Somewhere

A week ago Sunday we could see the full arc of a rainbow from my sister's front door. So we're looking across the street at a neighbor's house with the rainbow above it.

Back yard happenings

Yes, spring continues to spring. Today has been especially wonderful. After weeks of rain and chill (in the 50°s Fahrenheit) we have had some sun and warmth (mid- to upper 60°s Fahrenheit). It's practically balmy. Tomorrow will be similar, but starting to cloud up, and then we'll be back to rain and chill for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, this brief interlude of kindly weather will give us renewed strength as we carry on.

My forsythia is fuller than ever. 

Behind it, the trees are not yet showing any buds. This is why we appreciate having a forsythia. I sat out on the deck for a while this afternoon, and enjoyed the warmth. We get some noise from the businesses on the other side of the creek.

The Darigold milk-drying tower (which turns milk into powdered milk) is a muffled roar, while Vander Griend lumberyard provides the sounds of lumber dropping onto hard surfaces, trucks beeping as they back up, and the like. 

Vander Griend has improved in one way since last year. Their property used to extend to the creek, but they arranged with the city to remove a creekside building and stretch their works out longer in the other direction. This left room for the city to install a new section of Lynden's Jim Kaemingk, Senior, Trail. It's named after my Uncle Jim, for many years on the town council and also serving as mayor. Anyway, Vander Griend's change of footprint involved tearing down an ugly metal building that was heavily graffitied and which was always on view from my yard during the winter when the trees had no leaves to hide it from sight.

I zoomed in a bit to show the trail. On my side of the creek, the ground is lower, at the level of the forsythia. (My back yard is a flood plain.) The opposite side is several feet higher, and that's where the trail runs. I've pointed out where a group of kids is walking. You can't see the surface of the trail, but you can see the people using it.

Behind the kids, you can see a row of shrubs that I hope will grow tall enough to make even more of a screen for the lumberyard.

While I was sitting in an Adirondack chair in the sun, my herb barrel was at my elbow. It has parsley, sage, rosemary, and ... chives. I need to add some thyme. What I planted last year didn't thrive.

And so the world keeps turning.

Spring is springing

 I believe I've shared before that my dad claimed that his favorite poem was:

Spring has sprung.

The grass has riz.

I wonder where the birdies is.

Well, spring hasn't entirely sprung yet, but it's springing. Here are three signs of spring from my yard and deck.

1. My forsythia is getting some yellow blooms. I planted forsythia for the exact reason that it brings some color in early spring, when we're longing for it.

2. My honeysuckle is starting to leaf out. At the end of last summer, this plant was looking pretty leggy and straggly. I cut it back severely, not knowing if it would even come back. It's not a spring chicken. (Har. I crack myself up.) Perhaps it will recover.

3. Some tulips are sending up leaves. I bought myself some tulips in a pot last year. When they were done, I just left the pot sitting on my deck. Now it looks like I'll get some blooms out of the deal.

Welcome, spring. 

Silly dogs

So I’m just sitting quietly at my desk, minding my own business, when my dogs start barking, Vociferously. I see that my nephew is driving the lawn mower back and forth, to mulch the leaves in the yard. I open the door and, according to their custom, Benedict and Rosamund rush outside, barking. Vociferously.

Benedict: Barking is my almost-favorite thing (second only to treats).

Beatrice, who is clever, has been pretending that she too wants to run outside, but when the door is open she hangs back. She knows that if the other two are not around to act jealous, I will let her cuddle up to me while I hold her in the crook of my arm. So I close the door and sit with Beatrice at my desk.

Beatrice: All I want is to be warm and cozy.

Soon the outdoor barking stops, even though my nephew is still driving the lawnmower. I peep out the window in the door and there are Benedict and Rosamund wanting to come back in. I let them in and they rush to the couch and armchair and start barking towards the window. Although they are not clever, they are not entirely without intelligence, and they have decided it’s much more enjoyable to bark in a warm room while standing on cushy furniture than to bark outside in the cold. I open the door to see if they’ll go outside again, but they come running just to stand by the open door and bark from there.

Rosamund: I'm just a hyper little dog.

So I pick up a bag of treats and lead all three of them down the hall, reward them for going into their crates, shut the crate doors, and give them each a chewstick. I close the blinds and leave the room, closing the door behind me, hoping they will settle down to a nap. That’s where they are now. The lawnmower is put away and all is quiet indoors and out, except every so often Benedict gives a yell. Quiet, boy.

