Changes

The first snow of the winter of 2024–2025 came today.

I awakened at five and sensed something was wrong. As I grew more conscious, I realized I was smelling smoke. That’s never a good thing, unless you’re sitting near a campfire, or burning incense. And it was ugly-smelling smoke—not the pretty scent of someone’s fireplace or woodstove, wafting in the chilly air. No. It smelled like plastic, vinyl—acrid—nothing anyone should be burning, although we’ve had our share of neighbors who burn their trash in their backyards, in the early hours of the morning, trusting that no one will care about the smoldering dioxins and other toxins they inhale while asleep. Most of our neighbors smoke, anyway, so how would they even notice it?

But I was concerned. I tiptoed around our chilly house in my bare feet, making sure that all rooms on all floors were free of an obvious problem. I mean, we do have smoke detectors, but . . . Then I stepped onto the sunporch, which was colder still, and the attached “screen” porch (now with storm windows, of course, but still fairly open to the outdoor air, since we haven’t yet chinked the windows with insulation). And the smoke odor out there was much stronger. I moved back indoors and down the stairs to the front door, and stuck my face outside: again, smoky. Ugh. Whew.

This information led to another round of the second and third floors, this time with my glasses on, squinting more carefully out the windows. Is one of our neighbors’ houses on fire, or billowing smoke? Or is someone actually burning trash covertly? If the latter, I knew the fire might already be done with, even though the heavy, still air can let the stench linger for hours after the deed. But all I saw was a diffuse haziness in the direction of the motel on the expressway. (Hmm. And we need to clean our windows. Kind of late in the season for that, now.) Somehow, I managed not to awaken Sue with all this traipsing around at 5 a.m. (I also managed not to stub my toes on anything. Huzzah!)

Well, it turned out that around 2:45 a house had blown up on the east side of town. They haven’t yet announced a cause, but my money’s on a natural gas appliance or exhaust malfunction, possibly combined with electric space heaters or some such. It’s the first time this season that people’s heaters are running full-bore, and heating systems in poor repair are getting their dangerous shakedown this weekend. Yeah, while everyone’s observing Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and all that. Happy holidays.

And yes, if you know me, you know I’m too appalled about the results of the presidential election to feel very “thankful” this year. I live in a red state that was a purple state not long ago, before a Republican supermajority and gerrymandering, and toxic fundamentalist misinformation bubbles. I’m literally surrounded and ruled over by crazy, het, right-wing Trump-Jesus-gun worshippers. . . . And Thanksgiving? Are you kidding me?

Also, my parents are a grim situation all by themselves: it’s the inevitable collision between my mom’s unbending and increasingly unrealistic notion that she and Dad can continue forever to live in their home, with its staircases, and Dad’s flat-out exhaustion and increasing disability. He is her caregiver: he staggers and stumbles around their house; he fixes all her meals and carries them to her on a platter, brings her beverages and begs her to drink them, launders her clothes and bed sheets, supplies her with Depends and Poise pads, dispenses and tracks her (and his) medications, deals with all the house upkeep, pays the bills, everything. He exercises, does PT, walks, to stay in shape (“to keep myself physically fit . . .”). As she has for years, she sits in her puffy recliner and does nothing, not even the tiny amount of walking the doctors have been telling her for years that she must do if she wants to stay at home . . . and he’s simply exhausted. And so am I.

In retrospect, my brother and I should have talked them into moving a decade ago, and if they’d done nothing, at that time, we should have done it for them then. Too late for that now.

Mom, psychologically increasingly like a toddler, expects me to quit my job and move in with them until they both are gone, which, given my mom’s genetics and lack of serious chronic illness, could be another decade, in her case. Well, actually, I don’t think she knows I have a job, because I’ve been so generous with my time with them. As a freelancer, I’ve been able to skip some hours of work in the past five years to drive them to their haircuts and doctors’ appointments, to pick up groceries, computer supplies, and what-not, but those demands have exploded in the past few years, with Mom being taken to the hospital, often with rehab, six times in the past two years, and Dad twice.

Dad had a stroke, and he needed outpatient PT after it, and he needed me to drive him there a few times a week. And there’s always the questions about the computer. Or, Why isn’t the phone working? Or, I think we might need a new water heater. Your Mom needs more Depends: this size, overnight, super absorbency. . . .

Wash, rinse, repeat. I know Dad remembers I have a job, but I’m pretty sure Mom doesn’t realize it—or if she does, she doesn’t respect it.

Talk about pushing my buttons. I try to just see it, acknowledge it, know that it’s old, old material, breathe, and move on without, like, yelling. Of course I’m not respected. And I don’t need her validation anymore.

