Author Archives: lydias

Just tuning in? Start here.

“How would our strategy change if we knew more about them?” Daphne asked. “We already know they have better weapons than we do and that not everything they say is true.” The vaccination program was invaluable, but Daphne could think of little else they’d done to improve the lives of the people in Mingus valley. She fell quiet as the debate continued.

“We could figure out how they’re receiving orders and what kind of schedules they keep,” Daniel said.

“They’re not very organized,” Gerald said. “Most of their recruits are new and poorly trained.”

“That’s all the more reason to act now!”

“Under whose orders? With what supplies? We don’t have the authority to make these decisions, and if the strangers are keeping as close tabs on us as you think they’ll know what we’re doing before we do.”

“My larder is almost empty and I don’t know why,” Daphne said finally as the debate grew more divided. “How much food do you have left?” One by one the men confirmed that their food supplies were low as well. None of them had noticed declines as steep as the one in Daphne’s house, but she decided to try solving that particular mystery later.

“We need to go fishing. I heard Salt River is the best place to fish.” It wasn’t really, but any sort of catch would help tide over their dwindling food supplies until the autumn rainy season brought an end to the hungry time of year. Sparrow Creek was closer to home and therefore more useful for filling water jugs, but the largest river within walking distance of the community was much more likely to sustain a healthy population of fish.

Sean cocked his head and stared at Daphne with a puzzled expression on his face. Daniel opened his mouth as if he were about to vehemently disagree with her, then closed it again and furrowed his brow.

“We’ll need a lot of strong, young people to organize the effort,” Gerald said, corners of his wrinkled mouth twitching as he slowly realized which settlement was located on the other side of the river.”Fish spoils quickly, so if we catch enough to share we’ll need a way to distribute it to everyone as quickly as possible.”

“Of course we should see if Peoria wants to join us. Technically half of the river belongs to them, and we might need to cross into their territory if one of our nets or poles gets swept downstream. Is two days enough time to organize this?” Daphne was nothing if not neighbourly.

“Yes. I have a cousin who lives there,” Sean said. “I’ll walk over tomorrow morning and alert her. Daniel, can you round up volunteers in the west on your way home?”

Daniel nodded, still not sure what was happening. Somehow everyone had come to agree with him without actually doing what he expected of them. How had he won the debate so quickly?

***

The other members of the council left as soon as their plans were solidified.

Now to solve the mystery of her missing ingredients. The children weren’t old enough to cook dried food much less hide the evidence. Lemon might have eaten cheese if there was any left and if he was alone in the house long enough to devour it, but it had been weeks since that particular delicacy was eaten up.  Paige barely showed interest in eating these days. Cooking food and hiding it from everyone else didn’t seem likely for a woman whose joints had only grown more stiff and appetite less regular over the summer.

Assuming she could rule out thieves from other households that left Isaac and Ephraim. Ephraim’s time away from home was mostly accounted for. When he wasn’t gathering water or repairing tools he sat in the front yard copying the small, leather book he’d borrowed from the doctor who apprenticed him last year. Some treatments were so rare that it was likely he wouldn’t need to use them until long after his formal education had ended, but writing down what other doctors had learned was a good way to begin memorizing less common cures.

Isaac was a different story. After his meagre chores were finished he disappeared almost every day. Sometimes he took his brother with him, but more often he travelled alone. At first Daphne had believed her younger son when he said he needed to find the right materials with which to build a chair or practice repairing the roof, but over the long, hot summer few examples of his work has surfaced in Daphne’s house. She knew her son craved peace and quiet even more than she did, but it was difficult to explain why that desire prompted him to head out alone on even the hottest afternoons.

Asking Ephraim where his brother really went off to produced a quiet grunt but little more.  Daphne could only hope that her younger son would be more communicative when he returned. The boys had left together today.  She found it odd that they would come home separately several hours apart as they normally came back at about the same time. Daphne banked the fire, slowly lowered herself into a chair, and stroked Lemon’s marginally cleaner fur as she waited for answers.

