The Domestic Episodes of a Rodeo Princess

2010-10-31T09:00:00.001-04:00

Please help me to identify this photo. I think it was taken somewhere in the U.K. in the 1930's. Has anyone ever seen the mural? Is it a public building?

Twister!

2010-06-27T10:49:00.004-04:00

I've never been to Kansas. No skinny legs have ever shriveled up, beneath my house. Okay okay, we do have our share of little people here in the township, but that is a story for another time.

But, I would just like to declare to those in charge ENOUGH WITH THE TORNADOS!

A long long time ago, I was a twenty year old Pennsylvania girl transplanted to an army base a little north of Nashville, Tennessee. I had a brand new baby, two weeks old, and a pilot husband on active duty with the 101st Airborne. He was never home, especially during bad weather, which I was to learn over my three year stay there, occurred every afternoon from April through October.

I got used to the sky turning greenish black in seconds. After you have been warned tornadoes are on the ground about five hundred times, sometimes three or four times a day, you kind of get complacent. Get a "I'm gonna wait to panic til I see the actual funnel cloud" attitude. Until the day you do.

I was in my living room on an afternoon late in May. It was hot. It was humid. My baby son was asleep naked in his playpen. I remember his precious little head looked like a slightly damp egg. I didn't turn on the tv or radio, or play any music for fear of waking him up. We were still getting to know each other. Later I would learn he actually slept better with background noise.

Saying SUDDENLY, forming the thought and the word, does not express how quickly the sky outside the huge windows turned blackish green. No rain one second, the next - hail and rain started driving directly into the panes. I could see my funnel cloud, finally. It was moving slowly, methodically through the valley, I guessed, about a mile away.

Without thinking, I went to the hallway closet and got out two motorcycle helmets - the kind with the full face? I grabbed my sleeping baby boy, and shoved him into the helmets. Miraculously, there was a roll of duct tape on the coffee table. I used it to strap the helmet together around him. This takes longer to tell than it actually took to do. I sat back down on the steps (WHY do homes in tornado alley never have basements?) and watched as the tornado moved towards us in a freakishly random matter. It reminded me of a huge toddler left to wander at will. Very soon, I couldn't even watch it, because it was so dark, so loud and the rain and debris made it impossible.

Maybe three minutes after I first saw the cloud, the pointy end of it must have been at the bottom of the hill just below my windows. And it bounced.

Bounced up and traveled directly over my house. The wind howled with an agony, everything was vibrating, water started coming in through the cracks around the doors and windows. Yes, it sounded like being under a train. No other way to describe it.

My front door blew open against the hinges. With a commonness of purpose, all the front windows blew out at the same explosive moment. And then it was over, and all was silent.

Of course, the sirens started soon after and because we were on an army base, big green trucks started showing up, unloading people here to help. I didn't have to do a thing, except undo the duct tape and hold my screaming baby boy.

Fast forward thirty five years.

It's an afternoon in June. I am sitting in the living room of the house I share with my baby boy, now full grown, with two sons of his own. The darkness of the sky out the windows to the south catch my eye. Hmmm. That's strange. I get up to look. The view out the windows to the north west is a curtain of rain and wind, moving horizontally across Rt.82. My trashcans fly past the windows. My grandsons are in their part of the house, which I have to reach by going out on my kitchen porch. At the same moment I get to their door, my eldest grandson opens it and says, "Mom called. There is a tornado on the way." I said, "Get your dog and get into the basement." I went back in my house, snapped leashes on my dogs, dragged them out into the howling wind and into the kids' half of the house. (because of the construction of the addition, you can't get to the basement of either house from inside my house any more)

Youngest grandson is pushing their English Bulldog Bob down the basement steps. Apparently dogs do not have a special knowledge of impending danger, because at this moment, all four wanted to stop and sniff butts. Down the basement we all went, the boys and I, and four dogs, climbed over piles of tools and supplies for the construction, and stood at the sliding glass door watching branches and random bits of trash blow past. It occurs to all of us, after a very loud CRACK that it might not be a good idea to be here in front of all the glass, and we get under the steps.

Five or six minutes of the loudest thunder I have heard. Five or six minutes of mysterious crashes and bangs. Here I am, under the steps this time, with the babies of the baby I put in the helmet. My grandsons love that story, the thought of their big strong father inside helmets, duct taped together, to ride out the storm. You would think I was scared. You would assume that I would be anxious about protecting them. You would be wrong.

What I learned under the steps is that my grandsons are calm, collected and capable during scary times. At 13 and 17, they are mature and even funny when stressed. There was just a feeling of waiting it out, that nothing bad could happen to us. I would rather be in a tornado with them then anyone else I can think of. The dogs were so relaxed, they all laid down, taking the opportunity for a quick nap.

While waiting for the storm to pass, we chatted about how we knew a storm was coming - I told them the trashcans flew past the windows. They told me their mother called to tell them she watched a tractor trailer blown over in the parking lot of her business. They went around and unplugged everything, closed all the windows. And then, gone looking for Nana. That would be me.

As suddenly as it came, the storm was gone. We had no electricity, of course. Eldest grandson went across the lawn and checked on the animals in the barn. The horses were already out in the pasture grazing like nothing had happened. The goats don't like being wet, so they were hanging out inside. The chickens were all under the coop, not in it, which we thought strange. Well, except for one Barred Rock, who had ridden it out on the fence behind the coop. We imagined her there, wings unfurled, beak clenched, facing into the fray. She got a new name: Fearsome Bitch!

The three of us sat on the porch in the rockers and enjoyed the breeze. It was about ten degrees cooler! My daughter-in-law arrived home from work and we surveyed the damage: broken dining room window, huge branch out of the crab apple tree. It was a little like that game you play, where you try to figure out what is different between two pictures. Was this here, was that broken before? A pillow from my bed we find in the side yard. There is a mysterious pile of slate shards that wasn't there before. You can see where the wind ripped the ridge cap off the metal roof, and left it flapping. Upstairs my bed is soaked - I didn't have time to close the windows. There are piles of leaves in the hallway. A bedroom window broken. Some shutters hanging by their hinges. All in all, not too bad for a 150 year old house.

We pile in the car and go on the destruction tour, waving at our neighbors who are out on their lawns or controlling traffic in orange vests. We lose count of the number of trees down, or the miles of cable hanging from broken poles. On our cellphones, we call everyone we know and compare stories. We drive over to check on my daughter-in-law's parents who live about two miles away. They have some trees down, no power and some war stories of their own.

Over and over we say, Nothing that can't be fixed. It's a feeling of a bullet whizzing by your head. And if this hadn't happened, how exactly would I know, so completely, that my grandsons are tough as nails? And knowing that is a gift to me. The kids are alright.

The Blue Sky Farm Summer Bouquet

2010-06-17T10:16:00.003-04:00

Ahhhhhhhh.....summer!

I've been pushing it this year since April, which makes me feel guilty, because I completely devalued Spring. In my defense, Spring was a hurried affair this year, barely here for two weeks after the last cold rains of winter dissolved the remnants of the blizzards, grey and dreary in the pasture, and a heat wave arrived tempting us to wear white before Memorial Day and break out our Lawn MuMus. Lawn MuMus are big baggy brightly colored dresses that we wear in Honey Brook when we go commando and wander around weeding or staring at livestock. If bears emerging from hibernation wore clothes, this is what they would choose.

But now, joining the Barn Swallows and the Lightning Bugs, it's no longer ME deciding that Summer has arrived. There is a bouquet on the table that announces it with the exuberance of debutantes arriving back to the Sorority House.

Blue Hydrangeas and Orange Daylilies, or Mophead and Fulva, as we call them here.

Everyone who reads this is a better gardener than I. We don't even have to have a score card. It's not even going to be a contest. I concede. I grew up in a family where all aggression, competition and judgment is channeled into gardening. I gave up long ago in the race to drop Latin Names for species and have the first tomato of the season. I don't even CARE about heirloom seeds and grafting. I am much better with things that follow me and beg to be fed than I am with things that soundlessly wither and die without water. That leads me to Mophead and Fulva which you can't apparently neglect to death.

In addition to their ability to live through my inattention, they fill up vast amounts of space in the garden if you let them, so you don't have to plant anything else. When they are not blooming with mania, they are green and verdant enough to fill visual expectations of 'landscaping.' They can also withstand assaults by bulldozers and careless roofers: the hydrangeas and daylillies survived our three year construction phase and will provide the foundation for new gardens we will put in, someday. Also, for some reason, the chickens don't eat them or destroy them.

You can do a lot with hydrangeas if you really want to. You can change their color by changing the PH of the soil, you can get hundreds of different varieties from GI-normous to petite. I justlove my big blue blooms. Once a guy stopped and asked if he could buy some of mine for his wedding!!! I try to pull the wild grape vines out of mine once a year. It's the least (yes, actually it is) I can do for them.

There are lots of people who spend their time hybridizing daylilies. In the Eureka Daylily guide, you will find a Daphne Dore Daylily. For her 80th birthday, I found a hybridizer who would name one of his plants for my Mom. In my part of Pennsylvania, the orange variety (Fulva) bloom almost all summer along our roads. In the breeze, they wildly wave to tourists and residents alike, always happy to see you.

I prefer barn swallows to bluebirds and daylilies to dainty roses: the utility, predictability and toughness of my favorites is what endears them to me. I kind of hope that these qualities endear me to my loved ones, too.

The Light

2010-06-06T17:35:00.003-04:00

A couple years ago, on a summer evening, we were entertaining my cousins from Australia out on our deck. This is a blue moon, snow in July, extremely rare occurrence. The last occasion that we were all together was in 1959.

At some point in the evening, there was a pause in the conversation and I realized that my cousin's daughter had slipped off the deck in the darkness and was wandering around the yard with her camera. I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I just must have a snap of these fairy lights!"

Can you imagine suddenly seeing, for the first time, the thousands of sparkling, blinking, frantic tiny lights that are my lightning bugs, in the trees, bushes, grass?

Our farm has a completely amazing population of lightning bugs. Down at the bottom of the pasture, at dusk, they rise out of the ground, swirling, twirling glimmering dots of palest yellow, neon green and blue white, the exact opposite of the blanket of dark. I like to watch as they blink, then disappear, to reappear several feet away. To catch them, you have to guess what direction they go, or be fast enough to snatch them with your hand while they are lit. I think I used to be good at this, because I remember filling mason jars with grass and a twig and then using it as a temporary home for dozens of bugs. As long as I left the lid on the jar, I was allowed to have the jar in my room on my nightstand. I would fall asleep to the glowing semaphore they sent. I hope they found love, if briefly, inside the jar.

Because that is what that light is about. Love.

I took my grandsons down to the display in the pasture one evening. In my best National Geographic Documentary Voice, I explained that the light was a signal, that all the bugs were looking for love. "So," my eldest grandson said, "At some point in evolution, a bug said HEY, I bet if I slap a honking huge light on my ass, the girls will love it?"

He's seventeen.

The stuff that makes a lightning bug light up is called Luciferous, after yes, the Doomed Angel Lucifer, whose name means "Light Bringing." A google search of luciferous reveals that scientists inject this into mice and potatoes. I wanted to see this, so I search for images of glowing mice and blinking french fries but sadly, the pictures of the mice are all about breast cancer and the blinking fries do not exist. But should. I do find pictures of glowing Christmas trees that have been genetically adjusted to have luminescence (I want one) and even someone reading on a park bench at night, lit from above by a glimmering genetically altered mimosa tree. Instead of street lights!

When mixed with oxidizing agent Luminol, the same substance is used at crime scenes. It glows blue in reaction to the iron in blood, revealing trace evidence and sometimes, I guess, speaking for those who can't speak for themselves in the pursuit of truth and justice.

And I wonder...do people glow?

Of course they do! and Don't! How many times have you heard people say that a bride was glowing, or that an evil person had no light in their eyes? Is this just a figure of speech? Not according to Japanese researchers Masaki Kobayashi and Daisuke Kikuchi from the Tohoku Institute of Technology, who, along with Hitoshi Okamurain, "imaged the diurnal change of this ultraweak photon emission with an improved highly sensitive imaging system using cryogenic charge-coupled device (CCD) camera" and took DOZENS of pictures of a glimmering light coming from a human that was 1000 times weaker than our naked eye can see. They postulate that what they captured are metabolic changes that pulse and rhythmically emit light. This light, like the light on a lightning bug, emits no heat, and thermographic images of the same human, taken at the same time, are completely different.

So, no happy glowing mice, no radiant french fries, but there are pictures of glowing humans. I wonder if I have a highly sensitive imaging device inside of me that does see the glow in others at times, but if I have lost the ability through evolution or something similar to the scratches I get on the lenses of my glasses which prevents me from seeing the glow in others always. I am wondering if I can will this ability to the forefront of my life and use it to change my attitude (I will admit to being a judger at times). I experiment with this on the way into work. Instead of feeling anger against the slow moving, enormous SUV meandering down the road like a lost elephant in front of me, causing me to miss the opportunity to speed through three stoplights, I try to visualize the happy vacationing family inside. I fail miserably, succumbing to self serving mini-rage. But I get my point. It's going to require more work to recharge my camera.

Of course, this is not a totally original thought, that people have an energy or a glow that we sense more than see. When the Beatles went on their Magical Mystery Tour, they were looking for 'enlightenment.' Think of the thousands of images from hundreds of religions that show deities and average folks, radiating. I know this, but somehow, I suspect those who talk about it. A further search on the internet shows lots of sites willing to help me see the light, for a price. There's the rub. I just don't like mixing enlightenment with something concrete, like money.

On one web page I find a picture of a mason jar of shining bugs and grass, just like I used to make. And below it, is the etymology of the word blessing. Apparently, in Hebrew, blessing means "go forward.'Hmm. Go forward. Into the light. Where have I heard that before?

It's a smack me into the sunshine and call me Shirley moment. Looking for light, I found a blessing.

I don't know how my cousin's pictures of the fairy lights turned out- that was before digital and phones with cameras. But tonight, if it's still and the fireflies are out, I am going down into the field with my camera to see what I can see. And today, I am going to try to see the light in you.

The Barn Swallow's Return

2010-04-28T09:07:00.009-04:00

The barn swallows are back! Every year they arrive here on or around my birthday (April 24th.) I was in the yard, thinking about all my birthday surprises. When I glanced skyward, a pair swooped through the open door of the barn.

I get an 'alls right with the world" feeling when I see them. What a blessing - animals that come home without me calling, that I don't have to feed, that take care of their babies without my help. They are the cherry on the sundae of my spring! A being that, like my daughter-in-law says, appear just for extra happiness! Aristotle insisted that one swallow (or one happy thing) does not make a spring (or a person happy). Oh, go suck a lemon. As long as there have been happy things, someone has been around to deflate the moment.

This group of barn swallows have, I imagine, been coming to my barn since around 1790. I actually researched this as best I could on the internet, so I wasn't building idle daydreams on wishes. Something I have been trying lately, as a point of evolution - not rejecting facts because they collide with any convenient theory that I might come up with. And yes, people who care about these things assert that barn swallows have, forever, been following humans around and nesting in their buildings, tolerated for their attractiveness and their voracious appetite for flying insects. Meaning, like camp followers, they migrated with the European settlers from the coasts of the North East going from cabin to barn as settlement spread inland. Maybe that first woman who lived here, the one that left her hair pins in the rafters over the fireplace in the basement, watched the barn swallows follow her man's plowing, like I watched them swoop and swirl after Charles as he mowed the field.

I found out this morning as I read up on them a little, that DNA studies show that barn swallows from here colonized the Baikal area of Siberia. This is not a direction that is expected in bird migration circles, but the idea pleases me. You only have to watch them (not count them, analyze them, or catch them and dissect them) to see how errant they are, how they have a wonderful independence that defies gravity and sense to realize that sense and science are only going to explain so much about them, and the rest is left to that plan greater than us.

A barn swallow's life is not all being a happy harbinger of spring. Like all things that eat, a barn swallow is prey to larger species, like the American kestrel, which nests here, too. I'm not the boss here, I don't make all the rules so acceptance of the checks and balances of life is part of my tenancy. I have watched kestrels pluck barn swallows out of the air, but I have also seen the same kestrel fly smack into the barn while chasing a twirling barn swallow aerialist as it flew effortlessly into a tiny crack in the barn siding. Mrs. Kestrel hovered over him in the air, screaming what sounded like the bird version of the Honey Brook Cursing Dance until he picked himself up off the ground and took flight again. Hey, they were just trying to feed their kids.

I wish the kestrels would eat the bluebirds. Oh, stop! I know those are like the Golden Child of bird people, but honestly if you compare that demanding, picky species with all their requirements for special housing and fickle parenting with the barn swallow, WHO is exactly more useful? The barn swallow prefers to rebuild old nests. The babies that are born first in the spring stick around all summer and feed their younger siblings. Your flock begins in the spring with three couples and at the end of the summer you have forty or fifty Cirque De Barn performers doing a show with no matinees. Hours and hours of entertainment, right on the lawn, a useful search for food (bugs) turned ballet. I read they eat TONS of bugs. Those bugs are somebody's baby, too. It's just what happens.

What DOESN'T happen here is messing with nests. One kid, never invited back, decided that the mud nests were hornet's nests and attacked them with a stick. His mother and I don't speak. A horse boarder hung fly strips (completely unnecessary) which snared swallows out of the air and meant I had to drown three in the trough, to put them out of their misery. I put myself out of misery by sending her and her horse packing.

Some experts insist that they mate for life, but apparently that is when the experts are watching. We have the same drama in the barn, eight feet above the ground where their nests are, that we have in the chicken house. Males defend their mate and territory unless they are busy trying to invade some other male's territory and mate with their female. The females have kind of a (press hand back to forehead and appear overcome) boys will be boys attitude about it. I wonder how much T.S. Eliot knew about this, when he wrote "Quando fiam uti chelidon [ut tacere desinam]?" ("When will I be like the swallow, so that I can stop being silent?") in the Waste Land? And why did he write it in Latin?

If I ever get another tattoo, it will be a barn swallow. Sailors used to get one after returning home safe after a journey of 5,000 miles and another, if they ever returned after another. Sailors with two swallows were rare. Things happen.

I feel like I am on that second trip.

Opera Company of Philadelphia "Flash Brindisi" at Reading Terminal Marke...

2010-04-27T09:54:00.008-04:00

I Could Have Touched a Tenor!

2010-04-27T09:54:00.007-04:00

About ten years ago, for my birthday, Charles took me to a restaurant in Philly named Victor's. The food is Southern Italian so I was in Carb Heaven. And the wait staff sings opera. SO I was completely immersed in Rodeo's version of Paradise.

I had a glass of red red wine (this was before I understood that the flushing and the heat and the stuffed up nose I get from drinking wine is an allergy). I ordered lots of scrumptious food. And every time a little bell rang, a waitperson would sing OPERA. Right next to me!

I asked our waitperson if I could make a request. I had a notion that if someone would sing Nessun Dorma the top of my head might blow off from pleasure. She said, No. They don't take requests.

Cheerful with a filling belly and heady with wine and a stuffed up nose, I continued to shovel food into my mouth and enjoyed the random bursts of song. Arias from operas - all Italian, thank God - sprouted from all over the room.

Through the haze in my brain from the alcohol and carbs (I know, I'm making excuses) I become aware that yet another bell has rung and the room is getting quiet. Forks are placed next to plates. Glasses jingle as they are set down. A hush falls.

Directly behind me, a Tenor rumbles slowly, softly into the first notes of Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,

No one shall sleep, no one shall sleep, not even you, Princess!

I can feel the pressure of his swelling chest against the back of my chair. His breath disturbs my hair.

Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun saprà!

I have a secret, No one shall know....

Enveloped in his thunder, he rumbles through the lyrics. My right hand stirs in my lap. It begins to shake. Rises to my throat. I am helpless to stop it....

nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle
che tremano d'amore
e di speranza.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun saprà!

"Don't TOUCH the TENOR, MADAM!" Stunned by the shrieking of the maître d', I bring my hand back to my lap, and it lies there, spent and quivering. A roomful of proper people who have complete control of their limbs pause in judgment. I am shamed, but mostly disappointed. I didn't get to feel the vibration coming from that massive chest, the vibration that results in the gorgeous noise and the passion.

I make myself feel better by ordering baba au rhum. Charles can't even look at me.

An unfulfilled fantasy. A thwarted desire. It festers. It lurks. It waits for its moment.

Fast forward ten years. I am still reeling from my great birthday weekend - I had everything anyone could desire for a happy occasion. Great friends, love outpouring. Best wishes. Unexpected surprises and generous gifts. Larry Holmes The FREAKING LONGEST REIGNING HEAVY WEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD called me to wish me Happy Birthday! I mean, how cool is that? (A gift from a dear friend who knows I love boxing.)

And then, this morning, I check my twitter (something not possible ten years ago) and I notice that there was a twit about a Mob-opera at the Reading Market Terminal. Youtube has the video. I have shared it below. This happened on Saturday, my birthday. For a half a second, I have a regret. I could have gone to this, if I had known.

And then I realize, it's here for me now, on the video, and in my future, I am sure, there will be a tenor I can touch. I also realize that for me, there is always more out there. Nothing is going away. It's not that things don't happen, they just haven't happened yet.

To see the MobOpera, see the previous post for April.

What is in your wood pile?

2010-04-26T09:32:00.008-04:00

Big Dog Nola and Little Dogs Petey and Daisy spend a couple of hours every day in the outside kennels, keeping an eye on things, barking at chickens and goats, getting fresh air and sleeping in the sun. These dog kennels have a six foot by six foot run in the front like an enclosed porch, and insulated room in the back with a window, a pitched roof with shingles, mats to lie on, water buckets, chew bars, bones, etc. There is one for the big dog and one for little dogs. When it's time to go in, Big Dog gets a fifteen minute vigorous exercise with four frisbees, almost constant running at full tilt. She tells me when she's finished by taking a frisbee, walking toward her kennel and indicating she wants to go in and get a drink. Then she lies down and pants, and watches as I play frisbee with Daisy and Petey wanders around, marking his territory. We go inside when everyone is finished for an evening of tv watching and lounging on the sofa.

The other day, when Nola had collapsed inside her kennel for her rest, and I let Petey and Daisy out, they went immediately to the wood pile. I thought, MY GOOD DOGS watched a rat or mouse go into that wood pile! They are hunting! Good dogs! Smart Dogs! They dug in the wood and growled. They pulled boards out with their teeth, working as a team. I thought - I will just let them do this, get their "dog' on. After about three minutes, Petey emerged triumphant. With a dill pickle.

I took it from him, but not after he had swallowed a big chunk of it. It was cold, fresh, crisp and yes, a six inch Kosher dill. Dogs can eat dill pickles but not keep them down, because while I was eating dinner an hour later, he threw up green chunks.

This is why I do not write fiction, although my family thinks I do. My mother and my sisters call my blogs 'little stories' and my mother is sure most of them did not happen at all. My kids say things happened completely differently for them, than me. We all seem to remember the same thing, but in different ways. I am the only one who writes them down = that is my offense.

I am still obsessing about writer's groups and what I have heard in them. People write about vampires, werewolves, fairies, space, mysterious elements, ghosts, miraculous adventures, made up romances, character sketches of people they don't know, imaginary conversations with historical characters, all kinds of flights of fancy.

I am convinced these people do not have pickles in their wood piles. I DO. Dead deer appear under my car overnight. Hot water kettles get run over in the driveway.Strange men appear under my window at 2am, singing rock songs. Motor cycle axles get stuck in my ice maker.

On Saturday night, I had dinner with some dear friends and John said, Let the sails set your course, not the gale. I understand his intention. But the gale sends me to the places where pickles appear out of nowhere, and goats eat your hammock and that is my Wonderland.

It sounds like chaos, but actually, these pickles are always about the bigger issues. Strange singing men bring to me an understanding of loneliness. Goats eating hammocks put me in mind of good intentions to take care of myself that get forgotten. The pickle reminds me that I am not the center of the universe.

So life is a series of shocking realizations brought about by the unexpected, for me. I have been trying to get a handle on the mess that I made of my life while recovering from Charles' sudden death and the way that brought the issues that were just percolating along before to a 'Come to Jesus Moment.' I guess some people have a midlife crisis. I have a midlife pickle in a wood pile.

This week, the kids have moved into their new home and out of mine. This freed up a room which I turned into a huge walk-in closet. For the first time, all my clothes, handbags, shoes, hats, coats, scarves and mittens, are organized and visible, easily accessible. For seven days, I spent several hours a day in a fugue state, folding, hanging, arranging and cleaning. Quietly, I moved around my home, gathering, making decisions about keeping or trashing, placing things in order. I hung all my clothes by color. I cleaned all my shoes. I was profoundly moved when placing my suitcases on a shelf where I can see them, but they are not constantly tripping me. I could have done this before, in some fashion, but resisted. But now, I am ready. I am ready to integrate order into my richly textured life. The outer order will manifest an inner order. But, bad news, everyone else - I will still be writing my truth and not yours. No fairies, no werewolves or other people's view of the facts.

Head Bangers, Writer's Groups, and World Peace

2010-04-20T09:01:00.008-04:00

So, Emma remarks on her Facebook page. "It makes such a weird sound when the carpenter bees repeatedly fly head on into my lab window." I think, we must annoy God in much the same way.

I'm not a church going person, but I do have an abiding faith that what I do is of passing interest to some force greater than myself. I refuse to call this force a name or a gender personally, because I consider those identifiers to be human, and as I said, this force is greater than my humanity. I have to believe it is greater, because otherwise, I would argue with it all the time. Instead of arguing, I ask for help and then, misunderstand or disregard the help and bang my head into the same things over and over.

I'm not the only one. Whether it is a solitary committee of one running a life as best they can, or the collections of individuals organized as families, neighborhoods, villages, towns, states, countries, and unions, we seem to find a mistake we like and keep repeating it. We all know we do it. Change is more powerful and harder than the huge sins or acts of violence and war that they eventually lead to - the simple act of recognizing the crazy and making a different decision is what is going to save the world. Or maybe the day, or the essay.

Right this minute, I am sitting on a stool, typing away with my laptop perched on an ironing board in my closet. WHY? Because three days ago, I didn't listen to my own voice yelling STOP DON'T when I unplugged the router on the second floor of my house - the one that jumps the signal from the other end of the house into my bedroom, where I prefer to write. Now it won't work and I keep forgetting to ask for help to put it right. This is the only place that I can pick up a connection. Can I stop and move to a more comfortable location? NO, because I will lose all I have written. So, here I sit, getting crankier by the minute, with no one to blame but myself. Like ripples in a pond, this will affect my whole day and probably someone else's, as it spills over on to other things, and by mid-day, I will feel frustrated and defeated, mentally ticking off the list of similar things that prove I am a failure. All the while, writing about why I do this. No wonder I piss off that force.

One of the things I do over and over again which never leads anywhere is join writer's groups. It starts with this running commentary by the itty bitty committee: "You should get some opinions from other people, on your writing. Your friends love you, they know you, but they are biased. You really need some complete strangers who will give you input. Complete strangers are always experts and worthwhile listening to."

So, I sign up with a writing group and eagerly share. I start getting emails. Eventually, one comes in like this, as it did the other day, "i have plenty of poems i would like to be published i just dont know how to go about it help is needed desperetly" (errors intact.)

