A Battle of Wills ….

Okay, I know I’ve been very quiet lately, and for good reason:  I’ve been engaged in a war!  I was going to call this edition “A Battle of Minds,” because, truly, I have been engaged in a war of minds, but when I read all the negative comment running around the net about the brain capacity of my opponent, I decided to be kind to myself and call it a battle of wills.  Either way, it is a battle, one after another, in an ongoing war within my own “sanctum sanctorum,” so to speak, my very own backyard. Okay, so it’s my mother’s backyard, but I’m the one who feeds all the birds, waters the plants and blows all the bird seed off the patio, so I’m planting my flag on it.  Besides, ownership is not the issue here; it’s another set of rights we’re speaking of: the right to feed the birds without interference from outside sources.

I have multiple bird feeders up in the yard, large poles with shepherd’s crooks all over them, each holding different types of feeders for different types of feed for different types of birds.  Yes, the optimal word here is BIRDS!  I mean, it’s my money.  I’m buying the seed; I should be able to say who eats it, right?  Not right!  My friendly neighborhood squirrel and, obviously, his band of accomplices have other ideas. 

I was so pleased the first few weeks of the late spring when the bird feeders were put out there and filled.  Birds were happy, flapping their little wings, singing their melodious little hearts out and eating, as is customary for birds, five times their weight per day in birdseed.  Yeah, that old adage about “she eats like a bird” is really a misnomer!  But then THEY came.  First it was one, then three (I could still name them and keep track of them at that point) and then a whole passel of squirrels.  Now, for those of you who are sticklers for grammar, you may want to point out that a “passel” is not exactly the correct name for a group of squirrels, but in actuality, since squirrels are considered solitary animals, a group name was never given to them, so I hereby announce that I have indeed got a passel of squirrels in my backyard.

Well, I let the first one have its fun for the first couple of days, sitting up on the bird feeder, filling his little face as quickly as he could, but then I decided it was time to make my play.  I had two large-post feeders with multiple mounds situated back there, with one small stick-like hummingbird feeder in between them.  I got out my secret weapon:  Vaseline.  Out I went to “grease” the two large feeders with Vaseline.  What fun it was for the first day or so to watch the squirrels jump up on the feeder pole and slide down, then walk away, shaking their greasy little paws full of Vaseline petroleum jelly.  Really, mom and I laughed and laughed.  Yeah, we don’t get out much.

But on the third day, there she was, Lucy the squirrel, up in one of my prized bird feeders, greedily munching away again.  Mom and I took turns opening the door and stomping out there, probably looking like berserk ape-like creatures to the squirrels, which waited till we got about a foot away from the feeder before they leaped off into the bushes, with their bushy tail disappearing last of all.  They always reminded me of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, and I got almost as much fun watching them do their little acrobatic act as I did in trying to outsmart them.

Needless to say, I went out to the little stick-like hummingbird feeder and gave that a good dose of Vaseline.  That should take care of that, I thought.  And it did … for at least two more days.

Each morning Walter the squirrel would come out and walk around the bottom of the feeders, stopping now and then to ogle them from afar.  At least I though t it was ogling.  Turns out it was a type of reconnoiter, because the next day the squirrel was back in the bird feeder once more. 

That was also the day that mom called me into the kitchen.  “Sandi, come here.  I think this squirrel may be having heat stroke or something.  It’s not moving, and I’ve never seen one act like this before.”  I went out to see Walter lying on his stomach on the patio, still in the sun, with all four of his feet splayed out in front and behind him, just lying there, staring at us through the screen.  Well, I thought, perhaps he needs some water.  I got down my good spaghetti bowl, filled it with water and started out the door.  Whoosh, went the squirrel, quick as ever, with its bushy tail sticking out of the bush the only sign as to where it had disappeared to.  Hmm, for a squirrel dying of heat stroke, it sure was lively.  I put the big bowl of water out there and came back inside.  A few minutes later my friend returned, plopped himself down on his tummy, splayed out his four little legs and cocked his head back and forth as he watched us again through the screen door.  Not one drop of water was touched that day.  Or the next, or the next, or the next.  At which point I brought in my prized, but unappreciated, spaghetti bowl, washed it out and put it back on the shelf.

