The other patient

The koi in its Nifurpirinol bath, Day 13

It could really use a name now, couldn't it? I am nearly certain it's a female, but not enough to commit to a name. Maybe I should call it George, as in George Eliot.

No. That stinks. I'll just refer to it has "he" and "him" until I have a better idea.

I need to put together a series of photos, from the first day I put him in quarantine and began salt and anti-bacterial/antibiotic treatments to the present, to see if he really has improved as we think he has. His eyes seem to be less protuberant, and there is a less marked difference between the scales of his body from those of his tail, which is also to say that the scales of his tale now seem to stick out a little, too, but the rest perhaps less.

I pour over pictures of different varieties of koi, looking to see if his scales appear normal now by some variety standards, and one very encouraging thing is that the enlarged blood vessels around his right eye that appeared just after I began treatment disappeared within a couple of days of treatment, and they have not returned. Another is that he appears no worse, if not necessarily certainly all better. He is lonely in his quarantine tub, but that is better than dead. Sometimes he comes out when I come to visit him. He also seems to accept my removing him when it is time to change his water, to which I add a Nifurpirinol tablet, in addition to the salt, to his water, and I am no longer doing the concentrated, brief Nifurpirinol baths.

I am not sure he is eating anything, but that's probably just as well for his system, and besides, hiding all day behind his rock and plants doesn't require a large amount of calories. If he continues to do as well, I will return him to the "bassin" in a week or two and see how it goes, but don't say anything to him; I haven't told him yet, and I don't want to get his hopes up.

It's time to leave to go see Baccarat for the afternoon. It's her last afternoon before open heart surgery, and I am doing things I don't recognize that I am to stay calm. I don't know what you call it, but it's a lot like that afternoon when I knew Audouin would come home with the lab results for my melanoma. I remember thinking, up on my ladder painting the Orange Room, "Soon, you could get news that will change your life forever. You could learn that you won't live much longer," and I looked out the window at the sunshine in the flowers, the dogs and Shadow sleeping on the lawn, and myself spoke to me, Just enjoy this afternoon, this moment. It's what you have, and I felt peaceful, happy.

Sometimes, that's enough.

This evening, Sam will call me when he finishes work, and we will meet up on the Champs-Elysées to go see Toy Story 3. Like he was just the right age for Harry Potter when it came, and made a reader of him, he was the right age for Toy Story, so that 11 years later, when Andy is going to college and leaving his childhood room, so is Sam. We'll spend time together and enjoy that, and tomorrow will bring what it will. Each moment until they have the result of the biopsy is a moment of the present, when Baccarat is still alive and there is hope.

Everyone knows that it is already almost a miracle that she is still alive with this mass taking up nearly all the space inside her right heart, reducing the blood flow to a trickle, her circulation to a a stream in the desert. Her heart could fail at any moment, her brain be destroyed, but say the name of one of her beloved people, and the head darts up, the tail starts.

"Baccarat! Guess who's coming to see you! Sam! Sam's coming to see you!" and the tail is going. Everyone laughs because I could tell her in the same tone of voice that we were going to force feed her some more of that protein-rich food, and she'd stare out past the legs of the chairs and people and sigh heavily. She is still there.

"C'est un bon signe," they tell me, "qu'elle se bat. Elle aurait pu se laisser aller, mais elle reste avec nous et elle s'intéresse; elle se bat." It's true. She could let herself go; she could let herself die, but she is interested in what is happening around her, and she is hanging on.

"L'hôpital va lui manquer," I laughed, "Parce qu'ici, l'où elle va, elle est accompagnée par tous ses amis, un petit groupe d'étudiants, d'internes et de résidents! C'est très agréable!"

And, this is true, too. She will miss the hospital and all her friends there because wherever she goes, she is accompanied by a small troupe of friends, students, interns and residents. It is very nice to be so cared for.

Tomorrow, the car will take her and two vets, including Dr. Gouni, to Montsouris. At noon, the perfusionist will attach her to the cardiopulmonary pump, and they will begin open heart surgery. She is one of the very few dogs ever to undergo this surgery, which would be out of the question in the United States. Even here, where the surgeons are donating their time in the interest of trying to save her and to learn more, it is going to cost more than my son's lycée, as much as one year of his school in Paris during collège.

"There is no price that can be put on her life, Mom," he tells me again and again.

"There is, Sam. For everyone, there is a limit, a moment when they cannot spend any more. They just can't. For us, we are willing to make this sacrifice because she is so young, and because we love her, you love her so much, but for others, for most people, it would be out of the question." It is hard for him to accept this.

