Sunday morning, winter

Finally, winter weather. The blinding brightness of sunshine-on-snow is emotionally strengthening. I would not say that I had been wishing for snow cover, but in these first few days, it's pretty and not yet treacherous. After some time, after it's thawed and frozen, thawed and frozen, and it all becomes ice . . . then I'll want it to be gone. I am reserving lots of wood ash for traction. For now, with two more days of a long weekend, lots of wood for the stove, the cold and the howling wind makes me feel cozy . . . like a mouse cuddled up in my nest.

Image from "Old Balls Please" BBC Nature & Outdoors

The presence of the bright full moon has disrupted my hibernation mode. I have closed all the bedroom shades, but I can't stay asleep for more than two hours. Part of that is Max's doing . . . even with his diaper/belly band, he must be lifted to the floor to . . . feel better . . . and then replaced in bed. Part of it is that my brain train won't stop steaming down the track. Far too often I feel, as I lie in bed in the dark, in the quiet, that I am suffering a bout of Irish Alzheimer's, that is, forgetting everything but the grudges. What a weight to drag around! Jacob Marley, adrape in his chains, has nothin' on me in these full moon nights.


I have cinnamon raisin bread in the bread machine. It will be ready in about two hours . . . a long time from now. It does not yet tantalize with its yeasty warm aroma. 
I have the scatter rugs flopping and thumping around in the dryer upstairs. Putting down freshly cleaned scatter rugs makes me feel inordinately virtuous.
I paid the property taxes yesterday . . . drove down and around the hill to the Town Hall and handed over my check and that confusingly arranged tax bill. If not for my exposure to tax bills through Morning Job in Small Pond, I wouldn't have the vaguest idea what amount was required of me. Happily, the amount due is a few fewer hundreds of dollars this year. Thank you Agriculture Credit!


You might remember that last year my middle name, about this time of year, was Sparkles. I was obsessed with pearly sparkly jewelry, nail polish, lotion... I'm back to that now, but my focus seems to be narrowing onto my fingernails. I have a new toy: a crystal nail file. I love it. I keep filing my nails just for the fun of using the pretty thing.

I'm reading nothing but trash. Escapist goop. It suits my mental status in these winter months. 
All right. I have the wood stove going well, I have bread baking . . . I'm going back to bed. 
Because it's Sunday morning and I can.
I never claimed that I got any smarter or more ambitious in the wintertime.

Waitress anxiety dream #4031

It's full moon time again, kiddies, and we all know what that means: June has her epic nightmares and shares them with you. You might want to keep a half a Xanax handy.
Last time I saw the podiatrist, back when my toe was still broken, he said he'd always wanted to wait tables. 
"It's hard work," I said.
"Well, that's what everybody says, but I don't see what's so hard about it," he answered, the innocent. I wonder if I should share the following with him. It's a dream . . . a nightmare, but its parts are certainly real enough. I worked through many . . . many shifts like this.


Out of clean dishes, although there are plenty of dirty ones in the stacks. The heavy coffee mugs have pieces of food stuck and dried inside them. The dishwasher water heater gave up the ghost last night and nobody on the closing crew left a note so we could call the repair person before the store opened. It'll be washing dishes by hand in the bar sink all shift.
On the floor a pile of potato peels. One of the managers sees it, says, "What the hell?" and goes off, I think, to arrange for removal. But it's busy, he never comes back, so we all just step around it over it on top of it to get done what we need to get done. 


No more pre-measured coffee packets for the Bunn coffeemaker . . . partly used bags of No-Name ground coffee here and there in the waitstation. 
"How much to put into the filter?"
"Just so it looks about right." 
And where is the coffeemaker? Oh. Up there on the shelf an arm's length above my head. A maker but no warmer, so that once the pot is made (brewing while customers grit their teeth and tap their fingertips on the tables waiting for their cups) it sits and loses heat, which it does very quickly, necessitating brewing a new pot. ...if you can find enough raw materials and the few seconds and the room, among the coworkers darting here, reaching there . . . five of us with our trays in a twenty square foot floor space. 


No conversation in the waitstation except 


"Is this still hot?"
"Barely."



"This empty?" 
"More coming."


"What the hell is THIS???" from a waitress staring into a coffee cup with a dried bread ball stick inside it. 
"Mm. They're all like that."

