Then it was Child Abuse Awareness Month.  I really thought I might get through that in one piece, but after the pieces on emotional and psychological and verbal abuse started coming hard and fast, I have to say I took a pounding.  I grew up with a relentlessly abusive mother and an absent, codependent father who played the sympathetic one and passed me his handkerchief while explaining that Mom wasn’t feeling well, had her period (he described her as a “wildcat in a hatbox” when she was menstruating), or any of a million excuses for her evil behavior.

Since my chief drive as a recovering Adult Child of Abusive Parents is still to try to mollify my mother and protect my now-disabled father from her wrath, I moved to the US from my beloved Jerusalem to try to help them in their old age.  He is 88 and she is 86, although she claims to be 85.

They live in what my dear friend R_ in Jerusalem affectionately calls “East Bumfuck.”  Their house is in a remote hollow, and the road leading to it is so steep that the UPS man refuses to drive down there–he parks at the top and walks down, except in the winter when their access road is a bobsled run and utterly impassible.  Then he leaves the package at the post office, which makes the postmistress frantic because they’re not supposed to do that and what if she gets inspected etc., but there’s nothing to be done about it.

Because of the nature of the road and the ice in the winter, they are often housebound for weeks.  Several years ago when Dad was still healthy he slipped coming down it and broke three ribs.  My mom broke her ankle on it.  My dad broke his wrist on it.

The power goes out frequently.  Since Dad has been losing his balance and falling a lot, I pitched a fit about the kerosene lamps they used to put around everywhere when they were younger, and they finally caved in and got a generator, which has made life easier in that area.

I moved here in a panic, in the winter of 2010-11, when there was storm after storm and they were completely snowed in.  My mother was putting on ice cleats and crawling up the hill to gather firewood.  My dad tried to help her and slipped on the ice and got another of the three concussions he racked up that winter.

I had been calling all the neighbors to please go and check on them, since if anyone asks my mother if she needs help she will say no, whether she does  or not.  Please, please, walk down there and make sure they’re all right and have what they need.  Since they only have one neighbor, I didn’t have many to call, and he never did go down there.  So I packed up my house in Jerusalem and three weeks later was on a plane to East Bumfuck.

I had a hard time getting there because it had just snowed three feet, so I rented the biggest SUV I could find and put the fucker in four wheel drive with the towing gear on and managed to get down into “the hole,” as the UPS drivers call it.  They were in pretty sad shape, and mighty glad to see me.  I had brought groceries and eight gallons of spring water, since the electricity was out and they didn’t have the generator yet.

Well, that was two and a half years ago, and the winters since then have been mild, and my dad’s dementia seems to have stabilized.  And now is the time to start talking about the fact that East Bumfuck is no longer an appropriate place for them to live.  My mother has a million reasons why they can’t move, which I will not enumerate here.  None of them is insurmountable.

Then comes the question, where will they move to?  Their first thought is to move to the nearest small city, which is a lovely artsy place with all the amenities and museums and theatres and lovely architecture.  I remind my mother that Dad is not going to get better, and she is not going to be able to handle him herself for much longer, since she is no spring chicken.

“Well if we move to Hip City, what will you do?”

“I will go home to Jerusalem.  I miss my home.

“But this is your home!”

“No, mother, this is YOUR home.  My home is Jerusalem, and my soul cries for her every day, all the time.”

Her mouth twists with disgust.  I get triggered.

Anger starts to brew.  What does she expect me to do, spend the rest of my life taking care of her?  Dad won’t be around much longer, although his own father lingered in a pitiable state till the age of 91.

I get hold of myself.  ”I’ve sent for a packet from Lovely Hillside Retirement Community, where you can live independently until you need more help.”  She is a geriatric social worker and knows exactly what I mean, and knows the place.

“We can’t afford it.”

“I believe you can.”  I outline the plan.

“But what will you do?”

“I am going back to Jerusalem, and will visit frequently.”

Silence.

It’s obvious that HER plan for me is to be the caregiver, so that she can live the way she wants, with no regard to my life, my needs, my health…

Anger starts to brew.  I will not go into the childhood abuse issues that started coming up, because I don’t want to go there again.

Anger brewed into rage.  I live in a separate building, so there was no chance of confrontation, thank G-d.  Rage filled me, overcame me, and every time the sonovabitchin’ trains across the river blew their infernal horns, I was screaming with them.