The rest of the household had turned in to bed by the time Isaac arrived home that evening as dusty and dishevelled as had become his new normal. Isaac’s formerly pale complexion had developed a deep tan over the summer, testament to the hours he spent outdoors over the long holiday.

“Welcome home,” she said as he quietly crept into the house. “Where have you been?”

“Looking for supplies.” He began taking off his coat. It might be hot during the day, but the desert could become surprisingly cool after dark even in August.

“You never seem to find any.”

“It’s hard to find the right materials. You can only walk so far in this heat.”

A pause in the conversation. Daphne lit another lamp and slowly stood up, bracing her arm against the table to spare her bad knee.

“Isaac, our supplies are running low. Do you know what happened to them?”

“Mom, I – ”

As Isaac peeled his coat off his left arm a handful of beans tumbled out of the pocket and onto the recently swept hearth.

“Who have you been sharing our food with?”

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comics, videos, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Meaningless via SMBCComics. Ack, everything I want to say about this comic strip gives away too many spoilers. 🙂

Something Strange Happened at McDonalds. And here I thought I was the only one who tidies up after strangers in public! I’ve never gone this far, though.

Questions for Sighted People. This video was made by a man who was born blind. Among other questions, he wants to know what it’s like to go somewhere alone and how we remember what everyone else’s faces look like. I loved his sense of humour and hope questions for ____ people becomes a meme.

My Gender Identity via tmamone. As someone who has never questioned my gender identity I find Travis’ journey to be really interesting. I hope this is the beginning of a series on the topic.

Love Letters from a Scientist. This particular page is work safe. The rest of the site may not be.

Telescopic Droppings via Bluestocking. One of the (dis?)advantages of moving far away from the communities I grew up in is that I rarely hear the latest news about who died, or more likely at this stage in my life who got married or had a baby. While I absolutely relish the privacy of city life I can see the advantages of occasionally popping your head back into the loop to see what the latest community news might be.

From What Boys Become: Modesty Culture and Learned Irresponsibility:

This is the primary sin of modesty culture – it teaches irresponsibility and blaming others, but masks it as sexual purity. It teaches men to dispose of women who don’t fit their mold, under the guise of “keeping themselves pure.” It teaches men that women exist on a spectrum of worth determined by their clothing and that it is their right as men to determine which women are worth more – and yet, modesty culture masks it as “keeping away from sexual sin.” It teaches men irresponsibility and plays it off as “integrity.”

An Intimate Life is the autobiography of a sexual surrogate. The author works with clients who are disabled or who need help with some aspect of their sexual life. She sleeps with some – but not all – of her clients in order to teach them skills that are extremely difficult to learn by reading a book.

I loved the author’s descriptions of the people she has helped over the years, especially the professional relationship she develops with a man named Mark who became severely disabled after contracting polio as a child. Some passages are sexually explicit, but they are in no way intended to be titillating.

This is a book about the importance of connecting with others. As far as I know none of my readers are sexual surrogates ( 😉 ), but I think all of us can benefit from slowing down and getting to know people we might ordinarily breeze past without a second thought.

What have you been reading?

Painting by Édouard Chimot.

Just tuning in? Start here.

From an early age Daniel Hart was confident he knew more about death than Death himself.

The very old and very young were bound to this world by such tenuous strings that it was sad but wholly expected for them to slip away. Nonny, his mother, never shielded Daniel from the harsh realities of Arizonian life. As the community’s only doctor she was responsible for the well being of every man, woman, and child in Mingus. Once Daniel was old enough to sit quietly in the corner while she cleaned a wound or delivered a baby he accompanied her on her rounds.

Nonny held vague notions of apprenticing her oldest child  to her line of work so he could serve one of the several surrounding communities that limped along with occasional visits from nearby doctors in an emergency. One day perhaps Daniel or one of his future children would come back and take over her practice for her. She was still a fairly young woman, but locking eyes with Death so often had whittled her hopes for the future into wholly practical ones. The valley would always need a doctor.

What she wasn’t counting on was locking eyes with Death while her son was away studying. Daniel would have understood if her close contact with sick patients made her ill. It had happened to their last doctor after all, and his absence was a sore spot until Nonny was assigned to the community. He never expected to lose his mother in a drowning accident, though, and his bitter resignation at coming home to take over the farm and raise his younger siblings seeped into the ensuing decades.

