorption or a ‘you’re so vain’ thing. I don’t listen to the song and think ‘yeah, the world needs to revolve around me!’. I hear that song and see it as a reminder to take care of my own happiness. I have also spent too much time making space for someone else both physically and mentally. In my efforts to make room, I have made myself smaller and a little numb. So all the things I’ve put on my chart for the year have been activities I want to do for myself. I’m becoming less numb and less tolerant of being talked at as opposed to being talked to or with. I’m working at being less small. Making space for myself is involving a number of solo trips this year because planned trips force me to carve out the time for me. If I put it on the calendar and book the room, I’m going and that’s that.

I guess the next adventure will be solo camping. I’ve built the kitchen box and organized my camp gear. All that’s left is to throw a dart at the map and go.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Westside Local posted a picture of my art hanging on their walls, which I in turn shared to my social media places. The prints have been up all through March and I have to make plans to remove them at the end of April. Honestly, with all that is going on, I sort of set this showing out of my mind. I had intended to go into Westside Local for lunch with coworkers, but suddenly it’s April 19th and I don’t understand what happened to time.

Where’d it all go?

I realize there is still time to get there for a lunch or something. April is not over, but coordinating my calendar around everyone else’s calendars is like trying to solve a complicated quantum physics problem. Yesterday, I spent a large part of my morning texting back and forth with Jenn about lunch dates. I finally ended up just sharing my calendar with her. We managed to schedule a lunch day and provided proof to each other that it was a real date because we both put it in our calendars. Everyone is busy with life right now because we are all basically hibernating mammals. Sure, we weren’t sleeping during of the winter months but we were only into minimal effort activities. Now that the sun’s out and the birds are chirping, we’re crawling out from under our layers and setting down our bowls of soup. The salad days are upon us! I mean sort of. I have to cover plants tonight because temps are dropping into the low 30s, but it’s a brief two day cold front and then we’re right back into balmy thunderstorm weather.

Any way. Things are happening and we’re all doing the thing.

I’m super grateful to Westside Local for giving me the opportunity to hang my pictures on their walls. This has been the most chill experience. I didn’t feel rushed to get things prepared. There was zero hassles in hanging photos, which I had to do on my own. I didn’t have to endure another artist reception where I uncomfortably had to talk to people about my art. I haven’t sold anything from this showing, but funny enough I sold a print that is not in this showing, a photo from a recent trip. I do not care that I have not sold anything. Money is not my motivation, though it is a validation. It just feels special to have some of my favorite pictures displayed on walls where complete strangers will see them. Really, that’s all I want to say about it because it still feels super awkward to talk about my art.

With that, I’m off to Des Moines with Josephine as my copilot. We’re going to spend the weekend with Heather where there will be shenanigans, bubbly drinks and beagles. If you are in the Kansas City area and find yourself looking for a nice place for a meal, I suggest you give Westside Local a try. The food is delicious, atmosphere is charming, and the art on the wall isn’t bad.

THINGS I DON'T DO ON THE WEEKENDS

I don’t check my email on the weekends. I have two gmail accounts, one is the original that I got locked out of for a few weeks. I created a new account when that happened and now the old account is mostly spam/ads/trash with the occasional reminders for a bill or a receipt from Google Fiber. My work email used to be attached to my phone but I never had that set up when I swapped phones two phones ago. In order to get to work emails from home, I have to pass through the security gauntlet that is not unlike getting through all the booby traps to get to the hidden treasure. So I just don’t bother. The gmail account I created while I was locked out of the old one was meant to be a cleaner account but this one has started to get a little junky with the spams. Every Monday morning I open up the email accounts, select everything unread in the promotions folder and delete without thinking twice.

And it feels really good.

I also do not even look at the news until Sunday mornings when CBS Sunday Morning does their little snippet of news at the beginning of the show.

