• Tag Archives Gabe
  • The Day After

    Summer                                                Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    The grandkids went to see Hermann the German in New Ulm, then dropped to Le Mars, Iowa, the home of Blue Bunny Ice Cream and the National Museum of Ice Cream.  Sounds good right now.  Their parents plan, bravely, to camp out in Nebraska.  I would not be surprised if they decided to go ahead and spring for a motel room.

    Finished translating my sentences from English to Latin.  I’m a bit rusty.  I can tell this will have to be an every week thing as long as I want to get better.  I suppose there may come a time in the distant future when I may have it embedded somewhere, but that day seems a long way off right now.

    Lack of sleep and general grandchildren induced exhaustion made me feel a little down, but two naps today seem to have perked me up.

    On the morrow I return to the bee hives, have my phone meeting with Greg the Latin tutor and begin prepping for the invasion of the Mammoth herd here at Artemis Hives.


  • Travel Days

    Summer                                          Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    As the grandchildren moon waxes, Ruth and Gabe are somewhere south of Andover, headed back home to Denver.  They left about an hour ago taking their parents with 07-12-10_ruth-and-gabethem.  Like most leave takings, this one was bittersweet.  We will not see Ruth’s smile, nor hear her mischievous giggle; the house no longer rings with mymamameee as Gabe, eternally seeking his mother tries to orient himself to the star of his young life.

    We will not be able to talk with Jon and Jen about their lives, their joys, the things that matter to them and therefore to us.  The playhouse has lost its enlivener and no one will run up and down the slope in our front yard, shrieking and reveling in the sheer pleasure of walking barefoot in dewy grass.  No uh-oh or banana grabbed and eaten, one half in one  hand one in the other.

    There is, too, though the truth of lives disrupted by travel, part of its purpose, but also part of its drain.  The dogs lives changed, and they could not see why.  Everyone’s lives are not at their smoothest because routines become difficult to realize and routine soothes, calms.  So, for Gabe and Ruth, Jon and Jen, they now head back to the garden, to the plans for renovation of their home, to the friends both have made over their years in Denver.  Familiar beds, couches, dogs, food, neighbors.

    When Kate and I traveled in Europe, we hit on the idea of a travel day (p.s. Kate reminded me that was her idea.), a day when we just rested, weren’t trying to see some new destination, this museum or that market, this famous street or the Opera House.  This kind of intense, in the home up close visit could, as Kate said, use a travel day.  We’re getting ours today, but when we wake up tomorrow, there will be no mymamameee or Ruth crawling down the hall in her blanket.  And we will miss them.


  • OK. Here’s The Guy To Blame.

    Summer                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Ruth and Gabe have napped, like Grandpop and Granma.  This means they have considerably more energy.  Gabe covered a complete circuit of the patio to front door run, moving as fast as his stubby little legs and slightly forward leaning motor could take him.  I was in hot pursuit.  By hot I mean dew point that is absurd from a Minnesota perspective.  Gabe did not seem deterred.

    Ruth and Grandma, in other news, had feathered boas and performed various short versions of 1920’s flapper era music.  The show moved upstairs only a moment ago.

    Jon has the trailer attached to his car.  It will travel to Colorado and not return except under unusual circumstances.  He needs it for his remodeling and his fledgling custom ski business.  It’s absence frees up space in the third garage bay.  I know, I can’t believe we have three garage bays either.  If you come to our house from the west, it looks like we are pets of three internal combustion driven machines who have the big home.

    Due to a spotlight event tomorrow and an America’s public tour immediately after, I’ve had to study while the grandkids are here.  This morning I read the material on the butterfly maiden kachina and this afternoon I read about Tlingit culture and house screens.  The Hopi faith tradition fascinated me as I learned more about it.  They have a tradition of peaceful living, living that consciously seeks a balance with the natural world and all living things.  The Tlingits have a similar perspective.

    In listening to a set of lectures titled Religions of the Axial Age, I’ve learned that it may have been Zoroaster who pushed Western culture away from a natural, earth centered faith and toward a pantheon, adherence and propitiation of which had a direct correlation to eternal life.  Which was, at least according to this guy, also a Zoroastrian notion.  By developing the notion of a messiah, an end-times judge, and, along with it, the idea of an apocalypse, Zoroaster stuck us with the linear understanding of time.