In certain ways Daphne reminded him of his mother. Both women were headstrong but quick to change their minds with new evidence, and neither one had ever enjoyed being the centre of attention. Nonny begrudgingly accepted the status that came with being a healer, but she was even less comfortable being counted on to make decisions for the community than Daphne seemed to be at the handful of city council meetings where he had seen her. Even as he harrumphed his way through the vote on the water rights he obviously should have been able to keep for himself from wells that he built and maintained Daniel quietly appreciated Daphne’s desire to protect everyone in the community. Had he been unlucky enough to have a dry well he would have just as loudly insisted that his neighbours share their water with him. It was for these reasons he sought her out on a hot August afternoon.

Daphne felt a familiar tickle of anxiety in her stomach as Daniel entered the backyard. He had been in court enough times to avoid the angry outbursts he’d once been known for, but the withering glare he shot at her when the verdict of his water rights case was announced didn’t make her eager to see him again.

“You need another ombudsmen,” he said matter-of-factly after everyone exchanged pleasantries. “The charter requires there to be at least four of you, and I want to volunteer for the job.” Word about Aunt Lucy’s illness had spread fast, and even if she survived the council needed someone else to vote in her place while she recovered.” Daphne had expected to hear a complaint to be honest – Daniel was very good at sharing those – but Daphne was a little surprised by his offer. Daniel rarely engaged himself in community business unless it directly affected his property. He had a small circle of friends, but he’d never been known as a particularly sociable person even when he was a boy. Sitting in the corner and observing everyone else was much more likely to be his style.

“We appreciate that. Come inside and I’ll get you caught up on what’s been happening lately,” Gerald said when he realized Daphne wasn’t responding. While it was true that they needed another member on their panel Daphne had no idea how the four of them would reach a consensus on anything. Thinking about the logistics of getting four very different people to agree on was enough to bring back one of her skull splitting headaches.

After Gerald briefed Daniel on the scattered stories he had collected the four of them gathered around her dining room table once again to decide how they should respond to the intruders.

“We need to start fighting back,” Daniel said. “They have more manpower, but most of us have lived here our entire lives. We know the terrain better than their machines ever could, and if we move quietly we can cause a lot of chaos in their camps at night.”

“I agree,” Sean said. “If enough of their machines are damaged they’ll have to go home for repairs.”

“We need more information,” Gerald said. “How is it that they know where we are? What do they want from us? Will the gods be angry if we fight back too hard?”

“You make a good point,” Sean said. “We should send up an offering and wait for a sign.” Daphne bit the end of her tongue to prevent a sigh from escaping her lips. Sean’s peacemaking nature and willingness to see things from every point of view was an asset in court, but she wondered if he was going to agree with everything everyone said today. They couldn’t possibly use everyone’s suggestions.

“But we’ve already waited long enough,” Daniel said. “The time to act is now when they least expect it.”

“We don’t know what we’re fighting for or who we’re fighting against.” Gerald was one of the few former soldiers left in the valley. He rarely spoke about the skirmish that cost him a few fingers, but Daphne wondered if he was speaking from experience.

“We know they’re using land that doesn’t belong to them and practicing medicine that does more harm than good. Isn’t that enough? Do you want to be their next target?”

“I think you both make valid points,” Sean said. “We can pray about it and send armed scouts to gather more information.”

“What do you think, Daphne?”

Three heads turned toward the oldest member of the council to see what she had to say about their options.

Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

– Rainer Marie Rilke, 1903.

From Letters to a Young Poet, 1927.

This quote tumbled around my mind as I wrote the chapter of After the Storm that will be published tomorrow.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, dystopian short stories, lectures, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

“I Am an Aunt No Longer.” In early 1911 a teenage girl named Helena Muffly started a diary that she kept until the end of 1914. Two lifetimes later her granddaughter began blogging each entry on the 100th anniversary in which it was written. The entire blog is fascinating, but this entry is especially poignant because Helena’s older sister gives birth to a baby who only lives a few hours. He’s buried before Helena even knows of his existence. What an awful day that must have been for the entire Muffly family.

