Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 23

Rope

We are approaching the six month mark. It has been six months since Tibe or Emma have been able to run around freely in their own back yard. There is no fence in our sweet Michigan hideaway so every outdoor adventure involves a collar and leash. Emma tires of it. She longs for the day when she can sit outside alone in the sun and nap.  Fortunately we have had few sunny days so the denial of this pleasure is less acute.

Tibe has adapted to his leashed walking life. I feel the loss for him, however. He is young, energetic. I wish he could run around a yard every day, play catch with a plushy, run crazy and free. In this absence, he has rope and long lead. Most days, at the end of our park walk, I put him on the then foot long lead. He hops into the back seat of the car, anticipating what is to come and sits while I attach the leash and ensure it is not tangled, then he jumps out and circles around a bit. His excitement most evident in his butt which wiggles in the opposite way his tail waggles. Most days, he then sits and waits for me to take out rope.

I should note here, I am a bad thrower. I have never been good at sending objects into the air with my hands. And flying objects coming at me cause me to run away. Bad memories of gym classes. Basketballs, volley balls, any ball hurling toward me and I quickly move away. Just as I have no interest in catching, grasping, or holding a ball, I barely can throw. Tibe does not realize this, of course. To him, I am a champion thrower. Though back in Maryland, we lost more than a handful of soft toys that I would throw for him to the roof. Yes, the house was behind me. No, I do not know how I ended up throwing that lamb and duck and octopus up there. Yes, I was aiming to throw them away from the house. Tibe doesn’t care about any of this. He is just excited when sitting next to the Honda, I finally take out the rope and throw it about fifteen feet away.

We play with that rope for five minutes. He is exhausted after a few pitches, some running and fetching, then some focused tugging. It takes little for my boy to be happy and sated. He doesn’t want much: the walk, the rope, my affection.

Every time we play with the rope, it is the first throw that mesmerizes me. I reach into the back seat to pull out the rope, which is now gray and muddy and covered with slobber. Tibe is sitting and excited. I pitch the rope into the air and he jumps up. All four paws off the ground. Sometimes his small body spins all the way around in a circle. He is free for a moment, just watching that rope, dancing in the air. In that moment, when I watch him fly off the ground, I think, always I think, we all might fly in the air with the rope playing our way toward a majestic free future.

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Vita

Vita, the cat, notes that this blog of late has focused far too much on Tibe when, in fact, he is not the star of the household. She is. So here are ten awesome stories about Vita, to right the balance of the blog.

1. We adopted Vita when she was only four or five weeks old. She weighed less than two pounds. I say, we adopted her, but she chose me. I went to the Prince George’s Animal Shelter to choose another kitten after our beloved Liza died suddenly from failing kidneys. It was a moment of profound grief, but also the beginning of a new semester and I did not want to be sad. Sadness is impossible around kittens. There were many kittens, but Vita, in one of the bottom cages, squeaked until we picked her up then purred and squeaked and purred and squeaked more, which seemed to say, pick me, pick me, pick me. We did.

2. When she first came home, she fit in the palm of my hand.

3. She also had a cold so for the first three or four days she sneezed and wheezed a lot. The cold was like a geolocational device. We could easily find her as long as she had that cold.

4. The shelter and all of the advice on adopting new kittens said, give her her own space for the first few days. That is exactly what we planned. She rejected this plan, leaving the bedroom where I had safely situated her. She wanted to meet Shelby and Emma. She quickly became a fan of both.

5. After Liza our feral cat, I wanted a cat who loved to be held. So for the first year of her life, I held her all of the time. If she jumped on my lap, I pet her, I cradled her, I stroked her. It worked. She loves being touched.

6. While she loves being cuddled, she is also a biter. In her kitten months, she would wake up the beloved by biting the top of her head. She particularly likes biting ankles, but any exposed flesh will suffice.

7. She is a champion traveler, which we did not know until I threw her in the car to drive to Michigan. The best part of that day? When Tibe hopped in the car and sniffed her all over. The second best part of that day? When we were all together that night. Safe. 

8. She likes being outside on her leash, but only in the sun and when the temperature is ideal.

9. She rules the roost. No questions. While Tibe and I jockey for the role of top dog, she knows she controls it. She walks into the room and everyone looks, awaiting her command.

10. She has the sweetest pink belly, which she will let you rub. Sometimes.

Vita sleeping in the sun.

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Still Here

Sigh.

