After 13 Years, I Clean

Nutty with quarantine I cleaned a shelf I'd covered with newspaper back in 2007. Hadn't cleaned it since. It's a closet for canned goods, nobody sees it, and a bottle of balsamic vinegar exploded in there four or five summers ago, so I was extra reluctant but cleaned it, one shelf took 30 minutes, and laid down a sheet of 2020 newspaper as a reminder to clean that shelf again in 2033. A few days ago I manned up and organized the junk drawer. 

 

To my delight it yielded an end cap for a chair leg, five kinds of tape (scotch, masking, electrical, strapping tape, pink barrier tape), numerous craft sticks, two partly-burnt sage bundles, twine, red gift ribbon, 13 keys and various scraps of velcro I will surely need after I throw them away, and an NOAA weather radio, a transistor, useful until I moved out here, too far from a tower to catch a signal. The water-purification tablets got transferred to the camping-gear drawer. NOAA now broadcasts through an app. Packaged hardware for an office chair, long since given away, I had labeled and dated: again, 2007. Rather than tossing it I kept it. Who knows when I'll need it? That's what a junk drawer is for: contingencies. This is the "after" picture.

The War On Shrubs

Armed with the lopper I cut through thickets of invasive bush honeysuckle, starting with the path to the creek (wanted to take a friend there). My muscles grew as I spent a couple of hours per day lopping the fountain-like woody shrubs despite having to do it seated, and I proudly finished the path of about 150 feet to the creek's stony little "beach" where my friend and I basked, six feet apart, in the late-autumn sunlight.

 

That was such a tonic I tackled the invasive honeysuckle surrounding the house, sipping nutrients and water away from the oaks and hickories that rightly grow here. Yes, the cream-colored honeysuckle blossoms in summer are pretty, and so are the red berries on them now. But the price of pretty was the next generation of native Missouri trees. Birds don't care for honeysuckle berries; I understand they are low on nutrients, like candy. One morning I saw a cedar waxwing bite one and then fly away.

I can lop shrub trunks and branches an inch or less in diameter. Hired a man with a power saw to cut the rest. Before he arrived, I tied red ribbons on the young oaks and hickories I didn't want cut. I explained this, asked him to cut only the honeysuckle, "the fountain-looking things." He kinda-sorta did. There were plenty left. Spent this morning clipping and stacking the one-inch-or-less honeysuckle branches. The berries in the second photo are the fruit of the shrub in the first photo.

 

Invasive honeysuckle is truly removed either by ripping it out of the ground, roots and all, by fire, or by painting the cut stumps with Roundup or Rodeo herbicide (no other herbicide will work). Can't do any of those. When the shrubs grow back, though, they'll mostly be an inch or less across. Then they'll face the business end of my lopper, its blade sharpened daily, and I'm just as persistent as they are.

Keep Going

Was walking in a park savoring a beautiful weekday afternoon. Afternoons are a world I'm still exploring, closed to me for the 30 years I spent in offices hiding two or three jars of spices such as peppercorns or cinnamon in the desk drawer so when most depressed I could take whiffs of a natural, beautiful smell. In my basement office, also a supply closet, I hung a calendar of spectacular natural scenes, and prayed that someday, someday. . . I stayed there because I couldn't risk losing the health insurance. I'm much better off now.

At the park were a few other untethered people, older men, and a woman in her twenties sitting in her truck fiercely texting, and I thought, "Oh God, I remember that." I trudged into the wet sand beneath the highway bridge, to the river's edge and its beer-colored water, because every walk needs novelty; or else, under COVID-19 awareness, each day feels too much the same. We are all very tired, maybe dazed. Most of us are coping as best we can. We miss our communal lives and casual contact. It hurts to give that up for so very long, and some people won't, and they get sick and make others sick. I mean, the virus is reaching an astounding new peak in mid-America.

So it's more important than ever to strictly observe the health guidelines. I follow them. I had just visited an open-air fruit and vegetable market, purchasing bell peppers, cauliflower, scallions and fresh ginger for a first try at an exotic recipe, when this sign reminded me to choose to stay in my lane no matter how careworn and discouraged, because this too shall pass.

Pan Dowdy

My pots and pans hang above the stove and this is so convenient I forget that they are on display although rather the worse for years of wear. Stymied for something to do because my satellite Internet is so bad, my biker bro-in-law on a visit about a year ago asked me if I had any of those copper-colored curly-scrubby-scouring pads. I said no, why. He said he wanted to clean my pans for me.

 

I had long before ceased to be conscious of the state of dishware and cookware 10 to 20 years old. That it functioned was all I cared about. But after the visit I reproached myself and bought copper-colored scourers. It took half an hour to shine up just the interior of one small "stainless" skillet, using first soaking and dish liquid, then baking soda, then vinegar fizzing the baking soda, meanwhile scrubbing until the copper scrubby was in shreds. Then several rounds in the dishwasher. All this did not vanquish the brownish varnish, but it did make the pizza pan peel.

I settled for 50 percent improvement. Then on another day I began lapidary work on the pan's exterior, but soon lost heart.

One day this summer I bought new dishes and bowls and felt like a bride. But I forgot about the dowdy pans until today. Not an hour later I ordered a new nonstick pizza pan, small skillet, and omelet pan. Please see the photo, which I display as art, hoping you might validate my inkling that buying new was a good and reasonable thing to do.