It Doesn’t Take Much to Make Me Happy via Zorabike. This will be funnier if you start reading it without any clues about it’s subject matter.

Yes, I Buy Ice Cream with My Food Stamps via Youngmomsmusing. I completely understand wanting to encourage healthy eating patterns (especially since the standard American diet is so lopsided), but stories like this one reinforce my belief that people using food stamps shouldn’t be treated like children. There’s nothing wrong with buying treats.

Crisco Candle. My cousin sent me a link to this blog a long time ago when I desperately needed to be cheered up.  Too often people – especially women – feel like we’re in competition with one another, that our worth as human beings depends on maintaing a perfect image. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying traditionally “feminine” pursuits like homemaking, but I love the author’s snarky, self-deprecating take on cooking, decorating, being beautiful (in a consumeristic, insincere, plastic-y sort of way), and entertaining.  This is one of her funnier updates so far.

Zero Hours via AbiWilks. Imagine bidding on the Internet to work extremely low wage jobs with zero guaranteed hours per week. There are no other positions available and there’s no such thing as a minimum wage or worker’s rights.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how a lot of people live in the western hemisphere in the near future.

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. Common logical fallacies in cartoon form.

If you can spare 20 minutes this weekend, I highly recommend this TED talk about how IQ rates have changed over the last 100 years. I’m intrigued by James Flynn’s hypothesis.

Quick, what’s the silliest thing you ever thought or did as a kid? As I’ve mentioned here earlier I was homeschooled for grades K-3. Almost all of the other kids who lived in our trailer park attended public school, and when I was about 8 a neighbourhood girl attended a mysterious something called Saturday School. I was so naive and geeky that I thought she got to attend an extra few hours of school as a reward. It took several rounds of me knocking on her parent’s door before I understood that a) it was a punishment, and b) she wouldn’t be expected home again until late afternoon.

Self-Inflicted Wounds is the hilarious account of Aisha Tyler’s long list of embarrassing mistakes. I highly recommend it to everyone who wasn’t beamed down onto earth as a fully-formed human adult. Sometimes what one needs more than anything is a good laugh, and this book provides it in spades.

What have you been reading?

Picture by Thamizhpparithi Maari.

Just tuning in? Start here.

Daphne knew her supplies would be stretched thin by this point in the summer, but her cupboards were suspiciously bare. She had three weeks until autumn and enough food for a third of that time if everyone agreed to skip the already scant noonday meal.

It wasn’t mice. Daphne hadn’t found their telltale black, segmented droppings in her house for a year or more now, and none of the remaining food containers were in any way nibbled or gnawed upon.  Lemon’s enthusiasm for chasing mice was nearly as vigorous as his urge to bound after wild rabbits on his daily walks. Before he had come to live with her Daphne had had a serious mouse problem. She was nearly as grateful for his pest deterrence as she was for his company back when she lived alone.

“I’m hungry,” said the small, thin girl standing by Daphne’s feet. Wilma’s painful shyness has slowly been easing up, although she still preferred talking to and bickering with her brother over making eye contact with anyone else in the house. Neither of Daphne’s children had ever been afraid of her when they were growing up, and her memories of her younger brother were so dim she couldn’t say what he had been like at that age.

“We have bread,” Daphne said as she continued to rummage through the cupboard. Even the black beans were gone, and Daphne had purposefully been sparing them until the end of the summer. Bread and water wasn’t the most filling meal, but it was all she had to offer until she sorted out where the rest of their food had gone.

Ephraim had disappeared again, this time taking his brother with him. Daphne made a mental note to ask him if he knew what happened to the food when they returned. It shouldn’t be taking them quite so long to round up the other members of the council.

Only two ombudsmen appeared that afternoon: Sean Reed and Gerald Perez, the latter looked a decade older than he had the last time Daphne had seen him. A few years beforehand his beard sprouted a few solitary grey hairs, but now Gerald’s chin curtain was peppered with them. His eyelids drooped and he walked as if he was carrying a pack mule’s burden. Neither one mentioned where Daphne’s sons were or when they might be expected to come home.