I started feeling exhausted.  My exercise tolerance was for shit.  I started having these vague, vapory headaches, and I am not a “headache person.”

My blood pressure has been creeping up in recent months, to 130′s over 80′s, which is not good for a person who usually hangs out in the 120/60 range.  I felt so weird that I bought one of those home BP monitors:  150/100!  Fuck, I’m gonna die, and it’s all because I feel trapped by my guilt at not being able to fulfill my idea of filial piety without ruining my not-so-good health and sabotaging my future, which I hope will contain a home and a partner.  I went to my internist, and now have yet another pill to take twice daily.

At this point, my plan is to get them into someplace appropriate for their now and future needs, which is going to be a shrek in itself, since their house is a fine art museum which will have to be turned into money in order for them to afford the new place.  The property will be sold, so that means no inheritance at all for me because they failed to plan for retirement.

And they planned to use me as an unpaid caregiver, room and board included of course, with my social security for pin money.  But now I’ve come and thrown a monkey-wrench into the works, by coming to the realization that I deserve to have a life.  They also deserve to have a life, a pleasant and comfortable life.  But I’m a person too, and I sure don’t plan to live out the best years I’ve got left caring for people who made my whole life hell, and would continue to do so, if I let them.

Reblogged from depression comix:

I have been hard at work writing the life story of Mighty Mouth, the Most Unconventional Kitten.  He was a real kitten, born on my horse farm, and he was born to a life of adventure.  He announced his entry into the world the moment his black-and-white head emerged, toothless pink mouth open and yowling, even before the rest of his body was born.  His ear-splitting howls brought the farm hands running to the empty box stall his mother had wisely chosen as her labor-and-delivery room.

Mouthie had what to say about everything and anything, and kept up a continuous editorial regarding his opinions of barn life.  Wherever you were in the barn, you could hear his conversational meow-ings and yowings.  I don’t know why his mother did not eat him out of desperation.  I do believe he got the best of her teats, though, because he became quite portly, certainly a maternal effort to shut him up.

May lengthened into August and hay season was ending, and the kittens had grown out of their box stall nursery and were up to every kind of mischief in the barn.  One got run over by the manure spreader, and its eye popped out and the driver of the manure spreader had to throw up.   Another got squashed between two fifty-pound bales of hay, and just barely survived after we heard a muffled frantic mewing issuing from the hay mow.

And then there was Mouthie.  One early morning my son rushed in from doing his barn chores:  ”Mom, mom!  Mouthie’s been stepped on!”  And he threw up in the bin.  He was an easy thrower-upper, in those days.

After I got him cleaned up, I sat him down at the kitchen table.

“What do you mean, Mouthie’s been stepped on?”

“I went into Airhead the Thoroughbred’s stall, and there he was lying on the floor, with a hoof-print on his hind leg, and it’s broken!”

“Oh dear!  What did you do about it?”

“Well, I know you shouldn’t move an injured person, and an animal might bite you (here my heart swells with pride at my son who remembers what his emergency physician mother has taught him), so I caught Airhead’s halter and tied her up so she can’t step on him again.”

“What great thinking!  I am so proud of you.”  Big hug, even if he does still smell like throw-up.

We tromp back out to the barn to assess the damages.  Airhead, tied to the ring at her grain bin, shows us the whites of her eyes as she tries to shy but can’t because she’s tied up.  I smirk privately.  I only tolerate that horse because she is a paying guest, one of our 32 equine boarders.

At the opposite side of the 12-foot box stall, Mouthie makes a pitiful sight lying squashed in the sawdust bedding, alternately muttering a stream of sad commentary and giving forth heartbreaking yowls of pain.  We approach carefully, talking to him reassuringly, thus:

“Hi, Mouthie, it’s just us, it’s OK, we’re here now, you’ll be all right,” and so on.  Mouthie looked tragic and kept up his end of the conversation while I gingerly examined him.

His leg was badly broken, but I could find no evidence of lethal injury, so with the help of my son I slid him onto a board, secured him with a light wrapping of sack cloth, loaded him gently onto the back seat of the Suburban with my son next to him, so he would have someone to talk to, and drove 50 miles to the nearest vet.