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Kissin’ Don’t Last–Good Cookin’ Do

This is the cutting board from my childhood. For the past five months, I have been sifting through what remains in my ancestral home after my father left for his new home. It has been five months of failures in many ways. The failure of electronic appliances. First, it was the dish washer. It did not work but my father kept operating it knowing that it neither cleaned nor sanitized dishes. Then, the water heater. I replaced them both. The the refrigerator failed. The freezer would not freeze. It would not have mattered, but what is summer without ice cream? This morning, the toaster died with a spark and electric grumble. I worry about non-electric things, too. The drain in the upstairs shower is running slowly. Some of the “new” windows do not open and close properly. And as the weather warms the reality of screens for the first floor windows loom. These screens date from the original building of the house in 1938, matching the screen to the window is a challenge every spring. I foresee another failure.

For now, though, the beloved is making a delayed Cinco de Mayo dinner. After almost twenty years with her, mother’s cutting board seems prescient.

Filed under: personal writing, Tiberius

Old Women

Image from OLOC, Old Lesbians Organizing for Change

The lesbian communities I have traveled in and among celebrate age. Old age, a sign of wisdom, deserving respect, a form of defiance against the fetishization of youth in our culture. Lesbians create ritual to mark age transitions, mark the move from mother to crone with ceremonies, new names. The red hats and purple outfits now more widely adopted were, I believe, initially embraced and popularized by lesbians. “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.” The truth is: I embraced these ideas about aging. I want to be wearing purple and loud hats. 

Although with my grandmother over the past four months, I have seen old women outside the purple colored glasses. I have seen old women navigating the medical system. I have seen old women talking with physicians. I have seen old women in hospitals, in nursing homes, in their own homes. I do not want to be an old woman. I do not think anyone wants to be an old woman.

This week provides one story about how I came to that conclusion. My grandmother has a rash. A terrible rash that itches, itches like crazy, and covers probably forty percent of her body. Originally, it was a rash just around her ankles. It would get worse, then get better. We put lotion on it. We put caladryl and other anti-itch creams. We bought special socks. We did Epsom salt wraps. It would improve, then it would get worse, then it would improve again. While it was just around her ankles, it was a concern, but there we other medical issues. It did not quite hit the top concern for four months. Then it spread. It moved up her legs. It “weeped”: fluid came out of it, sometimes clear, sometimes bloody. Then she got a rash on her upper back, then on her arms. She itched all of the time. And she scratches, sometimes leaving scratch marks with blood. Sometimes just rubbing it. Suddenly, resolving her skin issues became the most important health issue.

This week on Thursday, we went to the dermatologist in the morning and her general practice doctor in the afternoon. The dermatologist did a biopsy, prescribed prednisone and recommended a special elixir of over the counter lotions. Fine. We can do all of that. Then the dermatologist said that there is little that can be done about the rash around the ankles. Chronic dematitis. She said. This is one of those diagnoses that really pisses me off because all it does is simply describe the problem. Yes, she has skin irritation that has been persistent over a number of months. The dermatologist offered no treatment plan for her legs.

For the arms, she did a biopsy to determine if the rash was caused by contact with something or if it is a result of a medication that my grandmother is taking. Sadly, in some ways, we hope it is a result of medication so that we can determine what the medication is and remove it from her care. If it is some type of contact dermatitis, determining what is causing it will be a long process–laundry detergent? Soap? Some type of fabric? Bedding? All possibilities wil have to be explored. It will be two weeks before we have the result from the simple test. Then the odyssey will continue. 

To try to interrupt the rash and bring relief in the interim (something I demanded, the dermatologist wanted to wait two weeks to get the results–she is miserable, I said, we cannot wait.), she is taking prednisone and using a cortisone cream. All good, you might think, except for prednisone raises blood sugar. For three months our focus has been on keeping the blood sugars in the reasonable range for her with a mix of oral medicine and supplements of injectible insulin substitutes. This is combined with diet, but diet for someone who has no short term memory is a special challenge. On Tuesday of this week, I arrived at my Grandmas at 1 pm. Lunch is at 11:30. I asked her, what did you have for lunch. Oh, she said, I haven’t had lunch yet, it isn’t time. Then when we looked at the clock, she said, oh, I must have missed lunch. Then I saw her sister and she ate a full lunch. As I said, diet is a challenge. Unhelpful dermatologist said, the prednisone will not affect her blood sugar if she adheres to a diabetic diet. I tried to explain. She ignored me and told my grandmother, just watch what you eat honey. Oh, yes, I always do, my grandm said. In the car on the way home, my grandmother said, they always say, watch your food, how else are you supposed to eat it? She has a devilish sense of humor. Today, her blood glucose was 457 at 3:30 in the afternoon. When I arrived to visit her, she said she did not feel great. She didn’t have a cold or fever, she just felt tired and out of it. We tested her blood sugar and that was most likely the culprit. An injection of an insult substitute and she felt better in a half hour, more animated, and funny.

