The past two months have been hard on my body: a wasp sting, two vaccinations, and a knee injury from falling over my poodle on the way to the bathroom in the dark. Thank God my friend Karen promised to send me the name of an anti-inflammatory loaded with turmeric.

Swelling and tenderness doesn’t stop with the  injuries. I live in a state high on the list for shootings, and the community college incident three weeks ago painfully inflamed my heart.

I recently read a wonderful quote reminding us that if we live, only once, in the moment, we have experienced eternity.Tonight I mindfully watched the remnants of this weekend’s leftovers  slowly circling the microwave and thought of us lumbering through the universe, in a world we no longer understand, in need of massive turmeric supplements…our hearts skewed.

Earlier this week, when my boss announced that neither he nor I would do well in the current court system because we are old and unattractive, I decided to let go of ego and settle for what C. S. Forester described in Captain Horatio Hornblower as…a turmoil of industry.

Were it not for the World Wide Web I’d be oblivious to the household items I was expected to acquire by age 30. I have the sofa — well, loveseat actually — and could likely pull together twelve wine glasses. I’m certain I lacked even the coffee table at age thirty since it would have taken up floor space where my friends sat while listening to The Moody Blues. The most befuddeling item I was expected to own was a collection of coffee table books. I can guarantee that in 1978 the only coffee table book a Seattle thirty-year-old would own would have been a collection of Ansel Adams’ photography.

I wonder what items the WWW would require in the thirty-year-old’s freezer. The other day, while cozied in to watch it rain, I felt  the urge to cook but didn’t want to venture out to shop. I opened the freezer, pulled out all the Trader Joe’s items we hadn’t eaten, and tossed them into my six-quart, red enameled Martha Steward cooking pot. There was a package of Indian curried vegetables with rice; Pa jeon; asparagus spears; half a bag of frozen corn; and turkey meatballs. I poured in organic, free-range, chicken broth and a few pinches of saffron salt then let it simmer several hours.

We have all we need.

Three of the contacts in my phone are dead but I can’t bring myself to delete them. Do others in my culture have a hard time with this? I still love these people and wonder if we’re all like sound waves, the hum of us slowly fading until our last friend or family member is, themselves, extinguished.

There’s so much my culture doesn’t speak of. I’ve recently discovered Chimamanda Adichie’s, Americanah. A roller-coaster of reader emotions: something opening; confusion; a faint understanding. There’s an unsettling notion that I just haven’t been listening because the hum of it is so far from my ears.

Find this book. Turn down the media. Listen closely.

This weekend’s storm left me without cell coverage yet one text message managed to slip through, a simple request from my friend Brook saying, Please write something! My diminished frequency of postings hasn’t meant I’m not looking closely at life, only that it’s taken me time to bounce back after my last post nearly eight weeks ago. Gratefully, an assortment of readers share my love of lists so following is my personal listing of how I spent my summer vacation.

1.) Minimal traveling due to home renovations. New roof (after twelve weeks trying to schedule workers). Last week the carpenters arrived to replace cedar shakes on the back of our house. The second floor area — sans shakes — looked better than it had in fourteen years even with only the black water-barrier paper — the paper that blew completely off in Saturday’s storm. The carpenters couldn’t work this weekend so the house has been nakedly exposed to the first rain in five months — without siding. My practice of radical acceptance and emotion regulation is serving me well.

2.) Steve played with an Indy group at Music Fest NW recently and cozied into his few minutes of rock-star life. Prior to the performance, the group was visited by the festival’s Cannabis Concierge with a briefcase full of free samples. Steve says the Pain Balm for his bad shoulder is working.

3.) We spent three days on the coast looking at spectacular scenery and overeating. One morning I practiced my meditation overlooking the ocean and the always-racing questions in my mind seemed a bit more imaginative than they do in the city: Does ADD disappear with Alzheimer’s? What happens to the tides if the moon explodes?

3.) I bought a six-month membership to The Movement Center in the hope of re-engaging in yoga. The class I specifically wanted was eliminated before I could attend due to the teacher’s illness. The organization’s president says, we are here for one reason only: to grow. Personally, I think we’re here to figure out how to be kind to one another, but the goal of growing sounds like a good start. Around this time, my nearly two-year-old grandson, Harrison, watched a spider zip across the floor. He bent over it and joyfully shouted, Hi!  I think maybe we could all use some un-growing.