I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to ignore my email accounts on the weekends. I didn’t flash a meme of sitting on the beach with a cold beer and a notice that reads “slams laptop ‘ill Monday” up anywhere. I just stopped checking my email. During the weeks, I am continuously answering to someone in email and/or Teams (stupid Teams). I much prefer face to face conversation and sometimes will ignore a work email and just go find the person who sent it so we can discuss the issue. This continued answering to people doesn’t just apply to work. There are doctor’s notices, Vet visit reminders, bill notices and the countless daily things that must be taken care of to keep the lights on. When I’m not answering to people, I’m keeping my self accountable by staying informed with worldly news and checking to see how my representatives are representing me with bills they are voting (or not voting) on. In my case, it’s about 50/50 on which rep is doing a decent job for this state. (I did just have to send out an email to our Attorney General, defending Planned Parenthood).

A Chookooloonks newsletter was waiting for me in my inbox this morning and in it Karen Walrond wrote of the importance of self compassion. Treating yourself with compassion should be a daily practice, not something you do when you’ve completely depleted yourself. Karen is not talking about spa days. She writes of small, simple actions like dancing or stopping to take pictures of wildflowers and how these actions help sustain us in our activism, particularly when there is so much that needs doing right now (any one see the recycling segment on CBS Sunday Morning this week?). The state of things is overwhelming and reminding myself that change happens in micrometers starting with my own community is my daily mantra, but I never really stopped and thought about the little actions I take daily that gives me the energy to write the letters and make the phone calls.

I often stop to take photos of flowers and it is not uncommon to look over at my cubicle and see me dancing like banshee. The no emails or news on weekends are just two small things I do as self compassion. I just didn’t realize it until now.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Sunday was for lawn work. I bought some plants for my tiny backyard garden that ends up being a mix of herbs and tomatoes every year. I purchased some decorative plants for the front, including a hosta plant called Queen Josephine (because, of course). As Michael and I roamed through the large plant center, our cart started to fill up and I was juggling cost, durability and beauty while reaching for this or that. I kept asking Michael “Can I get this?” and he would say “yes”, but I don’t think he realized that I was asking because I wanted him to keep me in a budget. At one point I said that he could not just let me buy and buy. Then he said “But it makes you happy.” And that is why we can’t stick to budgets. Sure, buying plants makes me a little bit happy. It also stresses me out because I am neglectful and just not into the continued maintenance of plants. I want easy, tend-for-themselves kind of plants.

Tulips came up in the front area this year, but only one bloomed so I pulled all of them out of the ground. I’ll plant new bulbs in the Fall. I trimmed back the hedge that had slightly gone wild and would try to grab you as you walked up the front path and I pulled out all the weeds. This is when I discovered the perennials I had planted last year and the year before. I was like “Hey you! I remember planting you there!” The hostas I had purchased at a plant sale in OK three years ago were also coming up and they had multiplied. I split them and redistributed them around in hopes that the whole front area will be nothing but hostas. I never would have wanted a hosta in my yard if I still lived in OK. Every time I saw them planted in someone’s landscape, I’d wince. They were sad plants. They were sad plants because they prefer a muggier climate. The hostas I have seen around my neighborhood have been large leafy green things with beautiful blooms. The first time I noticed them, I was stunned. I’m not a gardener and hostas are the easiest plants for me to work with. I told Michael that next year I am not allowed to buy new plants for the front yard, only something nice for the pretty blue pot I keep on the stoop. I can honestly say that as I prepared the front bed for the new plants and discovered the plants I had planted from previous years, I felt some joy.

I wondered for a moment if this is the reason my mother tends to her flower beds.

While I have said that I am not the gardening type, there is something about planting things permanent in the ground. One of my mother’s biggest laments when she sold and moved out of our family house in Collinsville was about all the plants she was leaving behind. She had multiple beds filled with irises and various trees and shrubs, all plants that she had tended to for more than thirty years. The soil and how the sun hits the house she lives in now is totally different then it is at the old house. A smaller yard also meant that she couldn’t just dig up everything and take it with her. She had to leave them behind for the new owner to do whatever with them. I haven’t been by the old house since we helped moved my mother out, so I have no idea if those irises are still blooming or if the magnolia tree we gave mom for mother’s day one year has survived. And while the house Mom is in now is different (her front door faces directly east), she has planted new plants in the ground and spends her time caring for them and fussing over them. Gardening seems like an activity my mom does truly for herself and because she loves it.

