Sylvia's Journal

I am writing this morning in my bed like the old days. This time I have a lap desk that Axel gave me for Christmas. It came with a long and beautiful poem about writing in bed and his waking up to the tap-tap-tap of my keyboarding. I am writing in bed because Tessa’s friend Roy is sleeping downstairs in my office which still has a bed in it.

The sky is winter blue and the sun is shining on Axel’s sleeping face. From where I sit I can see a few scattered patches of snow that survived yesterday’s rain in the yard of our neighbor Jackie. It looks like a great day for flying to Gardner.

I was supposed to have flown yesterday but the cloud ceiling was too low, 600 ft. Without an instrument rating I was not allowed up in the air. Instead I waited at the flight center with a bunch of other folks who were all hoping the fog would burn off quickly, as predicted in the forecast. I met David from Uganda who knows the US better than any of us because he drives a tractor-trailer and delivers goods all up and down the Interstates. He converts everything he earns into flight hours and has more ratings under his belt than I ever aspire to have. Once day he will go back to Africa or any other continent to fly commercially; According to David this is the place to learn to fly, especially the Northeast with its packed airways and variable weather.

Finally I gave up waiting for the skies to clear. Armed with a brand new navigation map to plan my trp to Gardner and a stylish Piper jacket that Arne gave me, I left to do some shopping. When I came out of the grocery store the skies were mostly blue. I did not return to the flight center but hurried home to get Axel to his massage appointment.

Axel woke up in terrible pain yesterday morning. I had not seen him suffer this much for a long time. It seems that anything that immobilizes his body for awhile (sitting in a car, standing up at a party) creates a terrible backlash for him, quite literally. He was able to get an appointment at the local massage place at the end of the day. He stretched and stretched until he ran out of energy and then withdrew with a book. When I got to Masconomo Street he had already started his walk downtown. I could see from the way he walked that every step was murder. We exchanged places and he drove the rest of the way downtown while I walked back home. It was my longest walk yet. I even tried a slow jog, no more than a 100 yards which left me huffing and puffing for the remainder of the walk home.

Back home I started to plan for my trip to Gardner. It took awhile to get the hang of cross-county planning again after all this time. I am excited about the trip but also happy I am not flying alone; I m not quite ready for that. When that was done I continued sewing the two baby quilts from scraps that were leftover from Sita’s two enormous quilts she made for Christmas for Tessa and me.

Roy, Steve and Tessa returned from visiting friends and cooked us a taco dinner, bickering in the kitchen about whether to add ketchup to the hamburger meat or not. Tessa got her way (with ketchup) because that’s what her dad always does. I listened in amazement at how strong her conviction was about this, and how equally strong Roy’s and Steve’s convictions were that this was not the right way. I think she won because they were on her territory. But it got me thinking about clashing cultures. I never mentioned that I was brought up eating spaghetti with ketchup instead of tomato sauce and thought that this was the right way to eat spaghetti. I had no idea.

My numb hands held the the fist paragraph of today’s entry when I woke up. It is always a fragile arrangement. There was a phrase in there somewhere, about yesterday. Not this yesterday, but yesterdays in general, which made me think something like, “Oh, of course, that’s why I do this EMDR exploration of the past (all these yesterdays).” It was a clever phrase and I had wanted to start my writing with it. But I made the mistake of turning over and sleeping a little longer. Now all that is left of this brilliant opening is a vague outline, like a footstep in a snowstorm, the wind quickly obliterating its exact shape and form. A wind is also blowing inside my head and waking me up. It is the airstream produced by millions of synapses firing; checking out to-do lists for today, smelling the bread baking downstairs (a machine), hoping for tea in bed, and stuff like that

There is also wind in the outside world, and rain. The fog horn bleats – I asked Axel for a verb to describe the foghorn’s sound and we agreed it sounds like a sheep. It is dreadful weather and staying in bed (by now the tea has arrived) seems like a great idea. Today will probably be the last day for the remaining snow that is still visible in patches here and there. Once again my flight to Gardner is postponed. I did keep the plane reservation to circle around Beverly airport again for some practice, assuming that the weather will be a little better around 2 PM and that I manage to get out of bed.

Yesterday morning we all piled into the car, Sita and Tessa in the back, Axel and I in the front, to drive to Wareham, south of Boston. We went to visit Axel’s mother’s only remaining sibling, the baby of them all, Charles, who was born in November 1909. He lives in a small trailer park, dwarfed by a big shopping center. This is handy when you cannot drive a car anymore. His small trailer home is the most uncluttered house I have ever seen and stands in enormous contrast to our most cluttered of all homes. His house is probably also one of the few remaining houses in the US without a computer or any other electronic gadgets; unless you count the singing and moving Christmas decorations. They are only up for the holidays and won’t clutter his living room much longer. His living space represents our collective yearning for a simpler life; but it would never do for us – no car, no computer. And yet, he is fully connected to the world through his friends, family and TV.

We had meant to treat him to lunch. Instead he treated us to a wonderful lunch at Lyndsey’s in Wareham. We ate all the things that Weightwatchers warn you about, served in huge portions. And while we ate Sita illustrated on a placemat all the family information we could collectively extract from him. Each piece came with a story and a twinkle in his eye. As the youngest of seven, Charles had been a keen and witty observer, especially of his quarelling sisters Penny and Betty, and appeared the wiser of them all. It was funny to hear him refer to his young nephew when we discovered this nephew is in his eighties. If that was young, what were we, and in particular Tessa with her 22 years?

After lunch Charles directed us on a driving tour of some magnificent beaches in the area. We people from the Northshore don’t know the Southshore at all. We felt like we were very far away from home. It was a glorious blue-sky winterday. I kept thinking that flying to New Bedford would have been a lot more fun than sitting in a car for 2 hours each way. We would have seen the cranberry bogs from the sky, as deep red blotches on the landscape, rather than at eye level. They are still magnificent that way, but not as striking; but the girls and Charles declared that they’d rather stay on the ground.

On the way back we had planned to visit the whaling museum in New Bedford but it was too late. So instead we stopped at the temple of modern and cheap furniture, called IKEA and got Tessa a rug for her large and cold Canadian living room. She’s penniless and in debt but we love her so much; we’d buy anything for our poor little darling. She found herself the biggest and cheapest rug that wasn’t also hideous. It has a tic-tac-toe pattern woven into it and nothing, we think, that the puppy can get his teeth in.

At home we found Steve up and recovered from his 18 hour bus ride from Canada, with his friend Roy. They were the ones that made the small ramp in and out of my bedroom, back in July. Now Roy is sleeping in that room, which looks again like an office rather than a sick room.

We completed Christerklaas and Christmas with an exchange of poems and presents between Steve and his family and ours. We now have more than a liter of real maple syrup, some more good books and Steve has things to keep him warm (including the rug) and several puppy paraphernalia.

Everyone went to bed very late, including us; we working on various projects (Christmas cards before Easter?) and the kids playing boardgames downstairs. It was fun to have a noisy and cluttered house. I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

I woke up with numb hands again and a painful shoulder. Yesterday Julia took measurements and asked for pain ratings so that she can write a summary for the shoulder doctor who I will be seeing on the 3^rd. It is hard to give a pain rating when you are not actually in pain. Pain is much like walking into a icestorm. After you are through it, it is gone and you forget what it felt like. When contemplating pain as a past experience, it seems more like discomfort and I hardly ever give numbers above a 2 (on a 10 point scale).

