A few times in the past 9 days, I wasn't sure I'd survive this virus, and was even less sure I wanted to.  I had been recovering from a virus (same one?  maybe) before my harrowing adventure ten days ago.  It had gotten to where I could breathe on my own and move around without going all woozy and wobbly.  The morning after that wild drive home on icy roads in blowing snow, I woke feeling poleaxed:  repeatedly and enthusiastically poleaxed by a sadistic crew of indefatigable torturers.  The adrenaline that had sustained me on the trip was gone and my glands couldn't seem to find the raw materials to produce any more.

I spent a week in abject physical misery, needing bronchodilators before and after even the slightest activity, including coughing and laughter.  I was too sick to have any emotional affect.  Feeling anything would have taken more energy than I had.  Then, a couple of days ago, I noticed some encouraging signs of recovery:  annoyance, irritation, impatience, and snark.  My dog put his head in my lap and gazed into my eyes with concern as I struggled wheezily to stand, and for an instant I felt like punching him in that big wet black nose.

A lifetime ago, back when my great-grand-children's grandmother was in kindergarten, I worked in hospitals, training as a nurse.  One of the interesting facts I learned was that when a patient progresses from silent misery to crabby irritability, it indicates she's getting better.  I still am unable to do much without sucking on the nebulizer first.  I've been grouchy and unpleasant, but I didn't act on any violent impulses.  I can thank the impaired function for that - it would have taken more energy than I had available.

Today, I can get a full lungful of air, even though it does trigger a coughing fit each time I try.  If I don't grab a dose of bronchodilators before I get up and do something, I might have to stop in the middle for it, and must surely load up on them when the exertion is done, but I'm getting more done.  I still have crabby, snarly impulses, but they're fewer, milder, and laughable.  I try to keep the laughter light, and not trigger asthmatic episodes.  I'm on the mend.

I've gotta write this now, exhausted as I am, while I can still hit these keys, and the memories are fresh.

Ted, the kitten formerly known as Klaxxon, was old enough in October, at six months, to be neutered, but for some reason  Hagee Veterinary Service and Alaska Dog and Puppy Rescue didn't have the usual monthly low cost spay and neuter clinic last month, so we made our appointment for this month's clinic and waited.

We'd had a minor snowfall in mid-October.  It melted, then the weather turned cold and the ground froze hard.  When it started snowing early this week, we knew it would stick.  It wasn't much snow, couple of inches of fluffy stuff.  Then a night and a day of high winds brought trees down on power lines and left the whole upper end of this big valley without power one night.  I was feeling glad afterward, that the wind died down before I was scheduled to make that trip down the valley and across Wasilla to get Ted fixed -- not that he's broken or anything -- maybe you know what I mean.

That little snowfall did stick, in the sense that it's still out there in its frozen form and is quite likely to still be there come next May, but it certainly didn't stay put or stay pristine.  After the wind abated, that snow was rearranged, packed, drifted and mixed with all sorts of debris, mostly bits and pieces of trees.  I'd be challenged right now to find any of it, though.  Yesterday and today it was buried under another foot or so of white shit, as the sourdough types around here like to call it.

Ted had to be restricted from food all last night.  We confined him in the dog crate so none of the other cats would have to fast along with him.  He cried a lot all night, and he wasn't named Klaxxon for nothing.  I had set the alarm for 5 AM, to get to Wasilla by 7, but I needn't have bothered.  Doug had brewed coffee for me by 4:45, 'cause he'd been up since midnight or so (on the night-shift leg of his ever shifting approximately 26-hour wake/sleep cycles) and we'd been conversing after a fashion since about 3.  Since there was coffee, I saw no point in lying abed that extra quarter hour.

It was snowing when we left, but hadn't done much more than just dusting over the paths that had been shoveled late last night.  Snow plows hadn't been around the back roads, but a neighbor had laid down some tracks, so I didn't have to break trail all the way out to the highway through that foot of snow.  Plows had cleared the main road sometime in the night, but with new stuff falling and blowing around when cars passed, the ups and downs and curves of this well-traveled (for this far out of town and this latitude [62°N]) 2-lane "highway" (It's all relative, y'know?)  -- it was challenging in the dark, slick in spots, with enough traffic to keep me blinded by headlights oncoming and in my mirrors.

Getting to the clinic to drop off Ted was a big relief, and the vibe in that busy place, with cars coming and going in the small lot outside, crated dogs and cats piling up on the concrete floor inside, was happy and efficient.  It was evident that they'd done it all before, and that they liked what they were doing.  Pre-dawn on a windy snowy day, and an attentive crew was getting things done without fuss or hassle.  We got our part of the whole parade sorted out, and threaded our way out of the driveway through a steady stream of new arrivals.

