Author: Judy Hanawalt (Page 8 of 23)

The summer months–June, July and August–are known for being cool and foggy in Berkeley. We do have some warm days, but the most reliably warm, clear weather comes in the fall. During these months, I wear summer clothes and sandals because of the calendar, not the weather, and I bring a sweater everywhere.

September and October feel like summer. On the clear, bright mornings, the deep orange color on the Golden Gate Bridge stands out against the deep blue sky and bay. The city and the bridges look close enough to touch. Most days are pleasant, in the 70’s, but we have hot spells when the temperature gets too warm for comfort.

Since we don’t have a lot of hot weather, most houses and buildings don’t have air conditioning. My Riverside upbringing taught me to open the windows at night, then seal up the house and close all the blinds to keep the house cool until the evening. On warm Indian Summer days, our house gets up to the high 80’s before the sun finally stops beating on the front windows and the air cools down.

If there are several hot days in a row, the house gets heated up; the wood and the stucco and the attic hold the heat and radiate it back even after the sun goes down, and we can’t get the inside temperature under 78 degrees.

On those days, we long for the fog. The high temperatures to the east of us pull the fog in from the ocean. It comes pouring through the Golden Gate and bathes the bay and Berkeley in cooling mist. On hot afternoons, I scan the horizon for any trace of fog; when I see it coming, I can bear the heat, knowing sure relief is on the way.

Water is the best way to cool off.

As a young child, I lived near Chicago, in Evanston. The hot, muggy summers there stand out in my memory. I remember wanting to go with my dad on errands, hoping he would go to the bank, the only air-conditioned place I knew. Sometimes we would seek out coolness in our basement, even sleeping down there. Our favorite relief was to fill up the little kiddie pool and sit in it. My dad put the end of our backyard slide into the pool, propped the hose at the top of the slide, and made a water slide for us.

The hottest days in recent memory come from living in El Dorado County, east of Sacramento. Our first summer there, we went to a Renaissance Faire in a downtown Sacramento park. It must have been 110 degrees–so hot I couldn’t even think. We walked around, amazed at the heavy costumes people were wearing and trying to look at the booths, but we felt terrible. We couldn’t stay long; it was just too hot.

One of my daughters was beside herself from the heat. She sat down on the grass on the way to the car and couldn’t go on; she was completely overheated. The park was on the American River, so we coaxed her down to the bank of the river where people were swimming. We all took off our shoes and waded into the cool water in our clothes. It was wonderful. It saved our family trip from being a miserable disaster.

Last summer on our way home from the cabin, we took a detour to visit Arches National Park. From an air-conditioned Starbucks in Colorado, I found a place on the internet called Moab under Canvas and made reservations. It seemed like fun. I saw the forecast for 106-degree days, but I told myself the desert nights would be cool, not realizing that the cool temperatures did not actually arrive until about 3 in the morning.

We stayed in a wall tent that was like a little cabin, but with canvas sides and roof and a zipper door. It had regular beds, and there was a large trailer nearby that had eight individual bathrooms with real showers and toilets. Some people call this type of accommodations glamping–glamorous camping–but I’d say it’s more like clamping–clean camping. The neat, lit pathways and the rugs on the floor of the tents minimize the dust that usually goes along with camping. It was comfortable, or it would have been if it wasn’t so hot.

Water to the rescue, again.

The tents had hoses attached to the ceiling with nozzles that put out a fine mist. We had it going the whole time we were in the tent. Everything got wet, but we did not care; as long as the mist was going we felt cool and comfortable. For some reason, the misters were turned off by 10 pm even though it wasn’t cool yet, so we poured water on ourselves to keep the evaporative cooling going until we fell asleep.

Arches National Park was amazing. The beauty made the discomfort of the heat worth it, and the misters kept us from being too immobilized by the heat to discover it.

