It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night. 

It was a dark and noisy night. 

Tethered to a CPAP machine humming quietly beside me, I dreamed I was snorkeling in the middle of the Atlantic - drowning, actually. No one snorkels in the middle of the Atlantic. Suddenly an alarm went off and a voice yelled, “FIRE!” 

Strange. How does one catch fire while drowning in an ocean? The next thing I knew, I was standing in my kitchen, looking for flames with no idea what to grab on my way out of the house.

But there was no fire.

There was no smoke.

There was only a voice every five seconds, filling the room with its warning, “FIRE!” and the ear-piercing sound of an F-5 smoke alarm losing its mind.

At 2:30 in the morning. 

Malfunctioning.

I still don’t know how I made it to the kitchen, disconnected from my CPAP machine.

There’s almost nothing worse than a smoke alarm that lies to you, unless it does it from the ceiling above your bed in the dark of night. I didn’t know what to do. Should I run out into the front yard, call the fire department, and let them and all my neighbors see me in my mismatched pajamas? What if, as I suspected, there was no emergency? I would be humiliated for absolutely no good reason. And would I have to pay them for showing up in the middle of the night for a fake fire?

I paced through the noisy house, listening to every single nerve in my ears die a violent death, and begged God for help. Maybe he was going deaf, too, but I had to give it a shot. I don’t have my own personal firefighter anymore to restore peace and quiet. My ceilings are too high for me to reach a spastic alarm without the use of a ladder, and I don’t even try stunts like that in the daytime, when I’m not drugged up with melatonin.

Finally, God got tired of all the racket, too, and the overactive alarm shut up.

I didn’t trust the silence.

After thirty minutes and no more adrenalin surges, I went back to bed. But I did not sleep. I stared at the defective smoke alarm which intermittently glowed red above me like a little red demon. I knew it was laughing at its insidious prank. And I knew in the morning I was going to get a baseball bat and beat the crap out of it.

Instead, when the sun rose, I reached out to my daughter, Katy, who was headed out of town with her firefighter husband. Of course. I have the worst timing. She asked his sister to stop by to analyze the problem. His sister is not a firefighter. She’s an engineer. And she figured out what the firefighters I contacted in the meantime could not. It was not a bad battery. It was not a bad smoke detector. It was a bad housekeeper. She arrived at my house with a can of compressed air and blew the heck out of that miscreant piece of machinery. I didn’t even feel bad as I stood there watching globs of dust float to the floor. It had it coming.

“It glowed red,” she told me, “because it wanted you to know which of your two alarms had gone off.”

Oh, I knew which one had gone off.

What I don’t know is how that dust got up there. Who knew you should carry compressed air in one hand and toilet bowl cleaners in the other when you clean house? I still think a good whack with a baseball bat would have shown that thing who’s boss.

All was quiet for a few weeks thanks to the engineer who came and saved my sanity. 

Until this week.

It was a dark and stormy night.

It was a dark night. 

There I lay nestled all snug in my bed while visions of sugarplums danced in my head. And then one of them went off. At midnight. When all good sugarplums should be sleeping.

I am sick and tired of alarms going off in the middle of the night and ruining my floor shows.

“Nooooooo,” I moaned, rolling over and covering my head with a pillow. It was weird, just like before. But this time I heard a series of steady beeps that slowly sped up, scrambling all the neurons in my brain while I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from. No one said the house was burning down, so that was something. I slapped every electronic thing on my nightstand, but the beeping continued, taunting me, daring me to get up to investigate. But if they weren’t yelling “FIRE” or “DUST”, I wasn’t going anywhere. Stubbornly, I stayed right where I was, listening to the faint cry of surviving ear cells threatening to go AWOL.

Thirty seconds later, the beeps burned themselves out and silence reigned. Relieved, I lay there, groggy, trying to figure out how I managed to build myself a brand-new haunted house.

I began to relax. My breathing slowed. I may have gone deaf but I was asleep and couldn't be sure. And just as I dozed off, a distant memory floated through my mind—the image of a tiny, black plastic clock in my bathroom. An item I had dusted earlier in the day. With little black buttons no one can read, including the one marked, “alarm.”

No matter what I do, dust always wins out.

It was a dark and stormy night.

But I didn’t care.

I can’t hear anything anymore. 

You Are Here

I’m so lonely. It’s the hardest thing to deal with. It comes on me so often in the twilight, just like tonight, when I’m tired and need Rob. I need Rob. I’ve always needed Rob. When I was sixteen and we fell in love and I knew in my bones, in the bones of my soul even, that I felt safe with him, I needed him. I was protected by him. Seen and loved by him. His patience was a safe harbor for me, one I’d never experienced in all my life.

He was always my safe harbor. Always the voice of reason and calm. He never jumped to conclusions. Never held a grudge. He wasn’t superman. He had his faults, thank goodness, or we could have never even been friends. But he was my hero. I was so lucky to be his wife and the love of his life for forty-six years, all told.

I was thinking today that if, whether by magic or miracle, he would return to me suddenly, that after all these months and months, three and a half years, of being forced to live without him, I’ve probably changed in ways I’m unaware of and he might step in and start telling me how I ought to do things his way because “it’s easier,” and then the fight would be on. It made me feel sad. Like I’m in this in between space of waking up and breathing every day, seeing familiarity develop as each year goes by and I have to do life without him, making memories without him, and yet longing for him so much that I can’t stop the deep ache in my heart. I'm doing the impossible, moving forward against my will. But it would be worth fighting with him just to be in his arms again.

I can’t stop it sometimes, the longing for him. I can’t “be grateful” most of the time. I can’t “put a positive spin” on it ever. He should still be here. He should still be here.

It must be a tiresome thing to be a friend to a woman like me. Deeply mourning her soulmate, well past the time most people think it should take to be over him. I will never be over him. I’ve written about this so often, using every word picture I can imagine to describe what it’s like to lose half your body and, to both your surprise and sorrow, still find yourself breathing. How tiresome to touch base with me or read my recent thoughts in a post and discover that the tears still fall every day, my life is still completely changed, and I don’t know where happiness is anymore. And that if you truly want to know what it’s like to be a widow, you will eventually realize you can never fix this.

How tiresome to keep coming back for more of that. How tiresome of me not to change my thoughts and make my life better and think to myself that Rob “would want me to be happy.” No one knows what Rob would want. He never got the chance to tell us.

Surviving the loss, the untimely death, of your person takes the rest of your life. How ironic to call it surviving, then. We think surviving is the victory that sets us free to live. To move on. Go forward. Find your way. There’s no finish line for this kind of survival, though. Never before have I had to work so hard to get through one painful breath at a time as I do now in moments like these. To be honest, this happens in moments now instead of every other minute as they did for the first entire year or more. But when these moments happen, when grief comes to the surface again, I am swept away once more in a tsunami of sorrow. It’s true that the waves of grief become further apart as time goes by, but they are never less intense.

People are ashamed of grieving. Embarrassed by it, whether it’s their own or someone else’s. There is a vulnerability inherent in grief. It plays no favorites. It reduces a person to their most basic self, stripping away pretense, washing away dreams and priorities. You find out who you are in grief. Do you believe that God is still good or will you spit in his face and run from him forever? Of the friends who remain when the storm ceases to roar, which ones have learned to see you and hear you and which ones have taught you how to do the same? Of the magnitude of blessings that remain in your life, are you able to wrap your arms around them and see their pain in this loss, too? In a world divided between those who still have and those who have not, can you be glad that they still have what you don’t? At least for now? Can you hold space for yourself, hold space for the empty space left behind by your love, feel the ache that never goes away even while you laugh and spend time with someone who loves you?

We see through a glass darkly, not yet face to face. We are not entitled to answers. Perhaps because we can’t handle the truth. We don’t speak the language of truth. We can’t see what’s waiting for us in a dimension we’ve never experienced. We’re in the waiting room, and it might be a long wait. A long time before we see our beloved again, face to face. What kind of roots am I putting down right now, how far do they stretch into the earth while I desperately search for stability in the aftermath of being violently shaken? I don’t know.

I don’t know.

There were long stretches in my life when I thought I understood how life works. How God works. I had answers, but no questions. Now I have questions, but no answers. And as time goes on, and I gain more experience in carrying grief, a thing that cannot be fixed, I realize a map has been drawn leading from where this began to where I am now. Others are beginning to need that map. Others are beginning their own journeys along this inevitable road, and I am sorry. So very sorry. I’m sorry that I once thought a scripture verse could stop the bleeding in someone’s broken heart. I’m sorry that I thought grief and loss were contagious and kept my distance from those in pain. I am sorry that I didn’t know or practice the art of simply showing up.

Grief was once my enemy. Grief is now my friend. It reminds me that I once loved deeply, that I was once loved deeply, and that missing Rob is temporary.

Grief holds space for our reunion.

With thanks to Jonathan Sureau for the wonderful photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: Tourist Map of Hazelbrook and Lawson | Notes: compiled and d… | Flickr

Detours

I set the timer for twenty minutes this morning and did a feelings dump on a document destined for deletion with as many painful thoughts and worries as came to mind. I’ve written more, but it’s an exercise I haven’t done for a while so, this morning, two typewritten pages in twenty minutes helped a lot. I don’t know if it cured me physically, but if stuffed emotions are what’s fueling the discomfort I’m experiencing, I know I unstuffed some stuff. And that was good enough.

I deleted it all and went to Pilates where my instructor spent extra time with me trying to determine why my body is hurting so much, worked out some kinks, and came home for lunch. Later, I drove to the drugstore for some meds, stopped by Starbucks, remembered the schools were all letting out and took a route home that wouldn’t tie me up in a traffic jam, and arrived home in one piece. Victory.

I can’t help reading license tags when I drive and do my best to decode the succinct messages on vanity plates. I passed a big, black truck whose plates read “xpnd4bl” where the “4” represents an “A” and knew I’d read it right when I saw the giant skull on his back window reinforcing his message.

Ewww. Some plates don’t need to be deciphered.

Another one made me think it was a scripture reference and would have been Josiah 31:8 but there's no book in the Bible by that name. I think there was a king but, as far as I know, he never published anything. Just my brain trying to make sense out of the senseless. Right away, another scripture plate drove past but even though there's a book called Jude, I dismissed JUD 3YF because it only has one chapter in it, so what would the 3YF refer to? My brain went down a rabbit hole at forty-five miles per hour, just like the SUV I was driving, where I sounded out the YF part, came up with “wife,” and suddenly I was transported to a cabin in the woods in northern Arizona where Rob and I lived for five short weeks.

The synapses in our brains are incredible. All of this happened in about three car lengths’ passage of time, and from the memory of our cabin in Heber to the word “wife”, something I’d deleted on this morning’s twenty-minute feelings dump floated up from the abyss and waved at me.

Trauma, like synapse, is an interesting thing. I journaled today about the trauma of letting Rob go be with Jesus when it was the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. Despite all the confusion and disconnect between his hospital room in the mountains and covid restrictions that kept me from being with him and dealing with doctors directly, we did everything in our power to help him make it but failed. We’ll never know why I got well and he didn’t. And here’s another interesting thing. We so desperately want to make sense out of the senseless things in life, if no one has an explanation for any catastrophe that comes our way, we will take the blame ourselves.

