Final Acts

This fall, I got to see something that I’d never seen before, having not been that long in the Pacific Northwest: Salmon leaping upstream, trying to get back to the place where they were born so as to spawn the next generation, and then die. I knew about this, of course, but I had never seen it and I didn’t know just how violent and tough it is. My friend and I were driving along the Sol Duc river and pulled over because we saw a lot of cars by the side of the road. We scrambled down rocks to near the water’s edge to watch these big black Coho salmon fling themselves up a short waterfall, although most didn’t make it, and those that did often fell back down again. Many leaped at the wrong angle, thus slamming themselves into a rock by the side of the stream with a loud thud.

The information sign by the side of the road said that these salmon swim as far as 70 miles to get to their spawning place, but the ones we watched weren’t getting much of anywhere. We followed a short trail maybe 100 yards upstream or less and saw no salmon. Where were they stopping? Consumed with curiosity, we slid and stumbled our way across the big round rocks along the river, backtracking until we could see the crowd gathered by the side watching the salmon leap. In the water right above that spot, My friend spotted just a few in the white water, although I couldn’t see them. Past there, there were none at all.

What the heck was going on? Those with more expertise than I have tell me the water was probably too low for them. Western Washington had a mercifully mild-ish summer this year, and although as always these past few years there were lots of wildfires to the north and and south, the smoke mostly stayed in the upper atmosphere or blew away elsewhere. But there’s no question times are changing, the climate is changing, and one result is that water in the streams and rivers is getting lower.

The next day, we went back to the same spot and the salmon were no longer trying to make their way upstream. Instead, they were gathered in a tight group near the bottom of the waterfall, just sitting there. Waiting for higher water. Salmon are patient and determined but they don’t have forever. They stop eating before they make their upstream trek and whether they get where they’re going or not, will soon die. Michelle says they’ll keep trying to make it upstream, even as their bodies begin to decay. Time is against them, which makes them the same as me and all of us.

When we walked along the river to try and figure out where the salmon had stopped their journey, my feet unexpectedly slipped out from me as I stepped on a rock. The fall itself would likely have been fine, but even though I knew better, I instinctively stuck out my right arm to catch myself and landed hard on on my wrist and forearm.

It was surprisingly painful. I sat up, but then stayed put for a moment before getting to my feet again. I was nauseated, a feeling I remembered from many years ago when I fell off a horse and badly broke my arm (the left one that time). I could have called out and told my friend I was hurt, but that was the last thing I wanted to admit to. She was walking ahead of me and didn’t see me go down, so I set the nausea firmly aside, scrambled to my feet and went after her. When I caught up to her, I told her I’d fallen, but not how hard.

I hadn’t broken anything, I found out when I finally got an x-ray five days later. But I easily could have. By morning, even though I’d iced the area, my wrist and forearm were a weird shade of brown that slowly transitioned to purple over the next couple of days. Picking up anything heavier than a piece of paper hurt. Circling my wrist around was excruciating. For days, the feeling of frequent pain and fragility kept me from doing much of anything physical.

What made the pain worse was the underlying feeling that, but for a bit of luck, I could have broken my wrist and wound up with a long-term recovery. I kept thinking about my aunt, who spent her whole life creating masterful still lives in oil, falling and breaking her wrist and finding that even after it healed she was permanently crippled and could no longer paint or do many of the other things she’d been used to doing for herself. When she died, she was less than ten years older than I am right now.

I’ve had the luxury of really good health. I’ve watched Bill struggle with health issues–some of my friends too–and I know what a gift it is to have a body that does what I expect and that feels good most of the time. This was an uncomfortable reminder. Just like the salmon, just like everyone else, I only have so much time.

Powerless

There were days of high wind warnings and finally it happened. A storm blew through Snohomish County, downed power lines, and knocked piles of branches off nearly every tree. Whole trees came down too. Everywhere you went, roadways and parking lots were piled with green piney branches, pushed to the side or along the center line of the road, either by road crews or cars driving through. No one picked up or moved the branches, or logs, lying around. There wouldn’t have been time to pick up that monstrous quantity of debris that truly was everywhere.

And of course, we lost power. With five minutes left in the first episode of Indian Summers that I was streaming, and with a load of laundry about halfway through its drying cycle…everything went dark.