The only experiences that I would rate ‘elevens’ were those two times that the rescue team and later the trauma team put my disclocated ankle back in place. I have never quite screamed as loud. I suppose people who are doing such jobs are used to that. I remember them calling out 1-2-3 and then they pulled and pushed. The first time was in the rescue truck. When, later in the trauma bay, people congregated by my foot and started counting 1-2-3 my brain knew what was about to happen. That scream was even louder I think. The next thing I knew was signing a consent form that was hovering above me in the dim light of the hospital’s subterranean corridors, where everything happens. And then everything went black (anasthesia) and I woke up with several pounds of plaster around my leg and 25 staples in my belly; but also with the good news that Axel would pull through.

All this is a faint memory now. The summer temperatures are replaced by snow and ice and the house is back to its previous cluttered state. We are living a normal life again. Only the doctors’ and PT appointments remind us that we are not there yet, but even those we are considerinig cutting back to two times a week rather than three or four.

Yesterday was a vacation day for all of us, except for Jim who had to work. He counts hits on internet sites to let advertisers know whether their advertising investments are worth their money. Our accident hass catapulted him into a new career. He even started his own business with a partner. This is the American way of course.

Tessa and Sita rose from their respective bed chambers halfway through the day, Axel went to physical therapy and so did I. And for the rest of the day we did things we like to do and don’t have much time for in addition to monitoring the ever present email in box. Sort of a boring day.

Most of yesterday was centered on food, the Big Christmas Meal. Axel and I got up early, after only a few hours of sleep. You know when you have recovered when everyone else in the house thinks that is perfectly OK. Axel had to set the alarm. I woke up half an hour earlier. We had slept for four hours, just like during our hospital days when the length of our sleep was measured by the potency of the pain pills.

We rubbed the turkey with chili powder. Try rubbing an eightteen pound turkey with not quite four fully functional hands (fifteen fingers). Axel then covered the bird with maple smoked bacon, as per Tessa’s instructions, and put it in the oven.

Somehow there was enough to do between this and when the rest of the house started to wake up that we never made it back to bed, as intended. The unwrapping of gifts that happened just before dinner is for me always a bit of an anti-climax after Christerklaas with its poems and gifts that need to be found elsewhere in the house. This part of the Christmas ritual never quite gets the attention it deserves. Tessa was trying to herd everyone to the living room but unsuccesfully so; Axel was too busy with doing, as usual, last minute stuff and I was happily playing with my new blog site. I categorized each entry. I can now call up the archive of Sita’s entries, Tessa’s entries and Axel’s entries. I like putting things in categories and I this new clean slate was very appealing. The categories are now visible on the front page.

In the process of categorizing I could not help to re-read entries as far back as July and I am grateful for the detailed descriptions. This journey will not be forgotten. I now read some of those entries, with the distance of time between my two selves, and see how anyone, even from a great distance, could ‘suffer with’ us as is the true meaning of the word sympathize.

We had a few visitors. Ted and Charles from next door showed up and brought us chocolates and nuts. We had coffee and talked about shit, or rather, the averted sewage disaster, including memories from the earlier time when things did not end that well.

In the afternoon our dinner guests arrived, Chuck and Anne. By then all the side dishes had been completed: turban squash, mixed with carrot puree, served inside the turban part of the squash with the other part as a cover. The drawing by Sita of a little Turkish man with moustache, under the turban was still visible albeit upside down. We had the very traditional creamed onions, mashed potatoes, and cranberry jelly. Tessa had added a green dish for color: green beans lightly cooked in ginger and sprinkled with almonds. And then there was the piece de resistance: our bacon bird, the stuffing inside it and gravy.

It was one of the most magnificent Christmas dinners we have ever had. It was traditional with a twist; with people near and dear to us around the table. Only Steve was missing. He was with his family in Kitchener (ON) and eating Elk. His people actually shoot their own Christmas dinner. Steve will be getting on a bus sometime today to arrive in Boston on Thursday.