Not snake oil

So I keep seeing these ads on Facebook for a pill that stops itching. Apparently it works like a charm. I get all interested until I realize it's a pill for dogs. 

Move along

Nothing to say, I just wanted to make it so that the first post you see at my blog is not one about difficult struggles and so on. Instead, here's a picture of my dogs out on the deck on a hot, sunny day.

Of course, one might find it distressing to see so many weeds growing between the pavers, but today I am optimistic about getting the weeding done. Later I may post about my accomplishment of planting all the plants I have bought so far. That is better than I've done in probably seven or eight years.

Also, I have a nephew & family visiting soon who have teen and pre-teen kids and I may see if I can hire them to help with some deck cleanup. Sometimes when I talk about work like that my sister-in-law says, "That sounds like a job for strong, young grandchildren." I have no grandchildren, but she has. They are still young and strong, but not so young anymore that they are not busy with their own lives.

That's kind of a double-negative, in the grammatical sense, not emotional. Anyway, they are busy doing things like having jobs and getting engaged. I have another grandchild by proxy (i.e. great-niece) who lives locally but is too young for such labor.

So I am hoping the visiting greats will welcome an opportunity to earn some money while helping their old Auntie. (I like to pull out the Old Lady card when handy.) If not, I'll still get it done, just not as quickly. So no pressure, youngest generation.

Okay, one more photo. While I was writing this entry, I felt a warm little presence by my left foot, so I took a quick picture of what was under my desk chair.

Discomfort

I remember reading once, in a novel, a description of a character that he was “comfortable in his own skin.” It’s a figure of speech that indicates self-acceptance and confidence. Now, not as a metaphor, but as a physical fact, I am uncomfortable in my own skin. My skin is dry and itchy. I scratch the itches and my skin becomes raw and painful. And ugly. Sometimes I see it as so ugly that I tear at it with my fingernails, making it more raw, more painful, and more ugly.

When I go to bed at night, after I’ve been lying there a while, my skin starts to feel hot, tight, itchy, and painful. It is almost impossible for me not to scratch it. After a while, I feel so upset about the ugliness and unpleasantness and pain that I become stressed, unable to relax—almost twitchy. I keep lotions nearby to rub on to try to do that instead of scratch. Sometimes, after I’ve been asleep for a while, I wake up with these feelings and scratch in a half-sleepy state until I wake up enough to get up and go to the bathroom to clean my skin with cool water and a washcloth.

Sometimes I've taken Benadryl at bedtime with the idea that it may alleviate the itching and in any case it will make me drowsy. But eventually I felt like Benadryl was starting to trigger restless leg syndrome instead of putting me to sleep. I also tend to develop allergic reactions to any skin product that I use for a while.

During the day, while I’m sitting at my desk, or in my car, or—excuse me for mentioning it—on the toilet, I explore my skin with my fingers, finding rough spots that I want to scrape smooth. This leads to increasingly raw, painful, and ugly skin.

Sometimes after I’ve scratched the skin on my wrists and hands until I am bleeding, I apply an antibiotic balm and wrap my wrists and hands in cotton bandages. For a while, this is soothing, often even for the better part of a day. Eventually, the bandages become annoying and I cut them off.

Scratching until I bleed makes blood accumulate under my fingernails, so I spend time cleaning my nails. Because my skin may bleed at any given time, I wear dark clothes that won’t show blood spots. I wear a lot of black, navy blue, and brown. I wear shirts with long sleeves and full length pants. I can only wear cotton clothes, smooth cotton. Anything else feels painful when it touches my skin.

Sometimes I plan a skin-care session where I take a shower and then apply my latest remedy to my damp skin—over the counter lotion made for dry skin or a prescription thing (lotion isn’t quite the correct word as its consistency reminds me of Crisco). I do this when I have time to slather it on, then sit wrapped in a cotton robe or sheet until it absorbs and I feel less greasy and sticky. Another complication is that my dogs think lotion is tasty, and they try to lick any exposed part of me that has lotion on it. So I have to be able to spend time in my room with the door shut to keep the dogs away.

I’ve had a bit of a struggle with dry skin since childhood, but it has been at its absolute worst the past few years. When I was in about elementary school, I would scratch the lower part of my legs. My sister once laughed at an old photo of me at about 10 years old wearing shorts with knee socks. I definitely looked like a dork, but I needed knee socks to cover my scabs. As I moved into my teen years, I got better at putting lotion on every day and stopped having such itchy skin.

