Emergency travel

Gonna be off line for a while I think, I don’t know how well I will be able to connect.

I am off to Connecticut to be at my brother’s side.   His wife, who has been dealing with a metastacized breast cancer that attacked her liver has been on a down hill slide for a while.   Now she is dying and he needs support.

So we are exercising the credit card….

Talk to you later

Pollinators’ delight

The Havens has become quite the pollinators’ delight.   Now that we have three colonies of honeybees living on the place, there aren’t many places you can look without seeing them at work.

This is a bouquet I picked just Tuesday morning, walking around the place and selecting things that were all fresh and new.   I took this up to the hospital to keep my mother company while she recovers from the knee replacement surgery she had Monday.

Beginning from the bottom of the bouquet and proceeding clockwise, we have clematis, skullcap, hosta, coreopsis (2 kinds), yarrow, purple bachelor’s buttons, lavender, great reed, coral bells, bluebells, white asiatic lily, butterfly weed.

Out on the lavender bed yesterday there was a zebra swallowtail disporting itself and hugely enjoying the nectar from the blooms.

Notice its very long swallow tails.   This butterfly was hard to capture due to its very peripatetic nature.   This next shot captures the red eyes at the base of the outer lower wings.   In this shot, a cabbage worm butterfly flits through the frame.

I spoke of the lamb’s ears the other day.   The honey bees have moved on to the butterfly weed, but the native bumblebees are still busy at the lamb’s ears.

This is why it is called lamb’s ears.  It truly is just as soft as it looks in the picture.

Here is one of the many shots I got the other day of the butterfly weed playing cafe to the honeybees.

The broadiae is blooming right now.   It isn’t very popular with the pollinators, but it seems like a little piece of sky broke off and fell to the ground.   I love it.

Not all my poppies are red.   Here is a pink one, volunteering in the herb garden, floating above one of the asiatic lilies that is going crazy right now.

That’s not all that is going on around The Havens, but it certainly gives you a good idea of what is happening.

 

Stroll garden: poppies, etc.

The stroll garden is looking fantastic right now.  That’s the small prairie with the barn behind.

The poppies are blooming.

So are the campanula.   I have two kinds intermingling.   They make wonderful bouquets that last well in the vase.

The swamp milkweed is out now, and the honeybees have found it.   They are also really interested in the lamb’s ears right now, which are producing pollen for feeding the young brood.   The colonies are both growing nicely.

Up close and personal with a poppy –

Polyphemus moth

The neighbor children were very excited yesterday afternoon.  They had found a very large moth wandering around their carport, and were admiring it.

I was happy to see this fellow.   He is a Polyphemus moth, named after one of the cyclops.  It is a member of the silkworm family, and probably one of the largest moths in Missouri.   The caterpillars feed on hardwood leaves, mainly oak, ash, hickory and sassafras.   Goodness knows there is plenty for them to eat around here!   The adults do not eat anything, do not even have a digestive system.   They have about 5-7 days to find a mate and lay eggs before they die.

This one was nearing the end of its life, but still beautiful even though battered.   It was happy to walk around on my hand as I took pictures of it.  Notice that the eyes on the upper wings are transparent membranes, and so are the centers of the eyes on the lower wings.

My “inheritance”

When my father died he left behind two cats, Shadow and Impy.   He always had a cat around, always.   A few years ago he had two cats, Puff and Creampuff, who were sisters.  They died of old age within weeks of each other at the age of 22 years.

After a few weeks I noticed that he wasn’t getting another cat, and it  concerned me greatly as I just couldn’t imagine my dad without cats in his life.  I knew of a little stray at the park that desperately needed a home, and I thought Dad would like her.  So I talked about it with him, and it turned out that he was worried that if he got another cat that he would die and it wouldn’t have a home.   At that time, I promised him that I if he adopted a cat I would make sure it had a home if he died before it did.

The ice was broken, and in addition to Shadow (the tortoise shell from the park), he acquired another cat, a tabby he called Stripy.

Life in the country is difficult for indoor/outdoor cats.   There are coyotes, owls, raccoons and foxes all eager to snap up a tasty fat pussy cat.   Stripy disappeared one night, and Dad was very upset about it.   My sister lives nearby, and she happened to have a cat that was nearly identical to Stripy, and she planted this cat on his deck early one morning.

Dad awoke to a cat calling to be let in and be given food, and went to the door and joyously greeted “Stripy”.   The cat was very friendly, loving all over Dad when he picked it up, purring and generally acting very glad to be home.   But inevitably, after a few minutes, Dad did notice that there were some differences between this cat and Stripy; the most noticeable one that caught his attention very quickly was the fact that this new cat was not neutered… and Stripy was.