From time to time, I blame myself for everything that led to losing Rob. All the changes around us, all the changes we made ourselves, all the inconsequential decisions that I have second guessed so many times now I’ve lost count. And as I journaled this morning, all of that came up again and led to a new heartache. Our life together was interrupted by Rob’s death. There were things we never got to say to each other., business left unfinished. He couldn’t even talk to me that last day when they finally let me be with him. I worried that he was upset with the medical treatment I’d agreed to on his behalf and wondered again if he felt abandoned while he fought for his life. I’ll never know. But if one plus one equals two, then the sum of those two questions equals this—did he still love me at the end?

I know that’s not logical or pragmatic. But I’m a writer. I’ve also given speeches. I know that the most important part of any story, after its beginning, is the way it ends. Its impact is what the reader or audience remembers most when it’s all over, especially if the book was lengthy or the speaker longwinded. Our story was forty-six years long and what I remember the most clearly is the ending. It wasn’t a happy one. It was a tragedy filled with questions and uncertainty at a time in the world when everything was upside down.

Rob tried to answer that final question for me in his last hours. He couldn’t talk—imagine that heartbreak for a Distinguished Toastmaster—but he mouthed the phrase, “I love you,” to me. I recognized what he was trying to communicate. But as time goes by, with all the adjustments I’ve had to make living without him, his silence now is fertile ground for regret and fear in my broken heart.

Synapses and trauma. They surface together and connect all those dots in our memories. As I drove home today, I casually pondered the license plate in front of me, YF, thought it could read “wife,” and suddenly remembered. A couple of weeks before we were hospitalized, as he set up the computer in our Heber home office, Rob was changing all his passwords to ILMW.

I Love My Wife.

He still loved me then. He still loves me now. If I’m honest with myself, at this very moment he’s loving his life like crazy and is probably astonished that I ever feared he blamed me for anything or will ever stop loving me.

Knowing that “the body keeps the score,” I journaled some of my soul pain this morning in an attempt to relieve some physical pain, an exercise I’ve done many times and which has scientific support. And then I deleted it all because stress journaling works best that way. Unless you’re a writer, and then you publish some of it in a blog and second guess that decision later as you are prone to do about everything you write.

I feel alone. A lot. That’s new to me. But I am not alone. The spirit of God lives inside me, he knows my innermost thoughts and cares about my feelings. It was no coincidence that I drove to a drugstore this afternoon following a painful morning, detoured to make an order at Starbucks, re-routed my trip home to avoid school traffic, and passed anonymous cars with personalized plates that triggered memories which answered a fear I wrestled with eight hours ago thinking no one would ever see or read my deleted thoughts.

I was surprised by love again. Just when I think there is no healing for wounds as deep as mine, the wounded Healer shows up with a message from Rob.

He loves his wife.

With thanks to Tom Woodward for permission to use the perfectly detoured detour sign seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: Detour | Tom Woodward | Flickr

The Race Is Not To The Swift

I could have been an athlete. I was really good at foursquare when I was in elementary school. I ran fast. Could dodge the heck out of a big rubber ball. Was never chosen last on a team. I even learned to go backwards on roller skates with my Girl Scout troop. I had potential, but no one saw it except me. Instead, we went to church and I focused on the piano. But music was never my first love.

Rob was.

Rob was an athlete. It’s the reason I first fell in love with him. Until I saw him hurl a ball and run the bases like the boss he was, I nearly dismissed the quiet, small-statured blonde guy who told me he was from Florida. Florida? Nobody comes from Florida. Its entire population is made up of old guys in ugly shorts on golf courses. You retire to Florida, you aren’t born there.

I was mistaken. Just as I was mistaken about that inconspicuous ball player I fell for. It was his strength and determination that I admired. I’d never seen anyone as humble and confident as Rob. It’s a winning combination that stole my heart.

I wanted to be athletic like him. I love watching baseball and wondered if I could up my own game. Rob bought me my first ball glove and tried to teach me how to develop a throwing arm like his. I played on a women’s church team for one season and threw like a girl, sending an outfield catch soaring as far as second base instead of reaching the pitcher where I was aiming. I caught fly balls against my stomach instead of in my new glove and struck out more times than I ever connected my bat to the ball. Finally, I realized I was better at keeping score in the stands than playing on the field.

You gotta know your strengths.

There aren’t many sports I enjoy watching, but when it comes to an Olympic year, I’m all in. Rob and I both were. From the opening ceremonies until they extinguished the flame at its close, we, like you, loved seeing people push themselves to achieve the impossible. Their wins were ours and we felt their defeats as well.

This morning that was the story for Brody Malone, the USA team leader in men’s gymnastics all-around finals. This is why I love the Olympics. When I turned on the TV today, I didn’t know a single man on that team. By the time the brief competition was over, I was in tears. I guess the glory of sports is supposed to belong to the winners, to the players who have a great day and never fall off of a pommel horse or miss a grab on the high bars.

But I think the glory goes to those who give it their all and still come up empty-handed.

Fifteen months ago, Brody’s knee was destroyed when he fell from a high bar during competition. After enduring three surgeries, there was doubt as to whether he would ever walk normally again. Fifteen months ago it looked like his career was over. Today he competed in Paris as the leader of an elite team of gymnasts. Today he had a bad day, but he’s still walking. His medal chances are in question, but he beat the odds to even be there. The sportscasters said he could have been the face on a Wheaties cereal box, but now someone else’s name will be memorialized instead of his.

I disagree.

I don’t want to discount all the pain and sacrifices the other athletes on his team have endured. I just want to point out that Brody Malone showed us what courage looks like. He’s still the team captain and will finish his race, but it's unclear whether he will get to stand on the podium with his teammates. I know that’s hugely disappointing to him, but that’s not why I was in tears today. I don’t know how to say this because I’m not in his league and it seems brazen for me to make a comparison. But I lost all my dreams after working for them my entire life and I know what it feels like to be down. To watch the world race by, achieving all their goals, celebrating all their victories, while you can barely stand up on your feet again.