The nearest big box store was just opened, and Doug, on foot, followed me as I rode a crip cart up one aisle and down another, finding about two-thirds of the items on my list.  By the time we left there, it was getting light outside.  By the time we found a couple more items and left the next big store, the sun was coming up.  It was daytime for real when we got out of the next supermarket, and a nearby fast food joint was open, so we had lunch.  I ate half my order of fish and chips there, and finished them off just now as I've been writing this.

A little side trip to a thrift shop netted 20-or-so episodes of Upstairs Downstairs (@ 50¢ each) on VHS, a few other movies on tape, a juice glass, 2 small "underliner" plates of sturdy old diner-style china and four or five assorted pasta dishes (or soup plates, depending on where and when one grew up) plus 2 tiny toy astronauts and an incomplete Transformer for Doug, the BIG kid, but the big prize of that visit was a kitchen timer, saving us ten or fifteen bucks and who knows how much more online shopping before we'd finally settle on which to buy... marvelous how these things work out!

Then on our way out to Greyfox's place, we stopped at AIH, Alaska Industrial Hardware, for a big roll of 3" ordinary silver gray duct tape, a small roll of 2" fluorescent green duct tape and a roll of 1" strapping tape, all of a quality unavailable closer to home.  One of the best things about trekking into town is getting more and paying less for it.

We filled Binky's gas tank (he's our "new" '94 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo, named for the famous late polar bear from the Alaska Zoo, just 'cause he's big and white, not because we expect him to munch on any tourists.  Then we met up with Greyfox at his cabin and followed him over to the sports center where he and a bazillion other vendors are setting up for a weekend holiday craft and trade show. 

Doug helped him schlep boxes, and I set up tables, unpacked merchandise... until Greyfox realized he'd left behind in his storage building some essential stock, and that his breakfast had been inadequate.  While he ate, Doug and I hit yet another big box store for a BiiiG box of rolled oats, several small packages of gluten-free spaghetti (oh how I'd love to find gluten-free pasta in economy-size packages) bananas, etc.  Then we rendezvoused with Greyfox at his storage place, cleared out a few boxes of stuff he'd accumulated for us, in the process of which we uncovered the 2 important boxes of knives he'd nearly despaired of finding.

By then, it was time to go fetch our fixed Ted from the clinic out the other end of town.  Traffic heading our way was fairly heavy, probably swelled by a lot of Valley folk headed to town to party, it being Friday evening.  Coming toward us from the Anchorage direction, it was 2 lanes nearly bumper-to-bumper, prompting Doug to utter an awed, "Wow," 'cause he's not had occasion to view that phenomenon before.  By the time the stream of weekend refugees from the city reach our end of the valley, it's thin and attenuated.  I confessed to him that I was forcing myself to relax and stay focused on the goal, when what my instincts were urging me to do was scream, get off that blasted highway out of that traffic and closer to nature -- IMMEDIATELY!  But, Ted awaited retrieval.

One more stop back at the same big box store we'd wandered through almost alone at the crack of dawn, for a package of absorbent pads for Ted's convalescent crate, then on across Wasilla for a final visit to Greyfox to get the rest of the things he'd forgotten to unload on us the other times, and we were on the road up the valley.  And this is where my story starts -- heh, I'll bet you thought it was almost over, eh?

Snow had been falling all day, a little bit here, little more there, big wet flakes followed by little dry ones, blowing around on the road, piling up along the center line... the usual.  From Wasilla out to Houston, it was mostly kinda slushy, catching the tires if one strayed out of the tracks laid down by previous travelers.  By the time we'd passed through Willow, it was frozen, slick, icy with patches of black ice.  Between Kashwitna Lake and Sheep Creek, the only way I could maintain traction consistently was to decelerate, and that's a self-limiting tactic.  Even keeping a steady speed on a straight course, my rear wheels would spin or I'd fishtail a little due to those incessant tiny steering corrections that are one of the prices paid for power steering.  Any acceleration would spin the wheels and threaten a skid, but accelerate one must if one wants to travel, and I did want to get home, so I made my wheel-spinning, fish-tailing way on up the valley. 

Doug, having worked hard after being up 20-some hours, dozed off holding Ted's crate on his lap.  After we got home, he told me that every time he woke on that ride, I'd given him a moment of terror and a jolt of adrenaline.  I can relate.  I was there through it all, keeping the shiny side up and the greasy side down.  Vehicles with more traction, better tires, 4-wheel drive and such, had been passing me, and I'd pulled over a few times to get the blinding following lights out of my mirrors.  I pulled into the parking lot at Sheep Creek Lodge and discovered that it hadn't been plowed.  I bogged down in the deep snow trying to get out onto the highway again, had to back up and slew around a few times, with ditches yawning on both sides of that snow-choked driveway, before I got back onto the plowed pavement.

