Category: Uncategorized

Grandpa’s Hands

Growing up on Kellogg Street in St johns, my world felt small, safe, and beautifully anchored by the people I loved most. Just around the block on Jersey Street stood my grandparents’ small house, and just as the house I grew up in, Grandma and Grandpa’s house always felt safe and full of love.

Location of the Western Cooperage Co.

Grandpa would leave every morning from his house, with his metal lunchbox in hand, He would walk to the bluffs above the Willamertte River on the well worn paths, leading to the Western Cooperage Co. It wasn’t many blocks from the house.

Work at the cooperage, as I was told, was hard, relentless work—the kind of labor that demanded everything a man had to give. The cooperage was a place of heavy timber, iron hoops, and deafening machinery, a site of true sacrifice where workers like my grandfather traded their physical strength, and sometimes even their fingers, to provide for their families. Grandpa had very few full fingers. As a young child his hands were fascinating to me.

When the workday was over and the heavy labor was done, Grandpa came home, and I’m sure, eagerly anticipating what good food Grandma had made for dinner. He must have been exhausted and famished after a day at the cooperage.

Evenings at their house were simple and comforting. The fortunate days that I found myself at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, when Grandpa came in, he was carrying his metal lunchbox, and I would look inside and invariably, he had left a treat for us kids.


I can still picture the living room, Grandpa sitting in his favorite chair, almost always with his bible draped across his knees. I know that grandpa was a believer, but it wasn’t that he lived a quiet life. He raised black labradors for hunting fowl, and he was an extraordinary hunter of other animals and he was a quintessential fisherman. I’ve heard tell of his drinking days, and I think my father took after him in every way except the bible.

I can’t even imagine the days that Grandpa had lost a partial finger or a complete finger at work. What kind of pain must he have suffered. What kind of healing had to take place for those hands to still work. What kind of courage did it take for him to get up every day after losing part of his hand and to go back to that dangerous place to work.These are things I never thought of as a child.

The machinery at the cooperage was dangerous and noisy and had no safety mechanisms. The men fed these boards into the saws to create the staves for barrels. There was the formation of the heavy metal hoops and the formation of the barrels themselves. I cannot even imagine. See the postscript for some historical notes.

Though Grandpa was very loving, I don’t really remember having conversations with him. But climbing up into his lap in his comfortable chair was a favorite place of mine. I would hold his broken hands in mine, but never ask a question about them. And he never offered an explanation. I didn’t really know what had happened to his handa until I was almost grown.

Grandpa and Grandma’s house was ffilled with familiar sounds and sights.

Jessie Foster Womack and
Edward Corliss Anderson

Sunday nights, without fail, Lawrence Welk and Oral Roberts, the televangelist, came on the television. After I contracted polio, it was a heavy weight on our family, yet Grandpa’s faith and love never wavered. When Oral Roberts would admonish those watching from the comfort of their homes, the television watchers, to lay their hands on those that they wanted to see healed, Grandpa would call me from my place on the couch with Grandma and he would have me sit between his slippered feet. He would place his worn, hardworking hands on my head and pray. In those moments, the hands that labored so fiercely at the cooperage became the ultimate source of tenderness, healing, and safety. Their home was a haven. Grandma and Grandpa prayed for my healing with all of their hearts with Grandpa’s hands on my head.

Postscript
The history of the Western Cooperage Company is a story of incredible industrial triumph, but it was built on the severe physical sacrifices of the men who worked the line. To achieve a massive output of 3,000 barrels a day, the factory relied on heavy, high-speed woodworking machinery that operated with completely unguarded gears, blades, and chains.
In the early 20th century, the factory floor was a landscape of immense physical risk:

* The Jointer and Stave-Bucking Machines: These used rapidly rotating, exposed steel blades to shave heavy Douglas Fir down to precise curves. A split second of fatigue while feeding the wood meant fingers could instantly catch the blades.
* Hoop-Driving Presses: These powerful mechanical winches forced the iron hoops around the wood under crushing pressure, creating notorious pinch points that could easily sever a hand.
* Exposed Belts and Pulleys: Centralized steam engines turned heavy leather belts dangling over every workstation. Without modern automatic emergency stops, a caught sleeve or stray hand would drag a worker directly into the gears.

