Friday, 8 January 2021
At home
With difficulty, I managed to tear myself away from reading news stories to go outside and weed for awhile during a sunny and springlike day. It was annoying that someone nearby had been burning plastic so that the air was eye-stinging and nasty smelling. I could have tracked down the source, probably, and called the non-emergency number for the fire department, but I don’t need small town enemies. The stink did dissipate after the first hour.
We’d had this much rain overnight….
…and this much rain over the past week.
I have tired of the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ and want to cut it back…but it will look so good if we have snow this winter.
My contorted filbert (Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick) looks great with its leaves gone. Winter is its glory time.
It would not be a good day to be dragging debris out of the willow grove at the south end of our property.
I wanted to dig out the tall white sanguisorba that is too floppy on the edge of the east bed. I bought it at a Hardy Plant sale years ago under the name Sanguisborba DJH followed by some numbers. That stands for Daniel J Hinkley and is the way some of his plant collections are named when first introduced. I wish I knew if this plant, that is one of my favourites, has a cultivar name now. It had gotten infested with some weeds.
Even though I employed the Root Slayer shovel and the big yellow pick, it was such tough going that I thought of rapping on Allan’s window for help. The plant has long tuberous roots. I managed to get the weedy corner out, so weedy that I discarded it, and several smaller pieces which I planted around the garden and then several small pieces that I potted up. Half of it still remains in the ground. I then told myself that I want the other pieces to get big and floriferous before I further divide my nice big plant. Yeah, that’s it.
Below left: the white sanguisorba in September:
In the same part of the east bed, I did considerable cutting back and weeding. Faerie watched me carry debris to the compost bins.
I toyed with the idea of taking her for a walk though the garden to meet lawn grass and puddles. If she ran off, the chase would be stressful, so in she stayed.
Befores of today’s weeding and trimming:
After:
It was a relief to see Skooter in the garden after he had languished, growling and grumping and looking sickly, on a pillow in Allan’s room all day. Concerned that he might have a sore tooth, I emailed our animal clinic for an appointment. He has chosen a bad time to be poorly because, due to a staff member having Covid, much of the clinic staff has had to go into quarantine and they are closed except for emergencies.
He is blowing his coat (shedding like crazy) so perhaps he just has a hair ball. I hope that’s all it is. We did get an appointment but for three weeks out. (He seemed much better the next morning.)
As for other cats, one of the Greys knocked a recycling basket onto the laundry room floor to make a nice hiding spot.
Faerie wanted the grey to emerge. (I can’t tell which grey is which from the hind end.)
She clamped on with teeth and tried to drag her friend out. Yowling ensued…
…while the grey hung on with determination, and I must admit I just stood there laughing.
Allan went to the library for an outdoor exchange of books. I’m excited that the Dodie Smith biography has arrived via interlibrary loan. He photographed a hellebore in the garden there.
Then it was back to reading the news (me) and working on his book (Allan). This week’s shocking news stories have slowed down both my book reading and my gardening.
Reading
I did finish this book tonight. I’ll be surprised if it is not my best book of the year.
It is so beautifully written.
On reading the comments of news stories about herself, the anonymous victim:
But then, after her victim statement was published (here), bags and bags of loving and supportive letters poured in. Even as just a reader, they comforted me. And I was impressed with the kindness and caring from Joe Biden.
I am now even happier that he will be our President very soon.
I wish that my mother was still alive so that I could give her this book. When she was about 75 years old, she told me that while she was in the Marine Corps in WWII, she was given drinks at a party: spiked or not, she woke up unable to remember but knowing that an assault had happened to her. Back then, she told no one, and I think that after decades, my spouse and I were the first ones she had told. It had clearly haunted her, with no support from anyone. Because I had been a counselor at Seattle Rape Relief in my early 20s, my training had given me the right words to say. I think that I did help her, but we only talked about it the once, which I now deeply regret. I just wish she could have read this memoir.
If you are afraid to read it because it seems too grim, let me assure you that it’s worth it and is suffused with light.
Very sorry about your mother! Glad that she was able to talk to you about it and that you knew what to say to her.
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Thank you. It explains to me why, when she never stood up to my dad, she real,h let him have it about some misinformation he was spouting when I was a crisis counselor. She told him I knew more about it than he did. That was very unusual.
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My heart goes out to your mother. I am glad you were able to talk to her. When I was in grade school, there was a really pleasant, nice girl in my girl scout troop I remember. One camping trip,when a bunch of us were in one tent telling scary stories, she told everyone her scary story, but in her case, it wasn’t ghosts, it was real. When she was 6 years old, she had been sent out trick-or-treating, alone. No adult supervision. She was attacked by a group of teenage boys, who assaulted her multiple times. She mentioned they left a scar. At the time, she and her family were living in Alabama. This was in the mid 1960s. The community blamed her for the rape, and the boys went free. The family moved north to get away from it. She wasn’t there all that long before they moved again. Not a Halloween goes by I don’t think about her.
