Last night I was multitasking by taking a bath and doing laundry at the same time. I can hear you asking, what? Laundry must be done, and washing skivvies in the tub means I can save my quarters for the sheets and towels. So, rub-a-dub-dub. Nobody gets close enough to smell me anyway, so who cares if I reek slightly? Anyway, I often think while I'm tubbing, and last night as I was squeezing water out of my socks, I was thinking, should I feel guilty that my life hasn't really changed all that much since Covid?
Sometimes I think I should be suffering more. It feels like my inner empathy machine is just a click or two out of alignment. Before I can get the empathy machine to lurch into gear and flood my system with angst, I have to nudge my brain into having a thought, oh hey, people are suffering, I should feel compassion. I should suffer too. Then the sluicegate opens, the wave of empathy and angst washes through me, and I cry a little. Then I wonder, were those tears artificial? Am I crying for others, or am I crying for myself?
For me, the great tragedy happened on January 9 when my cat died in my arms. Since then, I have felt frozen in amber, mired two heartbeats from feeling much in real time. I'm responding to life, I'm taking action, I'm talking, and showing up, but I always feel a step behind, like, did I say the right thing? Am I feeling the right thing? There's a long moment in which I feel suspended in freefall. I can name the abyss. It's uncertainty. The dark hole yawning beneath me used to be hidden by the fog of my mundanities but no longer. Yowza. Life is damn precarious! I bet you feel it too.
After a remarkably smooth trip to the dermatologist on Friday, we learned my mother has a pressure sore on her right ear. (Yay, not skin cancer.) After researching ear-hole pillows on the Internet, I leaped into gear, determined to use materials on hand to create a pillow remedy. A few hours of cursing later, after repeatedly remembering how much I despise sewing, I proudly presented my accomplishment to Mom's caregiver: A pillow with a hole in it and a pillowcase to match. Essentially, it looks like I took a pillow and shot it with a small cannon. I'm still picking up the stuffing scattered around the Love Shack, but Mom has her ear-hole pillow.
Tonight I finally conquered the problem of foggy glasses. It's difficult to drive with fogged up glasses, have you noticed? During the day, okay, but at night, impossible. With or without glasses, not good, I can't see a thing. That reminds me of a time my former boyfriend and I got stranded hiking in an arroyo near the Colorado River after dark. I had only my prescription sunglasses. After dark, I was blind with them and without them. I tied a bandanna to his beltloop and stumbled after him along the sandy riverbed, sure our bones would be washing out somewhere down onto the plain below after the next thunderstorm. Well, driving with foggy glasses at night is like that, without the bandanna and the boyfriend.
In an earlier blogpost I reported that I had discovered my ears were not in a good location for wearing a face mask. Now I can report that my nose also presents a prominent issue. That is to say, the bridge of my nose is quite prominent, which makes it difficult to get a face mask to cover that bony curve. Has my nose always been so bony? Big, yes, since my teens, but gosh, so bony? Why is all the meat on my body migrating away from my wrists and nose and going straight to my ass? Well, a question for the ages. Anyway, today I took a dust mask and stapled a rolled up strip of fabric along the inside top edge. I sprayed the strip of cloth with a little water (I read it on the Internet so it must work, right?) I donned the dust mask and pressed the metal band tight into my skin. Then I took two cotton balls and stuffed them into the two gaps on either side of my nose. Then I covered the whole mess with my faded plaid cotton pleated mask.
Feeling well barricaded, I expelled some experimental breaths. Eureka! Success. No fog! Special added bonus: Tonight the rain stopped long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the half moon in the southern sky. See what you miss when your glasses are fogged up?
My bathroom is festooned with drying t-shirts, tank-tops, underpants, and socks. Because the bathroom is cold and damp, each load of laundry takes about five days to dry. I've got a nightly routine. After I am done with my bath, I dump the clothes into the tub with me. No, I don't try to wash them while I am wearing them, although that did occur to me. Even though washing them while wearing them might be more efficient, wet clothes are not comfortable. I won't do it, even in the name of efficiency.
I wash each "load" cursorily with bath soap. I rinse the items in the bathwater and hang them on hangers to drip dry from the windowsill. That's the nightly routine. Every day I take one load of cold but mostly dry, wrinkled stiff clothes, fold them like cardboard, and put them away in my drawers. This is an odd way to live but I don't mind. I conserve quarters, which saves me a scary trip into the bank.
Tomorrow I get to make a scary trip to get a mammogram. After that I'll do my weekly scary trip to the grocery store, masked and gloved. In and out, like a burglar. It's a scary time but I feel oddly well-equipped to handle it. I don't let the pesky holiday season get in my way. My family stopped celebrating years ago. This is a piece of cake. You stay over there, and I'll stay over here. If you want me, you'll find me on the Zoom.
