Eat Your Heart Out

Once again to the rescue on a special day: my neighbor, Terri, with more baking. There were two more cookies before this photo got taken. Now there are even fewer.

On the warmer days (60-70 degrees) the air is like spring water and I saw stubs of daffodils poking up near a tall building where the earth was a bit warmer. On the colder days (18 degrees, snow) we have mass regional stir-craziness with everybody retreating into their favorite vice because a genuine, hat-and-gloves wringing-wet winter such as we are having, while formerly normal, is now unusual and distressing, we have had several "snow days" and slippery roads, and this year Lent and its fish fries are still weeks in the future.

Amaryllis

I received an amaryllis as a Christmas gift. I've always wanted one, simply never got around to buying it. I have a plant-free house (all the plants are on the hundred acres around me), except sometimes with bouquets arranged from wildflowers or especially lilacs in spring, but not by design. So I intend to plant this amaryllis bulb and watch it magically grow and bloom. What color will it be? Don't know. Or rather, it'll be the perfect color. Plants are simply magical.

Santa's Throne

Eureka--I found it--in Eureka, in the old community center next to the ballparks: Santa's throne room. I have always hoped to find it, beginning back when my family--like every family on our block--had a silver artificial Christmas tree with a motorized lamp turning it four different colors, the outer limit of awesome in 1966.

I'll return daily until I find Santa Claus on duty, and if he allows it and there's room between those armrests I will sit on his lap and tell him I've been sickeningly good and nice this year, and for Christmas I want--

--everything to stay the way it is, except I want a bit more energy and bone mass. Other than that I can't imagine a better life or home than mine.

Oh No; You Must Care For Me

Thought I'd run up some curtains on my Kenmore sewing machine, at purchase guaranteed for 25 years. "Good Lord," I thought, when I asked for and received this as my college-graduation gift, "It's guaranteed until 2003," and by then we'd all be piloting flying saucers. "I might go hungry," I told my parents then, "but with this I'll never go naked." And I never have, although I quit sewing dresses, pants and skirts around 1999, when clothes got so cheap that fabric and notions cost more, and my sewing skills honed in junior high school rusted out. Few things are as piercingly clear as when someone eyes your outfit and says, "Did you make that?" I use this wonderfully-made, solid-state, 23-pound machine rarely and take it totally for granted.

Curtains, however, I can still run up with confidence. Thirty-six years after the purchase and the five free lessons at an urban Sears store, I chose black fleece to insulate my single-pane windows when the cold is deep--as it will be someday soon.
I set to work. Straight seams are no problem. But the needle clanked and stuck, and the thread snarled, amassed on the underside and broke, and the machine whined and resisted and I finally consulted the instruction book, a fascinating object in its own right.

My mechanical masterpiece was asking me to clean and oil it and recalibrate the thread and bobbin tensions, using the tools that came with it. Instead of a blue screen and non-response it spoke and told me in its language, now almost a lost language, that it needed TLC. Just a little. Now it runs sleekly.

In the Broccoli Hills

Gratuitious butterflies. All we have to do is watch the Pearl Crescent in its favorite poison ivy or the Great Spangled Fritillary sharing nectar with a bee on a butterfly bush.  June to me is the peak of the year, the pinnacle of earthly beauty, and as I sit here ready to go to the farmer's market I see hundreds of acres of hills, bright green (called by gardener Demetrius "broccoli hills"; he'd say "Look: broccoli hills, Bun")  and every inch loaded with lives like these for the watching. Right now a bunny is eyeing the unmown grass and eyeing me to see if he or she can get away with eating it. Bunnies are many around here this year. Yesterday I saw a baby bunny too young to be scared of me. Gratuitous: Free! Revel in them; life is not forever!

Today is the seventh anniversary of the Divinebunbun's Rugged Rural Missouri blog. Thank you for following along and sharing my joys. In the city I lived with loud nightly drunken arguments and screaming, domestic battles, cop cars, boom cars that woke us all, drug houses with very irritable people just outside, and bullet holes in my car's windshield. And now. . .

Ask and Y'all Shall Receive

I dared myself to attend a "Laughter Yoga" class and became a regular. Our weekly games, exercises, stretches, and meditation are led by a trained leader who knows all the medical reasons why laughter is good for health. "Laughter Yoga" chapters exist worldwide.

