Red is a thorough professional in everything he does. He is responsive, attentive, and focused. I never tire of watching him manage the sheep, or of the intuitive way he deals with people in his therapy work.I will always be grateful to Dr. Karen Thompson for sending him to me. She is an angel.
This morning, it’s cold and rainy, a fitting time to bring out my new winter hat, strange and wonderful. Maria bought it for me at the Wool and Fiber Festival, I plan on wearing it at our Open House, now just a week away.
Today, the hat is going to Brattleboro, Vt. We are meeting an old friend there for lunch. I plan on doing some shopping at the only clothing store I ever shop at, Sam’s in Brattleboro. I get all my blue work shirts there and my underwear and jeans. I always wear a blue shirt and jeans, and have for decades.
Today, I’m going to get a new pair of red suspenders, maybe some new boots for walking. The suspenders will probably be the extent of my shopping, I have what i need. Lunch will be fun too, I’m looking forward to it. I think my new hat will work out well in Brattleboro.
We are heading to New Mexico in two weeks, I need to be ready. Today, I am also trying out a new backpack camera bag I got with some B & H Photo credits I didn’t know I had.
Our new house-sitter, Shelby Blanchette, is coming to keep and eye on the farm and exercise the dogs. We’ve only known her for a month or so, but she already feels like family. She is funny, conscientious and great with the animals, she grew up on a farm herself.
She works very hard, and is impressive. We trust her completely.
It’s an interesting thing about house and pet sitters, everybody has their own criterion. Mine is that they love the animals, but not love the animals.
A good pet sitter in my mind isn’t there just to cuddle animals, but to get to know them, and their human’s understanding of them. I see Shelby is paying attention to that. She knows how to calm Fate down, coax Red out – he hides in my study when I am gone – and help us train Gus.
We both have a real good feeling about her, and she’s coming over frequently to get to know the dogs and the farm and the routines here, so she will be up to speed when we head for New Mexico a week after the Open House.
We are both very excited about this trip. We did have a short vacation to Disney World five years ago, but it didn’t turn out to be too restful, for various reasons I don’t need to regurgitate. We both see that we really need a real vacation, we will be gone a week.
I am getting older, but have never worked harder or been as engaged in life. I saw Sheila, the other day, the nurse-practitioner who oversees my diabetes. “You have a great life force,” she said, “you will live a long time.” I told her about the wicked low sugar attack I had the other night when I mistakenly took a double dose of my night-time Insulin.
My sugar plunged and I broke out into an awful sweat and my blood count dropped 100 points. I was confused and disoriented and thought I was having a heart attack. Maria saw what was happening and gave me some life savers and dark chocolate. Still, I won’t make that mistake again.
This was only the second low sugar episode I’ve ever had, and I had to laugh. The upside of an incident like that is you get to eat all the sweet stuff you want, at least for a few minutes. It worked out fine.
I plan to take the new back pack camera bag (LowePro) to New Mexico and take some photos.
I’ll be blogging from New Mexico, perhaps not as frequently, but regularly. And using my new backpack camera case, I’ll have a better feel for it today.
We’ll be back this afternoon. See you later, and thanks for following my life and supporting it. I love you back.
If you go to the Mansion any afternoon, any day of the week, you will find Diane sitting and singing to the two parakeets in a cage in the long hallway. Animals are very important to many people in assisted care or nursing homes, they are the avatars of life, the life they lived, the life the mourn, they life ahead.
They bring inestimable joy and connection to them. I sat down on the sofa on the other side of the cage with my camera today. Diane has some memory issues, but she is always smiling, always filled with joy, especially when she is seeing Red, or the Mansion cat, or her beloved parakeets – she feeds them every afternoon, sometimes she lets them nibble on a cookie she puts through the cage.
Her songs are sing song, but the message is clear. “I will never hurt you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you, no sir, I will never let anyone hurt you.”
She sings it every day, over and over again, and the parakeets get excited when they see her, and hop up and down, hoping for food. I imagine the song is comforting to them, they sometimes sing back to Diane.
After awhile, Red comes over to her and puts his head in her lap. “Yes, sir,” she sings to him, “I will always love you, I will never let anyone hurt you.” Red closes his eyes, wags his tail, put his head on her lap or knee.
