Blue-Footed Musings

My husband and I were unsuccessful in our attempt to seed the front yard with grass a few years ago. Still, some grass did grow, and the yard didn’t look too bad last year. This year, though, the wild plants have come back gangbusters, particularly the clover. The clover doesn’t look very neat, but it’s lush and green and beautiful in its own way, so I guess I don’t mind.

My mom and I got on the topic of clover when we spoke last weekend. She said, “You could always find the clovers with extra leaves. Have you found any among all those new clovers yet?”

As a matter of fact, I have! Just yesterday I picked a four-leaf clover and put it in a small vase on my desk. When I first went into my office this morning, it looked sad, all folded up on itself. But after I’d been in there for a while with the light on, I noticed that it had opened itself up again, like a flower reacting to the sun. Cute.

A few weeks ago, I happened to look out my office window and saw a cop car on my driveway. That was unusual, so I went downstairs to check things out. By the time I got to the front door, the policeman had already driven back toward the road, where a fire engine suddenly flew by with a lout blat. Hmm. I stepped outside, and the air reeked of smoke. Alarming.

I went looking for my husband, and when I finally found him, I told him that I thought there was a fire nearby and that the cops were trying to figure out where it was. We walked into the kitchen together, and that’s when we noticed that the backyard and woods beyond it were hazy with smoke. There was so much smoke around that it took us a while to find where it was coming from, but we finally discerned a plume rising over the hill to the side of our house, seemingly from the area in which a few of our neighbors live. We put on some masks and walked up the hill to see if the neighbor’s house was on fire. It wasn’t. The smoke was coming from further away, thankfully.

Now knowing that the fire wasn’t right on top of us, we didn’t feel like we were in any immediate danger, but we kept tabs on it. We also kept our windows closed and our air purifiers on. Eventually the fire ended (thanks to the fireman who had been fighting it) and the smoke dissipated. All was well, and we were finally able to relax again.

But it did leave me with a thought. Obviously forest fires are a threat when you live near the woods. However, it’s now occurred to me that we’re not merely near the woods. We’re surrounded by them, and our road is also wooded on both sides. That could be, in certain circumstances, perilous. So I’m considering whether there’s anything I might do to prepare for such a risk.

As happens nearly every year, not long after finding the first violet of the spring, I found the first tick. It was hanging out on the wall in the foyer. Presumably it had been carried into the house on someone’s shoe. I used a tissue to pluck it off the wall. Then I took it outside, where my husband ground the nasty bloodsucker into the driveway.

A couple of days later I found a little green grasshoppery bug on the rim of a drinking glass in the kitchen. Another interloper! In this case, I took the glass outside and gently transferred the bug from the glass to the grass.

My son, if he had seen what happened to the tick, might have argued that it wasn’t the tick’s fault that it had evolved to suck blood. And I would have had to concede the point. But I am a practical person, and I follow a practical rule for creepy crawlies: if you’re dangerous to me, I’ll be dangerous to you, but if you’re cute and harmless, then I’ll be cute and harmless, too. It’s only fair.

This big news this week is that our main healthcare provider is going out of business. The entire practice, which covers 25,000 patients between its adult and pediatric branches, is closing up shop due to a combination of staffing issues (i.e., doctors are retiring in droves) and low insurance payouts.

My husband and I were blissfully ignorant about this at first. We didn’t get the e-mail announcement, and we didn’t catch the story on local news. Thank goodness for my SIL, who was all in a tizzy over it. She passed the news on to us, giving us a chance to compete with the thousands of other parents who were racing to find a new doctor for their kids. Fortunately, we found a practice that had room for them (again, thanks to my SIL).

As for my hubby and me, it may be more difficult. We had already had some trouble finding doctors. For example, I haven’t had a “real doctor” in years. All of my care has been handled by a string of PAs. My current one isn’t my favorite, but she’s competent, and I haven’t had any complaints. However, I had wondered if either the practice was trying to save money by using PAs, who are presumably cheaper, or if they couldn’t find enough doctors. Now it seems that both things may have been true.

