Critters

There are a pair of finches making a nest in the Boston fern hanging on my porch.  The female is, of course, an unassuming shade of don't-notice-me brown.  The male has a lovely red head and breast.  They have been busily bringing bits of grass and twigs and plunging them down into the heart of this potted fern for the past several days.  When I come and go, I generally find them both perched on the string of Christmas lights that is still, shamefully, circling our carport - watching from a distance as I pass.

I call them Mister and Missus.  They are so small and sweet and adorable.  I'm glad to have them in my fern. 

I was concerned at first as to how I would manage to water the fern without dousing the nest, but a facebook friend of mine told me she had the same situation and had gotten one of those glass watering globes that you fill with water and then plunge into the soil.  Good idea!  So I'll do that next week.

I love backyard wildlife.  I'm such a kid.  At our old house on 40th street, my garden was the home of an enormous brown toad we called "Old Joe."  He had burrowed down into the soft earth of my raised squash bed, and came out at night, or when I watered enough to flood his burrow.  He was hug and fat and we loved seeing him.  I haven't had toads in my yard since then, which I think is a shame.

I have mice.  The dogs chase them around the woodpile (i.e. large, unsightly pile of limbs fallen from the sycamore tree that I have piled next to the shed) at night.  Sometimes they catch one.

When I lived in North Carolina, near the forest, there were hundreds of gabillions of frogs and toads.  Tree frogs filled the night air with their calls, and there were loud-mouthed frogs too tiny to see in the grass around the pond, and giant GaLUMPHing bullfrogs and lots of toads that came up on the patio at night to eat the june bugs.  A horrible little boy lived next door for awhile who used to kill them for fun.  I always gave him the evil eye when I caught him sneaking up on one of MY toads.  What kind of child kills a toad on purpose?  I future serial killer, I'm guessing. I'll be reading about that kid in the news one day. Mark my words.

One of our educators at the museum told me I can go catch toadlets in the spring and relocated them to my garden, as long as I provide them a water source, like a wide shallow dish, and a place to hide.  So I'll be making a trip to the stream alongside the railroad tracks in a few weeks, to pick up some new garden tenants.  They can eat the bugs on my broccoli.

I get these caterpillars on my broccoli that are wreaking havoc.  They are exactly the color of broccoli leaves, so you can be looking right at them and not see them at first.  but they're there... munching away.  I've taken to spraying the leaves vigorously with the hose when I water to blast the little buggers away.  I can't kill them.  They're kind of cute, in a fat green caterpillary sort of way. I just pick them of and toss them out of the garden.  It's probably worse for them than squishing, because they probably starve to death, but it's easier on my conscience. 

Changes?

I'm considering a change... a few changes, in fact. 

First of all, I'm going to start the paperwork required to take back my maiden name.  I want my own identity back.  So Jin and I are going to the county clerk's office tomorrow and we're picking up the paperwork. She wants her name back, too. 

At first I kept my ex's name because I thought it was important to Grayson for us to have the same name.  And it was at first. But he's older now and I think he can understand why I would want my own name back.  It's time, I think.

Also, I'm considering a job change.  I realized, in talking to my wise and perceptive friend Jin, that I am a bit burned out here.  I love the museum, but, as Jin said "you've done everything there is to do there."  And I realized... yeah.  I kind of have.  At least in this position.  All my press releases are boiler plates that I just drop in the new dates and times.  I've covered all the curators' research projects at least once, some several times, and a 20-year study just doesn't ignite the same spark the second or third time I have to frame it up on the page.

So I've been sniffing around a bit today.  Even applied for a few.  I haven't done that in years.  (With the exception of the vet tech job at Free to Live recently, but that doesn't really count)  I need something to shake up my brain in a good way for a change... and a new job changes your perspective on just about everything.

Rain, Cattle and Creosote

Rain!  Glorious Rain!  I was beginning to think we'd never see it again.  I can almost hear my lawn sighing with relief. 

Utter downpour today, and so welcome.  Whatever Christian or Pagan gods you worship, thank them for me.  From the bottom of my dry little roots, I am grateful for the rain.

The downpour did make driving to and from my aunt's house something of an adventure, but it didn't matter... it was RAIN. 

Easter.  I'm not a big fan of easter.  I'm sure I've mentioned that before.  I love my family and enjoy other holidays when we all get together.  I have no idea why I'm biased against Easter.  But it's something of a chore.  I have always considered opting out.  But my mother would be quite put out with me, and really there's no good reason for it, so I go. 

