My camera... no! ...the computer... uh, the dog?  Which cat? 

Got it!  I'd upright the milk-crate shelf full of old family photos, toss the camera in, lay the comp tower on top and tote it out the door, calling the dog behind me and hoping the cats have sense enough to follow.  Of course, as it always is when I go anywhere, my purse would be hanging from my shoulder.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Everything is a trap... unless it's a test.  Of course, any general statement that begins, "Everything is...," cannot be absolutely true... unless it is, but in this relativistic, finite, observable universe, nothing is absolute.  Beware of absolutes, and of absolution.  The only forgiveness that counts is one's own.

I told Greyfox this morning that I had blogged myself into a corner.  Here I am, floundering around, trying to get out of that corner and on with my story.  On Thursday, I posted a memoir segment about the first time my first husband dumped me.  Friday, in response to several comments expressing strong disapproval of the man, some of them using ad hominem fighting words, I did some explaining, "making apologies" in the old sense of that word, not expressing regret or sorrow, just attempting to explain the guy's behavior in valid psychological and neurochemical terms without resorting to specious moralistic judgments. 

Saturday, responding to comments on that, I indulged in one of the occasional semantical wordgames that give me some momentary satisfaction but don't ever seem to adequately convey my meaning.  Today, faced with the choice between compounding the offense by addressing that issue, or ignoring the whole thing and getting on with my story, I opted not to choose, and decided just to ramble on with a metablog.

The nature of perception has been an occasional topic of discussion recently here within my family and with a few online correspondents.  One well known fact about perception (known to those who study the subject, but largely unrecognized or not even considered by most people) is that we don't see the actual things we are seeing (I will use "see" for perceive, but these ideas are valid for hearing, too, and sometimes for touch -- and, FYI, I'm not addressing light waves, neural impulses, etc.).  What we see are the boundaries of things, the differences between things.  Shifts, for example, in the shading of a field of gray, can be so small and gradual that we won't recognize any difference as it shifts.  Night can lighten gradually toward day and we may not see it changing, but suddenly something clicks and we recognize that it is different.  Charcoal is not the same as dove, but gray is gray.

People who study these things have presented test subjects with various things to look at, and observed their eye movements.  If it's a big circle, focus will move around its perimeter or jump from inside to outside.   Squares get the most attention at their corners, where the horizontal meets the vertical.  A broad field shading gradually from white on one edge to black on the opposite side will have the subjects' eyes jumping back and forth from one extreme to the other, ignoring the middle.  I found an analogy to this trait of only "seeing" differences while working with PhotoShop recently.  A large image, 2048x1536 pixels, of simple objects with few divisions, is a much smaller file (less for our computers' AI to see) than an image of smaller dimensions but with more edges and differences.

So, what do we do, in our minds, as we perceive differences?  Usually, we compare.  Now I'm sliding away from perception into processing and thinking.  Much of this has to be hardwired survival stuff.  There are sound reasons for animals with a limited viable temperature range, for example, to compare a warm site for bedding down with a cold one, and to prefer the warmer one.  Likewise, that same animal, in a different time and place, may compare a hot sleeping site and a cooler one, and choose the cooler shade in preference to the hot sun.  Hot and cold; warm and cool; hot or cool; warm or cold:  the first pair are abstractions, absolutes, while the second pair represents the tolerable range between the extremes, and each of the last two pairs offers us an easy choice between extreme discomfort and a tolerable alternative. 

But where, precisely, does warm shade over into cool?  We'll have no difficulty distinguishing between hot and cold, but the question of whether something is warm or cool depends on fine distinctions and many variant factors.  How we perceive the temperature of a drink can depend on ambient temperature and whether the percipient has a fever or not.  The temperature of a warm drink would, if applied to air temperature, signify a hot day... or not, depending on the percipient's acclimatization.  In New Mexico, when it is fifty degrees outside, people wear parkas.  In Alaska, fifty is t-shirt weather.  In cool Alaskan summer and warm Sunbelt winter, you can distinguish between the locals and the tourists by the clothes they wear:  differences, perceptible differences.

It is natural to have preferences.  All mammals have preferences.  I have noticed that even tadpoles have preferences, but let's keep it relatively simple.  Human preferences are complicated enough all by themselves.  Perhaps the one adjective most frequently applied to preferences is, "personal."  I prefer to breathe clean air, but most of the domesticated primates on this planet tolerate polluted air to have what they perceive to be "advantages" or "comforts" of city life.  Many people even pay big bucks to pollute their personal air.  Around here, the cost of a carton of cigarettes is between fifty and sixty dollars now.  But here we are sliding out of the zone of preferences and into the area of addictions, another perceptible difference, but one that many people will try to deny because the word, "preference," does not have the judgmental, pejorative connotation for them that "addiction" has.