There is satisfaction in planting things in the dirt and watching them grow, but the real joy comes from seeing those things come back year after year.

I’m meeting my mom and sister this evening in Manhattan, KS so we can go to the tulip festival happening in Wamego which is close to Manhattan. I’ve not been to any of these places before. Wamego is a tiny town known for an eclectic Wizard of Oz museum and apparently, tulips. I’ve been told that the museum is more like someone’s personal hoarding collection of all things Wizard of Oz. There a little Toto statues all around the town and a Dutch Windmill. I am excited to see the tulips and seeing my mom and sister. The weather is predicted to be sunny and warm. I’m looking forward to spending my day in the sunshine, basking in the bright colors of the tulips, something I am not sure I would have appreciated as much if I hadn’t spent years watching my mother work in her own gardens.

THINGS I DECIDED TO DO

I wrote a short Thankful Friday entry last week about a goose who has laid eggs in a precarious place and the whole nature vs nurture thing. I didn’t post it because I never really finished it. It was sort of done. Then I got busy and Friday rolled in. I technically could have finished it Friday afternoon, but instead I took my new camera lens for a walk to the Kauffman Gardens and then rushed back to help someone and finish up on some work. So, Friday’s gratitude post just didn’t get posted and the thing is, I didn’t feel too bad about it.

Back in October, I rented a camera lens to take with me to Woods Hole. It was one I was considering buying and camera lenses are not cheap. I thought that renting it and spending a week with it would give me some idea about want vs need. Would this be a whole lot of money spent on something I would only use on occasion? Or would this be the lens I would want to use most of the time, setting my zoom lens aside for those times it would be unsafe to get too close? I did not take my zoom lens with me and relied only on the rented lens. On day one, I was already starting a mental list of what I loved about the lens. It’s light weight, making it great for travel. Handles low light situations better than my zoom lens which allowed me to use faster shutter speeds, and all the pictures I took that week have a dreamy look about them. I counted maybe five or six times when I wanted a zoomed image. By the end of the week, I knew that this lens was a need. Okay…a wanty need, but a need none the less.

The rule for big ticket item fun purchases is that one must be paid off before buying the next. So, we paid off the last big “fun” purchase, a TV, and then headed out to buy my lens. Except the place where I was going to buy it, didn’t have it in stock or online. I had to go to the computer store that I hate with my whole heart. They didn’t have it in stock, but I could order it online. This actually turned out to be an easy, smooth purchase and I didn’t leave the place fuming. Side rant: I have not once gone to this particular store and been helped by anyone other than a condescending (male) computer know-it-all. This was the first time I have ever walked into this store and been treated like I actually knew what I was talking about. In fact, I was so surprised by the experience that I even said to the sales clerk “Wow! This was a way easier and a more delightful experience than I expected!” The camera lens arrived on Wednesday of last week, but my schedule didn’t open up until Friday for me to take it out for a spin. Then I started pointing it at things and remembered all the reasons why I fell in love with that lens in the first place.

Using my camera brings me joy and I am investing in my joy, not just with fancy new gear, but by making space in my day for my camera. I had zero plans to photograph the eclipse, but made some last minute adjustments to my camera and schedule. I set myself up at the top of our parking garage and while I don’t think I got anything spectacular (we only got 90% eclipse), I had a great time doing it. I used my phone as a remote device for my camera and laid back and enjoyed the sunshine and the view. As the eclipse reached 90% the parking garage filled up with people. Then I had a number of people chatting with me about what I was doing and how I was doing it. And while I wasn’t wowed by any of the pictures, I was able to compile a short time lapse of the event.

Skipping out on a Thankful Friday entry is by no means a sign that I had nothing to be grateful for last week or that I’ll stop doing gratitude posts. This is a gratitude post. I’m grateful for being able to invest in the things that bring me joy. It also has me thinking about how I can invest in other activities that bring me joy like yoga, bicycle rides for ice cream or plain old snuggling on the couch with Josephine. What does investing in those things look like or even mean? So much of that investment is time and making space for those things. Well…it means really learning the power of the word ‘no’ and really paying attention to how I feel when I say "yes” to something.