My skin was clear and acceptable looking (always pale and blotchy but at least not with open wounds) from about junior high until my 40s. It started up again with my lower legs and then my lower arms. I would always have one or two sores on an arm or leg, and I would try to keep them covered. My dad told me that he and his father had had the same thing.

My dad also suffered from psoriasis. All of my siblings and a significant proportion of my nephews and nieces have some form of skin issue—dry skin, psoriasis, eczema—some more severely than others.

So after my issues started to resurface in my 40s, I was at that relatively mild level for the next two decades. When it really became bad, with all the severe symptoms I’ve described, was during covid. I had some mental and emotional issues going into covid, mostly related to the decline and death of my parents, but I’ve had recurring bouts of depression since about age 10, so my mental health can range from getting along quite well to really feeling shitty.

I’m an extreme introvert and I would see memes about how introverts were loving covid isolation, but it didn’t work that way for me. My main feeling about the pandemic situation was that everything felt unnervingly weird. The situation was bizarre, and that stressed me out. Also, a few months into the isolation my dog, who’d been my dear companion for close to 15 years, died. More specifically, I made the decision to have him put down. Even now, tears come to my eyes as I remember that.

Sitting alone at my desk at home doing my office work—by the way, I was extremely thankful that I did not lose my job because of covid but had that steady income and benefits—but constant solitude gave me the opportunity to scratch and tear at my skin as often as the urge took me. No one could see me and be grossed out, so scratch and tear I did. I became more and more depressed and anxious until I really could not do anything my job required, nor could I care for myself or my house. I went days without showering, weeks where the only time I opened my door and left my house was to go to a grocery store to have my online order loaded into my car. I had gotten new puppies and their love was comforting, but I couldn’t train them or clean up after them. I finally had to take a medical leave of absence while I got medicated back up to functionality. Not to a high level of effectiveness, just functional.

I never caught the covid virus, but the pandemic still caused a severe (mental) health crisis that is still affecting me. Since getting effective meds, I no longer sit indoors with the shades down for days on end. I take showers, and I clean up dog poop. I was able to limp along, so to speak, with my job until I was eligible for Social Security and could retire. But the one thing that has not improved has been my skin.

I keep trying different approaches. Starting just the other night, I put a damp towel across my lower legs at bedtime, because that’s where the problem is the worst, and that cool, damp feeling did help soothe the pain and itch. I had a smaller damp cloth to wrap around whichever wrist felt worse. I hope that this tactic helps my condition to improve.

For several years, the way I am able to calm down and get to sleep is that I listen to and silently participate with the night prayer liturgy of the Divine Office, which I play on my phone from the Divine Office website. Night prayer is usually between 15 to 20 minutes long. Sometimes I fall asleep by the time it’s over. Otherwise, I move on to the Hallow app and listen to and silently pray along with the rosary, which lasts 20-25 minutes. I often fall asleep before that’s complete, but, if I don’t, I still feel more peaceful.

(I'm silent in my devotions so that my dogs don't think I'm talking to them and get excited.)

During the day, I try to spend some time using my hands to do needlepoint or write in a journal to give them something else to do besides check on how rough my skin feels. I only do brief journal entries; that’s all I’m up for. Since retiring, after I wake up and take my dogs outside, I come back to my bedroom with a cup of coffee and listen to and silently participate with the invitatory and morning prayer liturgies of the Divine Office.

But still my skin and I are in conflict. I am not comfortable in my own skin. I can only hope and pray and do my best to improve.

Keep on the sunny side

"Your nose is so delicious, mom."

About a month ago, I started a Word document that I call “Positive Accomplishments,” in which I list under the date any things that I did that I can consider positive actions to boost my mental health. Sometimes it’s things like “Washed some dishes,” “Washed & dried a load of laundry,” “Raked leaves on my deck.” Other times it’s things like “Went out to lunch with friends,” “Blogged,” or “Sat in the sun.” 

I have a southern exposure on my deck. One side of the deck is shaded by the upstairs deck and the other side is in full sun. Today I sat in the sun. A special thing that may happen while I’m sitting in the sun in an Adirondack chair is that all three of my dogs want to join me there. And by “special,” I mean “utterly ridiculous.” There is not ample room for the three of them, and two of them (the bitches) do not like to share space and so express hostility to one another and the hapless boy dog, Benedict (who just wants to get along). Also, Rosamund really, really wants to lick my nose. For a long time. Non-stop. So I have to hold her off while she tries and tries to get in my face. It’s nice to be loved, I guess.

Nevertheless, it is overall a positive experience.