Ken Keyes reached me at a teachable time in my life with his advice to "upgrade addictions to preferences."  It's an ongoing process.  I still enjoy appreciative feedback on my work, but I'm no longer addicted to external validation.  I am a lot less economically insecure than I used to be, but occasionally I still get anxious when I think about the debts I owe.  Continually, I compare myself to how I have been and how I would prefer to be.  This works for me, works a whole lot more effectively in getting me to where I want to be than when I used to compare myself to other people.

Of the many important life-altering lessons I learned from the junkies of Anchorage Family House, "comparing" is one of the most important.   Making  comparisons of better or worse, between oneself and another, regardless of on which side one placed oneself, was impermissible in that therapeutic community.  The community was 24/7 therapy for hardcore addicts, an alternative to incarceration.  It had been modeled on the highly controversial Synanon community, which was eventually disbanded, and on The Delancey Street Foundation, which is still growing and going strong.  Some readers may have noticed the Synanon Prayer in my left module.  It is there because I can relate to the aspirations it expresses, and because I feel I owe my life indirectly to Synanon and its radically confrontative brand of therapy.

Rationalization, defensiveness, and denial were fundamental parts of the personality I had when I began spending a couple of hours each Thursday evening in a therapy group run, for social services and public safety workers, by Family House graduates.  My outlook on reality was so skewed that I now find it difficult to believe that I ever believed the things I then believed to be true.  Again and again as I have related my memories, I have referred to myself as insane, nuts, crazy.  It is true.  I was a hardcase, able to whip out an effective defense mechanism in an instant if my bent version of reality was threatened by an inconvenient truth.  There are innumerable known defense mechanisms, and probably at least as many undiscovered ones, but, by definition, none of them is healthy.  A defense mechanism is psychopathology and, by definition, pathology is unhealthy.  Anyone who believes it is healthy to deny the truth and fearfully guard an elaborate fantasy is sick and has chosen that belief in order to rationalize and deny his own sickness.

Now, in my roundabout way, I have come around to covering "annoyance," the last of the five words I put up there in my title so I wouldn't forget what I wanted to say here.  I get annoyed when someone refers to a "healthy defense mechanism," or a "positive addiction," or some other semantically paradoxical, logical impossibility.  Then I get annoyed with myself for getting annoyed.  Eventually, I get around to forgiving myself and everyone else.  After that, I usually spend some more time thinking about and discussing psychopathology.  I know there is a lot of sickness in the world.  I also know that in the strictest sense it is not possible to draw a line and say that some of it is physical and some of it is mental.  There is too much interaction between body and mind for such delineations to be invariably valid.

Everyone unconsciously affects his or her brain chemistry through thoughts and feelings.  Some of us consciously affect our brain chemistry, too.  Brain chemistry that is the result of genetics, nutrition, injury, infection, etc., affects our thoughts and feelings.  If it wasn't such a complex web of interactions it would be correct to call it a feedback loop, but people call it that anyway.  I get annoyed at that sometimes, too.  It's okay.  Annoyance is mild, and I always get over it easily and quickly.  Being annoyed is preferable to being enraged, terrified, alienated, defensive, depressed, coldly indifferent, or any of the other extreme emotional states I used to allow myself to dwell in.  I'm not addicted to annoyance.  I consider it a transitional state, a tenable position, a coolly warm alternative to the hot and cold pathologies I could be indulging.  Relatively speaking, being annoyed is actually pleasant and comfortable, for as long as it takes me to realize that that is where I'm at and get over it.

This week's subject is suggested by Wingsofdesire.

Abundance

We have an abundance of abundance.  It is everywhere I look.  I could have overdone this one, but I restrained myself.

Thanks to the richly nutritious frogwater produced by Tadpole Ranch, the new rhubarb I transplanted this spring is huge.

Abundant rainfall has covered the forest floor with berries of many species.  These are bunchberries: Cornus canadensis, and they are not quite ripe yet.

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) is lush, at the peak of its bloom right now.

I'm often not sure I know what people mean by what they say, and I'm often pretty sure that they don't know what I mean by what I say.  So I ask questions, and I rephrase what I say when my words appear to have been misconstrued.    Maybe it would help if I'd define my terms beforehand, but I never really know before the fact which words are going to cause the problems.

Irony is the result of reality's not having turned out the way one expects it to.  It is a feeling born of expectations and logical projections.  As a literary device, it provides twists and surprise endings to stories that might otherwise be trite and meaningless.  It can be, and has been, overused to the point where literary irony is often trite.

My last two posts, about the first time my first husband dumped me, and my analysis of his behavior, had irony on top of irony.  Prissy didn't see the irony in my choosing to explain "Ford's" behavior in non-judgmental terms, but she found it ironic that I saw irony in it where she didn't.  Now that's irony.

