August 26, 2009

• “…nothing like being a hyperactive invalid!”

  Greyfox, my beloved Old Fart, said those words to me last Saturday.  He might think of me as an invalid.  I never had thought of myself as an invalid before.  Now that I’ve looked up the word — “someone who is incapacitated by a chronic illness or injury” — if we stipulate that the incapacity is relative, I’ll have to accept the label.  The label is easier to take than the incapacity, and I must admit that my physical capacity has diminished over the decades.

  I have never thought of myself as hyperactive, either.  Frequently ill or incapacitated since infancy, I didn’t walk until I was two years old and spent much of my life in bed or on a couch.  In the supermarket, I ride the crip cart, and my doctor and the state of Alaska consider me qualified to park in handicapped spaces.  As soon as I heard the term, “couch potato,” I knew it fit me.  But I also dance when I can, make trips to the spring and help Doug get water whenever we need it, go up a ladder to work on the roof when necessary, and take as many short walks, with or without my camera, as I can manage.  After rearing a kid with ADHD, that does not seem hyper to me.  What I have, in my far from humble opinion, is ADD without the hyperactivity.

  Here’s how Greyfox came to call me, “a hyperactive invalid”:

    Last week, on walks out to the rhubarb patch to mind what I somewhat grandiosely call my garden, I had noticed a few small yellow fungi growing beside the path.  Saturday, while tending the rhubarb, I noticed some brilliant red leaves on one of them, and returned to the house for my camera.  I took what was supposed to be a short trip out to get some photos of the yellow fungi and red rhubarb leaves, leaving my headset phone in the house.

  When I turned on my camera, I noticed that the battery was low, so I turned around and went back to the house for a spare set of batteries.  As I was digging around in the clutter looking for them, the phone rang.   My headset phone was lying there because I hadn’t clipped it on me.  I grabbed it and answered.  Greyfox was saying something to me when he was interrupted by the arrival of a customer.  He said he’d call me back, so I clipped on the phone and went back out to take my photos.

  I was pretty wobbly and shaky that morning.  I stopped on the way to the rhubarb patch to get some pictures of puffballs before continuing on to the little yellow ‘shrooms.  Bending to see my shot in the LC display, I keeled over.  I had promised myself and the guys not to lie down on the forest floor and inhale moss and mushroom spores any more.  That was what started the triple whammy of lung ailments that put me in the hospital two years ago:  atypical fungal pneumonia, followed by influenza, topped off with a colds virus.

  I picked myself up off the ground and decided to just reach down with the camera and catch some shots, and then check the display to see if they were any good.  Reaching down with the camera, I fumbled it.  That is not a good thing to do with the lens cap off.  I knelt to pick up the camera, and just about that time, the battery went dead and it shut down.  Kneeling there, short of breath and trembling, wasn’t a comfortable position for changing batteries, so I resigned myself to a wet butt (it had rained during the night) and sat down.

    I had fumbled the new set of batteries out of my pocket and was removing the dead ones from the camera when my phone rang.  I pressed the button to take the call and went on changing the batteries while Greyfox finished telling me what he had been saying when he’d been interrupted.  When he paused and I knew it was my turn to talk, I told him I was sitting on the ground changing batteries.  I mentioned having fallen over once, and fumbling the camera.  I said I intended to sit there a while and catch my breath.

     He told me to do that and then get back in the house and take care of myself.  I said I surely would sit there a while, catch my breath, and, since I was down there already, get some decent shots of those small yellow mushrooms. 

  Then, I said, I intended to walk on out to the rhubarb patch and get the shots I’d come out there to get, and on out to the road and around that way to the driveway, getting some pictures of fireweed fluff on the way.  That was when he sighed heavily and made the, “hyperactive invalid,” crack.

  On my way to the rhubarb patch, I noticed many ripe bunchberries and lowbush cranberries.  While I was photographing them, I ate some.

  I also noticed a lot of fall color in the understory.  The plant on the left here is wild Spirea.

  I got my fireweed fluff shots (all the way down, left and right), and headed on toward home.  As I came up the driveway, I could see that my car was swarming with bees, butterflies and iridescent blue and green flies.

  The defenseless flies and butterflies took off at my approach, but the bees stayed on, lapping up splatters of “honeydew” produced by the aphids that are everywhere this summer, up in trees as well as infesting fireweed and other wild and domestic plants.

  

  • 8:07 pm
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