The Burrow

She rolled off the couch, for crying out loud.  I can't keep her safer than that, now, can I?   Since she was the only person there when it happened, we will never know for sure what caused her to fall off the pillows and hit her head on something with a squared-off corner.  Our best guess is that her feet became entangled in the Horace Mann blanket she keeps on the couch.  When napping is your primary form of amusement, having a coverlet nearby is a necessity. I'd been whining about this to anyone who would listen and all I heard were rueful laughs.  Nope, there wasn't anything else that I could have done.  Nothing at all. That is, until I sat at the lunch table with Fran and her family.  They had had the same issue and had solved the problem through shopping.  I was intrigued. They removed the couch that Fran had brought from home, the couch from which she rolled onto the floor and on which she spent most of her days sleeping.  ...

The first shift has left and the second is ensconced.  The hosts are suffering a bit of familial whiplash as we move from my brother to his sister within the space of an hour or two.  Who's in which bed with how many pillows? Who knows? What we do know is that we are surrounded by love.  Brother fixed some things and improved some others and kept us laughing.  He is no longer amazed that we don't share his level of interest in carpentry and plumbing and HVAC maintenance.  He knows we are grateful for his help and that we never fear that he is intruding upon our territory.  He loves doing it and we love watching.  Everybody is happy. Thus, it should not have been a surprise to me that he drove a 10 gallon can of goo across America and wore the work clothes he'd packed while he applied the goo to the silver stuff in the closet that contains the machinery which keeps our house cool.  Whatever it is and whatever he did, it now works in a more ef...

He should write stories about these people, he says.  The Frog Man, the couple who can't make up their minds, the clients he fired after showing them dozens of houses and watching them walk away from 9 contracts.  My brother is a generous, smart, funny man who tries to pay his bills by selling houses.  It's an ever changing market as we all know, and he's on the cutting edge of the economic changes our recession is causing. He's driven 1800 miles across the country to visit his mother and me.  He'll be driving 2100 miles north to Yellow Pine, Idaho tomorrow, his youngest daughter in tow.  There is a golf tournament up there on Saturday.  You carry only one club in this event; your other hand is used to hold your beer.  Apparently, there are not enough straight paths to create anything longer than a 3 par hole.  Trees act as barricades and the golf balls must be orange since white ones get lost in the wildflowers.  He's not much of a golfer;...

Okay, Girlfriend!  You are on - for catching up and Subway lunches and transportation to manicures or radiation treatment or wig shopping or whatever.  I'm calling you the day after you get home from watching your kid compete on the international stage.  How nice of your cancer to allow you to travel.  How very very convenient of it.  Seriously, I'm thrilled that you are going to the event; I just hate that you are traveling with the knowledge that disease is not  now a part of your life. And yes, that was a Freudian slip - my brain wanted to include the disease, my heart typed not.... which is exactly where I'd like it be be in relation to you - not. You Suzi-Sat at 7am so TBG could make an airport run.  You brought me carry-in and sat at the table and told me secrets from your past as I revealed some from mine and we made a very unlikely pair, you and I..... Until I remembered that I've always had a pretty, energetic, blond woman in my li...

I am happily too tired to type.  I am exhausted, denizens.  Plum tucker'd out.  Too pooped to pop. I spent the day at a Thank You party at the hospital.  I spent it walking and hugging and walking and hugging and keeping my distance as much as I could from the media... most of whom I now hug and greet by name .... and hugging and walking some more. All the guests wanted to see me walk.  Everyone was thrilled.  Totally and completely and marvelously thrilled. They had seen me filleted and bloodless and wounded and broken.  They had seen me en-tubed and swaddled and crying for my Mommy.  I couldn't roll over or breathe on my own or do anything but be tended.  I am alive because they made it so. So, I walked.  I walked for each and every one of them, each and every time they asked. The cameras caught the hugging and crying and smiling and laughing and not one of them caught me walking.  And that was perfec...