In an era before modern safety regulations, factory owners routinely prioritized the blistering speed of the assembly line over basic physical safeguards. For the workers, losing a finger or part of a hand was a tragic, everyday risk of the trade—making the quiet endurance of men like Grandpa all the more profound.

Corrections to Grandma’s Nanny Story and Tales of Slavery in the Womack Lineage

    
In my last post, I shared a brief memory of my grandmother and the woman she always referred to as her “nanny.” I was inspired to write it after reading a troubling post on Facebook where someone recounted a family using the N-word for their household caregiver. It shook me, because in my very large family, I have absolutely no memory of anyone ever using that word. My grandmother never used it. She spoke of her nanny with fondness and respect, and that was the standard of decency she passed down to us.

However, as a professional archivist, I know that oral family histories are beautiful but imperfect things. They have a way of compressing time, blending generations together until the timelines blur.

Shortly after publishing that post, I received a note from my dad’s cousin, Carolyn. She is the oldest living relative of that generation, and she is wonderful at keeping our history straight. Carolyn gently pointed out a major flaw in my timeline: because slavery was abolished in 1865, and my grandmother was born well after that, she could not have had an enslaved nanny.

Carolyn was entirely right about the timeline. The woman my grandmother remembered so fondly from her childhood in Kentucky was undoubtedly a hired domestic servant or worker.

But Carolyn’s correction got my archivist wheels turning. While the nanny of my grandmother’s youth was free, I knew the stories I grew up hearing about our ancestorstoal tales of vast tobacco crops and prized racehorses in Greenup County, Kentucky. My historical intuition told me that an operation of that scale required a massive amount of manual labor. I decided to dig into the archival records to see exactly what kind of world my grandmother’s people came from.

What I found was a heavy, complex history.

The Womack line in Kentucky was established by my great-great-great-grandfather, James Tignal Womack, who moved his family and his wealth from Prince Edward County, Virginia, to the Little Sandy River around 1812. When he passed away in 1827, his will divided twenty-three enslaved individuals among his heirs.

His son, Archer Tignal Womack, settled in Oldtown, Greenup County. The federal slave schedules show that he held eleven enslaved people in 1850 and seven in 1860. In the hilly terrain of eastern Kentucky, owning that many people made him a substantial slaveholder. This labor force directly matched the stories of large-scale tobacco farming and horse breeding.

Because Greenup County sat right on the Ohio border, it was a hotbed for the Underground Railroad. Local newspapers from January 1859 even document a “panic among the slaveholders” after two young enslaved men successfully escaped from Archer Womack’s farm, prompting him to sell others further south for security.

My great-great-grandfather, William Archer Womack, grew up directly inside this environment. When the Civil War broke out, he held intense Southern secessionist sympathies. He was eventually arrested by Union forces, treated as a prisoner of war, and sent north to Camp Chase, a notorious military prison in Columbus, Ohio, before returning home to Oldtown as a businessman after the war.

Discovering this census and military data didn’t change the timeline Carolyn corrected, but it gave the story a much deeper meaning.

My grandmother was raised by people who had actively participated in, profited from, and fought to defend the slaveholding South. Yet, somewhere along the way, she made a choice. She broke the cycle of prejudice. She refused to carry the dehumanizing language of that era into the ears of her children and grandchildren.

“From dust we came, and to dust we will go”, she oft-repeated. and perhaps it is in recognizing our shared dust that my grandmother found her grace. The woman she loved as a child may have been a hired servant rather than an enslaved nanny, but the true miracle of the story is that my grandmother chose to look backward at her family’s history, and then chose to walk forward with love.

I will be bringing a great deal more history in subsequent posts. Stay tuned if you dare.

In bringing this historical documentation to light, I have gratefully utilized AI as a digital tool and editorial assistant to help research, structure, and refine the narrative. However, the intellectual framework, the emotional weight, and the driving motivation behind this work are entirely my own. This remains, above all, a direct reflection of my own voice and my deeply personal desire to ensure this history is remembered.

