Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Different Sense
I suppose this is related to the concept of “opposites attracting,” but living with someone who perceives the world differently from you has a way of complicating otherwise straightforward coexistence. Several times in the last week, Cyndie’s and my dramatically different abilities to sense smells has been made vividly obvious.
She brought a horse blanket into the house to be mended the other day. When I stepped inside after a day of work, I immediately commented, “It smells like a barn in here!”
She didn’t notice it.
Friday night, she put a pork roast in the slow cooker before going to bed, to let it simmer while we slept. The longer it cooked, the more intense was the appetite-triggering aroma that filled our home. When my slumber was interrupted by a full bladder in the wee hours of the morning, getting back to sleep amid that incredible smell, was like trying to go to sleep while someone continuously knocks on your door.
I couldn’t do it. Cyndie barely sensed the aroma.
There are other differences –or opposites– that tend to have greater significance. The way we process grief, and the intensity with which we experience it, is a particularly hefty one of late. The horses aren’t even gone yet, but the mental anguish over rehoming them started way back when the idea of doing so was first brought up.
The torment over their departure is deeper than just coming to grips with them no longer being here, it delves into the original vision that brought us to this land in the first place.
The difference in the way Cyndie and I perceive this whole development, and the varying degrees of processing our personal grief over it, can make for a difficult… life together.
It would be great for me if I could just deal with all of this my way, but then I would miss out on life lessons that are the gift of living in relationship with another person.
Cyndie and I got to where we are today, together. We intend to get to where we are going next, the very same way.
We’ll discover it together, even though she doesn’t smell half the things I do.
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Rehoming Horses
In less than a week, they will be gone. Our three horses are returning to the home from which they traveled when they came to us back in the fall of 2013. There is an invisible gloom darkening the energy around here of late. It feels eerily similar to the dreadful grief we endured after Legacy’s death in January of last year.
Happiness still exists, we just aren’t feeling it much these days.
Cyndie spent hours grooming the horses yesterday. I found myself incapable of going near them. It’s as if I’m preparing myself in advance for their absence. This place just won’t be the same without them.
For now, we still have the chickens. With the snow cover receding, and hours of daylight increasing, they are expanding their range again, scouring the grounds for scrumptious things to eat from the earth. It is my hope that they are getting an early start on decimating the tick population around here.
After Cyndie said she picked seven eggs yesterday, I asked if we were getting ahead of our rate of consumption yet. Almost three dozen, she reported!
Spring has definitely sprung.
I walked the grounds yesterday to survey the flow of water draining from the melting snow. We are benefiting greatly from overnight freezes that have slowed the process enough that no single place is being inundated now. It was the heavy rain falling on the deep snow that led to the barn flood last week. We’ve had little precipitation since, and that has helped a lot.
There are a couple of spots where the flow has meandered beyond the modest constraints in place to facilitate orderly transfer, mainly due to the dense snow that still plugs up the ditches and culverts.
Water definitely chooses to flow the path of least resistance.
I can relate to that. It feels like our life here is changing course in search of a new outlet for our energy to flow. Part of me feels like there should be a rehoming of ourselves, except we have no home to which we would return.
In a strange way, it’s as if I am experiencing a similar avoidance of being with myself, like the way I couldn’t bring myself to stand among the horses yesterday.
If this is not the place where I belong, then I already don’t want to be here any more. Unfortunately, there is nowhere I’d rather be right now.
When buds pop, and leaves sprout, I will breathe in our forest air. That will help.
But it won’t be the same without our horses.
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Infuriating Sounds
I’m just discovering this now. The irrational over-reaction I occasionally experience –say, to the mouth sounds of my wife chewing beside me– has a label: Misophonia. I’m well aware of plenty of people who voice irritation over a variety of particular sounds, but reading about the fight-or-flight reaction being triggered in the brain really caught my attention.
When I feel this surprisingly intense anxiety pop up, as the ambient quiet of an evening gets disrupted by the munching of almonds, I have been curious about a sudden desire to crawl out of my skin in hope of escape.
It’s as if I’m being attacked.
Since it is obvious that I’m not, the idea that my brain is firing as if the command to run away has been triggered, seems like a very plausible explanation.
Almost everyone is irritated by the sound of fingernails across a chalkboard, but a misophonic reaction goes well beyond irritation.
Misophonia is characterized by intense emotion like rage or fear in response to highly specific sounds, particularly ordinary sounds that other people make…
“It’s as if the survival part of the brain thinks somehow it’s being attacked or it’s in danger…”
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/03/18/npr-misophonia-when-lifes-noises-drive-you-mad
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Choosing to just ignore the sound is not an option when your brain has fired and the whole body is revving up for a fight.
