this year keeps getting better and better

Ok raise your hand if you thought I was getting a root canal today. Everyone's hands down! Cause you're all wrong.

Yes after 6 months of tooth pain and many rejections and then an appeal that got me the pink paper which means success, I won the root canal by fighting bro! So I made that appointment. Jan 16th. I told my friend Kurt I can't ride that day, I'm getting my tooth fixed. 

The day before they call me to confirm. They call me twice. They text me to confirm. I am definitely going to be there. 

Then I get one more call which I knew was going to come. Because I knew somehow this was going to fuck up. They call and say ooohhhhh yeah, your insurance says ineligible. 

Eyes wide.

I have been fighting for this incredibly not wanted prize for 6 months. And now you're saying the day before, oops. Kidding, you can't come in.

Somehow the computer is saying my insurance isn't working. So they have to take me off the schedule for tomorrow, they say. I wish you wouldn't, I say.  You should call your insurance, they say. But save that pink paper.

Eyes wide.

I call my insurance and wait on hold for two hours. I finally get a lady who seems already mad at me. She says oh did you cancel your medi-cal? No, I say. What??

Oh the system cancelled your case. 

Eyes wide emoji.

Wait I don't have any insurance? No. Oh, wait, Barry does. But no one else on here. Not you or the kids. 

Okay so somehow on the Christmas break, between getting the magic pink letter and Los Angeles burning down, they cancelled my insurance by mistake.

It's Thursday right now. So call on Tuesday after 2pm, she says. You have to give them 3 days to try and fix this. Then it can be expedited to 24 hours if not fixed by then. I said can't they just expedite it now?

So now I will wait until Tuesday at 2. And I'm assuming that I'll never have coverage again because isn't that the way this year is going. Then Bess walks in from school and is saying how life doesn't seem worth living. My little tiny baby is finally talking after 4 years recovery from covid lockdown, and puberty, dementia gramma and wildfires on the tv behind her, she is saying I don't feel very good inside. For four years now. She is teary.

So I made a doctor's appointment for next week and hope they don't check my insurance currently to get her a referral for therapy, and we talked to her a bunch. To see what's going on, how we can help her. Making sure she knows the only things that matter to us is the thriving of  her self, her brother and sister and her self.  She's made of us. We're all made of the same stuff.

Then I send her off to school the next day on my non root canal day and hope for the best and I tell Kurt sure I'll ride now, I never get down to the water unless he's there, I'm too exhausted. So we get ready to go and I'm too tired to take the dogs I don't wanna have to wrangle anything extra, just Dewey, and Kurt and his horse and dog. Dewey has sore legs so I say let's take the road there, it's flatter and easier for Dewey, even though we hate the cars and traffic. 

We're walking along the road, I didn't even get to air all my troubles yet, it was still early in the ride and right before the feed store, this pit bull comes running out across the street and attacks Kurt's dog. 

Then Kurt is off his horse, wrestling with the evil dog and the evil dog's owner is yelling and trying to get the clamped on jaws of death off Kurt's dog's leg. This dog is not letting go. Kurt looks at me for help and I'm holding the two horses just staring I can't do anything. Even though Kurt has breathing issues and shouldn't be wrestling a butterfly. Suddenly there are people everywhere, a lady has jumped out of her car and is calling 911, a teenage kid comes running with a broom handle and this kid saves the day, he uses the broom handle to pry open the dog's teeth and Kurt's dog gets out. Kurt's dog is loping off down the street and the pit bull takes off after him, with the owner running after both.

Kurt is wheezing on the ground and I'm speaking for Kurt who has no breath to get him the help he needs and then there's an ambulance and fire truck and neighbors.

The firemen are so huge and powerful like redwood trees, even just standing there you feel awed and safe. They bring a garden party mood to a traumatic situation, they've seen everything and frankly after all the fires and the lack of blood at this site, they could be in line at the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland, eating a churro, that's how easy this disaster looks to them.

They strap Kurt up into the red rectangle ambulance to get oxygenated, and the horses and neighbors and I are standing there in the intersection aftermath of the fires and dog attacks, and the horses are the best company. They doze in the sun. There are emergencies, they say. But also you're standing here, your familiar hand holding us, we're together and do you feel that warm sun right here.

The neighbors and the lady who jumped out of her car and the kid who appeared with the broom handle to save the day, where did they all come from and why did they care. They cared and they came out to help.

They all eventually disappear back into the fabric of the street.

Kurt and I end up back at my barn. His dog seems ok, just some puncture wounds. How this dog has a leg at all I don't know. He's going straight to the vet. But Kurt and I are standing there saying why didn't we take the mountain not the road. Why didn't my root canal happen, we wouldn't have gone riding today. 

As soon as Kurt leaves, I cry by the water bucket.  Because when people are there you're wrestling with what happened and using words to understand, but when people walk away you feel instead and you cry. 