Now, if I was a fish, this would be the biggest, fattest bait worm in the history of chum. It has grammatical errors, punctuation errors, spelling errors and perhaps most heinous of all, a cutesy lack of capitalization that says, "You can't pick on me because I lack ego enough to type a capital I." No wait, maybe even more egregious is the presumption that they can write an email that badly and expect people to help them become a published author. No, wait, that the person who sent it feels it is that easy! YES! That is what bothers me. I spell check everything, try my hardest to be grammatically as accurate as my voice will allow, the voice it took me decades to resurrect from my bowels as honest and true, then, I read and re-read and re-re-read, and, as beads of sweat and blood form on my forehead, send my writing off to the universe to be judged, with the certainty that it is, despite my best efforts, flawed and imperfect. By flibberdegibbets like this one. But the wiggle on the worm that sets the hook is the plea for help. I can not resist.

In seconds, I dash off a reply, "That red line that appears under a word means it is misspelled. Desperately. If you want to be taken seriously, use proper capitalization and punctuation. Heed your spell-check. "Don't" is a contraction. If you send an email to a publisher or a magazine with this many errors in it, they will not even look at your poem.
Also, follow directions.
Now, don't get insulted. You asked for help."

I honestly believe, at the moment I send this, that it is a good, helpful and correct thing to do. Well, that is, I have convinced myself that it is, and shushed the protesting of the itty bitty committee who are pantomiming head banging into walls and slicing of wrists. They just don't understand the gift I am giving - like the thirteenth Fairy Godmother I am giving a gift of honesty - one that could be the help this writer desperately wants.

In seconds an indignant response comes from someone on the list. "You just got the smack down layed (sic) on you with the Paddle of Passive Aggressiveness. . . holy shit." (errors intact)

And the race is on. I fume, I stew. I have arguments in my head with this one and that one. This is a WRITER'S group. I start compiling the list of things that irk me about this defense. A! It is spelled LAID! B! The Paddle of Passive Aggressiveness may be clever but I was NOT passive aggressive. I was pretty up front aggressive. No, I wasn't. I was HONEST. I start looking up the definition of passive aggressive, just to prove to myself I am right.

And then I get a private email: "Your email was awesome, I was thinking the same things myself!"

Oh, really? Then why didn't you respond to the whole list? When did stupid people get loud and brave, and smart people get quiet and frightened?

Another list wide email appears: "Same rules apply: It's cell phone."

This refers to the PUN (a literary device used to convey several layers of meaning) I use in my signature - sell phone. I'm a Realtor, for God's sake.

My brain sparks and my spirit is galled and I find sympathetic ears to listen to my drama. I figure I just proved myself right about another writer's group - I don't belong.

I joined this group to be judged. Now, I am not liking it, because I don't respect the judges. Head Banger? Oh my, how many times I have done this, the pattern to each micro-drama exactly the same: !. Join. 2. Submit 3. Get insulted 4. Argue 5. Feel Martyred 6. Quit.

Beyond the issue of the judging/quality of judging issue is the more disturbing idea that I do this ALL THE TIME. It's just the most minor of all my constantly repeated idiotic, non-productive, constantly looping same old songs. What ails me?

I wonder if I find comfort in these same old stories? I know that life brings troubles. I have endured pretty horrific unexpected, drop on you like a comet troubles, but many many more of the same old same old troubles. Chagrined, I realize that maybe I am hoping that the same old troubles will squeeze out the unexpected troubles, as if there is only space for a certain amount and I get to pick. I am reminded of another old hackneyed truism: God will only give you what you can handle. My choices are the currency of a bargain I think I can make with God. If this is true for me, is it true for committees, nations and continents? Could the answer to all our ills, global and local, be just waiting to be chosen, instead?

The Contingency Breakfast Solution

2010-03-01T08:04:00.005-05:00

It's a crystalline moment: Joanne, I, and Waitress Becky with Braids are standing next to our table at Outback and all three of us have our hands on the plate holding the remains of the Awesome Blossom. Our hair is catching the light in halos. You can almost hear the angel choir.

"So, do you want this wrapped?" The spell is broken. "Why of course!" Joanne says. She's the one who paid - she had a gift card with a history and asked me to dispel the bad juju by sharing the meal with her. I chime in, "Well, yes! Are there people who don't want their Awesome Blossom wrapped?" Becky with Braids nods. "Some people don't." Joanne and I with knowing looks judge these people as being younger and not ever having been broke. "We'll take it home." And Becky with Braids disappears to the back and returns with our receipt and a styrofoam clam full of goodness. All the way home in the dark, while Joanne drives and talks about how she gave the gift card as a gift and someone regifted it to her and how odd she felt about that, I am wondering whether Becky with Braids put some sauce in the container. And whether Joanne really wants that onion.

We arrive at Joanne's house and she invites me in, and I dutifully carry that the brown bag into the house. I put it on her kitchen counter and go into the living room where we do what women our age do - we chat about our families and gifts and regifting and how the world feels a little strange now that we are older and more alone than in the past. Like that onion, we peel the layers off our lives and examine them, showing them to each other, validating each other. Yes, certainly, that was a hard time. No, no one really knows until you live through it. We could not become anything else than what we are, having gone through what we did. It's nice to acknowledge that in each other. We both get tired at the same moment, yawning, and I call it a night and head to my car.

I'm about to get in when Joanne comes out of the house waving the bag. "You forgot the onion!" She read my mind! I hug her, thank her and drive home.

The next morning, I open the bag. It's a huge portion of breaded, deep fried onion. I wanted it, now what am I going to do with it? If I put it back in the fridge, I might ignore it til it is spoiled and smelly. It needs crisping to be palatable - some fat has congealed on the breading in little white lumps. I wonder at how they cut them so perfectly, so that the petals fall apart enough to be coated. I wonder at how my mind can take in this minutia in the morning yet miss rather obvious other stuff. I decide to stop wondering and plug in the George Foreman grill.

I got this grill because my oven is still broken, a metaphor for my indecision over what to do with my kitchen and my life. Instead of getting a new oven, I keep defaulting to contingencies: stove top broken, heat water in microwave for tea, stew in crockpot, roast in roaster, and now with the grill I bought for four dollars at the Goodwill, grill in George Foreman. So far I have made chicken wings, chicken thighs, and something I am calling a paffle, which is half waffle (because the grill has grooves) and half pancake (because the grooves only go one direction),some delicious stuffed french toast. I smashed and grilled some leftover sandwiches, too, which were outstanding. When I think about it, this is like that onion. Too complicated, too layered and just a little bit over blown. Maybe crazy. I am beginning to worry that I will always be a person that finds contingencies and ways around and alternate plans, preferring leftovers and hand me downs to new, thus wandering through life like a beagle through a cornfield. I am so used to things not working out the way I planned, I begin planning with Plan B, and realize there will be a C,D,E, and probably an F. I know there are people who do not accept anything but the original conception of an idea. I lived with one. Well, more than one. They rail against any deviation, refusing to change course one degree. It looks frustrating and hard to me, and I know that it works for them a lot because I adjust. Someone has to.

I must initiate then, as an antidote to the contingency response. I am starting with the windfall onion. I cut a hunk off, slap it on the grill, close the lid, try not to look at the huge amount of orange grease pouring out onto the counter because a four dollar grill does not come with a drip pan, and start to imagine what would go well, flavor wise. Egg for mellow mildness to compliment the strong, salty, crispy, peppery flavor of the onion. A little cheese for smoothness and to glue the whole thing together. Toast, to provide a foundation. And yes, Becky with Braids did include sauce, bless her heart. The whole mess is done in minutes. It's really good. Worthy of a name. Contingency Breakfast Sandwich.

Not Gonna Go No Mo

2010-02-13T20:40:00.010-05:00

I am not good at driving in snow. At least I am honest about it, or at least aware of it. I think people who think they are good at driving in snow aren't aware that luck has a good deal to do with not getting stuck in a ditch, probably more than skill. And you could have a four wheel drive, 4,000lb vehicle with traction lock front and back, an 18in clearance, chains and studs, and somebody driving a 1983 Bonneville with bald tires will come around a corner, slide sideways and mess you up. Or not.

But back to me. I have had two fairly serious accidents in the snow. The first one was in a 1977 Chevrolet Chevette. The only explanation I can offer for the following sequence of events is that I was young. You see, I was on a mission to find a copy of the Delaware yellow pages, so I could find a talent agent in Delaware who had hula dancers. I was trying to start a public relations/events business (which was as doomed as my trip that day) and I worked myself up into such a lather about locating those dancers that I got in the car during a terrible storm and drove the twenty miles down to my Mum's to get the book. This was way before the internet. I don't remember why I had my one year old irish setter/golden retriever mix puppy next to me on the front seat. On the way home, a tractor trailer jackknifed in front of me on a four lane highway. I slid into a guard rail instead of the tractor trailer. Because this was before seat belt awareness, I smacked my head sharply into the steering wheel, enough to see stars.

My head hurt. A lot. And I was scared. Really. When the cops and emergency workers arrived, I had my hand pressed against my forehead. The policeman told me I had to move my hand so he could see how badly I was hurt. I explained to him that I could not remove my hand, or my brains would shoot out all over the dashboard. He explained that if I was that badly hurt, I wouldn't be able to tell him that. Well, that made sense. I removed my hand and I didn't even have a knot or a bruise. That was embarrassing.

Years later, I was on my way to work in my 1986 Lincoln Town Car. It was not 1986 - It was more like 1998. I loved this car, but no one else did. It was huge - sort of battle cruiser class. It was black with a red leather interior which gave it a pathetic, trying to be sexy quality. My husband always said that it handled like a sled, which ironically made it terrible in the snow - you could only go straight. I missed a curve on a small hill, ended up
with the front of the car buried in a snowbank, and again - this time because I sit too close to the wheel - banged my face into the steering wheel, putting my teeth through my lower lip. I got out of the car, stood in the road with blood dripping down my chin. The first person to arrive is my daughter-in-law's brother. He gets out of his truck, hands me a tissue and says "Did you get thrown from the car?" I reply, "Gnaw - fly dumb they flap?" Which is, when you have a flapping bottom lip, "No, why would you say that?" He points to my sweater, which is covered with hay and grass. I fed the horses right before I got in the car, carrying the hay into the barn and me being me, had not brushed it off. At this point, the ambulance arrives, I am whisked off to the emergency room, and the first thing the attending asks me is, "Were you thrown from the car?" while he points to my sweater. They stitch me up, each person involved with this asking upon entering the room, "Were you thrown from the car?" The nurse calls my husband who says he can't come to the hospital to drive me home, finally getting in touch with my mother who picks me up and says, "Oh my! Were you thrown from the car?" She drops me in the driveway at the farm, I climb the stairs, wake up my son, who looks at me, sweater covered with grass and hay and now blood and the snipped ends of sutures and he says, "Why did you wake me up?"

This is how I learned the hard way not to drive in bad weather. I won't even go out now, BEFORE the storm hits.

No matter how many advisories, predictions of significant inconveniences, potential threats, winter mixes, hazardous conditions, frequent gusts, failing visibilities, threats to life or property, lake effects, sustained wind velocities, or even non-existent temperature warnings associated with blizzards they might declare, and no matter how many parka wearing, coyote fur hooded intern reporters they strap to telephone poles all over the Delaware Valley, weather reporters can not frighten me into going to the grocery store. What the heck is a ROVING Penn Dot Crew anyway?

All those alarmists who foam at the mouth when some high pressure system meets a low pressure one over a body of water and starts sucking up moisture and pairs up with gale force winds and begins to careen up from the south can save it. Won't work on me now. OH, I’ve gotten in line at Croppers with 24 rolls of Scott Toliet Paper, 6 loaves of Meyers Italian Bread, 4 Dozen Eggs, 3 Frozen lobster tails, and a pound of brown sugar just in case I want to bake something (which I never do). Not to mention the dog and cat food, chips, salsa, pretzels, soda, hot cocoa mix, matches, candles,bottled water, and chocolate I’ve lugged into the house. I will not wander down aisles this time imagining that I will make huge crock pots of steamy messes that I can post about to admiring Friends on Facebook. In the past I have reacted to weather warnings by spending hundreds of dollars on food that I really didn’t need, I’ve also gotten in line at the gas station and the hardware store to buy shovels, salt, chains, gloves, boots, windshield cleaner, radiator fluid and kerosene.

But not any more.

I’ve declared a moratorium on this kind of knee jerk catastrophe avoidance activity. Not only do I have most of the stuff from other binges still in my closets and pantry, but I am just fed up with the lines. I thought about it, realized that I have never, in fifty seven years, been snowed in for more that 24 hours. I’ve never been without electricity for more than ten hours. And if I had, all that food would have gone bad anyway. Also, as I’ve gotten older, I have just decided not to go out. And for the duration of this storm and all future ones, on the extremely rare occasion that I will get stuck at my house due to weather, I am going to relish it. I will consider it a demonstration of character and faith that this time, I will live on the girl scout cookies, canned tomato soup and frozen pizzas that I already have.

So there.

RODEO"S WINNING STORY SLAM PERFORMANCE!!!

2010-01-13T19:29:00.003-05:00

Let Me Help You With That

2009-12-07T06:53:00.007-05:00

FOG

by: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

It comes as sort of an epiphany, at four thirty am, when my mind is open to epiphanies. My cat is using me.

Her name is Fog because she is grey and she has little cat's feet just like the poem, and she does spend a lot of time just looking at me and figuring out how to make me understand what she needs. She believes I am trainable. And sometimes, when she can't figure out how to convey her wishes and needs to me, she just moves on with no hard feelings and kills something to slack her appetites. Mice are so convenient, really: little packages of hydration, protein and pre-digested vegetable matter that reproduce themselves in climate controlled corners of the attic and basement and pantry. The fact that cats eat mice we view as a benefit to us. However, I can tell you that your cat will never hunt your house mice to extinction. They will always leave a few for that rainy day when you run out of cat food and try to substitute something lame like scrambled eggs. That MIGHT work for your dog.

Fog will occasionally make the grand gesture. Once she brought a newly killed mouse into the living room and plopped it down in front of the old, brain damaged Jack russell. He was so startled that poop shot out his butt like a cannon. In disgust she smacked him on the head, picked up her mouse and left the room with her tail straight up in an exclamation point.

Fog owns places in my house I will never visit. My family laughs at my efforts to keep her from slipping out the kitchen door to the yard because they say they routinely see her on the lawn in the moonlight. I have seen her footprints in the dust on my car. I think the sounds I have attributed to the "ghost in the attic" are actually her using the old coats and Christmas wrap. She gets up there by jumping first on to the fridge in the kitchen. From there, she leaps at a 45 degree angle up to where the cabinets meet the ceiling. There is a hole up there through to the unfinished room above. She might actually climb up the inside of the wall to get into the attic. I am afraid that some day she might get stuck. I am afraid of that because I am human, not a cat, with a cat's confidence.

Fog greets every guest to the house, after the dogs are finished their hysterical STRANGER DANGER WHAT FUN slobbering, barking and jumping. She assesses visitors for usefulness by presenting her rear for scratching. She is happiest with a sort of unconscious stroking. If you get enthusiastic and try to place her on your lap, she assertively wiggles out of your grasp and calmly moves beyond reach, sending an unmistakeable message of NO THANKS - a move all young women should learn. No hard feelings, just NO.

On cool nights when I have the fire going, she will sit next to me on the sofa - once the dogs are settled. Her gorgeous, long, white whiskers enchant me as do the perfectly symmetrical swirls of dark among light of her fur. And then she purrs and all is right with the world.

The other day, I was doing chores and she came to fetch me - very declarative meows and short running bursts toward the kitchen. I put down my dust cloth (OH SERIOUSLY - do you think I was dusting? I was staring into space in the living room with the TV on, holding the dust cloth, in a Law and Order Stupor.) Anyhow, I put the dust cloth down, followed her into the kitchen while she frantically jumped on to the table where I keep her food and water out of reach of rude, opportunistic dogs. She stood next to her water and HOWLED - A gut wrenching, operatic mournful sound that caused people in three counties to stop what they were doing and glance toward heaven and cross themselves.

There was a moth, flapping in the water. I flicked it out, she elegantly stretched, dipped down to the bowl and sniffed. Turned her back to it and stared at the kitchen sink. I picked up the bowl, carried it to the sink, emptied it out, swished it with dishwashing liquid, filled it with fresh water, placed it back on the table. Stretching again, she sniffed the water again, found it satisfactory and began to lap with her perfect pink tongue.

Not til 18 hours later, in the middle of another sleepless night, did the full impact of this hit me. If my cat can work me like this, how well trained am I? My CAT has my number. My cat, simply by observing me on a daily basis, knows she can work me. Not only work me, but get me to perform. Tricks. Had I ignored her, she could have gotten that moth out, or she would have sipped that moth water, all the same. Perhaps she would have eaten the moth. Maybe it could have become Moth Broth. I've seen her catch them while they were beating themselves to death against the window, and then crunch them like potato chips.

And because it is an epiphany, and the middle of the night and my mind is free to wander, and because it is close to the third anniversary of his death, I am thinking about the time Charles told me he knew he would marry me. I had asked - and he said, "it was because of the movies, that time." "That time?" He says, "yes, that time at the movies. I think it was our third date or so. There was something gross happening on screen, I turned to you and pretended to gag. And you put your hands up toward me, cupping them."

I don't remember this, and it stuns me. "Like I was going to catch your..."

He says, "Yes. At that moment, I knew you would be my wife."

This was not the romantic declaration I was looking for. But he goes on, "I figured that a girl who would do that, well, would be a woman that I could count on."

So. I think about how angry I have been, for so long. I was a woman he could count on, many many many times, and a lot of the times I resented being counted on. Sometimes I was tired and sometimes I did not want to be the one cleaning up the mess. Sometimes I felt my good nature was used and abused. And then, he died and I was angry. SO angry. He died alone in that truck, and I remember thinking, that bastard. He was not sick, I could not hold his head. He was not in pain, and I could not make it better by fetching something or offering a glass of water. I did not get to pound his chest or press my lips to his to force air down his throat. I did not call the ambulance. Instead, I sit and listen, numb on my sofa, to two cops tell me the story of how he was found. When I ask, they say, the body was identified by the customer who found him. No need to go to the morgue. They hand me a slip of paper with a phone number on it, but tell me I really don't have to call. I will get a report when the coroner is through. They tell me that I don't need to do anything. My job as wife is over.

And That is Why They Call it a Turkey

2009-11-25T08:29:00.006-05:00

"That bird is going to kill himself."

As I remember it, Charles is leaning on a shovel, digging a trench, when he says this. I stopped raking debris long enough to glance up to see what he was talking about. The reason for the trench digging is lost to time and dead brain cells but the picture of a thirty pound turkey balancing himself on the lower half of a barn dutch door will never leave me. It was a blustery autumn day in November (which means there must have been an urgent need for a trench) and the top half of the door was swinging back and forth, barely missing "Orson Wells" as we called him. He was doing a 'duck and cover' maneuver, but would not give up his position on the door. Jane, the hen, was staring at him in a confused sort of panic, not knowing whether she was supposed to join him or just admire him from the ground.

Oh, now I remember - we were trenching out the hydrant for the barn water. It had rusted out at the bottom and in order to have water for the winter, we had to get it replaced before the ground froze solid. I remember this because we put down our rake and shovel, went around the barn to get the new hydrant out of the truck bed and carry it back.

To find Orson stone cold dead on the ground, his neck crooked at a forty five degree angle.

"Well," I said. "At least we already have a hole dug." (The search for the bright side of any situation is a knee jerk reflex. I can't help it.)

Charles said, "Are you kidding? That turkey cost us 3.50 and we poured all that food down it. We are going to butcher it!"

Eating animals we had raised was nothing new to us, but we had always taken them to the butcher in Terre Hill for processing because he was fast and efficient. He could kill and clean them in minutes, with no suffering. We had always thought it would not be fair for us to learn on a living, breathing entity. But now, Orson was certainly not breathing.

Charles bent over and looked at the huge bird, so quiet and limp. "I think he would want us to do this." I had my doubts, this sounded very convenient for us, anyway, but once Charles had a project in mind, we were on a set course. The hydrant could wait. He picked up Orson and headed for the top of the barn. My faint protest of "But we don't know what we are doing..." was lost to the banging of the barn door and the wind.

It occurred to me that I had a very very old recipe book in the kitchen. I bought it on a whim at a junk shop and I found it interesting that the recipes had directions like "select a fine hen from the yard." I had never actually used any of the recipes because I didn't think my health conscious family would actually eat anything I made with rendered beef fat or encased in clear natural jello made from pig bones, but I was pretty sure it would have some kind of directions we could follow.

I took it back to the barn. Charles had put the bird on a plank between two saw horses, under the swinging single light. He had collected a variety of tools he apparently thought might be handy - a hatchet, some pliers, hedge clippers. A dry wall saw. The shank I used to cut bailing twine. You know when you take objects out of their ordinary context they can start to look very odd. All in all, watching this was not good for my imagination.

He used the hatchet to remove the head, after some initial attempts with the hedge clippers. The feet came off next. Orson was starting to look like an object, less like the amusing lawn ornament he was when breathing. Charles hesitated. "Good! You got that book! What does it say I should do next?" In the index there WAS a chapter on butchering poultry, a step by step guide....and of course we learned too late that we had done things out of order, but we were sort of committed now.

"Okay," I say. "You need to cut him open *DOWN THERE* (pointing to the diagram) and I am going in to boil water for getting those feathers off. When you have all the guts out (holding the book in the light so Charles could see exactly what guts I was talking about) bring him in and we will finish him up."

So, I guess I could have waited and watched the gut removal, but it just seems that boiling water in the case of butchering or babies is always an excuse for the faint of heart to exit, stage right. I beat feet back to the kitchen, leaving Charles with one hand up inside that bird, and the other holding the book and squinting.

I realize that I am going to have a pretty big pot to hold Orson in all his grandeur. Even without feet and head, he was big. Real big. I mean, BIG. You don't really comprehend how large something is til you have to boil it whole. So I get my biggest canning pot, blow the shelf schmutz out of it, and start filling it with water. I do realize there is a displacement issue, so I don't fill it all the way up. I heft it on to the stove, across two burners, and turn on the flame.

A grey looking Charles arrives at this point, with off putting blood stains up his arms. "There was a LOT of blood, Rodeo. A LOT." I think he went seriously up in my esteem that night. This was a man who did not make his own peanut butter sandwiches. THIS was a man who did not know where our can opener was kept. He would cook something on a grill, but only after I had shopped for it, unwrapped it, seasoned it, placed it on a clean platter and carried it out to where he was in the yard. And by cooking I mean, placing over the heat, sipping beer and turning it while chatting. Now he was actively involved in the business end of meat.

The water is just not boiling. A watched pot, as the saying goes. The book says I need that water rolling and bubbling to get these feathers off. And we are talking a lot of feathers. Some of his wing feathers are over a foot long. I am not sure how this is all gonna work. I know that water better be hot when we put in 30 or so pounds of lukewarm turkey or it will take another hour to bring it back up to temperature again. According to the book, the de-feathering thing is a dunking and stripping action. There is a line drawing over a hundred years old in the book of one hand holding a carcass by the neck, the other yanking feathers off. Charles is not concerned with any of this, and just plunks the turkey in the pot.

And of course the pot is not quite big enough. Orson is posed with his wings over the edge of the pot, his headless neck jauntily poking out of his massive feathered chest, looking oddly like he is soaking off some muscle soreness in a hot tub. I show Charles the dunking motion in the book. He grabs the neck and tries to pull of feathers. Nothing. But the smell is pretty awful. The hottish water is now forming plumes of mist that smell like the barnyard. Dirty Bird.

We have a discussion about how this is not working. The water is just not hot enough. The bird is too big. The book says this or that. To hell with the book. Book is thrown across the kitchen. The turkey (not Orson any longer) is hauled out of the water and out to the yard because we have decided to skin it.

This works pretty well, and we convince ourselves that the skin wasn't any good for us anyway. After we remove the wings and make some judicious slits, the skin comes off and hold its identity - sort of a Turkey Suit. I say I can keep that in the freezer til we decide what to do with it, but Charles looks at me sternly and tosses it in to the trash can. Too late we read about the aging WITH the skin on. We wrap him in lots and lots of plastic wrap and aluminum foil, put him out on the back porch where it is cool and let him sit over night.

We don't call friends the next night to come over and share this feast. Some stories aren't funny or even interesting til a period of time has passed. It's taken me ten years to get around to telling this. It's not that it was too gross or too emotional. It was just that for most people there is no frame of reference for blood and guts and feathers and meat and eating and respect and heroics, outside of a plane crash on a desert island and survival. It made sense at the time and was part of our history. It's one of those memories that, now that Charles is gone, I carry on alone. No one can say whether it happened that way or not, except me. You will just have to trust me on this one.

Salad Days

2009-11-21T10:56:00.002-05:00

"I hope ya feel as good as ya look to your gal Sal" Gail and I smile at each other, because we do feel good! It's around 4:30 pm on a wintery afternoon about 1958, and Gail and I are watching The Sally Starr Show with our Patty PlayPal dolls. OUR GAL SAL is wearing a shirt with sparkles and spangles and stars, and a white cowboy hat. I know that this particular day I recall was in winter because in the summer we were not allowed to sit inside watching tv. We would be outside swinging on the swings singing Yippee Aye A Cay AYE! Yippe Eye OH! in our cowboy hats and spangly shirts, firing our cap guns into the air to add emphasis. I love Sally Starr so much that I am pleased that my initials (S.A.L.) get me half way to being almost named the same, and I love her blonde hair. (I consider remaining blonde into my mid fifties as one of my highest achievements.)

At 5:00pm, Daddy will come home, pretend that my blond Patty is me, kiss her and make a fuss. Sally will say "May the Good Lord be blessing you and your Family, Bye for now!" tv will go off, I will walk Gail and her Patty half way home, come and sit down to eat with my sisters and my parents. Afterward, we girls will do the dishes - singing all the while so we don't fight - and Mum and Daddy will walk the dog around the block. Then off to bath, bed and dreaming of riding the plains on my horse and and saving towns from bad guys in black hats.

I remember heroic dream hangovers for days, after one of these western themed sagas. A palpable threat, like say a horde of angry rustlers (I had a very vague idea what these were, from Bonanza) would be forming on the horizon (again, something I had only seen on TV because Springfield, PA's horizons were the roofline of the house next door) and I would do *SOMETHING HEROIC* (insert unexplained action) and the horde would disperse, the townsfolk would gather to cheer, there would be a parade, and I would get some kind of brain chemical infusion from this head trip that induced feelings of good will and confidence in the waking world of school and play and home.

These days my dreams have a Sisyphean theme: doing endless paperwork, car ignitions that just click and click but won't turn over, a salad making competition where I have to make a salad 'three ways' - and the only one I make is frisee with roasted walnuts and goat cheese. Why I have a dream about a salad I have never eaten or heard of is beyond me. I dare Freudian analyzers to sexify that.

So, at 4:30 am, I am looking up FRISEE on google and wondering why my family dislikes me.