Prissy also used a different word than I did, one I would not use, to describe what I was doing there.  She said what I did was to, "defend," him.  This comment from butterflyxlife also, I think, misconstrues my intent:

In my lexicon, defensiveness and rationalization are forms of psychopathology in which I do not knowingly indulge.  Denial is another one of those pathologies I do my best to avoid, so when someone accuses me of defensiveness or rationalization, I ask myself if that is what I'm doing.  I get tough with myself about this shit.  That's the only way I can maintain my mental health.  Mental health is probably more important to me than it is to most people who have physical health.  The way I figure it, I gotta have some kinda health, and if I keep my spirit, karma, emotions, and intellect in shape it makes it a lot easier and more pleasant to live in this body.

I have thought about it, and I have concluded that I had no intention to defend that man.   I was just responding to comments.  I felt that all the anger and outrage being expressed was inappropriate to the circumstances.  Anger and outrage, in general, never serve anyone.  Blame and shame are shit our society could well do without.  I'm certainly not blaming the women who focused their wrath on my ex.  I find them as easy to understand and forgive as he is.  I'm just not generally inclined to let bullshit slide, so I responded.

As I continue with the story, it will become evident how I reacted at the time.  Those initial reactions were very different from my current perspective on long ago events.  My feelings toward that man, my mother, and many other people whom I had perceived as having hurt me, went through a series of changes as my perception of reality changed.  I moved away from judging people and using pejorative labels for them.  I began to see choices and behaviors as the problems.  I am still involved in the process of accepting people as they are and learning to understand their pathological behaviors.  I used to think that some people were "bad" and others were "good."  I now recognize that dualistic oversimplification for the bullshit it is.

Is it coincidence that some of my posts get more comments from men, while others get more from women?  That's a rhetorical question.  I don't believe in coincidence.  Yesterday's memoir segment has so far received six comments, all from women, and all but one expressing some degree of disapproval or outrage over my teenaged first husband's behavior.  Deerinwater0727 only expressed her appreciation for my storytelling ability.  (BTW, you could go wish her a happy birthday.)

That guy I'm calling, "Ford," in the hope that it somehow might mitigate any embarrassment or possible damage to his reputation from my telling our story, may or may not have garnered a reputation worth preserving in the decades since I've had any contact with him.  The pseudonym would be a thin disguise anyway, to anyone who has known him all his life, because f-o-r-d was, or he thought it was, part of his name back then.  Oh, well, that's part of the story I haven't gotten to yet.  It can wait.

The nicest thing said about him in that half dozen comments was that he was a "jerk."  That was spinksy.  She is generally a nice lady, with the accent on "lady."  But ladyhood is one accusation that cannot be leveled against lupa.  She called him a, "bastard," and, "lowlife scum." 

Empathetic as always, misunderstood47 has focused on the things, "that he did to," me.  Furia_Fubar, too, expressed an urge to comfort and console the me-back-then.

The harshest judgment was this from babykittyfrancais:

Okay, my dears, now that we've all gotten that out of our systems, let's get real.  First off, if my father had been alive, I would not have been getting married at age fourteen.  I would have been firmly on that PhD track, disciplined and focused.  The road my life took was established when my father died.  My addiction to orgasms began on the evening of his funeral, and my neurotic craving for "love" and validation was born of his absence from my life and my belief that I had killed him.  I told that story here and expanded on it here in response to comments.

As for Ford's knowing "better," who can say?  He was a "piece of work," all right.  His warped personality was partially the work of his stepgrandfather, who beat him and forced him to go out and beg for money for the old man's whiskey.  Oddly enough, even at the time, I had been inclined to overlook or excuse Ford's violence because he had such violence done to him, and that was long before my study of psychology revealed to me that abused children generally grow up to be abusive adults.

Infidelity is another issue.   I think I understand it, but reconstructing my first husband's personality so long after the fact is not too different from a postmortem psychoanalysis.  Hang in here with me and I'll give it my best shot.

The diagnosis of NPD, narcissistic personality disorder, was not in currency at the time.  He might have been called a sociopath for placing his own drives and desires above social mores.  Someone like him would not now be diagnosed with NPD even though his behavior is consistent with it, because of his age.  The personalities of normal adolescents go through a phase of narcissism that would be considered pathological in an adult.  Ford was sixteen when I married him, seventeen when he threw me out for that carhop he had met two or three days before.

Here is how I reconstruct it:  Ford was growing weary of my insecurities and needs.  I was a tiresome crybaby, afraid of shadows, craving protection, validation, and reassurance.   I was also, then even more than now, a nitpicking ultra-Virgo perfectionist.    Even though he trained me early on not to criticize him, by slapping me or punching me in the mouth if he didn't like what I said, he must have recognized that he was no shining hero in my eyes.

I'd be willing to bet, also, that Sarah gave good head.  I had yet to learn how to do that.  The sexual mores I had absorbed from my mother and our culture judged oral sex to be a perversion.  I had not yet entirely liberated myself from Southern Baptist programming and my mother's hangups.  Ford lacked what it took to teach me, whether that was knowledge, or motivation, or both, I don't know.  He just liked to jam his little penis down my throat -- and isn't it fortunate for me that it was such a little one?

