Filling Gaps
Last night our internet connection was down so I did some reading in the most recent book I bought from the Pierce County Historical Association, “Log Buildings and Logging in Early Pierce County, Wisconsin.” In excerpts from journals and newspaper accounts dated in the early to mid-1800s, bits and pieces of what life was like in this specific locale materialize in my head where they mix with cinematic versions I’ve seen from movies depicting the same period.
A name, a date, and basic details of clearing several acres to build a log cabin leave a lot of gaps in my perception of what life was really like. One person’s father arrived some time later. How were they communicating prior to that? Another man is described rather superficially as having “opened a road from River Falls” through the wilderness to a mill and later, one to Prescott for a mail route.
How did one send mail to a pioneer living in the wilderness? How does one man build a road? I struggle to compare my activity managing our 20 acres in the present with the activities and accomplishments of people who were just arriving at this place 200 years ago.
For reference, we rely on what people chose to write about their experiences. If my chronicles survive for a couple of centuries, will readers think that all we did was mow grass and whine about the weather?
Will they get a clue about what life was like when the internet goes down for a few hours?
I am curious about the specific indigenous people who were living here when immigrants started claiming land and building cabins. Not the general story of being forced onto reservations, but the equivalence of a “journal” account describing the experiences of one individual that would depict what it was like.
I am also curious about my specific ancestors who intermingled in these valleys, cutting trees, building wagons, going to schools, and living lives at that particular period of history. It’s easy for me to fill the gaps with versions of pioneers depicted in movies I’ve seen throughout my life.
How accurate a portrayal was “Jeremiah Johnson?”
Life today can hardly compare but when I listen to the birdsongs echoing through our trees in moments when no modern-day traffic, lawnmowers, or airplane noise is occurring, the sound may easily be the very same chorus that played two centuries ago.
I wonder who was standing right here listening to it way back when.
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Special Treat
After a timid start, I gained confidence and began a stroll down our back hill to check on Cyndie while she re-established dominance over the labyrinth with the power trimmer. It is mind-blowing how quickly our surroundings change from hints of new leaves budding on branches into full-blown rainforest-level overgrowth.
Everything is growing faster than we can control along pathways we attempt to maintain through the forest.
As I continued my stiff saunter along the fence line around the back pasture, I was rewarded with a very special nature scene that was an absolute first for me.
In the drainage ditch I was walking beside, in the bright sun of the middle of the day, a trotting spotted fawn appeared moving toward me with a look of pure innocence. I was dumbstruck. The beautiful little creature passed within six feet of me and just kept going toward the woods beyond. It looked small enough to have barely mastered controlling its legs a few hours ago.
Where was momma? I looked around for clues as to where the fawn was coming from or what might have inspired it to move and saw nothing to explain what I had just witnessed. Then I noticed the horses grazing in the hay field were all staring in my direction with heightened awareness.
Maybe they were blaming me for disturbing the fawn, I don’t know.
I decided my exercise walk needed to move to the firmer footing of pavement and set out to plod along the road for an extended session of intentional stride.
As far as remedies for physical ailments go, there are a lot more difficult exercises from which to choose. As soon as my confidence returns, I intend to hop on the saddle of my bicycle. Rolling along carries much more allure for me over the limitations of repetitive step after step.
Granted, if I had been on a bike, I may have easily missed seeing that gorgeous fawn on its own little stroll.
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Double Punch
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. I have done what I could to put the COVID infection behind me and resume normal activity but putting it behind me wasn’t supposed to be literal. I now find myself about as far away from normal activity as I have been in years.
There is something terribly wrong happening in my lower back that feels in every way as if one of my discs is bulging against the nerve that generates incapacitating waves of pain. My poor brain automatically leaps to a conclusion that the timing of these two latest physical maladies are entirely related, but I have no knowledge that this might be true.
All I know is that I am now one week away from the day my health insurance ends with the company that covered me for the first five months of the year and starts with my new choice under Medicare. I was hoping to get through the transition with a clean break from activity on either account.
Today, it is shockingly difficult to avoid stabbing pain when I cough at a time when my asthmatically reactive lungs are teetering on the backside of a virus notorious for negatively impacting breathing.
I am not a pretty sight.
If I could walk without fear of losing my footing, I’d wander down among the horses and bask in their late spring serenity.
We are fast approaching the end of Asher’s on-site training session at a kennel up north. The trainer has scheduled a call this afternoon during which we expect to learn how Asher has been faring during the previous week and what the plan is for picking him up to continue the training at home.
It would really mean a lot to me to be able to walk without pain by the time of Asher’s return.
Walking is once again the exercise that will become my primary focus.