It's one of the few times during the year that I see my grandmothers.  I hereby vow to make an effort to see them more.  Each time I do see them, they hug me tight and tell me they think of me often, and I believe that they do.  So I told them each that I will call them next week and set a date to have each of them over individually.  I don't know why I haven't.  Inertia, I suppose.  Laziness?  Maybe that's closer to the mark.

But I'll remedy that.  I will. 

In the meantime... it has rained virtually all day.  I would love for it to continue to rain all night. What's better than sleeping through a rainstorm? When I was a kid, we spent a lot of weekends at my uncle's farm in St. Louis, Oklahoma.  I slept upstairs, at one end of a long room that ran the length of the cabin, next to a window.  The roof met in a peak overhead, and though the entire interior roof was finished in cedar shingles, the outer roof was corrugated tin.  The rain was wonderful up there.  Particularly when you could open the window and smell the air-- cow manure and grass and creosote and sun-heated dust and rain.  It's a combination that says Oklahoma to me.

At night I would lay in my bed with the window open and listen to coyotes howling, or the low drumming of the oilwell pumps scattered around the property.  In the morning it was cows lowing and birdsong.  If I could bottle and sell the sense of peace and well being those smells and sounds imparted, I'd be a wildly wealthy woman.

Trees I Have Loved

Earth Day!  It's actually kind of  pity that we felt it necessary to name a day to remind ourselves that we're indebted to and dependent upon the planet we live on. But I guess it's a positive step.  Today I'm thinking about the bits of Earth that I have lived on, known and loved in my lifetime.  Here's a composite picture of the mighty, mighty maple tree that grows next to Bob's house.  It is my favorite, favorite tree in all of Norman.

I'm an Oklahoma girl.  I guess you are always embued with the natural spirit of the place you come from.  My ex husband is from El Paso TX, and always had a special affinity for the desert, which to me always looked forbidding and abandoned.  But the wide open sky, red rock and scrappy trees of Oklahoma will always feel like home to me.  There's something so tough about the desert.  It's a hard place, because it has to be.  Oklahoma's tough, too, but not as hard.  Here the land ... and some of the people ... have a sort of self-deprecating "aw shucks, nuthin' much" attitude that hides a wealth of wonder.

As Oklahomans, we know that our environment doesn't have that much of a dramatic nature to distinguish it.  Our land is flat, but not as flat as Kansas (which some students at MIT did a study on a few years ago and determined that it was, in fact, flatter than a pancake).  We've got a lot of rivers, but not a lot of big, impressive rivers.  Some of them flow mostly through a layer of sand, or dry up completely in the brutal summers. Our mountains are short, lumpy and really, really old.  Our lakes are mostly manmade. Our trees are largely scrubby, twisted and not much to look at.

Yet the whole adds up to a landscape that is incredibly diverse, if unassuming.  Salt flats and sand dunes, piney woods and desert scrub, granite mountain and tall grass prairie.  None of it with the sweeping drama of MGM, but something special, nonetheless.

When I was in school in North Carolina I was amazed at the forest.  All those trees!  And their trees grew so much taller than our trees.  Trees of the same species would be twice the height in NC as in OK.  I guess with ample water, and without the wind raging up from the southeast all the time to keep them hunkered down, North Carolina's trees felt free to just stretch out and keep on stretching.  I loved to walk in the woods there when the wind was blowing hard up above.  Below all was peace, but you could hear the wind rushing through the canopy above, and if you placed your hands on the trunk of a pine tree, you could feel it sway, all the way to the roots.


In Oklahoma I was always partial to the scrappy blackjack oak.  post oak.  scrub oak, Crosstimbers... they go by  many names.  Pioneers hated them because they were virtually impassable, with an understory thick with greenbriar and venomous snakes.  They're useless for timber, and a little bit funny-looking, with their twisted branches like crooked fingers and their black bark and dark, tough leaves.There was one on my uncle's farm that grew a little way out into a pasture by itself, where a big owl lived.  If you were lucky you'd hear it, or maybe even see it swoop overhead when you went walking at night near the tree.  The tree it roosted in was a dense, squat thing, black against the sky and scarred with broken limbs, scabbed bark and dead patches, but still hanging on.  I always thought it looked old and wise.  I wonder if it still stands.


