230930 september, changes, mortality, gentians

 September 28, 2023

Now that the equinox has passed, we are starting to be up in time to see the sunrise. 

We have had many wonderful September days. September is my birth month,  - so, notable - , the month of grapes, my childhood family's yearly day-trip to Niagara Falls, chestnuts, new shoes for school, new crayons and pencils, notebooks fresh, smooth, not yet dog-eared, nor full of scribbles and mistakes. Best of all are these precious warm and sunny days, when the turning of the leaves is beginning, and somehow not sad, a symbol of the equinox which calls to mind season and change, not death, but the circle of life. How we look forward, so quickly, from mourning summer, to some magic that comes with the autumn. The acceptance of season by the natural world is foremost in my thoughts. I have no eagerness to reach for a new summer. It feels perfect to be here now with the leaves leaving the trees and the birds heading south without any forward-looking, or hope, or despair. 

How does the bluebird come back to this exact spot three years running? How? The family nests in the birdhouse at the corner of the yard here. I assume that it is the same birds or their offspring. Each September the whole family, last year five birds, this year I have not counted how many there are yet, returns to the house on the way south for the winter. How do they do that? Imagine trying to return to a home you knew in the past, without a road map, or even a road? 

A coyote, perhaps the same one as last year, came by for a munch of apples. It must be a sort of cleansing for him to binge on apples for a few days each September!

He is in the picture! But my phone camera has no zoom. I love to take pictures; why don't I have a digital camera? Do they make cameras with bluetooth and internet connection, or do you still need to use a memory card? If I had been born in the computer age like my children were, I would probably know the answer to this, and how to use instagram and hashtags!

The bottle Gentian: I saw this flower for the first time a week or two ago. I have since seen two or three more. They grow low on the ground upon a circle of leaves. I had planned to go back and see what they looked like when they opened. I identified them, using Picture This, and discovered that they do not open! Hence, the name. The fringed gentian is a fixture on the Bruce, where I holidayed as a child, and like this one, a harbinger of fall. Similar colour though more delicate and, well, fringed!

This is "doll's eyes", Fox's first flower identification. I told him the name once and since then he has named it himself every time. Sometimes he calls another similar plant by the same name, but he's only two.

*****

the time Rain said, "I don't need you to fix it, I just want to tell you about it."

the same daughter: "You don't have to buy me everything just because I said I like it!"

*****

September: K with a broken hip. Two days, to see if it was really a serious injury, and then a call for an ambulance.

Surgery - replacement of part of hip.

I think we have both been in considerable shock with this life-changing event. I look back at so many people I know that have met with some life-changing medical event at our age, though perhaps at any age after 65 you might see the same numbers. My father was our age, my mother was actually in her fifties, my father-in-law was seventy-five. I might have had my own two summers ago with the vaccine reaction, but it did not feel like a "mortality event" as is a cancer diagnosis, a heart attack, or a broken hip. A broken hip falls into this category because it can be the beginning of a slippery slope to fatal illness. In an older person whose health is compromised by other afflictions and general weakness a broken hip is difficult to recover from: the surgery, itself major and traumatic to the body and mind, its the chance of complications, and pneumonia from being so much in bed. Until I myself reached this age, I did not see these "mortality events" for what they are. They strike at one's sense of being mortal in a way that is hard to feel an empathy for in another until one gets here. 

*****

In spite of the stress and work that this event has brought, or perhaps because of it, I continue to get my mojo back; I begin to feel competent and "solid", fully grounded, some of the time. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." (Dylan) The hospital is an hour away and the language barrier was a challenge. I got lots of practice using my french. It is very much like being in another country here. The nurses often had an anglophone representative at the station who did the english communication, and they would turn to her when I showed up. Everyone is nice about it, however, and when I deal with someone with as little english as I have french, we muddle together and manage to understand each other. 