Axel stood up and made a little speech; he could not imagine a happier Christmas. And I could only nod as a little voice deep inside my head whispered, “This could have been a Christmas without him.” This realization is coloring some of my usual impatience with Axel not being ready and forgetting about time. We might have been much more regimented about time, the way I like it, but without Axel, what satisfaction could I possibly derive from that?

Desert was another Tessa concoction; not of the lean cuisine sort. Only I knew that because I had seen it prepared. For everyone else it was a glorious pumpkin cheescake, served with eggnog whipped cream. We served it with coffee made in our Cona coffee maker. It looks like a piece of chemistry lab equipment that happens to use coffee grinds and converts the grinds and water in coffee. I inherited it from my parents. I remember fondly being allowed to wait until the coffee experiment at the end of my parents’ dinner parties, to see the water first bubble up into the grinds and then whoosh down as coffee into the beaker. It’s a clever way to combine learning and enjoyment.

After dinner we watched Chuck and Anne’s pictures from their trip to Hawai on Tessa’s big computer screen, hundreds of them. After that they had to watch Tessa’s new puppy. It was not much different from seeing someone’s newborn baby pictures. Lot’s of ‘oh how cute’s.

Sita and Jim left for another Christmas party at his mom’s. By the time everyone left we had little energy left and retired to bed before 9 PM.

This will be my first entry after being weaned from Caringbridge. As you can read in the last entry on Caringbridge, Saint Nicholas himself (or Christerklaas as we ought to call him) announced that it is time to move to a new blog site that is no longer in the realm of the crippled, sick and injured, as Caringbridge is. “It’s actually better, you can search the site,” said one of Sint’s helpers. And you can leave comments, much like the good wishes in the guest book, so that I can hear from you (which is always wonderful). Saint Nicholas has gone virtual indeed. He’ so with the times!

So here we are. Sint painstakingly transferred all 200 entries from Caringbridge to this site so you can still catch up if you have missed any of those. You can search for words like “pain,” or “broken,” or “patience,” if you feel such a need.

Like thousands of little boys and girls I am up early playing with my Christmas toys. Actually, they are Sinterklaas toys, as we celebrated our traditional Christerklaas last night, or rather, earlier this morning. In good tradition we started after midnight on Christmas Eve, so it was already Christmas day. This is not really intentional but a simple fact of life; no one is ready to start rhyming and scheming until after dinner. Axel was the last to be ‘ready,’ at about 00:20 AM. We were done by 03:00 AM, when everyone traipsed along upstairs with us to our bedroom, just like the early days after our hospital homecoming, to see the last present that was hung over our bed. It was an Illustrator-made reproduction from a family photo we made in the late 80s on the rocks of Penny’s (now our) house. We are awed by the graphic skills of this Christerklaas. We were also awed by the sewing skills, quite unexpected, of another Christerklaas who made both Tessa and me a queen size quilt that is colorful on one side and warm on the other. There were other amazing poems, and some that were quite modern, in that they did not rhyme at all, but beautifully written. I will post that one later.

So now that I have been moved to a site for the normal and healthy, I don’t have to write as much anymore about my muscles and tendons (there’s not much to report other than the same-old same-old this morning), and instead I can write about the shit load present I gave to Axel for Christmas.

I am not kidding. Yesterday I wrote a check for $600 to the company that pumped out our septic system. The ‘honey truck’ carted out 5000 gallons of shit to a dump so that we could flush toilets and take showers again.

Abi had just completed my weekly massage and started to work on Axel when our neighbor Ted shattered my immediate post-massage euphoria with a most dreadful message: sewage was backing up into his washing machine and flowing over into the cellar and making its way to ours. A few years ago something like this happened in March and led to a week long evacuation of the house, and a complete emptying of the cellar. We have a picture of Axel and Ted in white hazmat suits, trying to smile. I was away in some faraway place and missed the entire nightmare. Having raw sewage in your cellar is a really bad thing to have, at any time of the year, but especially on Christmas Eve.

