Sweat/No Sweat

I’ve been doing a daily nighttime diary for 14 days for Carnegie Mellon University: “Help Us Learn about the Impact of the Coronavirus on Individuals, Couples, and Families.” It asks me what Covid-19 measures I do, what activities I’ve done during the day, and whom I’ve interacted with and for how long. Then it asks how I’m feeling, both emotionally and physically. I recommend the study.

Most days, the only person I’ve seen in 24 hours is Tim, and most days – especially bad weather ones – we’re in our house for a lot of the day. That’s usual for me, but Tim has always been a coffeehouse or daily athletic club, get-out-of-the-house kind of guy. That’s not possible now. Our house is our only inside place. Our only inside place.

Usually, we inhabit the house very nicely together. This surprised me, but I’d had to adapt to his invasion presence when he retired, so this was old business. I go downstairs, he stays upstairs. I am so grateful for this space!

But with Covid-19, how Tim and I occupy the house is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

It started with his little 8-minute workout routine. I’d hear his phone beeping and he’d start jumping or sitting up or hopping or stopping. It was so cute! I offered assistance: “Why don’t you use the old ensolite pad I still have? Oh, what about those weights I got for exercises when both my legs were broken (and haven’t used since)?” 

Little by little, those eight minutes grew. Tim rediscovered the monkey bars on the ceiling in Sophie’s old room – which has been My Precious Space for years – and he’s added pull-ups to his workout. He comes in while I’m writing on the computer and he grunts and lifts and sweats right behind me.

He moves from room to room on his now-hour-long circuit. Hopping things seem to happen in his office, but stretching things seem to happen in the living room. I’m not sure where he does the giant blue ball things. Or the lunging things. (I’m downstairs and just hear thumps.) And now, there’s The Box.

I only exercise outdoors, period. Indoors, I may interrupt inactivity to do things, but the general backdrop is inertia. For me, Covid-19 means there is no consequence to laziness; if I don’t know what day it is, everything can happen tomorrow. Tim does Covid-19 strenuously and in motion. Outdoors and indoors. He just finished building The Box.

I love boxes. I love a good, clean box with a snug-fitting lid. A box just the right size for whatever contents. I am a Box Person. Boxes hold things.

Tim’s box is empty. It’s 18 inches square, wooden, beautifully crafted, and empty. He jumps onto it. Yes, he stands in front of it and jumps up vertically and lands on the box. Apparently, according to YouTube, it’s a Thing.

I stood in front of the box. Nothing happened.

I don’t even know what muscles to tell to move to make me jump up vertically like that.

Now, if you can see where this is going, it’s obviously about more than a box. I have to adapt to living with someone who is doing Covid-19 very differently from me. In the same house as me. I can’t just tell him to stop jumping and sweating and hopping and sweating and lunging AND SWEATING all over the house.

Omigod, what happens when it’s winter and the windows are closed?!?

I have to appreciate that Tim’s taking care of his health and wellbeing in the best way. (The Carnegie Mellon researchers would be very impressed.) I have to appreciate that he just purchased a giant floor mat so his sweat won’t land on the carpet. Finally, I have to appreciate that just because I am a slug, I do not have any moral authority to begrudge the non-slug in my midst (especially when the non-slug doesn’t complain about my craft supplies invading the common space). We share this Covid-19 interior space, and I    have    to    adapt.

Uh, oh. This might be harder than jumping onto that box.

What's your 'resting face'?

My writing pipeline got clogged.

I’d written a piece for Valentine’s Day, and I balked at posting it. I was saying nice things about Tim, about Third Third revelations and appreciation of marriage; and it just seemed so … smug. Even though I admitted to “explosions, terrible ‘discussions,’ voiced regrets, shouted furies, quiet hopelessness,” it just seemed so … self-congratulatory. Like, hooray, we’ve made it!

But then I felt bad about putting aside a post that was so nice to my husband (since “nice” is not an adjective I really own); so I just … ran aground. That stalled post was blocking all alternative and future posts.

Combine that with winning a free two-month trial of Team Training at my athletic club and my discovering how utterly exhausting fitness can be. Basically, I ran around the room zipping through exercises that involved things like kettle balls and medicine balls and sliders for my feet. And big long ropes and elastic stretchy things and hanging from the ceiling. Not to mention jumping up and down and squatting for interminable periods of time. After all that, swimming a mile seemed like a rest day.

I was comatose by 7, asleep by 9.

We’d been on vacation and saw relatives, alligators, and manatees. In Epcot Center, in record-breaking rain, Sophie and I were on Spaceship Earth and somewhere along the line, they took photos of us. Afterwards, cartoon characters showed up in a video with our faces. Sophie’s face was pleasant and smiling. Mine was scowling.

“How’d you do that? Did you know when they were taking our photo? How come mine is so grumpy?”

“I just have a better resting face.”

“Resting face? Who ever heard of a resting face? Do people have resting faces?!?”

Well, I guess they do. And what I thought illustrated curiosity on my face actually looks like confusion if you’re generous and pissed-off if you’re accurate.

So then I had to practice a better resting face. Which is impossible while hauling kettle balls and medicine balls and pushing up. Or just sitting around fretting about that bit-of-love blocking my blog.

Someday, I’ll tell you about the valentines my husband has hidden around the house for me for thirty years, but right now, I’m just going to borrow a little quote from one of my favorite authors, David Grossman. In Someone to Run With, he describes the rotten underworld of the city, but then the wise woman of the novel, Leah, says this:

“You need a man with a big hand,” Leah pronounced. “You know why?” 