"Il faut être un peu psychologue dans notre travail," said Dr. Gouni yesterday, as I filled out the papers and wrote a check to IMM Recherche. My fingers spelled the sum out easily. I didn't need to make a list of all the things I could live without to make it possible. Like my friend said, we can eat potatoes for a couple months. "La plupart des gens ne pourrait pas se permettre de payer une chirurgie et les soins. On le sait et on leur n'en parle pas." One must, she said, be a bit of a psychologist in our work because most people could not pay for this surgery and the medical bills. We know it, she said, and we don't even suggest it to them.

"Je pense au chien," I answered. "Il n'a que son amour à offrir à son maître. Il n'a pas d'argent pour payer quoique ce soit. Si son maître est en train de mourir d'un cancer, on ne lui demanderait jamais de payer ses soins, de lui sauver la vie, alors, pour lui, c'est normal qu'on lui offre ce qu'on a, l'amour et de l'accompagner dans le temps qu'il lui reste. C'est bien à ses yeux.""

I think, I told her, of the dog. He has no money to pay for his master's medical bills were he dying of cancer. He only has his love to offer, and he will give it until the last. So, for him, it is normal that we only offer him the same if it is all we have. It is good in his eyes.

I need to go now. I am late.
....

The country life for me

The koi finds a friend

Please, don't tell it that it's its own self; I haven't let on yet.

Koi, like goldfish, are highly sociable creatures and don't like being alone in their own pond in quarantine very much, although this one seems to be starting to get used to the fact and the new rhythm of life, including 30 minute to one hour Nifrupirinol bath treatments in the afternoon. We are staving off the Ziploc bag in the freezer option as long as we can continue to give the antibiotics I can get in the store and the sea-salt regime a chance of working. It isn't eating anymore, aside from the perhaps accidental ingestion of a koi stick the day before yesterday, when I put it in the clear salad bowl of Nifurpirinol solution for the first time, which isn't so great a sign.

Neither were the enlarged blood vessels around its right eye yesterday. They don't look much worse, and possibly a little better today.

Word must be getting out, however, that I am something of an animal recovery and treatment center because the neighbor turned up at the gate with her 3-year-old and her 5-year-old niece in tow earlier than I expected them to come for a swim.

"Ah, on a eu un changement du programme?" I called from where I was peering into the quarantine basin. They were to have taken a postprandial nap before coming for a tea time swim.

"Non, on a trouvé un bébé crapeau dans le bac à sable, et on a pensé l'amener ici."

Why, merci beaucoup!

In short, they found a baby toad cowering in a corner of the sandbox, and they thought they'd bring it to me. Well, as it happens, I have a toad house or two available, with piscine, in the border. I invited them in through the gate, and led the girls, followed by my neighbor, to the very spot, an empty orange juice bottle filled with water for the toad pool in hand. This, I handed to her small daughter, standing next to me in her ruffle-bottom swimsuit, and asked if she would like to fill the toad pool herself before we released the bébé crapeau into it.

She began to show advanced stages of doubt and trepidation, standing there clutching the one liter -- plus 15cl gratuit! -- orange juice bottle against her bare belly, eyebrows drawing together and lowering several centimeters as her lower lip protruded worrisomely, and then quivered. She cast her glance demurely down to the right and refused all further action or offer of assistance.

"Tu veux que je le fais moi?" I asked, certain of failure. She raised her eyes and their brows a millimeter in my direction, and I detected the faintest nod. Oui. "D'accord, je le ferai." I reached for the bottle, which she released, and poured it carefully into the dish. I pointed to the clay flower pots, decorated with stones and sunk into the dirt on their sides below the yew tree. Chez Eugénie G, half-way house to toads not inclined to stick around.

"Ca c'est l'une des maisons. L'autre," I pointed to where the second one was, behind a hosta, "est là." She nodded, her blond hair drawn up into a ponytail leaving wisps of honey colored hair along her brow and round cheeks. Her mother smiled, amused by the seriousness of the event, and handed me the sandbox toys that contained the small toad. I opened them carefully to reveal a bébé crapeau, standing on its hind legs, eager to find la sortie. I lowered it to the dish and it hopped directly into the shallow water and on past it to crouch at the base of the Falstaff rose and clematis ('Niobe'?).

"Tu le vois, Lili?" asked her mother, as the older cousin looked on, silently. She nodded.

"Il y a quelque chose d'autre de l'autre côté," said Lili, her nickname. I peered, trying to understand to which of the many things possible she might most likely be referring. The holly berries, an eye-catching shade of a dusty violet-blue, seemed most likely. She pointed toward them. "Les choses bleues," said Lili. The holly berries. I reached and broke a bunch off.

"Ce sont les fruits du houx," I told her.

"Ca ne se mange pas," added her mother. No, I confirmed, we don't eat them. They would taste very bitter and give us a stomach ache. Of course, I am not sure of that, but it works with preschoolers.