    (a tower of silence where zoroastrians exposed their dead to vultures and decay)

    Give me the kachinas who come back from their home in the San Francisco Peaks for a six month period beginning around the winter solstice ready to help out.  Makes much more sense to me.


  • Families

    Summer                                              Waxing Grandchildren Moon

     

    Gabe and Ruth have broad palates.  Tonight Ruth ate sushi, tempura shrimp and a whole dish full of tempura vegetables as did Gabe.  They also wolfed down tempura ice-cream.  Afterward, Ruth wanted to put on a play in an ampitheatre located behind the Osaka Restaurant.  We waited awhile for her to decide on a performance, but the show, in this case, did not go on.  Maybe tomorrow in her playhouse.

    Families are magical and mysterious, the vessels proven to travel through time intact.  We create them often with little realization of the long tail such action has, but consider the genetic chain linking you to the generation before you and the one before that and the one that crossed the ocean and the one that came out of Africa and the one that links you to mitochondrial Eve.

    They find us at our most intimate, most troublesome, most winsome, most ugly.  The family collects bad acts and good, favors and betrayals, puts them in the alembic of an extended web of relationships and distills out the future.  Miracles are never more than this.

    Our own family, gathered in part here right now, is no different, not special or unique, but no less special or unique than any other.  Ruth laughs, Jon wonders, Jen ponders, Gabe opens and closes, Grandma hugs and Grandpop writes.  The things we do, the people we are.


  • Fiery Hoops of Passage

    Summer                                        Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Ruth and Gabe move and do, absorbing, trying, reaching, running, searching, asking.  They are both information and experience Brawny Towels.  Nothing passes them by.

    Their emotions are quick to surface and quick to flee.

    Jon and Jen face this firestorm of energy and demand constantly, at home and at work.  It’s enough to make a sane person tired and a neurotic neuroticer.  But, it is also the stuff of very stuff of which life is made; the fiery hoop through which we all had to pass on our way to and through elementary school.

    The cycle of family life, children, then grandchildren keeps  all ages in touch with the heroes journey on which we have all trod and on which those we love are now engaged.

    Here’s to Gabe and Ruth, two pilgrims now progressing on the path.  See the Machado poem in the upper left of this website.


  • Uh-oh

    Summer                                        New (Grandchildren) Moon

    It’s 10 am.  Do you know where your grandkids are?  I do, they’re upstairs.

    Ruth has brought her sombre et sol disposition with her.  When sol, her blond hair dances and her smile, often mischievous, lights up the room.  When sombre, she turns her face away or covers it up with her ever present bunny and pretends no one else is there.  When she first wakes up, like her grandpop, it’s all sombre.  Later, the sun breaks out and she starts to play.

    Gabe opens cabinets and investigates those things stored just for him, that is, at his level.  One minute he’s playing sword-handler by juggling food processor blades–yikes–the next he’s taking the microwave popcorn out one bag at a time.  One bag at a time, that is, until he tumbles to the fact that he can get them all out by turning it upside down.  As he often says, Uh-oh.

    Gabe, as you may know, has hemophilia.  That means, among many other things, that Jon and Jen have to give him infusions of clotting factor three times a week through a port in his upper left chest.  It’s an elaborate protocol.  First the one who  will do the infusing has to sterilize their hands, then put on sterile gloves and prepare the infusions.  They come pre-measured but they still have to be drawn into a hypodermic plunger.

    After that’s done one of them, in this case Jen, holds him and the other, Jon, takes a small needle with a butterfly attachment and inserts it into the port.  Hopefully.  Jen said she went several weeks without missing the port, then a long stretch missing it the first time.  Gabe anticipates the poke and is unhappy, fidgety, but not out of control.

    Once the stick is in Jon first flushed the port with saline, the switched to the factor (clotting factor), pushed that out with another saline injection and follows, ironically with a fourth and last infusion of heparin, a blood thinner.  Counter intuitive, at least to me.  But, not if you understand.

