A Moment Changes Everything

Just the quickest post for tonight. The power came back on just as I was trying to pick out David Gray's A Moment Changes Everything on the piano. I am just trying to catch the butterflies here. Last night, mostly insomnia the horrible wakeful night. Kept getting up, creaking bedroom door closed (waking D and stirring cats of course), in chill & semi-fever to obsessively check stats and whatever else. It was a bad night. So wakeful, returned to bed only to find 500 pound duvet cover shifted over to my end because it was too hot for D - but my God I'm in a fever myself it's too hot for me and too heavy. Finally towards dawn D got up and went downstairs to feed the cats and make coffee and I managed to fall asleep and my fever broke and the heavy cover was soaking wet. Overnight each time a cat had come to greet me I petted each and greeted and loved on them - and noted a suspicious "it" in Gwynnie's fur. This morning, from bed, I asked D to check the cats for ticks. (I'm very squeamish.) Have I mentioned that D has in recent days referred to himself as my P.A.? I am a bit of an a** - but what am I to do? I can't suddenly summon energy and become a - well, what? This is what I do, wait around for the power to come on, then a while longer for the computer to decide it's ready - and then, when I'm on the brink of exhaustion, I - not exactly - pounce.

The power went out around 4:30 this afternoon. I had spent the better part of the day in bed, in PJ's, making it a sick day already (homebound as I am, but - no walk). I woke up in soaked sheets and went about the morning doing laundry, remaking the bed. I was trying to exhort myself to be all Ruth about it - bake apples, light a fire, make hot tea - but it was all I could do to just keep going through my paces in my pink cashmere & cotton cobbled together set.

Our neighbor's out of town, with a housesitter taking care of (de-dogging the house) the dogs & chickens. I miss those chickens all over our garden. The cats didn't have ticks all summer, what with all the chickens. I think I may have Lyme disease again because two or three weeks ago complete f***ing ass*h of stupid other neighbor objected to chickens freeranging over his manicured lawn. In all his pasty overweight horribleness after "the operation" he rides his stupid tractor mower around his stupid, stupid lawn as if this were the suburbs.

Neighbor's chickens, besides laying fantastic eggs, are champion tick and all kinds of other bug else eaters. I miss them. I want them back. Why should stupid lawnmowing neighbor prevail on this one? But they're not my chickens - and neighbor owner of chickens picks her battles.

Spent most of today just getting over the breaking of fever, tentative recovery, missing brisk walk with weights two days in a row. Yesterday at the doctor's office my b.p. was fine but my weight, after all my steady applying myself was still a high number that might have elicited a stricken look on Oprah or much of anyone. It made me feel that I'm in denial about myself.

So today was a "sick day." True, it was grey and wet out. In the afternoon I lay in bed with the new 1.5 readers (package of 3) I'd gotten at Century 21 over the weekend, reading from the Emily Dickinson Selected Letters. I never know where to start with her. The times I pick up the book I don't feel like starting at the beginning and reading her childhood letters. So I open the book at random and notice how very "selected" the letters are, big number gaps between -- I really would like ready access to the "complete."

Can I say after waking up in soaked covers and then washing the linens and making up a fresh bed - how wonderful it is, when one is feeling under the weather, to slip between smooth sheets into a perfectly ordered clean sweet bed?

(I was my own mother - all that was missing was childhood sickbed ginger ale...)

After all that napping & dozing and lounging, I was just about ready to face the world again. We had the privilege of picking up neighbor's CSA farm share, and neighbor's housesitter (with whom D checked) didn't feel like going. I'll go for the ride in my PJ's if she doesn't want to, is what I said.

I was still in all-pink tops but threw on jeans in lieu of bad pink cotton bottoms.

I thought you were going to wear your PJs, said D.

I want to keep my options open. Maybe I'll want to go in with you into the barn and look over the produce, so I know what I'm cooking tonight.

Can I tell you once again how incredibly fortifying, revivifying it is for me to step along the border, at the CSA farm, to snip flowers - armfuls of them. I can be greedy now - it's truly the end of the season.

However ill & under the weather & wondering how many enemies I've made since my last post (or week's worth) - I felt completely, completely restored.

(I have a lot of complicated feelings & impressions from today. A woman I briefly once met, apparently is now dead. I have no idea the story. But I'm aware of her name, from someone who I know cared very much for her, who (I pause as I type) I don't know, and yet is weirdly in my circle - )

I came back from the CSA with bags of vegetables, and an armload of flowers, and my "convalescence" proceeded with amazing joy & alacrity as I sorted out the veg, and put together chicken to roast (lemon, garlic, thyme), and sorted through all the flowers, zinnias in a jar, pink cosmos in a crystal vase for the upstairs bedroom, white cosmos in a grey jug from Mexico that I had to wash the dust off.

And just like that - the power went out. The stereo died, the lights flickered off, the fridge stopped humming. Silence. Outside the windows trees moved in strong wind, rain lashing.

For sure, I'm no Chilean coal miner (tipping my hat) but it was a shock for wuss me to be without power right about when I was about to go upstairs to blog to - to whom, exactly?

The power outage lingered longer than my kitchen food & meal prep, and I like the idea of keeping my blood pressure low so I wasn't about to get all upset - OMG it's five and no computer!

When the power went out it was light out but now it getting dark and I thought - ah I should scrounge around for candles - so I did, and lit the few I found, placing them here & there.

But how to entertain myself without the computer? I rediscovered the Steinway in the dining room in which a stacked set of cardboarded bathtubs also resides on the ancient pine floor.

Gloaming settled admist sparse candlelight and I played the piano, a couple of Bach inventions (motor memory from the last 40 years), plus favorite songs that I could think of from KZE. I cracked myself up trying to bang out Stella the Artist - "no need to be modest, for right now at least..."). Theme song from Tootsie (a non-KZE favorite) -- I imagined Matt the Electrician singing that. A.A. Bondy songs - I've seen him (online) give one man concerts - I was able to sort of channel him. And with a change of key, higher, Alison Krauss. Broken Bird by Alison Moorer, and then a song by Meg Hutchinson ("so hard to change").

At one point as I sat at the piano I heard scratching and saw Penelope haul herself out from a hole on the side of a bathtub carton, Claire looking at her aghast.

... when a moment changes everything... come on come on come on come on...

I didn't think I'd be able to work that out. I stood at the piano, right hand at the keyboard beginning to pick out the notes - and at that very moment - come on - the power came back on. Ha ha!

Dearests...