The X-ray showed a bad spiral fracture of the femur, very unstable.  It would never heal on its own.  Needed surgery:  steel plates, pins, that sort of thing.  Estimated cost $1200.  I have to think about this.  Twelve hundred dollars to fix a barn kitten that might get run over by the manure spreader as soon as it was up and about again…this was sticker shock.

But it wasn’t just any old barn kitten; it was our Mighty Mouth, the Mouth that Roared, and did we want to make an executive decision to extinguish his bright little life just because it cost a gazillion dollars?  No, we didn’t.  But there would be compromise.

“OK, fix it,” I told the vet firmly. “And while he’s under, just declaw him, and neuter him too.  He’s going to be our indoor house cat, and he’s never going outside again.”  The vet heartily agreed, and we left, to return for our Mouthie in two days, all fixed and new.

Mouthie never forgave me for that.  His paws were sore for weeks, and he licked his missing testicles until I had to take him back to the vet to do something about the resulting infection.  He gave me so many reproachful looks and yowling lectures that I wondered if I had made the right decision.  At last I pulled myself out from under the black cloud of guilt and said, “Listen, guy, if it hadn’t been for me you would have died a slow and painful death on the barn floor.  Now what do you think of that?”   Mouthie subsided.

Not long after these adventures, it came time to move to the American Southwest.  Decisions had to be made regarding which of our menagerie would come with us, and which would stay on the farm with its new owners, and which would go to new homes.   Of course Mouthie came with us.  There was never any question about that.  He rode in the Suburban, talking on the CB radio the whole way.

Our new house had a pleasant patio out back, and a fenced yard, and behind that, a two-acre paddock with a nice small barn for the four horses we had brought with us.  Mouthie stationed himself at the glass slider that looked out on this idyllic scene, and muttered and yowled about how I had ruined his life by forcing him into a role he was not meant for, i.e., house cat, and he would rather have died on the barn floor, etc., etc.; eventually I lost my resolve and opened the sliding door.  He waltzed out victorious and hopped up into the patio chair he had been eyeing, and curled up on the seat for a nap.

I shrugged and went back to making lunch.  The next thing, the kids came running in yelling “Mouthie’s outside!  He’s up in the apricot tree!”  Outside, yes.  Tree??  I ran out into the back yard and followed their pointing fingers.  Good grief, there he was, curled up in the crotch of the tree!  How did he get there without claws?  Over the next months he was to show us that, apart from the joys of destroying furniture, cats can do very well without their claws.

And then one day Mouthie disappeared.  I let him out in the morning and watched him rolling around on the warm patio stones, having a nice back scratch, and I went to work.  When I got home that night he was not there, nor did he appear on any of the subsequent days.  Oh well, I thought; coyotes one, cats zero.  I was sad; the kids were sadder; but we were all philosophical about the hazards of life on this planet, and soon stopped thinking about Mouthie.

Months later I was riding Joe Crow, my Peruvian Paso, up in the old abandoned orchard that was an easy ride from our back yard.  We rode there several times a week, and knew every inch of the place.  There was a fox’s den on the southern border of the orchard.  I never saw any sign of activity around it, and assumed it was abandoned like the orchard.

On this day, as Joe and I approached the fox den, I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and blinked again.  There were two animal figures sitting in the opening of the fox den.  One of them was a red fox.  The other was Mouthie.  I thought perhaps some of the mind-bending drugs I had soaked my brain with in the ’60′s were coming back around for another whack at the old squash.

I “whoah’d” Joe to a stop and watched his face for clues.  If I was tripping, then the horse would not react to my hallucination.  But Joe pricked his ears, extended his neck and whinnied to his old buddy.  Mouthie responded with a friendly yowl.  His foxy friend turned, and giving us a wink over his shoulder, strolled side by side with Mouthie into the den.

If that had been the sole sighting of this odd couple, I would have chalked it up to Southwestern magic, or a waking dream, or somehow explained it away.   But I saw them twice more, sitting together in the arch of the fox den, surrounded by an air of a serene love: the love of two ancient souls reunited, having somehow found each other against unimaginable odds.  Time, distance, and form itself had not succeeded in keeping these soul mates from finding each other.

I cried.  How many hardships do souls have to pass through, how many agonies and ministering angels, before they finally find their resting place?  The aura of content surrounding these two unlikely lovers filled the orchard like the heart-breakingly sweet fragrance of apple blossoms.

