Ar Wahan's home office water cooler

I've been away a while, but want to document this.

We went from temps in the upper 50s one day to temps in the 90s yesterday and today. We had high school graduation Friday, stuff to do yesterday, including food prep for a recital and graduation party today, and today church, bridging ceremony for Samurai (moving from youth UU to adult UU), UU meetinghouse committee meeting after service, a flute recital at 1 p.m. and a graduation party that started at 3 p.m. I left the house early this morning with potted perennials for departing board members and a spinach and strawberry salad in a cooler for the graduation party at 3 p.m., knowing I would have no chance to come home between church and the recital and grad party.

My husband was home during all the time between when I left and we met up at the graduation party.

I came home in late evening after helping clean up from said party to find....

HE HAD INSTALLED THE AIR CONDITIONERS IN OUR BEDROOM AND SAMURAI'S BEDROOM!!!!

I am sitting here in the kitchen writing this with sweat running down my body. I never did get a chance to read our Sunday paper this morning. Maybe...

I will take a shower and read the Sunday paper at 11 p.m. in our bedroom!

In her English class today, they read a poem by Marge Piercy. She was impressed by it, as were many other women in the class:


"For strong women"

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn't mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.