Sylvia's Journal

I woke up in time to write but stayed in bed until there was no more time. With this I squandered the chance to write in great detail about my dreams that included a trip with Joellen to somewhere that took forever to get started and some brilliant thoughts about my work. These have gone back to the place where all the other brilliant thoughts live, in complete obscurity and irretrievable.

I biked to Quaker meeting and counted the empty beer cans along the way. If I were to pick up all the empties, in each direction, it could buy me one gallon of orange juice each month; there is money lying on the street! It makes you wonder what happens at night on these stretches of road.

Our youngest Quaker attender was 2 weeks old, little Gemma Louise. She handled the one hour silence like a pro. I suppose that after 9 months of silence in utero, this one hour is not much of a challenge.

While riding my bike I thought much about cleaning and clearing out clutter, an ancient spring ritual that is badly needed in our house. Back home I added deed to word and started un-cluttering a very small space. It quickly became a silver cleaning chore and took much longer than intended. In the end, I realized I was just moving clutter from one place of the house to another. There is a system dynamic at work that is stronger than my or Axel’s will; it is much like putting a policeman in one neighborhood to discourage criminal activity and the crime simply moves to the next neighborhood.

I did throw out some little things without asking permission. No one will notice the missing pieces of glass, rock, sand dollars and other neat stuff that, I know, will automatically slip back into our house as soon as someone comes back from the beach.

Yesterday we went to the Flower Show in Boston to see Woody’s exhibit and cheer him on to great sales. Those have mostly been absent. He tries to sell 400 dollar plus planters and basins, wedged in between 10 dollar Christmas ornaments, an all purpose gardening tool and tubes of udder balm sold as miracle hand cream by a woman and her, now free from eczema, boy. You get a squirt if you want one. While massaging it into our hands we discovered the saleslady is also a nurse at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester, which led to a long conversation.

We wandered through the main horticultural displays where Axel’s father used to show his talents and wares some 30 years ago. The experience of walking on concrete for several hours reminded us of our ill-advised trip to IKEA several months ago. We can still not do this very well and we arrived home limping (me) and Axel in great (back and hip) pain. We cooked ourselves a light dinner and ate it in front of the TV. It seemed fitting to watch Moore’s documentary about the US health care system (Sicko) to forget our pains by immersing ourselves into the bad (health) luck of others. The operative phrase is ‘so you think you are covered?’  I learned about all this in my early years in the US when I delved into the world of insurance and discovered nothing but scams.  We made it about halfway through the movie when we called it a day and got our tired and sore bodies into bed.