Even in my relative ignorance, I must have been conscious of the penis size issue (but not yet aware that it was such a sensitive issue to some men), because I recall one day in our little old house in Vernon the previous winter, when we had a discussion of "average" penis size.  I don't recall how it started.  I might have asked a question.  I have always asked a lot of questions.  Ford told me it was seven inches, the average, and proudly stated that he was "bigger than average."  He used a ruler to demonstrate that his erection was more than seven inches.   He held the ruler along the underside of his penis, measuring the length across his scrotum, from his anus to the tip.   I questioned (a) whether it wouldn't be more accurate to measure the topside, and (b) his eyesight -- it looked closer to six inches to me.  He lost the erection.

Who knows, really, what was going through his mind with Sarah?  I can make some educated guesses at what was going through his brain.  There was the dopamine, testosterone and norepinephrine cocktail that defines sexual attraction for all mammals.  That would have been on the wane for him with me.  I was pregnant, his biological work with me was done.  Presumably, his behavior was dictated by physiological, neurochemical cues, more than by his higher reasoning centers.   In stark mammalian reproductive terms, I was no longer the "beloved," and she was.

Helen Fisher writes:

Ford was also a risk-taker, an adrenaline junkie as I was, and the adrenaline buzz of illicit "love" and sex could very well have added to his quick addictive attachment to his new source of narcissistic supply.

I find it ironic that I would be making apologies for my unfaithful husband's loutish behavior.  It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and I'm someone.  There are no victims in this piece.  I had been warned.  I had chosen the "bad boy" type.  It was the only type that turned me on.  I was a dopamine - norepinephrine - testosterone (yes, females secrete it, too) - adrenaline - oxytocin -etc. addict, to an extent at least as great as Ford's.  Stay tuned.  There's more to this story.

We went to Wasilla together on Monday, an early birthday outing for him because we were running low on some supplies and I didn't feel up to making two trips in one week.  We had considered taking in a movie, both of us wanting to see POTC At World's End, but it was already gone from the theater and not yet in Blockbuster.  We settled for two DVDs and a pizza at Greyfox's cabin that evening, after having lunch together, the 3 of us, at Yukon's Diner, and a few hours during which Greyfox stayed home while Doug shopped and I sat and waited for some tire work to be done (Doug had to change a flat tire before we got away from home that morning).

He spent his birthday cash on books and games, getting bargains at a used book store and pawn shop, and has been hogging the PS2 all week with his four new games.  I baked his cake yesterday, his choice:  yellow cake with cream cheese icing.  It's a good thing I got two boxes of cake mix, and fortuitious that cream cheese was on a "buy two, get one free," deal, because we ate the first cake already and are both ready for another.  I have decided it's time to bring this latest sugar binge to a halt... just as soon as the second birthday cake is gone.  This is public notice of that fact.

This memoir episode, which occurred in the spring and summer of 1959, comes right after the emancipated minors segment.

Ford never found a job during the winter we lived in the cold and dilapidated old house that had been the original dwelling on his stepfather's family's defunct ranch at the edge of Vernon, Texas, a Panhandle oil and cattle town between Wichita Falls and Amarillo.  His step-uncles paid him for some odd jobs and the family pitched in to keep us fed and warm that winter.  In spring, one of the young married cousins invited us to stay with his family in Amarillo so Ford could look for work there.

The hours crossing the endless plains in the cousins' car were spent listening to country music on the radio, with the family singing along.  Unthinkingly, I tried to sing along, too, and got shushed.  Ironically, I remember all the lyrics to many songs, but can't carry a tune.  The songs I listened to on that ride included the old familiar You Win Again  by Hank Williams, a new one, The Race is On, by relatively unknown George Jones, and Hello Walls by Faron Young.  I always had liked and still enjoy listening to Hank Williams.  Faron Young never did anything for me by crying in his beer, and that boring ride across a boring landscape engendered a dislike for George Jones that endures even now.

I was pregnant when we moved to Amarillo, but it didn't show.  I could still get into my regular clothes.  I had been given two cotton shirtwaist dresses for Christmas, one solid turquoise blue and the other an abstract pattern of blue and deep purple.  Shirtwaists were back in, after fashion had gone through a brief fling with sack dresses, "chemises."  I had turned my old favorite white Easter dress into cleaning rags after my nose bled all down the front.  I had two sack dresses and a gray woolen coat I had worn to school.  The rest of my clothes were separates: jeans, shorts, pedal pushers, and a red cotton broadcloth gathered skirt I had sewn myself in home economics class in Wichita.

The first night we were in the city, Ford wanted to show me downtown.  I remember wearing my "good" shoes, black suede flats with grosgrain bows on the toes.  I was outgrowing them, or had already, and my feet hurt the whole time.  Wanting to get off my feet, I suggested a movie.  Ford decided, since we were emancipated minors, to do a grownup thing.  We paid a quarter each (nobody questioned our age) and I got to see my first porno movie.  It was a silent film of Victorian vintage, a confused and baffling drawing room farce rendered pornographic by the presence of women in voluminous white undergarments being pursued by men in calf-length black stockings held up by garters fastened above their knees.  The theater smelled of urine and was nearly empty except for a few sleeping drunks.

