Filed under: Gardening
I am impatient for sunshine and a warm front. Three reliably sunny days, sequential, preferably during a weekend. I tap my foot, cross my arms. I am testy. I’ve got work to do.
Last fall’s dead things need to be peeled from the garden bed, leaves raked, ornamental grasses–fountain, feather reed, maiden, purple fountain–plucked and trimmed. The wheel barrow has a flat tire; it’s filled with water and two bags of last year’s mulch. The compost needs tossing. October was spent with my neck in a brace, recovering from a discectomy. The garden beds are as I left them on September 30, only now with wet leaves and brittle appendages of chrysanthemums, black-eyed Susan, coreopsis, pink wand flower, aster, and others I no longer recognize in their hollowy decay. (more…)
Filed under: Life, in general
It’s been over two years since I last posted and that was the first post since my heart attack. That’s a long time to go without reflection through the written word, without silence, without exploring the hairline cracks, the fissures between lines. I have spent much of that time worrying that I would have another heart attack. I am like a Geiger counter, registering and measuring all of the tiny quakes in my body, analyzing the data that comes in through nerve endings and palpitations.
But worse than this was losing my sister three months after my heart attack. She died in the middle of the night, in the bathroom, from blood clots in three thin arteries. She was my best friend, even when she wasn’t speaking to me. She cut me out of her life and let me back in so many times I couldn’t begin to count. Each time she cut me out, I felt I had lost a limb. As I got older, I began to see my hands as hers, my feet as her feet–we shared these small features, short, chubby digits, wide, duck-like feet. Sometimes I will glance at my hands and think she is here, holding my hairbrush or putting on my shoes. (more…)
Yep. I did. It’s been over a month now. The date, December 4th, will probably always sit in the back of my head as one of those anniversaries to commemorate with respect (one part solemnity and two parts gratitude): This is the day you nearly died.
I’ve had a hard time talking about it, let alone writing. It is easy to recite what happened that day, less so how I feel about it all.
It happened like this: I got up, took a shower, felt fine and thought that the two weeks of back pain I had been experiencing was finally over. As I got dressed to go to work—I was scheduled to lead a workshop in budgeting in 45 minutes—I suddenly felt the pain in my back return, then move to my chest and down the underside of my left arm. I could breath but the pain was so intense I was doubled over and sweating. I called my assistant and then my husband. He rushed home from work and drove me to the emergency room. Pronto, we got three clues as to how serious it was: first, I was seen immediately; second, nitroglycerin; third, morphine IV.
I’ve been doing some research on my ancestors, specifically those on my great-grandmother Zula Smith’s side. Yes, I know, Zula. Wish I could relate some fascinating explanation for her name, but I have none. And therein lies my dilemma: I possess a rich genealogical chart going back to the 1500s—compiled, coincidentally, by Mrs. Zula Smith who was endeavoring back in the 1930s to join the Daughters of the American Revolution—but I have no personal anecdotes, no stories passed down through the generations to bring these people to life. They are strangers to me, one-dimensional names, flat on a page.
Filed under: About Pigspittle, Life, in general, Politics | Tags: canvassing, David Plouffe, Obama, political campaigns
I’m plagued with ennui, I’ll admit it. Three weeks since the election and I still can’t focus on any single thing. In the past week, I’ve distracted myself with genealogy research, a friending frenzy on Facebook, and started reading yet another history book (in addition to The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 that I’ve been picking at for the past three months). Now I’m reading Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry Caudill, something I was supposed to read 25+ years ago in a sociology class but never quite got around to (raising the question once again, how did I manage to graduate?). I don’t know why I didn’t read it—it’s actually kind of interesting.
In the past three weeks I’ve cleaned the kitchen stove and cupboards, the washer and dryer, the floors, the bathroom. Helped rake semi-frozen, wet leaves. Counted the dead deer on my way to work each morning (four, and one appears to be headless). Celebrated Obama’s election a couple of times, most recently with beer. Removed the dry leaves, one at a time, off the bittersweet branches that are in two vases. Planted some mums. Felt slightly crafty but not enough to launch into a full-fledged project, such as sewing curtains.