The other day, my husband and I were weary of the afternoon heat at home and decided to take the dog and go down to the marina. We walked around by the pier and cooled off in the breeze. It doesn’t take much water to make a difference. A little fog, some mist, wading into a river up to your waist, or even standing near it can be enough to change your personal climate.

It makes me think of the phrase that describes the extremes of possible obstacles: Hell or high water. 

Hell, I imagine, is hot and dry–the absolute lack of water. Biblical images of hell include suffering residents begging for even a sip of water. The opposite extreme is too much water: seeping, flooding, drowning amounts of water.

Somewhere in between the extremes is the happiness of being cooled by water.

I’m home from the hospital. It was a good day there today. My husband seems to be feeling better and will likely be coming home in the next day or two. I feel like we’re going to get through this.

I didn’t start out feeling that way today.

This morning, I loaded myself up with a bag of garbage, a bag of recycling, my coffee cup, a plate of Babka to bring to the playgroup I lead, my computer bag and my purse. As I tried to give the dog a treat before closing and locking the door, I remembered that I had left the back door standing open.

I put all my stuff down, went in and closed it, and came back to pick it all back up again, and that’s when I realized it: I’m going to drop everything. It’s almost certain. I readjusted my load, put the recycling down for later, and left for playgroup.

When I got in the car and saw that I was already late, I had the sense that I might drop not just the things I was trying to carry down the stairs, but everything–all the responsibilities at home, at work, at church, at school, at the hospital.

I thought I was taking all the hospital stays and uncertainty and disruption in stride, but today I was seeing my life from the outside. Watching all the moving parts, I was like a kid jumping into a game of double dutch, trying to time it right, trying not to stop the jump rope.

It felt like walking on slippery ice, taking every step  deliberately, trying to keep my balance.

As I drove down our street, I passed the Cal student who lives with us as he was coming home, and stopped when he rolled down his window to ask me a question. He wanted to take Tie with him to a meeting and to hang out with some friends. I said that was fine, except that Tie really needed a bath since he had evaded it the other day.

‘I’ll do it,” he said. I told him where I take Tie and gave him the wash token that was still in my wallet from the other day. That’s one thing I could let go of.

I skidded in late to playgroup to find the coordinator setting up and greeting the participants for me. When I told her that my husband was back in the hospital, she offered to take over for me, even at the last minute if needed. There’s another thing I could let go of.

It was enough to help me find a little solid footing.

It’s not that I don’t have people helping me. The support we’ve received has been amazing.

I was unconsciously holding on to everything, and trying to hold everything together.  Letting go was not about checking items off my to-do list. I just couldn’t hold on anymore. It was like releasing muscles that I’d been tensing without realizing, or taking a deep breath after forgetting to breathe for a while.

Today’s water is saline solution, tears, tepid tea, IV antibiotics and pain medications. We are back in the hospital.

This is the third time we’ve moved into a room on the ninth floor. This one is at the end of the hall.  It’s a smaller room, with only a sleeper chair instead of a pull-out couch. Instead of a panoramic view of the bay and San Francisco, we’re looking out at downtown Oakland. It’s a rainy, gray Sunday; drops are pelting the windows of our room.

A smaller room at the end of hall suits us better this time. We are tired. Less optimistic. Not caring if the room is nice, not caring about a million-dollar view.

My husband puts his favorite station–number 83, instrumental music–on his nurse-call/tv-remote handset, pulls on his tan no-slip socks, tucks his thin blue blanket up under his chin and closes his eyes for a nap. It almost feels like home.

With any surgery, there’s a chance of complications, and when you have complications, there’s a chance of more complications. He hit the jackpot.

I am not the patient, but I’m here with him many hours a day. It’s the most time we’ve spent together since our honeymoon. I’m trying to balance what needs to be done outside of the hospital with what needs to be done here: keeping him company, advocating for him when he needs something.

My schedule is on hold.  I’m not home to cook, and dishes from food grabbed and eaten quickly sit in the sink. I have to call someone to walk the dog or let him out to go potty. Laundry piles up. I lose track of days and dates. I go home in the evening and come back in the morning, doing only the bare bones of normal responsibilities.