Turns out, frisee is a kind of endive, and endive is a bitter salad green related to the daisy family. Now, this is interesting because I have often been accused of being a little over cheerful, sort of Daisy like. Gerbera daisies frighten me with their aggressive cheerfulness: this is how I must appear to some people - gigantic technicolor head on a tiny body inadequate to hold it up, supported by some kind of device like a clear plastic straw or wire. I love the regular shasta daisy with white petals and yellow center. I aspire to their simplicity and geometry. And of course, I always count the petals ahead of time, so I know where to start, to guarantee the results I crave while plucking off "he loves you, he loves you not." Yes, I want to know, as long as I know ahead of time and can prepare.

I am not sure that the walnuts and the goat cheese are important at all, except that I can't imagine having a salad with less than three ingredients. And then, at 5:00 am I finally get around to thinking what this would actually taste like, the bitter daisy greens, the acrid walnuts and the tangy goat cheese. Oh.

So, this harsh, acerbic mix is the only one I make, according to my dream. Sally Starr, I hope I am feeling as good as I look to you, but probably not. When did the Star-Spangled, gun toting Rodeo Girl become an acrimonious one trick pony? Those were my salad days, and I made of them what I could, but as far as I know, the competition is not over and I still have two salads left to make.

The Good Enough Mothers

2009-11-18T21:40:00.008-05:00

My grandson Jeremy (eleven) is the chicken guy and on vacation- and I have my instructions which go something like this: "Nana, Jim Bob is very bossy so don't turn your back on him- if he goes after you, just hold your hand down flat over his head. Or you can just let him get you, it doesn't really hurt - and he gets tired of it. Party Girl is laying eggs right on top of Lulu who is broody, she only has a couple of eggs under there but she's in a bad mood. Michele and Brenda are co-parenting again, they will take care of their babies, you don't have to do anything. Just make sure they have food and water inside and outside, only feed them once and try to keep track of how many babies there are." You would be thinking right about now that it's cute that he gave all of them names, and I won't know which ones he is talking about and that is the gist of my story. And then we can laugh all afternoon about one Nana's cute chicken antics. But no. That's not it.

I DO know their names, because our whole family watches the flock like it's the Real Housewives of Honey Brook. Much of our conversation as a family revolves around the drama and pathos of the chicken yard. The chicken's names were given them because of a characteristic behavior or their social status in the flock, mostly by me.

Our chickens are free range, which sounds like we made a conscious decision based on information regarding humane needs and best practices. In actuality, it means we don't have and can't afford a fence that will contain them. Our chickens have been 'free range' for twenty five years, never once has one been hit by a car. Occasionally, a rogue hen will refuse the coop they stay in at night. She might start perching in the trees and while we are deciding what and if to do something about that, she usually disappears - owls will pluck her right off the branch as she sleeps. We have had suspicious paw prints in the snow around the coop, and we have found some chicken bodies 'cached' in holes around the farm. Bob and Nola, the bulldogs, killed a chicken together when they were puppies, but a few days with the shock collar took care of that. Since we got goats, we don't see fox foot prints at all, so Ripper thinks that the goats are like watchdogs. It's a rate of attrition we can live with considering we aren't very efficient at collecting eggs, so we have piles of babies all the time. I know this manner of chicken keeping flies in the face of all those who want to complicate the simple life, but it works for us.

This morning I can hear them crowing and bumping and rustling as the flock moves around inside the small coop. It's a little like listening to someone's stomach growl - you can't see what's causing it, but you can definitely hear it. When I open the little door they tumble out, like clowns out of a clown car.

Party Girl (small black and white Banty) is the first one out. She is named Party Girl because... well, she only dates the dominant rooster, she lays fertile eggs all the time and insists that other hens raise her children. After the really hard work of rearing the babies is done, she will hang out with her own adolescent offspring, which can be identified by their distinctive coloring. Right now she has a pure white teenage rooster and a black and white teenage rooster following her every where, but otherwise, her only socializing is with Jim-Bob. Or with Jeremy. She loves to be picked up and carried around by him. They sit together on the porch and he strokes her feathers and talks to her. She stares at him with the intention of a geisha. She knows how to work it.

Jim-Bob is a pure white incredibly attractive nasty little s.o.b. He has cobalt blue cheeks and a black crusty comb. He is the father of almost all the babies. He and Party Girl have a very Clinton-esque relationship - she tolerates his indiscretions, she is unfailingly loyal to him. I think she thinks he has a job to do. And he does. Not only is he primarily in charge of making sure the flock increases, he watches the skies for predators during the day - like crows and red tails. He also is a caring wonderful father, often helping Michele and Brenda with their huge broods made up of their babies and Party Girl's. He teaches the babies how to find stuff in the ground, and he breaks up fights with the older kids.

Lulu, Brenda and Michele lay eggs, raise babies, and teach babies to find food. They often stumble around with a dozen or more babies pushed up under their wings, under their legs or chin. As the chicks get older, they take groups of them on trips down into the field, past the dog kennels, and to the manure piles behind the barn. Cluck cluck, they say, follow me, look at this, you can find food here. They issue warnings, confer with the other Mothers (But not Party Girl) and generally are a miniature theatre production of what goes on, on any playground anywhere. They keep track of all the babies, steal each other's babies and seem to know whose is whose. Well, that is how it appears.

As I said, the kids are on vacation and I am homesteading solo during a week of horrible thunderstorms. Almost daily, the clouds roll in from the southwest, darkness eating up the day, winds coming out of nowhere. One early evening, I get caught on the lawn, between the car and the house, as curtains of rain drench me. I am so glad to get inside, dripping water on the kitchen floor. It was hot, but now, soaking wet, I am freezing, teeth chattering. I am alone, so I strip down and grab a robe from the peg in the hallway. Then I hear it, over the banging of the shutters and the rain on the metal roof.

Hysterical, persistent chirping. Louder and Louder, more and more frantic. Where are they? They sound like they are right in the house! I can hear branches clashing, torrential sheets of rain crashing across the yard. The tree between the house and the barn is bending and twisting from powerful gusts, causing the motion detecting light to go on and off, almost at the same time as the lightening flashes. Still I hear the chirping. I go out on the porch with the flashlight and yes, I see them. A moving mass of yellow under the chicken house, on an island between coursing run off from the driveway and barn roof.

Chirping. Yelling for help. About to be swept away, out into the pasture.

WHERE ARE THEIR MOTHERS?

Throwing a raincoat over the robe, forcing my still wet feet into my barn shoes, I grab an umbrella and head out into the storm to save the babies. This is right up my alley.

I fight my way against the wind to the chicken house and think, I can just reach down and pick them up and put them in through the little door. Except, standing there, I can't reach them. They are too far under the coop. I realize I am going to have to kneel down in the rain and mud. Well, it would be ideal if it was only mud but it is the yard surrounding a chicken house, where chickens live. Who are not known for their excremental control.

It is impossible to kneel down, reach under the chicken house and hold the umbrella, so the umbrella has to go. It's not really functioning as any sort of protection anyway: the wind is blowing the rain nearly horizontal. However, I find I can use it to kind of scoop the baby chicks toward me, and I get four or five at a time out and up to where I can reach them. I open the hatch on the nesting box side of the coop and start throwing them in. I can hear the chickens inside protesting against the rain and wind that blows inside, and I can hear Michele and Brenda chirping 'come here, get under' to the rescued babies. I repeat the process several times until there are only two babies left, huddled together and chirping.

I call them, I beckon them, I plead with them and finally curse and scream at them. They heed me not. To save them from the cold water now swirling menacingly toward them, I get down on my belly, shimmy under, grab them, and shimmy back out. I can feel their tiny hearts beating through their bony, wet, feathery breasts. They seem more scared of me than the storm. I toss them into the nesting box and slam the lid closed.

I feel good, standing on the lawn in the storm, so wet and dirty that I realize I am as wet and dirty as I ever could be. There is a freedom to this, as it is no longer necessary to protect myself from anything. I do a little hero dance in the puddles, throw back my head and laugh. It's all very enervating until a bolt of lightening slamming to the ground in the field across the street sends me tearing for the house.

I am sure that as the storm rolled in, the hens moved toward the ramp up to the chicken house like they do every day at dusk. I am sure they called to the babies, and I am sure the chicks heard them. As the thunder and rain rolled in and crashed around them, the chicks chirped so loud I could hear them in the house - and I know the hens could hear them, too. At some point, the hens decided to stick it out in the comfort and warmth of the coop and stop worrying. Later, washed and warmed by a shower, I think about what kind of mothers would take such care of their babies in the sunshine, yet leave them to drown in a storm.

The Edge

2009-10-30T05:39:00.004-04:00

Charles has been dead three years, soon, and all my knives are dull.

When Fred came to visit with his family, I bought a beautiful roast of beef - something I do not do very often. He trained as a butcher and he loved these big cuts of beef, slowly, barely cooked, with rosemary and garlic pushed in. I was sure he was not getting such things in Iraq, and that he would appreciate that I remembered his preference.

I even had a chat with the butcher at the grocery store when I was picking it out, something else I do not do often. I wanted the butcher to pick out a really pretty roast, something another butcher would like. These cinematic moments only ever roll out in my mind so I don't know why I keep trying - black and white film clips clattered through the projector in my brain, calendar leaves flying, me - finally morphed into an odd melange of Ma Kettle grasping a flag to her chest and Aunt Bea in an apron holding a pie, adoring family paying homage to my efforts, local butcher presenting a huge hunk of flesh into a light from above and saying "Your soldier will appreciate this, Ma'am!"

At least I was expecting this at Wegmans' - a cut above - but instead, the young man (who apparently does not share my rich mental catalog of iconic images) merely pointed to the second one in, a three bone in rib roast, and said "That one looks good." and reached for the waxed paper.

My oven is broken, the heating element at the bottom blown out during a period of dank depression when I might have left it on all night or maybe for a day or two. Maybe a week. The oven that broke was not the oven I ever wanted: it was cheap, from the scratch and dent store and was supposed to make do until we had the money for the kitchen renovation. That money was going to appear shortly after every other single thing in our lives was taken care of. All oven type activities now take place in a stand alone, plug in roaster, which is pitch hitting for the oven I never wanted, until I get the stove I deserve and that is where I put the roast when I get home. But lately I have been thinking, maybe not. Maybe I will have a kitchen but not a kitchen, because after the kids move into the addition, am I going to do any real baking? As opposed to fake baking? I hardly use the roaster. Maybe I don't want a fancy oven any more.

Which makes me wonder if it is sad or happy that I may be giving up the idea of a dream kitchen, which was the fuel for terrible arguments and intense middle of the night cravings, and the hook that I hung all my martyrdom and justifications on. If I never, ever get a six thousand dollar dual fuel, self cleaning convection oven and a stove with a built in griddle down the middle, and I make that decision on my own, based on practicality and present need, if I give up that dream, that tightly held desire, which I have picked all the scabs off and used as my red badge of courage, the lack of which was the visualization of just how truly my needs and wants have been denied, who the heck am I?

And who am I having this argument with now?

Soon the roast is done, and I rest it for half an hour. I have heard that this is the single biggest mistake that home cooks make, not resting their meat. You see, you get your roast chicken or leg of lamb or roast of beef out of the oven, cover it all over with foil, and let it sit for a half hour before you cut. This way the juices stay in and don't run out all over your cutting board. I am a great, knowledgeable cook. I have created wonderful, memorable meals for multitudes of people in a terrible kitchen for thirty years. Lasagna, meringues, steamed shrimp and stir fry, roasts and pot roasts, jars of tomato sauce and jam, pickled green beans and red beet eggs, thanksgiving turkeys and chicken and dumplings, lamb rolled in rosemary and pepper, chocolate cookies and lemon sponge cakes, home made pasta, countless loaves of bread. The SOUP! The nameless mishmashes of leftovers that turned out to be delicious. I have done all this, I realize, in a kitchen that has two cabinets whose lowest shelf is 18 inches over my head, a sixty year old stainless steel sink, exactly three feet of counter space, no dishwasher, 1/2 inch to spare if you open the fridge and the oven at the same time, missing floor tiles and exposed plumbing traces to the second floor the cat uses to chase mice. My kitchen counter had little flecks of gold sparkle in it when it was installed after WW2, which you can only see now if you move the canisters. Not to mention seven doorways and two windows. All of these conditions grist for resentment and seething, stewing discontent and the springboard for imaginative problem solving and VOILA moments. For instance, if you don't have enough counter space, you get a cutting board that fits over your sink - that adds two feet. And one that fits over the top of your stove - when the stove is off, that is another two feet or so. If you don't have a dishwasher and company is coming before the dishes get done, put them in the oven til the next morning. In the winter, you can keep your extra groceries on the back porch - it's cold enough. If you keep the stuff under your sink organized in plastic tubs, it is really easy to get them out fast when the pipes freeze and burst.

And now, possessing the where with all to make all those headaches and compromises go away, I suddenly am not sure I care any more. I can buy that stove, I can have all new cabinets, I can have anything I really want, the way I want it.

I pull the carving knife and fork out of the block to carve the rested meat. Instead of the elegant slice I am expecting, I end up sawing and mangling. The roast falls apart in delicious but ugly chunks. Very embarassing because by this time Fred is watching me and I feel exposed and pathetic. The knives are all dull. I don't know where the steel is and I don't know how to use it. Charles used to stand in the kitchen and expertly flick the knives back and forth and listen to me bitch about how terrible the kitchen was. He used to say, Stop cutting directly on the counter, you are going to ruin this knife. I would retort, I can't hurt this crappy counter and I am going to get better knives! And then we would sit down and eat a fine meal and later that night I would go to sleep, feeling sorry for myself and what I had to put up with. He honed the knives and I sharpened my resentment for decades. And now I know it takes just three years for both to lose their edge.

The Whoopie Bridge

2009-10-11T18:12:00.005-04:00

A fine fall afternoon, a Saturday, I am sure. The top is down on the little blue Fiat Spider and I've loaded my son Mike and two golden retrievers into the jump seat. Everybody is excited to be going for a ride. We are getting ice cream.

The sky is blue, the trees are gold and the car is biting the wind like it is a crisp apple. We round a corner and I position the rearview mirror so I can see my happy son.

Downshifting, I pick up speed and the asphalt sings. Why isn't every car a convertible, I think. Two sets of ears flapping, my son's parka flying out behind him and my hair standing straight up with only about 400 feet to go, our speed is exactly 44 mph. The next moment, we are flying over the bridge, leaving the ground. I look in the rearview mirror and my son is holding on to the dogs' collars and they are in the air, off the seat and he yells WHOOPEE!

A thousand light years later, I get a phone call from that same son and he says, “Don't go straight down 82. The Whoopee bridge is closed. A big chunk of the bridge fell into the creek, probably from the thaw and freeze cycle working on the mortar.” He's a fireman, so he was among the first to know. Fortunately this all happened while no one was on the bridge but it does mean a detour.

I hate detours. This will be a daily thorn in my side for months, maybe years, I just know it. It's not like you can just take a right go down a block and there you are. There are five different ways to go around the bridge, all about six miles inconvenient. They are curving, narrow roads and I am not looking forward to all the hurried people careening around on them and cursing like me. Explaining the features and benefits of each route to visitors for a long period of time is going to be irritating. The whole thing just sets me off.

Everyday I sit in the driveway and ponder – This way? That way? I always end up making what turns out to be the wrong choice, stuck behind a tractor, or one morning, an actual gaggle of geese in no hurry to get anywhere, except down the middle of the road. Watching those geese I did sort of have a moment of OH COME ON, a acknowledgement that this is not the worst commute in the world. That was short lived. On the way home, more often than not I miss the turn that I would take for the first detour choice and end up driving more miles out of the way, just when I am cranky and tired. The itty bitty committee in my head just loves getting ten extra minutes alone with me to discuss my failings and inattention.

Each day when I am getting ready for work, I completely forget about the detour and how it adds precious minutes to my trip, and I end up making a lot of apologetic phone calls and exaggerating how much of an ordeal this is for me, mostly an effort to foist onto something other than myself an explanation for my lateness. Of course, after a while, my excuses and complaining are patiently endured but not really believed, and the conversations start to turn to “Just when do you think the bridge will be fixed?” Although I don't really have any idea, I say three months to three years, and the recipient of the call gives me much undeserved sympathy for how this is ruining my life, and I feel better.

The situation with the bridge does cut the traffic in front of our house by half, not a small thing when you consider that our old house is exactly 22 feet off a two lane state highway used by noisy gravel and trash trucks. They are now in front of someone else's house, slamming on the jake brake and jarring them out of bed in the morning. The guy who owns the ice cream store puts out his own custom detour signs, hoping that the baseball teams and camp councilors who swell his business during the summer will be able to find him. And his marque is how I learn, one afternoon, that the bridge is open again. GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE IS NOW OPEN! LARGE TUNA HOAGIE 5 DOLLARS! All good news.

See, I say to myself. It all worked out. I head out to work, driving in a straight line, which makes me happy, no thoughts of detours or excuses tormenting me. I approach the bridge at exactly 44 miles an hour. I wait for the whoopee.

And I get two.
Two mini whoopees.

Huh.

Where the old whoopee was a sharp, sudden jolt that sent you off the ground in a fine arch and placed you back down with a chirp of your tires, this new whoopee is like two little hiccups. Shaken, I pull over and drive back over, to try it again. Yes. Where there was one big one, there are now two.

I do it a third time, experience double mini whoopees, pull over to the side of the road, squint into a field of purple asters and ponder.

While I am fighting the disturbing idea that I might be the only person in the cosmos who would be moved to tears by an altered whoopee, it occurs to me that a bridge being out makes some things happen, other things not happen. Like the geese, like the trucks, like countless other things that were said or done or dreamed because the bridge was out, or not.

About two weeks after the bridge is fixed, I get an email from Fred.
Email : fred@yahoo.com
Comments : HI shirley I am not good at this computer thing. I am in IRAQ fighting this war .I am very proud of you!I am very sorry to hear about Chuck. I miss you both love Fred please email back

Well, that's good, because for years, I thought he might be dead.

Fred came to live with us when he was a teenager, as part of a program for building community and independent living for children who had been raised in institutional foster homes. There was nothing wrong with Fred – he was bright, he was handsome, he had no physical or mental impairments. He just got caught in the system when the courts were not happy about terminating parental rights, and he was unadoptable for many years. By the time he was in his mid teens, he had not really lived in a family home or a town. The group home he lived in was clean, the social workers were kind. He went everywhere in a bus. People whose job it was made his dental appointments and had his eyes examined. They brought him clothes. They made sure he celebrated holidays and had a gift. They made sure he went to school. But even the social workers felt this was not enough for kids – the state turned them out at 18 and they had no understanding of any other life, and no ties to any community. They didn't know how to get jobs, and they didn't know how to make friends.

When Charles and I heard about this from a friend, we thought it would be a great idea to add to our family this way. I never thought of myself as someone who would only have one child, but that was what had happened. Our son needed family, this kid needed family, we didn't feel we had to have a baby, so Fred was our perfect choice.

And life rolled on. We weren't perfect, Fred wasn't perfect. He will tell you so himself. I called him my boomerang child because he came and went so many times. He liberated himself from everyone (legally) at 17 ½ and came and went some more. There were fights, there were tears, there were ultimatums and pleadings – on both sides. And then one day I realized I hadn't heard from him in a year. And then Charles died and I didn't know how to get in touch with him to tell him.

But I guess someone had, somewhere – told him about Charles. But how was it possible he was in Iraq? Of course I emailed him back, and then there was a phone call, and we got caught up on things. And then he tells me he is coming home on leave and wants to come out to the farm, bring his wife and daughter.

Of course!

I ask him if he needs directions and he says NO, he will always remember how to get to the farm. I am secretly glad I don't have to explain the detour. He will come home over the bridge, just with two mini whoopees instead of one.

The first thing he says to me is “Are you still wearing that apron?” and I feel loved, that he should notice this. I show him the addition, tell him about Mike and his family moving on to the farm and while we stand on the porch and watch the chickens run around I ask, “Is it the same or different – how does it feel for you that Charles isn't here?” And he says, “Yes, it's the same and different.” I know what he means.

Fred puts on his hat and his uniform shirt and we take pictures: Fred and Mike, Fred and Mike and the Grandchildren, Fred and I. I put them up on Facebook, announcing Fred is Home From Iraq and that I am glad the family is all together again. Suddenly people are blessing me and our family for our sacrifice. They are asking who this other son is? These blessings shame me and overwhelm me, because to explain why I don't feel we should be blessed is such a long story, so many times back and forth over a bridge.

I don't deserve them. I have not sacrificed anything for him or the country, not for a long long time - decades. I did not even know he had joined the service til two weeks ago. I didn't even know he could, at 43. I also feel that long ago, we could have made a different choice and adopted him, instead of leaving him in limbo. He is my son, but not my son. Maybe that would have made a difference to him and what he did with his life. I don't know why I worry - He is calm, mature, determined--together. He's done fine.

Sometimes a bridge goes out and you take detours and because of that, different things happen. The availability of a bridge gives direction to your journey. You will always wonder if you went the right direction. If the bridge breaks down, it can be fixed, but there are no guarantees that when you go back over it will be the same.

Treasure Hunting

2009-08-23T08:30:00.007-04:00

We live in a very old house. No one seems to know exactly how old, even the public records. I recently had a conversation with my insurance person regarding this. You see, my house is not what insurance companies feel comfortable with, but it's okay, if you pay them more, they get over it pretty quickly. Although we only put in one claim in close to thirty years, I can hear them shudder when I call because they are basically pessimistic when it comes to 200 plus year old barns with imperfect flooring, horses and goats that spend their lives figuring out how to escape on to the road, the absence of sidewalks and fire hydrants, old trees close to the house and of course, they have read the blog so they know I am accident prone. I called my insurance person because we have the addition going up, basically doubling the size of the house, and I wanted to be sure we were covered over what has turned out to be (no surprise) a very protracted construction period.

She says, (after taking a swig of gin or whatever she keeps on hand for my phone calls) "What can I do for you, Rodeo?"
I say, " I need to make sure I have coverage for this addition - remember we talked about it?"
She says, "Let me pull up your account." I know she's got it in a bookmarked file on her computer, marked with a skull and cross bones, so it takes her no time at all.

"Now" she says, after another swig," Your original house is what? sixty years old?"

"Noooooo....it's like 160." I am patient. "The house you can see above the ground we think was built around 1876? Remember? there is a plaque on the wall in the stucco?"

"Stucco." she's starting to remember.

"And, remember, there is a house under the house that predates 1790? - the part with the dirt basement?" I hear her choke down some more gin.

"And remember, we talked about why it says sixty in the public records? Because when we got canceled by the old insurance company, you looked it up and it said sixty? That was in 2000 = and we figured that was when the Rural Electrification Program came through and we got electric, and the house then showed up as having been renovated, and the Simpsons who owned it then put the apartment in because Mr. Simpson had his knees broken by that bull and they hired a farm manager?"

"Riiiiiiggghhhhtttt." I'm losing her.

"No, no - you remember this, because you made the same noise then. Really, we brought the title search in from when we bought the house and you made copies, and it does indeed say the house, at least the part we live in now, was built in 1876. So that makes it...sort of 120. But we know it's a lot older. Because of the house underneath. We went to the Courthouse and we have records that some squatter named John Alford lived here long enough before 1790 so that he got the land from the new gov't, when they seized the land from the Penns? And now, we are building this beautiful addition - and we modernized everything, got a new metal roof, and a new septic, and well - well for water, not well, like I'm finished speaking well."

I realize that none of this is important in the context of our conversation, except that it makes me sound like I am pathetically trying to get her to like my house. We finally do get down to discussing coverage and get that all straightened out but I wonder if, in the future, some record will say the house was built in 2009.

And I start thinking about value. This is the second house Charles and I bought together. The first one was our 'smart decision' house. It was brand new, in a first time home buyer's neighborhood- a little three bedroom ranch house at the end of a cul de sac, with lots of kids in the neighborhood. The 300.00 mortgage payment, which included taxes and insurance, kept us awake at night - 17% interest! But we knew it was better than that 150.00 a month rent we had been paying. It was perfect, but I was never really at peace there. Charles was working on it all the time, tweaking that perfection: he put in hardwood floors (the only house in the neighborhood to have them) beautiful gourmet kitchen with a state of the art microwave oven/stove combo (again, only house in the neighborhood to have one) brick pathways and an over engineered fence to keep our two dogs in. Meanwhile I died a little inside each day, from boredom with the Tupperware parties and Creative Plaything parties, and just... two.... dogs. Only thing was, our son was deliriously happy.

So when I found this neglected but graceful farmette, not three miles from our present house, I went about convincing them both that this was also a 'smart decision' house. I told Charles that if he was going to work on something all the time, it ought to make a difference! He could restore this house, and never ever run out of projects! (I am a SERIOUSLY good closer) It took about six weeks of driving past every day for him to see the possibilities, but also it had a caveat: it was CHEAP but had almost 8 acres! He would be a LANDOWNER. He would have more ground than his brothers and sisters, PUT TOGETHER, and that was very important cred for the middle child of ten. Also he could have a big tractor. That sealed the deal.

My son was another matter. At eleven, the last thing he wanted to do was move away from his friends. We would be changing school districts. He looked at the no sidewalks, no pavement situation and asked plaintively, "Where will I ride my bike?" I explained he could have a DIRT BIKE. He said, "I have a dirt bike now." Which he did, but we had to load it in the car and drive to a place he could ride it. I said, "You can get up every morning and just ride right in your own backyard. Let's take a walk, and I'll show you what I mean." We climbed through the fence, into the pasture, weeds over our heads, gnats buzzing around our noses. He's skeptical. We walk and walk and I show him the barn full of weird scrap metal things, the huge rock in the field perfect for a fort. We actually get winded, fighting our way to the rear property line. I turn him around and say, look - all the way up there - that would be our house! And then.. I see something in the grass, half buried in the ground.

Pushing his head down for a closer look, I say, "Look! Every day we can come out here and find interesting things like this! It's an odd plant! We can come back every day and see what it grows in to! Some unusual pretty flower maybe!"

He shrugs me off. "Those are plastic grapes, Mom. Some old country person came out here and dropped their plastic grapes."

Okay, so he was right, and like most conversations that follow this, things are never as good as I think or as bad as my husband and son think. But he has no choice, we move and after years that fly past in the blink of an eye, he's moving in again, with his children and wife because it's the best place in the world and I can't stay here by myself.

But it is an old house, and when you live in an old house, people always ask you the same question: "Did you find anything valuable? Did you find buried boxes of silverware or cash? Did you find hidden antiques? Treasures?"

I got a metal detector once and within feet of the kitchen door, it started to click. I got a shovel, dug down and found a metal filter from a coffee percolator. I found what appears to be an entire tractor buried behind the barn. I have found shards of pottery and lots and lots of Schlitz beer bottles hidden beneath trees and in the eaves of the barn (someone seems to have had a problem). We have found big and small horse shoes, strap hinges three feet long, and lengths of chain.

Once, while facing the fireplace in the basement, I impulsively reached up into the beams and found ancient hairpins and a comb. In a moment transcending time and space, I knew a woman had stood where I stood, and let her hair down in the evening. And for a reason I will never know, never put it up again.

When we removed the mantle piece in the living room, a 1960's dog license fluttered to the floor. My son found an unusual blue marble deep in the foundation. He handed it to me and in minutes I found a Marble Guy on the internet, sent him pictures and was informed it was a regular old marble. Well, except that it was OUR old marble.

But no coins, silver or anything of real value (which means, worth money).

