Tag: Houndstooth

Guilty


A writing acquaintance, the poet and memoirist Shilo Niziolek, often posts memes she creates using Winnie the Pooh characters to her Instagram account. This one seemed only too relevant for the cycle where I’ve found myself over the past few weeks.

In some ways, I envy people who detach from the world. They don’t concern themselves with information they don’t want to know or hear. They take in news that supports their existing beliefs or affirms their comfort zones. They get their information about the world from pundits’ sound bites and ratings chasing (or more dismally, social media and its unchecked misinformation), and anything that jars them is easily dismissed as being the fault of the media or certain entertainers, influencers, politicians, and whatever groups or individuals are the target du jour. (Those groups often encompass some of the people I admire and respect most or love best in the world.)

I do try hard to keep out some of the noise because I like to sleep sometimes.

In 2017, work kept me so busy I could shut down a lot of what was going on and I was too exhausted not to sleep. It was also the year our property and homes flooded, which consumed my energy for nine months. By early summer of 2018, I emerged from home and work preoccupations to take in all the madness of the world. In June and July, my only escape was to be creative. I did a series of paintings and lots and lots of coloring.

At the beginning of 2019, that wasn’t enough. I’d bitten my tongue, mostly held my counsel, and accepted there were simply people I’d never again discuss certain subjects with. For almost three years, I’d silenced my voice except in the relationships or spaces I felt safest.

For a writer to silence herself is self-obliteration. I couldn’t accept this, but I didn’t know how to regain or retrain my voice. Though it didn’t seem obvious then, a little time and distance has made it perfectly clear why characters I’d known and loved for decades came back to me at that time. Maybe they were my safest place of all. Maybe if I grabbed whatever time I could find to return their voices to them, they would be an answer and a comfort and a way to express myself with compassion, creativity, and honesty.

It’s been quite a journey since. I’m on the sixth novel of what I thought would be one. This writing gave me purpose and direction during a pandemic that kicked off with my being laid off from my job. Over those years–2020, 2021, and 2022–I lost some friends to death, and because of the turmoil in the world or their own pandemic struggles, I also lost (or kept, greatly altered) a few friendships to politics, philosophical differences, and sometimes what I could only see as a violation of the trust and respect needed to sustain relationships in challenging times. You don’t have to agree with me, and it’s a terrible idea to flatter me or lie to me, but if you treat me cruelly, if you use my past trauma, my capacity to forgive, or my creative expression against me, you aren’t being a friend.

Now is now, and I’ve moved on from most of that, but I’ve also faced challenges and struggles that leave me vulnerable to the noise of the world. It does, truly, get in the way of creativity. It makes me unnecessarily question my choices and doubt my voice.

I’m trying, and though I know posting coloring pages seems like I’ve wasted time, those pages mean I was thinking about my characters and how to write them. Or the writing playlist photos, for example–the kind of thing people skim right over unless they happen to see something they like or want to argue about–reassure me that I’ve written, even if it’s only two to three paragraphs a day.

To write is to maintain some equilibrium.

I’ve written.

And I’ve listened to things more healing and sustaining, too.


Most recently, The Neville Brothers, Uptown Rulin’: The Best of The Neville Brothers; Randy Newman, Sail Away and the 4-CD set of Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman.

ETA:

Low-key

Sad day; no need to get into reasons.

Our Internet and cable were out for most of the day, and that limited my ability to do the research required for what I was writing.

I shot a few photos of things around the Hall so I could spend time outside.


Finally, the return of ruellia (aka Mexican petunias) outside the kitchen window.

After two days of heavy rain, these popped up.

There’s a larger one almost hidden by shamrocks.

This is the first time any succulent in Aaron’s Garden has bloomed. It was a nice surprise to see today.

Rainy day smiles

A few things I grabbed from Instagram that might make you smile.

Angela, an online friend in Georgia who’s an actor, coincidentally posted this the same day I talked about Macbeth on here.

A truly feel-good story about people uniting.

Teaching moments courtesy of kindhearted truckers.


Do you have a junk drawer? More than one? Here’s ours. Junky, right?

