All you can eat

Walhydra was at loose ends on Memorial Day, because Hubby Jim was (as usual) using a day off to...um...work as much as usual.

To his credit, she admits, JimJim has been pushing himself intensely for several years now in order to get the research grants and publish the research papers which will allow him—they both hope—to rise above the Slough of Despond, otherwise known as "teaching freshman statistics to root vegetables."

But, still...another long weekend of being a faculty "widow." Ah, well....

So, early that Monday afternoon, Walhydra decided that she would head out to her favorite place for grounding with nature, the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve on Fort George Island.

She discovered this marvelous place about a decade ago, one summer day when she was desparately in need of...well, if you must know... someplace to be skyclad outdoors, away from people and work and the city.

This out-of-the way island of live oaks, magnolias, pines, marsh grass and hiking trails suits fairly well, though it isn't quite as imposing or remote from residents and visitors as her old South Carolina escape, the Congaree Swamp, with its giant lob lolly pines and wide, slow river and ponds.

As a plus, though, Timucuan delights Walhydra's bright naturalist nephew with its giant banana spider webs, hung from pine tree to pine tree, and its huge burrowing gopher turtles.

Actually, on this particular holiday, Walhydra did not intend to go skyclad. In fact, she wore long sleeves and cargo pants, so that she could carry her toy Canon and make a stab at doing nature photography.

Her first objective was a "hidden" pond she has found, away from the paths and through a pine woods full of—you guessed it—banana spider webs. She knew that blue herons and kingfishers and egrets often gathered there, and she hoped to try out her camera on them.

Unfortunately, by the end of May, the overgrowth around the pond was so thick that she couldn't get down to its banks before the birds had all heard her and flown away.

She did manage a few shots of those water plants who could not flee her clumsiness. A little disappointing, but at least a start.

Next Walhydra wandered among the live oaks, her favorite friends. Long before Crow and Wolf became totems for her, trees spoke powerfully to Walhydra. The dance of their branches as she walks by stirs a sympathetic rhythm within her, and embracing them is like embracing the veins of the earth.

Of course, in the mundane world of two-dimensional photography, Walhydra is still such a tyro that she doesn't yet know how to capture the visual depth and rhythms she sees. Something to aspire to, though this image gives merely a hint.

Walhydra's best luck came when she decided to sit down in the scattered oak and magnolia leaves and to focus her Canon on the details. Complex patterns in nature have always been the most fascinating to her. Again, it's partly the intricacy of visual rhythms. She loves to "read the score" as her eye moves across such patterns, feeling the music inside.

For this reason, when Walhydra sat down cross-legged on the warm forest floor, her eye was immediately drawn to the overlapping patterns of leaves and shadows on the ground.

This is what Walhydra loves and wants to share, what she longs to be able to portray more richly. The image above is at least a start...though she doesn't quite feel in it the magic of that moment when she first saw the fern shadow.

In any case, the expedition was a success, in the sense that Walhydra returned to town renewed and ready...well, not really...to return to work after the holiday weekend.

Until Tuesday afternoon. When her ankles began to itch. And her shins. And the backs of her knees. And....

A little eyeballing revealed that Walhydra was covered with dozens of what looked like bug bites.

"Oy! I don't remember feeling anything biting me," she said.

The itching wasn't uncomfortable, so she feigned Buddhist equanimity ("Damned bugs!") and went back to work. That night, calamine lotion made no difference in the itching.

By Wednesday afternoon, the spots were raised and larger and itching more, so Walhydra decided to go to the doctor...just in case....

Here's where the rant comes in.

(The faithful reader, one assumes, was wondering when the rant would come in.)

For almost a decade, Walhydra has been going to an excellent Advanced Practice Registered Nurse in her GP's office, a cheery guy named Matt. Matt is not only open to real conversation about symptoms, differential diagnosis and treatment options, he is very comfortable talking about the medically relevant aspects of a long-term gay marriage.

Unfortunately, last month Matt moved to Florida's Gulf coast. He and his wife, who both grew up on farms, recently adopted five brothers, and they wanted to give them the blessing of country life. Matt had finally found a farm and an APRN practice. Wonderful for him, of course, but it left Walhydra with....

...maybe she should just call him "Dr. X," since he ought to be ashamed to be identified.

From the start, Dr. X seemed bored.

He didn't seem interested in even looking at Walhdyra's spots. When she began sharing details—where she had been, what she had done, what it might be—Dr. X hummed and hawwed. Instead, he started running through his own checklist of symptoms and possible causes, as if she hadn't even told him anything.

This was annoying, but since Walhydra had already decided to find a different clinic now that Matt was gone, she put up with it.

Then Dr. X glanced at Walhydra's chart.

"Oh. How recently have you had an HIV test?" he asked. "Given your life style...."

Wrong!

"I don't need an HIV test. I was negative ten years ago, and neither of us have outside partners."

Unperturbed, Dr. X ploughed ahead. Before long he said life style again.

Walhydra interrupted.

"Just a moment, Doctor. You keep using that phrase 'life style.' This is not a life style. This is a twenty-six-year long gay marriage."