“You aren’t Stripy!”  my father exclaimed.   “You are an imposter!”    For a few days he referred to the new cat as “The Imposter Cat”, but very shortly this was adapted to “Impy.”

Impy has come to live with us; Shadow has a new home in the enclave of felines at my sister’s place.

This is Impy.

He weighs 12.5 pounds, is quite friendly and loves to be brushed.   In the above shots he is ensconced in the back bedroom.   He is quite concerned about the presence of a DOG in the house and not exactly sure about the situation.   Ruby isn’t sure either, as she is quite nervous about whether this cat is mean or not, but she’d like to be friends.   But only if that doesn’t mean her nose is going to get smacked.

Mallory is totally pissed off.  In the shot below, she has Impy pinned down in the back bedroom.  She has hissed, and put her ears back, and told him that in general she thinks that there were quite enough cats in the house when there was only one, thank you very much.

Impy is used to pissy females, as Shadow used to box him on the ears on a regular basis, and not with her claws retracted either.    He is quite deferential in spite of the fact that he weighs almost exactly twice as much as Mallory does.

There is an uneasy peace as he has begun to emerge from the back and explore the house.

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In other news, my quilt is done and so is the new bed skirt.   I still need to do something about the covers of the boxes that support our bedside tables.   I may just get bedside tables that are tall enough and dispense with the boxes.

I think the new quilt changes the whole energy of our bedroom radically.

Andrew Nowell Smith — February 22, 1925 – May 6, 2012

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

My father died last night.  We kept vigil as he drew his last breaths.  The poem above is one he chose several years ago to be read at his memorial service.

He loved to hike and backpack.  The year he was 17, he and some of his buddies went hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and that was the beginning of his love affair with that area.   In 1960, we moved to Colorado and from that time on we spent many many days hiking and camping in that area as he showed us the mountains we loved.   We climbed Longs Peak, Meeker, Mt. Ida, Chief’s Head, the Twin Sisters, and many many more.    We walked across the Grand Canyon and back, explored Zion and Bryce Canyons, spent weeks in Canyonlands, visited Arches National Monument and hiked to every arch.   These are just a few of the expeditions we went on.

Our parents loaded us up in a truck with a camper my dad built for it and hauled us all the way across the country on a summer-long trip when my dad went to an antenna conference in Maine.   We visited almost every historical site on the East Coast on that trip, not to mention many of the National Parks and Monuments that are in the Northern tier of states.

Daddy travelled a lot when I was young, because he designed and tested VLF antennas for the Navy.   The one in Exmouth Australia, on the Northwest Cape, he designed and when it was built spent several months trouble shooting.   He also was responsible for the design of the one installed in Norway.   There are lots more, but when I was a kid he used to travel all over the world to the VLF antenna stations the Navy operated for the purposes of communicating with submarines.

He loved airplanes, and could remember the hoopla surrounding Lindbergh’s grand tour around the country after his triumphant return from the trip across the Atlantic.   He wanted to live to see what would be done to celebrate the 100th anniversary of that event.  He constructed dozens of model airplanes, some from kits and some from the plans, carving the pieces.   He constructed an ultralight aircraft and used to fly it around the Niangua River area on calm mornings.   In his hangar at this exact second are the wings and tail structure of another airplane he was constructing:  a flyable ultralight 85% scale model of the Albatross D3 WWI flying machine.

On his eightieth  birthday we threw a surprise party for him.   My brother came from Connecticut and my older sister from Texas.   He had no idea they were doing this.   We had a family dinner party for him at our house and gave him a Day Clock.   It was grand.

In 2008 my brother and his wife joined my Dad and me in Colorado for a backpacking vacation.   This was taken on that trip.

He was never the most easy person to get along with, being stubborn and opinionated.   He would shout you down if you engaged in an argument with him, and he “knew” he was always right.   Nevertheless, I believe he loved us very much.

When he and my mother conceived children (always planned, by the way), they committed to providing us with a college degree when the time came.   They began saving for these commitments the day we were born, and so I went to college on a full scholarship courtesy of my parents’ frugality and commitment to higher education.   For this I will always be grateful.

His decline in his last illness was swift and inevitable.   I know he is visiting with his old climbing buddies right this minute, and it makes me happy to know this even though I will miss my daddy very much.

There is beauty….

Things are progressing rapidly here at The Havens.   It is hard to ride the whirlwind.

My father was transplanted to his new apartment from the hospital.  The first couple of days were “okay”, although he was very unhappy that he was not at his home.  He expressed appreciation for all the work we had done to try to make the apartment feel familiar, to surround him with his familiar things, but stated categorically that it was “Not home.”

Of course it wasn’t.   Truly he could not function safely in the home he designed, built, and loved for 30 years.   It has too many stairs, it is at the end of a really bad driveway which is at the end of a really bad road, and far from all services.   Etc etc etc.

