Another visitor
Author: pilchbo
Reporter, editor, photographer. Eighth grade teacher of English and computers. Actor. Quality assurance professional for pharmaceutical manufacturing. And always a writer.
Catching up
It’s been a lengthy stretch of sporadic posting at best. I’ve excused it with “spending time with my wife” and “getting things done” which certainly sound worthy. We’ve just returned from attending her mother’s funeral. (More on that later.) A slate of urgent tasks demands my attention, as does maintaining my health, both physical and mental.
A few pieces of writing, stubs and nothing more, await more attention than I can manage right now. Today let’s just review the two-plus weeks since I posted a hawk in our front yard. Hawks continue to drop by, a vivid affirmation to our decision to rip out the front lawn and install native plants—and especially to my decision to let the leaves lie where they fall. The leaf cover has fostered those little grubs and bugs birds like eat and extends to small rodents for the hawks.
Sadly, rodents (squirrels) ripped into the blossoms of our star magnolia. This is as good as it ever looked this spring:
Perhaps the false starts to spring affected it? We had days in the 70’s and hit 80 once before cold weather set in again, complete with dustings of snow and some freezing rain. The cold became brutal for North Carolina, dropping into the teens. This delayed the magnolia’s blooming by two weeks or more. It looked like this last year, weeks earlier:
We revisited the Duling-Kurtz Country Inn in Exton, PA, Sunday evening. Sitting up by the fire that evening pleased us both. Dressing for the funeral in this room made things marginally better than performing the same in a generic Hilton or Marriott property.
We’re on the eve of a personal holiday, Opening Day of Baseball. The joy baseball brings will temper the immediate sorrow of losing our last parent. This year promises many highs and lows, a challenge from start to finish. “May you live in interesting times.” Indeed.
Dropping in
Just before breakfast today we looked out to the front yard and watched a Red-shouldered hawk taking a small rodent for its breakfast. It took a couple of minutes. Leaving the leaves: good idea. That’s the street in the background. Due to last fall’s landscaping, the front yard is crowned, hiding the sidewalk and the parking strip.
Belated Spring
Typically, or typical for the previous few years, our star magnolia blossoms sometime between the first week of February and around Valentine’s Day. Yesterday (February 27th), I looked out as I opened the blinds and saw many swollen, fuzzy buds, but no blossoms. Just after 10:30 I looked again and saw several had said, “Sun! Hooray!” and opened up to greet it. Spring, as defined by me, starts when some of the days peak at 60-70 degrees (or higher here in North Carolina) with the additional stipulation of the early bloomers: daffodils, magnolias, the camellia, and a few others. This occurs in the first half of February usually, although cold and sometimes snow have occurred too in those weeks. Put a gun to my head and I would admit we can’t count on these blossoms until about the end of February. Our winters have been warm for a handful of years. A return to a more normal range of temperatures in February (complete with a windy, cold snow-and-ice storm on the 19th) perhaps signals a return to normalcy.
Did I mention…?
… I like turtles?
Count me in
Every week I count out three different prescription pills and one over-the-counter drug into a one-week pill minder. Every week I think of my mother doing the same.
My brother and I traded exasperated texts when one of us witnessed this. By the time I shot the photo above, Mom had only eight months until others would count out the pills for her, and she had but 18 months left with us. She’s closer to 89 than 88 in that photo. Never strong in linear thought and simple arithmetic progressions, aging had taken a bit more away from what once was there. Our exasperation hid our anguish at several things: who in their right mind would think it’s a great idea to make tiny little white pills which will be taken mostly by old people with arthritic hands? And shouldn’t it be a regulation that no pill can look exactly like another? And how can a person not just look inside the pill minder partitions to see if there’s a pill in there before you start? Which of course left us with the question, how can one not notice when a pill isn’t taken one day of the week?
Having worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing, I have a formalized method for dispensing my pills, and for taking them.
- Open the container and flip out all ‘leftovers’. (I sometimes elect not to take the decongestant so I have leftovers.)
- Take prescription blood pressure medicine #1. Drop one into each partition. Double-check that it’s just one-per-cell. Close that pill bottle. Turn it upside down.
- Take prescription #2. Cut a tab in half. Drop one half each into the first two cells. Work left to right and repeat for cells 3-4 and 5-6. Drop another half tab into the seventh day’s cell. Close that bottle. Turn it upside down.
- Start the same for prescription #3, dropping two tabs in each cell.
- Cut seven tabs of the OTC drug in half, dropping the split tab each time into a cell.
- When it comes time to take the day’s pills, flip out the day’s cell into a little pill cup I have, then put one half OTC tab back in. At the end of my breakfast, dump the contents of the pill cup into my palm. Stop. Stare at the pills to be sure I know each of them and that there are the right number of each. Swallow them down.
“Rigidity for the things which should be rigid,” is my motto. Otherwise I don’t care. (Okay, yeah I do, but that’s a lengthier post about borderline OCD-ness.) Yet…when I dispense my pills each week, I think of how difficult this was for my mother when she was but 15 or so years older than I am now. I don’t believe she had nearly as much trouble when she was 70. What’s coming down the road? Why couldn’t I see that being 88 is not like being 64?
Next week: how to torture yourself about any trivial thing for the rest of your life. Please prepare by reflecting on your teenaged years and the relationship you had with your parents.
