mid August

 it is a serious thing

just to be alive
        on this fresh morning
                in the broken world. 

Mary Oliver 

Late summer always has me all over the place. The mornings are cool enough for long (!) sleeves but by lunchtime it's hot again. The garden is a jungle, we pull out plants that have finished their business (thank you massive tomato harvest) and argue about the best time to pick the conference pears. Wait another week, says I and let's store them all in the basement now, says he. The apples are already stored there the way my granny would be proud of, double layer of newspaper, decently spaced and so on. 

I walk and cycle and sit down with a cup of coffee watching the world go by and occasionally I recognise someone from the world and we chat for a while about the world going by.

We went to two museums in five days. One exhibit was local/national photography and the other was in honour of Wim Wenders, 80 years old now. The Wim Wenders thing was a lot to take in, so much memory lane for me, the way we watched movies back then, seriously, discussing endings and scenes and reenacting bits for clarity. Paris, Texas is still one of the best movies for me.

 

 

I am slowly reintroducing long forgotten food. One step at a time and with all the cautions I have been given as I am still waiting for the pathology/histology report on why and how this gallbladder was chronically inflamed, also liver values are not quite back to healthy. But I had one of these sourdough bread smashed avocado sandwiches with rucola and cress and radish and lived to tell the tale without pain. In other words, we sat down in a restaurant together like normal people.

Here's another video, very popular at the moment.

 

 

Here's an odd thing. In my immediate and extended family we've been booking flights from Europe to NZ for quite a long time, usually going south east from here, via Singapore or Dubai, the shortest route. In my latest search because yes, I am going to travel, the algorithms offer me dirt cheap routes via Texas with various US airlines. The price difference is considerable (much less), the stopover time too (much longer). And these routes come up first in almost every portal. No, I am not going to travel that way but what's going on? 

it is hot outside

So today's the day of that meeting between an easily manipulated, not very intelligent narcissist and a highly manipulative, completely unscrupulous former KGB officer. Apparently, first it's just the two of them one to one, probably most likely sorting out a deal involving minerals and rare earth and such like, all for the filling of coffers no doubt.

The heat has returned in full force. With good timing and attention we manage to keep the house cool, it's what I learned as a child in Franconia where summers are hot hot hot but I still have to explain methods to the man who grew up in Ireland at a time when summers would last a day or two. Last night we briefly debated moving the beds down into the basement but I was just too tired for it and slept in the living room on the guest sofa bed and when it had cooled down to 25 C outside at around 2 am, I opened up every window and the patio door and let the lovely night breeze blow through the rooms.

This is the coolest summer of our coming life, so we are told.  

 

The pears are ripe already, a month early.

 

something will come to you

 

 

This afternoon we sat for a while by the small pond in the back of the large cemetery, watching the dragon flies. The cemeteries here are beautiful parks and when I started to discover them during those strange and silent lockdown months I realised how busy my working life had been and that I must begin to pay attention to the world around me. Sitting under the willows with the dragon flies darting here and there I remembered my grandmother. and how she was always busy, so many chores, always on her feet. This is of course not true, she would also sit down and watch tv and talk while her guests ate the cake she had baked. She used to stack up on chocolate bars and hand out one each to her grandchildren if they had been good during a visit. The stack of these chocolate bars was in the big sideboard in her dining room on the shelf below the silverware drawer, next to the tea set. This is the same sideboard where, after his death, my brother found that box full of letters my father had collected, letters he had received from the women he must have dated over the years. I never saw these letters, I only know what my brother told me. "They were from all over, love letters mostly, some desperate, in German and French and Swedish, he must have met them on his travels. God knows what he promised them. Anyway, I got rid of them all there and then."

Once my grandmother had handed over the chocolate bar, we knew that we had to thank her politely and that we should never tear open the wrapping until we had left her house. Most of the time the chocolate was white with mould anyway and we broke it into small pieces that we flung out of the car window on the way home. Into the fields of Franconia.

