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Tuesday, March 5, 2024

The Good Old Days--maybe...

 



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More memory lane writing for February, a month I get used to skipping, because the obligation only comes around every four years. Recently, I completed my 79th trip around Our Local Star. So it happens that many of my elder friends spend a lot of time wishing they were 50-60 years younger. 

Sorry to say, but contrary to a lot of what my same-age friends seem to remember, youth wasn't all Golden Days. 

Here's a case in point, a memory I have of a now mostly forgotten blizzard which happened in Massachusetts in February in 1969. This was a year in which my husband had graduated from college but instead of entering the work world, we'd fallen for the siren song of those days and dropped out. He was working in a leather shop for a pittance and I was working a few days a week as a nurse's aide in a small hospital about an hour's commute away. 

We lived in a cabin in the woods near the Quabbin reservoir, which, in those days, was pretty empty of people, although there were a lot of deer, rabbits and raccoons. We had 1930's indoor plumbing, a woodstove and a kerosene heater, which made the house a lot more "modern" than others in the area.  

Other college friends had migrated to the big city of Boston (and vicinity) and were working 9-5 jobs. Sometimes we went in to visit them over weekends. On this particular Sunday, we left late, around 12, I think. It was snowing--but in those days that was not unusual or even a subject of much concern. A big storm was said to be coming in, but we knew the drive back to western Massachusetts well. It was two and half hours, give or take, to dirt road that led to our little house. 

We piled into the car. Our son, then 3 years old, was crying at leaving his same age friend and heading back to the no-kids world of the country. My husband took the wheel, I sat beside him, and we all headed out. First, we'd have to travel north on the 128 beltway before intersecting the secondary road which would take us much of the way across the state to our cabin in the woods. At once the wind picked up, blowing mightily. 


About 4 weeks later, the bump was revealed to be:


Snow blasted down. It was crystalline, and began drifting across the road, making it hard to see. If you remember old Beetle windshield wipers, you understand they were having a hard time keeping up, so now and then it was hard to see. The traffic, always heavy on the beltway, began to slow. The big cars nearby began to skid and wobble, struggling to maintain their lanes, lanes which were rapidly becoming little but the tracks of vehicle ahead of you. 

It was quickly becoming apparent that we weren't going to escape Boston. On every side, people were heading for the exits. Trucks fishtailed and then jack-knifed, but, intrepid Beetle drivers that we were, we maneuvered around them. Still, anxiety increased every moment because there we were in the middle of it--Daddy, Mommy and little boy, all within this German eggshell. And, oh, yes, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I was eight months pregnant. We were beginning to get cold too. It was the old VW tale about the single heating vent burning up the driver's left foot, while icicles formed on the passengers. 

The wind was howling, pushing the trucks. The wipers were no longer keeping up. Nothing to see but blowing snow and red tail lights as ahead, people braked for obstacles we couldn't see. Finally, my husband saw a familiar exit, the way to his parent's house in Lexington. This was problematic, as we currently weren't on good terms. Still, it seemed the only choice. We dove into the exit.

Now there was another problem--drifts were clogging the ramp. The plows, always diligent in these populated areas, couldn't keep up. Cars ahead were getting stuckwhile trying to exit the exit! The heavy cars of those days wallowed and skidded. People were getting out of their cars in that whipping wind, hoping to push themselves free. The little V-Dub became bogged down too. 

"Get out and push!" my husband yelled. So there I was, in my full-length dress, high boots and big belly, scarf tightly wrapped around my head, pushing the car. When he found traction and surged ahead, I fell flat on my face into the snow. He managed to maneuver around the stalled cars higher on the ramp, until he encountered the penultimate drift. His forward progress came to a halt.

I trudged back to the car amid wind and blinding white, shivering from the snow still stuck to my bare legs. When I arrived, he jumped out, cried, "You drive  now!" There had been only one car ahead of us, but they were making slow forward progress toward the main road. No waiting there! You just had to merge and pray the crawling cars saw you coming. 

So through that final, high drift, with me on and off the clutch, rocking the car, and with him pushing, we broke free and reached the road. He wore his prized, very cool hat, an old fedora--but this blew off, and was last seen sailing above 128 into a wall of white. 



Now at the top, we paused, changed drivers, and went the final few miles to safety, starting and stopping and negotiating our way through intersections where the lights were not working, and past many, many disabled, abandoned vehicles.

No cell phones in those days, so there were, on the steps of the Lexington house, where. blessedly, the door opened to us. Once inside, I had one of those false labor episodes, which are rather painful. I remember my mother-in-law calling a pediatrician who lived close by, who said he would make his way over if this didn't resolve, but, of course, once I was warm and had changed my clothes, it eventually went away.    