Grandma’s Nanny and her Twelve Children

I listened to a story on Facebook, I think it was, that was much like this story but also was different. And I’ll tell you why. But it reminded me that I should probably write this down because I’ve already forgotten so much of it.

My grandmother told me this story countless times. I never tired of hearing it because it was so strange and so different from anything that I knew as a white girl, living in the Pacific Northwest. I would picture, in my child’s mind, their nanny, washing clothes outdoors in a wash tub, on a washboard. I don’t even know if that’s an accurate picture.

I believe it was her great-grand parents who  owned slaves in Kentucky on a plantation they built themselves. According to Grandma, Grandpa was infamous for “being as kind to his slaves as he was to his race horses”. They grew sugar and tobacco. And I don’t know what else.

There were nine kids in Grandma’s family, but their house slave had twelve children. Grandma grew up with this house slave. She knew her house slave’s, name, and all twelve of her children’s names. This is where the story I read on Facebook differs from my own. They called their nanny the “N” word but not thinking they were saying anything wrong. (Translate: racist).

Grandma and her siblings would dance around their nanny singing, “tell us the name of your children, “nanny”, but using her real name. I guess it was because her children’s names sounded strange to them.

The nanny would go along with grandma and her brothers and sisters until she tired of it. She then shood them away, saying that she would “soap them all up with a bar of soap and swallow them whole”.  Then, they would all run away, screaming as though their nanny had turned into a monster.

Grandma told this story to me over and over again. Among other stories, never, I don’t think, realizing the racism of having only black people working for them. Grandma thought of this nanny as one of the family.

But after her work was done, scrubbing their clothes, cooking, cleaning their house, watching after all the children, she went home to her own home, which was more than likely a “house” on the plantation grounds and do all the same things for her children.

I don’t ever remember her talking about any of the other slaves. Her grandfather’s father had come to Kentucky from England. He moved to Kentucky with a black man, either slave or friend, I do not know. They first built a small cabin. Then grandfather or both   built a home and then built the plantation. This black man had a name. And it’s written down in history, but right now, I don’t remember it. Grandpa became a wealthy man on the backs of his slaves.

Still, our family is the wealthiest family in that countyl. I must say that wealthy is a relative term in this day and age. When grandma’s father and mother decided they wanted to move west to Rainier. Oregon, Grandma would tell the story of leaving their nanny and all nine children gathered around her, crying and tearing at her apron and trying to hold on to her. Say what you may, they believed they loved her. And they believed that she loved them.

When Grandma would tell me this story, tears would always come to her eyes. She never ever used the “N” word nor did any of her brothers and sisters speak of their nanny in any negative way. But the story of dancing around her and pulling at her apron strings and chanting “tell us the name of all your children” she didn’t see as racist.

At one time, I wrote this story down. But I can’t find that story any more, and my memory does not serve me as it should. I forgot the nanny’s name long time ago. The only one of the children’s names that I can remember is, Ethelial”… her oldest boy and the name that she would tell them first.

This is by no means the story of my grandma and her ancestors. It’s just a thought I had when I heard the story of this other person who used the “N’ word to talk about their black nanny, and I remembered grandma never doing that ever. I’m not saying that she was any less racist. I’m just saying they didn’t use the “N” word.

I still have a living relative, my dad’s cousin, who reads my blog. She has a wonderful memory for these things. And she might read this blog post and make corrections. I welcome them.

In Death. The Sisterhood of Motherhood

I just read a facebook post from Angie, sister of my son in law. Yesterday was the “anniversary” of her son, Shawndre’s, death. He was just twenty six. Covid took him.

I wanted to write back. I wanted to write something profound that would take away her pain that is still so raw. But I couldn’t think of any words to say that made any sense or would have any power, whatsoever. It still hurts so bad. Her grief tears my heart out.

Her message was so profound, and yet the pain is still so real. Even though Shawndre was not a relative of mine, except in that he was cousin of Nori and Ancel, my grandchildren, it feels like family. I knew him.