What we didn't find, and couldn't, was the real stuff. Like the reason that woman never put her hair up again. The first cries of the babies born here. The last sighs of those who died. The stuff that life is made of is in the air we breathe here, not in the ground or in the walls, and can't be sold on ebay. It's what we will leave behind when we go.

Starring In My Own Movie (Magic Number TWO)

2009-03-05T12:38:00.010-05:00

If you are just tuning in, I am going to suggest you read "I Believe In Magic Again" before you read this. It will give you the back up story as to WHY I went on this trip.

So, when last we left the battle over my soul, The Universe had sent this salvo out: "I don't like to make predictions, but the way things are going, Rodeo, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this year you have a ball, go to a ball... and put the pics up on Facebook.
You are so poised for the time of your life -
The Universe"

It was like I had just read a horoscope that said, Rodeo, Taurus that you are, you will back your grey Ford Five Hundred out of the driveway and run over your hot water kettle. So obscure but actually something that would happen in my world. And Has.

So with the power of the Universe solidly behind me, the actual details of the trip were easy to plan and execute. My faithful travel companion Carol called me the next morning about something else entirely and ended up committing to going with me. My Son and Ripper and the boys even started getting excited and pledged their support on the home front. Lisa and Gordon on the other end in New Orleans smoothed all needs out cheerfully and generously and Alan sent me bulletins every few days with tantalizing details about surprises and costumes and events.

Gradually, I started to believe I was going. And it was going to be magic! I vowed I would not buy any clothes, so of course I stopped at Talbots and they had some perfect colorful t shirts on sale, and the perfect velour sweatsuit equivalent on sale, so it wasn't like I really bought clothes. They were on sale. You know, like food eaten over the kitchen sink has no calories, clothes bought on sale at Talbots don't really cost anything. AND, I have found that packing new clothes folded by ladies at Talbots is ever so much easier than doing laundry. Ripper found me the perfect green hat at the Goodwill which went with everything, I gathered all my electronics together, then my makeup and my toothbrush and tucked it all away in the fabulous luggage I bought two years ago (Steel Magnolias: Olympia Dukakis as Clairee Belcher to Shirley MacLaine as Ouiser Boudreaux: I love ya like I love my luggage.")

I'm ready.

I drive to Carol's and then her sig other Andrew drives us to the Airport and then there is security and lines and shoes off and jewelry off and then plane boarding and lift off. The wind beneath my wings.

I never pay much attention to where I am sitting on a plane, but this time I am in the middle seat of three. On either side of me are two huge pieces of Man Beef in flannel and denim. I am like a little sliver of cheese between two huge slabs of rye bread. Conscious of this, the large men have their arms folded up and their mammoth thighs pressed together and are thinking slim thoughts. I feel so bad for them - they are trying so hard not to touch me or intrude in my space. I go for the joke.

Aloud I say, "Well, I am feeling pretty safe right now. I've got my own crash cage!" Tensions ease considerably. The big guys start chatting amicably about the price of carry on luggage and I fall asleep.

I wake long enough to change planes in Charlotte, NC. and immediately fall back asleep on the last leg to New Orleans.

On the ground, we call our host Gordon and he is there in minutes with smiles and hugs and lifting our luggage into the trunk of his comfortable car. A word about Gordon, the father of my friends Lynda and Lisa: I am going to be telling you many many things that Gordon did with us and for us, and how he drove us hither and yon, took us to dinner, got us up, made us breakfast every morning, etc etc. went for walks with Carol, how his house was decorated for Mardi Gras with masks and beads, how we all stayed up til all hours, and got really tired. All of us, except Gordon. He never gets tired, lost or out of sorts. He never complains about standing in a parking garage waiting for the car for an hour and a half. In the cold. and the Rain. He always has the perfect clothing, the perfect demeanor and the perfect attitude. He always knows perfectly where he is, how to get home. He always knows the right thing to say and the right thing to do. He always has cash when I can't get to the bank, he always accepts a check. He always remembers what you drink and how to mix it. He is the consumate host, the perfect escort. Gordon is 87 and setting the bar a little high for the rest of us.

Gordon tells us that before we even get to his house, we are going to a party and a parade! This is a great way to start our Mardi Gras! Our friend Jan, (a half and hulf like me - Australian mother and American Father) is hosting a party in her beauti-gorgeous home in the Sanctuary across Lake Ponchatrrain. The Sanctuary is where a lot of the Saints Football team live. Also, where Brangelina have a home, I have heard. There is gumbo and red beans and rice and beer and wine and happy talk and great accents. After dinner we drive a short distance and park and walk to where hundreds of people are already waiting.

Watching this parade with this crowd reminds me of a herd of Elk I rode through in Yellowstone Park once.The young ones are all together, playing reindeer games - galloping to each other and leaping in the air, squealing. There is young girl hair tossing and young boy posturing. There is shoving and little pockets of hysteria (did you see him? is he here? where? NO NO don't look!)

The parade was great, the beads flew through the air and later we drove home across Lake Pontchartrain, world class phenomenon, on the world's longest bridge (like 30 miles!). Carol and I settled down for the night in Gordon's wonderful home, and I set the alarm on my phone for BIG DAY.

Alan called me in the morning and asked that I meet him, the director Pasquale and the camera man Richard at the Hotel Intercontinental at six o'clock that evening for a meet n'greet, a viewing of the Endymion Parade and to film some footage of my Bead Catching Technique. I know, PINCH ME! Gordon volunteers to drive us back across the bridge - and I am flattered that I know he also wants to eyeball these guys. You know, guys I have only met on the internet who are "photographers" are filming a TV show, staying at a hotel.....I mean, would you let your daughter do this?

Lisa and Carol also say they would not miss it for the world! I am more worried about abusing the friendship of these three wonderful people than I am about the strange men thing. The schedule that Alan has outlined for me requires that I travel in and out of the city at odd hours, by myself - up before they wake up (well, not Gordon, who seems to never sleep at all) . I will not be with them even for meals, most days. I feel like the most selfish person in the world. Especially regarding Carol, because she came all the way down here to travel with me. Over and over when I try to talk to them about this, when I say I am sorry, that I will make it up to them, they look at me like I am crazy. They say HAVE A GOOD TIME! They will have a good time!

Back across the bridge to New Orleans the city, we realize the hotel is on the parade route and completely surrounded by barricades. For a minute I am panicky, but I forget I am with two women who could break and enter the Vatican. It is just a lucky break for the rest of us that Lisa and Carol only use their powers for good. While I am calling Alan to tell him I have arrived, they have scoped the place out, found us a place to walk through and blinded the hotel security with their charms. I have no idea if this last thing was necessary or they just did it because they can.

We meet my CREW in the lobby of the hotel Alan is cerebral, sensitive and creative. He has very unusual deeply colored, dark eyes but is otherwise fair. Pasquale looks EXACTLY like Mr. Tumnus from the Chronicles of Narnia. Well, maybe his ears are not so big. Richard will join us tomorrow later - he's the videographer. Carol, Lisa, Gordon, Alan, Pasquale and I settle into an easy conversation, fueled by appetizers and drinks. They are telling me that this is about ME. I do not need to try to be anything, just myself. That it will be fun! That there will be surprises. That there will be a camera, almost always on. oh. my. gosh. After a few minutes of conversation, Alan says, I think you over sold the part about you being an ordinary girl! Carol, Lisa and Gordon start rolling their eyes and laughing and snorting. I don't know what that was about. I am pretty ordinary.

Alan says the first surprise is tonight, and we should get going. Unfortunately, Carol and Lisa and Gordon can't come with us. He only has 'passes' for a certain number of people. I'm not to worry, my good friends tell me. They will amuse themselves, and we will catch up by phone later.

Dark has settled, the gas lights in the street are lit. I follow Alan and Pasquale to the front of the hotel where there are stands erected over the sidewalk. They tell me we are watching the Endymion Parade from UP THERE! This puts us on the same level as the upper tiers of the floats. Have I mentioned I am five feet tall? Do you know what it means to ME to be able to see over heads? Beads start flying, crowds form on either side of the street. Pasquale is lining me up for footage up here. He has a large handheld camera on his shoulder. The parade is unrolling below us, floats, stilt walkers, guys carrying gas lights on their backs! I am up on this astro turf covered deck - people are pointing at us from the stands below us - they want to know who I AM, that I am up there. They don't recognize me, but they sure know what I am doing is special. Out of the dark, down the street, floating on the humidity, I hear the strains of Sweet Home Alabama! Four men join us on the platform - one a middle aged guy in a suit, three in their twenties or early thirties, in beautiful, unusual, expensive clothing. When I start singing the lyrics along with KID ROCK on the float, the three young men start to sing with me and soon we are dancing in a line.....

The three guys go back to talking to the business man guy and I am catching beads and getting my picture taken. Alan says to me, You know Shirley - you just danced and sang with Better Than Ezra.

Cool.

The parade finally winds to a close, and then a typical, wonderful New Orleans thing happens. A couple of police cars, with lights going, sirens blaring, crawl down the street. Behind them a line of policemen on horseback, shoulder to shoulder, crab walks down the street, parade watchers scattering in front of them like leaves before a wind. Last in line, bringing real life back to the street, are the sweepers, big trucks and people with brooms, chasing the magic back into the night.

Allan and Pasquale look tired - well, they worked! Taking footage of me catching and throwing beads, setting up shots, telling the story. Being nice to me. Making it easy to have every living second of my experience filmed. They head off to their rooms and I phone Carol and Lisa and Gordon, who appear as if by magic (not all of it has gone back to where magic sleeps, apparently). We wait for an hour and a half in the rain to get our car out of the parking garage. This is my best advice for anyone who comes to Mardi Gras. Forget your time related expectations. Suspend any feelings that begin with "I should not have to..." You will wait in lines, people will dawdle. But it's all good. In fact, waiting in the line can give you moments you will remember forever. For instance, I watched a young mother with two little kids turn their coats into tents and cuddle in the smelly foyer to the parking garage. Mother was wearing a red and white striped Dr. Seuss hat, the little girl was wearing a pink tutu and a tiara and an over sized Saints t-shirt, and the big brother tried to cover them both with his Transformers blanket. Gordon was unbelieveably gracious to all the drunk cracker youth who could not walk past him without saying LOOK AT THIS GUY! I WANNA BE HIM, How old are you, old man? Party Hardy Grandpa! They meant this as the highest praise.

I fall asleep in the car, listening to Carol and Lisa talk about their night. I have to be back in the city in five hours. For a Surprise.

More Coming....

Rodeo and Ripper Celebrate Dumb As Mud Day

2009-02-14T16:38:00.005-05:00

It's early February and occasionally we have unseasonably warm weather which thaws the surface of the ground in the pasture just enough that it is a sea of mud. I know people say "sea of mud" and they think they know what it means, but until you have lived on a farm that is a construction site, and you have four dogs, teenage and tweenage boys, and various trades/craftsmen and others who are making multiple daily trips to and fro from the barn to the house and the parking area and then back to the barn and the house and the field for feeding, shopping, chores, and because you forgot what you went out there for and other errands, you really can't. Know what it means, I mean. The mud.

But it's not just the ground that is muddy. This time of year because of the holidays being over and the seasons teasing you with warm 60 degree weather one day and blasting you with 50 mph winds and subzero temperatures the next, and because it is a sort of wait and see time before good weather kicks in and outside chores become excuses to play, I find that my thinking gets muddy. Not one to point fingers but, so does yours.

Admit it.

So this morning I wake up and idly think, why don't they make snore strips for dogs? I actually design them in my head, imagine the fortune I would make, write the commercials and retire to Aruba. I spend a few minutes thinking about trying a human snore strip on the Big Spotted Dog. You can imagine the reason. Fortunately, my thyroid medication kicks in before this line of thinking becomes an incident that would require explanation and I remember HEY, today is a BIG DAY!

Ripper (Daughter In Law) and I are moving crapdedoodle. I don't think I need to share the WHY and the WHERE of this crapdedoodle: let's just say that the ebb and flow of my life requires endless piles of trinkets and chachka and doodads and geegaws to be packed up, lugged up and down stairs, in and out of trucks and barns and apartments and townhouses and basements and attics - mine and other people's. I can assure anyone who ever felt that they don't have enough THINGS in their life you just have not said YES often enough or looked hard enough. The more room you have, the more you amass. I do go on the occasional shopping spree, but really, I can tell you that if you just keep your ears perked, you will find yourself the happy (or at least willing) recipient of the byproduct of other people's lives - their flotsam and jetsam, their effluent, their excesses and and failings. And sometimes, they even have really good taste! I like other people's stuff just as much as new stuff and I'm not talking about stealing. Actually I wonder how stupid you have to be, to go to all the trouble of being a thief. There is so much stuff out there for free! I mean, why bother to climb through a window in the middle of the night and risk losing your freedom (or in West Cornmeal Township where I live) risk getting shot in the leg when you can just say Yes, drive up the driveway in your truck and most people will help you load it up.

Anyhow, today Ripper and I are off to bring a motherlode of stuff home and in order to earn it, we are also delivering seven large pieces of lovely craftsmen furniture to a woman who has bought it from the owner. When we said yes to this (Ripper will tell you that I said yes and she had a blackout) we weren't also moving My Son's family into my house, Eldest Grandson did not have a broken hand, and everything seemed possible because I was breathing the fumes of an estate sale. Nothing is ever as easy as I think it's going to be or as tragic and difficult as she feels it is.

Because I had a moment of clarity and realized that I was just not big enough to take an oak entertainment center down three flights of stairs, or even help Ripper do this, I have made arrangements for help. We are picking up two guys at a Mission in town and they are going to help us and we are renting a freaking big truck.

Ripper arrives this morning and I tell her we have help. That we are picking up two as yet Unknown Unfortunates at a men's mission who are going to be our legs and muscles. It's not just easier, it's GOOD KARMA.

Over her head forms a cartoon bubble where frame by frame it is revealed she is thinking that we will pick these guys up and later today will be found on the floor of the vacant house with steak knives sticking out of sucking chest wounds by her husband my son who has been calling our stolen cellphones frantically for hours.

She says, Other women don't do this.

I wave this concern away! I tell her I have decided it will be a great day! It will be FUN, we will get so much done! And, it's sort of like the exercise program we both said we would start around the new year, which is just six short weeks behind us - no time like the present! Then I tell her I will buy her breakfast. She gets in the car.

We go through the Burger King drive thru. I order a croissant sandwich, breakfast potatoes and a small diet coke instead of the coffee that comes with the meal. I believe this is a number three. It is 3.49. Ripper orders a bacon, egg and cheese, breakfast potatoes and a medium coke instead of a coffee. Hers is 4.59. I have to repeat this several times for the woman taking the order, shouting into the little box. She says thank you very much that will be 14.99 please pull around to the first window.

No. No it will not be 14.99. I'm not going to do the actual math, but just rounding the numbers up to the next dollar I can tell it won't be 14.99. It's like 7. Ripper says, That's not RIGHT. Even though Ripper is in the passenger side of my car, the woman in the box hears this and declares, I have to charge you extra for the coffee and cokes. I say, No no, they always just swap that out. And even so, two sodas are not seven dollars.

I careen around the side of the building to the first window where a woman with a Madonna style microphone is holding a bag. I refuse to take it. I say, that total is not right.

She says, yes it is.

I say no, it can not be. Are you gonna charge 15.00 for two sandwiches all day?

She gets unction. Fourteen ninety nine.

As if her unction effects me. I ask for a receipt.

She hands me a receipt that is completely undecipherable. Sure enough the total is 14.99. Ripper is shrieking, seven dollars seven dollars let me see that! and snatches the receipt from me. Since she is convinced she is going to die today, she is upset her last meal is being screwed up in this manner.

There is much arguing back and forth, much tallying up and other BK workers start to cluster in the little tiny window. Everyone has an explanation. They start to argue amongst themselves. No one is making any sense. RIpper and I are forgotten as they turn against each other.

I snatch the receipt back, hand it to the woman holding the bag and stomp on the gas. Just one more restaurant we can never go back to.

We stop for gas and spend fifteen minutes hunting for my wallet in the car. We do find it. Then...

We decide to go pick up the Freaking Big Truck - which is actually just a ten foot cargo van - and THEN get breakfast. I decide we are going to feed the Unknown Unfortunates, too. More good karma (especially since I have found my wallet). We pull into the rental place parking lot and now I can't find my phone. I am looking for my phone because a) Ripper's phone never has a complete charge, b) I do not go anywhere without my phone, c) I have the rental contract stored in my email on my phone. We tear the car apart. I take off my coat. I take off my sweatshirt. I look in the trunk. Ripper starts to call my phone and the vibration is rattling the car like bad dental work but we still can't find it. Finally, Ripper finds it between the seat and the console (in a place I looked over and over) and says, I hate you. Get out of my life. But with affection.

We go in to get the truck paperwork and keys. The people inside have never done this before. It's new to them. They have to call for assistance. The guy who shows up is their son. Dad disappears, Mom and Son get snippy with each other (You aren't logged in. Yes I am. No you are not. You have to be logged in.) Finally son gets the paperwork printed and hands it to me to sign. I hand it back. Mom passively, aggressively, slowly and methodically, folds it into an origami crane and slides it into the envelope. Ripper and I watch this little drama with some understanding - we have sons. But this is not getting us down the road.

I am going to drive the truck. Not many people know this, but I sold little trucks and big trucks for eight years. I can drive anything, any size. I could thread a needle with this truck. It will be a source of shallow pride to me all day. So, I am packing up my stuff from the car which Ripper is going to drive and I can't find my wallet. Or my phone.

I realize if I do this one more time today, I AM going to end up with a steak knife sticking out of a sucking chest wound, but it will be Ripper who did it and no jury will convict her.

We find my wallet and my phone after a few trips back into the truck place, a few more searches of the trunk and under the seats, and a fruitful emptying of the pockets of my coat.

This is when we realize, it is National Dumb as Mud Day.

I peel out of the parking lot with Ripper hot on my bumper and my phone rings. It's Ripper. She says, You are doing great! I think she was checking to see if I still had my phone, but it was sweet of her to notice my skill. Later I realize that she was probably also obsessing that I would drive slowly and over carefully and timidly and then she would be forced into taking the wheel of the truck and that would make HER nervous.

Now because it is NDAMD (see above) and because everything seems to be moving in slow motion, when I call my contact at the Mission to tell him that I am on my way, he tells me I have missed breakfast by half an hour. I don't get why this is important. Was I supposed to eat at the Mission? He says nooooo, but the guys show up, eat and take off about their business (?) and will not be back til 11 to line up for lunch. Okay then. Ripper and I are going to eat breakfast first and kill and hour or two, and then pick up the guys.

We eat at MacDonalds where something very similar to the Burger King Breakfast we order before totals just over 7 dollars. Hmmm. Ripper even has extra potatoes. After a nice, leisurely and reasonably priced breakfast, we moozy (I don't know how to spell that) over to a lighting store and poke around. Then it's time to drive to the mission.

We park and go up to the building, which is an old store front. The door is locked (it's not time to go in for lunch yet) but there is a dapper gentleman standing on the sidewalk, complete with snazzy hat, dress shoes and suit coat. He's very tall and he looks healthy. He asks if he can assist us. I tell him I am here to offer a few hours of work moving furniture. I am paying cash. He hods out his hand and says, Hello, my name is Robert. I will be happy to do it. I say, I really need two guys. We turn in unison and look at an older guy sitting on a bench, clearly not the man beef we are looking for. Now I am worried about offending him, though he doesn't really look all the interested. Robert says, let's go inside and maybe they have someone else for you. He raps on the door, they open up, a cheerful woman named Patty takes in the situation. Robert ducks outside again and reappears with a strong younger man in tow. This is Otis, and he can help! It's that easy. We get in the car, hunt for my wallet and phone again, and head back to Macdonald's where we left the truck. As we pull away from the curb, a young woman waves at the car and mouthes WHERE ARE YOU GOING? This is Otis' significant other. His cellphone rings and it's her. They have a discussion about what he is doing, what he is earning, and how long he will be gone. She's grilling him pretty good. When he hangs up, I ask him if he needs a note from me for the day? We laugh and hi-five each other and basically rejoice in the common themes of people's lives.

We pick up the truck and I pair up with Robert (we are close in age) and Otis climbs into the car with Jaime (the truck won't hold four people). I set the gps - a thing of wonder to Robert, who asks if it works if you are hitching - and off we go.

Robert and I settle into an easy conversation. We are both Hillary democrats who voted for Obama. Robert shares that he studied political science in college and finds this an exciting time to be living. He tells me he is a veteran. He played basketball for the Air force all over Europe and then tried out for the Denver Nuggets. He injured his knee and can't play any more. That his mother died six years ago and she was his best friend. He finds he does not have anyone to call with good news any more. He never had children. His favorite place in the world is Belgium. At New Years.

He asks about me and I give him the encapsulated Rodeo story.

Ripper calls and says she is hungry. So is Otis.

Robert says he has coupons for MacDonald's and pulls them out of his wallet. Ripper says she can't eat at the same fast food restaurant twice in one day. I decide I want Robert to hold on to his coupons, I'm buying so we go to Wendy's. We order everything they want.

Eating and driving, we get to the house and Robert and Otis load up the big, difficult furniture easily and energetically. They think of better ways to do things and Otis is particularily good at the spacial relationships that are required to load the truck.

We drive over to the delivery site and unload the furniture. The woman receiving the furniture gives Otis and Robert forty dollars each which they really appreciate. Then, we go back to the vacant house and in minutes load it up again with the items we are keeping. We all work together at this and it goes really fast. To our endless amusement, Otis' woman calls every fifteen minutes to see where he is. I keep wondering what she thinks is happening. And how does she pay for those calls?

On the way back to the Mission, Robert tells me that he had an apartment till two months ago, when he got laid off. They fired his whole shift. He's not worried. Something else will turn up. Maybe he will go to Florida to see an old girlfriend. He's thinking it might be time to settle down. Or get a camper and drive around the country. He says he's on Singlenet.com, too. He's Robert405. Okay.....he also says that he has a job interview the next day, but he can skip it and come out to the farm to help us unload. I tell him I don't think that will be necessary, we have family to help us unload. He looks out the window and says, I can skip that interview. He tells me that Otis is not really homeless. He doesn't know why he comes to the shelter.

Ripper and I decide telepathically to pay these men twice what we had originally said we would, because they made the day so easy. They are very happy, wave to us enthusiastically when we drop them back at the Mission. Call us ANY OLD TIME!

We drive the truck home, glad we have it for another day and don't have to unload it tonight. We are bushed. We sit and talk and Ripper tells me that Otis is thinking about going back to college, that his mother is a stock broker. Ripper says she talked to his mother when she called - Otis wanted her to say hello. She said that Mom was very articulate. She says Otis told her he voted for McCain because he thought McCain would do what was important, and wouldn't care about being popular. She says he told her he isn't homeless, that he and his significant other and her two kids live with another family in an apartment. He comes down to the mission because all his friends are there. His Sig Other likes the social life. Neither of them have jobs right now.

Ripper and I are sitting in my lovely home, bought with so much hard work. She says, I felt sort of guilty. We have so much.

I said, I know.

Ripper says, How do they get to be homeless, with no jobs, Rodeo?

I know she means she has met incompetent idiots just today who were not as efficient or thoughtful or as hard working. It is a puzzle, but I think about the job interview that can be missed, the injury, the death of a beloved parent. I think about relationships with insecure, needy people. About bad luck and bad decisions and bad habits. I think about National Dumb as Mud day. I tell Ripper that what keeps us from being in their situation is luck and things that can turn in a second and that we are but the width of a human hair away from going down that road most days of our lives. We just don't know it. it's the difference between saying Yes and No to the right and wrong things at the right and wrong times. It's the intervention of Angels and Shadows. I guess the answer might lay in our prayers. Robert told me that every night he thanks the Lord for another day. I told him that every night I thank the Lord that I am not cold or hungry.

I believe in Magic, Again

2009-01-26T08:35:00.014-05:00

It is 1958. I am standing on the lawn of my home in Springfield, PA. It's late winter - one of those mornings where the grass feels brittle under your feet, but the air has a different, fresher feel and smell. The signs of spring are there, but you have to look really closely, listen really well, close to the ground. It's a morning that is not just about what it is, but what it will become. Poised. About. Ready.

A noise from a tree distracts me from inspecting ice crystals on the grass. I lay down on the earth, face up, feeling the miles of soil and stone and rock and lava and whatever else I can imagine is the center holding me up. Above me is an equal amount of sky and clouds and planets and stars. And for a moment, the last one I remember, I am the center of the universe.

Life happens after that. A series of events and admonishments and personalities and work that are designed to chip away at that feeling. Love and passion and need and all the elements of responsibilities and leading a productive life of service and maturity conspire to make sure I understand what my place is in the scheme of things. I am a knife on a whetstone, run by the ceaseless pounding of things going forward, goals being reached, agendas fleshing out. But always, always there is the memory of that morning, of that knowing what it is like at the center.

Good news. Good things happen. Happy times. Comfort, surprises, Wonderful tastes and warm blankets on cold nights. Hot showers. Babies. Kisses. Smiles and gifts. Just in the nick of time sometimes, sometimes greeted with gratitude, sometimes overlooked in the crush of bad things.

Bad news. Bad things happen. Hopes that are dashed, regardless of the amount of effort put in. Unfair things. Cruel things. Accidents. Loss. Long faces talk in whispers. Closed doors. Stones in shoes. Broken plumbing. Debts. Sometimes the phone rings, sometimes the certified letter arrives, sometimes Young Policemen show up at the door with news that is so unfathomable it is like they are speaking a language I don't understand. Bad things always leave their mark.

I am not unaware of the balance. Every year at New Years, I take stock. This involves cleaning out of my head, heart and house of things I do not want to take into the New Year and going to Beliefnet.com and taking the spirituality quiz. It's like taking my spiritual temperature. A series of questions designed to gauge your fit with hundreds of world religions, spiritual beliefs or theories, when you finish answering them it tallies up your answers and matches you up with some body of faith that most closely resembles your mindset.

I never even get close to Catholicism, Judaism or Muslim. Never. I remember the shock of not even registering within fifty points of Protestant although I attended Presbyterian Church much of my childhood. I was sort of relieved at not having to say "I am a Presbyterian" any more when asked, because it never seemed quite right, given my belief that there were ghosts and spirits in trees and that dreams had meaning, and tarot cards could help you figure out tough situations,that animals talk and showed up to help you, and that you did what you could but at some point there was just a force or entity beyond the understanding of a human brain or experience that sort of controlled things but chaotically, and that had no explanation. A mishmosh of goobledygook that can only be described as magic.

I took the test in the quiet moments of midnight, the New Years after Charles died. Something changed in my score.
Something imperceptible to me, but showing up in my answers.
I scored an organized religion.
I no longer believed in magic.

I entered the darkest period of my life. I no longer cared about the balance of good things to bad things. Everything was a bad thing. My sunny personality was just something I put on, not something I believed. I said the same things, I offered the same encouragement, I don't think I am fooling myself when I tell you that I think I pretty much fooled everyone else - I think they believed I was just a little depressed, a little overwhelmed, a little beaten down. I would get over it.

Only I knew that I had stopped the struggle to stay in the center, to see the balance and was just accepting that it was all bad. That it had always been bad. That I was a fool who had never seen the whole picture. The memory of being the beloved center of the universe was just a childhood fantasy like the other ones of being Annie Oakley or Cinderella.

