Leaving The House

Lake Champlain is frozen over, and for all I know, frozen solid as well.  But in these sub-zero mornings, if there is no wind and the sun is out, the dogs and I go for a cabin-fever abatement stroll. The walk is short, but the preparation takes forever.

First I put the invisible fence collars on Wolfie and Bisou and let them out into the back yard to relieve themselves.  Because I don't completely trust the invisible fence (would the dogs stay within  if, say, a catamount showed up?), and because I don't want them to bark at some hardy Wake Robin resident snow-shoeing by, I always go out with them, but not until I've put on an old parka of my husband's, and rubber boots. 

Back inside, I take off the parka and the boots, and exchange the dogs' invisible fence collars for their regular collars and leashes.  This causes Bisou to twirl and gyrate with glee, and to launch mock attacks at Wolfie's head, which in turn make him yodel and howl.

While this is going on, I put on an extra sweater and gather my hat, scarf, and gloves.  I slather some tingly lip balm on my lips.  I put on my long winter coat and reach down to start the zipper, which gets stuck.  Why is it, I wonder, that we can put a man on the moon but are forced to struggle with zippers all winter long? 

Next I get Bisou's little coat, and plead with her to be still so we can, sometime before the next storm hits, go for our walk.  I put her legs through the arm holes and start the zipper up the back, only it too gets stuck.  Why is it that we can put a man...etc.

I put on my winter boots, the made-in-China-of-man-made materials ones that I can slip into without having to tie laces, a great time-saver these days.  Then I get Bisou's four little boots, and call her.  But she's still leaping circles around Wolfie and now her leash has gotten tangled with his, so I go and separate them.

The sight of her boots ratchets up her excitement, and I struggle to thrust her floppy feet into the stiff, narrow boots.  The boot instructions say to tie the velcro straps tightly around the leg, but I always worry about cutting off her circulation.  As a result, she often casts a shoe during walks, and  with the wind blowing straight off the North Pole, I have to get both dogs to STAND STILL for crying out loud, take off my gloves, and put the shoe back on.

We are now ready for our walk.  But wait--are the emergency  poop bags in my right pocket, the house key in the left?  I should probably put on yak-traks, too, in case of ice, but I can't bear the idea of putting on one more thing, so I don't.

Outside the cold is...invigorating.  The locals are calling this an "old-fashioned Vermont winter."  We flatlanders console ourselves thinking what havoc it's wreaking on the tick population.  The Wake Robin sugaring brigade, of which my spouse is a novice member, is gearing up for action, checking the sap lines for squirrel damage.  Spring, they hope, will come again this year.

The dogs and I trudge along slowly--me, because I'm looking out for black ice;  Wolfie, because of his pathetic lameness;  and Bisou because of her boots, which force her to fling her legs sideways and use lots more energy than she normally would (this is a good thing).  But when I take my eyes off the pavement and look up at the sky, for the first time in forever I feel the warmth of the sun on my face.

Bedroom Marmalade

After forty-six years and nine months of daily meal preparations, when we arrived in Wake Robin last June I turned my back on cooking without a second thought.  Good bye, cheese from my goats' milk, omelettes from my hens' eggs,  pesto from my kale.  No matter that our cottage has a fully equipped kitchen, my cooking days are done.

As we prepared for the move, I got rid of much that was dear to my heart, but I couldn't bear to part with my four potted citrus trees.  They survived the move and continued to bloom and set fruit in front of the cottage until the weather turned cold and they had to come indoors.  And then my problems began.

Wanting to recreate a Mediterranean climate for the little darlings, I found them the brightest spot in the house, which happens inconveniently to be in the bedroom, right next to our bed, which is also where Wolfie and Bisou sleep.  (If I get up during the night I have to watch to avoid stepping on a sleeping dog and bumping my head against a Meyer lemon.)  But despite this prime location the trees went into a decline and started dropping leaves. 

I got them a lamp with a big fluorescent bulb that I kept on whenever we weren't trying to sleep, but the leaves kept falling--and there is no more discouraging sound that the sigh of an indoor plant's leaf dropping in the night.  I started misting the trees with water twice a day, then every time I went into the bedroom.  Eventually I plugged in a humidifier and kept it going round the clock.  But the leaves continued to fall.

