Category: Health Care

Where the Cat Begins

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It takes a peculiar vision to be able to detect
Precisely where

The field grasses brushed by blowing
Stars and the odor of spring
In the breath of sweet clover buds
And the star-mingled calls of the toads
In the threading grasses and the paws
Of the clover brushing through the field
Of stars and the star-shaped crickets
In the ears of the sweet grasses
And the tail of the night flicking
Through the calls of the clover and the spring
Stars slinking past the eyes of midnight
And the hour of the field mouse passing
Through the claws of the stars and the brushing
Haunches of the weeds and starry grasses
Threading through the eyes of the mouse
And the buds of the stars calling
With the sweet breath of the field

End
And the cat begins.
~Pattiann Rogers “Finding the Cat in a Spring Field at Midnight”

photo by Nate Gibson

Six years ago, our calico cat Nala had an unexpected adventure.

The knock on the door seemed urgent: – “did we know we have an injured cat?” – the pest control serviceman was spraying the perimeter of our house for carpenter ants and saw our young calico farm cat crawling along the ground in the bushes, dragging her hind legs.

I grabbed my jacket and a towel to wrap her in, preparing for a quick trip to the vet clinic, but she had vanished by the time I got outside. I searched for an hour in all the likely places Nala typically hangs out but she was no where. I kept an eye out for her every day, calling her, but I never saw her or heard her distinctive voice.

Nine days later, there she was on the front porch, thin and weak and hungry, meowing for a meal. She was walking but with still-weakened hind legs and two healing wounds on either side of her lower spine. Something very traumatic had certainly happened, but she had survived, using up several of her nine lives.

As I inspected the wounds, I began to surmise what may have happened:
We have nesting bald eagles who spend time in the high trees around our farm house, watching for wild rabbits or other small prey. This cat is smallish, with plenty of white fur to be easily seen in the tall grass with sharp eagle vision. I suspect she was picked up by eagle talons as a tempting meal, pierced on either side of her spine to carry her away up to a treetop, but feisty as she is, she would have been more trouble than she was worth, so dropped from a significant height, causing a spinal cord contusion and temporary lower leg paralysis.

Little Nala has since recovered completely except for the bald patch scars on either side of her spine. She is a noisy communicator, insistent and bold. I think her loud voice and attitude saved her from becoming a raptor’s lunch.

Not many more lives to go, dear feisty Nala. Spend them well.

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Another Mammogram Day

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“They’re benign,” the radiologist says,
pointing to specks on the x ray
that look like dust motes
stopped cold in their dance.
His words take my spine like flame.
I suddenly love
the radiologist, the nurse, my paper gown,
the vapid print on the dressing room wall.
I pull on my radiant clothes.
I step out into the Hanging Gardens, the Taj Mahal,
the Niagara Falls of the parking lot.
~Jo McDougall, “Mammogram” from In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.
~Lisel Mueller “In November”

It does not escape me,
especially on call-back mammogram days
when I’m asked to return for a
“closer look” at something that
wasn’t there before.

which turns out to be a 1 cm. nonspecific solid something,
maybe getting smaller over the past ten days.

Maybe a bruise. Maybe not.
Check again in a month.
A brief reprieve that some in the
dressing cubicles around me
don’t get.

I wake every day knowing:
an earthquake happens somewhere else,
a war is leaving people homeless and lifeless,
a tornado levels a town,
a drunk driver destroys a family,
a fire leaves a house in ashes,
a famine causes children to starve,
a flood ravages a town,
a devastating diagnosis darkens
someone’s remaining days.

No mistake has been made,
yet I wake knowing recently
it was my turn to hear bad news,
my heart was heavy,
yet it
still beats,
still breaks,
still bleeds,
still believes
in the radiance of each new day I’m given.
I was reminded again today.

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Not Just a Leaf

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holyleaf2

It’s just a leaf. A damaged leaf at that,
clinging to a filbert tree ravaged by blight.
The leaf turns partially back upon itself,
riddled with holes, the traumatic result
of voracious insect appetites.

Damaged does not accurately describe
this leaf, the color of rich burgundy wine,
deep purple veins that branch to the tips
of its serrated edge. The holes open the leaf
to light and air, forming a filigree of nature,
an exquisite fragile beauty.

It makes me think of our own traumas,
how they open us, raw and hurting, humble us,
soften and expand us to the pain of others
and when we are most vulnerable we hold on,
weakened, but not necessarily damaged.

