A Five Year Sentence

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Just before New Year I was given a very attractive five year memory book. Essentially there are 365 pages, each page being designated for a particular day and each entry appearing five times on a page. The premise is that you just add the year and then write a line or two in the box – every day for f5 year memory bookive years. Because of the way the book is structured, you can then look back at any particular day and see what you had on your mind on that day over the course of the five years. It’s a way to keep track of both the everyday and the exceptional events in your life – but in brief, rather like a Twitter-log,  so that you don’t have to feel that it takes up a lot of your time or mental energy to keep it up to date.

The quandary I face is that I’ve actually kept a journal/diary and then a blog for many years and my entries tend not to be particularly concise. Whilst I do subscribe to Twitter and have learned to keep within the 140 characters that it dictates, my posts tend to be along the lines of passing thoughts or comments. I see the line-a-day diary entries as more personal and perhaps even meaningful, but have realised that I need to ‘Twitterise’ them so that they fit into the space provided in order for them to be succinct and interesting.

Thinking about all this brought to mind a Bernice Rubens book I read a while back. A Five Sentence is is about Miss Hawkins who, on retirement, is presented with a five year diary. For varioubernice rubens_a five year sentences and complex reasons, Miss Hawkins feels compelled to write in the diary – but has nothing to write about. So instead of writing about what she has done, she writes about what she will do – and then follows through on what she has written as though the entries are instructions, returning to tick the items off with a red crayon when she’s completed them. It’s a strange and disturbing little book, but a beautiful example of character development and clear, crisp prose. Sadly, I leant my copy to someone. Happily, I just found that it’s available as an Ebook and have downloaded it to reread.

Miss Hawkins and her five year diary, along with my attempts to Twitterise my thoughts for my five year diary, resulted in rumination as to the nature of compulsion and as to why people keep diaries/journals/blogs (of whatever sort). Some reading on the topic suggests that the reasons for doing so are probably as diverse as the people who keep them, ranging from tracking daily and/or special events to annotating holidays, from writing practise to therapy.

In my own case it started out as a means to discard or offload thoughts and feelings that I didn’t want to or couldn’t  share with anyone else. I was a moderately introverted teenager and had a range of complex issues to manage on my own, so I was basically writing to myself – and it worked very well. I was able to live in the moment and not hang onto angst or issues unduly and, as a result, to become somewhat pragmatic about life. This has served me well over the years.

More recently I’ve taken to writing for a wider audience, sharing my thoughts with others as a way of broadening the scope both of what I write and what I think about — and I enjoy it. This brings me back to day six of my line-a-day five-year-diary. I’ve managed five days of short entries and I think I’m getting the hang of it. I just hope that the three ladies in my life who ended up with one of these diaries at much the same time are busily writing in theirs each day too…

Loss and guilt

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The harsh reality of having a pet in one’s life is that they will almost certainly die before you do. I am told that dogs – my preferred household pet – sometimes live up to 19 or 20 years and can be hale and hearty for most of their lifespan. My experience, however, has been that 10 years is the best that one can realistically hope for. This indicates a clear need for acceptance and understanding of this outcome from the start in order to minimise emotional upsets further down the track.

Advice of that sort sounds sensible and is easy enough to give, although implementation can be a tad more problematic. What seems to happen in my case is that pets come into my life, become part of my family and that I give little thought to their possible or probable demise. I/we feed them, walk them, take them with us to the beach and on holidays, make sure they have regular checkups at the vet and that they get their inoculations on time. In short, we simply live our lives and enjoy the companionship they provide.

In due course, however, some or other event catches up with us and brings home the stark reality of their relatively short lifespan. In every case this has left me saddened and – in some cases – quite bereft. Looking back across my life, I remember each of my furry buddies – and the gap they left when they died. Time eases the ache and new furry friends come into our lives, but I’ve found that it’s impossible to simply replace a friend with another friend.
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Most recently Nuschka came to us. She was two years old, seemed fit and healthy and was in need of a secure home. We all thought she’d be with us for a long time to come and incorporated her into the family post haste.  In the yearn that followed we had a lot of fun together, but there was also a good deal of dog stress – low levels at first, but mounting over time to quite significant proportions. After months of her suffering chronic diarrhoea, numerous vet visits and all manner of investigations, we agreed to a procedure called a fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) for her in mid-December. Essentially this involved surgical intervention to empty her intestine and bowel and to then repopulate them with healthy bacteria. At the same time biopsies of her gut and intestine could be done in order to eliminate cancers as a possible reason for her ill health and to establish whether there were any other issues.