She needs to take the prednisone for two weeks and be rubbed down with the special batch of lotion four times a day to try and interrupt this rash process. The best we are hoping former, according to the dermatologist, is containment. Some relief from the itching. She cannot be healed. This happens all of the time to old women, she told me. Being an old woman, apparently, means that people do not want to find out what is causing your issues or cure them, rather they want to give language to describe your problems to the insurance company and offer little relief outside of death. Being an old woman sucks.

Though I am not an old woman. I will not be dismissed by the dermatologist. I will push and insist that we first provide relief and second find the cause, how to treat it effectively and prevent it in the future. I want the beautiful skin on my grandmother’s arms and legs to be clear, soft, and wrinkly. I want the skin on her back to be healthy and itch free. I am completely comfortable shopping around for a doctor who will be my partner in this quest.

All of this is why I tell people all of the time: don’t be an old woman. It is not all purple t-shirts, purple hair, purple shoes, and red hats. It is daily diminishments. It is rashes that carry on for months and itch and itch and itch. Scratching brings no relief. Doctors bring no relief. Don’t be an old woman.

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Olfaction

Recently, my grandmother moved into a sweet apartment in an assisted living community. Every time I go to visit her, I bring a few objects from her house, giving her the opportunity to say, yes, I want to have that here with me or no, I do not need that now. When we picked up and moved from the house that I pay for but cannot live in to my childhood home, I knew the totems I wanted to bring with me: the sandstone piece that holds books open, the “writer’s block” with Virginia Woolf’s photo and signature, the small plastic box that holds business cards, the wood strips that hold 3×5 notecards. These are all of the things that define my desk space for me, the space of creative production. I understand the role of small objects in eliciting the experience of home.

What has surprised me is the role of smell in memory. I can look at an array of objects around the house, objects that have been here since I was a child. Sometimes they remind me of my past, or particular memories, but they do not evoke memories in the same way as smell. When we first arrived in the house, we slept in the bed that I slept in as a teenager. An antique bed frame with a terrible mattress. We were eager to move into the master bedroom. When we moved, a week or so into our adventure, despite changing the sheets, the mattress pad, and airing out the mattress, there was still in that bed, the smell of my parents in my childhood. I cannot say what really constituted the smell, it seemed to be a mix of perfumes, deodorant, make up, and humanness. I could not escape that smell. Buying another bed became an inevitability for me–the only way I could find to escape the olfactory memory of childhood in the bedroom.

And the king-sized mattress worked. The bedroom no longer smells of my childhood. I no longer feel like an interloper in my parents bedroom. But the linen closet in the bedroom, right off the bathroom, the linen closet that I cleaned and washed with ammonia three years ago after my mother’s death, the linen closet that now has only our towels, new sheets we have purchased, and toiletries we have purchased and use, that linen closet still smells like my mother. Every time I open the door to get a towel or pick up sheets, or grab a new tube of deodorant, I am transported to early 1980s and my mother is somewhere inside the house, cooking or cleaning or puttering. I cannot banish the smell from the closet. Washing it makes no difference, leaving the door open does not lessen it. I think that smell, the smell of my childhood, will live in that closet forever.

At some point, I will pack up my desk, pack up the candles and books at the side of my bed, touch the sandstone then wrap it in something soft, secure the paper clips, wrap the cedar chest, but I will not be able to capture that smell of the linen closet. I will be happy to leave the smell behind; when I open the closet door, I feel an overwhelming sadness, a sense of loss, the eighties gone, my mother gone, my sister gone, and there it all is back again in a second in the scent of the closet. I will be happy to not have this olfactory memory as a part of my daily life. Although I wonder if there will be some point in my future when I will be hungering for memory, when memory will be slipping away, and I will be sniffing for a scent to bring it all back to me.

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Grizzlies, Tibe, and Wildness

As usual Tibe sits at my feet as I write this. He is playing with a Kong filled with treats, trying to liberate those small morsels of food with with mouth, his teeth, his front paws. This activity will consume him for an hour or so and then he will be exhausted. He will sleep for part of the night before it is time to go out and walk again.

On Monday, I heard part of Terry Gross’s interview with David Quammen who wrote about Yellowstone National Park for this month’s issue of National Geographic. One piece of the interview riveted me.