I feel pretty good about saying yes to investing in more joy.

THE STUFF WE DID

I’ve been a regular New Orleans visitor since the age of two. In all of those times, I have never participated in a swamp tour. We visited the zoo a number of times and rolled down the tallest hill in New Orleans (which is a man-made hill in the middle of the zoo). I have ridden the streetcar all through the city. I have walked down the most touristy streets, but I have never done a “Cajun Adventure Tour”. Michael wanted to see alligators on this trip, so we booked ourselves on a two hour flat bottom boat ride through the Honey Island Swamp just east of New Orleans. I could not convince Michael to ride an airboat or do a kayak trip through the swamp. Those things didn’t feel safe to him but a large boat carrying twenty people with a captain that often joked about losing tourists in the swamp felt safe.

There have been drives through swampy areas where Michael will ask me about what I might be looking at out the window. I always say that I’m looking for alligators. It is not really true because an alligator is pretty impossible to spot from a speeding vehicle. Alligators spend a lot of time mostly submerged with only the tops of their heads sticking up out of the water. They are the color of the water and look more like floating bits of wood than animal. The things I’m really looking at out the window are birds. White egrets and gray herons mostly dot the swamps along the road side. This trip, I saw two flamingos fly overhead. One our way down through Arkansas, I spotted a bald eagle just sitting in a field. One our drive up through Mississippi, I spotted another bald eagle flying away from some smaller birds he had made unhappy. Bird spotting is easy. Also deer. I see lots of deer on our road trips.

So this cajun goofball version of my dad gave us a tour of the Honey Island Swamp. He pointed out the wildlife which was mostly just alligators and raccoons. He told us about the spiders and snakes in the area. He thumped the boat canopy regularly to scare us into thinking a snake had fallen into the boat. When he wasn’t being silly, he told us about the plants, pointing out wild rice and irises. At one point, we came across a small pink cocoon like structure. This was filled with apple snail eggs, a highly invasive species that will wreck havoc on the ecosystem. I leaned over and told Michael about how we had to get special permits to use these as model organisms in research. We use them in the study of eye regeneration because apple snails can regenerate their eyeballs. This was so fascinating to Michael that he almost shouted out to everyone else on the boat that I am a scientists and I know about these snails.

Thankfully we managed to keep my knowledge just between the two of us.

Along with animal sighting, we collected license tags, forty two of them to be exact. Though four of those tags were Canadian and the Alaska tag was discovered at our very last roadside stop on the way home. Since Michael is a teacher by trade, he likes to give us ‘grades’ on our tag collections. He said we earned a solid B on this trip. Between alligator searches and tag collecting, we had sort of a scavenger hunt to find Banksy art pieces. Michael was unfamiliar with Banksy, an England based street artist, political activist and director. A while back, Melissa and I went to a Banksy Exhibition Show that felt like more of place to be seen, sipping fancy cocktails than a place to see and learn about the art. Frankly it was a little disappointing and now I think the disappointing display of work was by design. The thing you are supposed to take away from that showing is that Banksy’s art must be seen in the wild and part of the art is opening your eyes to the sights around you.

Banksy was in New Orleans in 2008, three years after hurricane Katrina. He left behind around fifteen stencils scattered all over the city. Most of those have been destroyed, painted over or part of buildings that were demolished. The first one we found was a piece called Looters that had been rescued from destruction and put on display inside a hotel lobby. The hotel has a small room off to the side of the art that explains a little bit about the artist and the efforts made to save this piece of art work. It helped that this was the first one we actually saw because this gave Michael a quick and dirty education on Banksy. Banksy’s art, for me, perfectly conveys the impermanence of life. Every thing. EVERY. THING. is temporary. Even that ‘permanent’ tattoo you had placed on your low back in 1997 will be dust someday. The map I was using to hunt Banksy art had not been kept up to date. There was supposed to be one of his stencils just two blocks down from where we were staying. We went looking for it on our first evening and when we got to the building, the stencil had been removed, the wall painted over with pink paint.

