the dog walker

 For the first time in months and months, I took my two dogs for a walk, one at a time. They cannot go together because the young one goes bonkers at the sight of another dog and she feels backed by Chucho, the old guy. Those months ago when I made the mistake of taking them together, they managed to knock me down in front of a fenced yard filled with small yapping dogs. 

That is unfair, it was the young dog, Pecas, whose leaping and twisting while barking knocked me over. Realizing that taking them both was simply undoable, I took Chucho home and took Pecas by herself. With no backup, she revealed that she is terrified of the street. That made her quite obedient since she kept close to me on a very short leash.

But of course, with no help at all, I managed to trip on the sidewalk and crash to the ground. There were a couple of people around, but they weren't about to approach me. I had a dog and that stopped any aid I might have gotten. I was not injured, actually, but it took me a long time to right myself. It frightened Pecas too, what was I doing on the ground like that, so suddenly?? 

Then came the diagnosis of a labral cyst, which got worse during the observation weeks, and an x-ray showed that another part of my hip was threatening to become bone on bone. Thus the total hip replacement which imposed a period of almost no activity, which in turn triggered once more a raging fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. 

But today that ended, as far as the dogs are concerned. Yes, one city block felt like a marathon, yes, I was weak, sore, and aching, and yes, I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack. But we made it, one dog at a time.

However, other interesting matters had to be sorted first. Pecas can be without Chucho for a bit, and without me if she is with Chucho, but she can't be without us both. I had to convince my husband that he would have to undergo Peca's howling and barking because I was going to take Chucho first. He deserves it, he seems depressed and had just spent the night trembling through a thunderstorm.

Pecas went into her cage, which she loves, and I left with Chucho. I think the noise inside the house probably registered on the Richter scale, but when we returned after a very short walk, Pecas was quiet. Her walk was tense and challenging. She hates the street, and we saw three border collies on leashes, which sent her into a crescendo of howling and barking. But we made it, and I let her stop any time to sniff the trees and grass. Her attention span on the walks is so captured by fear that I couldn't teach her the "left" order when I changed directions. Inside the house, she learns things I never taught her, but outdoors terror takes over her mind. It's going to be a long road, but we will try anyway.

There is a lesson her for all of us and any dog owner or parent should learn it immediately. You do not trick children or dogs. You don't pretend. You don't try to save yourself bother by deceiving a child or a dog. You don't leave a dog in the back yard so you can sneak off with another one; your yarded dog will know about it, and it will never trust you or the back yard again. Children and dogs can absorb the facts of life if you let them.

A dog will learn that you will come home again. It will learn to take turns and love it. It will adore you as a result. It might forgive you if you try to deceive it if you undo the harm.

A child may never trust you again. Be careful. Be kind. 

At last!!

 I watched each day of the Democratic convention that ushered in Tim Walz and Kamala Harris. It was such fun!

After many years, when Biden was still the most likely candidate, I had decided not to vote. Not because of Biden exactly, although it seemed obvious to me that the dear man is in trouble thanks to age and a degree of cognitive decline--at least speech-related, in other areas one doesn't know. But the reason is because I have to mail my vote into Travis County in Texas, a state that is to the right of Vlad the Impaler, a state that sends all its electoral college votes to the Republican candidate, whether he is a psychopath or felon or too ignorant to read. My expat votes only affect the president, vice-president, and senators who are running in the election. The senators are Ted Cruz, who was servile enough to tolerate the insults Trumps sent his way and whose wife Trump denigrated, and another old sagging ultraconservative who probably sleeps most of the day. The get elected again and again, thanks to the apparent death of thought in Texas except for Travis County, home of Austin, may it always be weird. Though Travis County tends to be Democratic, it is also the home of the state government, which on more than one occasion has resorted to fisticuffs. 

But now that Harris is running, I requested my ballot because I want to vote, once more, for a woman. A woman who this time may actually win. Of course, Hillary won the popular vote by some 2.9 million people, but thanks to the insanity of the electoral college, she lost the presidency. The poor founding fathers, who did not really trust the voters back in their day, established the electoral college so that the electors could overturn the popular vote if the people elected a dictator, a madman, a felon, or a weirdo. Guess what!!! Now its only purpose is to suffocate the popular vote no matter what kind of dictator, madman, felon or weirdo manages to convince enough people in swing states (whose power is absurdly antidemocratic) that he should be elected. 

My vote won't matter if Texas does its usual Back to Transylvania act, but I don't give a damn. It´s enough just to not feel stupid. 

Book club

 For several years, a group of friends and I gathered for a literary workshop under the guidance of a truly wonderful teacher. During the pandemic, several of us decided we had had enough of Zoom--everything was Zoom, it was exhausting--and the club then lost the teacher who was given an important job chairing a literary seat at the state university. 