Perhaps it is then our scars become beautiful
and an inner loveliness shines through.
~Lois Parker Edstrom “Fragile Beauty” (an ephrastic poem written about the picture below) from Almanac of Quiet Days

holyleaf1

Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound.
By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi,
the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty.
There seem to be two sides of this world,
presented us at different times,
as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death.
And seen with the eye of the poet,
as God sees them,
all things are alive and beautiful.
~Henry David Thoreau (journal)

holyleaf1-1

…writing was one way to let something of lasting value emerge
from the pains and fears of my little, quickly passing life.
Each time life required me to take a new step
into unknown spiritual territory,
I felt a deep, inner urge to tell my story to others–
Perhaps as a need for companionship but maybe, too,
out of an awareness that my deepest vocation
is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch.
~Henri Nouwen

As I stepped under a dripping birch tree on our farm on this rainy summer day, I ran head-long into a branch of leaves that appeared more lace than leaf.

They were filagreed nearly to invisibility, presumably by a leaf miner of some sort who chewed intricate designs as its leavings. The residual was left hanging, trying to make the best of things in the drizzle.

Though they are mostly eaten away, these leaves have nearly fulfilled their full season of growth in support of their home base tree. Instead of an ordinary summer of drying and coloring and dropping as a birch leaf must in another month or two, they instead manifest the creativity of our God who designed his creatures to interact in such a way that beauty could be found in the most unlikely places, slapping us full in the face.

God sees such intricate wounds in the leaf as beautiful.
God knows our visible and invisible scars are the way His Light illuminates our darkness.
I feel the deep urge to share this glimpse of such “holiness” with you.

Lyrics:
No star is o’er the lake,
Its pale watch keeping,
The moon is half awake,
Through grey mist creeping,
The last red leaves fall round
The porch of roses,
The clock hath ceased to sound,
The long day closes.
Sit by the silent hearth
In calm endeavour,
To count the sounds of mirth,
Now dumb for ever.
Heed not how hope believes
And fate disposes:
Shadow is round the eaves,
The long day closes.
The lighted windows dim
Are fading slowly.
The fire that was so trim
Now quivers lowly.
Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes

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Where We Could Not Reach

barnstormingblog2 Comments

My father would lift me
to the ceiling in his big hands
and ask, How’s the weather up there?
And it was good, the weather
of being in his hands, his breath
of scotch and cigarettes, his face
smiling from the world below.
O daddy, was the lullaby I sang
back down to him as he stood on earth,
my great, white-shirted father, home
from work, his gold wristwatch
and wedding band gleaming
as he held me above him
for as long as he could,
before his strength failed
down there in the world I find myself
standing in tonight, my little boy
looking down from his flight
below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,
his eyes wide and already staring
into the distance beyond the man
asking him again and again,
How’s the weather up there?
~George Bilgere “Weather”.

It was hard work, dying, harder
than anything he’d ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-
breaking chore he’d forced himself

to endure—it was nothing
compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job
be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was
hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we’d heard
my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this
was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,
in a field we could not reach.
~Joyce Sutphen “My Father, Dying”

Deep in one of our closets is an old film reel of me about 16 months old sitting securely held by my father on his shoulders. I am bursting out with giggles as he repeatedly bends forward, dipping his head and shoulders down. I tip forward, looking like I am about to fall off, and when he stands back up straight, my mouth becomes a large O and I can almost remember the tummy tickle I feel. I want him to do it again and again, taking me to the edge of falling off and then bringing me back from the brink.

My father was a tall man, so being swept up onto his shoulders felt a bit like I was touching heaven.

It was as he lay dying 30 years ago this summer that I realized again how tall he was — his feet kept hitting the foot panel of the hospital bed my mother had requested for their home. We cushioned his feet with padding so he wouldn’t get abrasions even though he would never stand on them again, no longer towering over us.

His helplessness in dying was startling – this man who could build anything and accomplish whatever he set his mind to was unable to subdue his cancer. Our father, who was so self-sufficient he rarely asked for help, did not know how to ask for help now.

So we did what we could when we could tell he was uncomfortable, which wasn’t often. He didn’t say much, even though there was much we could have been saying. We didn’t reminisce. We didn’t laugh and joke together. We just were there, taking shifts catching naps on the couch so we could be available if he called out, which he never did.

This man:
who had grown up dirt poor,
fought hard with his alcoholic father
left abruptly to go to college – the first in his family –
then called to war for three years in the South Pacific.

This man:
who had raised a family on a small farm while he was a teacher,
then a supervisor, then a desk worker.

This man:
who left our family to marry another woman
but returned after a decade to ask forgiveness.

This man:
who died in a house he had built completely himself,
without assistance, from the ground up.

He didn’t need our help – he who had held tightly to us and brought us back from the brink when we went too far – he had been on the brink himself and was rescued, coming back humbled.

No question the weather is fine for him up there. I have no doubt.

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You Can Have an Abundant August

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But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa.

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.
~Barbara Ras from “You Can’t Have It All” from Bite Every Sorrow

My pragmatic mother gave up her teaching career for marriage and family so would remind me regularly that I couldn’t have it all:
there was no way a woman can have a husband and children and a farm and a garden and animals and a profession and write and travel and volunteer in the community and not make a mess of it all and herself.

My father would listen to her and say to me softly under his breath: “you do whatever you put your mind to…you know what you are here for.”

They were both right.

The alluring abundance of this life has invited me to want to touch and feel and taste it all, not unlike another woman who was placed with purpose in the Garden to be a side-by-side companion and co-worker. Yet she demonstrated what happens when you want more than you are given and yes, she indeed made a mess of things.

Yet there is this:
despite wanting it all and working hard for it all
and believing I could do it all,
I missed the point altogether.

Life is all gift, never earned.
Life is all grace, not deserved.
It is all August abundance,
it is right now,
sustaining us through the year’s
droughts and floods and storms and drab gray weather.

And there is this:
I know what I am here for.

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Strung With Care

barnstormingblog2 Comments

In none of her other ages had she noted
her age or its burden and bounty of expectations.
The future was as flexible as the past,
and, in between, moments like unstrung pearls
strewn across velvet grieved and gladdened her
and always astonished her with their perfection.
There was no nothingness: there was only being.

Slowly she wakes from what had seemed a dream
to realize that this is her final age—
of indeterminate length and quality.
Things are ending, or have ended, or will end.
The pearls are strung with care, it is quite clear.
There is no nothingness—but she can almost,
some days, picture the world without her in it.
~Jane Greer “In none of her other ages”
(Jane died after a short illness last week at the age of 72)

I have always been well aware
we each arrive here with an expiration date
hidden from view.

We may live for decades assuming
the circled length of our own string of pearls
will continue indefinitely
with the latch closed and tight.

A few months ago,
my clasp opened unexpectedly,
my finite days of carefully strung pearls
threatening to spill, forever lost to me.

I realized things could end
without any hugged goodbyes.

Later, having been emergently restrung,
at least for the time being,
the look in my eyes
prompted the surgeon to say
“now you can live out your full life span.”

What I wanted to ask him
but couldn’t:
“and just how long might that be?”
knowing he had no true reassurance
for something only God can promise:

There is no nothingness.

By grace and a surgeon’s skill,
I gained nearly six months of pearls.
I’m still here, looking back
at the carefully strung
hours and days and weeks
behind and before me.

Right now I remain clasped tight,
hugging and held secure,
though one day I know
it will be time
to let go.

There we shall rest and we shall see;
we shall see and we shall love;
we shall love and we shall praise.
Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.
~Augustine of Hippo from The City of God, Bk. XXII, Chap. 30

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The Bees of the Invisible

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Let us go forward quietly,
forever making for the light,
and lifting up our hearts in the knowledge
that we are as others are
(and that others are as we are),
and that it is right to love one another
in the best possible way –
believing all things,
hoping for all things,
and enduring all things. 
~Vincent Van Gogh from a Letter to Theo Van Gogh – 3 April 1878

I have lived so long
On the cold hills alone . . .
I loved the rock
And the lean pine trees,
Hated the life in the turfy meadow,
Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.
I have lived so long
Under the high monotony of starry skies,
I am so cased about
With the clean wind and the cold nights,
People will not let me in
To their warm gardens
Full of bees.
~Janet Loxley Lewis “Austerity”


Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being.
It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth
into ourselves, so deeply, so painfully and passionately,
that its essence can rise again, invisible, inside of us.
We are the bees of the invisible.
We wildly collect the honey of the visible,
to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
~Rainier Maria Rilke in a letter to his friend Witold Hulewicz, 1925

I am convinced,
reading the news,
too many people are forced to survive
in a world cold and cruel,
without warmth or safety,
too many empty stomachs,
no healing hands for injury or disease.

Our country was trying to help
up until the last few months
when so much has been pulled away.

No longer are we, the helper bees, sent to the invisible,
bringing tangible hope and light, food and meds,
to those who have so little.

No longer do we bring collected honey
to the suffering, the ill, the poor and
invisible who share this planet.

Oh Lord, turn us away from such austerity.
Let us not forget how to share
the humming riches of Your warm garden.

AI image created for this post

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Where His Happiness Has Been

barnstormingblog8 Comments

Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim
Of twilight stares along the quiet weald,
And the kind, simple country shines revealed
In solitudes of peace, no longer dim.
The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light,
Then stretches down his head to crop the green.
All things that he has loved are in his sight;
The places where his happiness has been
Are in his eyes, his heart, and they are good.
~Siegfried Sassoon from “Break of Day”

My husband and I grow old along with our horses – we are now past 70, just as a couple of our horses in “horse” years.

None of us, horses or humans, need to climb in the harness or put on the saddle to pull or carry the heavy loads of our former work lives.

It is a good life – each day treasured for its ordinariness.

Our retired horses feel the morning sun on their withers and the green blades under their feet, they scan the pasture for the sweetest tender patch to munch in the fields they know and love so well. They nap more now than in their younger years, taking breaks to let their heads hang relaxed and nodding, their tails slowly swishing at flies.

This morning was not so ordinary.

Waldheer van de Wortel (Wally), imported from Holland as a foal 27 years ago to be our herd stallion, let me know he wasn’t feeling well. He repeatedly pawed at the ground and the pasture gates, biting at his flank, trying to lie down and then get back up, not eating – clearly experiencing colicky belly pain that was getting worse.

I wondered if Wally’s time had come to bid him farewell. I had made a promise to my geriatric horses that I would not allow them to live in pain just because I didn’t want to let them go.

The vet came quickly and we talked about Wally’s options. She remarked about how he didn’t look his age, was holding weight well, his coat so sleek and shiny, his long-lashed eyes still bright and curious. But she said an older horse could often have repeated bouts of colic before the end, even if they temporarily improve with medical treatment.

I decided it was the right time to let him go to Haflinger heaven on a sunny summer morning, nibbling a mouthful of clover I offered him.

He was laid to sleep where he had lived nearly three decades.

He leaves behind two sons who were his pasture buddies, a couple dozen offspring scattered around the country, and people who loved his ambassadorship for the Haflinger breed. In his younger days, he was an enthusiastic eventer in the northwest region, ridden by his trainer Jessica Heidemann. They both had an enthusiastic fan-following.

In his later years, Wally was patient and loving with our grandchildren and with us. He lived a good life in his place of happiness. I wanted him to die peacefully at home, without a worry.

It just doesn’t get much better than that.

Waldheer van de Wortel, 1998 foal in Holland
27 year old Wally
Art work made by a fan of Waldheer
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A Century From Now

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I’m sorry I won’t be around a hundred years from now.
I’d like to see how it all turns out.
What language most of you are speaking.
What country is swaggering across the globe.
I’m curious to know if your medicines cure what ails us now.
And how intelligent your children are
as they parachute down through the womb.
Have you invented new vegetables?
Have you trained spiders to do your bidding?
Have baseball and opera merged into one melodic sport?
A hundred years….
My grandfather lived almost that long.
The doctor who came to the farmhouse to deliver him arrived in a
horse-drawn carriage.
Do you still have horses?
~David Shumate “A Hundred Years from Now” from Kimonos in the Closet

When the local obituary notices lists someone who had lived nearly a century, I stop to think what societal changes have taken place over those 100 years.

Over the past century, our melting pot country has absorbed a panoply of languages and nationalities, in addition to being the source of plenty of political swagger.

There have been many new medical discoveries and public health measures resulting in longer life expectancy and lower child mortality rates, despite what our swaggering politicos currently say.

Although neither of my parents lived past 90 years of age, when they were born in the early 1920s, rural transportation was primarily horse and buggy, most babies were born at home, antibiotics had not been developed and only smallpox vaccination was routinely administered to children.

Everyone wrote postcards or letters to one another to stay in touch, and photographs were done by professionals.

The moon had not been visited, the web was something your face ran into on a foggy morning, and nuclear referred to a center of a cell.

Oh, and yes, we still have horses.

Not many horses still labor on behalf of humans as they did on a daily basis 100 years ago. Ours have a pretty sweet life here on our farm, living well into their thirties – a century in horse years.

Thinking ahead to a century from now?
So much more will happen that we can’t begin to imagine.

But I hope there will always be horses…

Aunt Lois, nearly 100
Aunt Betty, age 99
Great Grandma Elna, age 88
Great Grandpa Harry holding baby Emerson, photo by mama Abby Mobley
Great Grandma Emma, granddaughter Andrea, great-grandson Zealand
my paternal grandparents in the early 1910s
AI image created for this post
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Open Wide

barnstormingblog1 Comment

“Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it,” reads the needlepoint
above the dentist’s door, beyond which “Little Learners”
are doing time in the chair. One at a time, up and down,
they practice how to be not afraid, to tip their chins,
spit. And then to brush in circles gently
for two minutes. No blood today, no needles, drills,
just a plastic sack of gifts: a magnet of a happy tooth,
a purple toothbrush, paste. …when they’re all lined up and holding
hands in pairs, they lift their faces as if toward God
to the camera. Having been happily trained for pain,
they flash their unharmed smiles, and in my mind, I exit
with them, all my ex-selves, mittens attached
to their jackets, bright and unbreakable.
~Dierdre O’Connor from “At the Dentist’s” from The Cupped Field

One thing I like less than most things is sitting in a dentist chair
with my mouth wide open.
And that I will never have to do it again
is a hope that I am against hope hopen.

Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.
It is hard to be self-possessed
With your jaw digging into your chest.

So hard to retain your calm
When your fingernails are making serious alterations
in your life line or love line
or some other important line in your palm;

So hard to give your usual effect of cheery benignity
When you know your position is one of the two or three in life
most lacking in dignity.

And your mouth is like a section of road that is being worked on.
And it is all cluttered up with stone crushers
and concrete mixers and drills and steam rollers
and there isn’t a nerve in your head that
you aren’t being irked on.

Oh, some people are unfortunate enough
to be strung up by thumbs.
And others have things done to their gums,
And your teeth are supposed to be being polished,
But you have reason to believe they are being demolished.
And the circumstance that adds most to your terror
Is that it’s all done with a mirror,
Because the dentist may be a bear,
or as the Romans used to say,
only they were referring to a feminine bear
when they said it, an ursa,
But all the same how can you be sure
when he takes his crowbar in one
hand and mirror in the other he won’t get mixed up, the way you
do when you try to tie a bow tie with the aid of a mirror, and forget
that left is right and vice versa?

And then at last he says
That will be all; but it isn’t because he then
coats your mouth from cellar to roof
With something that I suspect is generally used to put a shine on a
horse’s hoof.

And you totter to your feet and think. Well it’s all over now and after
all it was only this once.
And he says come back in three monce.
And this, O Fate, is I think the most vicious circle that thou ever sentest, That Man has to go continually
to the dentist to keep his teeth in good
condition when the chief reason
he wants his teeth in good condition
is so that he won’t have to go to the dentist. 
~Ogden Nash “This is Going to Hurt a Little Bit”

Yesterday, as I rested comfortably in the dental chair for a repair of two decades-old fillings in my front teeth, I thought about my childhood dental experiences over 60 years ago.

There was the little round basin with swirling water next to the chair where I was told to spit the bloody stuff accumulating in my mouth as they drilled out the cavities.

Cavities were drilled and filled without novocaine for children. The injection was considered more traumatic than the sensation of the drill. I was a very compliant child, stoic when I was told to be, but tightly gripped the arm rests of that old dental chair as the high-pitched whir of the drill sent pain from my tooth into my brain.

It was, in a word, torture. But that’s how things were done back then.

I did get novocaine injections for several tooth extractions necessary for orthodontia to correct my crooked teeth. No numbing gel, no slow infiltration of the anesthetic into the gums, just one scary giant needle into the gums or hard palate.

I gripped the arm rests even tighter for that.

Dentists back didn’t want to torture children. They simply weren’t trained to do it differently. They didn’t wear gloves, only washing their hands between patients. And they had plenty of on-the-job hazards themselves with mercury exposure and being bitten.

In fact, my childhood dentist was so impressed with my stoicism, he later hired me as a high schooler to be his chair-side assistant several days a week after school. I learned many skills, helping people of all ages cope with a painful experience, but also learned I didn’t have what it takes to be a patient dentist.

I love my current dentist’s gentle technique, his pain-free injection of anesthesia, his reassuring banter and frequent check-ins (“you doing okay?”). Too many older adults still struggle all these years later with dentist-phobia, avoiding routine cleanings and check-ups. I still have all my teeth thanks to several incredibly skilled dental artisans over the decades who have saved my enamel with their sculpted crowns and fillings. I am beyond grateful for their care.

So I sit in the dental chair, put on the sunglasses, and gladly open wide for them.

But, I can’t help it, out of habit and reflex, I still grip the arm rests too tightly.

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