For those who asked, here is the state of the leg 24 hours later. Swelling down. Doesn’t hurt except when my masseur forgot a couple of times this morning and touched it. Then, Ouch!!! That said, I promise no more photos of sore subjects…
Click on photos to enlarge.
Looks sort of like bad graffiti, doesn’t it? This is what happens when you slip going between the pool and hot tub! A fast application of ice and elevation saved the day! These photos were taken 11 hours later—swelling almost gone. What an inappropriate bid for sympathy! See the fuller story HERE.
6:30 A.M. While the pooches were still sleeping, I got up and went out to clear the night’s cache of blown leaves and petals from the pool, then did my hour of exercises. 8:00 A.M. I took this photo of my chimney stack reflected in the water on the top of my hot tub pool cover, then thankfully placed my camera/phone on a nearby chair before attempting to climb down into the hot tub. Slipped on algae I had somehow missed cleaning from the pool stairs and fell, landing with my head in the hot tub, one leg in the pool, one on the bench in the hot tub, twisting and gashing and spraining my left ankle. Thank God I didn’t hit my head! 9:35, sitting at my desk with my leg up on a bench, icing down the ankle, whose swelling has gone down remarkably, milking the Internet for sympathy. Perils of living alone. Glad it turned out as well as it did. Not broken. I can still walk on it. Just bruised and swollen and muscle-sore.
My mailbox is totally full, so I’ve been deleting old emails from the past 22 years. I had deleted about 2,000 without reading them, when I chanced to read a couple and realized that there are some real gems there, so I’m going to share a few with you. (2,000 down, 37,000 to go! No exaggeration.). Here is one from 2010:
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Ineligible
Your temper is an irritation
leading to much perturbation.
Solving every little trifle
with your fists or with a rifle,
in short, makes it debatable
whether you are dateable.
I fear your image has gone to pot
and eligible? You are not!
For Pensivity’s Three Things Challenge the words are: IRRITATION, TRIFLE and IMAGE
Click on photos to enlarge.
When I moved into my house 22 years ago, I could touch the top of these palm trees. They’ve grown, I’ve shrunk.
For the Nature Photo Challenge: Trees
Click on photos to enlarge.
Algeria’s Happiness Project prompt is to publish a story, poem or photo that reflects happiness. I posted a few!!!
“Davy Jones Locker”
Mixed Media Assemblage
17″ X 21.5 “
by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Davy Jones‘ Locker is a metaphor for the bottom of the sea—the final
resting place for sailors who are the victims of shipwrecks and is used
as a euphemism for drowning. Silver coins spilling from a pirate chest
seem to be doing these victims of shipwreck at sea no good at all. Media
includes sand and shells collected from various Mexican beaches by the artist.
The slingshot, cloth and even the plastic cup were found on the beach. The cup is covered with coral and was obviously once on its way to being incorporated into a coral reef. The tiny chest, the silver fish and the skeletons were the only objects added to help tell the story that were not collected on beaches.
For Jez’s Water Water Everywhere prompt
Today, I have been working on Chapter 12 of a book about my first few years in Mexico. This one was written in my journal a little over a month after I moved here in 2001. As will be obvious by my packing crate desk, I still didn’t have furniture! Please let me know if this chapter holds your interest.
Natural Rhythms
Yesterday during the sunny part of late afternoon, I noticed the dust and streaks on the kitchen and sala windows. I knew the windows hadn’t been washed since their initial washing when I moved in a few months before, but I hated telling either Jesus or Sofia what to do. I felt like they both had a pretty good handle on what needed to be done and I liked the idea of a natural rhythm being established that pulsed along on its own. So I didn’t say anything to Sofia about the windows.
She had come late again, although I didn’t notice how late. Immediately, she came into the guest room, where I had moved my computer in anticipation of the visit of the electrician. In removing breakable objects from his path, I was doing my part. “Senora,” she said excitedly in her normal fashion. She then proceeded to cough and sniff and show in sign language that she had contracted my flu symptoms.
“Is possible trabajar?” I asked, meaning not that I was worried if she could work but that I was worried whether she should.
“Si, si,” she insisted, but we moved to the kitchen to make tea together for both of us. There I dosed her with echinacea and goldenseal––the horrible liquid variety that I hated so much that I couldn’t make myself take it. But she is more stoic and swallowed the glass of water with drops in it with two horrible grimaces and a general trembling of the body. We chased it with a glass of peach juice. Next time, take it with less water, I instructed, a bit late for her present comfort.
Later, I heard much talking and splashing out on the terraza. I had been hearing the loud voices for over a half hour but had screened them out. Now I realized that it was Sofia talking to Jesus in a voice made lower and almost unrecognizable from her cold. She had been outside for most of the morning, talking as he swept and watered. What was she doing?
“Senora, Senora!” I heard.
I ran out of the sliders that led from the guest room all the way around the house and finally found them in the back terraza. Jesus was happily giggling and sweeping water from the fieldstone patio floor. Sofia was squirting water on the windows. Sofia was washing windows! My house’s needs were being met according to that long seamless communication that required only my silence.
“Did you call me?” I asked.
“No, Senora,” said Sofia. It was the third time that day that I’d heard her calling me and had gone to find her only to have her say she hadn’t called. Perhaps some mental telepathy was in play. First the windows, now this. My life was being simplified. Like a mother whose children had sailed off seamlessly into their own lives, I felt content.
