Back to Beauty

...amidst one of the darker passages of our lives.

I felt bad leaving “Holler at the Squalor” up for so long without some sort of follow-up or reply. I don’t mean to be down on my town. I don’t mean to be down, period, but it’s been impossible to avoid these last few weeks.

Riding the county road towards the main highway.

The atmospheric magnification of the San Juan Mountains is impressive today.

I joked with my wife that I missed those days when I was depressed for no good reason at all. She didn’t take that well. Inappropriate humor aside, I think fondly upon those sleepy late summer days of 2016 shortly after we moved to the San Luis Valley. For all my gloom at having to move (it was not much of a choice) and adjust to new surroundings it was truly another world in which we didn’t have anything to seriously worry about. 

All that changed in November 2017 when my friend Steven died unexpectedly, and then I was diagnosed with cancer the following April. Any time I see something online with a byline of 2018 I think, “My Cancer Year.”

I was able to get more or less past that transitional phase, though. More than I’d thought I would, given what’s going on now. 

The view from the road behind the supermarket on the far west side of town.

The thing about living around mountains is they look different every day, at any given time of day, due to clouds and the position of the sun.

I liked how the snowfield shone with reflected sunlight.

The bills are coming due, though, so to speak. I’d written last month about our elderkitty Otis and how he’s entered his last days. As expected, he’s gotten worse. 

It was Thursday morning, 20 February, when my wife and I watch as Otis voided his bladder on the floor. That was bad enough, but it was seeing his once magnificent, fluffy tail dragging in the puddle that did it. We’d sworn to each other that when it got to the point that Otis was lying around in his own filth, we’d have him put down. We wouldn’t want to live this way. This is no way to spend one’s final days.

Or so we keep telling ourselves. I put off driving to a recommended local veterinarian for consultation on Friday because the idea of setting our 18-year-old cat’s last day on Earth was too much. 

I might have stitched these two photos together but we’d lose out on the beauty of these peaks. Pretend you’re looking from left to right, and note the strange, almost perfectly conical peaks you only see west of Monte Vista towards Del Norte.

It was bad enough thinking this would be his last weekend with us. After all, we had to set the date for sooner than later. We have to clean his waste from the floor every day. He doesn’t always hit the pad we put down for him.

I’ve had to come to terms with the ugly fact that my grief is more for me than it is for Otis. He’s a familiar sight of nearly two decades that’s going away. In his elderly decrepitude, he reminds my wife and I of what’s shortly ahead for us.

Meanwhile, we can’t be cleaning these messes up three times or more a day. Otis may well wear us down before he finally wears out.... 

Oh, enough of that. Of course he won’t. We’ll call the vet. The vet will carve out time from his or her schedule to drive the mile and a half to our house sometime over the course of the week. I rather like that I won’t know the exact day.

Also, the bill for having our first family pet professionally murdered at home won’t be too large. I also have a specific credit card for such emergencies, new tires, oil changes and so on.

I’m grateful we can do this much. One might as well approach this from a position of gratitude, because no amount of tears and grieving will reverse the natural aging process few (if any) cats in the wild are afforded. This was a bill due, a corner to be turned. We knew these days were coming. We’ll do the best we can.

These are the same peaks and ridge we see behind the supermarket, but two miles west down the highway out of town. I think this mountain is called Pintada, with Windy Mountain to the left and behind it, but that’s as best I can do from the maps, and I probably stink at this.

This, I’m sure, is Green Ridge.  It blocks a lot, but by no means all of the weather coming up from New Mexico.

We can wallow in the misery and squalor, or we can lift our eyes and hearts up to the beauty and love and life that also endures in the world. Otis won’t be here to enjoy the coming spring and summer with us. But the spring and summer are coming, whether any of us are here for it or not. There’s a comfort in that I can’t articulate, so I won’t.

I’ll just take in as much joy and life and beauty and love as I find available and do the best I can.

By the way, my work-in-progress is going well. There’s that. More on that later.