Someone must have recognized the importance of Nola Girl with Umbrella because a protective plate of plexiglass had been secured over her. She resides on the side of building that is boarded up and covered with graffiti. It looks like it used to be a walk-in clinic which is funny because right next door is a Voodoo shop. We found ourselves walking with a tall lanky young man who we shared pleasantries with while waiting for the street light to change. He had just found out that he had the day off and the weather was beautiful. He asked if we were looking for “the Banksy” and when we said yes, he guided us there because it was on his way. Michael and I stood there, the only tourists in the area, marveling at how temporary all this art happens to be. Not just the Girl with Umbrella, but all the other brightly colored graffiti art. It reminded me of something I had seen and experienced a long time ago.

There used to be a famous black sand beach on the Big Island of Hawaii. Photographs of the beach were plastered on prints and postcards and used in tourist promotional brochures. I was on that island with my parents in 1990 and there was a major volcanic eruption at the beginning of that week that sent lava flowing towards that beach. We went and stood on that beach and could see the smoke and glow of hot lava in the distance. By the middle of that week, half of the beach had been covered with lava and by the time we left, the entire beach was gone. Poof. Just like that in a week’s time this beautiful beach area was covered with molten lava. Now, years later, the ocean is wearing away some of that now hardened lava and a new black sand beach is forming. Vegetation is starting to grow up between the craggy lava rocks.

This is graffiti in nature.

New Orleans is, in itself, very temporary. It is torn down and flooded out only to be built back up again, very much like that beach in Hawaii. And we spent our time simply wandering around, soaking up the temporary beauty of it all.

THE BIG SAD

There was a small bit of graffiti that Michael and I passed a few times while roaming New Orleans. It simply said “Big Sad” with a sad face drawn under the words. I didn’t take a picture of it, which is weird because I took lots of graffiti pictures, but for some reason never pointed a camera at this one. It sparked a small conversation when we first noticed it. I said to Michael “You know how sometimes things make you a little sad? Like, I’m out of ice cream; this makes me a little sad. Big sad is reserved for things like when your favorite ice cream shop closes.” I told him that I think I’ll use Big Sad more in sentences.

Leaving New Orleans made me big sad.

On our first night in the city, we took a forty five minute walk through the Garden District to get to a dinner reservation at Basin Seafood. I was smarter on this trip and did some research, made reservations so we wouldn’t be floating with indecision on food choices. I found Basin on Eater in their best oysters on the half shell list. It’s a small but elegant restaurant on Magazine Street and the food there did not disappoint. Michael got the short ribs served on cheesy grits, which I tasted. They were the best grits I have had in years and the oysters and lima beans were so good that Michael, who does not really like raw oysters or lime beans, left thinking that maybe he was a raw oyster/lime bean eater.

On our walk to the restaurant, even on the walk back, we took turns pointing out various houses. Every time I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign I’d say “We could buy that one. We could live there.” I believe I even mentioned at one point that I had not seen any yoga studios in that area. “We could buy that one and I could open a yoga studio downstairs while we live in the top half.” Michael nodded and mumbled vague agreements each time I said something like this. While he agrees that we should visit this city often, he is less keen on the idea of living there full time. To be fair, summers would probably kill him. March is a tease in New Orleans. The weather was perfect with bright sunny days and cool breezes. The summer months are steamy and full of hurricanes (not just the fun boozy kind). I don’t know why I didn’t notice this on the last trip, but on our drive into New Orleans, we passed many stilt houses that you could only access by boat. “The only way to get to that house is by boat. What if we lived in house like that?” Those houses sparked more interest because Michael wants a boat. I think I wouldn’t be able to handle that kind of isolation. I need the street sounds and the strolling paths. I require the earth under my feet to be less squishy. Though, I wouldn’t mind kayaking through the swamps on weekends.