"Ils sont les graines de la plante," I explained, "pour que le houx puisse en faire d'autres houx." The girls nodded together, ready for lycée. "Tu veux les prendre?" I asked the older one, who reached out and took the little bunch of violet-blue fruits. "Ils ne te feront pas de mal si tu ne les manges pas."

I briefly considered a job as a teacher, or a gouvernante for a wealthy family with vast gardens, and exceedingly well-behaved children, interested in nature, literature and foreign languages, art and alpine sports. Perhaps yoga in the shrubbery.

We looked at the frogs in the bassin, and I accompanied them to the gate to go home for their nap so they could come back and enjoy our pool.

Ah, the joys of country village living, such as they are. Second only to the joys of marriage and your child being "admis" by the Académie pour son Bac.

Time to go remove the pool summer cover and vacuum it.
....

Dropsy

In a Nifurpirinol treatment
baktopur direct

I was going to give up, and then I went online one more time and googled "Dropsy" and "Hydropisie". I found just enough hope not to go get larger Ziploc bags and prepare myself to euthanize my koi in the freezer.

One site I had not read yet said:

My heart goes out to any koi or goldfish I see that has dropsy. It's such a nasty infection and almost always fatal. It's basically an infection of an internal organ, often the kidney. The fish is no longer able to process its fluids. They build up inside the fish causing the tell-tell [sic] signs of bloat. You could probably wquate the effect it has on the fish to the effect kidney failure has on us.

There's very little we can do to help a fish in the advanced stages of dropsy. We can, however, do things to help prevent it [great] and treat the fish we suspect could have early stages of it.

Well, that cheered me right up. About as effective as thinking of the bac results being available tomorrow. I read on, listlessly.

What makes dropsy so hard to diagnose in time to treat it is that the symptoms that we know as dropsy do not come out until the fish has entered the final stages of the disease. The fish literally blows up like a balloon. Its scales stick out, making the fish resemble a pinecone [sic]. In fact, dropsy is often called Pinecone [sic] Disease because of it. The eyes will bulge out from the trapped fluids beneath.

Dropsy is also often accompanied by external bacterial infections including fin rot, mouth rot and ulcers. In some cases I've seen almost any and all symptoms. It's really a sad sight to see.

There was a picture of a dead koi, lying on its side, a sort of medical tool lifting one of its raised scales.

My eyes continued scanning the page.

What was the point? My koi might not have ulcers or enlarged blood vessels, but it definitely has raised scales, even if it doesn't look like a cartoon of a koi that has breathed in the air from a balloon it was blowing up.

I have a bad habit of giving up when I hear the symptoms of dropsy described to me by a customer [Hunh? He had my attention]. I will always say that there's really nothing they can do for it [Oh] -- just to make it comfortable and let it live out its short life in a stress-free environment [well, that's not the Ziploc bag in the freezer, anyway]. I was happily reminded [Hunh? What's that?] just this spring that every now and then a fish actually survives dropsy -- even after it has swollen up from it [Smile!].

And ours isn't that swollen. Yet.

The treatment regimen [All eyes here] that worked on the lucky koi who survived this year was feeding it triple antibiotic food and keeping him in .3% non-iodized salt. This was such a no-nonsense approach and so basically simple! The triple antibiotic food kept the internal infection at bay while the salt prevented water from seeping into the sores or skin of the koi and keeping his protective slime coat intact.

That leads me to believe that there is hope for a koi or goldfish who has dropsy as long as the fish is still eating [Oh].

I hopped in the car and headed to Truffaut. The young woman has helped me before, and she told me the bacterial tablets I had picked up wouldn't work, even though I had read the notice, and it did mention the symptoms of dropsy and treatment, and showed me to shelves with the big bags of non-idodized sea salt. I put the tablets back and went to the cash register, feeling a little regretful.

I drove over to Jardin de France and looked for and found the tablets, picked out a pair of natural rubber garden clogs, some sock things that prevent human fungal infections or keep your feet warm in cold-weather gardening, looked at expensive cat litter boxes, tried on a few more straw hats, exercised some self-control and left them in the store and went to pay.

I drove home, hitting a bird of some type that was sitting on the road. I backed up, trying not to do the same to two kids on bikes, whose grandfather and younger sibling were watching from father up the road, and got out of the car. The wings flapped, the dog in the garden on the other side of the link fence came charging up, barking, and the grandfather looked at me -- oddly. I smiled -- forcedly. The bird folded its wings. Everyone peddled on by, the dog kept going crazy, and I started to reach down, uncertain what exactly to do, when it spread its wings and lifted at an unnatural angle into the sky, trailing a broken rear leg behind it, and disappeared into the branches of a tree across the street. I returned to my car and drove the last two kilometers, trying to not damage anything else.

The koi has had a 30 minute bath in the dissolved Nifurpirinol (antibiotic that is easily absorbed through the skin) "baktopur direct" tablet, over which Baccarat and I presided, and which it seemed not to dislike, and returned it to 60 liters of basin water with 280 grams of dissolved sea salt and two élodée (or elodea) plants for oxygen and company, and sat back on my heels with Baccarat to watch it.

It swam around more than it did in the malachite green solution.

It is not particularly interested in eating, although it did eat one koi stick at the beginning of its Nifupirinol treatment, but it has been moved about so much.

I have emailed a company in the US to see if they will mail their antibiotic food, not available in the UK and France, which has been said to have some success with dropsy, here.

Dare I call the vet to see about antibiotics?
....


















Update May 28, 2012: Over time, many people have read this page, and I thought it might be a good idea to add that as of this date, this carp koi is healthy, growing and in all ways thriving. I went back to the garden store to tell the young man who suggested I put it in a plastic bag in the freeze to end its life gently that my treatment worked, and he was on third interested, one third probably trying to remember who I was (despite my accent), and one third-distracted.

Quarantine

The sick bay

"Vous n'avez que de vous en débarrasser," said the young man in the fish department chez Truffaut after looking at the terrible photo of our sick Koï I had brought, along with the sample of water from the "bassin". The Canon printer had been telling me for some 3 months that it was out of ink. Now it is, but the salmon red lines across the photo weren't enough to obscure the raised scales toward the tail.

"L'eau est nickel," said the young woman to whom I had initially addressed my inquiry. "C'est quoi alors?"

"Une hydropisie," said the young man. Dropsy. A non-existent but fatal illness that describes a goldfish or koï with the body swollen, the eyes bulging and the scales raised all over the body, which also leads to it being called by its more proper name in English, Pinecone disease. The symptoms indicate a generalized internal infection and there's nothing to be done for the fish.

Only, the sites don't tell you what to do with the fish so racked with illness. This young man was much more specific: get rid of it.

"Mais! Comment?" I asked, off-balance. I meant how do I get rid of it. I am not good at killing things. Just look at some of the recent pages of this journal. Specifically, everything concerning birds. There is a tag for your convenience. And the shubunkin last June. Images of me trying to put it into the toilet and flush ran through my mind. I couldn't even one of any sort of crushing or stabbing.

"Mettez-le dans un sac en plastique au congelateur." I considered that a half instant. Put him in a plastic bag in the freezer. I understood. It was kind, all but the putting him (or her) in the plastic bag part. I nodded.

"Il s'en dormira. Je comprends, mais ça serait très difficile de le mettre en sac. Il se débattrait," I said. This time he nodded, and I continued to fill in the thoughts, "Il n'a pas de tout l'aire malade; il n'y a aucun changement de comportement, il mange bien, il est fort." In other words, he'd fight going into the plastic bag, and I didn't know how on earth I could force an otherwise strong fish with a healthy appetite into a bag and put it in the freezer. I had been online, and I had seen the information on Dropsy on the koï sites, but he didn't look like that. He only had one or two areas of raised scales, near the tail. And his belly and eyes were definitely not bulging like in the pictures. In short, I didn't believe it, but I hadn't read enough.

He nodded again and led me over to some shelves stocked with various antibacterial products, suggesting that I could try the one he eventually picked out for me.

When I got back, I did some more checking, and I found that there is a distinction between all over raised scales and areas of raised scales. In the second case, it is due to a bacterial infection, like the parasite Costia (scroll just under hydropisie, or check out an English language koï site for Dropsy and Costia), and can be treated with salt baths and/or antibacterial - antibiotic treatments.

Frankly, I can't imagine our vet injecting our koï with antibiotics.

So, I did as instructed. I cleaned out the black plastic basin I bought for the frogs last year, when we repaired the basin, and I put in 80 liters of water from the "bassin" and 80 liters of fresh water, added a plant and a rock and the appropriate amount of malachite green and then the koï.

He was not happy. I did not blame him. He blamed me. He might be a she.

Then I went and read some more while the hose refilled the "bassin", which I emptied by a bit more than the mere 80 liters. I found the references for salt baths and prepared a 3% salt bath in a galvanized pail, retrieved the koï, who might just never forgive me, if he or she survives whatever is ailing him or her, and put it in there, covering it with a largish water lily pot (they are like sieves) and sat, holding the inverted pot over the pail so he couldn't knock it off and perish in the sparse grass under the linden tree, for the 30 minutes suggested for the treatment, which it seemed to take rather well. Bath over, I returned it to the malachite green water in the black plastic basin, where he has been pouting ever since.

I can't say the scales look much better, but it can have some additional salt treatments, and the malachite green treatment is a four-day affair, followed by a second treatment if necessary. If that fails, I can consult the vet for antibiotics.