It took me weeks to realize that the weird web-like filaments on the leaves and stems might have something to do with the trees' misery:  spider mites!  This, coming hard on the heels of my sarcoptic mite episode, was a bit much.  But I went to work with home-made remedies and persistence, and eventually the mites disappeared.

By then, however, the Page orange had dropped all its baby fruits.  The larger of the two Meyer lemons kept its fruit but retained exactly four leaves (if a tree can look like it has mange, that one does).  The small Meyer lemon did only slightly better.  But the stalwart Calamondin orange kept on blooming, and setting and ripening fruit as if this were Valencia rather than Vermont.  By January, its crop of cheerful, grape-sized oranges was ready to pick.

Unfortunately, Calamondins are bitter as gall.  Some people use them as decorations for meat dishes, in lieu of kumquats.  But the only way to make them palatable is to turn them into marmalade.

I had never made marmalade in my life, and was tormented by visions of imperfectly sterilized jars leading to death from botulism.  In reality, it turned out to be quite simple, the only fiddly part being the slicing and seeding of the tiny fruits.  When this was done, I boiled them in water for fifteen minutes, refrigerated the mixture overnight, then added an unconscionable amount of sugar and heated it to 220F.  Finally I poured it into four clean little jars and bunged them in the fridge, thus averting botulism.

The results were terrific:  an ideal marriage of yin and yang, bitter and sweet.  And a feast for the eyes as well, each small jar a translucent carnelian gem.

Since it contains as much sugar as it does citrus, my bedroom marmalade does not qualify as health food.  But a little goes a long way, and a scant teaspoonful of the stuff can brighten a generous slice of buttered toast, and my entire morning.

As for that mangy Meyer lemon, yesterday I saw a barely-there bit of green poking out of one of its dead-looking stems--a new leaf!  The season of resurrection is at hand.

Neurons Firing Overtime

I could have danced all night...

Well, not really.  After an hour or so of trying to remember long-forgotten steps--twinkles and grapevines and promenades--I was pretty well done in.  It had been a couple of decades since I'd last put on my suede-soled shoes and fox trotted or jitterbugged, and I am not the dancer I once was.  But it's good to be a dancer again.

Last Friday at Wake Robin we inaugurated what we hope will be a long string of ballroom dances.  There were round tables with white cloths, a sizable wood floor, and music by Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.  About twenty of us showed up--more women than men, as is always the case where moving to music is expected.  For some, those big band sounds were the music that their parents danced and fell in love to.  For others, it was the music of their high school days. 

If a couple of years ago you had shown me a video of last Friday's scene, with me in it, I would have been incredulous.  Possibly dismayed.  Even frightened.  What, me, in a retirement community, in the company of people some of whom are less than fleet of foot? 

Like many Americans, I had bought into the superstition that old age is somehow contagious, and that the only way to keep ourselves young is to pretend that we will go on as we are forever.  How ignorant I was of the many meanings and faces of aging, of its relative and unpredictable nature, of its inevitability and its gifts.

About Friday night, you really had to be there.  There were ardent jitterbuggers, serene waltzers.  There were women dancing with women, and people dancing with people who were using walkers and canes.  At one point I asked a white-haired man who had just finished doing a competent waltz to dance with me.

"I would like to very much,"  he said.  "But I'm tired.  It happens when you're ninety-eight."  So we sat together and watched the dancers.

I've heard that dancing activates the neurons in the pleasure centers of the brain, and that watching people dance has the same effect.  Whether on the floor or off it, pleasure neurons were firing overtime at Wake Robin Friday night.

After an hour or so of steady dancing, we'd all had enough.  As my husband, who was in charge of the tech end of things, turned off various switches and I went to fetch our coats prior to stepping out into yet another sub-zero gale, I smiled at the various things the dancers had left behind--a single  glove, a bottle of red wine, a woolly scarf.  The lost-and-found department at Wake Robin does a brisk business.

It wasn't until we got back to the cottage that I realized I'd left my water bottle behind.

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.