Meriwether, the devil of all ponies, comes over to me and puts his butt next to my shoulders so I'll scratch him. Then he turns around and puts his face on my chest. He's a barn destroyer but also a deeply loving buddy.

Come on, man, he says. Don't cry. It's only January.

Someday you'll get that tooth fixed.

Total Loss

How can all of us feel so bad all at once

I can feel all of LA, the widespread cloud of horror, all of us poking the blanket we're crowded under, everyone huddled in clusters of sadness

It was Monday like three years ago, it feels like. Monday before there was even a fire. I went to Costco and got a pizza, it would last the whole week. My brother was here to help with my mom. It was just a Monday. On Tuesday I got hay because it was supposed to be windy, in fact it was getting a little windy. I was worried about the hay falling off the golf cart. But the wind wasn't really supposed to be bad until that night. 

That night Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. 

That night the wind blew fire through Patrick's neighborhood burning all his neighbor's houses to the ground. He got woken up at 2 am and ran out of his house filled with smoke, with only his charger. He drove away with his family, seeing his neighbor's houses on fire. He wrote me i think it all burned

Bess got up for school Wednesday and didn't want to go but she had a game but then texts were coming in, none of her friends were going to school. There's a fire. None of the teachers were going to school. As we stood there, everything that was regular life started to just fall away, Wednesday morning. Life shedded us. We became emergency.

We sat with our dead Christmas tree, staring at the tv.

We stared at it until now, Friday.

It has been three years since Tuesday, it feels like. 

We just keep watching things disappearing. People scrambling, everything turning chalky white. Cars piled up. People on the news talking and then dissolving into crying. Because Tuesday everything was okay, there was just a little wind. Then this line of fire, then this other line of fire. Right near us.

Nathan's work was evacuated. Nathan showed pictures of our passover friend's house in Alta Dena. It was a driveway and no house now. It was a driveway now.

That picture is when time stopped totally. Wait, people we eat dinner with can lose everything? And the panic of feeling Patrick's heartbeat in my head. His house is right near there. What if it all burned. What if it's gone. What if he loses everything. What if we all lose everything.

What do you do if you lose everything.

What are we living for?

A house is where you rest from the world. What if you lose your place of rest. The world is already harassing you to your very doorstep. At least you have your house, to shut everything away. And deal with what you can. At your pace.

It is a question no one can fathom. What happens if you lose everything.

Patrick and Nathan went back to Patrick's neighborhood. Everything was destroyed. But - Patrick's house was still there. The fire had burned right up demolishing the yard. It skipped the pig in a pen. It got to the wall of the house. It left black marks around Patrick's window like it was banging to get in. The wind must have shifted right then.

It blew to the left, it jumped the street and burned down all the neighbor's houses. It left Patrick but it destroyed the neighborhood. It broke all those people's hearts. That doesn't feel better.

The neighborhood is flat.

We sat by the tv watching the newspeople in weird yellow rainjackets like they're faking being firemen. We watched as no planes could fly because the wind whipped hurricane strength and the fires ate house after house because like the ocean it didn't care, it was fueling itself, doing what it was made to do. We sat with tiny arms at our sides, a whisper, not big enough to fight this monster.

All the pain of our city raining down on us. Every person who lost every thing they cared about and their safe place to belong to. They are standing in ashes.

All of Thursday felt like an entire year, like feeling every step of a hundred legged caterpillar, just trying to get across the sidewalk and not getting anywhere.

There was not any good news. Patrick had a house. I kept thinking. Patrick who had nothing, he had a house still. 

The smoke is lessening, it is Friday. There were other small fires, fires nearby, fires that made us stop and undecorate the christmas tree and throw it out of the house. So we have the homemade ornaments in a box in case we have to put it all in the car. We would let the horses loose in the neighborhood. Leave and come back to nothing.

The passover friends whose house burned down, they were eating dinner somewhere on Tuesday. My niece called them and said hey I think you have to evacuate. The friends were annoyed. They went back to their house. Packed an overnight bag. It's probably nothing. They took their papers. Everyone's always overreacting. We'll be back in the morning.

They packed an overnight bag. Not even all the way full.

They came back to nothing. 

I saw one old guy on the news who said what do you take when it's all going to burn down. You take nothing. All this stuff we collect it doesn't mean anything.  It's not the stuff.

We need to belong somewhere. He said.

We kept hearing total loss. It's a total loss. 

Widespread total loss. We kept looking at each other, wondering what happened to Monday. When it was overfull. Life was messy and full, dripping. Did we have too much?

What happens now. This is so long, staring into this flat razored land. Everyone's clumps of nothing next to everyone else's clumps of nothing, stretching to the ocean. How do you live when everyone around you has lost everything. You feel their pain. 

Patrick's house is still standing. 

