drinking tea

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Hazy, smokey days and the cruelty of nature

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 13 Comments



Can I make you a cup of tea? It’s been a weird week here and I could use one myself.

This week took a little bit of an odd turn on Tuesday and Wednesday when our already minimal plans for the week were thrown off even more by the smoke and haze that came down from Canada and made our air unhealthy to breathe. I’m sure many of you found your week impacted similarly (except you folks in California who deal with smog all the time anyhow.)

The smoke chased Little Miss and me inside for two days since she and I are the most sensitive members of the family when it comes to smells and smoke, etc. When I first smelled it all on Tuesday, I thought one of our neighbors was burning trash since outside burning is something we are allowed to do here in our area.

I looked outside a couple of times to see which neighbor it was. My eyes were burning some and I had already been sneezing but thought it was normal allergies.

I mentioned the smoke smell to The Husband who told me it was the Canadian wildfires and suggested I start shutting all the windows to keep it out.

I started Googling and found out that air quality was getting worse in New York state and realized that the air quality feature on our weather app does actually serve a purpose. I looked at our levels and started to become concerned, but on Tuesday it wasn’t as bad as it became on Wednesday when our air quality level jumped from code red to code purple and over 330 points. I learned the scale goes to 500 so I started to wonder if we were going to get up that high or not.

I spent much of Wednesday reading about what the fires were doing to the east coast and trying to convince my dad to stop going out in it and to bring my son home since the two of them were going to do work around Dad’s house. He finally agreed it was very bad out there and brought The Boy home.

The view at my parents when Dad decided the air really wasn’t healthy to breathe.

My son snapped a couple of photos on their way through town and he took a few on his way to work as well.

I snagged this photo from a newspaper 45 minutes south of us. This photo is not Photoshopped and there is no filter on it. This is how yellow it was out there.

My son said there were more people in our small town than he’s ever seen before during the day as the smoke got thicker and they were all out there talking about how bad the air was and coughing.

Sounds like a typical human reaction. Ha.

It was very yellow outside, as the photos above show, similar to how it looks when there is a really nasty thunderstorm coming, and that yellow stretched into our house, making it look otherworldly. I wanted to pull all the curtains over the windows and pretend it wasn’t out there. This was one of the few times I regretted all the windows we have that let in wonderful natural light. Mainly because the natural light was not wonderful at all.  

This introvert should have liked being forced inside for two days but I did not. I like at least being able to go outside and look at my slowly blooming flowers without coughing and my eyes burning. Grilling outside wasn’t much fun either. I ended up only going out once on Tuesday and not at all on Wednesday.

By Thursday I was excited when the air quality was improved, and I could go visit my parents. The air was much clearer with only a faint whiff of smoke by the afternoon when I went to their house. I also went into the yard Thursday to take photos of the white peonies that are already blooming and the pink ones that are just starting to open.

The peonies open every year around my brother’s birthday, which I mentioned last week, I think. His birthday was yesterday.

From what I heard from him, he had a nice, relaxing birthday.

My roses aren’t blooming yet but the buds are out and that makes me so giddy with excitement!

Let me go back to that visit to my parents on Thursday for a moment. My dad and Zooma the Wonder Dog went outside at one point, but Dad came back in a few moments later looking for his iPad. He said that there was a fawn in the backyard and that Zooma had been nose to nose with it, calmly sniffing it.

By the time we came back out, Zooma was walking away, looking very wary at the fawn. She didn’t even bark at it. Long story short, we left the fawn there as we know we are supposed to do because the mom will usually come back to the fawn and takes them back with her. We did think it was odd that the fawn was curled up in the short grass, not in higher grass because the doe usually leaves her fawn in a camouflaged area.

Little Miss and The Husband stopped by on the way back from gymnastics (Little Miss is in a new class) and Little Miss got a look at the fawn. She wanted to pet it, but we didn’t let her. After some online research, I did learn that the doe will not abandon her baby even if it comes in contact with humans or pets, but l thought she should stay back from it because I honestly thought it didn’t look like it felt well. We did read that a doe will abandon a fawn if it is sick.

We left my parent’s house and Mom and Dad went to bed later thinking the doe would come back for her fawn. In the morning, though, Dad discovered that the fawn had died.

We were all heartbroken.

When we pulled up to the house yesterday to take some packages that had been dropped off at the garage into my parent’s house, a fawn ran up the bank behind the house, near the dead fawn, (which Dad had covered with a tarp because he was going to bury later it later in the day), and we were confused, thinking maybe the fawn really hadn’t died. The fawn had, sadly, indeed died, but two other fawns were on the bank and ran into the woods. We are hoping that the three fawns weren’t abandoned by their mom somehow and we are also now wondering if the doe had triplets and the youngest one just didn’t make it.

The whole experience made me very weepy yesterday and added to a few other things that have made me weepy lately. I’ve had a lot on my mind this past week. I’ve been worrying and praying for a lot of people and situations but probably worrying more than I’ve been praying. I’m not going to share any of the situations I am worrying about because they involve situations with others.

We were glad that the heavy smoke didn’t come into our area until Tuesday because this gave Little Miss some time to visit with her friends who are moving back to Texas. They moved there once before, came back, and it looks like they are moving again. They flew out of an airport near us yesterday. Little Miss was very heartbroken that they most likely won’t be coming back from Texas again and I held her for a long time after they left, crying along with her. I had gotten used to them running up from their great-grandmother’s down the street and playing here for a while in the summer. It will be sad to no longer see them, but the move is necessary for their health and well-being for a variety of reasons.

