dreamweaver

I seem to live between odd dichotomies these days.

It's hard to go to sleep, in part because of lack of noise. I have just enough tinitis that when I can't hear the traffic it's hard to sleep; think of permanent mosquito in your ear. I found a technique in FB reels for tapping hard on the bone behind the ear that gets rid of the worst of it, but it doesn't always work. So I use an app called Calm, which has 'soundscapes' including things like six different kinds of rainfall, waterfalls, forests of various kinds and white, pink and brown noises, find whatever works for me that night and leave it on all night. That helps. Or I could stay awake till nearly 4, when the noise from the Capital Beltway a quarter mile south of me cranks up to its general daily roar.

A friend suggested that I get a night light for the bathroom in the shape of a capybara, or in her words, 'an imperturbable capybara'. So I did get it, and have it set to the lowest level of light, but I am not yet used to any light there. Normally I have my Kindle nearby, and when I need to get to the bathroom I flip the cover open and use it as a night light. Last night, the capybara was sitting imperturbably on my toothbrush holder, but its light shone out on a wall that I'm not used to having lit, so I had to remind myself that I had a friendly and non-aggressive critter there shining the light (I need reminders when I'm almost asleep but my body discerns something different.)

That meant that I slept on my left side last night, with my face away from the lit wall. Which, for most other people, would not be a problem, but I have all my life had a slightly curved spine, leaning to the left. (During the 2000s, I was doing deepwater running twice a week and the supported floating combined with gravity straightened my spine out, but I have not done it in several years now bcC (because Covid) and it is leaning a little. When I sleep on that side it leans more. As a remedy my husband put up a bar in one of the doorways that I can reach up and grab and dangle myself from, and my own weight straightens my back out painlessly. A side effect of the bar is that my grip strength has increased a bit, so I could do better at pulling out vines yesterday.

Much more of this balancing and I may start thinking of Philippe Petit balancing on the rope between the Two Towers, long ago.

Some years back, I was asked to spin the shed fur from a very fluffy dog so the owner could knit a coat out of it. There was definitely enough -- but the bags of fur she left me had not been washed. I carded them into rolags (outdoors) and gave them back to her, and asked her to find someone else to do it.

But in the process of doing that, I looked online and discovered that it was illegal, in the state I was living in, to sell any object or garment made from fur that could be construed as pet fur.

Why? Because nobody wanted to start having to deal with trapping pets and killing them for their fur. Never mind that it was shed fur and combed off a still-living pet. It was still illegal. I don't remember what the penalties were.

There are already enough dognappers stealing pets from hunting-type breeds to sell as 'trained hunting dogs.' One of my cousins lost a dog that way for a month, until he turned up in a neighboring town after running all the way back from the Adirondacks to Rochester, well over 100 miles. I still don't know how he survived.

So, a suggestion: check the laws in your state about this, if you plan to card and spin and knit something that isn't for yourself from Bowser's or Fifi's fur.

No, nobody died.

My elderly aunt -- who is the youngest and only remaining member of my father's generation, his little sister -- said something in an email that indicated that she, treasured and pampered last child, did not know the full story about her father's travels around the world. I grew up hearing stories of Grampa's travels from Dad and from his brother; I know all the details about what it was like to sail in a four-masted barque from Bremen to Cape Town to Sydney through the Straits of Magellan (in winter!) to Rio de Janiero to Genoa, a two-year voyage.

She took my offer as an insult; of course she'd been told everything (her version was "Nobody can know what happened."). And called me a liar, and worse. She said I was making it all up, or Dad had invented it, because nobody who wasn't there could know. (This is the woman who had a free ride to Purdue but dropped out after 1 semester because she couldn't be that far away from her mother. She has no idea about studying anything, let alone history, or about research. I'm amazed she got out of high school.)

I let out some of the head of steam this built in me (that has always been the worst insult for me, as a writer and journalist). Then I told her I was not a liar, nor did I invent family history. All that I knew had been verified not only by my father but by one of his brothers, and was truth. It was known, just not to her. All the family stories were softened when they were told to the baby of the family.

And just as I wasn't around in the 30s, she wasn't around at the turn of the century when Grandpa was on that trip.

She had also called me by my birth name, which is now an insult in the world; who wants to be a Karen these days? I told her my name has been Kit for more than 50 years, and signed the note that way.

I have never been one of her cherished nieces; they got all the attention long before I was born, and by the time I came around she had no room for anyone else.

So, if I am lucky, she will no longer leave snarky notes in my FB comment if I mention family history on that side of the family. She cannot put me 'in my place' as she sees it; I am far and away out of her range.

It is more of a relief than anything else, the thought that I probably will not have to deal with her. And, as I said in the header, I still have a cousin on that side of the family whom I get along with well, and several on the other side. None of them within 400 miles or so, but that's how it goes.

I do miss the departed members of that generation, that family, ones who accepted me as I am, who listened and to whom I listened, and who I know loved me. They're gone, but never forgotten.

Putting the Substack on hold has already had some effects. Since I'm not thinking about politics when I fall asleep, my dreams have returned -- in living color.

Night before last I was dreaming about an enormous library or bookstore that had been made out of a former doctor's office, with all the little office areas being different topics, and the books on the walls looked different colors and styles in each.

Last night I dreamed I was talking with Dolly Parton before she went onstage and noticed that her hair was not only touching the floor, it was long enough to trip her up. I managed to trim off about five inches that was in floor contact. Then after her concert she came back and asked me to go on a trip with her as thanks for keeping her from falling off the stage -- and we started off on a road trip. Somewhere in there she turned into Meryl Streep and wanted me to try a tiny heart-shaped hallucinogen as we drove off on the Southern Tier Expressway (which is not a place to go tripping.). And at that point I woke up.

Thanks for returning, Imagination!