At Ford's cousin's place, a duplex downwind from a meat packing plant and a couple of oil refineries on the edge of Amarillo, we slept on a foldout couch in the family room.  I remember days of puking from "morning sickness" every time I ate a meal, and only being able to keep down soda crackers.  I remember the noisy confusion of several kids, and nights falling asleep sitting up with my head on Ford's shoulder as the family watched TV and we waited to convert their couch into our bed.

We had been there ten days when Ford found a job.  It was classic good news / bad news.  He would be driving a dairy truck making home deliveries.  He needed a commercial driving license and uniforms.  His cousin's wife took him to DMV, and after paying for the license we had only a few dollars left.  His first day at work, a training run with another driver, he wore his regular clothes and I went shopping for his uniforms, which were supposed to be blue pants and a white shirt.  I found two pairs of secondhand pants that were just right, but that took almost all my money and the thrift store didn't have any plain white shirts. 

Finally, with my last dollar and change, in the same sleazy part of town where we'd gone to the movie, I found a sale where flimsy short-sleeved shirts were eighty-eight cents each, and I could buy two.  They only had one white shirt, but another one had small pale blue window pane checks and looked white from a distance.  Ford chewed me out for getting the checked shirt, but nobody said anything to him about it when he wore it to work.

During his first week on the job, we read classified ads together in the evenings, looking for an apartment.  With his first paycheck we rented a one room garage apartment at 1337 (rear) West 11th.  [The first apartment I rented alone in Anchorage, fourteen years later, was also leet:  1337 East 11th.]  The driveway at the end of which we lived sloped down from the street, towards the alley behind.  The floor of our apartment followed the same slope.  Spills and rolling objects went in only one direction: north.

Each morning when Ford left for work, the first thing I did was wash the uniform he had worn the day before.  I'd soak it in the kitchen sink, rub it clean by hand, rinse it, dip it in boiled starch, and hang it on the clothesline outside our door.  When it was dry, I'd iron it.  The rest of my day, other than housework and meal preparation, I could spend reading and listening to the radio that came with the apartment.   I got acquainted with a young divorced woman who lived in one of the upstairs apartments in the house, and she loaned me books and magazines to read.

Her magazines were mostly True Confessions and True Story, the same sort of women's popular literature my mother always read, the stuff I'd grown up reading.  The stories, of course, weren't true.  They were formulaic romantic crap in which troubled marriages were always patched up, widows always found kind and prosperous new husbands, and everyone lived happily ever after, after going through harrowing experiences to get there. Donna, my neighbor, had a subscription to Readers Digest Condensed Books, too.  I recall reading the war novel, "Warm Bodies" around then, but none of the other condensed books from that time come to mind.  I gobbled them up at a rate of more than one a day.

Donna also had a "marriage manual," which she loaned me after we'd gotten to know each other and I confided in her about my onesided sex life with Ford.  "Marriage Manual" was a 1950s euphemism for a genre of inexpert but earnest handbooks to sexual "compatibility."  Donna and I had known each other a few weeks when the conversation turned personal over coffee.  She astounded me by saying that oral sex (a) could go both ways, and (b) could be enjoyable.  Talking about that to Ford only made him mad.  He told me to stay away from "that woman," so I quit telling him about our conversations, and started hiding her books when he was around.  I was as obedient to my husband as I had been to my mother, meaning only when the "boss" was watching me.

That summer was beastly hot in Amarillo, with temperatures in the hundreds.  The sun turned our little converted garage into an oven in the afternoons, so I'd hurry through my chores and go up to my neighbor's airy tree-shaded apartment for the hottest hours, then back home in time to have Ford's food ready when he got home.  The biggest job was that daily laundry by hand, and my hands were in terrible shape from the detergent and abrasion.  Mama came to visit me, saw the situation, and did me a kindness that was totally unexpected.

A few days after her visit, a man delivered a big box from Sears.  It contained a countertop washing machine, "apartment size," just a big enamel pot with a fitting in the bottom around which the agitator turned, the removable agitator, and a clamp-on lid that contained the motor.  There was even a hand-cranked wringer that could be clamped to the side of the pot when the lid was off.  My daily laundry took more time that way, and more water, but was immensely easier on my legs, back and hands.

People claimed not to be able to tell I was pregnant, but it was obvious to me.  When Mama had come to visit, I was wearing an old pair of my jeans I couldn't zip, tied together in front with a shoelace wound through two belt loops.  I had always liked wearing long-tailed men's shirts, and they worked with the shoelaced jeans to cover my expanding belly.   Mama offered to order me some maternity clothes from Sears and I jumped at it, more because in maternity smocks my pregnancy would be more noticeable, than from any real need for the clothes.

