Pat Bertram's Blog, page 38

Consuming Time

It’s amazing to me how much time is consumed by paying a couple of bills and running a few errands. The errand part might, of course, have something to do with my not actually running. In fact, today I had to pick my way along slick, snow-packed roads, wearing cumbersome hiking shoes and using a couple of trekking poles.

And that was the easy way. I gave up on the sidewalks shortly after moving here. With a few happy exceptions, the sidewalks around here are cracked and buckled and downright dangerous during the dry seasons, but when they are covered in snow (because only those same few happy exceptions shovel the snow), the sidewalks are truly treacherous.

The slow trudging to get from place to place wasn’t the only thing that consumed time. I talked to the librarian for a while, then at a store I visited I happened to meet up with a person I needed to talk to, and when I was on my way out, I visited with another acquaintance. I had to cut that visit short — she kept moving closer, and I kept moving away. Whatever happened to keeping a six-foot distance?

But now I’m home safe, and though several hours simply disappeared out of my day, there is still plenty of unconsumed time for the important things of life, such as reading and perhaps cooking a meal for a change.

As it turns out, the books I mentioned yesterday that I had to pick up at the library and was hesitant to read, are books I’d already read, so that frees up time, too. I don’t know what glitch in their system sent the books to me twice, but I’m just as glad not to have to read them, though now I wonder if I should try to get the two I haven’t yet read before I completely phase out that author.

The snow is rapidly melting, so when I have to return these books to the library in the next day or so (there’s no point in keeping them for the entire checked-out time), the errand should be finished quickly.

I’m also caught up with bills, so yay! No more time consumers for a while.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Feeling the Cold and the Creeps

It warmed up a mite. A couple of mornings ago, it was minus eight degrees Fahrenheit, and this morning when I walked to work, it was twelve degrees. A veritable heat wave! Despite the high temperature being just above freezing this afternoon, the heat from the sun was so intense, the snow is almost melted. There will be another day or two with single digit lows, then it will get back into the temperatures I’d become accustomed to — lows in the twenties, highs in the fifties.

That also means I’ll be back to watering my grass occasionally. And the streets will be clear and dry so I can go to the library. They are holding a couple of interlibrary loan books for me, and I need to go pick them up, though I’m not sure I really care to read them. I ordered these books months ago — maybe even a year ago — but because of all the closures and slowdowns due to The Bob, I didn’t get the books until now. In fact, I’d completely forgotten about them.

Meantime, what was once an author (Louise Penny) I enjoyed reading became one who gives me the creeps. This author, like one I have abhorred for a very long time whose initials are JP, is teeming up with a politician to write a book. I have no idea why an author who is respected in her own right needs the name of such a controversial politician (initials HRC) to further her career or why she would want to further the needs of the politician. It makes me feel manipulated, as if hands on my back are steering me in a direction I don’t want to go. I realize I shouldn’t let her decision to team up with another person make me rethink the books she wrote before the teaming, but it does. I will never be able to unsee those two names together on a book without shuddering. (It’s not the same with James Patterson and the other Clinton because I lost respect for Patterson and his writing franchise decades ago.)

Life seems to be taunting me, getting the books to me now when I don’t care rather than long ago when I especially wanted to read them. But I will try to remember that these books were written pre-HRC when I still thought Penny was worth reading, and slog my way through them. If nothing else, maybe I’ll finally find out how her detective ended up in the tiny village of Three Pines. The first books I read had him living in the big city. The last books had him living in the village. Without the intermediary books, it’s an additional mystery, so I will watch for the move, enjoy the books as best as I can, and console myself with the thought that these will be the last books of hers I will ever read.

And anyway, with winter here, it seems only fitting to be reading mysteries that take place in the far north (farther north than here, anyway). One thing that fascinates me about books that take place in Canada is the peek at a country and culture that is so similar to USA, and at the same time, vastly different. Although we’re becoming a country divided by myriad languages, this is more by default than by design. Canada seems to have always been a country defined by its two languages and two cultures. Or maybe three when you include the First Nations. Unless I’m wrong about that? I have to admit, the only things I really know about Canada are from the authors I’ve read, not just Louise Penny, but Robertson Davies, Lucy Montgomery, and Margaret Atwood. And, of course, from people I’ve met online.

But I’m getting far from where I started this essay, which is the cold. Brrr! I hope you’re keeping warm this winter, wherever you are.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Someone to Call

Apparently the tarot cards are right. This year is starting off with failure and defeat. Actually, that’s not anywhere near the truth. Failure and defeat are sometimes simply in the mind of cursed — a mishap that is a defeat for one person can be one of life’s negligible challenges to take in stride for another, and that is the case here.

