I get new marching orders

I arrived in Michigan from our winter in California with an ankle that sometimes ballooned to three times its normal size. Friends and family were convinced I was going to die. I was pretty sure whatever was wrong happened because I repeatedly whacked my foot on the side of our daughter’s bed while I was taking care of her after surgery. She often insisted, quite loudly, that I move a little faster while helping her in and out of bed.

After several ex-rays and doctor visits I finally relented and made an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon to see if he could figure out what was going on. Turns out I have an extra bone in my ankle (it’s congenital) that was, in fact, injured by whacking it repeatedly on the side of the bed. There is actually a name for the extra bone. It’s called os trigonum.

The surgeon suggested I start physical therapy. Three summers ago I went to physical therapy when I had knee replacement. So it’s not new to me. It’s cool. It gives me something to do.  And I’d like to be able to keep up with our 13-year-old dog, Cindy, when we go for walks.

I have the same therapist I had three years ago. My first day of therapy was his first day back to work since the COVID shutdown. I would like to say here, I wear a mask,   I work out on a bike for several minutes of “warm up” and I have yet to die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Wrong again conspiracy theorists.  

So part of my therapy is to improve my balance while standing on one foot. I can’t do it and I’m pretty sure it’s not an injury thing. I simply don’t have any balance.  I used to. I could do that yoga pose thing where you put your left foot against your right knee and stand for hours.  Now I just tip over.  The therapist is always ready to grab me in case I don’t right myself in time.  I finally told him I would give him an A for effort but if I actually did tip over to just let me go. One person down is better than two.

Honestly, I used to be quite limber. I could do hand springs, cartwheels, forward and backward walk-overs and even a passable splits. It is quite surprising when you discover these feats are no longer possible.

Years ago, when the children were young, we were visiting my parents. The grass was soft and cushy and I decided to try a backward walk-over. I think I landed first on my neck and then on back with my feet stuck underneath me. And I could not move. I finally managed to roll across the driveway to a lawn chair and pull myself up. I walked into the house to find my father lying on the floor in fits of laughter.

He finally pulled himself together long enough to gasp out, “I was coming to help you but I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Anyway, that was the last time I tried anything acrobatic.

 

 

The give and take of marriage

It was a fairly quiet weekend for King and I. We helped our son paint his house Friday and babysat Friday night while he and his wife went out for dinner.

That left the rest of the weekend with little to do.

Saturday I attended a virtual wedding vow renewal for a friend I worked with years ago at Central Michigan University. Five months ago it was going to be an in-person vow renewal. Many things have changed since then. There is this thing called a pandemic. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It has forced a lot of people to make big changes in their lives. And because of those changes we are learning a lot about friends, family and acquaintances that may have been better left un-learned.

Anyway, Brian, (the former co-worker from CMU) was “the IT guy” for the department where I worked.  I can’t recall the number of times I would call him, “Brian I need a new keyboard.” Brian knew I spilled -- yet again -- another Diet Coke all over the keyboard. He never let on that he knew.  He would simply show up in my cubicle with a new keyboard and offer to plug it in for me.

There are some people (not many) I miss from that job. Brian is one of them. I’ve never met his wife Sara, but she and I chat frequently via Facebook. I wish them both all the best.

As for King and I…

Two weeks ago we drove to Chicago to get some RV equipment from a friend who is moving out of the country. The friend had just purchased a new high-tech motor home with all the bells and whistles. Since he is now moving and selling the motor home he gave us all the extra equipment he had purchased to go along with it.  It was a generous offer made because we had been good friends and loyal employees. After retirement King and I had worked as caretakers on his hobby farm in South Haven.  We were the last in a long line of people who came before us.  Taking care of his place was actually a pleasure and we stayed on there for seven years. Apparently it was somewhat of a record for most of the caretakers there.

We came back from our quick Chicago trip with two brand new deep cycle batteries, some type of holding tank pump, a made-for-RVs satellite dish and a few “other things.”

Among those “other things” was a foam mattress topper. I decided to cover it and use it as an extra cushion for the table-that-converts-to-a-bed in the trailer. I use the area as a reading nook – only setting the table up when I have a project that requires the use of my sewing machine.  I had ordered some material online and when it arrived I hauled the topper out onto the picnic table to attach the material to the topper – quilt style.

During the middle of the operation the wind picked up and the topper blew over onto itself. As I’m lying across the topper to keep it from blowing away I said to King, “I need a little help here.”  He promptly got up and went into the trailer.

Okay then. I’m resourceful. Guess I’ll do this one myself.  I pulled an ice chest over to the picnic table with my free foot and hauled it onto the end of the topper that was flying around. A second later King came out of the trailer and handed me my phone.

“What’s this for?”

“You said you needed a calculator.”

Marriage takes a lot of patience… and hearing aids.

We settle into a routine

We are still here. I guess that means we are here (at this campground) for the duration.

It’s interesting to see the campers come and go. Big and fancy motor homes, equally big and fancy travel trailers line the campsites on the weekends. King and I watch them as they pull in, expand their “homes” with slide-outs and bring out the coolers, lawn chairs, outdoor grills and awnings. We are not quite that fancy but we are comfortable.  In the trees are the primitive sites and tent campers find respite from the heat in the shade.  Those of us in the sun either bake or turn on the air conditioning.

By Monday afternoons the campground is generally empty. But oh, the activity over the weekend. The owners have started hosting a farm market on the grounds from 3 to 7 p.m. on Saturday. The vendors sell baked goods, craft items, BBQ and more. It's rather nice to be able to walk over and browse.  I'd invite anyone in the South Haven area over the weekend to check it out. Wear your mask. Practice social distancing. 

