Bring My Flannel Shirt So I Can Fell Some Trees Friday Round-Up

Last night I took off all my hearing gear and was struck immediately by a profound silence. Usually, I hear very little without my cochlear implant receiver and hearing aid, but I am used to hearing myself talk as if my voice was in an upstairs bedroom behind a locked door, discernible but very far away. This was different. I knew I was talking, forming words, uttering them, but there was no sound. This morning, making coffee, I said Wow, Wow, WOW! but heard nothing until I dropped everything and clapped my hands in front of my face. I should have been prepared for this but I wasn’t. My husband says everything will be alright. I guess.

A tiny white dog, a Bichon about as big as a toddler’s stuffed animal, followed us all the way around the dog park this afternoon. His owner is a quite large man who moves very slowly, painfully slowly, eventually sitting down on a bench to talk on the phone. I wanted to put his dog inside my sweatshirt and take him home to live with us and Swirl. I’d name him Freddy and he could lay on the bed here with me and Herc the cat. I think this longing for a tiny white dog is somehow related to my new hearing loss.

I ran a great Commission on Aging meeting today. And then I went to the special beginner’s line dancing class at a senior center where the teacher told us we have until the end of May to learn our right foot from our left and how to count to four. Then we have to go back to the regular classes. No more coddling! She told us how she started out not knowing anything and then she watched YouTubes and practiced and practiced and now “nobody can tell her a thing.” I believe it. That’s how I feel about chairing big meetings.

We are going to use the chainsaw tomorrow. And I think I’m going to take the plunge. Fire up that baby myself and saw some things. A young buckthorn that grew out of the stump of the old one we had to hire somebody to cut down. Other wacky weeds with two inch trunks that can’t be snipped – oh yeah, I’m going to put on my flannel shirt and boots and have at it. First time. I’m going to have my husband take pictures. Proof I can handle lethal machinery. Assuming I can.

I bought a book of all of E.E. Cummings’ poems. It is 1,144 pages long. The poems are listed in the index by their first lines, the first is “a blue woman with sticking out breasts hanging” which is on page 230. I haven’t read it yet. I bought the book because I loved a poem the first line of which is “love is a place,” which along with the first line of the second stanza, “yes is a world,” I had engraved on a silver bracelet I bought myself for my birthday. I fear, however, that this poem may be the only of Cummings’ 8 billion poems that I understand or believe I do.

_____________

Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash