A Moveable Garden

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

• Weather

Cold and windy the first few days of the week, then moderating from Friday through Sunday. Our weather station was off-line at times (think that issue has been fixed now) but these numbers are close if not 100% accurate. The highest temperature of the week was 30.9°F on both Friday and Sunday; the lowest temp was 4.5°F on Monday, but the temperatures don’t tell the entire story because the wind was whipping. On Wednesday, the wind chill never reached above 0°F, though the temps ranged from 7.3°F to 17.2°F. Overall, the average low temp was 12.1°F; the average high temp was 22°F. We got maybe 2 inches of snow on Saturday.

• Beginnings/Firsts

Many firsts this week at the Birdfy feeder, with our first tufted titmouse visit on Tuesday, white-breasted nuthatch on Thursday, downy woodpecker on Friday, Carolina wren on Saturday, and mourning dove on Sunday. Top row: mourning dove, American goldfinches; second row: black-capped chickadee, white-breasted nuthatch; third row: tufted titmouse, American goldfinches; fourth row: Carolina wren, downy woodpecker. And below that, some chickadee and titmouse video (19 seconds).

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

Top row: Chickadee at heated birdbath, male cardinal at heated birdbath, male cardinal. Middle row: tufted titmouse at heated birdbath, many goldfinches on feeder, single goldfinch. Bottom: red fox on motion camera.

• Wandering 

No woods walks this week but we did manage to weather the weather for in-town walks on Wed., Friday, Sat. (2 walks for me!), and Sunday. On Wed., we watched a flock of about 15 bluebirds fly across the street, sit in the trees briefly, then take off again. I also wandered to Dartmouth Hitchcock medical center on Tuesday to pick up a friend (JS) from chemo — and shop at the regional co-op beforehand.

walks & wanderings

• Curiosity & Discoveries

We enjoyed a Zoom presentation by Maine Audubon on Thursday evening, “Stories in the Snow,” about the tracks that mammals and a bird or two leave in winter. Covered coyote, bobcat, red fox, lynx, porcupine, muskrat, snowshoe hare, grey and red squirrel, river otter, ermine (weasel), opossum, meadow vole, white-footed mouse, turkey, and probably some I’m forgetting.

• Creating

I made a collage of covers from some of the books I read in 2024 for my annual list of Books Read, posted on my other blog, and I wrote at length about some of my favourites this year for the 2024 Books Summary post.

• Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: I worked out three times (3 hours) this week. I also treadmilled for 1-1/2 hours over four nights, walking or jogging 6-1/2 miles. In all, I walked over 9,000 steps on six days and over 12,000 on Sunday. I participated in Dharma Sunday via Zoom on Sunday for two hours; the topic was The Power of Presence: Cultivating the Courage to Show Up for Your Life. I took a Covid test on Tuesday before picking up a friend from chemo and it was negative.

Cat: The cat was repaired this week! Bumble was dropped off at the vet’s around 8:15 on Wednesday morning (having had no food!) and underwent surgery around 2:30-3:30p to remove two teeth that had holes in them. Recovery here at home was rough that night and through Thursday into Friday — he just wasn’t himself, sort of manic, unable to settle, and completely ravenous, perhaps partly because of the effects of the anaesthesia and other drugs that were still on board on Wed. night and through most of Thursday. He was on pain meds Thurs. and Friday but just an NSAID (Onsior). He finally caught up on food — soft food and treats only, which is not his normal diet — by Friday.

The strangest and saddest part was that this very vocal cat, who responds to anything we say with conversation of his own, didn’t speak at all until Thursday afternoon, and he didn’t really start chatting again until Saturday. The house was so silent. On his first night home, Wed. night, he sat, in his adorable soft collar with a celestial theme, at the door of our bedroom, just wanting out. The whole night. That adorable soft collar may have been a factor or even the main cause of his restlessness, who knows; we removed it Thursday morning and just kept an eagle eye on him, but he’s never tried to scratch his mouth or bother his partly shaved forearm. He finally chose to sleep with us again on Friday night. We have about a week more of solely soft food to go.