Fortunately, Bill and I are quite accustomed to losing power, which used to happen with a fair amount of regularity back in Woodstock. And in Woodstock, it was a bigger deal when it happened, for several reasons. For one thing, we had our own well, so that when the power went out, we would lose water too, once we had used up the small amount already in the pipes.

We also had a basement that was prone to flooding and so it had a sump pump, which of course didn’t work when the power was out. During Hurricane Irene, the worst power outage we had there, lasting almost a week, our basement flooded so thoroughly that we found our freezer bobbing along afloat. Then there was winter. When the power went out in winter it was a true potential threat to our pipes and our lives.

On the other hand, back in Woodstock, we also were much better equipped to deal with a power outage. For one thing, we had a very efficient and beloved wood stove insert centrally located in the living room that could easily heat the whole house even in extremely cold weather. This house has one of the worst wood stove inserts ever sold, in a corner of our living room, which is both the coldest and the least used room in our house.

The first night without power felt like a bit of an adventure, as they always do. The power had gone out in the evening, which meant that the house retained most of its warmth during the night. Fortunately, my laundry was in the dryer, not the washer, when the power went, which meant my clothes were already clean, all I had to do was get out my rack and hang them up to dry which was only slightly more of a pain by flashlight than it would have been any other time.

The second night without power was decidedly less fun. We had plenty of firewood, so I did what I could, making as good a fire as I could in that drafty insert. We played cards by the fire for a while, then went to bed. Our bedroom was at the other end of the house from the fire, so I put on my Duofold union suit, fur booties, and a warm fleece, and then snuggled down into a sleeping bag supposedly rated for 40 degrees. I was warm enough…just barely.

In the morning I crawled out of bed, brushed my teeth with cold water and pulled on warm clothes and headed outside for an armload of firewood. Over the last eight years, I’ve lost the habit of lugging around wood, something I used to do every spring, fall, or winter day back in Woodstock. So my shoulder and back muscles were complaining a bit as I dumped the wood next to our outdoor wood stove, which was about when Bill poked his head out the door to say the power had come back on.

Our quiet little neighborhood was one of the last to have its power restored. Apparently, there’s a reason. Our neighbor across the street pointed out a transformer about halfway down the hill from his house with a blinking red light on it. That transformer, he said, is a problem. It always goes, and it’s always the last to get fixed, which makes sense I guess, given that our little enclave is less densely populated than most around here and many of its residents are retired.

Back in the Hudson Valley, old utility wires ran through the forests of spindly young trees. High winds knocked those trees down easily, and they would fall on the utility lines. We could count on losing power, at least for a little while a few times a year. The first year we lived in Snohomish, in our old rental farmhouse, an unprecedented windstorm came through and knocked out power for the whole county. We lost power for about 90 minutes–Bill was taking a nap and completely missed it. Since then, any outages had been brief.

But now we’re in a different house, and I looked out at the blinking transformer, and knew one thing. In the future, we would have be better prepared.

Image credit: SilentObserver via Creative Commons

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The carnivore’s wife

Bill is a man of intense passions, and what he’s intensely passionate about at the moment is meat. Beef and lamb mostly–steaks, chops, ground meat patties, usually with an egg on top and melted butter alongside. This is normal for him now because he has embarked on the the carnivore diet.

Maybe you’ve heard of it? The idea is to eat meat, meat, and more meat, to the exclusion of almost everything else (eggs and cheese are also OK). Fat is considered desirable. Grains, including whole grains, are to be avoided. So are fruits and vegetables, which is the part of this that I don’t like. But once he started eating mostly meat, he said eating vegetables and fruits made him feel less well and so he cut them out and went “full carnivore.”

Many of our friends think he’s nuts. Me, I have mixed feelings. I’m all for cutting out refined sugars and grains as this diet has absolutely done. And I learned long ago that fats, if they’re free of toxins, are good for you, not bad for you as we were wrongly taught for so many years. On the other hand, although nutritional “wisdom” varies from expert to expert and philosophy to philosophy, there’s one thing everyone has always agreed on: vegetables are to be embraced, not avoided. But now here are the carnivores who claim that all vegetables contain tiny amounts of poison because “plants don’t want you to eat them.”

