Green Crunchy

The soft sluds of winter dulled every sound. Footsteps were muffled by drifts of white, talking to one another took time because of the layers of scarves and woolens wound about crucial circulatory junctions which kept the blood moving through fingers and toes. You held the scarf away from your face to speak, said your piece, then retreated back into the terrapin folds where the warm air was trapped. Listening was done by lifting earflaps. But hear this, sisters and brothers. The seven shrouds are shed, footprints of salt wiped off the linoleum, and two days ago I put my snow shovel into storage. It is spring.

Spring is different from winter. Congratulations, Einstein, you think. Well now roll this around a bit: things snap. Stems and leaves and flowers picked do so with a bright click of sound; leather soles hit bare pavement, voices are clearer without the insulation of snow. Doors slam, rain patters, kids are throwing rocks instead of snowballs. Birds are yelling their heads off, and people are happier from the added oxygen provided by the chugging food engines of new green plants.

The trees stretch their branches forward meters high, tiny specks and dibbles of green leaves mouse their way out further each day. Minute beginnings saturate each limb, the dark branches of winter become furiously speckled as if Persephone wound peridot foliage auguring the performance to come. I like it best just as the leaves arrive, once full-blown it's all salad to me; what's exciting are the tiny spaces of winter left between the burgeoning spring leaves, the greying goodbye conquered by the dazzle of young, tender shoots. Someday I shall come back as a rolling cat, rubbing shoulder and spine into new grass, paws in air, eyes dazed by the hum.

It's chilly tonight; I closed the window near me before sunset. Son arrived safely, happily with his girlfriend in Madrid and made it all the way to Paris. He is in a land six hours ahead, so now must be sleeping at three in the morning in France. Sleeping in France, doesn't that sound like fresh sheets and pillows? The deep sleep of exhausted travelers, dreaming of tomorrow's trotting about. I am ready to turn in myself, to dream of tomorrow's Friday.

Still time weatherways to burrow under covers in jammies. Tuck beneath a comforter and hope for a hot tea or coffee in the morning. An egg. Sleep in a land six hours behind Gallic time and know that the French dream of us, the people on the other side of morning, who sleep on as they rise to a less ancient sun. Goodnight.

Leeking

Haven't much time to write, have leeks to rinse off before bedtime. The annual leek hunt was a grand success, friend Karima and I filled bags with them, digging in our own spots in the woods. The trillium was out in triad petals of maroon, pink, white, and lemon; the mayapples are just popping their umbrellas above last year's leaves, and the best treat was a tiny, early jack-in-the-pulpit, in pale, stripey green. Birds sang, the trees dripped the last raindrops on our heads, and the rushing nearby creek poured sound and water into the landscape, muddy brown with unsettled particles. We gathered wild leeks in the woods by the creek in the rain. It's as close to church as I get.

Sleep well my spring buds.

Hot Diggity and So On

By cracky, you should see the fish tank! I scooted out to the best fish place in the world, called The Fish Place which is in North Tonawanda, New York. There is no South Tonawanda, we didn't want to push our luck with using up all the vowels in our allotment. Anyfishpoo, I scored plastic plants that are now waving hello to me from the aquatic tank next to the television. No, really, they move from the powerhead, a device made to add air and current to the water so the fish sort of think they are in their own real world. Like I have a car, they have a powerhead. And this is a bonus, I now own two bunches of plastic stuff that look like aqua chives but they glow in the dark. This will be verified later tonight, you betcha.

I haven't a clue what they use these days to pull that off, but when I was little and had a dollhouse, a couple of the lamps would glow green from the uranium dioxide those 1950 toy manufacturers tossed into the lampshades. The enchantment began early with things that weren't supposed to happen, like light coming from a non-electrical source. Not counting fire, which was also used willy-nilly to illuminate things that had no business being lit. For example, candles on Christmas trees, which disappeared as soon as Edison figured out how to put light bulbs that could give you a third degree burn on a rubberized cord. Remember the smell? Nothing like the odor of searing electric bulbs on flammable pine, mixed with the bitter smell of hot, foil icicles. Mom was frightened to death of most things, but turning the tree on without my father at home was beyond her horizon. Go play with your uranium dollhouse lamp.

I'll let you know how the fish like the glow in the dark fake plants, they may think they are living in the Vegas of Fishville. No, honestly, they know they live with me. The plants were added for hiding places so the little fish can save themselves. The one surviving platy now has seven other platy friends, and a koi-colored angelfish. Yuh, I know, koi-colored is just la-dee-da for orange and black spots on white, but it is a pretty thing and reminds me of a favorite calico cat from years ago, bless her, our Lucy.

Sunday night; the invention worked wonderfully and the whistling vent on the CPAP mask was silenced. I have a few things to push around and deconstruct, piles of papers or maybe I should create some art. It is a cooler evening again, but the green is maybe two breaths away from exploding like a burst of gunpowder, a fireworks shot shaped like palm tree fronds all pink and yellow and of course, lovely green. Makes me want to go outside, get down on my knees and eat grass and tender shoots. No wonder cows are basically happy, and I don't even like salad but this is magnetic, this verdant pull towards earth. Bet the leeks are up.

Say, just feel the freshness and reassurance of returning buds and familiar beginnings. Welcome the night, and if you are double lucky, you might have something that glows in the dark, it may even just be a fond memory, a firefly of a wish held warm inside a heart, a hope, a dream that keeps you going. Sleep well, covers tucked, pillowed and brushed smooth. Night.

Paper Trails

First of all, where did three of my new coral platies go? I bought four of them last weekend to fill in the tank with color, as the pleco is handsome, but looks like a garden stone with fins. The clown loaches are also bottom dwellers as are the two corys, so something small and orange to swim about the middle and upper levels of the aquarium was introduced. Platies breed, so two males and two females plopped themselves home.

Now, I figure, tell me if you know otherwise, that fish don't need fluorescent lighting much at all so during the week, the light stays off and the tank shadowy and darkish. Like in nature. Natural. I turn it on weekends to watch the show. This morning is when the missing three dinners were noticed. Huh. Who ate who? It wasn't the corys, who are smallish themselves. Loaches are meat eaters, and the clowns will clean a tank of snails lickity. But would they snag a silly little platy? Or three? I dunno. Before any new fish are added, I will put in more hiding places, more plastic seaweed stuff. Cripes. Nature. It's why I'm not watching Life on the Discovery Channel. Too many little babies and innocents getting eaten by bigger birds, sharks, seals, whatever. I am tired to the stars of watching babies get torn apart leg by wishbone while their eyes show terror. Hate it, shove your series.

So it goes. What motivated this post was the book found at the thrift store yesterday, a still-jacketed copy of The Joy of Cooking in excellent condition. Now, that is a lovely find in itself, but what I get a kick out of are the bits of notes jotted down on slips of paper left inside, used ticket stubs, receipts, headings from medical pads, notes written in pencil or ink. Bookmarks. But boy, what a story! And the older the book, the greater likelihood of ancient inscription.

A ticket stub from "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off" starring Anthony Newly from the 1960's was found in a book on shipping in the Great Lakes. So, who would read a layman's shipping book that would also use a live theater ticket stub as a bookmark? Had to be a true Buffalonian who remembered the days when this city was the Queen City of the Lakes before the Welland Canal was constructed, and yearned for those days. Ached. Ached for a busy city of sidewalks filled with people because the industry of shipping brought jobs and products for malting, brewing, toasting, and sifting. A city loaded with ballrooms and elaborate movie theaters with entryways of gilded meringues, ceiling-high mirrors, and lights that were circuited to blink in sequence, forming moving letters. Old Buffalo, New York.

I wonder if this book came from an older person, maybe a man, a man who had watched the ships come in. Did he scoop grain or work the inner harbor in a tug, guiding freighters to dock? And possess a ticket stub from a musical theater production? Other scraps of paper inside this book were a cleaner's stub for an Oriental rug, and a brief ingredients list for "boeuf daube". Whoever you were, your taste was impeccable. Smart, clever, I would have said married, but the grocery list leads me elsewhere. Sentimental. Active. Interested.

The cookbook I purchased yesterday has a religious bookmark with a verse from Chronicles 2, sponsored by Coral Ridge Ministries, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Also used as tabs were a photocopied play dough recipe, a slip from a pad advertising the diuretic Demadex, and a recipe for some sort of chili that called for a bottle of ketchup, written in red ink with a felt tip pen.

There is an inscription on the frontspiece that I shouldn't count as an informational bookmark, but it says, "Happy Mother's Day, 1983, Love, Steve, Anne, and Dyvan (I can't tell the cursive so it could be Dylan but looks more v-ish). A gift for Mom, this big old lunking cookbook. she used it, or tried to, for there are tiny spatters on the front edges, brown stuff. The jacket is in exceptional condition, and maybe was removed while the book was spread out on the counter. God knows how she could lug this monster around if arthritis was involved.

Imagine, a bottle of ketchup in chili. Sounds like a recipe from the days when putting a can of tomato soup in cake batter was hip. "You'll never guess the secret ingredient in this, family of the fifties." The new atomic age we were stressing through caused many many weird recipes to become real. "Mock apple pie" using Ritz crackers for the apples. "Chili-con-weenie". Anything that could be held in suspended animation in a crown of Jello. "Refrigerator dessert". Jesus. Mayonnaise, peaches, and lime jello with grated cabbage. Gack.