The Picture of Happiness

I pined for a Nikon camera, nothing fancy or weighty, just a point-and-shoot with a few bells and whistles, and around 2004 finally bought a Nikon Coolpix and loved it: great optics, a 4x zoom lens, a close-up option for intense nature photography; and I got a tripod, too, and with them snapped hundreds of gorgeous nature photos, turning some into calendars custom-made and lovingly sent 1) to my parents, who hated the calendars; one year I included a dramatic, unbeatable photo of a blacksnake, and photos of turtles, and close-ups of mushrooms, and a green bug on a pink flower; I had no clue they'd be so repelled and offended, and 2) the couple who lived on this Divine property just before me. They liked the calendars.

I hung the camera by its strap near the door, to grab when I saw deer, turkeys, sunrises, orioles & that. I'd owned other, heavier cameras, SLRs with multiple lenses. The Nikon felt so portable and good in my hand! It had a 256MB memory card, and no wireless capability. Around 2013 or 2014 its electronic shutter got gummy. It was not worth the repair. Besides, we now all carried cellphones with built-in cameras.

Realized when trying to photograph the Moon the other night how I missed the little Nikon and steady tripod mount. (The difference between amateur and wow-factor photos is the use of a tripod. )

 

Often I had thought to sell or throw away my tripod but didn't. Someday, someday. It waited patiently in its box for years until today, when I mounted on it a used Nikon Coolpix, purchased on eBay, one configured and operated very much and delightfully like the old one. Could have bought the latest model for about four times the money. Decided to see if I could again love photography enough to haul a tripod around and sit in the cold to wait for the ideal light, or wait an hour  to snap the just-right bluebird photo.

 

The 256MB memory card is now 8GB and that will be nice. Yes, to download I'll have to run a firewire between the camera and computer. So.

Here is my setup to take a photo of tonight's blue moon. I could just cry for all the time I missed my former Nikon camera, and for joy that I have one again.

Down the Road a Piece: A New Bridge

Since 2001 a thousand times on walks I crossed that crumbling concrete asphalt-topped Doc Sargent Road bridge across the creek, maybe 15 feet wide and 18 inches deep at that point, and maybe 50 times I waded beneath the bridge to hunt fossils, once scooping up a crawfish that bit me, a couple of times treading quicksand, and then after a storm one of the two ducts under the bridge got clogged with sand, and at the next serious rainstorm the mild-mannered LaBarque Creek began flooding in a foaming hurricane rush like I'd never seen, tore up stuff, then two years later did it again.

They're replacing that bridge. (Here's my 2018 post with a photo of the old bridge.) Work began in August. At 7 a.m. weekdays they're backhoeing and scooping and whatnot. Naturally I wanted to see, went over and asked a construction worker when they'd finish. He said, "Round Christmas." Here are some pictures. Where the bridge was is a tangle of naked, rusted rebar.

Considering that those toothpick-and-tar-paper new McMansions are built in two weeks from start to finish, they must be building a very good bridge here. Notice the pure-white sand. That's the sought-after St. Peters vein of sandstone than runs in a strip from Minnesota to here, and is still mined today in Pacific.

Bread Snobbishness Is on the Rise

We couldn't go out to buy bread so we made our bread: the whole nation. Of course I've always done it; my bread-making machines, one large one small, are both more than 10 years old and treasured. Fresh bread flour brings out the taste of wheat, and there's nothing like it. For 15 years now when it's sleeting and people run to the store for "bread and milk," I pity them what they think is bread. 

When I finally crept out to the store, like, in June, there was no bread flour and only a foreign brand of yeast in one-pound vacuum packaging (brand name SAF), so I bought the SAF and went online to my favorite flour purveyor, King Arthur. (If there were a mill around here, I'd buy it here.) Bread flour was sold out. I signed their waiting list and waited.

 

Meanwhile I bought healthy-type grocery-store breads: 12-grain, whole wheat, nuts and seeds, sometimes Jewish rye. When the two five-pound bags of King Arthur arrived from Kansas, I used them up. While waiting for more and again eating store-bought, I found I had become a bread snob. The bagels had no character. Squishy hamburger buns with dehydrated minced onion on top are not kaiser rolls. Sweetening syrup and preservatives marred the mass-manufactured health breads. My own (machine's) finest is its French bread. Or the pepperoni bread. Or is it the olive oil bread? The English muffin loaf? The flavorful "Cornell Bread" is a high-protein loaf scientifically developed for institutions. Its secret ingredient is one-third of a cup of soy flour. Enjoy during lockdowns.

Do you have an unused bread machine? Please don't fuss with sourdough! A machine will make every kind of bread! Beer, nuts, cheese, herbs, millet, caraway, challah, black bread, raisins. I used to mix dough with a wooden spoon, and knead and knead, and check rising dough every half-hour, but now everything goes in the pan, I press a button, then loll while it labors and bakes.

With cunning and stealth I obtained locally another two bags of King Arthur bread flour and two new bread-machine cookbooks. Blame the pandemic. I am also a fan of SAF yeast. Yes, I slice and butter and eat pieces of fresh loaves while they're still warm; that's why the picture shows the loaf raggedy where it's missing a piece.

Oh Brave and Faithful Plant

 

In late spring the baby basil plants were mostly sold, leaving only leggy and fragile ones. On the way home, the healthiest plant fell over and the stem broke. One shoot remained in that pot and two, undersized, in the other. The survivors all went into one planter because I expected to lose one.

 

I'm a good transplanter. No one else will ever know that except you and I. It is love. I love my basil annuals. Told them so and blessed them. Brought them indoors on cool nights. Moved them twice daily into the strongest summer light when the trees leafed out and cast shadows. A creature (squirrel?) always upsets and paws through the pot, but only once per season, usually soon after planting, as if to dash my hopes and grieve me. The basil always survives this. Looked up Saint Basil. Looked up Basil as a baby name. Breathed deeply. Scissored the leaves for cooking. Picked the flowering heads off so they'd keep leafing.

Today when frost is only days away I filled the chopper with garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and lemon, for pesto-making, and boiled clean a jar that held the store-bought pesto I buy when I must settle for less. (I've tried freezing, drying, and microwaving my basil harvest. Nothing but pesto works.) I thanked my plant for its beauty and fortitude as I picked off every leaf and the room filled with its sacred fragrance. This year I told it, "You are one of the great joys of my life."

Stars and Mars

Daylight veils and night-time reveals the most majestic sight of the planet Mars, like a huge red star, rising in the east soon after dark, dominating the sky. It's at its closest to the Sun right now, meaning that it's at its closest to us, and on the 16th was precisely aligned with the Earth and Sun. Oh! I tried so hard to get a photo showing how I felt when this planet appeared in the eastern windows each night, persisting, as if it wanted something. I'll give it! (This is the best my camera could do; there's a more awesome photo here.)

Dominating the southern sky not long ago were the two brilliant planets Jupiter and Saturn, so bright in the bedroom window that after settling in I got back up and went out to look at them. They're headed west, sinking soon after sunset. On December 21 (winter solstice!), look low in the southwest at sunset, and Jupiter and Saturn will be in a rare conjunction at 0 degrees of the sign Aquarius. This is also called "the Great Conjunction" and occurs every 19.6 years. Astronomers say that the star the Magi noticed and followed was a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.

This 2020 at least the planets are with us and want to entertain us!

Everyone Talks About the Ozarks

 . . . but nobody can agree on where they are, their features and borders, how to define them, what to call them. We know they're there: I just look outside or go walking. But for everyone who needs or loves clarity, I have permission from the original poster, Explore the Ozarks LLC, to publish this pleasing map. Enjoy that chicken and dumpling dinner wherever you find it!

Sassafras Magic and Lore

Pluck
the mitten-shaped leaves from the sassafras tree, then snap their stems and inhale the warm spicy sweetness. Once a guest here dug up a root and we made sassafras tea and talked about how root beer, made with sassafras, used to be actual alcoholic beer, and that sassafras twigs used to be toothbrushes, and it's good for lots of other stuff. Like what, I wondered today, and looked up all sorts of lore:

• Every part of the tree is fragrant.
• A ship, boat, or bed made of sassafras wood will keep evil spirits away.
• Tuck a leaf in your wallet or business till to stretch the money you already have. I tucked leaves between the checkbook's and account book's pages.
• It's lucky to carry some dried sassafras root with you when seeking a job.
• Rub the leaves on wounds or skin eruptions as an antiseptic and anti-bacterial treatment. That'll probably work better if the leaves haven't turned their autumn yellow.
  
• Sassafras tea is a "toner," meaning it will enhance health. The U.S. banned it in 1960 but it has been legally available since 1994. The safrole in sassafras was carcinogenic in rats given huge doses. It is now thought that no human can ingest that much safrole even if they tried, and nutmeg contains safrole too. Most store-bought sassafras drinks use artificial flavor.
  
• Dried sassafras leaves, ground up, make that "file" stuff without which gumbo is not gumbo.
• Woodpeckers and wild turkeys like the fruits.
  
• There used to be a huge sassafras industry: American sassafras was exported to Europe, where the tree is not native. Europeans liked the wood for ships and furniture. They also used sassafras as a cure for syphilis.
• Germans used to call it "fennel wood."
  
• Sassafras is the "triple goddess" tree because any one plant can have three kinds of leaves: ovate, single-lobed, and multi-lobed.

You read it here first, or second!

Happiness is a Warm Gun

I'll call it guano. Birds at my feeders left several spots on my porch screens, and just as you don't leave guano on a vehicle or your hat you don't leave it on aluminum screening either, for more than a season. The screens are beneath the eaves and rarely washed by rain.

Removing each screen and spray washing each with the hose was too much work. Spray washing the screens while they were in place, from the outside, would force guano inward onto the porch when that was the opposite of the goal. The screen frames are also old and fragile and the screening very delicately sandwiched between their pieces -- can't power-wash. And when the porch walls get wet the paint peels.

Rooting through the garage found me the answer: the old plastic-embedded-with-glitter "Splash" squirtgun, one of two. The pink squirtgun I'd favored got clogged with hard-water residue. This one still worked, and I'd kept it for 10 years thinking someday I might need it, and smack my butt and call me Sally, after filling the squirtgun with warm water I stood inside the porch and with skillful aim squirted water outward through my screens and I was pleased as punch that probably no one else in the county did the exact same thing today.

That Blue October Sky

Try explaining how blue the October sky is, how it grips even the loneliest spots on Earth and in the mind until they glow and seem meaningful when the rest of the year we don't look twice. 