For some reason, somebody as close as family, close to my heart, passed away. Why Angie’s grief has such an impact on me, I don’t know. Her daily posts of her grief at that time, hurt like daggers… and still does. I will never forget them. Nor will I ever forget him.

The sisterhood of motherhood.

A Christmas Eve Vision

Enora and I were up late on Christmas Eve talking about astrology and philosophy. She was explaining my birth chart.

I began shaking internally, and I began to see but not really see with my eyes. But see with my spirit, the structure of my spiritual self and it looked like a human shape but at each extremity, including like the top of the head and the knees, elbows shoulders, I guess maybe at all the joints, there was a glowing globe like a point of light,  like the planets in the night sky or stars or something.

Kind of what I “saw”

You know how scientists even say that we’re made up mostly of stardust, or of the same material as stardust; I felt this and like I said, it seemed like I could see this entity which was my spiritual being. Not really surrounding me, but all around me… inside of my consciousness.

Like I said, this is really hard to explain. It felt very protective and comforting. And as though it had always been there throughout my life, but I was just now able to “see” it or sense it’s presence. But in essence it was also me.

The intense shaking went on for probably 15 to 30 minutes. I didn’t count or pay that much attention to time, but it was really, really intense. I felt like I was vibrating inside and out. Eventually it slowed down some until I went to bed. That was about 1:30 when we stopped talking.

Nori knew exactly what I was talking about. You know how meditation instructors say that we don’t have to look hard or work hard to get to that place of peace and knowing because it’s right here, it’s right here with us . I’ve never really known where that was, but I understood through meditation that yes, I could access that place of peace and calmness, and I want to say knowledge, but I don’t think that’s exactly what I mean.

But during this experience, while I was up with Nori, I felt that I now know what it is. And that our spirit, that light source is right here with us all the time. And it is in this shape of a human form that is right here with us, around us, in us at all times. I’m going to try to draw what I “saw” or felt I saw. Like I said, it wasn’t really with my eyes. It was just a knowing. But it definitely was a being of light and each point of light corresponded with the planets in my chart.


I know this might sound crazy. And I know that I’m not doing a good job of explaining it, but maybe I can draw something that will make more sense. All I know is that now I feel that “it”, which also isn’t the right word, has been with me since I was born, even through all of my close calls with death, and in all of my joys, my ups and down in life.

What kind of a person would I be to leave you now?

My old friend, Arman, came over this morning and brought some fresh lentil dal. It was still warm. It’s loaded with chunks of fresh ginger and jalapen̈o, which makes it pretty fiery. It’s really delicious. I wish I had some fresh veggies, but all I’ve got is some lettuce. That will have to do.

I’ve been down now for 11 days with a hip flexor injury. Arman has been very present for this while he is having some terrible health issues of his own. I have determined off and on for the last, more than 20 years, to kick him to the curb, and I have occasionally. Once I did for more than five years. But then he always came back into my life but at different levels. In the beginning, as a lover. Now like an old friend.

When I had cancer back in 2004/2005, he was there for me the entire time, but then as a lover. He was there while I lost my hair, threw up and peed and pooped with little control… He was there through weekly chemo treatments, with a bloody wound, that went from my netherlands all the way up to my boobs and a sore and irritated port in my chest.

He would sit with me at home and take naps with me for hours, and take me for rides for entertainment, since I couldn’t even walk. He took me sometimes to a nude beach on the Columbia to bask in the sun to dry out my wounds. Once I could finally keep liquids down, we’d stop at a Mcminamin’s and I would drink coffee with cream and a shot of brandy.

He never once said a negative word about my bruised, punctured and battered body. He never complained once about me losing my waist length golden hair. He celebrated with me when my hair began to come in, rubbing it gently with the palms of his hands.

I had only known him for 6 months when I was diagnosed with a killer cancer. I knew I was going to be extremely sick and that I might not even make it. I told him that he didn’t need to stick around for this. He just answered gently in his melodic Indian accent, “What kind of a person would I be to leave you now?” And so he stayed and loved me through it all.