Or get a plastic bag.
....

Oak flooring in

Wisp naps on her dogs, to keep warm

Alright, so it might be a little chilly in the house, but just as I feared, May arrived and brought with it the April we ought to have had, complete with chilly temperatures, rain showers and scuttling clouds. I might have to turn the heat back on, and they aren't even selling firewood anymore in the stores.

What's up with that? It's never cold in the summer? Yeah, right.

Not that we don't have firewood. We have a large pile of very large pieces of aged oak. The problem is splitting them so they can burn properly in our little wood-burning stove.

Never mind. I promised myself I wouldn't tell too much intimate stuff here, and his cutting of the wood might just take us into that territory. My husband trusts me.

So, it's been awhile. Yup. I have been contemplating fiction. Real writing. A place for the stuff that gets in the way of writing here, where it doesn't belong. When that happens, I can't write anything. Been busy, too, laying the solid oak floor in the "petit salon", and feeling pretty proud of ourselves, if I don't say so. It has come out quite well.

Today, I ordered the oak threshold from the wood shop and stained the floor. The guy at the wood shop looked a little dubious. I don't blame him. You see, it turns out that the new slab and our oak floor are perfectly horizontal, but the terracotta tile floor in the entry is... not.

Not even close.

I noticed this before we laid the floor, but there was nothing to do about it then. Something has to be horizontal around here, and I wasn't about to try to plane the sleepers to make the wood floor meet the terracotta floor along the length of the door to the room, while managing to keep the tongue and groove flooring lined up and even. You see, at one corner of the door, the slab is 6 cm below the adjacent finished floor, while at the center point it is 5.5 cm, and at the other end it is 5 cm. The threshold will align with the floor at one end, and then stick up past it by more and more until it hits a centimeter of difference near the small end stair case.

Not good.

I asked the guy to make me a threshold that is 23 mm thick, like the flooring, but which is planed so that along one side it goes from 23 mm to 13 mm, while respecting the 23 mm at the other three perimeters.

He said he'd do his best. I am choosing to feel very hopeful.

The assistant asked when I'd like it. I hoped to look very hopeful and humble, while communicating my sense of urgency.

"C'est urgent, non?" she suggested.

"Oui, si possible," I said, nodding my head. She wrote "Urgent" at the bottom of the order.

I do need it to move the piano in more easily, although it would be a dream come true not to have the piano until the sheetrock is in place. We could lay the 120 cm x 300 cm sheets flat on the paper-covered finished floor, then lay down plywood as a cutting surface and prepare it in there, rather than have to do that in the living room and carry them in. But, I don't want to ask too much of Monsieur.



The two old carp and the new carp and shubunkin are still missing.

I am not pleased.
....

Koï, where art thou?

Saxafrage

"L'électricien est passé ce matin," said my husband, as casually as can be, at lunch out under the linden tree. I turned to face him so quickly that I nearly got whiplash.

"Quoi? L'électricien est venu?" I started, just about to add And you didn't tell me? He read my thoughts. I'll bet it wasn't hard.

"Non, non. Il est passé dans sa camionette. Devant la maison. Je l'ai vu." Oh. He merely drove by the house this morning. My husband saw him. "Et je te jure qu'il a accéléré quand il passait devant la maison." I swear, he said, that he hit the accelerator when he passed the house.

It wouldn't surprise me if he had. I have been suspecting that he is avoiding me, since I really wasn't so sure, as I have mentioned, that he found my reluctance to embrace his pinning all of France's (and the civilized, ahem, world's) problems on immigration. A quasi-polite way to express one's most closely held racist views. Of course, he really wasn't trying to be oblique in his racial propos. He seemed rather proud of them, actually.

It would, also, of course, be unfair to suggest that it his is an uncommon point of view. He has a lot of company these days.

If he ever did not.

I mentioned this to my husband, "Tu sais, je me demande vraiment s'il m'évite maintenant qu'il soupçonne que je ne suis pas une enthousiaste de son point de vue." My husband said the French equivalent of "Nah".

"Non. Il est juste comme tous les autres. Ils commencent, et puis il ne reviennent plus jamais." Not that he was writing off his bigotry. Only my lack of it being his reason for not returning.

"Mais," I pointed out, "Il nous a même pas facturé. Il ne veut pas donc être payé?" You'd think he'd hurry up and return so he can bill us. We'd be thrilled to pay for work done. My husband merely shook his head.

Je sais: he will return when he needs us, or has nothing better to do one morning or afternoon. They don't call back, either. Not, anyway, until they actually know approximately when they think they might really have a chance at a shot at a possibility of an opening in their over-booked schedules.

"Je vais connecter en parallèle à ce qu'il a fait et ça serait fait."

I always knew we'd end up doing this part of the work ourselves, too. Just how big an idiot can I feel like for being endlessly optimistic? I already felt terrible today, hovering around the basin like a lovesick wallflower in the school hallway, hoping for a glimpse of the three missing koï and the missing shubunkin, one of which koï and the shubunkin I had just bought last week for -- oh -- some 60-something euros, hoping for a glimpse of even one of them like the biggest jerk of a jock at his locker. Or a worried parent after curfew.

That's a lot for a heron's breakfast, or shy fish.

I googled "koi hiding" and "disappearing koi", and I read about water temperatures, character traits and individual dispositions, raccoons and herons, the shock of coming home from the store in a plastic bag removing their slime cover and making them vulnerable to bacteria (but the store that analyzed our water said it was perfect on the bacterial front, and two of the missing fish have been happy residents of the basin since last spring, and no one is visibly sick). End parenthesis.

I cheered up a little when I read one thread that began on a May 3rd with two koï gone missing just after their introduction to someone's pond, one of which showed up a few days later, with the second making its appearance May 30th in time for Memorial Day weekend festivities, if it actually coincided with the 31st that year. Maybe, I thought, heading back out to kneel by the basin and peer into the water, mine will show up again, too. They are surely simply hiding out under the stone sink in their safe place.

I just don't believe (can't accept that) we have herons snacking on our fish, although two fish disappeared last year and were never, ever seen again. We don't like to talk about that.

Meanwhile, we need to decide if we initiate a lawsuit against the company who contracted to do the exterior of the house. We'll have to send the whole damn thing to a contract attorney for their opinion and make a decision. In the mind of those who have been counseling us, and mine, it's the only thing that will ever get them to show up again, and we can always decide to drop the suit.

My fear? Even if they come, the work will be so god awful that we'll only regret it. And then we'll have to go ahead with non-payment on what is left on the contract and move to protect ourselves there.

So, what would I rather? A guy who works like a charm and respects his work, but doesn't necessarily show when he sincerely (really and truly) hopes to be able to (I am talking about the mason, not the electrician), or -- or what?

Nothing.

This photograph (below) is NOT photoshopped.
....

Stressed

The absence of fish

If I said Not me, my fish, that would be 50% true. We're all stressed, but my fish can't do yoga.

Not that I do yoga, although I should do yoga, but there isn't a yoga class here. Or, someone told me there is, once, but I don't know now. I can think about yoga, though.

That helps.

A little.

It happened quite suddenly. They went to their condo and wouldn't come out. I could see them peeking out from the edges, sometimes, but from one day to the next, they had amscrayed from sight. It was puzzling.

I went to see the experts at Truffaut, and I described what I saw: no fish, lots of fast-forming algae, and sunshine. Sunshine increases the alkalinity of water, which, in turn, favors the formation and growth of algae, which absorbs the carbon dioxide released by the fish through respiration and, so, the water becomes more alkaline still.

It was the algae that puzzled Audouin and I. We had had a lot more since the fall, and the recent stretch of uninterrupted sunny weather couldn't explain that. Anyway.

I went home with a product to lower the pH, and the fish jumped and swam for joy. For about a day, anyway, and then the pH was right back up there a little "too high" and the fish were back in their condo, the old, flat stone sink set on concrete blocks, the cells forming 9 amply-sized studio apartments with a stunning view into their own watery, internal courtyard set against the roots of the clump of reeds. What did I do? Why, I bought three more (rather expensive) fish and brought them home.

They didn't seem to mind.

Until today. And, then, I did a little Googling, using various combinations of search words, including pH, goldfish, water, sunshine, and so on. One source that came up linked an increase in the pH of water to concrete dust. Bing!

What had we been doing this week? Sawing concrete, that's what.



Yes, the mason was able to get to us this week, after having to put us off twice since he thought he'd make it here last Thursday. It's always exciting to see something that has previously only existed on paper, and in your mind's eye, start to take form. This time, it's preparing the old entry stoops for brick paving like the entry court, the new paths from it to these doors and on past them to the terrace in front of the guest rooms in the "petit mason" (no, not that the mason is small, but the mason, as in "house") will be.

Once the renovation company returns. If they return. I doubt it. I think they will move on to playing a game of chicken with us, preferring to lose the remaining 50% on the final contract sum to returning to finish and be paid, and betting that we won't really sue them.

It makes me so mad I could spit. Particularly the bit about not being able to apply the patina they swore up and down they could, and which was written into the final contract, which Georges feigned surprise about, as in "Mais! Ce n'est pas possible, Madame!"

"Alors, pour quoi votre cousin nous l'a juré depuis que vous avez fait la chaux qu'il pouvait et pour quoi donc vous avez signé un contrat disant que celui-ci serait fait?" He had no answer other than his you-caught-me idiot grin. I've seen it too many times before not to recognize it.