That’s what I was thinking about as I watched his Olympic dream fade with every low score that was posted. Sometimes you fall. Sometimes you lose it all and watch helplessly as your dreams evaporate. Sometimes, no matter how hard you work at learning how to walk again, beating all the odds, there will be days when you find yourself on the ground once more and your biggest win is simply standing up.

No, I’m not an athlete. I’m the furthest thing from one. I cheer for Team USA every couple of years from the comfort of my living room and wonder at the enormous price each one has paid for years to make it this far. I don’t think I could have done it. But then again, you never know what you can do or what you can survive until you have no other choice.

It’s not the end for Brody Malone. And as I pay close attention to the stories of defeat in these Olympics even more than the stories of victory, a little flame sparks in my own heart reminding me that I will learn to walk again, too. It’s going to take time. It means I’ll have to pace myself. But however long it takes, I know Rob would be proud of me.

Maybe I have the heart of an athlete after all.

With thanks to Tom Driggers for the great photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: Olympic Spirit | Within the Olympic rings of the Olympic fou… | Flickr

Learning The Ropes

There’s an old man visiting me this week. 

His curly hair is a bit long and he’s missing some teeth but since he doesn’t eat much it doesn’t much matter. He doesn’t mind a cold breakfast, or lunch or dinner. Or leftovers. He sleeps a lot. Lies around the house looking bored to tears, like staying here wasn’t his idea. Because it wasn’t. We don’t have a lot in common, so we don’t talk much. He doesn’t talk at all. 

But he’s another breathing body in the house and that’s a nice change.

He also has an old man sort of problem. Kind of awkward to discuss here but let me just say we’re depending on Depends this week. This is a new one for me. It’s new for him, too, and he’s not a fan. I don’t blame him. At his age, all he has left is his dignity and the adoration of three kids who think he’s the best dog God ever created. Because he is. But the need to walk around wearing a doggie diaper is putting a kink in his confidence and makes him sigh sometimes. Me, too.

I mean, I can kind of relate. Sort of awkward to discuss that here, but I feel his pain in a way that’s none of your business. I’m not an old man or an old dog, but I’ve met some people who think I’m old. Most of them are new and ride their bikes around the neighborhood when school lets out, but some of their parents think I’m old, too. I don’t mind. I don’t even think it’s a criticism. It’s more like a badge of honor.

At my age, I’ve earned every strand of this gray hair.

Rocky the golden retriever is hanging out with me while his family hangs out with other people this week. He’s pretty easy company. He’d spend more time outside if it wasn’t so hot and he wasn’t wearing that perpetual fur coat. So would I if it felt more like Alaska and less like Arizona out there. I know. And no, I don’t know why I live here.

Here's the problem. When you’re a dog, the bathroom is outside. Where it’s hot. I can’t fix either one of those things. Not even if you’re wearing a diaper. When you gotta go, you gotta go, and in his case he’s gotta go outside and somebody’s got to take that thing off before he does. We’ve almost got it down to a science now, if science means repetition but not perfection. Standing side by side at the back door, I count to three, pull open the slider, yank off his impediment, and just like that he’s a free man, running wild across the back yard, au natural the way God intended. 

Just like every two-year-old I’ve ever known.

This morning when he finished his business, he waited for me on the patio while I grabbed a new diaper and met him out there. That’s when I saw them. Seated side by side like two concrete yard ornaments. I don’t know how long they’d been watching us, but from the judgy tilt of their synchronized heads, they’d grabbed the cheap seats a while ago. We had an audience, and they were ready for popcorn and a show.

The judgy sister sheep.

Curious and critical, all at the same time, they barely like one another, let alone anyone else living near their pasture. I could practically hear what they were saying, the cackly old maids.

“What’s she doing to him now?”

“I dunno. Looks like she’s decorating him.”

“What for? It’s not Christmas.”

“Beats me. She has awful taste in fashion. Got any Milk Duds left?”

Sheep don’t have a clue. I wasn’t decorating him. I was wrestling him. Remember what it was like to put pre-folded paper and elastic rectangles on a nine-pound squirming newborn with two gyrating legs? Now picture doing that to an upright, four-legged, seventy-pound hairy Sasquatch who wants to sit on your feet while you finish.

I’ve been to a couple of rodeos. You know the part where the cowboy races on his horse across a dusty arena in hot pursuit of a calf who weighs twice as much as he does, then throws him to the ground and, without help from anyone, holds him there and trusses him up like a Thanksgiving turkey? When he’s finished, gallons of sweat pour out from beneath his ten-gallon Stetson while he throws his hands in the air in victory and walks away exhausted. It’s a weird way to make a living.

That’s how I felt every single time I diapered a baby. And more than once I threw my hands into the air in victory when I was finished. That’s how I feel now with every diaper I strap around the dog. At least I’ve got experience.

He’s a good boy, though. A sweet old guy who tolerates the way we dress him and puts up with my bad cooking. He takes a nap while I watch Hallmark movies and doesn’t mind if I ignore him to pick up my knitting or post another blog. He’s tolerant and just wants a little peace and quiet. In a way, he reminds me of Rob. Who, right now, from the cheap seats in heaven, is giving me “the look.”

Enjoy your popcorn, Rob. Just don’t laugh and point. That’s the job of the sister sheep. And if they keep it up, I’m going to chase them down and put a diaper on them for spite. I may not have my youth or natural hair color anymore, but I’ve overcome those deficits with the only thing that matters.

I’ve got experience.

With thanks to Bruno Pedro for the picture seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: The WireIt logo | WireIt is an OpenSource javascript library… | Flickr

For The Birds

Remember that vast flock of starlings or sparrows or whatever kind of dinky little birds we have here in Arizona that I saw swimming outside a few days ago? Right. The ones at the pool party, doing high dives from the massive ash tree that shades the kids’ trampoline, skipping over the water’s surface like they’re barefoot water-skiers, and wiping out in that huge mud puddle at the end of their runway?

Well, I was sitting here at my desk today, writing my first potentially uber successful future novel while I drummed on the keys and stared out my picture window at the sister goats across the street, when a big shadow passed overhead, blocking out the sun. I looked up at the formerly blue sky in curiosity and, to my amazement, it was obliterated by an entire squadron of starlings all heading north to find another water hole to play in. I assumed.

A strange longing rose up in my chest, and I thought to myself, why can’t I fly through the air like those backyard sparrow things? The answer burst my helium balloon. Because a hawk would snatch you right out of the sky, that’s why.

I’m not kidding. I witnessed it once, right above Katy’s house. We were standing outside together, her family and I, marveling at God’s beautiful spring evening, its sunset sky painted in ever increasing hues of purple and orange when, cue the birds, two dark figures emerged like planes soaring overhead, a smaller one in front with a larger one flying in tandem above it. That must be its wingman, I thought in admiration. Isn’t nature simply beautiful? So peaceful and . . . oh, my God. Did that big bird just eat the other one?

It happens. Right in the middle of your Wonderful World of Disney, the Pirates of the Caribbean get radar lock on It’s A Small World and the next thing you know, everyone in the audience goes home with PTSD as a souvenir. That mesmerizingly beautiful hawk you admired? He’s a traitor. Watching in horror as the raptor closes the gap between himself and his prey, you realize how wrong you were. He wasn’t the wingman for that starling. You’ve been watching an aerial dog fight between the Red Baron and Tweety Bird, only this time being small and cute is what foodies call “an appetizer.”

“Abort! Abort!” you frantically yell, but it’s too late, and you don’t speak bird anyway. It’s over. Your idyllic view is ruined by reality. It’s the call of the wild. The way of the world. Survival of the fittest. Every bird for himself. Set against the crimson and burnt orange backdrop of a fading sunset, the hawk flies away and a solitary feather flutters to the ground below. Bon appetit.

Eewww.

I’d give up on my attraction for hawks except that I remember seeing all those birds trying to drown each other in our backyard pond. There’s a reason we use the term, “bird brain.” Remember how I told you about how many of them keep nosediving into the windows on my house? Until last night, there had never been a casualty. I heard the crash, the loudest so far, but since it was the Fourth of July, I assumed it was a firecracker exploding. The thought crossed my mind it might be a sparrow instead, but either it had to shake it off or else it was time to go meet Jesus. I don't do CPR on birds. This morning, I counted to ten over the lifeless body of a mourning dove lying outside on the ground and credited the Knockout to the living room window. 

It's kind of unfair to the window to put the blame there. After all, it was just an innocent bystander, standing its ground. Frankly, I think it was a successful kamikaze maneuver on the part of the dove except my house didn’t burst into flames.

It's just plain dangerous to be a bird around here. There’s Jules’ cat, Ruthie, who is always stalking them and leaving piles of feathers at our front doors like grisly love notes. You’d sure expect something sweeter and more refined from someone with a name like Ruthie. Then, as I mentioned, there's my house with all of its villainous windows. And hawks are always on the prowl for fowl. For several years, there’s been a tight-knit family of these peregrines house-hopping from neighbor to neighbor, setting up residence in their tall trees. This year they found temporary shelter in Katy’s yard until the eight-year-old boy living next door peddled his little bike, Wizard of Oz style, down the street and up Katy’s driveway, pounding on her front door in agitation. Her twelve-year-old son answered the door.

“Your hawks are killing our chickens,” the boy exclaimed, “and you’d better do something about it!” Then he turned around and left on his bike, his threat hanging heavy in the air as if we should dispatch the wild creatures or our little dog might be in jeopardy. If we had a little dog.

We dispatched nothing. We’re afraid of the hawks, too. We saw what they did to that poor little starling.

I don’t know. They make flying look so fun. And then there's all that splashing around in mud puddles. But I don’t think being a bird is as wonderful as I once imagined. I know God said he notices every time one of them falls to the ground. But if what they’re known for is falling to the ground, then I’m gonna cross them off my list of things I want to be when I grow up.

I already have both feet on the ground. I think I’ll just stay put and keep enjoying the Enchanted Tiki Room from the safety of my front row seat.

Right here, behind my dangerous windows.

With thanks to Aaron for permission to fly his Disney balloon here. The original photo can be viewed from this link: IMG_1394 | Disney double balloon. Road Trip to Disneyland, D… | Flickr

A Mixed Bag

There’s a pool party going on next door in honor of tomorrow’s American birthday. Everyone in the neighborhood was invited, including me, but there are a couple of reasons why I couldn’t make it. For one thing, it’s a hundred and thirteen degrees in the shade right now and I’m allergic to furnaces. Also, I’m pretty busy right now turning into a recluse. Introverts at pool parties mix like oil and water, to coin a terrible analogy. Nobody likes swimming in stuff like that.

I don’t want to be a recluse. It seems to come with the territory though, that and loneliness. But I’ve been told I don’t have to view things that way. I can find a new story to tell as there are plenty of ways to reframe my perspective. For example, I’m learning to be my own best friend. I’m finding out who I am without Rob. I’m noticing details in the world around me and spinning them into blog posts. Stuff like that. And it gives me lots of time to eat chocolate.

That might be the reason I’m turning into a recluse. Too much chocolate.

There's still plenty of funny in my reclusive world. I just have to look a little harder for it from inside these air-conditioned walls. Today as I sat in my recliner, I read a book written by another widow about the disastrous foray she took into the world of online dating. What a nightmare. Just reading it is keeping me on the straight and narrow, except for that chocolate addiction. But she’s funny, our stories of loss are surprisingly similar, and I’ve got a bag of Dove milk chocolates sitting beside me keeping me company.