4.) Now that the evenings have cooled, Steve and I are enjoying our own patio. One night we sat sipping adult beverages as we laughed through the Willamette Week ads including one for a local vegan strip club. Makes one wonder who studied the demographics for that concept?

5.) I found a three-volume set of C.S. Forester, Captain Horatio Hornblower books for Steve which we’re reading aloud together. The vocabulary is delicious and last night, when confronted by the word volubly, vowed to use it in today’s posting, but after looking up the meaning I’m wondering how I can identify with talking much and easily. Yet…there it is: volubly.

6.) My last posting was about increasing the minimum wage and my cousin took offense. We never actually spoke about the disagreement, but there was a bit of electronic exchange. One day as I busied about with household projects, I felt the need to phone her just to say that the issue had nothing to do with the fact that I loved her as friend and family. It was literally a rush of emotion that, regretfully, I put off. Gail died two weeks ago without us ever talking. My friend, Karen, reminded me I could still have the talk. So I did. In the car while driving.

This evening I’ll try a new yoga class as I work to grow…in kindness.

This morning I woke up stressing over something I read last night on social media prior to falling asleep. It was a post about how liberals don’t seem to understand that prices will go up if employees are paid a living wage. The post gnawed away at me all day so this evening I added a comment of my own: raising the minimum wage isn’t a liberal issue…it’s a humanitarian issue.

They’re right about one thing…it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize prices will rise if minimum wage workers can suddenly afford their rent. As a liberal, even I can figure that out. What the non-liberals don’t understand is that some of us are willing to pay more for our fast food if it actually helps service workers stay afloat .

The only other option would be to pay people what they’re worth out of corporate profits. But it would take a rocket scientist to figure out how to make that idea work.

The roofing sign in my front yard advertises free estimates and from this end of the reality continuum the term estimate was spot on. Looking back we probably would have appreciated something closer to an actual. The roof is installed and it looks great; we just didn’t expect the added venting, dry-rot repair, etc., etc. The garage is now topped in plywood, installed after they trashed the original roof. “Can’t we pull the old vintage wood out of the dumpster and sell it as salvage?” I asked. Steve gave me a look.

“Why didn’t they just put the plywood over the old wood? Might have saved some of that $55 per man-hour labor cost.”

“It was bowed,” he replied.

The $55 guys moved my potted ferns from the kitchen porch into direct sun, starting a death march I’ve been unable to stop. The framing crew cut the garage skylight opening too low claiming the beams wouldn’t support it being higher. We’re both in funk at this point — nails in the grass, a Gatorade bottle stuck between branches of a front-yard tree — and I’ve hit my head more than once on the monolithic drop-box dominating the driveway.

Two nights ago I woke up and couldn’t breath so the dog and I wandered outside and roamed around the yard at 3 a.m. — the air was cool and it was too dark to see the missing cedar shingles on the back of the house, casualties of the tear off.

Our eastern neighbors are at the beach and we’re watering their park-like-setting. Their house was featured in the N.Y. Times last year and I imagine myself camping on their pristine little patio until our siding is replaced. The western neighbors left for Orcas Island this morning: my favorite place on planet Earth. [Does coveting include vacations and landscape?]

I expected the roof to cost us Paris and Italy, now we’ve said goodbye to Spain and the Balkans. Sometimes when I drive up to the house I expect to see a mid-size minivan perched under a dormer.

Last night my four-year-old friend, Luca, was relaying his lovely dream about low maintenance living structures. I looked into his bright blue eyes,”Do you dream in color, Luca?”

He thought for a moment, then told me the marshmallow castle was white.

Last week I relayed to my graduate students that I was behind Ursula K. Le Guin in the grocery line. But none of them knew who she was. Continue reading →

Now I’m cooking for the dog. Continue reading →

I’ve always wanted to write a story titled, The Breaking of Beautiful Things, but plot and characters remain hidden. Continue reading →