When I slowed down for our turn-off, I skidded past the first exit, went on half a mile or so and took the roundabout road that comes out on our road from the other direction.  Somebody had been through with a blade mounted on a truck, leaving one clear lane, but the big plow still hasn't been through.  On my second attempt, I got through the berm and far enough into my driveway that I'm fairly confident that the plow will leave Binky unscathed when it passes. 

The house was still warm:  50°F, but the fire had gone out.  My first task was to get the fire going.  Then I phoned Greyfox to let him know we'd gotten home safely.  Doug unloaded most perishable and frozen foods, partially prepared the big dog crate for Ted's convalescence, then muttered something about sleep and fell into bed.  I made a few trips out to the car, brought in things that might be adversely affected by freezing, found my fish and chips and sat down here to finish them and the last cup of coffee that was left in the carafe from this morning.  Now, I think I'll go finish preparing Ted's convalescent crate, get him out of his carrier, and tucked into the crate, then it will be my turn to fall into bed, but since I sleep in the top bunk it won't be as easy for me as it was for Doug.

BTW:  we got 2 surgeries for the price of one today.  When we collected Ted, we learned that he'd had one retained testicle, so he has two incisions - one in his scrotum, another in the inguinal area.  I can't adequately express my appreciation and gratitude for the low cost clinic and the expert crew that does so much for so many (about fifty dogs and cats spayed and neutered today) and apparently enjoy doing it, saving each of our families hundreds of dollars in the process.  Good job, guys!

As a wee girl, I was conditioned very early to love birthdays, even though I almost always got sick from overindulgence in cake and ice cream.  Eating 'til I puked was a common occurrence in my childhood.  I hated throwing up, and never learned to like it any better, but even so, my memories of early birthdays are mostly happy.

All that changed when I was raped, rejected and thrown out on my sixteenth birthday.  I've been raped three times in my life, two of them on birthdays.  Seven years after the first I lived through a violent gang rape by outlaw bikers on my twenty-third birthday.  After that, all my birthdays have been better.

The pattern of eating myself sick continued into my fifties, with several attempts to kick the sugar addiction.  I've had more success at that since I learned that wheat was also an addiction.  Poly-addictions reinforce each other, y'know?  Kicking wheat gluten and dairy casein has made it easier to abstain from sugar, too, but I can still taste, in memory, that chocolate cake batter I scraped out of the mixing bowl 64 years ago.

My friends and I are a diverse bunch.  Labels that have been stuck on some of us include sociopath, pervert, leech, whore, heretic, robber, fraud, rapist, killer, junkie, and traitor--and that's all in this current lifetime.   We've been called other things, too - names like hero, genius, paragon and mentor.  Some of us have been declared sick, with diagnoses all over the map:  dissociative identity disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, narcissistic personality disorder, schizotypal, bipolar... the list goes on and on.  We've called each other such things, too.  Which person gets what label usually depends more on who's calling the names than on the one being labeled.

With friends like this, who needs enemies?  I certainly don't, which is why I don't have any.  Maybe there are some people who consider me their enemy and who feel enmity toward me, but I feel enmity toward nobody: stranger, neighbor, acquaintance or family member.  I can't say that everyone in the world is my friend, because it would be a big semantic faux pas and social gaffe to impose friendship on a total stranger, but my acquaintances, in real life and online, become friends very quickly, often before they even know it. 

It has not always been this way with me.  It's a relatively recent development.  I was an only child who had difficulty making friends.  As recently as the turn of the millennium or even a bit later, I was ready to lay judgments on attitudes and behaviors I disapproved, such as racism and spousal abuse, and hatch a brood of enmity.  It was the way I'd been taught and acculturated.  However, I never felt comfortable that way, so I quit.

Another change in my attitudes developed along with that one.  I stopped trusting people.  Trust was my default setting, probably because my parents loved me.  I'd trust someone until they did something that caused me pain or loss, then I'd feel betrayed.  I got a lot of disappointment out of that mindset.  Then I heard some wise words that led me to rethink the whole idea of trust:  "No expectations, no disappointments."  Trust is an expectation.  The type of expectations vary case by case and from person to person, but trust always involves some kind of expectation.  Never having liked to be disappointed, it just made sense to stop setting myself up for it.

You might think that giving up trusting people would mean I'd become more suspicious and wary, but it is just the opposite.  For example, since I deliberately avoid trusting anyone, I don't think about whether a hitchhiker along the road might be trustworthy.  I just stop and pick him up.

I have not perfected this new attitude.  Humans seem hardwired to think that repetitive patterns will go on repeating indefinitely.  In most cases, it works out that way, and it would be very hard to get around in the world without, for example, the expectation that a yellow traffic light is on its way to red.  On the other hand, not expecting other drivers on the road to stop when the light is yellow can be a life saver.