(That last thing is a bad oversimplification. I spend half my life communing with plants and I almost always know what they’re thinking. What they’re thinking is: “Please help me pass along my DNA to future generations so that my line can live on.” In any case, nearly all the plants we eat are the product of hundreds or thousands of years of cultivation and our evolution and theirs are inextricably intertwined, so we can safely say that what they want at this point is for humans to keep planting them. But I digress.)

On the other hand, I can’t argue with the initial results. Of course anyone eating nothing but meat would lose weight quickly, and Bill is indeed losing weight super fast. But other things as well. For one, he’s been kind of down and low-energy for a while now, ever since we came back from France, really. This diet seems to have energized him. Research suggests that, whatever the long-term benefits or drawbacks of the carnivore diet, it does make people immediately feel better, and it’s clearly having that effect on him.

Also…his blood sugar is down (well of course it is, with zero carbs) and his blood pressure is also down, which is very nice to see. And he says he feels better, which makes sense because from what I’ve read this carnivore diet is very anti-inflammatory.

That last thing is worth thinking about, because so many bad things, including cancer and heart disease, seem to be associated with inflammation. Bill’s struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome is all about inflammation. Less inflammation equals less pain, and maybe more ability to walk or otherwise exercise which I think is a spectacularly good thing. So maybe some of this isn’t so awful after all.

A lot of unanswered questions remain for me. Like what will happen to Bill’s cholesterol and whether this is bad for his kidneys. But at least in the short term, it’s tough to argue with the results.

Photo by: In memoriam Chris Bulle, via Flickr and Creative Commons

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Trying to enjoy the temporary quiet.

Today, there are no podcast interviews, no trips anywhere to speak to anyone, no public appearances of any sort. And it’s peaceful. When I sit still, when I stop being that other Minda, the one who always has something witty or warm or even wise to say, the one one of my friends called “always so pulled together,”–I slowly start to relax.

I realize as I’m writing this that I’m being ridiculous. The public appearances and the interviews will be over soon enough. And…I really want people to buy my book. If I had any sense at all, I would want to do more of this stuff, not less. And I do want to do more. But for right now, I need a break.

A week ago, I flew to Toronto, gave a keynote at a big festival called Elevate, and flew home that same night. That made for a very, very long day, but I spent most of it feeling exhilarated rather than exhausted. I suppose it was inevitable that the tiredness would catch up to me eventually, especially with two other book-related appearances and several more interviews scheduled over the following week.

And now I’ve had two lovely weekdays with no appearances or interviews, and a delicious entire weekend with no work in it, the first full weekend in a few weeks. Today is Monday, and it’s my last interview-less day for a while. And I’m feeling so lazy. I don’t feel like working. I thought I’d spend a lot of the day outside, but the strong smell of smoke from the wildfires east of here has made that unappealing and possibly unhealthy. So instead of enjoying this last day of quiet or diving into an article that needs writing, I’m sitting here feeling out of sorts.

But only for a little while. There’s a lot of fun, relaxing stuff in my near future: A trip to Seattle to see Carmina Burana. A spa day with a different friend. More relaxing times, music, fun, and the pleasure of a well-received event behind me. I know really do have a lot to be happy about.

Whose Turn Is It?

Bill at his farewell dinner in Blaye, France

I don’t necessarily like getting life lessons from the movies, but this insight from the 1989 film Immediate Family has always stuck with me. “You’re asking me the secret of a happy marriage? Respect, affection, a lot of laughs, a sense of yourself and only one person gets to be crazy at a time.”

I wonder if everyone in a long-term relationship has bumped against this rule at some time or other. You can completely lose your composure and it’s up to your partner to keep things on an even keel. Or your partner loses it, and it’s up to you. On one of the first trips Bill and I took together, we were driving to Florida to visit my family. His childhood home in Middletown, New York, was more or less along the way, so we decided to stop and see his mother there. I never quite understood how it was that Bill and his Mom, both perfectly rational people individually, would become completely nutty any time they were together, but that’s what always seemed to happen.