“Why?” She knew she would now be painted a picture. 


“Someone who will stand with his hand up, open, strong, steady – like the Statue of Liberty, but without that ice-cream cone she’s holding – only his hand, open, in the air. And then” – Leah raised her square, rough, nail-bitten hand and moved it gently from side to side, like a flying bird – “even from far away, from any place in the world, you’d see that hand and know you had a place to land and rest.”

That is my husband’s hand. And when I think on it, my resting face smiles.

A New and Better Old Thing

In my Quest for New-ness to keep from going stale, sometimes I end up with an Old Thing Renewed. Like swimming.

It started with a free upgraded month from the athletic club, an upgrade that would get me into the clubs with pools. So while this possibility existed all along, I always concentrated on “it’ll mess up my hair color” or “my skin won’t be able to handle both winter and chlorine” or “it’ll be too crowded.” Negativity can really take hold, but in this case, the mere extra of “winning” this free month sent me into the pool.

And when I took that first plunge and swam across the pool, I felt welcomed into the water. I don’t know how to describe it except that water is my element. It relieves me of the burdens of land.

Land is my klutzy place. Land is where tree roots and cracks in  the sidewalk lie in wait to grab me. Land is where I can fall on my head (and this includes ice because when it’s hard, I count it as land, not water). Yes, I know I run, but I run vigilantly, looking at my feet and the hazards awaiting them.

This is how I start a run: “Grunt, grunt, get going. Creak, creak, get a rhythm. Just go, it’ll get better,” and it does. Eventually. After a few miles.

This is how I enter the water: “Ahhhhhh….”

How did I forget this? I don’t know when I first learned to swim, because I seem to have always done it. When the town pool was built in our town, my family got season passes. We’d spend the day at the pool, go home to eat supper, and return to the pool afterwards with my father. I even did synchronized swimming for a while.

Yes, the same girl who suffered through calisthenics in high school. You know “calisthenics” – the ’60s version of Jazzercise or aerobics or Zumba – the thing that involves rights and lefts and choreography. The phys ed teacher would start by saying, “Let’s begin. Will someone take Barbara aside and work with her?”

This same land klutz did synchronized swimming!

So now I’m in the pool again, doing laps. I count odd numbers out and even numbers back in. Eventually, after a couple of trips to the pool, I reach my ¾ of a mile length: 54 lengths of the pool or 27 laps. I get out. It’s where I always stop, where I have always stopped. ¾ of a mile.

And then one day, I decide to do 56 lengths. I have finished 54 and another out-and-back doesn’t seem so earth-shaking, so I do it.

The next day, I do 60. Then I calculate that if I did 63, and that’s divisible by 9 (just like 72), it would mean I had done 7/8 of a mile. Someone said I must have an active imagination to be able to go back and forth over and over again, and I told her I do math problems. I calculate the percentages of my laps, so figuring out – by ninths – is just one of my little games.

And then it occurred to me: I could swim a mile. I could just keep on swimming past what-I-had-always-done-and-stopped-at, and I could swim a whole mile.

So I did.

I am in my Third Third, and I now swim a mile at a time. Three or four times a week.

My hair is fading terribly (but at least the color is no longer dripping down my neck as I get out of the pool). My body takes gallons of lotion so I don’t itch, and I’m pretty sure the dark circles under my eyes have gotten worse as the swim goggles dig in right there.

But I learned a Big New Thing: I learned that many of the things I carry around are self-imposed limits. I stopped myself at ¾ of a mile my whole life. I’m not sure why, but I think it had to do with having to be somewhere, not having enough time, or just habit. But now, in my Third Third, I have the time. I just had to break my head out of its no-time-to-do-it place and consider the option to … pass that barrier.

This is mildly earth-shaking for me: what other limits are self-imposed? I think of myself as someone who likes challenges, tackles tough things, but obviously, I never swam a mile. Before.

Now I do.

We all fall down...

I fell down and hit my head.

Now I bet you’re thinking: Age-Related. You’re not thinking klutzy-related or athletic enterprise or slapstick or ha,ha,ha or so-what-else-is-new. You’re thinking uh, oh, fragility, weakness, elderly.

Argh!

So when the little toddler on ice skates got confused and bumped around and came backwards at me, I knew I was in trouble. I’m not a hockey player; I can’t turn on a dime. First skate of the season, I’m a Tin Man on skates. So I went down backwards and my head slammed into the ice.

Going down on ice takes your breath away. Slamming your head takes that up many, many notches. I’m pretty sure I panicked inside, and when I realized my jaw didn’t seem to fit in my head any more, I was … distressed.

Suddenly, people were all around me: “Do you need an EMT? Do you want us to call 911? Do you want to go to the hospital?” Tim and Sophie walked me off the skating oval, and I sat on an upside-down bucket. Sophie was worried, “You didn’t cry in Florida.”

“When was I in Florida?” (Was I crying now?)

“Typhoon Lagoon.” Oh, that’s right, I’d cracked my head before going down a water slide while we were on the National Waterpark Tour. I don’t remember that hurting. I just remember the blood everywhere. When I got to the bottom, 10-year-old Sophie exclaimed, “Mommy, all your hair dye came out all at once.”

So Friday, Sophie insisted she had to take my hat off and see if my head was bleeding. It wasn’t. She was relieved. I said, “Y’know what’s really killing me? That everyone here at this whole big Winter Solstice event is probably saying, ‘Did you hear about the old lady that fell?’”

I was on a plane a year or so ago and got up to stand in line for the restroom. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor and the flight attendants were telling me to stay there. Then they announced for any health professional onboard to come to the rear of the plane. It was all very confusing since no one else was required to get on the floor, just me.