"Marriage. Is that what it's called? Are you sure that...?"

Walhydra became very cool.

"We've been a married couple since 1985. It's not an issue."

"Well, this sort of thing could have come from some sort of 'exposure' to STDs, maybe a hotel room you 'stayed in' for one night."

The session was over, as far as Walhydra was concerned, except that she did want medical treatment.

Things degenerated quickly. Dr. X's prescribed Prednisone and Hydroxyzine for generic "exposure dermatitis," told Walhdyra to come back in a week, and muttered something about further testing if the "rash" didn't go away.

Walhydra drove off, fuming.

"If I could write scrips, I could have picked out those two drugs myself.

"What! Does he think Kaposi's sarcoma can pop up overnight...a quarter of a century after exposure?

"What an A-hole!"

The meds worked, fortunately, and Walhydra got a lot of mileage out of ranting about Dr. X.

Then, on Friday afternoon, drinking beer in the front yard of her best buddy neighbors, the pest control guy and his wife, she rolled up her pants leg to show them the bites. Now no longer itching, but large and bright red.

"Chiggers!" Mr. Pest Control said immediately.

Walhydra slapped her forehead.

"Oh, course! I didn't think of that. I haven't dealt with chiggers since my childhood in Ohio...way back in another century."

"They love Spanish moss."

"Duh! I was sitting in dead leaves and Spanish moss for almost hour."

"Well, that explains it," Mrs. Pest Control chimed in. "They definitely made a buffet of you."

Walhydra nodded ruefully.

"Yeah, an all-you-can-eat buffet."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

I love you, Jim

James Urban Gleaton, Jr.
and
Michael Austin Shell

Marriage Under the Care of Columbia Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

Saturday, December 17, 1994
Saturnalia
Full Oak Moon

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Tying the knot

Well, Walhydra and Hubby Jim are going the long way around, step by step, to make each other legal...no thanks DOMA and that wimpy, people-pleasing excuse for a liberal, Bill Clinton, who signed it.

Walhydra won't repeat her whole marriage rant, since you can find it here.

Even so, Walhydra says she resents having to find a lawyer, pay $600, and go through weeks of gyrations for two sets of six documents, in order to even approximate what any two heterosexual fools can do cheap with a license and a justice of the peace...even by accident.

Anyway,...yesterday morning, sometime around 10:30 am, Walhydra and JimJim met in front of their lawyer and two witnesses and each signed a Last Will and Testament, a Letter of Escrow Instruction, a Durable Power of Attorney for Property (and a backup, in case the designated attorney-in-fact is incapable of acting), a Health Care Surrogate Designation, and a Living Will.

How romantic....

Feeling a bit safer now, nonetheless, since they can take care of each other in hospital and inherit from each other, Walhydra says, "It still doesn't count as marriage."

She and Jim became a couple in 1985.

They were married under the care of their Quaker Meeting in 1994.

But they are still having to look for and plug loopholes, one by one, in order to protect each other as a family.

Feeling somewhat like the surly librarian she usually is, Walhydra instructs her readers to do their own research, for a change:

"Look up all the benefits that married couples get in your own municipality and state, as well as all the Federal benefits. Don't forget about all the retail discounts and give-aways and other special offers for married couples. Look it up!"

Meanwhile, Walhydra is happy. She and her Sweety are getting cuddlier by the minute.

And vacation calls.

Blessèd Be, despite it all.

Happy Anniversary

Full Oak Moon Saturnalia, December 17, 1994

Marriage under the care of
Columbia (SC) Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

There's more to the story, of course.

It keeps getting better.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Bless the Sunday New York Times

Walhydra is not usually one to read the Styles section of the Sunday New York Times—except out of curiosity.

Being a scrupulous Virgo, she makes every effort not to appear to care whether people think she is stylish, well-groomed or whatever...even though she tends to trim her moustache using a micrometer.

However, this morning, after the traditional 7 AM Sunday-champagne-on-the-porch with Joe and Nancy, the neighborhood houseparents across the street, Walhydra was moved to cook a Real Breakfast for herself and still snoring hubby Jim.

[Note: Being a Leo, JimJim, like any true cat, tries to sleep for at least 18 hours a day.]

Real Breakfast means driving to Publix—beware the champagne euphoria, please—to get the Times, free-range eggs, portabello mushrooms, butter, capers, majoram, fresh mangoes and blackberries, brewing fresh coffee (French press, of course), and whipping up omelettes and fruit on the side for her honey.

Yum!

Walhydra's reward for this was that hubby Jim actually read a whole, marvelous article for her, Cindy Chupack's Modern Love column, "An Ancient Coda to My 21st-Century Divorce."

[Cindy Chupack is the author of The Between Boyfriends Book. This essay is adapted from the anthology Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, to be published this month by Dutton.]

Being a writer, Walhydra wants to respect the intellectual property rights of Ms. Chupack (and the Times), so she won't repost the whole piece here. Nonetheless, she has to show you some bits that made the Sunday-breakfast-at-home-with-my-gay-hubby morning even more of a delight.