We were in that house for three days, because that's how long it took for all the abandoned vehicles to be cleared from the exit/entrances. Our son was happy to be at his grandparents because there were two teen Aunts to play with him, although, naturally, the elders were definitely ready for us to leave by the time we did. Driving around on the second day, hoping to find an opening, we'd passed by " our" exit, and seen the grill of the car that had been behind us, nearly buried under a monster drift that completely had encased it. 

When we reached home, we were delighted that our dirt road had been cleared. My husband forced the car into the drift at our driveway, and then we half-swam half-crawled our way over chest-high snow to the house, towing our little boy and a suitcase. The cats were glad to see us, as their kibble had long since run out and the house was darn cold. The old kerosene "furnace," by itself, kept the place in the vicinity of 45 degrees, so the plumbing hadn't frozen. With a fire started in the wood stove in time we were warm again.

~Juliet Waldron

Originally posted at:

https://bwlauthors.blogspot.com/2024/02/those-were-days-maybe.html


Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Why Watch Weather?

Trout Lilies

I'm a weather junkie. Unfortunately, we're in the streaming world now, and I've lost contact with my favorite zone-out fix, The Weather Channel. I must not be the only one so afflicted, though, because Weather Channel has had a long and successful run on TV and has become a go-to in apps and on the net.

I had the thought the other day, that while there are a lot of weather watchers today, most folks, most of the time in their American indoor lives, are barely affected by weather conditions at all. They just turn up the heat when they are cold and turn on the a/c when they are hot and don't particularly worry about it. If the apple blossoms are frozen here, they'll just ship our apples in from somewhere else.

Now, I've lived in hot places without a/c, and that wasn't much fun, especially as the place where I endured this was both noisy and hot. You couldn't open a window to catch a pleasant breeze for fear of being deafened, or, at least, of drowning out the TV you'd turned to full volume in an attempt to ignore the racket outside. During those summers you better believe I paid close attention to the forecast.

If you consider it, as long as you aren't living in a Third World mud hovel and earning your daily bread by farming, weather doesn't seem much to worry about. Many Americans go from homes to garages to cars to garages and then jobs and never have to brave the elements at all. Despite this, I think a lot of humans remain fascinated by weather, even if the life and death day-to-day consequences have been so smoothed over for many of us.


Central PA floods

The caveat is that the weather is changing--the world over. Maybe it's a good thing that no matter how sheltered an American suburbanite's life is, some of us, need to or not, are still paying (nerdy) attention to what's going on out there in the big world.

After all, Bad weather events--hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires--are Important Clues as to how our Mama is Feeling.

And we all should know by now that If Mama Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy. 





~~Juliet Waldron
Historical Novels
https://bookswelove.net/waldron-juliet/


Monday, May 25, 2020

New Moon, Possum Waddles Forth




The 1% always makes sure there is a myth surrounding them. Their entitlements and privileges are justifiable--God Given--of course they are!

It used to be the Divine Right of Kings, but here in America our Supine Court (Supreme Court, you say? When was that?) has brought us into an era of The Divine Right of Corporations. 

As always, there's well-armed police to enforce the rules upon peasants, like upon people whose property is "in the way" of an oil or gas pipeline. Oh, you say, those are not people, those are Indians and who gives a f**k about some old treaty! Pipelines and gas wells poison white people, ruin their farms and kill their dairy cattle, too, you know. Just look it up.

Don't think you are a peasant? Check out what Jeff Bezos makes an hour and then feel free to change your mind.  Per hour, he makes a whopping $8,961,187, roughly 315 times Amazon's $28,466 median annual worker pay.

Well, okay, maybe you don't feel like a peasant. You have an RV and two houses. Okay.

I'll grant you are not a peasant, but only if you also have a Yacht moored in Monte Carlo named "Chapter 11" and a bodacious boat babe or two to go with it. 

IF you are one of Corporations' Chosen Ones, you are probably not reading this blog. 





~~Juliet Waldron
Random daily thoughts from Possum

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Alexander Hamilton's "Hurricane Letter"







Viewing clips of Dorian's destruction of the Bahamas, with 48 hours of pounding winds and storm surges, I remembered Alexander Hamilton's experience on St. Croix. He, aged 16-17, survived what must have been an extremely violent hurricane.