Later, after the electrician had left, my plumber arrived and found the cause for our lack of water pressure for so long. It seemed to be a faulty water filter. More mysteries solved. I moved out onto the front patio to look at plants newly planted. The white of the repaired dome stood sorely against the sky like a bandaged elbow. One day I would have to figure out the color scheme for the repainting project. House projects stretched out in front of me like the line of leaf cutter ants that marched the edge of the terraza. Individual ants stood out clearly today, since each carried the pipestem of a vivid red lipstick blossom. At times they looked like the wings of vividly colored moths as they wove together and apart. Some carried their loads straight upright like periscopes or stovepipes. Others had cut off cross sections so their loads looked more like fat hula hoops.
Ant generals three or four times larger than the rest patrolled the lines, getting smaller ants out of difficulties, lifting caught flower barrels over higher zigs of stone or helping to disentangle plant collisions. One small ant struggled to try to extricate its load from a depression. It was carrying a piece of succulent shaped like a small pompon on a green stem, the pompon consisting of a dozen tiny green balls. Top-heavy, it kept landing in bowled depressions in the fieldstone and getting stuck. Time after time, other ants would come to help. They tugged and pulled and pushed. Again and again the small ant would get it balanced and start off again to land in yet another depression. Finally, he was well on his way over a particularly flat few inches of stone when the wind came up and lifted the load from his jaws, blowing it a good six inches out of the way. The same was true of an entire leaf being carried by one of the general ants, but in this case, the ant did not let go of his load and instead was blown with the leaf across the patio. The ants both abandoned their Herculean tasks, scurrying back in the opposite direction, fate having relieved them of annoying tasks their ant natures would not allow them to abandon.
A necklace of bright red lipstick blossoms bobbed before and after them. Who was the Mamacita being regaled with all of this floral bounty? Was it fiesta time in the ant world or was this just some particularly succulent provision that was worth the extra labor of traversing the entire terraza to obtain just it? Under the sink in the kitchen were six sticks of the insecticide chalk that had effectively stopped the onslaught of these leaf cutter ants against my hibiscus bush, but I couldn’t bring myself to end this gay procession, let alone to kill all of its participants. It was too wonderful, this colorful parade––its participants too determined and focused.
It was part of the workings of my house this day: Sofia now sweeping the floor, bringing out fresh flan, Jesus finished with his sidewalk sweeping and off to pay his electric bill, I moving my stool away from where I had pulled it to watch the ants and back to its position by my packing crate desk. The world moved around us, catching us up in its pulse and pulling us along. No boss. No list too organized. Rather, dozens of small lists lost in coat pockets and blown into corners. Someday everything would be finished. In the meantime, everything was here jumbled together. Things uncomplicated in their messiness were doing themselves, being done to, doing back. Something was being taught to me as I sat very still, letting myself be taught.
Memoirs of a Frequent Flier
It was in the spring of 1953 when I first realized that I could fly. It had been coming on by degrees—first in dreams, where I would hold my arms straight out, crucifixion style, and then pump them straight up and down until I rose from the ground to float through the air, feet hanging straight down below me, swimming through the air propelled by those pumping arms.
In the dreams, no one ever noticed me. Not the other kids playing “New Orleans” in my yard below me, not my dad out mowing the grass or my mom hanging clothes on the line. Birds flew by in their usual manner without changing their course, whizzing by so close to my ears that I became convinced that I was invisible to all nature–man and beast.
I was never stung by mosquitos when I was in flying mode, and for some reason, even during that long summer two years later when I was eight years old and flying every day, it never rained when I was flying. A few times the first raindrop fell just as my feet came into contact with the ground and I had to shift my mind to remember how to move my legs to propel myself and avoid getting soaked to the skin by one of those July rainstorms so dreaded by farmers trying to get their summer wheat crop combined before the heavy rain, or even worse, hail.
Hail! What would happen if it were to hail while I was flying? Would I be able to soar above the hail—to watch it fall to the earth below me–a wall of white water stones creating themselves just inches below my toes and falling straight down away from me? Could I see them forming? Turning to ice where seconds before there had been nothing, each one of millions a little miracle in itself?
I don’t remember how old I was when I stopped flying. All I can remember is one day remembering that I used to fly, long before, and wondering if the whole experience of that long summer when I was eight and less frequently in the years afterwards were just memories stitched together from dreams. Like so many other things, I can remember clearly when they began but have no memory of when they stopped. Perhaps they haven’t. Perhaps only the memory of this talent unique to me has faded, daily, as soon as my feet touch earth.
But I wonder, in these days of drones so easily and cheaply purchased on the internet, if flight such as mine has become an impossibility. With more people looking up at the sky, what is my likelihood of avoiding being noticed and if I were noticed, what effect would it have on my life? All the news agencies would call. Then Oprah and perhaps even the president. Perhaps Donald Trump would call wanting to make me into a reality show. Perhaps I’d be encouraged to launch a blog penned from above. How high up does Wi-Fi go, I wonder, and would I have to attach a Wi-Fi antenna to a beanie on my head and post the blog orally as both hands would be necessary for my flight, to prevent my plummeting to earth?
No, better that this miracle of flight be left behind with other marks of my adolescence: pimples and wet dreams and all those insecurities of coming of age. Perhaps they were what prompted my need to raise myself above it all. Now that I am well past being fully matured and in fact have embarked on that course that will eventually result in my sinking back into that earth I once rose above, I can make do with pleasures of that earth—chocolate and fresh ripe figs and a 5 o’clock Martini enough to raise me above the norm. And that truth that once I was unique is enough to assure that I still am—here in my Barclay Lounger with my New Yorker Magazine, my feet up on the step stool and commands that I can give through air simply by a push of the finger via remote control. Checking in to Oprah to see who she has found to fill my place this week. Keeping my secret. Knowing how thrilled she would have been. Rating my potential story against theirs. And in my own mind, I know that I would rise above them all.