On the outskirts of Norman, there's this tree I've been watching for a year. It was dead when I met it, last November, but dead in a pretty striking spectacular way:  black arms against a cloudy sky, and full of crows.  I went back in March and it was much diminished, limbs broken and collapsed, the bark stripping away to reveal the gray wood underneath. Today I went back and it is almost completely without bark, though it doesn't seem to have lost any more major limbs.

November 2010

February 2011

Today

When I was a kid, my dad planted a willow tree outside my window.  And as it grew, he carefully trained a few of its branches to make a comfy seat for me.  By the time I was nine or ten, the tree was big enough to climb, and I spent hours in that leafy seat, reading books or just being with the tree.  Then one year I broke a branch, swinging from it, and the tree got sick.  Beetles or disease got to it, and it began to die.  Finally, my dad had to have it cut down, and I couldn't watch.  After they carried it out, all cut to pieces, I went out and sat on the stump and cried. I felt like I had lost an old friend... and worse, that I was somehow responsible for the tree's death, because of that branch I broke. That I had betrayed my tree in some way.  I still have a strip of my willow's dried leaves pressed in a scrap book in a box in my garage, and pictures of my tree in its last days before we cut it down.

I wish I could have planted a willow for Grayson, that he could be climbing and loving now.  We did plant a sycamore at the house on 20th street, but even though it grew fast, it was still not big enough to climb when we left. Maybe soon we'll be able to plant one together.

Anyway, it's Earth Day.  And I'm thinking about trees. 

Kobi Returns and other night adventures

Last night as Bob was leaving, Kobi and Roxy streaked out the front door into the night. Within 15 minutes or so, Roxy came back, but Kobi was still nowhere to be found when I locked up and went to bed. I don't like to leave her out like that, but I know it's silly to wait up or go looking, and she'll come home and i'll find her waiting on the front porch in the morning.

At 3:30 I woke up and got up to check the front porch, figuring maybe she had scratched at the door and that's what woke me. No Kobi. I checked out back. No Kobi. A little worried, I went back to bed. Tucked my feet down under the covers and.... there she was.

My little dog had come home in the night, climbed the fence into the back yard, come into the garage through the doggie door, pushed open the door to the kitchen, let herself in, and put herself to bed. Clever girl.

After a chilly and gray day, the evening turned warm and moist and wonderful tonight. I went for a walk and smelled the trees and watched mockingbirds swooping through the evening air. It reminds me of something, somewhere else, another time. It reminds me of North Carolina, I think: the smell of the trees. I remember certain evenings there, standing in the forest, which was everywhere, all around and through the town of Chapel Hill, and smelling the trees. One night in particular I was at a party at somebody's house out in the woods. It was October. Just beginning to chill. I was with a group of people and we decided to go on to another party, so we all went out onto the deck to load into our cars. There was a guy in the group and we were doing that subtle, complex ritual you do at the beginning of a new relationship, when you know there's a mutual attraction, and you're both trying to engineer a way to be close, to touch, to share something. He was walking just behind me, and as we stepped off the deck he said "look at the stars!"

I looked up, and I had to look waaaay up, through the sharp ring of pine trees that circled the house, that circled the black, shining piece of sky straight above us. It was alive with stars. I leaned back and he let me lean on him, and that moment – with the holy brightness of the stars and the ring of black trees, the smell of the forest, the cool of the autumn air and the warmth of him at my back... that moment was one of the best moments of my life. Just then.

I think of it sometimes when I smell trees.

Driving Forward, Looking Back

When I was up in the weeeee hours of the morning this morning, I did some hard thinking.
I do a lot of hard thinking in the wee hours. What else is there to do?

I think over the past couple of years, since my divorce, I've pretty much been in a holding pattern. Certainly for the last year I've been sort of coasting, letting things happen, taking it easy.

Lately, however, I have a sense of Life Passing Me By. I look at where I've been and where I am and realize I have no sense of where I go from here. At present I have no real future... just tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Maybe it's because when I was married I felt like my future – our future together – was more or less mapped out, I didn't think about it much then. Since then I have had a sense of my future being erased, or destroyed, and for over a year all I could see ahead was rubble. But now I see nothing. And there's nothing left behind me when I look back. Certainly there is nowhere back there for me to go. And no reason to cling to it like a shipwreck survivor.

I exist, in one sense, in a Tabula Rasa. A clean slate.

What I'm learning in talking to others is that most people, at some point in their lives, find themselves starting over. I didn't know that until I found myself doing it. But the more I talk with people, the more I see amazing dips and curves and right angles in their lives. Mine is no different. It is just mine.