    You’ve just put clotting factor in the port.  It will clot any blood in or around the port, creating a possible source of a clot breaking off and entering the bloodstream.  Not good.  So, the heparin resolves that problem.

    As I said at the beginning of this journey, Gabe couldn’t have gotten a better set of parents.  It’s not a drama, it’s not a why me, it’s a we need to do this so let’s get on with it.  That attitude will transfer to Gabe who will have to manage all this in the future.


  • Grandkids

    Summer                                  New (Grandchildren) Moon

    Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe rolled in around 6 pm.  Kate fed them all, I cleaned up and Jon and Jen organized their family.  Vega and Rigel, of course, helped.

    Ruth went out to her playhouse, looked up at me and said, “I want more toys.”

    Gabe is in what I call the unguided missile stage of human development.  His motor is always on and he hits one thing, bounces off and heads off somewhere else, opening this, closing that, grabbing a pair of scissors, carrying his pin-wheel.  Busy, busy, busy.

    It’s a pleasure to have them here.  They’re here until Thursday.


  • Mighty Possum Warriors

    Summer                                         New Moon  (Grandchild’s Moon)

    From this point forward (if I remember) I’m going to start naming the moons in ways that make sense to our life here at Artemis Hives and the Seven Oaks.  The Grandchild’s Moon is in honor of a yearly visit that takes place most often in this moon’s ambit since Jon and Jen return to work as teachers in early August.

    The mighty possum warriors finally gave up and came inside to the cool, flopped down on the couch and promptly went to sleep.  A hard day hunting the wily critter had done them in.  I’m 99% sure that the possum only has shattered nerves.  All that barking.  Right out on the patio.

    Jen called today and they leave Chicago tomorrow and plan to be here Sunday night.  They are going to come up on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi, stopping in Winona at the National Eagle Center.


  • Strummed

    Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

    I have a pediatric illness:  an ear infection.  Well, of course, if I have it at 63, it’s not technically a pediatric illness, but my in-house pediatrician recognized it with her very own otoscope. I have a lot more empathy for her young crying patients now.  The damn thing hurts.  And right in your ear!

    It’s in my left ear, which is deaf already, so it can’t do any damage to my hearing.  But wow.  When the pressure strums the nerve, it gets your complete attention.

    I’d felt off for the last couple of days and the ear ache presented itself this morning, just as the bee guy came and the electrician who restored power to the honey house and the playhouse for Ruth and Gabe.  Kate’s really good with managing pain and illness.  I’m not.  I’m more like a dog; I want to crawl into a kennel and sleep until its over.  Fortunately, it began to drain this afternoon which relieves the pressure.  No strumming after that.  At least for now.

    I forgot to mention that Dave Schroeder also said, “You’re not a beekeeper until  you’ve been stung.”  I’m a beekeeper several times over!

    This afternoon and evening passed in a haze with pain and narcotics.


  • Hooray for the Red, White and Blue

    Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

    Hooray for the red, white and blue.  That is, the blueberries, the raspberries and the white clover among which I picked them this morning.  Worked outside for an hour and a half, moving an outdoor table back to its original place on the brick patio outside our garden doors, a plastic table into the honey house for some  more space.  Can’t set the smoker on it though.

    (Georgia O’Keefe, 1931)

    This all has two purposes, getting the house nicer and in better shape for our own use as the summer begins to take up residence and for our guests in July:  Jon, Jen, Gabe and Ruth and the Woolly Mammoths.  I also moved some potted plants around and am mulling painting a post I stuck in concrete a few years ago.  Painting it some bright, contrasty color that will make the green pop.

    Only 83 this morning but the dew point’s already at 67.  Glad the bee work got done yesterday.  On the bees.  The president of the Beekeeper’s Association lives in Champlin (near us, sort of ) and has offered to come over himself after the fourth.  I’ll be glad to have his experience looking in on my colonies.

    While I picked mustard greens this morning, I noticed a bee making a nectar run on a clover blossom near my hand. “Keep up the good work.  Glad to see you out here and hard at work,” I told him, rather her.  She jumped at the sound of my voice.  One of those workers best left to her own initiative.

    Haven’t heard yet from Kate but the plan is for her to come home today at some point.