Since then, I have learned that if you get up too fast from an airplane seat, you can faint. I guess I took down the flight attendant’s coffee pot with me. But it was the look on their faces that said not anyone can faint; only old, frail, infirm, elderly people faint. And then it’s so tragic.

When you’re 20 years old and you faint – I have low blood pressure, I’ve fainted my whole life – you get up, laugh, and people make jokes. They tell you how funny it was.

Now they look at me with Concern. I’m on the downhill slide to bedridden.

Am I being too sensitive? Do you know what I’m describing? Do we look … pitiable … if we stumble and fall?

Now, I must admit, the thing that sticks with me most about the whole event was a very kind woman named Mary (whom I’d met over at the hot chocolate station earlier). Mary stood next to me and said, “Relax into your body and let it tell you what it needs” or something like that which was incredibly calming and true, and I did it. I’d guess Mary was in her Third Third, too.

Very quickly, the daughter-with-an-iPhone looked into my eyes to make sure my pupils were the same size. When we got home, she looked at me again. She was worried because there were dark circles under my eyes, and that’s A Sign. “Or are those dark circles always there? It’s not blood pooling, is it?”

This is why we have children.

Then she said, “I just don’t want you to be a Natasha Richardson story! She hit her head, came home, hung out with her family, and died later. Do you have a headache?”

“What do you mean ‘hung out’!?! Like she was fine and then she died?”

“Only because she had a headache later.”

“But if I take Tylenol, will that mask the killer headache I might have?!?”

“Don’t worry. We’re watching to see if you deteriorate.”

This is why we have children.

Okay, it’s days later. It still hurts to brush my hair over the spot, and my jaw can’t tackle a bagel, but I haven’t deteriorated.

Hooray, I have not deteriorated!

The Cure for Indoor Torture

I hate sweating indoors. I hate the humid, steaming cloud that develops around my face as I sweat indoors. No, I detest sweating indoors. I ABHOR sweating indoors.

But I’m kind of stuck with it. Ever since the knee injury, I haven’t been able to run. I can’t run until I develop really good supporting muscles around my knee, and even then, on the advice of my doctor, the pounding of running is not really good for my joints.

So I swam. But since this is a Third Third story, soon my shoulder started hurting. I took to hiking (with trekking poles to reduce pressure on my knee), but I can only manage hiking one mountain a week (if that). There isn’t enough snow for cross-country skiing yet, so flab grew, pounds appeared, and pants and bras got tighter. And, as we all know, life expectancy diminished and odds of dementia increased. Meanwhile, worrying about all that increased my cortisol levels. Soon I’d be a goner. A depressed goner.

There was no way around it: I had to go sweat in the athletic club.

I could give the elliptical machine a try. It resembled running in an odd, loping, incongruous sort of way, and it wouldn’t pound my knees. Plus it would do my arms.

I picked a machine, checked the TV screens in front of it. My choices were football, NASCAR races, and more football. I put the little foamy covers on the earpieces of the headset and tried to turn on the channel and volume. It didn’t work. I peeled the foamy covers off and moved to another machine, where I put the little foamy covers on, and that didn’t work, either. Not to mention I had to stare at the guys around me to see how the headset is supposed to sit on my head. Upside down?

“You have to pedal to turn the sound on,” one guy said.

Okay. While I was trying to figure out my “options” (weight and age? What kind of options are those?), the machine told me to “Pedal faster.” So I pedaled while I fiddled with dials. I’d aim for 30 minutes of NASCAR.

29:20

29:03

I tried playing games with myself: Don’t look at the time remaining until the next commercial.

27:58 Does that count as “making it to 27” or is it really still mostly 28?

27:26 Oh, this is excruciating! My eyes wandered to every other television in the room. By the time I got back to my TV, the cars were still going round and round. There was a moment of excitement because a piece of lint got stuck in front of a brake air vent or something and somehow the pit crew cleared it while the car was still racing around.

26:01 Wow, that piece of lint was worth a minute and a half of distraction!

Eventually the steam started coming off my body. I was breathing sweaty air! I was breathing everyone else’s sweaty air! I had to think about something else – NASCAR had to get more interesting – or I was going to have a panic attack from insufficient fresh air.

Eventually – because time moves on, even on an elliptical, even when it’s torture – I got to 0 minutes remaining. And then, I actually went back another day. It happened to be a weekday at 3 pm.

Jeopardy was on! I watched and answered (or rather asked the questions), and when Alex Trebek took a break, I looked at my remaining time: 15 minutes! Time had flown! It was miraculous! I knew the words were from Australia’s national anthem, that Cervantes had written Don Quixote, and that antidote and anecdote were often mixed up.

I still sweated and breathed sweaty air, but I didn’t notice.

Now I even go a little earlier to make sure I get the foamy earpiece covers on in time. Tim asked if I go to the gym to watch Jeopardy. No, I go to the gym to exercise … but I’m only happy when Jeopardy is on. I once was stuck with a CSI or an NCIS or an SUV or whatever, but it didn’t make time fly as much as Jeopardy. Jeopardy exercises my brain, too!

My whole life, I always equated watching daytime TV with sickness or depression or degeneracy. With being a slug. Now, in my Third Third, daytime TV is making me fit. Ha!

Limping into our Third Third

Last week, as I arrived at my book club, I limped out of the car. Coming from her car was Chris, limping. Robin met us at the door, limping. If Riki were with us, she’d be limping, too.

