Day 60: The Deep Root Cure

Yesterday I woke up with a headache.  I get them on the days I take Zoe for chemo, and they usually linger the day afterward.  It's no big deal.  They're just like some bad weather I'm moving through.  A lot of people get headaches.

It's odd, though, because I didn't grow up as a headache sufferer.  I only started getting them regularly this past summer, before we knew Zoe was sick.  When I took her to two vets to find out why she was limping, and they both said she was fine, but maybe had a touch of arthritis, the headaches got worse.  I got two whopping migraines--my first ever--the week before that Saturday when, on an impulse, I took her to the Canton Animal Hospital, where she wasn't a patient, and asked them to x-ray Zoe's leg before I knew what I was going to say.  Ever since we got the diagnosis, the migraines haven't come back.  Just the milder malaise headaches on chemo days.

If you've been following the posts in this corner, you might have sensed that this week for me was kind of intense.  I wanted to have a relaxing Saturday, but I also wanted to see if I could cure the headache without taking anything.  It was a challenge because I carry around Ibuprofen in my purse so it's always there when I need it.  I'm not a purist about these things, but I was attending a workshop on balancing one's energy, taught by two lovely sisters, Jan and Julie, and I thought that maybe I could put the workshop to the test and get to the root of the imbalance without just treating the symptoms.  And then after the workshop, I was going to take two students I have deep roots with, Lettie and Scott, to a party at Deep Root Farm.  It seemed like a good convergence of forces for experimenting with natural remedies.

A year ago December, my students and I ate a chicken at my house that Lettie and Scott had helped raise and slaughter at Deep Root Farm.

At the energy workshop, we started with a meditation I have done for years.  You picture deep roots growing down from your spine into the earth. That always takes away my excess nervous energy. Then you picture branches growing up through your body, out your head, that reach to the stars.

Jan and Julie

Jan told me at that the sixth chakra, which governs intuition, could be the source of the headaches.  Sensing something is wrong even when others are telling you all is well will certainly give you a pain in the head, even if you don't go in for this kind of thinking.

Halfway through the workshop, my headache began to lift.  The delicious, earthy red lentil soup and homemade bread that Ann made us for lunch helped too.  And I drank a lot of tea and water.

Then it was time to meet Scott and Lettie.  They were waiting for me in the parking lot of the bookstore at St. Lawrence University.  I love these students, and seeing them also reminds me of places I have been with them--excursions deep into the country up here with Lettie and her classmates from a first-year-seminar I taught called Widely Traveled in the North Country--and adventures in Quebec City and Rouen and Paris and Dakar with Scott and the students who traveled with me on the France program.  (To read Lettie's lovely prose, See Day 8: Lettie Discovers the Zen of Orange- Eating.  See Day 45: An American Dog in the City of Light, Part I, where Scott has a walk-on part.)

Lettie and Scott

But I still had the ghost of the headache when we arrived at the party, even though the drive was so lovely, out into the deep country, on a road I'd never been on before, past pastures of horses, and tree canopies laden with fresh snow. 

The cure crept up on me before I knew it.  I loved talking to Mike and Maria Corse, who own Deep Root Farm, and their son, Ian, who, at age 17, has already written a novel, which he was happy to turn into a 750-word story, because he gets that you have to cut/cut/cut and let go to be a good writer.  Val, my massage therapist was there.  And it was great to catch up with Lettie and Scott and other former students like Maddie and Mike and Claire.  Mia, who went to to France in the group Scott was in, came in from sledding and we were happy and surprised to see each other.  She volunteers for Campus Kitchens, which serves free suppers to hungry people in our community on Monday nights.  They get some of their food from Deep Root Farm, and Maria helps them.

Claire wants to be a farmer, as do a lot of this group's friends.  I spoke to an English major I'd never met before about the meditation class I'm taking, which she is going to take next month.  Some of us went outside and watched children skating on a pond, and watched the last of a bonfire become coal, and we checked out all the greenhouses where seedlings will get started soon.  And naturally we had a good talk with the chickens.

Scott, Lettie, Maddie, Ian

Deep Root Farm chickens

a new greenhouse at Deep Root Farm

We saw a lovely bird with blue markings and a white breast, and we all tried to guess what kind it was, but didn't know

Before we left, Scott and Lettie and I each had a mug of Mike's homemade soup.  He had made it with kale and squash that grew in these gardens we had just walked through.  It was so delicious, so nourishing, and it made me feel, for lack of a better word, balanced.  When we left the house, it was hard to believe I'd ever had a headache, or might ever get one again.