Filed under: Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Christmas, Oliver North, republicans, Sean Hannity
(Stolen from my friend Bob…)
Filed under: Humor, Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Dick Cavett, Sarah Palin
Although I’m a week behind in nearly everything it seems (bills, reading, work), I can’t resist sharing this wonderfully biting blog post (not quite a week old) from Dick Cavett. Who knew Cavett was a blogger now? Not me. As a pre-teen, I watched Cavett’s talk show and even then knew that what I was watching was slightly left of center, slightly rebellious, just as the Smothers Brothers were. Cavett’s blog is no less entertaining. His latest post laments “The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,” punctuated parenthetically with wry asides like this:
(In passing, has anyone observed that hunting animals with high-powered guns could only be defined as sport if both sides were equally armed?)
And this typically deadpan observation:
It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
Contented sigh. My blogosphere is complete.
Filed under: About Pigspittle, Politics | Tags: 2008 presidential election, democrats, Obama, Ohio politics, republicans, working class voters
I stumbled across George Packer’s* Interesting Times blog today. I was vaguely aware that he was “slumming” in Ohio to report on the election. I scrolled down to a post he wrote a week ago about the white working class vote. In it, Packer relates his experience of interviewing voters from the Appalachian foothills, those southeastern Ohio counties—Athens, Meigs, Morgan, and Washington—that have suffered as much as any Rustbelt county and are more likely to resemble nearby West Virginia than Ohio’s capital city, Columbus, which is only an hour or so away. Packer recognized something those of us on the ground in Ohio recognized: the electorate is complex and this was no ordinary presidential election.
People can hold racist views and still vote against them, because they hold other views, too—they contain multitudes. And people can change. No one should imagine that the country has suddenly lurched in the direction of the Upper West Side. Residents of my neighborhood of Brooklyn have certain beliefs that are incompatible with those of residents of Glouster, Ohio. Obama will be wise to govern in ways that leave those unbridgeable differences alone, and instead direct the power of government to improving people’s lives in both places.
The identity of Pigspittle is similar to that of Meigs County. While some families have long roots in the ground, others were among the thousands of Appalachians who migrated North after the coal mines closed. They carried with them the same accents and idioms and holy-roller religion (though, to my knowledge, none of the famed Meigs County weed). They also carried a resentment on their backs that is still evident, though not nearly as violent as it was fifty years ago. (A black woman who grew up in Pigspittle told me stories of how she was treated in high school, how she endured razors thrown at her during drill team practice.) I confess that I find it nearly impossible to understand racism in Pigspittle. African Americans and Hispanics make up a minuscule proportion of the population here—no more than two percent. Yet, listening to some, you get the impression that the county is overrun with minorities who want to take their Pigspittlian jobs and run their Pigspittlian schools.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Federal Reserve, financial crisis, Freedom of Information Act, Valerie Plame case, White House emails
Kudos to two organizations for pursuing that rabbit-hole of obfuscation otherwise known as the White House. First, to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) for winning the right to sue the Executive Office of the President (EOP), the Office of Administration (OA), and the Archivist, and force the OA to restore deleted White House emails from March 2003 to October 2005 before they are irretrievable. According to a press release on November 10 from CREW, “D.C. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy upheld lawsuits brought by [CREW] and the National Security Archive challenging the White House’s failure to properly store and recover millions of emails.” As reported on the Washington Post‘s investigations blog, “The emails are thought to pertain to several controversial issues including the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame leak and the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes.”
On Saturday night, I dreamed that I could see Saturn’s rings. Hard to tell where I was standing—on Saturn itself? on a nearby moon?— but the rings appeared as shimmering curtains, like the Aurora Borealis except in blues and purples and yellows. Last night, I dreamed that I was on some scientific adventure, driving with a crew in the back of a station wagon along a dusty road. I was handed a paper cup that contained a large insect, as tall as a praying mantis. It had buggy eyes and long brown wings. Someone broke off the legs and handed them to me. I put them in my mouth, started to chew, and when no one was looking, spit them out the station wagon’s back window onto the dusty road.