I find one of the white crockery cups with the smallest flake of dried red sauce halfway down the inside, wonder for half a second if, untouched, it might just float off in the hot coffee and go down the customer's gullet unremarked. I chip it off with my thumbnail, and pour a cup of coffee from the half-filled brewing pot. Whoever comes after me will have watery coffee, but I have MY customer's, and I'm off out of the madhouse of the back of the house into the diningroom. White cloths, barely enough space to get between tables without my butt knocking over water glasses. 
The guests have no idea what the back of the house looks like, sounds like, smells like. 
Happy guests.


And now here come some disgruntled customers into the waitstation, coming after their coffee. Young men, soft and spoiled looking. 
"What's the problem here? Why have I been waiting for ten minutes for a simple cup of coffee? I'll get my own!" 
I am furious, stern-voiced: "Get out. Get out of here."
They were going, but my hand on one's polo shirted shoulder hurried him along. Part of me wished that his heel would find a drop of water on top of the greasy quarry tile and he'd go down, the pushy arrogant prick.


People at tables outside my station start to wave at me. "Can we get our bill?"  One of my fellow waitresses has left. Her shift is over: she's gone. Never mind her coworkers or her customers. I'm in the diningroom . . . on the stage, as it were, so like a mother bird, I lift my wing and make comforting welcoming noises, gather them underneath. Finding their checks, getting them more . . . what? 
"More coffee? Sure! I'll just whip up a fresh pot for you. It'll take just a few minutes." 
Turning, scanning tables, scanning heads, to see what else I can do on this trip. Anyone close to me would have heard, despite my lips moving not at all, "Oh God. Another flocking pot of flocking coffee."


Somebody orders two entrees and there is only enough left of one of them so that I have to take it out as a side, and lie to make it sound as if the cooks chose to present it that way because of the flavors or aesthetics or something. 
You don't want to admit that you've run out of food, clean dishes, coffee. 
You don't want to say, "We can't find our coffeemaker." 
You want to preserve, for the customers, the image of peace and competence.


And at the end of the shift, you'll go out and have pitchers of beer with your coworkers and laugh and laugh about sliding on a potato peel and nearly cracking your head on the counter edge. Somebody will say, "Why didn't he just go get me a broom so I could stick it up my ass and clean 'em up while I'm pouring drinks!" Laugh so hard you can't breathe . . . about the handle of the full-of-precious-hot-coffee pot coming loose as you reached way up there for it. Laugh about June pushing the customer out of the kitchen: [PUSH]"You can't be back here. [PUSH] We don't want you to [PUSH] get hurt!"

Three days and counting

Full Moon dates 2011
Year	Month	Day	Time	Day of week
2011	Jun	15	20:14	Wed

As I have mentioned before, the full moon does things to me. They are rarely pretty things. We used to have a boat, kept it docked upon a big lake in the Adirondacks. In a conversation with some new "lake" acquaintances, Husband told them, "On full moon nights, you'll see June down at the end of the dock. Howling."

The full moon makes my consciousness wispy, holey. It's an uncomfortable feeling, as if I'm dreaming in a world where everybody else is awake and a couple of beats ahead of me in awareness. The detachment and confusion have been moving in on me like fog since late last week. I blamed the rain, but no, it's the full moon. And it isn't finished with me yet.

By 8:14pm my incisors should be scraping my chin... 

On Friday at 4:30pm I will be on vacation. I will be At Home. Most likely I won't be drawn off the property for anything other than books or food. I'd like to believe I'll accomplish some housekeeping chores that I have put off for unrationed time but if I'm honest, I probably won't.

My mother's mother used to call peonies "pineys." The first few times I heard her say something about "pineys" I had no idea what she was talking about. 

One afternoon, some of my classmates walked by. 

"Who's the darky?" she asked me. 

"What?" 

"Who's the darky?"

It was the mid-1960s, I had just read "Gone With the Wind," and I was horrified. 

Horrified! to hear such a politically incorrect term from a blood relative of mine.

I believe I recall setting her straight, from my fourteen-year-old perch of moral superiority.

And I believe I recall her setting her lips so as not to . . . perhaps . . . cuff me. 

She was a real old time countrywoman, that grandmother, born to farm life before the turn of the 20th century. She had borne seven children, one of whom died (a twin) and only the last of whom (my mother) was born in a hospital. In her younger years, she got up every morning and made a big country breakfast on a woodstove in the farmhouse cellar. Pancakes and pies, eggs and meat for breakfast. Every morning, for the men, her husband and sons, who would come in from milking and then go out afterward to do more of the everlasting work.