Bumble Gallery: blissfully unaware on Tuesday, after surgery on Wednesday, finally deigning to grace me with his presence on Friday, and relaxing by the fire on Saturday.

He’s lying behind me (pushed up against me) on my office chair as I type, a favourite spot of his when I’m up late into the night working at the desk.

• Nesting 

Cleaning/Maintenance: I cleaned the shower niche on Tues. and the master toilet on Wed. (thoroughly! not just using the brush!) and the other downstairs toilet another day. On Monday, my husband ran electricity to the motion camera on the shed — no more batteries (in that one)! He cleared the driveway with the snowblower on Saturday. I did clothes laundry one day, maybe Wed.? The days run together and the laundry-doing even more so.

Supplies: I tossed our 15+-year-old grenadine (could have been 30 years old for all I know) and ordered some fancy stuff that uses cane sugar instead of corn syrup, which arrived on Sunday.

On Wed., I rejiggered the Amazon S&S for Jan. and Feb. and the Chewy autoshipment (adding soft treats) and on Friday I ordered 24 cans of Beyond brand pâté, four different flavours, to have more soft food on hand for the cat.

Food: I was very uninspired to cook this week. Monday and Tues. we had baked prebreaded haddock, leftover mac & cheese with peas and tuna, and carrots, celery, cukes, and peppers with olive tapenade for dinner. Wed., we had half the asparagus-red pepper quiche I bought from the regional co-op the day before, with veg and tapenade, and Thursday more of the same. Friday was canned soup and homemade sourdough. We finished the week with artichoke-olive-spinach pizza from the local pizza place and a big green salad on Sat. and Sun. We also ate more of the breads friends gave us for Christmas, including stollen (RLJ), eggnog bread (ED) and rye-einkorn bread (RL).

I bought the grenadine mentioned above to try a Shirley Temple cocktail recipe posted recently by Richard Godwin (The Spirits newsletter). If it’s behind a paywall, his recipe is 15ml grenadine, 15ml ginger syrup, 20ml lemon juice (or lime juice), and fizzy water. Instructions: Stir together the grenadine, ginger syrup, citrus and mere splash of fizzy water at the bottom of a tall glass until combined. Add ice cubes and then top up with (~120ml) fizzy water. Garnish with orange and/or lemon wheels and a cocktail cherry. I changed it to 2 Tbsp grenadine and 2 Tbsp fresh lime juice, then added a couple of cute little square ice cubes and 5 oz. of Reed’s no-cal ginger beer to it. And a good maraschino cherry and a bit of orange peel. We had one on Sunday night and I look forward to more.

Financial/Admin: I paid a largish medical bill online on Tuesday. I emailed our tax preparer on Friday to make sure he’s still our tax preparer and he is! Whew. I published my Books Read 2024 list and summary on my other blog on Thursday, and I also updated my password list that day. On Sunday, I updated some of the literary births pages on my Library Booklists website, adding recent deaths and NYT links (Nikki Giovanni, David Lodge, Jacques Roubaud), which also necessitated remembering how to log into that account and emailing back and forth with support about how to delete a flagged malicious file, which I successfully did. I have plans for lots more updating of that website this winter.

• Sleeping & Dreaming

I slept an average of almost 8 hours per night this week, with a high of 9-1/2 hours on Monday and a low of 6 hours on Tuesday. My average FitBit sleep score was 85.3. I got exactly 12 hours of REM sleep and 9 hours 17 mins of deep sleep. I find it difficult to get out of bed when it’s cold.

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

Reading

BOOKS: I finished The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography (2018) by Deborah Levy this week and really enjoyed it. It’s my favourite kind of book, threaded fragmented rumination on the past and present occurring simultaneously, as they do, and as she describes them doing. Her topic, or one of them, in this slender book (135 pp) is the high psychic cost of being a woman in society, and particularly of being a wife, a mother. My favourite chapters are Footsteps in the House, The Black and Bluish Darkness (the title of which prefigures a later fragment), Night Wandering, and I also love everything about her writer’s shed in her 80-something friend’s garden. Now I’m on to My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh and so far it’s compelling, too.