GROSS: What happens to a bear that mauls somebody if that bear can be identified?

QUAMMEN: This is a very controversial and very difficult issue. Yeah, when bears get in trouble, when they attack people, when they maul somebody, if they kill somebody, then a decision has to be made. The decision is not always that that bear has to be taken out of the population, by which they mean killed, executed. I don’t like to use the term euthanized because it’s not really euthanasia. Euthanasia implies putting some creature out of its miseries.

This is different. This is killing an animal because of something that it has done, not because it’s suffering. That is not always done if a grizzly mauls a human. But if a particular grizzly is implicated in repeated, seemingly unprovoked attacks on humans, suggesting that that grizzly has come to associate humans with food and think of them as prey, then that bear is taken out of the population. That bear is killed. 

My reaction to this snippet of the story was powerful and complex. Immediately, I started weeping. Those poor grizzlies facing possible execution because of an incident with humans gone awry. The history of grizzlies at Yellowstone is sobering, how we have made their lives bend and contort to our desires for wildness and entertainment. Yet what struck me in the interview was not simply the facts and Quammen recount of them. Rather it was his tone, the thoughtful, soulful way he talked about the situation when grizzlies and humans came in contact. It is not easy to determine what to do when a grizzly attacks a human. It is a complex circumstance without easy answers. The outcome is not always that the grizzly is sentenced to execution.

This fact surprised me and of course leads me to think about Tibe and how quickly and easily the people in our neighborhood called for his death. The easy thing of course is to think if a grizzly can attack a human and not be sentenced to death, how could people think that Tibe’s tousle with another dog deserved a death sentence? My self-absorbed indignation raises larger questions. Who has the right to sentence other sentient creatures to death? What does one have to do to be deserving of a death sentence? How can we call for the death of another creature? What are the ethics of living in the world where so many wild culture collide sometimes with negative consequences?

All of this makes me think about wildness and domestication. Particularly, our desire for wildness and our need for domestication. I want the grizzlies to be wild. I want them to live their lives as they did before human intervention, but I recognize that we need a world were people, humans, are safe. These two things are in opposition occasionally. How do we manage that conflict? With dogs, we manage this conflict between wildness and domestication through training. Training Tibe is all about enforcing a particular type of domestication. I am the pack leader and any deviation from my direction results in the temporary withholding of my affection for him. It is exhausting work.

The push and pull of wildness and domestication makes me think about Tibe’s smell. Tibe gets regular baths so there is the smell of a domesticated, pampered dog, but there is also a smell in his head, some dirt that builds up in his ears, perhaps, that smells doggy. I love it. It is doggy and fecund and a little bit wild. I love it. Some mornings, I pull his head toward me and smell him first thing in the morning. He rolls onto his back and wags his tail. I breathe deeply. We are both domestic, trained, behaving. We are both wild.

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The Price of Labor

The new refrigerator is a joy. In my previous life, where, you know, I lived in the house that I was paying for every month, I was never really happy with the refrigerator. What I really want in a refrigerator is one where there is a space right on the door to press your glass and see it fill with ice. That is my nirvana: a full glass of ice in seconds without ever opening the door. Imagine what you can do with that joy in your life! That bliss seems far away, however, so I am happy with the most basic of refrigerators where we fill the ice trays with water and wait twenty-four hours for it to freeze. Perhaps Michigan is meant to remind us of the the basics: the ice and not how it is delivered.

Michigan also reminds me of the price of labor, of what it actually costs people to work, not with currency but with their bodies. Most recently, the fellow who delivered the refrigerator reminded me of the price of labor. He was missing part of two fingers. His middle finger and his ring finger stopped at the top knuckle, no nails, just missing tips. It reminded me of my grandmother talking about work at Lufkin Rule. She worked on the line producing rule or measuring tapes. When she described to me what she did on the line, she showed me working with her hands, moving machinery and parts, but there was also some part of the machinery that she operated with her feet. My grandmother worked at Lufkin in the 1950s, so over sixty years ago. Her memory of the work is in her body; her verbal descriptions were less concrete. Still she remembered the foot operations were dangerous; one woman she worked with lost a foot. She quit working at the factory afraid that she too might lose a foot.

Michigan has people who have paid the price of labor: people missing fingers and toes, people who have been burned in plant fires, people with eye injuries and ear injuries. Plant work is labor that can endanger the body. Certainly there have been improvements through legislation and oversight over the years, but the fact remains, physical labor takes a toll on the body. In Michigan, that toll is visible. If you live on the east coast, when is the last time you saw someone missing a part of their body, lost in a work accident?

