It's cold and sunny here today, but the weather forecast for tomorrow says that a storm coming from the south is going to combine with something else, resulting in a "nor'easter" that may drop as much as sixteen inches of snow on southern Vermont.
Or not. The anticipated blizzard may dwindle to a couple of flurries, leaving school children disappointed (it takes a major, major storm around here for schools to even delay opening), commuters relieved, and some of us embarrassed.
Several times each winter the same situation arises: a snow storm is forecast for a day when I have plans to be away from home. Do I cancel my plans or do I ignore the weather and go about my business as if I were in, say, Atlanta? Although I am a lot braver about driving on snowy roads than I was when we first moved here, my daring does not approach that of my spouse, who will blithely drive into the teeth of a blizzard.
The easiest thing would be to wait for the event to be cancelled, thus relieving me of all responsibility. But in Vermont cancellations tend to come, if at all, at the last minute, by which time one may be risking life and limb on the road.
Tomorrow morning, right when the blizzard is expected to hit, I'm supposed to drive half an hour to the first of a series of figure drawing sessions. This being a small community, it's important to show up for stuff, to encourage the organizers so they'll keep things going. On the other hand, if one gets oneself killed on the road, the community shrinks even more.
So--should I go to figure drawing tomorrow, or should I stay home? Either way, the potential for embarrassment is considerable. If I stay in, and we just get a couple of flakes, I will look foolish not only to others but to myself. But I'll also look foolish if I set out in the car and end up in a ditch and have to be rescued by strangers. This is what I mean by the horns of winter.
While I wait for developments, I check the online forecast frequently. I also use my personal forecasting method: the number of birds at the feeder. In my experience, if the weather is clear and calm but the feeder is mobbed, a storm is on the way.
I just looked and saw: a male cardinal, half a dozen chickadees, a flock of juncos, and a tiny nuthatch--a respectable showing, but not what I would call a mob. My guess is we won't get much snow.
I've often wondered how parents of three children manage. After all, most adults only have two arms; most families have only two adults, maximum; and there are only two windows in the back seat of most cars. Foolishly, I never did wonder how people with three dogs survived.
Here's the story at our house, in this winter of 2011. Twelve-year-old Lexi, neat as a pin otherwise, has acquired the nasty habit of poop-eating. (Be forewarned: the following material may not be suitable for the delicately nurtured.) Not her own poop, but the other dogs,' especially Bisou's. She is like a heat-seeking missile, zeroing in on excreta with speed belying her age, while pretending deafness as I try to call her off her prey. I pooper scoop the yard every morning, but cannot be out there to whisk away every scat from every dog during the day
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I have consulted several vets about this. To a woman, they have shaken their heads and said it's a nasty habit, popular among dogs, and virtually impossible to break. It does not, they have assured me, hurt the dog in any way.
Unable to muster a Zen attitude towards this problem, I persuaded my husband to install a line across our yard, and a chain running along it to which I could attach Lexi when she needs to go out. And so I do. Every time Lexi needs to be let out, the two other dogs--yapping and swirling and beside themselves with eagerness to go outside--have to wait until I have attached Lexi to the chain. This doesn't sound like much, but time after time, day after day, it gets old.
Wolfie, during the recent snow and ice events, has cut both his hind pasterns by crashing through the ice crust or being scratched by sticks and stones lurking under the snow. The wounds don't seem to bother him much, but they are swollen. I put warm salt-water compresses every day on them, hoping to forestall infection.
This means that I cannot take the dogs out into the woods or field for exercise, since every time I do this Wolfie's wounds open and bleed. The only way to exercise him is to walk him on leash up and down our icy driveway. And because Bisou, if left behind, would have a nervous breakdown, she has to come along too, on leash.
For a long time, I couldn't figure out why Bisou, at over a year old, would still occasionally poop in the house. I'd never had this problem with a dog before. I thought she might have neurological issues.
We have always kept a well-stocked bird feeder in the back yard, and there is lots of seed spilled by the birds not only around the feeder, but under the bushes and trees where they congregate to enjoy their meals. The dogs love the bird leftovers, especially when sprinkled with avian poop. It finally occurred to me that the vast quantities of bird seed that Bisou would consume in the briefest excursion outside might be affecting her digestive tract. All those sunflower seeds and shells are a lot of fiber for a little dog.
