Bulletin From Sabbatical

As the winter solstice came and went I found my resistance to posting on this blog, which had been growing through the summer and fall, impossible to overcome.  I'd been writing here for seven years,  and my blogging well had run dry.  It was time to let it replenish. 

We spent ten years in a house with a recalcitrant water well, and I learned the hard way to pay attention to its moods and its periodic needs for rest and recuperation.  No matter how high the pile of dirty laundry, if the water level was low there was nothing to do but wait for it to slowly rise again.

So after New Year's I decided to give myself a sabbatical.

It's not just the seven years of posting that finally got to me.  Our move to Wake Robin last summer, followed by my daughter's cancer diagnosis, had discombobulated me at a deeper level than I realized.  Thankfully, my daughter is doing very well, which means that we are slowly beginning to breathe again.  The move to Wake Robin feels like the right decision, but it has made a radical change in how we live, and that brings with it its own quandaries and dilemmas.

Why is it, for example, that now that I no longer keep chickens or grow vegetables or cook or shop for groceries (or post on my blog) I seem to have less time than ever?  Maybe it's because the chickens and the gardening, etc. have been replaced by other stuff that I cannot resist, such as:

--A surprisingly demanding yoga class twice a week
--Weekly visits with Bisou to the residents of Wake Robin's nursing facility
--Daily recorder practice, and duets with my recorder buddies once or twice weekly
--Dinner with fellow residents three or four times a week (optional, but fun)
--Daily dog walks (not optional)
--Daily walks to the community center for meals and classes (2/3 mile round trip) often in a sub-zero gale
--English country dancing once a week
--Ditto ballroom dancing...

For a former hermit, let alone a hermit with CFS, this is a major shift in activity level.  You should know that, compared with my fellow residents, who hike, snowshoe, ski, garden, maintain the community trails, sing, serve on committees, make maple syrup (locally known as "sugaring"), and practically run the place, I am the very soul of sloth.  But one does what one can.

Sometimes, when things get quiet, I hear a faraway tinkling, as of water falling drop by drop into the depths of my writing well.  There's not enough to run a load of laundry yet, but there may well be by sugaring time.

Of Mites And Mange

This is the story of how Bisou, Wolfie and I got mange.

It began in the golden month of September, when the skies were blue for days on end and the leaves were turning and the goldenrod and the ragweed were wafting pollen into the atmosphere in unprecedented amounts.  I noticed that Bisou was scratching quite a bit, and shedding red-gold hairs in unprecedented amounts.  Wolfie was scratching too, and shedding copiously--but then Wolfie's always shedding.

At about this time my doctor put me on Gabapentin for a back problem, and after a couple of days I noticed some red itchy spots on my skin.  "Hives!"  I said to myself.  "I must be allergic to Gabapentin."  And I stopped taking it.

Bisou's scratching was starting to drive us all crazy, so I took her to Vet #1.  "I've never seen so many itchy dogs as I have this fall," he said.  "Bisou is suffering from environmental allergies.  Here, give her some of this prednisone."

Although the prednisone made the itch go away, I worried about its effects of Bisou's innards.  But the minute I stopped the prednisone, the itch came back.  My dog savvy friends recommended over-the-counter benadryl, so I tried that.  It worked well, except that it caused Bisou to retain urine, a common side effect.  So I stopped the benadryl and the itch resumed.  Fortunately Wolfie, who by now was also itching a lot, was able to tolerate the benadryl.

Meanwhile, despite  stopping the Gabapentin, my red spots continued to multiply, but I was so focused on the dogs' problem that I didn't pay too much attention to my own relentless itching.  I was especially worried about Bisou, who was looking thin and raggedy, her once lovely coat reduced to tatters.
Then, one night, I saw that the edges of her left ear were completely hairless and, worst of all, the skin seemed to be flaking off.  At eight the next morning, Bisou and I were at the office of Vet #2.  "It's been an itchy season, all right," he said, "but I'll take a skin scraping just to make sure."  He came back from the lab with a triumphant grin.  "Good news!" he said, waving the slide in the air.  "Bisou's got mange!"

"It really is good news," he said, as I recoiled in horror.  "Mange is a lot easier to treat than allergies."  He recommended a complicated course of Ivermectin for both Bisou and Wolfie. ("If she has mange, he has mange," he said.)  When I asked how this disaster could have befallen my dogs, he explained that all it took was for Bisou to rub against a plant that a fox with mange had previously touched.  There is a big red fox that travels frequently through our neighborhood.  Could he, I wondered, be the culprit?