Nathan and Patrick said they just grabbed the one hose that was working in the neighborhood and started putting out tiny fires. A guy in a car detailing van stopped and was spraying water out of his van to help the neighbors. The powerlines were down all over the street like a basket of electrified yarn had spilled and rolled all over.

It's only Friday, and what do we do.

You stare at the mess and feel burned down. Now there is looting and anger and curfews. Now there is scrambling and people parched with loss and devastation. There is going to be so much upset because no one knows the next step, things are still on fire but everything is still gone. There's too much sadness and not enough bags to gather it all into. How do we help our people suffering, this is our city. On the streets in our neighborhoods, right across the street from Patrick.   

How do you start over when you were just in the middle, living your life, you weren't even anywhere yet.

shituation

Let's talk about the Christmas break shall we friends.

It was not so much a break as a mauling.

The most important things I came away with where I wanted to kiss the ground was the fact that my green trash cans got emptied and I won a hard fought battle for a root canal.

But let's step back.

Right around the time the fat red man was coming to dump presents down our chimney, I have five horses at my house. Right? So that week the trash truck decided to accidentally NOT take my ten green trash cans full of horseshit. Which sets off a chain reaction of me calling every day begging them to please come get my trash cans. So my farm can resume regular working conditions not high alert working conditions.

In the meantime I had five horses still committing to their steamy green output and me with nowhere to input their output. So at night I was having to roll their output down the secret path, rake away some fallen leaves along the sides of the paths, hope the weird silent asian lady who is never in her yard is fingerscrossed never in her yard at this certain midnight, dump my (what will be eventually nice mulch) along the fence and then cover it back up with leaves just like in a crime show.

So this is one aspect of the shituation.

At the same time, Nandy our sometimes nemesis and full time extended family decided she was going to try to die around Christmas Eve. Not a little covid or maybe a fainting spell, a full on cardiac arrest where as doctor niece explained to us layfolk, Nandy's heart said "I'm tired" and stopped. Luckily she was in an ER with B at the time. So they shocked her back to life and then B was spending every day until still this minute going to the hospital to check and be there for this very old friend of his whom he raised a baby with. 

That baby, meanwhile, is 40, and until the day Nandy tried to die, this grown up baby had been telling B for the last two years that he hated B and he wanted nothing to do with B anymore. He certainly wasn't going to be coming down to Christmas because he felt no duty to see the man he didn't feel was his father. Even though this was the man who raised him from before birth. So this rejection baby who was never going to see us again, was suddenly called down here to this emergency, and now in my kitchen and sleeping at the foot of the bed of the man he rejected. 

Eyebrow raised.

A very unhappy grown baby, for sure. He and his nondad did their best to care of the sick hospital part of their family.  I only sat in the kitchen playing morning word games on my phone while I drank tea and woke up each day, and this was my time sitting and listening to this boy I had known since he was 7, telling me how he has never been the person I knew. 

Question mark.

?

Sip tea.

Okay.

I look out the window at the line of green trash cans, full of shit. 

When will they come dammit. Will they ever come. There is more potential incoming shit in this house than I can handle.

In the meantime my brother is coming to give me a break in caring for my invalid mother, and he misses his connecting flight in Dallas. Maybe he is not coming. Also my mom is looking kind of glassy eyed. Is she deciding to chuck it all now, when the house is full of this impending shitcano?

The best part of this particular season this year is I filled with the help of two sweet nieces and a gramma susie, 4000 stockings for people who wouldn't have a stocking at Christmas. I mailed stuff to people out of state who had stockings. So they'd have a thing to surprise them on Christmas. They weren't big things, maybe some socks or a special candy or some lip stuff or a bra. But things people need. People like to be remembered. loved. Even in small ways. 

That was the best part. And Bess playing guitar since the day she got one. Music in the house adrift in a floating shit hub, satelliting the earth.

And then the not documentary worthy battle to win a root canal with my insurance company I've been having since the summer, with rejection after rejection and finally an appeal TO THE STATE like I'm trying to reinstate Roe VS Wade I have battled because my tooth hurts to get this procedure without paying 3000 dollars, and FINALLY after Christmas I get a pink letter from the state, that says OKAYYYYYY we WILL FIX YOUR GODDAMN TOOTH LEAVE US ALONE and I immediately felt terrible because I do not WANT a root canal, I just HAVE TO GET ONE because my dentist shrugged and said well that's the only way to make it better.

So after a winter battle like an irish army starved with rotten potatoes but still fighting, I made my root canal appointment, while cringing. And the blessed green trash truck CAME and emptied every single can, one day before the actual next trash day, but one blessed day less of having to bury the evidence on the trail. One less day of lugging, and I could kiss that wet trash can, and the dentist I will see in two weeks. The burden is lifted. But why so much fight for the burden that isn't even interesting.