They exchanged greetings and gathered around Daphne’s worn kitchen table. Lemon let out a yip of joy before curling around Daphne’s feet and settling in for a long discussion. Paige was bathing the children in the backyard, and while they spoke the solemn atmosphere was occasionally punctuated by giggles and the sound of splashing water.

“Aunt Lucy is very ill,” Sean said once everyone settled in. The visitors had politely turned down Daphne’s offer to feed them, although they did accept water after their long and dusty hike.  The site of her vaccination had become badly inflamed, and in an attempt to draw out the infection she had accidentally pulled something out of her body. It was the the width and length of a child’s fingernail, black, and could be bent but not broken. No one knew what it was, but soon after she discarded it Esther Penn made another visit to her farm.

Her second vaccination hadn’t healed her sore arm. If anything it seemed to make the infection grow worse. Sean’s second wife had brought her to the Reed homestead when she became too ill to look after herself. Aunt Lucy had no living family members in the Mingus Mountain area that Daphne had ever heard of, so if she didn’t survive her land would automatically be inherited by those who had taken care of her while she was alive. The land Aunt Lucy owned wasn’t particularly valuable in and of itself, but it included a small, stable creek and several caves that were rumoured to be storage facilities for rare goods that occasionally became available from faraway traders. No one knew exactly what she had squirrelled away, only that the oldest woman in the valley suddenly obtain access to desperately needed supplies like salt or nails when the right people requested them.

Daphne felt her stomach clench as Sean described how quickly his new border’s health was going downhill. No one knew why some wounds got infected, but few of her grandfather’s stories about this kind of disease ended well. If Aunt Lucy died Daphne would be the oldest member of the council. Traditionally the oldest ombudsmen would be deferred to in cases where a consensus could not be reached, and Daphne had no interest in assuming that kind of responsibility for her community.

Gerald had been hearing rumbles in the community about Ms. Penn’s vaccination project. Aunt Lucy wasn’t the only person who had a poor reaction to it, and Ella Graber’s son had even reported being held down and forced into treatment when he changed his mind at the last minute. Ella had always been fond of stretching real events into slightly more exciting or traumatic experiences with each retelling, but when the Harris family reported a similar problem Gerald knew something strange was going on.

The discussion slowly grew more serious as the children’s bath ended and Paige began washing herself. Little did she know how much Lemon loved soaking in water or how difficult it was to get him out of the tub.

“Help! Help!”

The younger members of the council rushed outside at the sound of Paige’s shriek. Daphne walked to the backyard as quickly as her bum knee allowed and collapsed into giggles when she saw what had the older woman so frightened.

Paige was sitting up stark naked in the shallow tub beneath a few scraggly trees, Lemon curled up on her lap with a blissful, toothy grin. His fur had soaked up so much water and he was so adverse to being moved that Paige found it impossible to get out of the tub.

“Get him off of me!” she yelled as she grabbed her tunic and slipped it over her head. Her right shoulder had slowly grown more stiff with time and Paige couldn’t cover up as fast as her modest temperment demanded.

“Lemon, come here,” Daphne said, the corners of her mouth twitching. Lemon lifted his head, twitched his ears, and then lay down again. He’d been blisteringly hot for far too long. Even the call of his favourite human couldn’t rouse him from the slightly cool water.

Sean laughed and averted his eyes as Gerald called the dog to no avail.

“He won’t listen to you,” Daphne said. “You’ll have to either leave him there,  turn the tub on its side, or wait until he gets hungry.”

“Could I lift him out?” Gerald asked.

“He’ll only leap back inside as soon as you set him on the ground.”

“He can have the water. I just want to get out,” Paige said. Her hair was greasy and her skin coated in several layers of dried sweat and desert grit, but she had no interest in bathing with an even dirtier dog.

No sooner had Paige been ushered inside to change into dry, cleaner clothes and Lemon hopped back into the tub to cool off than a stranger yelled hello in the front yard.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Child Exchange. A series of 5 articles about the practice of “re-homing” adopted children in the United States. This is a long read, but despite the sensationalistic titles of certain entries I think it did a fairly good job explaining the kinds of issues that can lead to adoptions being disrupted. There aren’t a lot of good options for people who adopt a child only to later realize that he or she needs more help than their new family can provide.