I never saw them again.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/daily-prompt-unconventional-love/#like-24689

Reblogged from depression comix:

Reblogged from depression comix:

She’s a classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Me, Me, Me, Me.  In fact, my private name for her is MeMe.  She’s always a step ahead.  If I lose one pound, she loses two.  If my disabled father is not moving fast enough to suit her, she’ll take off at her swinging clip and leave him to fall face down on the sidewalk.  Things like that.

My childhood was one big nightmare on toe shoes, tiptoeing around on eggshells, never knowing what I would inadvertently do to set her off into a screaming rage.  I spent a lot of time outside.

I never knew which of my possessions was up for disappearance next.  Or my pets, for instance: which would be given away, which would “just die,” which would “run away.”  The only ones that stayed were the ones she and my father considered their own.

As most of my bloggie friends know, I ran away at age 16.  My mother went to a psychiatrist (the only time in her life) who told her it wasn’t her fault: I was just a rebellious teenager who should be left to learn my own lessons.  I did: homelessness, hunger, rape, prostitution.  Good lessons.

For some reason I was not killed, and eventually pulled my way up and out, and even more eventually became a doctor.  That made Mom happy, because it reflected well on her.  See, I turned out well after all.  It wasn’t her fault.  But I never returned to the parental “home,” which was not my home.

Then things got pretty bad when I had a breakdown and lost my practice and everything I had, and ended up totally disabled and bankrupt.  No help from Mom there; in fact, she persisted in telling her friends that my practice was going great!

I moved to the other side of the country, and that felt better, to be on a different coast and less in the weltering chill of her force field.  And then I moved to the other side of the world, which was even better.

On a mission trip, I fell in love with Israel: in particular, Jerusalem.  As soon as I set my foot on the broiling hot stone paved streets, I knew I had found home.  A year after the trip, I went back to study in a Jewish women’s seminary for a month, which turned into three months.  I shed buckets of tears praying at the Western Wall for God to please bring me home.  It came to pass, in March of 2007, that I moved to Israel to stay.  I was Home.

It wasn’t easy.  I moved eight times in the first fifteen months, for every reason you can think of, and some you would never imagine (bracket fungus growing out of the kitchen walls after a flood soaked the plaster).  I felt like the Wandering Jew, and in my own country at that!  How ironic.  But never, even through those hardships and others, did the feeling of joy at being home ever leave me.  For one who has never had a home, the delirious joy of having found Home is hard to describe.

My parents are old, and I am the only child.  I had planned on making trips to see them every four months or so, to keep a finger on the pulse.  And I did.  After two years, my father started a downhill slide, and I increased the frequency to every three months.  As you can imagine, at an average of $1200 per trip plus car rental (they live in the boonies, and I would never be without a car: an escape route from my mother), it was a serious drain on my savings.

My father had a small stroke, and some other things started to go wrong with him, so the visits increased to every other month.  Finally, he started falling, and after two emergency trips back precipitated by head injuries, I decided that the time had come to move back across the world and be on site for what I thought were going to be my father’s last days.

His last days turned into weeks, months, and years: two and a half of them.  He’s certainly not the man he used to be, and considerably disabled, but he seems to have stabilized, thank G-d.

I am living in what is basically a barn: his former pottery studio, which I have restored from a rotting shell to a tight shelter.  That is a story in and of itself.  It’s close enough so that if I’m needed I can be there in two minutes, yet far enough away that I have privacy to do whatever I want to do.  It’s tolerable.

But I long for Jerusalem.  When I first came here I would find myself uncontrollably sobbing for hours.  I long for Jerusalem herself.  I miss my many friends, dear friends like I have never had before; and I miss my family of choice, my holy brothers and sisters, with whom I have bonds unlike any I have ever experienced in my previous life.

I miss just wandering the streets, watching the swirling admixture of Jews of all varieties with their distinctive ways of dress, and the plethora of priests, nuns, monks, striding out of their monasteries and convents in the Old City, countless varieties with their own dramatic habits: nuns so covered up in black that they would give any Muslim woman a run for her money, unless she was wearing a niqab; Muslims, the women in every degree of covering–the one I get a kick out of is the college girls with tight colorful hijabs that make their heads look like periscopes,  and skin-tight jeans and high heels; or the head-to-toe chador lady walking arm-in-arm with her mulletted husband in a muscle shirt and cut-off jean shorts.  All swirling around in the streets together, gabbing in the countless cafes, shopping, going to school–doing what everyone does.  And me, me! there among them, one of them.  Home, home at last!