When they cleared out, she'd clean up the dishes in boiling water poured from a kettle on the woodstove into a metal dishpan, and start peeling potatoes for dinner. It seems as if all she did was cook and clean up after meals. Cleaning the house didn't enter much into the equation, and she stood me in good stead there. 

Country dirt is cleaner than city dirt.

The toe of the stargazer is often stubbed. ~Russian proverb

I am not a stupid person, but I have always been clumsy. I have always stubbed toes, dropped things, maneuvered only half my body through doorways, smashing the other half into the jambs. I have dropped an industrial-grade mop bucket on my foot, missed stair steps and skidded to the bottom with an unnaturally angled, and therefore badly sprained, ankle, nearly removed the tip of an index finger in a Hobart commercial slicer. On my way back to bed in the middle of one night, in an astonishing feat of precision, I managed to snag an electric cord between my toes, trip, and fall, breaking my ankle. In my youth, a boyfriend and I had a conversation about why all this should be so. I contended that the cause was deeply psychological, that my body image and self-perception were unclear, that I didn't know what size I was on the outside. He said, "I think you just don't pay attention to what you're doing." In the years since that conversation I have had innumerable occasions to recall it, and I believe he was correct: I don't pay attention to what I'm doing.

On Tuesday afternoon I came home from work, left my shoes at the door, prepared the dogs' supper with their pills carefully hidden in tiny dablets of butter on the side, made beds, mopped the floor, emptied the dishwasher, and went to the porch to load firewood into the wagon. I was tired, and feeling a little desperate to finish my chores. I had brought home some ready-made supper, so when I had brought in the firewood, I would allow myself to fill my glass with ice water and relax. 

I hurried. 

I had, perhaps, eight pieces of wood in the wagon when I hauled from the stack the crucial piece of wood that held the whole jigsaw puzzle together. Many . . . many . . . very well-dried, very hard and heavy chunks of wood rumbled out of the woodpile and dived for my feet. It happens often enough to be routine; I would wait until they had stopped moving, and resume my labor. At least one of those logs, however, landed on my foot. On my big toe, in fact. The impact caused me to make noises, some of them intelligible, few of those polite. 

The wood stopped falling. Wounded Angry I recommenced, with renewed vigor, to chuck wood into the wagon. As I reached near my feet to pitch one of the offenders onto the load, I noticed a bright bulb of dense red at the corner of my toe. Hm. Broken skin then, not just the usual contusion. I pulled the wagon through the doorway, removed my knee-high stocking, took a quick look at the injury, wrapped a paper towel around my toe, and limped over to energetically transfer the wagonload of wood into the woodbox. Behind me, the dogs took up their habitual muttering at each other. Their noise shredded my last nerve, causing me to apprise them in stentorian tones of the facts that they were very lucky little dogs, had no problems about which to complain, and they needed to shut. up. now.  Intelligent little canines that they are, they, in fact, did shut. up. which fact may have saved their fuzzy little lives.

I performed the dance routine that enabled me to keep the door open long enough to angle the emptied wagon properly and roll it back to the porch and added some of the freshly-gathered wood to the rekindling fire in the stove. I filled my glass with ice and water, took a long swallow. My toe throbbed and I had begun to shake with fear of what I might find when I unwrapped the paper towel, which was quickly absorbing (should I write an appreciative letter to the people who make Bounty paper towels?) an alarming quantity of blood. 

We do what we have to do: I turned on some good bright lights and unwrapped my toe. 

My toenail was broken. Not across, but diagonal, a third of an inch from the tip toward the cuticle. Horrifying sight, and extremely painful. The log had made a good dent in that poor toe.

That was about the time Husband arrived home and came through the front door to find me breathing heavily, gasping a little, replacing the paper towel as snugly as I could bear. 

"What happened? Are you hurt?"

I explained to him.

"Do you want me to take you to the emergency room?"

Going to the hospital would require that I first walk all the way to the car and then sit in the vehicle without thrashing like a wounded bear for sixteen miles. I didn't think I could do all that. I hunched over the kitchen counter and growled, "Oh, what are they gonna do?" 

I ingested a quantity of over-the-counter pain medication, and perhaps a few of the dog's Tramadol tablets, and settled on the couch with my foot on the coffee table. After a couple of hours my toe stopped paining me enough that I could breathe in regular in/out rhythm. I observed mournfully, "My poor feet."