A Love So True via StoryRoute. I dare you to watch the video embedded in this post without crying. Cathryn’s blog is always excellent, but this particular story is going to stick with me for a very long time.

Putting Time in Perspective. As a species we aren’t very good at measuring large amounts of time. These graphs make this topic a little easier to digest.

Cassandra’s Legacy. At this point you’re probably wondering why I’ve included two links with such similar themes in the Suggestion Saturday roundup. “Putting Time in Perspective” provides a birds-eye, purely scientific understanding of time and the probable fate of all life on earth. This link eventually splits off into two different paths, both of which are creative guesses about what might happen to earth based on whether or not humans are able to slow down their consumption of natural resources and temper the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

A Ghost of My Own via JohnJGeddes. This short story reminds me of my favourite “Start Trek: The Next Generation” episode of all time. If you don’t want 20 year old Sci-Fi spoilers, skip the next sentence. 😉 In the episode Beverly, the ship’s doctor, travels home to attend her grandmother’s funeral and meets a mysterious entity living in a candle who just wants to love her. I don’t know if John’s story was influenced by this episode, but I strongly prefer his take on this type of storyline.

“I Put Algernon’s Body in a Cheese Box and Buried Him in the Backyard. I Cried.” The title of this post comes from the novel Flowers for Algernon. I don’t have any personal experience with Lyme Disease, but the author’s description of how it’s affecting him cognitively is chilling.

From Spent via jdubqca:

You’ve spent a lifetime,
trapped by the four walls
of a bedroom world.

What if mythical creatures like satyrs and mermaids once really existed? Dr. Spencer Black, The Resurrectionist,  is convinced that they are very old versions of what the first humans looked like, and in the mid-1800s he scours circuses, hospitals, and graveyards for proof of his convictions.

Medicine in the 1800s had just begun to make major progress in diagnosing diseases and figuring out what might have caused them. Some of the theories that were formulated during that time ended up being true while others have since been discredited. What I loved about this book is how realistic it felt. Dr. Spencer Black’s deep-seated prejudices, hunches, unshakable belief in science, and determination to discover the truth rang true for everything I know about medical advancements in that century.

What makes it even better, though, are the anatomical diagrams and brief descriptions of mythological creatures in the second half of it. I loved seeing the physiology of the mermaids in particular.

What have you been reading?

My responses to September 2013  Search Engine queries.

Is Lisa Scottoline an Atheist?

I have no idea.

Why do I have to automatically respect elders?

Some people believe it’s important for cultural or religious reasons. I think behaviour and our common humanity should influence the respect we give to one another. Age is just a number.

The Wizard of Oz, Sat. Aug. 24 at 11pm.

I did not attend. Was it fun?

My brother-in-law doesn’t acknowledge his nephew.

So much depends on the age of the child here. A baby likely won’t notice or care, but an older kid could be quite hurt. It’s totally ok to not be a baby/child person, but  the brother-in-law should at least say hello to his nephew. I do not think he should be pressured to hold or play with the kid, though.

Is there a book written about Lou Xiaoying?

No, but if you pay me I will happily write it!

How do you get quiet patients to talk?

What would work for me:

• Shut the door for privacy reasons.
• Allow my spouse to stay with me.
• Introduce yourself.
• Explain slowly, in detail, and a little more than you think is necessary.
• Give me lots of chances to ask questions.
• Understand that silence is ok.

Do non theists have morals?

Yes, of course.

Mentally ill people who yell at strangers.

They highlight the gaps in our current healthcare system. Yes, some people were once institutionalized who could have been successfully integrated into the community had they been given the appropriate support. But a lot of those support systems either never fully materialized or were very poorly funded when old institutions were emptied out.

100 years from now I think we will have very mixed feelings about how the severely mentally ill  were treated in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Our intentions as a society were good, but we basically dumped a whole lot of people who were not capable of taking care of themselves onto the streets.

My energy is charging.

My first thought when I read this search term: