Can You Hear Me Now?

It’s starting to get that time of year again when I have what I refer to as “the zombies.” I feel dull, listless, and all I want to do is sleep. I’ve noticed over the years that I react to different allergens in different ways. I have allergies (corn, potatoes and pollen) that make me sneeze, allergies that make my nose run (pollen, dust mites), allergies that stuff up my head (pollen, mold), allergies that make my eyes red and irritated (pine and cedar pollen). Oranges give me heartburn that does not respond to antacids. I’ve found the combinations of avoidance, antihistamines and decongestants that work for most of the other allergies, but not the zombies. So I was dead to the world when the hearing aid people called me Friday morning to tell me Mom’s hearing aid was fixed and to come get them.

I really had to hustle to make it out to 114th Street before they closed at 3 p.m. And because I had the zombies, I didn’t connect stopping to get groceries on the way back with needing to bring my cart out with me and put it in the trunk when I got in the car to go. (I also forgot that I should have gotten Mom’s loaner hearing aids to take back so I’d only have to make one trip way out into the inutterable boonies . . .)(like I said, the zombies . . .)(At right, me jumping the gun on Halloween . . .)

Of course, then I had to come up and get my cart and bring it down to unload the groceries into it (three paper bags of groceries cannot be evenly divided between two hands!) and haul them back up.

After I got my perishables and meltables into the refrigerator, and everything else put away, I brought Mom’s hearing aids over to her. She had forgotten that she had loaner hearing aids, and thought that she had the ones I’d gotten her that turned out not to be loud enough. She was also confused about how her newly refurbished hearing aids worked and had forgotten how to tell which was which. Part of it was that they put new earpieces on both hearing aids, but then I saw that she had written down about what she and and our friend CK had decided Thursday about what she wanted to do for her birthday which is coming up in September. (CK is in touch with her PEO friends and her friends from church and liaises with them about anything they want to do for Mom. Whatever CK and Mom decide, I go along with.) I also noticed that Mom had written down parts of the phone conversation she had with her niece EJ about she and her sister wanting to come up from Pearland for Mom’s birthday.

EJ’s husband had been in failing health for a number of years and recently passed away, not unexpectedly. Now that she is able to travel again, she and her sister C want to come see Mom. EJ and C are the daughters of Mom’s second oldest sister (there are a sister and four brothers between them). Mom knew EJ and C when they were kids. It will be good to see them again. Anyway, this will be birthday #99, and Mom just wants a small party for just family.

My Mom is a great anniversarian. This was so-and-so’s birthday, so-and-so died this many years ago today. Family and friends, she remembers them all like a calendar of saints. Monday the 21st would have been my dad’s 101st birthday.

I’m not that way. Dates don’t matter all that much to me. It’s life that remind me of this or that person, living or dead, distant friends, absent friends and relations. I’ll be reading a knitting pattern and hear the voice of a friend who died of breast cancer reading it with me. I’ll see something a friend would have gotten a kick out of, and suddenly, they are with me in spirit, if not in truth.

There is a channel I follow on YouTube. The guy is a restorer of fine art paintings. He does videos showing how he goes about restoring and/or repairing a painting. I like it because he is very ethical and professional in his approach to what he does and he takes his art and his craft seriously. I appreciate that. He’s also very good at what he does.

I was watching this one last night, and as he was fixing the stretcher, I suddenly thought how much my dad would have loved watching these videos. My dad had tried to learn to paint in oils at one point, but oil paint needs a long time to dry and turpentine smells, and he had no place where he could leave it set up. . . As I watched the guy use his tack hammer to tack the canvas back on the stretcher, I thought about how my dad had once had a job as a furniture upholsterer, which is why we moved up here to the flat lands when I was a toddler. I remember him recovering a chair for my mom and what a beautiful job he did of it.

My dad liked woodworking, too. This mantle was his handiwork. I think he would have done a lot more of it if he had had a workshop instead of having to do it in the garage where it made a mess . . . But my dad had macular degeneration and became very hard of hearing as he aged.

When we lost him in 2014, he was all but blind and deaf. So I watched the video and enjoyed it twice as much, once for me, and once for him.

Waiting for Laundry

Doing my laundry is kinda like going to the laundromat. I mean, it’s just down the hall, probably 50 feet from my door, so I don’t actually have to go outside and use a car to get there, but I still have to schlep everything there — laundry basket full of dirty clothes, soap, dryer sheets, like you do when you go to the washateria.

There’s a really nice seating area for gatherings and parties just across from the laundry room, and there’s usually a jigsaw puzzle in progress on one of the tables. (it’s a me trap. Traps me every time. I love jigsaw puzzles.) It takes about 30-45 minutes for a load of wash to wash (One day I’ll think about it at the right time and time it with the clock app on my phone so I’ll know. God gave us kitchen timers for a reason . . . ).

There was a jigsaw puzzle just begun on the table. It trapped me until the washer finished.

I threw the clothes in the dryer and went back to my apartment because I’d broken the fingernail on my thumb getting the dryer door open and it was super raggedy and snaggy. My fingernails are very brittle anymore. Partly due to age, but I’m sure chemo also has something to do with it, too. They break off in layers like mica. Anyway, I set the kitchen timer for 60 minutes and sat down to do this post because . . . .

Yesterday, I ran across a video by this guy (his name is Martijn – which makes me think he’s Dutch) who bought some acreage up in the alps in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. It has two stone buildings on it, and he’s renovating them with a view to eventually living there. He’s spent the last ten years doing very long bicycle camping trips and he’s very used to minimalist living.

So I’m watching one of his videos (the scenery is breath-taking!) and as he’s building a stone walkway and sweeping out the cabins and setting up solar panels and otherwise puttering about, on the voice over narration, he happens to mention that his nearest neighbor is a priest. Then he films a segment about visiting the priest, and I’m thinking, Kirsten Dirksen did a segment on a priest living in the mountains of Italy, and it’s this same guy! Then come to find out she did a segment on Martijn, too. I watch a lot of Kirsten Dirksen’s videos for the same reason I watch HGTV. I like home reno and home decor kind of content.

Kirsten Dirksen describes her channel as: Videos about simple living, self-sufficiency, small (and tiny) homes, backyard gardens (and livestock), alternative transport, DIY, craftsmanship, and philosophies of life. She and her husband and her children travel all over the world making videos about people who have renovated, innovated, and retrofitted various types of housing in mostly urban but also rural settings (what a great childhood her kids are having!). They interview the person and find out the story behind the house, the whys and hows. If you’re into that kind of thing, you should check their channel out. The ingenuity, inventiveness and creativity of people is just amazing.