We brought her home after her surgery and, although she was clearly happy to be at home and pleased to see us, after a week she had lost weight, was vomiting and dehydrated. Despite  calming words from the vet, we rushed her back to the surgery at 3am on Christmas Eve. The week that followed was spent waiting. We waited to hear from the vet each day – and each day brought no new plan, no improvement and no clear idea of any resolution. The biopsies had shown that she had both inflammatory bowel disease, as suspected, as well as lymphangiectasia – a chronic and pathologic dilation of the lymph vessels.

We finally ran out of options just before New Year.  The surgery was very busy when I got there to see her and we ended up sitting together in a back room, my Nuschka and I, until our turn came. She was so happy to see me, her great plume of a tail swishing back and forth as she sniffed me and licked my hands and face. We sat there for four hours, cuddled up on the floor, my hand compulsively stroking her as I talked to her. I think I even dozed off with her at one point.

In due course the vet came back to give the lethal injection via Nuschka’s intravenous drip, after which we just sat with her as her life slowly ebbed away – and then for a while longer, chatting quietly about dogs and loss and life. This was the final thing I could do for my girl – to be there and take responsibility for my decision to end her life. Even though the decision was certainly in her best interests, I could not leave the implementation completely in the hands of others. She was my responsibility, not theirs.

It’s hard to sit by and watch a beloved family member fade away – but it is much harder to watch them suffer, particularly when there is an alternative. By the time I got home I thought I was all cried out – but I was wrong, apparently. Dear Nuschk – what a damn shame it ended up this way.

Ten things

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When I was in the shower yesterday I found myself thinking about an incident I’d witnessed earlier in the day and the surprising level of rudeness expressed by a random stranger. This sort of thing always bothers me and thinking about it led me to consider other things that drive me crazy. Not a positive train of thought, really, so I thought about the things that make me smile instead … the things that combat the crazy-making things so that they don’t win out.

As is my way, I started to make a mental list, randomly deciding to try for ten of each. It was easy enough to come up with quite a few negatives, so I switched to the positives – but ran out of shower before I came up with 2×10.

Not surprising then that the topic was still on my mind when I woke up at the crack of dawn to take the puppy outside. That doesn’t drive me nuts, by the way – it’s just part of puppy training and won’t last long. Not getting back to sleep afterwards – now that is a bit crazy-making, but I often offset it by just getting up and doing some work. 4am is a pretty quiet time round our place (other than potty breaks for puppies) and a surprising amount can be done then – like listing my ten things of the moment (they change over time). So here are the current lists:

10 things that give me the crazies
People who don’t pick up their dog’s poop in public places
Misunderstandings resulting from poor communication
Politicians – pretty much everything about them
Tiring a little too easily (mutter!)
Indecisiveness (I call it dithering) – in myself as much as in others
Unkindness – ditto
Litter – just litter. Really, why do people?
A chaotic environment, particularly a messy kitchen
(Loud) mobile phone use in public places, e.g. the train: much rudeness, so discourteous
Poor planning – whether it’s for events, meetings, whatever – it’s simply not efficient and is time-wastey

10 things that make me smile
The crazy and unexpected things that people do
Dog, puppies, wagging tails – our dogs are particularly happy-making
Our visiting kittens, Cloud and adorable Prism. So much purrrrrr…
Finishing a project – any project
Entertaining friends & family
My art shed – sometimes just having one is enough 🙂
Kindness in strangers
The beach
Riding my bike
Doing something that makes someone else smile
Quiet time to reflect

They’re not very exhaustive lists or even very profound ones – but they reflect the mood of the moment.