The real concern is that this happened at all. We’re talking about a large, successful, well-respected medical practice. If they couldn’t keep going, then other practices may soon meet the same fate. I’d heard warnings of a looming crisis in healthcare, so I was aware that it could happen. I just didn’t expect it to strike so soon and so close to home. But it confirms what I’ve known for a long time: the healthcare system is broken. And given all the upheaval in this country right now, things will almost certainly get worse before they get better.

I spotted the first violet of 2025 a few days ago. It was a white violet, and it was standing several inches tall, which was impressive given that most of the other violet plants are barely out of the ground. I almost missed it though, because it was right up against the foundation wall, and its light color blended in with the light gray concrete.

This is not the first time that I’ve found the first violet of the season growing against one of our foundation walls. My theory is that the sun heats up the concrete, which makes that area warmer for longer. This either convinces the flower that the spring is more advanced or it provides an advantage for growing, or both.

• In case you were wondering, the power company did finally come to fix our power lines that weekend (but only after my husband made himself a “squeaky wheel” by calling again). Then our electrician got to work hooking everything up. It took him several hours, and he had to replace a bunch of stuff, including the meter. Such work and gear does not come cheap. We knew it before we got the bill, and the bill proved it. Oh, well. I’ve gotten so beaten down by the cost of everything lately that this kind of thing just makes me shrug now. It’s not worth the energy it would take to get upset. Bright sides: while the electrician worked, our power was out, and I chitchatted with the kids for a while, which was nice, and then did some reading by lantern-light, plus the new meter looks better than the old gear did.
• Our most recent jigsaw puzzle was so hard that everyone gave up on it but me. It was so hard that I hardly knew where to start. It required every jigsaw-solving strategy I had, and it took me several weeks to finish. Now that it’s done, I’m proud of it. It’s a reminder that everything is hard at first, but hard work and persistence win out.
• The warmish and rainy weather has brought out the peepers. I want to say that peepers are a sure sign that spring has arrived. But peepers do sometimes get fooled by unseasonable weather. Not this year, I think. This year they seem to be right on target.

The Boston Globe always posts a recap of the previous night’s Saturday Night Live. I often watch it Sunday morning. In this one, Colin Jost made a joke about DST (“Tomorrow marks the start of Daylight Saving’s Time, when we set our clocks ahead, ideally four years.”). The joke was on me, though, because I hadn’t realized that it was time for the clock change. Darnit. It hurts to lose that hour.

We’ve had a lot of windstorms lately. Yesterday’s was particularly fierce. I was inside and perfectly cozy, so I wasn’t paying it much mind. Suddenly, I heard a terrible racket come from the corner of the house. I went downstairs and looked outside, expecting to find the usual sort of minor mess (garbage bins knocked over, a stray tree branch, etc.).

What I found was shocking. Our entire power cable had been torn from the house, and the lines were down. It took me a while to spot the culprit (a fallen tree), because it was so far from the house. The tree must have made a huge crash when it fell, but I’d had my headphones on, so I’d only heard the closer sound of the power lines being ripped from the house just outside my office.

Fortunately for us, the tree did not break the lines, so we still have power and Internet. Unfortunately, the lines are on the driveway, so we can’t go anywhere. And this happened on our property, so we’re the only ones affected and consequently not a priority to the electric company.

It’s been a whole day, and they still haven’t come to fix the problem. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait for it to be fixed, how long we’ll have to live without power while it’s being fixed, and how much it’s going to cost. But for right now, though the wind continues to roar and though I’m stuck at home, at least I’m still perfectly cozy.

I read an article recently about the drop in fertility rates around the world. The article mentioned that some governments have been trying to incentivize women to have children, but that the policies haven’t been very effective. The article suggested that there might be a monetary value high enough to get women to have children, but that it was likely in the range of $300,000. And I just want to say that, yes, for $300,000 I probably would have had another child, because that would have made it affordable. Of course, let’s be real–there’s no way the U.S. government would ever give such large sums of money to its citizens. Well, unless those citizens were billionaires. 😉 The government has zero qualms about handouts for the wealthy.