After giving the dogs their first dose of medication, I looked up sarcoptic mange online.  This is what I found.  Mange is caused by a mite, sarcoptes scabiei.  There are several varieties of sarcoptes mites, each with a preference for a different primary host, on which it reproduces.  Sarcoptes scabiei var. canis causes mange in dogs. We humans have our own mite,  sarcoptes scabiei var. hominis, which is contracted through human-to-human contact.
I scrolled through the websites and scratched my head.  Could it be that what I had was not hives, but mange?   The dog-mange mites, I learned, can crawl onto humans and bite.  However, they will not reproduce on human skin.  Thus, the sites stated, in humans the infestation is self-limiting--that is, the mites bite but eventually die.

Soon, thanks to the Ivermectin, the dogs stopped itching.  I spent my life vacuuming frantically and washing dog towels and bedding in hot water to prevent re-infestation.   And scratching.  It was odd that, as the dogs were getting better, I was getting so much worse.

"You should go to the doctor," my spouse--who, miraculously, was not itching--advised.  "There really is no need," I replied between scratches.  "In humans the condition is self-limiting.  I just have to wait for my mites to die a natural death."

Days passed.  I was covered in bites and scratching all night.  "If I go to the doctor, he'll just give me steroids," I told my husband as I raked my fingernails over the backs of  my knees.  "Remember, the condition is self-limiting in humans!"

Finally, after a month of itching, I acknowledged that, for some reason, my mange was not self-limiting.  I went to the health center, displayed my bite-speckled abdomen, and walked out five seconds later with two prescriptions for permethrin cream, one for myself and, just to make sure, one for my symptom-free husband.

The instructions were to rub the greasy cream into every inch of our bodies, from the earlobes to the toes, at bedtime, then twelve hours later take a shower and wash bedsheets, mattress cover, bed skirt and every stitch of clothing we had worn over the preceding two days in hot water.  And vacuum everything.

It was exhausting, but it worked.  My mites died and I stopped itching almost immediately.  Vet #2, who is versed in Chinese medicine, gave me a bottle of Four Marvels powder to help Bisou's coat, and it has grown back marvelously, a deeper, richer red than ever.  But neither the vet nor the doctor was able to explain how I managed to get dog mange, and why the mites prospered on my skin.

A couple of mornings ago Bisou burst into high-pitched barks.  I looked out and there was the neighborhood fox, ambling through our yard on his elegant narrow legs.  He was wearing his full winter fur, thick and red and healthy-looking.  I have always loved foxes.  But as I watched him disappear into the bushes, I found myself scratching my neck.

Bisou Gets A Job

No dog-book author would ever classify the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, that ultimate lap-warmer, as a working breed.  But Bisou, who has lived her entire life for pleasure alone--the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of ball-chasing, the pleasure of my company--is now a working dog.

Last Sunday she auditioned for the position of Therapy Dog in the facility (to be known in these pages as "Alder") that houses Wake Robin's assisted-living and skilled-nursing residents.

She was by no means a shoo-in.  As we battled a freezing gale on our way up the hill to Alder, I rehearsed various dire scenarios.  The most worrisome was that she would jump up on people, get tangled up with their walkers, and gouge their shins with her nails.  Have you ever trained a small, friendly dog not to jump up?  I've taught three German Shepherds not to jump up, and it was a relative snap, the main reason being that nobody reinforces a big dog for jumping up.   But when Bisou jumps up on guests at our door they invariably say "Oh, you little sweetheart!" and reward her by ruffling her fur and making kissy noises.

I also worried that, when confronted with persons who appeared ill or disoriented, she might turn away in despair, as a former therapy dog of mine used to do.  She might cower at wheelchairs, run away from walkers and canes, recoil from strange sights and sounds.  She might even, god forbid, poop on the carpet.

But I had underestimated my dog.  When she spotted the first wheelchair, she ambled up to the tiny occupant, sat down, fluffed out her ears and gazed up with her big, liquid eyes.  She waited for the gnarled, trembling hands to reach her head and stayed still for as long as the caresses lasted.

Our next stop was a jolly centenarian who addressed me in perfect Italian and Spanish while she invited Bisou to put her front paws up on the recliner.  I held my breath, envisioning Bisou leaping up and landing on the woman's lap--but my brilliant dog just stood there on her hind legs, making soulful eye contact, enjoying the petting.

And so it went, room after room, with the figures in recliners or on wheelchairs stretching their arms to her, and she trotting up to them, wagging her tail, doing her job.

But for all Bisou's enjoyment, it was work.  When she sensed that we had turned in the direction of the exit, she began to pull on the leash.  She was done.

Back in our cottage, Bisou gave short shrift to Wolfie's concerned greeting ("Where have you been, and what's that smell on you?") and ran to the water bowl, took a good long drink, then jumped into my reading chair, practically patting the seat to say, "come here, you!"  I complied, pulled a blanket over us, and we both fell asleep.

