Erin's land journal

Too much people in the last little while. I spent a bunch of time at the studio which had a bunch of ambient folks and some time on the phone with disability folks and it's just been too much.

The pill fluctuations are catching up with me too; with PMDD it's the change in hormones that's the problem, not necessarily the levels, so I'm back to steady on the pill to suppress my body's cycles which had started to wake up. I have to remind myself that I lived through this monthly for decades, until it became super constant; I can get through this bit ok until I stabilize. The bubbles of hatred and despair and pain are just very unpleasant.

Being outside makes everything ok, though. Moving around, looking at different things, making garden beds and planting bulbs and splitting firewood-- those settle me and give me peace. I've nearly finished putting in the peonies and have added some grapes and a toka ownroot plum and three manchurian apricots, which may well be hardy here. They're all miniscule plants, of course, 2.5" pots, which take longer to mature but they're what I can afford. I can't spend as much time doing these things as I'd like, of course, or I lose use of my body, but any day that contains them is a better day.

Today the plan is to screw some pallets together to make a winter pig shelter. They can't stay in the back, and since the rescues are full they need to stay here, so I'm going to bring them in closer. We'll see how much of it I get done, but even if all I can do is move the pallets today, pound the t-posts tomorrow, and screw things together the day after then that's how it must be done. Weird to think I used to be able to do something like this in one bite in the dark after work, and work the next day.

The days are getting distinctly shorter. I think we're below 8 hours of sunlight now. I hadn't realized how this would impact my ability to be outside; because I need good long rest periods between pieces of activity I end up running out of daylight even if I'm only spending two hours outside total unless I start very early.

The ground is starting to freeze. I bet I can still get t-posts through the crust, it's not deep yet, but I'm not sure about digging anything and a bunch of stuff is likely frozen to the ground. I may have one hose encased in an ice flow on the north side of my house, which I think may not thaw till spring now, but I got most of the hoses and pallets up. I'd thought to move woodchips later in the winter but had forgotten that the outside of the chip piles, which are wet, freeze. I've moved most-ish of the chips anyhow, making the lasagne chicken-manure-and-green-deciduous-chip beds. I'd left bulbs-and-mulching the orchard until the ground on the way back there froze. It's more work slogging through mud, and anyhow, I just haven't had the ability.

A friend helped me take measurements for the automatic pattern thing (apostrophe patterns) where you feed in your measurements and it spits out a pattern. I just don't have it in me to self-draft leggings, and it's worked well for shirts in the past. Weirdly my arms are symmetrical now, biceps at least. I've lost 3" on my biceps in the last two years, which is not surprising but it makes me sad. I'm so much weaker now, and it's a combination of less physical activity and the illness.

Anyhow, the vast majority of my pants are in rags at this point. I have three pairs of comfortable-enough pants without holes, but none without stains, for winter. I have four additional pairs of pants that will work for winter with long underwear, two without stains, but that won't work for daily life, and of course I don't want to wear the ones without stains for daily life or they will stain. Either way I've been wearing the stuff with holes and trying to eke out the time between laundry, but if I can manage to put together several pairs of warm winter pants it will make a big difference.

Shirts that fit will be lovely too. I have several t-shirts -- they don't need to fit in order to stay on so I can buy them online -- but winter weather shirts that can handle chilliness and body moisture are beyond my price range, so it'll be good to put some more together. I did splurge on socks, as I have done at least every second year since moving north. Luckily I don't go through them as much as I used to when I was putting kilometers on them every day, and I don't need that level of quality, so it's a reasonable splurge.

Money is on my mind a lot. I have maybe eight months at most of the level of friends' support I've been enjoying. It's kept me alive through the worst of disability paperwork and learning to manage this, but it of course couldn't last forever. After that it will be back to survival expenses only.

As I go through the days I'm slowly saying goodbye to the luxuries I've enjoyed: premade food, steak sometimes, fresh veggies and even non-apple-or-banana fruits in the wintertime, fruit juice or pop or fancy tea or any drinks that cost more than a cheap teabag, milk and probably nut milks, gas for popping into town, a truck without check engine lights on, maybe regular membership at the pottery studio instead of saving my work at home to pop in and use the kiln every so many months, new plants, testing fancy clays maybe?, new sheets, electric blankets, keeping my home warm even in the shoulder season, running the dryer in the summer and midwinter (shoulder season is necessary I think), I know there'll be lots of things. In the meantime I need to sort out if there's anything that will substantially make my life cheaper at that time, and get it now. I've been thinking an e-bike, to get to town and back without gas, but that's only good in the summer. Maybe worth it? Maybe I can't maintain it well enough with my cognitive stuff and it's not?

I'm going to try and figure out some way of replacing my upstairs tile at least. Right now I can't wash the kitchen and bathroom floors except on my knees with a nearly dry cloth, because the tiles and grout and the MDF board underneath are so compromised that any moisture swells the MDF and further cracks or pops off the tiles and several are already missing or at an angle. So, I haven't been using my magic vacmop and in fact haven't been washing the upstairs floors at all. That just can't go on for the next 40 years. Even if I can just get it off and put well-sealed plywood in? It doesn't have to look like anything but I need it to function like a floor.

In the midst of all this, the ball I've been letting slip is meds. I've put off my covid shot, which I hear is a demanding one this year, because I haven't had enough recovery time lined up. I'm supposed to have started B vitamin shots a month ago, but again need to take the time to make sure if I have a bad effect I can recover. And I haven't been tracking meds symptoms except noticing the bubbles of intensity creeping back from hormonal fluctuations, and I notice them because they really are incapacitating.

Enough of that. I'll get the pigs tucked in somewhere warm today, or tomorrow, or the next day. I'll get the bluebells under the rest of the woodchips. Cats will snuggle with me when I rest by the woodstove. In a couple weeks I'll get the pottery area tidied so I can head back to my own wheel instead of the studio ones. It's a good life, full of things I love, and I'm very grateful to have it.

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.