For 24 years, he has never stopped calling me, even when I would be so angry with him that I would beg him to stop. No one in this world has made me more angry and more frustrated than Arman. Part of it has been the incompatibility of our two cultures. Other issues such as personal style, educational and economic levels, his culture’s attitude towards women, all presented huge obstacles to our relationship. But he never gave up. He is still a part of my life, as frustrated as I still get with him.

So now it’s my turn. At 72, he has developed serious health issues. This once healthy and robust man seems to be falling apart. As a restaurant owner, he never once missed a day of work in 27 years. He was a long distance bike enthusiast. He was a runner. But now disease is racking his body. From day-to-day, it’s one thing after another with doctors visits, hospital stays and handfuls of prescription drugs. Yet, he just keeps going. He still makes me delicious indian food. This morning, he brought me the lentil dal. On other days, he might show up with ice cream or other Indian dishes.

He is a Sikh who believes that god is in control of everything, therefore he doesn’t complain. Whatever happens in his life, be it good or bad, he gives god thanks. He has tried fervently to get me to believe in god, and is mildly frustrated with me that I can’t seem to find a reason to believe that there even is a god. Not only does he believe in his religion, he attends temple regularly. As well, he’s a believer in the traditions of his culture. Though he has been in the United States for over 30 years, his language skills are just barely sufficient. He has relied heavily on other people (mostly women) to help him through business dealings and health issues.

That has been my role in his life for decades. There have been times when I’ve been glad to assist and other times when I have resented his reliance on me and other times when I rejected this role and stepped away from him. When legal issues came up, I helped him, but I helped him in unveiled great anger. For one egregious violation, I even charged him hourly for my work, claiming I was done with free assistance. I lost all trust and respect for him.

Arman has a lot of street smarts, to the point where he could run a successful business for over twenty years. And yet so stupid in other ways. We were and always had been unequally yoked. I, an educated, career-oriented woman, who never had even a scrape with the law, and he having had, to date, 6 ugly charges against him. All of these charges were warranted because of his volition. The last time in court with him, I was embarrassed, in front of the judge, the lawyers and the district attorney, that I was even associated with him. I told myself then, that I would never again involve myself in any of his legal battles. But, as they say, money talks. It was aggravating to me that, though he was guilty on all counts, that his high powered lawyers helped him to walk away Scott free. I thought that if he could only suffer the consequences of his actions once, that he might change. Arman is not a bad person, just ignorant in some ways.

But maybe there is something real about karma. Now he’s suffering. Really suffering. But not to his mind. God is in charge, and his god knows what he’s doing.

It’s not that I feel responsible or obligated to help him through this difficult time in his life. But I cannot forget all of the years that I’ve known him and his incredible kindness when I was going through my cancer journey. He’s a selfish man. And yet, in some ways, he’s incredibly generous. He’s a stubborn man and set in his ways and yet, has never given up on me. You might accuse me of the many times I acquiesced when I should have walked away. But I didn’t, and here we are now. He’s sick.

And I will say, like he did to me so many years ago, “What kind of a person would I be to leave you now?”

PS: i have changed the name to protect the innocent or shall we say the guilty?. To those who know me and have been with me throughout this journey, will know who i’m talking about. But for those who don’t, know that I am talking about a real person.

Let’s Not Walk Softly

You Tracy and Me

Let’s not walk softly as though on hallowed ground.

Let’s walk boldly and talk of love.

Love, so young, careless, unbound.

Love, so foolish. Yet love that brought forth life.

A tiny seed began to grow secretly, quietly in a dark and lonely room.

This seed became… begun in love, reckless, foolish, and too soon.

A spark of passion warm and light, a seed burst forth,

And out of love came you.

How easy it is for children at play to make another life.

It took no thought, just passion.

Then a spark, barely visible,

Became a fire when you came so sudden.

It was you dear child, a heart, joined to mine… forever.
.

When Giants Came A’Calling

An ominous sky

While sitting here in my chair by the open door, suddenly the scent of rain hit me and I lifted my head to look outside to see that it was pouring. We were expecting a storm with thunder and lightening… the precursor to rain all week long.

