Sunday Scribblings - Goodbyes

This week's Sunday Scribblings prompt is goodbyes.

I don't know if I can write this post; I feel the tears starting already. On December 17, 2006, I said goodbye to my house. In doing so, I also said goodbye to my independence, my privacy and a good chunk of my self esteem. And I said goodbye to a lot of my "stuff" that I just could not keep. It wasn't our idea to move. J was unable to work for health reasons and the savings had run out. The house went into foreclosure. Selling was not an option; the house needed a lot of work to make it salable and there was not enough equity left to do it. Our only option was to vacate. I did not want to move but I had to start packing anyway.

This was a very personal and painful process for me. I am the kind of person who wraps her memories around things. Sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. I had unidentified movie ticket stubs and popsicle sticks from the 1960's. I suppose I thought I would make a scrapbook or something. This move forced me to choose what bits and pieces had real meaning and which had to be told goodbye. I gave some precious things to friends who would treasure them as I had done. Our niece who was setting up housekeeping for the first time was the happy recipient of the dishes and silverware I had purchased in my bachelor girl days (and was still using) and even some wedding gifts. I donated useful things to charity, and we took a literal ton of magazines and papers to the recycle lot. No, really. We added up how many grocery bags of paper goods went, in five trips, and their average weight. We topped 2000 pounds of recycling.

We are starting to settle into a routine here, but I have periods of melancholy when I think about our nice little house and our old lifestyle, and how it is all gone. I miss being able to do what I want, when I want. I miss being surrounded by all of my books, magazines, videos and mementos. I feel like a tip of an iceberg, where most of me (i.e., my stuff) is buried out of reach. I suppose time will heal these feelings, but for now, I am still saying goodbye.

Before I posted this, I saved the draft and went around to read other Sunday Scribblings. After reading about the significant losses of others, relationships, family members...I wondered if I should just chuck this post altogether. A part of me said no, grieving is grieving, whether for people, things or intangibles.

The First 30 Days

We have lived here for 30 days now. I'm counting from January 1, after the holidays were over and we could get back to normal, whatever that is going to be.

One month of rural living.

Personally, I missed most of it. I have SAD. The first three weeks in January are the bottom of the black hole. SAD is like having PMS, with one week spread out over three months. The symptoms are so similar, I wouldn't be surprised if they find a connection someday. One would think that the bottom of the cycle would coincide with the shortest day of the year, but I seem to have a delayed reaction. My brain defers the worst of it for mid-January, for which I am thankful, as it would certainly ruin my Christmas even more than it currently does.

The fatigue is the worst, followed by the carb cravings. Left on my own, with no obligations, I would crawl in bed with a big bag of Oreos and not come out until spring. Mom and J suffered through it with me, putting up with my moodiness, not seeing it as a character defect. They know this, too, will pass. J has been by my side through these episodes for many years now, but it was the first time my mother was seeing it first-hand. I think she found it a bit disconcerting, this shift in personality. She understands the nature of it, now, but it took some doing on my part to convince her it is really a disorder and not just laziness on my part.

There are treatments for this. Prozac or something similar would help, but I don't want to go that route. I was on Prozac for several years to help with PDD, which is the disorder level of PMS. When I cam out the other side of The Big M, nearly two years ago, the PDD just disappeared on its own, and I weaned myself from the prescription. I didn't like what it did to me, even on what my doctor termed a "teeny, tiny" dose. It gave me a nap attack every day. With the fatigue of the SAD I don't need to feel any sleepier than I already do.

I can't afford the fancy lightbox. I have the full-spectrum lightbulbs; I do feel better when I spend extra time under them in the winter, but this year I have not had time. We have at least 100 boxes to unpack, to assimilate our stuff into the household, and put into storage whatever we can do without. I try to work on it everyday. I have to have it finished before the hot weather arrives, as there are boxes of items in the attic and garage that will be damaged by the heat.

Herbal supplements help. I take ginseng, which helps mental acuity, and maca root, which fights the fatigue from both the SAD and the menopause. Since I have been off Prozac I have gone back to St. John's Wort, which is a mild natural antidepressant that does not cause sleepiness, at least not for me.

So, the first thirty days were spent, when I could get myself out of bed, unpacking and also shopping for supplies to stock a larder than now has to feed three mouths instead of one.

Oh, and I started these blogs. At least I can claim something worthwhile accomplished. I've made a few blogfriends and I hope to meet more. Perhaps the new year isn't off to such a bad start, after all.

A Mixed Blessing

A Mixed Blessing. That's what J calls having farm cats. They are a joy to us but we experience such grief when we lose them. And the loss is inevitable.

My brother felt we needed farm cats, like we had years ago, to keep the rodent population down in the farm buildings. In October he brought over a mama and five 7-week-old kittens given to us by a family that had too many cats.

"Farm cats" are not supposed to be pets, we knew we shouldn't get attached to them, but we are such softies. Even my sister-in-law, who thought she did not like cats, was smitten by these five little bundles of fur. When they came to visit, she would scoop up two or three of them and say "aren't they cute?" J quickly became especially attached to them. His mother allowed no pets when he was growing up; his first experience with being around animals and sharing a home with them was when he married Chloe and me (more about that later.) He has taken on the daily responsibility of going out to the former chicken coop which has been converted to a cat coop, to fill the food and water dishes. Before they go in to eat, they all line up to be picked up and cuddled, one at a time. Butterfly, Butterscotch, Buttercup, Buster Brown, and Ruffles.

In three months we have lost three of the six, and it broke our hearts every time.

We lost the mama within the first week. She came up to the house severely injured, apparently having nearly lost a fight with something vicious. She only lived a few more days. There was nothing we could do. Farm cats generally do not get vet visits; it is too expensive, and they would have just had to expedite what was coming anyway. Thus we found ourselves with five motherless two-month-old kittens. We had planned on supplementing the mothercat's hunted food with commercial catfood, at least until the kittens were old enough to hunt on their own. Now we had to fill that dish every day.

J commented on how fast the food was going down, considering it was for five little kittens. We became suspicious that something else was getting a free lunch, so my brother set up a camera in the coop to catch the culprit on film, and it worked. We found several photos of raccoons helping themselves to the catfood! At least one of the kittens sat and watched, and in one photo, joined them at the dish.

One of the raccoons, his tummy full, decided this was a good place to lie down and have an after dinner nap.

The photos made several things clear. We now knew not only where the catfood was going, but what had attacked the mothercat. She must have been trying to defend the food dish from these intruders. The other clarification was the reason for the strange sound Ruffles had started making. We thought at first she had a respiratory problem, but she seemed to be healthy otherwise. She was making a very loud, chirrupy sound, in addition to her purring, that can be heard way across the yard. After we saw the photos, it hit us: she was making a raccoon sound! We think she is the one in the photos eating at the same dish as the raccoons, as her markings are different than the others. Her name was amended to "Ruffles the Raccoon Cat."

Chicken coops have little chicken-sized doorways, low to the ground; the one used by the kittens now has a board nailed over most of it to make it too small for raccoons to enter.

Even without a mother, the kittens grew and thrived, except for one. We nicknamed Buttercup "Tiny" because she was noticeably smaller than the others. It may have been something congenital. Just before Christmas she just went to sleep next to the food dish and did not wake up. J buried her next to her mama behind the coop. As with the loss of the mothercat, we felt sad but accepted it as part of life on the farm.

The second week of January we found Butterfly. He was the most outgoing, adventurous one, always in the lead no matter what was going on. We think he was starting to go out hunting on his own, but without his mama to teach him to watch out on the road. In his experience, everyone watched out for him. No one told him about the farmers who barrel past here in their grain trucks. We had a much more difficult time accepting this loss. All of us shed tears for him.

The three remaining cats are doing well, and growing fast; none of them can be called kittens anymore.

I worried about their survival during the coldest part of the winter. In the past, when we had farm cats, they lived in the barn with the cows who, frankly, put out a lot of body heat. There are no cows, not even the barn is standing now. These cats have a cavern of hay bales my brother arranged for them inside the coop, and I lined it with the bathroom mats from our old house. It must be enough; even on the bitter cold mornings they come up to the house, alert and playful.

The Cat Goddess must have noted our grief over these losses and sent a stray to boost our diminishing cat population. This week Mom thought she saw a white cat out in the yard. J went out to see if he could get closer. He called “kitty-kitty” and the cat approached him, but so did the Three Mousecateers, and the stray ran back to the edge of the woods. J herded them into their coop and closed off their exit with a piece of plywood, just for a little while. With those three temporarily removed from the situation, the stray came back closer to the house. She hungrily accepted food and water, and then got up in J’s lap for some cuddling.

She was obviously someone’s pet but unlikely to belong to a neighbor. We get visits from neighbor cats who might be looking for a handout but are not hungry like this one. We suspect she is a “drop off.” Around here, people drop off unwanted dogs and cats near farms, in hopes they will find a new home. In this case it worked. She has come back three more days for food, water and snuggles. She seems to be working out a non-aggression treaty with the other three cats.

Mom named her Snowball.

Once again we are saying to each other, “We shouldn’t get attached.”

You Can Be Happy No Matter What

I'm working on some essays, not quite ready to publish, about rural life, etc. and I'm browsing blogs like crazy to get a feel for what bloggers blog about. I came across an interesting idea, a "meme" to write about. I found it on A Spiritual Journey Through Life who got it from GoGo on a Page who got it from Beansprout who got it from Step away from the cake ...and the links go on but I followed them far enough to understand what the "tag" part is about. I'm such a noob at this, I don't know anyone to tap and say, "tag, you're it." So if you have actually found this blog and read this far, please consider yourself tagged, if you wish.

This is how it works:
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.


You Can Be Happy No Matter What by Richard Carlson
Subchapter heading: Happiness Lies In The Present Moment

Excessive thinking about your past and your problems will convince you that you do, in fact, have good reasons to be upset and unhappy. But you don't want to be unhappy. And your past is over. It is a harmless memory, carried through time, through your own thinking. It was real then, but it isn't now.

[Some of those sentences were so short, let's cheat and finish the paragraph] You can learn from your past, but it is a mistake to continually go into your past or overanalyze life in a search for happiness. If this worked, you'd be happy already!

****************
I purchased this book nearly ten years ago and, typically for me, it languished in one of my many TBR piles until we moved. When it was time to start unpacking, I grabbed a random box of books and this one jumped out at me. With all the hassles and sadness of the last year, I know I have had a bad habit of doing exactly what is described above. Isn't it interesting how a book will come into your life, or in this case, reclaim your attention, just when you need it? This one was propping up the laptop which has been overheating and shutting down, in an effort to allow more air to circulate to the fans underneath. Thus it was "the nearest book." I think I'll be up late reading tonight.