The Best Worst Day of my Life

Posted in College, emotions, Humor, Mountain life, Nature, Pets, Survival, Virginia, Weather by Shelley Sackier

You know how you can have like … the best day of your life, and then suddenly the whole world just beams down on you with sunshine and flowers for days and days to follow, and you just bask in that glow?

Yeah, neither do I.

Except for the first part.

My child has finally finished school. The official kind. At least for a little bit. Seventeen years of schlepping to class nearly every day. She’s graduated. She’s now a fully-fledged rocket scientist and has permission from all her teachers to hurl stuff up into space.

I wish I understood what it is that she’s going to be doing. I only know it has to do with the subjugation of Mars, triumphantly wrestling that planet into servitude for us Earthlings who are apparently fed up with this planet and are ready to conquer another one.

Or maybe she just wants to plant flowers and make it less orange. I don’t know.

The point is, is that graduation day was a day where I thought my whole heart would burst with joy. She raced down the aisle, and I sped toward her too. I have never hugged someone so tightly before. I cried. And laughed. And sobbed. And explained to all the thirteen thousand other people around us that my child just graduated from college, in case they were wondering.

Then I went home.

And I brought her cat with me. Just for the summer.

I love this wily, scrappy, reckless cat. Except for when she is wily, scrappy, and reckless.

When she’s sleeping, she’s awesome.

First thing that morning following graduation, I opened the front door to grab a flower pot on the front porch and this streak of jet black fur flew past me and disappeared. I panicked. Like really really panicked. I was in charge of the care of this cat who did not belong to me—the tiny little champion that supported my child’s exhausted soul all through school—and now it had entered the on-location shoot of a National Geographic special about mountaintop birds of prey where she was likely going to be the tasty treat of one vulture shared by seven of his closest friends.

Oh, dear God, where was she?

For two hours I searched outside. Under porches, bushes, behind barrels, and up trees. For two hours my head raced with what I was certain would be the result: my child would ditch her dream of meddling with Mars because her cat died. How could I be responsible for this?

I was defeated. I had to make the call—let her know what had happened and how hard I’d tried.

I opened the front door and suddenly that brazen black streak blasted past me once more—straight into the house and under the first couch she found.

My heart refused to stop hammering against my ribcage for at least a full hour, and my brain could not think of anything apart from “that was too close a call to ever repeat.”

Which is why paying a tax bill directly afterward was a really bad idea.

When one’s body and mind are busy recalibrating its official duties, math does not appear anywhere on the Top Ten Most Important Things list. It’s nowhere close. In fact, it’s so far away, Math doesn’t even know that a Top Ten Most Important Things list is a running concern. Math is out there busy chewing the fat with its neglected neighbors: grouting tile and soap sculpting.

Math did not think to show up and shout, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND DON’T PRESS THAT BUTTON! when I ended up mistakenly paying the IRS the equivalent of Lichtenstein’s GDP for 2017.

I’m pretty sure I heard the smack of a giant facepalm it made though once it heard what I accidentally did.

As it was Sunday, no accountant was going to come to my rescue. The accountant I’d hired to help me with my taxes was very good at math, and she made clear to me that she knew how to count hands on the clock. There were still twelve full hours of Sunday left, plus eight more after that before she was going to answer her phone.

But mine began ringing off the hook suddenly. My cell phone, my house phone, the radio, and my computer all simultaneously began belching out panic signals “Grab your children off their swing sets and flee to the root cellar!” A major storm was barreling down upon us.

Now normally I am quite capable of handling big booming, lightning filled thunderstorms up here on this big hill I perch upon, but this one was determined to be a record breaker—also a tree breaker, a window breaker, and a furniture taker. (That last one was close enough. Move on.)

