Weekend update

I know it isn't a weekend but we live on island time here which is time for people who wear nightgowns all year and don't look at clocks

Jupiter was given a rabies vaccination and had her temperature taken up her butt (sorry Jupe) her teeth are fine her heart sounds fine New Vet said Jupiter probably caught an upper respiratory  infection at the shelter and it should be gone in  a week and if it isn't bring her back in which is exactly what I told the boy but that nose bleed scared me the vet said she may have broken a blood vessel from sneezing

I am nervous as a mother with a colicky newborn


thank you Darklings who remembered us in your prayers to The Animal Gods

LOVES

Jupiter sneezed out blood yesterday
I think she might have an upper respiratory infection
or something else who knows
taking her to the vet at 3:40 this afternoon

I feel sick too and my palms are sweating from nerves/fear I hope the vet is honest a drive to My Darling Veterinarian is now out of the question so I'm going in blind

say a prayer to The Animal Gods for us if you can and if you can

Love

Sunday edition

I have been sick (again) for a while it feels like forever I have been flat in bed with Jupiter playing around me or sleeping in my armpit or talktalktalk talking she is a very talkative young cat she is no longer sequestered all the time now I take turns letting The Evil Orlando have the run of the house then Jupiter gets the run of the house and Orlando gets sequestered etc. and for a kitty who just got spayed and vaccinated and had a chip implanted and a broken hip then had to live in an animal shelter she is feisty and good-hearted and she adores TEO and has acknowledged TEO's dominance even though Jupiter is twice Orlando's size they have sniffed each other and touched noses but Orlando only has about ten seconds of Jesus love in her heart when it comes to Jupiter but this is easy going and I think in another week they will exist side by side then they will be friends Orlando has always had a companion cat

Jupiter chose my market basket for her kitty bed though I bought her a fluffy kitty bed which she ignores she drinks out of the tub and and and




she's a mouser
yes


when I first had this house appraised I asked the appraiser if there were any rodents in the crawl space under the house and he said rather snootily you realize you're living in the forest right? and I was schooled I have caught two in mouse friendly cages and released them into the woods Jupiter is less kind and much more efficient and I praised her for (oddly to me for a second) howling and stalking the cupboard in my bathroom and then she dispatched mouse with the precision of a Celebrity Chef and that was that

she is friendly and sweet and loves my son and me equally

this morning I was able to eat some yogurt then I went out to the deck in my nightgown armed with a toothbrush and some clean water and I scrubbed the bird bath and thanked St. Francis and then I came back in the house and baked an herbed omelette with goat cheese five eggs and cream and gruyere for my son's Sunday visit



now I'm wiped out (again) and weak and stupid and must take to my bed like a flaky Victorian dowager

LOVES

Meet Jupiter

She's two years old and is healing from a broken hip. I adopted her this morning from the Camano Island Animal Shelter.

We are all in stupid love here at Summer's End.

yesterday I had to get my taxes prepared because I no longer have the mental stability to do them myself this is because of my disease which is degenerative these days I look at forms and numbers and numbers move around on the page and the forms are in a language that is now foreign to me and so it is and so I had terrible stress Thursday knowing I had to go see a tax person in an office and explain that I was disabled and had not made enough money the past two years to even bother filing for taxes so I drove to La Conner to look at the tulips and fallingdown barns and hawks and cows and goats and farms a road trip always helps then yesterday morning I went to the tax person I managed to get all my tax paper ducks in a row I don't know why I worry about it so much I do keep clean and careful files which is easy to do when you are poor and only have one tax document but I am grateful that I advised Boeing to take a crapload of money out of my pension check for taxes because I will get enough on my return to pay the taxes on my house all of this tax business though makes me feel itchy and sick though it went impossibly easy but I could hear myself talking word salad I couldn't stop the words from flying through my mouthhole talking about my crazy my poor past my dead mother all of it the weirdness the crazy growing wings and flying out of my body with knives all of it bad leaving the house talking in a closed space all of it sick making

then I came home and baked this gluten free sour cream cheesecake and it is delicious I had some for breakfast with fresh strawberry coulis and the gluten free graham crackers didn't really cut it for the crust but it still tastes like Easter to me and so far it's stayed inside yes I have a pink cake stand of course I do