Finally we have gotten back together at the host's home each Wednesday, and our trial of another teacher was sadly unsuccessful since several people didn't like him. Now we are on our own, and it works rather nicely.

Our first selection was The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdi. This is a hard book to read because it is very long, it is in the realm of magic realism, it is layered with symbolism and meaning, and it feels so very wild! It is a brilliant book, with some glorious comic moments. I began reading Midnight's Children, curious if all Rushdi's books are vast and roam the world, but this one is different. It is a delight. It is also easier to read!

Then we took on Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. A marvelous book in spite of the underlying theme of trauma and slavery, of generational suffering, shot through with moments of enlightenment and connection. I am reading Beloved by Morrison, another stunning adventure in literature. 

The book club itself is such a relief from the suffocating boredom of each day. Two of my best friends are in the club, and the host, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, is the personification of kindness and good humor. 

There is, however, a major pain in the ass in the club too, damn it. I call her the Kafka Woman, since when she first entered the group, she seemed to relate everything in life to Kafka. That seems to have faded away, thank the Force, but she has something irrelevant to say about every single idea that is tossed around in the club. My friend Nancy periodically says, "Now, returning to the book..." in order to get Kafka Woman to shut up. She didn't attend the club for a long time, but her husband has taken an interest in it, so that means she will show up because he will show up. Crap! He does not know me and kept looking at me during the session--not because of my looks, believe me, folks, I am proudly an old swamp witch--and I fear he is too interested in my long-gone fame as an editorialist for our local newspaper.

Again, crap!

On another front, the drought-tough grass we had put in seems to be growing, but there is another kind of grass poking its way up through the sod that needs to be pulled. I aint going to do that. It is hotter than Hell's waiting room today, and I am too tired and sore to take on the job. I would happily mow the lawn with my manual mower if that were the job, but not the bending and pulling to get that rogue grass out.

I am propagating desert willow; I have one that is large and a new one recently planted. I have some cuttings and seeds in pots waiting to see which pots produce a tree. These glorious drought and heat resistant plants produce beautiful flowers that are magnets for my hummingbirds. My other plants are doing both great and oddly. My lemon tree is going like gangbusters in a pot, thanks to some fantastic fertilizer pods, my chile serrano is bumby and too small, my sweet basil is doing fine but has to be protected from the godawful sun. After I first used the lemon fertilizer pods, the next day the soil was dug up and the pods gone. I blamed possoms and covered the area with hot sauce to discourage them. But the next day, the same disaster occurred. Turns out it was my dog Pecas. The pods contain animal elements that must smell wonderful to a dog, so now the whole lemon tree pot is covered with permeable cloth tied down and weighed down. 

The dog is fine. Seems the pods are tasty and harmless.

Alone but not lonely

 There are moments, sometimes days, if you have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, when any level of living together is too much. As a friend said not long ago, you are like a doll with no battery: you seem fine, but the soul is lacking.

Or, as another friend (a doctor) said to me, "Hey, if someone says you look fine, tell the person it's not your face that is sick." 

After shifting around the house like the domestic ghost, keeping out of the way as the marvelous lady who runs my home cleans, vacuums, and generally keeps things functioning, I finally decided that survival demanded my own room, my own space, my own stuff. 

My old study/session room I used when I was still working is the perfect space in spite of a degree of lack of light. Yesterday I hauled a mattress from a guest room into my study and left it on the floor. It's good enough there. I had to order a replacement for the guest room, of course, but with Amazon riding the ether, that was no problem.

Now it's full of my books, my CPAP machine, my banana pillow, all kinds of odds and ends I particularly like, and it may look crammed, but it's perfect. There is a tiny waiting area with a desk and a bookshelf, and a bathroom complete with shower. There is a small throw rug. 

This is not just a "room of one's own", however. It is a tool to eliminate my addiction to watching any ridiculous streaming movie in order to shut my mind up and let me sleep. Because I have back problems if I sleep on my stomach, I had moved to the t.v. room with the dogs to sleep on a couch that prevented me from turning onto my stomach and killing my back. But that caused me to watch literally anything, the worse the better, in order to stop thinking and go to sleep. You wouldn't believe the crap that has lulled my too active mind, even, may the Force help me, Transformers! The parameters for nighty-night viewing include non-stop action, a storyline that makes subtitles irrelevant so that I don't have to wear my glasses, and enough chaos so that I can turn the sound completely off without affecting the anesthesic effect of the so-called plot.

Last night I tried to sleep in my room. One problem is the dogs. They were disconcerted but they are not letting me out of their sight, so there was a lot of moving around, checking back and forth, and cold noses pressed against mine during the night. 