I hope you know that my talk of the tarot and its prognostications is more or less me being facetious and playful. Whatever the cards say is not something I take personally. If anything, they seem to reflect my state of mind, and I think that’s because I interpret the cards through whatever my mood is at that particular time.

That being said, I started off the day with a frozen hot water pipe in my kitchen. I had cold water in the kitchen and both hot and cold in the bathroom. To be honest, I didn’t know a hot-water pipe could freeze, at least not more so than a cold-water pipe.

I texted my contractor for help, and he suggested putting a space heater under the sink, and if that didn’t work, he’d come out and unfreeze the pipe for me. So I opened the hot water spigot (to relieve the pressure), put my little electric space heater under the sink, and in the hopes that the hot water in nearby pipes would help, I also took a shower. Not the smartest thing, perhaps, to leave a heater alone in a semi-enclosed space, but this heater is so small and uses so little electricity, that I wasn’t worried.

Whether it was the shower or the heater, I don’t know, but the hot water soon came gushing out of the faucet.

So, not exactly a disaster.

Even if my efforts hadn’t helped, the contractor would have come out or sent one of his workers as he did last year when the entire pipe (both hot and cold) to the kitchen froze. He’ll be replacing the water lines someday, and when he does, I’m going to ask him what all the pipe are, how they connect up, and where they go. I can see some of the water lines, but I’m not sure which are hot and which are cold and where they meet up. (Last year, I guessed wrong about which was the frozen pipe and heated one that wasn’t a problem.)

As long as we’re even and I’m not too far ahead of the contractor with my payments, I’m fine with however long it takes him to do my work because he always responds to my texts, so it’s like having a contractor on retainer. (I must admit I do get worried when the payments get too far ahead for too long because if something happens to him, I’m out the money. I am certainly not going to dun a widow and her fatherless children, and I can’t afford to just write it off.)

It’s not supposed to get down below zero (Fahrenheit) again for a while (apparently eight below is too much for my pipes), so I should be okay. If I remember, the next time I’ll open the cabinet doors under the sink so maybe it won’t get as cold under there as it did last night. That’s assuming, of course, that those are the pipes with a problem.

This is certainly no omen for an unpleasant new year. It’s just typical of the myriad things that need to be taken care of when one owns a house.

It’s funny, now that I think about it. One reason I preferred renting was that when things went wrong, all I had to do was call the landlord, and have him do the work or arrange to have it done. Too many crappy landlords and landladies taught me that this was a naïve view, so I didn’t take the matter into consideration when I had the opportunity to buy. Now, though, I have the best of both worlds. A house of my own, and someone to call.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Being Right . . . and Wrong

I was right about being awakened at midnight last night by fireworks. At first, still groggy from being half asleep, I worried something was happening to my house. Being responsible for a house is still so new to me (even though it has almost been three years since I moved here) that I panic at every strange noise. Admittedly, there aren’t as many strange noises as there used to be since I have come to recognize most of them. Still, banging noises do give me pause. But then I fully woke, realized people were celebrating the new year, blew a few wishes for all of you into the wind, and eventually went back to sleep. But not before I noticed there was a bit of snow coming down.

It’s still snowing, and has been all day, so I was wrong about my guess that we’d get a negligible amount of moisture. It turns out I was right to make the effort to plant my wildflower seeds yesterday. Those that didn’t get blown away will be firmly bedded for the rest of the winter, especially since it won’t get above freezing for a couple of days, and then only for two or three hours before the temperature plummets again.

I was also right that despite having a feeling of finality for the end of the year, I don’t have a similar sense of beginning for this new year. I do have a new calendar, though, with empty squares to fill with plans for fun and adventure, so that’s a beginning of sorts.

I also started with a new deck of tarot cards, one I haven’t used before. I never liked these particular cards, which is why I haven’t used them. They seem too bizarre to me and unmagical despite their name “The Magickal Tarot.” [Apparently, I’m wrong about not having used this deck before. While adding tags to this post, I happened to discover a previous discussion of the deck on my blog here: The Magickal Tarot]

This change of decks isn’t a new year sort of thing but a new month thing — every month I change the deck of cards I use, trying to find one that speaks to me. The Magickal Tarot is not such a deck. In fact, it dislikes me as much as I dislike it. The cards it fed me today are the seven of pentacles (Lord of Failure) reversed and the five of swords (Lord of Defeat).

Yikes! Talk about a bad omen for the new year! The first card of my two-card reading denotes the situation, the second card is the challenge I will face. My question was “What do I need to know this year?” and apparently, the cards think I need to know that my hopes will come to naught, and my challenge will be to deal with sorrow and loss and treachery. Oh, my!

The interesting thing to me about this reading was the reversed card. I make sure to keep the cards always in an upright position; I’ve even learned to deal the cards so they always face the same way. And yet, somehow, this one card, for the first time in the 18 months I have been doing a daily one- or two-card reading, was upside down. You’d think that a reversed card of failure would be the opposite of the upright card, but that is not true. If the card were upright, it would mean only delay and success unfulfilled, but reversed, it’s even worse.

I’m not worried about the prognostication. Most of my readings don’t seem to have anything to do with me, so I’m sure this reading is the same.

I hope I’m right about that!

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Wishes on the Wind

I didn’t know there was such a problem with wildfires in the towns of Boulder County in Colorado until I started getting messages from people online asking if I’m okay. Luckily, I am two-hundred miles from the fire zone. The only problem I foresee is that my house insurance will skyrocket again as it did last year in response to wildfires in other parts of Colorado, which seems unfair. Our rates here in my corner of Colorado are among the highest in Colorado and across the nation, and yet when anything happens in areas where people don’t have high premiums, my rate goes up too. In fact, the increase is in proportion to what I am already paying, so that means I end up paying more than my share. I guess I should be grateful — and I am — that I’m not one of those whose house has been destroyed, but if my insurance goes up much higher, I won’t be able to afford the dubious protection.

Other than learning about the fires, it was a good day. There have been high winds, of course, bringing in frigid temperatures and maybe even some snow for tonight. They are forecasting one to three inches, though I will be surprised if we get any moisture. Still, I took a chance on their being right about the possibility of snow and planted my wildflower seeds. I stamped them into the ground as best as I could to make sure that they don’t all get blown away. I do have more seeds, so can replant if nothing comes up next spring. Comes up in my yard, I mean. With the wind, there’s a possibility that my seeds are being planted all over the neighborhood.

I’m taking it as a good omen, though, that I planted the seeds on the last day of this year — the seeds of a new beginning as well as a way of perhaps bringing the best of this year into next year.

I’m hoping that the cold and snow will cut down the noise of tonight’s revelers with their firecrackers. If not, then I hope I’ll be able to sleep through the midnight commotion, but if I’m awake, I will think of you and send out wishes on the wind that next year will be your best ever.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Happy New Year’s Eve Eve!

Happy New Year’s Eve Eve! That sounds redundant, but it’s the truth — tonight is the eve of New Year’s Eve. One night, one day, one evening, and then this year will be finished. I don’t know how to feel about that, to be honest. All things considered, it was a good year, but it seems unreal that this year is done for and another year is beginning so soon.

I have no real plans for the new year, just the same plans I’ve had all along — take care of my house and hope that more of my landscaping gets finished by and by, take care of myself and hope that my health holds up, take care of all the little things that arise and hope I have the stamina to deal with them. That’s a lot of taking care and hoping, enough to fill a year — and a lifetime — that’s for sure.

As for the remainder of this year, I expect to fulfill the last two days of my 100-day blog challenge. But that’s a given — not a special plan for these days — as is the continuation of my daily blogging for no other reason than if I took a day or two off now and again, I’d get in the habit of not blogging, and since it’s the only writing I do, I’m not ready to give it up yet. But blogging is all that’s on my schedule for the next two days.

Because this area is going to be subject to fierce winds followed by a huge temperature drop off from a windy high of 60 (degrees Fahrenheit) tomorrow afternoon to a bitter low of 9 tomorrow night (and a high of 19 on Saturday with a low of 0 Saturday night), today I went to the library and stocked up on books, then did one last bit of lawn watering. So for the rest of the year my time is my own with no responsibilities except to stay warm.

I don’t have any plans for tomorrow night, either. There’s no reason to stay up until midnight to toast the new year, though I imagine I will be awakened by all the fireworks set off by witless neighbors. (Witless because they ignore the law prohibiting fireworks in Colorado as well as discounting the fire danger inherent in high winds and low humidity.)

I hope your year end and your year beginning will be as pleasant as mine. Meantime, have a Happy New Year’s Eve Eve!

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Left-Behind Secrets

A common storyline for mysteries and thrillers is the secrets one finds after the death of one’s husband. Sometimes the husband is not really dead, but faked his demise for nefarious reasons. Sometimes the husband had a secret life, such as a second wife and family. Sometimes the husband was murdered, which eventually uncovers a whole slew of secrets, including whatever he did — sometimes innocently, sometimes with malice — to make someone want him dead.

All these left-behind secrets, of course, add to the grief of the widow because not only does she grieve for her husband, cad that he might have been, but she also grieves for the illusory life she’d taken to be real.

I’ve used this storyline myself for my novel Unfinished, though the secret didn’t really have that much of an impact on my character except for the awful realization that her husband had never trusted her enough to tell her about his past.

This is a popular storyline for a reason. Often, in real life, when clearing out a loved one’s effects, secrets do come to light. Sometimes it’s a stash of love letters, relics of an affair the husband had that the widow never knew about. Sometimes it’s a financial mess that was left behind, though in rare circumstances, it’s a trove of much-needed cash that the widow never knew about.

People are always shocked to find out these secrets because they were sure they knew everything there was to know about their spouse. In a way it makes sense that there are secrets — both the husband and wife generally lead separate lives for most of the day, he with his job, she with hers. Even more than that, though, our brains tend to fill in the gaps. For example, we all have blind spots — literally blind spots in our vision — but our brains fill in the missing information so most of us don’t realize we have a blind spot. It’s the same thing with knowledge. We can only know what we know, so our brains create some sort of boundary that excludes what we don’t know when forming a concept, so we assume that what we know is all there is to know, especially when it comes to a person we’ve lived with for many years and think we know well.

Chances are, we do know that loved one as well as anyone can know another person, but I don’t know how accurate that knowing is. For example, I lived with Jeff for more than three decades, most of which we spent in each other’s company. We worked together, lived together, watched movies together, and talked for hours on end. And yet, there’s no way I would ever assume that what I knew of him is all there was to know. Despite our almost mystical connection, he was his own person. I tend to think that in all the talking we did over the years, I learned most of his life, but there’s no way I could ever know if there were things I didn’t know.

At this point in my life, of course, it doesn’t matter. He was who was, and a big part of dealing with grief is understanding that despite all the love and experiences two people share in a lifetime, in the end, they are two separate people. He had to go his way (to death and beyond, assuming there is a beyond), and I had to go my way. If I were to find out now he had some sort of secret life (secret from me, that is), it wouldn’t seem the betrayal it would have been when he was alive or in the first years of my grief because grief did its work, and I let him go. I still miss him and I still talk to his picture, but that is in no way talking to him. I don’t expect him — the “him” that was once my life mate — to listen to my mutterings, nor do I expect a response. It’s just a way of ending my day, enumerating the highs and lows of the long hours spent mostly alone.

As you’ve probably guessed, the book I am currently reading is about a husband who was murdered and whatever he did to get someone angry enough to beat him to death. (I think it was something innocent, perhaps giving evidence of a crime, but I don’t know yet because I am only halfway through the story.)

One thing I do find interesting is that unlike most books of this ilk, the widow is still grieving a year later. Intensely grieving. Most books have the widow cry a few tears then shrug off their grief and go about their life as if nothing had happened, as if the death was merely a springboard for a change. But this author knows that grief is not simply an emotional upset but is a neurological condition that overloads the brain, changes the chemistry, and affects the neurological system in ways still not understood.

I was impressed with the author’s insight on grief if nothing else.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

A Reflection of My Thoughts

Today’s two-card tarot reading was The World followed by the Ten of Cups.

The meaning of The World in this deck (The Ancient Egyptian Tarot) is completion. The final achievement of all one’s objectives. The attainment of harmony. A sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. The end of an era.

The meaning of the ten of cups is also completion and satisfaction (complete satisfaction, actually) along with contentment. It’s about living for today, with no regrets over the past and no concerns for the future.

The first card in my two-card readings tells me the situation. The second card gives further information about the situation, so it seems to me that the cards are saying that this is the end of an era, but that I am okay with it.

However these cards are read, it’s a great fortune, but what I found most interesting is the cards seem to tie in with the feeling I’ve been having of things coming to an end, though not necessarily in a bad way. This end could be the end of the year. It could be the end of this particular “era” for me. Or it could simply be a feeling that means nothing. But whatever the feeling is, it seems to be reflected in the cards, though I don’t know whether the cards are saying that I am right about my feelings and this is the end of something or they are picking up on my thoughts and reflecting them back to me.

This reflection of my thoughts happens quite frequently, though I don’t see anything particularly mystical in it. It could be that I interpret the cards through the screen of whatever I am thinking or feeling.

After all this time — a year of one-card readings and six months of two-card readings — I still don’t have a feel for the truth of the cards. It could be that my logical mind rebels. A person who is learning the tarot is supposed to study the cards and see what she intuits, but all I can see when I look at a card is a picture that is someone else’s (the artist’s) interpretation of what the card might mean.

It’s possible that a logical yet intuitive (or do I mean intuitive yet logical) person can never really get more out of the cards than the superficial meanings I am finding. So far, I am not learning anything about myself that I don’t already know, and if I am learning anything about the future, I don’t particularly want to know what it might be. After all, I will know for sure whatever the future might bring when I arrive. (Though the fallacy here is that there is no future because when you arrive in the future, you are in the present.)

Despite my continued reservations, I am sticking with my tarot studies. After all, I have a long way to go. The first year was for a one-card reading, the second for a two-card reading, the third year will be for a three-card reading, and so on until the end of my interest.

Hmm. There’s that word again: “end.” It makes me wonder if when this year has ended and a new one begun if I will have a sense of new beginnings. I guess I’ll find out when the new year arrives.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

The Coming End

This week seems to be a time out of time, when people are concentrating on the year to come, planning New Year’s Eve events, making resolutions (or at least thinking of making them), and even shopping at year-end sales in preparation for next year’s needs. Like everyone else, that’s generally how I’ve thought of this time — as a few extra days tacked on to the end of the real year in preparation for the next real year.

Despite all that focus on the future, there are a few days left of this year, time enough to hurry up and finally do some of the things you resolved to do when this year was new, and time enough to celebrate the remaining days because every day should be a day to celebrate, if only that we are still alive.

Oddly, for the first time in my life, I am very aware of this year coming to an end. I can actually feel a sense of finality, though I’m not sure whether it’s for the year itself or for some as yet unknown experience. I don’t in any way think that I am prescient; this feeling of an end could be what I originally intimated — that the year (and only the year) is coming to an end. The feeling could also be due to my spending so much time alone and hence able to feel some sort of change in the atmosphere. (A change in weather is coming, that’s for sure — there won’t be any of these balmy winter days for a while.)

But what do I know. Not much, really. I do know that all things end, whether it is a day, a month, a season, a year. And yet years don’t really end, now that I think about it; they just roll over into a new calendar year with no clear demarcation between the end and the beginning, the old and the new (except for a new calendar, of course.) We’re still the same, though I wonder what it would be like if those resolutions could be actual changes, not just feeble plans to make changes that so quickly dissipate in the sameness of the new year.

To be honest, I’m not sure many of us could handle real changes, to wake up on January first, suddenly fit and healthy, disciplined and kind, rich and satisfied, or whatever it is that we wish we were that we aren’t. I suppose it’s healthier in the long run to realize we are who we are, with an ability (or rather an inability) to make any significant changes to ourselves or our lives from one year to the next, though changes do happen.

Maybe that’s the “end” I feel so acutely right now — the end of hoping to be the person I wish I were and a greater acceptance of the person I am.

Or it could be, as I said, that the feeling of “end” is nothing more significant than a simple awareness that this is the end of the year, a thing in itself, not a prelude to something else.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

A Pleasant Day

I had a very nice day yesterday, which just goes to show that a person doesn’t have to be with others to celebrate Christmas. Of course, it helped that I texted with my sister for a while as we opened our gifts from each other. (She got me gardening tools and a sun hat — so very thoughtful and fun.) The interesting thing is that we have her usual Pacific northwest December weather, and she has our usual Colorado weather. In other words, she was experiencing a rare Christmas snowstorm, and we experienced a rather mild and dry Christmas.

Mostly I watered my grass, read a novel, and played on the computer.

[I think I’ve mentioned a find and seek game that I’m sort of addicted to, the playing of which should make me feel silly except that I play the game during the times most people are lounging in front of a television and besides, there’s only so much reading a person can do.]

I also made a point of fixing a special meal for myself, though the “fixing” was mostly sticking the food in the oven and waiting for it to fix itself. Still, it was delicious, and a real treat. (Literally a treat since the dinner kit was a gift.) I even used my good china. Which makes me wonder: since the dishes were made in Japan, shouldn’t they be called my good japan? (You know I’m being silly, right?)

Today was more of the same, at least to a certain extent. It’s been very windy (it still is, actually) so I didn’t go outside at all, but I made sure to do my knee “therapy” and spent a couple of minutes on my elliptical. (It sounds rather pathetic, but more than that aggravates my knees right now.) Then I read and played on the computer. Come to think of it, I even fixed a nice meal, though I didn’t bother with a pretty layout or the stove. I just heated the meat and vegetables in the microwave and ate from the cooking dish.

I hope your days (yesterday and today) were as pleasant as mine, whether you celebrated or not.

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Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.