Sweat the small stuff!

                        Sweat the small stuff!

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I am unhinged. This morning my daughter sent me a picture of a lap blanket she bought me.

I am in tears. The blanket, purple and turquoise, with feathers and butterflies and such, is beautiful. Beautiful.

You know who uses lap blankets?

Old women, that’s who! Old women! A few days ago I had another birthday. The good news is that this morning I woke up still alive and grateful. The other side of that coin feels like a slap in the face.

These last couple weeks have been hard. I rappelled down the steep cliffs into a pit of depression, dragging along all my niggling fears and worries in my backpack, knowing I could feed and grow them in the fertile pit.

Lethargic days. No energy. Nights my mind managed to find some unsolvable problem, danced around a Mobius Strip from whence it could not jump off.

Maybe my birthday precipitated it. Maybe not.

I muddled around in the muck and mire a few days, lying awake through the dim hours of the nights.

 I tell it like it is. One night I said aloud, “I’m scared.” “Scared of what?” the saner part of me asked. And answered, “Scared of dying alone in poverty.”

Talk about a slap in the face. But that is what it took for me to begin the arduous climb back out of the pit, leaving my backpack behind.

I had to ask for help along the way, of course.

Josue came to talk with me. We both ended in tears, talking about being scared. When he left my patio, I felt better just for the talking.

Charlotte sent me a link to watch, live, an osprey nest in Missoula. Seeing an osprey hanging out in a spot familiar to me brought memories from when I’d lived in Missoula, as well as the pleasures of simply watching ospreys hang out.

Crin took me for a walk in her neighborhood park in Victoria, via a series of photos. Seeing the daffs and tulips and primroses and especially the forsythia perked up a little piece of my heart.

Kathy, who got stuck in Banff, not by her choice, and not a hardship, not to be outdone by her sister, took me on a walk along an icy mountain stream. I could feel the cold, smell the ice and the pines and firs.

Gary wrote me about an “ah-ha” moment. After twenty-seven years of slogging in real estate, he said that staying home is powerfully healing, stripping away his workaholic guilt, allowing him to truly enjoy those close to him. It is good.

Pam, with whom I shared that I dragged my painting supplies out of storage, set up an easel, selected a canvas, sent me a link to a Havre artist who shares her insights and perceptions. A gift.

Janet and Tom, my only remaining gringo neighbors, who chose to stay on the Rancho, said she and Tom express gratitude daily for simply being here, a place beyond any dreams they’d ever had. Those simple words touched me and reminded me, to not compare my insides with somebody else’s outsides. I’m always wrong. We share a living dream.

Michelle from Oconahua, up the road a piece, emails daily; Are you okay? Need anything?

Ben reminded me that most of my worries are none of my business. Blunt. But correct.

Dee observed, in the midst of all my angst, “You are reading national news, aren’t you.” It was not a question.

“News? What news? It is all speculation. Maybes. Dire predictions. Conspiracies. Idiocies. Gossip. The sky is falling.”

“Quit it,” were her words of advice. “I think I will,” I agreed. I’m not one to capitulate easily to my bossy daughter but I recalled how many times over this last year I’d said to her, “Don’t watch the news! It makes you crazy.”

What makes me feel good today? Getting up in the morning, still alive. Making cowboy coffee. 

Planting another pot of lettuce. Walking the Rancho lanes. Gorditas for lunch. Dabbing paint on canvas. Picking a papaya from my tree. Talking with friends.

Waiting for my old-woman lap blanket. It’s all small stuff.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 23, 2020

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Re-reading the classics, irreverently yours

                Re-reading the classics, irreverently yours

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Occasionally I pick up one of the classics in literature for a re-reading. I don’t recall what prompted me; it wasn’t the virus. Several weeks ago, in the interests of perusing a translation I’d not read, I chose the Ignatius Bible.

The Bible is a daunting big book. I begin at the beginning. Granted, I skim the genealogies and speed through pages of dietary laws and building codes.

But otherwise, I read a few pages at a time, slowly, pondering. That Moses is quite the dude. After all he’s done, distributing plagues, parting the Sea, leading his quarrelsome kin-folks, forty years wandering in circles, he is denied permission (by the Big Guy) to cross the River into the Promised Land.

What really struck me this time through is how human everybody is. It’s like watching a movie and you want to say to the protagonist, “Don’t open that door. Don’t open . . . “

Sheesh, Moses, you know you are leading a people notorious for their stubborn ways. You tell them to go left at the wall; they pull to the right. You lead them through the Red Sea on dry land and they want to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt.

