This was a magnificent full double arc across the whole eastern sky yesterday evening, and an equally beautiful western sky, after all the rain. Photos don’t do it justice, but I haven’t even bothered to edit.  It was the most amazing sight.

I’m having another one of those off-days, when I can’t think of a topic.  I know, me, the rant-queen, with nothing to say!  It’s freezing inside, and pouring outside, and I’m still counting down to actual spring when I can go out and plant all my seeds and seedlings.  I hate being patient!!  Do they even have spring here in Ohio?

When I was working in the horticulture industry, I used to bemoan the irony of working so hard outside to serve other people’s gardening needs, that I was too overworked and tired to watch spring slowly emerge, or work on my own garden at the end of a long day.  I longed for a time I thought would never come, when I could work less and enjoy nature more.  Well here I am!  Bored!!

I’m not really complaining.  It’s a luxury to have a roof that I can actually stay home under, wake up whenever, not have other people’s rodeos and train wrecks to manage, and get to experience some downtime before I’m too senile and decrepit to enjoy it.  Not many people get to have that.

It’s challenging, though, to allow myself to be okay with that much unstructured, unproductive time.  It feels somehow like it’s undeserved laziness or cheating, while others work hard to survive, raise kids, and make some kind of difference while they can.  I’m sure that other shoe’s gonna drop, and I’ll pay the price of getting away with murder!  Probably just my neurotic upbringing, what do you think?

Ironically, the circumstances that cut me off from my livelihood and former life, eventually led me onto a whole new path and chance to start over.  Not that I recommend the means it took to get here, but I never would have experienced some of the unexpected detours and revelations it brought about.  I probably would have stayed in my rut until I was exhausted, run out of options, and fizzled out.

Thus, I’m poor but privileged at the same time.  It’s a paradox!  I live from day to day with my friend, weathering catastrophes and setbacks, but spring has to come, right?  Or if not spring, then summer, for @#$! sake!  It’s hard to predict, these days.  But rest assured, whole entire days, of me not droning on while stuck inside, are certainly in your future.  As certain as–the weather.

I don’t keep a dream journal, but if I did, it would read like a dark, demented, surreal Hieronymus Bosch-scape.  Most of my dreams are horrific nightmares, but just to be different, last night I had one that was actually pretty cool.  (You had to have been there.)

Women were transitioning into Cat-Women.  And I don’t mean actual cats, or were-cats, or superheroes.  They were transforming mentally and emotionally into feline beings.  They still looked human, but had the mind and instincts of cats.  Their moves and reflexes were sensual.  Think ancient Egyptian cat goddess combining enhanced intelligence with wild animal instincts.  Think Queen of the Damned, only catlike, not vampire.  An entity totally changed, no longer human except in appearance.

In my dream, one cat woman had already completely crossed over, and was reveling in her newfound heightened senses.  There was music playing, and she found she could dance more catlike than human.  The other was still in transition, in physical and emotional distress, to the point of bleeding.  There was an animal attraction between them.  They were drawn to each other in a very primal, but not bestial, way.  It was more of a fierce protective, empathetic relationship.  It was as if humans no longer existed for them, in their new powerful world.  It was such a fascinating dream that I recalled it vividly.

Disclaimer:  This dream has nothing to do with real life!  Don’t even go there!  It’s just my demented brain on steroids.  It’s why I generally don’t share my dreams.  Too weird.  It would make a pretty cool, not very original fantasy novel, if I could write.  Lesbian CatWomen Go Medieval, or some such thing.  It’s probably been done, though.  I can’t be the only sick mind.  This is why sleeping is overrated.

E has definitely established herself as the bread maven of the family.  We think it must be some primal ancestral spirit-thing!  She just gets it in her head to try some ethnic bread she’s never even heard of before, and gets it right the first time.  I mean nails it.  And not just simple recipes that anyone could do, but challenging traditional recipes that people grow up learning, like challah, native American fry bread (she does have some vague childhood memories of that, but not details), and today’s marvel—Indian puris.  And without the specialized tools or ingredients, she fakes it.  She didn’t have atta, so just used regular whole wheat flour, which she could tell made a difference in the texture.  It’s like she has a bread sixth sense, for someone who grew up not only without recipes or exposure to cooking, but without food.  Pretty impressive for a first try.  (It tastes good, too.)  Here’s some evidence:

Literally, chilling—it’s freezing out, with icy stuff coming down, but inside we’re warm and cooking.  Today I made our first homegrown mixed micro-greens and cilantro salad of the season.  I added tomatoes, toasty chickpeas, and onions, middle-eastern style.  I also made herby dijon-wine Mediterranean turkey, and roasted potatoes, Cajun-spiced.  Of course E’s famous home-baked challah.  And for dessert,  middle-eastern-style tapioca custard with coconut, sultanas, cashews, almond, cardamon, rosewater, and honey.   I know, weird and eclectic, like me.  L’chaim!