A friend at work noticed a chink in my happy armour one day and sent me a link to a fluffy, whimsical email newsletter that she said helped her through some bad times. I thought, what the hell. So I signed up. They started coming and I would read them first thing in the morning. Honestly, the happy, affectionate notes from the Universe initally got on my nerves. The depth of my sadness and loss of faith was so deep, they were like throwing snowballs at a bonfire.

Seriously. You can't stop crying when you are alone in the car, but you get "Baby steps spark miracles, Shirley.

Miracles do not spark baby steps.
Ungawa,
The Universe"

Or:

"When in doubt, Shirley, show up early. Think less. Feel more. Ask once. Give thanks often. Expect the best. Appreciate everything. Never give up. Make it fun. Lead. Invent. Regroup. Wink. Chill. Smile. And live as if your success was inevitable, and so it shall be.
Happy global domination,
The Universe"

Yeah, I needed that crap.

But I kept reading them, every morning.

I also kept doing things. Mechanically, but doing things. I like to respond to Haro Queries - if you haven't signed up, go do it now, it's over there in the sidebar under Help A Reporter - everyone is an expert at something, and it is fun to actually get some acknowledgement. I had extraordinary success at this, having every pitch I wrote accepted, getting quoted in The New York Times, USA today, Grands, Grandparents.com, Inflight Magazine, the list goes on and on. Just google me. Reporters were showing up at my house, photographers in tow, for articles in Ladies Home Journal and First For Women magazine. My son kept saying "What the hell, Mom?" I know - it's freaky! Especially considering that I didn't believe I was the darling daughter of the All Knowing any longer. God didn't have a plan for me, he was busy elsewhere. I was on my own.

Apparently, though I did not know it at the time, the battle over my soul was heating up.

A couple of weeks ago, a query shows up on Haro that goes like this:

33) Summary: Need Celebs/Ordinary People For TV Pilot

Category: Travel

Name: YYYYYY YYYYYYYY

Email: XXXXXXXXX@XXXXXXX

Title: Publisher

Media Outlet/Publication: XTRORD.com

Anonymous? No

Have you ever wanted to fly a jet or ride in a Float on Mardi Gras? Write us a paragraph and tell us why we should pick you.

This is how I responded:

Name: Shirley Landis Van Scoyk
Age: 55
Hometown: Honey Brook, PA
How To Reach You:XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
Your Story: (a paragraph about yourself and why you've always
wanted to have this experience)

First of all, let me just say that if you are looking for ordinary, I am your girl. I am a short round outgoing cheerful grandmother/widow who lives on a farm in PA and works as a Realtor. But I have this one... little.... weakness..... Mardi Gras!

I have been to Mardi Gras four times. I have a dog named NOLA. I have a coconut from Zulu, but not a spear. I have thirty five pounds of beads in my bedroom closet, and three boas. I have a shoe from Endymion. I have dressed in my pajamas and screamed when the Rex King went by. I have begged, Throw me something, Mister! I have taken tons of pictures from the ground but I have always secretly wanted to throw beads to the crowd.
I have always wanted to know what it is like to see the crowd from UP THERE - to decide who to throw beads to, what method works the best - there is a science to the begging, and I want to know it, see it, live it, from behind the masks. I wanted to send you some pictures, but I don't know if you would accept attachments.

I have friends who live in NOLA who can put me up and I will fly there myself. I can be ready to go at the end of Feb.

PICK ME< PICK ME< PICK ME, Life - throw me something Mister!!!!!!!!!!"

And they answered. Yes.

And then, I renigged.

Yes. Read this:

"Alan: I am so sorry, but I have to withdraw my pitch for Mardi Gras. After I sent you the email saying I have a place to stay, yady yady yady, I realized I do have a work conflict with the dates. I thought I better write you as soon as possible, and I hope that whomever gets this opportunity really appreciates it and that it works out for you. Shucks, I am bummed but it can't be helped.

Shirley VanScoyk"

Liar, liar pants on fire.

I told everyone - Lisa and her Dad who would put me up and put up with me graciously and actually like they were excited, my Daughter In Law and my friends, that yes, I wanted to go, but really I had to be an adult, I had things to do, dogs to feed, money to save, it was time I just started saying no to myself and these crazy, impractical notions of fun and different and cherry on the top experiences. The dark side won.

But the bright side was not ready to give up.

The guy called, we talked, I said NO NO, he said please please. He emailed. He upped the ante.

His email:

"Hi Shirley --

So I've been sick as a dog for the last week and consequently haven't gotten around to replacing you in our TV show's Mardi Gras segment. We've switched to the star-studded Orpheus (Harry Connick Jr.s krewe) parade on Monday night and we'll be attending the ball afterwards, which should make it just that much more fun!

Before I move to the next name on my list, I thought I'd check in with you one more time. For our purposes, you'd only need to be there by Saturday night, we'll shoot Sunday and Monday, and you could fly home Fat Tuesday to minimize the time you'd be away from work...

So, whatd'ya say? Lemme know ASAP!

Thanks!"

Okay, I'm shallow. The name Harry Connick Jr. turned it all around for me.

Also I am also a complete sucker for a man who is begging - just ask my two husbands, my son, my grandsons and my old boyfriends.

On Friday I made a few phone calls about my animal care concerns, worked it out in minutes and guess what, called the guy and said yes. Happy Happy Happy. Mostly. And I also got a positive response from another query I wrote - I sent this wonderful woman Pam The Cremains Tour when she requested funeral/celebrant stories and she was so receptive and kind and appreciative that I was overwhelmed, but in a good way this time. A remarkable turn of events - later to be seen as a metaphor of historic proportions, sort of like.....The Battle of Midway or Gettysburg. I start looking at Ball Gowns on the internet, checking out the Orpheus site. You know - Orpheus, one of the handful of Greek heroes to visit the Underworld and return; even in Hades his song and lyre did not lose their power.

But the Universe does not like it when you minimize its work to a human scale. Once it gets started, you have got to stand there and wait for it to swallow you up and show you once again that you are the chocolate-y, chewy center of the Universal Tootsie Roll.

Monday morning. This am. First thing I do is roll over, grab my blackberry and read what emails have come in over night. There it is - the Universe Calling.

And this morning it says:

"I don't like to make predictions, but the way things are going, Shirley, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this year you have a ball, go to a ball... and put the pics up on Facebook.
You are so poised for the time of your life -
The Universe"

Okay, Universe, you win.

Oh Sleepless Night

2008-12-25T05:37:00.001-05:00

(To The Tune of Oh Holy Night)

Oh, Sleepless Night
The VanScoyks they are barfing
It is the night when they all got the flu

Long lay the bug even with the hand washing
Til it appeared and our tummies felt it's wrath

A thrill of hope, at 4am Jeremy is rejoicing
For yonder breaks a new and spew-less mourn!

FALL ON YOUR KNEES
O hear our anquished voices

Oh night of slime!
Oh, night the washer ran
Oh, night of slime
Ooooooooh, night of slime

Led by the nightlight, down the hall careening
With growling bellies, by the toliet we stand
O'er the laundry, a bulb is softly glowing
As Nana washes chunks out of a blanket by hand
The mother of the brood lay thus in lowly danger
Of throwing up in her queen size bed.
Brad knows her need, her weakness is no stranger
Behold the pot, before it lowly bend!
Hold her hair, down the drain please send!

Truly we must love one another
To clean up this mess and do it in peace
The fever will break, but now we are sick all together
In the morning this oppression will cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
When the cramping passes and sips of water we retain
Cola is the cure! Then, ever, ever praise we,
In our bellies it will remain!
In our bellies it will remain!

Merry Christmas, Everybody! I cherish each and every one of you for the way you brighten my life. Thank you- The heart is mine, the fingerprints are yours.

Shirley

And this is why she naps, frequently

2008-12-22T10:38:00.002-05:00

At 7:15 this morning, my eyes fly open and I think, "Wow. The house is awfully quiet. And Cold." And I realize that the furnace is not running. This didn't happen last week when it was 65 degrees - no, it has to happen when it is wind chill three below. I'm just not good at keeping track of the oil in the tank in the basement - the gauge is meant to be comfortable viewing for men five foot eight and over, and to get an idea of how much fuel in there requires me to get something to stand on. SOOO, instead of actually keeping a stool next to the tank, and remembering to check when I am down there, I just seem to.....run out. Occasionally.

So, before I even leave my bed, I place a call to the Oil Guy and someone HUMAN actually answers the phone. We go through the ritual of spelling/misspelling my last name. V as in Victor, A, N, S as in Sam, C excuse me is that D as in Dog? As this point, my brain always screams WHY WOULD IT BE D? WHERE would it be D? but it's pointless. Anyhow, we get that straightened out and oil is on its way.

I get the dogs out of their crates and put Little Black Dog in her houndstooth coat. All business is done within feet of the front door because THEY can't wait to get back inside. I start the little gas fired heater in the living room. Close the doors on the little dogs. THEY will be warm, soon. Okay, then. I go into the kitchen to make tea, and the pipes to the kitchen sink are frozen. I go upstairs and get the hairdryer so I can take care of THAT while I am outside doing the barn chores.

Since it's Christmas Holiday, there will be no kids getting on the school bus today so the barn chores are up to me. The oilman arrives while I am out there! That was fast!

I think it is worth mentioning what I am wearing. A black hat with built in earmuffs. A black puffy coat - like rappers wear. Black gloves with the fingers cut off, so I can actually DO things. A sweater. A Turtleneck. A pair of fleece pants. Socks. Rubber garden clogs. Oh, and I am carrying a hairdryer.

I throw one pile of hay through the hole in the barn floor down to the Big Yellow Horse who is waiting beneath with three goats under her. I take another pile of hay and throw it in the door to the Big Brown Horse who I notice is shivering and favoring one leg. She is very old, and a rescue, and I briefly consider going in to put her coat on her, until Nellie Goat charges the door. I slam it shut just as her horny head barrels into it. Note to self: text DIL to help me with this later today. A belly full of hay will keep her warm until I can get back in.

By the time I have finished in the barn, the oil guy has the tank filled and is trying to figure out how to get into the house to start the furnace. Other people's houses are designed so you can get into the basement from the house, but not mine. And now you have to go through the addition, up a board that serves as a ramp, through a door and voila! There you are in my basement. The oil guy takes a minute to take in The DISHROOM which is kind of daunting, starts the furnace with a roar and a bang and I have heat. While I am down there I notice that the insulation I have stuffed in the grillwork windows (no glass) has blown out. Okay, well, I will fix that while I am thawing the kitchen pipes.

These grillwork windows are about six feet off the ground. I am five feet. There are four of them. Four times is about the number of times a woman of my age and physical condition can climb onto a wicker chair she has dragged around, so I have to maximize my opportunities. I collect all my materials - fiberglass insulation torn in the right size pieces and placed flat in trash bags, odd scraps of wood to wedge in to hold the fiberglass in place, a long piece of pvc pipe to push it in place (because of course there are shelves full of dishes in front of each of the windows) and put it on the chair. I am so proud of how I am working this. As I am dragging the chair to the second window, the arm of the chair rips the door off the furnace box. I wedge that back in with a piece of wood. Wedging is the operative task of the day.

I plug in the hairdryer and hook it over the door so it is blowing directly on the kitchen pipes. I work my way through stuffing fiberglass filled trash bags in all four windows. By the time I am finished, I am pretty sure the pipes are thawed, so I heft myself back onto the chair one more time and wrap fiberglass around all the pipes that lead to the sink.

I go back upstairs, hit the powder room and knock a mirror off the counter. It doesn't break so I am spared seven years bad luck. I am trying to remember if I broke one a while ago. It's now 8:45 am. I'm exhausted.

The Blue Sky Farm Christmas Letter

2008-12-16T12:45:00.010-05:00

It's that time of year when people I haven't seen for a long time (and with good reason) feel the need to connect and send me Christmas Letters. Always folded in quarters in lavish Christmas cards, opening them sends shivers down my spine. They seem to come in categories: TMI and Full Out Bragging.

TMI (Too Much Information) is usually a list of funerals, surgeries and divorces. Full Out Bragging is a recitation of graduations, awards, births, and trips. There is a hybrid (TMI/FOB) which is bordering on emotional abuse.

I've never sent a Christmas letter not just because I don't like getting them, but also because Rodeo's Christmas Letter would go something like this:

Hey, everybody, sorry this is late.

It's been a busy year here at Blue Sky Farm. No, the addition is not done. No, we don't know when it will be done. No, the kid's house has not sold. No, we don't know when it will be sold. Yes, that is our bucket truck, no it's not rented, we bought it.

The boys have each grown five inches and keep their school work secret from their parents and me, so we don't know what grades they are in or if they have won any awards. They get on a school bus everyday, but they could be part of a secret gov't program.

I have only been to the emergency room three times this year: vertigo, teeth through my lip and a truly near death prescription mix up. We do have two weeks to go til the New Year.

Trips: Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Lost and Found in New York City, TWO trips back to New York with Anita for "the View", Road Trip with Gail to Arizona (pictured, with our candy necklaces), each wonderful and fabulous in it's own way!

However, who could forget the Summer Stay-Cations - one for me, one for the dogs. And for Nola, Petey and Daisy, winter stay-cation looks pretty similar to summer stay-cation.

Sadly missed: Earl and Josh W.

Things Acquired: Lucille (pictured), Nellie, Rita, Nathan, Two Yet to be Named Chicks, Fencing, Manure Spreader, Gas Fire Place.

Things Lost: FIVE HUGE DUMPSTERS FULL OF CRAPDEDOODLE, thousands of dollars in commissions due to the market, three chickens to either the bobcat or the red tail hawk.

Hey, wait. This has been sort of cathartic. Maybe that's why they send those letters.

Out my window, the snow is falling, the wind is howling but I am toasty and warm, as are all my friends and family and animals. Merry Christmas to all and may this coming year bring you the blessings of creature comfort.

Spirit of Christmas

2008-12-15T08:56:00.004-05:00

This year, I am trying to reclaim Christmas.

The last three Christmases I took a pass - 2006 it was just three weeks after Charles died and I was pretty much in a fog. One of the last things he did on this earth was put up Christmas lights. I remember watching him teetering on a ladder, tweaking the weather beaten strings in the crabapple tree and wondering if he was ever going to come in for dinner. I'm looking out the same window now and I can see those strings of lights blowing in the wind, nobody in the family having the heart to cut them down. Obsessed with Christmas lights, we are still finding boxes of vintage bulbs he hid in the attic and bags of brand new strings he forgot in the barn.

2007 we were still adjusting and making it good for the kids, but feeling our way, and making a lot of jokes about getting to pick out trees WE liked. An oft quoted Charles anecdote was of Christmas tree hunting in the snow, on a bitterly cold day in a local tree farm. Daughter-In-Law and I found ourselves standing in a cold, bleak field with darkness sifting down around us, not knowing where Charles and the kids were. The lights went out in the vendor's shack, only a few cars left in the parking lot. After about two hours, an ancient school bus lurched into the lot and Charles and the two boys fall out the door, laughing hysterically. They had taken a BUS to a distant field in search of the perfect tree and ....didn't find one. This was funny to them at the time, but not funny to DIL and I for another five years.

The up shot of this is that I have a PINK fake tree covered with girly ornaments. The lights are already on it, and you just plug it in.

However, to keep the Ghosts of Christmas past from casting a pallor on all future Christmases, I am trying to do new things, start new traditions, and feel Christmasy. So I have to act Christmasy. I decided to make Christmas gifts for friends.

(My family does not want home made gifts. We do enough of the touchy feely Walton's Mountain kind of crap every day, they want the hard goods like appliances and bling)

I didn't want to bake cookies. It seemed toooo hard. I've been making soup like a fiend but I don't want to give anyone food poisoning by mistake. It's just what would happen.

So, I decide on something that LOOKS Christmasy, suits the majority of my friends, and would be fun. This is how I arrive at Homemade Cranberry Liqour.

It's a beautiful red - so it's Christmasy. It's alcohol so it suits my friends - sort of a liquid one size fits all. And It looks more like 'compiling' than cooking, so it would be fun.

I've had my eye on these huge Ball jars with bales and rubber gaskets at the local Hardware store, so when the Liqour is done, I use them for something else so it also fits the 'gift for me' category that I was ashamed to list above.

First step: research. I read about fifty recipes on line, all of which seem to be cut and pasted from an original one.

Second step: buy the ingredients and amass the tools. (I even buy a new vegetable peeler because I realize that the one I have is not very sharp, and I bought it in 1978). I have to go to the Liquor Store to buy the vodka. In Pennsylvania, you have to buy wine and liquor (except rubbing) at a special state owned store, with state employees, during restricted hours. If you want beer or malt beverages, that's another store. But not on Sundays, at all. I think that this is a holdover from our Quaker heritage, not that I know many Quakers who don't bend an elbow. I googled the subject but got more complaints about the system than information on its history. However, Pennsylvania was also the location of the Whiskey Rebellion - moonshiners fighting government regulation of home stills. However, here I am at the liquor store, buying three huge bottles of vodka. I can read minds, so I know that everyone in the store has noticed what is in my cart and has decided I am an alcoholic. I fight the urge to explain the purchase to the clerk, because A.) I know he thinks I am an alcoholic B.) I know he doesn't care. I trip going out the door and feel that everyone has confirmed their suspicions. I have been to the Liquor Store about four times in my life and felt this way each time. More pointless self loathing.

Third Step: Mulching the cranberries and pouring the vodka in the big jars. You also have to make a sugar syrup which IS cooking, but I didn't notice at first, but really easily accomplished, until I have to pour the hot syrup in the jars and find that they are too tall for me to reach easily when on the table, too heavy for me to move to the floor or the chair. So I climb on a chair with a pot of boiling sugar syrup and risk my life. Well, it is christmas time and I haven't been to the emergency room yet.

It's gorgeous! In a couple of days I will decant this into smaller jars and wow my friends with my thoughtfulness and creativity. If you are one of my friends and reading this, feel free to thank me now. I will also be 'cricutting' a label - that should be another episode.

I hope this is good enough to repeat next year. It's sort of a decoration for the kitchen in addition to a gift so it's really a win/win. I hope it gives my friends a warm glow on a cold night, sometime in the next month or so. Because really, that's the best we can expect in this life.

Threads of Memory

2008-12-10T17:19:00.006-05:00

I have forgotten birthdays, anniversaries, and tax bills. I have forgotten my phone, shoes, and hair appointments. I've forgotten to unplug the iron and I've forgotten where I've parked. I've completely forgotten people's names, where I met them and why I've disliked them. Don't even get me started on hours spent hunting car keys, lost earrings or important papers. I've picked up an exquisite Limoges milk pitcher from the sideboard in my own dining room and wondered where it came from. Thank goodness my old horse Bonnie had a real barn lust or there would have been many afternoons out trail riding that might have ended in hysterical phone calls because I forgot how the trail went. I accumulated almost fifteen pounds of brown sugar over time, because I could never remember - while at the grocery store - whether I had it in the pantry. I've walked into rooms, forgetting why I went in. I've forgotten to close gates in the pasture and doors on the barn, leading to many many domestic episodes. I've forgotten how to spell "predicament" and how much 35 minus 17 is.

In fact, while I was writing this, several times I have forgotten what I was doing and wandered off to do something else.

My point is....Dear Daughter-In-Law brought an ancient Singer Sewing Machine in from the barn (don't remember where we got it, how long it's been there or why I brought it home in the first place) and said, plaintively and with much rolling of her doe like eyes, "I wish I knew how to use this."

I have not touched a sewing machine in many many years. My mother was and is a Seamstress Supreme and sewing was an activity, much like reading or playing an instrument, that was a huge part of my childhood. She made all of our clothes, and going to the Fabric District in Philadelphia to pick out fabric for dancing school costumes or prom dresses was a very special occasion to be shared just between us. We would stand together in front of the pattern books, turning the large pages, and she would say - I can take that sleeve, and put it on that top, and we can match it with that skirt and make it out of this fabric- and outfits and evenings and girlish dreams would form, and out of the scraps, my Barbie and Chatty Cathy would have the best, most fashionable doll clothes In our neighborhood - sorry Gail, but I still think so!

She had a Necchi Sewing Machine that did zig zag stitches and scalloped and serged and ruffled. The arrival of this machine when I was little meant that my sisters and I got her old machine just for us to use. It went into the basement on its own table, next to the "toy' iron which heated up enough to really iron clothes and the 'toy' oven which got hot enough to bake cookies. We had real scissors, boxes of straight pins and needles, and all these appliances used electricity. All the little girls in the neighborhood had similar little kitchens and laundries in their basements, which we played in when we weren't sledding down hills without helmets and riding our bikes in traffic. Or walking over a mile to the candy store with our quarter allowance. It was a different world. It's not that we didn't burn ourselves or cut ourselves or sew our fingers into the hems of little doll pants - it's just that unless you were REALLY hurt - requiring treatment by a doctor - it was just child's play.

But, where was I? Oh, yes. DIL, with a dusty, chicken poo encrusted ancient Singer Sewing Machine.

I'm staring at the machine which she is wiping down with a cloth. It's so pretty - shiny black, with gold scroll work. She's holding an equally old spool of thread. Apparently, in the same pile of junk in the barn that held the machine, there was a sewing box full of balls of lace, little papers of needles and pins, LA MODE buttons, and that is also now on my kitchen table.

"I could make stuff with this." DIL is now unrolling lace across the table. "Why would someone have so much lace?" (I'm assuming she means the original owners of the box and the machine, not us - because I still can't actually remember bringing this stuff home)

I say, "Well, women used to sew the lace on the hems of their skirts, to make it pretty, or longer, if there wasn't enough fabric."

"I could make something on this machine, if I knew how to put this thread on it." She's trying the spool out on various places.

I know how to thread it.

Of all the things I have forgotten in my life - important things, unimportant things, objects and thoughts and occasions and feelings - I remember how to thread this machine.

I remember my sister sitting next to me and saying,"I'll show you - just ONCE, though." I remember where to put the thread spool, I remember the way you hook it through the arm (I remember it's called 'the arm') I remember looping it around the tension knob. I remember that you have to be careful not to screw with THIS too much. I hand her the thread and tell her to thread the needle - because my eyes just can not do that.

Once the needle is threaded, there is the matter of the bobbin. I show DIL how to use the wheel to move the needle down down into the sole to loop around the bobbin thread and pull it up. I remember all of this. I remember that the bobbin is a pain in the ass.

We start sewing all the junk mail. About every three inches, the bobbin thread breaks. Apparently the long deceased owner of this bobbin kept adding different colored thread to the already filled bobbin and it is a hot mess. DIL gets tired of sewing the junk mail and rushes off to the fabric store to buy fabric to 'make something.' I insist she take a picture of the machine with her camera, so she can show the people at the fabric store what she is using. I don't really know why I think this is a good idea, but there is just something about US buying fabric that seems to require some kind of validation.

In about an hour, she's back with batting and fabric and a BIG IDEA. She's going to make pillows. Now, in addition to making all my clothes and my doll clothes, my mother made slip covers and curtains and I remember that it was a major activity that involved piping and fabric on rolls and moving furniture to get areas big enough to cut the fabric and rows and rows of straight pins and zippers longer and more problematic than the Mexican American border. The whole family talked of nothing else for weeks, and even my father the engineer used to get in on the cutting and pattern making. DIL is unfettered by any need other than to get that Singer chewing up yards of fabric, so she cuts two squares, sews them together and stuffs them. Every once in a while the bobbin thread breaks, or the machine comes unthreaded, or I offer technical advice like - "reverse at the end of each row, to secure your stitches." Voila, pillows! Less than three hours after she dug that little machine out of a pile of hay in the barn she has a stack of pillows and a whole bunch of creative pride.

Then she says it: "You are like a real mom. You taught me to sew."

With affection.

Along with threading a machine, I will never ever forget how I felt when she said that.

I make her promise that at my funeral she will tell my sisters and my mother (assuming I go first) and anyone else that will listen, that I taught her to sew. On a machine. That I remembered how to thread.

Putting Up The Star For Charles

2008-12-04T18:31:00.007-05:00

So, not every family has a forty foot bucket truck to hang their Christmas decorations - just THINK what the world would look like if they did!

However, We Do. And My Son the Genius built a star out of plastic coat hangers and a string of lights, and decided to hang it as far up the spruce tree in the front yard as possible. He used a pole to hang it. We did get it lit, but he's not satisfied, so will make modifications tomorrow. Charles would have loved this.

Dream River

2008-12-03T22:10:00.003-05:00

Of the many things that Charles brought to my life was music. He loved it, needed it, surrounded himself with it. We used to sing together in the car - all the songs we grew up with - and make the grandkids crazy. "Dream River" is one of my favorite songs by one of Charles' favorite groups. I didn't know it would take on such meaning for me.

Dream River, The Mavericks

Floating down the dream river,
With the moon and stars above,
Maybe they can help me find a way
To have your whole love

Sleeping in the darkest room
Dreaming you are in my arms
Oh how I wish my dream comes true
With all my heart

Don't want this night to end
Don't want to live without you

Floating down the dream river
With you by my side
I know it's make-believe
But please don't wake me
I don't mind

Don't want this night to end
Don't want to live without you

Floating down the dream river
With you by my side
I know it's make-believe
But please don't wake me
I don't mind
I know it's make-believe
But please don't wake me
I don't mind.

For Charles - Two Years Later

2008-12-01T21:53:00.002-05:00

American Tune
Lyrics and Music by Paul Simon

Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
but it's all right, it's all right
for we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
and sing an American tune
Oh, and it's alright, it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest

2008-11-14T17:57:00.003-05:00

BABY CHICKS!

2008-11-09T09:52:00.007-05:00

To My Dear Friends Paula and Daphne

2008-11-05T11:23:00.002-05:00

I was a poll watcher for the Obama campaign yesterday. I need to tell you that I was dearly hoping that Hillary would get the nomination, because I felt she most closely matched what was important to me. When she didn't, I brought my political head to the task of choosing a candidate and I treated this like any other election- I felt both candidates were fine men with well thought out platforms, but the choice of Sarah Palin as vp I felt lacked research and smacked of lazy thinking. That solidified my resolve to vote for Obama.

Sooooo, yesterday I got my ass out of bed at 530am, got all the animals taken care of and got to the township building at 715am. The line was already around the building.

I saw people I had never seen before. I saw a little boy choose an American Flag over a tootsie pop in a bowl of candy. We had more than 3/4s of our township voting before 2pm. I saw no fights, no political discussions - heated or otherwise - The only topic I heard discussed over and over was the question of funding for water resource clean up. I sat two feet from a Republican Committee woman I have known for twenty years - and she behaved for the first time as a professional and decent, fair minded, considerate human being. In fact, she admitted to several voters that I knew more about the water issue than she did, and she would go with my opinion.

Again, I am relating this to you in the hopes that you will understand the context of what I am trying to say. Not that this was about me. That's what I am saying. As the numbers of voters grew beyond anyone's expectations, the cloud in the air over our heads - the one with our different views and backgrounds, prejudices and affiliations, the elephant in the room no one was talking about, disappeared and the overwhelming energy was about HOW MANY people were voting. I moved into the actual polling place and counted heads for my party next to the Republican woman doing the same thing. We didn't know how people were voting, but each time someone came in, said their name, we would cross them off a many paged list and look at each other, stunned at how pages were filling up with orange highlighter lines. We counted off the names remaining - Look, Sue ONLY THREE PEOPLE on the B page have not voted!