When I tell her she can’t expect me to come take care of them at their house 24/7 for the next decade or so, she tells me that she and Dad will simply have an elevator added to their house, or they will just hire 24-hour in-home assistance. I recently sketched out the math for her: $30 an hour, times 24 hours in a day, is $720 a day; multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you’re paying $262,800 annually just for someone (some person or persons—who?) to be there to help you, in a home that’s not going to accommodate a wheelchair, which she will soon need to be in—it does not count food or food preparation, transportation, incontinence supplies, heating and cooling bills, water, house maintenance and property taxes, medical copays and drug costs, and the ever-loving cable TV and landline/internet bills. It’s just fantasyland.

In our family, the dynamic has always been to go along with Mom’s ideas, because she’s always been “the practical one.” The one good with finances. The one who takes care of the house, the bills, the do list. Balances the checkbooks. (Kind of like the myth about Republicans being good about the economy.) She was always the one to deal with the plumbers, electricians, and handymen. She used to be sharp as a tack, “on top of” everything. But those days are long gone, as she becomes more confused and lives increasingly in the past. Actually, they both are.

So it’s past time for independent living; it may already be too late for assisted living, for Mom. She’s hurtling toward skilled nursing; she doesn’t want to drink, so she gets dehydrated and gets UTIs, she doesn’t move around, she’s weak, her blood pressure tanks when she merely stands up. The idea of getting her up the staircases is a horror for me. She’s been hospitalized three times in the past six months. But she still expects us to treat her as if she knows best, and we all still tend to twirl around trying to make her happy. Of course, that is impossible. People like her will never be happy; this is how ninety years of untreated depression and anxiety disorder, with a little side order of NPD, ends up. And so we are moving ahead with plans for senior living for them both. Dad is ready. We simply leave her out of our conversations, which is easy to do since she only ever sits in her living room chair and has grown pretty hard of hearing.

So we’re in a race to get them moved into a good place where they can be safe, clean, fed, comfortable and hopefully find things to be happy about, to be entertained with; to have people to talk with; to maybe even find ways to still contribute to the world (Dad would like that, I think).

You know, I started this blog in a state of deep stress and depression. Hopelessness. Things that used to cheer me only made me feel like I’d been slapped. I was repeatedly contemplating suicide. I thought that starting a blog about the things—the few little things—that I can unequivocally claim as good would help me regain a sense that there is something still to enjoy, even when my life seems in shambles, when my career—hell, my whole life—seems a big fat joke, when I see myself as the center of all my problems. Even when I’m almost convinced that I don’t belong here, that I have no place or purpose.

I truly don’t have any goddamn time to be fucking around with a blog, or anything, anything, that is not related to my job, or with the needs of my parents. I’m not going to fuck around with Christmas cookies this year. (Well . . . maybe I’ll make a few kinds. To give to the elders who remain.) Christmas tree? Bah, humbug. I’m down on Christianity, too—all the white Christian nationalists have turned me off of religion entirely—in America and globally, the trouble, the evil, that religion causes far outweigh its so-called blessings. Overall, religion is still, always, eternally a way that greedy, mean, power-hungry people convince other people into doing horrible, selfish, mean-spirited things. I’m sick of it. Grow the fuck up and learn how to be a good person without having the imaginary threat of eternal damnation hanging over your head, okay?

But yeah, I think I’m gonna attempt another year of “Jar of Goodness.” Because I kind of need it. At least, let’s give it try before I call my doctor and ask to “up my dosage.” I’ve been doing a lot of journaling the past few years, and I have a lot I’d like to say about that. And there are several other half-baked posts I can complete and upload. Let’s keep a-goin’.

Cicadas: What’s Up With Their Eyes?

It’s just uncanny how insects seem to be looking right at you. No matter how you turn them, and from no matter what angle you look at them, they always seem to be looking right at you.

Right

at

you!

So, what’s up with their eyes? I mean, we “know” they’re compound eyes and that they are quite different from our own. Our eyes are basically a clear-jelly-filled ball, with sensors (retina) at the back, a lens-covered, expandable aperture (pupil) in the front, and muscles that rotate it (so we don’t always have to turn our head in order to look around).

But their eyes are quite different. They are fixed; they don’t rotate. So why does that dark spot on their big, buggy eyes seem to follow around, so it’s always looking at the viewer?

Wet or dry . . . they always are looking at you.

Even while they’re molting!

How does this work? It’s caused by the structure of their compound eyes. It’s essentially a result of tubes, shadows, and mirrors. To understand this, imagine a model: Think of their globe-shaped compound eyes as a cluster of narrow tubes, all pointing outward from a center point, and imagine these tubes are coated, on the inside surfaces, with silver. Closest to you, the tubes are pointed directly at you, and you can see into the whole long (dark) tunnel (you’re not seeing much of the silver), while the tubes increasingly angled away from you appear light-colored, reflecting the light.