Subsequently, my little band of madcap friends were found to be climbing the fence nearby, jumping onto a hanging basket of flowers and climbing up the top of the pole (who ever thought I’d have to grease that part) to get to the feeders.  The baskets of flowers were removed and now placed on the patio floor instead of hanging up.

With the flowers gone, the next step was to climb the fence, leap into the air, land on top of the big bird feeder with the rain cover and climb over to the other feeders.  The shaded feeder was put further away from the fence and the top of the poles and other feeders were once again greased with petroleum jelly, along with an extra dose on all of the poles.

The next day the squirrel climbed out on a mimosa branch until it bent over the feeders, then jumped the rest of the way over.  I went out and cut the branch off the tree.

The next day I don’t know how he got into the feeder, but I went to Lowe’s and asked the man working in the aisle with all the food and repellents, “How do I keep squirrels from eating all my bird food?”

“Well,” drawled a passerby, “I’ve always found a 12-gauge shotgun did the trick pretty well.”  The Lowe’s employee stifled a chuckle and said, “Let me go ask someone who is more expert in that than I am,” and disappeared.  He returned a while later with the solution the expert gave him:  A 12-gauge shotgun was the only sure-fire way.

Opposed to that idea, I asked, “How about some of these repellents?”  He then went on to regale me with the anecdote about the time his father-in-law decided to put deer repellent in the backyard to prevent the deer from eating all his flowers and shrubs.  “I’ve never smelled anything so horrible in my life,” he exclaimed.  “And the smell just wouldn’t go away!”  That nixed that idea.

With a heartfelt apology, he left me helpless in the aisle, where I happened upon an idea.  Yes, there it was, a wooden box I could hang on the fence filled with “Critter Food.”  It had a wooden lid that the squirrel could open up to get the food and which shut automatically when he withdrew his little paw.  The food looked yummy, at least by my standards of what appetizing squirrel food should look like:  Dried corn, whole peanuts in the shell and big, fat, giant sunflower seeds!  It even had a picture of a happy squirrel on the front of the package.  Eureka, I cried.  At last a means by which we could coexist, minus the 12-guage shotgun!

I went out in the sweltering heat that evening, took down the hanger my brother had put up years ago for my mom’s one and only bird feeder and which now was festooned with a feeder sock full of thistle food for the goldfinches my mom loved so much.  I dragged out my antiquated 7-pound electric drill and put up the squirrel feeder, filling it to the brim with happy little critter food.  I even put some on the ground so they would figure out where that yumminess came from.  And the result, you ask?

The next morning they were back in the bird feeders.  That’s when I went on line to see just how much intelligence these little critters had.  Do you know that each squirrel buries about 10,000 nuts each year for his winter storehouse?  Not only that, he digs two or three holes per nut, one to deposit his hidden treasure in, and the others are to mislead any other squirrels who might be hiding in the bushes and taking notes from knowing exactly which holecontained the prize.  Then in the autumn an amazing thing happens: the size of the squirrel’s brain grows larger. Why?  Duh, so he can find the stupid nuts!  Apparently he has like a GPS system in his little head so that he can recall where each and every one of those nuts was hidden, and he zigzags all over town finding them and chowing down.  This is very impressive to a girl who can’t keep track of her car keys, or her car for that matter!  Then to top it off, before burying the nuts, the squirrel munches out the germ inside so it won’t sprout and spoil before he gets back to munch down his tasty morsel six months or more later.  Okay, got me beat on the whole GPS in the head thing hands down.