I’m so happy, otherwise if we don’t get enough rain in Oregon and Washington we are going to be on fire this summer. Blessed rain. This is the Pacific Northwest and I am not a stranger to rain nor to thunderstorms.

Though I have lived where there was big sky, there’s something about being four stories up where you feel like you could touch the sky. I’m not just four stories up, I am on a knoll on the side of Rocky Butte… an extinct volcano cone.

My view is mostly sky but it’s even broader than that. Stretching up to the sky are giant Douglas fir and deciduous trees of all kinds including the beautiful spring blossoming cherry and plum. It’s been a spectacular spring.

But beyond that, I can see busy Sandy Boulevard and beyond to the airport and beyond that to the Columbia River and even beyond that into Washington. Then the eye travels up into the sky.

Really, I think besides not having to pay utilities, I moved into this small apartment because of the view. The living room wall is mostly glass leading to a Juliet balcony. My view is unobstructed.

Though there is nature all around, which includes the heavily forested Grotto next door and the Rocky Butte Nature Park,  the sounds of traffic and of the airport creates an urban soundgarden.

From my favorite chair at the door, I watch hawks and crows and every kind of small bird… some even land on the railing of my balcony. This panorama makes me wish I had my mom’s old binoculars.

But what holds my attention most is the sky. From my vantage point, I have been watching some of the most spectacular Portland sunsets that I’ve been privileged to witness. I’ve always lived, while in Portland, on the city streets and we’re surrounded by hills. So to the East and to the West we rarely see the sunsets and the sunrises except for the amazing colors reflected up onto the clouds.

That is not to say that we don’t have stunning sunsets because we do but there’s something about being up higher that changes the view. One’s perspective is altered.

So back to Friday’s sky and the storms. Most of you who know me, know that I’m afraid of everything. And nothing more pronounced and intense than of nature.

Quoting Georgia O’Keeffe, I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life… and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I have wanted to do. Because I have felt this way for most of my life, it has been such a comfort to read such a quote from an artist that I so admire.

I have been bold and brave. I survived two illnesses that nearly killed me and yet I have hiked up mountains, swam in the ocean and big rivers, ridden mountain bikes, I’ve traveled alone throughout Mexico, and attended four universities and had an exciting career. And yet fear was my constant companion.

For the first time I think, I felt fear of the sky yesterday night. The black clouds came out of the North, dragging curtains of heavy rain, darkening what had been a sunny day. They came in low towards me roiling and lumbering appearing like angry giants. Out towards the West there was a line of clear sky over the hills where lightning flashed repeatedly.

Those dark entities seemed creature like or perhaps more like wild spirits. But too heavy to be ghost or spirit like. More like giants whose arms and hands could reach down through the clouds to carry one away. I stood my ground, not looking away but marveling at their power as they seemed likely to soon engulf my house.

I was mesmerized and watched the clouds and the pouring rain until night came on, melding Darkness with Darkness, and until all that was left was the flashing light out over the West Hills, too far away to be audible.

Did those creatures carrying their cloaks of grey and the blackest clouds think of me as bold and brave as I stood my ground against them? I believe it’s possible.

What to Do About a Cat

But is she happy?
Fran Ham and Yum Yum

As you would know if you follow my blog, when I moved from our large four-story house, repleat with our dog, Yum Yum and our two cats, Eris and Fran Ham, I brought Fran Ham with me to live in my small apartment.

Fran Ham is a very lovely cat. She’s big, not unusually so, but enough so that her nickname is “Chonky”.  As you can see from the photo, she is a medium-haired tabby. She wears white stockings and a white dicky but the rest of her is a lovely gray and golden and black coat of distinctive patterns.

She is very affectionate and loves to sit on one’s lap and talks incessantly in kind of a high squeaky chatter, and will follow one anywhere never stopping to take a breath. It seems she has much to report.

She’s very insistent about her meal schedule and lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that breakfast, lunch, 3:00 pm high tea, dinner, and before-bedtime snacks are due. She does this by, instead of her high-pitched conversational tone, she begins to wail quite loudly, walking, one might say insistently, between the refrigerator, her bowl, all the while, circling your legs. She is not to be denied.

