My gardening heros, the Davises from Denver, used to send me homemade jars of rhubarb in exchange for some favor or another.

​I don't remember the chore, but I do remember the treat: that nearly chalky, stringy goop with a sour/sweet flavor that reminds me so much of springtime in the North Country. 

I know, sounds delish, right?  But no, it is.

Consulting my notes, I see that it took me until 2017 to put in rhubarb plants at the Farm. It takes them a couple of years to get their feet under them, but they've done quite well.  Enough for us to have a half dozen or so desserts in the last couple of years. 

But is that really enough Rheum rhababarum? No.

Obviously.

Still, it was an extra surprise bonus that we acquired another patch of rhubarb this past summer.

The nearest small town (pop. 650 people) did earn a mention in a Neil Young song, but frankly, the Would-Be Farm is located somewhere just this side of Beyond. The wild-and-wooly frontier nature of the place is mostly lovely, but it does have the occasional drawback. 

For instance, our former neighbors just to our north...nice folks, perhaps, but considerably more gun-happy than makes us entirely comfortable. Sure, fire your gun at a target, a varmint, dinner. But random gunfire? Combined with a LOT of empty bottles and very loud (and frankly awful) 1970's rock'n'roll? Oh boy.

So for the past couple of years, when these neighbors were in residence, my favorite skipper and I simply avoid the north section of that one field. Discretion being the larger part of not catching a piece of lead. 

It's not generally part of the culture out there near Beyond to call the coppers. Or at least not until things have escalated to the sort transgression that does deliberate physical harm. Holding a hootenanny at midnight on a Tuesday, well that's annoying, but live and let live. Letting your toddlers run loose at night –– well, that goes too far.

Anyhoo. Those lively neighbors with the large supplies of ammo moved along, leaving a "For Sale" sign behind them.

Things sometimes work themselves out.   

Which is how the Would-Be Farm grew a little over the summer.  We gained an additional 40 or so neglected old apple trees, an open field, and a honking big patch of rhubarb.

Okay, so everything has changed.

​More or less.

Less in some states. 

But for many people, especially those with a healthy respect for both the science of infectious disease and the preservation of our elders, this summer seems like the start of a not-so-brave new world.

So here's what I am missing.

In photo format, because nobody wants to hear that tone of voice.

With vintage photos, because it does seem like a long time ago since we went out dancing, or hung out without a care with multiple generations of the family ––or not-family –– or planned a trip, or hugged people, or shared aprés-sailing stories...

But all this aside, please be sensible and gentle with one another. We're all trying our best –– even when it's not that great, it's likely all the effort we can manage. 

​That is all. For now.

Everyone knows someone who is irrationally (well, that's all in the perspective, right?) afraid of, say, legless reptiles or eight-legged wall-walkers.

​Not just slightly averse to these creatures, but seriously, panicky, clawing-a-way-out-the-window fearful.  

Each of my parents had one. For my father and his siblings, having survived a canoeing accident as children where they and their mother clung to an overturned boat while long strands of seaweed brushed their legs, the fear was snakes.

I never noticed Mumsie's issue until that first summer at the cottage. We'd gone to take a quick look at what they had purchased –– waterfront! as is! Bill Bailey blue! furnished with toys and musty furniture! –– on the shore of Lake Ontario. We ended up just staying all summer. Daddo went off to work downstate during the week while the three of us swam and read books and played with the neighbors (each according to her tastes. Mumsie was not much for running around pretending to be horses).

Naturally, given the body of fresh water, the long Northern summer days, and the untenanted nature of the cottage, there were spiders.  But it was a summer cottage. When sweeping, you directed the little pile of debris down that knot-hole in the floor in the hallway. On Thursdays, before Daddo came up, we'd eat ice-cream for supper. It was a Platonic ideal of summer cottage life.

Except for the spiders. One morning, we all scooted out of the house while Mumsie sprayed some sort of aerosolized poison. We must have been gone all day. Or maybe it was stormy when we returned, because while my sister and I, diminutive then, walked into the shadowy cottage without incident, our mother entered to a suspended carpet of deceased arachnids. All hanging at about eye-height from the ceiling. The horror. The horror.

Eventually, she dredged up a memory for me. "It might be this," she said, draping her paperback over her knee. "When I was very little –– on the farm in Springville –– I was playing in the creek."  [The word "creek" in the geography of rural northern Pennsylvania was pronounced "crick." A thing I miss from her.]