I am getting my strength back too. I have been strong and capable all my life, doing my own heavy-lifting, carrying children and firewood, but my illness made me too weak to carry even a basket of wet laundry to the porch. I have suddenly found that it is easy to do that, and to bring in an armload of wood, and I am carrying Fox without strain. (I have been trying to remember how I walked when I was twenty-seven. I cannot find the memory in my body. I catch myself walking with bent knees and back as if I am ninety!)

There was a jam last week, and I had a good time singing and playing with the group, but I did sneak away late in the jam, gathered my belongings and left without a word, for which Rain scolded me! But there are times when you just want to do that, and not have to say what you're feeling or why you're doing it. This is a confidence, or mental health, thing. An ego thing, I am beginning to recognize, meaning that it is the ego that says, "what will the others think?". Ego, depression, embarrassment, all connect to not being one's whole self, present and in the moment.

*****

Breakfast, the most important meal of the day,. Hm. As a parent, I accepted this notion, and in recent years have adopted the "front-loading" of nutrition as a healthy model, seeing that it might be better to provide the body with food upfront to run on, rather than pushing it to upload and process stored fats and nutrients to do the day work. But (there is that but, starting a sentence again!), when I get up, I am full of energy; I am ready to work. I feel as if I lose some of this edge if I eat. I have a couple of coffees, with some milk and no sugar, and want to keep going without eating. So, this morning I am questioning the whole front-loading thing. I am wanting to explore the principles of fasting, not that coffee can be properly included in a fast, perhaps. I have been corrected when I referred to a "fruit fast", since that is not considered fasting either, although I practiced fruit fasts (only eating fruit and drinking water) in the past for one to three days. Back to today, I wonder about listening to my body (?), or mind (?), and postponing eating until I feel ready. So I will try that. I wonder if it is a trade-off to have the body process stored nutrition versus digesting new foods. Is there an efficiency there, that offsets the advantage of front-loading? 

This would be a good discussion for the community meeting, if one lived in a commune of sorts. Wouldn't that be amazing? to live with a group of like-minded people who share in the community work, the intellectual enrichment, the child-raising, the senior care-giving. It is a model that several of my friends and relatives are looking at. It is the village.

Since we started eating more unprocessed foods I find that my taste is much changed. After spending a life eating bottled spaghetti sauce, I found that I did not like it any more. (I was raised with English cooking and spaghetti sauce was not something I ever cooked from scratch although I usually added fresh ingredients.) Now I prepare a simple sauce for pasta, canned tomatoes with several fresh veg and a few herbs and spices. It is quick to make, and the flavours of the individual ingredients are present. I like to use eggplant, because it makes a three-dimensional central ingredient, but there was no eggplant this week, so I used zucchini, and mushrooms were on sale. A little basil, oregano, parsley, pepper and cayenne, and it may not be a traditional cooked-all-day Italian dinner, but it is very satisfying - I feel as if fresh unprocessed foods make my body very happy.

Rocky is heading off for a walk. He likes to check out who's been visiting the witches. I love this life for a dog: my father used to say that dogs do not belong in the city, and I see how it is different. My father's dog had the run of the town (Biggar, Saskatchewan) and wore no collar or leash. Rocky knows our yard line because he does not allow Blackie within it. Blackie is free to walk across the meadow below or beside us and when we are on a walk the two of them are friends and co-conspirators..

The witches:

Last of the sun and a quarter moon:

Talk soon. Keep well. Beware the plague: it's out there.

Mumma Yaga

Bottle Gentian , Wikipedia: "The closed flowers make entrance to feed on pollen or nectar difficult for many species of insects. Those strong enough to enter through the top of the flower include the digger bee species Anthophora terminalis and the bumblebee species Bombus fervidus, Bombus griseocollis, and Bombus impatiens.^[3] The eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) chews a narrow slit at the base of the flower and "steals" nectar without pollinating the plant, a behavior known as nectar robbing. The holes in the petals created by this species allow smaller insects to also access the nectar and pollen, including the honeybee (Apis mellifera), the green sweat bee species Augochlorella aurata and Augochlorella persimilis, and the eastern masked bee (Hylaeus affinis)."