Ring the Dinner Bell, my Dear, and Call the Family Home.

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

My maternal grandparents own a fairly large piece of land in rural Michigan. It’s mostly forest, and while there is a highway going right by the place, it doesn’t get much traffic all told.

In other words, it was a great place for my Mom to just kick the kids out to go play in the woods as soon as we were old enough to know not to go on the road.

We visited every summer for a few months, plus a week at Christmas, for most of my childhood years. Mom would get to enjoy the rural life she grew up with and my sister and I would get a chance to explore and play and learn the old fashioned way.

And every evening, Mom would ring the dinner bell to call us in to eat. It could be heard pretty far into the woods, and we would come trudging up in a few minutes, happy from hours of building forts in the woods.

We still use the dinner bell today, though my sister and I stopped spending all our time outside years ago. I do have younger cousins, after all, and a few of my uncles spend a lot of time out there as well, especially one of the civil engineers in the family who enjoys making trails in the woods.

In the winter, we don’t use it much. Few people head into the woods when there’s a foot of snow on the ground, and if they do, they’re on skis and are heading out of the area you can hear the bell anyway. Besides, the bell gets covered in snow too.

But it is quite happy to sit there, waiting for the next time it’s rung to bring the family home.

  

A Flash of White-Red Anger and then… Nothing

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2006
(Photo taken with a dying camera.)

I was a bit delayed writing this post today due to a small argument with my mom which included a near-miss of a social phobia attack, so well, at least that means I have a topic for today!

For most phobias, you hear about panic attacks, and my social phobia attacks may actually count as them, but I have absolutely no panic related to them, so I don’t use that term. It still has a lot of things in common with them, though. It’s triggered by things related to the phobia, it is overwhelming, and it has after effects that last for days.

For me, it’s triggered by social events, since that’s my phobia. But that covers a very wide range of possible events, so let me narrow it down some. Unlike a lot of social phobes, I’m not triggered by passive social events, such as being in crowds or having issues eating around people or the like. I tend to have more problems with active events, like talking to someone or meeting a new person. I also picked up a set of issues relating to authority and paperwork because of past traumatic events. But the thing I’m most prone to having an attack triggered by is issues of power imbalances.

I’ve long had the tendency to think myself as a low-power person. That’s normal when you’re a kid – you’re solidly under the authority of your parents, and every adult has a higher status than you. And as a college student, I was under the authority of the teachers as well as still obligated to my parents to do well as they were paying for a large part of it. I didn’t always do well, which started to build up stress points of failed obligation that were one of the many factors to the breakdown I had my last semester of college. And after that, I was in no condition mentally to go off on my own. So I moved back home, once again solidly in obligation to my parents, with further obligation since they were no longer socially required to take care of me and were doing it anyway. And then I tried and tried to get a job, barely getting any interviews at all and only seasonal work at all. It was right after the economy tanked, so everyone was having problems (and still is), but it just made me fall in to the rather low status of unemployed bum living with my parents.

I’ve been trying to pull myself out of that rut. And part of that is claiming more power. When you think of yourself as low status, you act as low status, which makes people treat you as such. So part of what I’m doing is convincing myself to act as higher status, by making more decisions on my own and actually getting angry when people treat me as low status.

Which leads back into the social phobia attacks, alas. When I get angry, it burns through my barriers and willpower reserves very fast. And if I don’t shut it down before long, it burns through them all, and I shut down. It really is a burn-out situation. One hot blaze of anger, then blank ashes. I will be unable to deal with people for days, I’m crying out of frustration, I have a nasty headache, and I’m not able to do anything mentally stressful for weeks. It wipes me out.

For most of my life I dealt with it by both trying not to get angry with anything and by clamping down on the anger the instant it appeared, far too fast for me to really realize why I got angry. But anger is a healthy thing in moderation. There are slights and issues out there that are quite worth getting angry about. And by not doing so, I was letting them slide past and in many cases making it seem as if I didn’t really exist as a person, like I was just a lump of mobile flesh that couldn’t be hurt by words. Now, I’m trying to step forward and say “Yes, I am a person, I did care about what you said and I was hurt by it.”

But that’s really tough to do when you’re used to being of secondary concern, and when it bears the risk of overwhelming myself and setting me back for weeks at a time if things go wrong.

I won’t be able to gain higher status until I do. And the higher status I’m seeking is that of a functional adult, capable of choosing her own path and supporting herself. It’s not much to ask for.

