slowly she turned

It feels like I’ve been here much longer.

Here is a short video of a gator in the canal across from my sister’s house. Thursday night I spent the night over there. Tim had gone back to Chapel Hill for a doctor’s appointment. We hung out on the pier with Rascal, one of her precious cats. He always has this intense expression on his face, but he is the most relaxed cat I have ever held. He melts into you. Rascal is an indoor cat but is allowed outside with supervision, because he is mostly very well-behaved.

I spent a short time sitting on the beach under the bald cypress tree on Friday afternoon. The ducks are almost tame. They were really about six feet away. There was a sandpiper on the beach at Lisa’s house. The ducks are so in love with her that every square inch of her beach is covered in duck footprints. She cares for the orphans and the injured ducks. I picked up a mallard feather with the iridescent blue/green color – the feather gathering here is wonderful.

I also poured some of the dark grey house paint into a small container and touched up some places that the painters missed. The paint went a long way, so I painted the bookboard that I brought with me. It is still tacky today, but I’m considering painting a door with the coral paint and making a lake house book. Stenciling it too.

Last night Tim came back and we ate barbecue and when I came home I listened to Lyle Lovett and Shawn Colvin’s Facebook Live concert.

My sleep schedule is back to normal – falling asleep around 11 p.m.-12 and waking around 8 a.m. I need to start waking an hour earlier if I can maintain the ability to fall asleep at an earlier time and not wake up all night. Not taking fish oil at night and eliminating my allergy meds has helped, although not with my allergies, of course. When the fall allergies come rolling back in I’ll have to see what I can do about those without triggering restless legs syndrome.

It is too hot and humid to do much outside, and the midges are out again this morning. But it is not less hot and humid in Greensboro, and so I can’t decide whether to go home tomorrow or not. I don’t have to. I miss Sandy and Diego and Pablocito. I wonder how my garden is doing.

I am pretty depressed and anxious and I think that I will spend the day alone in the quiet today. Also, I realize that I will probably be coming back here to the lake house a lot more often, just like I did when we couldn’t afford to go any place else. I appreciate that I have this escape to visit, and that I can actually work from here. I am lucky in many, many ways.

Here is the new house color. You can’t see the door, but it is a bright coral that peeps out from behind the wooden screen door.

I ended up working some yesterday morning and then Lisa and Tim picked me up in their pontoon boat for a ride while the water was smooth. The second photo is from the boat coming in to the back of the house. Or the front of the house, as the lake residents say.

The wind picked up soon after and changed direction. One of the best things about being alone here is that I get to listen to the sounds of waves and owls and frogs and insects. I have barely turned on the TV and listened to very little music. The nature sounds are a big part of why I like coming down here, and when others are here there is always a lot of noise drowning it out.

I worked on masks and when I say “worked” I mean “struggled.” I was trying to make this mask more polished than I usually sew. And without elastic. This one is big because it is for Sandy and I want it to accommodate his beard. I sewed fabric loops that were too big, so I tied knots in them and attached hairbands and a safety pin. It works. I also sewed tucks in each side to deal with the side gaps after I took this photo.

The fabric is batik prints of grizzly bears and bison that I bought at a quilt shop on the Blackfeet Reservation when we went to Glacier National Park in 2016.

This morning the midges are covering the grass lakeside and I can smell the sulfurous odor of the paper plant. It will be a good day to stay inside.

I’m actually considering going home. My brain is going weird places here, and my allergies are scaring me. Sandy tends to keep my hypochrondia in check by joking and grounding me. Maybe I will relax again today.

The painters are here today. My sister arranged to have the outside of the house painted, and my cousin’s wife picked the color, which will be quite dark. I am chipping in with the refund I got from my cancelled events in July. The above is a before photo of the house. It hasn’t been painted in thirty years, and will look different than I’ve ever seen it, since my cousin would not change anything about the house. He didn’t even like for you to rearrange the bar stools or change the radio station. It was comforting in a strange way.

I put the paint cans out on the porch, told the painters that I had to isolate because of my husband, and shut the door. Let them make of that what they will – I figure that it will make them cautious around me. Afterwards I saw one of them with a mask on.