“Let us cart those rocks, build those bricks,” they say. “We want to return to the terrors we know, along with the palms along the Nile, ‘gators in the water, dates and olives.”

Doesn’t matter if you turn your back for ten minutes or forty days and nights, same spiel. “Egypt. I wanna go to Egypt. Are we there yet?”

Or, hey, Moses, I like the one where you went for a stroll up the mountain and came back to find your stubborn backsliding people feverishly worshipping a golden calf. “It was not our fault. The gold jewelry jumped out of our hands into the forge and the calf miraculously rose from the flames. Don’t blame us. You left us alone.”

We lack Moses, but, sheesh, people, do you see any parallels here?

For the first time in the history of the world, we all share a common peril. Our leaders, political and medical, say to us, “Self-isolate. Keep a social distance. Only go out for necessities.”

But how soon we tire of manna in the desert. How quickly fade our concepts of danger, to ourselves and to others. How bright the neon lights of the fleshpots of Egypt that lure us, kind of like the Vegas Strip. How loud our protestations of innocence.

How human. We tire of the walls of home, the known boundaries of our yard. 

Other family members bounce on our last nerve. I, even though alone, am capable of severing my own last nerve.

After all, we feel good. We are not sick nor have we been around who are ill.

Surely it is safe to go to that out-of-the-way campground, that almost-deserted beach, that shopping mall for necessary items, Pinot Grigio, the latest shade of lipstick, the essential automatic weapon with ammo. And, who knows, maybe we can pick up an extra pallet of toilet paper.

Seriously? Seriously, we are tired of wandering our own confining desert. 

Wandering a continuous loop from living room to refrigerator to bedroom while the plague rages and ravages around us.

I don’t know. Close your eyes and think of England. Remember the blitz bombing of London during WWII. Back to the bomb shelter, stiff upper lip.

Persevere.

Buck up. This plague is not forever. The life you save might be your own. Or your neighbors. Or the whole neighborhood.

We are a stubborn people. We are human. We have every weakness of every human since time began. We also have every strength.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 16, 2020

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This Time Reminds Me

                                                This Time Reminds Me

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It must have been the winter of ’65-‘66. I was pregnant with Dee Dee who was born in April. Harvey and I lived on the ranch south of Dodson. A mile-long dirt drive with three ‘farmer gates’ of barbed wire strung onto diamond willow sticks separated us from the highway, only three more miles from town.

That grim winter we were snowed in for ninety days straight. Every day of that time our thermometer on the post registered below zero. Wind drifted each snowfall until packed into hard crusts.

Not by choice but necessity, I helped break and learned to drive Harry and August, our young, unbroken team of Percheron workhorses. King and Queenie had become too feeble, too long in the tooth to work under such adverse conditions.

Harry and August could not put up too much fuss against the high drifts. Harvey climbed atop the stack, forked hay onto the sleigh. I held the team. Once loaded, I drove the horses while Harvey forked hay from atop the sleigh down to the hungry herd.

Mealtimes became creative adventures when we ran out of basic supplies such as flour, sugar and dry beans. Before Christmas, Harvey took the team and sleigh to town to pick up much-needed kitchen staples, to send my letters and Christmas cards and pick up our mail. 

Nobody out our way had a telephone. During that three month period, the only person other than my husband I spoke with was Hugh Kienenberger, the blacksmith in town, and that only because the pump broke.

Cattle had to have water. It was minus thirty that day in January. The cattle could survive a day or two without food but water was a necessity.

Harvey saddled up Sputnik for me while I donned all the warm clothing I had I tied the broken pump piece behind the saddle and rode into Dodson, big belly and all.

I don’t know how I managed to get those dang gates open and closed again with the heavy snowdrifts. I remember I left the last one open until my return trip.

While the blacksmith hammered out a new pump part for me, I huddled close to his huge cast-iron red-hot wood/coal stove, trying to thaw my feet for the ride back where Harvey was feeding the cattle by himself.

I made it home before dark, fired up my own wood/coal cook stove and fixed supper.

Harvey put the pump back together. A hundred-fifty bawling cattle crowded against the tank for a drink.

Vast differences separate three months of weather-enforced isolation that winter and this first month of self-enforced isolation, not the least being the ease of life in my spot of paradise in Mexico.