My brother showed up, my mom is in good hands, there was no nearby snow so no place to take Bess for a one day vacation so instead our vacation became I made chocolate chip banana pancakes for her. I made potato pancakes for the family. I drank tea longer in the mornings. I sat in quiet a little bit while people rushed in and out to the hospital. I admired my long line of stockings hung along the beam by the dead Christmas tree. It is still pretty. It is sparkly and full of memories pinned on.

The best part of having Christmas was Emma home face down on the couch asleep, dreaming math dreams, and me in the kitchen making a turkey and stuffing by myself on Christmas Eve, and baking scones and pumpkin muffins and dreambars, and Emma and Bess making sugar cookies. And little boy Nathan helped me clean the heavy pool filter. Same as when he was four years old, just standing around near me, curious, wanting to help do a hard thing. We wrapped a huge pile of presents for under the tree and at night I would feel happy because time slowed down, Bess got to see the singer she liked at a huge concert, I got to look up at the stars and know it would be warm the next day because the weather is good here. I have a couch and dogs and shapes of family and horses who look at me quizzically. 

The burden, I tried to tell the adult baby who visited, who is struggling, every morning while drinking tea, I tried to tell him yes it is all a mess. All our lives and feelings are a mess. I tried to tell him that the burden is the burnt side of this whole thick life. Do you see the other side where we didn't burn it? We tried to show him. The other side is still good.

Home for the Holidays or Asunder (I can't decide)

I want you to know I see you. You are not invisible. I know it looks like I'm doing other stuff, like I make alot of stockings and I muck alot of horseshit and I cater to my mom, but really I'm seeing you and your pain. 

It's not all bad pain maybe it's growing. Better word. I see all that globby mixed up beauty in you.

The torrent happiness of Christmas with all the people I want to feel happy and the stacks of presents and cookies and baking and cooking and the welling up of the people all washed ashore at my doorstep, picking themselves up and walking in for awhile.

All of us confused because our normal productive routines are picked up and thrown out the window because there is this eddy whirlpool of time together that won't come again and is too busy and at the same time completely wasted, there's no math accomplished to a Boulder daughter who does math normally 8 hours a day. She now does a variety of family things and painting and in the place of math she is growing a tiny bit of anxiety about not doing the math. She will return to math because math is growing her so limitlessly well.

One other daughter put down her phone and picked up a ukulele which I just learned how to spell and a guitar and now she sings all day. With and without her friends who tumble through the house loud and laughing, with college looming only 8 months away does no one see this but me, maybe but we do all feel it, the littlest Bess buzzing off to grow herself still. In another place. But for now, a singsong homebird.

I get to see my old friend Nathan and his buddy Patrick, the two best sons a mom could ask for. Nathan works like a real man now, barely ever home, working with people who need someone to talk to, they took my costco buddy, my drive to costco therapy and pizza, they're using him for their own good but he's liking helping people, and then changing oil with Patrick after work. At Patrick's work nearby, they change oil and look under cars and talk about transmission fluid. Patrick has done everything for all our cars the way I have made stockings for everyone we know. Between us, Patrick and I have family car care disasters and Christmas morning surprises covered.

Then we have Nandy in the hospital and B's whole family going to help her, Linda baking cupcakes for the nurses who had to work christmas, Aela following doctors on rounds to casually eavesdrop on how she's doing in cold medical terms, B himself being there as much as he can so when she wakes up scared there's a face she knows. Wouldn't you want that? he says, cause that would be comforting. Even though his feet are freezing. But he does like the cafeteria. There's a whole salad bar, he says. 

I see the struggling son from up north come through cause his mom is sick. He's in his late teens rejection phase even though it's hitting him much later, a later age than that. I see his circle of fear that he's not loved enough, the one we all have of course, but he's forgotten the self love, he's left that somewhere, in a sticky movie theater bathroom or class he never goes to anymore, it's sitting there on the floor somewhere waiting to be remembered cause no one else wants it, no one's gonna take it,  that belongs only to him. It waits. Hoping to be found to ease the awful hole he's digging so ardently. Expertly, really, he's really very good at digging the hole and asking every angry question based on no fact. His brain will only allow him disappointment, and madness. Instead of forcibly turning his back on that and grabbing up the peace that is sprouting up all over his feet. We all have that, all of us, the joy right there look you can touch it all. But I know we are all more layered than we'd like to be sometimes and maybe we could grab lots of things but we're too busy just trying to survive the day. Sometimes. Right? So he's still in his two years now ongoing grasping for something pattern. B and I have gone through many phases of help for that situation. Some help has worked but mostly it's like holding up a plastic cup to a fireplace and watching the plastic moltenly curl up and melt away. So now I sip tea and hear, and offer chocolate.

So all this is churning under and around Christmas but Christmas itself? A clear fountain. A couch and some books and people content, happy is the nutella layer on everyone in our house. We just bask in the peace of all being together, being fed with food already made yesterday and waiting

all the prep is done and now we just rest, and I see everyone. 

