Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - Poor Me

The Amazon Trail

Poor Me

          My sweetheart and I are on extreme ends of the country right now, for very practical and very temporary reasons. I’m trying to keep the house clean, the animals content without their adored other person, and feed myself.

          Last year I had treatments that released me from my allergy to corn products. I can go wild foraging in previously verboten aisles of the food co-op. If I so choose, I can have breakfast, lunch and dinner at McDonalds. I could eat nothing but popcorn and ice cream made of corn syrup. But without my sweetheart, I have no appetite.

          She is an outstanding cook. It’s certainly not the only reason I am heartsick without her, but when she takes out her beloved mom’s recipe book and whips up Pork Chops Liegoise with gruyere cheese and Dijon mustard, or her amazing Bread Pudding recipe, redolent of cinnamon and vanilla, which appears in The Butch Cook Book, I am so happy I get all teary-eyed.

          On my own it’s ramen noodles with frozen turnip greens and diced turnips (two nights ago) or matzos with butter (last night). For the first week and a half she was gone I ate a bean soup I made with the recipe on the Bob’s Red Mill dried bean package.  One night I took two pieces of two-week old rosemary sourdough we brought home from a restaurant, added cheddar cheese, stuck it in the microwave and immediately forgot it. Later, I gnawed what I could of my rock hard dinner. The next day I made an appointment with the dentist to replace the filling I broke on that bread. It was one expensive doggy bag, but the actual doggy delighted in it. I may apply for a pet food patent: “Doggy Bag Cheese Bread.”

          My thrill, on this lone Valentine’s Day, consisted of an iced tea and a soft serve cone at McDonalds. I stopped there on my way home from the dentist’s office after dental emergency number two. I’d eaten muesli at breakfast – something healthy – and a crown came off.

On the other coast, my sweetheart eats prepackaged oatmeal for supper. I found a box of 50 at the restaurant supply store and send a few each week in a care package. Fifty? she’s going to say when she finds out. They come in flavors: maple and brown sugar, apple and cinnamon, cinnamon and spices and just plain oatmeal. Hmm, sounds good. Maybe I’ll have one for dinner tonight.

So food is not filling the void of Without Her, but I’m not going to starve to death. We talk on the phone at least once a day and the emails fly back and forth. Between times, when I’m not working at my job, or writing, or giving meds to the pets or seeing the dentist (three times now and another appointment coming up), she left me something to keep me company: a Kindle.

I should be one of those folks who say, it’s not the same as a book and, passionately, I love the feel of a book in my hands. Although I’m not likely to stop reading and collecting real paper books, these e-readers and tablets are the future. I don’t want to be run over in the digital stampede. There will be books and there will be electronic devices and possibly other mediums for stories. There were, after all, once no books at all, only oral tales.

My sweetheart could not have timed this gift better. After work, I settle at the kitchen table with some food-like concoction or other, and I drown out the pangs of missing her with stories from my Kindle. I avoid breaking the household bank by borrowing e-books from the library. (Confession: I did give her a great big cream-colored faux-fur throw to keep her company.)

       Holding a book is comforting and satisfying until the day when you’re reading and your hands get shooting pains and your finger joints ache. For a person with arthritis, a lesbian who wants to keep her hands nimble and functional, this basic Kindle is a little miracle. Hardcover books get heavier as I grow older. Holding a paperback open with one hand makes me wonder if the arthritis comes from doing just that since childhood. Holding a lightweight e-reader is sheer pleasure.

       And so, while she bravely eats her oatmeal across the continent, I fill my sweetheart-less days with work, find excitement in a Subway sandwich on Saturday nights Without Her, and plunge into the worlds where my little toy reader, light as popcorn, takes me.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2013

February 2013

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - Handy? Man?

The Amazon Trail

            Handy? Man?

I’ve never had much use for straight men other than my big brother, but I’m learning they have their uses.

My friend the handydyke turned 80 and gave away her tools. She has a contractor now, but he’s much too busy to work at odd jobs. So the manager of our development recommended a guy who loves doing just that. We’re on such a home improvement tear, he’s practically living with us.

A retired fisherman, Roley could have been anything. I picture him as a gentle teacher, maybe shop, maybe math, or as a die-hard surfer or – Instead, at age 70, he is putting up shelving and installing a doggy door at our house.

Actually, he’ll install a kitty door, as our little Mini Foxie is afraid of dog doors. Or maybe isn’t smart enough to figure them out. At the Handydyke and Pianist’s house, the dog sat and watched over a couple of years while the other dogs came and went through a dog-sized flap. She’d stare like a muggle at the train station, wondering where Harry Potter and his pals went.

In any case, Roley the Handyman is in our closets marking the walls, tapping for studs, drilling, attaching brackets and borrowing my tools. Or else he’s off buying materials. Sometimes he calls a couple of hours after leaving to pick up materials and asks if it’s too late to come back to work.  His lady friend lives down the street so I know where to find him.

Forty plus years they’ve been together, in separate homes, and here my sweetheart and I are, thrilled to be married and cohabiting. Kind of ironic, kind of fun, having the tables turned this way.

The house, of course, is a mess. We’re also downsizing during this transition and I actually turned down an offer of a bookcase from an ex who is also downsizing.  Who would have thought I’d still be dividing property with former lovers decades later? Though I was tempted to reunite the her & her bookcases, I remembered that my sweetheart and I already have 42 of our own.

Since Roley’s moved into our closets, we’ve dragged our “wardrobes” out. The house is not that big, so we’re sharing space with, besides the dog and cats, heaps of jackets, pants, t-shirts, my sweetheart’s dresses, my vests and a nightmare of tangled hangers. It’s kind of like living in a used clothes shop or a Salvation Army store, though Sally’s Army wouldn’t like that. Roley and his lady friend would be okay, but not lady lovers like us.

He’s also strengthened the bars in our closets. What a surprise: they were overloaded to the point of pulling out of the walls. I wish I was the kind of person who traveled light, but when I hit a certain age, I started growing, and not in a good way. I finally got rid of my size 28 jeans and men’s small shirts, but I’m hanging on for dear life to the 34s and larges with great optimism.

It may be time to stop collecting favorite things. Or not. I could ask Roley to put up narrow shelves for my toy cars. They haven’t been on display since I lived with my ex-bookcase. Back then, I had the energy and patience to do my own projects.

If only I was the kind of person who could leave things behind, and not save for tomorrow. I’m the child of depression parents. Like my mother, I’ve taken to making balls of used string and folding paper bags neatly, ritually, because I might need them some vague day.  Although I squander thread – Grandma Lynch would consider that a crime – I’m the kind of person who’s always afraid of running out – of words, of pet food, of safety in a county that just voted down domestic partner rights for everyone, gay or not..

The oddest part of working with Roley is how very much he reminds me of my friend the sailor who, when I first moved to the Southern Oregon women’s community, was the local handydyke. The sailor and Roley are both tall and thin, with weathered, handsome faces. More than that, they move exactly alike, always in rush-forward motion, with long quick steps, figuring aloud, gesticulating with tools and frequently in search of misplaced measuring tapes, small bags of nails or big orange loops of electrical cord.

The handyman is back, after an extended lunch hour. He’s putting up my sweetheart’s shelves for her collection of shoes and other femme essentials. He’s courteous, honest, respectful, non-judgmental and not at all sexist. Can a straight man really be as nice as a handydyke?  Will his shelves hold up till my sweetheart and I can marry in as many states as Roley and his lady friend?

Copyright Lee Lynch 2013