Perhaps the main or most vital difference was our focus. The simple feeding, doctoring and care of the cattle took up our days. We had not been able to use the tractor with the forklift to feed since mid-November when the snows piled up.

We had a radio, my constant companion in the kitchen. When we came in for lunch, usually soup I made the previous night, we listened to Paul Harvey. That summer we’d bought a used television from a man in Malta. Paid the handsome price of twenty-five dollars, scrounged from the household budget. We seldom missed “Gunsmoke”, “Bonanza” or “Ed Sullivan”.

We usually caught the newscast. Was it at 5:00 or 6:00? If there was news at ll:00 on our one channel out of Great Falls, we were asleep by then.

Believe me, life was neither ideal nor romantic. Like all things and times in the past, some memories seem sweet, some I would not want to return for any reason.  

I would trade the brutal cold, the fears, the sore muscles, the lack of things we today consider necessities, and the harsh conditions of that harsh winter for one day of relief from living in this nightmare “Reality Show” of today, in which we all play a role.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 9, 2020

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How to survive and maintain sanity in the “new normal”

How to survive and maintain sanity in the “new normal”

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Now that I gained your attention I confess, I have not a clue. Neither to survival nor to sanity. I’m fishing for answers. I figured if I cast out a line, I might hook you and you could tell me!

Self-quarantine and social distance. You’d think they would be my old normal since that is pretty much my life during the summer months when my snow-bird neighbors return to the north-country.

Yet I went through the same patterns of ups and downs as my friends reported. We found the first few days rather gleeful, planning activities long neglected, trying new recipes, tackling that electrical or construction project or digging out the jigsaw puzzles, binge-watching Shakespearean plays on You Tube, from the simple to the sublime.

Then came the days of the grumps, snarky responses, angry reactions, to what? To self-enforced safety measures, to not being able to go with friends to a restaurant, to chapped hands from constant washing? For one of my friends, having to cancel the pedicurist.

Hopefully, eventually, for it seems we must plow through the whole range of feelings, around a corner we get a glimpse of acceptance.

We cut our own hair, oh, well, nobody will see us anyway. We polish our own nails. One friend got help with his electrical project. Another discovered his construction project would not tolerate shortcuts. Long way around, it is finished. Another sewed and delivered facemasks to friends and neighbors. The jigsaw puzzle had only one missing piece. We settled into a routine.

My world of smugly coping exploded when the EMTs carted my son Ben to the Bremerton Hospital with a fever of 107 and with trouble-some breathing.

I told a friend I had a couple rough days. She immediately called me on my understatement. She hit it right. I was plumb nuts, loon crazy, around the bend, an emotional wreck.

Ben was incarcerated in ICU a few days, moved to the infectious diseases wing, underwent numerous, numberless tests which took forever (Mom Clock) for results. Once the coronavirus test came back negative, we in family breathed easier. But what was wrong?

Two people were my rocks during this time. Gary, Ben’s Dad is a good man. Conversation with him calmed me down. Dee, my daughter, is my other rock. We talked daily. Dee had her own drama. My granddaughter, Jessica, pregnant with problems, was supposed to have her little girl on my birthday. Doctors in Glendive induced labor and Jess has the sweetest little bundle imaginable, whom she did not name after me.

I still felt helpless. I could not speak with Ben. I could not go see him. I could not kiss him and make it well. I had no control at all. Ah, control. As if ever!

When illusion of control, or lack of control is the issue, I (eventually) know what to do. I sat myself down and had a meeting, channeled my inner Al-anon. Those Al-anon men and women are mean and tough and tell it like it is. This meeting lasted hours. Nothing changed. I still had to feel all the fear and anxiety, all the way to the bottom. But, I felt grounded.

My son was finally diagnosed with a severe infection which had entered his blood, lungs and heart. Yesterday he was released, sent home with super-antibiotics to be administered by IV. Gratitude whelms me.

Today I was supposed to be in Montana to renew my MDL. I said to Dee and Chris, “Aren’t you glad I did not get to make the trip.”

They fluttered and stuttered. “Just think,” I continued. “I would have been in quarantine with you for months.”

Today my son is home. Today my daughter sent me pictures of our baby girl. Today the jasmine is in full flower around my door and windows. Today the jacaranda is in full purple umbrella.

Today I have control over nothing. Today is all I have. It is enough.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

April 2, 2020

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