 

Driving home I saw this sight and could have kept driving but scolded myself, "Time was when you'd turn around, stop, park and stand in the road to take a picture to share with everyone so they could see what you see, feel the reverence, how great it is to live here and now. Is that time gone? Are you old or just lazy? Maybe taking it for granted? What about beauty? What about awe?"

 

So I found a place to park and backtracked up the road, walking past a field of dead sunflowers on long thick stems much taller than I, with weird little gray birds shooting in and out of them. I stopped and saw they were goldfinches, not lemon-yellow anymore but wearing their duller winter corduroy. High winds roiled the grasses and treetops and filled my ears. If a car were approaching I would have to feel it through my feet. But there was no other car and I got my photo. Happy October.

You Wouldn't Be the First to Drown Here

Small wedge-shaped park on the Big River now called Rockford Beach, where I had a secret spot for fishing, has a short run of rapids, and despite all the warning signs they have now, people keep drowning in it. Today although I saw no people in the grass the parking lot was full. It so happened that a whole line of like 25 men waist-deep on river's opposite shore were rescue-service workers being trained.

There's barely any "beach," and the wardens say not to eat fish out of the Big, but on hot days families wade there, splash around, and swim across although it's forbidden, aiming to climb the rocks into that eye-socket hollow in the photo -- that's private land -- and they get caught in the current. When I moved here (19 years ago, as of tomorrow) just above the rapids was the remnants of a grain mill. After the floods of '08 -- and the Big River is the first to flood and close the roads here -- the park land was gated and locked for years, I thought forever.

But one day it opened, with all traces of the mill erased. A sandbar "island" in the middle that had attracted too much attention has been replaced by riprap. But it still has, like, the smallest and mildest-looking rip-snorting rapids, for professionals to practice with.

Goofin' Off at the Pharmacy

To build muscle, people my age need more protein, so driving home from the hair place I became roast-beef-sandwich-minded. But first, like most people my age, I stopped at the drive-up pharmacy, where I'm well-known. Charming pharm tech "Tonia" came to the window and microphone. Feeling goofy I said, "I want a roast beef sandwich. . ." and we laughed and she said, "So do I, bring me one, with fries," and we laughed some more.

On the day my hair is cut and styled I am very cute, so I chose this day and hour and really cute earrings to pick up my prescription because I'm flirting with the male pharm tech. As you know, proving your identity at the drug counter requires reciting your birth date. (When waiting in line, I am fascinated by everybody's birthday.) It happened that on one visit, after I told my birth date, the good-looking male tech said, "You're Aquarius? So am I," and we began talking zodiac signs & comets. We banter whenever he waits on me. Last week at the window he asked what I thought about the latest solar flare, adding that he plays trivia online at a local place, and I am thinking: He's cute and he's sweet on me.

Yes, I know that only batty old ladies think the pharmacist is a hot number.

Today he angled Tonia out of the window and said without preamble, "It wasn't our sun that belched, it was Beetlejuice." I was momentarily confused -- I didn't recall having a son with him, but anything is possible. Then he said, "Beetlejuice, the star. Last week I said the sun, and wanted to correct it." He meant Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion. Recently astronomers saw a very unusual flare erupting from that star. By now I'm like jelly with silliness.

I said Betelgeuse is not in the zodiac so it doesn't affect us.

Tonia, with my bag of goodies, bumped my boyfriend away from the window. It was Aquarius hilarious. She wanted a signature and a form of payment, etc. and I tried not to laugh. As I took my crisp white paper bag she asked -- it's required -- "Do you have any questions for the pharmacist?"

Cracking myself up, I said, "Why was I born?"

The Old Horseshoe

The old bent horseshoe came with the house and hung above this particular door, outside, "heels down," for, like, 15 years until one nail came loose and I took the shoe down and left it by the door intending to nail it up again, and today was the day.

It's iron, all right: hot from the sun. I admit I'd never seen or touched a real horseshoe; this one still has one horseshoe nail. Age and origin unknown. Horseshoes repel evil. The tale is told of an Irish blacksmith confronted by the Devil, who demanded shoes for his hooves, right now! The blacksmith nailed on such painful shoes that the Devil screamed, pried them off, threw them aside and vanished, never again to bother humans at their work. (If you are idle, that's another story.) The Devil, traumatized, hasn't come near a horseshoe in ages.

It's also said their crescent shape or iron content repels evil spirits and that's why it's hung above the door.

Furthermore, it's said that nailed with heels up, the horseshoe is filled with, and retains, good luck. The Divine Cabin's horseshoe had been originally nailed heels down, and plenty of folks advised me that was not lucky. The lived experience with that door -- the late Demetrius's favorite port of entry to the room he favored and trashed -- was unlucky. Others say "heels down" lets the luck pour down on everybody passing through that door. Well, that's an old wives' tale, seems to me.

I'm lucky to be the owner and beneficiary of a real horseshoe, and to have the Divine Cabin, am probably the world's luckiest person, and want to keep my luck. Nailed the horseshoe up best I could, crooked and off-center, but hey. Or maybe I should turn it sideways. But then --  heels to the right or the left?

