Reading: What's that?

Moving: Hauling and swimming

House: Hauling

24 May 2000: D'Elbow

I banged my belbow yesterday. (Yes, I regularly say "belbow," at least privately (which this isn't). I picked it up from the Branagh "Henry V.") I was carrying a milk crate of books downstairs and caught the joint against the railing. I was only at the top of the stairs and I am far too stubborn to have set the books down and nursed my arm for a minute, so instead I continued on to dump the books in the study.

(I deliberately didn't look at Beth or Jenn when the house tour arrived at the stack of books in my study. I need to reuse my milkcrates, so I have been unceremoniously overturning crates on the floor. I horrify even myself, but I'm way behind schedule here and taking it out on my books' spines. And on my belbow.)

I keep trying to do the stuff I normally do with my left hand, like braid my hair, lift a cup to my mouth, or hold a book, and I keep being sharply reminded that I shouldn't do that. I've long suspected I am not purely right-handed. My handwriting is too abysmal for that. I even once entertained a theory of having been forced into right-handedness, to explain my math inability and my illegibility, but if I had been switched, my beloved nursery-school teacher Mrs. McGovren would had to have done the switching. She wouldn't've. My math-phobia and my scrawl are my own fault. But I could be slightly left-handed without ever having been forced.

When the arm is just left alone to type, it's fine, but walking I cannot let the arm hang free. I went to the library at lunch and kept hold of a strap of my knapsack (on my right shoulder) to keep my left arm immobile across my body. In the library I tried to hold a book, suspending the whole arm with the extra weight straight from my shoulder, and that just can't happen. And I can't flex it enough to bring a fork, cup, or fingerful of Blistex to my mouth. (I can do it, but not without pain.)

So I was grumpy.

I decided to buy Organic Wild Rice Chicken from Organic Orbit, good healthy yummy food. My favorite is Power Pesto Pasta, but that has way too much garlic for work. I also got a wheat grass shot, which I tossed back in the restaurant. Back at my desk with my lunch, I forlornly discovered it wasn't quite right. The food itself wasn't off, past its date, but it had some kind of Wrong taste, almost medicinal.

Not only wasn't it nummy as usual but it even made me worry it might have additives, and then it didn't sit well. I figured chocolate might help.

No one wanted to accompany me on my chocolate run. One was on the phone, another wasn't hungry (and that has what to do with eating chocolate?), another had just had a calcium chocolate chew. "Ooo, what a treat," I observed.

After I tasted the sensation, I got the treat I'd wanted my lunch to be.

Last year when my sister sent me birthday presents, she hadn't got our new apartment number quite into her head. She sent it express because she was late, but express to the wrong address so it came back to her post office, except if she stays at her boyfriend's she doesn't get such notices and then she can never get to the post office when it's open....So this year, she sent the box to the office.

Two years ago my father sent me flowers at work. I couldn't remember ever telling him Dot Org's name, let alone its address. My sister had found the address for him on one of my letters, which I generally print at work on the back of drafts of publications or botched letterhead. This year my sister decided to take her own advice, and just a little while ago one of the service staff brought me a box.

I accepted it, not remembering recently ordering any office supplies and not recognizing the hand-printed label, then seeing the Mail Boxes Etc. label.

Immediately I brought it into CoolBoss's office. "You want to see this, don't you?" I said without preamble.

"You know I do," she handed me scissors, "I just noticed on my calendar what tomorrow is. Is it from your sister?" Of course it was. I popped back into my cube for another box I gleaned from the office today. I dumped styrofoam beads from the MBE box into the Dot Org box, exposing two boxes wrapped in paper with a Victorian motif. I sifted through the beads, but she hadn't sent a card.

The first box held a dark lavender linen shirt and a book covered in hand-made paper with petals impressed into it, It's Great to Have a Sister Like You. It's all quotes about sisters, of course, and the epigram is my favorite:

"For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather:
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands."

That's Christina Rossetti, from, if memory serves and it does, "Goblin Market," one of my favorite poems--because it's about sisters.

The other box held a mixing bowl that looks like the ones our grandmother had, that old-fashioned tan glaze, with a wide blue stripe flanked by two narrow white stripes. CoolBoss thought it was really neat that CLH spotted and bought it for the same elements I recognized in it. My sister, I love her. Presents and a moving box.

I told CoolBoss about the time CLH brought me on a trail along the Roaring Fork river in Aspen. She had told me there was something she wanted me to see, but she hadn't said what or where or why. So we walked and talked for a while and turned a corner and I said, "You wanted me to see that bluff, that looks like the Indian shelters at home." Which it did, of course.

In the woods behind our house, perhaps a square mile bounded by I-95 (in any woods-context, however, we called it, anachronistically, "the turnpike") and the Boston Post Road and some other roads, there are several tumbles of stone left by retreating glaciers. Our father rambled all through these woods as a youth and brought us and our dogs to them when we were children.

The easier ones to get to were the Indian shelters, a ridge about a league high when I was a child that is probably about 20 or 30 feet tall. Our father told us these had been Indian shelters, and so that's what they were. One of his arrowheads came from there. There was enough overhang under the rock face for summer shelter against the rain, I guess. The harder place to get to, which I never ever did find on my own, were the Indian caves. These weren't proper caves like the one where Injun Joe died or where Brownie found those boys in the Great Brain book, but a proper jumble of huge boulders forming nooks and crannies, giving protection from wind and snow.

The bluff along the Roaring Fork looked just like that. CLH knew I would recognize it, and I did. She always wanted to show that to our father.

So.

I meant to move two carloads a night this week. That has not happened. I still have books to move and all of the kitchen, and some clothes. There is a stack of jeans in the closet I asked RDC to weed through, because he does not weigh 125 anymore and isn't likely to again. He said he would sometime before we moved. (My eyebrows were somewhere in my scalp, so dubiously raised were they.)

Another factor in my lassitude and low mood, besides the stress of moving, is the fact I have had no exercise since maybe Tuesday. Wednesday I smudged the house, Thursday I moved, Friday ???, Saturday I primed, Sunday I primed and painted, and for two days I have hauled boxes from apartment to car and from car to house, "bundled about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Rome, from Rome to Sicily, quite unaware of anything outside Baedeker."

Hmm. I don't know exactly which cities the vicar names. I haven't watched "A Room with a View" in far too long.