Wednesday's Words, by Morgan Ashbury

This past Saturday, stepping out on an extreme limb of faith, I asked my husband to once again remove the ice claw from my cane; but even more brazenly, I asked him to please put my winter boots into storage, upstairs—along with my winter coat.

He did ask what I would do if it snowed again, and I told him the truth. We’re nearly all the way out of April. If it snows again, I’m staying inside the house—and I don’t even care if we’re out of coffee when I do it.

I know that last bit has my beloved concerned; after all, that’s going below the bottom line beneath which we both, usually, we will not sink. But friends, I tell you truly, a person has to draw the line at some point and take a stand.

That’s mine.

We’ve had a couple of days of magnificent, fresh-smelling air in the last couple of weeks. I took the opportunity to have my front and back doors wide open to air out the house. Also, I have my bedroom window open about an inch and a half now. I’ve always slept better in a cooler bedroom, with the window open. But I’ve noticed some changes, lately. And I believe that I’m possibly on the verge of inching toward that tipping point, the one my daughter has told me about. The one where a person steps (or maybe stumbles) over the line from middle age, right into the morass of elderly status.

My daughter, Jennifer, is what’s known here in Canada as a PSW—a Personal Support Worker. I believe, in the U.S., that career is referred to as being a Nurse’s Aid.

Now, Jennifer doesn’t tolerate the heat well. She not only visits clients in their home, but she also has clients she visits at a senior’s care facility, here in town. The rooms there, apparently, each have their own thermostats. And a lot of her clients have that sucker cranked right up, no matter the time of year it is.

She tells me that there are days when she comes out of a client’s room and has to take a moment to allow her body temperature to come back down to normal while she uses a tissue to mop the sweat from her brow. She shakes her head as she tells me, that sometimes, even in those environments, those poor people will complain of being cold.

I am beginning to understand that concept.

My internal thermostat has been off since I hit menopause, a while back. In the middle of the day—any day—I will either feel icy cold or very hot. Part of the cold, I understand, has to do with poorer circulation. That is especially true in my right foot—because of the veins they took out of my right leg during my emergency heart by-pass surgery in 2002.

My office is cooler than the rest of the house, and my feet can get very chilly, even though I am wearing socks and leg warmers and slippers. Later in the day, when I am “legs up” in my recliner, with a blanket covering those legs, from my knees to my ankles, I sometimes have the same problem.

I solved that dilemma about a month and a half ago. While in Walmart, I purchased an inexpensive fleece blanket, the small kind meant for sitting with, not for beds. I folded it in half lengthwise, and sewed it shut across the bottom and about a foot and a half up the side.

Mostly—when I’m in my recliner—I slip my legs (minus my slippers) into this hand-made “cubby-hole” for my feet, get those legs up, and cover myself as previously with my other fleece blanket. Within about fifteen minutes, sometimes sooner, my ankles and feet are toasty warm and I am a happy woman.

One other dilemma has no solution. Sometimes my knees will ache like a bad tooth-ache. So, I put my heating pad on them, and that begins to ease the discomfort. That wonderful device can also, unfortunately, trigger a hot flash.

My husband suggested, and yes, with a straight face at least until the words were out of his mouth, that on such occasions I apply an ice pack to my head. He said, that way, I could be a real earth mother: my knees would represent the tropics, my head with the ice pack, the north pole, and the rest of me, the temperate zone.

A sense of humor is a wonderful thing. But I digress.

Just like those dear souls my daughter cares for, I, too, have taken, from time-to-time, to raising the thermostat in the house. Most of the time, over the winter months, it’s set at seventy degrees. Last year, that was sufficient for all but a handful of days.

This past winter, however, and even as recently as last Sunday night, we dared to be wastrels, spendthrifts throwing away heating dollars as if they were so much flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life.

Yes, I think we’re making that leaving-middle age transition, because we dared to raise the setting on our thermostat from seventy degrees all the way up to seventy-two.

If you tell me that proves it, and it’s all downhill from here, I’m going to pretend I don’t hear you.

Love,
Morgan

Wednesday's Words, by Morgan Ashbury

There’s been a lot of talk, lately, about history. As in, “when history looks back on these times, they won’t be looked upon kindly”. Or, my personal favorite, “They’re on the wrong side of history!” “They” of course, being whomever, depending upon and according to the speaker of the moment, is considered “in the wrong”.