Anyhow, by the time we finally left Middletown for Florida, it was well after dark and really too late to be getting on the road. Plus, I was pretty frazzled from the general insanity of Bill visiting his Mom. Then we hit heavy traffic on Route 17, and we both started losing our cool. Except that we passed a highway sign directing us to Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, and suddenly Bill was off into a lengthy and very funny riff on the name Ho-Ho-Kus. His sudden burst of humor was like a car’s cooling system engine’s heat sensors flooding the engine with coolant just before it overheated.

I thought a lot about this only-one-can-be-crazy rule before we left on our recent travels–because we were at serious risk of breaking the rule. Bill, heading into a two-month music residency with people he didn’t yet know well, in France, where he didn’t speak the language and would have to get along without his spouse/interpreter, was properly freaked out. I was heading into the ASJA conference where I had often moderated panels, but this time I was giving a workshop all on my own for the first time. Then I was heading home for a month without Bill, the launch of my new book, and then off to present at the huge Collision conference in Toronto. Both of us were feeling daunted simultaneously.

But here’s the thing. I may have been feeling daunted, but I had to recognize that what Bill was facing was lot more daunting. And so, if the rule was that only one can be crazy at a time, it had to be his turn. Next time it would be mine.

And sometimes neither one of us has to be crazy. I wrote most of this on an early morning in the Dublin airport, on my way from Toronto back to Bordeaux, to hang out with Bill for the end of his residency. Despite his nerves about it, he had a great time, performed all summer at a wide variety of wineries and chateaux, and has made many musical friends who love playing with him. Meanwhile, Collision went off without a hitch for me and the book launch seems to be going well. I’ve gotten through many podcast interviews, most of which went smoothly. Our time living apart, which was freaking us both out a little, is over.

So maybe, for now, there’s no reason for either of us to be crazy. I may be jinxing us by saying this, but maybe we’re actually doing just fine.

The Anniversary That Wasn’t Quite

On an unbelievably beautiful day after an unrelentingly rainy summer, Bill and I got married by the side of a lake in the midst of the Catskills fall foliage. The wedding was also a large and wonderful party for about a hundred of our friends and family members that began the evening before and ended the following day.

Since our wedding was Saturday, October 14, 2000, on the Saturday nearest October 14 in 2010, we had another huge party in a rented tent in the field outside our Woodstock house. The foliage was again beautiful, but the weather was quite cold, so we sprang for side covers and gas heaters inside the tent, and then filled it with plants, catered and pot-luck foods, many different things to drink, giant balls and other toys for kids, blankets to wrap up in and a home-made platform for musicians to play on. About 40 people came from all over and it was almost as fun a party as the wedding itself had been.

So well over a year before October 14, 2020 rolled around, we started thinking about how to celebrate the hard-to-believe fact that we have been married for 20 years. We were together for five years before we got married, so all told, we’ve clocked a quarter-century as a couple.

My first–admittedly ambitious–idea was Ireland. Specifically, I had a notion to go there with Bill and his children and grandchildren, and their various significant others. A big endeavor, yes, but not altogether unprecedented. We’d managed a smaller version before, for Bill’s 50th birthday in 2002, with his son and daughter and their spouses, which turned out to be a fun and memorable trip. Driving an outsized, red, right-hand drive van that took up most of what were supposed to be two-way roads, getting awakened in the middle of the night by a hotel fire alarm, and holing up for hours with the female members of our party in a friendly County Cavan pub drinking stout with Bill’s farmer cousin while waiting for the male members of our party who’d gotten hopelessly lost after retrieving a forgotten item in Dublin–all that just added to the overall charm.

When I floated the idea of a family Ireland trip at a big family dinner in May 2019 I was pleasantly surprised that everyone, Bill’s son and daughter, their spouses, and their kids all seemed to want to go. I said at the time that it might be a pipe dream, and it turned that it was. By winter, I knew we couldn’t afford it, at least not in 2020. We’d discovered a years-long slow leak in Bill’s bathroom that necessitated redoing the whole thing and replacing not only the floor but much of the structure underneath. I reluctantly abandoned that plan, at least for 2020. As it worked out, of course, the coronavirus was coming, so we’d have had to cancel in any case.