“Must. Stop. That. Sound. Before it kills me!”
My siblings may recall our family dinnertime ritual of being chastised by our beloved sister, Linda, for letting our teeth make contact with our fork.
I now have a better understanding of why that probably made her so angry.
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Launching Spring
Continuing my celebration of reaching the milestone of Relative Something‘s tenth year, I found two previously posted Words on Images creations in the “Previous Somethings” which correlate nicely with this first full day of spring.
Happy Vernal Equinox (which happened yesterday afternoon at 4:58 p.m. CDT)!
After the weather abuses we suffered throughout the second half of this winter, reaching spring seems particularly worthy of special recognition.
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From May, 2018:
Buds
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From June, 2009:
Leaves
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Out Late
Cyndie and I had a night out on the town with her brother, Ben, last night.
Guess what city we were in?
We met for dinner in a historic diner.
Guess who we saw in concert at the Palace Theatre?
Guess who didn’t get enough sleep last night?
Yeah, that’d be me…
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Brothers Reenact
Continuing my tour through past posts, I found this old favorite. I love my family.
From April, 2011:
Now Then
I have already shared this with all of my siblings, and also with my Brainstorms community, so it almost seems redundant to post it here. However, I think it has a universal appeal for the novelty of capturing the similar poses and for the always interesting visual of comparative shots of people when they are young and when they aren’t as young.
I have been wanting to do this for a long time, but younger brother, David, lives up north and older brother, Elliott, wasn’t able to be at our family reunion gathering last summer, so getting the three of us together has been rare.
My family tolerated my attempts to try (probably too hard) to direct the shot to be exact. I thought Elliott should take off his glasses. He disagreed. I respect his opinion that they belong.
In the end, Elliott got in the ‘last word’ about my drive to accomplish a pose exactly the same as the first picture. I only had one image available on my camera when I got home, so after I pasted them together, I sent it out to the family asking if anyone had a better version. I noted that in this image, I didn’t have my shoulders squared to the camera, and with multiple photographers taking pictures, Elliott was looking at a different camera than this one.
Elliott sent this, in reply:
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Choose Twice
In celebrating the accomplishment of my 10-years of posting daily, I am somewhat randomly exploring the “Previous Somethings” archive in search of anything that might catch my fancy. One of the first challenges I have discovered is dealing with a bit of embarrassment over plenty of what I am finding. Who wrote this stuff!?
Oh. I did.
Skip that one. And that one, too.
One of the features of “Relative Something” that evolved pretty early on was resorting to two-word post titles. On one hand, it took a lot of thinking out of the process of deciding what to title my posts. When writing every single day, trying to come up with a worthy title over and over again can become an inordinate burden. Limiting it to just two words simplified the task nicely.
However, when I started down the path of this feature, I didn’t realize how soon I would reach a point where I was coming up with titles that I’d already used. Most of the time, I make changes until I come up with something fresh, but as I’ve approached this tenth anniversary, I’ve decided it doesn’t really matter so much.
You may have noticed that I differentiate my poetry posts by using a single word title. It’s a lot harder avoiding repetition when reduced to one word.
Here are two poems that I posted under the identical title, “Choose.”
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From August, 2013:
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freedom
to choose health
in the face of other options
takes effort
that is rewarded
incrementally
sometimes infinitesimally
over time
do the math
not the science
that it takes
making rockets fly
simple addition
day after day
for months at a time
healthy emerges
for goodness sakes
like green on the grass
running in a river
rounding the rocks
headed toward forever
where life is esteemed
and success of good health
the spectacular garnish
that feeds on itself
in magical ways
running and jumping
with joyous persuasion
returning investments
of health options chosen
turn off that tv
go do something else
break down that routine
be someone else
that unlikely person
you never felt could
emerge from your shell
stuck there for good
just a choice
to be made
inside the mind
there’s reward to be nabbed
free for the choosing
life filled with promise
of better than good
outside the lines
of everyday drab
just beyond reach
of those who don’t try
it’s easy to grasp
for the bold few who do
exercise free choice
to choose better health
not just for a day
but from now on
days-months-years at a time
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.From October, 2017:
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Words on Images
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Another Thought
Well, tomorrow brings another thought. And, yesterday’s tomorrow, is today’s today. I have another thought this morning about how I might respond to the milestone of completing ten years of daily blogging. What if I did it for ten more? That’s another way to look at this interesting opportunity.
It has definitely become a comfortable habit that continues to offer me multiple benefits, and occasionally, surprising rewards. Also, by writing about my life every day, I avoid accumulating a build up of some wild idea about someday writing an autobiography.
I should try an experiment where I choose a memory from my past which I have already chronicled here years ago, and write a fresh version to compare how different they might come out. Last night, Cyndie and I met our friends, Barb and Mike for a fine dinner out in Red Wing, MN. One of our conversations touched on the fact that memories get reshaped a little each time we recollect them.
One way I have been contemplating a recognition of ten years of Relative Something is to mine the archives for a variety of gems from years ago and repost them anew. I’ve also begun seeking possibilities for resurrecting a couple of my old “games.” One involved guessing images from an extreme closeup, and another required readers to conjure their own picture in their minds from a description I write. A day later, I provide the picture I was describing for comparison.
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of new stories worth telling happening every day around here. The flooding wasn’t catastrophic for us, but it still caused me more anguish than I care to experience. I think part of that came from the fact that Cyndie was dealing with it alone, while I was so far away at work during the days.
The days of rain have passed and the return of below freezing nights has eased the worst of flowing water for now, but there is still a ton of snow yet to melt, so who knows how long this will last.
The horses were absolutely heroic in allowing Cyndie to guide them out of the barn through the standing water without panicking over the scary reflections and sounds, of which they have had little exposure in their time with us. They’ve dealt with a lot of mud over the years, but rarely, if ever, been asked to traverse water over their ankles.
Oh, the horses.
Man, we are going to miss the horses.
There will be much to write about with the pending re-homing of our herd, but it’s hard for us to even think about, let alone put into words. Maybe that contributes to my pondering the idea of ceasing to write.
If you know me, that is a pretty unlikely result. Writing is how I best process my thoughts.
Here’s to the possibility of ten more years of somethings you might find relative.
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Who’s Counting
Who’s counting? Apparently, I am. Today marks the 10-year anniversary of Relative Something. My first post here was March 15, 2009, after my son, Julian, recommended that I create a blog to chronicle my planned trek in the Himalayan mountains to best share my stories of the great adventure for friends and family to follow.
I’ve posted almost every day since.
Now, on this anniversary, I’m faced with a computer problem that has me stuck poking letters on my phone to compose these thoughts. It’s humbling, to say the least.
The barn has flooded and I am brooding after trying futilely to influence the water to drain around instead of through.
There is a new lake where our back pasture used to be.
The troublesome weather has sapped my energy.
We are back to dealing with icy conditions, as the temperature has dropped below freezing once more.
I had visions of composing some deep review of what ten years of writing daily has been like for me.
Instead, I’m now wondering if this ten-year milestone might be a time for closure on this chapter of my daily memoir project.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Please stand by.
Big Changes
Last Sunday, Wintervale declared a “Snow Emergency,” restricting any parking on either side of our driveway until June, but it looks like that will be rescinded very soon. The weather has changed in a big way, from cold and snow, to chilly rain. 
The liquid precipitation yesterday made short work of the snow that had collected on tree branches, instantly changing the landscape views. The woods now have an incongruous appearance with so much snow still on the ground, but the trees all wet and dark.
At this point, the deep snowpack is absorbing the bulk of the water that is falling from the sky, but the situation should get interesting after a couple days of increasingly intense rain.
After the saturation point is reached, the water will start the great migration that ultimately takes it to the Gulf of Mexico. Can you say, “flooding?”
The glacier on the front side of the barn already has a lake forming on top, and the piles of snow on either side look like they aren’t going to offer an outlet any time soon. I may resort to a little creative drainage engineering to avoid the water choosing its own alternative route through the inside of the barn.
Up by the house, on the hill where I boasted about not worrying about flood concerns, I noticed the water running down the gutters wasn’t flowing out the end of the ice-packed downspout.
As a result, it isn’t directed away from the house, finding its way, instead, right where we don’t want it, along the foundation.
That situation shouldn’t last long, but in the land of freeze and thaw, I never like seeing any water pooling where it isn’t welcome.
Funny, how the landscaping which used to slope away from the house in November, takes on a variety of gradients after months of settling, being heaved by frost, and burrowed in by rodent pests. The results are rarely favorable.
Meanwhile, it is refreshing to have this glimpse of the next season making its rapid appearance. It’s WAY too early to expect such luck, but I would be thrilled if don’t have to plow again until next year.
On that note, I should probably make sure the lawn mower blades are sharp and ready to go.
Big changes are underway!
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Relative Something 