MindSpinner

The Cornish hens are chicken soup, now almost gone. Catapult Kid’s visit is done - he’ll be home in two weeks for the holiday season but fully intends - fully, fully - to enlist in the National Guard and go catapulting off to basic training in February.

School resumed without me this morning - the car wouldn’t start, and it was too late to hitch a ride with the teacher who lives here in town. I’ll bum a ride tomorrow and retrieve the car in the afternoon. An extra, quiet day off was what I needed somehow. So good of the car to arrange it.

Six raised beds are sitting, newly constructed, in the driveway, ready to be moved to the garden for next spring, when the vegetable gardening endeavor expands. In the meantime, the weather has been unseasonably lovely, with highs in the 60s - perfect for a Sunday afternoon’s walk in the woods at the nearby wildlife refuge. The slow turn of the seasons, the yellow ochre leaves on the path, the brown bird rustling in the bush to the right, the deer following us with dark soft eyes - these promise that, despite all that befalls us, there is that which abides. They are like the shoulder of God, to lean upon.

This is a sequel to my Thanksgiving Day post and will make no sense if read first.

Nothing succeeds like a good night’s sleep followed by a renewed attack on an apparently insoluble problem. I found that, by securing one side of the apparently incorrectly cut piece of wood (called a “jaw”) first, I could then will/force the other side into place and tighten the second bolt. Somebody must have planned for this tight fit. This victory achieved, finishing the worktable/vise/clamp came easily enough, and this morning I have happily been able to clamp and hand saw the 2″ x 2″s that form the corners of the 4′ x 6′ raised beds I am building for next spring. The other lumber has already been cut to size by the able fellows at Lowes, who probably hate to see me coming. Now that I’ve managed this breakthrough, it’s back to the kitchen to prepare our modest day-after-Thanksgiving feast.

The U.S. government continues to refine its message regarding pandemic preparedness. See the latest on sheltering in place from the State Department:

How to Prepare for “Sheltering-In-Place”

Avian Influenza

Health professionals are concerned that the continued spread of a highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) virus among animals in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe has the potential to significantly threaten human health. If a virus such as H5N1 mutates and spreads easily from one person to another, avian influenza may break out globally. While there are no reports of sustained human-to-human transmission of avian influenza, the U.S. government and international health agencies are preparing for a possible pandemic.

Depending on the severity of a pandemic, commercial airlines might drastically curtail or even cease operations. Travel restrictions could also impede people from returning to the United States or fleeing to other countries. For these reasons, it may make more sense to “shelter-in-place” (i.e., stay home and practice “social distancing” to avoid contagion) for an appropriate period of time.

United States Residents: The Department of Health and Human Services suggests that US residents prepare two weeks of emergency supplies (food, water, medicines, etc.) in order to shelter-in-place during an influenza pandemic.

American Citizens Abroad: Due to varying conditions overseas, Americans abroad should evaluate their situation and prepare emergency supplies accordingly (non-perishable food, potable water, medicines, etc.) for the possibility of sheltering-in-place for at least two and up to twelve weeks. Water purification techniques such as boiling, filtering and/or adding chlorine to locally available rainwater, swimming pools, lakes, rivers and wells may replace the need to store large quantities of water.

What can you do on a daily basis? Cover your cough. Wash your hands regularly with soap and water for at least 20 seconds to eradicate viruses and bacteria or apply a hand sanitizer with a minimum of 60% alcohol content when soap and water are not available. Stay home if you are sick. Vaccinate yourself against seasonal flu.

Travel: American citizens living in or traveling to countries with human or animal cases of H5N1 virus should consider the potential risks. Keep informed of the latest medical guidance and practical information and plan accordingly. Consult www.travel.state.gov for the latest tips on international travel.

On-Line Resources: Detailed information about suggested preparations, as well as planning checklists, are available on the U.S. government’s one-stop web site on pandemic influenza (www.pandemicflu.gov), also the World Health Organization (www.who.int/en/) and the Centers for Disease Control (www.cdc.gov) websites.

Excuse me, but I’m still mightily curious about weeks three through twelve of a pandemic wave here in these United States. Are there underground storage facilities brimming with MREs and bottled water for U.S. residents one and all? Have we arranged for manna from heaven? Will Santa and his eight tiny reindeer be delivering food and water down my chimney and yours on week three and every week thereafter?