That's my job.

 

stuffed

I was riding just the little nearby trail

always in between, mom cleaned and ensured and resting

Bess at basketball practice on a saturday, also fed and loved and listened to about billie eilish, listening to her music always when Bess in the kitchen

Riding down the same dirt path, where the houses couch us on either side, and the trees hang over the top like a leafy local amazon jungle

it's safe here, there's people if I need but no people in sight, people in my pocket on my phone if I fall

Under the trees I felt full of something, a layered fullness from my toes inching up from the dirt path, through the steady horse hooves, up to the top of my head

I felt full of happiness

This was right after the baby horse had leapt forward because sprinklers had gone off and she'd never seen water shooting out of the ground like a surprise party. She shot forward but she always only spooks the length of the rope, and then stops because Dewey is just plodding along contentedly so she looks apologetic and turns back and I laugh

The happiness came right before the guy on the horse rounded a blind trail corner at a run in front of us and appeared suddenly and the baby horse again leapt in surprise and turned to run but stopped because Dewey blinked slowly and kept walking

Today nothing scared me, it just seemed funny

Today was a full lucky day, lucky to have my mom, to get a daughter ready for one of only a handful of weeks of basketball left in high school. To have steady horses next to young horses and to get to let them carry me and be their burden for awhile, to be refilled with their peace on a regular boring trail on a regular boring day. That feels so rich

I come back to clean up poop, and get my mom up, and pat the dogs and see the family that is in and out, and dream about my dreamy projects, characters talking in my head, some beavers right now, of course still the 1800's explorers, Bob Fosse sometimes says hi, the lady from the steam bath who was exercising IN the steam bath and so I had to write about her.

It's a floaty life, floating toward Christmas, with three strands of popcorn on the tree, and the lights glommed on in one ball because we haven't really decorated but it couldn't be unLIT if it's in the house, right? We'll wait for Emma to decorate.

Mostly I wanted to talk about the lucky feeling of being full, when you feel so lucky you are full to the brim and you actually notice it stacked and stuffing your limbs and torso. 

Maybe I don't have everything but I do have everything. 

Write Here Right Now

I was telling my friend that all I needed was to sell my gay lewis and clark series, I had done everything else, I had had the kids I wanted, raised the family and I had the horses and I'd done all that I was put here to do except sell my gay musical that was all I needed.

And she was saying wait a minute. You were here to be a mother. You wanted to be a mother more than anything. You did this huge job. Your last one is about to be done with high school. She's about to start her life as a grown up ish. 

You don't have to do more. You CAN do more, you can make this show or publish a book or put all your writing into one big pot and save it for the rest of the world maybe your family at a later date. You have your blog and your novella and some scripts and some other scripts and some plays and some scenes and some poetry and some novels. You have it all, you wrote it all, you felt it all. It's all there, it's not going anywhere. What's the POINT of it, that is true. If the point was mothering, then the writing what is all that? Just the ice floe I'm floating around on?

I guess part of the point of writing is to take all the feelings and fling them out so they don't whirlpool me into their vast suction and suck me down and kill me. Like there is not enough booze or pills in the world to shut off all that noise. That's why I never even started with that shit. Too expensive and the upkeep is too boring. I don't want to waste all my time driving to liquor stores. I do like to drive to feed stores. So I do use horses to try and quell the feelings, and that helps. 1200 pound furry creatures that are intimidating at times unless you have a crop and not sore hips which I do have. But at core they are big blocks of peace. Peaceful and quiet. They are my peace and quiet, and I can see them and touch them. 

Writing has helped me get mad and fling pain at people who molested me or people who left me or people who didn't understand me. But more than that writing has made me laugh at what I think I control, who I think I am, what goes through my mind and leaks out as funny

Writing proves to me that life is ridiculous, that life is hilarious, that life is deeply touching, that life is tender, that life is soft, and life is thick and confusing. Life is a corn maze. It's so green in there and there's bits of yellow that taste good if you boil them, but when you're in the middle of it all you can see is confusion unless you look up and there's a blue sky. You are rarely ever going to know where you're going so you might as well go with good people so you can laugh while you're in there. Because there's really no chance you're going to find your way out by nightfall without a map and we're always always holding it upside down.

But later we see the map is shaped like a pumpkin and someone planted it that way, so the corn would grow a certain way, and they tractored it so it would be smiling. See people are funny. They know life is funny and crowded and full of sprouting corn. Under your feet.

I wish I had a whole farm for my feelings. Acres of land empty just so I could stop writing and pour myself out onto the land instead, the land that feels me and that I feel as well as these words. 

I am so grateful for the space and the green and the words. Even in this congested world series winning Los Angeles where somehow I have made my own little farm and child filled life.