Little Miss does have another friend coming over today to play and I know she’s looking forward to that after saying goodbye to her other friends and being locked up in the house for two straight days.

Tomorrow we may visit my parents. I will be put to work cleaning out the pool so we can eventually swim in it when the weather gets hotter, which I’m sure it will do by mid-June to early July.

As for next week, the sky is the limit. Homeschool is officially over for a couple of months (I plan to have a post up about that later in the week) so we will just take it easy until Summer Reading starts June 20th.

The local summer reading program includes activities at the local library and a couple of field trips. It should be fun and fill up our summer so we’re not sitting at home too often.

I usually share what I am drinking, tea-wise, but I didn’t do that at the beginning of the post this time. This week I went back to my regular peppermint tea because our days were a little chilly, but we are warming up again today and throughout next week. Little Miss made me some cinnamon sugar milk last week for fun and I actually liked it.

So how was your week last week? Did you have to deal with the smoke from the wildfires as well?

An afternoon chat and a cup of tea: More Mary Berry, rainy weather, cuddly cats, and molasses milk

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

 I really need a cup of tea again this week, though it might have been a slightly better week than last week.

I loved the teas that everyone shared with me that they were drinking last week. What are you drinking this week?

I think I was drinking cocoa and maple syrup last week instead of tea, but today I’m sipping a cup of peppermint tea with local honey stirred in.

The cold weather seems to be here to stay and we might receive some snow tomorrow, but so far our winter has remained mild. I’ve enjoyed staying inside as much as possible, covered with a blanket this week while I read or tried to figure out how to design journals and sell them on Amazon.

The only days we got out of the house for very long were a visit to my parents on Sunday and a dentist appointment an hour away for Little Miss.

It was raining and messy the day we went to the dentist appointment so we didn’t enjoy the view of the drive through the local state park on our way there. I was glad when we returned home and I was able to pull a blanket up around me and watch some Andy Griffith. The cats have been inside more often recently due to the weather.

Scout has decided she needs to visit my chest to touch her nose to mine and curl up a few times each day, including in the middle of the night a couple of times, which made me almost scream. She doesn’t seem happy with simply curling up at the end of the bed. She wants to walk up my chest and stick her nose in my face first and then she’ll go curl up somewhere else. She was practically thrown across the room one night because she woke me up and I thought a monster from one of my weird dreams was attacking me.

She is one of the few cats I have had that have let me pick them up and cuddle them, at least for a few moments anyhow. I mentioned this to my husband and he said, “Smokey used to let you pick her up.”

Smokey was one of the cats he had when we were dating. I inherited her, along with Squeek and my husband, when we got married. The issue is that Smokey really didn’t like me. She was The Husband’s cat. She loved The Husband. He could pet her on her nose and put her to sleep while she lay on his chest.

She hated me. At first she hated me. Later she tolerated me. Either way, she did not let me cuddle her.

“She let you cuddle her,” I reminded The Husband this morning. “Not me. I replaced her in your life and she hated me for that.”

The only time Smokey did like me was when I was lactating. She would rub up against my chest during that time. She was a milk fiend and loved when I would pour a little of my lactose-free milk for her in a plate or bowl. When that tradition started, she decided I was okay and she could like me a little bit. She lived 17 years and she did let me pet her, especially when I needed to comfort her after she went partially deaf and would sit in the middle of the living room floor and cry after her longtime companion, Squeek, died. I do miss that cat. Even if she wouldn’t let me cuddle her.

This afternoon Little Miss had gymnastics. She’s getting ready for a small competition at her studio in February. It will be her first. We are hoping she will wear her leotard because she doesn’t like wearing it during her weekly practices. She prefers to wear her stretch pants and a T-shirt instead.

Today, The Boy has a friend over to visit. They’ll talk about video games and whatever 16 and 17-year-olds talk about (sometimes it is a little frightening so I don’t listen. Ha!).  The Husband, Little Miss and I usually hide upstairs when he has friends over and watch shows on our laptops or read books. This gives the boys time to be boys and laugh about body sounds and similar things.

Seriously, though, these boys have quite a few serious conversations about history, dictatorships, economies of foreign countries, former presidents, various battles in various wars, and other topics which sometimes go over my head. My brain can’t really comprehend anything too complicated these days.

Recently, I have been craving simple things. Simple shows, books, food, and days. I can’t always have the simple days, but I try to take a small amount of time out of the day to read a book and drink something warm like a cup of tea or, like I did earlier this week, a cup of molasses milk.

When my dad had his knee surgery several years ago, his doctor required all of his patients to drink molasses milk for a certain number of days to raise their iron levels. I’m drinking the molasses milk for the same reason, hoping it will help either raise my iron or keep it at a good level. I find I feel better when I take iron capsules or increase my iron intake. I, of course, am using black strap molasses.

Earlier this week, after a particularly difficult day, I warmed up a cup of molasses milk, sat at our kitchen table, and opened up Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery. I forced myself to sit still for 15 minutes and read a couple of chapters and I found that I felt a lot more relaxed afterward. I love escaping into Anne’s world.

Listening to good music, such as worship music, or reading a devotional and saying a brief prayer, helps me in a similar way. I would like to do all of those things this weekend as I try to give my brain and body some much needed respite from recent stress.

How do you relax during a stressful time? Do you have to force yourself to relax like I do?

And what are you drinking today? Let me know in the comments.

Last week one reader was drinking a new cinnamon tea from The Republic of Tea, and another was drinking a loose-leaf flavored black tea called Florence by Harney and Sons.