I've been focusing primarily on human behavior, and particularly on my friends and family, in my efforts to live in the now without expectations.   I more or less expect politicians to lie and paramedics to show up if I call 911, and I can forgive myself for that.  I don't expect my friends not to lie or my family to remember my birthday, so whatever they actually do, there will be nothing for me to need to forgive.  And, of course, I don't expect my friendship, or my lack of expectations, to be reciprocated.

This would not, of course, work for everyone.  I can get away with it because I am neither an employer nor an employee, not wealthy or in a position of power.  I don't need to be able to trust people to guard my body or safeguard my valuables, because I own very little of any monetary value and can handle my own personal security.  I live outside society, in a place where there's more real danger from bears or moose than from humans, and I am armed.  I am, in other words, at liberty to live without trust.

...but I needed to look up the word, to make sure.

"Adjective: Bad-tempered and sulky; moodily cross."

Nope, not me.  I'm irritable, sarcastic, and a wee bit cynical today -- ill, but not ill-tempered.

Yesterday, on my way down the ladder from the roof to go to the outhouse, I was struck by severe localized abdominal pain.  When I'd gone a few steps from the base of the ladder, I started belching and burping an insane, outrageous volume of gas.

Bent over and holding onto my hurting belly, I gimped to the outhouse, then back around the house to tell my son, Doug, I wasn't going to get any more roof work done.  (Each time I mention the outhouse, I wonder how many, if any, of my readers are just now learning for the first time that I don't have indoor plumbing.)

I had been up top, cutting ropes to size, attaching them to grommets for Doug to tie down below, taping the seam between tarps, and reinforcing (with tape) the mastic seals around the seven holes we'd had to cut for vents, stovepipe, etc.  Roof repairs were almost finished, the sun was shining, and until that pain hit me I was thinking we'd have it all done by end of day.

Ordinarily, a brief search of one or more of half a dozen good diagnostic websites would have told me that I was passing a gallstone, but all afternoon yesterday, each time our modem tried to dial up the web, it elicited an error message saying the line was busy.  Tech support said someone was out here checking the lines and they'd call us when the co-op was back online.

Meanwhile, I sat hunched over in a chair, searching through my medical library, feeling, along with the grave discomfort, a lot of gratitude for these books I seldom use any more.

The pain passed, presumably along with a gallstone, but I felt as if I'd taken a beating.  I could barely walk.  I hurt all over, was burning up with fever, wracked with intermittent chills... Hallelujah!  At last some symptoms I can identify without a reference book:  autoimmune flareup, fibromyalgia, the same old same old. 

I rustled up a cold meal (plain potato chips and Greek yogurt for the protein, fat and carbs, with a handful of pills for the vitamins and minerals) and stretched out on the couch for some video diversion (old VHS of Voyager episodes I'd never seen [haven't had TV for most of my life] including the one where they picked up Seven of Nine).

After my evening conversation with Greyfox, my husband (not estranged, but we don't live together -- think "bi-coastal couple" on a smaller scale, at 2 ends of a big subarctic valley) I crawled onto my top bunk and Doug fetched me a late snack (leftover fried chicken) and stood by to help me defend it from marauding cats.

When I woke today, I lay there a while wondering why I felt so wretched.  Then I remembered that I'd gone to bed feeling that way.

We must go to the spring for water today.  We are out of "drinking" water and to make coffee this morning I had to dip into one of the buckets usually reserved for the washing-up grade of water.  It's all the same water from the same source, it's just the containers that are different, but anyhow.... 

For those who might not know what a "water run" entails, it means loading empty jugs and buckets into the hatch of the jeep -- a process complicated by a broken hatch latch, so that we have to get a ratchet from the glove box to remove the screws that hold on the cover over the latch mechanism, before we can open the hatch.  Then we screw it all together for the 2-mile drive to the spring, unscrew it again down there, carry empty jugs and buckets down a mercifully short but perilously steep path to the spring, fill them, haul them back up, load them into the jeep, drive home, unload (with the help of that little ratchet again -- but even a defective jeep is better than no vehicle of my own!) and carry them up a mercifully level but tediously long driveway and into the house.

Doug's not out of bed yet, and we've got about eight more hours of daylight, so I'm not in a hurry to get into gear here.  Today it is raining, and that's not my favorite weather for doing a water run, but it is heaps and tons preferable to how it will be in a few months:  life-threateningly cold and hazardously slick.

I'm not complaining.  I could, if I desired, trade in my relative peace and solitude, the clean air I breathe and the clean water from that spring, for the relative convenience of polluted and chemically treated water from a tap in a place that is much noisier and not nearly so beautiful.  I'd swap city crowds and civilized bullshit any day for what I have.  Not complainin', just sayin'... not grumpy, just tired and ill.