I'm just saying writing and mothering and loving and horsing around is I guess all one thing, aside from success or money or whatever, it's all jumbled into the corn maze called the life of Juliet Myfanwy. I guess I wish more people talked about it or wrote about it or bared themselves so I could paint them on my skin and feel like a tribe earth. I need all of us to feel whole.  I am always searching. 

But maybe now I can search knowing it's okay if I want to wear pioneer clothes and carry a lantern. And maybe a truckload of Mel Brooks movies, Van Gogh's paintings, all of LM Montgomery's books and some women comedians who explain the universe as undeniably vast, funny and in the palm of my hand.

 

Thanksgathering

I spent thanksgiving with people I don't know. Some ukranians that are extended to the extended family and do I know any of any of us really? 

Okay I do know them, they've been coming for a few years. There's a mom of someone and a boyfriend with a big hat that the dog always barks at cause he doesn't like hats or black people. Thanksgiving is good if it's family of family because there's no pressure to be perfect. They don't know you, they aren't slogging through muck of years together to drop their homemade pie on your table, they just skate right through with fresh eyes, still in the infancy of you, and they're glad they didn't have to cook.

I like hearing Russian at the table and seeing the kids barely eat anything because they'd rather play ping pong and I like the noise and the sharing of noise where nothing gets solved but there's cheer and old family cornbread recipes.

The lugging makes your body hurt, the before and after lugging of making the house nice. But after we ate and sort of cleared up some dishes but not all because some people were still sitting to talk and we wandered out because kids wanted to see and hold the one bunny we have left and then they wanted horse and pony rides because my little niece (who is 45 and delivers babies but to me still 15) wanted to ride bareback and work on her leg because she's a rider too. And wasting time with horses is my favorite way to waste time.

We don't have a nice arena or any arena just a basketball court driveway so that became our arena and people who wanted to get on the tall horse or short pony got on, and the horses were polite and careful, even the youngster Meriwether who can be a devil took care of the little bundles on his back. Everyone was learning, riders, young horses, and attention was being paid and I liked that. Everyone outside. Then the basketballers grew restless and kicked us off their court, even though the ukranian in the long skirt who brought the lavender dried into a bunch and looked like she had harvested it herself with her long hair and long brown skirt, she wasn't quite done riding in her drapey skirt on my old Dewey. But she slid off so the boys could play and the horses went back to eating hay and watching over the fence and the voices slithered off to find the pie and brownies and ice cream rumored.

Then everyone was gone, and the table was almost empty, just some decorations left, and you fall on the couch with the dog and the few kids left, the memory of the people gathered noisily and the sound stays in your mind and in the hard wood floor keeping us all company until next time.

It's in the Bag

I think I'm going to collect the nice things people are saying. I'm going to open a bag in my mind and fill it with nice things and maybe that will start overflowing and shoving out all the restless anger fear and anxiety that has been rooming in there trashing the place.

It would be weird to not have all that fear and anxiety and anger, that is the natural state after 4 plus years raising my mom to her ultimate death with dementia. That is the fallout, a little known movie playing in your mind from the daily care of someone you adore dying in front of you. 

I don't think it's bad to feel the whole thing. To use your hands to care for the person who is out of control of themselves. They need you. More than ever. To be cared for by hands that love you, that is why we are on earth. That is the real thing. 

I do know now that you need a whole big family to help hold you up. Mine is doing a a good job, it's just tattered, but we are a good unit. But there is not enough help to rebuild your insides as they are being shredded, there's no way to get ahead of that pain. Because it is real, and it's just a by product of doing a good job. You don't have to do the job with no fallout, you can't do it neatly. It's a wolf attack, and you can't be cleaning up while you're fighting the wolf. You have to do the job and realize that you also need to call FEMA in to help you manage the effects of the job on your soul. Because like any good job. It takes tending to the tender. 

I'm going to concentrate on relieving the bag of anxiety, yes. If I can. It is overflowing and it is tiring. I do fill it with beauty from outdoors, the horses and creek, and chickens pecking around my feet and dogs always always walking me everywhere, to every chore. They walk with me, and they lie at my feet. They look at me resolutely, and hopefully. Every animal on this property is holding me up. And chickens are pretty fragile. But they are dinosaurs so they have some staying power. 

Kurt congratulated me on being a horse trainer and doing things in slow easy steps, and feeling success with the new young horses we have. He said I'm proud of what you're doing. It's really amazing to watch. He said nice things. And Linette called me on Halloween to wish me a happy anniversary of our long ago beginning of our relationship. Maybe it didn't work out exactly the way we expected but it did work out in the mothering and laughs department. It's nice to be remembered, and to remember happy things, and to remember you still are that happy thing.

