The Caregiver’s Tales: A Blog
The Caregiver's Tales (A Blog)
My goodness. The weather is turning. A north wind is blowing in a cold front. Over the next several days we’ll have highs in the 60s, lows in the 40s, and memories of summer will be blown out the door. And that’s it for this archaic weather report. Because these days all one needs to do is roll over in the morning and look at a phone to see what’s up when it comes to the comings and goings of Mother Nature. Even TV is outdated.
In the evening, as I stand on the east end of my southern porch and look out over the dark park next door, I can see the lights in the tops of the trees of the electric co-op as they get ready for the Christmas season. It officially launches on Thanksgiving weekend, which is more than a month away, but there are a lot of trees to cover and it takes time and effort to get the lights just right. So, up go the men in the cherry-pickers and the lights will be there for Halloween.
I’m going to do something different. I’m shortening these tiny essays. In the digital world in which we live, where getting someone to watch a video for three seconds is a big deal, 300 words and three paragraphs feel like long form writing. So, I’m dropping back to two paragraphs. I liked three because it felt like a beginning, a middle, and an end. But in the beginning, it was only two, and given the current mundaneness of my life, going back seems fitting.
Slept until seven, which seems a waste of an entirely good morning. I have no idea how my alarm failed me, or why. I distinctly remember ensuring it was set. Of course, it might have gone off, and my tired body simply ignored it. Sometimes my body sends messages like that. I do know I woke up at three and felt wide awake. But I cooled myself down with a little ice pack. That may have been the trick that sent me into a deeper sleep than planned, in addition to the chamomile tea from earlier in the evening.
Well, the garden of the front porch is rid of the Turks Caps. They had a nice run, but I’m ready for new plantings. First, however, I need to amend the soil. It’s got too much clay, according to my arborist son, and needs a little something to break it up. We planted some red clover yesterday and that will help in the long run, but it needs something like rice hulls to make it a bit more friable so that oxygen can get to the roots.
I’ve started making my own coffee creamer. Half and Half blended with sweetened condensed milk. My bullet does the job. It lasts a good while. There’s probably a small cost savings, but the big saving is no chemical additives. Although, I’m fairly certain at this stage of my life there’s not much left to reduce when it comes to loss of longevity through use of chemical additives. I think it’s just fun.
They say a watched pot never boils, and sometimes I think a watched plant never blooms. Several years back I moved the schoolhouse flowers to three different beds around the yard. There were lots of bulbs, way more than enough to go around. But none of them seemed to thrive. Until this year.
Another weather report. The morning low is in the 40s. That’s it, except to note that it feels good to walk outside on a cool morning. I wonder, however, if this is how it felt when the Little Ice age started in the 14th century. One morning everyone got up, and it was cool outside and it stayed cool for six centuries. And no one much noticed. It was just the weather.