I wanted to let Abi finish Axel’s massage but after a second appearance of Ted’s grim face I rudely interrupted his enjoyment. What happened was a confluence of factors: a severe rainstorm over packed snow and frozen ground filled the overflow tanks that were not able to drain into the frozen ground. The sewage had no other exit than to go back into the house.

The rest of the day consisted of preparations for our Christmas Day meal, baking and writing poems and wrapping presents. Axel, with thousands of other men across the US, went to the shopping mall; this is something that we sensible women would never even consider. Tessa and Axel, who have both worked in retail, remember this phenomenon. It’s good for sales of items that haven’t moved, as the guys, in their last minute shoppers’ desperation, will get anything that is recommended to them.

Sita and Jim went to his dad’s house for dinner while Axel, Tessa and I had a quick meal and went back to writing our poems; a task that everyone in our household always underestimates. Thence the late start.

Last night we went to the Prout/Emmens for their annual Christmas singing celebration. Diane is very good at organizing celebratory community events (I missed one early November at Manchester’s Community Center). This joyful gathering is apparently a longstanding Christmas tradition at the Prout/Emmens on December 23. There is something magical about doing something together with people you don’t know, whether it is working, playing or singing. We were practically hoarse after having worked our way, under Diane’s enthusiastic leadership, through an entire songbook, created especially for these December 23 occasions. We were lucky to sit next to Rosalie from Boston, who had the most beautiful voice. Sometimes I could not resist resting my own voice for a moment and listening to hers. Of all the instruments, an exquisite voice like hers is one of my favorites.

On our way out I got a brief doctor’s lecture from Curt to take it easy and say ‘no’ a bit more often (I said no to that last suggestion). I am not driving into Cambridge this week. My intend is to do the minimum to keep the rising email tide at bay and look out for messages related to my upcoming trip to Ghana. For the rest this week will be dedicated to seeing friends and dropping of our traditional Christmas mustards here and there. Today we will all start our Sinterklaas preparations, rhymes and packaging, which I already described in greater detail in my journal of December 5.

Yesterday Axel accompanied me to Quaker Meeting, which is a fairly rare event. This meant that I left my bike in the shed and we went together by car. I missed my weekly energizing and meditative ride but it was probably just as well; the roads are narrow because of the snowbanks and there were still sections with ice on the road.

We were both very stiff and sore all day. We didn’t quite understand why and chalked it up to the high humidity. Such days, when our recovery seems to go backward, we need some explanation to hold our frustrations at bay. After Meeting Axel looked so droopy that I literally had to tuck him in bed for a nap. He slept most of the afternoon. His nights are still very much interrupted, sometimes sleepless, and he clearly had some catching up to do. As a result we did not make the intended visits to friends. I finished some work that needed to be in the email in boxes of several people in Ghana by Monday morning and had been weighing heavily on my mind. When I was done, Axel woke up and it was getting dark and time to dress for our Christmas party.

When we came home our driveway, nearly halved because of the accumulated snow, was filled to overflowing with cars. Inside we found Tessa with many of her old friends. They were filling up every sitting surface in the living room and seemed to be having a great time. It is so nice to see these kids, some of whom we have known since their awkward teenage years, grown into confident adults with jobs and exciting possibilities and/or plans for the future. Both Sita and Tessa have wonderful friends who we enjoy seeing.

Being the old and decrepit parents that we are, we left the youngsters alone and went upstairs to bed where we watched part of another rather depressing Ingar Bergman movie called the emigrants, showing some of the dirt (as in soil) that once covered Axel’s Swedish roots. Seeing a scene in a village church, with all the men more or less dressed alike in the pews on one side and all the women covered from head to toe in black on the other side made us realize that some of the current scenes from the Islamic world are actually quite similar, with the hell-and-damnation fundamentalist preacher exacting total obedience from his flock, all in God’s name. And that was just hundred and something years ago. What’s a hundred years on a cosmic scale?