I WAS finally getting married. That’s what I kept telling people. I didn’t say I was finally getting married “again,” because bringing up a first marriage during the planning of a second is a major buzz kill for everyone involved....

And I didn’t want to hang that cloud over my fiancé, Ian, because this was his first wedding (another term I didn’t like, because it implied he may have a second). So we tried not to talk about first or second anythings until our meeting with the rabbi.

Ian called our rabbi “the hot rabbi” because she was young and hip and, well, hot. I didn’t mind his calling her hot. In fact, I found it reassuring, because it was yet another indication that Ian was not gay. Above all, I wanted to avoid publicly declaring my love for someone only to have him later realize he’s gay. Again.

Yes, O.K., so that’s what happened the first time, and that’s what I told the hot rabbi when she asked if either of us had been married before.

She blinked, and nodded — appropriately unfazed. Then she asked, “Was he Jewish?”

This seemed like a moot point to me, but I told her yes, he was....

Among the most remarkable things about [my new hubby Ian] was that after hearing my story, he remained straight.

During the divorce process I was toying with stand-up comedy, and my friend and fellow comic Rob had been endlessly fascinated by my story, asking: “What were the signs? How did he tell you?”

A year later, Rob came out, forcing me to see, in retrospect, that for him the hero of my story was my husband.

At a Hollywood party, I told my story to a cute guy I thought was flirting with me only to learn that he already was married. To a man. He explained that he had never even dated men until he met his husband while traveling abroad.

Then I told that story to my friend who was the host of the party, and he confessed that he was bisexual, which he said was often difficult for potential partners to comprehend. For example, he asked, how would I feel about dating him?

When I realized his question was not rhetorical, I blushed and declined.

Then I told that story to a male friend I knew to be straight, and he also confessed he was thinking of dating men, but after coming out to his stunned parents and trying a couple of gay relationships, he decided he was more interested in women, and he’s now married to a woman who had previously considered herself a lesbian.

My feeling, at this point, when everyone’s sexuality seemed to be in flux, was simply: Pick a side! I’m fine with it all! Just declare a major!

Ms. Chupack proceeds to tell the story of catching up with her ex...because the "hot rabbi" said she ought to get a get, a Jewish divorce decree, so that her potential children by her new hubby would not be considered illegitimate.

The rest of the story is a beautiful affirmation of gay marriage by this bright straight woman, but Walhydra will leave the gentle reader to view it at length. She'll just give you one more short selection:

It’s not often a girl has the chance to have lunch with the man she thought she would have children with and the man he had them with, but the truth is, they were a pretty perfect family without me.

I had met my ex-husband’s partner at a Christmas party years earlier and liked him immediately. He was handsome, smart, kind and funny, and whether it was accurate or not, I found it flattering to imagine that he was the male version of me.

Now they’d adopted two beautiful boys. As I watched my ex-husband juggle juice boxes and crayons and children’s menus, he smiled and warned: “Get ready.”

As a bonus, Walhydra herself stumbled onto this other piece in the same Styles section: Bob Morris' The Age of Dissonance article, "Global Yawning." Here's the first part of it:

I was running errands the other day when a pleasant young woman with a clipboard tried to stop me. “Do you have a moment for the environment, sir?” she asked.

“No,” I barked as I evaded her, “I don’t!”

I felt guilty, but also vindicated. I mean, of course I have a moment for the environment. Saying you’re not for the environment right now is like saying you’re not for education, children, world peace, Africa or a cure for cancer. These days you would have to be a fool or a lobbyist to dismiss global warming and natural resource issues.

But is it possible that all this marketing is cheapening the cause?

Must every hotel, restaurant, shampoo, detergent and beverage that is environmentally responsible talk so much about it? Yuban “sustainable development” coffee. Paul Mitchell “protecting our planet for generations to come.” Levi’s Eco jeans.

How much green-standing can we stand? It’s enough hot air to melt Antarctica.

In no time, an inconvenient truth has become an obnoxious one.

But from what I can see, there’s as much selling as thinking going on.

Read it.

And enjoy the day.

Blessèd Be.

Till death do us, etc.

Walhydra has never understood all the flap about same-sex marriage. Of course, this could be partly due to having been reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.

“That has nothing to do with it!” she snaps. “As far as I’m concerned, the real problem is that most people have the ridiculous notion marriage is about sex!”

She glares briefly toward the left wing of her audience. “And that includes queer people. It’s ridiculous! Marriage isn’t about sex. It’s about kinship.”

Being a Virgo, Walhydra figures that in a reasonable world that pronouncement would settle the matter. Since she’s dealing with human beings, though, she knows that she’s going to have to explain.

“Look,” she says, feigning patience. “Anybody can have sex without getting married. They can even have on-going affairs, lifelong relationships—families, for Goddess’ sake!—without being married. But….”

Now she glares toward the right wing of her audience. “If they want their chosen kinship to be acknowledged and affirmed publicly, if they want their families to be honored and protected by the government, they HAVE TO GET MARRIED!”

Walhydra actually wants to stomp away at this point. It infuriates her that any society would even need “the arm of the state” in order to protect kinship.