A Touch of PTSD

If you live long enough, stuff happens to you.  For me, most recently, it's been the breast cancer diagnosis and surgery of my daughter A.  The great good news is that her lymph nodes are clear.  I had never thought very much about lymph nodes before, but now I think about A.'s all the time, and send them messages of gratitude and encouragement.

These have, needless to say, been trying weeks.  Never had Francis Bacon's saying, "he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune" struck so close to home.  Happily, my particular hostage is doing very well. I, on the other hand, surprised myself after the good news about the lymph nodes by going into a sort of decline.

Before the surgery, I spent days of panic in which I only assumed the worst.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't talk myself into imagining a less-than-dire scenario.  All attempts at rationality failed, reducing me to a trembling, gnarly tangle of dread.  The only explanation I can think of is that I was acting out of a deep well of primitive superstition, believing that if I allowed myself to picture a happy outcome, I would instantly jinx its chances of happening.

My strategy apparently worked, and when we got the good news I felt that Atlas himself had removed the weight of the planet which had crashed down on me the day of A.'s initial diagnosis.  I also expected that I would immediately begin to feel much better.  Instead, on subsequent days my dark emotional state persisted, as if my body--and the feeling did, in fact, seem largely physical--had grown so accustomed to being in alarm mode that now it couldn't shift out of it.  I felt raw, exhausted, yet unable to rest.  I finally concluded that I was experiencing a minor case of PTSD, and that I would just have to wait it out.

I'm happy to say that the dread is subsiding.  The other day I was driving through Vermont's annual foliage extravaganza, with a Bach piano partita playing on the radio.  The assault of so much beauty on eyes and ears simultaneously almost forced me to stop by the side of the road.  For a moment I didn't think about lymph nodes, Francis Bacon, or the need to perch serenely on the knife-edge of uncertainty.  There was only the visual buzz of the sumac, the honey locust and the maples, and the measured, majestic gracefulness of Bach.

My Mother Says...(continued)

They wanted me to sew! my mother says, but all I wanted to do was read novels.  I hid them under my mattress, and I read them at night.

Didn't your parents see the light in your room?

No, because I didn't turn it on.  I used to kneel by the window, with the book propped on the sill, and read by the street light.  I read many novels that way, and that is why I went to law school.

Because of the novels?

Because of the novels.  I read about lawyers defending poor people against injustice, and I decided I wanted to be like them.  So I went to the University of Valencia to learn to be a lawyer.  Valencia was only a four-hour drive away, but in those days--before the Civil War--it was like going to America.

I still cannot believe that my mother let me go.  I was seventeen, and girls from my village did not leave home except to be married.  But as I've told you, my mother was different.  She was not afraid of what people would say, and even though like most girls of her generation she had no more than a grammar-school education, she was smart.

My mother's mother, my mother says, referring to her grandmother, died young, and left four children behind.  Her husband worried that a new wife would make the children unhappy, so he never married again.  Instead, my mother, who was the oldest girl--about twelve when her mother died--took care of the family.  At one point, when she was about fourteen, she did go away to school, but she cried because she was homesick, and her brothers and sisters cried because they missed her, so finally her father hitched up the wagon and went to fetch her home.

When she was eighteen, a spirited, pretty girl, she met my father, who was from a different village and  had just finished veterinary school in Zaragoza.  This seemed very exotic to her, plus he was handsome, so she married him.  When they came back from the honeymoon to their new house, they found her little brother and sisters already installed there.

 My father was a wonderful veterinarian, very progressive, and the peasants trusted him and loved him.  But he was terrible with money.  He couldn't bear to ask people for what they owed him.  In addition to his practice, my parents owned quite a bit of land which was farmed by sharecroppers, so we should have been well off.  But everybody, the peasants whose mules he cured and the sharecroppers who farmed his land, found it easy to get around Senyor Boque.  They were very good at finding excuses--a child was sick, the harvest had been poor--and he always said "Fine, fine.  Don't worry about it."

I'll explain later how this soft-heartedness of my father's may have saved us all in the worst days of the Civil War, my mother continues, but in the meantime there he was, with a wife and four children and a couple of maids to take care of, and perennially short of cash.  And that is when my mother--remember, she had very little education--decided to take things into her own hands.

She became his administrator, secretary and accountant, keeping track of visits paid and medications administered, payments received and monies owed.  When people didn't pay, she told him not to treat their animals, but, my mother says, softening her voice, he used to sneak out and take care of them anyway. 

She was fair but tough on the sharecroppers, too.  On the day when the wheat was put into sacks and weighed, she was there, making sure everything was fair and square...while my father took off  on a on a pretense to look at the fields, but really so he could avoid any disagreements that might arise.