None of this had been planned in advance. We weren’t reading a book with a limping character. No Hunchback of Notre Dame, no Treasure Island. No game of charades, no funny ha-ha mimicry.

Our bodies are just crapping out on us.

I even cringe writing that because I harbor the desperate hope that my currently bad knee is just a temporary aberration and has nothing to do with long-term degeneration.

But, of course, it does.

One day, I was biking and running and walking, and the next day, I was in terrible pain. No fall, no twist, nothing catastrophic. It just happened. It was going to go away in a couple days. That’s why I hobbled, iced, and Aleved my way across the Badlands and South Dakota. That’s why I foolishly thought the 422 stairs of the Presidential Trail at Mount Rushmore wouldn’t be a problem. That’s why they’re probably still talking about that crazy hopping redhead.

So, of course, I was at the orthopedist the day I returned. (Yes, the same orthopedist. I trust him. He gave me my knee back before.) That’s why I was in an MRI machine the next day and physical therapy the following week.

Sample thoughts while limping and freaking out: What if I don’t have my knee back?!? How can I run? How can I go up and down stairs? What do I do when my mental health requires movement? How will I not get fat????

And on the Fourth of July, I went to two parties where people enthusiastically discussed ailments. Or, as Our Third Third readers have put it, “organ recitals.” Then the New York Times did an article on knee interventions, which everyone shared. And shared. My doctor said that as we get older, we can injure ourselves sliding a shoe box with our foot. We are all degenerating.

My physical therapist has pointed out that my right knee doesn’t line up with my right foot when I walk. I have pointed out to her that I can’t even balance on one foot, period. Basically, I have to re-do my whole skeleton. My friend Irene has to re-learn how to sit. We should have done this when we were three years old, but if we can fix it now, we’ll have mobility.

The looming Third Third question is: what do we have to give up? I used to play soccer and tennis, but I had no trouble giving them up. They weren’t worth the injuries. The doctor and the physical therapist feel the same way about running. They call it pounding, and they wince when they say it.

I’m not a devoted runner. I don’t train with intervals; I don’t go fast. I don’t like races. Very often, I try to find excuses not to run (rain, wind, laziness, other things). But running is outside, tires me out, maintains my weight, keeps me healthy, and wards off depression. It’s cheap, easy, and accessible anywhere. I just haven’t found anything else that works on all those levels.

So a bum knee starts a cavalcade of reactions in me beyond the initial five-months-of-crutches freak-out. Beyond the “Oh, no, we have stairs now!” It starts all sorts of “beginning of the end” scenarios in my mind, visions of restrictions and incapacities. Of no outlet for all the parts of me that need an outlet. Of limitation.

This is my first encounter with Aging-with-a-capital-A. (Well, not really: there is that issue of my face sagging….) But this could mark the transition from getting-older-means-you-get-to-do-more to getting-older-means-you-get-to-do-less. That’s going to take some mental readjustment. If this is a first step, no wonder I’m limping.

I know I’ve been lucky. There’s a woman in physical therapy who’s trying to walk at all. When my mother’s memory went, she had to give up the reading that she loved, and that would be HARD. Maybe you’ve already had to cross this bridge; what was it, and how’d you do?

No Leg to Stand On

This is a Second Third story, but I’m going to tell it here because you need it for my next post, the Third Third version. Sometimes it’s a hilarious story that I tell when I’m in stand-up comic mode, and sometimes it’s a lesson-learned story that I need to re-tell myself. Feel free to take it either way, but it does sort of occupy an epic place in my life experience.

Thirty years ago, Tim invited me on one of our first dates. We were going to cross-country ski with his friends in the back country. His circle of friends skied better than I, a fact I discovered right away when I blinked at the trailhead and they disappeared. So I shuffled along by myself – muttering all the while this would be the last date with That Guy.

It was the kind of ski outing where you catch up with everyone else as they’re finishing lunch, and they stand up and say, “Okay, time to get going.” But there’s a mountain, and then they’re all laughing and falling, falling and laughing, which seems do-able to me. I could certainly laugh and fall. Except that my fall was accompanied by a very clear twang as something in my knee gave way.

So Tim and the rest raced back to the car to plan my rescue, and eventually I ended up at the emergency room in a temporary cast. The next day, I was fired.

I know, that seems out-of-the-blue and maybe even un-related. It was. A new mayor had been elected and, since I served “at the pleasure of the mayor” managing the transit system, I was fired. It’s political. I get that.

The day after, I went to an orthopedist. In his office, the receptionist had some forms for me to sign. As she slid the window to hand me the forms; in a freak accident, the window, the frame, and the molding fell out of the wall, landed on my good foot, and fractured it.

You read that right. I went into the doctor’s office with one broken leg and left with two. Or, as the doctor put it, the knee meant I couldn’t stand on that leg and now the fractured foot meant I couldn’t stand on that leg.

“But can I still swim?” I asked, panicking.

“Uh, you’re not going to be able to sleep in a bed,” he admitted. “You’ll be on the floor for a while.”

All this ended up translating into five months of crutches, braces, and limited mobility. My doctor made a case for conservative, non-surgical treatment so I’d have my knee for the rest of my life. In the meantime, I learned a lot:

• You cannot collect unemployment if you are physically unable to take a job. If, as a healthy 30-something, I had not magically checked the box for “short-term disability” when I took the job; I’d be broke fast. This is how people end up homeless.


• I felt helpless and weak, totally un-strong. I felt ugly, pathetic, and worthless. Eventually, a new definition of strength had to emerge: it had nothing to do with lifting things; it had to do with keeping my spirits up.