Mom’s been on Zoloft for a month now.  She found herself crying all the time, so when both of them got bronchitis and I took them to the doctor she took the opportunity to tell the doctor about that, and got some Zoloft.  She really is feeling better, you can tell, although she insists on only taking half the prescribed amount.  That’s her.  She eats half an English muffin, half a sandwich, half a tab of Zoloft.  Oh well; what matters is that she actually copped to feeling bad and did something about it, and realizes she is feeling better.  Let’s pray she doesn’t quit just because she feels better.

So today, seeing that she is in a good mood, I decided to break some news: I am establishing a schedule for visiting my home, because I am miserable without it.  I will return every fall for the High Holidays and the month that precedes them, which is a month for study and preparation;  and I will return in the spring for Purim, which is thought of in the States as the Jewish Halloween because everybody gets dressed up, but in fact it is a holiday steeped in deep mysticism.

She shrugged.  ”You do whatever you need to do.  I’ll get along somehow.”  What did I expect?  But the little child in me wanted approval.

“I miss my home,” I said, by way of what I hoped would be explanation.

“This is your home!  Your home is right here!”  Her little eyes snapped.

“No, Mom, this is not my home.  This is your home.  You fell in love with this place, and you chose to live here.  I have never lived here.  I moved out of your house when I was sixteen…”

“I know,” she interrupted coldly.

“And just like you fell in love with this place, I fell in love with Jerusalem, and I am very sad when I am away.  And you know that I have a mental illness, and I have to take care of myself.  And all of my support system is in Jerusalem, all of my friends, my religious life, everything.  You don’t want me to end up in the hospital again, do you?  Because of isolation and no support?”

“What, being away from Jerusalem will put you in the hospital?”  Snort.

“What I would like you to do is to start looking into home care options that will give you respite and help while I’m away, so that you don’t get sick yourself.” Long conversation about that, leading to dead ends but it was a start, anyway.

I gave up.  Changed the subject.  Will not speak of it again.  Will just buy the tickets, get on the plane, and be there.  And eventually I will be able to pack up and go back, G-d willing, back to the crazy peaceful whirl of war zone in the Middle East, the only place in the world where I feel safe.

And there’s more, says my friend.  T_ is a massage therapist, a very good one with a large practice, and lately she’s been falling asleep right in the middle of giving a massage.  My mind snaps into place here.  Falling asleep GETTING a massage: yes.  Falling asleep GIVING a massage: no, no, NO.  Brains do not do that under normal circumstances.

What else?  Oh, there have been some minor problems with memory, a large recent weight gain, headaches, double vision…

STOP!  Stop there.  My mind says brain tumor.  That is ALL my mind says.  In fact, it doesn’t say it, it SCREAMS it.  She must go to the emergency room NOW.

She has a doctor appointment in June for the headaches, my friend says.

That’s very nice.  She can keep that appointment when it gets to be June.  It’s the beginning of May now, and she must go to the emergency room TODAY.  NOW.

OK, says my friend, who has been my acupuncture client since 1998 and knows that tone of voice.  OK, she says, I’ll go and get her.

This morning I wake up to an email from my friend.  T_ has been transported by ambulance from our little local hospital to the big regional hospital.  They’ve been there all night. The brain tumor is huge and pushing on her pituitary gland, among other things.  Won’t know what kind it is until the biopsy.  They’re still doing all the preliminary workup.

Thank G-d she called me.

I wonder why the Creator, if there is one, and in these cases I must say it fuels my doubt, took me out of my profession by way of my illness.  S/he gave me, as my birthright, a degree of intuition that could be called Second Sight.  I don’t need to hear more than two or three sentences regarding a case, if it’s a fresh one, and I nearly always have the diagnosis right in front of my eyes like a movie marquis.  It is a great grief that my ability to practice medicine, which I worked so hard to achieve, was snatched away from me.

The Sight was what propelled me into medicine.  And yes, there are still times, like this one, where someone in need will call me and I can help them.

It’s a beautiful gift, but a cruel judgement against me that I don’t get to use it on a daily basis anymore.  I wonder what it all means…if it means.