The surgery was successful, and that's putting it mildly.  My spouse, soulmate and partner in crime, #ArmsMerchant is seeing better than he ever did in his entire life.  He had been legally blind probably from birth and definitely since his first school days, with severe myopia and astigmatism.  He wore strong corrective lenses since childhood, and as the cataracts developed over the past seven years or so, the eyesight he had was diminishing.  Now, the cataracts are gone, replaced by implants that give him near-normal vision for the first time.

This made the trip worthwhile (more understatement) although an unpleasant hotel stay took some of the luster off the surgical success.  Greyfox already posted about it HERE, so I'll spare you some of the details.  The only thing I really want to add to what he wrote is that the Hampton Inn fails to live up to its advertising and the general run of its price-range (Yeah, I know: "surprise, surprise" right? :-/ ) in more ways than I can list.  A few:  the "hot breakfast" might satisfy Homer Simpson, but it's gonna gag any gourmet; the "business center" is a closet containing 2 laptops, a non-functioning printer, and 2 swivel chairs that bang into each other if anybody swivels a few degrees in one; in-room phones malfunction; desk personnel pay lip service to the chain's "warm and friendly" policy, but dispense misinformation along with key cards that don't open the room. 

The warm-and-friendly bullshit was perhaps the worst part of the entire experience.  Individual employees' interpretations of it ranged from highly inappropriate personal revelations and questions from a female server in the breakfast lobby, to multiple shouted inquiries from various men behind the front desk about what kind of day I was having when all I was doing was minding my own business and going from point a to point b.  Hampton Inn's pretensions cannot hide the fact that it was constructed on the cheap and is staffed cheaper still.  End of rant.

Aside from sharing in Greyfox's life-changing experience, for me personally the best parts of the trip were my visits to New Sagaya and The Natural Pantry.  Both are, generically speaking, grocery stores, but like nothing available to me out here in the Valley, and I've missed both businesses ever since I moved from Anchorage in 1983.  Sagaya was an Asian specialty grocery that long ago outgrew it's original space and expanded its inventory.   Except for the "Asian" part, the same is true for Natural Pantry.  When I first shopped there it was a small and cramped space, but crammed with all sorts of natural and organic foods.  It hasn't lost that cramped feeling, still has narrow aisles and high shelves, even though it's now in a big space that once housed a Safeway supermarket.

My big score from those shopping trips was 100 pounds of gluten free flour: 25 lbs. each, of  brown rice, sorghum, garbanzo, and Bob's Red Mill All-Purpose Baking Flour.  I had been running low on alternative flour, and was facing the expensive prospect of ordering online and spending more for shipping than I did for the flour.  Buying it there and hauling it home from Anchorage saved me about $200.  The only downside is that now I keep having these head trips about things I can bake, and I've got to get the leaky roof fixed before I get involved in any other time-consuming work-intensive projects.

I knew immediately what I was stressing over:  the upcoming 3-day trip to Anchorage.  Where did I get my first clue that I was stressing?  I still had two bites left of the banana in my right hand when I scooped up half a dozen blueberries in my left.  A glance at the half-naked bunch of grapes in the glass bowl by the mouse pad confirmed my suspicion.

For me, under the circumstances, stress is understandable.  Anchorage is the anteroom of Hell.  I dislike all cities.  The bigger they are, the harder they are to tolerate.  It isn't just the pollution and traffic, although those are unpleasant.  The worst part for me is the psychic cacophony.  Out  here at home on the edge of the fringe of the back of beyond, I feel it when neighbors are intensely distressed, frightened, anxious or angry, but these are like bubbles or beacons, discrete and identifiable.

In a city I'm overloaded with input.  Some of it might even be important.  I don't want to block it out.  I value all my senses.  It is the stress I could do without.  People tell me stress is "natural" or "normal" or "human" or something like that.  It's also contra-survival and counterproductive.  It floods my brain and body with chemicals that disturb my already ragged sleep and further age a body that can no longer be called premature.  Stress distracts my attention and keeps me from handling at peak efficiency the things over which I'm stressing.

These things aren't just the incidental accompaniments of any trip to the city.  This time, I'm taking Greyfox in for eye surgery.  Our first afternoon in town, he will have a stage 4 cataract removed from his right eye.  Then, we stay overnight in a hotel.  Next day, he has a morning followup appointment on that operation, and surgery to remove the stage 1 cataract in his left eye.  Then there's another hotel night, checkout, and a morning appointment for followup.  Then I drive him home and hit the laundromat while I'm in Wasilla, before heading back up the valley and home.