Christiansted, September 6, 1772
From the Royal Danish American Gazette—
By Alexander Hamilton

“I take up my pen to give you an imperfect account of one of the most dreadful Hurricanes that memory or any records whatever can trace, which happened here on the 31st of August at night. It began about dusk, at North, and raged very violently till ten o’clock. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour. Meanwhile the wind was shifting round to the South West point, from whence it returned with redoubled fury and continued so ’till near three o’clock in the morning.

Good God! What horror and destruction! It is impossible for me to describe or you to form any idea of it. It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.


A great part of the buildings throughout the Island are levelled to the ground, almost all the rest very shattered; several persons killed and numbers utterly ruined; whole families running about the streets, unknowing where to find a place of shelter; the sick exposed to the keenness of water and air without a bed to lie upon, or a dry covering to their bodies; and our harbours entirely bare….”


This is just sample of what was a much longer piece of teen prose, one which may have propelled this young literary up-and-comer out of the West Indies. The remainder of his discourse is as full of allusions to an All-merciful and/or All-punishing God as any 18th Century churchgoer might wish. Sometimes, however, unvarnished truth breaks through the flow of his pious public sentiments:

"But alas! how different, how deplorable—how gloomy the prospect—death comes rushing on in triumph veiled in a mantle of ten-fold darkness. His unrelenting scythe, pointed and ready for the stroke.—On his right hand sits destruction, hurling the winds and belching forth flames;—calamity on his left threatening famine, disease, distress of all kinds.—And Oh! thou wretch, look
still a little further; see the gulf of eternal mystery open—there mayest thou shortly plunge — ...

Hark! ruin and confusion on every side.—Tis thy turn next: but one short moment—even now—Oh Lord help—Jesus be merciful! 


Thus did I reflect, and thus at every gust of the wind did I conclude,—till it pleased the Almighty to allay..."


Alexander had been waiting to die; he now thanked God that he'd escaped.  At the end of the essay, he went a step further in his Christianity. He wrote an impassioned plea to his wealthy readers to help their less fortunate neighbors, the many who now had lost everything.

"—Look around thee and shudder at the view.—See desolation and ruin wherever thou turnest thine eye. See thy fellow-creatures pale and lifeless; their bodies mangled—their souls snatched into eternity—
...Oh ye, who revel in affluence, see the afflictions of humanity, and bestow your superfluity to ease them.—Say not, we have suffered also, and with-hold your compassion. What are your sufferings compared to these? Ye have still more than enough left.—Act wisely.—Succour the miserable and lay up a treasure in Heaven."

Hamilton, I think, truly wanted people to do the right thing, and he wasn't afraid to give men three times his age a lesson in scripture. It's an aspect of his personality that is endearingly boyish.


All I have is words, but for me they shall be a magical buckler and sheathe!



Juliet Waldron








Friday, February 8, 2019

The Incredible Everywhere-ness of My Gray Hair



My hair is long and gray and getting scraggly. (Weird to be physically falling apart, in a losing battle with entropy, but that's the way it is for me this year.) Sometimes my long hair still looks cool, but it's really getting tatty at the ends and has to be clipped constantly. 

Mostly, though, my hair is in the way. I'm losing the energy to put it up, to braid it, to do anything with it. Of course, I'm also in a spell where it's tough to get up the morning, but that probably has to do more with politics than with my actual physical state. Once upon a time I looked like this, a collegiate Mommy in an apartment with a black high gloss floor, a handsome young motor-cycle riding husband,a toddler and a host of neato posters:


and now it's like this, at Dragon Con, trying on a dragon's tail I didn't quite buy.






These days, my gray hair is caught in my vacuum nozzles, wrapped round around the little wheels of the machine, choking the wands, so that once a job (at least) I have to disassemble the thing and peer into the tubes to see if a clog is impacting the once forceful suckage of the my little Mighty Mite sweeper. If it is, then it needs to be poked out with long brushes, the kind used to clean furnaces.

Hair is threaded into the weave of my doormats, so that to clean them, I have to not only sweep and shake, but pick them by hand, unwinding and knotting for disposal those long gray strands. Hair is in the brush every day in ever increasing amounts. I even find it--pardon me for going here--in the cat poop that I lift from the boxes. It's distressing to be losing so much of it, really it is, after years of taking the bounty for granted.






Once again, I want to cut it, a process I constantly go through, growing it out and then cutting it off. 







Cut it--and look in the mirror and lament--WHY DID I DO THAT? 


And begin to grow it out again. If it will grow, in the winding down of my physical form...


Peace--


Juliet 

See all my historical novels:

https://www.julietwaldron.com




Thursday, July 5, 2018

How Dystopian S/F became Our Current Reality





We’re like 18th Century aristocrats, all of us in the West. We sit and lounge while communicating with one another at lightning speed, like insects twittering to one another inside some over-burdened global hive.  Perhaps the trip to a Matrix destiny, that proposed end game of our “civilization,” is a lot closer than we think.