The things she ordered for me were all part of a package deal, two skirts and two tops, no choice of colors or styles.  What I got was a straight black skirt with a cutout front and ribbon ties, a similar navy blue skirt with an elastic panel in front, a sleeveless plain blue smock, and a short-sleeved pink gingham checked smock.  I kept wearing jeans tied with shoe strings, and seldom wore the skirts.  I don't think I ever left home in the sleeveless top, but it got a lot of wear around the house.  I loved the pink one even though my mother was chagrined and apologetic when she saw it.  In her reality, redheads did not wear red or pink.  I suppose it must have brought out all the green and yellow in my complexion, but I liked the cheerful color and didn't really have to see how it looked on me.  It was my "best" outfit, and I wore it everywhere.

My maternity clothes became a subject of endless jokes among the family and friends.  The jokes were on the theme of my slender figure.  I would even smooth the top down over my little lump of a belly, to prove I was actually pregnant, and someone would accuse me of sticking a soup bowl in my pants.  My eagerness to show my pregnancy, and my delight in being pregnant, seemed to puzzle almost everyone.  I suppose, upon reflection, that was because we were presumed to have had a shotgun wedding, and most girls in my situation would have done their best to hide their pregnancies.

We didn't have a phone in our place.  My neighbor took messages for us.  She came to the door one day and said my stepfather had called.  My mother was in the hospital with a heart attack -- her first.  After talking to Bill, and later to Mama in the hospital, we decided I should come home to look after her for a few days when she was discharged.  Bill couldn't get time off from his truck driving job without losing the job, and everyone recognized that having his batty old sister Bee around would be more of a health hazard than a help.  For Mama's sake, Bill sent Bee off to live with their other brother in San Angelo.

Ford was worried about how he would cope without me to cook and wash clothes.  I suggested he either buy another uniform or two, or go to a laundromat in the evening.  He could pick up burgers on his way home from work (he rode to and fro with a coworker) and could pack his lunch before going to bed.  He did not try to deny that my mother needed me and had nowhere else to turn, but he was petulant about my leaving him to fend for himself for the four days that Bill would be on the road.

I went, and was gone for only three days, not the four days as planned.  Bill had made his turnaround in record time.  When I got back, the apartment was a mess with the bed unmade, dirty dishes in the sink, his clothes and a few unfamiliar items of women's apparel scattered around, and a few inches of Jim Beam bourbon in an open bottle.  Stunned, I sat down and stared at the whiskey bottle.  My feelings wobbled between despair and outrage:  "How dare he?"  "What will I do now?"  After a while, I poured a little bit of the whiskey in a glass and filled it with water and tried to drink it.  The stuff tasted so vile, I dumped most of it down the sink.

I had been sitting there a few hours when a car pulled in the driveway.  I heard Ford and the woman get out.  They were laughing as they came in the door.  Then the laughter stopped.  I think I was already crying before they got there.  I know I was crying as Ford explained to me that Sarah worked at the burger drive-in where he'd gone for dinner while I was away.  He had lost his job, fired when without me to wake him up and get him to work on time, he hadn't shown up.  They were in love.  He'd be sure to find some way to take care of me and our baby, but his life was going to be with Sarah.  I would have to go back to my mother's "tomorrow," but tonight Sarah was going back to her place to pack up her things so she could move in with him.

He walked her to her car and I watched through the window as they hugged and kissed goodbye.  As he stood there watching, she got in her car and tried to start it.  It wouldn't start, which was apparently an occasional problem, because he immediately got in front and started trying to push the old Buick up the driveway.  The slope was too much for him.  He couldn't move it, so he came in and asked me to help him push the car.  Right then, I would have done anything to get Sarah away from me, so I grunted and strained alongside Ford and we got her out on the street, where he could get her rolling downhill, and her car finally started.

I was hurting in my back and legs as I walked back into the apartment.  Then I felt a warm gush between my legs.  When I looked, and saw it was blood, I was scared shitless.  Ford seemed frightened, too.  He ran to a neighbor and phoned for an ambulance.  My red-light-and-siren ride across Amarillo on that stifling hot August day was one of life's more memorable moments.  They wouldn't let Ford go in the ambulance, so he didn't show up at the hospital until after he'd gotten his cousin to pick him up and take him there.

They stuck me in bed, cranked up the foot of it, and gave me a shot of DES to halt my contractions.  I phoned my mother, and the next day when I got out of the hospital Bill was there to get me.  He had picked up my clothes and stuff from the apartment so I never had to go back there.  I moved into the room that had been Bee's before I'd moved out -- no more bed in the living room for me.  Bee was to stay in San Angelo indefinitely, but the downside of that was that she had made my dog Button her own, and he was gone.  Mama seemed happy to have me "home" again.  I interpreted that as triumph, her having been proven to have been right all along, and I see no reason now to doubt that interpretation.

...more to come, of course.