Making me happy, because it means I’ve been writing some… I seem finally to have reached the end of the “M” artists on my Writing Playlist, unless I’ve overlooked something. These last few CDs provided quite a varied list.


Ian Moore, Modernday Folklore; Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie; Van Morrison, The Best of Van Morrison; Mumford & Sons, Babel and Sigh No More; Shawn Mullins, Soul’s Core; Michael Martin Murphy, Austinology: Alleys of Austin.

Jagged Little Pill takes me back to the place I worked in 1995 and makes me think of Nora, who told me about the bonus track and how it made her think of someone we knew, and Lisa Y, because we listened to it the nights I hung out with her while she worked on a mural in our company’s break room.

Wednesday’s Jack is full of woe

Little Jack is still not fully recovered. Sometimes he’ll eat; sometimes not. After visiting his vet, some of his liver numbers aren’t what they should be, so he’ll be getting a supplement for a few weeks before his next checkup.

Of course, you never know when an animal will have a health emergency, and before Jack’s, we scheduled Keith our contractor to do a few jobs around Houndstooth Hall. He’s been in and out since… last Friday? All the days run together. Which meant Jack and all the dogs have been spending their days with Aunt Debby, because doors stay open, some dogs aren’t friendly to strangers (though… Keith hardly qualifies, since he’s been coming here since 2015 taking good care of us, the Hall, Fox Den, and Fairy Cottage, when we first moved in, especially after the Harvey flood, and for our two frozen pipe events). Part of Jack’s woeful attitude is having his routines disrupted, even though he could not be in more indulgent, loving hands than Debby’s.

Among things we had done, we had new floor tile and a new shower door installed in the master bath. Keith thinks the tile was original from 1960, and through the decades, someone regrouted it, not very well, and no matter how how much I cleaned it, or what cleansers I used, I could never make it look good, especially after that drain backed up during the flood. The shower door, too, had accumulated years of staining.

It’s nothing fancy, very basic, which is exactly the way I wanted it. It looks new. And clean

Button Sunday

Since April is National Poetry Month, I chose this button.

After a very long and sleepless night of looking after Jack, I figured he was entitled to use his artist voice with some Wood Words (same company that makes all the Magnetic Poetry kits). Here’s his perspective.

I spent most of the dark hours of last night trying to keep him company and clean up after him. I think I fell asleep around five AM, and Tom was up by 6:30 AM. Jack was still feeling bad, but there was a lot less bloody diarrhea that needed to be cleaned up, which was great. I did laundry all night, and that continued throughout today. Gastroenteritis is hard on a little dog. He did finally start drinking water, which was a huge relief. He was badly dehydrated yesterday, and that can lead to shock and death. Twelve hours of IV fluids helped his body get on the right track; now drinking water holds another crisis at bay.

Be assured, the bed in this photo has since been washed, but this was Jack refusing food for at least the dozenth time today.

I mean, that bed… Ugh, but it doesn’t even begin to show how the house looked like a crime scene. In only minutes, Jack could leave five to seven puddles of blood across a room. It’s awful to imagine what his belly must have felt like.

He spent most of the day lying on a “pee pad” in Tom’s lap, sleeping while Tom watched TV, and we both kept laundry going. When all the other dogs ate dinner, Tom finally put the little bowl of food in a crate with Jack and closed the door. I went to check on him a few minutes later and…

Success! That was around 6:30, and again after 10 PM, he ate another small helping of food. So we are hoping very much that everyone sleeps tonight, the floors and dog beds are still clean in the morning, and Jack has indeed gotten his wish that “feeling good will come with time.”

Thank you everybody who texted and messaged and checked in on him today. We needed the support. Now we need sleep.

No Fun Saturday

Usually on April 28 (this year on Friday), I bake a cake or cupcakes and decorate with Pooh characters in honor of our late friend Steve’s birthday. Most years, there are friends or at least the four of us to sing happy birthday and have cake. This year, we had no plans with friends, and Tim was away housesitting, so Tom picked up some Hostess Ding Dongs to split with Debby and me, but we still made it a little festive.

