The Furious Spinner

I just meditated on the couch for an hour. I fell to sleep near the end, so I curled up under the quilt my father made for me, ready for a nap. Now that I was trying, I couldn't sleep. Services ended across the street at the Methodist Church, so I got up and ran over and told some of my friends there to come on over and take any hydrangeas they wanted. The rain had laid the flowers low—all the way to the ground low. I hurried back through the cloud sweat to our house. We were going to go to Maryhill Museum today for the Native dances. Not certain I wanted to go in the rain.

This morning I got up before Mario, about 7:30 a.m., so I tiptoed downstairs, put on my pajamas (it was chilly), and made some oatmeal. I sat at our big old table and looked out at the feeder and garden as I ate. I was using one of the new bowls and plates we bought yesterday: dinerware. They're white with one narrow dark blue stripe around the rim, just like the kind of plates you see in diners. I got them because I was tired of our other plates chipping. Any kind of plates restaurants use are my kind of plates; they last forever. I bought dark blue place mats and light blue with shreds of white showing through napkins (not really stripes of white, hints of white).

The house was so quiet, except for the ringing in my ears and the hum of the refrigerator. Bright red and tawny finches clung to the bird feeder as they nibbled on sunflower seeds. I could see my potatoes were getting too tall. I needed to put more dirt on them, or I wouldn't have any potatoes at all. The lavender, marjoram, arugula, and sage were all blooming. I couldn't see my second planting of salad greens. They just might make it because of this unseasonably cool and rainy weather. Couldn't say the same for my zucchini and pumpkins.

Then I went outside (still in my pajamas—I'm practicing being a bag lady), armed with my big cutter (they must have a name but I don't know what it is), and I began cutting the blossoms off the hydrangea bush. No one was up and about; the only sound I heard was a dog barking in the distance. I was hoping once I cut a few stalks, the rest of the flowers would pop right back up. That did not happen. So I stopped.

I got a bucket and several vases. I took the stalks of beautiful blue flowers and shook them gently over the grass. Around here, that's the first thing you do with hydrangeas or else you'll bring dozens of earwigs into the house with you. In fact, I'm never certain I get all the earwigs out, so I generally don't bring hydrangeas into the house. I stripped off the leaves and cut down some of the stalks and put them in various containers as I talked to the bush, explaining that I was trying to help it out. (Darn it; I forgot to listen again!) One vase fell over on the steps and the top part of it broke off, leaving wicked points that looked like they could pierce pretty much anything. I took the blossoms out and tipped the vase back on its side and hoped I remembered later to pick it up.

About that time Mario woke up. He stepped out on the porch, already dressed for the day. "How long have you been up?" he asked.

I shrugged. "A little bit." I started shearing off the peony heads.

"Is that called deadheading?" Mario asked.

"Yep."

"It looks like you're having fun."

"Why not?" I said. "You wanna try?"

"Naw." I grinned at him. I remembered a conversation we had the other day in Portland. We were walking to our car and we passed by an Oregonian newspaper box.

"That says it's thirty-five cents here," I said. "They charge us in the gorge sixty cents?"

"Fifty cents."

"Oh, I thought you told me sixty cents this morning."

"No, fifty cents."

"Still, fifty cents is a lot for someone to pay for a paper."

"Yeah, it is.'

Just then I noticed a young woman hurry by us, and I started laughing.

As Mario unlocked the car, I said, "She must be thinking, 'ohmigod, don't ever let me have a conversation like that in my life.'"

"Oh, like her conversations are any better."

We got into the car, and I said, "I know when I was younger if I would have overheard that conversation I would have said, 'please kill me now before I'm left with that.' It took me a long time to realize that ordinary trivial conversations are not a sign of a superficial relationship." Small talk was how we established and maintained connections with all kinds of people. It was part of how we wove a life together. I appreciated small talk much more than I had when I was younger—unless it was used as a pretext to never talk about anything else. Then it still drove me buggy.

This morning, I put away my shears and went up the stairs and kissed my husband. Then we went inside. I tidied the house while he made breakfast.

"I dreamed of a lizard," I said while I set the table and Mario sauteed the mushrooms. "It was really colorful but frozen in fear and this woman and I were trying to catch it but it got away and went under the paint of this barn and came out all red, like the paint."

"A chameleon."

"Yes," I said. "It saw us then and went back under the paint, and then this huge arm came out and then a body and the lizard was now huge, like a Ninja lizard, and he had a gun which would spew pesticides. And we started running for our lives. It was really scary." I had awakened with my heart racing. Now as I told it to Mario it sounded funny.

"A Ninja lizard?" He laughed.

"Yes, dressed like those Ninja turtle people. Or whatever they were."

"What does it mean?"

"Who knows?"

We ate scrambled eggs with shitake mushrooms on our new diner plates, sitting side by side, while we watched two huge blue jays trying to get sunflowers out of the feeder. We sipped hot water from our new diner mugs—Zen tea, Mario calls it.

The house was quiet, and Mario and I breathed in the morning. 0 comments

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