Then I found a couple of videos on You Tube.  You’ve got to check this out because I know you won’t believe me if I tell you:  http://youtu.be/nWU0bfo-bSY.  Made me feel a lot better about losing the battle of wits, never mind the battle of wills.

So, who is winning the battle?  Well, at the moment we are apparently happily coexisting.  The squirrels have found the squirrel feeder and have trained me to keep it full with Critter Food.  The only time any get into the bird feeders is when the squirrel feeder is already occupied by another hungry squirrel.  And remember Walter who spent his afternoon sunning himself on the patio and watching us through the screen?  I’ve decided he thought he was at a zoological park and watching the funny humans locked inside.  He probably named us:  Dumb and Dumber.  Then I’m sure he wondered how intelligent we were as creatures and whether he could train us to do tricks, like keeping him fed.  Well, I showed him!  That feeder is never empty.

I'm retiring to a pot farm...

Okay, I know my readership (both of you), so I know you skipped right over the “I’m retiring” part and zeroed in on the “to a pot farm” segment.  But don’t call the DEA (or the elders of my local congregation) till you read the rest.

So the time has come to retire.  I would have loved for it to have been two years ago but couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t expect to be able to do it till I turned 70, which is a ways down the road, thank you.  So I guess 64 was a good compromise.  Mom gave up her car, finally, and that was the turning point to needing to pull up stakes and move from the “big city” (Clemmons; actually officially the “Village of Clemmons”) to rural life back in Yadkinville, NC, where I started by Southern journey some 20+ years ago.  Yep, they accepted this transplanted Yankee and her New York City ways (well, actually Bergen County New Jersey, but no one knows where that is, and if you’re a really good spitter, you might be able to hit the GW Bridge from up on the crest of the Rt 17 and Rt 80 junction, so that's close enough to be called a New Yorker when you move away several states), and accepted me into their little community where everyone was related to everyone, except me. 

Now, I know I’ve spoken to you before about Yadkinville, but let me give you the culture shock picture from a girl who used to ride the bus to NYC and then walk all over Manhattan to visit the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza, Time Square, the Metropolitan Museum of  Art, and the garment district, where I bought my wedding gown for $89!

Lodi was a small town (and still is) in the northeastern corner of New Jersey,  (Bergen County), and the southwest corner of that county.  Settled by immigrant Italians, it  owes its name to an Italian city also called Lodi, and a statue of Cristoforo Colombo graced the center of politics downtown all my years there. Most people only know Lodi today because apparently scenes from the HBO show The Sopranos were filmed there. It was known as a mafiosa town when I lived there, and I guess that hasn't changed all too much since the newspaper report of February 2011 concerning  the arrest of a "reputed mob associate from Lodi" once brought us fame  But that's not the Lodi I knew and remember.

 I grew up coming home from school each day to pastina served with melted butter and fresh parmesan cheese.  Hmmmm, the aroma of that is still lingers in my mind and on my taste buds.  Why don't all kitchens smell like that?  And, no, silly, my mom didn’t make it; it was my Italian next-door neighbor Ann Capazzola.  I'm not sure mom even knows today what pastina is.  

Little mom & pop Italian grocery stores were all over the place, and upon opening the door of any one of them, you were pleasantly assaulted by heady aroma of real provolone, Parmigiano, Romano and other imported cheeses.  They hung like great bulbous, golden lanterns suspended over the meat counters, tied up to a railing with twine and sweating in the summer heat.  Along the walls there were always jars of peppers, artichokes, mushrooms and anything else you could preserve in oil, lending color and intrigue to this little  English girl’s imagination.  Garlic hung in great huge bunches, and there was never a crustier Italian bread to be found anywhere.  To this day, there is not a fragrance so enticing to me as the smell of a real Italian grocery store!