When she came to us from a sister of a friend, she had been leash trained and box trained and was strictly an indoor cat. But being the people that we are, we did not deny her access to the outdoors through the cat door from the very beginning. She was well-mannered and came and went at will and never wandered far from the yard.

Though Eris, tiny warrior cat, was brought home first from the Humane Society (in an attempt to clear out the mice in the attic, which she promptly did), Fran Ham wanted to be Top Dog. Right away she started slapping Eris around, hiding and stalking her, jumping out of corners and pouncing from tables causing a terrible racket. Such a cat fight you have never heard.

Eris…Tiny warrior cat
Eris… After a mouse

Fran Ham won. To our chagrin Eris acquiesced. She began to walk along the perimeters of the rooms and gave up her favorite sleeping places and even gave up her food before she was finished. But she never stopped being the warrior kitty. She continued to bring in mostly mice and the occasional large rat that stalked our neighbor’s chicken coops.

Eris is tiny with large green eyes, a pink nose, a pink mouth with long sharp dagger like teeth and has never grown larger than a kitten. Why she gave in to Fran Ham is beyond me. Maybe it was the size differential and that was all.

So now the cats no longer cohabitate. From what I’ve seen and from what Hannah says, Eris is a much happier cat now that she doesn’t have to contend with Fran Ham jumping on her and slapping her and taking her food and bogarting her way into Eris’s favorite sleeping places.

But it was sadly certain that in the first month of living with only me, no other members of the family, and no dog, and no access to the outdoors, that Fran Ham was lonely and not the happy contented cat that she was. And perhaps she also missed tormenting Eris.

At times Franny would lie in my arms and look at me with the most forlorn look in her eyes. But there was naught to do since we were in the same boat, having moved away from home and family. I’m sure she saw that same look on my face.

It’s been over 2 months now and we are slowly adjusting. But curiously, when family comes to visit or when anybody comes into the apartment, Fran goes under the bed and refuses to come out. There’s only one exception and that is if Ancel (geandson) comes over on his own and the two of them greet each other with great affection.

I too, Fran Ham, get misty-eyed after a visit with family. But one thing is certain, that I am glad to have you as my companion. We’ll be fine.

What’s That Chemical smell?

The secret

The culprits

I’ve been noticing what I thought was a toxic chemical smell since moving into my new apartment… I thought. That was my first mistake.

I thought it was coming from my refrigerator like “freon” or something. Like a responsible tenant, I put in a work order for the maintenance guys to come up and take a look.

One guy came in and said he could kind of smell something. But it wasn’t the refrigerator, he assured me.

He sent up the main maintenance guy and the head staff person, clipboard in hand. After pulling the refrigerator out from the wall and opening all the cabinets and closets, they also said they couldn’t smell anything but thought that perhaps it was my plethora of jars of herbs and spices.

So they sent up another staff member, head financial officer, who they said has a better sense of smell. She said, “What I’m smelling is something like old fruit, you know when it begins to decompose”. I said, “No possible way, everything I have is fresh”.

She kept looking around, not willing to give up. Finally she opened up one of my vegetable drawers and sure enough, when she moved my bag of lemons, they were rotting, molding and off-gassing.

Well, as you might imagine, I was embarrassed. From what I could see looking into that drawer, they were fine. I swore everything in my refrigerator was fresh. But obviously not. They were busy hiding a secret. How could I have missed this?

There’s still some residual odor but I’ll make sure that it’s just the lemons. Because to me it smelled like a chemical. I even claimed the smell was giving me a headache.

Of course, fruit, when it off-gases and ferments, puts off a chemical smell, like ammonia. It’s definitely a chemical process. Right?

The worst part of this is that I alerted the entire staff of the apartment facility. All but the leasing agent showed up. I can just hear them now, “You know that new tenant? Did you hear what she did?”  I’m probably marked as “that crazy person in #409”.

I’ll laugh about this later but right now it doesn’t seem so funny.