Archive for December 2014
Progress Marches
One small step for Cyndie, one giant leap toward mobility without chronic joint pain. Yesterday, the visiting physical therapist rather quickly had Cyndie leaving behind the walker and using a cane to stroll around the house. Moments later, she was caning her way up and down the stairs to our basement.
It was fascinating progress to witness. What a blessing to have the guidance of the therapist to keep our patient moving forward with exercises and activities.
With a nod to the title of this blog, progress is relative. From an overall perspective, there is not a lot happening at Wintervale lately. I find myself repeatedly struggling with the decision of what I want to write about. At the same time, the progress Cyndie is experiencing toward recovery and rehabilitation seems huge. I’ll take that.
Whether we notice or not, progress is marching along.
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Luxury’s Lap
I have to admit that genuine moments do actually occur when Delilah settles down on her day-bed for a nap under her own initiative. I find it a bit startling to come down the hallway and find her so elegantly settled in. I was so impressed last night, I took a picture.
She is livin’ in the lap of luxury around here, I tell ya.
Dog ownership is not something I have done as an adult, until we got Delilah almost a year and a half ago. My knowledge and experience are still rather limited. I’m learning on the fly, or walk, as the case may be.
Back at our old house, where we subscribed to cable tv, I used to watch Cesar Millan’s Dog Whisperer program where he trains people to handle dogs, and his methods all seemed like common sense to me. Common sense is what I have primarily relied upon for my interactions with Delilah.
I do regret throwing out Cesar’s basic rule about not letting the dog lead a walk, pulling me along behind, but that is how we operate. Ever since we changed to keeping her leashed (since she began to regularly run off to visit the neighboring properties around us), we have needed to take her for walks.
Let me just back up a moment here and point out that this is something I said I would not do —keep a dog on a leash. I guess that was before I was being paid to take care of her. When we created the position of Ranch Manager, the responsibility of caring for all our animals shifted to me. Right now, she doesn’t get free-run privileges, so I walk her on a leash, chewing on my words all the while.
I used to also diligently avoid ever tending to the cat’s litter box. Funny how things change over time. I picked up more cat litter at the grocery store yesterday (grocery shopping being another thing I once shunned with gusto).
Who am I? I don’t have any idea any more. Don’t bother asking.
But I digress. Back to walking Delilah and learning about her by simply living with her. I decided to let her walk in front because it feels like a simulation of how she would behave without being leashed. I have been letting her choose the route (unless I have a more pressing agenda), and allow her to stop and investigate enticing scents. I let her practice hunting rodents and wait patiently as she pounces on some grass and then listens to see if anything moves. She works feverishly to pursue the source of some scent that must be fresh, based on her reaction.
I call it “practice” because she almost never catches anything. I’ve watched plenty a critter scramble away while she remains oblivious to its departure.
I have been pretty vocal about her passion for eating other animal’s poo. It drives me nuts. She works way too hard to break loose frozen poop she finds on the trail during our walks. I have recently gained new insight on this behavior, but I don’t know what it means.
There appears to be an animal, or something an animal has eaten, to which she has quite a different reaction. Several times I have watched her sniff a pile of scat and then leap sideways and make a conscious effort to give it a wide berth.
Apparently, it turns out our dog has discerning taste in animal poo.
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Just Acting
It’s not that surprising to me that simultaneous to the “routine” I described yesterday, I am also feeling a bit of chaos around here. There is no longer a clear reference for what day of the week it is. With Cyndie not leaving for work Monday through Friday, there is no reference for week or weekend anymore.
We have pulled out the holiday clutter, …I mean, decorations; covered counters and table with baking supplies and delicious final products; and rearranged furniture to accommodate Cyndie’s recovery period. I am trying to keep up with my usual duties while also filling in on tasks normally provided with unparalleled style by Cyndie, and I find it getting more frustrating as time goes on.
It is easy to act as the head cook for a day or two, but keeping up the charade for weeks on end becomes rather daunting. When I write “act,” I don’t mean as in doing the work, I mean literally pretending to be a cook.
Luckily, beyond my escapades in the kitchen, we have had a lot of support from Cyndie’s mom, who has cooked meals and prepared food I can simply heat and serve.
Yesterday, we were blessed by a visit from Elysa and her friend, Anne, who provided a very excellent meal on a day their visit was a surprise. It was the first day I had planned to be away from Cyndie since the surgery, without having provided cover during my absence. It didn’t feel right to me.
When I received a message from Elysa that they decided to come, I was able to relax and enjoy a movie and meal on the far side of the Cities with my precious cycling friends.
By the way, I highly recommend the movie, “St. Vincent,” with Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, and the young Jaeden Lieberher who does a fabulous job in his role. Moved me to tears.
It was nice to see some actors who could really pull off the job convincingly.
