The Frog Whisperer

This week may end up being one of our strangest weeks as homeowners. 

Wednesday we thought our cottage was on fire. I wrote about that in yesterday's post.  But the week wasn't done with us yet.  

Thursday morning, as I'm in the shower about to reach for my washcloth that's hanging over the shower rail, I realize that a frog is in the wash cloth, watching me. I'm not afraid of frogs, but I thought we had a chance of getting it outside. I called for my spouse to come help, and as he tried to remove the washcloth and the frog, the frog jumped away (happily, away from the shower). We couldn't find him in the house. Happily, we're not afraid of frogs, and he's not likely to get into our food, the way a rodent would.

This morning, I heard a giant thump, and I saw the frog in the living room.  It was dark, and I didn't have many lights on, so I couldn't get great pictures:

I tried to show him to the back door, but he was always a few jumps away from me.  Finally, he made his way to the bathroom:

I didn't think to close the door.  I was hoping he'd hop back out, and once again, I could try to show him to a door.

My spouse got up surprisingly early, and I told him that I had last seen the frog in the bathroom.  He said, "And you didn't shut the door?"  Nope.  

My spouse went into the bathroom.  The frog was still there, so he shut the door.  I expected to hear thumping and crashing, but instead, my spouse came out with his hands cupped.  I opened the back door, and my spouse took the frog into the back yard.  The frog immediately sounded much happier.

My spouse has wrangled many animals (mainly bugs and the occasional rodent) in our house, but never a frog.  Who knew he had these talents?

I am grateful that he got the frog outside.  I am grateful that these are the types of housing issues we have.  It could be much worse.

Now, back to monitoring the storm to our south.  Here's hoping our homeowner luck holds.

When Your Cottage Doesn't Catch Fire

When you begin your morning thinking that your back yard cottage is on fire, the rest of the day seems easy.  I'll spoil the tension:  the cottage was not on fire.

Yesterday, I was almost ready to go to work when my spouse called me from the back yard.  His voice had the urgency that told me either something was wrong or there was an unusual animal in the back.  I hurried to the back of the house to see smoke coming from the roof of the cottage. 

I waited 20 seconds before I went inside and dialed 911.  The operator was calm, and I was calm-ish.  My voice quivered, but I was able to tell her what I saw and where I was and my phone number.  Then my spouse came in to tell me that it was a false alarm.  Smoke was coming out of everyone's plumbing stack.

The water company had told us they were doing a smoke test and that we might see smoke, but probably not.  I envisioned smoke the way I used to draw it out of a chimney, a slender thread.  I didn't expect to see gray smoke chugging out of the roof.

Even though I told the dispatcher that it was a false alarm, she sent the firetrucks anyway.  They were very kind.  They said, "Better that you call us and not have an emergency than to have an emergency and not get help."  The police officer who showed up later was also understanding.

I was pleased that I performed well under pressure.  I don't want to be one of those people who freezes and can't act--or worse, that falls apart in hysterics.  I was glad that I remembered my address.  But more than that, I have been trained since childhood to call 911 in an emergency.  Happily, I've never had to do that. 

Now in the past 6 weeks, I've had to make that call twice.  The first was for a student who was having chest pain and tightness and tingling in his left arm.  He was young and looked like he was in good shape, but the symptoms were close enough to heart attack symptoms that I decided it was better to call 911 than not.  He was fine, although there was some irregularity revealed by the tests that the paramedics used.  They wanted to take him to the ER, but he declined since he was sure he wasn't in danger of a heart attack.

As I said, the rest of the day felt easy yesterday.  At 1:00, I watched the new poet laureate of Virginia being sworn in.  Maybe these events have always been livestreamed and/or recorded, and I just didn't know it--but one of the benefits of this recent time is realizing how many of these events need to be livestreamed and recorded to reach a larger audience.  It was so inspiring to watch--it would have been inspiring regardless, but it was even more so because I know Luisa Igloria, the new Poet Laureate.

As I watched, I made this Facebook post:  "I am watching Luisa A. Igloria's acceptance speech--she's being sworn in as the Poet Laureate of Virginia. How cool that we can all watch, even if we can't travel to Virginia. And even more wonderful to know that she was chosen--it gives me great hope for the future, both the future of poetry and the future of the country. It wasn't long ago that a female would not have been chosen, an immigrant would not have been chosen, a non-white poet would not have been chosen. She's an amazing poet, and I'm so happy that she's been chosen!"

I ended the day by reading Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church, a history of various types of Orthodox Christianity.  It's more compelling than it sounds, although I confess I likely would not have picked it up if it wasn't required reading for my certificate program in spiritual direction.

Throughout the day, my equilibrium didn't slip.  I don't recommend a 911 call as a way to trigger gratitude at the beginning of every day, but maybe the idea that we're not calling 911 can trigger gratitude too.

Pandemic Brain vs. Hurricane Brain

Because we don't have enough to worry about, I'm keeping my eye on a tropical system that's expected to plow into South Florida this week-end.  Will it just be a tropical disturbance?  Will it assemble itself enough to be a tropical storm or a hurricane?  Is there any chance it could be a strong hurricane?  A strong hurricane seems unlikely, but in this time of very warm oceans, it's not as impossible as it might once have been.