Now we had a new dilemma. How do you celebrate a big occasion in the middle of a pandemic? His birthday was in March and mine–a big one–was in April. We’d had Zoom parties which were fun enough. But in the months since the pandemic began, Zoom had come to dominate nearly all my social and business interactions and the fun of it had largely worn off. “Of course we’ll have a Zoom party,” Bill said, and we did. But I had an additional idea: Invite people, two or three at a time, to sit on our patio where we now have an outdoor wood stove. I can’t begin to explain how much I love this outdoor stove, which cost all of $235, or how much of a difference it’s made to our lives. Like any other wood stove, it throws a ton of heat and has a chimney that reaches up beyond the patio roof, which means there’s no smoke down below where we sit with our friends, drinking cups of mulled wine and snacking on cheese and crackers, Bill’s signature roasted zucchini with parmesan, and other items. We’ve done this three times now, once in the middle of a rainstorm, and each time we’ve been warm and dry enough and so glad to spend time with friends that neither we nor they noticed the hours slipping away.

It felt almost normal. And in 2020, that’s the best anniversary present we could imagine.

Image L-R: Bill, his son-in-law John, daughter Alyssa, former daughter-in-law Bryony, son Steve, and me outside cousin Charlie’s house in Ireland.

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Meanwhile, in my Backyard…

Nothing in this whole world is as it should be, except in my little backyard where the biggest challenges are things like the rust fungus on my Oregon grape bush and how to stop birds and slugs from eating our newly planted lettuce and bean plants. So, both out of love and because I can’t go anywhere else, I spend a lot of my free time in my backyard, even though I’m still falling woefully behind on jobs that need doing both indoors and out.

Sometimes, I take my laptop and sit on the patio and spend an hour or two working out there, which makes a change from working in my office. I was doing that the other day when I noticed something odd, two finches on two perches of our bird feeder, their beaks interlocked, doing…something.

My first guess was that it was some form of battle, only because the finch battles at our bird feeder are pretty much non-stop. Often, they try to peck at each other from adjacent perches. We fill the feeder with sunflower seeds, so the chickadees and other birds pluck out a seed and take it a short distance away so they can work on opening it. But finches are grosbeaks, a category of bird that has powerful beaks, and they can just park on the feeder’s perches all day, grabbing a seed, chomping it in their super-beaks, and then consuming it while the shell falls to the ground. There are four perches on the bird feeder and a lot more than four finches in the neighborhood, so they are constantly fighting–and occasionally even ramming–each other, competing for those four spots.

But this was something else because these finches clearly weren’t fighting. In fact, it looked like the one on the upper perch was feeding the one on the lower perch. Then the pair moved to the top of the fence nearby and did it some more.

I looked it up. Apparently male finches feed female ones during courtship and incubation. So either he was trying to win her as his mate or else he had already won her, she was now tending a nestful of their eggs, and he was feeding her out of gratitude and affection. Either way, the feeding was clearly ceremonial and not needed for her nourishment since he’d been putting seeds in her beak while she was actually sitting at the bird feeder with her own supply of seeds right in front of her. Maybe something like a man buying you dinner when you make a good living and could easily buy your own dinner. I always had mixed feelings about letting men pay for my dinner back when I was dating, which was a very long time ago. But seeing the finches do this was very sweet.

And in the Oregon grape…

I mentioned that my Oregon grape had rust fungus. It’s a near-native plant so I usually pay it little mind, but it was looking decidedly unhappy and I figured I’d better do something to help it. Because it has spiky leaves, which discourage many larger animals (including humans), the Oregon grape is a favorite hangout for a lot of our backyard birds. As I approached it with my gloves and clippers, a Bewick’s wren departed in a huff. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but you love this plant and it needs my help,” I tried to explain.

There was a lot of rust on the plant, so I had to chop off quite a few branches and then rake them up. Also, there’s a blackberry plant growing up inside it that I have to keep cutting down. So all in all, I was rooting around in there for a while, thoroughly disturbing the plant. All of a sudden, an American robin–which is a fairly large bird–came bursting out of the bush, vigorously flapping its wings and squawking loudly. I jumped, startled for a moment, but it flew off and I went back to what I was doing. Looking deep into the bush in search of the blackberry plant, I spotted a second bird huddled inside. I could tell it was a juvenile robin because it was slightly smaller than the other bird and had a light gray breast with black spots that would turn solid red later when it got older. That bird was holding absolutely still. And then I understood: The older bird’s noisy exit had been intended to draw my attention away from the bush and the younger bird, a parent seeking to protect its young.