• I was part of a community of friends that rose to my aid: doing my shopping, making my house a social center, installing bathroom hardware, driving me to physical therapy, checking in on me. I needed help, and they were there. “There-ness” made all the difference.



• I was totally unproductive. When it takes 40 minutes to get to the bathroom, you quickly run out of time in your day. All I could do was Be. Amazingly, I got very, very happy. I think the universe had been telling me to slow down. When I wasn’t listening, it broke the first leg. When that didn’t work, out went the job. Still focused on too much Doing and not enough Being? There went the second leg.



• I learned what it’s like to be disabled. I suffered through office buildings that had ramps outside yet no elevators inside, people parking illegally in the parking space I needed to get into a building, power doors that opened out and knocked over my crutches. Happily, I lived in a ranch house all on one level.



• I had a good story. No, a great story. People loved hearing this story. Telling it helped me be cheerful rather than pathetic. There were the side stories, too: the one about the taxi driver who got lost and I, thinking he was taking me to some dark alley, extracted the crampons on my crutches and prepared to attack him from the back seat.

• During all this, I was in new-love, and love conquers all.


As I fought my way back to mobility – passing through the stage Tim described as “might be called walking … in a prehistoric kind of way” – I set a goal for myself: I would run the Alaska Women’s Run, 6.2 miles. That would be my sign that this episode was over.

Shovelsful of Snow

Let me tell you about snow. About how here in Anchorage we have missed it terribly for the last two years, about how we require its reflective light to brighten our barely-there daylight, about how we need it for our outdoor life of skiing.

Now, after shoveling almost three feet of snow from our driveway, let me tell you how I really feel about snow. There is snow for skiing (good) and snow for shoveling (bad).

Light, fluffy snow is not necessarily easier to shovel than wet, heavy snow. You pick up light, fluffy snow, and it fluffs right back at you. Those are the four words I have for snow. Other people may have 43, but I also have four categories of snow shovels.

The blue shovel: It’s big and substantial and heavy. It’s the push kind, but pushing is limited in Anchorage. You push till you get to the berm, and then you have to lift. (Note to non-Alaskans: a berm is the mound – no, the mountain – that collects after you have moved the snow to the sides of the driveway, roads, paths, etc.) Maybe the first snow presents no problem, but when the berm is several feet tall, lifting is impossible. Except that you have to do it, so …

…you switch to the aluminum shovel. It’s also a push shovel, but it’s smaller and lighter. Unfortunately, it’s also too shallow, so when you lift it up, the snow falls out the back end. On you. On what you’ve shoveled. So you come up with a newer plan: you scoop up snow and FLING it towards the berm, high in the air, hoping it will clear five feet of berm. Some of it does … and some of it slides back down the slope of the berm. The angle of repose.

So where, on a first snowfall day, you can push the blue shovel all the way across the driveway in one load; now you have to take six pushes. Push, fling, push, fling, push, fling, clean up stray snow.

I am a fastidious shoveler. I won’t let a car run on the driveway before I’ve shoveled because the tire tracks make stripes of packed down snow. Then you have to use the blue shovel with all its weight to dig into the stripes and scrape them off.

But by Day 4 of snow and husband’s exquisitely-timed convalescence from surgery and prohibition on strenuous activity, stripes are the least of your concern. Your big concern is lifting your arm to brush your hair. The whole driveway is one big, white stripe, and besides, it’s getting longer. It’s not your imagination. The plows are running out of space for their berms. The street gets narrower and you have to shovel out to where it begins – about seven feet from the curb. Tim says the plow guys must have decided the mail carrier is on his own. He actually climbs UP the berms to reach the mailboxes, and one of these days, he’s going to flip over.

I try to run out when the plow comes so they’ll see me struggling with my shovels and take pity. If they don’t, they spill plowed snow across the driveway. Plowed snow is like concrete. Blue and aluminum won’t do it; then you need the real shovel. The kind that shovels dirt. Or concrete.

My neighbors on either side have a different kind of shovel. Theirs is called Snowblower. They are in their 80s, and it reminds me of moving my mother years ago. I’d called up my cousin and asked, “Do you have a pickup so you and I can load up the furniture and take it to her new place?”

“Barbara, we’re 60 years old. If I move a household of furniture, I won’t be able to move for a year.”

And then I realized we weren’t in our 20s.

The day I moved two feet of snow, I wondered when I’d stop shoveling. I wondered it when I swallowed my Advil, when I soaked in my first bath in about eight years, when I tried to remember which truck had run me over. When will Snowblower move into our garage?

I’m not 20 and I’m not 80. I’m in my Third Third, but I still look out at our shoveled driveway and feel insanely proud and satisfied. It may be cognitive decline or delusional thinking, but right now, I’ll take this sense of accomplishment. And another Advil.

Do-able Resolutions

This is the big thing I don’t understand: why – when I need to feel better – I don’t do the things that I know will make me feel better. I’ve talked with friends; I know I’m not the only one. Let’s say I feel sluggish and depressed. I know a run will make me feel better, but I don’t do it. Why is that?! What is the sabotage or lack of will that leaves me blobbing around, digging a hole for myself?

Maybe a run outside is not your thing. Maybe a hike or a social outing or a phone call does it for you. But then you don’t do it. Why is that?

Every new year, I start off hoping I’ll be a better person, maybe even Making Plans to intentionally be a better person, and it doesn’t happen. But as I mentioned here, my daughter taught me something about New Year’s resolutions: if I make them cumulative, I see progress, not the times I miss. My resolutions to work out three times a week always left me missing weeks and feeling failure; her resolution to run 500 miles in 2017 takes the miles whenever they come.