We were doing this, because it provides the parties with an independent record, and also, in the past, if the turn out was really low, volunteers would start calling the lists, to see who needed a ride, who couldn't decide. At 3pm, both party committee people decided that there was no one to call! Sue had done this job for many years, in fact, as township secretary she knew most of our 1300 plus or minus voting citizens by sight. She would look down the line of waiting voters and say, Now, Shirley, those are the Tregos. The Hannums. The Shireys. The Paladinos. The Fuscos. Our highlighters would flick through the names on our lists, pages and pages. We laughed at each other trying to keep the alphabet straight, the pages from becoming messed up. I put my glasses aside, rolled up my sleeves and found myself muttering s,t,u, v, VAN HORN. When the registrar announced that one skinny white guy in work clothes, about twenty five years old, dirt on his boots, rushing in after work, was the 1000th person to vote, the room erupted into spontaneous applause. We had never ever had a thousand people vote in our district in any election. Sue told me she used to get excited when the number would hit 250. Carol, the Republican Committee woman, kept saying THIS is the way it should be! Every Election! Come back In April!

Dancing around, in and out of my ability to pay attention to him, was a young white man, in a suit jacket and jeans. Great hair. Great skin. Tall. A sparkling kid. the kind of kid that has a quality to him that you can't forget. He was wearing an Obama sticker on his jacket. Occasionally teasing the parents of his friends as they stood in line about their lack of lapel buttons. When he finally sat by me I said, Run for Congress. It's your world now. He said, maybe I will.

At 8pm, no one was in line. We shut the door. Our peak period was the forty minute line at 7am. There was a problem with one of our machines and the Republican Attorney and the Democratic Attorney bullied Voter's services into coming to our township building to count the vote manually, in front of the women who had collected them, rather than transport the votes down. No one wanted the slightest wiff of a taint on the ballot's credibility. Serious business. But all day long, no way of knowing just how this was all going to turn out.

I packed up my crock pot and headed home, exhausted, around 830pm. Let the dogs out. Took a shower. Got into my pjs. Sat on the sofa. Turned on the tv. That is when I had the shocking self realization that I had missed the whole point of the election.

My township has 1338 registered voters. Less than 2 percent of those voters are African American. Republicans outnumber Democrats three to one.

Numbers for West Nantmeal:
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS
(VOTE FOR NOT MORE THAN ) 1
BARACK OBAMA (DEM) . . . . . . . . 444 40.92
JOHN MCCAIN (REP). . . . . . . . . 628 57.88
RALPH NADER (IND). . . . . . . . . 5 .46
BOB BARR (LIB). . . . . . . . . . 4 .37
WRITE-IN. . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .37

Again: 1338 voters, give or take. 98 percent white. 75% Republican.

It is NOT about who won in this small township. It's about these numbers and the choices that they represent.

Eighteen months ago, I missed the fact that it was extremely important for my son to build a house for his family. I wanted to make things easy for everyone and pay a contractor and it was a painful and expensive lesson to learn that his need to provide was greater than his need for easy solutions. In a very similar fashion, I thought this election was about my issues with George Bush, and my simple vote.

I missed how important it was to you.

Please accept my apologies and know that my eyelids are pealed back. I am thrilled by your happiness and sense of pride. I feel blessed that in my small way, by voting and being a witness, I was able to contribute to your feeling of inclusion. I can not take any credit for starting out with this in mind, but I hope you know that my intentions were never to do harm.

As I watched the celebrations, I missed three people very much: One, my father from whom I learned that you judge people by what they do, not what they look like. He met his first person of color in the army, a long way from home in a situation where he was the minority and in charge. Nothing in his childhood growing up in Wernersville prepared him for this. He also taught me that minding your own business was more important than minding others. The other was my husband Charles, who didn't see color, he saw music and friends and memories of picking up the white girlfriend of his black friend - to help them bypass disapproving families.

The third person I missed was Gertrude. She was part of my household when I was growing up, part of a parade of black women who did domestic work in my neighborhood. I remember her as ageless and beautiful, wearing the first spectator pumps I ever saw, and enormous black plastic hoop earrings. She would come to our house to clean our bathrooms and windows because my mother was sick a lot, and she always gave me five minutes to clean up before she hit my room and ratted my messiness out to my mother. When she worked she wore a housedress and scuffies. She and my mother would sit for hours at the dining room table, eating the lunch of tuna sandwiches and cokes that my mother made, and I would eavesdrop while they talked about babies and men and life in general. I remember when Gertrude told my mother she was pregnant and my mother asked her when the baby was due. Gertrude said she would "jess git a feelin', I guess." and my mother and she counted back and giggled. Once, Gertrude was appalled that a neighbor lady had purchased a 'sexual sofa' and expected her to clean it. My mother cleared that misunderstanding up for her, too. Before getting on the bus to go home, or before my mother in later years drove her back to Chester, she would go in the powder room and put on her beautiful black and white dress, take the rag off her head and put in her big plastic earrings. She would touch up her red polish and blow on her nails. I know she did this because she would let me sit on the bathroom floor (scrubbed by her on hands and knees) and watch her. The appreciation I got for clothing and fashion is directly related to these bathroom moments.

Until we moved to West Chester when I was twelve, and I was enrolled in a school with a more diverse population, she was the only person of color I knew.

I was in high school when it occurred to me that someone must be taking care of Gertrude's house while she was taking care of us and I asked her about it. She said she had a Puerto Rican woman named Spic and Span at her house. I was a lot older when I realized that this was probably a joke. Although my mother kept paying her long after she could not work, and she came to my wedding, we lost track of her family after she died of complications of diabetes. Last night I hoped that among the crowds of happy celebrating people, her children and grandchildren were dancing in front of cameras.

So, Daphne and Paula, I want to give you both hugs. I am glad I was a witness to this fulfillment of a promise democracy made to you and your families. I am sorry this is just another situation where your guy has to come in and clean up some white guy's mess.

I love you madly!

Shirley

International Cyber Tag

2008-10-22T07:54:00.012-04:00

I have been tagged by The Winds of Change!

the rules..
1. Link to the person or persons who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up

Six things about myself:
I was married at 20.
I was a mother at 21.
I was divorced at 23.
I was remarried at 24.
I was a grandmother at 39.
And again, at 45.
I was widowed at 54.

I think that reveals way tooo much!

Who I tagged!
Firefly Cottage

In Search of A Simple Life

My year in photographs

Ragged Roses

The Winds of Change

Waterlogged: life on a wooden ship

A Papaya Like Memory

2008-10-19T09:03:00.004-04:00

The last time I saw a papaya, I was in my grandmother's garden, on my first day in Australia. I was looking over the Brisbane River, watching pelicans land. I was five and a half years old, had just spent three days on planes (this was prior to jet engines), I had crossed the international date line and I was missing my father and my cat - who were home in the states. So many strange, fragrant colorful things I was seeing for the first time: frangipani, poinsettas in a hedge as tall as the house, kookaburras, funny cars, palm trees, houses without heaters or frig's.

So when I was in Wegman's fruit section last Sunday (fighting off the usual anxiety attack that grocery stores evoke since Charles died) and in front of me was a huge green blob labeled PAPAYA, I had to buy it. I seemed to remember that they were a color other than green in that garden, and I don't remember them being so big, and it seemed unusually firm for a melony fruit. The grocery store anxiety attack usually takes on mindless flinging of crapedoodle into a cart, rushed careening down the aisles trying to remember what I need (toothpaste? dishwashing liquid?) and decisions involving food that won't look lonely when cooked in pans too big for dinner for one. So, I was pretty sure I didn't need a papaya, but it was big enough to not look silly, and of course, I could corner my grandchildren in the kitchen and tell them why the papaya was important to me while DIL and Son rolled their eyes. A family moment, in a fruit! What more could you ask for?

At home, I decided it needed a few days to ripen, and then got distracted by...well, going to New York, etc. So this morning, I gave it a feel-up, it was noticeably softer and had turned a spottled orange. I was going to slice that thing open and eat a MEMORY!

And take photos.

And blog it. Cause that is who I am now - a blogging, exotic fruit eating Sunday lounger!

Well, either I let this sucker ripen much too much OR when I was a kid my tastebuds were so bored by red delicious apples and the occasional strawberry, but it was a little disappointing.

Sort of like sweet, soft pumpkin. Not inspiring. Which left me with the feeling that memories, of fruit or otherwise, are probably best savored fresh and in your mind, rather than physically recreated on a cold kitchen counter thousands of miles and decades from the original moment. I think I will go scramble some eggs. I wonder if goats will eat papaya?

And the academy award goes to....

2008-10-09T14:24:00.002-04:00

You can put a backpack ON a chicken, but

2008-10-09T14:16:00.003-04:00

Naked Shrimp Caught On Tape!

2008-10-08T22:42:00.004-04:00

And Sharks! and MONSTROUS FISH!!!!

(WARNING WARNING EXTREMELY PROUD AUNT ALERT!!! If you find Aunt-fawning and boasting offensive, please read no further)

My brilliant nephew Mike works for National Geographic building critter cams. If you go HERE you will be instantly transported to Belize, Mexico where he was on a team that built this wonderful continuous streaming camera that films actual goings -on at the Reef. Imagine! Right on your computer!!! Make sure while you are there you check out the other critter cam sites!!

PS: the cherry on the cake - I got the link from Mike's exceptional fiancee, Monika, who was at an international Nature Conservancy conference in Barcelona where National Geographic promoted Mike's site!!!

Oh, Oh, if you enjoy it, it wouldn't hurt to donate to National Geographic so they can keep doing this great work! Button on the site~

Dog Heaven

2008-10-02T18:38:00.005-04:00

And then there are the orbs......

2008-09-30T19:40:00.003-04:00

About the spirits in this house - people are always asking me if there are ghosts or spirits here, because of the age of the house. Statistically, if your house is more than thirty four years old, someone has died in it. So, since ours is hundreds of years old, and has sheltered dozens of families, it stands to reason that people have passed on here. We know definitely that babies were born here (although none of ours).

After Charles died, many many small electrical events were laid at his feet - light bulbs which blew over and over, the barn light suddenly coming on when no one was in the barn, etc. Once, Girlfriend Lynda and I were on the porch talking about him and the porch light over her head flashed on and off several times.

Years ago, a friend's mother said something "touched her' on the shoulder while she was looking out the window. She said it was a very 'real' experience, and she was alone in the house when it happened.

Often, items that are hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen are found on the counter in the morning. It's a nine and a half foot ceiling - I'm five feet. Even if I was sleepwalking, I couldn't get up there without a ladder, and since I don't put things away when I am awake, I am sure if I was asleep when I used it, that ladder would be left out in the morning. So I am saying, it's not me.

I once found my eldest grandson, then about four, sitting on the steps talking to the air. I said, who are you talking to, baby? He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "the people in the bubbles" and pointed randomly in the air. That's sort of cute, right? Until you have virtually the same conversation with his little brother, six years later.

Anyway, one day this summer some ghostbusters just stopped by and asked about 'activity' in the house. They specifically asked about orbs. I got orbs. Oh yes.

These orbs show up every time I take photos. WIth any camera. They show up in pictures taken with my camera, in friend's cameras and movie cameras and video cameras. They show up in pictures in the barn, in the dining room, in the living room and the kitchen. For instance, the two photos above were taken seconds apart with the same camera, from a focal point only inches apart. There's that orb again - and if you look closely you can see a stylized sort of 'eye' in it.

Even with this going on, I have never felt scary here, whatever is here is fine with me and we get along. I have offered a tactical truce about behavior though - I just asked loudly that if things are to be moved, I just don't want to SEE them. Or I will get the priest. Anyone else with an old house have these experiences?

Like I was saying, about the daily weirdness...

2008-09-30T18:33:00.004-04:00

This is Old Jack Russell, the one with the brain damage. He stuck his head in a popcorn bag that was left on the sofa and just walked around with it on his head for ten minutes. He wasn't hysterical, he wasn't afraid, he was just....wearing a popcorn bag.

Deer In The Headlights

2008-09-29T18:55:00.010-04:00

Every morning I wake up, do some mental sorting out - usually along the lines of remembering that I am alone now in the house, thinking of things I have to do like grocery shop and work related duties. Before I could not do this because the minute my eyes would fly open, my dogs would be awake and to prevent having to clean up accidents, I would have jump into some clothes of any description, find shoes, tear down the stairs, snap leashes on their necks and then open the door barely in time to keep Ms Manchester from piddling on the floor in the hallway. About a year ago I started putting all three dogs into crates at night, not sharing my bed with them, and we have ALL been sleeping better. I have time to get properly (if you count striped pj bottoms and a sweatshirt) dressed, control the stampede down the stairs and there have been LOTS fewer accidents.

This morning was no different - a little sniffling about the alone situation, happy dogs excited about another day here in heaven, and out the door to greet the day. It's been raining for days but this morning the grass was lush and green, the sky was bright and all and all, it was a good way to wake up.

Because of the construction, we (me and the dog-tourage) go out the front door - Big American Bull Dog on a pink leash, Little Manchester on a Blue Leash, Old Jack Russell NOT on a leash. The control of the dogs on the leashes is a fanciful ballet of high kicks and slipped discs. OJR can not be on a leash because of his terrible accident as a puppy when he was kicked by one of the horses and survived a head injury which left him with short term memory loss and small seizures. Don't feel bad for him - he wakes up every day in this Dog Heaven and says to himself HEY WE HAVE A BARN! and it's all gravy from there. But he can not wear a leash because even if we put the thinnest gossamer thread of a leash on him, the minute we attach it to his collar he falls over. We don't know why, but it's not funny any more so we just try to keep track of him. The other two - well, they have bad habits which involve chasing livestock or attacking animals larger than themselves and need the control til they get to the fenced dog play yard.

As I have said, this morning we leave the front door without incident (by the time you get to the bottom of this post you will be wondering WHY at that very minute I did not KNOW something was WRONG - having Three Very Active Noses working) and head to the dog play yard. The goats are in their adjacent play yard, and there is some fence jousting and threats and intimidation on both sides but it never goes anywhere. Big Yellow Horse and Big Brown Horse give a glance and head for the pasture. Eldest Grandson catches the bus before I usually get out and he lets the chickens out (again, you are going to wonder why HE didn't alert us). The Ugly White Rooster is on top of the chicken house crowing. An idyllic morning. Picture Perfect. Quiet.

Daughter-In-Law comes out on the lawn with Youngest Grandson ready for the bus. He does his chicken count, DIL and I exchange bleary good mornings and lean over the fence watching the dogs and the goats and the horses and the chickens, and in general, accessing the very good life that God has given us. Once Jeremy is on the bus, we go back in THE FRONT (again, completely clueless as to what is around us) DOOR and sit on the sofa and start to wonder why the traffic is going past the house sooooo sllllooowwwly.

In fact, I remark on it. "Look, that car is going past the house realllllly sloooowly."

DIL says, "Of course it is. Our house looks like crazy people live here - with all the construction, with the bucket truck stuck in the porch like a permanent fixture, I am sure there are people for whom a highlight of any given weekday morning is checking out the latest crazy crap that is going on here blah blah blah.... " My attention is momentarily diverted to the TV where they have just announced that the average woman eats 450 extra calories between Friday evening and Sunday night. 450? That's like ten calories an hour. Big deal.

I am pulled back into conversation with DIL when she says something about having to pick up a trumpet for Youngest Grandson. I say I thought he played the violin. She says NOW he wants to play the trumpet so she has to go to Reading to pick this trumpet up and she wants to know if I can go with her because she doesn't know where she is going.

I say, use your GPS. She says, well, somehow a penny got down the cigarette lighter thingie and shorted it out and she can't plug the GPS I gave her for her birthday in.

I said, I thought MY SON YOUR HUSBAND fixed that. She says, He did. But it happened again. Sigh.

I have a business appointment at 11am so I can't go to Reading to pick up a trumpet, but I suggest that she go to my car (parked next to the front door because it was raining so hard when I got home the day before I just pulled it up on the lawn), plug my GPS in, and then it will be charged and she can take it with her when she leaves.

Another car crawls by the front of the house.

DIL says that is a great idea and goes out the front door. I go to get a cuppa tea. Seconds later, she is back in and says....

"I don't know how to say this. Get your shoes on and come outside."

Through the window I can see another car slowing down and then speeding up, and the driver shaking his head.

I say, "No."

She says, "Get your camera, get your shoes on and come outside." She sees me hesitating and knows I am going to need to know something, anything, that will help me walk the twenty four feet from my kitchen to the front door and out, to see the thing that requires shoes and a camera.

She says, "There is a dead deer stuck under your car."

Well, now. It's not a horse, it's not a dog. Thank God it's not a child. Not pleasant. But not a tragedy. (For those of you NOT from this area, deer are like rats with antlers, wandering around roadways, killing innocent drivers, causing untold millions of dollars worth of property damage, spreading lymes disease, ruining crops. Our native deer are three times the size of the ones our forefathers found when they came to this country, because most of them are cornfed scavengers.)

We walk out together and sure enough, there is a deer stuck under my car. Not just any deer. The BIGGEST, HUGEST, MALE DEER I have ever seen. In perfect condition. With one two three OH MY GOD seven points! (how you measure antlers) A spread of about eighteen inches. She says, "This wasn't here when you parked last night, was it?" Just the first of many questions I will be asked about this situation which will give me insight into what people think I am capable of.

No. It was not there when I parked my car last night. And, NO, even though the bedroom where I sleep is under thirty feet from this scene, I didn't hear anything. And furthermore, doesn't she think I would have MENTIONED it?

Best guess, someone ELSE hit the poor thing and it was thrown or projected off the roadway into my car. And even though like most things in life there are no answers, and since neither of us are really sure what we are supposed to do at this moment, we wander around it, look at it from a lot of different angles, talk a lot of speculation and take a lot of pictures. We make our best guesses regarding the bloating of the corpse and turgidity and the time of death (DIL practically grew up in a funeral parlor and I watch a lot of court tv so we both can make pretty educated hunches). We look for drag or hoof prints in my soggy lawn. We count those antler points. We wonder WHY the dogs didn't react to several hundred pounds of fresh roadkill virtually beneath their noses. And then we start making the phone calls and sending the pictures.

DIL calls My Son, sends him a picture to prove she's not hallucinating, and he says he is on his way. (As wife, she trumps mother when it comes to giving news) She calls her brother-in-law, Hunter/Gatherer and sends him a picture. She calls her father, also Hunter/Gatherer. He doesn't have a phone that will accept pictures, but he runs around his workplace finding someone who can get an email - because you just can't have this happen without sending pictures. So we send him a picture. All these Hunter/Gathers have been sitting in tree blinds freezing their asses off for years to bag a specimen like this, and I have one thrown on to my lawn. The irony escapes no one.

I call my appointment and leave a long, confusing and absurdly neurotic message about deer and my car and I can't move it and not being able to put time constraints on this situation so I will have to call them later to reschedule. Patient And Amused Male Business Partner calls coincidentally to discuss something entirely different and when I explain I can't move the car because of the dead deer stuck under it, he says, "Well, it's already dead. Just back up. You can't really hurt it now." This makes me gag for about three minutes and he hangs up, saying he will call back later - I told him I would send him the pictures so he can understand the situation better.

And then my phone rings and it's Wonderful Neighborwoman. She says, "Rodeo, Did you shoot that thing?"

I say, "Noooooo." We have a very intense conversation about when she went by, that she thought I shot it or that I hit it, or that something'd it. That maybe the Crazy Cat Lady next door put it there. That makes us both laugh.

Meanwhile DIL is arranging to have the deer taken away, which is something I haven't even thought of. I tell her I want the antlers. I want them mounted. I explain that God gave me the deer and I want those antlers over my fireplace, right above my rifle (which I have never used to shoot anything) and I want to be able to point at them and tell the story over and over for years...

She says "You are not keeping that deer. You know what will happen. That head will just go in the freezer and never come out."

Meanwhile, My Son Her Husband arrives at the very second that a flatbed truck with an earthmover pulls off the road just feet from the deer. A skinny young man in a John Deere (!) hat asks, Hey, can I have that deer?

My Son says Yes. I say No.

My Son says, you don't want that deer. No one will take it away if they can't have the head. And you know what will happen, that head will go in the freezer and never come out.

You leave a couple of animal bodies in the freezer for a couple of months and your family never lets you forget it.

I feel genuinely sad as my son and this stranger drag the deer out from under the car and put it on the flat bed. The stranger is beyond excited. That cheers me a little. I hope he makes up a huge hunter's lie about how he got this magnificent beast's head.

All the excitement is over and DIL and I adjourn to the kitchen table and are astounded at how two hours have past. Not only past, but we know this is not how most people have spent their morning. As My Son was leaving he shook his head and said, "You have to stop doing this. Things like this keep happening. Really." He wasn't blaming us, but the thought was not lost on us. We start trying to figure out why we have one domestic episode after another. We worry about what will happen tomorrow. DIL distances herself a little by reminding me that until she and My Son took what is now approaching custodial care of me, they lived a very tame life. She swears months would go by without anything happening. I need to come clean with you all and tell you that I don't put one TENTH of the daily, unusual, crazy, unpredictable, bizarre things that happen here down in writing because frankly a lot of the times I am embarrassed because if I did, it would speak to the out of control, random direction my life takes ninety percent of the time and no one would let me hug their children or pet their dogs for fear of some cosmic intervention that would wreck havoc on the innocents in proximity to me. I say to DIL, "While everyone is laughing, I am thinking I need some kind of Chi-cleaning or something. Like an exorcism."

She says, "We need a Priest."

I say, "I was thinking of something more like an asian spiritual monk, someone who would smudge smoke over me and waft away the evil spirits."

DIL says, "Oh, no Rodeo. You need a Priest. They scare the shit out of Demons. You don't want some asian spiritual monk that just makes friends with it."

Well, something to think about it. I think I have to think about what this all means. I used to think in terms of animals as totems or messengers. What does it mean when a deer crashes itself into your car when you aren't even in it?

Nellie's Preggers!

2008-09-21T09:08:00.010-04:00

Concerned about our HUGE family Carbon Foot Print (we own one gas truck, one diesel truck, four cars, two golf carts, a tractor, a bucket truck, one dirt bike, one street bike, three four wheelers) Daughter In Law and I decided to get some goats to take care of an out of control weed problem. Well, and also, someone offered us two FREE goats. Nellie, a Nubian/Alpine mix doe and Nate, who looks all Nubian and seems sort of slow, mentally. After we upgraded fencing and bought goat appropriate accessories at the Farm Tractor Store, the free goats cost us about 1100.00. My Son was impressed with the efficiency with which the goats tore into vines and weeds and brush and said, We Need A Dozen More! (more power, more power, faster, faster, better, better - our family mantra) so DIL and I stopped at the farm around the corner and asked about borrowing their buck. Three days later, a GORGEOUS young woman named Jen pulls into the driveway in a pick-up truck. DIL and I look at each other and say, What's that smell?

She opens the back of the truck and Hawk jumps to the ground, large and in charge! Before his feet hit the driveway, he was armed and ready for action, and without even a lead, walked purposefully toward the goat pen and let Nellie know he was there to service her. He did this by peeing in his mouth and checking his equipment. I think I dated a guy like that once.

Nellie was coy at first, but Hawk was persistent and remarkably patient and charming. The more charming he got, the worse he smelled. There was some action going on, but it was sort of... confusing, which led to to comments like, Did he get her? Why is she walking like that? Does that mean he got her? And, of course, don't touch him, you'll get pee on you! Hawk was literally DRIPPING with goat essence. Which smells a lot like a pair of 'lambskin' gloves I bought in an import shop once. Or, like the most potent fatty greasy musky lanolin hand lotion. Because no one was sure he got her, he stayed the night.

In the morning I got the dogs out and you could smell him from the front door. DIL's eldest sister was already here, leaning over the fence because news of backyard sexual shenanigans travels fast in her family. I said "good morning" and held my breath against the odor, and she said, He got her, right in front of me!

Gorgeous Jen mentioned when she came to pick Hawk up that he was for sale, but I think we got what we needed. In five months we will have two or three or maybe one little baby goat. I'll keep you posted! (PS: this is the business end of Hawk, registered Nubian Stud Muffin)

Be Afraid. Very Afraid.

2008-09-13T11:36:00.002-04:00

This is Youngest Grandson hunting barn rats from the bucket truck with a pellet gun. We try to provide a rich and varied cultural life for our children. He also plays the violin and loves chickens.

How I wasted a solid hour and a half

2008-09-13T09:19:00.005-04:00

Big Brown Horse has a stone bruise and some thrush in her passenger side front - the stone bruise happened I think when she and the big Yellow Horse broke into the goat pasture and chased them around. Old rickety girls in their late twenties, they should not be cavorting around a small pasture posturing like roping horses and making quick slidy turns in the corners. The thrush is just a bi-product of this wet wet summer. The grass is lush and wet most mornings and it has rained two or three times a week for a month or more. The treatment for the thrush is a quick dip in bleach water, the treatment for the stone bruise is a soak in Epsom salts, followed by a dressing consisting of a newborn baby diaper duct taped to the foot to keep dirt out and the Epsom salts on. I was chatting with a horsey friend the other day about this and she said that in the barn she had when she was growing up they had horses with injuries from going through fences, weird skin diseases and other stuff, but never a stone bruise. We've never had THAT stuff, just colic (horrible, mostly fatal) and stone bruises. Interesting that there is a theme to barn episodes.

Anyhow, the vet came yesterday and took a look and said the soaking is the cure and gave me some butte (horse aspirin) to take the pain away. The butte is for the horse. No one is interested in taking MY pain away. She said that shortly the bruise will abscess and burst and the pain will go away and it will heal. The thrush I need to bleach. If you are going to have lameness, this is the best kind - not stiffles or founder or laminitis, or any of the other expensive and horrible things that can cause it.

This morning I went out to do the baby diaper/duct tape/epsom salt/bleach soak thing feeling very comfortable, very much Woman Healer. I had all my supplies - the butte, the diapers, the duct tape, scissors (very proud of myself for remembering them - scissors being the actual TOOL you use to cut duct tape - instead tearing it with your teeth while balancing a 1200 lb horse's foot in one hand and mangling duct tape into your hair - like I have done before), warm water in a thermos that says Property Of Charles. I can't find the horses, but activity in the barn usually brings them in for starlight mints and sweet talk.

Sure enough, while I am PRECUTTING the duct tape - so proud of myself for thinking ahead, Big Yellow Horse and Big Brown Horse come thumping into the aisle. Miraculously, Big Brown Horse is still wearing her halter from yesterday so she is easy to catch and put in the cross ties (one tie on each side of the aisle securely anchored with carriage bolts into 200 year old oak as hard as rock). This fall, when the foliage on the trees is gone, I expect to find about six brand new halters hanging in branches or stuck on rocks or dangling from fence posts, because she just won't keep them on. But this morning, everything is going fine fine fine. Which should have given me prickly hairs on the back of my neck.

I give each horse a starlight mint and Big Yellow Horse actually goes and stands patiently on the other side of the barn. Horses are like curious, critical seventh graders - you can not do ANYTHING with just one of them. They poke their nose in (literally) to anything you are doing and comment loudly about the idiocy of it.