“In a sane world,” she insists, “people would be glad to take a couple’s word for it when they said they intended to put up with all the hassles and grief of taking care of each other for years on end. People would rush to celebrate and support them, do everything possible to help them stay together.”

Walhydra sighs deeply. “Instead…, instead…. It just doesn’t make any sense!” She sits down abruptly and waves at everyone to go away.

Walhydra has had marriage on the mind for several weeks, every since her mother, Senior Witch, found a picture from the wedding of Walhydra’s younger brother back in 1986.

Walhydra immediately recognized the gorgeous bearded guy on the right as hubby Jim. She pretends not to know the guy on the left.

“That’s me,” says the would-be writer.

“No. You’re not that young,” Walhydra smirks.

“Neither are you.”

[Slight timeout while the referee intercedes.]

The wedding picture was taken just a year after Walhydra and Jim did the “for better or worse” bit themselves in a private, mostly unspoken ceremony for two.

That mutual promise, in turn, came shortly after Walhydra’s two plus years of grad school and addictions counselor job search—during which, ever the single-minded, studious Virgo, she had failed to notice Jim’s patient, persistent courtship.

Once settled in her first outpatient treatment job in Charleston, SC, Walhydra sat on the floor of a friend’s house one evening, watching, of all things, Somewhere in Time. At one moment, she leaned back against the legs of Jim, who was on the sofa, and thought, “Oh! This is the man I want to spend my life with. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

This brave, brilliant, gentle man with the warm hands, whose Leo body and soul radiate blessing energy!

[Note: Hubby Jim, a convinced scientist, teases that he doesn’t believe in tantric energy or astrology. “Or reincarnation,” he says. “At least, not in this lifetime.”]

Walhydra and Jim went to her brother’s wedding determined to remain discreetly closeted, so a not to draw attention away from the publicly happy couple. Her brother took them from friend to friend throughout the day, saying, “This is my brother, and this is my brother’s, um….”

He confessed later that he kept wanting to say, “…my brother’s loveranddoyouwanttomakesomethingofit?!” Instead, what happened was that “my Um” became a family in-joke term for same-sex spouse.

Toward the end of their visit, Walhydra and hubby went to say goodbye to both of her grandmas, with whom they had been carefully practicing their discretion.

Senior Witch’s mother hugged each of them and said sweetly to Walhydra, “Now, you come and visit me—and be sure to bring Jim!”

Walhydra glanced sideways at her hubby and raised an eyebrow.

A few years earlier, Walhydra had giggled when she received in the mail from her other grandma the pair of carefully embroidered pillowcases. For years, Grandma had periodically reminded Walhydra, “I make a set for each of the grandchildren, for when they get married.” Smiling at the colorful Pennsylvania Dutch stitch work, Walhydra assumed Grandma had finally figured it out for herself.

Walhydra’s stepmother told her later that, during a visit, Grandma had gone snooping to learn why Walhydra wasn’t married yet. When she somehow found out, her wry comment was, “Well, that’s what I get for snooping.”

That was all she ever said about it. Years later, Walhydra and Jim attended Grandma’s big, Ohio farm family reunion, sleeping in the guest bed of one of Walhydra’s aunts. A few years later, they both attended Grandma’s funeral.

So...nine years into their private marriage—on the Full Oak Moon Saturnalia of 1994, to be overly exact—Walhydra and Jim were publicly married under the care of their large Quaker Meeting.

Eschewing clergy and outward sacraments, Quaker couples traditionally “marry each other,” before God and in the presence of all their fellow Quakers, family and friends. They say to each other the vows they have written for themselves and sign a non-secular marriage certificate. Then, after a silent worship during which anyone can speak blessings or prayers, everyone else present also signs the document.

At Walhydra and Jim’s wedding, their Meeting’s historian spoke to explain the significance of what the gathered body was doing.

“In the mid-1600s,” he said, “only marriages performed by the Church of England were legally recognized. As dissenters from the C of E, Quakers decided that they needed to document and witness publicly the vows of their married couples, in order to protect the kinship rights of those couples. This is what we are doing now for these two men, whose marriage we all affirm but our government refuses to acknowledge.”

Twenty-some years into her marriage, Walhydra remembers that moment fondly.

She wonders how it can be in America that, because of the dominant ideology of churches other than hers, the secular government refuses to protect a loving kinship which she and Jim still sustain “for better or worse.”

She snuggles into Jim's calm strength after another long, challenging trip to care for Senior Witch—who considers Jim to be one of her sons—and frowns.

“Oh, well…,” she says softly.

A kinder, gentler Walhydra?: In which drastic things happen, and we have to proceed without a road map

[Note from Walhydra's amanuensis: Here's a story written in 2003 for the Crone Thread listserv, about three years after Walhydra and hubby Jim moved to Florida. Although Walhydra complained at the time, the gentle reader may recognize some parallels with her confession in Walhydra's Convincement.]

Walhydra is having an identity crisis.

The fifty-something, queer, would-be writer she rides around in has discovered a new mindfulness practice which is "changing his life."