So I looked at how I wanted to grow as a person and how could I take baby steps to get there. Maybe it would be like exercising my oomph muscle. (And if I’d missed along the way, I could always race to catch up at the end of the year.)

I want to be more thoughtful, feel more gratitude.
I was so moved by the condolence cards after my mother died that I wrote thank you notes for them. I wanted people to know how much I appreciated their thoughts. My friend Linnea writes appreciation notes often. I save them (even though Linnea says, “You’re supposed to be de-cluttering!”) because they make me feel … appreciated. So: I will write 20 thoughtful notes in 2017.

See? It’s a baby step, but maybe it will feel so good, it will become a habit. If it doesn’t, I will still have written 20 notes.

I want to be more of a hostess, welcoming people into our home.
So: I will hold four dinner parties. Most years, I’ve done this, but this past year, I’m not sure. I’ve still socialized, but I want our home to be a welcoming spot. The point is, it’s not a killer task. It’s do-able.

I want to be more fit.
Here’s the 500 miles of running/skiing. I already do both irregularly, but I let things interfere. Maybe this will help on those self-sabotaging days when I’m digging my personal hole.

Since my exercise tends to be one dimensional, my muscles are pathetic. Tim and Sophie say squats are big, that they also help with getting up (for when we’re older). I hate squats. I can’t imagine anything more boring than doing squats. Tim says I should do three sets of them a day. With weights. Ha! I’ll do 50 sets (three times ten squats) in a whole year. I’ve already done one so far. Baby steps.

I want to eat better.
This one is really an odd one. I already don’t have meat in our house; I only cook vegetarian. So, of course, I thought I was getting my five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. I go through four pounds of Costco grapes a week, but I just read that it takes 32 grapes to equal a serving! Yikes! Maybe this means I need to move off beans, carbs, and cheese more. So: I will eat 15 servings of fruits and vegetables each week. Yes, I know that five a day means 75 a week, and that this isn’t a cumulative measure like the others. What should I say? Eat 780 servings in 2017? Too much recordkeeping. Besides, I don’t know how to count the vegetables IN my meals and this is just to get me thinking more intentionally about meal preparation. I’m going out today to buy baby carrots. It only takes nine of them to make a serving.

I want to keep up closeness with my sisters.
So: I’m going to have five Skype or phone conversations with them in 2017. We email regularly, but that’s email.

Missing from these resolutions are the things I already do. I read 75 books last year without noticing, trained for and ran my half-marathon as a matter of course, and wrote this blog because I do (This is post #203!). I don’t need to resolve to do those things. For whatever reason, desire and will are sufficient for them to happen.

Some researchers say willpower is a muscle to be exercised. Others say we can suffer willpower depletion if we have to rely on self-control too much. If you draw on willpower too much, you drain your self-control for the next situation.

Baby steps.

Insatiable log splitter on the loose

By the time other people reach their Third Thirds in Alaska, they often have a cabin. By the time I’ve reached my Third Third, I have friends with cabins. Boy, am I lucky!

I have resisted a cabin for us because I have enough trouble maintaining one residence and its assortment of do-over-and-over-again chores. But I certainly do relish the idea of one’s very own national park in the middle of whatever wilderness it’s planted. So we were delighted to visit Connie and John’s cabin.

As we hiked in, Connie said she used to just walk on trails. Now she realizes how much WORK it takes to keep those trails from being overrun by vegetation, mud, rain, muskeg. Brush, swamp, tree roots. Decay, rust, animals. When they’re your trails, it’s your WORK.

It was a spectacular sunny day. Denali was out and brilliant, the cabin is a 10 on the comfort scale, and Connie and John are gracious hosts. And then I was introduced to QuickSplit. I was so enamored with QuickSplit, I hogged it, didn’t let anyone else get to use it.

Meet QuickSplit:

Why QuickSplit is more fun than a barrel of monkeys:

1. I’ve never done it before. It’s my newest New Thing.


2. It takes a job – splitting logs – and adds two of those six simple machines to it to make it EASIER. I feel very homo sapiens-proud when I can see evidence of the brain making the brawn work better. Hooray for the lever and the wedge!


3. It works better with a partner keeping the log in position. Tim holds the log so the log rises up to the blade in the middle. When the split needs a little help, Tim wields the axe. (He’s good with axe handles….) When you need brawn, you need brawn. I don’t even have aim.


4. QuickSplit exists within my danger parameters. The blade comes down slowly; it’s not a guillotine, and I’m a whole lever away. Unlike my issues with the axe.


5. I can see the pile of split logs growing and growing and growing! Yes, this might be a do-over-and-over-again chore, but there is now a mountain of split logs. I am not the one who’ll do it over-and-over-again; and I am helping friends not to have to do it over-and-over-again as soon.


6. At one point, QuickSplit stopped working. Uh, oh. I broke it. But Connie showed me the little doohickey that swings the ratcheting thing back into position. So now, I KNEW QuickSplit; I was knowledgeable and experienced. Always good feelings.


7. Sometimes, the log was extra dense and I needed lots of force on the lever. Then I’d have to JUMP UP and PUSH down with everything I’ve got. I love my brute force.

8. It was sunny, gorgeous, and I was being the little squirrel preparing for winter. I was not waiting till it rained to repair the roof; I was being READY. Something in me felt … righteous.

After a long while, after the wood shed was starting to bulge, I stopped splitting. But then I noticed some newly-chopped log rounds just winking at me, begging to be split. It’s hard to quit when you’re having such a good time.