Time to wrap gifts to pop under the tree. Feliz Navidad ~ Prospero año y felicidad.

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Self-indulgence – or self-nurturing?

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One day this week, as part of my daily activity regime, I wandered down to the local shopping centre to pick up a few requirements for dinner. In an unexpected moment of weakness I also bought a chocolate-covered, nut-encrusted ice-cream-on-a-stick. Feeing slightly guilty, I loaded all the purchases into my little backpack and started the uphill trudge back home in the late afternoon sun. By the time I was most of the way there I was tired… and that ice cream seemed to be crying out for attention… So I found a shady spot, plonked myself down… and ate every last super tasty morsel of it!

Watching the traffic and listening to the wind in the gum trees while I nibbled the chocolate coating away and then got stuck into the ice cream was remarkably restful. Ficecreamor a while I was just in the moment, completely absorbed in the taste and texture, the delicious richness of the slowly melting treat. Before long, however, I found myself starting to think about how self-indulgent I was being. I hadn’t bought ice creams to share with the rest of the family – I had just bought one. For me. To compound this indulgence, I was sitting there having a rest, not thinking about work, dogs, cats, children or dinner – I was just watching the world go by and slowly consuming my treat. Definitely self-indulgent, right?

This train of thought made me start to consider the difference between self-indulgence and self-nurturing. Like many women of my generation, I come from a background where ‘self-indulgence’, i.e. greedy or selfish behaviour, was discouraged – both by example and more actively. I assume that the objective was to instil some notion of self-discipline and restraint in us as children and to make us more inclined to think of others. If so, then this was probably not a bad thing to aim for. Whether it was successful, however, is debatable.

Talking to my female contemporaries, it seems that many of us have ended up with an inculcated notion of guilt. We feel guilty when doing things for ourselves, things that don’t directly or clearly benefit others in some way. Social conditioning as to the role of females in our society – or at least the one in which I grew up – reinforces that outlook, encouraging women to put the needs of others first. It’s taken many years of introspection and self-analysis for me to get to a point where I know myself well enough to be able to figure out what my needs are – and to use this to examine and temper those notions of externally imposed guilt.

As an adult I can see the many ways in which my mother denied herself simple pleasures so that we, as a family, would benefit. She did so willingly and as a matter of course, having lived through the post-war depression years of food and employment scarcity and thus having a very clear understanding of sacrifice for the greater good. As a nurse, the greater good was the well-being of her patients. As a mother, it was that of our family.

This outlook certainly benefited both my siblings and me in diverse ways, enabling us all to got through school and into adult life largely oblivious of the sacrifices made for us. We didn’t stop to consider the impact on Mum, both mentally and physically, or to wonder who looked after her while she was looking after us. If I could reach back into that distant past I would like to tell her to be a little kinder to herself. I would like to suggest that she stopped – just sometimes – and enjoyed an ice cream in the sunshine, putting everything else aside for those few minutes. It’s not an indulgence, I would to tell her, you’d just be taking a breath and enjoying the moment for a change. Self-nurturing is simply looking after yourself, being mindful of your state of mind, your body and the world around you  – and responding appropriately to ensure your continued good health.

Despite knowing this, and despite giving advice to others to take a moment, I still sometimes get glimmers of those deep-rooted twinges of guilt when I do so myself. Then I give myself a little mental shake and remind myself of the real necessity in everyday life for self-nurturing in all of us. Particularly at busy or stressful times, such as when the year is thundering to a close… and that ice cream was delicious 🙂

Suburban Agrarian – a farmer’s life for me?

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I’ve been told that an urban agrarian lifestyle at its simplest incorporates slight lifestyle changes – growing as much of your food as you plausibly can in your backyard / window box / allotment, using renewable energy, making use of public transport or HPV (human powered vehicles), keeping a couple of chickens for fresh eggs (and, in due course, fresh chicken), buying local produce to fill the gaps and sharing resources wherever possible.

None of those things are particularly hard to do and most of them are even good fun. It does take a certain level of commitment, however, since they take time, which is perennially in short supply for the average nine-to-five worker. Some days it feels like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to sustain the dream.