I'm watching her float on the raft, her purple bikini complementing the turquoise and blue of the water and the sky and the raft itself.  She has her smart-phone in one hand and she's texting with the other as the breeze blows her from wall to wall to wall to wall. It's a delicate balancing act when she needs a drink - there is gentle paddling and soft pushing and no help is needed as she maneuvers herself and her device over to the cold water bottle I just brought out from the 'fridge. Tomorrow is orientation at the UofA and Kitty, the little Wildcat, will be a freshman.  I'm wondering what she's thinking as she lies there, motionless, french manicured fingers and orange painted toes peeking out of the water as she floats in my backyard.  I knew her when she was in diapers and now she's going to train to be a nurse and I don't know where the years have gone. Not-Kathy, her mother, is doing business on the phone in the house.  I am typing to you.  ...

I made a lot of new friends after January 8th, but few of them have touched my heart as much as the 5th and 6th graders at Stockton Elementary School.  They wrote to me in pencil on lined paper with perfectly readable penmanship.  Their addresses were in the upper right hand corner and the date was above Dear Mrs. Hileman  and I loved them even before they shared their hearts.  They read the newspaper every morning and Christina's story touched them.  They knew that she would want me to be happy and that she was glad to have me as her friend and that I shouldn't worry too much while I was healing as quickly as they wished I would.  They were sorry I got shot. Is it any wonder that I fell in love? Turns out that their teacher graduated from my high school a few years after the Class of 1969 and I went out into the world.  He sold real estate until he found the good life teaching small humans.  His emails are filled with warmth and adm...

I remembered that I am my mother's keeper. This reminder came in the form of a ringing telephone at 11:25pm.  Caller ID told me it was the pod-castle and at that time of night I knew it couldn't be good news.   " Hi, Pod-Castle.  How is my mother?"  The stunned silence on the other end of the phone was less than comforting.  Her  "Oh, she's fine" was even worse.  If she's fine, what are you doing calling me at midnight? No sense in getting angry at the help, though, so I waited for her to introduce herself and tell me that G'ma had been calling for help and was found on the carpet alongside her couch, blood pouring from her head. Head wounds bleed  I can hear my mother reassuring me in my mind as I try to wake up enough to process the situation.  Mommy would know that I'd be getting anxious right about now; it was nice of her to insert that thought to calm me down.   No, they hadn't called the ambulance.  Yes, G'ma...

I didn't sleep much last night.  G'ma fell off her couch and we spent the early morning hours in the Emergency Room.  Everyone was very nice, not everyone was very efficient, and it was 5:34am before I had tucked her in back at the pod-castle and pulled out of the parking lot on my way home.   The sun rises very early at this time of year.  I didn't need my headlights.  I did need my pillow ***** A 22 year old Irish lad with a crooked grin and big bear of a dad won the US Open golf tournament on Sunday.  According to TBG, this is the first of golf's Majors .  Apparently, winning it is a very big deal.  For my part, it was nice to watch golf without Tiger, whose peccadilloes and never-ending-never-healing injuries (after using performance enhancing drugs, perhaps?) distract me from the foliage and the clouds. Golf is a pretty game to have as a backdrop to writing to you.   ***** We are thinking about traveling east for a class next m...

Or what about She/He, or I/Me.  You/I is tricky, too. How would you use words to describe the difference?  Two English language learners, fluent in Spanish and Nepali but struggling here in the USofA, bright eyed and totally confused by my chattering, were wondering the same thing this morning.  While the rest of the class moved from station to station, we three tried to find a way to differentiate between in  and on. Eventually, we resorted to visuals.  The tiny tie-dyed super ball we were using for mine/yours went into overdrive with in/on.  We began with a red plastic box and created ramps out of small envelopes on  which he rolled the ball til she saw that it was in .  Then it was her turn but she didn't want to try so we gave her the camera and worked on big and small  as she decided which button to use to take the picture.   I stopped filling the silences with meaningless verbiage.  I encouraged her to wait with her answ...