Saturday  a couple pulled in next to us. They had just come from an RV sales place in Grand Rapids and are doing a trial by fire with their new trailer for the next two weeks. It’s a nice trailer and it was fun to watch as they set it up and discovered all the bells and whistles it has to offer. There are a lot of them.

Bells and whistles on our trailer? Ummm. No.  As I said we are not that fancy. The old Shasta we owned before this one had a roof air conditioner. This one does not.  Last week, with temperatures predicted to soar into the 90s, our youngest son decided he did not want to come for a visit and find baked Mom and Dad inside the trailer. So he bought a portable air conditioner. It’s the kind that sits on the floor with a large hose vent for the exhaust. After considerable debate King relented and let me block off the back screen door with foam core board (the kind that’s used for school projects) and vent it out the hole for the door handle.  We never use that door anyway. He thought we should set it up in the shower and vent it out the top trailer vent.  We tried it. The bathroom was freezing. The rest of the trailer – not so much.  We now have it set up in the back. 

Prior to installation the inside trailer temperature reached 100 degrees. It truly does help keep us from baking.

Days have kind of melded into one another. King gets up, putters around the outside of the trailer (Sometimes he starts a fire – sometimes it’s on the hottest of days), takes our dog, Cindy, for a walk and then we sit outside in companionable silence. For us 40-some years of togetherness basically means we’ve said all there is to say to one another.  Since I am the family communication person, he’ll ask, “Hear from anyone?” And I will give him the Cliff Notes version of a conversation with whatever child I’ve chatted with via messenger or text.  Later in the morning he’ll get up from his lawn chair and go into the trailer. I know it’s a sign he is getting ready to head to the store, but I’ll wait until he says, “Are you ready?” because if I get up and get my stuff together he’ll sit back down and wait until going to the store is, once again, his idea. Rather than have us ready to go to the store at the same time, he would rather wait in the truck drumming the steering wheel with his fingers while I get my purse, find the keys and lock the trailer. It’s his way. 

Our trips to town include a drive through the parking lot at the North Beach in South Haven. I call it “checking to see if there is still water in Lake Michigan.”  Then we head to the gas station where he buys scratch-off lottery tickets, lemonade, beef jerky for Cindy and an ice tea for me. It’s the same every day. Tuesday evenings are reserved for golf league. It’s the reason we stay in one place for the summer. Well, it’s the Tuesday evening golf league and twice a month golf scrambles that keep us here. And yes, he practices social distancing.

Sunday morning was one of those golf scramble days. So I sat alone and watched a few neighboring campers pack up and get ready to head home for the week. I would be lying if I said I envied them.  I’m quite content where I am.

Life may sound mundane,  but it’s peaceful.

It's all in the genes

Those who knew our Mother knew her as a classy, wise, Christian woman. What few people knew was Mom was incredibly deaf. A childhood fever left her with 20 percent hearing in one ear and completely deaf in the other.  Growing up Mom was somehow able to hide it from her family because she learned to read lips. It wasn’t until she had to take a physical to work at the Willow Run airport during World War II and the nurse said to her, “You are deaf, aren’t you?”  that Mom realized maybe it did not go completely unnoticed.

Mom’s lack of hearing did not entirely escape my older sisters and I either. As we were growing up we learned that if you didn’t turn your back to mumble a disparaging remark directed toward her she knew exactly what you were saying.  But few, if any, of her friends knew just how deaf Mom was.  (Her hearing aids she got when I was a young teen did help). 

It still came as a surprise to me when her friends from church were incredulous when I told them how deaf Mom was.

A couple of years ago while having coffee with the “church ladies” from the Reformed church our family attended when we lived in Hamilton, the subject of Mom’s deafness came up. “Your Mom was such a great woman. And when you talked to her she always paid such close attention to what you were saying,” one of the ladies said to me.  Yup.  Because Mom was reading your lips. Oh, she could probably hear what you were saying, the lip reading re-enforced she was getting it accurately.

Mom had a fun-loving streak in her too. And she wasn’t always reverent. I recall a Sunday evening church service in the middle of summer, probably in the late 1960s. It was hot. The hot, sticky, humid summer that is pretty normal for Michigan. That evening she decided it was too hot for nylons and opted for a summer dress and sandals.

This was the late 1960s. In Hamilton. In Church. Women did not yet own pant suits. Or jeans. I think of Mom’s four sisters she was the only one who had shed a dress for Bermuda shorts during the week. But there was Mom, bare-legged and comfortable in church on a Sunday evening. Sacrilege.

As was the custom, clusters of people gathered after the service outside the church before heading to their cars.  Mom caught three old biddies talking about her. (She read their lips). They were aghast that she had shunned nylon stockings for bare legs and (gasp) was wearing sandals.  Mom was quite steamed.

As we left the parking lot that evening Mom hung her leg out the car window and yelled, “I painted my toenails too.” It was the first time (and unfortunately not the last) that I realized not all “Christians” were non-judgmental of others. I applaud my mother for letting them know what jerks they were.

Genetically speaking we inherit genes from both our parents. The classy, wise genes passed me by. The “screw you” hang your leg out the window gene, however was doubled. From my father, I inherited the “see injustice and seethe in anger” gene. Couple that with the hang your leg out the window gene and you’ve got one pissed-off older woman who speaks her mind.

For years I was able to keep the combination under control.  And that is partially because as a journalist it seemed prudent to keep my opinions to myself lest I be accused of being biased.  A true journalist will still do that. But people can’t seem to understand the difference between news and editorial and everyone gets lumped into one big “fake news” pie.

But I’m retired now and I don’t have to be politically correct. So for all those who want to talk about my absence of nylons, my sandals and my political views – I paint my toenails too.  

Read between the lines.