Then, homeward bound, and a gentle walk with Zoe across the river and back.  We looked at each other often on that walk.  She is always a bit subdued after chemo days, a little tired, and I am too.  I asked her when we should stop and she told me with just a slight nod of the head. When interspecies communication works, it always seems like it's the simplest thing in the world.

Sometimes what we need is very simple, so elemental.  To feel rooted to this earth.  Warm soup with legumes and vegetables that grew near the place where you are eating it.  The company of people who are kind and who are trying to plant themselves in a community where they can grow and be part of other people's growth.

Sometimes we don't have to travel very far or do very much to get what we need to cure what ails us.

Day 43: Bipartisan Pet Politics

I read somewhere once that in France, conservatives tend to choose dogs as their pets, while leftists prefer cats.

I once tried to conduct a casual study: to try to sneak a peak at what newspaper the pet's companion was reading at the café: Le Figaro, or Libération.  I saw no obvious pattern.

The other problem, of course, was that the cat's people were generally far from view, keeping their politics to themselves.  If the cat was the pet in residence at a particular hotel or café, its people were working, not sitting around reading the paper. 

At home in the U.S., I haven't found any obvious patterns.  I've known people across the political spectrum to prefer the same pedigree, say, the affable golden retriever.  And one's social class isn't always evident either, beyond the big-ticket markers, such as the car the animal came in on.  Still, it's hard to generalize.  I've seen people with modest incomes splurge on expensive show dog quality breeds, and I've seen well-to-do people rescue abused mixed-breeds and cats.  People across the political divide volunteer at animal shelters--people with nothing in common beyond their shared love of animals and their shared enemy: the people who hurt their own pets.

Among the many things I learned in those exciting first days of pup socialization with Zoe, when I would strike up a conversation with anyone who came by who had a dog, was that a dog gets you outside your own echo chamber.  When you walk your dog in a dog park or another lively, dog-friendly setting, like the campus behind our house, when your dog joins the pack, for a day, or if you're lucky, for a season, you don't need to agree on who should be the next president. 

In the early days, Zoe and I regularly walked with two golden retrievers, one old and one young, and a dog with so many breeds in its mix that I wouldn't be able to give you a picture here--just trust me, we're talking mongrel.  The two goldens were with her most often, and to this day the golden is a breed she knows to be reliably friendly.  The two people who owned these two different dogs, the elder and the younger, had almost nothing in common except their love of golden retrievers.

During the 2004 election, I wondered if the people in our pack would continue to get along.  I sensed we had conflicting views, but I didn't know for sure.  When politics finally came up one day, we discovered we had one centrist Democrat woman, one very-leftist woman, a registered Republican, and an Independent who was still not sure who to vote for.  We also found out that the Republican was very devoutly Catholic, as was the Democrat.  For a short spell, a Wiccan joined us, (forgive the pun) but then she moved out of town.  The very mixed breed dog's person was living with a transgendered person who was beginning to identify as female, but hadn't begun the medical procedures.  The woman's extremely conservative parents had been so happy when their daughter, formerly a lesbian, brought home a male partner, but that was all about to change.

All that mattered in our makeshift pack was whether the dogs got along. If your dog played well with others, you were in.  If your dog was a bully, you had to exclude yourself.  No one, in my memory, was ever asked to leave.  The people just knew.  It was all done amicably, although everyone felt sad about it when a certain configuration had to change.

Near the end of Zoe's first summer, she met a springer spaniel named Cooper.  The two became very good friends, and in doing so, their human female companions became friends too.  I would not have any reason to know Pat, who walks dogs with me mostly in the summer and fall, if it weren't for Zoe and Cooper having met one day in the woods and deciding spontaneously to chase each other.  By the following summer, the four of us were walking for 90 minutes every afternoon.  That's a long time for two people, previously strangers, to make conversation.  At first the dogs were our primary topic.  We never ran out of things to discuss.

Pat and I vote the same way, but we really didn't know this about each other until 2008, when the election was our shared obsession. For the five years leading up to that fall, we had too many other things to look at on our wooded walks, and too many other things to say.

Sometimes the two would carry the same stick out of the water

Cooper is an excellent swimmer, and he gave Zoe tips