Then today, Saturday, when we woke up, it was to discover Jack had been up most of the night very sick. It’s the weekend, so that meant going to the emergency vet, and Tom took him. They were there for about four hours getting blood drawn, exams, ultrasounds, etc., until they put Jack on an IV with meds and antibiotics. He couldn’t be picked up until 10 p.m. if he was showing improvement.


That generally killed my mental ability to write, because the better part of my mind was on our dog and hoping he was okay/would be okay. Instead, I tackled a project that’s been sitting on the kitchen bar for a few days: purging and organizing my recipes. In addition to my two recipe boxes, I have my mother’s, and a ton of handwritten papers with, or printouts of, recipes given to me or found online by me through the years. They were folded up and stuffed into these boxes or into whatever space I could find for them in my spice cabinet.


Everything is tidy now. All the recipes I wanted to keep have been transferred to index cards and then filed with the category where they belong. It’s going to be a lot easier for me to find what I’m looking for, because I cook a lot and plan to be cooking even more.


Here’s the pile of paper for recycling that will no longer be cluttering up my recipe boxes or my cabinet.


And here’s the dog who’s home, has meds, and needs to be on a special diet for a few days, and doesn’t want to do anything but sleep, not even eat or cuddle with Tom, which is UNHEARD of, because he always wants to be in Tom’s lap. We’re hoping a good night’s sleep will help, and Nurse/Aunt Debby says it can take 12-24 hours before meds they gave him for nausea, that probably make him lethargic, will work their way through his system. I hope tomorrow to be able to share that he’s doing lots better.

Midweek and Macbeth

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”

Part of a passage from Macbeth that I had to memorize in twelfth grade and can still recite from memory. It kept crossing my mind today. I’ve had a brutal week for insomnia, and last night was the worst. So that by this evening, when I cooked dinner, I was on a frustrated version of autopilot, and it didn’t help that I was trying a new recipe for the entrée and also a different way to cook my side dish.

The meal turned out well, despite it all.

I have never really understood the intricacies of my current phone’s camera, but this shot makes me feel like I’m either very tall or a bird equipped with a tracking camera. (I hope I’m a crow or a raven.) The entrée was a pasta dish with kale cooked with caramelized onions, garlic, and diced tomatoes, then mixed with al dente whole wheat spaghetti and topped with toasted walnuts and parmesan cheese. The side dish was eggplant. Added a tossed garden salad and a piece of toasted garlic bread.

Sadly, though everything tasted good, I was so tired that I ate only a small portion of the pasta, a couple of slices of eggplant, and about a third of my piece of bread, though I forced myself to finish my salad. There will be tasty leftovers for lunch tomorrow!

Afterward, Tom cleaned up the kitchen, and I took a long shower, then lay very still listening to music and thinking about my work in progress. Now I’ve taken medication (over the counter; nothing exciting) and hope to get a full night’s rest. Tune in tomorrow for more about Macbeth and to see whether I slept or if I’ve become a full-on zombie.

Tiny Tuesday!

Today’s Tiny Tuesday post is dedicated to our late nephew Aaron. This is the anniversary of his death, so I chose to clean up Aaron’s Garden while I thought about him. Tom and I got a couple of new things to put there, including this little horned toad (or horned lizard?) for a bit of whimsy.


I picked him up at the nursery, then I reconsidered and set him down. Before I turned away, I patted him on the head and back in a kind of apology.

Two women were shopping nearby, and one of them saw me, laughed, and said, “You just patted him so gently.” “I don’t want him to think I’m rejecting him,” I said. I meant it.

We walked away, continued shopping, and then when we went back that way, I chose him again. It wasn’t until we got him home that Tom told me he was missing a foot (not noticeable in this photo). It confirmed for me that I was right to get him; I never saw a flaw.

I don’t know why I anthropomorphize objects; from childhood, I felt energy in places and things. It’s why losing some, not all, things can sometimes be hard on me emotionally.

Losing a person however, is always hard, especially Aaron, who was so young and had so many things yet to experience and do, so many people to meet and affect and be affected by. He was, and is, deeply loved, and even now, in objects he never saw or touched that are in his garden, I feel an energy connected to the love he gave us all and we all continue to give him.


We also added a colorful dove wind chime. It has a lovely, delicate sound. I like the look and the music of it.