That’s using your head!

Birds can be sweet and noble, but they can also be awfully dumb. That was made clear in a recent incident which I only heard about after the fact because, to my infinite regret, I was taking a bath when it happened. Bill, who’s become as much of a birdwatcher as I am, was observing our bird feeder and noticed something odd. A black-capped chickadee had put its head through one of the openings in the feeder to get some seeds…but it didn’t pull its head back out again. Instead it stayed there, occasionally fluttering its wings in an ineffective manner. It was stuck, he realized. The bird couldn’t pull its head back out of the feeder.

So Bill did the only logical thing: He carefully grasped the bird, and gave a gentle tug. That was all that was needed for the head to pop out of the feeder–apparently the bird just didn’t have the right leverage to pull itself out on its own. Bill opened his hand and the bird flew off and landed on a nearby branch, looking back at Bill with obvious bewilderment. It seemed none the worse for the experience.

Birds are wonderful. I love having them around and I spend hours watching them. But every now and then you get a reminder: There’s a reason for the term “bird brain.”

Image: Pussreboots via Creative Commons

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Lucky

It only took three weeks for the whole world to transform itself into something completely different.

I remember, like it was long-ago occurrence, sitting in a wine bar with Bill and several friends, everyone so jammed in together at the tables you couldn’t walk across the room. Even more people were standing in a space in the back, having not been able to find a place at the tables. Onstage, women were singing. In duos and small groups, or solo, professional singers and rank amateurs, one after another, allotted three songs each. I was one of them, singing with a guitar player I’d been practicing with every week, back before the pandemic.

One after another, we used the same microphone. We sat practically in each other’s laps. There was a big platter of cheeses and salami and olives sitting on the bar and all of us snagged a few bites as we waited for our wine. Looking back, it seemed like a recipe for contagion, and it was. Fortunately, the worst thing going around that night was a stomach flu that I caught and then gave to Bill, which was mild and soon forgotten. That was February 15.

We were so innocent, and so lucky. It was three  weeks after the very first Covid-19 case in the U.S. was diagnosed at a hospital less than two miles from where we were singing that night. Researchers later determined that the virus had been loose in our state for many weeks before that. If one of the dozens of performers or one of the hundred or more audience members had already been infected, this would have been a very different story.

Maybe a story like that of the Life Care Center in Kirkland, 22 miles south of here. Nursing homes all over the country have had devastating encounters with the coronavirus, but Life Care Center is the one most people know about because it was unlucky enough to have been the first.

The coronavirus economy finally came for my income last week when I found out I was having my pay (but not my workload) reduced by almost half by my biggest client. That’s caused a fair amount of panic and worry for me and Bill. But really, if we think about it, we’re very lucky. Stuck at home but in a home we enjoy, together instead of alone, surrounded by the beautiful springtime weather. We have a garden and (in my case) a book to work on. We can give live performances on Facebook (in Bill’s case) any time we want. And there are people delivering food and anything else we need–even toilet paper–to our door.

Luckiest of all, we gathered in a large crowded group in Snohomish County in mid-February. We shared microphones and food and nobody got sick with anything worse than a stomach flu!

We’ve had several friends and one family member who caught Covid-19. We worried hard about them until they got better. And I still worry about what would happen to Bill or me if one or both of us caught it. Our future, like everyone else’s, is filled with uncertainty and I’ve never been good at dealing with that. Maybe reminding myself how incredibly lucky we’ve been so far is the place to start.

Image: Singing with guitarist Greg Dilley.

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Till We Meet Again

I spend a lot of time trying to be more confident. So I really hate it when my confidence gets rattled. But that’s what happened on February 3. I was riding a horse in a gymnastics class, going over a set of poles laid out on the ground. As I rode toward them, the horse I was riding, a very sweet and very fit 24-year-old gelding named Cowboy either stumbled or hesitated, I’m not sure which. I drove him forward toward the poles and he recovered and started trotting over them, but his hesitation or whatever it was startled a younger horse that was being ridden nearby. She spooked, and her spook caused Cowboy to spook sideways, and I lost my balance and fell off, the first fall off a horse I’ve had in the three years since I started riding again.