I lean over and grab the tendon that runs down the back of BBH's leg, below what would be her knee if she was human and she lifts it cooperatively. I dig a big dark oyster shaped clod of dirt out of her hoof. She is standing quietly while I do this and my confidence soars again. I am HEALER, I am INDEPENDENT! For the rest of the day I will walk among mortals, smiling at children and making the lame walk and the blind see. I will work the story of my success at healing into conversations with total strangers at the Dunkin Donuts. Others will seek me out for my wisdom and skill.

I put her foot down and you can see the relief on her sweet big face just from having the muck removed that was pressing on the abscessing wound. Even SHE is impressed with my skill at easing her pain. Like Androcles and the Lion, we are crossing anthropomorphic boundaries and forging a bond worthy of a Disney movie. Any minute, bluebirds are going to start at my feet and weave a prom dress up my body while singing! Crickets will smile benignly at me from my hearth! The mice in my kitchen will start wearing big white gloves and red short shorts and stop eating my cornmeal muffin mix! The rooster will stop being an ass and become charming like Fog Horn Leg Horn. Okay, maybe that won't happen. Now it's time to soak that foot.

I carefully measure out the epsom salts and mix them with warm water from Charles' thermos in a blue feed bucket. I test the temperature - because I am a caring, considerate animal healer. Perfect. I say Give and BBH lifts her foot cooperatively. I guide her foot into the soothing waters.

She backs up, rips her head out of the halter holding her, gets her foot between the bucket handle and the bucket making it clang around on the floor, rears up and slips on the water spilling out of the bucket and goes down like the three quarter of a ton animal that she is.

I watch helplessly as she thrashes around between the stalls on the slippery cement floor. I can't do anything til she either stops struggling or gets herself up. BYH helpfully GALLOPS out the door screaming.

She eventually gets herself free of the bucket, flinging it across the barn with determination of a Hellfire missle and stands up and shakes herself. Calmly limps out the door to join BYH. They take off for the field at a fast dressage-y lope and run in circles. I try to catch my breath and and stop panicking. She's okay. I'm having heart palpitations.

I pack up my supplIes and decide to try this again later when I have help and a bucket with no handle.

I am going inside for a nice cuppa tea. At least that is the plan.

On my way out, I notice that Old Brain Damaged Dog is rolling in the grass inside the goat pen. He got kicked in the head as a puppy because he was hanging on the tail of a horse - just like his crazy mother. Her life was one big episode til she was finally killed by a Bud Lite Truck while hunting ground hogs. Old now, he doesn't hear well, doesn't see well, has small seizures where he leaves the planet and basically doesn't give a flying fig about anything but his immediate comfort. Right now he's comfortable, rolling in goat pee.

The goats, however, are the most dangerous, unpredictable, sociopathic animals I have ever encountered. And right now they are conspiring like the Sante Kimes family and staring gleefully at the clueless dog. I throw the only thing I have in my hand - the easy boot I was going to clean for the horse. It makes no never mind to the goats. I should have thrown it at the dog. I finally get his attention and he trots through the gate.

I go inside and have my nice cuppa. I am exhausted and it's only 8:30 am. The kids arrive to work on the addition and are full of youthful exuberance. They want to chat. They want to share plans. I want to go back to sleep.

I do plumbing and what I wear

2008-08-29T08:19:00.007-04:00

My house is very old - the house under the house was built sometime before 1790, when the first deed was recorded. My apologies to my friends in England, but originally my land was a grant from the King to William Penn. The Penn Family was...ah hem...loyal to the King what with all the land gifting and after that little relationship hiccup we call the Revolution, the disgruntled newly autonomous Colonials took all the land and gave it to the people who had been squatting on it. I am sure there was all sorts of outrageous justifications all around, because these same squatters had ousted the Lenni Lenape Indians who were here first. The well documented currencies of exchange for these transactions are very interesting to me as a Realor (or Land Agent - which is what I think they call us in England). For instance, the Squatters like my John Alford gave the Lenni Lenape small pox which drove them out, and then, in 1790, gave the new Government of the United States $204.00 in newly minted dollars and any of the Penn Family that showed up on May 4 each year thereafter one black peppercorn. I don't know what year the Penn Family opted not to collect the peppercorn, but I have one framed next to my front door in case they ever show up. At any rate, eventually the house under the house became too small and somewhere around July 1876, a state of the victorian farmhouse art was built on top of the one room stone home. With 32 windows and lots of intricate gingerbread, ample porches and high high ceilings and warm golden pine flooring, it must have been quite a sight. I have a map which shows that we were much larger (at 162 acres) than our mere 8 acres now. If I ever win the lottery, I won't move - I will just buy all the houses I can see from my upstairs and return my view to what once was.

It's the best place I have ever lived, even though the source of most of my frustrations and adventures. When Charles and I bought what I now call Blue Sky Farm twenty years ago, it was a hot mess. Most of the plumbing had been installed during the Rural Electrication Period following WWII and we made it the first priority in decades of repairs. Now, it all needs to be done again, and this time, just by me.

About three months ago, the shower drain upstairs just slowed down. I would be taking a shower standing in several inches of my own soup and that water would stay there for hours. The mold from this was outrageous! Not to mention the foot fungus.

I tried plungers. I tried a traditional cup shaped one, and one I found in the barn with a more aggressive bulb kind of thing. Nothing but burping. I tried everything on the shelves at the grocery store - foaming things, burning things, gel things, foul smelling nasty things. Blue, Green, Red. Twin Bottles that ominously mix only in the drain, where the magic is supposed to happen. All these potions and mixtures are supposed to dissolve grease, hair, and I guess flesh and bones. If these didn't work - and they didn't - I was AGHAST at what might actually be causing the clog! I mean, what the HELL could be down there?

I started a very thorough search for another effective method. Which means simply that I started whining to everyone I know about the water and the clog and the slow drain and my soupy feet. My Daughter In Law, tired of hearing about it and suspicious that somehow this was going to end up a project for her overworked Husband My Son, finally said, "Why don't you get one of those blaster things?"

WHAT BLASTER THING?

She said SHE had a clog in her shower drain and she went to Home Depot and bought a WEAPON which had cartridges and BLASTED the CLOG out with a HUGE AND TERRIFYING NOISE!

Now THAT's the ticket!

I went directly to Home Depot, described what I wanted to several working members of AARP wearing orange vests and no one knew what I was talking about.

I stopped at the office and whined at Patient but Amused Male Business Partner. He said, I have one of those and it really works but the noise is AWFUL. Patient but Amused Male Business Partner is hearing impaired so I could not imagine what that meant.

I convinced him that he should get in his car right now and drive me to Home Depot and show me exactly what shelf, what pegboard fixture he got this miracle from.

We found it right away. It is about two feet long, oddly like a bicycle pump with a red knob and yellow handles. The package had four cartridges that looked like bullets which Patient But Amused Male Business Partner explained were CO2 cartridges. I felt comforted by their bullet like appearance. Like - if it looks like a bullet, then it must be effective, right? I also found BLACK FLEXIBLE TAPE to use on the kitchen faucet which was spraying water out the top right at my breast bone, through holes eaten in the metal tap by our water. (note to self - get a water treatment system, don't BE a water treatment system) They also had a huge array of parts and crapdedoodle that I know I will eventually need as I rebuild my house piece by piece.

So I bring the shooter thingie and the tape home. Grandsons and Sons are drawn to it as moths to a flame, until they find out that it is for opening drains. Eldest grandson begs to be allowed to shoot just one cartridge, nana please, c'mon, let me shoot it just once to see what it does i won't point it at my brother.

I'm sort of curious about this huge noise it is supposed to make so I tentatively agree to the experiment, as long as it is on the lawn and not pointed at any one or thing. At just this point I am distracted by some other near catastrophe and forget all about it, for a couple of days.

Meanwhile, the open package is sitting on the steps. I walk past it every day. I glance at the cartridges, a SPLATTER MAT thoughtfully included but not noted earlier. Rubber Washer Things. Multi page instruction manual with many many translations into foreign languages. Cautionary Alerts in BRIGHT ORANGE AND RED. Circles with Crosses. People missing eyes. No, I made that up, but you get the drift.

So, of course, the thing now looms large in my imagination. I actually dream about it, puncturing my ear drums and shattering the pipes in the dining room ceiling. And every day I am standing in that water with my now stinky feet and moldy bathroom walls.

As often happens with me, the fog lifts one day and I mend the kitchen tap. Well, I wrap the stretchy black tape around it and feel totally inappropriately proud of myself. Now, you may be wondering why I just didn't get a whole new tap, but the kitchen is going to be gutted any day now (this would be comical if I hadn't been saying it to people for twenty years) and it doesn't make sense to buy a new one if I can literally put a bandaid on this one. See video below of how well this is working. Daughter In Law said yesterday that it was going to blow. Noooo it wouldn't. I wasn't dressed for work.

With the faucet repair so successful, I decided to tackle the plunger blaster thingie. I don't read the instructions - I can't find the english ones anyway. I unscrew the top and insert a CO2 cartridge. I screw the top back on. So far, so good.

I ignore the splatter mat. (I'm in the shower stall) I strip down. Why get my clothes wet? I put on a shower cap and safety goggles. No picture. Thank me.

I place the plunger blaster thingie over the drain. I pull the handle.

A farty, slightly like a balloon losing air noise. Some white foam.

That's it.

I simply can't believe that this worked and I still have my hearing. I wonder what ails the rest of them - what were they doing that I didn't do????? I run the water. It goes right down.

Right. Down. The. Drain.

No noise.

Just to make sure, and because I now have a ridiculously high level of confidence about plumbing, I do it again.

I run the water. EVEN BETTER. Much congratulation of self. Much ironic reflection of how proud C would have been, maybe. Can't wait to tell Patient but Amused Male Business Partner.

Maybe I will buy a new faucet and install it myself. And I have that new chandelier in the dining room I could tackle.........

Life, Death, Toilets, Ice Makers and Motorcycle Axles

2008-08-24T08:57:00.011-04:00

Don't know about you, but I hate mornings that start like this: Reaching in to the toilet tank to pull up the rubber stopper thingie, getting wet to the elbow with water you aren't sure is bacteria free, flushing it, waiting for the tank to fill, replacing the crapper flapper thingie, figuring out which is left and which is right to screw on the nut thingie, washing the toliet bowl to free it from the remains of yesterday's use because no one had the energy to do this although the part was sitting on top of the tank all day because they were busy with OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS. I mean, you would think that after THAT, the rest of the day would go pretty smoothly. However, after you do THAT, you want a nice glass of ice tea, with crushed ice. And that is when you discover that yet again, there is a motorcycle axle in the ice maker, thoughtfully wrapped in plastic.

Which is now wrapped around the crusher mechanism.

This is not the first odd item to be stuck in my icemaker. It's sort of a common situation at our house, but I have not heard others complain of anything similar. It starts like this. The freezer is crowded. And disorganized. People come to the freezer with a situation, like needing to freeze a motorcycle axle, or they are rooting through the freezer looking for the last fudge pop, or they need a place to put something that might spoil. So the obvious solution is to put Whatever in the icemaker which is usually pretty empty. These Whatevers have included but are not limited to: a dead parrot, a pound of hamburger meat and a buffalo penis. I am actually happy to reduce this to ONE domestic episode when in reality, there have been dozens. There was the dinner party when everyone's drink had little red flecks of flesh in them....you know, from the hamburger getting ground up into the ice bucket.....

But this time it's a motorcycle axle and I try to lift it out. I can't get my arm into a position where that works. I get a chair, jam it in the small place between the freezer door and the stove, climb on, wedge my head into the small opening between the icemaker and the top of the freezer so I can see that yes, my fingers didn't lie, it's a motorcycle axle, wrapped in plastic, on top of the ice cubes.

OH there is the problem. The action of the icemaker crusher thingie, like an axle itself, has snagged the plastic bag the axle is in. SO, I reach for a steak knife (from the wedged chair) and start sawing away at any loose bit of the bag, thinking this will free it so I can lift it out. But it won't budge. I decide to move on from this til someone comes over to work on the addition. I make ice tea with the ice from the trays - oh, I have ice TRAYS in the freezer because during the construction they cut the supply line to the ice maker, so I have to freeze cubes and then dump them in the ice maker for crushing.

My phone buzzes. Its a text from My Son. The genius who put the axle in the freezer. I am thinking it is some kind of apology.

No. Earl is dead.

My Daughter-in-Law's Uncle Junior has died peacefully at home of the liver cancer he was diagnosed with two long weeks ago. The minute the words were in the air, he started to fade. This has given his family time to organize his affairs and come in from all over:- Shug, ChaCha, and Suki in from the Carolinas. A sister to Earl who is married to a Japanese Ballet Dancer has come in from her home in the hills above Tokyo. Other relatives from Oklahoma and Delaware. His daughter Melissa put her life on hold and spent the last two weeks at his side. For two weeks, hushed voices, purposeful consideration of feelings, embraces, tears, laughter, memories. Photo albums brought out and shared. Communal meals with disaster-oles brought over by neighbors. A switch to the time frames we have when everything else stops for a while, sort of like a snow day. Some things fall to the side, the really important things come to the front. Intensity. Intimacy. I am almost jealous of them because as a family they seem to navigate the toughest waters with grace and affection. All of them emotional gymnasts, not afraid of the big feelings. They don't flinch or look away when someone cries.

So, I put the steak knife down. Walk away from the axle. Leave that for another day. I'll buy ice when I am at the grocery store getting stuff to take over. The stuff that sustains us during bad times: wine, plastic ware, cheese, strawberries, paper napkins. Ice. Family.

Nola, Petey and Daisy on their summer Stay Cation.

2008-08-18T12:23:00.004-04:00

And she couldn't even make it back to the sofa. Next life, I want to be my dog.

Leeks

2008-08-17T09:57:00.006-04:00

After I used the bulb in soup I put the stems in an old jar. The vascular system of the leek continued to pull water up and it swelled the different stems inside, and each morning when I come down, the protrusion is about half an inch higher. Fog the cat keeps nibbling on them.

I am posting this for Greentwinsmummy - over at the Simple Life blog, because I was startled to see that she and I - thousands of miles apart, bought leeks the same week.

I was going to post this picture last night but I was distracted by Presidential Politics on Tv. Sorry, Greentwinsmummy!

Four minutes with the chickens...

2008-08-09T10:42:00.005-04:00

They Laughed Til I Cried

2008-08-09T09:37:00.006-04:00

My son is a genius. No, seriously. A bonafide, card carrying genius. I should know to trust him, after 34 years. However, when someone hooks a chain up to your house and starts ripping things off, you get nervous. When you are watching this video, make sure you notice the "pole vault sticks" that hold the roof up and away as it is wrenched from the building. THAT's why you don't need plywood over the windows! (despite my pleas) He says, "You think. Then you do. You THINK, then you do."

The videographer is Eldest Grandson - and yes, he's the giggler at the end. The fun never ends for this father and son!

How I spent my summer Stay-Cation!

2008-08-07T16:24:00.007-04:00

It wasn't the price of gas or the state of the economy. It wasn't even the election. I wish I could say it was a conscious decision. But it wasn't any of those things. It just happened. I find myself accidentally trendy. This summer I am having a Stay Cation.

The house is under construction,

Gas is expensive.

All my playmates are doing something else.

Work is soooooo slooooooooow.

I am a bad travel planner, much better at being a go-alonger than an initiator.

So, I am not going out of town any time soon.

One night I was watching a commercial for something called Joe's Crab Shack where you eat out of buckets. They were showing all kinds of hip people laughing and eating out of buckets, drinking fun drinks and I was overcome with a longing for camaraderie, food in buckets, and general summer fun. I looked up the nearest Joe's Crab Shack and it's in Wilmington. If I could get one of my friends to go to dinner, I knew they wouldn't go to Wilmington just to eat out of a bucket. Seldom do they share my complete vision. Which led me to the question, Why Can't Chester County Have a Crab Shack? We have thousands of restaurants, some even sell Seafood, or specialize in seafood, but nowhere can you eat from buckets. I wanted to dress in shorts and colorful linen tops, feel the late afternoon breeze on my sunburned skin, have silly conversations with clever hip people, linger for hours over buckets of clams, lobsters and corn on the cob. (In this fantasy I am thinner and more blonde. My blue eyes dance while I engage in clever repartee.) I could not remember the last time I had fun. I was tired from worry and work and worry about work. I have spent weeks packing up all my things and moving them to the basement in 100 degree heat to accommodate the house construction. Imagine a summer highlight being spending $2000.00 on plastic bags, totes and shelving. When I got too hot and too exhausted to make the trip from the kitchen, out the front door, down the side of the house, in the basement of the addition, up a plank into the old basement carrying a rubbermaid tote with a 12 piece dish set I have not used for three years, I was drinking home brewed too strong ice tea and playing freecell for hours on end. Then I would call some previous client that I thought might have a lead to some business which I hoped would save me from having to make the trek with the next box of ceramic mugs or dinner linens. I only left the farm to go to Lowes or Walmart and although they have buckets, there are no crabs or corn. Every day I was being serious, hard working, woefully adult. Setting goals to prove my maturity. Killing my own buzz with Teutonic Task Angst.

Suddenly it all became clear. I would take a vacation from feeling like hell, and have some fun! Simple!

These might not be how you would choose to spend your stay cation, but any way you do it, make the commitment and cut the tether on your woes, and watch that balloon just drift away. For me, it was a simple decision to just not worry so much for a short time. Sort of just let go and say yes to some urges and whims. Here is what I did:

I was quoted in The New York Times.
I auditioned for a tv show.
I started a blog.
I took up smoking.
I did a good deed.
I had a fine dinner with friends.
I was quoted in USA-Today and had my picture taken by one of their staff photographers.
I had Ghost Busters Over to the House.

When Charles died, my friend Lynda told me it was like he and I were playing tug of war and he just let go. I have spent some months holding on to my end of the rope, looking at the other end and wondering who was going to pick it up. Maybe nobody. I know that in my old life as a wife to Charles, I would not be talking to reporters and bagging work to go off and audition for tv shows. This is not to say that I chaffed at my responsibilities and obligations. They were what I was doing then. I am doing something different now. Now being different was not something I chose or planned for. So I am thinking I might wing it for a while. Maybe stay on Stay Cation for a while.

By Way of Explanation: Itty Bitty Committee

2008-08-03T18:29:00.002-04:00

I mention in my episodes an entity called The Itty Bitty Committee. This is an imaginary group of critics and backbiters that live in my psyche. They are the product of my upbringing and culture. They were inserted through my ear canal at different developmental stages. Picture either The Last Supper or a gaggle of Gods and Goddesses peering over the edge of Mt. Olympus.

Green Guilt Giant: Environmentally Militant, it could be noble to have such a thing as one of your sensibilities if I didn't know this was just another way to manifest guilt about something.
Frightened Adult: Wearing a beige sweater and skirt, FA is a hand ringing alarmist who is terrified of lead pencils and other sharp objects. She is responsible for making me wear my seatbelt and never letting me get drunk.
Naugahide Man: He wears a dirty white undershirt, blue plaid boxer shorts and one of those baseball caps that holds two beer cans and a long straw and sits in a fake leather recliner at the left of the long table. He hates everything I do. He knows nothing is going to work and that if someone likes me, they just haven't known me long enough. He is single handedly responsible for keeping me from having a writing career twenty years ago.
Librarian: Has no other function other than muttering "Oh, really?"
God Bothering Gospel Dependent Bible Banging Foot Dragger: Morality Watch

Other members come forward every once in a while but these are the major players. By the way, this group is not meant to be ever confused with The Itty Bitty Titty Committee - that is a lesbian movie about plastic surgery.

When Balloons Go Wrong

2008-08-03T18:12:00.007-04:00

When Balloons Go Wrong

It's Sunday and some people go to Church (like real Church, not Talbots) and Realtors run Open Houses. This is an activity that I think the general public has a lot of shallow uninformed opinions about. For instance, clients have told me that Realtors run Open Houses just for themselves, to pick up clients. Yes, we do. That is how we sell your house. It is not true that we enjoy littering the landscape with signs and once we shove them into the ground next to that stop sign, we forget all about them. Well, just because you go past the same spot ONCE a week on Sunday morning, and Every Time you DO, that sign is there, it doesn't mean that I haven't picked up it by 4:15 the previous Sunday, ridden around with it in the back of my car all week, and then pounded it back into the roadbed at 12:45 today.

Think about it. It's Sunday. Sunday you could be going to Church as I said before or Sunday you could be spending with your family, or doing laundry or mowing the lawn of your own house. I work seven days a week even in a challenging market like this because I have to be always available. But Sunday is also the day I could be driving my clients around to look at houses. Or Sunday is the day I could be answering phones at my office. I could be doing that, but instead, I am sitting in a sparkling clean, cool house for sale waiting for buyers to show up. In order to get to the point where I am waiting for buyers though, I have to go through a certain number of steps.

I have to get balloons.

I do not know why balloons are a perquisite for selling houses, but Real Estate runs on five things: Paper, Money, Food, Signs and Balloons. If just one of these elements is missing, the national economy will tank. I think MSNBC ought to launch an investigation into who forgot to put their balloons out in Florida. Wasn't me. Anyhow, I can not hold an Open House without balloons and they must have helium and they must be filled up the morning of the Open House. The tank I can use for free is at the office, a twenty mile one way trip and it just seems silly now to send eight dollars in gas dollars to drive down when I can get five balloons filled up for five dollars at the grocery store which is only 11 miles away. If I start to think of the mammoth Paul Bunyan size carbon foot print this activity produces I get a headache. Once you get the balloons blown up, you have to transport them. In your car. Normally I have a plastic bag (I KNOW I KNOW IT JUST GETS WORSE AND WORSE) that I use and you can fit about five balloons in a contractor size clean up bag. I have seen other realtors with nets and anchors and stuff in their cars. You can not put six helium balloons into your car for transport without the Itty Bitty Committee in your head going absolutely nuts. The bickering is relentless. The Green Guilt Giant is pissed and flashing pictures of sea lions wearing collars of (YOUR COMPANY HERE) balloons on ice bergs. The Traffic Cop is writing out a warning for obstruction of the rear view mirror. The Mother is beating you up for not spending Sunday with your family baking casseroles and other memorable meals. The Frightened Adult is wringing her hands and speaking in low tones of Accidents that Are Avoidable. But, you know, you go ahead and do it anyway because on a good day you can only listen to about ten percent of what they say, anyway.

So this morning, I am already at the office for phone duty so I can blow up my balloons for free but I do not have a plastic bag and I anchor the five strings of my balloons around a bottle of Mother's Sealant and Wax I get from behind the passenger seat. I bought the wax but apparently you have to apply it for your car to shine - you can't let the bottle fall out of the Pep Boys bag and roll under the seat of your car if you want a showroom shine. Now that is an activity you could spend a Sunday afternoon on. But, I secure the balloons and the wax snugly behind the passenger seat. This is going to be fine.

Since I am obsessing about gas and the environment, and since the interior of my car is about 150 degrees because of the black leather and the August midday sun, I open the sunroof. I just saw on tv that UNDER 45 mph, you are getting better gas mileage with the windows down and the sunroof open. If you are going OVER 45 mph, you are better off running the air and cutting the drag. Once underway, I open the windows and appreciate the breeze.

Which toys playfully with the knot I tied around the wax bottle. Coyly, the balloons rise over the back of the passenger seat and flirt with me in the rear view mirror.

Then, predictably, one pops through the sunroof. At this point, I have pushed the button which closes the sunroof s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully. It slowly mashes one of the balloons like a toddler's head in the opening. One balloon is out flapping in the wind at 46 mph, one is caught by the window against the frame of the car, the rest are jammed behind the headrest of the passenger seat. It is several miles before the one on the outside pops - I didn't pull over because...I was just struck that it might be interesting to see where this controlled event would take me.

Well, of course, one place it took me was being pointed at by small children in passing mini vans. Another place was a feeling of living on the edge...in a non -sky diving, no bungie cord sort of way.

When I get to the first place I am putting out signs I take the pictures above. Now I have a blog. It seems silly not to share. This morning I was talking to another agent about going with flags instead of balloons. I am going to order them right now.

Picture a Ferris Wheel

2008-07-30T18:22:00.004-04:00

Horses love playing with their food. I feed our horses round bales of hay - if you are familiar with previous domestic episodes, you know the nature of those. Anyway, the citizens of our barn love unwrapping the hay from the bale - much like playful kittens with a toliet paper roll. Once they get it unrolled, they roll in it, pee in it, poop in it and make it inedible. I've been so thrilled at the cost difference between the round and square bales, this hasn't really bothered me until lately, when the effects of this long hot dry summer have impacted the cost of the bales negatively. Now, like all problems, there is a solution to this situation and it involves tools, a trip to the Farm/Tractor Store and lifting something awkward and heavy all by myself. It's called a round bale feeder and looks (when put together) a lot like an eight foot in diameter ferris wheel made out of 16 gauge tubular steel (about as thick as your wrist) welded together that slips over the top of the bale. The idea is that the horses will put their heads through the spaces in the feeder (where the seats would be if it were truly a ferris wheel), eat but be unable to stand on the bale and crush it, strew it and mess it up. This saves you money and hay and according to the people who make bale feeders, enough money to pay for the bale feeder in two or three bales. Oh, the other reason I didn't buy a bale feeder before was because the guy who sells me the hay said I didn't need one. Of course.

SO last night, C. and I went to pick up the feeder which comes in three convenient (if you are 5'10" man) sections, each weighting about 80 lbs. These sections fit easily into the back of the truck and in no time we are on our way to Bob Evan's to get a nice meal. (It makes us feel good to eat there because it's the reverse of eating at Pizza Hut - instead of being the oldest we are usually the youngest in the restaurant). To C.'s credit, he did ask if I would need help getting the bale feeder out of the truck when we got home and I said, Oh, no! I don't think so! I'll just drag it out. Actually that was pretty simple. Once I drove the truck into the pasture, I was able to flip those sections right out on to the ground pretty close to where I thought the feeder would end up.

I'm excited to notice that the feeder actually has the hardware required to put it together - 6 carriage bolts and nuts- already in the holes. All I have to do is undo them, slide the next section into place and do them back up. Easy!

The first five go fine. They were only finger tightened. The sixth and last bolt has paint spilled on the threads and the nut is now fouled with the paint. I need a tool.

I know everyone has a thing, a permanent short cut in their brain which causes them to make the same mistakes over and over. Mine is an infantile need to avoid using the actual tool best designed for a job and make something that is completely inappropriate work. It starts like this in my brain: "I could use a tool for this. The tools are in the tool room. All the way over there. BUT I have a high heel, a roll of duct tape, a bottle opener, a dog leash, a tire iron, a bungee cord and a burned out halogen bulb within reach. Perhaps one of those will work?" I try using the dog leash to improve my grip on the nut. I jam the bottle opener against the carriage bolt to keep it from rolling. I use a piece of duct tape on the dog leash to make it tighter around the nut. I pound the whole mess with the high heel just because I'm frustrated and can't reach the tire iron. I can't think of anything to use the halogen bulb for. Whew! The bolt and nut are finally free after 30 minutes. At least I didn't have to take five minutes and walk to the tool room for a wrench or pliers!