She is there every day, every afternoon, her walker parked near the sofa, to the front of the cage.
You can write to Diane c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
I will be honest and say I did not believe it possible that the letters and messages of encouragement would have triggered something in Bill that made it possible for him to read again, the first time in more than a year since he had a debilitating stroke that prevented him reading and writing and brought him to live in the Mansion, an assisted care facility where I work as a volunteer with Red.
Two weeks ago, Bill told me he felt he had no reason to live, and greatly missed a connection with the gay community, a profoundly important and defining part of his life. He said at 82, he had lost hope and purpose. He rarely got out of bed.
He told me he could not read or write or see well. I got him CD’s and audio books and a CD player, but it was just frustrating him more. He said he just couldn’t figure it out.
In the past weeks, after I asked for help on the blog, Bill began receiving beautiful, affirming messages from people all over, and his mood and demeanor changed before our delighted eyes. The staff was elated. He began smiling, joking, moving around, taking walks, it was as if the letters – read to him by me and the Mansion aides – were some kind of miraculous medicine, a spiritual IV that began to revive him and give him hope.
I have never seen anything quite like that, not in a decade of therapy work among the elderly and the dying. Each letter was like a powerful vitamin, a miracle drug.
At first, Bill could not believe that these letters were for him. Then, he could hardly wait to read them.
Today, when I came into the Mansion, he was sitting on the porch, grinning at me, waving to me, and he fairly shouted, “hey, I’ve been looking for you, I’ve been waiting for you! I read today. I can read today, I read a letter today from beginning to end, for the first time since my stroke!”
He was elated, his face filled with joy. He gave me a great hug.
Then he said “this is because of you,” and I corrected him, and said, “no Bill, this is because the community you said you need found you and and reached out to you, and given you what you always said you needed. Your community come back to you.”
Bill read the letter to me in his room, and then again on the porch, he is saving it to read to his daughter, who is coming to visit him tomorrow.
The letter was from Gaye F, It began this way: “Dear Bill, I hope this note finds you well…I have been reading about you online. Although I live in the South, and am straight, I felt moved to write to you. Most of us are drowning in loneliness and dying for connection to community. We we would never dare admit it. We would rather accept misery that open up to the world with our needs. I admire your bravery in being open with your struggles. We all want connection. We all need affection. And we are so afraid of speaking up. I hope that by being open, your tribe finds you..”
Gaye’s letter was apt, and it follows a daily stream of messages from gay men and women all over the country, from Los Angeles to New York City. Day by day, as these messages (and cakes and cupcakes and scarves) arrived, Bill’s outlook got brighter and more energetic.
I have been taking pictures of Bill for some time now, and he never once smiled until these last days. Now he is always smiling.
He had a stroke, and doctors have told me that recovery from strokes is part medical, part physical, part emotional. I could see that Bill felt he had nothing to live for, and had been cut off forever from his community. I saw the letters restore this. Bill is having surgery on his eyes, I did not believe he was fully able to read these letters, but today, he was and did.
I don’t want to emotionalize his experience, his stroke was serious and he has a number of serious cognitive issues to work through. But this was a remarkable breakthrough, when I left, was clutching Gaye’s letter, reading it over and over. Bill cautioned me that he was not quite ready to read books again, and I asked him what he might like to read and he told me and I am going out to get some books for him first thing next week.
I won’t push it on him, but I want him to have the books he likes by his bedside. (Please don’t send any at this point, we need to go slowly and cautiously.)
One of the Mansion residents died recently, he was the sweetest man, and I wrote about him that he was a Prince In The Kingdom of Heart, and the term stuck in my mind. I think in our corner of this universe, in this place, with these people reading together, we have formed our own Kingdom Of The Heart, an antidote to the poison and hatred that sometimes flows all around us.
I am wary of over-reacting to things.Bill has a good long ways to go, but I sometimes think that in the Kingdom Of Heart, miracles are possible. I feel I witness one day, and thanks to all of you good people who reached outside of yourselves and brought connection and community to someone tottering at the edge of life.
(Bill is seeking letters and messages from people in the gay community, his community, he also welcomes letters from others. You can write Bill c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. These messages are making a difference.)