Two summers ago, after our old computer died and the one rosabelle gave me to replace it was damaged in shipping and had to be rebuilt, I spent a lot of time sitting on the edge of the cul de sac, watching tadpoles turn into frogs.  Eleven weeks, during which we had no computer, part of which time we were without a PS2 as well, twice a day or more, I'd park my butt in the dirt at the amphibian observation point where four-wheelers and snowmachines had dug holes in their attempts to climb out of the muskeg and onto the road.  The depth of water, absence of vegetation, and proximity to the road, made it a good place to watch the tadpoles, several species of aquatic insects, and occasional birds that came to prey on them.

The conditions that made my amphibian watching possible had not occurred previously during the nine years we have lived here next to the marsh, and have not been repeated since.  The winter of 2005 had brought heavy snows, and frequent rains during breakup increased the runoff and flooded the muskeg.  (above, April 29, 2005 - below, May, 2005)

What usually happens is that the marsh has shallow standing water during the thaw, and dries up as summer progresses.  It was still muddy at freezeup in 2005, and a few new little frogs even crossed the road into our yard that fall.  Without much snow the following winter, and very sparse runoff in breakup of 2006, the frogs' spring mating songs were stilled almost as soon as they started.  The muskeg was dry that summer until the local flood in August, by which time it was too late for frogs. (below, Aug., 2006)

MORE PICS FROM THAT TIME

At freezeup in 2006, the ice sheet extended right up to the edge of the road  The muskeg apparently never froze completely that winter, but went on soaking into the ground after the surface was frozen over.  This year at breakup there were several inches of ice extending across the entire open area you can see in the photo above, resting on the high spots, suspended over a shallow pond underneath.

BLOG ENTRY HERE

There was enough water this year to wake the little wood frogs (Rana sylvatica, grenouille des bois) that hibernate beneath the frozen ground, above the permafrost.  Researchers at University of Alaska in Fairbanks have found that they can survive frozen for at least five years.  For over a week during  breakup this year, their chorus of chirps was the prevalent sound out there throughout the mornings and evenings.  What remained from the previous autumn's floodwaters lasted long enough for them to mate...

...and lay eggs,

before the muskeg dried up.  I watched the deep puddle by the cul de sac as the water level receded and more eggs were exposed.  I hoped for heavy rains to save the frogspawn, and even carried a few bucketfuls of springwater out there until I realized the futility of watering the swamp.  On the last day that I dumped a bucketful of water into the deepest puddle, I scooped some of the eggs from a shallower, already dry, nearby puddle and carried them home in the bucket.

That day, as I was looking around for a suitable home for the polliwogs, I stuck my head in the door and asked Doug, who was online at the time, what tadpoles eat.  He did a web search, then came out and told me they apparently live on algae.  For a while, I kept extra buckets sitting around open in which to grow algae, but that proved unnecessary.  Algae grow on the sides of the kitty litter pans where the tadpoles live, and on the rocks I placed in the pans to stabilize them, faster than the tadpoles can suck them up.  For a while, I had tadpoles growing in three containers, but very early on the water in one of them turned inky black and opaque overnight, and everything in that container died.  That gave me some anxious weeks until it became apparent that the ecosystems in the other containers were stable.

I go out there several times a day to check on them.  I don't have aerators or filters for their water.  When it turns brown from their excretions or green from algal overgrowth, I dip some of it out and replace it with clean spring water, poured onto the rocks from high overhead to aerate it.  I'm careful to avoid scooping up tadpoles with my skimmer, but there was one that rode all the way to the garden in the watering can before I noticed it and took it back to the ranch.  The perennial plants I brought this spring from our old home across the highway:  rhubarb, hardy onions from Japan, chives, Siberian strawberries, Shasta daisies, and giant dandelions from Holland, are thriving on the frogwater. 

When it rains, I cover the pans with big translucent lids to prevent washouts.  I have set the pans slightly aslant, with containers under their low corners to catch any overflow.  A couple of times rain came while I was asleep and I found tadpoles swimming in the overflow containers and returned them to their colonies.

Tadpole Ranch has become my favorite place to spend time.  On a sunny day last week, after doing the routine maintenance and watering the rhubarb, I sat down on a bucket as I often do and just watched the tadpoles.  One of my most delightful discoveries is the air bubble each one carries in its belly.  I have yet to get a picture of one, because they turn belly up only very briefly when they come to the surface to exhale and suck down a new air supply.  Visible through the thin membranes surrounding their bodies, the air sacs make iridescent flashes in the sun and their mouths make tiny round holes in the surface of the water as they gulp air.

One mystery that Doug and I have discussed is the broad variance in their sizes.  They all hatched near the same time and were fairly uniform in size until relatively recently.  Now we have a few super jumbo tadpoles, a lot of smallish medium sized ones, and some that don't appear to have grown much at all since they were hatched.  They are too tiny for me to be able to compare their development, so I don't know whether the little guys are developing more slowly or just not growing as large as the big ones.  I am waiting to see whether I get frogs of varying sizes at about the same time, or frogs all near the same size at different times.