Sunrises and sunsets photograph the same, in case that means anything.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

When the Only Way Out Is Through

...or, as one of my favorite depressive functional alcoholics put it, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” A recap of a long week and the (we hope) longer game ahead:

The one thing that kept me going throughout this week was the Friday evening date my wife and I had scheduled at our favorite restaurant. The Mountain View was closed the day of my wife’s birthday on Monday, I’d committed to some things outside the house on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so Friday would be the day we properly celebrated.

Given the expenses of the Christmas season and our limited cash flow, we’d been unable to make our once-weekly appearance at our favorite eatery for a while, so this had to happen. Dealing with our failing elder cat, and realizing we’d be dealing with more failing elder cats later on top of own failing elder selves, even as our grown son talks about moving not just from the house (where we prefer having him; it’s good having a professional handyman around), but from the San Luis Valley where the opportunities more closely match his considerable skill sets...all this change, worse, all this going away, was very hard on the spirit, to say the least. 

These are more than transitions we’re dealing with. They’re departures. Finales. Endings. And even sitting in the restaurant last night, smiling for the Valentine’s decor everywhere, I reflected that the owners of this most excellent establishment were getting on in years, too. How long would it be until they had to give it up to new management? It would, of course, never be the same.

And the obvious answers are stick around and find out; you know it’ll be sooner than you’d like. Just get there and enjoy it while you can.

Still, it’s difficult to maintain good cheer when all you’ve got to look forward to is one thing after another winding down into oblivion.

Sunsets are pretty. Until it’s dark.

My wife was astonished when I told her happy birthday. I had to remind her this was why we were at the Mountain View in the first place. Monday already felt like a month ago to her and I knew exactly what she meant. I hesitated to bring up, as I’m prone to do, that Christmas Eve was exactly one month ago. And imagine how far away New Year’s Day seems already! January can really mess with your sense of time. 

Things are so much different than when we moved here three and a half years ago, and much of it is for the better. I think of when I was on a Facebook page for a school I went to over forty years ago, and leaving because it was so depressing seeing how many of these people I knew from the 1970s hadn’t changed. Not even a little bit. I’m not even the same person I was three and a half years ago, and I thank God for that.

Things have to change. People and cats grow old. There is nothing else to do but press on and take comfort in the slowly lengthening, oh-so-slowly warming days. Meanwhile, we take care of ourselves so we can take care of those depending on us. That is all.

Otis on the bed upstairs with Jack and Puff, 25 January 2019, exactly one year ago as of this writing. What a difference a year makes.

The River Over the High Valley, the Mountains of Mid-January

After my bilious last post, let’s chill.

My tires, brand new as of last September, were all but flat on the passenger side earlier this month. It turns out that leaving my Jeep parked in the same position with only one side facing the sun in sub-freezing, sometimes sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures will do that. After pushing a small stack of quarters into the air pump at the gas station down the road and getting all four back up to specs, I resolved I should take off in the peak heat of each day to warm the vehicle and its tires on the high-speed parts of the road on either side of the town where I live.

I drove west out of town and turned around on the cemetery road. Blanca Massif stood tall and proud, magnified from 50-60 miles away as I drove back in.

It’s made for a nice, relaxing break in the middle of the day. If I get a notion to explore, I might run into something worth photographing.

I knew I’d gone a little far north on the country road when I encountered the frozen remains of the fourth longest river in North America. I turned around and took these photos.

Squinting back towards the source of the mighty Rio Grande in the San Juan Mountains.

I passed by this view of Blanca Massif on my way back to federal highway.

Zooming in on one of the four mountains sacred to the Navajo Indians. Which one is Mount Blanca, I couldn’t tell you. It’s mashed in there with at least three other mountains of 14K elevation plus numerous lower peaks.

Looking for Uplift in a Downdraft

I made it to the 17th last year. This year, it was over by the 11th. So much for my post-a-day routine. I’d feel worse about it, but it was a mercy killing.

