slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Lake Waccamaw, Part V

    One evening we were invited to sit on the pier of some friends on the bluff side of the lake for some socially distanced drinks. This is the side of the lake that didn’t get flooded, but most of the piers were ruined. My sister and brother-in-law rented a house up here while they repaired their house from Hurricane Florence, and they almost sold the house on the water and bought a house on this side, where the bluff protects the houses. It is nerve wracking to worry about every big storm that comes in off the coast.

    The whole lake is part of Lake Waccamaw State Park. The marsh grasses moving with the waves were lovely.

    Sandy had supposed to return for jury duty, but the state postponed jury trials again due to the pandemic. So we stayed another day.

    My plan is to come back for a week or so in late July during the time that we had planned to go to Knoxville for Convergence and to Topsail Beach. The wifi is actually better at the lake house than it is here, so I could work from there if I wanted. Late July can be really hot down there if there is no breeze, and I prefer to keep the windows open instead of turning on the air conditioning, so I might play it by ear.

    So today is the last day of my two week vacation. It’s been good to be able to turn off the work email, although I did weigh in a couple of times. If I had not taken this time off, I probably would have been tied to this laptop all day every day, because of all the preparations for returning the students to campus for fall semester. Of course, the administration came up with an incredibly complicated way to deal with it, and my personal feeling was that it would have been less confusing to leave it the way it was and let the faculty members handle dividing up the class lectures. Fortunately, my department head told them that I was off for two weeks and that someone in the registrar’s office would need to handle the schedule changes. I need a mental health break and he knew it. As I’ve said many times, I work with an incredible group of people.

    Tomorrow I am going to go back to my office for at least a few hours a day, isolated. I need to get back into a routine. Luckily my home is a 15 minute walk away, so I think I can manage this without having to use the public spaces much, such as bathrooms. If I needed to, I could easily do my whole job from home, really. I hope that it doesn’t come to that.

  • Lake Waccamaw 2020, Part IV

    My sister and I took a few walks beside the canal across the road from the houses on Canal Cove Rd. There are a lot of alligators in the canal these days, but I didn’t see any on the banks beside the road and none of them were huge. The lake residents don’t really think twice about them.

    Lisa loves birds. There are many bird feeders around her house, and the variety of birds at Lake Waccamaw is astounding. At night you get to hear all kinds of sounds that I never hear anywhere else.

    And my sister absolutely loves cats. Her two cats are like children to her, and they have great personalities, both very, very different. She can take Rascal outside and hold him, and he doesn’t try to get away. He will try to slip out the door, though, so you have to watch out for him. When you pick him up, he melts into your shoulder. Sissy, on the other hand, is tiny and shy. It takes a few days for her to accept you.

    She, along with a few others, takes care of a feral cat colony down the road at a cabin that is seldom occupied. It used to host Friday night potlucks on the pier for the community, and a gardener continues to keep the plants blooming all over the pier. Now there are three mother cats and four kittens that we know of. Lisa found a home for one kitten that didn’t seem to belong to the colony, but the others are too wild.

    There really is nothing like gaining the trust and friendship of a feral cat.

  • Lake Waccamaw 2020, Part III

    My sister’s house is a short walk or swim away. They have a beautiful place with their two adorable cats and a pier and a pontoon boat. One morning they pulled up in front of our house to take us for a ride. It was the first time that all thoughts of the pandemic left my mind for a long time.

    It rained almost every evening and one storm produced two rainbows. We could see the end of each rainbow. One faintly ended on top of the pier and it is hard to see here but I tried to capture it. It was so close!

    The other developed a few minutes later and spanned the sky, ending in the lake past the piers. You could actually see the colors reflected on top of the water. I wonder what is down there?

    I thought that the texture of the hard rain hitting the lake was striking, also.

  • Lake Waccamaw 2020, Part II

    I believe that it was Saturday when Sandy and I spent time sitting in the lake and on the shore. The little fish kept nibbling at our legs and when one tried to go up my bathing suit I gave it up. I got a bit of sunburn despite sitting in the shade of the bald cypress trees. Every now and then I walked out in the water to the end of the pier next door to cool off. The water is high from all the rain right now, but it doesn’t get over your head for a long ways out.

  • Lake Waccamaw 2020, Part I

    We are lucky that we still have the option of staying at the family house at Lake Waccamaw. Everyone thought that Hurricane Florence had finally done it in, but my cousin’s wife, who has lifetime rights to the property, sunk some money into fixing it back up. She replaced the appliances and the mattresses and the furniture, for the most part. It still has a problem with flooding, being that it sits directly upon a cement slab in the ground. In fact, there was minor flooding there a couple of weeks before we got there.