You know what’s fun about Dove chocolates besides letting them melt in your mouth? The “silky smooth promises” written inside the foil wrappers. Every couple of pages as I read the author’s struggle to fill out a profile for herself, I picked up another Dove chocolate and decided I’d never expose my soul like that online.

Oh, yeah. Well. Anyway.

“Things I could never live without,” she was asked. “My late husband,” she wrote. I loved her already. She wasn’t gonna get any dates that way, but I knew we could be friends if our paths ever crossed. “Write your own fairytale and be your own hero,” my chocolate therapist wrote. Of course. Table for one and you don’t have to share.

“What are you looking for?”  “A time machine to take me back to when my husband was alive,” she answered. You go, girl, I thought, unwrapping another blue foil with its milk chocolate treasure. “Don’t let anyone dim your light,” Dove agreed. You gotta be you. No one does it better.

It’s a pretty good read. I already knew from watching her interview that she gets a second chance at love in the end, but reading about all the frogs she had to kiss before a prince showed up is entertaining.

I stared off into space, through the sliding glass doors, and out to the pasture beyond. Dan and Katy’s irrigation came in last night and the grass in my front yard and theirs plus everything in the back is a collection of ponds as gallons of water absorb into the thirsty ground. Judging from the arrival of feathered friends, the birds eye view from above must resemble Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes.

Earlier, glancing out my bedroom window, I counted at least forty sparrows having their own pool party in a large puddle near the kids’ trampoline in my daughter’s backyard. Now, I spotted one of the neighbor’s white chickens at the far end of Katy’s pasture near the old chicken coop. She was having the time of her life. It was like she’d found the holy grail of bugs and worms out there, rescuing them from floodwaters where it appeared they were doing their best not to drown.

They weren’t drowning. There was no time. In front of our feathered opportunist, a feast of celestial proportions was laid out for her, and she was getting her fill. Also, I suspect she’s an introvert, too, and was escaping all the splashing across the fence in her own yard.

I went into the office and sat at my desk. In the front yard outside my huge window, a snail vine flourishes against the gate beside my back wall, its little purple flowers balanced on wandering tendrils backlit by healthy green leaves. Jutting up from the ground in the middle of its flowering expanse is a tall weed I would have pulled out by now if not for my fear of furnace-like heat and an allergy to wasps. That weed ruins my view and my perspective. But standing tall like it’s doing today, I’ve seen a steady flight of tiny little finches or starlings or something the size of hummingbirds, but without the humming, land delicately on its stalk, pausing mid-flight to snack on it.

Who knew there was something to appreciate about tall, obnoxious weeds? The birds fly in low like a jet on approach, snag the weedy stalk with their landing gear, and hang on while it lurches back and forth like a ride at an amusement park. They make it look like fun to be a bird.

Across the street where the goats coexist with a herd of chickens and baby chicks in the neighbor’s back pasture, their hens tiptoe through irrigation lakes of their own, like they’re afraid to get their feet wet. Kind of like I do when I forget the front yard is a muddy bog every two weeks like it is today. Irrigation is the entire reason things are green in this little oasis in the desert, though, and I cannot tell you how happy that makes this weary desert dweller.

I’m so tired of the heat. It keeps me trapped in the house, playing snoop dog while I spy on the livestock outside who’ve learned how to survive in these temperatures. Sometimes I escape in my truck—and by ‘sometimes’ I mean three or four times a day—just for an air-conditioned change of scenery that won’t bring on heat exhaustion. I’m an A/C hopper. Hold my breath and jump inside the truck. Hold my breath on re-entry into the garage and run back inside the house.

Come to think of it, I do a pretty good imitation of a chicken, inside and out.

The birds have disappeared and I reach for the Dove bag again. “Chocolate now. Stress later,” the foil promises. I’d vote for skipping deferred stress, but there are still three or four more months of summer left for us so it must be true. “Smile like you found twenty dollars in your pocket,” another bite urges. Well, since the bag of chocolate is running low, twenty dollars would come in handy about now. “Manifest it and you’ll make it happen.” In case you lost count, that was the fifth Dove I stuffed into my mouth. I’m manifesting another couple of pounds on my frame as we speak. I probably ought to put this bag in the trash and slow down on the chocolate therapy. Is it too late to start a diet today?

Okay. One last piece. “If you don’t start today, you’ll regret it tomorrow,” my nemesis warns like a coach at a Weight Watcher meeting. In full on rebellion, I snag the final chocolate in the deflated bag of temptation. “Confidence starts with you,” it reads.

I’m not buying Dove chocolates anymore. They're too judgy. 

Chopped

Have you noticed that it’s hard to find three funny things a day? Yesterday’s funny didn’t happen until I was almost ready for bed and decided to watch clips of the presidential debate. That’s enough comic relief for an entire week. Laughter is awesome but it’s keeping me awake at night.

So, I’m upping the ante. I’m calling it a win if I laugh out loud three times a day at other people’s humor instead of putting so much pressure on my funny bone. If I can find one funny thing on my own daily, that should be plenty.

With that in mind, I did the unthinkable this morning and cooked a meal for myself. I used to love cooking and baking and making healthy foods from scratch. Now I don’t. You can add cooking to the long list of things I loved to do before Rob died that have landed in the dumpster now. Turns out that’s super common. As a popular grief coach puts it, “Every corner of my universe has been affected by this enormous loss. Nothing feels the same now. I have to unlearn almost everything I thought I knew and relearn a completely new way.”

I knew this was true instinctively, but it was so weird when I first noticed it. Especially the cooking thing. When you’re grieving, it’s important to get enough rest, water, good food and exercise. These are also the last things you want to do when you’re grieving.

As a result, my new microwave is threatening a coup and fast-food employees working the drive-thru know me by name. This is not good, and I have the extra pounds to prove it.

Still, you have to find a win wherever you can. I was headed out the door with my purse over my shoulder this morning to get another sweetened iced coffee with extra cream and probably a couple of baby donuts as a chaser when, hand on the doorknob, I stopped and asked myself, “Is that really what I want? Is that really what my body wants?”

Sometimes a superior kind of laziness wins out over a basic version, and I make a better decision. I knew that in the time it takes me to drive to Dunkin, make my order on a Saturday morning, and come back home, I could have scrambled some eggs with all the extras, browned up some potatoes (from a bag – I’m not a gonna be extreme here), and enjoyed a hot breakfast in peace. Good food, nourishing food, food I already own and have already paid for.

The cheapskate in me won out and I put my purse away. I’m not sure it was my best decision.

I pulled out the bag of ready-to-cook hash browns and put them into my new non-stick skillet. I covered them with foil to speed things up and then—here’s where you may want to look away—nature called. It was serious.

Now, I know it’s a bad idea to leave a pan on a hot burner to cook while you make a pit stop in the bathroom, but I don’t have a choice anymore. I don’t have someone in the house I can yell to for backup in the kitchen. It was a risky move, I’ll admit. I’ll also admit it just now occurred to me that I could have turned the burner off for five minutes. See? At my age, the synapses are misfiring, and dicey behavior overwhelms common sense more often than anyone needs to know. No, I didn’t fall down in the bathroom, hit my head on the granite countertop, and wake up in a room filled with smoke while a herd of firefighters carried me out into the yard. How embarrassing. You have such an imagination. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, just that it didn’t.

I made it back to the hash browns in time to turn them over, nicely browned, and began to work on the eggs. All scrambled up in a bowl with salt and pepper and lots of onion powder, I did my level best not to make a mess. This is the main reason I don’t want to cook anymore—I don’t want to clean up after myself. I don’t want a dirty stove top or island or dirty dishes in the sink. I don’t want crumbs on the floor or any evidence at all that life is messy. When I pick up supper from Chick Fil A, like I did last night, the dishes go right into the trash and there’s nothing left for me to do except turn on Netflix.

The hash browns all finished, I planned to use the same pan for the eggs. To save on dishes. I picked up my shiny new non-stick skillet, tried to put half the stuck-together potatoes onto my plate and the rest into a bowl for tomorrow, and dropped them on my clean counter instead because nicely browned browns don’t want to stop holding hands with each other. The pan was hot, the potatoes were hot, they slid out of the non-stick skillet as slick as snot and covered the counter from end to end. Frustrated, I left them there to think about what they’d done.

Drippy, eggy fork in my left hand, bowl of liquid breakfast in the other, I realized I’d put an empty hot pan on a still cooking burner without any oil or food in it. I also had no more hands available to fix this problem and I didn’t want to put anything down because everything was drippy and eggy and I didn’t want to make a mess. Smoke was coming up from the new, empty pan. I had to do something. I set the bowl of eggs down and grabbed a rubber spatula to slice off a pat of butter for the pan. Half the stick of butter stuck to the spatula, which is too much even for me, but my left hand was still holding the drippy egg fork.

Why God didn’t give us four hands instead of two leaves me inclined to believe in evolution instead of divine design.

I put the fork down on the counter, which was desecrated by potatoes anyway, picked up the fork I’d set aside for eating my breakfast, and quickly fixed the butter situation. The butter hit the pan like an ice cube in an angry volcano and before I could pour in the eggs it began to bubble and burn. I sighed, gave the eggs one last whip with the drippy fork and, with both fork and bowl in my left hand, poured in the yellow liquid anyway. I’ve heard browned butter eggs are chic. And here is where I made a costly error and was reminded again of why I don’t want to cook anymore.

I’ve lost my mojo.

I also lost my fork. It slipped out of my hand and into the skillet of eggs where, before I could blink, it disappeared into a pool of bubbling yellow. Chic browned butter eggs are one thing, but omelets aren’t supposed to come with a fork cooked into them. I grabbed the rubber spatula which was no help at all in rescuing the fork because—rubber. The fork fell in again and I had to leave it there to cook while I put the empty mixing bowl in the sink, and when I came back my scrambled breakfast was nearly set. I snatched the drippy egg fork from its resting place on the potato-covered counter, wedged it under the superheated scrambled egg fork in the pan, and in one quick flip watched it fly into the air, do a triple reverse backward twist and slide down the lower cabinets just before it hit the floor. I gave it a 7.9 for style and returned my attention to the eggs.

The kitchen was a disaster area. Egg was all over the counter, running down the side of the cabinets, and pooling a bit on the floor, but not too much since half of my omelet was still attached to the hot fork. The butter dish, smeared with a rejected slab of butter, needed to be washed now, and the stove top was splattered with an overspray of oil from the potatoes and yellow drips from my sloppy egg maneuver. The sink was filled with a pile of dirty dishes not even seen in the kitchen of Chick Fil A, and there were dots of ketchup all over the island from a bottle that I forgot was nearly empty before I decorated my hash browns.

The food was delicious. And it was free-ish. And hot. But it wasn’t worth the trouble or the nutrition.

I watch a lot of cooking competitions on tv, but not once have they ever given credit to the people responsible for damage control in the kitchen. They barely even show you the pile of dirty dishes in the sink or the way the counters have been desecrated in the process. I want to see a show where dishwashers compete to see who makes it through without dropping a dish or getting chopped. Now that's something I can aspire to.

Honestly, though, I don’t want to cook a meal for one and have to do all the clean up, too. It’s not satisfying anymore. If you’re gonna destroy something as clean and organized as a tidy kitchen, you should at least have an audience to applaud you for the effort and tell you the food tastes good.