Husband looked up from his reading. "You do have a lot of trouble with your extremities."

I laughed tremulously. "I have a lot of trouble with my whole body!"

Ascending the stairs to my bed was surprisingly painless, and I slept well for three hours. I got up and swallowed more Tylenol, and perhaps a couple more of Max's Tramadol tablets, and went back to sleep. At 6:45 yesterday morning I got out of bed and considered my options. 

• I could call in sick, but the likelihood was that this particular difficulty would be painful for some time, and I would need a doctor's excuse to be absent from work for the two weeks I anticipated I would need to recover. 
• I could go to the emergency room and call work from there.
• I could go to work and call the doctor's office and see how soon I could get in at the clinic.

I opted for the last: it seemed like the thing a normal person would choose.

Closed shoes of any description would be impossible: I wore sandals out into the 28-degree weather. At work, I moved haltingly up the stairway and into the Morning Job office. Morning Boss, who, upon my return to work two weeks after last summer's mastectomy,  asked me, "Now, what was it you had done, June?" noticed nothing. I overheard her telling someone she would need to be out of the office for a short time. I asked her when she expected to be out and I said I needed to go to the doctor's office at some point during the day. I related the story as amusingly as I could, and called the clinic. My doctor would be in meetings until noon, and was booked up after that. He would call me back. 

Fine.

At 1:00pm, Afternoon Boss observed that I was getting a little raggedy and suggested I stop waiting for the doctor to call and just go to the emergency room. My whole leg had begun to twitch with pain, and medical attention for my toe had moved to the forefront of my mind. I hied myself off to the hospital. My greatest concern was that the exposed nail bed would get infected and I would grow, and forevermore sport, one of those oddly shaped toenails that you sometimes see on Old Women In Clunky Sandals. 

As it happened, however, the doctor was less concerned about infection than he was the "distal undisplaced fracture of the great toe." There's really not much to be done with it, except wait for it to heal, and not go on long hikes while it's doing that. 

In the end, undramatic. 

...except for the eventual shedding of the toenail. It has grown increasingly ugly in color and shape since Tuesday afternoon. I shall avoid clunky sandals until it's back to normal. In the meantime, I circle the firewood carefully, aim for the dead centers of doorways, grip stair handrails tightly. I know from experience that I can handle only one of these minor disasters at a time.

Night lights

I haven't seen any blog posts about the hoop-de-do eclipse the other night. I was up around 2:30 and the world was bright with moonlight, although clouds covered the sky. I've spoken with a couple of people who saw the world go dark around 4:00. By then I was back in my bed. I had wanted to see that eclipse sky just because the last time it happened the Tudors were in power and I'll never get another chance. Such a historic event and I missed it for want of sleep.


Earlier that day, around 5:30, I noticed a patch of pale light on the bathroom wall.  It took me a second to realize that it was a reflection of moonlight from the mirror on the opposite wall.  It charmed me because that window is small and high up on the wall, and facing nearly north/northeast as it does, it hardly ever gets direct light. There's something about patches of pale light on walls that soothes me.
When I was very young, sometimes I would stay for the random overnight at my grandmother's. Her house was one of gazillions built in a little northeast mill town in the railroad heyday of the late 19th century, the front door opening into the side hall with the stairway (that bottle of pink Air-Wick between the balusters on one of the stairs) and with the rabbit warren of upstairs rooms. No hallways in the days when that house was built, each bedroom led to another. My room, the one designated for overnight grandchildren, was a small room off her bedroom, with a small metal frame bed and a white matelasse coverlet. She would tuck me in at night, we'd say our prayers, and then she would leave me. The excitement of streetlights would keep me awake. After she'd gone back downstairs, I always looked around for a long time, just to see how different the furniture looked, illuminated by the pale secret oblongs of light cast through the windows. Streetlights! Such sophistication to a country kid.
When I grew up and lived in a tiny studio apartment, sometimes I would sit with my lamps off at night, just to look at the room in the wash of yellow-gray light that came through the windows from the street. I could move around and do almost everything I wanted to do in that light, feeling hidden yet protected, private but not alone.  The headlights from the infrequent car crossed the wall and disappeared. Here . . . and gone . . . the travelers oblivious of my observation. 
I got married and we lived in the suburbs where, shortly after our purchase of the house, the town planners in their infinitesimal wisdom changed the zoning across the street and welcomed a twenty-four hour supermarket, with adequate lighting for the parking area. I was assaulted by, pummeled by, Light all the hours of the night. I could not find a dark spot. The charm of light at night was no more. And so we moved to the country.