I think it’s good to keep history in mind as we live our lives. But not just the history we’re making in the moment. You see, some of the history we’re making is new. But sadly, much of it is a repetition of what has come before—actions we took that wreaked dreadful consequences upon humanity.

History, you see, really is something you’re doomed to repeat until you learn from it.

It was a fervent belief in eugenics and racial purity that allowed a power-hungry madman to come to power in Germany and to go on to become one of the greatest human monsters of all time. That didn’t happen centuries in the past—that was just eighty-five years ago, in 1933. Those beliefs weren’t simply beliefs that sprang into being spontaneously; they were beliefs that were coined and fed and nurtured by the madman himself. In that monster’s day, the scapegoat he chose as the reason his country was no longer great, was mainly the Jewish people. Millions of them died in this satan’s attempt to not only make his country greater, but to make himself the absolute dictator of his nation, and then of the world.

Ultimately, he failed primarily because one nation, The United States, left behind its isolationism and rose to the challenge, leading a force of allies that defeated him. And from the moment that war was won, wise souls began to caution us all that these freedoms that our courageous fighting forces had secured for us were not guaranteed; we needed, all of us, to stand guard over them, and keep vigil upon them, lest they be subverted once more.

We needed to remember, lest we forgot. Sadly, it would appear that we’ve forgotten.

Our basic human nature lies at the bottom of our susceptibility to being led astray. Times get tough, things change, we feel insecure, and because of our human nature, we seek to blame someone or something for our woes. We didn’t do this to ourselves, so someone must have done this horrible thing to us! And that very aspect of our nature gives an opening to the snake oil salesmen of the world to slither in and wreak their havoc, to wallow in their chaos and to generally make a mess of everything. But all that havoc being wreaked upon us has nothing to do with bettering our state of being; it’s all about the despot of the moment and his fortunes and his whims.

Down through the ages, times have gotten tough and things have changed. It’s not someone doing something to us, it’s cyclical. The answer, the way to cope, is not to cast aspersions and strike out at whoever appears to be a convenient target; it’s not to blame others, and shout to the world with a raised, shaking fist that all would be fine if only they would just go away. Whenever we’ve done that, which I liken to throwing a kind of “grown up spoiled-child hissy fit”, the cosmos sees to it we get a “time out”. And that time out is rarely pleasant.

The better way to respond when times get tough and things change is to support each other and to adapt and adjust to the new paradigm. The adoption of the can-do spirit that led to the boom times that followed the end of the Second World War is a prime example of that sort of response. In my mind and in my heart, I know that’s the only way to answer these kinds of difficulties.

In nature, species that do not adapt and adjust to changes, die out. That’s what survival of the fittest means, and it’s not a political tenet, it’s nature’s way of protecting life, all life. Only the strongest, the most viable, and the most adaptable organisms are allowed to go forward.

They adapt, and they adjust and they, to totally mix my metaphors, make lemonade out of lemons instead of trying to rid their environment of “the others”.

We have to learn to do that again. We have to learn to recognize when we’re being sold a bill of goods that is nothing but horse pucky. We have to remember that the freedoms we cherish are not absolutes, they are not forever. They, like the most delicate of orchids, require care, and attention, and work. We have to remember that we were created not to rule this planet, or to live in isolation, but to help one another.

I have great hope for our future, because I do believe that most people are good—if, perhaps, a little too trusting of those smooth-talking snake oil salesmen.

Love,
Morgan

Wednesday's Words, by Morgan Ashbury

Autumn has arrived. We’ve attacked the fallen walnut leaves for the third time, and will likely have to do so again before the neighborhood maples drop their leaves around the end of October.

When it was me doing most of the raking, I always figured that since I had enjoyed the beauty of those neighboring trees through the spring and summer, spending a couple hours raking was a fair price to pay.

I no longer do that chore.

When our grandson isn’t on the job, my beloved is. But please don’t feel too sorry for him. You see, at a company golf tournament a couple of years ago, he won a leaf blower. So, while there is some effort involved, it’s not the heavy slog of raking—at least not until he has amassed a pile. Then he puts nature’s debris into the brown paper bags, and that can take some work. The only thing he really minds about the entire process is that he can’t do physical work like he used to.

The countdown to his retirement is in serious territory now—less than two months to go. I will admit that I am at this point used to the idea (or should that be resigned to the idea?). We’ve joked some, and I’ve told him that if I ever tell him to go outside and not come in until the streetlights are on, that he should perhaps stop and examine his recent activities.