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Morning Routine
We are in the third weekend since Cyndie’s surgery and things are going really well. Struggles have been minor and triumphs have been many. This morning I am experiencing a bit of a longing to be able to sleep in. Normally, weekend mornings are Cyndie’s chance to greet the horses she has been missing during the week, allowing me the opportunity to wake slowly, linger in bed, and compose my weekend blog posts.
I’ve long heard stories about dairy farmers who needed to get up early every day of every week, without exception, to milk cows. I am feeling an increased appreciation for that commitment.
My morning routine has normalized for all of us and is flowing very comfortably of late. Delilah has pleasantly announced her waking with soft mutterings, remaining stretched out on the bed in her overnight crate after she hears sounds of me getting up. I switch on the kitchen light and she lolls in place luxuriously while I get myself dressed and ready to take her out and feed the horses. It is a very soothing pace to start the day.
We step out and locate the horses during our stroll to the barn. It takes the herd no time at all to sense our approach, whereupon they begin something of a controlled stroll toward their morning feed. It is as if they don’t want to appear too eager.
The one variation in the pattern happens as they select who gets which feed pan. Some days it is very straight forward, and sometimes it becomes a complicated exercise of gamesmanship as the chestnuts take turns flaunting domination by driving each other off one pan to another.
If it is windy, or something else has them already on edge, feeding under the roof overhang is fraught with multiple emergency response drills as they all erupt in a hasty dash out from under cover whenever any one of them even flinches at the slightest thing. Just as quick, they seem to figure out it was a false alarm and come right back, but that doesn’t stop another panic from happening 20-seconds later.
It’s interesting that my presence is sometimes a contributor to their alarm, but more often completely ignored. I need to stay alert to be out of the way when they panic, and they surprise me that they don’t react at some of the clanging and banging noises I make when I am fumbling about.
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While they are focused on the feed pans, I wander over to the hay shed to fill the wheelbarrow with flakes that I distribute to the two feeders. As soon as the horses have licked the feed pans clean, they come munch hay. Hunter most often chooses to wait until the other three dive into the first station I have filled, then he chooses the other one. Sometimes another horse might meander over to join him, sometimes not.
After horses are fed, Delilah and I head out on an exploration of our trails. I will often let her choose the route, and I just follow along, stopping wherever she chooses to linger, examining the source of some scent that has dramatically grabbed her full attention.
Once back to the house, both she and Pequenita are served their breakfast, after which there settles a wonderful calm over the house.
When Cyndie gets back to full mobility, and we get back to the old weekend morning routine, that calm moment will be about the time I think about finally getting up.
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Stitches Out
We traveled to the big city yesterday for Cyndie’s follow-up appointment to have the surgeon’s nurse inspect the incision and remove the two stitches in the long wound. The way modern medicine closes surgical wounds in this day and age amazes me. Everything looks good and Cyndie says she is a lot more comfortable having that sticky bandage finally removed. Her movements have improved visibly as a result.
This morning our farrier, George, is coming to trim the horse’s hooves. It was scheduled on his calendar after the last appointment, but I had completely lost track of it. Luckily, he sent a text alerting me. Suddenly my morning routine is squeezed a bit.
The horses were in good spirits when I showed up to serve their a.m. feed and put out hay. I’m hoping they will be cooperative for me in an hour, because Cyndie will not be able to do more than offer moral support as I take on the role of chief handler for George as he works.
Delilah is another challenge. She has been hyper-focused on critters out the window and doing her worst to destroy glass and window trim to claw her way after them from inside. We have tried resorting to instant “time-out” when she loses control and jumps at the window, bringing her back to the spiral staircase and leashing her in place for a spell. After the second instance in a row this morning, instead of lying down in acceptance of her fate, she took to boldly barking her defiance.
I tried the “ignore” technique, because I was busy trying to write, but that didn’t help Cyndie. She couldn’t stand it. I understand that totally. There are plenty of times when I absolutely can’t tolerate the bark. It’s interesting that I was determined enough to try to finish my task with the looming appointment in the barn creating a tight deadline, that I was fine in this instance with letting the loud bark float in one ear and out the other.
The dog will unfortunately be restrained in her kennel during the hoof trimming today, since we don’t have enough hands to tend to everyone at once. Sadly, I think her time in the kennel while we were gone yesterday is the reason for her rambunctiousness today. It just means I will have to give her extra attention this afternoon.
I have taken to letting her run off leash inside the pasture fencing, while I toss discs for her to chase. The fence has worked well to keep her from giving in to the urge to dash off into the woods after some tempting scent, even though she can finagle under it if allowed. The lowest strand is not electrified, and I think she has figured that out.
Time to go prepare the horses for their hoof-icure appointment!
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Reality
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one never knows
how close or far
reality lies
away from here
but that sound it makes
when crashing down
is way too familiar
a thing to hear
and it resonates
both far and near
and brings to mind
a most basic fear
about fundamental truths
we once held dear
which only now come around
every occasional odd year
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‘Tis Seasonal
I am truly living a storybook life here, folks. The season is upon us when decorators of the world pull out everything they have saved for years that has anything to do with December holidays and inundate their surroundings with color and lights.