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So many stories like these. It breaks my heart, and her entire life would have been affected. If she is still alive, I hope she finds Chanel’s book because it really is full of hope for how one can survive. The cover is symbolic of a cracked vessel repaired with gold.
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I remember her name, and what she looked like, back then. I have never been able to locate her.
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😦
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Oh your mother! And made worse by the times, where women were blamed. Well, blamed far more than they are now.
In my late teens a classmate of mine was raped whilst walking home through a local park. A friend was raped in a car by someone she had met at a party and who was giving her a lift home because she was too intoxicated to walk. And too intoxicated to put up any resistance to the assault.
At a house party I pulled my best friend out of a bed where she had laid down after drinking far too much, and then passed out. Some random guy was trying to take advantage of the situation.
None of these were ever reported to the police. It was the early 70s, and although the battle for equal rights was well under way, girls knew the score when it came to reporting sexual assault, conviction – and the societal stigma.
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I was a counselor for a couple of years and also worked in the office compiling the statistics so I read every case that came through for those two years. After awhile I just couldn’t do it anymore. I admire anyone who can stay in that counseling field without emotionally breaking down.
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I am sometimes overwhelmed by the sadness in the world. The lies, the secret assaults, the loneliness, the hypocrisy. Just too much to cope with. And then I, too, am distracted by the antics of my two dear but not bright cats, and the world resolves itself through laughter.
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The author started fostering little dogs for the same effect.
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Your rain gauge is working hard. At least you haven’t had frozen soil like us for weeks.
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This one could have used a line over the last paragraphs.
There is a lady in town who is viciously malignant narcissistic, which is difficult for me to explain. To be brief, she is weirdly abusive to people online. (I mean, she literally talks ‘crazy’.) She sets up entire Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts just to say creepy mean things about her victims. A pattern that we in the Community notice is that she accuses her victims of things that she is guilty of. For example, while her home was in foreclosure, she insisted that all poor people who can not afford to live here must move someplace more affordable. While she had a few accounts on GoFundMe, she accused a homeless advocate in Santa Cruz of exploiting GoFundMe, and continues to do so. When her daughter was arrested for DUI and got a mugshot, she started posting and ridiculing other people’s mugshots. The list of examples is extensive. Anyway, She is presently targeting three homeless advocates in Santa Cruz, with two very disturbing and regularly repeated accusations. One of the two accusations is of incest. The constantly repeated accusations alone are disturbing. What is more disturbing is that we can not help but consider if she is describing her own experience. It is so saddening to think that, not only might she have been the victim of such a horrid and ongoing crime, but also, because of it, she continues to be so miserable.
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That sounds horrid and very very stressful. I think your insight into her problems could well be true.
I do have lines, but they are not as visible, being the “separators” offered up by the WordPress block editor. I thought about stronger lines and thought….this is not about news, it’s about experiences that afflicted me, too, when I was young … example, her several pages about street harassment, so well written, echoed my life as a young woman.
I sincerely hope that you, as a homeless advocate, don’t become a target of that mean person.
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She tried to get a restraining order against me last July. She accused me of stalking and harassing her, even though I had done nothing of the sort, but she had made several Facebook pages to mock me in the creepiest ways, and lied about all sorts of family members and anyone she could find with the same last name (including Teresa Tomeo). She left weird Yelp reviews for one of my employers, and said that I was videoing people here. She even tried twice to kill the Memorial Tree in Felton Covered Bridge Park. https://feltonleague.com/2020/06/28/vandalism/
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I am so sorry, Tony. And I thought I had problems with a local person telling people I was crazy and should be avoided! Now I am grateful there was no FB page involved. That is extremely creepy. Also, I continue to very much admire the work and mission of the Felton League.
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Narcissism is supposedly more common now that it has ever been. That is why there are so many ‘Karen’s about. Accusing others of their own behavior is very common.
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I was friends for awhile with someone similar to the person Tony describes. After getting to know her for a year, I had to let her go as a friend. She said terrible things about other people that I knew that weren’t true. But here’s the thing–She had been diagnosed with lupus years ago, and apparently people who have lupus can also have mental problems such as paranoia. Once I understood this, I could forgive her more easily…but I still had to let that friendship go.
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That is interesting. After years of mourning a lost friendship, and the social circle that had revolved around that, it finally got back to me that all that time this apparently influential person had been telling other people….even new to town people…that I was “weird and crazy and should be avoided”. I thought, how much does that explain about ostracism in a small town and how much is in my vivid imagination? However, it did result in my having a lot more time at home to get things done, and in the long run it has been a blessing to my life that it happened.
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