You know when your time in a place is time well spent if it breaks your heart a little to leave that place. In my case, I feel like I am always leaving something behind in New Orleans, something of great value so that I must return again soon to retrieve it. Then I leave something else and must return again, repeating this loop until maybe I’ll get that place out of my system. Maybe one day, it just won’t have the same appeal. I did notice a number of houses up for sale as though some of the residents of New Orleans have given up on the city. It didn’t seem as crowded with tourists this time around, but honestly we didn’t venture too deeply into those places. We skirted around them and into those residential areas that are often ignored by our government. That’s where you’ll find the best fried chicken and a Banksy that’s been left untouched by other graffiti artists or painted over by the shop owner.

We stopped in Mississippi on our way back north to meet my cousin for lunch, a cousin I haven’t seen in almost twenty years. I didn’t expect the feelings of joy and delight in seeing her face and hugging her tight. It was almost as if there had been no space or time between us since our last encounter and I confess that tears welled up in my eyes when we said our goodbyes. She had asked if we would be traveling up through Louisville, the town where our parents had grown up, where Pepaw’s house and shop used to be. I told her that I couldn’t stomach to drive through there knowing those places were gone. My cousin said she felt the same even though she lives close, she always makes a point to drive around. It’s too hard to see the empty spots that once held so much. I wiped tears from my cheeks as we drove north through that state, brushing away my complicated feelings. It might sound as if I didn’t have a wonderful vacation. Complicated feelings and tears and melancholy and all. The truth is, the trip was too good. Misti sent me a text asking if I’d had a good adventure and I burst into tears because this adventure had ended. I am still full of oysters and crawfish. Making this week’s menu was a challenge knowing that nothing I make is going to taste as good as the food we ate last week. I don’t cook with bacon fat or ham juice. And I ate plenty of things cooked in meat juice last week, plus a piece of fried chicken.

Recently, I sat down to evaluate the wordy collage I had created for the things I wanted to do this year. I listed all the things that had been completed, made a list for things that have been planned and a list of things that are still a work in progress. I was surprised by the number of things that I have already completed. When we got home, I took New Orleans from the planned list and moved it up to the completed list, but not before noticing that I have several adventures still sitting in the planned section. I’ll be back in New Orleans in a couple of years. I have to retrieve a valuable item and leave an equally valuable item behind. For now, I have hundreds of pictures left to be processed and I will take my time pouring over each photo, savoring the memories.

I’m big sad this adventure has ended but I’m really excited about the next adventures.

NOW WHAT

There’s a part of me, that people pleaser me, that almost feels like I should apologize for the rage that I poured out onto these pages last week. I have to stop and remind myself that I am practicing the allowance of all feelings good and bad. Contrary to what some may think, I don’t walk around breathing fire like a dragon or punching walls all the time. My rage stays contained inside this body until I can furiously type it all out. A friend of mine referred to it as “Beautiful rage” and I love that so much, I’ve been thinking about where to have those words tattooed onto my body. But I don’t want this space to just be a rage against the machine page.

Saturday morning, I sat down in my usual space at Heirloom and opened up my Fortune Cookie Journal (so few pages are left…I don’t know what happens when I fill them all). The music playing that morning were all the 90s bands that made up the soundtrack of the end of my HS years and into my college years. Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Cake. I knew the words to every song that played through those speakers and I was pulled back in time to a place of great happiness and naivety. Those years smelled like burnt coffee, used bookstores, cigarettes and incense mixed together. These were the years of learning the importance of finding meaning in words and oh how we dissected lyrics and movies and scripts. I was a biology major, living alongside english majors absorbing their coolness while memorizing biochemical compound structures. We were carefree even though we had no reason to be so.

I watched Past Lives over the weekend and I have been pondering those moments that feel like past lives for me now, much like the one described above. It took me longer to get around to seeing the film than I had intended. I knew that it would be beautiful in a way that feels prickly and it was. It was full of the what if questions, the kind of game I have often played on my own. There are the choices we make and there are the choices made by others that have a ripple effect on the trajectory of lives and all of these lead to questions of what if I had chosen this way instead of that. If everything in life is a choice, half of those choices are how we have decided to react to the choices made by others.