So I declared this the Year Zero. And set myself some simple touchpoints to guide me. I thought "I need to know what I want from this new life I'm offered, so I can begin now to create it, not just to take what happens." So here is what I came up with. I'll call them The Nine:

1) I want to feel good about myself: physically and emotionally.

2) I want to manage my relationship with alcohol, and with all potentially damaging extremes

3) I want to be financially secure and independent

4) I want to build and maintain a supportive network of friends

5) I want to have a variety of interesting experiences that enrich my life and the life of my son

6) I want to be creative and productive

7) I want a home of my own

8) I want to live in a world in which I seek ways to say a hopeful yes to my heart's desires, not reasons to say a fearful no

9) I want to love and be loved.

Those are the Nine. And every day I think I need to ask myself "What have I done today to further the Nine?"

And finally, I think there is a tenth principle, but since it's one of negativity, not a want, I hold it separate.

10 is "No regrets. No guilt." In other words, my past is behind me and I am who I am. It's okay to seek out the life I want for me.

I realize Grayson does not figure in this list. Of course, he's central to everything in my life. And of course I want a happy, safe and fulfilling life for him as well. But this is the list for myself, so I kept the focus on me and what I want. I think if I can stay true to this list, and just keep moving forward, I'll get somewhere good.

Starting Today.

I can't sleep. I mean, I really can't sleep. It's 4 a.m. and I've done little better than doze since I turned out my light at 10. And the hell of it is, it's all from good intentions.

I decided to try to kick my weight loss and bikini-plan into a higher gear by knocking off the sauce for a week or two. I've been counting calories, and hitting the gym in the mornings a few times a week, but still not moving things along like I want to. It's discouraging because if there are two things I hate to do, they're diet and exercise. Oh, I'm happy to spend the day working like a beast turning over the garden. But I really and truly hate grinding away on an elliptical machine, for even the deadly 20 minutes I do on my super-speedy morning workouts. And just the thought of dieting makes me feel deprived and grouchy.

So naturally I decide to take it one step further and deprive myself of one of the primary pleasures of life: wine.

Problem is, I'm a more or less chronic insomniac even with two glasses of wine on board of an evening. Without it, I'm just sitting in the dark like an owl, making up shit to worry about: Global warming, the plight of the sea turtles, dogs that died 20 years ago, why I had trouble making friends in sixth grade, why I can't remember the ending of Villette. You name it. At last, to save my sanity, I get up and eat a bowl of cereal and sit in the living room for awhile, hollow-eyed and exhausted, until I'm able to quiet my interior monologue enough to go back to bed. Likely I'll fall asleep around 5:30 and be a zombie when the alarm goes off -- rudely -- an hour later.

I'm not sure the few hundred calories worth of wine are worth it, frankly. But I remain steadfast. I have clothes I can't wear, and bathing suit season -- horror of horrors -- is fast approaching. The stark unavoidable fact of my middle-aged body in a bathing suit is sobering in and of itself, without the extra cottage cheese.

In my callow youth I imagined myself aging gracefully, accepting each line and wrinkle with equanimity. But the reality of it is much more distressing. In my 20s, when I gave lip service to aging gracefully, I always imagined that I would have achieved a certain "maturity" by my 40s ... that simply failed to materialize. Nor could I realize in my 30s that my sense of being a grown-up had gone as far as it ever would. Mentally, I never aged beyond about 34, and let me tell you, for 34, my body has gone all to hell. I didn't realize, see, what probably any woman over 40 could have told me. No matter how mature I become, no matter how experienced or wise or worldly my accumulated years might make me, I'm never going to feel any older than about 34. Okay, a tired, achey and jaded 34, but when I look in the mirror, 34 is about what I expect to see.

Imagine my shock, then, on confronting the tired 44-year-old broad that turns up in my bathroom with me every morning. Those roots! That cellulite! That... thing under the chin! Why, it's enough to drive even a mature, grown up woman to drink. For me, it's falling off a log.

So, the upshot is... I'm awake. At what is now turning up to be 4:21 a.m. Worrying about whether tis nobler in the mind to sacrifice the nightly glasses of wine to the gods of bikini or just chuck it in.

Think I'll go lie in bed and worry about it.

In Which I Make a Daring Rescue

Thursday evening I was feeling kind of bummed out after work. I'd been to the pharmacy to pick up my meds and was told that the insurance company had "updated" their formulary and decreed my medicine "out of formulary," thereby jacking the price up from $30 to $60. This forces me to take the generic version, which is only $10, but works about half as well. That would be bad enough if we were talking about an allergy medication, but this is an anti-depressant, so I knew I was looking at near future of increased bouts of sadness and despair.

