Winter storm Quiana

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