the magazine on aging: I picture perfect shadows in the soft white light, a woman's face turned aside, her wrinkled brow and crinkly eyes looking elsewhere, hair in full drift, frame. ... a face full of something undefined, not sadness, not grief, though she will have had much of both, her fair share, it would be lame and too easy to call it 'wisdom' but it surely has its connections to experience.
Watching people age into elderly in real life, is daunting. daunting. I'd love to say its full of meaningful lessons and i'm sure that it is at some level. the level far far below sea level, where the bits lilt down, where the self-lighting fish live. ( and in there, you find a place too full of metaphor.)
but mostly what i am watching is discomfort and fear. daunting. things are magnified: loneliness, fragility, emotional distance, reserve, independence, dependence, the complete and utter separation of body and mind, and their complete collaboration all at once. complete, incomplete. all the relationships of a lifetime replayed, a crescendo in a glass house. . .
this cycle, so damn evident in spring, is just mind-blowing, as preparation for death marches in lock-step alongside the daffodils and the coming tulips. the very soil, i know, the very soil.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Aging, graceful is for the magazines.
Posted by Kate Hall at 3:00 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Kerfluffle. (and poop)
Today will mark the fourth plumber to visit our humble domicile. FOURTH. and this does not include the man who came to pump out the septic system yesterday. I am lucky to have friends who count as the first group, because probably i'd have gone to four digits already in the quest for 'no poop in the sink' which i find to be an almost universally upsetting quest, which most people are well ignorant of...
yes.
my mother-in-law had a seizure on sunday. we, here in the phone-call-receiving household thought that she was dying. She was not. glory be. and we have been awakened.
it is school vacation week, yesterday rain, today glory. yesterdays destroyed trampoline has been fixed and i've made them clean the disastrous room in which they did their rainyday mayhem... so we start with some rooms in which there probably isn't any poop. so theres that. i'm in a hurry for my radishes to pop, and for some fritillaria meleagris to show itself in my very own yard. its probably the only latin name that i know, for anything, and its a cutie pie that i have never seen but for pictures... and it will presently be in my very OWN YARD.
i would much rather yell at that then poop in the sink. wouldn't you?
we have an entire area in the yard which is being consumed by grape hyanciths and my seven year old has declared it a grape city, and it has battles with another patch elsewhere in the yard. someday a photo, because its a calming battle, believe it or not.
i think thats pretty cool..
and i looked at my last blog post and there are all these doubly underlined words with ads attached to them. what the heck is that? does that happen every time? doesn't someone need to ask my permission to do that? maybe it'll resolve on its own? a glitch in someone's kerfluff?
meh.
i await the plumber, in chain-smoking resentment and grossness...
wmx
** EDIT: OH! and then i spent 8 hours at the Pediatric ER for a kid's broken pinkie. just saying...
Posted by Kate Hall at 11:05 AM 0 comments
Thursday, April 9, 2015
I have low blood pressure. (thrills yet? )
anyhow, i do. i have low blood pressure. laughably low. rest assured, i am a living thing, i do have blood moving around in here, but it is leisurely... in no hurry to travel the whole shebang at anyone's whim. and what this means to me is little, but weighty. my extreme appendages tend to get cold. aaaah, fingers and toes baby. i try to keep them swathed in woolens but honestly, now that the winter has been crushed beneath the unfrozen damp, woolens are a chore. and today is the most perfectly damp spring day, and i am in great sufferance with my chilly digits. i feel in good wutheringheights-like company... british damp having the most literary presence ever. . .
i kid about the great suffering. i've got a barely sick toddler watching doodlebops, i've turned all the heat in the house down to a no-central-heating temperature, and i'm downright sexual with the coffee mug. i don't kid anyone that this is suffering. but, oye, my digits.
i'm making a real effort to write because i do like this aspect of my personality to have an outlet. but it is hard. things are hard here, and i'm weary. my hubsJ has been gifted my dad's leather coat and while it is on him, its all good. when it is hanging on the back of the chair, or on the coat hooks, the absence and loss are all that i can see. the small details like the snaps at the cuffs, the way the collar folds, how it would look all zipped up... the hanging of it suggests all its emptiness and i am all forlorn again.
hubsJ says Yeats has something to say about that too, that only age can make one understand. . . but i can't find it, and yeats is sometimes too beautiful to peruse.
my mom is going to have to have more procedures. all is not clear.
Posted by Kate Hall at 10:45 AM 4 comments
Labels: death, hands, health, hope and family
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Candy, arch-nemesis or sweet little bob of joy?
I had a complete melt-down yesterday while trying to re-glue, clamp and completely repair the top drawer of my kids' bureau, a necessary bit of work as all his underwear and pajama matter is currently spread flat all over the everything.
My dad used to fix things, just like me.... with lots of glue and swearing. I got glue all over my sweater while i was carrying the drawer around looking for something to clamp it with... rope in the trunk, as it turned out. glue glue, wherever you may be... for i am the lord of the blue, said he...
I spent a whole lot of my sobbing power on that drawer, got really really mad at my dad for being unavailable... its the first real time, i think, that i've been so damn mad about it, and was very glad that the little was asleep and the boys were still at school. was able to chill out and wash face before they got off the bus- there just ain't no calming boys who think you're upset for mysterious reasons. i try to limit the times i CAUSE their inner turmoils. i do.
man, it was a rough go. and yes, i fix things. and like my dad, they are bound to break sooner rather than later, again. although he did tend to go WAY over the line and use lots of hardware on top of it all... assuring solidity through stainless steel. he fixed the boys bunkbed with something like six different nut/bolt combinations, it was solid man.
but our biggest problem in the fix-it realm is chairs. i have kids who act like kids and lean back in chairs, stand on supporting pieces, flip them for use in forts, etc. and so they break. and they get glued and hit with hammers and so on. and so on... and so on... and all that my dad has fixed, has broken again and i work with more glue than can possibly be healthy.
gha.
so i decided after my breakdown, that i needed to have candy stashed all over the house, so that i could sneak and binge and feel like a very questionable personality while keeping it all from the kids and salving my emotional upheavals.
and what i wanted was a real live candy shop to go to.. not bags of branded candies at the grocery store or fancy expensive chocolates but jars upon jars of choice, so i could make up a delicious medley of corn syrups and cane syrups and chocolates and dried fruited bits slathered in all of the aboves...
not that easy to find. had to settle for a target binge today, but tomorrow i am skipping the gym in order to find my way to billy boy candies. i've got to find its website, but if i am giving in to my slavering desires, than i might as well go whole hog. aha! https://billyboycandiesinc.com/
ridonculous.
Posted by Kate Hall at 3:42 PM 0 comments
Labels: candy, death, do it yourself