It's good to build a chicken house and shred your hands because your hands come back together if you use enough lotion and give them a rest. And it's good to hear your friends' voices and know they are out there and thinking of you with respect and happiness. You cheered their days, and they told you. I like that we're all on this floating planet thinking the same things and feeling shredded and too full of pain and scared and also buoyed and too full of busting love and safe. It's such a rocky boat. The simple things are the hardest things, aren't they. 

Ice Ice Baby

As some of you know cause it's been in all the papers our ice machine broke over the summer. It didn't break all the WAY just was barely giving any ice so when you went to the freezer and looked in hopefully you were like the little match girl dressed in rags, face dirty, looking up hoping for salvation and there were like two broken cubes. 

It happened at a point in the summer where I gave up trying to fix stuff. You know, the austrians had just been here and I had worked really hard to make sure they loved america and left knowing they'd never have it so good ever again. I saved our country's reputation, singlehandedly, so when the ice machine gave me the finger and laid back on the couch continuing to give me the finger while flipping channels, I just divorced it. I divorced that whole side of the freezer. 

Cut to four months later. I'm sick of having no ice. I call the fix it place we bought the fridge from, a used appliance store where you when you walk in there's like a cloud of comforting 70s cigarette smoke. I love that place. Anyway at first there was never any answer and I assumed oh man it finally shut down. Cancer had finally come for Judy the lady who never gave up on used refrigerators. But then I called a few weeks later thinking maybe, little match girl, maybe you can have ice again. And she answered! She wasn't dead at all!

So this was yesterday. She sent Luis to come out and fix the ice machine. I could have done some trouble shooting. Tried to figure it out. But like I said, I was full up on trying to figure anything else out. I'm still shocked that I can't fix dementia. So fuck it. Luis can do it. 

A tiny man with a dirty navy tshirt and some bags of tools arrives on the porch seven hours after his appointment time. I lock the dogs in Emma's room to destroy that while he checks into his assignment in the kitchen. I go outside to clean up horse poop. My mom is watching Gunsmoke in the living room or really she is looking at her lap while Gunsmoke is on. 

Cut to Luis is packing up his tools. He is smiling. He needs a shower. By the way. So here, look, he says. He disconnects the little tray top of his tools and puts it under the water nozzle like a trough to get a cup of water on the freezer door. He presses it. Water comes out fine into his little tray. Then he puts the filter in at the bottom of the freezer and does the same thing, pressing the lever for a glass of water. The water barely comes out. It's your filter, he says, pulling the filter out again and showing the nice stream of water again. 

I knew it coulda been the filter. The filters are kind of expensive, like 60 bucks and I just got a new one in April, I didn't want to pay again. I so much didn't want to pay that I decided to pay Luis to come out and tell me we needed a filter so that I could now pay for the filter AND pay Luis. I think I just wanted someone else to do something while I looked surprised and then nodded my head understandingly.

Luis was reattaching the lid of his tools that he'd used as a water tray. He was wiping  up the water that had been on it with the cleanest white towel I had ever seen on a fix it guy in my life. He opened the freezer door and said so it should work better with the filter. He gestured around at the let's call it disaster of haphazardly packed in food in the freezer. It's not that it's overpacked in the freezer, it's that it's packed stupidly and badly. Like if you took a rubic's cube apart and then jammed them in whatever place you could fit inside your shoes. I live in a youth hostel, I'm about to say to Luis. So much of my life is out of my control, including how things are stuffed in here. But he says first you just can arrange things differently so the temperature can be more regular in here. I'm like Luis, the temperature is not making the ice not work. The ice is still frozen. But I appreciate you freezer shaming the fuck out of me. Do you know who I live with? Do you know that a counter would never be wiped if I wasn't taking up space in the kitchen every day. Also Luis, let's talk about the shave you need. And let me go to your house right now and look in your closets.

Cut to today I ordered a new filter. It should get here before I ordered it because it's amazon and it's like they're outside just throwing shit at your house the second you order it.

I didn't even need Luis to fix it and I didn't need Luis to tell me my freezer is like the wilds of England before Christianity. The freezer looks amazing compared to the inside of my brain. Have you looked in there man

By tomorrow the ice will be flowing and it will be newly filtered Alaska in there. By Christmas I will have organized my freezer which will stay that way for ten minutes. 

Also I appreciate you Luis, because you showed up, with a tool belt. I know I sound like an asshole, but really anyone who comes to help, like our welcome mat says

YAY you're here

please stay forever

applause

Getting ready for a new horse I musta made some sort of pact to destroy my body as I moved the chicken house, and sawed branches off to fit the chicken area over there in the corner, and when I wake up after two days of immigrant hard labor I feel my body like a dead fat Marlon Brando tied on my back in the morning, I swing my feet over, get out of bed and I feel mortal

Like I can actually feel that the body I tote around and the sparkling clean me inside are two TOTALLY different things.

