Not a good night. No, not at all.

March 10, 2026, by No comments yet

I couldn’t sleep at all last night. Tossing and turning, just like the song. Then, about 4am, I needed to get up to go to the bathroom. The second I sat up, the room started spinning to the left. I managed to get to the toilet but the disorienting feeling increased as I carefully made my way back to bed.

Then, suddenly, I felt my dinner rise from my stomach. I grabbed the small plastic wastebasket next to the headboard just in time and violently vomited into it, over and over again.

The noise of my retching woke up my husband, who turned and asked, “What’s happening?”

“Vertigo,” I gasped, and vomited some more. It was awful. It felt like I was on an out-of-control carnival ride. I could barely catch my breath. Lying down made it worse, so I sat on the side of the bed, bent over the wastebasket, trying not to get vomit on the bedclothes. The abdominal spasms were agony, and after three or four minutes of this my stomach was empty and all that came up was mucus.

I had been through this once before, several years ago. It’s called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV), caused when calcium particles in the inner ear become lodged in the semicircular ear canals. My restless tossing and turning had probably caused it. Read more →

Well, today was interesting….

February 16, 2021, by No comments yet

I grabbed a cup of cracked corn and went out the back door just before noon today to check on the chickens, because one of my three remaining birds is sick and I don’t expect her to live much longer.

When I stepped off the back porch slab onto a large flat stone we use as a step, I failed to notice that it was coated with glare ice, with predictable results. My feet flew out from under me and I landed HARD, slamming my lower back and upper hip bone against the edge of the stone I’d slipped on, and slamming my head against the edge of the concrete slab.

I let out a bellow of shock and pain you could probably hear two counties away, convinced I’d broken my hip, or worse, my spine. After waiting a few seconds, I cautiously moved my fingers, my toes, and then all four limbs. They all worked. Sofar, so good. I rolled over onto my side, not trusting my legs yet because I had wrenched my bad knee when I landed. As I got on my hands and knees and slowly tried to rise, I saw blood in the snow, on the porch slab, and dripping down my hands and neck. A lot of blood. My blood.

Read more →

The Way We Weren’t.

March 3, 2012, by No comments yet

I don’t do high school reunions anymore.

A high-school reunion, for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, is a malicious version of “This Is Your Life,” except that instead of a studio audience of admirers and friends, you are confronted by a provincial gaggle of hostile peers, waiting to judge you by ten-, twenty- or thirty-year-old expectations.

Unlike some of my classmates from my then blue-collar hometown, high school was not the high point of my life, so I guess my perceptions are a bit skewed. In fact, my memories of that time and crowd—those I haven’t successfully suppressed, that is—make the cast of “Survivor” look like a support group. Continued…

This is why I live in the country.

May 7, 2011, by No comments yet

Oh, man… I just went out to lock up the feathered ones at the tail end of a light rain. The clouds had begun to disperse, yielding to end-of-day light from the setting sun, and the air smelled fresh and cool. As I locked the roosting chickens safely into their shed for the night and turned to go back to the house, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of an ENORMOUS rainbow, arcing from east to southeast, the colors vivid enough against the still-grey sky to glow through the electric greens of emerging foliage at the horizon.

I just stood and let the sight wash over me for several minutes as the last drops of rain from the departing clouds splashed about my shoulders and head like a Spring benediction.

That sight is going to stay with me for a while.

Dig we must.

January 24, 2011, by No comments yet

The Brits have an instruction manual for everything.Ah, tis the season. A time to once again celebrate those simple, traditional rituals that bring the human family together, united in spirit and in action.

Christmas? Hanukkah? Kwanzaa? Solstice? No, I refer to the only truly universal winter ritual–one that all New Englanders practice, regardless of personal belief systems: Digging out. Continued…

There’s a TREE in our living room!

December 26, 2010, by No comments yet

2010 Christmas TreeIt’s only recently that I’ve begun taking photographs of our Christmas tree. For almost five years we didn’t put one up, even after moving to the country–we were too busy with work, school, housework, or feared that one of our cats would try to climb it while we were away from the house. But we missed not having one, and at Christmas our new, high-ceilinged, bewindowed home seemed incomplete without one. And since living in the country means that you can’t drive down a road in my little town without seeing the hand-lettered signs on every other utility pole indicating where you could get your holiday fix of pine needles and pitch, it seemed unsporting to hold out just for practicality’s sake. So we caved, and now go to a nearby gentleman’s farm every year and cut our own. We’ve even gotten into the habit of acquiring one or two new ornaments a year, mainly to replace the inevitable broken or faded one–with the exception of one winter when we went on a bauble-buying binge at Macy’s and Pier One Imports and came home with two shopping bags full, some of which we have yet to take out of their boxes. Continued…