The Election Nobody Votes In

Hope you vote. I do, every time, even on the upcoming Tuesday, April 6, when I know hardly anyone will vote. Worse than an August election. Just checked the county-wide ballot online. The only candidates on the ballot are seven people running for the school board. No political affiliations are given. Six are female. Four of them, in their professional "candidate" photographs, have dyed blond hair.

 

Nothing against it, except that if you are the sort who conforms to what every other under-60 white woman in the suburbs and exurbs and countryside is doing by bottle-blonding your hair like a TV personality, even if it looks nice I don't want to vote for you.

 

I carefully read all the candidates' biographies and statements so that I would be an informed voter. Only two of the candidates had experience on a school board. These same ones wanted what I want from a school-board member: Someone with an educational background and positive plans. 

 

They were the two women on the slate who were not dyed blond. [A rude observation that should go here has been withheld.] Coincidence, I guess.

Restoring A View: Before and After

Behold "before" and "after" pictures of an area of property that allows a view of our shaded double waterfall -- if, and only if, one will cut away a screen of invasive honeysuckle shrubs growing in the half mud-half sand where two nameless streams converge. The site is only yards away from where the confluence quietly empties into LaBarque Creek, beginning its long journey toward the Mississippi River.

How to accomplish this? One shoulders loppers, then crawls, then chop-chop-chops, thinking the labor is really a fool's errand because the honeysuckles will grow back, but a clear view of the double falls (operating best after a rain) is worth conserving. While I was cutting close to the rocks, I was privileged to see the very last of the ice and the first of the fiddlehead ferns. This is one of the lowest spots on the property, a micro-climate, even in hot summer noticeably cooler than anywhere else -- and in spring and fall, has breath that's sweet and positively chilly.

And of course I left standing the native Missouri trees.

I could go back and do a bit more, but I've adopted a philosophy that many male types I know practice with insouciance: 80 percent is honorable; it's good enough.

They Can, I Can't.

Last week 0 degrees. This week 70. That's better than the other way around.

Anytime I try to do something, I just can't. Have to go inward for a while and fix this. Am glad to have crocuses around for inspiration. They're blooming in the stony little rock-garden microclimate just outside the kitchen door. First seen March 2. Crocus day is always the real first day of spring. They've also already attracted honeybees.

No Such Thing

When will I learn that when an old item crumbles or won't come clean, it's time to buy new? Towels I bleach and bleach until they fray, or rubber gloves with two fingers fused with hardened LocTite are still serviceable, I say, and keep using them. Then the day comes when my eyes are opened, like people's are in the Bible. Today while lying on the folding mat that I loll on daily, indoors and out, a foam mat used for 25, maybe 30 years not only for lolling on rugs and concrete and grass but for exercise and camping and blissing out and suffering agonies (just the normal agonies of any lifetime, no big deal) and napping, I realize that little acid-green crumbs, the mat's core, are coming through the pink, and they're not bugs.

The thing has worn out.

 

I use the mat daily, often more than once. In summer it's hosed down, washed with soap and a scrub brush, and dried in the sun. It's thinning out, and the edges curl. I slept on this mat the night I moved into the Divine Cabin, before there was furniture. It was June. Warm breezes wafted through the screens. I was in such ecstasy I thought I might not sleep.

The manufacturer I assumed must be long out of business since their mats last 25 years. So I spent an hour looking at possible substitutes. It is thicker than a yoga mat, and its top is not sticky but sueded. (When I bought it there was no such thing on the market as yoga mats.) Those crash mats covered with vinyl; one can't loll on vinyl. I don't want one I must roll and unroll and tie. One (I guess literally only me -- there is no such thing even on Amazon!) wants a mat one can fling open the selfsame second one is seized by the impulse to loll or do push-ups.

 

Oh hell, I thought. I'll google the brand. Amazing: It's still in business! But they're down to royal-blue mats only.

 

I will take it! This pink one I will repurpose for gardening or seating.

What If I Said Yes?

I let errands pile up until I have four or five, then drive to town to do them, and yesterday, as the snows melted in the February sun, came an impulse to pick up a takeout salad. Oh, man, how I fought with myself, turning in the direction of the place, then turning away, then turning the car around and back because I could make salad at home. I shouldn't spend the money, because when I'm old and shivering I'll wish I'd saved it . . . But gosh, I can't ever treat myself? And the portions are big enough to make two meals . . . I overthought a Chicken Caesar salad. I wanted it all readymade, with potato chips and a cookie. It's been months since I've had a bag of chips or an oversized greasy coffeehouse cookie.