Ugh.  And I went grocery shopping yesterday and shopped with my pandemic brain (stock up and load the freezer so we don't have to shop again soon!) instead of my hurricane brain (only buy non-perishables).  Of course, if we lose a freezer of food, that's survivable.  

I've been beating myself up for making a rookie mistake, while also reminding myself that we're all rookies, having none of us gone through a global pandemic like this one before.

I came across an interesting term this morning:  holy resilience.  One of my pastor friends recorded a "Come to Jesus" meditation to remind us that these times are hard, but we can be resilient.  She mentioned a blog post that used the term "holy resilience"; I did a search and came across this post.  It's got lots of encouraging words, lots of good ideas, lots of Bible verses that address different aspects of what it takes to get through trying times.

I'll keep meditating on that phrase in the days to come.  

Today I plan to watch the swearing-in ceremony for Virginia's new poet laureate--Luisa A. Igloria.  It's always thrilling to me when a poet I know is selected for publication or an honor of any sort.  It reminds me that there can be rewards for persistence.  The deck is not stacked--you don't have to know someone to get noticed.

Of course, you do have to put in the work.  Luisa has been writing at least one poem a day for years now.  If you want to get a sense of her work, the Via Negative website is a great place to start.  My favorite book of hers is The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-life Crisis, which you can buy here at the Phoenicia Press website.

And now, speaking of work, I need to get ready for work.  

Preaching to the Chickens

Once a week or so, I leave work to do some errands.  So it was that I found myself in the car yesterday listening to the coverage of the coverage of the body of John Lewis arriving at the Capitol Rotunda and the service that followed.

I was listening in the car as I drove along, weeping so much that my shirt got damp. It was the good kind of tears, the kind that says I'm so grateful to live in a world shaped by these leaders. It was also the kind of cry that knows what's missing still.

I thought it was brilliant of Nancy Pelosi to play part of a commencement address that Lewis gave a few years ago.  It was wonderful to hear him tell us all to go out and make good trouble.

It was also good to have a minute of self-reflection.  When I was younger, I aspired to changing society the way that Lewis did.  He was much more relentless than I am proving to be.  I am sure that he had months or years where he, too, wondered if he was making a difference.  But I am also sure that he did more than I have done.

It's good to be reminded of the importance of trying to do good in the world, of trying to transform the world.  He told the story of asking his parents and grandparents why there were different facilities and services for whites and coloreds, and they shrugged and said, "It's just the way it's always been.  We just have to accept it."

But he didn't accept injustice.  As I listened to people reflecting on the ways that Civil Rights workers did that work, I thought about the simple act of people ignoring the law and sitting at lunch counters and riding buses.  Who would have predicted that those actions could so totally transform society before it was all over?  

And of course, it's not all over, is it?  Lewis also reminded us that the fight for a better world is never over.  In that commencement address, he talks of the evil people who want to take away the hard won rights and how we must never allow that to happen.

I thought of John Lewis as a child, preaching to the chickens on his family's farm.  I thought of what that experience taught him, and how even until the end of his life, he was preaching in all sorts of settings, to all sorts of creatures.

May we all have the courage to follow.

The Medieval Mind in a Physical Body in a Time of Pandemic

I know I'm not the only one who has gained weight in this time of pandemic.  My weight was on an upward swing even before the pandemic.

When it became clear that it would be some time before I'd be going back to spin class or any other gym-based approach, I decided to try to mix some more high intensity activity with my walking.  It's hard for me to walk fast enough to get my heart rate up.  So I jog a bit.

Last week, I jogged 2.5 miles without stopping.  Hurrah!

But instead of focusing on this accomplishment, I can't seem to snap myself out of this mindset of body loathing.  But if we're honest, I haven't ever been far away from this mindset--only when I'm at my thinnest, which is usually when I'm at my most athletic, can I seem to rest a bit easier.  And I'm never fully at home in my body.  I joke that I have a medieval mindset, in that I feel like I'm a soul trapped in a physical cage--I joke, but it's not far from the truth.

Recently, I was reading an article about how menopause is similar to adolescence.  The article focused primarily on hormonal changes at both parts of the life cycle with very little analysis of the physical changes that the hormonal changes create.  I've been thinking about how they are similar, and for me, the surrounding culture feels similar to.

I turned 13 in 1978, and the geopolitical changes then feel similar to those we're facing in our current day.  My teenage years saw a hostage crisis in Iran, various other hostage crises, international flares that led many of us to worry about war, and a feeling that the U.S. had lost status in the world.  These days are very similar.

I came of age during the AIDS crisis, and now, we have a different pandemic.  The mindset, however, feels similar:  the hope for a cure and a vaccine, the sense that what we don't know is greater than what we know, the mourning for those gone too soon.

And my physical situation feels similar.  Then I might have some night sweats, and I'd wonder about AIDS--now I wonder about COVID-19.  In all instances, I need to have a thermostat set lower, but I rarely lower it as low as I would like because I'm living with others.

