Maquinna's Poop du Jour

Bride

Badger Gets Spayed

I suppose there's some irony to the fact that while I'm actively trying to get pregnant myself, I took our little kitty, Badger, to be spayed this morning. Badger's not quite eight months old but it was time to get her snipped before she got to her first heat this spring. With our luck the Winterloper from the junkyard would try to do the daddy honours and then we'd have a whole house full of his smelly offspring.

Given her rambunctious nature, the vet felt it would be best to keep Badger overnight so she didn't try jumping around too much and possibly popping a stitch. I'm sure she's pretty groggy anyway so it's just as well. I know this was all for the best for her but I still felt like a dirty rotter taking her there this morning. The whole time I'm thinking, please fertility gods, don't punish me for this! Really, it's for her own good!

Gillingham's General Store, Woodstock, VT

The Single Pink Line

After feeling queer for the past week and strongly suspecting a bun was in the oven, I jumped the gun this morning and dipped the magic stick into a cup of my freshest urine in hopes of seeing those two - not one, but TWO - magic pink lines appear in the window.

Alas...only one line deigned to show up.

I tried to tell myself that I wasn't that disappointed, but I suppose I am, somewhat. Did I just will myself into feeling strange because I hoped I was pregnant? Seems like ever since I saw that single pink line, like the bottom of the sodapop cap liner that says "Sorry, try again!", I have felt completely UN-pregnant.

The strangest things go through your head. If so many people get pregnant all the time, why am I not pregnant? OK...I've only been seriously trying for the past two months. I realize this can take time, but I *am* going to be 40 this year and there's no sense in ignoring that. The truth is this could potentially be difficult. Have I squandered away my fertility over the years with chemical intervention, less than perfect diet and exercise, and thumbing my nose at a life tied down to diapers and nursing bras?

I feel as though all the gods on Olympus have decidedly, rather petulantly, to admonish me for my cheek. I seriously think Demeter is waiting for me to slaughter my finest heifer in her honour. If my womb is destined to spill forth this weekend, I'll crack a pinot noir and toast Bacchus, ask him to say a few kind things about me to the lady of fertility, and have her send me *two* pink lines next month.

Tractor, 2006

It's Going To Be Okay

OK, so it's been awhile...I admit it. But no whining and no excuses. Here we go:

Last Thursday night I was driving home from class. It was getting close to 10 pm when I got off the turnpike onto Route 9 and started heading west. Shortly after that exit ramp, the road splits into two but there isn't a great deal of timely signage so it can sometimes be a bit of a lane scramble. I always try to keep my wits about me through that section. Just as I got into the mix, however, I noticed that there were cars where there shouldn't be - most noticeably wrapped around a tree to my right, and hanging in a ditch to the left.

To be more accurate, they were both trucks, rather than cars. The one wrapped around the tree had been divested of its canopy (cap, for you yanks) and a dizzying array of equipment, likewise mangled, all over the road. No police or ambulance had yet arrived, and people started spilling out of the trucks, plainly dazed. I pulled over without even really thinking about it, and behind me others started to do the same. Someone got out a cell phone and called 911.

A woman came out of the totalled truck around the tree, crying hysterically. She was a little tan cherub of a woman, hispanic, blubbering back in forth in Spanish and English. She was holding her left arm into her chest, and it was scraped and bloody. A dark man with a face cratered like the moon got out of the other side. I asked him if he was alright and he just looked at me blankly with a 'no English'.

Across the road a woman with long light brown hair and a coat the colour of butterscotch got out of the truck listing into the ditch. She seemed so lost. She looked at the crying woman sitting beside her truck, and all the pieces of who-knows-what all over the road. I asked her if she was hurt and she started talking to me, in disconnected and disjointed sentences, and I could see she was starting to get very emotional. I remember telling her that it was going to be okay, that no one got badly hurt, nothing else mattered and it would all get sorted out. I touched her arm. By the truck-around-the-tree, the other woman started bawling and crying about 'the crazy driver' who had clipped her truck and forced her into the tree. The woman in the butterscotch coat's chest began convulsing, and before I knew it, she was sobbing into my chest.

I put my arm around her and rubbed her back, and just let her cry. She clutched at my lapels, crying into my coat there in the middle of the highway. Memories of the accidents I had been in over the years flooded back to me and I remember how disoriented I was, and unexpectedly emotional. A combination of anger and relief, fear, guilt, and loss. I knew I could say nothing to console anyone but I said it anyway. It's going to be okay. It's all going to be okay. Her long hair was soft in my hand as I rubbed her back.

The police and ambulances came...it seemed like forever before they did although I'm sure it was only minutes. The darkness was now a chaos of emergency lights and flares and flashlights. A policeman came over and the woman on my chest went to him to talk. Walking back towards my car the other woman was still on the side of the road, holding her arm. The people who had been talking and tending to her were all elsewhere and she was alone again. She looked up at me and I just reached out to her and held her for a few moments too. It's going to be okay, I said. She sobbed and choked out something about being hit, and look at all her equipment, and this was her livelihood, all spread out and destroyed over the highway. I didn't have to look around me to know she was right, and my mind flashed with the idea of her being a tough little woman with her own company cleaning offices at night, and her despair over what would happen to her now. I touched her shoulder. It can all be replaced. What matters is you are going to be alright. And she just shook her head and cried and cried. And then the police came to speak with her, and I stepped away.

I never saw the accident happen. I have no idea who was at fault. All I know is that there were two women, two trucks, and a moment where everything changed for both of them. And I just felt so keenly for them both, felt their loss and pain and confusion, it didn't matter at all how it happened.