For decades he's known that he is a grouchy, critical, angry old soul. Yet, since childhood, he has been a master of the art of being polite and generous and affirming to people while cursing them behind their backs.

He can be "endlessly tolerant" of the demanding, obnoxious things people do in his presence. Behind the wheel, though, every too-fast driver on his bumper, every too-slow driver in front of him, every driver who creeps through the yellow to leave him on red, gets shot at with streaks of blue death. Likewise every object which obeys gravity at inopportune moments, every website which loads too slowly, every pen which runs out of ink before the end of....

"So what's wrong with that?" Walhydra inquires coyly. "A well-adjusted curmudgeon. A man after my own gallbladder."

Of course, Walhydra has been known to spend entire incarnations terrorizing the neighbors and reporting little dogs to animal control.

So what is she to do, she wonders, now that he has finally noticed?

It began a decade or so back, when he started to feel guilty that he didn't practice what he was preaching. Naturally, he always forgave himself. God is a forgiving Goddess, you know. But it rankled.

Then there was that dangerous reading he did in the late 80s. That guy James Breech in The Silence of Jesus, stripping away all the doctrinal add-ons in the Gospels and finding just sayings and stories about people who resent the choices other people make.

"Oops," said Walhydra, sensing danger. "Too close to the bone there!"

She managed to distract him for another decade. During which he spent eight hours a day helping homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted men in prison—and then resenting being hit up by street people while drinking his cappuccino al fresco after work. It was a hard battle, but she managed.

Until the move.

"Oh, that move!" Walhydra grows livid when she remembers. "Everything, everything got bent out of the frame when he and his honey moved!"

Both would-be writer and honey hated their new jobs. They loathed Jacksonville. Would-be spent the first year and a half diligently avoiding being there. Refused even to learn the names of streets or which ones were one-way in which direction.

But love will out, damn it!

Sometime during his third year, driving home from a movie across one of Jacksonville's seven high bridges, he realized that he now knew the back route from anywhere to anywhere else in town.

"Oh, no!" he thought. "I've finally become a Jacksonvillain!"

As he turned to explain this to his honey, Honey said, "I just had the same thought!"

"Curses!" muttered Walhydra.

It got worse.

Toward the end of that third year, he and hubby were on the out and out over a much-in-need-of-a-retread marriage. And he was praying and sitting zazen overtime to find the discipline and emotional self-reliance to stay reasonably sane.

And then one morning....

"No," said Walhydra.

He realized....

"Eek."

That he was angry because of resentment.

He was resentful because things didn't go his way.

And then....

"Don't go there!"

It occurred to him....

"Nooooo...!"

That there was no reason why things should go his way.

"Oh...."

He was just one person....

"I'm melting. I'm melting...."

In an ageless, cyclical cosmos of being and nothingness....

"What a world! What a world...!"

And that: "It isn't about me."

"Oh.... Look what you've done to my wonderful wickedness...!"

Now, whenever he even notices annoyance, he says quickly, "It isn't about me."

"Ooooooh...!"

And, because there's nothing to resent, his anger melts away....

"Ooooo...."

And he just enjoys the scenery.

"...!"

Walhydra's Health Attack

[Note from Walhydra's amanuensis: Here's another story written late in 1997 for the Crone Thread, a private listserv to which Walhydra still belongs. Walhydra and hubby Jim were living with Miso the Cat in a tiny, two-room apartment in Columbia, SC.

Rereading the story over my shoulder, Walhydra observes that she "used to be a lot more preoccupied with astrology than she is now."

"Oh, really?" I reply, ducking....]

If there's one thing Walhydra doesn't like, it's stereotypes about Virgos. All that dull, second‑fiddle stuff about efficient, health‑conscious, analytical, service‑oriented—and, of course, fussy, obsessive, perfectionist, critical....

Sheesh! What's a person supposed to do?

Keep everything she knows and observes to herself and let the whole world just slide on down the tubes? Ignore self‑care, avoid pointing out other people's errors, disregard both ethical principles and pragmatic realities, just because most people can't appreciate the salutary order which Goddess built into Creation and...?

"Hoooold on thar!" as Quick Draw McGraw would say.

Okay, so the Moon's been void of course since four‑something this morning and it's gonna stay that way for the next...oog!...32 hours.

Walhydra sometimes wonders, stuck as she is for this incarnation in a middle‑aged gay male body, whether void of course is the male equivalent of PMS.

Eek! Every few days?! Suddenly the monthlies don't seem so bad.

Or maybe—returning to the original topic of this rant—maybe it's just that VOC and Virgo don't go together all that well. Especially natal Pisces Full Moon Virgo.

Granted, there is an obscure orderliness to the pattern of VOCs. And, if one could through practice and discipline...ugh!...attune oneself to the timetable....

"But it doesn't suit my timetable!" Walhydra whines—having by now completely forgotten what she set out to tell about in this story.

Oh. That's right. Health.

One of the things for which Virgos are infamous...grr!...is "obsession with health and purity." Virgos, we are told, are highly sensitive to the esoterica of diet and nutrition, medicine, environmental integrity, etc.

