full fathom five

Garden, 2009

Maine gardens peak early, especially this year when we've had so much rain the last two weeks that our lilac, the Korean Miss Kim (to right of door) has just raised her sagging branches enough for this picture.  We've had a welcome day of sun.  Right under Miss Kim is a Nelly Moser clematis, also low-lying after the rains, and clematis President is on opposite side of the trellis-arch.  And in foreground is the foliage garden, leavened with a Russell lupine in front, a volunteer.

 

Below, here's a closer look at our surprise candelabra, doubly amazing because lupine thrive in ditches alongside roadways in Maine, but have always died in my garden.  So I thought they didn't like rich soil.  But here comes this one out of nowhere, blooming to bust in the most prominent place in the garden.

Clematis Nelly Moser is down-playing her beauty by staying near the granite steps rather than twining up the trellis.  The rain has kept her down as well.  (It's the wettest June on record in our state). 

The clematis President is an unearthly blue, so pure it seems to sing.  It's twined up a bit higher on the trellis, but my dream of having them meet overhead hasn't come to pass.  Should I take the trellis down and replace with two lower ones, or should I replace the clematis with a higher-climber, like the Trumpet Vine?

Diet vs. Lifestyle

Recently my husband was diagnosed with Adult Onset Diabetes.  He has a genetic proclivity in his family, but I suspect that his being overweight is what pushed him over the top.  About five years ago, his doctor had warned that he was pre-diabetic, and could either take drugs to ward it off, or lose weight.  Win chose to go on a diet, lost 57 pounds, and was no longer at risk.  We were very proud of ourselves, and vowed to keep up our habit of portion-control at meals and fast-walking for four miles each morning.

    But Win then got arthritis in a hip, and it became too painful for him to keep up the fast-walks each morning.  He gradually started putting on weight, and I did too as our exercise regime and diet eroded.  

    We recently found swimming as an aerobic exercise to match our former walks, and this plus a lifestyle change around food has us headed once more in the right direction.  This is the first time we've been faced with having to change our eating habits for the rest of our lives, so we've been careful to call it a lifestyle change rather than the more transient "diet."  And this seems to make all the difference.  

    Since March 1st, over 3 and a half months, Win's lost 20 pounds, and I've lost 12 and 1/2.  This isn't as fast a drop as the more restrictive "diet" would be, but the more restrictive regime would have us feeling deprived and scheming to reward ourselves for every few lost pounds.  It would have us yearning for off-limit foods, looking for situations when having a treat doesn't count.  I know, I've been there.  I've taken the ferry to a local island to buy a $5.00 Ben & Jerry's turtle sundae, which I then have to walk off while I'm waiting for the return ferry.  This was just one of my time-consuming schemes to make the empty calories not seem to count in my years of dieting.  And those years make up most of my adult life.  

     The diets never work.  I'll get to my goal weight, then heave a subconscious sigh of relief and gradually drift back to my old ways of unlimited sugar, salt, fat, alcohol, and caffeine.  All having me quickly back up to my usual 20 pounds over goal-weight, with no lasting change.  

     But thinking of food changes as permanent takes all this yoyoing between deprivation and reward out of the equation.  It's amazing what your mind can't do when you simply say, "It's for a lifetime; otherwise, we'll be hobbling around on a bunch of medications, or worse."   Without a focus on food, scheming or yearning for restricted foods or constantly feeling deprived, your mind moves on to other things.  Such as the silky feel of the water when you're swimming laps; the comforting tingle of a hot shower when your laps are done for the day; the warm drive home to a good book with the heady scent of lilacs wafting in the window.  It's amazing what other senses the mind throws up as reward when the focus is off food.

     So that's what I've learned about diets; they fixate your mind on food and dwarf other sensual rewards.  And you don't realize how they do this until you can get your mind off food for days at a time.  My husband and I don't plan meals any more.  We come home from work and forage in the refrigerator for fresh fruits and vegetables for dinner.  When this is all we keep, we don't have to make menus to make sure we avoid fats, sugar, etc.  We've tried to keep the focus positive, on fresh fruits and vegetables, chicken and fish, that we're eating instead of the red meats, butter, and breadstuffs that we're avoiding.  So we're shopping more at farmstands for things in season, like fresh strawberries and salad greens.  Sometimes we just come home and have a dinner of fresh string beans with a pat of butter and a cup of yogurt or some scrambled eggs for protein. 

