February 14th, 2017, A Tribute to True Love

I’m in love. I have been for decades. Oh, yeah. In love with life–that, too–but I mean with the man who is my husband, Forrest Wayne Lineberry. For years, after a very ugly divorce, due to the bills that divorce wound up ladling upon me, we lived in a space that measured 14×18. Feet. It included one tiny bathroom with a shower, one tiny kitchen, and the bedroom/living room. Two cats, three birds, a hamster, a frog and a tercel in an aquarium, plus a 55 gallon fish tank filled with very old, very long-lived fish resided there with us. My horses and livestock didn’t. The horses I boarded. The livestock went to Dad’s.

To say we were poor is an understatement. Still are. The divorce took everything and more. (Yes, I got screwed, having hired an attorney who was honorable, while my ex- hired one who was Machiavellian, more the fool me.)  The divorce took my relationship with my father, as well, a man who, because of his Dutch Reform upbringing, believed marriage was for life, never mind any abuse.

Anyway, I fell in love. With my bodyguard. If you ever want to know about that, watch the movie, The Bodyguard, starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner.  Except, unlike that movie, the bad guy wanting to do me harm wasn’t some wacko or some jealous relative, but rather the man divorcing me. I wasn’t a wealthy, successful singer with a beautiful voice, and Forrest was only a skilled martial artist, not a trained ex-Secret Service man.  Oh, yeah.  And, in the end, we stayed together.

I’m wishing for you all the same love and commitment we have with and for each other–a cherishing–in your relationship with your significant other. There really is no substitute for it. So, find it, keep it, and don’t ever settle for less, no matter what you have to give up.

Sincerely,

Me.

 

February 13th, 2017

Twice a day, a flurry of activity breaks the peace and solitude. Livestock squeals, bawls, and whinnies. Dogs bark. Cats yowl. Diesel engines rumble. Then, the frenzy passes, and, for the most part, quiet returns, broken only occasionally by the shriek and rhythmic clucking of a hen announcing her successful laying of an egg.  It’s late winter, here, the unbroken snow fields where animals don’t roam waist deep in snow.

Today, sunshine bathes the land, delighting eyes weary of the past week’s storms. Birds sing and peep, crows and ravens cackle, happy for reprieve. A moose wanders by, still chewing on leaves and branches stolen from the rhododendrons.  She adores them this time of year, those and the twigs and branches stripped from the aspens and the maples by the ice storm than followed last week’s heavy snows.

Inside the house, faintly you can hear the washing machine cycle through its rinse and spin, rinse then spin, again, while, outside, you hear metal pounding metal and the occasional muttered oath when that pounding falters. Somebody’s smacked their thumb, again, while driving in a latch pin.

A while later, chains clank as a tractor rumbles up the track to park inside the shed. The engine dies.

Footsteps clomp upon the porch.  Chores done, it’s time to get to work up in the office.  It’s Monday morning in North Idaho.


Last week’s snow

Live Now.

An  art friend of mine has recently begun posting some secular humanist perspectives over on G+. He turns off comments, perhaps to avoid discussion…or, maybe, to fend off trolls.  Of course, it could be that he considers anyone who might choose to discuss the topic to be a troll.  He’s rather odd that way–easily offended, easily riled, easily disquieted.

Anyway, his posts got me to thinking about the mindset of atheist secular humanists, especially those who perceive life and reality as reducible to clear, concise mechanical processes that include chemical reactions and Newtonian physics. He’s a retired engineer, so this mindset comes quite logically and naturally to him and his. Dwelling in the strictly empirically measurable pragmatic, any idea of something more than life as a chemical reaction and consciousness as a neurological function is quite alien. Having myself dwelled in mechanism, pragmatism, atheism, and stoicism for a solid decade or more of my own existence, I can understand the very solid, stolid stability provided by it. What bothers me is that what he’s doing is no different than the proselytizing of the fervently religious. In truth, it’s no different.

Here’s the thing, though: Does it really matter what he believes versus what someone else believes? No. His beliefs give him solace, just as those who believe that their loved ones have gone to join Jesus or entered Nirvana or…do them. The fact is there is no proof or disproof of continuance of the self/soul/spirit upon the body’s demise, and, truly, it really doesn’t matter. Live now.

Part of an NF Book Series I’m Writing

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The weather forecast predicted a low of 48°F. and a high the next day near 62° with partly cloudy skies. I sat on the cement apron under my awning, reading one of my manuscripts, a novel I was planning to publish the following month. Around me, a few wasps and hornets still sipped at the water saucers put out expressly for them. Others worked at the dried beef strips provided them because their normal fare of garden insect pests was long since depleted.

Out in the garden, my tomato plants were heavy with green tomatoes slow to ripen, everything else having been harvested, except for a couple of winter squash and pumpkins. We had yet to have a frost.

