Well when I say "park", think more like a corner room in a rehab facility overlooking Rte 7. My shift began at 4 PM. I arrived with, as requested, Peg's (freshly done) laundry, Laughing Cow cheese, Keebler Club Crackers, an emory board, a Coke, and Depends Fit-Flex Protection, Size Large.
Dinner this evening was onion soup and chicken salad sandwich on white bread cut in 4 triangles and garnished with, for some reason, a tortolini. Tapioca Pudding to follow. Peg ate 4 bites of everything.
She is now kipping next to me while we wait (she waits) for her favorite TV show to come on at 7pm, something called The Middle. There would appear to be 3 episodes in succession, which will bring us to 8:30, and then it's into night attire and beddy bye and I get to go home over the mountain in the dark again.
Needless to say, the volume is at its highest, and I think if you crane your necks and listen very closely, you can probably hear Peg's TV too, wherever you are. There are three other TVs on simultaneously in the three other occupied rooms on this corridor.
However, my headache began last night, when, after a local dinner party, snow and ice prevented me from returning to my cozy bed in Becket and I had to stay over in a neighbouring town in a friend's barn. Think barn converted to house, with no interior walls. In fact you can't get more open plan than this barn. There is one bedroom, which I insisted the owner retire to, while I climbed two flights of stairs about a mile away down the other end of the barn to a recently built third level, in which sits a stair master machine, a rowing machine, a child's desk, and a single bed you can't sit up in or your head hits the oak roof beams.
Could I sleep? No. At first it was too quiet, not counting the Australian shepherd's toenails on the wooden floors tick tick ticking away, back and forth and up and down, clearly pissed off by my presence in the upper balcony and trip trip tripping up to stare at me, chin on bed, about every twenty seconds. So I turned the other way. Then remembered the Noise Machine on my phone ("Gentle Rain" mixed with "Fountain") but it ran out of juice in about half an hour and I hadn't brought my charger (or indeed toothbrush), not having planned on staying over. Then mine host's snores, from Level Two, North Wing, began reverberating around the barn. Then I had to pee about 12 times (two flights down). Then decided to put a chair across my staircase to keep the dog out, which started whining. Then it was too hot but didn't know how to open the window, which in any event was up at the top of a long step ladder, which I thought I probably should't try on my own. Then it was too light, for some reason the outside floodlights were on. So I tied my scarf over my eyes. Then the dog saw or smelled a coyote and went demented. Then I took half a sleeping pill. Didn't work.
I was up at 6, in a filthy mood, it was snowing to beat the band, and I was on the back road to Becket sliding my way home ten minutes later.
Where I threw open the drapes covering the doors to the front porch and an owl flew out and up to the big maple tree, where it sat until I left, four hours later. Rather than being any sort of omen, I now understand it to have it's eye on the flocks of chickadees and juncos that frequent the bird feeders. I then took 12 pictures of it with my phone, like Bonnie did, all of them looking like bad photos of branches as seen through mesh squares and you can't tell it's an owl.
I then pitched a big container of 2 week old short ribs out, asparagus, and scalloped potatoes, also in fridge growing stuff, answered 300 emails, signed checks left for me because Peg is not up to it, tried to kip, couldn't, showered, ate some cheese, and headed to Marshalls on the Pittsfield-Lenox road to buy a suitcase because mine died, and then to CVS for Depends, loudly explaining they were for my mother.
The bad news is that The Middle is not on, because it's Sunday, and we will have to move on to Turner Classics or the Weather Channel.
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