Enough to bring anyone down, I think. And it's doubly frustrating because there's nothing you can do. There's not even anyone to yell at. It's not the pharmacist's fault. It's not the fault of the guy on the phone from the insurance company (though I did give him a healthy dose of the rough side of my tongue, I assure you). It's not my doctor's fault. The people who made this decision did it in some shadowy, no doubt richly appointed board room somewhere, based solely on the output of their stock portfolio. It's just maddening. You can get to anyone to tell them what their decision has done you. I can't afford $60 a month for these pills. But can I afford to be depressed and crazy more? I have a kid to raise, a life to lead!

I have decided to just ask my doctor to increase my dosage. I don't necessarily need the increase, at least of the brand name medication I don't. But I know I'm not at my maximum dosage, so there's room for an increase, which should make up for the 20% drop in active ingredient allowed in the generic.

I know generics are supposed to be "Just as effective." And I always used to believe that, until I made the switch one time and was longing for death two weeks later.

Anyway, I told you all that to explain why I was feeling a bit low after work on Thursday. I went out to sit on the patio and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine and read a book. I was sipping my wine and reading peacefully when I heard a ruckus in the limbs of the crepe myrtle bush at my back. The ruckus became a scrambling and then the dogs came to attention and leapt at the bush.

A squirrel had apparently missed its footing and fallen through the branches. The dogs were after it in a flash and the poor thing panicked and took off across the patio, practically under my feet! It actually stopped under a chair in front of me and then was off again like a shot, but it ran the wrong way and got itself cornered between a planter and the porch steps.

At this point I realilzed the poor squirrel was truly in mortal danger, and I jumped up from my chair to try to call off the dogs, but just then the squirrel made a desperate run for the yard, right between Roxy's feet, and she had it.

She snatched it up and made for the yard with it, with Flower right alongside her and me in hot pursuit. I snatched up one of the dozens of fallen sycamore branches that are currenty littering my yard and started wailing away at her, trying to get her to let the poor thing go. Twice she dropped it, but snatched it up again before the squirrel could right itself. And then she dropped the poor thing again and Flower caught it. I switched my attack to FLower.

At last Flower let the squirrel drop and I stood over it, swinging my sycamore branch to keep them at bay. I thought the squirrel would run off, but it seemed frozen, its little sides heaving, just standing in the grass at my feet.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't leave it to go get a towel or box to put it in, because the dogs would grab it immediately. I didn't dare try to pick it up bare-handed. Fortunately about that time Grayson came out to see what all the shouting was about and he helped me out by corralling the dogs into the house and then watching the squirrel while I went into the garage for a box.

The little thing didn't move a whisker all this time. It just stood there, as if it had frozen stiff in the act of running: with one leg out behind it. Grayson said he was afraid the leg was broken, and it may have been, I don't know. When I tried to pick it upwith a towel, it did sort of hobble away and bury itself in a pile of leaves next to the shed, but then it didn't try to escape again when I scooped it up the next time.

It's a young squirrel, which probably explains its poor choices in the melee. I put it in the box with some old baby blankets of Grayson's, and didn't see any blood. Amazingly enough, I don't think the dogs punctured it anywhere, but I do think it was hurt in all the dropping and snatching, but not seriously. Mostly just scared half to death. It held very very still, with its face buried in the blankets, and didn't try to escape or make any move to defend itself, even when I gave in to temptation and petted its soft little sides. I let Grayson pet it once, too, and then I closed it up and we left it alone.

We kept it in the box overnight, with a heating pad underneath to help keep it warm and ward off shock, and some tiny little peanut butter sandwiches and a bit of water. Before I went to bed, I checked on it and saw that it had nibbled on some of the peanutbutter, and was curled up tight and sleeping. On Friday morning I drove the little guy out to Wildcare to be taken care of. The woman who checked him in reached in and picked him up to check him out and again I saw no blood on him. He squeeked and struggled, so I think he'll make a fine recovery.

I'm a hero!

This morning, however, I was out on the patio and heard a scrambling as yet another juvenile squirrel made a miscalculation in the crepe myrtle. He slipped, scrambled, saved himself, and then made an awkward leap to the porch roof, an equally graceless scramble across the cable to the tree and a fairly lumbering climb out of sight. Must be a litter-mate of our rescued squirrel. Lord help him.