At one point in my bipolar journey, nothing was working, med-wise, and my shrink planted an idea in my brain that had consequences I don’t think he intended.  There is a great deal of similarity between bipolar illness and seizure disorder: both share the phenomenon of kindling, where a little spark gets going and if it’s not stopped, it spreads until it causes generalized dysfunction.  In Bipolar-land we usually call that a trigger, but there is functional MRI evidence that demonstrates similar changes in brain metabolism during the moments leading up to a seizure, and the moments leading up to a bipolar decompensation.  So it should be no surprise that anti-epileptic drugs also treat bipolar symptoms.

When my son was a teen going through a bipolar meltdown, his psychiatrist told me, and showed me clinical papers to back his words up (which unfortunately I do not have and am not in the mood to dig up), that if, in the young brain, bipolar disorder could be suppressed for a two-year period without a breakthrough, it could be considered cured, just in the same way as epilepsy.  The theory is that in the growing brain, suppressing the kindling effect for that long gives the brain a chance to literally “grow out of it.”  My son, now 28, recently went through a battery of neuropsychiatric testing which showed that although he does have Major Depressive Disorder, he has no remaining features of Bipolar Disorder.  Bingo.

Back in the olden days before they had anti-seizure drugs like Depakene and Tegratol and Lamictal, there was very little in the anti-epilepsy arsenal.  The ancient Greek physycians noted that if you fasted a person with epilepsy, the seizures stopped.  Eventually, over a couple of thousand years, this observation led to development of the Ketogenic Diet.  If you look at the Wikipedia article under this link, it will tell you as much as or more than you ever wanted to know about the Ketogenic Diet.

The basic idea is that the brain can function on only two kinds of fuel: glucose, which is a product of sugar and carbohydrate (and in some cases protein) breakdown, and ketone bodies, which are small molecules that result from the breakdown of fat.  Ketone bodies also have the ability to regulate blood sugar, so if the balance of glucose and ketones is correct, the body literally shifts from a glucose based metabolism to a ketone based metabolism.  This has a wide range of effects.  The Atkins Diet  works on this principle: if you stop feeding the body carbohydrates, then it has to break down fat to get ketones to feed the brain and the rest of the body.

For reasons still unknown, ketone metabolism, or ketosis, suppresses kindling in the brain and controls seizures.  It can be a miraculous thing.  If you read through the Wikipedia article you’ll be astounded at the numbers.  I was, anyway.  The only problem is, it’s a very difficult diet to do.  You have to really be committed to it, and one little slip-up can set you back weeks.

So, at the time when meds were not working to suppress my bipolar fire, I was a little overweight anyway so I decided what the heck, I’ll try the Atkins diet, and do the most extreme version just for kicks and chuckles.  It was a bitch to do.  It’s a fat and protein based diet, so you have to pretty much live on eggs and cheese and (at that time I was not religiously observant) bacon, which was my staple food, cheeseburgers (God, I miss those), mayonnaise all over everything, heavy cream (for a treat, I would whip up a carton of heavy cream and eat it), cream cheese, and lots of leafy greens.  Oh man, it’s hard.  But: my BP symptoms stabilized, and I lost 30 pounds in the bargain.  I stayed on the diet for three years, then got religious and couldn’t eat bacon or cheeseburgers anymore, and started eating challah and kugels instead.  The thirty pounds came back, and my brain went wacko again.  Hmmm.

Now my brain isn’t wacko, really, thanks to Seroquel, but the problem is, with the Seroquel I just don’t feel anything.  I’d like to feel happy, or sad, or excited.  I was just walking by the river here which is just a couple of feet from flood stage, and in fact did flood last night, and I kept thinking, jeez, I should be feeling fear, this thing is so awesomely powerful and out of control.  But all I felt was, I should feel fear but I don’t.

So I decided to go back into the land of Ketosis, just to see what will happen.  At the very least maybe I’ll drop those two pants sizes I picked up over the winter, and if I’m lucky, my brain might start working better and I might be able to drop part or all of the Seroquel so I can feel things again.  Stay tuned!