When I’m home I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t want to think much, or talk either. I just feel tired. I might eat something, or just get in bed with a glass of wine and watch a show. When I’m away from the hospital, I feel like I might miss something important, but when I’m at the hospital, the day is spent waiting–for a doctor to visit, for new orders to come through, for the meal tray, for the next dose of pain meds, for healing.

This has been a little window into the lives of families dealing with chronic illness. I know I don’t understand it fully, because I still have the hope that this is just temporary, but the total disruption and the need to focus all my energy on the one who is sick must be the similar. For us, it’s a bump in the road, not the whole road. It’s been longer than I imagined, but it is not yet normal. I have new compassion for the ones that can’t see the end of this road.

It hasn’t been all bad. Easy for me to say, I suppose, since I haven’t been the one in pain. My husband would say it too, I think, or at least he will when the pain is gone.

It’s been nice to have quiet time. I work on my computer or read while he reads or dozes. Sometimes we play games or talk. It’s been a little like a snow day, hunkering down in the storm and staying in together. The companionship, the long days of just hanging out together, has been healing for both of us.

I almost hate to say that, because it has been an expensive time-out from daily life. It has cost my husband dearly in pain and suffering. It has taken a toll on his work, keeping him down for much of the last 10 weeks.

The benefits have been rich, though. The view from a hospital room always brings new perspective. Brushing up so close with mortality can’t help but shake up and re-order priorities. I feel like something broke open in both of us through this ordeal.

We’ve been married for 32 years. There’s a certain crustiness that builds up in relationships, and the familiarity of roles and routine makes it easy for us miss each other. We think we don’t have to pay attention because we know what the other one is thinking and doing. This experience pulled us up short.

Some of the crustiness has cracked off and revealed tender, fresh bits of our relationship that are alive under there, waiting for some fresh air and sunshine to start growing again.

The downstairs bathroom has always been the lesser bathroom. It was old, dated, and never really felt clean, even when it was mopped and swished and sprayed. The upstairs bathroom has been the “good”one, though it isn’t much to talk about either. It is dated and impossible to clean, too;  it has bathtub with a pitted, grimy finish and a squat vanity with a cracked sink. In spite of its flaws, it’s got old-house charm, with a light green tiled floor and wainscoting trimmed with dark green tile.

There was no charm downstairs. The 70’s vinyl flooring with the  gold and orange geometric pattern was peeling, and the shower was missing tiles in the ceiling. The floor of the shower came off in chunks, leaving the concrete pan exposed. When we first moved in 10 years ago, we took out the old broken-down vanity after it proved impossible to clean and replaced it with new Ikea sink, vanity and shelf. It helped a little.

A couple of years ago, we decided to spruce it up by putting new flooring down. The old stuff was glued to the concrete and could not be removed easily, so we put plywood  over it, installed the new flooring on top of that, sealed it all up and painted. It was a huge improvement.

Things have always been a little green and mossy around the outside of the shower, so we knew there was a moisture problem. We assumed it was splashing and leaking under the shower door onto the bathroom floor. We hoped that sealing it carefully would keep things dry. 

A couple of months ago, that bathroom started smelling strange. It reminded me of rhubarb, a sweet and sour smell; it wasn’t exactly bad, it was just wrong–something was happening in there that should not be. The odor was a strong and heavy. When I sprayed the shower with cleaner it lessened for a bit, but was back full force within a day or so. I was embarrassed to have guests stay down there. 

We decided it was time to remodel that bathroom.

When they pulled out the old tile, they found water and wet rot in all the wood around the shower, and cracks in the shower pan. Water had been pushing behind the tile through unsealed nail holes, cracks and other ways too mysterious to understand.

Water is a slippery character. Tumbling over rocks or washing up on sand, it looks so innocent and straightforward, but given the chance, it slithers into smaller and smaller spaces, dissolving, disintegrating, destroying. It is incessant, probing and prodding  for weak places to break down and invade. It’s the universal solvent. With enough time, it can carve out the Grand Canyon.