After a couple of days of him being at the new apartment, unhappily trying to live in an environment he did not like, he began to lose all the ground he had made at the hospital.   One day he could cook his breakfast.   The next day he really couldn’t do it because he couldn’t find the ingredients in the refrigerator or in the cabinets.   Jim went over a couple of times and once found an empty pan on a burner that was turned on, another time an attempt at a hard boiled egg that had boiled dry as my father sat in the living room. He could not find the food we brought him for meals and put in the refrigerator.   He could not figure out how to operate the microwave.

For a couple of days he was happy to eat if food was provided for him.   The visiting nurse and the physical therapist had him doing exercises but as he was performing the strengthening exercises each day his strength waned.   In the course of about three days he went from being able to walk with his cane to not being able to even walk with the help of a walker.

Yesterday the visiting nurse called Hospice for an emergency initiation.   Last night the Hospice agent came and did paperwork, about an hour later the Hospice RN came with new medications prescribed by the doctor for palliative care.

My father has not been out of bed at all for three days.   My mother is staying with him, and for three nights out of the last four I have have been sleeping on a pallet on the floor to assist her with night time events.   I have learned how to change a protective pad on the bed for an invalid, how to administer sublingual drugs.  I have learned what it is like to try to move a dead weight, what it is like to listen to a strong person as they struggle to bring air into lungs that are filling with fluid.

I have learned what it is like to hold my father’s penis in my hand to guide it to a urinal so he can rid himself of urine without wetting himself.   I have learned what it is like to have him tell me he needs to pee and find that yes indeed, he does need to but has already done so previously, and to deal with his humliation.  I tell him that he changed me and cleaned me enough when I was a baby.  Now it is my turn to do those services, lovingly and respectfully.

His cat Impy hardly leaves his side, except to eat and use the cat box.   He knows something is happening with his person.    Daddy is very comforted by that purr and sleek fur.

In retrospect, I see the decline as similar to what happens when you transplant a wild flower that has grown with it’s roots deep into the rocky subsoil.   At first it might seem to do well as it is sustained by its reserves of strength.  But then the lack of the root system and the huge radical change in environment hits, the plant withers and eventually dies.   My father was transplanted too precipitously, and even though he was told in the hospital he was not ready.   Of course, like that wild flower, he probably would never have been ready, and like the wild flower there was no way to extract him from his environment gently.

My shoulders are so sore — I should have been doing weight training to prepare me for the lifting that is necessary to move him in the bed, to raise him up so he can drink a sip of water.   He no longer has the strength left to suck on a straw, we must hold a cup to his lips, give him ice chips.

My brother is here from Connecticut, my sister from Texas, my niece is here from Columbia.  My little sister is trying to take care of the farm while my mother sits with my father.  My clients are wonderfully supportive as I cancel their appointments.  Jim cooks us all wonderfully sustaining food.

Our strawberry bed is producing succulent berries that for several days have been the only thing my dad cares to eat.

I came home to rest today, took a bath.  Mallory guarded me as I bathed, stationed out in the hall just outside the bathroom.  Then while I took a nap, she watched over me from the end of the bed.

Yesterday, I took Ruby for a walk out at Bennett Spring.  As I was walking the gravel bar, I asked the place for a rock for Daddy.   I meandered along, and suddenly  a rock called my attention.   It was partially buried in the gravel bar, and had a place that had a “cavern” worn into it.   I picked it up, and saw the depths of the miniature cave were filled with gravel.  I tapped it on my palm, the gravel fell out and I found that it was a holed rock, with several tunnels through it.   I felt a huge “Oh!” in my heart, and I looked up to find that at that moment I was surrounded by over a thousand tiny blue butterflies, all flying about me in a beautiful iridescent cloud.

I took the rock to Daddy yesterday, and he was fairly lucid at the time I told him about finding it.   He looked it over very closely, trying hard to focus on it.  Eventually he found the tunnels through the rock to the light.  Since then, through all the turnings and changings, the visit from Hospice, his Ativan fueled sleep, he has not let go of that rock.  Whatever the message it carries to him, I think he received it.

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Meanwhile, the young catalpa in the front yard is blooming.

The leopard frog in the pond has a mate.

There are poppies blooming.

The stroll garden is fantastic with dianthus and hostas and bluebells right now.

My quilt is finished.   This is it hanging on the wall at the quilter’s workshop when I picked it up after she finished the quilting process.

A close up of the quilting work she did — so beautifully.

It is finished now.   I sewed the binding on it the day after I brought it home, and whipped the back of the binding closed while sitting at my father’s bedside.

It has not been on the bed yet.   Jim says he doesn’t want it on the bed until we can spend the night under it together.

Maybe tonight.    It is someone else’s turn to spend the night on the pallet in the apartment.