Of course, the labor of office workers hurt the body, but it’s visibility is different. Sweet Honey in the Rock sings about this in the song, “More Than a Paycheck.” Labor has a price. Here in Michigan it is visible.

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Giving Up

This week, I replaced the vacuum cleaner and the refrigerator in the safe house in mid-Michigan. The vacuum cleaner was an old red Hoover. We never found bags that really fit in it and the suction never worked. It would pick up some of the animal hair, but that is about it. The cord had been vacuumed over a number of times, and my mother repaired it with black electrical tape.

The refrigerator is a whole other story. Three years ago, when I was here for my mother’s funeral, the refrigerator would run and run then there would be a huge thump and it would go off for a little while and then the cycle would start again. By the time we arrived to live in the house, the thump had stopped and the refrigerator just buzzed and buzzed and buzzed all of the time. A few weeks ago, the freezer stopped working. Now we have a shiny, new basic refrigerator. The new appliances are growing in the house.

In spite of the new appliances, the house still feels like my mother just gave up at some point. This is hard to accept because my mother was extremely ambitious and ambitious about material things. She wanted a swimming pool, a grant piano, a trip to Hawaii. She achieved all of those things. She was constantly saving for the next thing: clothing, furniture, make up. She wanted particular things and nothing would stop her form getting them. I learned from my mother that many things can be done on sheer will alone.

So it is odd, discomfiting to realize that at some point those ambitions ended. She wanted to have a beautiful home and wanted everyone to know she had a beautiful home. Yet, over the past twenty years, nothing has been done to the house.  My father will say that much work has been done: new windows, a new furnace. Still the home feels rundown, even neglected. It is unusual too for Michigan where people regularly renovate bathrooms and kitchens, recarpet floors, redo rooms. At some point, she let the house slide into its current state, worn, in disrepair, neglected.

I fantasize about renovating it, making it beautiful. That is what I miss most of all living here in Michigan. Beauty. Being in a space that is beautiful as I see beauty and having that beauty echoed back to me every day. I would like to make this house beautiful, to give my mother posthumously beauty restored. I cannot do that, however, so I will give her and my father clean and empty. The house at our eventual departure will be clean and empty. In that, there will be beauty. Not completely the beauty I desire, the beauty I remember, the beauty I want restored to my life, but a type of beauty and a type that will make me happy at least briefly. And, in this process of making this house where I grew up clean and empty, I will make myself a commitment to not give up, to live differently at the end than mother.

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Basement

A day or two before the beloved comes home from New York each week, I do laundry. Usually it is just the clothes that I have worn during the week. Occasionally an outfit or two that the beloved wore during the previous weekend. The laundry in our mid-Michigan hideaway is in the basement. Most laundry spaces in Michigan are in the basement. It makes me miss my first floor laundry in Maryland and how easy it is to do a load or two during the week. On the wish list for the next house, beside land for dog-roaming and gun-toting, is laundry near the bedrooms and a giant soaker tub.

The basement laundry means that while I am doing laundry, I lose my shadow-boy Tibe. Yes, Tibe is my shadow these days. I move from room to room and he comes with me. On more than on occasion, Emma has just rolled her eyes as if to say, Calm down, Ti. She isn’t really going anywhere. Basement laundry though means I lose my shadow. Tibe will not go into the basement. Anywhere.

He has always hated them. We have a basement in Maryland and he never went down there. Ever. As if something happened once down there and he did not want to return. This fact about our little pup was one of the things that was heart-breaking about packing Tibe off to his temporary shelter when animal control insisted he could no longer live with us. Tibe stayed at a great home, with a great set of adults who loved him very much and a little baby who was also fond of little Tibe, but he had to live in the basement. It was a lovely basement. Refinished. With a big comfy couch. It was the very best option that we had. Still, a basement. 

It was almost as if Tibe knew it was the best option, though, because he never objected. When I visited and walked him in the neighborhood and we returned, he would happily go barreling down the stairs with me. It was as if he knew those eighteen days were grueling for all of us. The uncertainty. Emma’s disorientation. Missing Tibe at night while sleeping and during the work days. Tibe knew that my emotional state was such that I could not survive struggling with him to get him in the basement. So he jauntily took those steps down to the basement for eighteen days. Happy to greet me when I came to visit and content when I departed. As if he knew I would return. As if he knew after the interregnum, he would never have to go into a basement again.

And he never does. No more basements for Tibe.  

Tibe and Vita resting while I do laundry.

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