"So...?" Walhydra challenges. "It's just that my whole body—including the astral parts—is one big homeostatic device. If conditions are healthy, I am. If conditions are unhealthy...."

She glares at her audience of average mortals.

"Actually, your bodies are, too. The difference is I notice. A real pain in the [bleep] it is, too." She tries to unkink her [bleep].

"Every food additive, every suppressed emotion, every solar storm, sets off some sort of bodily alarm. And if we don't pay attention, the noise and static build up until we can't ignore it anymore...but probably have forgotten what the alarms are about."

Glumly she stalks away from the podium and sits down, hoping that in her next life she can come back as a full‑tilt, sensual Aries—or at least a Taurus, if she's gotta be stuck with Earth signs.

Anyway, all last year Walhydra was way too busy saving the world, raging against the system and cursing her luck to notice. Until around Samhain, when the corporeal rebellion became too chronic for her wonder chiropractor to unkink.

It only took a couple more months for her to make the necessary connection. "Oh," she said around New Year's Day. "I'm not paying attention."

(That tends to happen when one is busily fixing everybody else.)

Fortunately, Walhydra has finally learned a few things about "moderation in all things"—even Virgo things. So...she did not make any New Year's resolutions. She just went back to work "mindfully."

(She loves that word. It's so...mercurial.)

First thing she noticed, to her delight, was that she didn't want to drink coffee on the job any more. Not "decided to give up coffee," but "didn't want coffee."

She took to carrying a coffee mug of water around all day. Decided to "reframe" (good social worker jargon, that) all those extra trips to the restroom as "improving health" rather than "leaky plumbing."

(Although, you know, this middle‑aged male body thing about the last drops always going in your pants, no matter how many times you shake "it"…?)

Then chiropractor said, "I've adjusted everything obvious. I think your aches are maybe congested liver, expressing as pain elsewhere. You ought to try this herbal kidney and liver cleansing program."

Time for today's Virgo Lesson #2: Virgos are simultaneously the ultimate skeptics and the ultimate believers.

They will approach any new theory or fad with an utterly pragmatic, "show me" attitude. What's more, if the new theory involves new effort—like, shall we say, ten pages of detailed instructions about how to mix and use a recipe of eleven hard‑to‑find ingredients prepared through a complicated, multi‑step process and consumed daily for six weeks—they will wonder if maybe there isn't a simpler way.

Like reincarnation, maybe.

All the same, Virgos are...shh!...closet idealists, and they long for there to be some process whereby they can finally get themselves (and the world) perfectly and once‑and‑for‑all cleansed, realigned and on the way into the Kingdom of God. Or Goddess.

So, after a month of humming and hawing and grousing about how everyone from the FDA to the Gnostic Pleroma was trying to keep her from finding chopped gravel root (not extract, please!), Walhydra finally called the 800‑number her chiropractor had given her at the start (Virgos don't take easy advice till all else fails), got all the stuff, and settled in for a Saturday of kitchen witchery.

"Hmm," she said, as she started to hunt for a place to store the eleven bottles of herbs, vitamins and mineral supplements. "There's too many old bottles—oh, my goodness, unlabeled old bottles—of herbs and seeds and condiments on this shelf."

"Hmm," she said, as she rummaged through the containers on top of the cupboards over the sink (this is a tiny apartment). "These mason jars have no lids. And these other jars still smell like artichoke hearts or kalamata olives...or something."

Returning from the hardware store with a dozen pristine pint‑sized mason jars (ever try to buy just two?), "Hmm," she said. "I don't have enough quarters to dry the laundry I started two hours ago."

Several hours later, the whole herb and spice shelf had been reorganized and relabeled. The smelly jars from three years back had been recycled.

The last three day's worth of Crone Thread emails had been replied to.

And Walhydra was in Virgo heaven, measuring and stirring and brewing and measuring again and bottling and refrigerating and freezing.

"Ahh," she said, tucking the last freezer box of elixir away for the night. "I've put the universe back in order. I feel better already."

Sunday morning. This is where Hubby Jim comes in. Jim is Cancer‑on‑the‑cusp‑of‑Leo.

"But with Virgo rising," Walhydra jibes.

"Hopefully," Jim leers.

[Brief intermission.]

Jim and Walhydra have a marriage based on teasing. Pretty good for two utterly nerdish sissies who were teased beyond repair all through childhood.

Walhydra sometimes thinks that the main reason for astrology is to have something to tease each other about.

It's also important for the reader to know that, while Walhydra's mother was not at all obsessive about house‑cleaning (she's a Sagittarius), she was, after all, Swiss/German Lutheran—a sort of alternate universe Virgoism.

Jim's mom, on the other hand, was Southern Baptist with a vengeance, and had a fervor about house‑cleaning that went so far as to include covering the bathroom floor with newspaper (except for guests) to catch the water spills.

Walhydra alternates now between putting off for as long as possible the big chores, like scrubbing and dusting, and making a meditative practice of her Saturday morning plant watering, laundry washing and tidying‑up rituals.

