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The past few evenings we've driven up to the house an a large light colored bird has swooped through our headlights. I surmise we've an owl hunting in the front.
So many predators!
I'm trying to sort out blue feelings. Sunday i had blue feelings related to my mother giving up her cake decorating equipment. It's a past time that gave her and so many others great joy. Mom had incredible skill at making beautiful gum-paste decorations with delicate coloring. I remember hydrangea flowers with all the tiny florets, a tedious repetitive act to create all the little florets but assembled, incredible. And my sister's wedding cake with tiny heads of wheat all over, piped from golden icing. I'm so sad to see her retiring that, acknowledging her fading.
I worried for years about how Mom's anxieties and anger would manifest as she aged. I am in awe of how gentled she is. I know, from Dad, she still explodes and is controlling, but i'm thankful that she is generally not reacting in anger.
The elections hang over the US: the comic pages are filled with get out the vote messages. A book review in the NY Times yesterday expressed the polarization in a way new to me, but it resonated:
I search my feelings about this election, and i realize what i feel is the dread of the next two years.
And then there's the gloom: not only have we fiddled with the clocks so it's dark earlier in the evening, but locally we are under a gloomy blanket of weather. Daytime is dim, dusk lasting all day.
Are there joys? Yes, yes. Luigi snuggling with me on the sofa. Watching MASH, which hasn't been available to us but for a few months in the past fifteen years. Picking the harvest of unripe peppers and planning to string them up. Hanging up Thai basil to dry in the laundry room as a test. Christine coming home from the passport office after a respectful and straightforward interaction.
So many predators!
I'm trying to sort out blue feelings. Sunday i had blue feelings related to my mother giving up her cake decorating equipment. It's a past time that gave her and so many others great joy. Mom had incredible skill at making beautiful gum-paste decorations with delicate coloring. I remember hydrangea flowers with all the tiny florets, a tedious repetitive act to create all the little florets but assembled, incredible. And my sister's wedding cake with tiny heads of wheat all over, piped from golden icing. I'm so sad to see her retiring that, acknowledging her fading.
I worried for years about how Mom's anxieties and anger would manifest as she aged. I am in awe of how gentled she is. I know, from Dad, she still explodes and is controlling, but i'm thankful that she is generally not reacting in anger.
The elections hang over the US: the comic pages are filled with get out the vote messages. A book review in the NY Times yesterday expressed the polarization in a way new to me, but it resonated:
... stories of centrist liberalism coming to dominate mainstream politics in the aftermath of the Cold War can be told throughout the countries of the West — just as most of these countries have now begun to experience populist insurgencies aimed at dethroning that consensus. (In the United States, the challenge to the liberal center is coming from both the right and the left.) The insurgencies are inspired by widely felt exhaustion with, and anger at, the unacknowledged failures of the ideas and policies that have defined the ideological center for more than a generation. That exhaustion and anger can’t be willed, wished or insulted away, no matter how unsavory the insurgents may be.....
Linker, Damon. “Did Max Boot Turn His Back on the Republican Party, or Did the Party Turn Its Back on Him?” The New York Times, November 5, 2018, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/books/review/max-boot-the-corrosion-of-conservatism.html.
I search my feelings about this election, and i realize what i feel is the dread of the next two years.
And then there's the gloom: not only have we fiddled with the clocks so it's dark earlier in the evening, but locally we are under a gloomy blanket of weather. Daytime is dim, dusk lasting all day.
Are there joys? Yes, yes. Luigi snuggling with me on the sofa. Watching MASH, which hasn't been available to us but for a few months in the past fifteen years. Picking the harvest of unripe peppers and planning to string them up. Hanging up Thai basil to dry in the laundry room as a test. Christine coming home from the passport office after a respectful and straightforward interaction.
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