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Intractability
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it’s hiding where none of us will ever look
please don’t tell everyone that you already know
we’ve heard the last best reasons time and again
phrases your mother used to use
heavens to Betsy
usually from the kitchen or bottom of the stairs
sucking the salt from the empty peanut shell
one last time
knowing there were some who could chew the whole thing
at least gave us pause
like when the President told the FBI to kill us too
when they had their chance
but we didn’t go bragging to the world about it
there were fires in our fireplaces
slide projector fans blowing their own hot air
pillows on the floor but we still strained our necks
for a better view
and the way the screen smelled when you got real close
with blended chocolate milk whipped to a froth in that small Dixie® cup
there was no clue a virus would show up sixty years later
reshape the world to varying degrees
leave people gasping for a breath
listening to music without any instruments in sight
no records or tapes or discs
no moving parts
practically impossible intractability
echoing from every corner
of every night
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Separate Rooms
The end is in sight but apparently it’s too soon for me to celebrate. I have completed the full regimen of antiviral meds and am more than ready to be done with this whole COVID infection. Yesterday, Cyndie brought home some new tests and proved she continues to be free of the virus.
My test wasn’t so clean. We have added a cancellation of our plans to go to the lake for Memorial Day weekend to the list of things scratched off our calendar. The variety of people whom Cyndie arranged to care for the horses during all these events must think we are loony. Each day they get another message that their services are no longer needed.
I decided recovering from COVID was going too easily so I added tweaking my back yesterday just to complicate things that much more.
Since our practices have succeeded thus far in keeping Cyndie from picking up my germs, the routine of living separately together will continue for a while. I’ve been granted the bedroom and she is living in the den.
That is getting old. Communicating by text inside the same house is not the usual mode of operation for us.
I tried watching the Timberwolves first game in the series with Dallas last night but there was no magic to be found there to distract me from my health woes. I did find a Joel & Ethan Coen 2018 film, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” to entertain me that I particularly enjoyed.
It was the kind of movie I could watch while isolated in my room and not worry about Cyndie disagreeing with my tastes.
Just trying to make the best of this unappreciated situation we find ourselves in.
If it stopped raining every hour or two I could spend more time outside and maybe work the kinks out of my back. The muscles are probably filing complaints about too much time in the bed or the recliner.
For the record, I agree.
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Mostly Rain
Amid a heavily broadcast series of warnings about the chances of severe weather, I dawdled indoors much of yesterday until time was dwindling in a break between bouts of precipitation. It felt like now or never to get anything productive accomplished outside.
I gassed up the power trimmer and went after as many easy targets as I could hit, with particular interest in two of the most needed places. I reached the strip of longest grass just beyond the culvert as the sky began to grow dark again. It wasn’t pretty, but as raindrops started falling, I finished what I had set out to do.
The area of that strip is now a sloppy mess of long, wet cuttings, but it is a cut sloppy mess. If I’d had time before more rain, I would have used a pitchfork to pick up the mass of wet chopped grass left behind.
Earlier in the day while it was raining, I spent a little time perusing old newspapers for ancestor names again. Focusing on the River Falls Journal in the latter half of the 1800s, I found a treasure in 1878 under “Local News” for Esdaile. It lists the names of “pupils who excelled in their respective classes in the first month of the winter half of the present term.”
My search term was, “Hays” so it was easy to spot my great-granduncles, George and Charles Hays. Those two are the younger brothers of my great-grandfather, John W. He would have been 17 years old at the time. Charles was 9 and George was 8.
What made this find such a treasure was the name of one other excellent student: Minnie Church.
Minnie is my great-grandmother. She was 10 years old that winter when the grades were published. I would imagine the younger three knew each other well, spending their school years together. Ten years later, in 1888, Minnie and John (seven years her senior) were married in Minneapolis.
I wonder how the younger brothers felt about John getting the girl in the end.
Discovering those records was a lot of fun for a mostly rainy day.
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Slight Pause
As my body arrived upon day 5 of my COVID experience, the vital signs of temperature and oxygen saturation were back to my healthy normal. I executed the majority of my routine of core strength poses and stretches, dressed for the day, and enjoyed a full breakfast that Cyndie had prepared.
I was ready to go, except for one significant thing. I had no “get up and go.”
It wasn’t that I lacked confidence I could step out and fill another day with chores. It was that I lacked any impulse to do, well, anything.
I felt zero motivation—a complete absence of momentum.
In that case, returning to recline on my bed seemed like an appropriate response. The intangible aspects of a COVID-19 infection are worthy of our respect. I’ll give the prescription medication another day to do its thing.
I allowed my body at rest to remain at rest for the majority of a beautiful day.
As the afternoon faded into the dinner hour, I noticed the summery sounds of our surroundings serenading on an intoxicating breeze beyond the screen door.
