The Day When Two Gross Tasks Broke Me

As I was telling my local (and so much more) friend Doug while we walked to weekly yoga at the community center this morning (see how much goodness I shoved into that phrase?), I slept like shit last night. The methadone I’m newly taking for restless legs gives me a histamine reaction, so I’ve been taking Claritin each evening along with those magical tiny little capsule-shaped pills. (I’m up to one and a half each day: Magic, not Claritin). I thought that, by now, my body is bound to be used to the stuff, so I left the Claritin out of my regime last night, and man did I suffer for it. Itchy itchy all danged night long, all over my freaking body. 

At about 4 am when I must’ve finally gotten to sleep (I can guess I was asleep because certainly did wake up suddenly), I hear Banjo retching on my new, gloriously full-of-antlered-animals area rug at the foot of our bed. She’s been eating all kinds of city stuff she finds on the sidewalks in our neighborhood, and none of it agrees with her. (Just like when we spent a week in New Orleans and she scavenged as much as we were served.) We knew this from how many poopbags we have to cram in our pockets on each of her four daily walks, but now we know her up-chuck end is as unhappy as her doody-shoot end. 

So, I was cleaning my new rug last night instead of sleeping. This morning, instead of resting I was at this new fabulous yoga class with Doug, which I gotta tell you pushed all the right stretchy, muscle-building, mind-relaxing buttons I have and then some, and the “some” there are the imagination buttons, which I don’t have. 

I’m not used to being in a yoga class at all, for one thing. The winter of 2021 when we stayed on Mars (aka southwestern Arizona, near Yuma), I attended a yoga class on a mysterious cement pad in the desert, where we students arrived early to hoist up the wind-break panels and sweep the sand off the concrete, and we stayed late to contrive how to thank our nomad/yoga instructor/JFK Jr. fanatic who led us diligently each week and insisted that you always breathe through the nose, both in and out, never the mouth. Then there was a week(ish) I spent doing yoga with my doppelgänger and her husband in Tennessee, which I also appreciated. 

Those were, oddly, more structured classes than this one, in that this instructor had us doing whatever we wanted at several stages. That puts me in a panic. “What do I want?” That’s asking a lot, pretty young yoga instructor. So, of course, I overdid it during the “Do what you want” sections. When I got home, while I was still bundled against the cold, I jumped on my bike and rode to the florist downtown, where I exchanged the too-small saucer for my new Bird of Paradise plant for a just-right saucer. And then I pooped out. (Not like Banjo, but like I was super tired.) 

I had just enough time for a bath before Tracy served lunch, but in the tub I discovered the second gross task: someone else’s hair was clogging the bathtub over-flow drain.  Yuuuuuuuuuck. I have scrubbed that old bathtub within an inch of the lives of however many tens of people have lived here over the past 100 years, and I scrubbed the recesses of that old bathroom all over, just for moments like this, when I could ignore the remnant of dog barf on my antler rug and soak away the yoga and bike stress. But, nope. How can a person relax with someone else’s hair clogging a vertically inclined drain? How do you even get hair in there? 

That’s when my energy gave up the ghost. For three weeks I’ve been a whirling dervish, packing, unpacking, cleaning, organizing, buying, lugging. Yesterday, alone, I grabbed a bunch of stuff in the forest (I’m calling the few feet of trees at the back of the yard that) and moved it this way and that, and I shoveled the yard overgrowth off the driveway so we can get a sense for where a shed might go. I dug up rocks halfway hidden by the overgrown yard and stacked them around the tiny pond, and I resuscitated the large, iron flower I found among the leaves and shoved it in the ground next to the mailbox to give our front a little funky chicken.

I washed all the windows (turns out we have the kind that pivot inward so you can do that, AMAZING), and I degunked the little fountain in the little pond so the birds will hear water flowing and come to our yard. 

I spotted two piles of rejected housewares on my walk with Banjo and lugged stuff back to our house, where other people’s rejects are our welcome new possessions.

That morning, I rode my bike to the farmer’s market, where I found that I could have spent $15 for pussy willow bunches.

I’d gotten mine when I had trimmed them from my tree just that morning and put them in a vase I’d gotten from the thrift store the day before, on my bike ride when I’d bought the saucer for the bird of paradise that was too small.

Are you getting the drift about my frantic activities? Well, they all came to a roaring halt when I found that tangled, decades-old, clogged up hair in the bathtub outdrain, and I still hadn’t fully cleaned up the dog barf. My body collapsed. 

And I haven’t done much since then. I got behind the computer to write part 2 of my Yukon post, but, suddenly, it’s 5pm on a Sunday, and all I can do is stare out the window by my desk watching the lady in a wheelchair who sits on her back deck quite often, feeling the outside air. I think, tomorrow, I might do only this.