She turned her head in the same questing way as when she was trying to recall the details of a dream. "I was splashing the water with a stick and there was an enormous water-spider. I hit it and it burst open and dozens –– hundreds?–– of baby spiders spilled out."

Gulp. Okay then. 

My sister shares the distaste for spiders. We've often agreed that should there be an unfortunate single-car accident in her life, it's a near certainty to have involved a spider emerging from under the dashboard and landing on exposed skin.

​As for spiders?  I understand they won't actually kill me, but I find it hard to casually look away once I've noticed one nearby. I find their globular bodies shudderingly distasteful.

Be that all as it may. I actually meant to write about weird phobias. There's no shortage of oddity in the world.  And phobias are the most common of mental illnesses.

Mental illness. Huh. ​

​I've felt claustrophobia. Couldn't get into an elevator for two years.  It was a side-effect, I think, of a dreadful boyfriend and asthma.

Once I nearly fainted –– and me a farm kid! –– at the vision of a big splinter protruding from someone else's finger. All the blood and guts in the world, and I was about to keel over from a splinter. I couldn't even help her yank it out. 

But that's pretty mundane stuff. What's more intriguing is the fringier fears.

Mr. Linton has been fishing pretty regularly, though because of last summer's red tide, he can't bring anything home. Social distancing is easy on the water. 

And naturally, he has a lot of boat-work to fill his days on shore.  

The two 2.4 Meter boats (one fresh, one experienced) are slowly coming into alignment. Jeff's re-rigged the older boat so that it's indistinguishable from the newer one. Fresh paint, fresh lines, carbon-fiber bits and bobs. He orders stuff on-line and obsessively checks delivery times.  He splices lines while watching Bosch in the evenings.

Given that many of our upcoming regattas have been cancelled, he seems content.

And me, I'm always looking forward to a chunk of time in which to write but as it happens, I've been distracted by real life. It's hard to make up a story more exciting than the news right now.  

So instead, I'm doing a lot of reading (check out my goodreads shelf for the bookwormy details).

​And making stuff.

We're avoiding the grocery store –– taco Tuesday involved some freezer-burned ground beef that I might normally have donated to the fishes, but it tasted fine with the fresh greens from the garden –– and keeping our IRL social distance from the world. I've become a big fan of FaceTime right now for actual social interaction. Yay internet!

I'm hoping to settle into whatever this new normal is and get back to my keyboard sometime soon, but in the the meanwhile, as they say in one of my favorite movies, "Rule #32: Enjoy the little things."

Wishing you safety and kindness from here...

The President's Fitness Test. An annual event of anxiety and entertainment that amped up the usual mood of gym-class through my youth.

The opportunities for hilarity –– always close to hand in a mixed-gender high-school class where the gym teacher had a tendency to turn nearly purple with emotion when anyone did anything vaguely teenager-esque –– were legion.  I don't remember much pantsing going on, but there was definitely some flatulence (both inadvertent AND deliberate), and the odd fainting.

My buddy, Judy Hall –– she had green eyes and lived in the farmhouse that my great-great grandparents once owned –– was a wiry farm kid, astonishingly fast with the sit-ups, always in the top rank. My own best skill was hanging on. I could suspend myself overhand for what seemed like ages, thinking about something else.

Which brings us, by a wide-ranging path, to a writing warm-up.

*No surprise, since the country grows ever less fit, that the test was discontinued in 2012.  

Story #1
His husband said it over and over: Damont couldn't take a picture to save his life. And this one, the last image on his trusty GoPro, was no exception.

According to several witnesses, Damont was attempting a selfie, holding the camera at arm's length, squinting into the sun. Possibly hungover –– he was vacationing in the Keys with his family after all –– his hand wavered visibly, so his last expression is lost to us. 

And then came the curious chain of events that led this tourist from Detroit to his unlikely demise at the fangs of a spray-painted king cobra on the beach in Key Largo early one Easter morning.


Story #2
"Ain't that the truth," Theresa said as she snapped the picture. 

Susan snorted dismissively, but Bobbi laughed with her usual abandon, one big hand on the straining knot of her sarong, the other inching down her sloping belly. Catching her breath after a long minute, Bobbi managed to wheeze out, "Falling! Coconuts!" 

Theresa shrugged, but Susan could tell that she was inwardly pleased. Theresa played tough, but the woman loved an audience.