Reblogged from Tell About Abuse:

Claude (who was slow to larnin’ but hell on critters) blew that hole in the boards about twenty-five years ago, after Carlene, the previous postmistress, started hearing strange sounds emanating from under the boards; and the source of the sounds was revealed when she came out from behind the counter to close up the post office one evening and there was a great-granddaddy of a rattlesnake grinning at her from the doorway.  After she got done shrieking, which could be heard all the way to Bailey’s Holler, she got on the phone and called for Claude to quick come down with his shotgun, which he was happy to oblige, and blew that hole in the post office porch.  Once he had it opened up, he saw that there was a whole nest of rattlers living underneath there, so he fired off the other barrel, which pretty much took care of that problem.

Inside the post office isn’t much more sophisticated.  The fifty mail boxes, vintage 1879, are beautifully cast in brass, having been moved from another post office. All the original scales and equipment are still there, although since the computer has invaded the scene, it is some crowded. The post office inside has plank walls and a puncheon floor.  A puncheon floor is made by smoothing out some dirt and laying some boards over it.  That’s it.  That way you don’t have to go to the trouble of making a foundation.  It is a matter of speculation what the postmistress and her clerk do about bathroom needs, as we know for sure there isn’t any over there, not even a port-a-potty like I have.

The best part is the postmistress, Becky, who is Carlene’s niece.  She started out as Carlene’s clerk when she was about fifteen, and then took over as postmistress after Carlene got too sick to work.  She smoked herself to death.  Carlene, not Becky.  Becky is as charming a mountain lady as you will ever meet.  She likes to tell me about Mr. De Bell, who is the ghost who lives in the Old House, which sits on the same rock as the one I live on.  In fact the two buildings are attached.  Anyway, Mr. De Bell, who died of a heart attack some fifty years ago, likes to come sit in the rocking chair next to the wood stove in the post office and smoke his pipe.  Becky says he smokes that cherry pipe tobacco.  She loves the smell of it.  She maintains that Mr. De Bell is good company, and it always makes her feel safe when he’s there with her.

But you didn’t really come here to hear all this gossip about the speculative inner workings of the post office.  What you’re after is the view.

The white building on the other side of the river is the post office.

This shot is taken from the River Road, which is the road I live on.   What you see here is a spray of wild Dogwood blossoms hanging out over the North Toe River.  The river’s real name is North Estatoe, after a Cherokee princess named Estatoe who jumped off a rock because her parents wouldn’t let her marry a boy from another tribe.  But I think the name of the river has been officially changed to the North Toe, because there is also a South Toe River.

On the other side of the river is the railroad grade.  It was once a narrow-gauge railroad, called the Clinchfield Railway, and there was once a thriving town where you see a few little buildings.  The Clinchfield had a passenger line, and Penland was a regular stop, not a whistle-stop.  A gigantic flood in 1916 wiped out the village, leaving only the post office, the general store, and a couple of houses that were fortunate enough to be above the flood line.

The flood also wiped out the narrow gauge railroad, and a standard gauge track was built to replace it.  It used to be a Conrail track but now CSX has taken over, and to tell you the truth even though I hate CSX for personal reasons, they take a lot better care of the track.  When Conrail had it there were derailments every five minutes, practically.  Now, for the two and a half years I’ve been living with Mr. De Bell, there hasn’t been one.

The Penland Post Office

There is a railroad crossing right next to the post office,  so the trains have to blow four times every time they approach it.  The standard pattern is BWAAAAAA, BWAAAAAA, BWA BWAAAAAAAA, but they like to mix it up so it could be anything as long as they get their four infernal blasts in.  I hate them.  I have visitors (VERY rarely–I hate visitors too) who simper, “Oh, a train, I LOVE trains!  Don’t you just LOVE living near a train?”  No, I don’t.  They  come BWAAAA-ing down here day and night, and some of them have OK voices and some of them sound like a cow in labor.

I don’t have to tell you that I don’t have indoor plumbing.  Plus, if I told you, the building inspector would shut me down and I would have to move; which might be a good thing, but at least here I don’t pay rent.

But I do have to put up with Mr. De Bell, who makes an infernal racket walking around in the attic at all hours of the night.  I can always tell when Becky goes home from the post office, because he starts up tromping away in the rafters.  If he thinks I’m going to invite him down here, he can think again: not only do I hate visitors, but I’m asthmatic and I’m not about to put up with his damn pipe.  And by the way:  whoever told you that ghosts don’t cross water was WRONG.  Mr. De Bell lives over here, but he crosses the  North Toe River and visits Becky the Postmistress whenever he wants to, so that completely debunks that old myth. I never believed it anyway.