He thought that I’d made a very clever joke—but he also knew I meant it. This is going to be an adjustment for the both of us. But then, we’ve been together more than 45 years, and through that time we’ve undergone plenty of adjustments. We’re not in the U.S. army but we’ve used their motto—adapt, improvise, overcome—for most of our lives.

There’s an old saying that the only people who really like change are wet babies, and I think there’s some truth to that.

He is looking forward to not having to get up at four a.m., to not having a boss, and to not having to interact with people he doesn’t necessarily like. It’s been slightly more than fifteen years since I last worked outside the home. I spent much of my working years employed by big companies, so I do understand his feelings on the matter.

I even know, although we’ve spent some time negotiating responsibilities around the home and the upcoming division of labor, that he’s likely going to take the first few weeks and do as little as possible. I really am all for that. If retirement is supposed to be a reward, then he should be allowed to feel as if he’s being rewarded.

You know how, as a parent, you live your life a certain way and hope that your example inspires your kids? Yeah, I don’t think that works the same way with spouses. David and I are two totally different people. It’s rare for me to blow off a day. I might not get everything done I think I need to do, because I can’t do physical work the way I used to, either. But I rarely spend more than an hour or so “doing nothing”. The only codicil to that is when I am captured by a good book.

My daily routine is what I call “multi-tasking”. Every hour of every day is filled with either writing, or housework. There are always things to be done. Dishes that missed the after-supper round up the night before, a bathroom to be cleaned, a floor to be vacuumed, and a bed to be made. Supper also has to be made, unless it’s Friday or Saturday—yes, I now have not one, but two “no-cook” days. As I said, I may not get everything done on any given day, but I work on it as best I can. I’ve learned that an hour or so taken with my legs up in the early afternoon generally eases the pain of my arthritic joints so I don’t need pain meds until evening.

I keep busy so that by the time I head to bed, I’m tired, and I can sleep. Rare is the day that drags, and I guess in a way I’ve traded the right to loaf around for a lack of boredom.

I’m honestly looking forward to finding out what my husband’s after-retirement routine, once he settles in, is going to look like.

Love,
Morgan

Wednesday's Words, by Morgan Ashbury

The pictures coming out of Texas beginning last weekend, and over the past few days have been heartbreaking. To see some small towns practically demolished, and the streets of Houston with waist to chest deep water—and rising—is beyond shocking. Entire neighborhoods will have to be leveled, I think. You can’t have homes submerged for so long a period in so much contaminated water, and hope they’ll dry out and be fine. You just can’t.

The disaster that was Hurricane, and now Tropical Storm Harvey truly is unlike any storm we’ve ever seen. Usually a hurricane comes, rages for a day or so, and then goes away. The cost in human lives can be counted almost immediately. When I awoke this morning, it was to news that the death toll had reached 18, doubling overnight. The authorities fear that number will climb, once the water drains away. Hurricane Katrina stole 1,836 lives. We can only pray that is a number never to be matched or exceeded.

In addition to the deaths, thousands of people have and are going through hell. Thousands have escaped with their lives, but have lost everything they possess, save the clothes on their backs. Some arrived at the shelters, shoeless. For the person experiencing it, losing everything is more than a shock, it’s a violation—very similar to the kind of violation one would feel after a physical attack. It’s happened to us twice, through fire, so I know a little of what these people are feeling.

The Houston police chief, Art Acevedo said during the telephone interview that I listened to Monday morning, that he feared the worst was yet to come, and his words have proven true. All of the water brought by the rainfall and flooding in south east Texas will head to the Gulf via Houston. There are over 6 million people in the metropolitan Houston area, a number far too high to have tried to evacuate, given the propensity for flash flooding on many of the roadways leading out of the area. A family of 6 was lost, having perished attempting to evacuate their flooded home.

The Army Corps of Engineers had to release water from two Houston dams into the Buffalo Bayou on Monday morning. This was done to prevent uncontrollable flooding of the Houston Metropolitan area, and to keep the dams from failing. It was a measure taken much sooner than originally planned, because the water in the reservoirs rose so quickly. Some people were not yet flooded until the gates of the reservoirs were opened. And even so, one of those dams, built in the 1930s, still breached it’s banks, spilling water into areas that had previously escaped flooding.

A category 4 Hurricane with no “steering currents” gathering last minute strength from the unusually warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, coming ashore and lingering, wreaking havoc and with the potential for unprecedented rainfall—well, there was simply no real play book to follow for this crisis. They are writing the book for this one as they go along. Another blessing? There was no storm surge in the Houston area.