    So, instead of going to Ireland, Sandy and I spent a week at the lake. We got to spend time with my sister and brother-in-law, which was fun and good for my soul. We brought a ton of food because I vowed not to shop at the local stores because of their lax co-vid attitude, and we got take-out from Dale’s twice. The rest of the time we ate at the house or my sister and brother-in-law fed us. Fed us extremely well!

    I was delighted because the beach had not been cleaned up for a while after several big storms, so the driftwood picking was good. A turkey vulture must have had a fight, because I got a couple of really big feathers that are in good enough shape to make quills with. There was also a lot of plastic to be disposed of, sadly.

    Unfortunately, I still could not break out of my artist block. I started to put together a collage, then the wind picked up on the porch and I put it away, never to bring it out again. The idea is still with me, though. I read a lot and took some really great photos. Sleep continued to be elusive for multiple reasons and I will take a mattress pad with me next time I go, which could be in a few weeks.

    To be continued, with more photos.

  • Saturday afternoon Smithwick’s post

    I was supposed to be in Howth, Ireland tonight. I was going to go to the Cock Tavern for some craic and eat some great seafood down on the harbour..

    Anyway, the front porch is absolutely delightful this afternoon. The temperature is perfect, with low humidity and a small breeze. I would like to thank Mother Nature for providing this weather for the first day of my vacation. I haven’t done much differently, other than not check my work email. I painted some of the wooden panels to mount my small collages on, and glued an 8×8″ one down. It is weighted down with books and I hope that the glue is going to work well.

    We went downtown to Scuppernong Books this afternoon to pick up a copy of the Instant Pot Bible so I can learn to use this damn thing. Sandy and I are not ordering anything from Amazon these days because we are supporting local businesses. However, we are lucky that we have choices – many people in this country don’t have the luxury of avoiding Amazon or Walmart or Dollar General because they have run all the local stores out of business. As a former country girl, I saw three of our local small towns decimated and people could not understand the damage that they had done by driving thirty miles to Walmart (and spending that money on gas!) until it was too late and the choices were no longer there.

    So now people buy their groceries at Dollar General or Family Dollar instead of the grocery store when they can’t take the time to drive to Walmart, because the IGA and the Piggly Wiggly are closed. The local pharmacy is closed too. The local doctor has moved to a bigger town. The movie theater. The local bank branches and car dealerships. Closed. The swimming pool got filled in when it became clear that it couldn’t be restricted to whites only any more.

    I don’t miss living down there at all.

    Since I am on vacation, Sandy and I picked out some used books to take to the lake with us later. Not that we needed extra books – we literally have hundreds of books in our house and half are probably unread. I am trying to download “The Lathe of Heaven” from the library for my Kindle. So many people are making clueless posts on Facebook about race and how it shouldn’t matter and why can’t we all just ignore race and live in harmony la la la la la that I am ready to scream. It reminded me of this book so I want to re-read it. And I am trying to be patient as well, because so many people are trying to learn. I know that I used to think this way.

    Magical thinking. It’s the American way. The white American way, anyway.

    Here’s my latest array of books:

    We got to see some of the great protest art that went up on the boarded up windows of the businesses on Elm St. I would have liked to have taken a walk while we were there, but very few others were wearing masks. I don’t have a problem with people walking outside without masks when they have one around their neck just in case, and there are not many other people to cross paths with. That was not the case in downtown Greensboro. The folks at Scuppernong had it right though. Required masks, required hand sanitizer as soon as you walked in, and limited to 10 people inside. I felt safe there.

    I have walked over to Oden Brewing a couple of times in the past month to buy a six pack of their beer, and I cross over the railroad through a hole someone cut in a chain link fence to get there. It is at the end of our street. I am fascinated with the wildness around the railroad tracks – the wildflowers, the vines, the old rails over to the side, the trash, the broken bottles and bricks and bric-a-brac.

    The bee balm is flowering in my front hugelkultur bed and boy did it turn out pretty:

    I painted a rough sign to put in our yard. It matches our across the street neighbor and our next door neighbor’s signs. I do love this neighborhood. If there is one good thing that has come out of this pandemic mess, it is that we have actually met a few more of our neighbors on our walks around the block.

    Okay, that’s enough for tonight. This Smithwick’s ale won’t pour down my throat on its own.

  • Catching up with some art

    Although I am sunk pretty badly, I am not in the hole so I’ve been able to laugh from time to time and do a little bit of art-making. Between Crystal Neubauer and Roxanne Stout’s online classes, I’ve been encouraged to doodle and follow my intuition. I would like to do more but I have almost accepted that my brain is gonna do what it’s gonna do, or not do anything at all. The main thing I’ve been able to do is work on this Tunisian crocheted weather scarf while we watch Doc Martin. Combining Tunisian knit and purl stitches has kept it from rolling up, but the edges are pretty awful. Practice makes perfect, I guess, and I’ll go around the whole thing with a slip stitch or something to firm up those edges.