And so, because of her work and determination, we began to have more money.  But she paid the price.  Everybody in the village said that Senyor Boque was a saint.  "La Senyora Boque, on the other hand...."  Still, she did what she had to do.

(To be continued)

My Mother Says... (continued)

I don't know why my mother was so different from the other people of the village, my mother says, but she was, and so was my father.  This gave me a terrible complex when I was growing up, because I wanted my parents to be like everybody else.


They didn't go to church.  It's not that they were anticlerical, or that they didn't believe in God.  They sent me and my two sisters and my little brother to Mass on Sundays, but they stayed home.  My father didn't like it that at Mass the women and children knelt in the pews at the front of the church and the men stood in the back, by the door.  He thought that they were there just for show.  But I would have given anything to have parents who went to church like everybody else.

And, my mother continues, her voice rising as she recalls yet another mortifying fact, my parents went to the movies!  The mayor, the lawyer, the doctor all stayed home on Sunday evenings, like proper people.  But my father, the vet, without whose work the local farms would have collapsed, he went to the movies.  And he took his wife along!

But what was so bad about going to the movies? my daughter asks.


Only the poor people went to the movies.  They were also the only ones who could dance at the village festivals, as I've told you.  How I used to wish that we were poor....

But the worst thing was--and here she pauses dramatically and lowers her voice--that when my father went to the cafe after lunch, my mother went with him!  In Barcelona women went to movies and to cafes all the time, of course.  But this was a village, and before the Civil War no woman had ever been seen in the cafe, except your grandmother.  

My  mother stops to recall the scandal, and for a moment my daughter and I bask in our ancestress's daring.

The cafe, she explains, was only for men.  Every day after lunch, the men, rich and poor, went to the cafe to smoke and drink coffee and tell stories.   All the women stayed home, sewing.  It was a little bit like Saudi Arabia... You know, she adds, remembering another Saudi-like custom, that in the village it was customary at meals for the wife to stand and serve the family, and wait to eat until everybody had finished.  In our house, of course, my mother sat and ate with us.  This did not embarrass me so much, because other people didn't see it.

Another strange thing, my mother says, is that in winter she used to feed my father breakfast in bed.

She brought him breakfast in bed?

No, she fed it to him.  With her fingers.  My father used to lie flat in bed with the covers up to his chin and she would bring in a tray with a cup of coffee, two pieces of toast, and a piece of chocolate.  She would sit on the bed and give him a sip of coffee, and then she would break a piece of bread and put it in his mouth, and when he had swallowed that, she would give him a bite of chocolate, then some bread, then a sip of coffee...

And after that?


After that he would get up, put on his long underwear, his corduroy pants, his wool jacket and his black beret and hop on his bicycle and go on his rounds, to cure the mules and horses that had gone lame.  And you know what?  All the years they were married--and my mother married him when she was only eighteen, the prettiest girl in the village--she called him by his last name, "Boque," instead of his first, which was "Josep."

(To be continued)

My Mother Says...

After so many years, the boundaries start to blur.  Mothers, granddaughters, daughters, grandmothers--the skein of talk and memory passes from one to the other and grows more tangled with each pass, so that in the end you can hardly tell the threads apart.

I am listening to some recordings that my daughter S made of my mother back when my mother was the age I am now and my daughter had just finished college.  She taped these sessions during one of my mother's visits, and in the background you can hear dishes being rinsed, a dishwasher being loaded.

My mother speaks, and periodically someone interrupts with a question or a remark, and often I can't tell whether that voice is my daughter's, or mine.  There's no mistaking my mother's voice, which  sounds young, like she could be thirty instead of seventy.  Prompted by my daughter, she begins to tell about her own mother and to bring to life a world that no longer exists:  the world of a Catalan village in the 1920s and 30s.  My mother's world as it was "before the war," meaning the civil war that sundered life in Spain into two separate eras:  before 1936 and after 1939.

Before the war, my mother says, life in my village was almost medieval.  The farmers plowed with Roman plows and a pair of mules. Middle class girls weren't allowed to do much besides attend daily Mass and, on Sundays, morning Mass and Rosary in the afternoon.  And visit relatives, of course, and the sick.  The married women all wore black.

At the harvest festival every year a band would come and there was a dance.  But I could never dance because I had to sit with my family in a box high up in the stands, and no boy dared make the trip up all those steps, in view of the entire village, to ask me to dance and risk being turned down.

But the poor people, they were out all night on the dance floor, and they could dance with whomever they pleased.  And they could go to the movies--even the women!--and see things like Mary Pickford and Buffalo Bill.  The poor people had all the fun.  How I envied them!

And you couldn't go to the movies?  my daughter (or is it me?) asks.

Of course not!  my mother says.  But my mother was different...

(to be continued)