Where can I find some Black-Hole-B-Gone?

Here we are a few days from the dreaded arrival of August and what do I have to show for it? New artificial lenses in both eyes, new paint on a bunch of walls, nice memories from Dad's memorial service, but the rest of the summer feels like a big black hole--not just empty but an insatiable force sucking my entire universe toward oblivion.

People keep asking how my second cataract surgery went and I tell them fine, it went fine, I feel fine. The surgery itself went even more smoothly than the first one, and this time I'll know better than to take a long sunny road trip ten days after eye surgery. They even told me not to mow the lawn lest foreign matter gets thrown toward my eyes, and I'm more than happy to oblige. No troubles. All good.

But the truth is that I feel reamed out. Maybe this is cumulative effect of this whole long complicated summer piling up on me, but truly I want to pull the covers over my head and block out the world for the foreseeable future. Here's how bad it is: my home internet has been on the blink all week and I didn't even want to drive to town to find a working connection. 

And yet here I sit in my office trying to weed through the messages that have been piling up in my inbox: Gordian knots requiring swift Faculty Council action, problems with a nonresponsive contributor to the volume I'm editing, problems with paperwork for Dad's estate--and you don't know how complicated these things can get unless you've tried to track down a notary recently. This place used to be crawling with notaries but someone came along with some Notary-B-Gone and wiped 'em out.

For an academic, summer should be a time of research and writing and calm consideration of future classes, but that's not how this summer has worked for me. August marks the end of scholarly productivity and the beginning of the scramble to prep fall classes, so whatever scholarship I could have tackled this summer simply didn't happen, and now it won't. I end the summer with nicely painted walls and a thicker bank statement and new lenses in my eyeballs, but everything else has fallen into that hungry black hole. I'd like to put it all behind me and start fresh, but the minute I turn my back, it'll come creeping up behind me, ready to start chomping up my fall.

Dealing with deferred maintenance

When the first dribble of funds from my father's estate trickled in, we ordered a new mattress set. The mattress delivery guys took one look at our bridge and said we're not driving our truck over that, so these two strong young men cheerfully walked two-tenths of a mile uphill carrying the mattress and base on their backs, like tiny leaf-cutter ants carrying impossibly large loads. I tipped them well, and we've been sleeping peacefully ever since.

In case you're wondering how we've already received distributions from my father's estate, it's because he was a very smart man: after my mother died, he made all of his accounts payable on death to me and my brothers. There are still some bits and bobs hovering out there in limbo--a couple of small life insurance policies, a refund from the assisted living center, possibly a tax refund--but otherwise, Dad's modest assets have flowed smoothly into our grateful hands.

Aside from the new bed (badly needed), we've been mostly devoting my inheritance to what people in the facilities management field call deferred maintenance. For instance, last week we got both septic tanks cleaned. (Dealing with family history!)  We had a flooring company come out and measure rooms for new flooring but haven't ordered it yet. I've wanted to tear that stained wall-to-wall carpet out of our bathroom for 18 years, but I'll have to live with the new flooring for the next 18 years so I don't want to make any rash decisions.

And we've been painting. Truthfully, we were planning on painting the living areas this summer anyway, but Dad's generosity meant that I didn't blink at the price of high-quality paint. We painted the upstairs living areas before our trip to Florida and we've painted the downstairs this week, with the exception of the two most annoying spots in our house--possibly on the planet. One is the stairwell connecting upstairs to downstairs, where there are all kinds of fiddly bits to work around and you can't use a ladder or a step-stool to reach the high parts. I'm capable of finding something to trip on on an empty basketball court, so a stairwell covered with plastic drop-cloths and surrounded by wet paint is strictly a no-go zone for me. This is one of those times when my husband fully realizes the disadvantage of being the graceful one in the relationship.

The other difficult area is a big stretch of wall behind the old entertainment center in the basement. The basement is full of heavy things that don't get moved often--two old sofas, the piano, many overflowing bookshelves--but the entertainment center is actually bolted to the wall, and there's nowhere to put it until all those other things get moved back in place. In addition, it's full of stuff: books, old stereo equipment, piles of vinyl LP's, boxes of board games, an old radio-controlled airplane, several wooden hippopotamuses (don't ask), and an old-style television too unwieldy for any one person to handle.

This would be a good time to chuck the old TV and get a new flat-screen TV and a tidy stand, but then what to do with that ancient entertainment center? It's not exactly fine furniture--it came into our lives close to 40 years ago as a stack of particle-board pieces in a flat box accompanied by incomprehensible directions, and it's a miracle our marriage survived the process of putting that behemoth together. Last night I learned that the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore won't even accept entertainment centers, which is fine because I have no idea how we would get it there. It would be deeply satisfying to take an axe to it and burn the resulting pieces, but that's not a particularly respectful way to treat family history. I suspect that it will end up in the garage, gathering dust and mouse nests with all the other stuff we don't know what to do with.

Someday we can pass it on to our children--part of their inheritance. Along with an axe and a box of matches.    

Who wants to paint around that carpet?

Just a part of the basement chaos.

 

 

Buckeye buzz

And this is why I planted a bottlebrush buckeye: when it's fully blooming, it's like a magnet for pollinators. Last evening it was abuzz with butterflies, hummingbird moths, and all kinds of bees. Very soothing. Very beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Grief/relief

Days after my father's memorial service, I keep waiting for that intense feeling of loss I experienced when my mother died--the sense that the world had suddenly gone dim, the nightmares about misplacing something important, the sudden urge to call her on the phone and the grief when I realized it would never happen again. 

None of this has happened since Dad's death. Even the memorial service, which was moving and very well done, left me dry-eyed. I enjoyed chatting with family and old friends, visiting places that were meaningful to me once and that I won't have any good reason to visit again, but instead of loss, I'm ashamed to find myself experiencing an immense sense of relief.