It’s one of those things you laugh about shortly after rolling out of bed in the morning. Not always—I’ve had mornings when I’ve awakened feeling every bit as depressed or more when I went to bed. At least I know this is straight-up seasonal.

These are the times when you have to remind yourself you’ve done a couple of things; you’re not entirely worthless. In my case I maintained my Christmas-season streak of repairing or otherwise putting things in order left long undone in my office by taking down and gluing the base of my primary bookshelf. It was on its side in the middle of the floor in my west wing for 24 hours with my heaviest coffee table books on top to hold it fast until it cured.

The view from my office chair Saturday. I was chagrined to realize I’ve lived here long enough for my bookcase to leave an outline on the wall when I took it down. That got cleaned, too. And having made a clean spot....

I regret not being able to show all the wonderful titles here, their placement on the bottom shelf having contributed to the fracture requiring repair, but I needed to angle them for balance.

The bulk of yesterday was spent getting the bookcase back up, with as much of that fine San Luis Valley dust I could remove from the tops of so many books at a time with rapidly depleting cans of compressed air. Everything came together nicely in time for sundown, which I spent twitching in my chair in front of my desk, struggling to focus on my work-in-progress, a years-overdue concluding novel to a trilogy that’s already 351 pages long, but progressing—forgive me, I’m going to say “literally”—one sentence at a time. 

I sat in a daze before my monitor. I started a piece on my oldest cat, whom we’re likely to lose in 2020. Upon typing out a list of sad things, with a break to go downstairs and take some photos of the lonely elderkitty in his bed in the kitchen, I decided that was enough. I’d punished myself sufficiently. More to the point, there was no reason to punish my audience at all. 

Not yet, anyway. Certainly not when I’m in this kind of a mood.

So many little tchotchkes. So much dust.

Two spaceships from different universes reconcile the randomness of existence with the Tower Buddha.

I wanted to blame it all on a desire to break my alcohol and tobacco fasts, but I already knew what was behind that. And if I didn’t drift out when I could have at 8 p.m. and picked up a 12-pack and a deck of cowboy killers, it’s because I knew that, for three or four hours of overindulgence, I’d wake up even more depressed in the morning. Bloated, and with bad breath, too.

Everything back in order and shiny-clean to boot. My favorite music is playing. I can’t get my creative engine to turn over to save my life. My battery’s dead, Jim.

The nights are the worst, and they’re the longest in the winter. But I got through it, and so did Otis the Elderkitty. Today will be one minute and fifteen seconds longer than yesterday. I’ll take it. 

A Most Industrious Midwinter Melancholia

Hey, it happens sometimes. It’s a tough month.

I got a nice smirk going for all that “first full moon of the decade, special energies will be released” pixie dust that showed up in my Facebook and Twitter timelines this week. Yeah, those energies were special, all right.

Seriously, it was something new. I somehow found the energy to not only clean my main bookcase, but glue the base and set it down to cure throughout the afternoon and into the night. If all goes to plan, I’ll reassemble everything in the morning and that’s one more thing I put off too long fixing that finally got fixed.

Yet for all that and a sunny sky besides the day was melancholy. It wasn’t just me; my wife was feeling it, too. She never stopped being busy doing her usual Saturday chores, but there was little satisfaction in it.

A lot of it is winter fatigue. We’ve had snow on the ground since Thanksgiving weekend and it has rarely gotten above freezing for weeks. It’s January, not even the middle of it. Grin and bear it, it’s all you can do. We’re getting stuff done. That’s no small thing.

Sometimes you feel like a lone dented trash barrel amidst the glory of God’s creation.

You pass beyond the barrier...

....only to realize you still have February after this. Ah, well. It’s not like I don’t have a book to finish writing.

Spring Fever, 2019 Edition

“And just like that, winter was over.”

February was a day short of done and we didn’t need to run the wood pellet stove that night. For a psychotic moment I felt a little sad that Winter 2018-19 was drawing to a close—it had been a very good Christmas and a not entirely unproductive New Year—but I’m happy not to have to run the kerosene heater in my office in the morning.