We meet Mondays. During guided meditation we are asked to thank the universe for all we have and make one request. Normally I want for nothing, but this time I asked for $300 (heating bills larger than expected). In Wednesday's mail came an unusually early birthday gift from my mother, an unusually generous $300 check, and also -- the cherry on top! -- a letter forgiving a $50 parking ticket I and a dozen others received while attending a special event. We had been told where to park so as not to be ticketed; we did so and all got tickets anyway, and worse, a bill in the mail after we'd complained. As of Wednesday all our tickets were forgiven.

With the day's mail in hand I laughed and laughed, especially at the extra $50.

This had to be the 50th or 100th time in life I've received deliverance on request, of all kinds from all sorts of sources, and it can't be mere 21st-century New Age magickal claptrap. I learned some time ago that "Amen" means "So be it" and yesterday that one possible source of the word "Abracadabra" is the Aramaic phrase avra kehdabra, meaning “I will create as I speak."

Christmas 1958

My Christmas trees grow outdoors and birds are all the ornaments they need, so I don't decorate for Christmas, but cleaning out closets today I found my oldest personal possession: this Santa doll.

Mom said a Serb named Kuzman gave it to me. A family friend, Kuzman must have habitually brought gifts because there's a dated photo of him handing me a non-Santa-doll gift in our living room at Christmas 1958. (The film was processed in April 1959; at that time one took fewer photos than now, because developing and printing cost money, and if anyone had wasted film on "selfies" back then, the whole town would have been aghast.)

Our family was Eastern Orthodox, celebrating Christmas by the old calendar, on January 7. We had

"American Christmas" because everyone else did. At Christmas 1958, I, their eldest, at 23 months, was too young to have pestered my parents to put up a tree, so they did it voluntarily.

Daddy certainly took the photo. At Christmas 1958, Mom has a six-month-old and she will have a third baby by Christmas 1959. Wasn't any birth control for women in those days, at least not that Mom knew of.  Guests were always invited to settle in and stay a while, have a drink or coffee and talk, so Kuzman wearing his coat is unusual. His name is the Serbian version of "Cosmo," a 4th-century Christian martyr. As for my small self, I am already abashed or ashamed to receive gifts. I will, however, straighten out in about 20 years.

The skier in a glittering leotard and silver cap -- built like a snowman but with flesh and facial features -- ornamented our family Christmas tree as long as I can remember. At some point Mom gave it to me. I'm not one for tchotchkes, but I can't call these things clutter.

See My Christmas Present

See the overgrown brush? I'd planned on hacking at it two hours a day for four months until I cleared it. (See entry "My Machete," Dec. 19, in menu at left.) This is the "before" picture.








See my friend and hero Reeve? As my Christmas present he brought his gas-powered brushcutter and cut all the brush and briars from hell's half-acre in one hour or less, and then made a bonfire of the debris, using just one match.

The "after" picture. (The fallen branch along the bottom is the same as in the "before" picture; there's just a lot less of it.) Best Christmas present. Reeve got a big omelet, a big hug, and other good and valuable consideration.

Sammy Strikes Again

Remember Sammy, unsuccessful suitor of Shelley? Well, he snuck down our road in his blue pickup this morning, and I knew he was fixin' up yet another holiday display for the woman of his dreams. Garlands, ribbons, wreaths, tinsel, Santas, etc. This photo ain't the half of it. True love. I hope Santa brings poor Sammy a new girlfriend. This year Santa brung me David, and I don't want nothin else.

Ya Think He Kinda Likes Her?

Neighbor Shelley's suitor has been courting her for over a year. She pays him no mind. So Sammy gifts her with all sorts of artistic creative floral arrangements he builds and leaves at the gate of her driveway. Once he gave me a wonderful hanging plant that he had extra. Shelley lets the stuff rot right where Sammy left it. It's such downright odd behavior that I think Sammy might be her ex.

Sammy stops in front of my house if he sees me workin outside, and is polite, and asks me if I've seen Shelley, and where she might be these days.

This morning I saw a van come and go, and later I saw that Sammy had outdid hisself on this Halloween display. He brought in bales of straw, mums and pumpkins, the cornshocks and skull, the cobwebs he draped over the arrangement and the bushes. If I were her I'd at least give the man the time of day.