The Last Summer Sunday

So it is: the last Sunday of summer 2020; autumn equinox is September 22. Did I have a good summer? I did my best, like everyone else, and for the first time in life ate garlic any darn time I pleased. On October 1, I have lived here 19 consecutive years, not counting the 14 months' sublet in 1998-99. Filled the hummingbird feeders to ensure the birds won't leave me. (Smile; of course they must leave, always in September's final week.) But hickory nuts began falling and exploding on the roof weeks ago, and a monarch butterfly sat on a coneflower here on August 1 -- rather early for signs of autumn. 

On the walk today, luxuriated in all the greenery, noticing, compiling a mental keepsake. Missouri goes autumn overnight. Maybe a week from now it'll be golden rather than green.

Interior signs of autumn: Scramble out to get a flu shot. Wink at the good-looking pharmacist. Unbox the "happy lamp" and use it as lighting at Zoom meetings, something unheard-of a year ago. Ordered all new winter clothes, i.e. long-sleeved silk undershirts, hooded sweatshirts, and pants with fleece interiors; new coat, socks and sneakers; and the fresh flannel pajamas ought to arrive soon. One last wash and folding of the summer sheets before exchanging them for flannel. Huge dinner plates of chili spaghetti and excessive emotions about hot drinks (I love my coffee, but didn't know my coffee loved me.)

Some folks don't like autumn, but at the equinox it's only 90 days until the solstice, and when I was in my 20s and complaining, a fellow worker in his 60s said, "Don't wish your life away."

Why Hollyhocks Are Old-Fashioned Flowers

"Old-fashioned beauty," "old-fashioned Southern favorite," "definitive old-fashioned garden plant" -- why, when someone says "hollyhocks," does "old-fashioned" precede it? These yesterday were on an island in a strip-mall parking lot: showy, heart-colored; perhaps the popular "creme de cassis" color. I want some! Blossoms the size of a face! I want to meet whoever planted them for our enjoyment. And I want to know why they're old-fashioned.

My brother-in-law just phoned and I told him "hollyhocks" and he said his grandmother mentioned hollyhocks in one of the poems she wrote.

They're originally from China, where they're called "shu kui." Google Translate says "shu" means "book" and "kui" means "God," "chief," or "serious"; Wikipedia says that in Chinese legend, Kui was the inventor of music and dancing. In 15th-century England the plant was named "holyoke." They are neither holy nor oak, but it is said, who knows if it's true, hollyhocks arrived in England from the Holy Land.

Ancient photos show the house I lived in from birth to age 7 (house built 1887; no longer standing; it's a parking lot!) had a tumbledown white-painted arched wooden trellis, with two seats.

Me and Aunt Anna in Sunday best. The car's four "ventiports" identify it as a Buick.

Photograph taken summer 1958 is of me and "aunt" Anna Savin (nee Weiss), a German who during the war dug ditches in Russia. The trellis held morning glories in season, and behind us, outside of the fence, on long bare stems, are hollyhocks. Alongside the house in spring grew violets and lilies of the valley, and in summer,  "four o'clocks," cradling smart black seeds; we also had peony bushes. A lilac bush and orange lilies bloomed out back. My parents planted none of these. All these flowers are still designated "old-fashioned" perennials. There were rambling roses, because I remember the scent and thorns.

Those are all old-fashioned flowers because they're English cottage-garden flowers, and there must have been a time when English was the type of flower garden for a Midwestern householder to have. In the language of flowers, hollyhocks mean "ambition" or "fecundity."

I remember as a kid crumbling between my wondering fingers the corncob-like stamens of the hollyhocks. The flowers in the parking lot in 2020 I did not touch.

Things I No Longer Worry About

• Did I leave the iron on?
• Did I take the meat out of the freezer so it's thawed when I get home? (There's no dinner for the family if I forgot.)
• Did I miss that important phone call?
• Will the dimestore have my size of typewriter ribbon? Or must I go downtown on Saturday to the office supply store?
• Did the bookstore already phone me saying they had my special-order book? (Why must all the books I want be "special-order"?)
• Will my airplane ticket arrive in the mail in time for my trip?
• Running up long-distance phone charges; so I'd call after 7:00 p.m.
• Will I have enough cash at the checkout?
• Did I shake every bit of sand out of the driver's side floor mat so my father won't know I went to the beach?
• Am I wearing two different color nylon stockings?
• Can I run to the grocery store in time for them to cash this check?
• Is my slip or my bra strap showing?
• Do I have a dime with me at all times in case I must make a phone call?
• Oh no, I have no quarter for the collection plate! All I have is my last dollar bill!

I'll never forget the time I went on a movie date and for some reason my mother was convinced we had gone to see a terribly forbidden movie, The Happy Hooker. Planning to catch me there, she dragged my father that evening to that movie, the first they'd probably seen in a theater in 20 years, and probably the last in their lifetimes. The joke was on them. I think Ray and I saw that evening The Towering Inferno.

Bunny 2020

This bunny is in its Eden. Always as the sun sets, a couple of bunnies enjoy dining on the part of the lawn kept mown. The day had been one of those stunningly blue and temperate June days (I think today is another). For a while this property was low on bunnies, but this year young ones were born, too young to know enough to run away from me. They grew up. So I know bunnies are thriving as they should. The second bunny ran as I approached, so this one looks lonely, but I assure you it isn't.

Territory

It's a young turtle if its shell is vividly and clearly painted and shines, and surely a young one if it's crossing a road, likely in search of a place claim-able as territory. With great self-possession -- animals seem to have more confidence as humans have less -- it held its pose as I sidled near and snapped the camera. In the background is my own home, my own protective shell. So this is a picture of what's important to us both.

On this walk just a few minutes before, yards down the road, I met a pencil-slender baby copperhead snake lounging on the gravel in the exact spot copperheads in summer quite often lounge on the gravel. Recalling well the first time I met a copperhead -- full-sized -- at that spot and nearly stepped on it, on every walk year-round I glance down at that point on the road, and step lightly. Perhaps I bring them into being by imagining them there. Happy summer solstice.

It Can't Be Beet

I grocery shop online every 16 days and have it delivered; today's delivery surprised me with vanilla yogurt instead of plain; a carton of 18 eggs rather than 12; and strangest, a bunch of fresh beets in place of a radish bunch.

How'd that happen? Indeed the illustration of the radish bunch on the order form might have looked a lot like fresh beets to the Middle Eastern middle-aged man who shopped and delivered today. He bypassed the house and I had to trot 100 yards after him to say, "I'm the first house. It says on my note, it's the first house you see." "Ho, sorry," he said, while I fled indoors; he wasn't masked like the other delivery people, and was long gone before I unpacked the groceries. The packaging and bags stank of cigarette smoke, and I thought: This time I ought to call the bosses and complain. His unusual name -- I looked it up -- is Arabic for "generous."

Annoyed, I washed and cooked the beets, which bled all over, meanwhile wondering who was this man, and where from? Syria? I happen to love beet greens and beet roots; radishes are the spartan, bloodless version, not so tasty but easier to clean up. Complain because there were 18 eggs and not 12? Divine, have you yourself ever made a mistake? (Yes.) Were folks tolerant and kind when you messed up on the job? (Mostly, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart.) Divine, you smoked for years; did people complain about the cloud of reek hanging about you? (Only once.) Could you go into a Middle Eastern supermarket with a list made of pictures and get everything just right? (No.) His job is one no one wants unless they really, really need the money. I wondered whom he is supporting. Like everybody, he's doing the best he can. I didn't call.

Violets on Earth

I have not much to say today that springtime can't say for me. First, April has had numerous sunless days. After several sunless days, turning into weeks, of no visitors and no visiting, fewer phone calls because we're all in shock and can barely mumble, and all aware we are all in the same waterlogged boat, and this is real life -- a sunny day and noticing violets at my feet felt like spiritual sustenance. I don't grow these. They're 100 percent free random grace.

Happy Earth Day!

Abnormal Groceries and Brand-Name Shame

You know how when people look in your cupboards or fridge without being asked to, you feel sort of -- naked? Or offended? As if they should beg your pardon? And how other people's cupboards and fridges seem utterly foreign?

You know how, if you have a choice, you hide generic and store brand supplies, instead putting brand-name cans and bottles out for guests? Which is why for hair products I began buying only Pantene because it was the only brand that if someone saw them in the bathroom it wouldn't embarrass me ("Aussie"? "BedHead"? "Nizoral"? "Pert"?).

You know how when you first start dating, you two go to all the best places, drink fine wine, gift the rarest chocolates, and then you settle in or marry and live like paupers scraping ash off burnt toast in dread of spending one extra penny?

Well, I'm giving all that up because now I grocery-shop online, and with the coronavirus hoarding shortages and shortfalls of this and that, one must accept substitutions for familiar name brands, allowing into my house, for the first time, strange new name brands and packaging at unfamiliar price points.

After unpacking my last grocery shipment I left the non-perishables out on top of the microwave not wanting put them away and could not figure out why, but now I think:

1) These brands are like strangers in the house and I have this weird need to get used to them.
2) This is my "store." Actually going to the store could be lethal, what with all these people scorning masks and wanting their freedom, so I've re-created a version of a "store" and enjoy the feeling of variety and wealth that was part of American grocery shopping. 

Shopping My Lawn

It's no longer smart to buy fresh greens at the store twice a week, so I hunt the lawn and surrounds for dandelion greens -- strong-tasting but palatable if "massaged" with oil and then vinegar; thanks to friend Jody for the tip. And while hunting -- needing about 3 ounces for a serving, because the greens break down radically -- I stop and see: a morel.

Haven't seen morels on this land for years, despite scouring the deep woods for 'em every April, and here on the side of the lane was one insolent little perfectly formed morel, and then I saw another, and another, a total of six, and then after getting scissors from the house and cutting them I looked again and found two more. I'd have missed them entirely had I not been hunting dandelions and spring onions that very day and hour.

The romantic cliche about finding morels in the woods had over the years displaced in my mind the fact that morels, being sociable, liking disturbed earth, prefer to pop up next to a well-traveled path. These occupied an area about four feet square alongside the gravel driveway.

I told a friend and she said I had been aligned with God. For the next five days, I cased the spot for more. Morels don't regrow. They decide when, where, and how they'll pop up, they're all up at once, and either you're in their moment or you're not. Sliced and sauteed them.

Irish Brown Bread

The pandemic says (to us all), "Show me what you're made of," and I never thought about what I was made of, but whatever I am made of recalled from seventh-grade home economics class how to substitute for a cup of buttermilk 1/2 cup of evaporated milk and almost 1/2 cup of water, leaving just enough room in the cup for a tablespoon of lemon juice, to sour the milk. This solved the problem of the buttermilk required to make an Irish brown bread.