I read the good news in an email from an editor at BlogHer who saw it on Twitter and wondered if she could pay me to write about my thoughts.   Once I pulled myself off the ceiling and stopped grinning so hard that I couldn't see past my puffed up cheeks I typed back a very happy Yes! and started thinking about recovery and leaving the hospital and who I am and what is left for us to do and it didn't take me very long at all to create  this post. I can't cross post it so that you can read it here, but I can give you a sample to tempt you to actually click through and read the whole thing on BlogHer.  There's nothing to sign up for, no cookies installed on your machine, just one more step to read what I wrote. I'd post something else here except Gabby being released from the hospital is exactly what I want to tell you about today and my best work is  here . Here's your teaser: Rehab exposed me to a different kind of pain. It's not broken bone pain ...

Let's work out on Saturday morning.  Call me when you are on your way and I will meet you there.  I will warm up on the recumbent bike while you impress me with your speed on something and then we can see what we are capable of accomplishing with the weights.   That is part of the email I just sent to Amster.  Between me getting shot and she preparing and then trying her first case as first chair, the months have flown by.  She'd given up her gym membership around the holidays when she was saving for a down payment but life has intervened and the house search is on hold and we are both uncomfortable in our own skins. We did this once before and we can do it again. It will require discipline and determination and, as Amster barked it, that Army mojo .  We are good for one another in that way; we don't allow excuses.  When we are working out we are committed to the process.  We keep track of repetitions and the number of plates on the bar and we ro...

Deborah Harkness just might be your newest guilty pleasure. BlogHer paid me to write a review. They send me funny emails about my work and I get to keep the brand new books, too. I'm having a great time writing them; hope you're enjoying reading them.

The Dallas Mavericks defeated the Miami Heat in the National Basketball Association's championship series this week.  Dirk Novitzki's 7' self led the Mavs to victory, leaving LeBron James in his dust. If you're not into the sports posts that paragraph should give you all the information  you need.  Come back tomorrow for something entirely different, As for the rest of you, would you agree that what started out with sloppy and unimpressive performances transformed itself into a beautiful example of well-played team ball?  Dirk can't get the ball to drop?  No worries, Jet's got him covered.  The Mavericks' bench scored nearly as many points as did their starters; that is team ball. Jose Barea claims to be 6' tall, but if that's true I want his measuring tape and I want it now. When asked why he was successful his disarming reply made short people everywhere stand up and cheer: When I am dribbling I am close to the ground and those big guys they...

The closet was ridiculous. It held the detritus of our lives since January 8th It didn't go into the experience in a healthy state, either.  It had never recovered from Big Cuter's request for an old photo many months before I went out of commission for 5 months. There was no longer any chance that items on that bottom shelf could be retrieved without putting yourself and the item in danger. I did manage to keep the paper flat and semi-organized, but those photo albums were as precarious in reality as they appear in this picture. The Halloween pumpkin emits a hearty chortle in response to loud noises.  We are not yet ready to be startled and startling it most certainly is.   I could take out the batteries and make it stop but then again I could also put it away where it belongs.   Sigh.  You see how I got to this point? TBG loves having a phone book.  I take no responsibility for that small portion of the chaos. The knickknacks are neat and safe, but the ga...

http://www.zooborns.com/?cnn=yes Little Cuter was in a funk.  She clicked on zooborns.com and she was smiling. I'm going to spend some time today staring at these two. I'm not going to think about Congressional members (sorry, I couldn't resist ... the fingers just kept typing away.....) I'm not going to worry that I'll never stop lumbering. I'm going to think about motherhood and slurping away troubles and I think I might just take G'ma out to lunch and let her smile at me and take away my woes.

Remember that monkey shirt I wrote about while I was recovering?  Here it is again, 6 months and many wearings later. It's gorgeous.  Simply perfect.  In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that the shirt was sent to me for review.  I didn't buy it.  I received no compensation other than the shirt itself.  The expectation was that I would write something wonderful about the product, but there was no penalty if I slammed it.  Publicity was the goal and I was happy to provide it if the price I had to pay was receipt of a free t-shirt. Because I love t-shirts.  All kinds of t-shirts.  I rarely buy unadorned models; the shirt has to speak to me in order to make the cut.  Concert tees are annoyingly over-priced which makes the fact that I simply have to have one all the more irritating.  And yet I do have to have one.  Each and every time.  I know that wearing it later on will bring me back, if only for a mome...