Above are some shots from the living room. Along with the ceiling fan that fell apart during the last trip down here. This is what all the inside walls look like – plywood. I often see images in the wood grain.

Last night I cut out fabric pieces for masks. I don’t have elastic, but I am using fabric ties and hairbands and safety pins to fasten them. I found a bunch of pieced strips that I sewed together last year. The brown masks are batik fabrics with buffalo and grizzly bear designs that I bought at a quilt shop on the Blackfeet Reservation when we went to Glacier National Park in 2016.

Late yesterday a strong thunderstorm blew in. Thankfully it didn’t have much rain. We’ve had quite enough here. You could see breakers on the lake all the way out, and it cooled down enough that I was able to throw the doors and windows open for a while and sit on the porch.

Hallo!

From the (short) morning walk, I bring you flowers and gators.

I am working about half of the day, then I will take the rest of the week off as vacation time. Unless something crazy comes up, which is entirely possible these days.

Don’t worry, all the gator photos are cropped. One of the baby gators gave me a start when it splashed in, but I was not that close. Gators are fast, and although I am not afraid of walking along here any more, I am not stupid.

^^^The persistence of bald cypress tree knobs.

It is going to be a tough weather week. It was already dangerously hot and humid at 9:30 this morning. Right now at 11:30 it is 76% humidity and 102 degrees heat index, and no breeze.

I was pretty exhausted today from restless legs syndrome last night. Funny how it seems to hit after a really hard day when you are so tired you’re sure that you will sleep. I was up and down until 4 a.m. this morning and got up at 10 a.m. So I decided to be kind to myself and not try to schedule my day as planned.

The morning revealed a dead gar fish on the beach and yes, I did retrieve a couple of those jawbones. I will have to boil them at home but right now I hope that they will lose their mild stink in the sun. Given my love of symbols of sharp objects, I think that they will go well in a collage or a weaving. I will be picking up pieces of plastic from fireworks off the beach for a while. There were a few okay pieces of driftwood. This is a nice one.

I spent most of the day inside in the air conditioning because the heat index was something like 110 degrees with no breeze for the first part of the day. So humid. The water is very warm. I organized and set up a studio. I watched a few samples of mixed media/journaling videos to see if I wanted to pay for the yearlong bundle, but I think that I will pass for now, considering how many online classes I never finish. I watched an episode of “How to Get Away with Murder” and the first episode of “Dead to Me,” and crocheted my weather scarf. Spent too much time on Facebook and reading the news and ate a tomato sandwich for dinner. My nerves were so shot yesterday that I barely ate anything.

My sister came by and we talked across the room to each other about eight feet apart. Talking inside was probably a mistake. We are both very careful but I felt exposed by my mechanic on Friday when he drove my car out of the garage without a mask on, and she and her husband met with their tax guy and she didn’t feel good about that. We agreed to not spend much time together until later in the week.

An old friend of mine who happens to be my brother’s brother-in-law is in ICU with Covid. His cousin told me that he has just been taken off a ventilator. The little sister of a guy I dated in high school died of Covid. She was in the hospital for shoulder surgery and they think she caught it there. I found out that a friend of mine who thought she had a rare form of shingles back in February actually had Covid. It’s moved into the personal realm.

Being alone here is a good thing. Even though I am already missing Sandy a bit, I need time alone, and I mean real time alone, when nobody is going to pop in or interrupt my train of thought. I think that it will go far in healing my nerves.

Later the evening breeze came along with the sunset and I sat on the beach beside the waves until dark. When it got very dark, I walked out on my neighbor’s pier (he isn’t there) and looked for the comet. I couldn’t find it, but the stars were bright. I read that it might be just under the Big Dipper, but unfortunately that is over the trees in Cove Swamp across the street, not over the lake. So it may be that the trees were in the way. It was still a lovely experience. This is a wonderful place to starwatch.

I will look at my work email in the morning, do some website and schedule work, and then probably opt to go on vacation for the rest of this week, other than a staff Zoom meeting that I am volunteered to host because I need to learn how to do it before graduate student orientation.

Now, please, Lord, let this melatonin work tonight.