That hot day last week, with the fragrance of frogs in my nose and the heat of the sun on my back, I had a vivid recollection of a day with my parents in a small boat on a slough of the San Joaquin River, about 1949 or 1950.  Then I remembered eating frog legs from the frogs speared by my father.  They were big California bullfrogs.  These tiny Alaska wood frogs aren't for eating.  If the tadpoles survive this summer in the kitty litter pans, and become frogs, I'll return them to the muskeg before freezeup even if I have to water a small portion of it to make a hospitable home for them there.

The entire sequence of this year's frog photos is in my Frogspawn album.

You are White Chocolate

You are White Chocolate You are sweet, caring, and truly very innocent. Whether your naive ways are a bit of act or not, people like to take care of you. You are a quiet flirt, and your power is often underestimated!

Hmmm....  I suppose some people like to take care of me.  It's lucky for me that they do, even though I'd prefer being able to take care of myself.  There are quite a few similar situations in my life, where I'm happy to have what I need even though it isn't exactly what I want.

As for being innocent or naive, for the longest time in my life I didn't see any value in that.  When younger, I found it embarrassing whenever my inexperience, or my tendency to dense literal-mindedness, was exposed.  Then the fascinating half-Rom, half gadjo, Jovano, changed my way of thinking.  He walked into my life at a time when I had just begun to teach some techniques for psychic exploration and development, and taught me even more.

Jovano had ways of sizing people up, evaluating their personalities, power levels and alignments.  I registered high on his power scale, high enough, he said, to have drawn some dangerous attention from the "dragons," if I hadn't been so naive.  My innocence kept me below their radar, Jovano said.  For a while after that, I felt some occasional mild anxiety that by having clued me in Jovano had dispelled my ignorance to a dangerous degree.

I have since realized that ignorance and innocence are two different things.  I can work as diligently as I might (and I do) to eradicate my ignorance, without affecting my innocence.  Since ignorance is relative, and the Cosmos is infinite, I can diminish it with effort, but will never entirely get rid of it.  Innocence is an attitude, a state of mind.  It is that outlook that impels me to identify myself as the bastard child of Pollyanna and Candide.  I could shift that attitude to cynicism or pessimism at will, but that would be stupid.  Learning to be unflinchingly innocent is one of my major accomplishments.

Having established what innocence is, I now must ask, "What is 'purity'?  Having found the test below on some other Xangan's blog, I inferred that the test's creator was referring to sexual inexperience:  not just virginity in its strictest sense, but one's degree of relative "purity" or lack of first-hand knowledge of several forms of sexual activity.  Scoring seems counterintuitive for me.  Since the scale measures the absence of something, low numbers indicate more experience of whatever a given category is evaluating.  

Since nobody else in my demographic has taken the test, all I have for
comparison with my scores is the universe of all ages, races, sexes and sexual
orientations who have taken it.  Across the map, I'm less "pure" and more experienced than the average Joe or Jane, but where I really excel is in the area of "straight" heterosexual happy humpin'.  I'd dearly love to be able to feel pride in that accomplishment, but that test is so poorly designed, and its author's judgments and preconceptions are so glaringly obvious, that I feel that my purity is just the slightest bit tainted for my having taken it.

You scored as  Lara Croft, A thrill-seeking, slightly unscrupulous, tough-as-nails archaeologist, Lara Croft travels the world in search of ancient relics perhaps better left hidden. She packs two Colt .45s and has no fear of jumping off buildings, exploring creepy tombs, or taking on evil meglomaniacs bent on world domination.

Yeah, okay... another silly one here.  I'm posting it only because it's a cool picture of Angelina and the table shows that I was almost El Zorro.  If it hadn't been for the alcohol, I'd have been Cap'n Jack Sparrow, I'm certain.  Not that I'd want to be him, but wouldn't mind being with him.

Coming soon:  The Fragrance of Frogs.

I'm peachy.

Yesterday I was looking for a word to express a feeling I have had from time to time, of longing for a place or places that I haven't been before, or at least have never called, "home."  Just about the only thing I knew was that "homesickness" (which I experienced often, with great poignancy, in my childhood), although it expresses a similar feeling, wasn't the word I was seeking.

Scriveling had a word from Welsh:  "hiraeth."  I looked it up.  It definitely covers that feeling I  have for bagpipes, William Wallace, Robert Burns, and other people and things associated with Scotland, the homeland of many of my ancestors, which I have never seen in this lifetime.  Wales exerts the same strong pull on its expatriates and their descendants.  This I can understand.  While I was reading Sharon Kay Penman's series of historical novels about Llewellen ap Gwynnedd, I caught a heavy case of hiraeth for Wales.

Googling, "hiraeth," took me on a journey through many cultures and languages.  I will hit a few of the highlights here for you.

"Saudade," is a Portuguese word with which I am familiar from bossa nova, fado, and Cape Verdean morna songs, but I never really knew the depth of feeling it expresses.