I'm relieved, of course, that his suffering is over, that the lifelong workaholic will finally have a chance to rest. But I'm also relieved that I'll no longer need to make those awkward phone calls, yelling down the phone line in hopes that he'd understand a fraction of what I was trying to say. 

I'm relieved that we won't ever again have to re-litigate every stupid thing I've ever done in my whole entire life. Once when I was a kid I lost a shoe, and for the rest of his life my father characterized me as the kind of person who's always losing things, a person no one else in my life would recognize. But the shoe-losing version of me died with Dad, and I am relieved to let her go.

Since my father died, I've been telling people that I intend to honor his death by forgetting every horrible thing he ever said or did, but it's not easy because so many of the happy times have horrible bits attached to them like leeches. Last week my brothers and I were comparing notes and realized that we had all recently vastly over-tipped a server in memory of all the times we'd had to go back into a restaurant and add to the tip after one of our father's epic public tantrums. If nothing else, his temper made us all generous tippers.

Well your father couldn't have been all bad--look how great all of you turned out! I heard this from several people last week and they're right: my father was not all bad, and toward the end of his life he was trying to be very, very good. He endowed us with an appreciation for hard work, independence, and humor, and our complicated upbringing made us resilient and self-sufficient, able to compartmentalize our feelings so we could act rationally.

So that's what I'm doing now. I've been sick for the entire month of July, still struggling with a lingering sinus infection, still getting negative results on Covid tests but feeling guilty every time I cough in public, still trying to power my way through all kinds of estate-related details even though all I really want to do is sleep. I don't have room in my life right now for loss, so I think I'll set it aside for later. Which is a huge relief.

 

Walk on the wild(ish) side

Who thought visiting Florida in July was a great idea? It's hot! And bright! And the birds I love to see here in winter are keeping cooler elsewhere. And yet we're finding a way to see some sights, in between family visits and services.

At Fort Caroline, a reconstructed fort near the site of an early settlement of French Huguenots who attempted to colonize Florida before being massacred by Spanish conquistadors, we saw crabs waging and epic battle for territory on the shores of the St. Johns River. While hiking through the dense woods to see what sort of terrain drove the Spanish to near despair so long ago, my son got whacked in the face by an errant elderberry bush. When you see elderberries so close to a French fort, it's time to look out for taunters, and sure enough there was a tiny crab in fort's moat waving its big claw as if to claim the entire territory for itself. The crab probably has more right to the place than the rest of us.

Fort Caroline, a reconstruction

Crab in the moat

Mirror world

Sea breezes

There's nothing like a sunrise walk on the beach to clear your head, especially after spending 12 hours on the road to get here. Tomorrow: Dad's memorial service. Today: fresh air and sunshine. What more could we ask for?

 

My summer phlegm-fest

I'm watching a bunch of little birds scavenging in the tall grass below the birdfeeders, their little bird bodies popping up above the grass like popcorn kernels. Some kind of sparrow but I can't tell which kind unless I get the binoculars, which are way over on the other side of the room, and I don't have the energy to reach for them because I'm sick. Not interestingly sick: no fever, no covid, no exotic diagnoses; just the usual summer sinus crud--a little coughing, a little malaise, a lot of congestion. The only thing that makes me feel better is to go out on the back deck and sit in the dry heat with the sun blazing on my back, but I can't stay out there all day, not to mention at night.

One recent night--Friday, maybe?--I got up in the wee hours for a coughing fit and came out to the living room so I wouldn't wake up the hubby (who could sleep through a freight train crashing into our bedroom, but never mind). I was sitting on the sofa and looking out the window when suddenly I saw something looking back. Raccoons! Two of them, juveniles, very interested in the plants on the front porch. They kept climbing up to look in the window but didn't seem to know what to make of what they saw, and then one of them climbed up the brick wall all the way to the porch's ceiling. How did it hold on? Clever little beasties.

They've been quite a pain this summer, knocking down birdfeeders and rooting up plants, and they're not the least bit intimidated by my husband's frequent attempts to scare them off with a slingshot or air rifle. I can coexist with the raccoons until they start eating our corn, but since we're a little behind on the gardening this summer, we've got a while to wait before we go into total war mode.

Another day I saw a different visitor on the porch--a giant leopard moth, which a friend suggested ought to be called a coloring-book moth. I love those subtle blue spots livening up the black-and-white palette. In the distance I can see that the bottlebrush buckeye is finally blooming, and my goal for tomorrow is to summon the energy to walk out there and look for hummingbird moths.

Right now, though, I'm happy to sit here and let the world come to me, but that won't work later in the week. We're leaving Thursday for a road trip to Florida for my father's memorial service, and we have an awful lot to do before we leave. Like painting the house. Well, not the whole house, but the main living areas--entry, hallways, living room, dining room, kitchen. We've been taping up woodwork for days and finally this morning we started slapping on the paint. My contributions to the project were punctuated by trips outside to sit in the sun and clear up my congestion. Tape up some woodwork, sit in the sun. Roll paint on a wall, sit in the sun. It's not the most efficient method of painting but I made it work.

Eventually we reached the point where all the remaining sections required either more manual dexterity or longer arms than I've ever possessed, so I wrapped myself in a blanket, sipped hot herbal tea, and supervised my husband from a distance. He doesn't need my help to paint the most intricate details, but it made me feel useful.

Tomorrow we'll pull off all the tape and move the furniture back where it goes, because right now my house is labyrinth that might well have a minotaur in the middle, growling for supper. Wait, maybe that's me. I could be stuck in here a long time if no one shows me the way out. Where are those clever raccoons when I need 'em?

 

Giant Leopard Moth. Note the tiny blue dots on the top of its head.