A few days ago, we moved the bird feeder to the front yard, to which the dogs don't have access. However, because there are still masses of leftover seeds and shells in the backyard, I have been taking Bisou out on a leash--into single digit temps in the morning, in my pajamas; into blowing blizzards whenever she gives me a meaningful look during the day; into the frozen night, last thing before bed. And give me meaningful looks she does, all day long because, hey, who wouldn't want to be taken out for a romp in the snow? However, the leash routine works. There has not been a poop in the house since we started this regimen.
So things are actually perfect. I have total control over Lexi's poop-eating, Wolfie's wounds, and Bisou's house training...as long as I spend most of my day and part of my night obsessing about, keeping track of, and interacting with my three dogs.
Went to an opening at the local arts center this afternoon. It was a big show--two whole floors of a largish building--because every member of the arts center was guaranteed to have at least one piece accepted. Alas, almost everyone at the reception was an artist, and I saw no more than three red dots (indicating sales) while I wandered around. This was the first time I showed one of my new clay pieces, and the setting hen, which had seemed so robust and substantial while I was working on her, looked pale and wan on her shelf in the show.
Afterwards we met several artist friends at a Chinese restaurant. While I ate my eggplant in garlic sauce--it was actually eggplant in syrupy glop--there was a discussion about whether the work of certain accomplished but conservative local artists had "soul."
Things got intense, and I kept fighting the urge to shout, "Hold it for a minute! Would you please define your terms?" But I held my peace--every "definition" would have sparked another discussion--and concentrated on the sticky eggplant.
The old questions about art that used to set me on fire--what gives it soul, what makes it honest, what makes it good or bad--now leave me tepid. Art, I have decided, should be looked at in silence--reverent or irreverent depending on the looker. And it should be enjoyed, if it is to be enjoyed at all, in solitude. Talk just gets in the way.
Back home I was glad, when I went to shut the chickens in for the night, to see that my real hens are as robust and substantial as I could wish.
Every once in a while I get a day like today. A day in which CFS only hovers around the edge of my consciousness. A day in which I was able to:
Write reasonably thoughtful answers to a number of e-mails.
Put in several hours of reasonably satisfying clay sculpting.
Walk the dogs in the cold sunshine.
Go to yoga class.
Have a long telephone conversation with my sister about our mother.
Sit by the fire and read the New Yorker (eat bananas while you can--the one export variety in existence is now endangered).
Write this little post.
I realize that tomorrow may be a completely different story, so I'm not attaching to my present state. I'm just relishing it, and putting off going to bed.
Combing the tangles out of Bisou's coat the other day--a process she does not enjoy but for putting up with which she gets small bits of mozzarella--I thought about some hair issues that arose over Christmas concerning my granddaughter, V.
V is in second grade, and has long hair. Not long enough to sit on, but long enough to cause problems with knots. The trouble is that V wants long hair, but doesn't want to deal with the ensuing tangles--especially the ones at the base of the skull, which are both the biggest and the hardest to reach.
Over the holiday week, everyone in the house--parents, grandparents and aunties--volunteered to very gently brush out V's hair. But she turned us down. We then suggested that she get it cut--not, God forbid, like a boy's or anything--but short enough so that it wouldn't hurt so much. But she wouldn't hear of that.
One of the persons offering to help with the detangling was V's Auntie A, who, back when she was in second grade, had even longer hair than V, and tons of it. Like V, A refused to have her hair cut, and turned down my offers to brush it for her. The summer she was eight years old, A took swimming lessons, and you can imagine the effect of frequent baths in chlorine on already-tangled, sweat-coated hair.
One day, A finally agreed to let me help untangle the mess. I found the comb with the widest teeth, and went to work as gently as I could, gripping a hank of hair with one hand, holding it away from the scalp to minimize the tugging, while slowly combing out the snags with the other. But tugging was inevitable, and A put up with it without protest, although under the tent of hair I saw her shoulders shaking--she was crying silently. I don't know which made me feel worse, the fact that I was hurting her, or the knowledge that she was taking responsibility for the pain, and being brave.
But back to V. Inevitably, her mother had to step in and detangle. There were tears. I left the room, unable to watch, and wondered, what is it with little girls and long hair? Why, in this enlightened age, do they feel that it is worth the pain? Do they believe that long hair is beautiful, and beauty is worth suffering for? What do they think would happen to them if they were less beautiful, but more comfortable?