Appearances can be deceptive.  We try to keep a cheery face on a very trying situation, try to find normalcy in a surreal place.

E continues to encounter extreme setbacks and challenges, due to being “different”, such as still not receiving her birth certificate with the legal name/gender change, or her tax return with the much-needed refunds that she’s entitled to.  No doubt the sludge that is the Ohio government bureaucracy was thrown into confusion by the process, and won’t make it easy to just become a normal person moving forward.  Then there’s the health insurance from hell that will no longer cover routine medical expenses, though they certainly make her pay for it, and won’t release her from the contract.  And those are just some of the highlights of being in a marginalized fraction of a percent of a shunned community in this backward state.  That on top of still grieving for all the people and life that she was forced to lose.

But I’m not here to whine and feel sorry for ourselves.  We make the best of a bad situation.  We take each day as it comes, and work through the challenges together.  We continue to hope and plan for a modest future away from here, from all its traumatic reminders that she’s not welcome or acceptable.  We witness the political climate around us becoming even more bigoted and non-inclusive, but we hold onto the hope of just finding a quiet corner out of the limelight from which to start over, near people we love who get it.  We look forward to a future cross-country hippie adventure wherein E finally gets to discover other places not Ohio.  We try not to be defeated or stop dreaming.

So that’s our positive spin on a negative world.  It’s not very ambitious, but it’s what we’ve got.

“Spring” being a loose interpretation of this cold, windy day, and “determined” being likewise a loosely defined word involving me cracking the whip, we pressed on down and up all the stone steps of Glen Helen.  It was so cold, all the wildflowers were closed and cowering, although a few brave souls were open.  A huge blue heron was just standing around in the creek, not exactly basking, probably half-frozen, but photogenic nonetheless.  If you look closely at the creek photo, you’ll spot him (sorry, no zoom lens).  A few hardy, friendly fellow hikers, mostly old hippies of the area, stopped to talk nature and reminisce about back in the day.  I was excited to recognize many early spring native wildflowers I’ve been studying up on.  (My new Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide from GH gift shop will help with that.)  The falls and yellow springs were really gushing ice-water.

We survived our chilly adventure, and headed over to Yellow Springs to do a little hippie shopping, and eventually adjourned to our HQ, the Tavern, where I had a Warped Wing (Dayton) Corliss Cali Common (nice, with a lovely dark amber color) and for dessert a pleasant dry blackberry pear cider, which conjured up a shady rocking chair porch on a southern summer day (which this definitely wasn’t).  And there you have a typical day in the life of poor retirees making the most of our temporary detainment in Ohio.

On the way back from a medical consultation (for E) near Columbus, we stopped in the quaint town of Dublin, and found Brazenhead Irish Pub.  It was a beautiful old building (once a farmhouse) from the 1800s, with soaring rafters and a dark wood bar.  I drank a dark Smithwick’s, and a shot of Jameson, along with my fish and chips.  It was decorated with Irish everything.  It was really nice to find a place like this, not just some chain dive, to hang out in.  Check out these photos.

It was a lovely spring day in April, with temps in the chilly 40s dipping to the freezing 20s overnight.  Gale force winds were blowing sheets of snow horizontally across the green landscape.  I had been planning to direct-sow more seeds out in the raised beds, but screw that.  The power kept flickering off and on all evening.  Maybe Mother Nature woke up and realized she had missed her April Fools’ cue, and got busy fixing that.  We awoke to snow-covered roofs and white-tipped grass.

My Ohio friend assures me that their weather is unique for its schizophrenic behavior, but I’ve lived in many states that share that claim to fame, especially in these days of climate change.  The thing that’s special about Ohio is that you often get sudden tornadoes featured in the mix, a uniqueness I could do without.  I’ll never get used to staring nervously at dark, ominous skies, waiting to be exported to Kansas or Oz, or some even more hellish place.

Well, that’s your weather report.  It doesn’t take a Weatherman etc…  I find it somehow significant that our “way station” coincidentally turns out to be in the same weather and climate band that seems to affect our future homeland of E. Tennessee.  The planting zones are slightly different, although our frost-free date is one month earlier than in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, so oddly a lot more like the south.