Now it's time to put the feeder together. The first two sections go together easily: in fact after the first section, I'm proud of my short learning curve - I get the idea it's better to put both bolts through the holes and then tighten them, rather than one at a time.. I am so good at this!

In fact, my brain is really cooking now. It occurs to me that if I STAND THE FEEDER UP, I WON'T HAVE TO SIT IN THE PEED IN, POOPED IN HAY TO DO THE LAST NUT!!!! It's fairly easy to rock it into position on its edge. Now it really does look like a ferris wheel! Whew! It's eight feet in diameter. I'm....five feet. The last section with the loose bolt is now three feet over my head. But, hey it's round and I can just roll it over until the section is within easy reach. I get it rolling and of course, down the hill it goes.

It comes to rest against a tree finally, and it doesn't really look all that banged up. For some reason it doesn't roll back up the hill as easily (with the one part still not fastened) as it rolled down, so after about three tries I figure out that I better get that one last bolt done. It's the fouled bolt and there are no dog leashes, high heels, duct tape or bottle openers within reach! Heck, I can't even SEE the halogen bulb if I wanted it. I use a stick from the tree to poke out most of the paint and then manage to get the nut on the bolt, most of the way up. I roll the feeder back up the hill.

Once in position, all I have to do is flip it back down and I'm ready to go. Now, it is an immutable law of physics that a five foot person with a reach of about five foot six inches can not get to a point on an eight foot circle where you can become a human fulcrum and pull it over. I wedge the thing against the fence, sprint for the truck for that bungee cord and before you can say "you could have had C. do this really easily last night and all it would have cost you is kissing him tenderly in appreciation" I've got it that bungee cord up and over the top. One yank and (although all 180lbs narrowly miss hitting me in the head) it's over! It's even over a pile of hay!

I let the horses out of their stalls and eagerly wait for them to see it and use it. The first four walk past it toward the field where the grass is, never even noticing the new toy. Number five, Mr. Doc-who-has-issues, braces himself against the barn wall and screams at it as if he's just seen a shark in the pasture. After a few days, I am sure he will take right to it.

Crows

2008-07-30T18:06:00.007-04:00

My dogs and my grandsons have no 'disgust' discernment. There isn't anything in any state of decay that they won't poke with a stick or drag from its resting place.

So, one afternoon in July, I wasn't surprised when I found them hovering over a dead crow in the side yard. Eldest Grandson indeed was poking it with a stick and Youngest Grandson was wringing his hands. He's had some issues with death ever since the unfortunate "the hamster bit me and I threw him and now he won't move, woops he is still alive" fiasco. EG watches the news, he knows about West Nile virus. He knows, with the certainty of a nine year old, that something must be done with a dead bird. Youngest Grandson is convinced that if we just give it some water, it will be okay. It worked for the hamster. It takes some persuading to get him to realize that a bird doesn't just sleep in the yard with its legs up in the air. EG still wants to know what I am going to do with it.

Now, that's a problem. If I just throw it in the bushes, the dogs (who are waiting impatiently for the kids to give up the stick poking so they can commence with the dismemberment) will drag it back on the lawn. If I bury it, they probably will just dig it up. It doesn't seem right somehow to just put it in the trash. (I have no logical explanation for this conclusion in retrospect.) And yet, it is so hot I just can't think what to do.

I tell EG we are doing nothing.

He looks me dead in the eye and says, "Nothing?"

I said, "Yes, we are doing nothing."

"Why?" he asks. A reasonable but irritating question.

"Because," I say, "Because it's hot and I can't think and I'm having a hot flash. That's why!"

I bribe YG with unlimited hose use and he finally gives up trying to make me do something about the crow. EG has learned not to do anything past the hot flash statement.

Several days go by and I still haven't figured out what to do with the crow. I can't seem to get Charles interested in taking care of it. It's taking on mythical proportions now. It's a special bird, and needs a special ceremony. Bright light fills my head. The CHIMNEA!

I get some gloves and pick up the bird - not any better for being several days older. I walk it up to the deck and place it gently in the firebox of the chimnea. I go get some dryer lint (extremely flammable - someday I'll tell you how I learned that little bit of information. I didn't have to wax my brows for several months.) and pile it on top of the bird. I get some nice dry firewood and put that on top, too. I say a few words about what a noble bird a crow is. That I haven't really been negligent - I was just waiting for the planets to be correctly aligned, for the time to be right, for the inspiration to be present to send it out to the universe. I take the long bic lighter, light the lint and in a flash that bird is on its way to heaven. Too late I wonder whether I can die from breathing the smoke.

All that took place on a Friday and by Monday morning, the crow is a distant memory. I have to drive Daughter In Law to the dentist with YG because he knocked his front teeth out so I'm rushing around. Before I go upstairs for a shower I notice the dogs are on the porch. They look so cute lying in the sun. I'll just leave them out there til I'm ready to go.

I take my shower and I actually have clean clothes so I'm feeling pretty spiffy. My hair got wet so I can push it into a style sort of. I like to pretend I have the kind of hair you can do that with. This only works until I look in the rear view mirror of the car, so I'm savoring these last few minutes of feeling positive about my appearance. On the way down stairs I stop in the living room to put on my cleanest shoes. The first thing I notice is that there appears to be charred meat all over the living room rug.

I wonder, could the dogs have figured out how to get the frig open? I can see the kitchen from the living room. Everything out there seems to be fine. I lean down closer to the charred meat. It is meat and feathers...Charred meat and feathers. And bones. Yup, there are bones there too. Despite my best efforts, the dogs have resurrected that crow.

Now I know you are wondering how you get dead crow off an antique Nichols rug worth over $4000. Well, you get the kitchen trash can, a broom and a snow shovel. After you have finished heaving your guts into the trash can until you have nothing left but stomach lining, you use the broom to push the charred bits onto the snow shovel. Then you march out onto the deck where the dogs are hiding and hurl it right out on the lawn. You don't really care anymore.

Then you scrub your arms and hands with bleach and hot water, gag up some ginger ale you thought you might be able to hold down and make a few passes with the rug shampooer.

Now I'm late and it's time to go. I'm not at all surprised when I turn on the car radio and the first tune that comes up is Cheryl Crow singing "Come Again."

Creamed

2008-07-30T16:34:00.003-04:00

Because of the no job, no money situation I'm in right now, I spend a lot of time doing nothing but feeling guilty. Especially when the rest of the world is whizzing by my front door on their way to work. Out and About. Places To Go, People To See. Me on the porch, watching.

This morning I decided that guilt about this situation is stupid and I

deserve to spend some quality time with myself on the deck. (Which I

scrubbed with bleach Tuesday afternoon to get rid of the mold - I'd also covered the summer furniture cushions, cleaned the grill, cleaned the glass on the table on both sides, scrubbed down the furniture, put out new candles, made an arrangement for the table, put new wood in the chimnea - yes, there were still feathers in it) I had a pint of strawberries and like all the women in my family, I happened to have an aerosol can of Redi Whip in the fridge.

I carried my treat out to the deck, put my feet up on the new, freshly

covered cushions, dispensed myself some cream, and started

enjoying my strawberries. I had the stereo on really loudly, because I

spent yesterday putting together a Tribute To Chuck (the Hubby) cd for his birthday party and I wanted to hear how it went together.

During a particularily mellow song, I noticed some noise, which I

thought possibly was one of the infamous BIT ERRORS my illegal downloading program is always warning me about. The song ended, and I could still hear the noise. Maybe I left the hose running? Maybe the stereo speakers were EXPLODING JUST IN TIME FOR THE FREAKING PARTY ISN'T THAT JUST MY LIFE- CRAP!

Suddenly, the Redi Whip can lifted right up off the table. Right into the

air. In front of me! Behind it was a pool of cream! It was shooting out

the side of the can, with enough force to pilot the can all over the table top, spewing dairy product. Now it was all over the newly scrubbed floor, all over the dogs (it always seems to involve dogs) all over me, all over the wall of the house. Just as suddenly, all the bees left the crabapple tree and swarmed the cream. I grabbed the can and put my mouth over the hole. Wait, that's HUFFING and dangerous! I tried putting my hand over it, but I just got a palm of sticky cream.

I hurled the can onto the lawn (not far from where I hurled the crow parts). Last time I checked it was going in circles, covered with bees.

I have decided I don't have time for a job outside the house. Hell, it just took me four hours to clean up after I made myself a snack.

This TIme It is Kinky

2008-07-30T16:29:00.002-04:00

Mums! The real harbinger of fall! The geese are starting to travel, the barn swallows are gone - it's time to change the decor on the porch from summer to fall.

SO, I went up to Mrs. King's to get some mums - giant ones, she's got - 3.49 at piece, unless you get 7 in which case she gives you the 8th one free.

I get eight, load them in the truck and go in to pay. Guess who's at the checkout? C's sister Nancy. We make artificial small talk, it's painful.

When I get home I spend about an hour staring at the porch and trying to figure out the best way to get all the dead annuals out of the pots, throw out the potting soil (which is about five years old) and get the pots down the stairs. It seems easiest to empty the pot over the rail into the bed of the little trailer I can put on the back of the golf cart and then haul it to the manure pile, where it will be regenerated over the winter into GOOD potting soil.

I get potting soil all over the porch doing this, so I decide I have to wash it off with the hose. I get the new curly hose out. Not sure I like it though, it tends to kink.

When I get finished washing off the porch, I move to the front steps. Now in order to do this the easiest way, I pull the golf cart and trailer ALL THE WAY UP the path in front of the steps. I realize too late that this may mean I have to back the trailer up - something I am not good at. I defer that decision until I am finished.

It's dark when I finally get all the mums planted, all the pots emptied and the path washed off with the curly hose. I'm still not nuts about the curly hose - as I said, it kinks. I'm ready to move that trailer now. I think it will probably be easier if I pull it forward even through some bushes, than it would be too back it down the little hill, possibly jack knifing it.

All seems to be going well. As I pull around the front, I show off by picking up the trash can from the front yard - like a rodeo princess - without even stopping the cart. No one is watching, but I feel good about it.

Turning right around the house, I notice the golf cart is slowing down and the trailer isn't rolling right. Even if I PUSH THE GAS IN ALL THE WAY, the damn thing is slowing down. The cart is cocked at a funny angle. I take my foot off the gas and the golf cart actually goes BACKWARDS about fifteen feet. Completely on its own! Weird!

I think to myself, I better get off and see what the deal is. In the dark I notice something light green and thin protruding from behind the rear left wheel. In the dark, I run my hand under the wheel. The first thing I feel is the nozzle to the hose snug up against the axle. The next thing I feel is the hose - completely tensed, now about 1/4 of an inch in diameter, ready to recoil the minute the tension is relieved. My new curly hose is stretched twice it's original length, tight.

Of course, the water is still on, adding to the drama.

I try to back the trailer up to loosen the situation up. The trailer jackknifes. The hose doesn't come off.

I unscrew the nozzle, turn the water off. Try to lift the cart. Nothing. The hose is jammed up between the axle and the wheel. In fact, it's wrapped around twice.

I figure out the best thing to do is detach the hose from the faucet and drive the golf cart forward dragging the hose with it, around the house to where there was more light. I figure when I release the tension on the hose, it will spring back to it's convenient curly shape. No, it doesn't. I now have a 25 dollar, 1/4 inch diameter perfectly straight hose that leaks attached to my trailer. Much like the others that I was trying to replace. Except it doesn't seem to kink anymore.

When C. got home he was able to get the hose out from around the axle. But it still leaks and no longer curls up. The mums look good though.

Hay La Lu Ya

2008-07-30T16:23:00.004-04:00

I've been having trouble getting in touch with our hay guy. I was over there a couple of times, called a couple of times, and he just doesn't seem to be around. Because I watch too much Court TV, this morning around 7:30am I checked his barn and the outs for signs that something horrible had happened, but nothing. I actually thought I shouldn't be leaving fingerprints when I helpfully latched the banging screen door to the porch. Spent a few minutes thinking about that scene in "In Cold Blood". Anyway, since I couldn't find him (and for those of you who would know - this is the famous brawny, handsome Mennonite Guy) I realized I had to find some other source for my immediate needs.

Since my life is complicated by my penchant for saying yes to everything my family needs, I had to rush home so I could watch Youngest Grandson while his mother got her hair done. (Something I don't have time for because I'm too busy saying yes to ...you get the idea) I figured YG could come with me on the great Hay Hunt.

YG and I took off down the road, playing follow the dots with farms that had hay signs out but nobody home. Maybe there was a Hay Guy Convention some place, rife with John Deere Shirts and net backed baseball caps. Driving down 322 I am talking to YG about all the things he can see from his car seat in the truck - stop signs, trucks, what's going on in other people's back seats, 24 horses grazing peacefully in the parking lot of the truck repair place, pumpkins in a .....WAIT JUST A MINUTE!!!!

Do you remember that game "One Of These Things Doesn't Belong Here?" I was never very good at it because it made sense to me that an ice cream cone would be inside a mirror, just take a look at my house or my desk top. So it took me a few seconds to really understand that the horses didn't belong in the parking lot. I turned the truck around and screeched to a halt just as Ms Alpha Mare decided the pasture was greener on the other side of the road. Cars, trucks etc all were skidding to a stop - I parked my truck with the four ways right across the highway and jumped out to...I didn't know what the heck I was going to do.

I waved my arms around for a few seconds and persuaded Ms Alpha Mare to take her herd back across the road to the parking lot. Some of these horses were wearing coats, all of them had halters, there were ponies and thoroughbreds and paints and drafts - the only thing missing was zebras! By the time she gets them back across the road, several other women have jumped out of their cars and are shouting WHAT SHOULD WE DO TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR HORSES at me. I explain that THIS TIME THEY AREN'T MINE!!! At that very moment, the whole herd takes off across the back of the parking lot, fortunately in the opposite direction of the highway. I jump back into the truck where YG has been waiting patiently and take off down the road. I can see the horses through the trees and behind the houses, tails high, Arabs prancing, thoroughbreds strutting, ponies scurrying to keep up, they remind me of colorful litter being blown before the wind. Suddenly, I loose them behind a small hill, and the other cars that have been giving chase stop suddenly and empty out.

One woman who swears she has no horse experience but has a carload of toddlers says, I'll watch your kids while you go help! Another woman in business dress and I go over the hill and find them grazing in a small field and off in the distance I see a thin man and a tiny woman holding buckets and leads.

The woman in business dress (here after known as WIBD) gets Mz Alpha Mare and another horse by the halter and starts leading them toward the tiny figures in the distance. I take out a dollar bill and crinkle it at a grazing horse nearby. Many people don't know this, but it's a great way to get a horse's attention. They think you are rattling a candy wrapper and might share. This pretty thoroughbred lets me grab her halter and off we go, a handful of ponies in tow.

We catch up with the thin man with the bucket who is apologizing to every one. He has a pile of leads and we are hooking everyone up. With about 19 of them under control, the tiny woman who has now arrived thanks us all, but definitely wants us to go so she can fall apart.

On the way back to our cars (where WIBD and I realize we have left our children with a total stranger) WIBD and I chat about horses. She says she has two, and I say right now I have five and we nod at each other knowingly. There will be no judgement from us about horses getting out! Fortunately, the kids are safe - the woman with the toddlers is running back and forth from car to truck saying Your Nanna Is Coming! Your Mommy is Coming!

Woman with Toddlers, WIBD and I laugh like old friends, joke about all being in this place where we are needed and the unpredictable way a morning can change. We laugh about the story we will all tell at dinner. We climb into our cars and trucks and...

Of course my truck won't start. Of course it doesn't start. YOU KNEW IT WOULDN'T START!

I try over and over. YG helpfully tells me to give it some gas. Then asks if the horses broke the truck. If his dad can fix it. Woman with toddler has noticed that I'm not moving and climbs out of her car.

First thing she says is Praise Jesus. That sort of takes me back. Then she starts pushing on the front of the truck. We manage to get the truck pushed into a driveway.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you have a car problem a guy appears? Now this man somehow missed 2 dozen horses running through his yard, but the sound of the truck misfiring has brought him out of his house. He bangs on the hood and I open it and he says, You have some kind of fuel problem.

I know a little about cars. I already KNEW I had a fuel problem. YG knew I had a fuel problem. The gas gauge says 3/4 full, but it won't fire up. The car guy ( he admits that he sort of likes to fiddle with cars, part time gosh golly) is also dressed almost identically to me, which is unnerving. I am wearing a hooded sweatshirt, sweat pants and a flannel barn coat sort of thing. He believes it's a fuel filter and he wants to know when truck had a tune up. I explain that is not my job so I don't know. He looks disgustedly at the corrosion on the battery terminals. "These are bad," he says, "but I don't think they are the problem." Before he can pull out the dipstick and check the oil I thank him SO much for his help, and ask the Woman with Toddler to go to a very near service station and ask them to send a tow truck. She says, I'd hate to have them tow you for no reason. She doesn't understand that I would write a check right now for $500 if this nightmare would end. I say, No really you've been such a help, could you please just send a tow truck? She praises Jesus again, says she will, and Car Repair Guy asks me if there is anything else he can do for me. (?) I thank him again and apologize for clogging his driveway. He says it's not a problem, he has no where to go. Imagine my surprise.

I know you are wondering when this is going to end. Soon, really soon.

While we are sitting there, Mr. YG is asking questions. What is this? What is that? on the dashboard of the truck. He gets around to the fuel tank selector switch. You see, the truck has TWO fuel tanks, I explain. He says, Well, why don't you try the other one?

Why, indeed?

I switch the switch. I turn the ignition. It fires right up.

I hightail it out of there to the service station and tell them to cancel the tow truck. I meet up with Woman With Toddler and, bless her, she was heading back to me with bottles of water and lollipops. We joke some more and she assures me that Jesus is my Saviour, and I agree with her.

I finally do get some hay, and I get it for a bargain price. When asked by his mother what happened on our hay hunting he says Well, we got hay. That's all that he thought was unusual. What have I done to this child?

Snow,Golf, Insomnia and Dog Poo

2008-07-30T16:11:00.003-04:00

Insomnia is one of the things I enjoy most about menopause. When I fly at night across country, I always look down at those twinkling lights and think, "Hey, look at all those women watching Court Tv!" Last night Court TV was a rerun and I had memorized all the forensics

already (it's sort of like a correspondence course) so I was surfing

through the channels.

Did you know that there is actually a whole channel on cable devoted to sports? Apparently there must be men who are up all night (though I don't know any) who watch sports. Any sport. Also, apparently, these same men LISTEN to other men talk about sports. I know - think about it! Men LISTENING for hours! Oh well, next life I'll get me one of these.

A guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt was interviewing Tiger Woods. I may

live in Honey Brook, but Honey Brook is not under a rock, so I know

Tiger Woods is a great golfer. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he has perfect teeth. I haven't the foggiest notion what they were

talking about but the image of golf just seems to have stuck in my head.

It's been very very cold here on the farm and we've had record amounts of lingering snow. For weeks it seems that the ground has been covered with what started out as lovely drifts of pristine white which aged into lumpy masses of grey sludge and ice dotted with gravel, branches and unfortunately, dog poo. I don't care too much about the gravel and the branches, but as it got warmer and the snow melted more and more, it was all too clear that my dogs had been taking less and less time to find a private place away from the house and were just rushing out, going, and rushing back to the warmth. My front lawn looked like someone was lobbing in poopy with a trebuchet. C, the long suffering husband who barely tolerates dogs, came home during daylight one afternoon and said, well, he said a lot of things, the gist of which was that the four hundred pounds of recycled kibble on the lawn had to disappear or else.

As is my habit when faced with a task, I gather the right tools and

systematically attack. Okay. I don't do that, but I like to think I have my own effective process. I did go out on the lawn to ponder the

properties of what I needed to remove. Some were pretty close to their original consistency, some had deteriorated to beigey fibrous matter, and unfortunately some reminded me dogs derive no nutritional value from popcorn.

I kicked some with my toe and it rolled nicely, free of the frozen

grass and entirely removable. I had a plan. I would get the snow shovel, the broom, push the poo onto the snow shovel with the broom, and fling it over the fence into the pasture.

Didn't work. In the simplest terms, whatever rolled on to the snow

shovel when pushed with the broom rolled right off when you moved the shovel to the next pile. Okay. I started to sweep the poo from all

over the lawn to the sidewalk where I figured I could scoop it up all

at once, once I had it in a pile. I found I could actually get some

loft on the poo with the broom, and I started thinking about golf

again, and then I remembered that I had a set of golf clubs in the

barn, and the rest is history.

I primarily used a Hogan Plus with Bounce Shoe. A nine iron. The

angle of the head seemed to be most appropriate for the different

sizes, shapes and weights of the material being moved. I found if I

got low in the hips, sighted along the shaft and concentrated on my

wrists, bring the club high and wide over my shoulders on the upswing, I got poopy right over the fence. A warning, though. I recommend you only do this when temperatures have remained below freezing for about a week. You'd have to experiment with different clubs for other weather conditions.

Wet Feathers

2008-07-30T16:01:00.003-04:00

What was I thinking?

I gave our two dogs an old feather comforter to lie on in the basement. One day, they ripped it to shreds. Of course. Clouds of feathers drifted into the corners, stuck to the windows, the water heater and the dehumidifier. As episodes go, this one was at least fluffy and sort of funny, but I was in my January hibernation mode and thought I would postpone sucking them up with the vacuum until I had nothing else to do. In this kind of mood, I would postpone breathing until a more convenient time.

On a day that was unseasonably warm and sunny, I crawled out of my cave, scratched my back on a tree and decided now was the time. C was nagging at me to get it done and it might even be fun!

A trickle of water snaked out from under the outside basement door toward my feet the minute I opened it. It was dragging a feather. And another. And another. I stared while the feathers pooled around my feet. I tried to push the door open but I could only budge it a couple of inches. It was like there was something behind it. Through the window I saw that something. Feathers. Wet feathers.

The floor was covered with pools of water and pools of feathers. A breeze from the open door blew some of the dry ones on to the wet ones. They became wet ones, loosing their fluffy white purity to become menacing and grey.

I had to wade through piles and piles of dirty wet feathers and gallons of muddy water to get to the shop vac. It was parked next to the laundry tub, which was overflowing. This tub collects water from the washer on the third floor of the house and directs it out into the back yard and occasionally clogs up with lint. Once I found a drown rat head down in the drain. Another story for another day. Today there was no rat, just the dread of finding one.

Just from wading across the floor I was looking tarred and feathered. Each time I moved, drifts of feathers stirred, and lemming like, jumped to join their buddies in the puddles. Too late, just as I plugged in the vac, I realized I was standing in a puddle - waiting to be fried like Wiley Coyote.

I directed the nozzle at the biggest lump of wet feathers and it sucked for about thirty seconds before it clogged. I got a thin piece of PVC from the corner and shoved it down inside the hose. Scrunching the hose up like an accordion, I managed to push out a seven inch wad of wet feathers and mud. Did I mention our basement floor is dirt?

This is where the snow shovel comes in. See, snow is sometimes soggy and heavy, and sometimes dry and fluffy. Just like the feathers! I did use the vac on the dry feathers. The occasional piece of gravel sucked up actually made the dry feathers move through the hose better. They sounded kind of cheerful rattling up the hose. Twigs and small pieces of paper caused even the dry feathers to clog the hose. I'm only relating this because I have a naive notion that someday this will happen to someone else.

I have a vacuum canister full of feathers and I am going to have to ask C. to help me empty it. It weighs somewhere around a thousand pounds. This is going to lead to some nasty man/woman discussions involving antique plumbing woes, the behavior of my dogs and the way women solve problems. I also have three trash bags full of wet feathers.

I am so glad we tip our garbage men.

Geriatric Lesbian Sex On A Ladder

2008-07-30T15:54:00.001-04:00

Geriatric Lesbian Sex on an Extension Ladder

I am a Realtor - which means I go to a lot of parties with a lot of other Realtors in houses that we can't afford and will never sell. These parties are given by builders who have to spend great amounts of money on entertainment for business in order to get tax deductions and keep their trophy (second) wives busy while they consider whether to have an affair with a tennis pro or start a catering business.

I was on my way to one of these parties when I encountered one of our older agents wandering around the parking lot. I said, Doreen - come with me to this stupid party! She said, I can't - I locked my keys in my car! Come help me get them out! She hands me a wire coat hanger and I twist it into my best abortionist-hook-format and start trying to fish it through her volvo wagon's sadistically designed windows.

No luck. I say, well, I'll drive you to your house and you can get your spare set. She says, My house is locked! I said, did you hide some keys in your garden or something? She says, No. I'm feeling bad for her now, but I bet that tomorrow when this is all just an unpleasant memory she will be burying a tuna can in the side yard with every key to every locked thing she owns.

We decide she has the following options: Break a window in her car, break a window in her house, call a locksmith for her house or call a locksmith for her car.....

We opt to break a window at her house, climb in my car and head off.

When we get there, we realize that she has storms and regular windows on the ground floor - all closed. We would have to break TWO windows. I notice that on the second floor, she has a window open, with only a screen. I point it out and Doreen says, I have a ladder!!

We get the extension ladder off her fence and haul it over to the wall of the house. We heft it up and I'm thinking, this is pretty cool for two old women like us! With great humility, I confess to Doreen that I have tremendous upper body strength from all the crap I do at the farm. I show her my muscle. I admire my muscle - bulging as it does through the sleeve of my brand new Talbot's shantung silk wrap top in Sage Green (Ripper Gurl is going to want to borrow this - it goes great with my new bling I got off the dead lady - another story for another time)

The thing is though - it is time to climb that ladder. I tell Doreen she is on her own. There are many things I can do with aplomb but I can not climb into high heel shoes without getting vertigo. She says that she used to mountain climb in Europe every summer when she was kept (yes, kept) by a Junior Ambassador to some country that doesn't exist anymore. I say, Have at it! and start to admire my muscle again.

I am pretty much concentrating on something that might be skin cancer on my upper arm when I hear a rustle and I turn around and Doreen is standing at the bottom of the extension ladder in nothing but her bra and panty hose.

yes.

My first thought is that this has all been an elaborate ruse to get me over to her house so she can seduce me into some weird geriatric lesbian sex orgy that involves an extension ladder. She sees my bewildered look and before I can say, I want to be friends and I'm not even remotely bi-curious she says, I don't want to rip this suit - it's a Worth from Paris.

OH! well, that makes sense.

I'm still digesting this when she starts climbing the ladder and I find I am staring at parts of her that I haven't seen on my mother. I think, This could make me BLIND! but it's lilke a car wreck and I can't stop looking.

She climbs up and up and then, using the pen knife that I carry because I am always needing one to cut duct tape or pry open clam shells. She slits the screen and with amazing agility for a woman her age in control tops, slithers over the sill like a baby seal and falls with a soft thunk on the floor of her upstairs bathroom.

I don't know what I was thinking, but I assumed she would put some clothes on before she came out, but NO she comes down stairs, lets her dogs out and stands in front of me pointing out the varietal digitalis (foxglove plants) that are springing up in her garden path. Just as she bends over to pull a weed, I say Doreen! we should be going, and she pulls on her clothes.

Later, at the stir fry bar (the newest wrinkle in local extreme catering) I find myself telling this story to a woman I don't know. Fortunately she was drunk on tax deduction open bar box wine, so I know she won't remember, the next time we are wrangling over a radon inspection for some town house.