Lessons of the Chilkoot Trail #2

Two hours into the Chilkoot Trail, we stopped for a snack break. I sat in a lovely spot under a tree … in a pool of sap. My pants were a sticky mess, soaking through to my underwear. When I pulled them down to go to the bathroom, it tore from my skin like duct tape. For the rest of the trip, I carried bits of the Trail with me, stuck to my pants.

This was not a problem on the Trail. This was a “funny anecdote.”

The river had reached flood stage and the ranger warned us at the outset that waters were waist high. Fortunately, by the time we got to the worst part, the river had crested and people had laid out planks of wood to traverse the miles-long swamp. We had to climb over rickety debris to figure out the next path through the muck, tilting and turning, stretching to reach the next foothold. One false step and we’d be soaked and filthy.

This was not a problem on the Trail. This was an adventure. We called it the “jungle gym.”

The last thing on my to-do list before going was to sew and secure the buckle on my backpack. I didn’t get to it. After stopping at our first camp, Gwen approached me with a found buckle: mine! The trip would have been impossible without it.

This was a potential problem on the Trail that didn’t materialize.

The Trail includes a long suspension bridge. My fear of heights rose up and lodged in my throat. The bridge swayed, the slats looked rickety, the river below roared. I had to keep moving and force my way forward. Somewhere in the middle, I thought I’d throw up, but then I’d have to lean over the side or look through the slats. I made it over. I have steely resolve, after all.

This was a problem that foreshadowed a far bigger problem: the Golden Stairs.

When I'd looked at the pictures of the stampeders going over the Golden Stairs in winter, all lined up, it didn’t look bad: they were standing on two legs, there were a lot of them in a line. That’s winter, when 1,500 steps were cut in the snow. This is summer, when there are only boulders up the steep, 35-to-45-degree slope with orange wands planted intermittently so you can find your way.

This is what you have to do to climb the Golden Stairs: you reach up with your hand and find a stable boulder that holds its position. You search your feet around to find supports for them. You look ahead for the wand. Sometimes your head can’t lift because a jutting boulder blocks your pack; you have to reposition with a shifting 37-pound pack on your back. At all costs, you DO NOT look down. Your whole world is just your next step: choose a rock, test it, step up, fight off fear, don’t look down. Choose a rock, test it, fight off fear.

Hysteria nipped at my psyche. By then, I knew I was nimble and strong. On any other rocks, I would be scrambling like a monkey, sure-footed in my trusty, beloved new boots, but here I was high up on a steep slope.

I made it to the first false summit. There are three. It levels off for a bit so I calmed because now I couldn’t fall the whole way down anymore. Then it started raining. Then I became trapped behind a guide and an extremely fearful, slow-moving woman. Then the wind picked up.

The summit is less than halfway on that day’s hike, and there’s a hut at the top. I’m sure I read something once about a ranger there, about hot chocolate. It turned out to be a freezing closet that could barely hold eight people. When my teeth started chattering, I knew I had to get going. The next camp is four miles away over more difficult rock scrambling; shifting, eroding paths on the steep edges of water; hazardous creeks and icy snowfields to negotiate; yes, beautiful wildflowers and waterfalls.

It took 11 hours to go the eight miles from Sheep Camp to Happy Camp.

I walked into Happy Camp and two women offered me hot tea. “Do you have a cup?”

I stared. Cup?

“Here, use our bowl.”

After three bowls, I set up the tent in the pouring rain. Later, when Barbara and I were lying in the tent, she asked, “What exactly was the point?”

Tomorrow, the point. Or not.

Lessons of the Chilkoot Trail #1

Before I left for the Chilkoot Trail, friends described it to me as four days of hiking and one arduous day for the ascent of the Golden Stairs. At the end of the trip, Lee said in order to understand arduous, you’d have to re-think hard as if it were easy. Personally, I prefer grueling, but because it also involved fear, I’d add harrowing.

You can tell this whole experience is going to require some processing as I write about it. The lessons I took away – things I learned about myself – are multi-layered.

We were six women ages 60 to 70, and every one of us made it through safely and without mishap. I shared a tent with another Barbara, who regaled me with her summations of each day. At the end of the trip, Barbara said that when people will congratulate her for finishing, she’ll say, “It was the trip of a lifetime. Let me tell you all about it so you won’t have to do it.” The bottom line: if I were to advise visitors to Alaska, I would NOT send them on the Chilkoot Trail. I wouldn’t send myself.

Around this point, Cheryl would shout at our tent, “Stop introspecting! It was a great hike! I’ll come back in a couple of years and do it again.” And if you’re Cheryl – the only one of us who’d done it before – TWICE before – you’d be an energetic spark plug who simply loves the movement, the activity, the effort, the terrain, the rocks, the creeks, the sheer adventure of it all. There is no doubt that Cheryl thrives on this, and it was a pleasure and inspiration to hike with her.

What I love about backpacking:

• I love being in air that has not sat inside walls. I love the freshness and openness.
• I love having all that I need contained on my back.
• I love the simplicity of living minimally, wearing the same clothes for five days, not brushing my hair, having no chores outside of the ones on the trail.
• I love not being reachable by the outside world.
• I love sleeping in a tent where I am protected from mosquitoes and rain and feel utterly and completely safe.
• I love wildflowers, leafy foliage, babbling brooks, pretty rocks, the hugeness and awesomeness of Nature.
• I love feeling my own strength and fitness.

