slowly she turned

Just realized that I didn’t do my usual Festivus post yesterday. I didn’t do it last year either. Gah! Oh well. I hope you had a Painless Festivus and you received many apologies for your grievances and you were victorious in your wrestling matches.

We weren’t expecting any Festivus miracles. My brother(in-law) is still hanging on. He hasn’t eaten in over a week. Hospice is helping my sister care for him at home but they haven’t been as much help as she hoped for. There is one Hospice NP that is very experienced and helpful who was supposed to come last night. The main problem, other than my sister dealing with the emotional and physical trauma, is that she has to ask for everything and she is exhausted and doesn’t always know what to ask for. Last night they were going to bring a hospital bed and start him on morphine.

Another huge worry is that we are in the midst of this Arctic blast and there are power outages everywhere. If they lose power (and they did for a short time) I don’t know what she will do. I guess she will have to call an ambulance and put him in a hospital, because the Hospice care facilities aren’t giving her any firm answers. Of course now she is second guessing her decisions but honestly, if she had decided to have him live out his last days in Chapel Hill or in a facility, she would have wondered if she shouldn’t have moved him home to Lake Waccamaw. That is where he wanted to be. It’s so hard.

I’ve talked to my blood brother twice in the last couple of days, and that’s a struggle for me. However, last night we had a good conversation even though I do get frustrated about his distrust of doctors and medicine. He just got over a bad case of Covid and I had hoped that he learned a lesson about getting vaccinated from that, but no. He loves my b-i-l like a brother too, so it is tough for him also.

The three of us have had our father’s last days of his life on our minds, and each of us has mentioned that last horrific day, which we normally can’t talk about. We just hope and pray that there won’t be a repeat. He says that he needs to talk about our parents and how much he misses them to somebody who understands, so I said that he could call me and talk. I promised to call him with information as soon as I got it from my sister, and he will do the same, but she has a hard time calling people and often she will not take a call. I understand that too because I am like that.

Today the wind has finally calmed. Last night it got down to about 6 degrees F here. That is very unusual for North Carolina. The wind chill was below zero yesterday. At least we didn’t get sleet or ice. The high is expected to be 26 today. We’ve had times like this before, but they were a long time ago. When I was in my early twenties, I sold batteries at a Sears Auto Center. I was on commission and a day like today would have been extremely busy for me. I remember getting in my car to go somewhere that night in the early 80s and I had to turn around and go home because my windshield kept freezing over on the inside.

I like to think that I would like to move somewhere to the north of this latitude but times like this make me realize what a Southern girl I am. I am NOT into snow. It’s pretty, but I want to stay hunkered down during winter weather instead of getting out and living a normal life. I can’t imagine dealing with temperatures way below zero or being stuck inside a house without heat.

This morning I dreamed about my little Squirtly. I was boondocking in a white van in a parking lot next to a desert scrubland. (I just finished reading Nomadland this week.) I remembered that Squirt was in a box and opened it to let him out, then realized that I had let him out earlier and he had been out all day. I nearly panicked, thinking about all the wild critters out there and whether he was lost. I called him and he meowed and came running to me, very happy with his day’s adventure. “Let me hug you, baby,” I pleaded, and he did. I picked him up and walked around with him, contently curled against my heart.

I have written before about Squirt showing up in my dreams to comfort me, and also about letting him go. It’s been fifteen years since I had to let him go from this world, and it touches me that he still comes back from time to time.

Anyway, I have this weekend through next weekend with no alarms in the mornings and I slept long and hard last night. It’s obvious that I am now a night owl and my body wants to sleep from 1 a.m. to 10 a.m. I have been hemming my tapestries and once we get on the other side of this @#$% holiday and weather I’ll get them mounted and drive them to Asheville. I have barely left the house since last weekend. On Monday Sandy and I brought most of my stuff home from the print studio and went out for a very late lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant we like. I checked my accounts again and apparently my payments to rejoin the studio never went through. So there’s no money lost there – I just got some free storage for a while. I can’t get back into the building until next week.

Reading “Night Train to Lisbon” again. It is a very slow read because of the philosophical ideas. I’m enjoying it when I have the mental energy to stop and think through a passage. When I don’t, I turn to other books. I’ve been on Mastodon a lot, and I subscribe to a lot of Substack newsletters. Yesterday I checked out “Braiding Sweetgrass” as an e-book through UNCG’s library. That one I’m having to read on the big screen.

I’ve also been cooking more than usual and depending on how things go, a baked ham and sweet potato gratin and some other side dish is in the near future.

Speaking of which, it is time for lunch.