On the way down, I was partly thinking: “Oh good. I’ve been so scared of falling off, I’m glad to get it over with. Now I won’t be so scared of it.”

Then I was sitting on the ground, catching my breath, and realizing that something around my shoulder blade hurt. I didn’t seem incapacitated, though, so as one always should, I got back on. I tried trotting again but that hurt, so I walked Cowboy around the arena for about half an hour, which he usually needs to cool down from a lesson. Dismounting hurt too.

Back home, I took a hot bath and rested for the evening but the next day was just as bad. The day after that, at the suggestion of my chiropractor and insistence of my husband, I went for some x-rays. I was sure I’d just pulled a muscle, but no. I had three cracked ribs that would take six to eight weeks to heal. The doctor also volunteered a prescription for powerful pain meds. Have I mentioned that cracked or broken ribs are supposed to be among the most painful injuries you can have? For the first few days, lying down, rolling over, or getting up out of bed were all things I had to work myself up to. So much for being less afraid of falling off.

For a little while, those first few days, I thought about giving up riding. I’m going to be 60 in a few weeks. I don’t usually think of myself as too old for stuff but I started wondering if I was too old for riding, or anyhow if I should stop now so I don’t get hurt this badly again, or worse. To my surprise, Bill, who is usually overprotective, pushed me to not quit. He even suggested I get back on before the six weeks were up, once I started feeling well enough to go back to most of my usual activities.

And then the coronavirus happened. I decided I was too nervous to go to a medical facility for my follow-up check, especially since I knew I was just about completely healed. Around the same time they decided to do almost all their visits by phone. So I had a phone call with a doctor and we agreed I should wait till eight weeks were up just to be sure and then I could ride so long as it didn’t hurt.

OK! I thought. I started visualizing stepping onto the mounting block, putting my left foot in the stirrup and swinging myself up and over into the saddle like I’ve done hundreds of times. How scared would I be? As a friend pointed out, this is a rare case where the phrase “getting back on the horse” can be used both literally and figuratively. Based on past experience, my guess is that I’ll be frightened up until the point that I’m actually in the saddle, and then I’ll be a lot better.

But it may be a while before I find out. Because the governor just issued a statewide stay-at-home order, telling non-essential businesses to close and it’s pretty tough to argue that a horseback riding stable is an essential business.

A week and a half ago, I went to the barn to visit Cowboy and feed him an apple and see my riding teacher who is also a good friend. I’m glad I went because I couldn’t go there now. Cowboy hadn’t seen me in more than a month, but he still came to me when I called to him across his paddock. After the apple, I scratched him on the tummy which is his special spot. When I stopped, he started leaning his body into me to try and get me to do it some more. That’s an annoying habit in a 1,500-pound animal so I didn’t indulge his request.

When it was time to go, he stuck out his tongue at me, an equine way of saying that he likes me and wished I would stay. “I’ll be back,” I told him. And I will, just as soon as I can.

Image: Cowboy and me in healthier days. Photo by Michelle McVey.

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Yard-a-geddon

It happens every year.

I’ve been intimately involved with the American Society of Journalists and Authors, for more than 20 years. I was president for two of those years, vice president for three, and on the board of directors for sixteen years, finally rotating off the board in 2018.

So when ASJA has its annual conference, I just have to be there. And it’s always in New York, and always sometime around the beginning of May. Which means the same thing always happens every year: We leave town just as the rain is abating, the sun is coming out, the days are getting long, and every plant in Washington State goes on overdrive, growing for all it’s worth. We leave a yard and come home to a jungle.

Every year it’s a problem. This year it turned into something much worse. Faced with an overgrown yard and a fair amount of spousal nagging, Bill made a common-sense suggestion. “I need help,” he said. My attempts over the years to find someone reliable and affordable who could work on our yard have all ended in frustration so–since it was his suggestion–I decided to make it his problem.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to find anyone we can afford who’ll be trustworthy,” I said. “If you can, go ahead and hire them.”

“But–” I said, and it was a very important “but” indeed–“You have to supervise them.”