The Surfer will be gone tomorrow the first time ever he has been gone on Easter ever and I feel a little bit bad but not bad enough to let him know and I'm making a lasagna just for the hell of it and today I am cleaning cleaning cleaning and in a few minutes I'm driving to Seattle for the last of my prescriptions at my old chemist and to make a stop at the cannabis store and to check for figs at the Duck Blood Store and to go on the hunt for lilacs to liberate

as soon as they are available I'm going to buy a large magnolia and two different lilac trees for my yard I am outside most of the days now even in the rain and all of Summer's End is greeny and smells like the very best day of camp inside the house are vases of tulips and daffodils all over in every room

LOVE

I am notating . It is inside an oven inside my face a red sky sloop-down weeppweepweep. I am stained beyond anything that might occur in the bathtub at night. In the morning [L] sat on my chest and begged that my fever and I stay home stay home he was the Magicker sleek and black we are dizzy with mustard pricks. I cried and the phone flung itself out of my hand. My throat is a yellow eyeglass. My lungs are wasps. To-day. Just sit. To-morrow the same. Sunday I will go to mass and beg forgiveness.

Summer's End on Holy Tuesday

one of the first things I put in my Dream Bible was to one day have a kitchen window in which I could grow herbs which I use prodigiously in my cooking so today I celebrated by planting my first pot of rosemary sage lemon thyme and mint which were the only herbs available at the nursery still it pleases me no end

tada!

then I planted strawberries on the deck lots of them because one can never have too many strawberries right outside one's back door

even gargoyles love Easter

in the parlor

my mood today

ps. my son took that last one and I'm laughing not puking though that's probably how I look right before I puke I don't know as that involves horrible retching and not posing

LOVES

Holy Tuesday

Here is what "The Bible Gateway Drug" says about Holy Tuesday

Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.

When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?” they asked.

Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

I don't think so

Two important things

1. I was looking for the email address of an old friend when I discovered an archived email I sent to myself when my computer was dying in 2013. The email contains 10 Henry poems that I completely forgot about. HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT I WAS FINISHED WITH THE BOOK VERY GLAD I HAVE YET TO GIVE IT TO A PUBLISHER.

2. I forgot the second thing on account of I got so excited running into Henry just four days before his 150th birthday.

Holy Monday

this is probably my favorite Bible story because Jesus had just traveled all the way to Jerusalem only to find the nasty money lenders (banks, those payday cash loans places, creditors, bill collectors, slumlords and the IRS) doing their business in the temple and he turned their tables over and coins flew everywhere rolling along those stone floors into god knows what kind of crevices forever then Jesus whipped them with his donkey stick until they bled and created the Red Sea meek and mild? I don't think so

I decided to treat my Palm Sunday misery to some retail therapy which turned out to be a very bad idea first off I almost drove into two different ditches and I kept rolling over the road turtles that warn you that you're about to get killed by a giant flatbed truck carrying forty huge cedar trees this is how my head gets when depression and anxiety meet up in there to cause trouble

I drove to the grocer's and bought two baby watermelons four champagne mangoes and fifteen small cartons of yogurt which is about all I eat these days then I stopped at Orchard's Nursery (their name really is Orchard) where I bought a concrete birdbath that is a wide shallow bowl with bunnies frolicking around its edge and also Saint Francis of Assisi that's right I bought RELIGIOUS STATUARY but it was 30% off and I can put it on the deck right outside my bedroom window I was so excited about it about having an actual birdbath instead of using my bread bowl which is unsanitary to say the least and also my bread bowl broke last time when it accidentally froze over night with water in it then I called my son and told him he'll have to pick up the birdbath because it weighs a trillion pounds when he rolls around this week and I was driving as I was on the phone and he was cranky in the orchard and he yelled at me because he said the birdbath will bring mosquitoes and I reminded him that I live on an island forfucksake there is water everywhere EVERYWHERE and there will be mosquitoes but not in my birdbath because if you change the water in a birdbath every seven to ten days you can beat the mosquitoes at their game sheesh he treats me like a beginner

and I cried of course

then I thought a manicure would be just the thing for me so I went to the little salon at the IGA and picked out the softest pink imaginable but quick as a hummingbird Anna my manicurist ran and grabbed the most hideous shade of pink on the face of the planet and began slathering my nails with it she said it matched my skin I told her I was too old she laughed at me and I really like her so now I am stuck with it

when I got home I bought this dress which is the correct shade of pink I hope and I'm sure I'll look exactly like this girl when I wear it

here are my hideously pink fingernails and my old lady hand and my healthy plants the bright side being maybe a hummingbird will alight on me thinking I'm a begonia