Mom the gift book receiver was game. She went to church, loved her grandchildren, visited Florida, and tried new recipes with safe, American (ketchup) ingredients. Family-focussed, probably Republican (the book is clean), thrifty (again the ketchup, but toss in the homemade play dough), and had a red pen that she was used to writing with, mayyybe for correcting papers? A teacher? A retired teacher?

Now, 1983 was twenty-seven years ago, so I am guessing that the book was passed on to the thrift shop as a cleaning out the household due to the final relinquishment of possessions. It's sad. I shop for clothing at thrift shops, always AmVets, and the nicest if not saddest pieces are the ones with adult name tags ironed into the neck seams. Sad, because that person has most likely died. Nice, because the sons and daughters of these nursing home folks buy the good stuff for Mom or Dad as one last way of saying I love you. What a complicated world. We do the best we can.

There are other notes saved from other books, I think it's a human way of communicating history, small important bits scratched onto paper for memory's sake, so we don't forget. Little do we know how readers of our passed on books relish these fragmented ends of paper as a shared road reflected backwards, a mirage of where we have been. People are wonderful. I do love them so.

Not much energy today, but there is a smell, a musty, not so freshwater smell I think is coming from a certain tank, probably based on fish, seven dollars and fifty cents worth of little orange fish that are now digested and floating in strands of goop. I am off to investigate, intrigued musings on paper to be put aside, and the big ol' plastic hose pulled out for siphoning. My neighbors apparently have a new karaoke machine with which they are taking turns listening to themselves make speeches. Thank heavens they don't speak English, or I would go nuts. As it is, I like the sound of Cuban platitudes, if only everything wasn't so emphatically shouted .

They have parties, loud and often, but bless them, everything is shut down at exactly eleven p.m. By that time I am off in the back, tucked in, out of the waking day. I will sleep nicely tonight, I have a solution for the whistling air vent that has been keeping me awake, having to do with maybe cotton gauze, maybe just a plain bit of cotton ball. Not so much as to block the thing, just want to wick away the beads of water which gather inside the vent, creating the whistling CPAP machine. I will be a teakettle no longer. Really, I should write a book.

Sleep well my beautiful ones, eat your vegetables, live long and tuck notes, handwritten is best, into your book that will then be set sail into the ocean, bringing messages to us others, bobbing from hand to hand like corked bottles in the waves. Whose shore will you land on? Whose dream will you enter? Ah, the fun. Sleep well, good night.

Ye Undulations of Brain

The sleep doctor, my own personal sandman, has a background in neurology and thought it was a good idea for me to take a neuropsychological evaluation just to rule out any sneaking memory thieves other than lack of solid-ito sleepo. Fun! I am all in favor of anything that advances figuring out what the hell is wrong and where did my electronical mnemonical slap it in a box ability go? I bump through life like a helium balloon lost at the top of the ceiling, swinging from car wreck (have had 2) to nervous twitch. The doctor who led the interview was surrounded by three grad students studying to be neurodoctors themselves. Very nice young people.

It took two and a half hours to administer the testing, which consisted of things I am sure you have done before yourselves. The old "word red printed in green but you had to read it as red" game, the word red in a box then the next word green printed blue but you had to read the words in the box, then all out goulash with words printed in redgreenblue but you had to say the color of ink, not the word.

And oral recitations; first repeat the sequence, then the sequence backwards, then it was mixed up with alphabet letters and you had to number count the letters not the numbers. Then two personality tests if I thought people could hear my thoughts (no) or if I wanted to be a florist (sure). And then sequence recognition tests like the game you play at baby showers: lion, emerald, horse, tent, cave, opal, cow, sapphire and repeat as many back as you can, and picture recognition where you had to remember if you saw the picture in a sequence of fifty.

Really, they didn't ask if I believed in ghosts which I do but didn't volunteer that information as I thought it may come under the strange noises/hallucination question. And it wasn't strange at all, it just--happened. No questions came into the realm of psychic inclination, I figure because science generally wants to be able to manhandle the answer into tangible matter. Did I see strange things? Only if you count a cat not there about twice a day out of the corner of my eye. Do I know how I got to the testing center? Yes, I drove, but then on the way out I got lost and went up too many levels in the parking ramp stairwell cause nothing looked familiar and was it 3 or 5? Who is the president? I completely forgot Clinton. Obama, Bush, Bush, and do I know what the Sabres are doing tonight? No. Don't want to. Can't make me. You do it.