That’s basically it: you are looking at a spherical cluster of tubes.

And it’s not just with cicadas; many insects have compound eyes that have this property.

Like this common meadow katydid.

Like this little baby, gray short-horned grasshopper. So cute, sitting on a leaf in his prairie.

And like this pretty green planthopper.

The next question is, why does this seem so freaky to us?

We humans—with our social nature, our interdependence, our allies and enemies, our capacities for trust and for deceit—have evolved to be masters at evaluating each other. We look carefully at one another’s eyes. You can tell so much about someone by their eyes! Yes, “the eyes have it.”

This is why those professional poker players so often wear mirrored sunglasses—they want to conceal their thoughts and feelings. (Why shouldn’t that be considered cheating?)

It’s why people who have eye-alignment problems have a real social disadvantage, because crossed eyes or other misalignments are stereotyped as a sign of severe developmental disability, or head injury, of being dazed or semiconscious.

It’s why silent movie actors wore such heavy eye makeup.

And so we, in our anthropomorphization of insects, can’t help but look into their eyes, too, and try to read their expressions. And what we get back is an unblinking stare, perpetually fixed upon us. Does it freak us out?

Maybe it should. Insects depend on us to not ruin the world for them. They need elbow room. They depend on the existence of their many native food plants; they depend on the habitats—prairies, woodlands, glades, wetlands—that support their various food plants. They need plenty of plants and habitat, because the usual existence strategy for insects is to create a bazillion eggs and offspring, most of which won’t make it to adulthood. On some scale, they need room, like cicadas, to have a bloom, a heyday, and then have a majority eaten by countless predators, and then return to the soil.

So yes, they depend on us.

If you feel stared at, it’s not surprising.

Do things to preserve and increase native habitats.

And vote for the environment.

The above text explaining the dark dot in insect compound eyes is loosely edited from a page I wrote for MDC’s online field guide, Mantids (Mantises). Mantises, of course, are one of the many insects with compound eyes that exhibit this phenomenon.

Totem Pole Is Up!

Ta-dahhhhh--! The totem pole is now standing in our backyard! This is its third location, and after more than forty years in Columbia, it’s back in Jeff City!

I told you about it in my previous post—how my cousin Phil made it, how it was in Aunt Minnie’s backyard, then got moved to my parents’ home in Columbia. It fell over last year, Dad gave it to me, and I’ve been rehabbing it.

The last thing to do was patch some missing broken wood on the wing, and let that dry, and dab it with some paint to make the wood filler look better, and wait for it to dry again.

On Saturday, Sue and I carried it out of the garage and up the steps to the backyard, where the two support posts and concrete platform were waiting. Sue held the totem pole against the posts while I wrapped wire around and around it, hopefully unobtrusively.

Later that day, we bought some solar-powered lights (for fun), including a solar-powered spotlight that is now pointed up at the totem pole. So I can look out the window and see it at night!

Earlier in the day, I mowed the lawn (first time this year!), so the whole yard is seeming really pretty right now. Despite the pollen, and the cold, gusty winds we had over the weekend.

Totem Pole

It’s a project! With a history! Oh, boy! I’ve been going around showing pictures on my phone to anyone who’ll look at them! It’s a totem pole, and my work is almost finished. About the only thing left is to stand it up in the yard.

First, the history. My cousin Phil made this in the late 1970s, I think as part of a Boy Scout project. Or maybe it was just for fun. Did Uncle Richard help him or at least inspire him? Probably, at least as a scoutmaster.

It was made out of a utility pole. The wings, bill, nose, and ears were nailed on. The features were chiseled in. The paint was Rust-Oleum, in the standard colors available in the seventies. Phil’s initials are carved into the back of the wings.

When first created, it was installed in the backyard of Aunt Minnie’s, out on Forest Hill. She had it in the far southwest (left) corner. It added a really unusual touch to her otherwise quite proper, upscale landscaping. She loved her family and appreciated everyone’s unique characters, so it probably didn’t faze her at all to have a totem pole in her yard.

It also has strong connections to scouting’s early, and sincerely held admiration of Native American spirituality and philosophy. Today, we call it cultural appropriation and know that it isn’t the innocent thing we used to think it was. We see that white people’s “take” on Indigenous people’s culture was indeed just that: a gleaning, from people who had had nearly everything taken from them: their land, their property, their rights, their language, their culture. But I contend that we should also recognize that early scouting’s admiration was sincere, even if flawed in hindsight, and that their idealized understanding of Native American perspectives and life-ways helped produce better people. It represented a bend toward nature and ecological wisdom, toward harmony, toward quietude and humility, toward simplicity. These are good things, considering the overall trajectory of US culture in the twentieth century: commercialization, natural illiteracy, discord, selfishness, materialism.