One by one I saw the heavy iron patio furniture glide right off the deck and tumble across the lawn, the cushions becoming new nesting fodder for a local fox’s den or half of North America’s birds. The lightning strikes—spitting distance away—made my hair stand up on end and left the acrid whiff of soot and cinders. Likely it was the charred fragments of a few desperately needed synaptic connections still struggling for cognitive responsiveness housed within my head.

Hours later after clean up, the windows, doors, and roof leaks, the search and rescue for the outdoor furnishings, the weeping over losing every tomato, green bean, and budding cucumber, I told the hound we were taking a walk. We would breathe deeply, walk swiftly, and cry where no one could see or hear us. I mean me.

He agreed but refused to have more than two boxes of Kleenex strapped to his collar. He’s so fussy, as it hardly added to the five pound whisky keg he already had fastened to that spot.

We walked. It felt good. The rain having plunged the temperature down twenty full degrees. All that deep breathing was finally starting to bring my heart rate down to somewhere around “only mildly concerning.”

Until I heard the fearsome, high-pitched scream of an unholy banshee—or it could have been a baby fawn being stepped on.

And one would remember that very particular sound because believe it or not, I too, have stepped on a fawn.

They hide. Beneath the grasses. Because apparently for a few tedious hours after being born they struggle with actually walking. Damn them.

And the hound had come upon one in his sleuthy, ferretting way. He scared the bejeebies out of both of them simultaneously.

And upon hearing the baby banshee holler, her mother—freshly finished from birthing—came shrieking down the ridge from above us. Barreling her exhausted body like a freight train straight toward her baby’s clueless predators, this doe was sending the message that she had not spent the last umpteen hours pushing out this bag of gangling bones and four sharp hooves for nothing.

Deer are loud.

And fast, and big, and really scary when plowing straight for your head.

She lept from the side of the hill and landed on the driveway where, because of the rain, her hooves skittered right out from beneath her big bloated body, and she slid across the road just like all my heavy iron lawn chairs. Then she scrabbled her footing on the other side and raced back up to the top of the other ridge mirroring the first.

She was prepping for another go around.

I screamed for the hound. And the little banshee squealed. The doe barked or roared or boarked (it’s a weird sound). There was just so much noise.

The second pass from Bambi’s furious guardian was apparently enough to jar the hound out of his muddled state of mind as he hightailed it straight up the hill and out of sight.

Which still left one large angry doe careening down a mountainside with anger and physics on her side. I was the remaining target.

Dumbstruck, I had no plan of action. I had bear spray on my belt loop, but that was about as useful as telling a Mac truck at full speed that he’d better “hold up there, buddy, can’t you see I have some Q-tips in my back pocket?”

She hurtled past me, again leaping and splattering on the driveway to slide straight across it like an ice cube.

I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together three times real fast.

When I opened them, I realized three things:

If I made it home alive, I’d best cloak myself in bubble wrap for the rest of the day.
If I made it home alive, there should be no “rest of the day.” Go to bed.
If I made it home alive, realize that the universe does not like imbalance. For every high there is a low. And taxes. There are always taxes that somehow don’t count on the universe’s balance sheet.

I just really hope there won’t be taxes on Mars. Let’s not forget … I saved a cat that might be vital in allowing that to become a reality. Surely the universe will count that in my favor.

~Shelley

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Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.

23Jun2013

A little night music

Posted in Mountain life, Nature, Nocturnal hours, Summer by Shelley Sackier

Victorian-era Engraving of the Man in the Moon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve not been sleeping well lately. The temporal length of night stretches endlessly, a slow, measured awareness of time. I close my eyes and try to center on my breath, but my active mind is unwavering and demanding.

Many nights I’ve given up the pursuit of sleep. I find the more I struggle, the more energy I expend. And energy has a way of creating energy. Therefore, it’s often best I slip into this fine-spun, cottony existence: a night shift form, a continuance of nocturnal wakefulness.

I find I am never alone. There are others who occupy these hours and regularly show up for the anchor watch.

What is it that wakes me? It could be the moon.