Is this a cultural phenomenon or a predisposition towards masochism embedded in that pair of X chromosomes?
Unlike V, and A before her, poor Bisou isn't free to cut her hair, which is why she gets bits of cheese while I work on her mats.
I don't make New Year's resolutions, other than to write heartfelt notes to the people who send me, in time for Christmas, personally signed (for which I'm grateful) reports of their yearly achievements (no one is busier, it seems, than the newly retired).
However, every January I imagine new ways to radically change my life.
One snowy January in Maryland--back when it still used to snow there--I decided that academic writing was o.k. for salary and promotion purposes, but what I really wanted to do was to write for real people, and thus embarked on an alarming and thrilling venture into magazine and newspaper freelancing. I wrote giddily and earnestly about stuff that was unrelated to my professional life but close to my heart: raising children and vegetables, milking goats, training dogs, making do.
Another January, living and working in DC, and newly diagnosed with CFS, I was struck with the idea that the road to healing lay in returning to my earthy roots--goats, chickens, and swiss chard.That impulse eventually brought me to Vermont where, possibly as a result of the wisdom that supposedly comes with age, my post-solstice inspirations have taken a milder turn.
This year, I resolved to rearrange the room where I make stuff. I never know whether to call it my study--for that is where I write--or my studio--since that is where I draw and sculpt. And that very duality makes the space both interesting, and hard to arrange.
It is a smallish second-floor room, with tall windows, two facing north, one facing west. In it there is a single bed, covered in red dog hair, where, reclining odalisque-like on many pillows, I write on my laptop and nap with Bisou. There is a six-foot-long cafeteria-style table where I do my drawing and clay sculpting. There is a bookcase, a small chest with a CD player, and a desk, consisting of a heavy board resting on twin two-drawer file cabinets. I have never liked working at a desk, and I reserve this one for things like filling out insurance forms and other tedious tasks.
My rearrangement today consisted only of moving the sculpture table to where the desk had been, the bed to where the sculpture table had stood, and the desk...wherever. But the physical change matters far less than the change I feel inwardly, the rush of hope that the light coming in from a different direction as I sculpt, the different view of the front field as I write, will make of me not necessarily a better, but a different sculptor and writer.
All this is not very Zen, I know. I should be content with what is, and make space in my heart for it, and gaze compassionately on myself and my misguided urges. But for just a little while, the naive Western illusion that change is really possible, that a new life--a new me--is just a few adjustments away, keeps me going, keeps me hoping.
Not once since I embarked on my vegetable-growing career decades ago--not in Alabama, North Carolina, or Maryland--have I worked in the garden in January. But yesterday, in Vermont, I did.
Every year, in March, I go out and plant spinach in the snow, which guarantees me an early crop of greens that snatch us back from the brink of beriberi. As I pick the delicious but none-too-abundant leaves, I promise myself that this time I will not neglect to put compost on the spinach beds at the end of gardening season. And every fall, sick of garden tasks, curled up by the stove, reading a book, I tell myself that it's o.k. to have early spinach that is less than lush, as long as I have some spinach. By the end of November the ground freezes solid, the gate into the chicken yard where I store the compost freezes shut, and the whole question of fertilizing garden beds becomes moot.
Yesterday, however, out of nowhere, the sun came out; the temperature rose into the 40s; and the knee-deep snow melted down to a mushy couple of inches. In some places I could actually see the compost that, having filled the two bins to overflowing, I had dumped on a corner of the chicken yard. I tried the gate and, sure enough, I was able to work it open.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I seized it.
I got a shovel and a big tub (the gate wouldn't open wide enough for the wheelbarrow), filled it with compost, carried it to the garden and dumped it into the first spinach-destined bed, then filled it again and dumped it into the second bed. I gave a few desultory digs with the shovel to see if I could work the stuff into the soil, but couldn't make a dent--the soil was still frozen hard. Come spinach-planting time in March, the little seeds will have to find their own way through layers of snow and compost to a bit of dirt to burrow into.
I spread the compost as best I could, then put away the shovel and the tub, and bid them adieu until spring. As I did so, a cloud obscured the sun, a cold wind picked up, and the chickadees, who had been chirping while I worked, fell silent.
This morning the gate to the chicken yard is frozen shut, the compost is covered in ice crystals, and we're in the depths of winter once again.