I get the results in the beginning of May, after the next sleepover performed at the center for further diagnosis, now that I am used to sleeping hooked up to this CPAP-amajig. Truly this approach is welcome, for no one is stuffing me with pills, in fact quite the opposite. To me this is medicine, looking for cause rather than going ahead and treating the symptom with all kinds of capsules that some get paid to prescribe. What has taken so long to find the root cause, is my gripe. Sakes, if I was tested for sleep apnea back in my twenties, would I have been a consumer of the many anti-depressants, sleep aids, wake-up aids, stop shaking aids throughout this life? No; and the medical establishment would not have made half as much money if all I relied on was a breathing machine.

So there it is, nothing to be frightened of, it all leads forward. Solutions hopefully, support and information at the least. I can't wait to get to bed. Did both federal and state taxes this afternoon, zip zip, in the mail. My little cat Kai is on the arm of the couch to my left, her ocean eyes edged in deepest brown, her breath marked by the movement of her flanks, her coat of mottled dappled pied umber over cream lifting and lowering with every small respiration. She is now washing herself, and Snowbelle has leapt to the other end; sphinxes, I am surrounded by sphinxes, I say. I see them both clearly, no cat phantoms in unluminous corners.

Things are winding down, Tulip is now aboard the couch ship, ready to sail off to dreams. They sleep early and will wake around nine tonight for a bit of chase and nip. Me? My heads hurts from backwards numbers and pictures of asparagus. I think some light reading will do fine until doctor sandman raises his beckoning finger, telling me that mechanisms of air pressure and water are waiting to pull me under the tide of dear sleep. You sleep well also, this fresh spring is filled with new energies that yank the green from down in the soil to up above. Time now for warm beds and wells of deepest distance. Sleep. Good, fulfilling sleep.

Ow

My ring finger on the left hand stings like a sonof after burning it on hot beeswax. This is after melting my (ahem) brassiere with a spark from the match that lit the candle that heated the beeswax. This is after tripping on the edge of a rug and catching myself with the same hand except I hit the board with the nails hammered into it by circles of three to hold the eggs while they dry after I drew designs in hot beeswax on them. Easter, you know. I think it's a better idea if I go sit down and cruise YouTube except I will get up and since I don't make ice because I never use it, go chip off a chunk of permafrost from the manual defrost freezer to hold against my finger which is beginning to swell like a sonof. Son of a bitch, for those of you who remain innocent, and I am proud of you.

No, I don't like ice in my drinks. Only in the hottest of weather days, and then we all benefit from ice. The cats get it in their water dishes, the aquarium gets it if the temp is over 82 degrees; but I buy a bag. The chintzy ice that my refrigerator makes takes forever...but say, what can I complain about, the refrigerator was a hand me down from a once beautiful, good friend who had it in her garage. It works well, very well, but the freezer has a thin shim of a plastic alleged door and so wastes a lot of cold; ice cream is never frozen solid. This is small potatoes, but also a reason I don't bother with ice. I do have a small chest freezer for the seasonal things like wild leeks and farmer's market berries, and that does nicely.

A friend who raised snakes once had a miserable time of it, and had to put down six of the garters. After doing so, he asked if I wanted them to draw. Well sure, but no time today, so I wrapped them tightly in plastic wrap and kept them frozen solid for a week. When the time came I thawed them to draw, but they were so stinky and floppy it was really a lost cause. And sad, poor things.

Anyway, I have microwaved potatoes and am now going to make potato salad in the style of Dorothy, my Mom. If there were two things I would like to be able to replicate, her potato salad and bread stuffing would be the apex, the prize, the summa cum laude of deliciousness.

But you see, after the triad mess of burning/melting/crashing of twenty minutes ago, I am giving myself a sidelong glance to see if really, should I be handling a knife to chop up celery?

Jump in, go for it, nothing gained, etc. Momma, watch over me.

Day of Thurs

Oh this is lovely, the fresh daylit air coming in over the sill. Today I caught up on dishes, cleaned off the dining table, and accidentally called Puerto Rico. This new phone, you see. I punched in my son's number and reversed the area code with the next three numbers while programming the speed dial option. I wanted to touch base and see if he and Dana returned safely, so pushed one button on this phone in a hip, I'm-cool-with-new-technology way and got a flustered (I think) woman (I think) speaking a foreign language very quickly. At first I thought Brian had answered in a comic voice and was pulling my leg, but there were no breaths in between sentences; I apologized and hung up. Seeing the error, I checked the number online and found it was listed near San Juan, Puerto Rico. Real Puerto Rico. Their Spanish sounded nothing like my neighbors'.

This is the first day of vacation.