The Smell of Summer

My friends came into my house almost obscured by the purple blooms- they brought a huge bouquet of lilacs.  The dining room filled with their fragrance and I was back in my grandmother’s bedroom.

It’s spring here in South Dakota and while trees are just greening up near my house, it must be another gardening zone here in Rapid City. 

Here the wildflowers are popping up through the pine needles.....

Even the dandelions are fresh and full of spring. 

the bushes are blooming..... 

Found some honeysuckle! Reminder of Virginia where it is everywhere.

and the lilacs are having a bumper year. 

 The lilac bushes, ten feet high, are rows of lush purples and whites set off by rich green leaves.  The smaller the house, the bigger the bushes. In the older neighborhoods of crowded streets, small houses sit right next to each other on small lots. But the lilacs in those neighborhoods.  A king’s garden has no lilacs to best these. Strong healthy bushes practically dwarf the houses and cast their purple hue over the entire neighborhood.

When I smell lilacs, I’m on  a narrow cot in my grandmother’s bedroom. The room is small and my bed blocks off the one closet but it’s right against the window.  The sash is cracked for fresh air and I lay on the cool pillow and listen to night sounds. Crickets sing and an occasional car passes with a swish.  The dark always puzzles me.  We drive down from Alaska every other summer and even the long drive doesn’t prepare me for summer nights that get dark. Alaska summers have daylight way past our bedtime and now it feels strange to be in bed in the dark.  But I hear the soft breathing of my grandmother and I smell the lilacs.  They crowd the bedroom windows and block the path of broken stones around the house.

Everywhere in Colorado we play we climb under or around lilacs bushes 

but it’s here in grandmother's room, 

the night is quiet, that I breathe in the lilacs and sleep.

On being an adult...or aging isn't for sissies.

 I still panting and weak as I plop down at my keyboard, determined to record my thought before they flee my oxygen deprived brain.  Grateful for spell check, I review my new work out plan.

Yeah, yeah, I get it... but tie those shoes on before you race up the stairs...

 I had set the light timer for the stairwell light for ten minutes. The goal is to keep my heart rate up for the entire ten minutes- how hard can that be? It's only ten minutes.  I race up and down the steep steps – well, I race carefully down and try to race up. Those last two steps are clearly much deeper than the rest and I have to pause to catch my breath. Undaunted, I repeat the grueling workout, up and down the treacherous steps four times.  Then at the base of the stairs, I turn and race down the short hall and enter the far guest room. It is decorated with mementos of trips to Africa and I pretend I am a stalked animal.

Quickly, I race around the double bed remaking it with fresh sheets and fending off the  lions.  I bounce on my feet while I tug pillows into clean cases. I jog in place as I smooth sheets,  fluff the comforter and dust the elephant.  Surely, the timer must have run down and I missed it. No, the light is still on at the top of the stairs.  It leers down at me in full strength and again, I sprint up the steps to challenge its supremacy.  The sprint is more of a jog but I make it up and down another three time.  The light remains on.

I jog down the hall- it takes fourteen steps at this pace. I sprint back to the staircase and glance up at the light before running on to the family room where I do twenty jumping jacks, each slower that the last.   I rush to the couch and replace the cover. Dashing around wildly, I arrange the throw, replace the pillows, fold the blanket and toss it in a basket- all while bouncing or running in place.  I'm sure I look like a crazy woman.  

And I can hear that incessant timer ticking on and know without looking that the light continues to shine in the stairwell.

I resume jumping jacks, I race myself down the short hall again, I climb the steps with gasping breath. The light switch timer mocks me with its buzzing countdown.

I quit.

I’ve just started my regimen- three times a day, ten-minute episodes of getting my heart rate up. Exercising the lazy muscle that maintains my life is becoming a priority. No longer content to sit quietly in my chest and pump fresh blood like it’s supposed to, my heart is either pumping too hard and stressing out my arteries or my arteries are clogged, swollen, stiff, uncooperative, lazy...whatever and my blood pressure reflects their poor performance. Clearly, I am not certain to the cause of my high blood pressure. 

All I know, I have taken my circulatory system for granted for years. When I ran after small children it responded and pumped harder.  I took aerobics classes when it was just a fad and the ticker did just fine. Later, when I did the occasional hike or perhaps a small run, my red face showed my excellent blood flow and then my cheeks immediately faded to my normal, unfortunately pale complexion. 

Suddenly, well, no, not suddenly, this is yet another body change that snuck up on me as my hormones shifted and fell. My lifetime of low blood pressure changed to ‘borderline’, then ‘high’ and now, medication is not working.  My heart is not working the way I assumed it always would. 


It’s not fair.  My mother is eighty-five and she has never had high blood pressure. The women of her family live into their centenarian years and I should, too. I think. As I age, I do question the wisdom of living into our second century but I don’t want to go quite yet.  But my father had his first heart attack at sixty-four and my fifty-nine year old brother upped the ante last month when he was rushed to the hospital and a stent was placed into a blocked artery.  And he has low cholesterol, unlike me who somehow managed to also inherit our father’s high cholesterol.  Perhaps I am not so much my mother’s daughter as my father’s.  I have his appreciation for art, his moodiness, his ability to charm strangers and irritate family.  And now it appears I share his genes that can lead to death by heart attack.   

To avoid this..... I'm doing this-

 I am cutting out dairy, eating even more fiber and huffing and puffing my way up and down my stairs.  And I checked that timer- it is not at all accurate. When set against the microwave timer, it dinged a full two and a half minutes after the microwave beeped.  I am vindicated. I did the full ten minutes. Only two more sessions today and then, three heart pumping, ten minute sprints every day.

For the rest of my life.

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/hbp/intro.htm

or

http://watchlearnlive.heart.org/CVML_Player.php

I'm trying to find a cooler picture of a heart but it's stressing me out so this will have to do. And I think red wine is full of antioxidants, also dark chocolate but I had that for lunch.  I refuse to be held hostage by my genes!

From roses to .... yep, snow

Nashville's Parthenon
http://www.nashville.gov/Parks-and-Recreation/Parthenon.aspx

I was in Nashville last weekend. The temperature did drop 20 degrees the day after I arrived but the last day was lovely and I walked around the Vanderbilt- Belmont- Centennial Park area.  Lots of walking but hey, how many times do you get to see the Parthenon in America?



So the day I flew into Denver it was 80 the day before and this happened that night.... what's with this??   Everywhere I go, it snows, except North Carolina and Nashville. There the temperature dropped and it rained.   I am the Queen of Winter.

Ready for summer dinners on the deck at my sister's house

Lawn chairs ready to enjoy a nice cozy fire- we could use the heat!

I am so ready to get on the road and to home-
I think....  what will happen when I arrive in South Dakota?
Last time- ten inches of snow.

I couldn't drive home yesterday- high winds closed some Wyoming highways.  Ice caused chaos on Denver roads last night.

I'm trying!