Sylvia's Journal

It seems every year there is some surgery  that is necessary so I can function as a whole person (again). The ankle, securely fused, now allows me to walk without pain on flat surfaces.  Frozen unpaved surfaces remain a challenge, but I am learning to adjust to that reality which is a whole lot better than what happened to others recently.

After a nice Thanksgiving dinner at Sita’s in laws I slipped on a small patch of ice – my luck – and learned today from the shoulder doctor, supported  by pretty graphic MRI pictures that even I understood, that I managed to tear two tendons, the supra and infra spinatus, which are supposed to keep my (left) shoulder in place, entirely off the bone. Although I had already started on a regimen of physical therapy and anti-inflammatory pills, they cannot repair this, only the surgeon can.  Of the eight tendons that keep my two shoulders in place, one is retracted beyond repair (from the plane crash), one was pulled up and is anchored in the bone, and now these two.  Ughhh.

So I am looking at surgery again. I know the drill now – 6 weeks in a sling, and PT for months.

The year started sadly, only days after all the good wishes and happy thoughts, always for a better year than the last. But the reality is that every new year carries sadness and suffering alongside happiness and joy. A young Dutch/Indian couple, rejoicing in the arrival of their first baby later this year, which they announced on Christmas day to the grandparents, friends of mine in Holland, is no longer a couple. The young woman died on the second day of the new year as the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic and, I assume, medical aid came too late, in far away Bangalore. I am familiar with the statistics of maternal death in India (190 deaths for every 100.000 live births) but when it is someone you know, who happens to be the same age as your own daughter, it is terribly upsetting.

We headed to Easthampton on New Year’s Eve, allowing us to get our Faro-fix and also celebrate the arrival of the New Year with some of our daughter and son-in-law’s closest friends. We made raviolis from scratch sitting around the kitchen table, taking turns at hand cranking the pasta maker, placing dollops of various fillings on the thin bands of dough and stamping the raviolis, square and round. A salad and scallops cooked to perfection rounded out the last meal of 2014.

I had a hard time keeping my eyes open past 10 PM, my usual bedtime. Axel closed his eyes and fell asleep and we woke him up minutes before midnight – as my parents used to do when I was little.

I remember being carried down and placed on the black-tiled window sill, cold to my feet, pressing my nose to the cold glass and watching the fireworks being lighted by the older kids in our street.  Most of the grown-ups would be out, greeting neighbors and standing, arms crossed to stay warm, teeth chattering, exchanging wishes and watching the do-it-yourself fireworks.

Inside it was warm and there was food and warm wine, sometimes champagne and always enormous quantities of runny French cheese and baguettes. I wasn’t interested in the cheese and wine; instead I would go for the leftover chocolates. But the biggest thrill would be to be tolerated among the merry grown-ups. Some years later we would all stay up and play card games until midnight and then go out onto the street and wish our neighbors happy New Year. That is still what happens in Holland: the midnight hour is a signal for a neighborhood to go out and share good wishes; here in the US, if you choose to stay home, New Year’s Eve is a private rather than a community event.

On New Year ’s Day we visited Sita Co.Lab in Easthampton, a large loft in an old mill building, where Sita started her 3^rd business,  a place for young entrepreneurs to work side by side or together, turning ideas into something that produces an income, in an environment that is all about creativity. She’s done a great job in furnishing the place, creating a shared vision, a pricing policy and private, semi-private and common spaces; some are being rented, some not yet. It’s risky business, as all new ventures are, but she’s committed to make it work. Now, for their first time, she and Jim have a real office and we have a place to park our unused furniture, our rugs and old copies of Wired Magazine. Now she needs more toys and things that will stimulate the creative urges of its tenants.

We spent the afternoon assembling IKEA furniture, something I love to do, probably because it is simply a variant on my favorite pastime, the puzzle.

Christmas has come and gone. The dread turned into inspiration. First (even before the 25th) I hung all the christmas light we have that still work, everywhere: around the plants, the windows, the curtains – a tangle of wires. On the outside we also look more Christmassy than ever. I figured I would rise in stature as a homemaker in Tessa’s eyes. The lights were also for Faro of course. When I turned everything on he was mesmerized though I am not sure he even saw the outside lights that Axel tangled with.

As every year I had warned everyone about buying things they couldn’t afford and/or we didn’t need and especially those gifts that would produce more clutter in our already cluttered households (it’s a gene  we both passed on).  I think this year the message took. We gave each other either home-made gifts or clutter-free experiences (like restaurant gift certificates two nights at an inn, swimming lessons), though the teepee that Tessa made for Faro does take up valuable real estate in the Bliss’ already full house.  My present to Steve and Tessa were 6 enormous curtain panels that will keep them a little warmer in their drafty house. It took most of the Christmas week to sew them and line them and hem them, sitting in my temporary workshop set up in the basement. Tessa kept me company while she was making the teepee.

On Christmas Eve we celebrated with one part of Jim’s family, dinner and the traditional Yankee swap, though this time we returned home with several of our own presents. This included a box with the ingredients for Jamaican coffee (coffee, rum and 4 cans of whipping cream). We taught Faro one of my favorite things: spraying the whipped creamed right into one’s mouth. “”More..,more..,” he said in great delight. Now we have another whipped cream junkie in the house.

I had tried to give up on the Chisterklaas ritual of starting our adaptation of Sinterklaas avond late on Christmas Eve and instead do it the next morning – given that we have a toddler in the house who wakes up at 7 AM. But we fell back into old habits and started close to midnight with the preceding hours a frantic burst of activity for most: everyone was busy either writing poems, creating surprises, hiding them all over the house, or finishing projects (like the teepee) – it was, as always, rather stressful, so stressful that I kept walking around muttering ‘this is no fun’ and ‘let’s bag the whole thing.’ Tessa was in tears in the basement working frantically on the teepee with a sewing machine that didn’t cooperate. Only Axel was unaffected; he took a nap and accepted the reality that he was not ready and would not be uuntil the 27th.

And so, despite wanting to orchestrate this otherwise, we couldn’t help ourselves and had our Christerklaas that included IOUs from Tessa and Axel who had not even started their poems.  Our poems hang in the Christmas tree, a novel spin on an old ritual. Jim’s poems are of the literary type, with adapted passages from Keats or Shakespeare or the cleverly composed ‘histories of whatever the present it.’ Sita and my poems have real rhyme and Axel and Tessa’s, well we don’t know yet.

And now the house is nearly quiet with the Blisses departed for Easthampton to pay some attention to their cats since they had been a bit forgotten in the frantic Christmas prep and left to fend for themselves in Easthampton.  Steve arrived very early this morning returning from a long road trip to his family near Toronto. He has had his own franticnness up there and our post-Christmas celebration will be a bit subdued in comparison but welcomed no doubt. We will read the last poems this morning…and be done with Christmas for another year.

I have this tendency to dread Christmas because of all the hoopla about it and then, poof, suddenly it is there and I am not prepared, being so busy with the dreading.  That was one reason why I have not been writing. The other is that my fall on the ice after Thanksgiving is turning out to have some more serious consequences (another dread), requiring an MRI and physical therapy and many anti-inflammation pills, daily. I am rather handicapped in activities of daily living, which includes putting on a coat, pulling up and zippering my pants and drying myself after a shower.

And finally, my long stretch of not traveling has been shortened due to the insertion of a trip to Rwanda before I head out to Ethiopia.  It required a lot of re-scheduling and juggling doctors’ and PT appointments with the requirements of having a full time job. The Christmas vacation, short as it is, comes as a welcome rest stop – now that I think everything is back under, at least the illusion of, control.