Remiss

So many rabbit holes I went down lately. And had to forego some pleasure (aka this blog) and explore other avenues of creative expression.

I went back to major "big piece creation" in knitting. I started a throw for my godson and his wife. A belated wedding gift. 

I had to make a tough decision about my friend here with Alzheimers/ Dementia. I don't know about other elders out there, but I find I can't tolerate too much stress in my life anymore. And keeping track of her or making arrangements with her were proving to be increasingly challenging. It's a dreadful disease, and I lived beside it a few times, most notably with one of my closest friends, Lana. Written about here.

With Susan (pseudonym) her dementia is different, often hostile, oblivious and defensive about her condition. I tell her I'll text her rather than phone, as she remembers texts better. "Ouch, not true," she says, "I just delete texts!"  Well......I spoke to another friend about the decision to detach and the frisson of guilt I was feeling when she reminded me that Susan would forget about me very quickly. And that is true. I haven't responded to her calls or her texts in the last few days. 

I note HP is no longer supporting my old expensive (at the time) workhorse of a laser printer, so I had to shop around, which took time. I will never deal with HP again. This time I got a scanner too so I could copy valuable documents for my siblings. We are sharing so much these days on Whatsapp. Pooling our mementoes as we all face the grim reaper.

Daughter and Grandgirl treated me big time for my upcoming birthday. Two theatre events (how I miss theatre) and a weekend away in a gorgeous inn by the lake. 

I feel I have a new lease on life after all the sickness and I am so grateful for this. We just never know how long we have and we need to maximise our remaining seconds on this planet.

The planet is in such a sorry state currently. Endless wars, the climate crisis. And a criminal cabal in the country south of us enriching themselves as the citizens get poorer and hungrier and without healthcare. I don't pay it as much mind as I used to, apart from occasional outrage on Bluesky, but I have moved away from all the political screaming and finger-pointing as it truly doesn't make anyone accountable for the myriad of crimes committed daily against the most vulnerable. Something massive died in many of us when concentration camps were normalized (for nearly a century now.)

So yeah, long-winded. I wind up with a picture of my orchids which bloom constantly and are staggeringly beautiful.

May there be more beauty in all of our days and less worry and stress.

 

 

Cognitive Decline in the Elderly

I won't get into the link business here as there are far too many essays and articles on the topic of cognitive decline during these hazardous times.

Elders have been adversely affected during Covid, due to lack of social interaction, normal leisure activities, large family gatherings, etc. I would add the appalling new layers of climate change (which is quite horrifying out in British Columbia at the moment), here's a link to that for readers outside Canada. BC has been cut off from food delivery and is totally isolated with highway washouts and mudslides.

I am witnessing a situation first hand here in the building with a friend who has virtually pulled down the shutters and refuses to come out. I've tried my best over the past week or so to get her to come to the beach or out for a meal or even a coffee or even to come here for a chat in her PJs or me to visit her. I believe the Black Dog (or perhaps a pack of black dogs) has got her firmly in it's grip. I can't get through to her and it's alarming.

She's let many activities go, even her driving. Another friend tried to coax her out to a prime beef dinner on Saturday night at the RAF club ($15.00!!) and she declined even though our table will be just people who know her well. 

I texted her today that I didn't want to be a pain in the arse trying to break through to her and said I was always available for a chat. All I got was a little heart emoticon in return.

I am really concerned. The Black Dog was my familiar in the past but thankfully, gratefully, he took off some time ago and hasn't shown his slavering jaws in a long while.

I believe this is a rough time for many of us (children, seniors) And the future of this wee planet is looking grimmer and grimmer and Covid rates are through the roof in Ireland and the UK again. Masked will be part of our daily existence (forever?) and I have little faith that politicians will sort out and correct the trajectory of the acceleration of devastating weather conditions due to advancing climate change.

As an Australian prime minister said a few years back (sorry can't remember his name) when the fires were chewing through his country "You're on your own."

We are all on our own basically. 

There is no magic wand.

Another fine mess you've got us into, Stanley........

The new suburb then.

The smallest of reflections on how we got here (see previous post).

As a child, I lived in one of the first suburban areas of Cork City, the site of a small village where surrounding farms were being sold off and the suburban phenomenon of tract housing was levelling and concreting the landscape. 

We were new to the development and arrived from a small town in East Cork where we were surrounded by relatives and community activities.

Here the landscape was strange though for a little while, we were still surrounded by lowing cattle and harvesting of crops but knew nobody.

We had no car and no phone. Our house had a fireplace in every room and a tiny gas stove in the kitchen along with a small coal stove which heated the water. Out back there was a coal/turf shed. All those fires had to be lit sparingly in winter to keep us warm. But it was the lap of luxury for my mother as we had left a third floor cold water flat in the small town.

There was no washing machine or dryer. My mother had to wash everything by hand. There was no fridge. There was a "cold safe" out back behind the coal shed which kept meat and vegetables "cool" with a mesh door. My father, a government employee, grew our winter stock of vegetables in the large fertile (a former farm section) back garden.  My granny would get on a bus from her small village holding and often bring us chickens and the blessing of a turkey at Christmas, which would be hung in the cold safe. We would have to pluck them and save the feathers for cushion fillings.