Our eighth Open House is just about one week away – Columbus Day Weekend, October 7th and 8th. As you can see, Maria and I have just discovered the beauty of signs printed on Vista Prints online, inexpensively and easily. What took us so long?
They say it all – sheep herding with Red and Gus and Fate, Belly Dancing with Maria’s Belly Dancing Group, and an increasingly popular art show from Maria showcasing the artists of rural life.
Our Open Houses have become a celebration of rural life. And a celebration of us, with our readers, our neighbors, our good and much-loved friends. When the Open Houses began at the much grander first Bedlam Farm, people flocked from all over the country, we were somewhat overwhelmed.
We moved to our smaller farm, and it is not so overwhelming, although the crowds can still be large.We have learned a lot about h ow to do it in an order, intimate and comfortable way. A few years ago, I despaired about the Open Houses, through no fault of anyone but my own, they had turned into something disturbing to me, and far from what Maria and I had imagined.
It seemed alien, on many levels.
For one thing, the movie about me had just come out, and people get very excited about movies. For another, a lot of people came who didn’t have any idea what we were about or what the Open Houses meant to us. That was my fault. Time seems to have resolved that, and Maria’s energy and creativity has moved me past it.
That was a very painful learning experience for me, and for others. Last year, and especially this year, I feel we have our purpose and our focus back. It feels very good again, Maria and I are excited. Almost all of the people we want and hope to see are coming, and many new friends have told us they plan to be here also.
Local motels and B & B’s are filling up for that weekend, the start of leaf season in nearby Vermont and her in New York.
There is a glow of community and love and friendship again, just what we hoped for, and the leaves are really starting to turn.
The older I get, the more I realize that things left alone quite often find their own way, and Maria has assembled a quite outstanding group of artists and will also show and sell her own art. I’m back to selling photos again in an inexpensive and hopefully, sensitive, way.
She is a natural curator, with great energy and impeccable taste. We are also mindful of everything we do being affordable.
Maria and I are only planning one Open House next year, so we can plan it more thoughtfully. This year, a focus on the art of rural life, of the gathering strength of women, on herding sheep with Red and Fate (and Gus), on our sweet donkeys. The shearer is coming, knitters and spinners are coming, the art has never been better or more affordable The RISSE refugee chorus is coming to sing, some of our friends from the Mansion will be our honored guests, there will be belly dancing, poetry reading.
Ed Gulley, an artist and the co-author of the popular Bejosh Farm Journal, will be here with his farm art sculptures, wind chimes and striking “flowers” made out of farm parts. Ed is an amazing artist and human being, a life-long dairy farmer with amazing stories to tell. People have bought his very striking wind chimes from all over the country.
We couldn’t feel better or more welcoming about it, and I hope that will be reflected in the weekend. It is, after all, a celebration of warmth and creativity and connection, important things these days. No arguments here or screaming cable news panelists.
Some housekeeping details.No dogs, please. We can’t offer toilet facilities but we do have a port-a-potty coming. There is plenty of food and some neat stores in our small town, just down the road. Children are most welcome, but please don’t let them chase after the chickens, for some reason a favored activity of (mostly) boys of a certain age.
Chickens can get killed that way.
Our dogs are very welcoming, sometimes too much so. Fate loves to jump up on people initially, I have not been successful in totally curbing that. Gus does the same thing, but he is too little to jump too far up. They absolutely love people.
We are sorry to ask people not to bring dogs, especially to Bedlam Farm, but our dogs and the donkeys are very protective of the farm and the sheep, dogs prompt chaos and some danger. Please don’t bring them.
Red is, as always, appropriate. The donkeys love to eat carrots and apples, and Shelby, our friend and house-sitter will be here to conduct some donkey tours.
The belly dancing, a must see will be at 1 p.m. Saturday. Poetry readings, talks and sheep shearing afterwards. Art is sold in Maria’s studio all day. The Open House are free, we accept and welcome donations to help us defray expenses. A donation box will be right near the Tin Man.
You can donate to work of the Army of Good when you buy a pussy hat, Maria can explain.
Parking is along the road in front of the house. Be careful. We are eager to meet you and talk with you. This is not an imposition, but the point, and this year, we definitely have our mojo back, we are psyched.
Maria will be holed up with her artists, I will be happy to sign any books you bring with you or buy for me to sign.