I had coffee on the deck this morning wearing the peacoat my son bought for me at the Army Navy Surplus Store when we started moving in December the coat is HUGE three of me could fit inside I thought I was smiling when I photographed myself but now that I reconsider I see that I am probably grimacing because I had my nightie on (of course) and the peacoat doesn't cover my bottom and I was sitting on a metal folding chair and my butt was frozen to said metal chair though my grimace looks rather royal to me if I pretend that the enormous hood is a crown

I have to go my computer is out of juice and is about to go to sleep and besides I have Easter eggs to dye

LOVE

Sunday Special panicattackoutofnowhere

god I wish Denzel would comfort me tell me it's okay it's okay

Boreingest blog post ever

my stomach aches right now so this post will be boring
you've been warned

my fig tree might not look like much to you but it looks like the whole wide world to me

I dug up my Lady In The Bathtub/Bleeding Heart/Dicentra Spectabilis (which sounds like a wizarding spell from Harry Potter) in the dead cold of winter during my move here and threw it in a pot hoping it would survive and look what I discovered this morning! JOY!

this is a Fairy Path in my back yard not to be confused with the Deer Trail

here I am looking exactly this fuzzy and tired and exhausted HELLO! her pancreas screamed on the brink of 64 years but I still have the best hair though I haven't brushed it in three months and prednisone has given me squirrel cheeks also YES I STILL HAVE MY NIGHTIE ON but I wash it every day almost

Pee Ess

I meant to write about how ungrounded I felt in this house until finally finally I was able to unearth my books my constant companions and champions through the sum of my years that until yesterday I felt I was living in a hotel even as I love this house this land I needed my familiar landscapes that particular smell that beloved books give to a room the knowledge contained therein books old and still unread beloved with skin thin pages and stains and broken spines the library of my heart

Dear Darklings,

I want to answer each of your comments but you fly in so swiftly then I think I can sit up then I puke and tire and yet I spent the past three days putting my library together I only have three boxes of books left I had to lie down about halfway through each box exhausted with dusting and absolutely zero arranging happened with the exception of my children's books which have their own smaller (63 inches tall) shelf which looks so happy in the pink and green library which I decided to keep pink and green because they are both colors I adore

here is the window that was not going to be a bookshelf but now is (I need to buy two more large bookcases but this month I paid taxes on the house and bought a chainsaw so the bookcases will wait or I will find them with a FREE sign on them in a stranger's yard) with a macaroni and toy necklace my son made when he was three in daycare on the left and on the other side is the stuffed satin Sufi heart I made when I lived on the mountains that I've held onto for all these years (just a few scant years later I got that heart tattooed on my back but that is another post except for the fact that when I was recently in hospital one of the very young nurses asked WHEN DID YOU GET THAT TATTOO? and I answered 1907 because no one got tattoos when I actually got that tattoo and I really think that most youngsters these days getting heavily tattooed don't think of how that tattoo will age as their bodies age I guess most youngsters don't actually believe they'll age at all) and a small painting by Angela Simione but I digress much better than I digest

this is a fuzzy photo of the large trio of bookcases on the north side of the room my books are just up there helter skelter along with the actual book Helter Skelter but I feel so much more normal (okay go ahead and laugh I know I did) the only arranged books at all are the top shelf of the middle bookcase where all my Bukowski books (all of them that were ever written) and subsequent Bukowski materials including three comic books illustrated by Robert Crumb I still believe Buk was one of the finest short story writers of the 20th century and I believe this will eventually be discovered by all the snoot nose bluestockings who consider Bukowski a homeless drunk when in fact he worked harder at the writing business from the dirt up that any writer I know of

my art supplies are in the box on my little table that is blocking the photo my large easel is in the open closet that I have yet to photograph

*

my son is still here so he drove me to DOGNURSE today which was a whole stress thing for me and tomorrow he is leaving for the orchard and I am thankful and I am grateful for his stewardship and parenting of me something he thinks I need and I probably do and now I hurt my stomach hurts from being upright too much today

LOVE

The truth will set you free, but not until it's finished with you.
~ David Foster Wallace