1st December, 2018 Saturday
Tea With Me took a break over Thanksgiving. In 11 days what’s different?
Well, weather here in the Gorge Heart has definitely turned the Winter on. The trees are bare, ground is muddy, wet drains from clouds marching swift down the corridor of hills the mighty river carved anciently determinedly. The grey has definitely descended. I am feeling it inside.
Yes, the second anniversary of my Mama’s passing is coming in 11 days and the veil between here and where we go is thin this time of year when the sun is low all day. I find myself disinterested in anything unrequired in the last few days. Its a malaise I know is sourced in processing the loss of so much that was in the package of my mother.
We did not leave for Thanksgiving Feast at SIL’s Family’s home because our radiant heat monster that lives in the bowels of our house is now 25 years old started springing leaks early in November. Our Radiant Doctor is the only one for 50 miles in any direction. He visited us quite a bit for three weeks wrenching joinings and replacing gaskets. He was interested mostly in the pressure gauge above an elf hat looking thing he called “The Regulator”.
There are many things about being a girl with an active imagination and a limited hardware vocabulary. I get it from my Dad, I guess, who may have been the head of the army of lawyers employed to legalize the activities of one of the two largest oil companies in the world but he couldn’t retain the word “poolsweep” for the octopian device which swished the detritus up from the bottom of his pool, oh no. He called this device Oswald, as we all did, all of us his beloved rabble of a family. One Sunday afternoon in my teenagehood, the poolsweep once again had heeled over on its side and refused to do the swish it was charged to do. My Titan father gets on the phone with the pool doctor and keeps repeating into the mouthpiece of the phone, “But Oswald isn’t working!!!” His beloved family rabble, eavesdropping in the kitchen all look at eachother bug eyed doubled down with gagged guffaws because of course the poor benighted pool tender on the other end of the phone which had interrupted him on his Sunday afternoon, had no idea what the fuck “Oswald” was. But my Papa did.
So the regulator was dubbed by me accordingly in true oswaldian tradition, The Elf Hat.
Well, The Elf Hat was signaling for weeks that it had provided the last of its regulatory service to the spider web of piping across the wall of our basement room a while ago by springing all those leaks. Radiant Doctor T had taught Husband how to tweak the leaks in between Doc T’s visits to replace valves and check the gauges and then the last bit was that Elf Hat was most likely past his sell by date but Doctor T was leaving town the Monday before Thanksgiving for Las Vegas and not due back til Saturday.
Monday afternoon Husband tells me the pressure gauge was way too high and Elf Hat needed a replacement which of course he, in all his wisdom would have no trouble doing. He’d tracked down where to find Elf Hat 2 and was out the door to bring it home.
But what this replacement meant was that we had to remain at home for the first few days after Elf Hat 2’s installation to make sure the pressure could be adjusted if needed so we wouldn’t blow a pipe in our floors. Not the time to leave the house with a new house sitter who I wasn’t sure could handle all the Zoo much less a leaky floor.
So we stayed home and binged “Game of Thrones” and fired up for the first time our intensely top of the line Vermont Castings wood fireplace complete with catalytic converter.
Husband studied the entire manual, and methodically built the kindling pile and lit the thing where upon the grill along the sides spewed forth a lot of smoke. He said, “The instructions say it has to heat the shoot before it will draw.” Oh good. I opened several windows.
But soon he had a fire going, its heat pervading nicely.
We have named the fireplace “Smaug” in further oswaldian tradition.
No spring pipes, many episodes of “Game of Thrones”, two ducks and artichokes and pates. Samug warmed the house in ways it was plumbed half a century ago to do. It was a sweet Thanksgiving.
Then Friday came with news that we would be hosting SIL’s family for its second round of feasting. I was reminded of the rhythm I was used to about my children trickling in between their father’s home and mine for the yearly swap of Holidays. That rhythm had always carried sorrow as I waited for my bit to either begin or end. I had little room in my heart for the perspective that they were growing fine and firm with their own version of family. As I have said before they are their own in ways I am not a part and niether is their father.
Friday night I decided to retrieve a sirloin roast from the heap of half a cow we had in our freezer just in case the two small cuts of pork belly Eldest and SIL had set aside might fall short of feeding 12 people.
Saturday arrived and family trickled in as we prepared for feasting. Husband built his incredible mashed potatoes as well as tending the hours of pork belly baking and the Sirloin roast while I went with SIL’s Mama and Papa up to Eldest’s winery for pizza and a glass and wended our way home in time to set the stage for another happy gathering of chaotic feasting.
And Thanksgiving 2 had definitely done its job of fulfilling all our desires.
Husband and I waved good bye to all on Sunday morn and went back to a bingeing “Game of Thrones”.
This week has passed with little to report aside from my lethargy and a totally beloved indulgence in the journey of the epic story in “Game of Thrones”.
Oh and the gleeful growing feelings around the name of Trump. My mother passed in the middle of the space between the election and the inauguration, a time of such deep grief for me as the world of anticipated politics tipped into the unreal. As my sister has said, Trump is so much worse than any of us thought. The shame of it as an Ameircan who considers my community The World, has carried with it the arrow of an unavoidable systemic depression on top of my erratic cycle of sorrow about the levels of loss that came with the passage of my mother. I have been so eager to start seeing the cracks in the facade of Trump Tower and this week it came with news of Cohen’s pleading guilty to lying to Congress with Trump’s White House legal team and Trump himself having designed the fallacious package.
Christmas is coming and Trump is going down, Yes my dearest dears there In’t gonna be a corner the Rat can scurry. Thank you Santa Mueller. We are all pulling for you.
Ta.
Tea With Me 