Could have blended evaporated milk, water, and a spoonful of plain yogurt; that works too, but I am hoarding my last cup of yogurt, unopened; the grocery stores are not taking online orders because they're overrun with orders and can't be sure what will be available. Friend ordered chicken breasts and the in-store shopper said she could have turkey tails, would she like to substitute turkey tails? That's what they had.

I made the Irish brown bread (a quickbread, a "soda bread") because that specialty coarse-ground flour is what I had. It was Irish brown bread or no bread. The recipe made a 10 to 12-inch loaf, too big for one person. Elementary-school math helped me halve the recipe and figure roughly how much less baking time the half-a-loaf needed. It wouldn't be one-half the time, because baking doesn't work that way. How do I know baking doesn't work that way? It's part of what I'm made of.

How to Work at Home

I have worked from home for ten years. People say, "Oh, real tough. Pajamas all day." Working from home has serious dangers: burnout, weight gain, backache, poor overall health, depression. I share here advice I learned the hard way:

• Allow yourself time off each day.
• Eat three good meals a day. Not all at once.
• Draw strict boundaries between work time and time off. Do not be always available.
• For best results, start the day with work. Also known as "start strong."
• Keep two-column to-do list with "must do today" on one side, and "universe, you take care of it" on the other.
• Don't keep sweets around, including dry cookie mix, because you will pick all the chocolate chips out of the dry cookie mix and then eat by the spoonful what's left.
• The only snacks in the house should be terribly fibrous items such as raw carrots or Triscuits. 
• Drink water.
• Social media and surfing will exhaust you via cumulative decision fatigue, and social media as a business strategy does not work.
• Exercise or do physical labor or your body will rapidly age and your mood deteriorate: no joke.
• Demons hate fresh air.
• Those working at computers need real office chairs that fit them and maintain good posture.
• That little skin tag is not cancer.
• Specs wearers, have an optometrist make you "computer glasses" with single-vision lenses that show clearly only that which is 18 to 23 inches from your face. "Computer glasses" reduce squinting and neck craning, and are cheap.
• Shower in full and dress in fresh clothing twice a week, such as on Wednesday and Sunday.
• Limit pasta to one day per week. Something to look forward to.
• Never try to trim your own hair.
• Doing the impossible trains your employer to expect you to do more impossible assignments.
• One day per week is laundry day. Do not do laundry on any other than the designated day, unless you have kids.
• Do have three working computers in the dwelling, especially if one of them has Windows 10.
• Back up your work, and your clients', into the cloud or onto a thumb drive.
• Pull the plug from the TV and do not use it except to play exercise DVDs.
• Sleeplessness, a very much changed appetite, or feeling sickened when you approach your work station, are signs of burnout. Stress is about to ruin your health. Recovery might take months. Reduce your efforts at once.
• When you find yourself reviewing the same thing over and over, or reading and not comprehending, quit for the day.
• If your ears are ringing, quit for the day and go to bed as soon as is feasible.
• Do what you promised your boss or client you would do, and offer no more than that unless you are offered more money.
• Withhold information about your personal life. Bosses, clients, and students are not co-workers or friends. Avoid volunteering unnecessary information, such as describing how hard you worked on a project or that your son is graduating next week.

Best of luck.

Use It Up, Wear It Out

The garage is a universe of ungodly junque including a clear plastic tri-fold egg carton I should have recycled months ago and also a big dirty bag half full of potting soil, and so today, as the world closed down, I spooned soil into the plastic dimples, soaked it and planted 12 collard seeds, showing them the seed packet to encourage them. Closing the carton created a terrarium. It's now in a dark warm place. Possibly the seeds will germinate in five to seven to ten days, maybe. I realized I have utterly forgot how to garden, remembering only that the largest part is faith.

Next I wanted, or rather, needed, for the very first time to put up a house number, but didn't want Mylar numerals stuck on the siding or the constant sight of numerals disrupting my contemplation of nature. Everyone until now has found this house, but one dark night someone had to drive seven miles from here to catch enough phone signal to call me and wail that there was no house number, and I had to go stand on the highway with a lantern to guide them.

What might the solution be? In the garage, behind trashbags of packing peanuts, was a two-foot metal planter so old I had grown up with it, heavy and too corroded inside to plant in. Inverting it over a rock and applying the numerals created a sturdy yet portable and removable house number, a courtesy for the Instakart drivers and first responders one might need in a pandemic.

These frugal up-cyclings enhanced the refreshing and sparkling spring day, ideal for scrubbing the bird feeder and refilling the outdoor mousetraps with poison, admiring the perennial crocuses down by the road; a hawk careering in an uncluttered sky and red cardinals calling to hardly anybody.

Long Lost

Our sign says "No Turnaround" but trucks can't read, and when backing up inch by inch to try to turn around, their tires fump down off the gravel and churn up a track of mud maybe three inches deep. In spring especially. Today while walking the trash can back up the incline I saw something odd in the latest tire track, stopped, recognized it.

I had splurged on a five-piece set of Henckels scissors around 2002, and by 2007 or 2009 had worn out its kitchen shears and flower shears and the other, and lost two including the pair I favored for harvesting herbs. Never again had a set that elegant. It's 10 years later and I notice handles?!?!? in the wave of mud.