In the country, there is night light even when the moon is new, even on cloudy nights: I don't know where it comes from. There is no problem navigating while walking outdoors at 2am: brush and stone walls are solid humps of black and the open ways are colorless. One walks carefully, still, since the dips and bumps of the hayfields elude exposure and an ankle can turn quickly; it would be a long cold crawl back to the house. Down the hill toward the village I see the amber glow of the lights around the sheriff's office and the jail. In the other direction, through the bare trees, more orange light, a faint glow from what is called a city, twenty miles away. Amazing that that light could intrude here, across such a distance.


As I grow older, I need (they tell me, correctly) more light by which to read. To live, it seems, I want and and am comfortable with less light. A few years ago a friend who was staying with us came upon me in the pre-dawn while I was setting up the coffeemaker. 
"Why don't you turn on a light so you can see?" she asked. 
"Oh, I'm fine," I said.
"Oh," she said. "You're one of those."


It's a contradiction, since I love daylight. 
Maybe it's just artificial light that I dislike.

Let there be light. Please!

I've been funking for several days. The cold wind, the white-gray sky, the early dark (soon to become earlier darker, DST ending on 11/7), the care of aging animals, two evening meetings that were . . . difficult . . . to live through, not to mention the tedium of preparing the minutes, which, in these cases, I feel, need to be verbatim. It wears me down. During the week I had one of my rarely-indulged twelve-hour sleeps: went to bed at 7pm and stayed there, mostly unconscious, until time to get up and, once again, shoulder my yoke. 
The season of dry hands, dry skin everywhere, has arrived. Lotioning, as an activity, is not so luxurious in the dark and cold as it is in the balmy warmth of summer. 
Life has not been fun.


Deprived of sun, I have turned to illusive sources of light and warmth. I dig in the jewelry box for all the sparkly things that I own. Pearl and silver and faceted jewelry, the prisms of color and glimmers of light provide remembrance of human-friendly seasons. Pearly-pale nail polish to reflect any stray glimmer of illumination in my environment. I have discovered sparkly body lotions: gold, silver, pink.
Arrayed in my faux glow I emerge luminous as the interior of an oyster shell.


Remember that gaudy colorful bracelet? Wore it yesterday, received compliments from fellow color addicts. I could recognize them by their glazed eyes as they stared hypnotized by the jewel tones.
Listen: We take our pleasures where we find them.


I have run through every possible eBay item I might want and am now shopping for things for friends. Told Little B yesterday: "I bought you a couple of nightgowns. If you don't like them, we'll give them to the poor people."
"Why are you buying me nightgowns?"
"Oh . . . they were a good deal..."


Yesterday, in the shop that specializes in fitting those of us who are breast-challenged, a fortuitous introduction to an eighty-something woman twenty-six years further along in this experience. Baring of, comparing, what remains of former bosoms, sharing of stories, tears of gratitude and celebration and empathy. Sometimes just the right person appears at just the right time. Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? It was, in a minor this-is-my-world-now way.


And now it's Saturday, the forecast is for "milder with some sun" and 58*F. Today I will be able to be see and feel the sunshine, freed as I am from the week-long office captivity.  A respite from the long clawing-through-winter that has barely begun.

Just something to help me ease down into sleep

I am  antsy and agitated, bored and boring, crotchety and cranky.
I fall asleep over my book, turn out the light, turn over. And wake up.
I feel chilled, pull the covers over my shoulder. And begin to feel sticky.
This is why:  The moon is waxing, 95% of full.
What to do...?
If I were a cat I would be roaming the house and yowling.
I decide to give up on "bed" and write something.


If it were warm outdoors, a hot summer night, I would go outside and wander around barefoot, lie on the grass and stare at the lit-up landscape.  On a clear moonlit night, the trees look bigger, sounds carry farther. I would know what's afoot in the old orchard at the bottom of the field.


I have been ill. A virus that swelled in mere minutes into a full peony blossom of a cold and settled in my sinuses and in my bronchi.  I am mostly past the wheezy stage, thanks to an arsenal of medications. During the worst of it, I regressed emotionally to six years old.  I wanted my mother, sitting on the edge of the bed, running her fingers through my hair over and over again, speaking in soft tones about nothing.
I tried running my own fingers through my hair: it isn't the same.