The Chilkoot Trail had all this plus history. Blueberries littered the bushes till it looked like blue jewels had been flung around. On one path, there were so many blue and green stones it looked like a blue Yellow Brick Road. Creeks and waterfalls and lakes just sparkled. Forests were magical, with rock punctuating every landscape. Dubbed the longest museum, rusty artifacts from the Klondike stampeders littered the path. The terrain was varied, shifting from rock to water to spruce to snow and back again, and it was exciting to follow a trail with cairns, steps cut into stone, and an improvised “jungle gym” (more about that later).

Before the trip, I was worried about my physical stamina. I didn’t know if I could DO IT – travel the 33 miles uphill with a 37-pound pack on my back. Within five minutes, I knew that was no problem. I literally scampered along the trail.

Lesson Learned #1: I am fit, powerful, and strong. I have physical strength and stamina as a product of the way I live and exercise. I can lay that question to rest. I don’t need to test myself on that anymore.

Before the trip, I prepared. I measured what I ate on camping trips, registering what amounts left me full and satisfied. I figured out how to package things so they’d be easy to pull out meal by meal. Because all trash has to be packed out on the Chilkoot, I minimized waste and packaging. I experimented and figured out how to keep my Wheat Thins unbroken and unsoggy! I took Tim’s sleeping bag to save 10 ounces, borrowed Mary’s tent and Thermarest because they were lighter.

I could do all this because Joan handled all the paperwork: registration for the Trail, permits for our campgrounds, hotel reservations before and after, train tickets for the return – even lunch on the train! She is a logistical wonder.

Lesson Learned #2: I am a diligent preparer. Not overly familiar with backpacking, I asked advice, aimed for minimizing weight, maximizing convenience and taste, and it worked! I came back with only eight ounces of a spare meal.

Lesson Learned #3: I have steely resolve. At the end of the Trail, when Joan described our state as being “depleted,” we realized that if we suddenly had to hike five more miles, we’d do it. We do what has to be done. Period. We six women are six tough cookies. On the trail – in life – we do what has to be done. Period. We may have known this before, but the Chilkoot Trail reaffirmed it.

All these valuable lessons, with beautiful Nature – what wasn’t pleasant? What lesson did I learn that means I don’t need any more Chilkoot Trails in my life?

That’s tomorrow.

Pushing Ourselves Uphill

Over the July 4th weekend, we rode our bikes to the Girdwood Forest Fair, a little over eight miles on the “Bird to Gird” path. I ride a one-speed with coaster brakes, the only kind of bike I’ve ever had. (I’ve done triathlons with that bike. People laugh. Did I mention that it has a big basket on the back?) Coming back from the Fair, I used to walk my bike up the relentless uphill. Then, about ten years ago, I started riding the bike up. Somehow, I’d gotten stronger. Now, it’s what I do.

Except this year. This year, I became convinced I wasn’t strong or fit enough. Heading out, I noticed all the downhill, thinking, Oh, no, that’s the uphill I won’t be able to do. So on the way back, I steeled myself, grit my teeth, groaned and pushed and sweat and got that stupid bike up the #!*&!# hill.

All the while, I was thinking, “No one has a gun to your head. You can stop anytime and walk the #!*&!# bike. You can just stop, get down, and walk.” My heart was racing, sweat was pouring, and I thought, “You’re going to have a #!*&!# heart attack and yet you won’t stop and walk the stupid bike.”

I didn’t have a heart attack. I got up the hill and continued biking along. Did I have some incredible feeling of accomplishment, of pride, of relief? No, mostly I was trying to figure out what gun I had to my own head.

Do you know this feeling? Is it about facing down some age-related decline, some fear of mortality that’s fueling this doggedness? Is it about having some notion of my capabilities and not wanting to see them wane? Or is it just pigheadedness and tenacity looking for a target?

Years ago, I wrote and performed in two one-woman plays. After publicity was already out and tickets already sold, I panicked. Not only was I portraying some personally revealing subject matter, but I was doing it on-stage with lines I had to memorize. Memorizing those lines became a trauma for me. I distinctly remember saying, “Nobody put a gun to my head. Why on earth did I sign up to do this harrowing thing?!” I was consumed with terror at the thought of forgetting my lines on a stage with no safety net.

In the end, I made it without a problem, but only after the fact: each night, I was positive on-stage humiliation loomed.

In two weeks, five other women and I hike the Chilkoot Trail. I have not trained as much as I’d like specifically for that so I’m just POSITIVE I’m missing some vast storehouse of strength and fitness, and I’m worrying about it even though a few weeks ago, I ran my annual half-marathon. (Yes, I can run a half-marathon and still worry about whether I’m fit or not. I can come in fourth in my age group and still worry about it.)

Before any race, I am never sure I’ll pull it off. This time, on the way to the start line, the sun was shining and it cast my shadow in front of me. That shadow – that person – looked really fit. She swung her arms, had a zip in her step – she was really strong. She knew she’d finish well. At some point, I made the connection: that shadow was me. I could be that person. I relaxed and ran my happiest half-marathon yet.

Yes, in my Third Third I have skills and capabilities that I don’t even question. I tackle plenty of things that cause me no angst. But on the ones I have self-doubt about, I have to struggle to entertain a positive outcome, to believe that I am strong enough or capable enough or resourceful enough to pull off whatever it is. And yet I sign on for these things!

What I ask of my Third Third is that I’ve learned something. Maybe wisdom, maybe just insight – so elusive! But now I have two thoughts that I’m trying to internalize for the challenge of the Chilkoot Trail:

• The Chilkoot Trail is a plodding kind of trail. It’s meant to be a walk uphill. There is no timing chip, just one foot in front of the other. Metaphorically, I can get off the #!*&!# bike.


• If the sun shines, I can find my shadow and follow her to the finish.