"Cuckoo for coconuts over here." Theresa made as if to order drinks from the non-existent pool-boy. Bobbi was inching the sarong back up her formidable front and didn't hear the quip. Susan pretended she wasn't listening. You couldn't just give her the laugh. 

"Ooh, look!" Bobbi said, pointing with her free hand. "Freaky pool float!"

Later, Susan thought it might have been the funniest and most gruesome thing any of them ever said, but then Theresa was running into the water, yelling "Call 911! Call 911!" in her paramedic's voice, and Susan was pawing at and then upending her straw satchel, trying to find the goddamn phone. 

I posted this blog back in March of 2017. How I wish it were not still apropos.
 
I was tootling along in my innocuous Honda minivan, possibly singing, when my life flashed in front of my eyes.

As it does.

A montage of really good stuff, actually. Kind of like the Sports Center Highlights Reel, only the soundtrack wasn't great: just my own voice, repeating a filthy variant of "Oh, fiddlesticks!" 

I didn't injure my shoulder doing my sailing thing.

Well, maybe it was a little injured from sailing. But then while pushing the chunky Scuppernong around on her trailer, I lost my footing and caught myself –– and my shoulder made a distinctly unpleasant crunching sound. Ouch.

Sports injury. No big: ice, rest, anti-inflammatory meds, and give it a week or so off. Two weeks later, yoga class.  And straight home to make an appointment with the local shoulder doctor. Or, ideally, with the local shoulder doctor's PA.

Oddly, I got right in. I wonder if they keep track of how many Linton shoulders they have dealt with? Do we get a volume discount? Is it like a frequent buyer deal?

The shoulder doctor's PA –– a young guy with a cheerful straight-arrow bedside manner –– came in, moved the ouchy arm around, and looked at my x-ray. Then he laid out my options.

I would need an MRI to be sure, but either I'd have some minor injury in muscle x or tendon y, or else it was a torn rotator cuff. He made a face and summarized the latter, "In which case, you're pretty much fucked."

He would know. 

Fast forward to this morning, the shoulder doctor's Fellow –– another personable young guy with good people skills –– walked us through the results of the MRI: the usual wear-and-tear on the ball-joint for someone my age (!), excellent cartilege margins, good-looking subscapularis tendon with no tears, muscles look good (why thank you!), infraspinatus looks fine, supraspinatus tendon no tears. In short, an intact rotator.

Yay!

However, he said, pointing at the grey image on the screen, where the supraspinatus comes into the arm –– where it should be clear and defined –– (I nodded, though it was like admiring someone's sonogram photo. It always look a little like an inkblot) –– it appears, the Fellow said, "a bit frayed."

Wisdom of the body: when things get frayed, inflammation steps up and says, "No, no, bad dog!" In order to keep the stubborn user of the frayed tendon from continuing to overuse the damn thing, inflammation ladles up a heaping dose of pain and weakness. Which causes one to remember to ice, rest, and anti-infammatory the snot out of oneself.  

Did that mean I should NOT sail next week? I asked. He laughed. Well, if you mean sailing with an umbrella drink in hand while he –– nodding at my favorite skipper –– does all the work? Sure. 

Icepack at the ready, ibuprofen at hand, I will be on shore for a bit.

​Andyman to the rescue! 

We spend a good portion of our time, we humans, trying to identify and categorize all manner of creatures, including one another. (Is that a boy or a girl? What kind of accent/haircut/outfit is that? One of ours or one of theirs?)

And, even when we can't identify, we sort things as either "good" or  "not-good."  

Any little kid can tell you that dolphins are nice and good, while sharks are mean and scary. 

Anyhoo. ​

​Judging is arguably how we survived for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution: correctly id-ing food vs. non-food, sorting bad guys from among the good folk of the world, drawing clever parallels between similar things.

"What's past is prologue"* even with as spendthrifty a pen (keyboard) as this one.  

*This quote from of course, The Tempest. Act 2, with Antonio and Sebastian piffling away on shore.

And with the prologue passed, the point of my piffle:
While strolling through my tiny kingdom, I find myself not just trying to name the plants, but also sorting them by my lights as bad or good.  ​I spent a studious half-hour or so on figuring out what these four plants were. Each with a maybe yellow flower, each growing rampant on the Would-Be Farm. Each a familiar mystery.

Right to left: the nettle is easy, but as it turns out, it's not common nettle, but Tall Nettle. The second is Garlic Mustard, then Cypress Spurge. And finally, with the dandelion-y leaves, Marsh Yellowcress. 

Tall Nettle (Urtica procerea) is a stinger: tiny hairs on the stem will give you a dose of formic acid and histamine that feels a bit like the bite of a fire-ant.  Dried, it's used to treat scalp problems, while traditional herbalists would suggest applying the stings to arthritic joints –– sometimes the cure is worse, wait, no, it does in fact work.
Nettle also nutritious: steamed or cooked as spinach, nettle is full of Vitamin A and calcium. So while I want to say it's a bad plant, it's got its good points too.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a garlic-scented member of the mustard family. Shocker, I know, with a name like that. Pretty solidly a baddie, although it's edible from top to toe. I will be grazing on this plant next spring, knock wood.

Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) is a recent (1860-ish) immigrant to the country. It's an ornamental that spreads rapidly. Its seed-pods detonate and can broadcast seeds up to five feet. Whoa. It's poisonous to horses and cows (but not sheep. Go figure.)  
​While the milky sap is poisonous to humans, it has been used to remove warts. That's something.
Cypress Spurge has some other traditional medicine uses, but I'm going to keep my gloves on and pull it as a weed. 

Marsh Yellowcress (Rorippa palustris) is a mustard and a cress, which is all to the good. It's native, it likes the boggy wetlands that stripe the farm, and it is edible raw (ooh! peppery!) or cooked (add a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. nom nom nom). 

Is it ironic that I am basically re-discovering the common knowledge of my hunter-gatherer ancestors?

On a sunny morning on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, a late-model muscle-car –– a Shelby or a Mustang (my apologies for blasphemy to whatever car-guy still reading after three paragraphs) –– almost smoked his tires stopping by the side of the road ahead in the distance.

Flinging open his door, the driver jumped out and assumed a classic shooter's stance: dominant arm outstretched, holding, with the other supporting, legs square, eye to the sight. The tiny, deadly, dark circle of muzzle pointing at me.

It's a testimony to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that adrenaline hits the system quicker than the brain can process the need for it. I was already ducking a little (as if my steering wheel would offer any real cover!) before the thought of how fiddlestickingly stupid this was as a way to go: death by sniper.

Adrenaline grants the sensation of time dilation. My irritability about gun culture was accompanied almost simultaneously by a fleeting regret about the very LONG list of things left that I'd hoped to accomplish. And the lightning-flash reel of life highlights.

And then, quicker than a blink, I processed the shooter's details: a fit man in a tan uniform, sunglasses hiding half of his dark face, the light shining off what I really, really hoped was a lawman's badge. I hoped that he wasn't a man in the grips of mental illness, uniform or no. And then, the last thing I recognized: the hair-dryer shape of a radar gun.

Half of South Tampa passed before my heart stopped racing like a rabbit.

I am grateful to get that letter. It's a lucky day.

Even without a precedent to give my worry shape, it feels like this form-letter from my doctor's office is akin to a big red mark on my doorpost, telling the Angel of Death to pass me over once again. 

But another letter followed shortly afterwards.

​It said "Dear Amy. We have attempted to contact you on numerous occasions and have had no response from you. We are in receipt of test results that we need to discuss with you." 

To which the only response is, "Oh crap."

There was more in the letter, but I did not read it until I was waiting on hold with the doctor's office.

Side rant: I don't know why they call it "voice mail." It's more like voice-maze. As it turns out, a week later, my messages seem to have been awfully stupid mice, never earning me the reward of a call-back.

​In the back of my mind, the refrain: Oh crap. Oh crap. Oh crap.

I began to grow irritable (default setting, perhaps, but that's another story). I re-read the letter again: 

"It is important that we discuss these results and possible further follow-up and/or treatment options available to you. Since we have tried to contact you by phone and have been unsuccessful, this letter will serve as notification that you may need further evaluation and/or treatment." 

And "We will assume you do not wish to discuss this further and/or will seek treatment elsewhere."

It closes with "It is our desire to continue to provide you with informed medical care."

And another thing –– I fill out form. after. form.

​Every time I go to the office, I jot down my contact number about seventy-neenty zillion times. In the ten days since I had last written those digits, there had been zero telephone calls from them, so this "numerous times" that s/he tried to contact me? Bullcrap!

​Eventually, after leaving half a dozen tremulous voice-mails and entertaining my insomnia with a fresh new crop of 3-a.m. anxieties, I pressed some mystical combinations of buttons to reach a live human at the doctor's office. 

​Four transfers later, I reached my physician's assistant's assistant. Or something. ​