Our place looks like Christmas magic all of a sudden. The only thing missing is little kids in footsie pajamas running around with eyes like saucers, over-anxiously waiting a visit from the guy in red who travels by reindeer.
We were blessed once again with a visit from Cyndie’s mom who worked tirelessly for the entire day yesterday to provide her exquisite skills in bringing the spirit of the season to life in our home.
She went beyond the call of duty before even arriving by taking time the day prior to shop for baking supplies and accoutrements like garlands with lights. With barely a pause to catch her breath, yesterday she cooked and baked and decorated, then helped me run an errand to drop off a car for service, then helped get Cyndie down to the barn for her first visit with the horses since the surgery.
She is a superwoman!
The best highlight of the day —among many— was having Cyndie get bundled up to be outside, her walking part way down the driveway with crutches, then hopping in the back of her mom’s car for the rest of the distance to the barn, and finally communing with the horses that had come up to the barn to see her.
They were a little freaked by her crutches and walker, but very happy to see her after all this time she has been away.
Back in the kitchen, Cyndie and her mom moved into full production mode for a while and cookie smells were mixing with the home-made caramels and Chex mix snack that had just come out of the oven.
What could I do? You can’t fight this kind of momentum. I went upstairs and put on the holiday music, came down and set about testing the goods coming out of the oven.
I told you, it’s a storybook life I’m livin’!
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Monumental Improvement
Tuesday morning I received the most wonderful news from Cyndie as she made her way down the hall from the bedroom after waking. I expected from the sound of her voice that the message was going to be good, but she caught me by surprise with how good.
It wasn’t simply that, for the first time since her hip replacement surgery over two weeks ago, she had gotten a good night’s sleep, it was the best she has slept in years! I do believe she is experiencing the improvement that so many people have described to us after having gone through their own similar surgeries.
The pain from that old arthritic joint is gone. Her description of the improvement helps me to better grasp how much pain she has been living with, and for how long she has been struggling to endure it. As often as I witnessed her pain in person over the years, I still lacked an accurate sense of what exactly she was dealing with.
She hasn’t even enjoyed a good, full night of sleep in years. Her amazing ability to cope with it as well as she has all this time had led me to interpret it as not being that major a problem. The sudden return of the light in her eyes and joy in her voice has opened my eyes to the fact of how much her spirit and energy have been repressed for far too long.
She seems so much better now that I am wondering if maybe I should look into a lower back replacement for the days my degenerating discs make me uncomfortable. She’s doing that well!
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Going Right
When things are going right for you, ya just gotta soak it up and enjoy it for all it’s worth. I’ve had a vision in my head since we moved here about how I might manage firewood. After a variety of stumbles in the time since, yesterday I made progress that went as smoothly as I could ever hope, in terms of the vision I had.
When we first arrived on this property, there was firewood stored under the overhang of the barn that the previous owners generously left for us. I had to move it up by the house, but it was more than enough to allow us to enjoy fires through that first winter.
When we had our fence contractor start clearing trees from the water drain path and pulling out old fencing, they created a hefty pile of cut logs that I needed to split to augment the dwindling stockpile that had been left for us. I needed to shop for a splitter. I found that ingenious Swedish manual splitter which works slick and will be perfect, once I am ahead and only splitting a small amount at a time.
The fence crew cut logs haphazardly and I found the lack of uniform length frustrating. It made it difficult to split, but that wood got us through the second year.
I found myself looking forward to eventually being able to cut my own wood so I could enact a little quality control. I figured out the chainsaw I wanted to have and made that purchase, but the quality control would take some time as I gained experience. Meanwhile, I still had a large backlog of already cut wood awaiting splitting, and that kept growing because of the new trees I was cutting down for this year’s fence project.
When the woodshed I had built was knocked down in a storm last spring, I let the wood splitting slip while I figured out how to get the roof back up again. That has left us a little short of ready to burn firewood for this winter. All the splitting that my neighbor recently helped me with is for wood that will be burned next year.
Now with Cyndie home for weeks on end, recuperating from her hip transplant, we’ve been having fires almost every day and have quickly consumed much of the balance of dry wood. I need to take action on a plan to turn the many downed trees in our forest into firewood.
I’m hoping they have been dead long enough that we can burn it as is. I broke off a few small branches and mixed them in our fuel a few days ago with good success. Yesterday, I got out the chainsaw and cut the bigger branches into perfect-sized logs. Some of them getting big enough around that I felt I should take a crack at splitting them.
It’s an oak tree, and the manual splitter was popping them in two with surprising ease. I stacked them in the open space on the right side of the shed and quickly had a pile over two feet high. Everything was working just as I envisioned it could. This is the way I will be able to stay ahead of our needs by just doing a little at a time.
It was an incredibly rewarding exercise, made more so by the hassles I’ve dealt with prior, before finally getting to this point of things going so right.
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Relative Something 