At the moment, it’s fully round and luminous, as large and potent as a Hollywood spotlight advertising a movie premier. It peers through the glass door to my bedroom balcony, illuminating the room as if the dinner party was finished, all the guests have left and we were preparing to search for a woman’s lost earring.

Sometimes I’ll wander outside, amazed at the clarity of night, convinced this might be an opportune time to bend down and finally weed a patch of garden I regularly ignore. But then I am distracted by the fireflies.

And what are their briefly kindled bodies if not a wink meant to tease? Like a child drawn to the sound of the tinkling ice cream truck, I too must chase these will o’ the wisps, to catch one maybe, or simply be close enough to see their alluring alchemy up close.

Maybe it is the forlorn owl, woebegone and patient in his solicitous appeal to be answered, that rouses me from my listless state. I’ve heard his beseeching notes seep through the stone and wood and plaster meant to protect me from such invasive intrusions. But perhaps his degree of desolation is one that travels in a way yet undefined, but innately known.

The whippoorwill converses with friends. He is persistent with his practice, determined to perfect a call with nuance so subtle, only the finest and truly dedicated of musicians would recognize this desperate quest for perfection. I hear the same pursuit from the scales and arpeggios of my daughter’s violin–often at that bewitching hour–late and lonely and languid. To me, it’s up and down and up again. To her, it’s day and night, oil and water, thick and thin. The differences so palpable, so sharp, and so lonesome a club membership.

Oftentimes, I’m brought out of my light stupor by the chorus of coyotes at a rowdy clan gathering. Their yipping, crazed cries for action depict a bloodthirsty plan, and its poorly written code is broken by my nervous sheep. They send their own secret slang that easily reveals their fearful tally of the numbered enemies. At this point, my faithful hound lifts his sleep-laden head and rouses to the call of duty. He takes one moment to listen intensely for classification of intruder and direction of the assailants and then he blasts through his door like a bullet out its chamber.

There is a forceful announcement of the acknowledged trespassing–a warning shot thrown over the bow–and a detailed promise of injury to come, his amplified version of Don’t make me come down there.

Then again, it’s nearly impossible to sleep through the din of amphibious pining. Once the Festival of Frog has begun, nothing but a cold snap will freeze their lips shut, and this is a long way off. Yet their summer sonata is a resonant one where the cold-blooded instruments move with ease from croak to peep to trill. They are an orchestra sans conductor, impromptu with timing, but lyrically musical with their swampy cadence.

It may easily be the sound of the crickets keeping sleep at bay. They punch in for work as soon as the afternoon shift of cicadas clocks out, one choir replacing another. Except their tune melds effortlessly into mind-numbing Muzak. That is, until there is one lone fellow, desperately lost and forever separated from his family, who seeks sanctuary beneath my bed, calling for reinforcements.

More likely it is the sound of a stirring breeze that catches my ear. This is the intro to the flutter of leaves, which whirl in a tiny, tight panic. Another nod to the wind section excites the wind chime section, which announces the herald of the low timbalic register of thunder. Distant and rumbling at first, it can quickly crescendo to clashing blows and a tremulous, foundation shaking finale. No lullaby, indeed.

When the performance is finished, I envision the remaining debris: leaves scattered like discarded paper programs and sticks tossed like spent sparklers from an Independence Day display.

But it is still night, and I am still awake.

The only remaining sounds are that of the tired dog, tasting something yet uncaught in his drowsy moment of rest between patrols, and the sleuthing cat, who cannot manage a leap up onto furniture without uttering the human equivalent of an “alleyoop,” and cannot come down from any without allowing a forceful grunt of air to audibly demonstrate the effort as well.

No matter. I choose to look at this misfired attempt at sleep as a mere rehearsal: one meant to work out the squeaks and missed notes. It’ll all be fine come show time.

Practice makes perfect.

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery (here) and what we all talked about down in the pub (here). And to see more of Robin Gott’s humor–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone–click here.