Pull 'em out. The herb scissors. I'll be darned. The pivot is dark with rust and corroded, looks like a raisin, but the blades are still keen. Rinsed it, and scrubbed away some of the rust with baking soda. Gave it a little lubricant. Maybe I can replace the pivot.

I'm amazed. Just amazed. Durability.

Irake

Before this world turns green, it's taupe. And this portion of meadow was covered with fallen oak leaves all the way along this tiny flagstone path to the back area where stands the bluebird box.

Bluebirds begin hunting for homes in late February, but  won't settle anywhere that's covered with leaves. They need bald earth, mown grass, or plowed soil -- because they seize bugs and worms and pin them to the earth, and that's how they eat. No bare ground, no bluebirds. Last year, after securing the bluebird box in a concrete foundation, I was too lazy to rake and had no bluebirds. As you know, they bring happiness. Thus raking equals happiness.

This might not look raked, but on the photo's right see the carpet of fallen oak leaves I've cleared away. The gray brushy stuff needs a chainsaw or, better, a controlled burn. The white things on the left are opaque ground cover held down by jugs of water. Ground cover will retard the growth of grass and weeds on those spots so I might plant collards there.

So this is really a picture of potential. In my mind I see it green, blue, and thriving.

I'm No Longer Going to Save You From Yourself

Friend has heart attack but still smokes. "I've cut way down, to about five a day." I say, "We so much need you to stay with us on this earth. I will help you quit smoking any way I can." He still smokes.

Sometime friend can't sleep because a belly the weight and size of five bowling balls suffocates him when he lies down. He buys a new ultra-super-duper mattress but still suffocates. He phones the mattress dealer demanding a refund because he's heard that sleeping on a bad mattress causes weight gain and his weight is the fault of the mattress.

Friend, age 50, has never seen a dentist. Complains about and shows me a painful infected wisdom tooth. I said, "I have a great dentist, right in this neighborhood." He says no thanks, it really doesn't hurt that much.

Person pays me to edit a book manuscript so it will be of publishable quality. I do it. Then he asks me, is there one button he can push to undo all the edits, or does he have to reject each individual edit manually?

Friend who has lived in apartments all his life buys on Zillow a $200,000 house in Maine, where he has never been, from its owner. "Don't you want to go see it first?" I said. He said, "It's perfect, exactly what I want, only half a mile from the ocean."

Friend writes a brilliant book manuscript and I say so and am so excited I look up names of agents. "Thanks," the author replies, "but I know the critics will tear this book apart, I'm such an outlier, they don't want to hear what I have to say."

"I have such terrible stomach pains," said Mom. "Have you called the doctor?" I said. "Oh, doctors. They don't know anything. All they do is take your money," said Mom, who finally goes to ER two years later, in March. It's Stage 4 and she's dead by June.

Friend tells me, "Eskimos eat only fatty meat and they're very healthy and never get fat, so I will eat only meat, no carbs, and ketosis will burn my fat off," and I say, "Fat cannot burn in the absence of carbohydrate," and they say, "What?"

Friend says (this is the condensed version), "My daughter moved back in with her baby and the house is chaos and she is never home, and here I am at 60 forced to parent all over again." I say nothing.

Acquaintance says, "My son punched in all the sheetrock in his room again this week after I just had it replaced. I got mad and he started breaking my stuff and screaming he would strangle my parrot, and I don't know what to do." "How old is he?" "Thirty."

Friend says, "I am so sick, but I won't take this poison the doctor prescribed, and I'm using essential oil in my diffuser but it doesn't seem to be working."

Demetrius, panicking, shows me blood blisters in his mouth after he eats grilled hot dogs or Spam. He develops esophageal cancer. With surgery, radiation, and chemo, it is cured. He resumes eating, in secret, pounds of bacon, bologna, ham, hot dogs, and black licorice. Died 11 years ago this week.

Six of these people I never see anymore. Feel kind of sad I couldn't save them from themselves. But I see now it was wrong of me to try.

I Run Over A Deer

Once, along the two-lane road, I and the drivers behind me were stopped and blocked by a police car. Some vehicle had hit a fawn, injured but still standing. A policeman took his handgun and shot it in the head. It collapsed, convulsed, then died, and that was the best choice.

Who'd have picked up that fawn and driven it to the vet? Paid for its treatment and rehabilitation? What for? If permanently crippled, returned to the wild it'd be hit again, or coyote meat. Not even the oh-poor-Bambi folks would give several grand a year from their own pockets to keep it in a sanctuary. Unfortunately the increased "development" in this area is herding deer down toward the road. I see about one dead deer per week, and each dead deer might have been a dead person. You have to choose.

Yesterday, after 18 years with about four near-misses, it was my turn with a deer. On the same two-lane road about 6:00 p.m. my car's headlights illuminated a dead doe, a fresh one, lying across my lane with her back toward me, and at 50 mph it was too late for me to swerve. Thump-thump. I heard bones cracking. Sickening. The car seemed fine so I kept going.

Came home later, halted the car to hop out and pick up the mail, and saw that the back license plate looked cracked or "crazed." Poked at it. It was deer hair, sticky. Hair all over the back bumper and a spot of blood. Did not think it wise or see any point in inspecting it further, or taking a photo for you. Next morning, first thing, to the car wash, leaving a nice tip in the tip container for the nice young people about to hose God knows what from beneath the car. Later, concerned about damage, I had the oil changed and hoped they would tell me if they saw bones and meat stuck in the undercarriage.