OTHER: I read several interesting articles and essays this week. Two were on related topics, or at least both writers came up with similar causations (social media & smart phones): why are people spending more time alone, and why are young people around the world more unhappy than previous generations? Both trends started pre-pandemic.

The first article, THE ANTI-SOCIAL CENTURY: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic is very long and it may be behind a paywall (which is too bad, because it covers a lot of fascinating ground, including in a section called ‘Secular Monks’ the idea of neededness and how when people don’t feel needed, despair creeps in). The second, An Expert on Happiness Uncovers a Worrying Trend by Hannah Silverstein about David Blanchflower’s work, at Dartmouth College’s website, is much shorter and should be open access.

The Atlantic article posits that “sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction” and that the “best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised. I’m not arguing with this — I like unsupervised outside play and physical interaction with friends, and these both seem critical to development and happiness as a human — but I am curious what “best” means in terms of play and how it’s measured, and why texting or sharing things online isn’t seen as strengthening bonds in a very real world way. (Look up pebbling.)

The Dartmouth article raised the same thoughts in my mind: “‘When kids spend time on smartphones, they don’t engage with people face to face, and they don’t do some of the things we adults did when we were kids,’ Blanchflower says. ‘Neuroscientists say that when people interact with each other, their brains establish important pathways for social and emotional behavior.’ Can people not be said to be interacting with each other when they’re not in the same room (and just because they’re in the same room, are they necessarily interacting)? Many teenagers from the 50s, 60s, and 70s remember long long hours spent on the rotary-dial or touchtone house phone talking with friends and love interests, and those hours interacting over a device and not face to face were, I’d argue, very developmentally important. Face-to-face is great, and voice-to-voice can be too, so why not also interacting with each other by writing, whether email or text or long letters sent through the postal service (all of these forms can at times communicate as much or more nuance than in-person interaction), and why not by sending supportive, comforting, or funny clips to others to reinforce connectedness?

My favourite part of the Atlantic article was this hypothesis, about the erosion of boundaries between alone time and social time leading to social burnout:

“Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. ‘Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,’ Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. ‘Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.’ Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

“If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.”

Another not-unrelated article, When Your Terminal Illness Makes You a TikTok Star by Caitlin Moscatello in The New York Times (link gifted), looks in part at the nature of social media relationships and how we can feel so close to people we’ve never met in real life: “The connections that we form parasocially have the same potential to have a real impact on us. … One question I get asked often is, ‘Why do people grieve for people who die that they’ve never met?’ And it’s because you’ve gotten to know this person, and you’ve developed familiarity with the hallmarks of human interaction, which are the face and the voice.”

Beyond these three articles, here are a couple of screenshots on how to be with someone who is grieving, and Covid’s effects on the immune system:

Watching

We (re)watched a favourite movie, “My Cousin Vinny,” on Wed. and Thurs. while eating dinner.

Listening

I didn’t Shazam much of what I listened to this week, or maybe I just didn’t listen to much. It’s all from local radio while I’m getting ready in the mornings.

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: Bought produce at the local farmstand on Saturday – it’s reopened two part-days per week until April. Ran into our neighbours (WD&RD) there. Bought pizza and salad from local spot on Saturday. Shopped at the regional co-op on Tuesday while I was up there.

Relationships: Salon met in person on Friday, with five of us in a lovely home facing the lake — our hostess (DH) made us hot cocoa on the stove and served a homemade cherry pie. I picked up a friend (JS) from chemo at DHMC on Tuesday. I went over to a friend’s (LM) on Monday afternoon for about an hour to seek her advice on a thorny group-interpersonal problem, and I sent emails back and forth with her and another friend (RL) for a couple of days to get their input before attempting to resolve the situation (or mitigate the predicament). Texted with my sisters and a couple of good friends a lot this week. Paperwhite lilies that a friend (ED) gave me for my birthday are blooming now!

• Endings 

My aunt’s visiting hours were Sunday (funeral is Monday). I didn’t attend but my sisters both did and we texted a lot on Sunday. Thursday I had ordered, with some online chat help, flowers from a local florist (Wild Flower Stem + Sundry) for the visitation and the funeral and they look great.

• All This Useless Beauty

luminous goldfinch