Mum made most of our clothes and "cut down" my father's old trousers for my four brothers and made my dresses. She knitted our hats and sweaters and gloves. Hand me downs were part of our existence. There was no shower and the bar of soap was used for hair and skin in our weekly baths. Toothpaste was in a tin which seemed to last forever. It seemed to me, looking back, that we shared one toothbrush which was only replaced when there were hardly any bristles left. Combs and brushes were communal. Shoes were repaired. Clothes were darned.

The village had everything we needed, a butcher shop, a small grocery shop, a post office and a pub. And milk was delivered first thing in the morning and the fresh bread was delivered in the late afternoon. The post was delivered morning and evening. There was no garbage. None. No plastic bags. Paper was used to wrap school books, or fire starting. Baskets and cloth bags for daily grocery shopping down the road. We had a compost heap for kitchen waste.

Excursions to town were on the bus and were rare. Usually to get us new shoes or in later years school uniforms. Our best clothes were for church and our wardrobe holdings were slim. My mother wore a shop coat over her clothes to protect them  as she did her chores in the kitchen.

My father cycled to work, about two miles into the city. The money saved on transit was put towards our annual holidays on an island off the coast of West Cork which was completely primitive and had us shoeless for the summer running all over the place with no supervision and swimming all day. It was life changing in so many ways and fostered in all of us children a deep, compelling love of the ocean and for self-entertainment.

All this to say, life was way simpler then. A movie was a treat. Radio was entertainment at night. There was no television. Library visits were Saturdays. I remember hauling out 10 books for the week. 

Consumerism and retail therapy were unheard of. 

Television and its commercials changed much of that. Our first one was installed like a god in the dining room in the early sixties. Our minds were filled with the American lifestyles shown on this magic box. The endless closets filled with clothes, the fabulous kitchens, the huge living rooms! The cars! Shampoo!

We all looked around and saw how shabby we were, how impoverished, how lacking in the luxuries. 

We wanted more. 

And by gum, we were going to get our share of it. Or more. And we did.

Ant thus we lived happily ever after, amen.

The suburb now.

 

Thoughts on Reality

Conversations on the weekend circled around the inevitability of our extinction. As we have passed the point of no return in our extinction plan.

The latest UN report confirms this.

 "Earth’s climate system is changing across the entire planet and human activities are worsening its effects which are “widespread, rapid and intensifying”, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

"The report by leading climate scientists published on Monday provides evidence that “unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees will be beyond reach”.

"Such as a scenario will come with inevitable catastrophic impacts over coming decades for human populations, especially in the form of extreme weather events and rising sea levels, the report’s authors have warned."

Read more here

I'm not in fear of all of this and I don't share the opinions of many, e.g.

(1) There's an afterlife and God/Goddess etc. will save us all. 

(2) It's another exaggeration to curb our Free-Dumbs.

(3) Science will save us.

(4)Glass domes over cities with AC will ease the worst of it. (I'd like to see that!)

And on.

No one thinks of the climate refugees escaping from waterless environments and the devastating effects of forest fires. California has never experienced anything like them, along with BC here. And massive food shortages.

I spent time in a roasting hot Labrador this summer - no one had ever experienced that kind of heat up there.

And the humidity and heat on the island of Newfoundland this summer is extreme and unique. And grain is being grown for the first time. And our iceberg season was pitiful.

The flooding is alarming everywhere. 

We've all been warned, of course, of this end of days, but nothing of any major reversal has been done to halt the rapid progress of warming oceans.

Capitalism roars on. Gas is supreme still. The plundering of the Amazon (the lungs of the earth) continues

I compare our slumber to the Three Wise Monkeys of old.

Not that us individuals can do anything at all. But I do wonder who else is giving any thoughts to what is going to happen and if you are, like me, resigned to the inevitable and hoping that whatever cataclysmic event wipes our little section of the planet into extinction, it doesn't hurt too much. But then I'm old and may pass before everything gets worse.

Or maybe, just maybe, the new virus variants will take us all out first. 

Another excellent read from Science Daily.

Sunday Smatterings

Question

Aferlife

What is your concept of an afterlife if you believe in such a thing?

I find out here on the Edge, for the most part, the concept is of a life just like ours here on planet earth, bingo is still played, pubs still attended, birthdays (the earthly variety) still celebrated and Facebook is used as a message centre for the Great Beyond. As in "Happy birthday Dad in heaven, I know they have your favourite beer up there!". "Happy anniversary Mom, are you now baking your pies for God/Jesus?" I have yet to see a response, but it would be lovely just to see the reaction.

As for me, I believe we live on after we die in our very original form, as in stardust, I can't ever imagine us rising from the dead on Judgement Day and the concept actually gives me the willies.

This one wild and wonderful precious life is all we have I think. But I am always interested in others' beliefs.

But I also believe there are billions of other planets, like ours, many far more evolved where time travel exists and I like playing around with that concept in my head. As in our planet keeps going back to square one and a massive culling takes place every couple of hundred thousand years and yes, time travellers from the past walk amongst us watching in disbelief as we continue to eff everything up yet again.

I look out my window tonight at a sunset of rose, the wise crows perch on the wires and the gulls soar overhead, with a pink blush drowning the white of their wings and I am gobsmacked at the beauty. And I wonder if the Trumps and the Johnsons and the Putins et al were forced to watch such magnificence would it change their view of this world. But somewhere deep inside, I know it wouldn't. We are accelerating towards climate collapse at an ever faster rate and the kings will stay in their counting houses. And yes, they would shoot those goddamned birds for sport.