Nobody tried to get onto the bed with me, no matter how accessible it was. Two things were noted: one, I need to get a water dish for the dogs and maybe something more than the throw rug for them, and two, I couldn't sleep worth a damn without my visual anesthesia. I wound up in the t.v. room again although I don't know what time that happened.

Addictions are terrible things, no matter if it's hard drugs or cigarettes or Coke or streaming rotten movies. The work to defeat an addiction is a killer. May the Force aid anyone fighting to throw out the mental garbage or the physical torture chamber of an addiction.

By the way. So far, no answer to any of my letters. 

Grass!

 Our region has suffered a prolonged drought that put the local dams to the point of extinction. During this time, at my house we have stored water falling from the roof during the scarce rainfall, water condensing from an a/c unit that drips from the roof, directing the washing machine water into a big tank, and I went so far as to save water by practicing storing urine (check The Earth Institute) to use as fertilizer. It makes sense, you know. It's the best fertilizer around and a toilet wastes tons of water just to eliminate a few milliliters of pee. I had to quit, though, when I ran out of containers to store it.  

After some rain from hurricane Albert and Beryl, the dams are somewhat recovered. Meanwhile I let my yard die. There was no point in watering the grass. I turned part of the yard into a desert area with nopales and agave cacti, a huge amount of work but well worth it.

For months we debated whether to get the massively expensive fake grass or try for tough natural grass that might outlive the next drought. After realizing how hot fake grass would get in a 42 degree Celsius day with full sun, we also realized you would have to cool it down...with water. An added problem was the existence of an invasive tree that broke into parts of our house through the cement. We didn't know the tree was such a menace (it's called palo blanco) until it invaded us, so we had let the thing grow and prosper for years. It had been here when we bought this house decades ago.

Our first task was the destruction of the palo blanco. Nature made this tree to face all comers. My first puny efforts were laughable, such as pouring salt water on the sprouts it sent up around the yard. The palo blanco does not produce flowers or seeds. It reproduces by sending roots from the main tree out dozens of yards into the soil where it then turns into more trees as it pops up its little leaves all over the place. We were forced to hire people to cut down the tree, dig out the roots which were alive in spite of the herbicide we had applied, and then dig up the entire yard in order to scotch the chance the devil tree was hiding roots unseen and laying in wait.

Finally it was done, and we decided to chance real grass. It came in turf rugs that are now all over the yard and which I am hovering over like a mom with a new baby. And yes, it will have to be watered here at the beginning for about two weeks unless we get more rain, but now the dogs can go outside and come back in without covering the floor with dirt, mud, and leaves. Grass! Impractical, supposedly unecological, and in our case, the only natural ground covering that will work in this heat and sun. 

My dedication is total. I have a weedeater and a manual lawn mower now. Bring it on, as she says! (And you know who says that, right?)

And by the way...

 After years of listening to my husband encourage me to publish a book I wrote many moons ago, I finally decided to do it. It is at Amazon, of course, under the pseudonym Patrick Church. The title is "Cold Snap". it is a murder, but not a mystery, because you know who does it and how. If anyone is curious, there it is.

Bionic hip

 Thanks to my rude lifestyle that has included falling from horses and being bowled over by my dogs, one of my hips has had to be replaced. The surgery was, oddly enough, entertaining. I sang one of my favorite songs and declared that the surgeons sounded like carpenters. You can pretty much assume I had some fun drugs for the procedure.

Recovery was rough but there is a whole slew of "by the way" items you don't hear about until after the surgery is done and you are home having to deal with these items. By the way, your legs will no longer be the same length, and the one operated on will be longer. This means you will have to compensate by placing partial insoles into the shoe for the opposite leg. You can try whole insoles, but your foot will be crammed into the instep part of your shoes and your toes will be popping out of the end.

I went for the partial insoles. And by the way, you have to get rid of a rather large number of shoes. Got any high heels? Adios, amigos! Sandals? Well, do you mind if the partial insoles are so very visible if you try to wear the cute little strappy sandals? So far I have kept soft flats, ballet-type flats in fact, and tennis shoes loose enough to allow blood to circulate in the lifted foot. I also still have some wedgies that I fantasize wearing even though I suspect it will be an exercise in pain management.

No more riding for me, either. My horse has a trot like a Beetle with no shock absorbers, and no running either, because both activities can eventually damage the implant. Maybe "eventually" is the clue here. I'm almost eighty years old and "eventually" has a really short shelf life, so who knows? Could a slow trot on the treadmill really be so terrible?  And if I got on the horse, could I just ride around with no trotting or galloping? No, that part isn't going to work, I feel. 

But I have my dogs. There is a sign on my front door that states: "Spoiled dogs (and their staff) live here." I think that sums it up.