Friday, 7 October, 2016

Oct.7/2016

Another disappointing day. I remember yesterday as being pretty good. Work went well and when I got home, Nick and I made some zucchini bread together. Actually he grated the zucchini and I did the rest.
As usual, Nick got out of bed in the middle of the night and either went to sleep in one of the other bedrooms, usually he goes to the one his daughter Alexa sleeps in when she is here, or he went downstairs to sit at the computer. He spends a lot of his time doing that.
So I dragged myself out of bed, giving myself just enough time to shower and get dressed and get out of the house, leaving a few moments to grab a bag of green tomatoes, some cucumbers and two zucchini to take along to work with me. We planted a huge garden and have tons more produce than the two of us could ever use, or even give away to family to enjoy. Nick insists that we keep it all and gets angry if I let him know I am planning to give anything away. But the previous two harvests were either left in the garden to rot or freeze, or were picked and left around in the porch to shrivel and dry up. So this year I have resolved just to put up with his protestations. This morning he announced that next year we wouldn't be bothering with a large garden if we were going to continue to give most of it away. I will admit he does a lot of the work getting the garden ready, but I do nearly all of the weeding and I have done all of the picking each year. But then, like everything else around here, he loses interest and the job or project is left half-done and is never finished or even put away for another day. It just sits where it was started.
I arrived at work, which I enjoy, I guess maybe because I get to return the land of sane and logical thinking, in the company of rational and well-adjusted, average people. I get to escape from the cloak of oppression and sharpened daggers of the place I call home. Then my cell phone pinged mid-morning. I glanced at the screen to see the name of the sender, unfortunately it was Nick. Sometimes I got lucky and it was one of my daughters or less often one of my sisters, but usually it was Nick with some comment or question that would suck all the air out from under my sails and leave me  swirling in the middle my ocean surrounded by sharks. I would invariably spend the rest of the next few hours distracted and distressed. You would think by now I might have learned to shove all these interruptions into a box and blow them to smithereens, but I have yet to figure out how that is done.
The text on my phone was asking me if I had let anyone drive Nick's car last night, which I had had at work with me. We had discussed this the other day. I had taken the Chrysler to work today and obviously he was driving his car and something was wrong with it. Something else in addition to what he had discovered was damaged a few days ago.

But I managed to have a good day somehow anyhow. Until I turned down our driveway and saw the lights still on in the barn. It was almost nine thirty at night which meant he was behind schedule. I went out to say hi to the horses and let Nick know I was home. I then packed a couple more bags of tomatoes to take to work and I went into the garage to take a chicken out of the freezer. He yelled at me from the barn, asking what I was doing. I don't lie to him, although I wish I could and often I think I probably should. I knew how he felt about giving away any of the food we had raised to anyone besides family but I admitted I was taking a chicken to give to a customer because she couldn't afford a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner and I had decided I would surprise her with a gift of poultry. So of course we argued like we always do.

The house was still in the state of disarray it had been in the morning when I left. The turkey he had cooked three nights before was still sitting on top of the stove in the roasting pan. I was annoyed and depressed, as I often became upon arriving home after work.

He started getting his array of vitamins ready and then he paused, with his arms on either side of the counter above the cupboard and his head bowed down in a posture of defeat.
I asked him what was wrong. Sometimes I just ignore him when he does this and sometimes I am not smart enough to keep my mouth shut.He picked up the bottle of fish oil capsules, and told me that over one hundred of them had gone missing a couple of weeks ago. I chose to ignore the comment and sort of gave a disinterested grunt. I walked over to the turtle tank and started to feed them. This usually cheered me up. Until he announced that one third of the turtle food had also disappeared. I knew where this was going.

Nick had installed video cameras throughout the house and the property, carefully situated to survey every point of entry to the house or barn or any part of the central area of the main yard. I reminded him of this, to which he replied that there was no camera in the actual kitchen itself.
The camera was in the hallway and viewed the entrance to the kitchen. The implication was that these things had been taken from the kitchen without anyone of interest being caught on video. The implication was as it always was, that it was I who had taken these things and that they were now in the possession of someone else.