Perhaps I was a bird and you were the branch I rested on. - Nora, Past Lives

I joke that in a past life I was a devout Catholic, possibly even a nun. Guilt was often my motivator and I would constantly stress over doing the “right” thing. I’ve never really thought much about who (or what) else I might have been in other lives. I’ve never really thought about the what if I’d gone to a different college, accepted that full music scholarship to OU or at the very least sent my MCAT scores in and applied for medical school. I don’t really think about it because I know how unhappy I would have been with those choices. I knew at the time of decision that choosing those paths would not lead me to a life of joy. I never started playing the What If game until after Chris died. Then I questioned all the choices I had made and what life would be like if I had made different ones. Except, I haven’t played this game with myself in quite some time. I didn’t choose those other lives; I chose this one. Has it led me to a life of joy? I heard someone say once that we can’t have all joy all the time. This is true for me, but I do have joy.

This is my life and I am living it with you. -Nora

Next week, I’m dragging Michael back to New Orleans, a place where if past lives are truly a thing, one of mine was lived here. The last time we went was the first time I’d been back since before Hurricane Katrina and I thought that so much had probably changed since then that I wouldn’t feel at home there anymore. What happened during our last trip was I became so overwhelmed by memories of previous trips, that I froze. I didn’t make tentative itineraries or search out restaurants. We just sort wandered aimlessly and hoped to stumble onto good food. The wandering aimlessly was good, the food finds were not. Reservations are needed in this post-Covid landscape. This time around, we’ve made better plans and we’re even doing an activity that I have never done before any all the many times I have been to New Orleans. We’ve booked a swamp tour in hopes of seeing alligators in their natural habit.

We’re not leaving until next week, but I feel like taking a break from this space. Maybe I’ll spend some time updating some photos and thinking about what’s next. I need to spend more time with paper and ink. This is how I conjure up the experiences I want for myself and I’m a planner at heart. Don’t worry though. I’ll be back.

In this life I am still a blogger.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the beginning of this week, I posted tales about the state of my body that many found relatable. Women friends have reached out, nodding heads in agreement and sharing their own personal experience. This was exactly my intention behind that entry. I am infuriated by the taboo of conversing above whispers in regards to our female bodies and well over the idea that I should feel shame about the normal things that happen to my female body. And because of the lack of interest from the medical industry, we (women) must come together and share, share, share in hopes of navigating our way through this highly uncertain phenomena of perimenopause/menopause.

Chad sent me a TikTok story about Rosalind Franklin and how Watson and Crick stole her research, which ended up winning them the Nobel Prize in 1962. This story is not new to me. All female scientists know this story. My first education on Watson and Crick though told a different story. They didn’t mention stealing any work or ideas from Franklin, but they made sure to talk about how disagreeable Franklin was to work with and, one would say, a bitch. The reality is that Rosalind Franklin was standing up for her research and herself. Watson and Crick would never have figured out the helical structure of DNA without Rosalind Franklin’s work. So instead of allowing a woman to get the credit for this discovery, they villainized her. They projected their fragile male egos and jealousy into writing a false narrative of a contentious woman.

Psst…this isn’t the first time in history fragile male egos and their jealousy has been projected to vilify a woman.

Some of you are probably wondering what the story of Rosalind Franklin has to do with woes of perimenopause. Trust me. This is all linked together. For far too long women have been pigeon holed into a projection of what men have wanted us to be and in doing so this has lessened us. Our bodies, our thoughts, our appearances are all gender constructed for the man. Deviations in said construct are not to be tolerated and should be ignored, thus putting our basic needs in the backseat and our contributions outside of childbearing, something to be stolen or unnoticed. I did not intend to set off to write yet another rant on the never ending reach of the patriarchy, but I can’t ignore that the lack of research and information around women’s health is directly linked to the patriarchy. Women have been relegated to barely even whispering words such as vagina or bleeding because men find those words unappealing or offensive, while there are whole industries built around glorifying the male ejaculation. A cock and balls is probably the most popular choice for graffiti artists and it is usually placed near the mouth of the model on the poster.

Where is the graffiti artist drawing vulvas in the mouths of poster models?