It had made it’s way under the new plywood subfloor and made it a harbor for mold and rot. Water was splashing on the floor, but it was also traveling down the wall and trickling through the shower floor.

Instead of making it cleaner and dryer, we had inadvertently sealed in the moisture we were trying to keep out. We made it worse. Rhubarb-stinky worse. 

Water itself is not the problem. The qualities that make it destructive also make it useful. Water is not often neutral. It is not going to flow in somewhere and just sit; it makes itself known, highlighting the breach by hosting some rot or mold.  As long as it keeps moving and doesn’t linger too long, it’s helpful, flushing and cleansing.

Showers are a good example of the good and damaging attributes of water: we get clean in them, but if the flow isn’t positive, they harbor mildew and worse.

The downstairs bathroom will be beautiful when it’s done–we picked tile and fixtures that fit in with the character of our old home, but meet current standards for moisture control and plumbing. For awhile at least, water will be our friend in that bathroom. 

Now that the upstairs bathroom has become the ugly one, we will eventually have to re-do that one too. There’s no telling what we’ll find behind those shower walls.

The first storm of the season has arrived and it’s supposed to be a big one. We have an inch accumulated in a bucket outside, so it already feels like a good soaking. 

Yesterday, the morning commute was a mess. The first rain makes the roads extra slippery, adding water to the accumulated dirt and oil that hasn’t yet been washed off, and after the dry summer, everyone has forgotten how to drive in rain. Not wanting to be on the roads, more people opt for public transportation when it rains, but it didn’t help much this time– by mid-morning BART had long delays system-wide. The city canceled tomorrow’s street fair because of the forecast of heavy rain and wind all day.

I want it to rain, I wish I could will it to rain–for the moisture, of course, but also for the way it slows everything down and makes it ok to duck under cover and take a breath. I love the way weather has the ability to change my plans and put things into perspective. A storm makes a regular busy  weekend into  an opportunity to catch up on my reading and knitting. I made beef stew and beer bread (you have to try the beer bread mix at Trader Joe’s!) and am ready for some good old-fashioned hunkering down.

Bay Area storms often dump less water than they promise, and the clouds and bluster give way to sunshine and business-as-usual again too quickly for my liking. A couple of years ago, the weather experts told us a big one was coming. School was canceled and the whole Bay Area braced for what was dubbed “Hella Storm.” It did show up, but it wasn’t the big event we were all prepared for. It was just a good storm. It felt like a let-down.

We’ve started believing that we can know and plan for everything weather-related. It’s very convenient; I can check what’s coming in the next ten days without looking out the window. It’s certainly helpful to  give people in the path of a storm time to prepare or evacuate, but I wonder if another motivation is to make modern life weather-proof, to get to the point that weather can’t interrupt our busyness or disrupt our lives. If we know what’s going to happen, we can side-step it and plan around it.  It’s the illusion of control.

Maybe it was better when we didn’t have the technology to track weather systems so accurately. The old-fashioned ways of predicting weather kept it a mystery. Seeing rings around the moon, feeling an ache in my bad knee, looking for a green tint to the sky or watching to see how many nuts the squirrels are storing seems more like a weather premonition than a promise, but I’m ok with uncertainty in weather. It’s changeable by nature.  Even with modern equipment and knowledge of how weather works, storms still seem to  have a mind of their own. We can see what weather is doing but not exactly what it’s going to do.

Technology makes us feel like we know what’s coming, but looking at the clouds and smelling rain in the wind isn’t a bad way to gauge things either. Whether we know what’s coming ten days out or just feel the drops and grab a jacket, we can’t control it.

The weather ap on my phone says it’s supposed to start raining early tomorrow morning and keep up all day. I guess I won’t make any plans, though–I’ll wait to hear the pitter-patter of raindrops on my roof.