     It's taken me till 65 to learn this.  Sure, I've read it all before.  But I've never HAD to try it, never been threatened by a major health crossroads like this one.  And as long as we keep our focus on the long-haul - the rest of our lives - the pounds melting off seem incidental.  They are not a trigger for reward: "Oh, now I can haev some Ben & Jerry's."   They are just part of a lifetime practice, par for the course.  And I want to keep it that way.      

"Window," by Nancy Jensen

Nancy Jensen's debut collection "Window" compels you to stay with the author from start to finish. This is a unique hybrid book of five short stories and five essays.  I picked up the book intending to read only one piece (I started with the essays) at a sitting, and was chagrined to find I'd read the whole book in an afternoon and the next morning. (Chagrined because I felt like a kid who snuck her family's entire quart of ice-cream!) I'd tried to get up and do other things, but found myself ruminating on the pieces as I gardened or vacuumed, wondering how the author tied so many disparate points together into satisfying and intriguing resolutions. Jensen seems at home with conflict, and is not afraid to face struggles within herself that compel the reader to take similar stock. Conflicts define and lay bare the souls of Jensen's characters, like the History professor who's ashamed of his Appalachian roots, so advises students to look forward, not back. The student protagonist recognizes him as a fool, because in denying his personal history, the professor gives the lie to his own chosen field.

 
Such charletons are laid bare in this book, like the art professor who's an armchair liberal, yet traffics in the vast power differential between himself and his student lovers and third-world servants. Yet in the midst of these highly flawed characters, the author never lets herself off, is hardest on herself when examining her own biases and evasions. This is an intriguing search and the author makes some stunning discoveries. I highly recommend this unique and compelling collection. 

Swimming II

During all the years I taught Creative Writing, there were always students who questioned my advice to write from their own experience because, they said, their lives were too boring to write about.  I'd tell them that a good writer can make anything - even pocket-lint - interesting.  Well, here goes.  I'm going to practice what I preached by telling you about bathing-cap fabric and bathing-suit elastic.  But first, some background (ahhh, a reprieve!).  

    My husband and I were at the dog-park a few weeks ago, and as we walked with the human pack following the dog-pack, we found ourselves drifting into gender groups.  A man had been talking about changing his doorknob and not being able to find the right screws, so we women fell back as the men gravitated to him, giving him advice.  We commented on the chains of events these projects inevitably spawn to eat up your weekend.  I told them about how my husband's preference for motors in any yardwork we do, can be a super time-waster - how we'll be picking up brush and walking it to the brush pile, and Win will say, "Wait, I'll get the tractor and trailer to haul it," and by the time he drives into town to fill the fuel can to gas up the tractor and/or buy new spark-plugs and/or oil the trailer-hitch, I've already finished the brush-hauling by hand.  The other women added examples that got us on the subject of the latest gadgets, how husbands like experimenting with them while we just want to get the job done as simply as possible.  I mentioned how I wouldn't even try out the bathing-suit drying machine in the locker rooms of the YMCA where my husband and I now swim.  Win had marvelled at it and told me to try it, but I told the women that I didn't want to create another new habit that stretched our long carbon footprint even more by using a ton of heat.  I said I was fine wrapping my wet bathing suit in a towel and taking it home to hang on the clothesline.  One of the women corrected me, saying the machine used no heat, only centrifugal force.  "It just squeezes the water out of the suit," she said.  "I love that machine," and then she went on to tell me that as a single mom with four kids, she wasn't going to let anyone make her feel guilty about using time-saving devices like clothes driers, hair driers, etc., even if they were energy hogs.  I apologized and said I was just talking about us, Win and me, and hadn't meant to preach, and we proceeded amiably from there.

   But learning that the bathing-suit squeezer didn't use heat intrigued me, so I tried it out.  And got quickly addicted.  It added to the luxurious ritual of reward for a vigorous workout to put my suit into the chest-high metal box, straining my biceps further to push my palm down hard on the lid of the centerfuge and squeeze water out onto the floor in a satisfying, splashy spill.  Then wonderful to walk out of the Y with everything dry and light, to get in the car and drape the nearly-dry suit over the passenger seat, my towel over the seat-back, and drive home luxuriating in the cozy, sun-heated interior.   

   Another pleasure of this new regime is getting tips from other swimmers, including blog commenters.  One of them mentioned in an e-mail that she wears a bathing cap to keep water out of her ears.  So I went shopping for a bathing cap, and Wow! have things changed in the 50 or so years since I've worn one.  Unlike the old rubber ones with a strap under your chin, the new ones are all strapless, and only one of the four kinds is waterproof.   The others have to be sprayed with waterproofing if you want to keep water out.  And the only waterproof one - the latex model - tells you on the directions that you must "wet hair before putting on."  So none of them keep your hair dry, which seemed to be the sole point of the ones I grew up with. 

  When I asked the clerks in the sports store which kind they'd recommend to best keep water out of the ears, they just shrugged.  So I picked the cheapest one, the latex at $2.99.  The others: silicone, lycra, and spandex models were all $9.99.  But when I took the el-cheapo one up to the counter, the cashier warned me about "latex allergies."  I asked if that was something I could catch myself, or does it spread through the water to other swimmers?  She said she didn't know, but that some pools ban latex caps.  

So I went and put it back and said I'd have to go to my pool to get their recommendation, that I'd had no idea that bathing caps were so complex.  It's lucky I did, because at the Y, they sold bathing caps and earplugs, and knew what they were doing.  The swimming director told me that the only way to keep water out of your ears is to put in earplugs, then wear a bathing cap to hold them in place.  So I bought a lycra cap and wax earplugs, all cheaper than at the sports store. 

    Two things have happened since I got the cap; 1. my bathing suit came out of the centrifuge with all these little white bits of lint in splotch-like shapes on the chest and back of my suit.  I thought it was from the white-painted logo on the cap, which I'd thrown into the machine with my suit.  And 2. I carry my head down in the water with my feet coming above the surface to kick, like I'm tilted toward my head as I swim.  I went and asked a life-guard about both these conditions, and she said my bathing suit elastic has rotted because the centrifuge machine is very hard on suits, that she always wraps hers in a towel and takes it home to line-dry; and that now with a cap, I'm no longer carrying my head high to keep the hair out of my face.  She'll help me with the latter, but now I guess I've got an excuse to look for new bathing suits.

Can anyone tell me how to shop for ones that have long-lived elastic?  I'll go back to wringing out my wet suit by hand (even more work for the biceps), and never use the centrifuge again, but I'd like to start out with something that will give me a couple of years of wear (given suit prices).  Is this a realistic goal?  And - is anyone still reading?

             

Swimming

My husband has arthritis in his hip, so we've had to cut way down on our early morning fast-walking, which was our primary form of aerobic exercise.  We've replaced this with swimming at the local YMCA, doing an hour's laps three days a week.  So far, probably because it's still new, it's been wonderful, filling me with a well-earned tired feeling throughout my body afterwards, as if I've given every muscle a good workout.  

At first, I had the usual self-consciousness at changing in a locker room, walking into the very public pool area under glaring lights in a bathing suit, wearing mantis-like googles, etc.  And then, as I swam, I was ashamed of how slow I was, how everyone - even the kids who were just learning to swim with kick-boards - was passing me.  But this soon gave way to the demands of the moment, as I discovered that if I didn't concentrate on what number lap I was on as I was swimming, thinking it like a mantra at every few strokes, I'd forget how many I'd done and have no measure of progress to keep me going.  Practice at anything, at least for me, is supported by a sense of progress, and I know so little about swimming, that all I had at the start was the goal of trying to extend the number of laps each time I swam.  My husband and I started at 10, and we're now up to 31.  We write them down (with pride!) on our calendar each evening.

And now I'm happy to say I'm no longer self-conscious.  There's too much else to think about, namely technique.  Not wanting to shell out money for lessons, I'm trying to pick up tips watching the fast swimmers all around me;  I know one of the obvious things they're doing to boost their speed is somersault-turns at the walls.  That's low on my list of priorities, because it'll require me to spend extra time beyond my allotted workout hour to practice flipping at the wall into a tight, quick underwater sumersault.  For now, I'm trying to pick up small techniques that I can incorporate immediately into the laps. 

One of these is to change my breathing habits from turning my head to catch a breath every time I raise my right arm to do a crawl-stroke, to not taking a breath till the third stroke.  It's gratifying to find that I'm quickly gaining lung-capacity this way.  When I started, I could only do two sets of three-stroke breaths, then I'd return to my old habit of gasping air every righthanded stroke.  But now I can go a whole lap on three-stroke breathing.  The next challenge will be to learn how to alternate sides I take breaths on.  My old habit is to turn my head only to the right to breathe.  

And I've learned to angle my hands downward as they enter the water, fingers first.  So that the entire time they're in the water, they're pushing water backwards.  Before, I was bringing my hand down flat onto the water and making wasted effort to push it down without getting any propulsion out of it.  Angling my hands has shaved 10 minutes off the time it takes me to do 31 laps.  

Once I get these new techniques cemented into habits, I'll use this extra 10 minutes to increase the number of laps I do.  But till then - and it takes slow, steady practice to break old habits - I'll take my reward in the many luxurious sensations of swimming: the silky feel of the water, the extra rythmic power when you keep your legs underwater to kick, the cozy warmth of an oversize towel after the post-swim shower, the slickness of body-lotion rubbed into tired legs and forearms, and finally, the refreshing feel of clean, dry clothes.  This workout has so much going for it, an ironic vein of gold in my husband's arthritis.             

Coming Home III

We spent the last two weeks in February on a whirlwind trip to Florida to break up the winter.  We could only afford two weeks away from work, so we had to get down and back fast - five days' total - to optimize time basking in the sun.  We had to keep expenses down, so we drove our hybrid Honda, at 44 mpg, and stayed with friends when we could.  We spent the bulk of our time at friends' in Bonita Springs, just below Naples. There, we swam in the neighborhood pool, biked around the neighborhood, went to the local farmer's market for flowers and oranges, walked on the beach, and gloried in the sun and freedom from parkas, mittens, and face-masks when we walked outside.  Our friends' condo backed up on a golf-course which has been abandoned, so there were ibises, mockingbirds, buzzards, and other birds foraging in the dried brown grass.

     And on our seven-hour/day full-bore drives down and back, we had audio books to eat up the miles.  On route 95, 72 miles would woosh by in three or four good chapters.  I heartily recommend audio books - except remember to take them with you in a tote bag whenever you leave the car in warm weather for extended periods of time.  If they're left in sun in a hot car, their plastic cases will bubble, earning you a considerable replacement cost when you go to return them.  (They're so expensive, I'm just assuming no one buys them, that we all get them from the library).  

     On this trip we discovered Michael Connelly, a very good detective-series writer, much less formulaic than P.D. James. His protagonists are flawed and gritty, making you root for them because you're intimate with their vulnerabilities.  There's uncertainty whether they'll succeed for the same reason, upping the suspense.  

     We listened to two Connellys: "The Lincoln Lawyer," and "Echo Park."  I'd recommend them in that order.  We listened to a Peter Carey Booker-prize winner, "The Kelly Gang," and turned it off after the first disk.  It was beautifully written, but moved too slow for a road-trip.  We listened to a P.D. James novel: "Unnatural Causes" all the way through, but that was before we discovered Connelly, who blew James out of the water.  James is a good writer but follows a mystery formula, so her world seems narrower than Connelly's.  James has a cozy, limited circle of characters who could have committed the crime; Connelly seems to have all of L.A., or Denver, or whereever his books are set.  This makes his work edgier, more suspenseful.  

     And the last book we listened to was "Death Match," by Lincoln Childs, about a high-end couples matching service.  There was some flawed writing, but the work was well researched in the fields of computer science and psychology, and keeps you turning pages - or, in this case, listening intently for two full days.  

    When we got home, we were disappointed that winter didn't seem to have receded at all.  There was 16 inches of new snow and a three-day power outage.  The power company had restored power to all but our little town on the morning we got home.  Our neighbor had kindly turned on our back-up heat: a small propane stove in the livingroom, the night before to keep our pipes from freezing.  And another neighbor had plowed our drive.  Both of these acts were unbeknownst to us, so we again felt grateful to be in such a small, caring town.   

     It seems we hardly got the power restored when we were woken up by a call from the retirement home where my husband's mother lived in the skilled care unit.  The nurse told us that she had passed away.  She had pneumonia, and was in her late eighties, so it wasn't a shock, but it was eerie to get the call at 2 am, and then to drive over there in the middle of the night.  The fog was thick on the roads because of the high snowbanks on either side releasing moisture that condensed, sending thick white clouds of steam up from the pavement and over our windshield.  It would have been impossible to see deer or other hazards right in front of us.  Luckily, we have deer-whistles on the front of our car, but still we kept to 45 or 50 on the highway.  

    The eerieness of the travelling blind in a white cloud at three in the morning was conducive to reflection, and we talked about Win's mother, the new perspective that we had on her character now that her story is done.  I was glad to note that my husband has her abundant sweetness, a wonderful legacy.  

     My husband had about a day to plan the funeral and write the obituary, and then we were hit by yesterday's storm.  While Win snowblew the drive, I shovelled some of the snow off the deck.  Its accumulation from two storms was three feet deep and four in the corner where the deck meets house.  I was afraid it might collapse.  

     But even with vigorous shovelling, my fingers turned numb in my warmest gloves because of the unrelenting wind.  Fierce winds seem more prevalent this winter than ever before.  They, and the frequent heavy storms, remind me of the predicted effect of global warming: more extremes in the weather.  

     I think it's time for Obama to draw on his large store of political capital to ask this nation to do all it can to reduce its carbon footprint.  I think we're ready to pull together, sacrifice things like unmonitored electricity use, frequent car trips to the store, energy-hogging appliances like clothes dryers and hair dryers, etc.  If we know we're doing it together under systematic leadership and evaluation to effect significant change, I think we could really get behind it and feel good about ourselves.

     Anyway, those are my thoughts on coming home.  It's great to be back, but we're ready for spring.              

The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch

A wonderful book that I finished about a week ago is the above titled novel in Iris Murdoch's large fictional output from the early fifties till the seventies or eighties.  She is an amazing writer, and I'm so happy to find that I have about twenty more novels of hers waiting for me.  I've only read two, "The Sea, the Sea" being the other.  Both these novels are extended studies of unreliable narrators, both middle-aged men who fall in love obsessively, and late in life.  Neither knows his love-object at all.  The narrator of "The Sea, the Sea," decides that the little girl he grew up with is really the love of his life; he looks her up and finds she's been happily married to the same man for almost forty years, and is now an overweight, gray-haired grandmother.   The narrator of "The Black Prince" is a pudgy middle-aged man who falls suddenly and irrevokably in love with his best friend's daughter, who's almost forty years younger than him.  

     Like the grandmother of the first book, this young woman is nothing special.  This fact lends credence to the obsessive quality of these narrator's loves; they are almost totally one-sided.  The grandmother doesn't return the narrator's love; in fact, she withdraws from him and wants to avoid him, thinking him predatory and dangerous.  The same is true of the young girl in "The Black Prince."  Both women feel that they are in danger of being suffocated, having their identities obliterated, by these men with their all-encompassing obsessions.  Both women are spirited away by the narrators to lonely cottages by the sea and end up escaping, running back home to their families. 

     Murdoch captivates us through both novels by the puzzle of how much we can believe these narrators.  Both books keep us turning pages to solve the mystery of who these men are, and how their obsessions will end?  Both narrators could either be saints or monsters; they have moments when they personify both.  

     Murdock intensifies the question of how reliable is the narrator in the second book, the Black Prince, by first letting Bradley Pearson (BP) tell his own story, giving us his autobiography, and how his life suddenly changed by falling in love.  And then we hear from the characters around him: his family and friends.  They narrate their own opinions about him after he's been imprisoned, and we don't know whether their judgments of him as a monster are because he lied to us in his own narrative, or because he was formally judged as a criminal by a judge.  If we believe BP's family and friends, then he's a criminal, deserving of his life-sentence.  If, on the other hand, we believe BP, as I tended to do, then there's another criminal /monster in our midst, and BP is truly a saint because he has forgiven this person for framing him.  

      Read these amazing mysteries.  They will keep you guessing till the last page, and their settings are seductive and inspiring.  Despite the less than savory characters, you want to be there.         

Wally Lamb's "I Know This Much is True"

This novel, Lamb's second, came out ten years ago, and I never got around to reading it.  But over Christmas, I spied it in a friend's bookshelf and borrowed it.  I had liked Lamb's first book, "She's Come Undone," because of his emphasis on psychological growth in his characters. 

This second novel covers the same territory, showing the main character's growth from childhood to middle-age, embodying the uplifting message that humans are capable of substantial changes in attitude at any age.  This novel is narrated by Dominick, who has a twin brother, Thomas.  Dominick's dominant emotion is anger, and his brother's is sweetness.  So Dominick is aligned with his stepfather, "the last of the genuine tough guys," who fought in both WWII and Korea, and thinks all generations since his are full of spoiled weaklings.  He regularly terrorizes his wife and kids, is a petty tyrant that they all tiptoe around.  But he's easier on Dominick, because D. imitates his toughness, his anger.  And so he reinforces the behavior.   

Thomas shares his mother's sweetness, and the two have secret tea parties together after the boys come home from school.  They post Dominick by the front window, to warn them when Dad is pulling into the drive.  One evening, Dominick doesn't warn them, Dad finds a tea party in progress, and sweeps all the cups and tea things off the table in a rage, then takes a belt to poor Thomas to "toughen him up."  

Both Dominick and Thomas grow up hating their stepfather, but that doesn't keep Dominick from blindly fashioning himself after him, imitating his angry retorts and bullying ways.  It's not until he grows up and loses his child and is divorced by his wife, that he realizes he's no longer being served by that behavior.  He stumbles into the world of psychiatrists and social-workers because of his brother's late-blooming mental illness, and - in trying to negotiate his brother's care, must tell his own story to his brother's psychiatrist.  She ends up treating him as well, and we learn about how twins depend on each other, compensate for one another, and must eventually forge their own independence.

Dominick is a great narrator, speaking for an entire generation of baby-boomers whose anger at their parents simplistic John Wayne values erupted in the sixties, catalysing them to come up with something more fully human.  Dominick realizes that he's spent untold energy avoiding the kind of sweetness that makes Thomas loveable.  He finds it in himself, and finally lets it out, thereby winning back his estranged wife and eventually forgiving his stepfather.  

For any reader fascinated with family dynamics and psychological growth, this book is un-put-downable.  But be careful; it's thick, weighing in at almost 1000 pages.  And another hesitation I had besides its length is Lamb's titles.  I've had trouble remembering both of them, and I can't seem to even be able to recommend the book to friends without it right there, where I can check the title.  It's a slight nitpick in an amazing work, but it's important.

And now another tidbit for readers.  Yesterday I did a booktalk at a local library, and over the lunch which followed, the library director told me that their circulation figures have sharply risen as the economy has declined.  There's been a surge in demand for fiction, especially.  

I've always heard that movies do well in bad times, because people want escape.  But how wonderful that they're turning now back to books, the source of movies and other genres of entertainment.  Makes one proud to be a reader.       

Homecoming II

Finally, I'm home from my last out-of-state trip to promote my book.  I'd recently gone to Seattle, which is one of the most beautiful, liveable cities I've ever visited.  But it's so nice now to be home for good.

    I've been trying to get my old sleep patterns back; this Fall's travels have had me waking up after only 3-4 hours' sleep a night.  After trying warm milk and honey, camomile tea, melatonin and other over-the-counter sleep-aids, I had to resort to prescription sleeping pills.  They kept me functioning, but they had a side-effect of making me feel like I was coming down with the flu during the day.  That reminded me to pack vitamin C and other supplements which I think kept me from getting the real flu, but now that I'm back home for good, I've jettisoned the sleeping pills to try to get back to my natural sleep cycle.  And finally, this past week everything came together, and now when I first wake up in the morning, it's dreams I remember instead of long bouts of tossing and turning trying to get back to sleep.  This is the first week in months that I catch myself feeling odd moments of bounce, anticipation, during the day.  It's the first time I don't feel like I'm trapped in a kind of half-life, putting things off till I have more energy.   

    Here's how I did it, in case any of you are experiencing the same problem (sleeping the first part of the night, then staying awake from 1 am on).  1. No more than one cup of coffee each morning 2. No alcohol on week nights, 3. An hour's fast-walk each morning (this has cured our dog's itchiness, which just developed this Fall when we had to interrupt our morning walks)  4. Weight-lifting three times a week, and 5. sleeping with the window cracked for fresh air (plugged open with a sock).   

    As with all goals here in middle-age, I don't expect to stick to all five of these rules every single week.  Goals, in this more relaxed time of life, have become something to aspire to, not something to chain myself to.  I'm hoping that one more week of loose adherence to this schedule will cement the sleep pattern I've just now started to enjoy.

