Hospitalland

In the hell of hospital land, you can go for days without seeing a doctor. You can go for days without finding out anything at all. Does my mother have pneumonia that's a result of a virus or bacteria? Or is the fluid from congestive heart failure on a little vacation visiting her lungs? I don't know. Here on day four in hospital land, I'm willing to say, I might never know.

Here in hôpital land, if you're 90 and weak and arthritic, you could starve trying to open your little packets of butter, jam, mayo, mustard, ketchup, sugar, coffee creamer, the lid on your coffee, juice, your carton of milk. Where the hell are all of the school kids who need to log volunteer hours? Get over here with your lithe and nimble fingers. Please.

Here in hospital land, they give you menus for your next day's meals and no pencils. They give you plastic devices to cough phlegm into without opening the package and assembling the thing.

So I'm here in hospital land. Visiting with my nimble fingers and my purse full of pencils. For every meal, I'm here. (Not going anywhere near the phlegm thing.) Camped out. Keeping vigil. Somewhere in this damned place, there's a doctor. I'm sure of it.

The plastic owl on the rooftop and I are waiting.

Feeling Owlish

My balcony. Terrifying to pigeons. Hahahaha.

It's almost spring. Love is in the air.

Sunday I removed the stalagmites of pigeon poop from three years ago. If you visit here often, you know I love birds, but I do not love pigeons pooping all over my balcony. This spring, I'm  waging war, not love--or so I tell myself. There was a dove sitting on the couch out there this morning and I'm clearly insane because I added a third owl. Two plastic owls weren't doing the trick, so now there are three plastic owls. Snakes, my aunt told me on the phone earlier, get some rubber snakes. Rubber snakes, plastic owls. Pretty soon I won't want to go out there.

There''s also an owl in the palm tree below my balcony.

I have an owl suspended above my front door too. It startles me sometimes when I catch a glimpse of it from my upstairs hallway.

The swallows will begin to arrive any day now. The best solution for that is to take off the window screen and spend a lot of time upstairs by the window where they like to nest. I stalk them with a spray bottle. Eventually they give up, but it's a full time job for a couple of days.

Uh-oh. I gotta go. I hear pigeons cooing.

Hang onto Your Haaa-----Better Yet, Hang onto Everything

The wind is having its way with Ventura County. All night long gusts rocked my house. Howls were punctuated with crashes as all my potted trees tipped over. My mom feels terrible for me when the trees tip over. So much work for me, she says. Not really, I tell her. I really want the greenery outside my windows instead of the neighbors' houses. So my trees are horizontal, laying low quite literally, until Mother Nature decides it's time to inhale. The trees have blown down a dozen times in the last year. I'm okay with it.

Luckily, not one of my mother's seven different doctors needs to see her today. Palm fronds are thudding to the ground. Streets signs come loose on days like today. Traffic lights go out, and it's the planet of projectiles out there when these winds pry loose various things from their moorings.

It was difficult to sleep last night. I was not particularly anxious, as I sometimes am when nature gets testy, but these straight line winds, as damaging as they can be, are not the tornadoes that occasionally touched down in Iowa while I was growing up. In Iowa, if my Dad deemed it wise, we kids slept in the basement. He lost a brother in a tornado when  he was growing up on a farm in southern Illinois.

Here, my house doesn't even have a basement. I like to sleep with the shades up when the wind blows. I can see what's blowing by, and prove to myself that it sounds worse than it is. If a boat ever becomes air born and sails by my window, it's quite likely that I'll run for the first floor screaming like a two-year-old.

One of my plastic owls (in the photo above) has had an unfortunate encounter with a gust. He was the handsomest one--with luminescent eyes and a head that swivels in the breeze.  I've nicknamed him Humpty-Dumpty. I hope I can put him together again.

The real birds are faring much better. Still visiting the feeder despite the wind.

 Piper, the ancient cat, has interrupted her nap on the couch a time or two to express interest.

While I would never let her outside to even hint at terrorizing the birds, I think it's good for her to be interested. I stare at my writing on my computer screen. My mom stares at the newspaper on the iPad. Piper stares at the birds.