(They have the same rednecks and religious bigots here, too; I call it “the South of the North”,  but that’s a whole ‘nuther story, y’all.)  It’s a completely different world than the one I’m used to, in every way.  Yet it turns out to be like a transitional hardening-off place, to better acclimate to our eventual destination, both literally and metaphorically.  Who knew.  Couldn’t have planned it better if I tried.

Speaking of weather is a good indication I have nothing more scintillating to talk about.  But rest assured I will remedy that.  Most of the time I have a bad case of writer’s block, but invariably something jumps out at me, and I’m off again!  I’m finding, like any new habit, once you’re over the initial hurdles and laziness, resistance is futile [RIF]. You will be Assimilated.  It’s almost like a new drug, only more productive, or at least harmless.  You may find it boring as hell, but it keeps me occupied and less obnoxious, trust me.

I’m borrowing and reprinting this letter, because it spoke to me.  Read on for my personal takeaway.

*****

“Elizabeth GilbertLike Page
29 March at 10:33 ·

IF YOU’RE NOT DEAD YET, YOU’RE NOT DONE YET.
Dear Ones –

This is a line my (73 year-old) mother said to me the other day, while she was issuing a gentle warning not to fall into the trap of letting your life get smaller as you get older.

She was talking about how frustrating she finds it that — somewhere around the age of 50 or 60 — she watched as so many of her peers stopped making goals and long-term plans for adventure and exploration in their lives. Instead, they began shutting down, and making their lives smaller, and their minds smaller, too. She got so weary of listening to them making self-deprecating jokes about how old they were, and how much their bodies hurt, and how bad their hearing and eyesight was getting… She felt they had surrendered to age far, far, far too soon. My mom said, “Nothing is more frustrating to me than listening to people who are still vital saying, ‘Well, at our age, you have to be careful…'”

No. She begs to differ. As you get older, there is no more time to be careful, and no more REASON to be careful — at least as my mom sees it. Instead, this is time to seize as much life and joy and adventure and learning and novelty as you possibly can. As my mom said, “I hate seeing people slide themselves into the grave far before their time. Death will come when it comes — but it’s crazy to sit around waiting for it. If you’re not dead yet, you’re not done yet.”

My mom thinks that everyone should have a five-year plan for their lives, and also a ten-year plan, and a twenty-year plan — and that every few years you have to revisit your plans to see if your goals and aspirations have changed…and that you should never stop making these plans, even as you age. (Especially as you age!) She has shared with me the travel she wants to do in the next 20 years, and work she wants to finish, the projects she wants to begin, the cultures she wants to explore, the people she wants to enjoy, her fitness goals…

It’s inspiring.

I have heard people speak of their lives as if they were finished at 30, done at 40, washed up at 50, too late to start over at 60, no more chances at 70…

But are you still here?

Then you aren’t done yet.

Don’t make your life smaller as the years pass. If it’s time to start over, then it’s time to start over. If you aren’t where you planned to be, then it’s time to make a new plan.

Today, I ask you all to share the most inspiring stories you know (from your own life, or the lives of others) about people who refused to be done yet, because they aren’t dead yet.

Rise up, everyone, and keep rising.

We are still here. There is much to be done and enjoyed.

Let’s go.

ONWARD,
LG”

*****

I’ll just say:  Guilty as charged, and I wholeheartedly agree, but it’s good to be reminded sometimes.

It’s so easy to get insecure and just give up and die inside.  Everyone and thing around you and inside of you tells you you’re done, you’re no longer relevant, viable, or even visible.  Your peers are all shriveled up and boring and petty, or they’re in denial, trying desperately to stay youngish looking.  Their lives are behind them, and they’re just waiting to die.

I hate and resist becoming like that, but it’s insidious.  I have to fight the tendency to just give in, resign myself to having had my chance to make a difference and failed, and time is running out.  That’s the point—all the more reason to keep fighting and taking on the life that’s left, however long or short it may be.  If I give up, I may as well be dead already.

We have so much learning yet to do, so many possible adventures and challenges ahead of us, and no time to lose.  There’s lots of room to become better people, more compassionate, more open to new experiences and paths to explore.  There are people in our lives, present and future, who need us to become better role models and allies.  We’ve made our terrible mistakes, but it’s not over yet.  We are never done, until we decide to die inside.

I’m going to keep trying, and flying, if it kills me!