If I ran a restaurant…
… I would serve a dish of duxelles, a French term referring to a mince of mushrooms, onions, herbs and black pepper which is then reduced to a paste. I’d add cream and a dash of madeira. I would serve this as a two- to three-inch smear over sliced breast of duck. I’d call it …
Dux’ and Quackers
[Patrons will kindly stop throwing bottles at the stage.]
Goodbye, Christmas
Western Catholics have lost touch with the historical End of Christmas. Today, February 2nd, is that day, the 40th Day of Christmas (counting Christmas day as “1”). Christmastide, i.e., The Twelve Days of Christmas culminates at Epiphany; the period of time between Epiphany Sunday and the Presentation of the Lord (at the Temple) culminates at Candlemas (in the Western church). Traditionally some cultures leave Christmas decorations up through this day. As I may have stated previously, leaving Christmas decorations up past this day carries very bad luck so let’s not tempt that, okay?
I lean into this gradual easing into Ordinary Time. Though we’ve marked the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Ordinary Time–we forget that usually this day falls midweek and doesn’t take precedence over a Sunday–we also tarry with the Christmas spirit through this date. I like that Jesus at 12 years of age stands at the threshold of adulthood. Time to put away the pleasantries of our Christmas-childhood and enter the reality of our calling.
Winter, NC-style
Prior to moving to North Carolina, my definition of winter used the words “cold” and “icy” and “snow”. I’ve had to redefine that, but in unexpected ways. Those words still pertain but in lesser roles. In fact, snow only made cameo appearances the past two years. (I acknowledge I’ve now jinxed us for a multiple-inch snowstorm before February ends.) The photo above documents the approximately one-inch snowfall we received a week ago today. Prior to that no measurable amount had been recorded here since January 2022. (“Measurable” as defined by the National Weather Service records. I only examined records for Dec-Feb backwards until I found some because I don’t think we’ve ever had snow in November or March this century.) After a trace fell on the 16th and 17th of January that year, we received two inches on the 21st and 22nd. On the 23rd another inch fell.
All of this seems manageable to the historical Me living inside my head, but we’ve succumbed to a combination of the contagious fear of the locally-raised and Old Folk Fartism. We generally just stay home when any measurable amount of snow falls. During the eight winters we’ve lived in our current house, only one has recorded a “real” snowfall, defined completely subjectively as “about four inches or more”. It fell December 9th, 2018:
Although Raleigh has experienced significant snowfalls in the past quarter century, the real snowstorm fell in February 2014. This local TV news account tells it better than I could. It dropped less than four inches of snow, but just imagine a nice topping of sleet and a city of nearly 200,000 people, none of whom have put snow tires on their cars. Raleigh has hills: not steep hills, but steep enough that folks just abandoned their cars when they got stuck. Click through to the article–if you live in the northern half of the US, you won’t believe it.
There have been others–in 2000 nearly two feet of snow fell, and nine to ten inches fell at Christmas in 2010–but the salient feature of winters here is that at some point between December 1st and the end of February you will get at least one day at 70 degrees or above. Thus, winter here compares to a streaming series with six to nine episodes; winter in the north compares to a traditional network series of twenty or more. You still get the drama, but it’s over soon. Last week’s one-inch snowfall started with freezing rain. Low temperatures and shaded streets made it a bit slick for days, but today marks the beginning of highs in the 50’s and 60’s. And yes, one forecast (Foreca and the European model ECMWF) says we’ll hit 71 on Friday.
I rest my case.
Marching
To those who face the frailties of life and to those who have transitioned elsewhere…
We're marching to our deaths at birth
Then unaware of Life's propose.
Plans made, plans dashed, let's laugh with mirth
As march we must to last repose.
When first we view our life's true end,
Made real by year, yet not by day,
We vow to hoard, vow not to spend
More time in idleness, in play.
Not 'til our bodies tell us true,
Our end looms close, looms real,
Do we admit, "I wish I knew–
Please, one more spin around your wheel."
This knowledge brings its own reward,
Knits us to others suff'ring too.
As I face down my ailments hard,
I understand how so do you.
In the past month one of my blogosphere contacts has died, and another faces a tough cancer battle. Here in the physical world a good friend struggles to walk, a second puts on a good face as her husband remisses into cancer, a third breathes slightly easier that her sister didn’t die last week, and our closest friends both battle mystery ailments. On a personal note, sciatica has said, “Remember me? I think I’m gonna stick around this time,” and my blood pressure has decided to ignore all my meds. I really can’t think of one good reason for the fact I want to grab every single person between 40 and 60 and declare insistently to their startled face, “WAKE UP! QUIT WASTING YOUR TIME! DO WHAT YOU WANT, DO WHAT YOU MUST, BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE QUIT DOING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT, WHAT YOU KNOW IS WRONG FOR YOU!!” Yeah, I wouldn’t have listened to me either. I don’t really have regrets. It’s just the shock with how quickly it changed in the past five years. There’s no way to prepare for it–but for some reason, perhaps the shock, I want to turn around a tell someone how I never realized what this was going to be like. Sure, I’ve seen folks navigate these years, but for some reason I never saw the road that connects I’m Okay Right Now with I Am Really Old And About To Die. And I really wish I had.
all the voices in my head 