There isn’t a turkey. The dogs, the cat, and I don’t need it, and the rabbit says he’s a vegetarian, but do I have a carrot? (I haven’t introduced the rabbit yet - I must get around to that.) The turkey eaters are eating turkey with the other side of the family, and I’m trying to put together a Black and Decker workbench, you know, for when I want to build things and need to clamp them to do it. Trouble is, I can’t build the workbench. Step 12 is not happening. I swear I did steps 1-11 correctly, just according to diagram and directions, but Step 12 is where I’ve been stalled for the past hour. I’m supposed to bolt two wood pieces to two plastic pices that fit to the frame, and the holes I’m supposed to put the bolts through are an inch farther apart in the wood than are the corresponding holes in the frame. If you read the last two sentences over and over in an endless loop, you will get a sense of my thought processes over the last hour. All you need to add to your picture are diagrams too small to see clearly and “guy” directions, the kind that assume you already know what you are doing and kinda sorta have an idea how the result will function.

There isn’t a turkey. There are Cornish hens instead, still thawing in the fridge for tomorrow, when the kids and I will pretend it’s Thanksgiving Day all over again. I try to unhook my thinking from the calendar and all those memories of parades, gathered family and my mother’s cornbread stuffing, for which there is no recipe.

Yesterday I picked Catapult Kid up from the Academy. He walks about the house, and I drink in his features and his movements, quaffing his presence here the better to face another drought. He is 17 years, 10 months and 2 days old. He says he’d like to go ahead and enlist in the army come his 18th birthday, serve first, and then go to college. Read that over again slowly.

There is, in fact, more trouble afoot than that, and this just as near, but it will be the first of the year before its precise nature can be known and named.

Just now, Cornish hens, stuffing, cranberry salad, sweet potato muffins, green beans and pumpkin pie seem some tattered little army deployed against what tomorrows may bring.

For now, I’ll just be thankful that today is today and none of those worrisome tomorrows have come yet.

The details of Wednesday morning’s dream are lost to me now in distance and fog. Waking spirited me away from them, and it was day, and time for work.

In the dream, I was re-encountering an old love, having that first face-to-face conversation after years, gingerly navigating what was then and what is - this was a dream segment unto itself - when my father appeared, took me by the elbow, and pulled me aside to tell me that I deserved more than to be merely a casual or occasional romantic interest, that I deserved to be cherished, for someone to want me to have and to hold instead. It was the sort of lecture that embarrasses daughters, even in dreams and even when daughters are forty-five and fathers five years dead. I don’t know if my father actually used the word cherish in the dream; I remember only the gist of his admonitions, his familiar face, rectangular and square-jawed, his khakis from Sears, his suede hush puppies, those pens in his shirt pocket - the clickable ballpoints with four colors of ink.

It is the word cherish, however, that has been with me since Wednesday morning. It seems to be the residual gift of the dream because it defines what it is that the heart seeks better than does that hard-ridden, used up warhorse of a word, love. My father was the persona the dream resurrected to tell me what my heart would have me know. It is cherishing I want, and to cherish in return. It is good to know such things, even when they are not readily to be had, because it doesn’t do to get confused and settle for something else.

My Mac has a dictionary widget; I conjured it that morning with a click of my mouse and typed in the word cherish:

Cherish [verb, trans.]

• to protect and care for (someone) lovingly: he cared for me beyond measure and cherished me in his heart.
• to hold (someone) dear: I cherish the letters she wrote.
• (of a hope, idea or memory) think of longingly or lovingly: we will cherish your memory.

ORIGIN: Middle English (in the sense [treat with affection]), from Old French … cher ‘dear,’ from Latin, carus.

I think people need cherishing. Children need cherishing, and when they are not cherished, they are terribly wounded and slow to recover. Partners and friends need cherishing. The cat, the madcap dogs, and the soft white rabbit all need cherishing. So do the garden, the skies, the ocean, the earth. There is altogether a shortage of cherishing in this busy, disconnected and distracted world of ours. What does it mean even today that I sit down to write deepest things on a screen instead of speaking them across the kitchen table at breakfast to someone who has chosen to hear both today and tomorrow?

Sometimes I say under my breath and into the air, without thinking, “I love you,” and these days I shake myself a little and ask, “Who in the world are you talking to?” I think we come into the world to cherish and, in the best of circumstances, to find ourselves cherished as well. We want to be cherished not just when we strive to please, but when we are lying asleep with our mouths half open, or when we’ve forgotten the thing we were supposed to remember at the grocery store.

In the end we must learn to cherish ourselves - to extend ourselves a measure of grace, forgiveness, and mercy, approval and love, and to hold ourselves close when there is no one else to hold us close - and even when there is. We must give ourselves our own blessing.

On Wednesday, in the half hour between waking and the tyranny of clocks, I traced the word cherish back a little farther. I wanted to know about the Latin root carus. Google’s first result landed me at Narrow Shore, assuredly the blog of a lover of words. Carus, it turns out, gives us not only cherish but caress, charity, an Old Irish word for friend, and the kama (’love,’ ‘desire’) of the Kama Sutra.

It is also, ironically, the etymological ancestor of the word whore (originally ‘one who desires’).