This is going to be a very long recovery for the people of south east Texas, and especially, it would seem, for the people of Houston. The storm has moved on but the water will continue to bring heartache until it eventually drains away. What the water hid will then be revealed and the true recovery can begin. Only six days of Harvey, but the rebuilding, the mending of lives, and of spirits, the reconstruction of neighborhoods—that is going to take years.

The one bright light throughout this disaster has been watching neighbors helping neighbors, and strangers helping strangers. People came from far and wide, brought their own boats, and just got to work. Much has been written about the great divide within the United States these days; and yet I am certain no one offering help inquired if the person in need of that help was a democrat or a republican. They didn’t care what color their skin was, or if they might be an immigrant or native born. In the midst of the chaos named Harvey, all those people were Texans, and they were Americans—they were brothers and sisters. And while this tragedy has been hard to watch, and clearly even harder to endure, the affirmation of the greatest of the values for which America stands, has been something we all needed to see—and more, something we all need to emulate.

There are ways we all can help the people devastated by Harvey. Canadians can donate money through the Canadian Red Cross. Here is a link to the designated page on their website: http://www.redcross.ca/about-us/red-cross-stories/2017/red-cross-responds-to-devastation-caused-by-hurricane-harvey

The American Red Cross is, of course, involved in providing assistance. In addition, here is a list I found of resources in need of various donations, for my American friends who want to help: https://www.yahoo.com/news/help-victims-tropical-storm-harvey-212340221.html

You don’t have to give a lot; you might think your five dollars won’t help, but it will. Your five dollars added to the five dollars of thousands of other people means thousands of dollars times five will flow and be used to help put people’s lives back together again.

In the meantime, let’s all send positive thoughts and prayers for the people affected by this disaster. The people of Texas are resilient. They will get through this, and come out stronger. I truly believe this to be so.

Love,
Morgan

Wednesday's Words, by Morgan Ashbury

I cannot remain silent. To witness such grotesque injustice, and say nothing, is to agree with it. This past weekend I watched thugs marching in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, spewing hate and Nazi slogans, giving Nazi salutes. That is completely intolerable, completely and unequivocally wrong. I know my history. The United States of America as well as my own country of Canada went to war, not even a century ago, against the evil of Nazism. One cannot claim to be a patriotic American or a patriotic Canadian and be a Nazi.

You just can’t. It is not physically, emotionally, or morally possible.

Looking at the bigger picture, I have to ask myself, why do human beings hate?
Why do we allow ourselves to feel the roiling, boiling cauldron of emotions that leave us full of anger, full of rage? Full of hate? Those feelings don’t make us feel good. They don’t create, they don’t uplift, they don’t enhance. Nothing good comes from those emotions. So why do we allow them purchase within our souls, and within our society?

Of all the things we, as a species, permit in our lives, the one I don’t understand is this pervasive, black, crippling hate, the likes of which we all saw on our television screens over this past weekend. I can’t understand it. Am I hopelessly naïve? Oh, more than likely.
So, what makes people hate?

I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t as a rule proselytize in my essays. And I won’t over much, this time, either. But I will say this: I have read the Bible. I state that because I have also heard some of these haters saying they believe in God, and I do not doubt that they do: after all, Satan believes in God, too.

I am a Christian, and hate has no place in my faith. That isn’t my opinion, it’s fact. There is no hate in that Good Book. Jesus did go into the temple with a whip which He made in response to seeing God’s House turned into a ‘den of thieves’. That was anger—righteous anger. That was not hate.

Hate is not the emotion used by God. Hate is the tool of Satan.

So again I ask, why hate? There is absolutely no positive to be gained through hate. See, I told you I was naïve. The only gain these haters are interested in is power. They hope to overthrow democracy, and take over, and “purify” their nation. Their words, not mine. It appears lots of people agree with them. Maybe those people think if there we only white people around, life would somehow be better. More jobs. More money. Just like the good old days!

But that’s not true, not any of it. Those people just want the power for power’s sake. And once they get it, they may decide, hmm. All those blonde people, just you know, being blonde. Those blondes steal our jobs, they’re the reason life is no longer good here. We need to get rid of the blondes! If we got rid of the blondes, life would somehow be better. More jobs. More money. Just like the good old days!

Yeah, that sounds silly, but there is as much logic behind that as there is logic behind their stated goals and motivations now. Those that would have power at any cost will lie to attain it.