  

Ancient Droplets, Frozen in Stone

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Location Taken: Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky
Time Taken: October 2007

Did you know there’s only one section of the massive Mammoth Cave system that is full of stalactites and stalagmites? There’s a few areas that have an occasional one, including a cave system nearby that’s not actually connected to the Mammoth caves that has a nice selection (Great Onyx cave, if you’re wondering.) But for the Mammoth Caves, it’s only the Frozen Niagara section that has these water-based features.

Most of the cave is actually just holes in the rock, without the pointy bits that are in our general stereotype of a cave. It’s because of the very same reason the Mammoth Cave grew so large and extensive in the first place: a hard sandstone cap on top of the limestone the caves wind through.

Water can easily tear through limestone. It’s a porous material, and it just gets in there and rips off bits of the rock like nobody’s business. Sandstone, on the other hand, resists the water. It has a very fine grain to it that leaves very few holes for water to work its way on. The rain falling on these Kentucky hills gets blocked by the sandstone, but any water that works its way through to the limestone has a much easier time.

And the sandstone doesn’t cover all the limestone. To the south of the Mammoth Cave area is a large plain covered with sinkholes. It’s all limestone there, and the water goes there, finds low spots, and makes them lower. And then, once it’s below ground level, it finds its way through various cracks in the rock as it searches for the lowest spot. In this case, it’s the Green River – and that section covered by the sandstone is between the sinkhole plain and the river.

The water coming from the sinkholes doesn’t need to find a way through the sandstone. It’s already in the limestone. It just need to work its way through crack after crack on its path to the river. And the cracks widen, and open up, and more water can fit in to them, and the cracks become caves. Eventually, a new crack will be exposed to the cave that leads the water deeper, and it abandons the old cave for a new series of cracks and caves. Mammoth Cave is on its fourth major layer, and each layer is full of winding caves going this way and that.

And that sandstone cap just sits on top, protecting the upper layers from disappearing like they do in most cave systems that form like this. But the sandstone cap has an edge, and the Frozen Niagara formations are right on it. Here, the sandstone has holes, worn away over the long millenia. And water seeps in to the caves below.

As the water passes through the rock, it picks up minerals from it. Rain water is slightly acidic, and it eats away at the limestone and dissolves it. And when the water reaches the ceilings of the caves below, it finds the lowest spot on the ceiling’s surface, pauses, gathers itself, and falls as a drop before working its way downward once again – leaving some of the dissolved rock behind on the ceiling and the floor below. And that just makes the spot where that drop decided to fall that much more lower than its neighboring rock, encouraging other drops to choose there to fall. Over the ages, those tiny remnants of rock add up to giant amounts, forming a lasting monument to the power of water and time in the form of giant stalactites and stalagmites.

Oh, and if you’re on a cave tour and the guide tells you not to touch the stalagmites, listen to them. Human hands have a fine coating of oil to repel water, and it rubs off on things you touch. Including rocks being formed by the slow dripping of water. The stalagmites will literally stop growing where you touch, as the oil makes the water move too fast to deposit its rocky burden. So really, don’t do it.

  

Just a Bit of Purple, a Circle of Red, and a Dash of Painful Spikes!

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Location Taken: Olympic National Park, Washington
Time taken: June 2008

It’s a giant thistle!

No, really, it is. It’s not just a regular thistle appearing big because it’s close to the camera. This sucker was at least six inches across.

I really like this photo, with its framing and colors. It’d be in my best category if the focus was just a bit better. But it’s a strong photo all around.

And the spikes on the leaves stand out so nice and spike-y!

…That was a bit circular there, Sharayah, yes, spikes are always spike-y, it’s what they do…

  

Just a Dash of Snow, on the Giant Pile of Logs

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

My grandparents have a wood-burning stove to help keep the house warm. It’s quite effective and with the large woods they own, rather cheap to keep fueled. Of course, this means they have to have a large wood pile.

It’s actually twice the size it looks here. I took this photo right by it, after all. They only need a few logs a day, so this will last them all winter.

I actually find the wood stove more effective than the gas-burning furnace in my house. A bit too effective in some places. My long-held sleeping spot while visiting the grandparents was right by the chimney and it was often a bit too hot for me at night, even when it was snowing outside.

I do love the combination of snow and wood here. It’s downright pleasant.