The more important similarity for me is not knowing what body I'll be in during any given day.  Will it be the one that's agile or the one that's klutzy?  Will it be the one that has pain or not?  How much weight might I have gained overnight?  Will it be the body that demands we eat all the homemade baked goods at once or the one that can ration out the sweets--or more rarely, the one that feels no pull towards the treat?

We could debate whether I'm feeling this way because of menopause or because of being unsettled by a global pandemic or because of work stress or because of elements of aging that aren't menopausal (like the arthritis in my feet).  But truth be told, I've always felt this way for much of my life.  In some ways, it's not as disconcerting as it might be.

Celestial and Terrestial (Comets and Wreaths)

I may have finally seen the comet Neowise this morning.  Last night, I left the curtains open slightly to enjoy the lightning show in the clouds.  This morning, when I got up at 4:30, I looked out that east-facing window and at first thought I was seeing a plane--that's how bright the light was.  I kept going out in the backyard over the next hour to see if it was moving, and it wasn't.  I didn't see a tail.  If I hadn't been looking for that comet, I'd have wondered if I was seeing Venus--and in fact, I'm still wondering.  But Venus has been in a different spot in the sky all week.  And this object was even brighter than Venus has been all week.

I do realize that all of the writing about the comet say that it should be very low to the horizon in the morning right now.  But often, we have a different view of the sky down here in South Florida.  I can see the constellation Orion for many more months a year down here than other places where I have lived.

Last night, in those last moments before dusk settled into twilight, we stretched out on the chaise lounges in the back yard.  We watched the clouds roll in and waited for the rain to start.  And when it did, we came in and stayed up much too late watching The Big Chill.  I have a copy of it, so I'm not sure how we got sucked in.

I kept thinking, I'll watch until the next scene is over--I want to see it again.  And scene by scene, I stayed up until 10:45.  It's no wonder that my morning was a bit more low energy than many mornings.

But yesterday I did get a start on my short story that revolves around 3 comet sightings.  And I'm not expecting today to be hectic, so I should be O.K.

Let me record a few more nuggets:

--Today is the feast day of Saint Anne.  I'm very surprised I haven't written about her before.  And now I have--see this post on my theology blog.

--In December, we had a Christmas wreath hanging on our front porch.  By mid-January, I had tried to make it multi-seasonal by taking some of the more festive stuff off, but it was starting to look tired.  This week-end, we turned it into something new with some ribbon and sea shell mixes that I ordered online.  My spouse did much of the gluing:

--I did think about all the shells we collected on Marco Island, all the shells that we left on the beach, because how many shells do we really need?  I'm trying not to beat myself up about that, about not realizing I would want to create a wreath.

Ode to My Bread Bowl

I am old enough to remember the last time the nation went through a bread baking craze.  It was the 1970's, when some of us went back to the land, some of us went off the grid, and many more of us baked bread.  Back in those days, many grocery stores sold only white bread, the kind that has very little in the way of nutritive value.

I remember the first time I had homemade bread that wasn't my grandmother's rolls.  We went over to a seminary intern's house, and she served us bread fresh from her oven.  It tasted like no bread I ever had before.  She gave us the recipe for Milk and Honey Whole Wheat Bread from Ellen Buchman Ewald's Recipes for a Small Planet. 

My mom knew that our standard mixing bowls wouldn't hold all that dough, so we searched for another one.  At the time, we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has a downtown section closed to car traffic, or it did in the late 70's.  At one end, there was an old-fashioned hardware store, the kind that sells everything.  There in the window was the bowl we needed--and it only cost $6!  We bought it, and it's since traveled with me to many states.

Here is the bowl, next to my grandmother's large Pyrex mixing bowl, the kind that's the largest of a set of 4:

Over the past decades, I haven't been baking the mass quantities of bread that require my largest bowl.  But I haven't been able to give it to a thrift store either.  I know how hard it is to find a bowl this big.  Through the years it's held cloth scraps and picnic paper products and all sorts of stuff that wasn't bread dough.

This morning, I realized that I wasn't going to have enough room in the yellow bowl for all of the dough, much less a place for it to rise.  Here's what the bowl looked like before I finished adding all the flour:

I thought about getting out additional mixing bowls, and then I thought, why would I do that when my big bread bowl is right here on top of the fridge?

So I got it down, gave it a quick wash, and finished mixing the dough in it.  The sight of the dough rising has been an unexpected delight to this morning.

I know many people who can tell all sorts of horror stories about how their parents never supported them.  I am not one of those people.  As I look back, I realize more and more how lucky I am that my parents almost always encouraged my native interests, while also trying to make sure I considered other possibilities too.

When I think of my favorite example of their support, I think of my mom and a cold night outside of a window of a downtown hardware store.  I think of summers spent experimenting with bread recipes and my mom taking me to health food stores where I could get some of the stranger flours that the recipes needed.  I think of my family hungry for good bread and full of praise for my efforts.

I realize that I am a lucky woman in so many ways.