I was so mad the first day doing all this lifting and moving of heavy fences that I first yelled at Bess as soon as she got home to show me her new sweatshirt of Billie Eilish and I said BUT COULD YOU FUCKING HELP ME WITH THIS FENCE and then she looked sorry for coming outside but she did help and we didn't fall in the pool lugging heavy shit together

and did I mention that I got on ebay a little sound effects toy because I decided my life is crumbling a bit, I am over the limit with solo dementia care and so I bought this little toy and every time I do something like make dinner or build a chicken house I press the button with the little clapping hands and I get applause.

It is so nice to be taking a bow in your kitchen with a smile on your face, and to know that people are clapping for you

You know it's for you cause you pressed the button

the applause has really cheered me up it's almost as good as the ice cream I share every day with my mom around 4 damn that's now, I better get going. I eat all the nuts and chocolate off the ice cream and give mom the ice cream by pre biting it a tiny bit then feeding her. I am going to miss sharing ice cream, it's a really good excuse to have ice cream everyday at 4.

So today I finished the chicken house and it's only Phase One, because my hands were too shredded to make it perfect yet, so it will keep coyotes out for now but I have to still dismantle a little section, but give me a break, I'm 58 and there are no men here to do this work, I had to prairie up

I did get to use Nathan's saw and this was so fun I want to saw everything. I also want a see saw. I like anything you can ride.

I want you all to know that my days are all horse work, writing, swimming, dementia, love boat at 1pm, cleaning, laundry, couch, old pizza, needlepoint, caretaking, ice cream, Bess history and research homework (actually interesting) reading worrying resting and now applause

applause 

helps me release fat Marlon Brando off my back and back out into the universe. Ice cream coats my insides for the day coming tomorrow. I think about all those people in the hurricanes and I'm worried for people floating on roofs of houses in swollen rivers. I want everyone safe, with their family and warm socks.

no small thing

ice cream. safe feet. applause

so I'm in a pickle

Seems like what I do when I have a crisis of feelings, I buy a horse.

I don't actually need another horse, or any more poop out there. The poop is the hardest part about having a horse in the city, you have to scoop and lug and battle dragging two ton trash cans on gravel roads for trash pick up. 

But having the face there. On a daily basis. The little red face. 

Sometimes when I'm changing my mom's diaper, and she's turned over in bed, and she's never mean, she never says anything but I'm sorry, and thank you

But sometimes I'm in the middle of my job with her and I have to go outside and I leave her on her side, she's safe, and I walk right out the door and I go to the horse fence and I stare at the horses. Because I feel sad or horrible or terrible for her and for me, and I take a break right in the middle and stand at the fence to look at horses. And they look up at me, the shape of their faces, the biggest eyes on any land animal, and those eyes are always gazing at me like you're okay pickle.

So I go back in and finish my mom work. And tonight I kissed her all over her face and pretended to bite her chest and arms like you would a baby and she was laughing so much. Her face all lit up. Love matters. Even if she doesn't know who I am. She knows she's loved and cherished. How is that not like the whole red carpet.

So there was this little red horse out near Emma in Colorado. I think I woulda rather had Emma come back and live in the living room and I could keep her in a glass case and only take her out when I needed her but instead she's having a good life, she's having a better than glass case life and I'll see her as soon as I can. In the meantime there is this little red headed horse, and she's one year old, and she could do some damage to our hearts, with her gentle face.

She's coming here. 

I figure Meriwether is almost all used up, now that he's getting ridden a little bit and slowly learning what he'll be doing as an adult horse. As soon as I did the terrifying thing of sitting on him, my first baby horse that I ever raised, for the very first time, a few months ago, I sat on his back and felt suddenly like oh my GOD I can do this! Maybe I'm stupid I'm old and I don't want to break every single bone, but I am learning I can start from the ground up and make a decent, kind, easy family horse. So I immediately wanted to try again. I had lifetime enough to try one more time. But start at a yearling, so it's not so long til they're ready to work. By the time she's ready, in two years, to have a person on her back, Meriwether will be solid on the trail, and ready to have her come along. Dewey and Mags will be getting older and I will have yes too many horses, but what does that even mean. If the work is bringing me joy. I remember as a little kid all I wanted since I was three years old, according to my mom, was horses and babies. 

Seems like all the good stuff in life does come with trash cans full of shit. It is not as clean as it looks on instagram. Life is alot of reckless hell. At times. Although these last four dementia years have been a treacherous muddy swamp of thick shit. 

But I've had her face. My mom's face. That's the whole red carpet.

So I spent the first part of this year reading all about Bob Fosse because his life was funny and broken and his dance the same. Because my heart is funny and broken and my writing the same. And he called his daughter pickle, and he was a bad dad but he still got a pickle and I feel like a pickle most of the time and we will name this horse Jane, Calamity Jane Austen

but we will call her pickle

because we are all in one

and now it will have a face

a little red face with a white star