Anyway, I recognize that the totem pole could be viewed as problematic, but I appreciate it for what it has meant to my family. For me, it’s a totem of a time when scouting unselfconsciously admired and emulated Native American culture, and it produced some generations of people who were better humans for it.

So after Aunt Minnie passed away, by 1982 the totem pole was moved to my parents’ house in Columbia. There, it stood in the southwest (right) corner of their backyard. I was about sixteen, then, so the totem pole doesn’t figure into my childhood memories. But I sure mowed around it, lived with it, and it has long been a fixture in my parents’ backyard.

Here it is in April 2008.

Well, last year, it finally pitched over. (It was a rough year all around, I guess.) The base had rotted to the point that it fell over.

Dad picked up the pieces that broke off (the bill, the nose, the ears, a bit of the wing) and moved it all under his screened-in porch. And there it lay for months. He was wondering what to do with it. Last fall, he asked me if I had any ideas. Did I want it? Should we just chuck it down the ravine on top of fifty years’ of yard waste? So I took it, and all the pieces. It actually fit in my Civic, if I folded down the seats.

And so it ended up in our garage for the winter. The last few months, I started on its renovation. I decided, first, that I wanted it to remain looking elderly. I wanted to embrace its weathered look, its impermanence. Wabi-sabi. I would mix the paint with thinner so it would not look too dressed-up.

Here's a picture of it laying in my backyard, in early March. It had been rained on, so it looks dark. Remnants of the original paint are more visible, looking like flecks of white.

The wings were hanging on by only one screw, its nails having rusted and broken clean through, so it needed to be secured. That was pretty easy.

The bill, fortunately, was still in pretty good shape. A light sanding, and some thinned-out yellow Rust-Oleum, and it was ready to reattach.

The original nose had split in half, so it needed replacing. I’ve replaced it with a section of sweet gum from a limb that fell out of my parents’ front-yard tree. It is pretty sound wood, and I left the bark (with lichen!) on it. I think it gives a nice woodsy, organic look.

The ears, however, were a problem. Only one of the originals survived, and it’s pretty rotten. I’m no woodcarver, so I couldn’t fabricate new ones on the original pattern—even if I thought brand-new wooden parts would look good.

But I wanted to do something different, also woodsy, so we found some cedars that had been culled at a local conservation area. (MDC had cut them down in order to improve the native woodland habitat. Did you know that before white settlement, the only places cedars lived in Missouri was on cliff faces? Pretty much!) With loppers, I extracted some good-looking branching portions and brought those home.

After a bit of reflection, cocking my head to one side and the other, some careful trimming, and holding different branches in place against the totem pole, I selected my two new antlers. It’s a different look, but I like it.

I’m surprised I got them to balance as well as they do. I’m not convinced I’ve attached them very securely, but I think we’ll get at least a season out of the current construction. Reevaluate next spring.

Before I got too far with any repainting, I wanted to find some old photos. I kept looking through my parents’ old photo albums and striking out.

A lot of the photos I found were generic views of the backyard, and the totem pole was so blurry, I couldn’t tell much. But we sure had some pretty fall color! And my parents have a beautiful backyard.

The day before Uncle Richard’s memorial a few weeks ago, I finally found a photo of it from 1982, which turned out to be the year it was put in my parents’ yard (apparently). I was surprised at how much color had been on it—it had faded so much over the years!

I changed some of the color patterns, though I kept the same “palette” of 1970s Rust-Oleum paints: royal blue, sunburst yellow, regal red, gloss black, gloss white. I think it’s looking pretty good!

The only thing left to do is figure out how to repair a chunk of wood missing from the top edge of the wing. I glued a broken portion back on, but there is still a hole where (I think) a knot had been. Should I cut out a square-edged hole and replace it with a squarish piece of wood that fits in it? Or cut an old piece of wood to “kind of” fit and fill with wood putty? Or maybe leave it as is? Maybe I can think of a clever workaround. Beads or feathers. A big scallop shell?

After that fix, it’s time for the ceremonial placement in our backyard. It will be in the north corner, next to The Door. It will stand on a small circular concrete platform (so the rotten bottom won’t sit in water or stay moist), and it will lean against two stout metal fence posts, to which it will be wired. I could instead sink it into the ground, but with it already rotting and shorter, and the depth it would need to be sunk, I think it would end up shorter than me. And we can’t have that.

Because I think you’re supposed to look up at totem poles.

So, we’re in the home stretch with this project. More news soon.