X-rays, x-cuses, x-cited

 The weather has been up and down, up and down, mild one day and below freezing the next, calm and sunny, nor’easters and driving rain. This week I’ve mostly been making plans for our annual solstice party. It wasn’t annual last year as it was shortly after my first knee operation and I was still completely immobile, mostly still in bed. This week I’ve also been reading poetry mss. for my juried intensive poetry workshop in June here in Wellfleet. I pay no attention to publications or prizes but just read the five poems and pick out the poets I think I can help raise to a new level and whose work intrigues me. Often there’s a mixture of well-published poets and a novice or two who have something going on that grabs my attention. In addition, I’ve been reading stories for 5th Wednesday zine out of Chicago. Woody and I are co-editors of a fiction issue. So far, he has been too busy with WOMR and things that need doing around the house before serious winter sets in – digging leeks, repairing the lighting system beside the drive that was completely out except for one lone light; ordering a new toilet for downstairs bathroom; arranging with the guy who is to put in raised beds in the two upper gardens. He has been swamped. I have been almost useless in the garden after midMay. We drove into Boston Thursday. First we got cat food. When we bring boxes of cans of cat food into the house, the cats know exactly what they are. Puck, Xena and Mingus [Sugar Ray is too much of a gentleman to get involved] swarm the boxes and try to sniff through the metal what’s in the cans. Then we went to Whole Foods to get supplies for our party, especially cuts I need for the cassoulet I make. I use mostly Julia Child’s recipe with a few variations of my own. I start it the day before and then cook most of it the day of the party. Then we went to Beth Israel for X-rays and an exam of both my knee replacements. The prognosis was good. I have excellent range of motion and the implants are doing well. But I hurt. That just seems to be the way it is. The doctor said I could stop physical therapy and just do the exercises I have been doing and be as active as I can be.The Beth Israel parking garage was absolutely full and we were lucky to get the truck in anyplace. We drove around for ten minutes before we finally found one woody could squeeze the truck into.  Little light to see by, poisonous air.  Cars driving around and around crazed to find a parking space.  People on crutches hobbling along or being pushed in wheel chairs with cars narrowing missing them.  Mayhem. We had to park very close to a big SUV. When I stepped down from our high truck, I twisted my knee and was in considerable pain for the rest of the day. By now, it’s fine again but it was scary. Since we’d redone the floor in the diningroom to match the kitchen floor we had redone last year. the curtains I made in 1986 no longer worked. We had a slate floor [greyish, oozing in damp weather, impossible to clean, the grout always dirty, cold underfoot] so I made blue-grey curtains. They are pretty but we have a new floor of vinyl in warm colors, yellow and orange and beige. I no longer have a sewing machine --it died a noisy death twenty years ago – and don’t really have the time this winter to make more curtains. I picked the material and Woody found a local young woman who said she could make curtains. So we gave her the measurements and a curtain from each of the three sides of the diningroom, 10 windows in all. Well, when she brought them over, six were four inches too short and two were nine inches too long and two were five inches too long. None was right. So it goes. She is supposed to be fixing them after two weeks of them all looking ridiculous but we’ll see.

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