I saw a coyote in the morning two days ago while I waited for the dogs to wend their way indoors from the front yard. It was strolling uphill in the field between the house and the road. I wanted Husband's gun, not to shoot it . . . I couldn't hit anything smaller than the house . . . but to make our environs noisily inhospitable.  Lacking anything more noisy than myself, I yelled unintelligible sounds, and clapped my hands to make as much of a rifle sound as hands can. I jumped up and down and waved my arms. The coyote heard, stopped, looked at me from the quarter-mile distance.
He looked for a little longer than I wished him to. But then he dropped his head and took up a slow lope toward the top of the field until he was out of sight.  I suspect he was put off more by the sight of a leaping, yelling crazy woman than by any fear of harm.
Pretty little thing, he was. But I want him no closer than he was to me and my dogs.

The robins, red chests all fat and round, have been scouring the yard for days, reminding me of The Gleaners.  

A few times a day during these days of Bad Breathing, I suit up and go outdoors to wander the perimeter of the yard with the dogs in the deceptive sun. It's colder than the golden light makes it appear, but just right for my out-of-order respiratory system.  There isn't mud smell yet; too early and too chilly. But neither is there the scent of snow in the air.  

I wander the way I did as a child: over there to see if the bluebird houses have tenants, a little farther to pick up branches fallen from the locust trees. There is a branch twisted loose enough to hang down, but not broken, partially blocking one of the bluebird houses.  I think the bluebirds won't like that, so I pull on the end that's near the ground.  But it needs a saw and it's too high to cut without a ladder. Ladder-carrying is beyond my interest and capabilities, so I leave it, and wander on. 

I watch the ground under my steps. Most of the yard has solidified, but in spots my feet make prints surrounded by pressed-out water. If I were six, I would imagine I were a giant stepping over the earth.

There's something greening up in the garden. I suspect it's a weed, but it's green.  I so long to see green that I leave it and make a note to trowel it out on a later trip.

A red-tailed hawk perches in a tree, waiting for some four-legged meal to appear. He allows me much closer  than I expect and I stare upward at him, all gathered into himself, part of the tree in which he waits motionless. Finally he spreads his wings and flaps twice, with the slightest of feather sounds, flies off.  I don't know if I've made him feel crowded or if he's simply off to check other hunting grounds.

Since I'm out and moving, I bring in some wood from the shed, justifying my continued existence: Two trips, seven pieces of wood. I let them fall, bumping and banging into the woodbox and take off my jacket, hang it by the door. 

I have three novels half-read. Begin one, take it upstairs for napping, forget to bring it downstairs, start another. That one takes more concentration than I can spare, so a third comes off the shelf. My mind weaves together plot and characters from all three so that it takes several pages of each to orient myself to whatever book is in hand.

All this desultory motion, and not much product to count up at the end of the day. 

Exactly like being six years old again.

Memories of what I have not known

Perhaps because of the full moon and its weird effect on me, I have spent this, the first morning of 2010, looking at French real estate . . . tiny versions of the castles I was thinking about a few days ago. 
Why do I do this to myself? I'm back in my "Pilgrimage" mood.  The family genealogy gets us back to 15th century France, and the French family name persisted to my great-grandparents. The offspring from then on were all female, except, I imagine, for far-flung cousins unknown to me, and the heritage ran from then on to English/Irish and . . .   one German grandmother Wilhelmina, pictured here as I imagine her.

. 

I look at these old wrecks of thick stone walls with the huge blackened hearths and the gigantic overhead beams and the oddly placed asymmetrical windows, and I want to be there. I want to smell them. I want to see that sunshine on old stone steps.  
Those thick stained planks charm me.

If only I had a gazillion dollars to buy one of these old places and restore it. . . or even to live in it as is, with the damp and the mice, moldy rushes on the floor.

[Heavy sigh.]

The truth is, as Abe Lincoln pointed out in one of his responses to a fairly recent post, time is like away . . . there's no  such thing.

Lunacy

Merriam Webster's second definition of lunacy is "intermittent insanity once believed to be related to phases of the moon."

Once believed? I believe it now.

In one hour, the moon will officially be full. I'm suffering great distraction of the mind. I can't keep my thoughts straight. It's one of the hallmarks of full-moon-itis for me.
In the days when we had a boat, Husband would tell people that on full moon nights, they could find June at the end of the dock howling at the moon.

This month there are two, count 'em! ...two full moons...today and again on New Year's Eve.
For joy.