    For Roxanne’s “Notebook Journeys” class, I needed a spiral bound watercolor paper book, but all my watercolor paper is in pads. I do have quite a few spiral bound sketch books, so I am using a 9×12 landscape book and folding and pasting the pages to make them heavier and convert it to a 9×6 portrait oriented book. I’m trying very hard to use up what I have before buying more supplies. This studio space is still bursting at the seams.

    It’s been fun to doodle in, especially with ink washes and Pitt brush pens. I’m going to do some sewing and writing, maybe a little more collage. Cutting some pages and seeing how they interact with the pages before and after is an interesting exercise.

    As for the collage – well – my plan to make one 4×4 collage per day fell apart 3 days in. I love collage but I don’t love glue. I mixed up some Yes paste and Golden acrylic satin glaze according to Crystal’s method and I hope that will help with the papers curling so badly. The consistency is very thick and I might have to mess around with it some more.

    When I am awake at 3 a.m. I keep thinking about cloth. So eventually I will be playing with that again. I could not explain to you why I am not doing it right this minute.

  • Black Lives Matter

    So much to say, and no adequate words to say it.

    I keep putting off posting here, because it feels trivial to post my everyday life events in the scope of what is happening in my country and the world today. As a white middle class person, I have learned a lot about racism and listening, but it is confusing to hear the contradictory statements about giving space for African American voices but that white silence is consent. I’ve been trying to walk that thin line.

    If it wasn’t for this damn virus, believe me, my husband and I would be at the protests. I wish that I was in DC right now. I feel bad about not participating. I would feel worse if I caught this virus and spread it further. In other words, I feel like shit. Everything is infuriating and terrifying and guilt-inducing and I feel like a turtle flipped on its back. Overwhelmed and helpless, and not at all sure if I can find a way back on my feet.

    When it comes down to the choice, I think that the protests are doing fine without us, but an exponential rate of viral infection and the fact that between the two of us we check all the boxes for severe consequences if we catch it makes our decision clear. I’ve been obsessed with looking at the footage and tired of hearing sirens and fireworks (was that a gun shot?) within walking distance of my house. As a senior white woman in a safe middle class neighborhood I never have to worry about being abused by police. All of my police interactions have been good ones. Even the one in which I argued with a patrolman, even the one in which I was arrested, I was treated with respect. The only beefs I have ever had with police were about over-zealous parking enforcement. I am privileged and I know it.

    I worry much more about the right-wing domestic terrorists and Boogaloos instigating and accelerating violence, and this city has seen murder from the KKK and Nazis before. It is also the home of the Greensboro Sit-Ins, a proud civil rights event in our history. The Woolworth’s building now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, and given that one of its windows was broken in the riots the other night, I doubt that it was civil rights protesters who did the damage. This city has a very complicated civil rights heritage.

    Anyway, my mental health is damaged enough that I don’t think that I need to say anything more except that All Lives won’t Matter until Black Lives Matter. That is what “All” means.

    Back to the usual programming later.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    I’m finishing up my coffee before I go for a social distanced walk with a friend.

    The Covid-19 news just keeps getting worse. Looks like we will have to be isolated for a very long time, mainly because of a bunch of yahoos that think they’re invincible and we are disposable. At least I can work from home or isolate in my office, although I don’t think that I will want to use the bathroom after classes begin. My prediction is that there will be a much worse second wave at the end of summer and classes will go online again. We haven’t hit the peak of the first wave here yet.

    It’s tiresome, to say the least.

    In other news, we have highs in the 80s now so I planted my tomatoes, etc. The Romas and squash don’t look so happy. The Better Boys and volunteer tomatoes (I hope that they are Cherokee Purple) are doing fine. Knock wood – even though the peppermint and feverfew are a pain to deal with, they seems to be keeping the groundhogs at bay so far. I took before photos that I hope will improve later:

    The front hugelkultur/herb garden is looking good. Still need to plant my basil. I did not hear from the guy who I hoped to hire to help me in the garden. It is very frustrating trying to hire help and there is so much that I need help with because of tendinitis. I wonder if we will have to abandon this home for a condo or townhouse eventually. I hope not. Sandy can’t handle it all even if he was willing. (Rant deleted.)

    First radish is always mine.

    Positive note: For the first time in several months we produced more solar energy than we consumed. I changed most of our light bulbs to LEDs and I’ve been drying most of my clothes on racks instead of using the dryer and washing dishes by hand instead of using the dishwasher.

    Sourdough was not as much of a success this week, and of course I had offered a loaf to my next-door neighbor before it came out of the oven. I jinxed it. Halving the recipe seems to make it more manageable. Next time I will let it rise longer. It didn’t rise in the oven at all.

    I received my order from Dick Blick yesterday with LOTS of small cradled wood panels. My neighbor across the street who is an accomplished artist said that I could participate in his studio sale in the Fall. We’ll see if that happens, but it did light a fire in me. He has always been meh about my fiber art but he was enthusiastic about my collages. So even though I sound depressed right now I am actually kind of excited. I am going to bring a work table onto the porch and gesso some panels today.

    Not much reading happening since I finished Bridge of Sighs. It’s hard to get going on a new book and I don’t want anything very depressing. I’m reading The Juniper Tree, a compilation of Grimm fairy tales illustrated by Maurice Sendak right now. Wonderful illustrations – I am tempted to cut some pages out and frame them.

    TV – Ozark and Doc Martin right now. Sandy binged through Ozark. I just can’t watch TV for that long, so I’m at the end of the first season. At first I didn’t think that I could watch it but I powered through and became hooked on the plot and the excellent writing. Doc Martin for Cornwall and comic relief, although the soundtrack is making me crazy by sticking in my head.

    From my walk with Susanne last Sunday:

    Also, it was our 33rd anniversary yesterday. Hard to believe! So many travel memories from this time of year too. Vacillating between feeling sad and enjoying the photos.

  • Shopping Covid-19 Style

    We went inside a local grocery store last night because they carried a few items that I was out of, plus SMITHWICK’S ALE, and I am somewhat sorry that we did. We decided to do it because they are one of the few stores around here that are requiring face coverings. Although I am excited to have Duke’s mayonnaise again (it’s the little things these days, right?) I had a disturbing conversation with the cashier.

    I am of the opinion that food workers who process food and who deal with the public (grocery cashiers, managers, stockers, wait staff) are front line workers. I am well aware that health care workers are at the front of the front line, in the gravest danger. But everybody has got to eat, and as a former cashier/retail manager I know how difficult it can be to deal with the public. I also know firsthand about being the working poor, with no sick leave. Now with people actually getting killed by domestic terrorists for simply trying to do their jobs to abide by their employer’s rules, these workers are definitely on the front line.

    So, I was a bit chatty, and I had a few bucks in my pocket and I tipped the cashier, telling him that I appreciated him being on the front line. I had wanted to do that for the curbside delivery people but it was contactless and paid ahead of time online. We are not rich by any means, but we didn’t really need our stimulus payment because I am still working and Sandy is getting his Social Security payments – it went to paying off Diego’s vet bill and paying off debt, so I have been tipping generously and donating to charity.

    The response I received surprised me. He told me that he was not on the front line, that he was there because he had to be, that he had heard that from several people and for personal reasons it was somewhat offensive to him to be told that. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I tried to explain my reasoning and told him to split the tip with his co-worker if he wanted. I could just see the anger and the words “fuckin’ Karen” behind his eyes, even though his tone was flat and polite. I wasn’t going to argue with him – he has a right to his feelings and who knows what his personal reasons were. Maybe he had a bad day.

    We won’t be going back into a grocery store for a long time, unless absolutely necessary, because the cases are still increasing in North Carolina. It was strange to feel so excited about being able to walk through the aisles and picking items from the shelves, as if we were in an American grocery store for the first time – they have this! And this! I also went to Walgreen last Sunday after my walk with Susanne because we needed distilled water and toilet paper, and I felt the same way. There weren’t many shoppers and they were pretty good except for one couple without face coverings, who I easily avoided. There was hand sanitizer for customers to use next to the door. (There was no toilet paper, but Deep Roots Market got me some later.)

    But now I feel so anxious that we made this grocery trip. It wasn’t necessary – I wanted Duke’s mayonnaise and I wanted to shop a local merchant who was good about safety precautions. But there was no sanitizer and many of the customers who were there to buy beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets only had bandannas tied around their faces. We washed up as soon as we got home and tossed our masks into the washing machine. I was awake until 2 a.m. thinking about all this.

    We have got to make sure that everybody has access to personal protection before we open up everything. Maybe we can’t force people to do it, but we can make sure that they have the choice to wear it. The cashier told me that some customers were pissed off about the face covering requirement. I told him that they were also going to get new customers because of it because people on Facebook were spreading the word to those who were looking for food stores with these requirements.

    I feel so fortunate that I do not work in retail any more.