He is anxious over the surgery, has told me over and over about the video he was shown in the surgery center, with an animated needle entering a cartoon eye, and his mental and physical recoil from the images.  He's also feeling hopeful, looking forward to being able to see better.  We're attuned.  I'm sharing these feelings and experiences with him.  I need to be able to function well for the driving and all, and to be supportive of my soulmate.  I can't afford to stress.

It would be so easy to stress out over getting stressed, and to beat myself up over the stress eating.  Where's the benefit in that?  I think I'll just move this bag of potato chips out of easy reach, and start thinking about what I want to take with me -- bubble bath, certainly, 'cause I haven't had a tub to bathe in for ever so long.  I'll occupy myself with packing a bag and preparing for the trip, while I stay in the present and let the future weave itself as it will.

Taking a shower might not seem like much of an accomplishment, but in this case it seems great to me.  After you've read my story, it might make an impression on you, too.  I'm not saying it will make a good impression, just that it might have some impact.

The story starts with dirty laundry -- not a metaphor for shameful secrets, simply a big pile of soiled clothing and linens.  I had been ill for several years.  A few times I was able to make a trip to the laundromat with a few loads, and a few times Greyfox took a few loads to the laundromat for me.  The washer and dryer that were in this trailer when we moved in here are no more than unhandy non-standard storage areas in the absence of running water.  The heating unit in the dryer didn't heat anyhow, and I unplugged it to prevent accidental tumbling when I started using the drum to store collectable china.

Greyfox hates doing laundry - hates it vocally, volubly, emphatically and with loud profanity.  He prefers dumpster diving, so over those years when I was unable to wash my own old clothes, he would bring me other people's old clothes that he had dug out of dumpsters or bought from the tables and bins of stained and damaged things sold for a dime or a quarter each at local thrift stores.  He told me a story once about the owner of one of the thrift stores pointing out to him that the sweat pants he was buying for me had some big holes in them.  He answered her, "That's okay, my wife is pretty beat up, herself."

Combine that steady intake of new old clothes with my parental programming not to waste things, and you get an ever-growing pile of dirty clothes.  I threw away a few things, but they were mostly Doug's clothes.  He wears his things much longer between changes than I do, and I have come to learn what will wash out and what will not.  Occasionally, I would, with sad resignation, toss out one of his stiff odoriferous garments, or one of mine that didn't seem to be worth repairing and/or washing.  Usually, I just tossed them all on the pile... the pile that was growing in the bathtub-shower enclosure.

When we first moved in here, I showered frequently in that tub.  There was never running water.  This trailer was manufactured with all the usual plumbing, and the landowner had a well and pump installed, but a previous set of house sitters had abandoned the place during a winter power outage and fled to the light and warmth of town.  Things froze and burst here:  pipes, the toilet tank, the water heater....  The owner had pitched them out into the yard and had not replaced them by the time we moved in.  The costs, in money and sweat, it would take to get them all fixed is beyond my capacity, especially since the well would need to be drilled a few hundred feet deeper to get down to clean water, uncontaminated by groundwater.

When I showered back there, I used a plastic Sun Shower bag, designed for camping.  In summer I could hang it out in the sun to heat with solar energy, but for most of the year I heated water in a teakettle.  I'd climb onto the rim of the tub to hang the bag on a hook I fabricated from a wire coat hanger, attached to the bracket that once, I assume (before I moved in here) held a shower curtain rod.  Then I could luxuriate in an intermittent flow of a gallon or so of water - tricky to wet down, soap up, rinse off, shampoo and rinse before it all ran out, but still preferable to standing on a towel by the wood stove in the living room for a sponge bath.

For years, those sponge baths were all I had, because the pile of dirty clothes in the bathtub just grew deeper.  Last year, by the time I'd recovered sufficiently from my illness to begin pulling things out of there and taking them to the laundromat, the top of the pile was above my head.  I discarded a lot, washed more, and, by the time last November when my car broke down there were only about five or six loads (in the big triple-load machines) left to be washed.  More dirty clothes accumulated through the winter, of course. 

Last month, when Greyfox drove up here for a medical appointment at Sunshine clinic, he drove in the '93 Jeep he had just bought for me.  I had my laundry baskets full, loaded them into Binky the Jeep, and did four big loads that day after I dropped Greyfox off at his place.  This Monday, I did four more big loads of laundry -- the last of our accumulated dirty clothes -- at Wasilla Wash Day, the only laundromat I know of this side of Anchorage with high-speed extractors and, for that reason, my favorite laundromat.  Sunday night, I had loaded the dirty clothes into Binky and took my first shower in years -- three years and seven months since those I took in the hospital.  My mother and Granny would say that I can get just as clean with a sponge bath, I know they would.  For that reason, I seriously doubt their wisdom, their veracity, or both.

Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

It was a new building, unfinished, surrounded by rough gravelly ground.  The company had expanded its facilities upon winning the contract to supply foodstuffs and general merchandise to Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction camps.  There was little talk and always a sense of urgent hurry to load and unload the vans backed up to the docks along the street side of the warehouse, except at break times.  Then everything went quiet and still, except for the voices of the men, joking, insulting each other, and making bets, or noises of joy or disgust, over the ongoing blackjack games in the "break room."

It wasn't a room... wasn't even an alcove.  It was the roof over the rest room, tucked in behind the drive-in freezer and refrigerator next to the partitioned-off office area that took up a small portion of the northwest corner of the warehouse.  Access was a set of unpainted open stairs up the side of the rest room, and accommodations up there included a table and a few chairs.  I went up there once before I learned by observation that it was the exclusive domain of an elite clique of warehousemen, including the shift foreman and shop steward.  Everyone else took breaks sitting on the machinery or the merchandise.

I developed the habit of grabbing a cup of coffee and going back to my corner of the warehouse, propping a butt cheek on whatever pallet-load of boxes was a comfortable height for me.  Most of my time was spent in that northeast corner of the warehouse, at the end of the row of electrical outlets along the north wall, where pallet jacks were plugged in for recharging.  "Recouping", I learned, meant cleaning up the men's messes.

If a pallet was overturned or dropped, or rammed into a wall or the upright on one of the big racks, or if somebody had his forks a bit too high and ran them through the boxes instead of the pallet, damaged cases were hauled back to my corner and dropped.  Most of that hauling and dropping was done on the swing shift, when there were fewer incoming and outgoing vans, fewer warehousmen on duty, and the janitors could get into the aisles between pallet racks to clean up messes.  Unless a mess was badly obstructing the work of the day shift warehousemen, it would be left where it fell.  Union rules:  warehousemen didn't do janitorial work.

On my first day there, a forklift operator approached me, stopped his machine, and asked if I'd been told that damaged cases of snack foods were to go to the break room.  My instructions had been fairly detailed and explicit:  I was to inspect broken cases, remove dented cans, broken jars, etc., repack the undamaged cans and jars, tape the cases shut and mark them to indicate how many were missing.  Dented cans, crushed cracker boxes, and anything else that was unsalable but apparently still edible was to be packed in assorted cases for donation to charities.  Nobody had mentioned taking snacks to the break room.

The guy insisted that this was the usual policy, and went on to say that he really liked Cheez-It Crackers, and if I ever found any of them, I was to bring them to the break room for him.  Not long after that, sure enough, I found a case of Cheez-Its in one of the heaps of damaged cases,  largely undamaged except for a deep dent in one side and a big boot print where someone, presumably the Cheez-It loving forklift operator, had stomped it.  Stomped Cheez-It cases showed up periodically afterward, every few days, as the supply in the break room ran low.  Eventually, a few other guys mentioned to me that they were getting pretty sick of nothing but Cheez-Its, so I diverted a few other kinds of crushed crackers and such from the charity boxes to the break room.

My job title was "recouper and inventory control clerk" but it was hardly a clerical job.  Each shift, before wading into the mess in my corner, I took a clipboard and walked the aisles, noting down the numbers of any empty slots in the pallet racks.  That was inventory control.  Picking up and dropping off my inventory clipboard were the only times I entered the office area.  The two women who worked in the office, a secretary and a receptionist, never entered the warehouse itself.  I was the only woman in that enormous ozone- and testosterone-reeking echo chamber, and from the demeanor of many of the men, I was the first woman they'd ever had to work with.

Some of them obviously resented my presence, and others seemed uncomfortable, inhibited around me.  Once, early on, a man was saying something to another as I approached, his speech liberally laced with the f-word.  As soon as he saw me, he went silent, lowered his eyes, blushed and said, "pardon my language."  I shrugged and replied, "I don't give a fuck what you say around me."  He looked stunned, and I heard a few nervous laughs and one or two hearty guffaws.  Things started loosening up after that.

More about the warehouse, next time.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you'd like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can't afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

People often remark on the quality of my memory.  From my perspective, it's not very good.  I know I have forgotten more than I remember - I can zoom in on some incidents and tell their stories in detail, but those sharply defined times are surrounded by long periods of time with no associated memories.  One thing that helps me remember is the fact that I moved around a lot, and memories are associated with places.  At this point, I come into a period of 23 years during which I lived in the same little trailer, only moving it once in those years.  These times run together and chronology is hard to recall.  Sometimes I'm not sure if something happened before or after we moved the trailer from Rabbit Creek to the Susitna Valley... but that's getting ahead of the story.

Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

I know approximately when I moved into that trailer (an 8' x 35' uninsulated aluminum box built in California in 1953) because Charley wrote a date on the wooden molding beside the door.  Trouble is, it wasn't the date we bought the trailer, nor was it the date I moved in.  I didn't even notice the graffito for some time after he made it.  When I did, some discussion ensued but we could never agree on exactly what the date on the wall commemorated.  He claimed it was the day we bought the trailer, but I knew that wasn't right.  However, that date, September 15, 1975, was within a week or two of the night I moved in.

He was up at Pump 8 on the pipeline, hauling loads of fill and gravel in a big belly dump truck.  I was working at Youth Employment Service in Spenard.  A couple of times I loaded Lucy, the VW bug, with clothes and stuff, drove to work in the morning, then up to the hillside after work, unloaded and went back to Chugiak to reload the car, sleep, and do it all again.  One day in early September, I got up early, loaded up the pile of carpet padding that I used for a bed, and left the duplex clean and empty but for the reason we were compelled to move out:  my five marijuana plants in their 5-gallon buckets.

That evening after work, I drove up to the trailer park, unloaded, removed the back seat from the bug, and headed down and out to Chugiak for that final load.  It was dark and raining by the time I had my plants stuffed into the space behind the car seats, their tops gently bent under Lucy's curving roof.  It was an uneasy drive that rainy night, across Anchorage, with every passing car's lights illuminating my illicit cargo.  The Ravin Decision had legalized private possession within one's home, but did not address the blatantly open haulage of the distinctive foliage.

I continued working at YES, and Charley went on with the routine of 2 weeks on the pipeline job, 1 week off.  When we were home, we spent most of our time working on the trailer.  I hung the 8-foot fluorescent fixture for the pot plants from the ceiling, by chains, along one side of the bedroom, and put the two 4-foot fixtures for my tropical houseplants in the front room.  He put a work bench and shelves in the little 6-foot square lean-to that sheltered the door, and repaired a few holes and gaps that let in the weather.  We blocked, covered and insulated the loosely-fitting back door because it let in too much weather.

The whole time that I had been working at YES, I'd spend coffee breaks around the corner in the adult Job Service office, standing in front of the cork boards where the job listings were posted, looking for a better job.  My hope was to find something in social services, but few positions came open and, despite going out on several interviews, I wasn't hired.  I widened my scope to include clerical work, but found nothing until one day not long after the move, when I saw a job opening for "recouper and inventory control clerk."  I didn't have a clue what kind of work a "recouper" did, but I was willing to give it a try, since the pay was more than double the hourly rate I was getting at YES.

The Job Service clerk who referred me to the interview told me that a recouper recouped damaged merchandise in a warehouse.  The warehouse in question was J. B. Gottstein's, the wholesaler that supplied Carr's supermarket chain as well as all the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction camps.  Uncertain exactly how recouping was done, but confident that I could learn, I emphasized my inventory experience and clerical skills to the clerk and she set up the appointment. 

I must have made a good impression on the exec who interviewed me.  There was no waiting for a call to find out if I was hired.  After showing me around the big echoing steel building busy with men zipping around on pallet jacks and forklifts between tall rows of steel pallet racks, he led me back to his office, talked to me for a couple of minutes and told me to come in at 8 the next morning.

First the brakes, and then the gear box, went out on Charley's belly dump on a long incline with a full load, and he damaged 2 other trucks in passing before bringing it to a stop by ramming it into a roadside bank of dirt.  He was shaken up, banged around, not too seriously hurt, but the belly dump was totaled.  He lost that job and started spending his days seeking work at the union hall or at his "office", the local Denny's restaurant where a lot of building contractors hung out drinking coffee and talking shop.

One evening, he picked me up from work and drove up to our moldy little trailer on the hillside.  The door was open.  My marijuana plants were gone, along with a cookie tin with our stash, and another tin containing pipes, roach clips, papers and such.  Also missing were 35 troy ounces of silver and a box full of cassette tapes. Some of the tapes contained music, but most were tapes I'd made myself, recording Tarot readings, conversation at parties, journal entries and notes for a novel I planned to write.  One, the one I valued most highly, was a past-life reading done for me by Aron Abrahamson. 

Our moldy little trailer had been burgled.  I called the State Troopers.  It didn't take a psychic to recognize the bemusement of the trooper who responded.  He'd never before had anyone complain of having their dope and paraphernalia stolen.  He looked around, took a few notes, told us it was unlikely they'd ever find the person or persons responsible, and left. 

Within a week or so after the burglary, the teen-age son of a neighbor knocked at the door and said his mom told him to come over and apologize to us for her.  His older brother had ripped us off, apparently in the middle of a crime spree that had ultimately landed him in jail.  The boy, Todd, said he didn't know what happened to my tapes, but that his brother had buried the silver on the hill below the trailer court.  He and Charley went down there several times before snow fell, digging up every likely spot, but never found anything.

CONTINUED HERE.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you'd like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can't afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.