I had good reason for this emphatic caveat. The first year we came back to a lawn that looked like the Pacific Temperate Rainforest, I asked around and hired some guys who came recommended to mow the lawn and cut back the blackberries. The following year the beautiful, old Concord grape next to the deck started dying. I’d made jam from it our first autumn in our house but that second summer it was looking decidedly sickly. That was an unusually hot, dry summer so I figured that was the problem, did some research, and bought one of those donut-shaped watering rings to do drip irrigation around its base. I ran water into it for an hour every other night but to no avail. The following year, it looked completely dead. Looks can be deceiving, so I gave it another year to make sure, but nope, it was never coming back.

It took me a long time and a lot of asking around to figure out what had killed it. The previous owner of the house, with whom we’ve stayed friends, finally provided the answer: It had gotten weed whacked. I took a look around the garden: There was also damage to the green grape plant near the patio, although it seemed to be holding its own. One of our large old rose bushes also showed weed whacker damage from last summer and I held my breath through the winter as it kind of limped along, but with care it burst into bloom this summer. I’d learned an important lesson about the harm hired yard help can inflict.

Bill agreed to supervise, and he hired someone I’ll call the Mad Mower. The Mad Mower charged a fairly reasonable hourly rate, and when Bill set him to mowing, he was impressed with the Mad Mower’s efficiency. The guy had serious equipment and he rapidly chopped down the overgrown grass in the front yard, collecting it and piling it high on top of my compost heap.

On the Mad Mower’s next visit, Bill set him to weed whacking, and that’s where everything went to hell. That evening I found that the lavender plant by the entrance to our driveway had been cut most of the way to the ground. It was a very old plant with several thick trunks. The house was built in 1965 and I suspect that lavender might have been planted then. It was one of the many old, beautiful plants that made me want this house so much when we first saw it. 

Lavenders don’t need much care, but every year I carefully pulled the morning glories off it, and lugged gallon jugs of water to it during the hot, dry part of the summer since it was well beyond the reach of my garden hose. Every year I admired its tall stalks and made mental plans to harvest the lavender buds on the ends of them. Now it lay almost flat in its little stone bed, with only a few remaining stalks of lavender blooms doing their best to make up for the big gorgeous plant that was no more. Not only that, but several of our rhododendrons–as old as the lavender and grown into thick-trunked small trees–had bark stripped off them at weed whacker height.

For a little while there, I went out of my mind. I raged. I banged the table. I yelled at Bill, who already felt terrible and couldn’t bear hearing me say, over and over, how upset I was. I walked around in a blinding state of fury and sorrow. I couldn’t bear the thought of watching another one of the old, beautiful plants that had made me fall in love with this place slowly fade out and die.

Eventually, I calmed down. I wasn’t really angry at Bill. As for the Mower, he had asked Bill if there was anything in particular to avoid when he weed whacked the strip of grass next to the lavender. Bill said no. I’d have been angry at him for this answer, except that I’d have probably said no too. It didn’t occurred to Bill, and it likely wouldn’t have to me, to warn someone that a lavender plant the size of a card table, with thick, well-established trunks, a profusion of purple blooms, and surrounded by painted stones, was not a weed. But, since he did ask the question, I couldn’t really be angry at the Mad Mower either.

It took a long time, but eventually I calmed down and set about doing everything I could to save our injured garden. The consensus in the plant community is that putting cutting paste or any other such product on a weed-whacked tree trunk ultimately does more harm than good; better to let the plant heal on its own. So I did what I could: I weeded around the rhododendrons and other injured bushes, and put down mulch and food. From what I’ve read and been told, they have a good chance of survival.

The lavender is more worrisome. They’re hardy plants but apparently you should never cut one back by more than a third. The fact that it’s very old and well established might help it survive, according to a garden expert I called at a local nursery. I did what I could there too. I cut the ragged ends of branches off so there would be neat edges that might have a better chance of healing. I fed it. Most days I stop on my way into or out of the driveway and take a close look at it. If spending a long time staring at a plant had healing properties, it would get better for sure.

For the moment, it looks OK. There are a few proud stalks standing tall, and a few new shoots among the bare remains of branches. It seems to be doing its level best to survive. But we won’t really know until it’s been through the winter whether it’s going to make it or not.

Meantime, Bill and I agreed: Never again. We can’t really blame the Mad Mower, but he’s not welcome back here either. And the next time anyone wields a weed whacker on this property, it will be one of us.