The three days in a row of 50°+ F (10° C) have gone a long way towards melting off the snow that’s lingered since the storm we got on New Year’s Eve. We’ll have a low temperature of several degrees above freezing Thursday morning, a number we’re lucky to get for the high temperature in either February or January. 

So, I’m calling it. Winter 2018-19 is finished. Sure, maybe one more single-digit degree cold snap awaits, and I certainly hope we get more snow. But the week-long death-freezes which would make the furnace run nearly non-stop if it weren’t for the wood pellet stove are behind us. We’re good until November.

♫”There’s a feeling I get/When I look to the West/And my spirit is crying for....♫ dinner.”
My traveling for the sake of traveling days are long done, thank God. 

Burps in the Road

Inspirational, super-motivational burps! #7 will make you sweat pure vinegar! 

You wouldn’t know it to follow this blog, but I’m actually still quite invested in my Christmas/New Year’s resolutions, with only a week to go in February. 

With everything else in my life going on, e.g., dead furnaces in subzero January cold, pipes frozen the entire length of the house, busted Jeep idler pulleys with mystery drive belt size (what was supposed to fit, didn’t), cracked windshields, et al., I got hung up on telling the tale of how I fell off the wagon in terms of maintaining a daily posting schedule (this wasn’t a resolution, but that I managed 18 days straight of quality posts was quite the Christmas miracle) as well as beer ragers that same night. It was a funny story, but requiring too much exposition to translate said humor to an audience. 

The funniest thing I can relate is learning that I use social media to lurk more than interact. I made the mistake of “waving back” at someone who waved at me on Facebook, and found myself in mortal terror of interacting with someone while half-drunk. I am hardly sociable under optimal conditions. The very idea of interacting while impaired with anyone outside my extremely tight orbit of family and friends absolutely mortifies me.

Of all the things in my life that requires squaring away—and some degree of turning around—that would be the one. I’ve got to develop a working policy towards dealing with people. I was always a somewhat odd, socially autistic duck to start, but all this time alone is really making me dysfunctional.

Whatever issues I have, I’ve always prided myself on being functional.

The bearings within went bad, then exploded out the hard rubber seal. The pulley seized, and the serpentine belt unscrewed the pulley. For all the pieces of metal and rubber flying around under the hood the damage could have been much, much worse.

Things are going well on the creative front, but they need to go faster. The furnace is working. My Jeep is operational. We’re almost done with February. I need this book out by summer.

It’s just a matter of re-establishing control, which can be done with one simple trick (people hate me with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns for this!):

Don’t give up. 

Green grass and warm, sunny skies will return. Better have something to show for it when they do.

“Always Winter, Never Christmas”

The expression from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe come to mind during this most Monday of months. It’s pretty enough in pictures, but I’m not alone in wishing all this dirty, slippery, weeks-old snow would melt away already. For my part, I don’t think I’ve seen snowpack on roads stick around this long since I lived in Anchorage.

This is what 1°F/-17C looks like. At least the freezing fog has already cleared out, allowing for a better warm-up than yesterday.

This is my son’s third winter with us. He says this will be remembered as the one with lots of freezing fog. It’s no joke for guys like him who spend a lot of their day on the road.

It’s like the aspen is photo-bombing the poplars. The trees were pretty this morning. Of course, everything looks prettier against a blue sky. Today was the first day in a while for that.

Yes, I’m fascinated by these icicles. You could kill a man with some of these things.

Someone from the city was kind enough to drop random piles of dirt along the southbound lane of my street, so we’ve got that.

On the way back to Monte from Alamosa, grooving to Led Zeppelin IV. I actually heard “Stairway to Heaven” for the first time in a long time driving with this view and I absolutely loved it. The entire album was nice to hear again. I was so afraid I’d fallen out of love with my old music. It turns out all I’d needed was a break.