That was the same day they installed the old mail box from 1868 back into the street wall with natural color chaux, and I asked them why they hadn't mixed the pigment into it to make the ocher color.

"Ce ne pose pas un problème, Madame. On mettra la patine et vous ne verez pas de différence." I had accepted his reassurance that once they applied the ocher patina all would be well with mistrust. There was nothing they had been doing that had been anything other than un peu pas très bien. Voir pas bien de tout.

When I pointed out that they had specifically agreed to applying the ocher patina all around the house to deepen the color on the walls that had come out too pipi yellow, he answered, "Mais! Vous l'avez vu autour de la boite aux lettres? C'est un massacre!"

It wasn't until after they left that I went to look. It was a massacre.

They weren't supposed to apply it to the natural chaux. They were supposed to use the pigment in the chaux, and then add more in the patina. If necessary. But, it wasn't only that. It was the way it was applied. Un massacre, and we might have to live with it, or try to get someone else to fix their work.

So, Tuesday, the concrete dust flew. And it was Tuesday that I went to Truffaut with my aunt. We bought the stuff specifically for fish ponds to bring down the pH, and it seemed to make the fish very happy. By the next day, it was sailing up there, somewhere above 8 again. Only, there is a flaw in my reasoning. They had stopped being active and retired to their "hiding" place in the condominium before the weekend. It wasn't the first time they had done this. When it happens, it is as though some chief fish acting as the president of the homeowners' association gives the order and they scoot off at once and make themselves scarce for a lengthy meeting. I imagine them sitting around tables with little bottles of perfectly pH balanced water and laptops with Excel spreadsheets glowing on their screens in the watery board room. Some of them are very bored.

Anyway, it was making my aunt nervous.

Which was making me more nervous than I ordinarily am about their disappearances. I have tested the pH at least 10 times a day every day since Tuesday, and it stays up there, on the alkaline side, stressing the fish. The concrete dust settling on the surface of the water and dissolving there can't be helping, but the real culprit is more likely the nearly endless stretch of sunny weather we have been having.

This evening, they were out. Including the new veiled shubunkin and the veiled white koï carp. I call him "the ghost". There is also a larger koï, who is a beautiful, beautiful blue (a very prized color for koï and shubunkins, which you can tell from the price, ack!) with orange spots near his head.


....

Sunbathing, koi carp style

Staying warm on a cold March day

It's disconcerting, to say the very least (if you care about your fish) to see a koi carp keeping warm at the bottom of your fish pond. They look, in a word, poorly, if not outright possibly dead down there in the algae.

They are keeping warm, you know.

At least, that's what I tell myself. To be absolutely certain, I pick up an absolutely dead frond from the Japanese horsetail and poke near the fish. If it moves, I breathe.

It always moves. That's how I know to continue breathing anytime I see one in this posture.

Today, I saw the multicolored one on the bottom, and it was while photographing him (please forgive me if you are a female; maybe I will learn this about you this mating season) that I saw the gold one, shining in the sun on the other side of the rock against which they were both wedged, down in the algae, for warmth on its sun south-facing side. That's why I left the surface plants to rot over the winter and the algae to proliferate a bit; this provides shelter for the fish and the frogs wintering in the southernmost zone of the basin.

Still, it has been confusing for them, since a warmer day alternates with a cold and blowy one. Sometimes at this time of the year, I can be out cleaning up the garden and preparing it for the season in my shirtsleeves, but this year, that is out of the question. I'm still in sweaters and my winter coat, although I am not actually working in the garden, preoccupied as I must be with the house and the drawings for the woodwork in the petit salon, while the garden is left to its own devices. I think the man from whom I bought the piano is more than mildly tiffed by my not having taken delivery yet, since he hasn't replied to any of my emails, so I had better make it worthwhile, n'est-ce pas?

At least the sun is true to March standards, and despite a thin sheet of ice on the surface of the fish basin, the fish are comfortable down in their watery abode.

On the warm days, the whole band darts about, and they even eat.
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Goodbye to you my carp koi

Our fish

I love this photo. I love it even more because yesterday morning, I found one of the fish in it -- the gold-headed, black-backed carp koi just under the reddest of the goldfish to the right -- lying dead next to the basin. It was the fish that has amazed me by how quickly it grew from the same size as the other koi carp I bought in May at the garden store, the one I started going to once Florosny seemed to have dedicated itself to going out of business.

They were all about three inches long when I bought them, but different colors. There was the entirely golden one I bought first with some shubunkin, but it seemed lonely, so I returned with my stepdaughter -- one of the first outings I proposed, the day after a terrible scene; the day I asked if she wanted to learn to ride -- to get more. I was also hoping to increase the chances of the carp koi breeding by having more of them. I felt a little silly asking the salesperson if a single carp koi with lots of goldfish and their cousins, the multicolor shubunkins, can feel a little lonely. She said they could. Vindication! But, everyone did really seem happier once they had greater species representation and balance in the basin. Everyone got along swimmingly.

[I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself.]

Then, one of the two beautiful, fancy, large shubunkins I had bought first, after we repaired the leak in the basin, disappeared, and shortly after, about three other fish, including the smaller fancy black shubunkin with red markings that had come from someone else's filthy basin. An act of charity on the part of my stepdaughter brought him and a red goldfish to ours, newly rechristened in April. They all disappeared without a trace, without an explanation. Had a heron come to pick them from the basin in the gray early morning? Had a nimble cat succeeded in grabbing them with his claws?

Audouin favored the latter; he has it out for cats, who he believes are essentially cruel, killing for the pleasure of it, playing with their injured prey and not always eating it. He's not the only who thinks this. I argue it is in their nature. I am not sure this makes it less cruel. He adores Wisp, though. She is even allowed to sit by his elbow while he eats dinner. His elbow is on the table. I thought the heron was more plausible, since there was nothing left. Not a scale or a bone or a fin near the basin. Nothing. I also heard that they herons tend to do this in May, when we lost the fish.

Don't they eat in July?

Then, there were no more disappearances. Everyone grew and thrived, perhaps especially the gold and black koi carp. By his size, it was probably a she. Two of other three started to catch up to it, only the first one, the beautiful gold one, staying smaller. Now that the gold and black one is gone, I begin thinking that perhaps they would have had exquisite golden baby carp together.

I make myself touch the dead. Even if I am not close to them. I know they will feel cold, unyielding flesh under my fingers. I know I won't like it, but I feel like I owe them that much. A bridge between the dead and I, the living. A gesture to the spirit to say that I know it is there, only a difference of state exists. It is a form of respect more than affection. If I have loved the person, I will kiss him, like my grandmother, or my uncle, my husband's brother. It is a kiss to tell the spirit that I know it has gone on, become larger than the body that held it, present wherever it now chooses, and perhaps it has chosen to remain close to the body. I can't take the risk that it hasn't and not touch it.

I believed for an instant fighting belief that the fish was not ours, lying as it was just at the edge of the Santa Barbara Daisies the surround the basin. Sense won. It had not come here from somewhere else to die. From its size, it was also obvious which fish it was. The colors had started to fade. It was unmarked, no blood. Eyes open and fixed like the fish in the market. I went and got paper towel in which to wrap it. Turning it over, I searched the other signs for marks left by its killer, but there was nothing but slight indentations, depressions frozen in its flesh. They didn't necessarily come from teeth, or anything outside the fish itself.

"Peut-être," someone else suggested, my neighbor, wise in the ways of fish "il a sauté." Perhaps the drops of rain, overflowing the basin onto the inclined brick border at the top of the low wall had made it jump to meet them, and he had finished on the ground.

Or, perhaps he had tried to get to the two koi sticks I found lying in the bit of water on top of the border on that side of the basin, where it tends to overflow. Perhaps he -- or she -- thought that it he flopped a little in that water, he could get to them, and he flopped too hard, right out of the basin.

"Why," asked Sam, "do fish commit suicide?" He was perfectly serious.

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone hears how fish will suddenly jump from their bowls and die." I remembered Bubbles being found in the sink from time to time by my mother or my sister.

"I don't think," I answered, "that fish know that outside the water in the bowl awaits death." They are, I thought, probably thinking that it is the only thing they know that is also on the other side of that transparent divider, more water and the objects that interest them. I don't think that fish are existential enough to wish to die as a result of unbearable boredom or loneliness.

"Il est ici, le poisson mort," I said to my husband in the evening. I began to remove the paper towel wrapped body from the plastic bag in which I had placed him, noticing an unpleasant odor wafting up to my nose "Tu vois, il n'a y pas de marques --". He stopped me.

"Je n'ai vraiment besoin de le voir," he said. I supposed he didn't. I didn't really want to smell him without the benefit of the paper towel.

"Que fais-je de lui?" I wasn't expecting a real suggestion from Audouin, like "bury him under the dogwood, or anything.

"Jette-le." He meant in the garbage, and that is what I did. For the first time. He softened, "Tu peux acheter un autre." I felt very young, my husband as father telling the small girl that she could have another fish to replace her special one that died.

No, actually, it wasn't the first time that I threw away an animal that died in our garden -- I usually bury them --; that was when I threw the frog I found dead in the grass alongside the basin into the bin in which we put cuttings for the town to collect for compost.

I ought to have put the fish there, too, come to think of it.
....