Thus they were made manifest, bagged, and passed to me through an open window and as the day neared noon and 60 degrees -- a full 60 degrees warmer than the previous week -- I thought it ideal for the year's first picnic. I added a plate of sliced apple and a beer. (Beer: It's not just for breakfast anymore!) My in-laws always know when they visit to bring a case of Wisconsin beer, and because they visit twice a year at most and less so this year, I hoard my beers for special occasions, like the first day of 2021 warm enough for porch dining.

Salud! Then I had a nap.

Preparing for Polar Air

In a log cabin the logs get chilled all through in deep winter and then radiate cold -- indoors. That's my least favorite part of living here. Then I use my extreme-temp strategies. There's no gym, church, coffeehouse, library, club meeting or anywhere to escape to this year, so:

 

• Wear over-the-knee wool socks and long underwear under fleece-lined sweats, and maybe leg warmers and headgear. Indoors. I do mean it.
• On the weekend, place the closed car or other vehicle in the sun (if there's sun). Let the sun heat it up real good. Go nap in it. Warms your bones.
  
  
• Eat higher-calorie food to sustain body weight. It is not healthy to "get thin" because of cold temperatures.
  
• Curtain or shade all windows, or tablecloth your window, as I did this morning. If possible, tape the curtain's edges to the walls. Science says a curtained window loses 25 to 35 percent less heat. 
• Take vitamins and eat citrus daily. I like water with lemon. Here are lovely honeybells (cross between grapefruit and tangerine. Their skins "unzip" very neatly).
• Make and consume soups and herbal teas and lots of water. That sounds counter-intuitive. It isn't. Single-digit temps and indoor heating bring very dry air, dry air means dry and vulnerable membranes. Intersperse intake of caffeine drinks or alcohol with glasses of water.
  
• Set and patrol mousetraps because furry company is likely to creep in seeking shelter.
• For the duration, forget economizing. Use all resources.
  
• Leave a stream of water running in the slop sink so the pipes won't freeze.
• Exercise will warm cold extremities.
• Find an active, distracting household task: Ironing, long recipes, repairs and alterations, dusting, cleaning the oven or the ceiling fan blades, shoe and boot care, and so on.
• Don't complain or call people to complain that you need spring or summer. Move to Florida if Missouri's too much of a challenge for you.
  

Still Life

This rare (of course!) neurological thing lets me walk and sit just fine but my legs tremor when standing and they demand I lean on something or sit down. At last I know why hour-long exercise classes wore me out, why I leaned on walls at parties. Mom had a more common and disabling tremor; fortunately she didn't live to see mine. I can stand for a while, more with a cane, but then the legs tremble and I widen my stance (this is called "the Frankenstance"), and widen and widen until I either have to start walking or sit down. I carry the cane to show folks I'm not drunk. It does not hurt, nor is it fatal. Neurologist (my first ever! He's really nice!) can only give stupefying anti-seizure drugs. There is almost no research because no public figure has anything resembling this except Germany's former chancellor Angela Merkel.

Well, I never wanted to stand in lines anyway. So I carry a collapsible stool or wheel a handsome, top-of-the-line  folding rollator (a rolling walker with built-in seat) that I have named The Bolt, or carry a featherweight aluminum folding chair I took fishing. On hikes and mushroom hunts I can sit and rest and then keep going. It was news to me, but the act of standing takes big bandwidth in the brain, and one tires easily.

There are some benefits. People are helpful and kind. If I must seat myself at the hardware store while discussing what wrench I need, the clerk will squat so we're face to face. When I unfold the portable stool in the checkout lane people ask why didn't they think of that, or where did I get it because they need one too, and they tell me why. And in the woods today while sitting for a minute I saw a perfect little still life of oak leaves and the side of the acorn cap that looks like the iris of an eye, and one tiny hopeful green February shoot.

Another doctor prescribed physical therapy, and the exercises increased my strength, balance, and standing time. Exercise holds this thing at bay. If it thinks I am an easy mark, it's mistaken.