33° and raining yesterday. 29° and snowing today. Quiana is
next in the parade of winter storms that has hammered us, one after another,
for what seems to be as long as I remember. This winter has sucked. I recently read a news brief
about a small moon of Neptune, now named Hippocamp (mythological creature with
the head of a horse and the tail of a fish). Analysis of Hubble data has
revealed that Hippocamp has been repeatedly blown apart by meteor collisions,
and the fragments coalesce again from the forces of gravity. I see this as a
metaphor for my life this winter.
33 degrees and raining |
Faithful readers may have noticed that I did not post last
week. If you inferred a crisis, you were correct. My dad woke up Sunday morning
unable to catch his breath. We called 911. The ambulance took him to Harvard,
where he was intubated and sedated. He was then transferred to Rockford. To
make a long story short, he had a tiny heart attack coupled with pneumonia. He
was in bad shape. We had dark and difficult conversations with doctors and
nurses, drawing ever-thinner lines in the quicksand between palliative care and
heroic measures. We were pretty sure we were going to lose him.
And yet, the night passed without The Phone Call. On Monday,
he was weaned off the ventilator and took up breathing on his own, thank you
very much, although he did have supplemental oxygen. Tuesday he was lethargic,
but by Wednesday, cheered by the possibility of going home Thursday, he was
quite chatty and personable. He didn’t go home on Thursday because the doctors
were still tweaking his meds, but he came home Friday and did not even need to
have oxygen. He does need to have all his food thickened, though, because his
epiglottis isn’t closing properly from the breathing tube. In many cases, this
damage does reverse. He will be tested again in a month.
We had a break in the weather Friday. It was a beautiful,
sunny day. Doug (my brother) was with Hilda and Dad in the hospital. I was done
with work at 1:00, and looked forward to getting a haircut and cleaning the
chicken coop.
At some point in our lives (or my life, anyway), chores stop
being a burden and start being cherished rituals, like thumb tacks that keep
the fluttering pieces of our lives from blowing away in the winds, or the
gravity that reassembles the fragments of meteor collisions. It is probably
that gradual transition between scrubbing the garbage can vs. playing (I grew
up before plastic garbage bags—hard to imagine, right?) to cleaning the chicken
coop vs. helplessly sitting in the hospital wondering if your parent is going
to die. Believe me, cleaning the coop is much more satisfying.
The chicken coop was literally a shit-storm. It made my eyes
water. We can keep the coop pretty clean when we can get out there just after
the girls have woken up. At that time, we can remove the poop from under the
roost before the chickens have buried it. In nice weather, they spend the day
outside, fertilizing the run. In order to maintain laying during the winter, we
have to extend the day by having a light go on very early in the morning. By
the time we get out there, the poop has been scratched into the wood chips. In
addition, there have been so many days when we left the girls cooped up because
they would not have gone out anyway. So all of the night poop and all of the
day poop accumulates.
In half an hour, I had all of the dirty wood chips in muck
buckets and new, piney-smelling chips in place. Sadly, the girls are staying in
today because of 50 mph winds from the northwest. Sigh. Then as now, chores are
never done.
Clean wood chips! |
Bianca, by the way, looks fine. Which is good because I didn’t
have time to fool with giving her vitamins this week. In fact, Terry, bless his
heart, took over the feeding and watering during the crisis.
Bianca looks perfectly normal |
After the rain yesterday, some patches of bare ground
started peeking through. If the sun would just shine before we get more snow,
the ground would heat up and the melting would accelerate. The forecast, however,
is not promising. The field has a giant puddle, now frozen, which will likely
become a flood when warm weather comes, if ever. March begins next week. I keep
telling myself that spring is coming.
Patches of bare ground peeking through the snow |
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