Our solution to that was to start small and work our way up. The first step was to plant fruit trees so that we’d (hopefully) be able to produce and share quality fruit that hasn’t been treated with pesticides. After a few years of putting in the odd tree here and there, we now have a veritable orchard: cumquat, calamondin, Australian finger lime, blood orange, plum, cherry, loquat, blueberries, Tahitian lime, pink grapefruit, pear, passionfruit vines, olives and apples. The apples and pear tree are dwarf stock, since our property isn’t really very large, but they’re starting to fruitpears_1dec14 and we have high hopes for good crops from them in the future. Trees are pretty low maintenance and it’s been great to be able to share some of the fruit – and the jams and chutneys – with friends and family. At various times of the year it’s actually unwise to visit us unless you’re resigned to leaving with at least one jar of cumquat marmalade – the tree fruits prolifically!

Our next bold step was to install four raised garden beds and to start to grow seasonal vegetables and herbs. This takes more effort than the trees and is intermittently rewarding. Basil, mint, tomatoes, kale, spinach and beans have been the winners; most other crops have been a bit disappointing. Sometimes this is simply because the garden beds aren’t well positioned as far as sun/shade goes for a particular crop, sometimes because critters have invaded and I’ve been unwilling to spray – but also not diligent enough to do a daily critter parade. At the moment I have corn, cherry tomatoes, basil and spinach growing, but we do need to augment the home grown produce with visits to the markets. The local Farmer’s Markets are great for this – although the prices aren’t really competitive, so it’s certainly not a cost saving.

Solar hot water is a great solution in summer, but since I’m a sucker for a hot shower we use an electric booster through the winter. A 4.5-kilowatt array of solar panels on the roof means that we could theoretically go off-grid and be self sufficient for power, but before that can happen we’d need to be able to store the energy. Batteries are probably the most obvious and cost effective option and that may be a future project. In the meantime we feed power back into the grid, which in turn offsets our power bill to some extent. In terms of transport, our future plans hinge on the electric utility vehicle that’s under construction in our garage. Meantime we use conventional internal combustion vehicles and winge about the cost of fuel and I use my bicycle from time to time and public transport whenever possible.

About a year ago we ended up with two backyard chooks. This isn’t something I ever thought of as likely, since I’m not a fan of feathered things unless they’re in trees, the sky or a tasty casserole, but the promise of fresh eggs was pretty tempting. Once we’d built a chicken run under the fruit trees as a temporary ‘chicken daycare centre’ for my daughter’s chickens whilst she was away, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that we’d eventually end putting the run to more permanent use. Two of the chickens simply didn’t end up going home with her last November. Instead, we inherited a pair of rather attractive Australorps (http://www.backyardchickens.com/products/australorp) and they rampage around in their run fairly happily. We tried having them on the loose in the garden, but the darn things seem to think that the froblackchooks_2014nt doormat is the chicken equivalent of a kitty litter tray. This does not please me, so their free ranging has been curtailed.

The downside of chickens is that they are a bit noisy early in the morning. Actually, they’re darn noisy! By early, I mean 5.30am – and this is not an hour at which I’m usually terribly sociable or, indeed, amenable to loud noises. I’m pretty sure that this applies to our neighbours as well, although no-one (other than me!) has complained so we’re either shutting them up fast enough by staggering out to feed them at the crack of dawn – or the neighbours haven’t figured out where the noise is coming from… yet. Other than that, though, they’re pretty easy to manage in terms of care and maintenance and do provide us with a steady supply of eggs. I haven’t actually bought eggs since they started laying early this year and we often end up having to give eggs away when production overtakes consumption.

Although each step along  our suburban agrarian journey has been fun, collectively it can be exhausting. The combination of planting, mulching, watering, weeding, feeding, pruning, making preserves and egg-related dishes and cleaning chicken hutches is sometimes quite a load, particularly when in conduction with early mooring wake-up calls from our avian buddies. I’ve concluded that whilst I do enjoy home-grown vegetables, making jams and chutneys and using freshly laid free range eggs, I am at heart a city girl and I may have reached the limits of my suburban agrarian dreamscape.