This is not a sermon for the choir kind of post. I wrote all of this on Wednesday and usually writing down my rage helps to dampen it. Instead, all I managed to do was pour gasoline all over my rage. I spent the day feeling prickly and stabby. But after another fitful night of sleep, I thought about what many of the women in my community had said about what they are going through. The most common phrase written in my comments is “I thought I was going crazy.” Of course we think this; we’re all tired and doctors wont listen to us. The number of comments I read that started with “my doctor didn’t believe me” or “three doctors later..” was ridiculous. Not only are we dealing with changes in our bodies that start with messing up the very foundation needed for basic living (which is sleep. sleep and rest are the most important things for our bodies), we are doing so while still, STILL, fighting to be the women we want to be and not the women men (or society) may want us to be. I want you to know that I am grateful for your voices and your continued hard work in this daily battle. We all deserve naps.

Let’s all go take naps!

DESPERATELY SEEKING

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a lot of different things. Things I want to do. Things I want to write. Things I want to buy. Things I want to change. Things that may be too expensive for me to keep. All of this is surrounded with questions. Should we get another dog? Should we try to rehab the chicken coop? How do I get someone to repave my driveway for a reasonable price? Can I remove the bushes in front of the house and have a porch installed? Am I ever going to do something about my kitchen? Should I enroll in electrician school and learn how to rewire my own house? I think I should teach a yoga workshop about shoulder anatomy and straps?

That last sentence doesn’t really read as a question, but when I say it out loud I tend to illicit a questioning tone.

I am restless. Truly, restless. Even when I am supposed to be sleeping and resting, I am lost somewhere in my own thoughts. Just last week I was so lost in my own thoughts while on my morning building walk, that when I made it back to the first floor I didn’t know what floor I was on and could not remember walking all of the second floor. I am now up to three different wake up times in the night. Sometimes it is because I had that dream where I have to use the bathroom in an unconventional bathroom setting but mostly it is because I heard a noise and then I have to spend the next hour trying to go back to sleep while thinking about the noise. Before I know it, Josephine is tapping me with a paw and it is almost about time for my alarm to go off. Last week, Josephine started tapping me exactly one hour earlier than the alarm in anticipation to the time change. I am sleeping. I am just not sleeping well.

This is probably why I have finally fallen for one of the many hormone treatment ads that I am bombarded with on a daily basis. I poked around on the company website and then I went in search of some non-sponsored reviews. As a result, I discovered a community of women who all had similar stories of restlessness, no sleep, scattered thought and mood swings (I didn’t really mention those but…). This community had some very insightful and helpful reviews in regards to the product I was considering and after reading through many discussions, I was convinced. I filled out the survey, had a very brief chat with an online doctor and am currently waiting the arrival of an estrogen body cream along with a dietary supplement of DHEA. If I see some significant changes, I plan to contact my regular doctor to see about getting this stuff through my insurance.

I’ve been slow to admit to myself that my symptoms were not all in my head, a perfect example of how the medical industry has been gaslighting women since there was a medical industry. It doesn’t help that perimenopause is the great unknown of medicine with confusing symptom descriptions like “frequent or infrequent periods.” Perimenopause and Menopause are the epitome of Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to dole out grant money to research it. No doctor wants specialize in it. No one cares about a woman’s body unless it is still capable of reproduction. Perimenopause is that gray timeline where a woman could still have a baby. While there’s a whole lot reasons why a could is not a should, no one’s going to do anything that would exclude the possibilities. Women in America do not have rights to their own bodies.

I’ve had four periods since the start of the year. Yes, that’s two a month but so far zip all nothing but an occasional right ovary cramp for this month. I don’t think I’m having hot flashes, but experience moments when I feel hot. It’s nothing dramatic. I get hot, take a layer off and five minutes later I’m so cold my teeth start chattering. I have no energy yet I still do all of things. And since I have no idea what forty eight is supposed to feel like, I chalked it all of this up to seasonal depression and inefficient heating and air systems. Honestly, for all I know those things could be the problem. I guess I’ll find out soon enough once my prescription arrives.

I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here looking at puppies.