Jim, by contrast, believes one oughtn't to do any household chores before they are needed. When Walhydra explains that the garbage can needs to be emptied when it's full, Jim's solution is to press down on the garbage.

It should be noted that usually—usually—Walhydra remembers to laugh ha ha ha at this mismatch, which their couples counselor years ago designated as both negotiable and teasable.

One other note, on semantics.

Walhydra, when they go shopping, says, "We need another can of bathroom cleanser."

Jim says, "You mean 'cleaner'."

"No, I mean 'cleanser.' It says so right on the label."

"Yankee!"

Slow burn.

So, anyway...Sunday morning. Jim is cooking Cream of Wheat. Walhydra is taking her first dose of The Potion.

Jim: "So, does the rule apply about 'medicine having to taste bad to be good'?"

Walhydra (frowning): "Well, look what the recipe adds to make The Potion taste good."

"Oh. Black cherry concentrate."

"Yes. Bleech."

"But black cherry is...."

"...I know. Good for kidneys."

Walhydra grins, getting in the mood to tease herself. "You realize, of course, why I got convinced to try this rigmarole after all?"

"Hm?" Jim peruses lengthy instructions and recipe. "Ah. 'Kidney cleanse.' How Virgoish."

"Um‑hmm."

Jim pulls out American Heritage Dictionary.

"'Cleanse....To free from dirt, defilement, or guilt; purge or clean...'," he reads. "'Usage: Cleanse is largely figurative and literary, with special reference to spiritual and ceremonial matters; Clean (verb) is literal."

He gives his best Q.E.D. smile.

"Humph. But that fits anyway," Walhydra says, brightening. "The whole point here is that I've realized I need a change of attitude. It's not just that my physical health has been sliding. I have needed the spiritual process. Deciding to start this herbal stuff is already a healing process."

Virgo touché.

Jim (pensive): "You know. I think that when my mom cleaned house, she was cleansing. When I had to help, she was cleansing—I was just cleaning."

[Scene dissolves. Witchy cackles on both sides.]

Walhydra’s Thanksgiving Kitchen Disaster

“I HATE this machine!” Walhydra shouts politely.

She shakes the whole cylinder and base of the blender viciously. A few more cranberries deign to drop into the path of the tiny blade as it whirs away in the slosh of orange juice and pulverized rind.

“This thing obviously wasn’t designed for what I’m trying to do!”

Intelligent design has never stopped Walhydra from believing that material objects should obey her command—regardless of the laws of physics. Force of will should be enough, shouldn’t it? She rattles and bangs at the blender, jabbing at berries through the half-closed lid with her narrowest spatula.

At this moment, hubby Jim comes into the kitchen. “Oh, no...!” he exclaims.

There is a horrible, panicked silence as he pulls his famous “secret recipe” maple walnut gingerbread out of the oven, its edges all returned to elemental carbon.

“Did you...do something to the timer?”

Walhydra sinks through the floor. “Oh. Babe. I’m sorry. I forgot you were using the microwave timer and warmed up some coffee.”

Jim says nothing as he sets the baking dish on the stove. There is a horrid moment during which the ghost of Jim’s Mom wrings her hands at the ghost of Jim’s Dad. Then he quietly opens the fridge for more eggs and flour, the kitchen cupboard for more spice.

“How can I help?” Walhydra asks meekly. “Should I get the walnuts ready for you?”

“Yes.”

“How much.”

“A cup.”

Walhydra remembers horrible fights over domestic life a few years earlier. Fights in which the shades of all four hurting, angry parents—plus siblings—had loomed over them, brandishing swords of well-chronicled resentment.

The disrupting move to Florida from their childhood South Carolina home had left the two of them suddenly with none of the habitual escapes and safety nets of their marriage. It took some years of terrifying loneliness—both of them trying to signal “I still love you” across the no man’s land—while they worked separately with counselors to name and tame their respective family curses.

Now, second batch of magic gingerbread in the oven, Walhydra goes back to her blender, while Jim returns to his computer. Walhydra feels a bit chagrined that her silly anger at the machine still wants to outweigh Jim’s grief over the baking she ruined. She pokes cautiously at the cranberries....

BrzzBANGfloopfloopsplat!

“G*@-d#$!ed f%^&ing piece of s#@^!”

She flings the remaining half of the spatula into the dining room. Grabs a towel to wipe slaughtered cranberries off her face and shirt—and counter and floor and walls. She finds bits eight feet away on the refrigerator door.

Jim, wisely, does not come to see what happened.

Walhydra is convinced she learned to curse from her Dad, the Lutheran pastor...even though he managed to keep it all inside throughout her childhood. Jim says it’s genetic.

Walhydra’s Grandpa, the Lutheran pastor father of her Mom, Senior Witch, was a much more restrained and proper nineteenth-century gentleman. His only, only swear word—which Walhydra had seen written in books, with its odd, nineteenth-century spelling—was “Pshaw!” Or “Oh, pshaw!”

However, he could make it sound like “G*@-d#$!ed f%^&ing piece of s#@^!”