Let me say that one sentence again. Those that would have power at any cost will lie to attain it. And they will use any means—stirring up fears, feeding insecurities, whatever it takes—so that their mindless minions will believe, and will do what’s asked of them.  And those who are pathological liars just lie because they can’t help themselves.

I believe in the right of all people to protest. I believe in the right of all people to speak their minds, and to have their say and to choose their own beliefs.

However, when people go to a so called “rally” armed with guns, knives, clubs and shields, they’re not there to protest. They’re there to commit violence. They are there to hurt other people. Unarmed people. Ministers, and pastors, and community volunteers. Legal assistants.

And if they drive their car into a crowd of innocent, unarmed people, hoping for a high body count? Why, then they’re terrorists.

We all have the right to protest. We do not have the right to riot, to hurt, to maim or to kill.

Love,
Morgan

Wednesday's Words, by Morgan Ashbury

This past weekend my husband and I tackled a long overdue job—one that we had to do upstairs. This was supposed to be our bedroom/office area. Unfortunately, the renovations, a joint project between my husband and our second son, were never completed after our son died. My husband simply didn’t have the heart for it. There needs only the finishing work to be done: drywall, and some type of finished flooring. Over the years this space has housed bedrooms for my grandkids, and a place for my daughter and her son when they moved in with us for a couple years.

We also use this area for storage, and what called us up there this past weekend was the task of sorting through the thousands of books we have stored up there—some on bookshelves, some in boxes, and some in a very long, sturdy wooden cedar chest.

Yes, my friends, I said thousands of books. The last time my daughter counted them, there were over 4,000. These are mostly paperbacks, though there were a few hard cover books in the lot. Some of the oldest books dating back to the 1940s and before sadly weren’t in good condition—nor were they when they came into our possession.

Our goal, over this past weekend, was to separate the wheat from the chaff, basically. What books did we really want to keep and which ones could we put in a pile to give away?

I know. You’re all still up there at the 4000. Seriously, I think’s closer to 5000 if you count the more recent books, the ones that are down stairs on our 6 bookshelves. You’re probably wondering where all those books came from.

To preface, I will tell you that we’ve always had books, and to top that off, we have had 2 house fires where we lost virtually everything, including our books. My beloved pointed out in the middle of this weekend’s sorting work, that this was indeed our third collection.

When the kids were younger, when we were struggling, and both of us working, each bi-weekly payday we’d give ourselves 20 dollars a piece as our “allowance”. That total of 40 bucks was our entire entertainment budget. And each payday, we would take ourselves to the bookstore at the plaza in the town where we shopped. There, we would each purchase as many books as possible with our allowance.

At the time, I’d begun to read romance, and became somewhat hooked on some of the monthly release lines, like Silhouette Desire and Harlequin Loveswept, and other lines, too. Those books were fairly inexpensive. My beloved actually liked historical romance, and he read those long before I did. He’d also buy other action adventure books.

When we each finished reading our books, we’d often swap and read each other’s. As I said, that was our entertainment. We also bought a fair number of books at garage sales. “You can have the entire box for five bucks!” What a deal that was for us, a deal only topped by the time we bought a four-piece living room suite for 15 dollars at a garage sale—but that is another story.

Sorting began Saturday morning. I know my husband was expecting a battle; I know he somehow thought that I would want to keep a ton of those books. But that was never in my plans. Yes, there were a few books that I’d really loved. And when I would come across those? Why, they went into the keeper box, no question about it. By the time we called it a day on Saturday, David had accepted I wasn’t going to cling overmuch to the past.

I found all of my old favorites except one; I’m going to post on my face book page about that one, because I don’t recall the title or the author, just the plot.

My reading tastes, and yes, my standards have changed. That’s not a slight against the two lines of books I’ve named, not at all. Anyone who’s watched an episode of an old favorite television series will know what I mean. Books and shows over twenty years old seem less sophisticated when you revisit them; as they should because they reflect the society in which they were produced, and times do change. There’s a kind of social innocence to those pre-global terrorism days that one could almost term halcyon.

I’m grateful to the hundreds of authors who wrote thousands of novels, tiny vehicles of escape and relief. Back in the days before I ever believed I would be a published author, I sank into those simple, happy stories and felt uplifted. Those hours of escape were as good as any vacation I later took.

In the end, we kept about four boxes worth of books, and have twenty-two boxes ready to go—hopefully to good, grateful homes.

Love,
Morgan