year end

No promises. I won't be better at anything, and I'll probably be worse. I re-read my resolutions from last year, and, barring the intention to "write it all down," I've kept most. I'm older by far than I ever expected to be.

This morning the sky in Yamhill was a watercolor, indescribably lovely, just out my back door. I am not working today or tomorrow. So I will un-decorate and let the dogs out and in and out and in again. I mop and vacuum, they muss it all up again. Sid is painfully arthritic now, but with his magic pill he still plays like a pup and pays later, and dearly, and spends a good deal of time on the memory foam bed we got him for Christmas. Sid Vicious, now in his 14th year. Duffy is eight and still the grumpy Alpha, Mac is one, the baby of the pack. He cries and tries to act like the other dogs but he is a funny, silly thing. Always the clown. It will probably be Sid's last year. He is such a good boy, mother to all.

Mark bought his first house this year. It is out in Central Point, a foreclosure, and he is excited to begin the work of transforming it. Built in 2004, 3 bedrooms 2 bath, nice floor plan. Huge lot with big outbuildings for his trucks and equipment. I am deeply proud of him and I hope he finally has a sense of it all finally being enough. He suffers from the man thing pretty badly -- incomplete without property, beliefs about success a barrier to contentment. Maybe he will relax a bit and enjoy his good life now.

My husband's children, two of them, bring joy to his life and mine. Nicole continues to cause him immeasurable pain. Of course, being who he is, the pain is what he focuses on rather than David and Haley, who love him, understand him, and stay in contact. The holidays are hard for him. Now that they are over, perhaps there will be some light in our home. My husband is a sun lover, and often measures his happiness by the minutes of light that increase from the solstice forward. Day before yesterday we had six more minutes in that day. As we all know, I am not nearly so discerning. If I wake up, it is a good day. If I've slept the night before, even better. My strategy has long been to have Christmas anyway, despite his molecular sadness, and it has rubbed off on him, my inexplicable joy, year upon year, to at least offset the depression. He does not share my faith, which is silly and a remnant of my childhood, but it is my faith, afterall. I can't shake it. Believe me, I've tried.

My year? I remain stunned by the political reality of this age. I keep thinking that somebody somewhere will do something. But they don't. Day after day I wake up to the stark reality of Hitler's Germany. I imagine ex-presidents riding in on horseback to save our day, our place in this world, our planet, but nothing happens. The secret meetings to impeach the monster we've loosed on this country in our full-bellied slumber go forward too slowly if at all. We have too many laws that protect the guilty and prohibit simple declarations of right and wrong. Our leaders are circumspect when they should be screaming. Democrats are so well-behaved I am ashamed to be one of them. I keep hearing of a march for impeachment, and I'd be there, but I can't find it online except in DC and I can't go there. Not in January. Probably not ever.

And what about me, you ask? I am older, now. My health is a reflection of my appetites. Not great. Oh, my appetites are great, but the long term effects of denial are cumulative. My feet hurt. I take pain medication rather than anti-psychotics and neuroleptics. At least I can still think. I think. I still work every day, and enjoy my job, although when I got sick in early December I began to consider retirement. But what would I do? What? (someone is whispering from some forgotten place just behind my right ear.) Wait....shhhh. Write? Art?

Okay. Write. Art.

research monkey

As my health fails, as aging does what it does, I am introduced to medication after medication that will cure my ills. I've been through several -- several -- trials over the past three months. The most recent, Cymbalta, kicked my ass. I'm tired, exhausted, really. The intent is to treat diabetic neuropathy, screaming feet. There has to be a better way. Narcotics work, but like Keith Richards said, "you can't get anything that feels good anymore." Or something like that. I get it. As a hope-to-die dope fiend, I appreciate the risks. Shit.