The only way to keep the mess to a minimum without trying to serve a cheesy fork omelet to yourself is to pick up your purse and head to McDonald’s where Buffy recognizes your voice in the drive-thru and keeps your debit numbers on speed dial. They even have a trash can in the exit lane where you can deposit all your used dishes.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

With thanks to Mike Mozart for proof that cooking isn't for everyone. The pic seen above can be viewed in its unbroken state at the following link: Broken Eggs, by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMe… | Flickr

Finding The Funny

Sometimes it’s hard to find the funny, especially if you’re not in the mood. I was hoping funny would find me so I wouldn’t fail on my second day of this challenge, but things were feeling a little forced. I’ve won a couple of awards in Toastmasters for humorous speeches, but I quickly learned that if the audience isn’t ready to laugh, you ain’t gonna be funny. There really is a thing called ‘energy in the room’ and I struggled to find it today. Maybe our outside temp of 113 degrees was to blame. There’s not much to laugh about inside a furnace.

I was determined, though. You’ve got to make finding funny its own special kind of treasure hunt on days when life feels too serious. On a good day, funny will fly right into your face where you can’t miss it, like the time I was offering a glass of grape juice to my cousin and it slipped out of my hand. The glass landed straight down on the table in front of her, which was a pretty good save. For the glass. But Newton’s First Law of Inertia states that an object at rest will stay at rest unless the object is acted upon by an unbalanced external force. I played the part of the unbalanced external force.

See, the grape juice had been resting inside the glass until the glass hit the table, and the effect was the same as when a kid jumps out of a tree and onto a trampoline. The contents of that glass, twelve ounces of purple grape juice, hit my cousin full in the face and it was several minutes before she recovered from the shock and the rest of us stopped laughing long enough to hand her a towel.

I actually still feel bad about this incident, but we were both homeschooling and this was our science co-op day, so it all turned out for the best, I think. At least I learned about gravity and my cousin learned to get her own beverages when I'm around.

See? That kind of funny catches you off guard. I wanted to find off-guard funny today, but I think it was too hot outside. Even planet earth was in a foul mood this afternoon, and who can blame it? Four hours east of here, high in Arizona’s beautiful White Mountains, a friend of mine lives in the little, scenic village of Greer. People escape to Greer for months every summer when they find out about the weather there. “It’s raining and 69 degrees,” my friend texted me today, “but I shouldn’t tell others that.” I always forget how lovely it is there. So hard to believe paradise is that close when there's sweat running down your back. "Yeah, you probably ought to keep that to yourself,” I responded. “You don’t want to get TP’d in the rain.”  Four hours from here. Which is apparently the actual physical distance between heaven and hell. I still might go toilet paper her yard.

So, funny had gone into hiding and I had to get out and see if I could find it. There wasn’t much in my email’s inbox to fall back on, and I realized I was gonna have to at least take a drive around the block and put myself in the path of good material if I wanted to squeeze out a chuckle somehow. I decided to go wander around a Home Goods store and either look for inspiration or discover something I suddenly couldn’t live without.

Right away I spotted an amazing table that would look spectacular on the patio of my crazy friend’s house in Tucson. She needs this in the worst way. It was a two-foot tall plaster sailor with a bird on his head and an empty tray held out in one hand. Ugly as sin and a real statement piece. The statement was, “I can’t wait to see the look on your face when I give this to you.”

Don’t go feeling sorry for her. She torments me mercilessly. Outdoing each other with horrible gifts is the foundation of our friendship. She once gave me a huge, painted styrofoam hand that she decorated with fake poinsettias and a photo of herself. It rose up out of a worn-out gift bag looking like a Halloween nightmare. She made me open it inside Starbucks so there’d be witnesses to how depraved she is, and when I did, two customers next to us came over and gushed about how beautiful and unusual the present was. Later I found out she bribed them to say that stuff. I thought they were just crazy like her, but she’s in a league of her own.

I really wanted to get that little nautical decoration for her, but I left the store empty handed today. Home Goods’ price tag for the tacky sailor was a hundred dollars! There is no accounting for taste, but I don’t have to pay for it. She’ll have to buy that ugly table herself.

Just walking across the black asphalt parking lot ruined the good mood I’d almost managed to find, and I climbed inside the oven I call my truck, sat down on a melting leather seat, and turned on the air conditioner full force, sucking in overheated air for a minute until the compressor found its stride. Buckled in, I threw it in reverse, and watched in my backup camera as a woman in a shiny, new Navigator sitting in a parking space on the row behind me did her level best to meet me by accident right outside the Home Goods store. In self-defense, I put my Tahoe in drive and pulled as far forward into the empty space in front of me as I could so the woman wouldn’t succeed and ruin my bumper. She never turned her wheels. She just kept coming at me like I wasn’t there or maybe she assumed I was slowly pulling straight out so she didn’t have to do some fancy maneuver like using the steering wheel to steer.

At the last minute, she changed direction and drove away from potential disaster, oblivious to the fact that I was anywhere close instead of in Greer in the rain where I belonged. Mumbling to myself, I made it out to the main street through town without further incident, only to have another little Zippity Doo Dah try to hit me from behind again. You know, when someone rear-ends your vehicle, it’s always seen as their fault, but that’s no consolation when you lose your mode of transportation.

At this point, Mama had had enough. “Siri!” I yelled above the roar of my air conditioner. “Make a note!”

“To the jerk who nearly ran me over on Ellsworth Road and to the lady who tried her best to link bumpers in the parking lot, better luck next time. I know it’s not very Christian for me to hope you each get flat tires, but I’m still a work in progress so don’t expect too much from me just yet.”

I don’t know if I found funny today or just did the best I could with what I had, but some days are like that. If I’d had the patience to watch the debates tonight on TV, I’m certain I’d have found plenty of rich material there. I’ll settle for an ugly plaster table and a full glass of grape juice, though.

I don’t think I could handle any cow pies today.