   This has been the big homecoming reward, getting back to normal nights' sleep.  But within that, on a smaller return from a visit to the local dogpark the other day, my husband and I found a bluejay lying on its side in front of our garage.  When we tried to set it up on its feet, it flapped a wing but kept wobbling over onto its side.  

    We'd left the garage door open, and I suspect the bird had flown in and couldn't find his way out, and - lured by the light in the windows, beat himself against it to a broken wing.  My husband and I put the bird in a cardboard box and brought it into the cellar so it wouldn't freeze.  Then I dialed the Audubon Society, and - referred to a long list of wildlife vets and bird rehabilitators - I finally found a place within an hour's drive where I could hand the bird off to another driver who would take him to a rehabilitation center called Avian Haven.  This is a network of volunteers who rehabilitate birds and release them back to the wild. Their website has wonderful stories of their work.  They're based in a small rural town two hours' north of us, aptly named Freedom, Maine.  

     There's something poignant about people in this challenging economy and fierce winter climate trying to help birds - for no pay and little recognition.  These people x-rayed our injured jay, didn't find any breaks and thus determined some neurological injury, probably because of flying into one of our windows.  They put him in an incubator and hand-fed him for about five days.  But he got weaker every day and finally died.  On autopsy, they found that he had a skull-fracture.  

      We've put audubon silhouettes of hawks on a number of our house windows, which has cut down such incidents, but now it's time to do it to our garage windows as well.  It's the least we can do, seeing as we've built up the bird-population around our house - and thus their risk of injury - by putting out bird-feeders.  

      This is a part of homecoming as well: small sorrows in the deeper joy of ongoing engagement.  There are always improvements to make, maintenance to make our home more natural, less intrusive and threatening to wildlife.  It's good to be home, to have the energy once more to take on the daily challenges of rural winter.                           

Coming Home

I just got home after two weeks in Tuscon, Indianapolis, and Richmond, Ind. giving book-talks.  When my husband picked me up at the airport in Manchester, N.H. for the two-hour ride back to Maine, I kissed him and then got into the back seat where our dog Cody was standing with his nose pressed against the window and tail wagging.  He'd recognized me.  

When I got into the back seat and took him in my arms, he gave an open-mouthed whine that sounded like human crying.  He stepped across me on the seat and leaned against my chest, pressing me hard into the seat-back as if to say, I'm never letting you go.  While I could hardly breathe, he stood with his head down, nose in my hands, crying and crying.  He stayed like that for about fifty miles, through Exeter, N.H. and on past Portsmouth.   

Once we got on the Maine turnpike, as if feeling that he could relax being closer to home, he finally lay down across my lap, and I stroked him the rest of the way.  It was so good to sink my fingers into his husky-like coat, so thick and warm.  I pulled an occasional tick from around his ears; this is the latest and coldest I've ever seen ticks.  I cracked the window to put the ticks out.

When I began telling my husband about the trip, Cody drew back to lift his eyes to mine.  He seemed to be re-memorizing my face and voice.  I can't remember ever having a dog who looks straight into my eyes as I talk.  This was one of the things we learned to teach our dogs at the obedience classes we took Cody to when we first got him, but I can't believe it really took.  Yes it did, and it's a great way to feel closer to a dog.  When I use words that he recognizes, like "go," "play with the doggies," "food," "treats," "walk," "leash," his pupils widen with lazer-beam attention.  I know it sounds absurd or that my husband's falling down on the job, but it feels great to be so closely listened to.

When we got home, the first thing I noticed when I walked in the door was how warm the house was and how familiar it smelled.  A vague, faintly musty smell, but clearly signalling home.  It was so noticeable and welcoming, that I asked my husband if we could have some friends for dinner in a few nights.  I wanted to enhance the homey smell with a thyme-scented slow-cooked potroast and root vegetables in red wine sauce.

Even though my husband and I were both too tired to clean house, we told our guests to just take us as we were, and when they walked in and ooohed and ahhed over the aroma of pot-roast and apple crisp, shedding their coats in our messy bedroom and coming into our living-room to join us by the fire, I felt my bones go gluey as all the tension of travel and meeting deadlines finally fell away.  I felt profoundly thankful to be home.

And since I've come home, I want to pass on another blessing: Ian McEwan's On Chesill Beach.  This is the perfect novel to read on cold winter nights in front of the fire.