Despite a minor PTSD flashback of an unsettling encounter evicting a rather large eastern fox snake wrapped around the entry of one side of the shop garage door the day before, I stepped out onto the deck to inhale the fresh air.
I had considered not writing about my having been infected with COVID-19 but I wasn’t sure where that inclination was coming from. I shamelessly share almost everything else about myself.
Having done so, I now appreciate the messages of support and well-wishes I’ve received. Thank you, both of you.
Just teasing. It’s been more than two. Getting better takes time. Feeling better is a process related to getting better. Support from others is a good prescription for feeling better.
I am definitely feeling better. Yesterday will be registered as a slight pause in the return to regular physical duties.
There are so many others who have experienced far more severe illnesses than me as a result of this virus (or lost their lives to it), it occurs to me that maybe I didn’t feel the descriptions of my experience deserved the column space. I’ve also heard plenty of tales about folks who tested positive but didn’t even know they had it.
One thing for certain, I’ve lost the bragging right of never having Covid. I’m booted from the club that thinks they have some magic natural immunity. For now, I am still able to boast of only having it one time.
I will frame this as having been just a slight pause in my otherwise surprisingly good ongoing health.
“Full speed ahead, immune system!”
“Aye aye, Captain. All systems go!”
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Plans Obliterated
As soon as my health took a turn for the better, I began to care about all the events my illness has forced us to cancel. While I was feeling miserable, I didn’t care about anything but enduring the misery. I completely missed out on watching the NBA Minnesota Timberwolves blow out the Denver Nuggets by 45 points on Thursday night.
Good thing I was feeling better last night so I could watch them score their lowest first-half points for the entire season. I suffer that terrible fan affliction in spectator sports. The games I’m able to see my teams play are too often lousy and the ones I miss are the ones that turn out great.
Turned out last night’s game was one of the rare exceptions of that theme. Biggest game 7 comeback in NBA history. Whaaat?!! Go Wolves!
Cyndie and I lost the opportunity for a dinner out with family on Friday night and then a 100th-anniversary event at one of our old hometown schools on Saturday. Brunch with friends on Sunday was a bust.
Most frustrating, my plan to mow some portion of our property every day during the season of fastest growth suddenly came to an abrupt halt. That meant more than four days of unchecked grass blade growth.
I got out of bed yesterday morning, took a shower to wash a couple of days of fever off of me, and put on my work clothes. It was time to mow.
After a few days of feeling too sick to care, I carried some of that absence of concern forward with the difficulty of mowing tall grass. Tossing away my usual perfectionistic tendencies, I did my best with a single pass and didn’t let it bug me when the result was downright ugly.
The goal was to get as many of the areas knocked down with what I’ll call a “rough cut” so that I could return in a day or two (pending the rain in our forecast) to mow another time to my usual high standards.
That area in the outflow of the culvert has been so wet this spring that I couldn’t cut it until now. Too bad now it is too tall for my lawnmowers. However, we do have other tools to choose from. This area will get the power trimmer treatment. The good thing about the string trimmer is that it cuts just fine even when the grass is a little wet.
For the rest of the week, I’m making no plans to have anything go as planned.
Recovery Underway
I’ve heard many times that there are people who are asymptomatic despite testing positive for COVID. You get it, but you don’t get it. That seems weird. I had imagined that my vaccinations and booster shots would ward off the virus even if I got exposed, though I knew there was no guarantee.
Well, I got it and was slammed by symptoms quickly enough to warrant taking the in-home test and alerting my doctor. He prescribed Paxlovid, but with a caveat that if insurance didn’t cover a high cost for the medication he would support me in just riding out the virus with home treatments.
The nurse who checked me in on the phone appointment warned that subsidies were ending for Paxlovid and it could cost as much as $1200. I logged into my insurance account and initiated a chat to check on the cost. With my annual deductible at $8000, an amount I had barely come close to meeting, I could expect the price to be $1334.60.
That information was enough for me to plan to ride it out. My second night was pretty brutal and had me considering spending the money. In the morning, an email in my inbox from the pharmacy said my prescription was ready at a price of $379.60. Maybe the subsidy was still in play. I was all in at that price.
I don’t know if it was coincidental timing but my fever broke by the end of the day of my first dose.
Things are headed in the right direction. I’m giving my mind and body a “positive thinking” boost to maintain the healthy momentum.
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Feeling Lousy
Not feeling much like writing today. Had a high fever Thursday night at the lake. Drove home yesterday morning and took a COVID test. I registered positive. This is the first time I have tested positive. Wish I could have been one of those who never experienced any symptoms.
I’m feeling pretty lousy. Cyndie doesn’t have any symptoms and tested negative so we are desperately trying to keep it that way. Suddenly, any plans we had before are now being thoroughly disrupted.
It’s a whole lotta yuck.
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