I'm sitting at an old CPU, practically a dinosaur, typing on a miraculous late 1980's IBM keyboard. It's indicative of my age, annual income and education that I treasure this antique. It has a marvelous decisive finger touch that this old style typist appreciates. 

However, the world has passed me by. Now babies clutch tiny devices in their fat dimpled fists. Their little faces, which used to shine while they discovered the world, are now are intent and passive. We are being readied for our place inside Some Thing's great machine, just as s/f  writers, our Cassandras and prophets, from PKD to Silverberg to Octavia Butler--and many others beside, who I have yet to read.

*

The Overlords must need a lot of us, perhaps for the now well-known flesh-as-battery option. They have set their "sacred" minions to declare that sex-- one behavior we monkey/people naturally have a gift for--is Evil. Of course, to the monkey mind, these days also bent and shaped by our creation of language as in the Medium is the Message--it is at once inevitable that therefore "evil sex" must occur as often as possible. Our governments seem to believe that sex occurs only for the procreation, though any self-respecting teen will tell you this is patently ridiculous.

 All methods to prevent over-population and consequent destruction of our species' range (now this entire planet) -are strictly forbidden by various "religious" authorities. Let's face it--an oversupply of anything in our current Capitalist system leads to low valuation. Therefore this insane directive to increase and multiply is nothing less than a "Majority Church/State Sanctioned" breeding program for slaves. 

Human lives clearly mean less and less and less to the 1%, our corporate masters who have just about successfully concluded their game of Planetary Monopoly. The "excess population" (per Scrooge) is doomed to become either Soylent Green or just old-fashioned cannon fodder--when there are 9 billion of us, who in charge will give a rat's ass when a million give or take are killed in some unnecessary but rah-rah-team-fight church and/or racist final solution? Take a look at how quickly and completely the westernized Middle East collapsed under the weight of sectarian conflict and a few rapacious, murderously inclined dictators!

Mother Kali will be dancing soon, I fear. I just hope she can clear out some of our major demonic evil-doers, along with the inevitable "collateral damage." I can only pray that our beautiful Mother Earth will survive our bad behavior.





Friday, May 11, 2018

The "Summer Collection"


A 1950's Canadian Indian Residential School story: 



Now it’s May again, and the possum has fully awakened.  Of course, it doesn’t just gradually become spring these days—no! That would be old fashioned; it would be what we've grown to expect after the last 70 years. Instead, we have had a long dry chill here where I live in the literal rump of the NE, followed by 90 degree weather for a few breathless days, causing the everyone, including the cat, to suffer from pollen allergies. Next, it falls back into something like the kind of May oldsters like myself remember: a bit gray, a bit sunny, puffy cumuli that might turn into a sullen deck over the apple blossoms , and a distinct pleasant chill whenever the wind blows.






The result is that I have to start changing my winter clothes collection for my “summer collection.” We’re not talking Turner Classic movies or million bucks athletic garb at this house; I’m speaking with tongue firmly-in-cheek. 

What that graceful word “collection” actually means to me is putting my light colored t-shirts, capris and shorts in the drawers in place of the heavier, darker heavier tees and turtlenecks which have occupied them all winter.
  
It involves lifting heavy plastic tubs full of shirts in/out of tiny spaces in badly aligned closets, maneuvers that require me to bend and lift and twist.  Either that or getting down on the floor to retrieve a low flat box from under the bed. And we all know the fun of getting up on two legs after we've had to get down on all fours, we who are now in their "Golden Years."

 Willy-Yum watches the human bang, crash and clamber from a safe distance--the hall rug. Here, he settles in, big front paws tucked inward against his chest.

After wiping the dust from the lids, I open the tubs. Inside, there they are, the tees I put away at the end of October last year. 





It’s an ever growing collection, I fear, because I have become attached to each and every one, carefully chosen as they were from catalogs or from artsy websites. There are dinosaur tees, one with Eco-slogans, Wheels of the Year, Calaveras, cats, famous movies, and other famous types, from Alex and Eliza Hamilton and Wolf Mozart and his Stanzi as well as  the many faces of Dr. Who. It’s my down-market version of sartorial elegance, suitable either for bike riding, grocery store, yard work or the gym.






When the task is completed, we’ve got the Possum Perfect summer wardrobe (or is it weird-robe?)   packed into the chest of drawers. I’m all ready now for all the heat and humidity now relentlessly on its way.



~Juliet Waldron

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