My grandmother died thirty years ago in her sleep shortly before her 103rd birthday and on the way back home from her funeral we crashed the car during a sudden snowfall on the motorway, a rear-end collision while driving very slowly but a total write-off nevertheless resulting in the first of two spinal surgeries for me, one that summer and the second one, almost 20 years later. 

My grandmother is buried in her hometown, my grandfather, my father and my father's sister are buried next to her. Their cemetery is on a hillside in a dense forest. I think I've been there maybe five times including my father's funeral two years ago - mainly when I helped my father over the years to place several expensive terrocotta pots with seasonal plants like some sort of offering between the tombstones, but I know I can find the site no problem and I can see the writing on their tombstones when I close my eyes. Not that I have plans to visit. As was the custom, my grandfather's profession - senior magistrate - is recorded and for my grandmother it says senior magistrate's widow. In Franconia, back in the days, the wives insisted on having their hard work that enabled their husband's career recognised and honoured.

Eventually, the gnats got the upper hand and we left the pond and the cemetery and cycled on to the Italian icecream parlour where I had a scoop of butterscotch and R had pistachio.  We swapped half way.

I feel almost back to normal these days, I am digesting ice cream without pain, the resorbable stitches at three of the four incision sites have almost disappeared. The GP is a bit concerned about the fourth incision but I think the redness is due to a mosquito bite and we agreed to wait and see.

Another snippet I found at the back of my blog draft archive:

 As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.

Richard Wilbur

 

 

spuds and news and a nasty lump of coal

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan 

First things first:

After admiring Ellen's feast of blossoms forever, we ordered seeds from a hopefully reliable Dutch supplier and look what has come up:

Caesalpinia gilliesii aka Bird of Paradise bush

 

I speak words of encouragement everytime I pass the little pots. I am expecting only greatness.

One of these days, my energy storage tank, which is filling up nicely, will reach sufficient levels to become active in the blogworld again. However, supervision in this household is strict, nurse Ratchet would be proud.

So again, just a few bits and pieces. 

Because of about a hundred stickers protesting against the Nazi regime, Liane Berkowitz was beheaded with a guillotine 82 years ago today, on 5 August 1943, two days before her 20th birthday, in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin. Take a moment to remember her.

The potatoe harvest has been exceptional this year, we are reaching Irish standards. Here are representatives of some of the varieties we harvested and are now eating.

left to right:

Ackersegen (blessing of the field), Rote Emalie (red Emalie), Cilena, Blauer Schwede (blue Swede), Heidemarie (Mary of the heather)

The last tigridia of the year:

 

And two bits that came through the ethers this morning. 

This is not meant to be funny because it's actually disturbingly evil, where to begin, if women are bits of coal what's next . . .

 

Instead, let this be your guide today:

 

 

 

 

so this is August

Here is an amazement - once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

         Mary Oliver

But wait until you're 67 and had surgery . . . 

Accepting 

1. limitations of age 
2. chronic illness treated with immune supressives 
3. after effects of surgery due to 3
4. massive lack of get up and go 

 All of it a work in progress. Isn't this the life.

Due to a massive lack of energy and brain power, all I can do is dig up my seemingly endless list of drafted blog posts, mostly first sentences, half finished posts, a selection of what I saved ten years ago:

 

• There’s being dogged in pursuit of a goal and there’s the pointlessness of being bitchy.
  A hen is a hen and a cock is a cock, but a chick is always female.
  An Old Master is one thing, but an old mistress is something else entirely (note those capitals). 

• I spent the last two hours editing papers on oxytocin and its effects on hunger craving in women. Yes, it is just as you imagine only now male scientists have found a way to prove it using big machinery and extensive tests which include healthy women staring at images of sweets and desserts while inside MRI tunnels. 

• I am whistling in the dark - praying, hoping, that fraying edge between worry, misery, loneliness and actual illness, that blurred line.

 Recent social media finds:

 

 

 

A fitting addendum to my bicycle post: Norman Quentin Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) shows off his new one.

 

 

Also, the last post was censored by my family. And they come first.