These were the lazy days of autumn, when you get a lull between the heavy work of a summer spent preparing for winter and the miserably hard work that ice and snow brings to the north country. It’s my favorite time of year, not too hot, but not yet cold enough to warrant wearing a shirt over my t-shirt.  My mom calls them ‘gravy days’, and it’s an apt term.

Happily occupied on finding where reader flow could falter in the novel, I ignored the first nudge.  And the second.  When I got up to get a cup of coffee, though, the nudge became impossible to ignore.  I groaned.  I didn’t want to and reminded myself that NOAA (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) was predicting continued mild weather.

The nudge turned into an insistent pressure, like a nag, but silent, just known…like when your mom is watching you from across the room when you haven’t done your homework or your chores, yet.

Okay!  Enough, already!

The pressure backed off, but its presence didn’t leave.  I got dressed to go over to the local farm store where they keep a supply of straw on hand.  Starting up the truck, I felt my usual, pragmatic terseness about giving up my afternoon for something that, while it needed to be done before the freeze, certainly wasn’t critical right now. The thought of the empty fuel containers came to mind, and I groaned.  Got out.  Got them.  Tied them in the back.  The neighbor was outside lighting his barbeque as I pulled past his place.  He waved.  I waved back.

I don’t argue with my nudges. I’ve had too many proofs of just how important it is to listen to them. So, begrudging the fact that I often get smirked at by neighbors and friends, I do what’s suggested, when suggested, regardless of how illogical and impractical it might seem.

At the farm store, the high school kid who loaded the bales of straw onto my flatbed wondered out loud to me on why I was getting a full load today instead of my usual handful of bales.

I thought about hedging.  Decided against it.  “Because it’s time to winterize the garden and stock up for a blow.  Livestock can’t go without straw in the cold.”

He gave me what, locally, we call ‘the hairy eyeball’, pointedly looked up at the blue skies and sinking sun, then, more pointedly, said, “Su-ure,” sarcasm dripping.

I grinned, finished strapping the load, then followed him inside to pay, grabbing a couple of rolls of heavy plastic and some snow blower sheer pins, to boot.  Then, I stopped at the gas station and filled my empty gas cans, bought some fuel stabilizer, and got some oil, just in case.

Once home, I spent the rest of the afternoon on into dark harvesting the green tomatoes and squash, pulling the houseplants in, winterizing the roses and banking the house, then loading the rest of the straw into the storage barn.  Last, with the yard lights on, I stapled the heavy plastic up around the north end of the open air barn.

Exhausted, I fell into bed around 10PM.  The thermometer reported the outside temperature at a pleasant 54°.

 

I rise early.  And I don’t keep the furnace on all year.  At 3:30AM, upon rising, the house felt chillier than usual.  Not much.  Just a bit.

I poked my head outside.  It was brisk, but it hadn’t frosted.  I shook my head.  “So much for following nudges,” my surly side grumbled inside my brain.  “Hey, the job is done, and I won’t have to do it later,” my ‘glass-is-half-full’ side shot back.

Not to be outdone, the pragmatic self responded with, “If it stays warm, the roses will rot. I’ll have to uncover them during the day, at least.”

I damped down all comments, moving to ‘not-think,’ the only sane way to deal with all the arguments and counters the rational, pragmatic brain will spawn.

Daylight showed gloomy overcast.  By 8AM, a chill wind had started.  By 10AM, the temperature outside had dropped from 42° to 35°.  By noon, the grass was frozen stiff, a winter storm warning in effect according to the National Weather Service, and the wind chill put the outside temperature down near 10°.  By evening, it was much, much worse.

If I hadn’t ‘listened’, which is another way of saying, paid attention to my instincts, my inklings, my nudges, I would have been scrambling to get everything done, working in miserable conditions to do it, and, believe me, it’s no fun stapling up plastic in the wind, to say nothing of trying to binder twine leafs of straw around roses to protect them from the bitter wind’s frost burn with freezing fingers.  Instead, I prepped the snow blower, then, bundling up, went over to help the neighbor with his frantic winterizing.

That night, snow started, the wispy, nasty stuff that creeps into every crevice and burns your face like stinging nettle when it hits you.  By the following morning, we were sitting at an ambient temperature of 3° F. with a wind chill of -26°.  It stayed that way for three solid weeks, no breaks.

 

People ask me how I know when to do what. Above, I gave you a simple example, not life critical, certainly, and probably inconsequential to most, but very demonstrative of how following nudges, following ‘flow’, allows you the luxury of avoiding unnecessary panic, toil, and suffering.

Oh, and the next time I visited the farm store, that high schooler grinned at me.  “You were right about the weather!  How’d you know?”

I gave him the easy answer, one that doesn’t give people willies: “A little bird told me.”

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