It must be a guy thing. Sissy that she is, Walhydra nonetheless carries on the male tradition of cursing objects which disobey. As usual, she soon witnesses once more the damaging repercussions of this stubborn trait.

Back in the kitchen, Walhydra cooks up a new, alternative version cranberry sauce, one which entails no use of heavy machinery. She fishes the blender pieces out of the trash can, where she had tossed them in fury, and does the washing up. She glances around.

“Oh, s#@^! There’s cranberry on the ceiling!”

Later, as she reads Anne Rice on the back stoop, Walhydra hears the timer beep through the open mudroom door. Then she hears this long, mournful groan.

Hubby Jim has just discovered that the oven somehow got bumped up to 450° from 350°. Another carbonized baking dish comes out to sit atop the stove.

Hours later. Walhydra and Jim are dinner guests of their friend from the gay/lesbian bowling league and his new flame.

Just before the excellent turkey dinner—graced with a lonely bowl of jellied cranberries—their host asks them to join in a tradition from his home in Phoenix. There, at Thanksgiving, all the Buddhists and Druids and Jews and Navajos and other “outsiders” would gather in a circle and, each one in turn, voice personal thanks, before sharing the holiday feast.

By now, Walhydra and Jim have retold the kitchen disaster story with comic embellishment. Walhydra takes the blame for the second fossilized gingerbread as well as the first, since she figures she discombobulated Jim with her cranberry theatrics.

In the circle, Jim gives thanks jokingly for a number of things, and then gives googoo-eyed thanks for his loving partner.

Walhydra says, “I’m thankful that we finally rediscovered how to be married.”

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

In which Walhydra reconsiders: or, Isn’t there a way to turn this thing off?

Walhydra wonders if it was such a good idea to let the would-be writer back out of his closet.

Ever since she allowed him to do that first blog post, he won’t stop composing. He wakes her at all hours of the night. He interrupts her in the middle of conversations, while eating, while driving, attending to nature….

He acts as if he has to catch every insight in metaphor at once, before he loses it. Walhydra hopes bloggers eventually hit a rhythm with all of this…but meanwhile she’d like to get some sleep.

Worse, this is happening while Walhydra is on a week-long visit with her dear mother, Senior Witch—away from any practical, 21st century connection to the ‘Net. Senior Witch’s dial-up Windows 95-era browser keeps shutting Blogger down as an illegal operation. The would-be writer just knows he’ll forget everything before they get back to civilization.

Walhydra and hubby Jim call her mother “Senior Witch”—secretly, of course—because she is such an unselfconsciously enlightened soul. In her eight-plus decades, she has passed through Christianity and out the other side gracefully, without even noticing.

She protests that she is “not at all spiritual.” She wishes she knew what having a religious experience was like. Meanwhile, she does spontaneously what Jesus would do and walks lovingly into situations which Walhydra is still trying to intellectualize.

When the Lutheran Church was going through its latest round of squabbling over the supposed danger of affirming same-sex couples, Senior Witch said to her pastor: “I don’t understand what my son’s marriage has to do with my marriage. I don’t know what he does in bed, and he doesn’t know what I do—except in the textbook sense, of course.”

Walhydra is visiting because, as eldest and physically closest of three children, it is her assignment to help her mother make the transition into elderhood. Senior Witch has been a brilliant mother, housekeeper, pastor’s wife, college professor, grant-funding agency manager and neighborhood organizer. Now short-term memory loss and the attendant anxiety keep her from balancing her checkbook. Ex-social worker Walhydra has to summon all her patience and courage to coach Senior Witch through a loss of self-reliance which is both frightening and painful to experience—and as much so to witness.

Fortunately, Walhydra and her mother have been frank and loving adult friends for over 30 years. When either catches herself trying to avoid distress by “protecting the other’s feelings,” there is almost always some new opening of intimacy to follow. They are not at all good at hiding from each other.

So, Walhydra finds herself wondering when Senior Witch picks Iris as the rental DVD for their last night together. Judi Dench, one of their mutual favorites, portrays the rapid decline into Alzheimer’s and death of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in a screenplay based on the memoirs of Murdoch’s husband John Bayley (Elegy for Iris and Iris and Her Friends).

Walhydra keeps glancing sideways at her mother as the love story of Murdoch and Bayley unfolds. “Is she trying to tell me something? Does she recognize her own future in Murdoch’s losses?”

But all of Senior Witch’s comments are about how well they have done this movie of two books she greatly appreciated, and how great an actress Dench is. As usual, she seems to enfold someone else’s tragedy within her own compassion without personalizing.

Which, of course, Walhydra almost always does.

Once the film ends, Walhydra concentrates through teary eyes on teaching her non-techie mother for the umpty-umpth time how to use the DVD player—after Senior Witch says, “Maybe I’ll watch that again once or twice after you’ve left.”

They end the evening searching, first in Senior Witch’s concordance and then through Google, for the last words of the movie. The elderly Murdoch concludes a lecture on love and goodness, her highest ideals, with the Psalmist’s words to God—which she speaks while holding the eyes of her husband in the audience (Psalm 139:7-10):

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou are there.

If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.