I never saw corn grow till I was on my honeymoon, traveling south through the Carolinas, though I know somewhere in NJ they grow bunches of it, but every house in Bergen County, no matter how small a patch of property it was on, had its own little backyard, or front yard,  garden full of fresh tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, basil  and eggplants, at the very least.  It was tomato sauce in the raw (or “red gravy” if you live in Lodi).  Imagine my surprise when I came to Yadkin County in January of 1987 (or thereabouts – you know I have no concept of time) to find that the nearest grocery store with zucchini or eggplant in it (at any time of the year) was 30 miles away.  Oh, we had plenty of collards, and peppers and tomatoes were still garden staples, but my favorite Italian veggies were on the endangered species list here in Yadkin County.  Pinto beans were offered as the most popular vegetable in restaurants, and every time I asked for a cup of tea, I had to make sure I said “hot” or it would come with ice and heavily laden with sugar.  Once I finally got the waitress to realize that a cup of tea was like a cup of coffee, only with hot tea in it, then I had another fight to replace the ever-proffered lemon with milk.  Hard to believe the Brits actually settled this land way, way back.

I had to learn to cook all over again, or at least shop smarter when I got into the bigger grocery stores in Winston.  But I do love those black-eyed peas and sticky grits!  Yummy!

Times have changed and even Yadkinville has become more “cosmopolitan.”  Well, that’s what we like to call it.  I no longer have any problems finding zucchini, though eggplant is still not on the top ten favorites of local veggies to be found here.  Avocados, yuca, green plantains, fresh cilantro and even an occasional boniato can be found now in the local Food Lion.  Hmm, can we say sancocho, and give me a great big bowl or two?

When growing up in Lodi, as most kids in a small town, I couldn’t wait to leave.  Remember that Credence Clearwater Revival song “Lodi”?  They may have been referring to a town in California, but every time John Fogarty wailed, “Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again,” I felt his pain.

Funny how we change, isn’t it?  I cannot think now of a better place to have grown up.  We were close to the City for museums and cultural events, but lived in a town that comprises a whopping of 2.4 square miles (and the .4 part was water, and no one lived on that.  Although I’m not sure if that includes the flood water that inundated many houses along the Saddle River each spring.  Nah, I don’t think they count that.)  Everyone knew everyone, which can be good and bad, but mostly good. I’ve lived many different places, most of them NOT city, but not far from one, so here I am again, in Yadkinville, the Lodi of the South.  (Hey, Y’ville friends, that could be a “good thing,” as Martha Stewart says!)  And this time I’m not on my one-acre plot, but my mom’s two-bedroom/one-bath condo. 

So now we get to the pot farm.

For those of you who know about condo living, it’s good if you do not want to do maintenance on the outside of our home or cut grass.  I chose a condo in Clemmons because cutting the grass on my 1 acre in Y’ville would put me in bed for an entire weekend with severe allergies.  Now someone else cuts my grass while I list in air-conditioned comfort, safely enclosed in my filtered air, safe from that wonderful fresh cut grass smell which is so popular you can buy it in candle shops, but which causes me to do thins like stop breathing.  At my mom’s condo, they’ve done away with most of the grass.  When my mom bought hers back around 1980, her front yard was full of plants, she tells me.  I don’t recall, but I’ll take her word for it.  I do remember two dying rhodies in big buckets on either side of her walkway, but that’s as far as my memory goes.  Since that time, however, all plants are gone.  There are a few bushes near the houses themselves, and then the rest of the yard is red porous stone (UGLY!!), except for my friend Beth.  She’s such a rebel!  She has white stone!  Then I noticed a house across the street that has mulch.  No plants, not much space or soil, but at least it’s brown mulch. 

The stones are obviously migratory and must be kept penned in by little red, scallop-edged cinder block-type “decorative ‘stone’ garden edgers,” and I use that term “decorative” loosely.  So now you’ve got red stones penned inbmy red “stone” edgers.  Monochromatic can be a beautiful thing, but not in a garden!  These edgers apparently come in little two-foot sections, which do not lock into each other very well at all, so they give the appearance of a five-year-old’s mouth with missing and loose teeth.  Instead of a straight line delineating the break from parking lot to yard (like you can’t tell where the black pavement ends and the red stone starts, they teeter and totter, weaving this way and that.   Some just flat-out lay down and give up the fight!

Now I’m retired, I want to garden.  I come from a gardening background.  My Aunt Lila could grow anything.  English gardens are spectacular.  They are a dazzling array of colors and heights all jammed into a tiny yard in front of a row house.  Blue delphiniums nodding in the breeze, surrounded by 4-foot high hollyhocks with blooms as big as your fist.  Her flowers were always beautiful to look at, and so typical of an English cottage garden.  And then I was dreaming of veggies again:  real homegrown tomatoes, not the cardboard-tasting stuff from the grocery stores that are advertised as “grown on the vine” and still taste like chalk; basil, zucchini and peppers, oh, my!  But ain’t nothing gonna grow in stones.  You remember the blue grass song Rocky Top?  “Corn won’t grow at all on Rocky Top.  Dirt’s too rocky by far.  That’s why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar.”  (Those lyrics do run through my mind every time my mother walks by with her water/juice mix in a Mason jar.  I think she’s been Southernized, and not by Paula Dean).  Anyway, if I want to grow anything, it will have to be in pots.

So, I finally get to the point.  I am going to start slowly to introduce decorative pots full of flowers, and then veggies, to that rock-infested, barren landscape upon which we feast our eyes each day.  Little by little I envision adding more and more till there is such a plethora of flowers and fauna that they will not notice that I have removed those stupid ramshackle edging stones.  Then I’ll start actually planting in the ground!  I’ll start from the center, or maybe from the bushes near the house,  and painstakingly work my way out to the edges.  I’ll transplant those courageous little daffodils that struggle each spring to pop through the rocks and semi-permeable black barrier to meander willy-nilly in a drunken line down the center of my mother’s yard.  I’ll introduce big, bold flowering plants, airy ornamental grasses that flow in the breeze, and don’t forget the clematis to trellis up her entryway.  If I have enough stuff growing, they’ll never notice that the center of the rock garden has been replaced by soil and actual growing things.  Inch by inch I’ll make my way to the edge, and by the time someone actually complains that I’ve PLANTED things in dirt and not pots, I’ll be able to truthfully say, “Well, it’s been that way for years.  Why are you complaining now?”

Two condos down from my mom is a beautiful, huge Bradford pear, the only attractive piece of greenery in this red-rock dessert.  It was planted several years ago by the woman who used to live there.  It had become fairly well established by the time the Board of Directors told her that she it had to come down.  “Wh?” she asked.  “Well, all these units are supposed to look alike,” they opined.  “Then I suggest they all palnt their own Bradford pears,” said she, and the tree stayed!  You’ve got to love a woman who stands firmly behind her pear (tree that is)!I’m retiring to a pot farm…..

Okay, I know my readership (all two of you), so I know you skipped right over the “I’m retiring” part and zeroed in on the “to a pot farm” segment.  But don’t call the DEA (or the elders of my congregation) till you read the rest.

So the time has come to retire.  I would have loved for it to have been two years ago but couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t expect to be able to do it till I turned 70, which is a ways down the road, thank you.  So I guess 64 was a good compromise.  Mom gave up her car, finally, and that was the turning point to needing to pull up stakes and move from the “big city” (Clemmons; actually officially the “Village of Clemmons”) to rural life back in Yadkinville, NC, where I started by Southern journey some 20+ years ago.  Yep, they accepted this transplanted Yankee and her New York City ways (well, actually Bergen County New Jersey, but no one knows where that is, and if you’re a really good spitter, you could probably hit the GW Bridge from up on the crest of the Rt 17 and 80 junction), and accepted me into my their little community where everyone was related to everyone, except me. 

Now, I know I’ve spoken to you before about Yadkinville, but let me give you the culture shock picture from a girl who used to ride the bus to NYC and then walk all over Manhattan to visit the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza, Time Square and the garment district, where I bought my wedding gown for $89!

Lodi was a small town (and still is) in the northeastern corner of New Jersey,  (Bergen County), and the southwest corner of that county.  Settled by immigrant Italians, it  owes its name to an Italian city also called Lodi, and a statue of Cristoforo Colombo graced the center of politics downtown all my years there.  I grew up coming home from school each day to pastina served with melted butter and fresh parmesan cheese.  Hmmmm, the aroma of that is still gets my all-time favorite scent of food, and just the thought of it sets my little salivary glands dancing in anticipation.  No, silly, my mom didn’t make it; it was my Italian next-door neighbor Ann Capazzola.  Italian grocery stores were all over the place, and upon opening the door of any one of them, you could count on being drawn in by heavy aroma of real provolone, Parmigiano, Romano and others.  They hung like great bulbous lanterns suspended over the meat counters, tied up to a railing with twine and sweating in the summer heat.  Along the walls there were always jars of peppers, artichokes and anything else you could preserve in oil, lending color and intrigue to this little  English girl’s imagination.  Garlic hung in great huge bunches, and there was never a crustier Italian bread to be found anywhere.  To this day, there is not a fragrance so enticing to me as the smell of a real Italian grocery store!

I never saw corn grow till I was on my honeymoon, traveling south through the Carolinas, though I know somewhere in NJ they grow bunches of it, but every house in Bergen County, no matter how small a patch of property it was on, had its own little backyard, or front yard,  garden full of fresh tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, basil  and eggplants, at the very least.  It was tomato sauce in the raw (or “red gravy” if you live in Lodi).  Imagine my surprise when I came to Yadkin County in January of 1987 (or thereabouts – you know I have no concept of time) to find that the nearest grocery store with zucchini or eggplant in it (at any time of the year) was 30 miles away.  Oh, we had plenty of collards, and peppers and tomatoes were still garden staples, but my favorite Italian veggies were on the endangered species list here in Yadkin County.  Pinto beans were offered as the most popular vegetable in restaurants, and every time I asked for a cup of tea, I had to make sure I said “hot” or it would come with ice and heavily laden with sugar.  Once I finally got the waitress to realize that a cup of tea was like a cup of coffee, only with hot tea in it, then I had another fight to replace the ever-proffered lemon with milk.  Hard to believe the Brits actually settled this land way, way back.

I had to learn to cook all over again, or at least shop smarter when I got into the bigger grocery stores in Winston.  But I do love those black-eyed peas and sticky grits!  Yummy!

Times have changed and even Yadkinville has become more “cosmopolitan.”  Well, that’s what we like to call it.  I no longer have any problems finding zucchini, though eggplant is still not on the top ten favorites of local veggies to be found here.  Avocados, yuca, green plantains, fresh cilantro and even an occasional boniato can be found now in the local Food Lion.  Hmm, can we say sancocho, and give me a great big bowl or two?

When growing up in Lodi, as most kids in a small town, I couldn’t wait to leave.  Remember that Credence Clearwater Revival song “Lodi”?  They may have been referring to a town in California, but every time John Fogarty wailed, “Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again,” I felt his pain.

Funny how we change, isn’t it?  I cannot think now of a better place to have grown up.  We were close to the City for museums and cultural events, but lived in a town that comprises a whopping of 2.4 square miles (and the .4 part was water, and no one lived on that.  Although I’m not sure if that includes the flood water that inundated many houses along the Saddle River each spring.  Nah, I don’t think they count that.)  Everyone knew everyone, which can be good and bad, but mostly good. I’ve lived many different places, most of them NOT city, but not far from one, so here I am again, in Yadkinville, the Lodi of the South.  (Hey, Y’ville friends, that could be a “good thing,” as Martha Stewart says!)  And this time I’m not on my one-acre plot, but my mom’s two-bedroom/one-bath condo. 

So now we get to the pot farm.

For those of you who know about condo living, it’s good if you do not want to do maintenance on the outside of our home or cut grass.  I chose a condo in Clemmons because cutting the grass on my 1 acre in Y’ville would put me in bed for an entire weekend with severe allergies.  Now someone else cuts my grass while I list in air-conditioned comfort, safely enclosed in my filtered air, safe from that wonderful fresh cut grass smell which is so popular you can buy it in candle shops, but which causes me to do thins like stop breathing.  At my mom’s condo, they’ve done away with most of the grass.  When my mom bought hers back around 1980, her front yard was full of plants, she tells me.  I don’t recall, but I’ll take her word for it.  I do remember two dying rhodies in big buckets on either side of her walkway, but that’s as far as my memory goes.  Since that time, however, all plants are gone.  There are a few bushes near the houses themselves, and then the rest of the yard is red porous stone (UGLY!!), except for my friend Beth.  She’s such a rebel!  She has white stone!  Then I noticed a house across the street that has mulch.  No plants, not much space or soil, but at least it’s brown mulch. 

The stones are obviously migratory and must be kept penned in by little red, scallop-edged cinder block-type “decorative ‘stone’ garden edgers,” and I use that term “decorative” loosely.  So now you’ve got red stones penned inbmy red “stone” edgers.  Monochromatic can be a beautiful thing, but not in a garden!  These edgers apparently come in little two-foot sections, which do not lock into each other very well at all, so they give the appearance of a five-year-old’s mouth with missing and loose teeth.  Instead of a straight line delineating the break from parking lot to yard (like you can’t tell where the black pavement ends and the red stone starts, they teeter and totter, weaving this way and that.   Some just flat-out lay down and give up the fight!

Now I’m retired, I want to garden.  I come from a gardening background.  My Aunt Lila could grow anything.  English gardens are spectacular.  They are a dazzling array of colors and heights all jammed into a tiny yard in front of a row house.  Blue delphiniums nodding in the breeze, surrounded by 4-foot high hollyhocks with blooms as big as your fist.  Her flowers were always beautiful to look at, and so typical of an English cottage garden.  And then I was dreaming of veggies again:  real homegrown tomatoes, not the cardboard-tasting stuff from the grocery stores that are advertised as “grown on the vine” and still taste like chalk; basil, zucchini and peppers, oh, my!  But ain’t nothing gonna grow in stones.  You remember the blue grass song Rocky Top?  “Corn won’t grow at all on Rocky Top.  Dirt’s too rocky by far.  That’s why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar.”  (Those lyrics do run through my mind every time my mother walks by with her water/juice mix in a Mason jar.  I think she’s been Southernized, and not by Paula Dean).  Anyway, if I want to grow anything, it will have to be in pots.

So, I finally get to the point.  I am going to start slowly to introduce decorative pots full of flowers, and then veggies, to that rock-infested, barren landscape upon which we feast our eyes each day.  Little by little I envision adding more and more till there is such a plethora of flowers and fauna that they will not notice that I have removed those stupid ramshackle edging stones.  Then I’ll start actually planting in the ground!  I’ll start from the center, or maybe from the bushes near the house,  and painstakingly work my way out to the edges.  I’ll transplant those courageous little daffodils that struggle each spring to pop through the rocks and semi-permeable black barrier to meander willy-nilly in a drunken line down the center of my mother’s yard.  I’ll introduce big, bold flowering plants, airy ornamental grasses that flow in the breeze, and don’t forget the clematis to trellis up her entryway.  If I have enough stuff growing, they’ll never notice that the center of the rock garden has been replaced by soil and actual growing things.  Inch by inch I’ll make my way to the edge, and by the time someone actually complains that I’ve PLANTED things in dirt and not pots, I’ll be able to truthfully say, “Well, it’s been that way for years.  Why are you complaining now?”

Two condos down from my mom is a beautiful, huge Bradford pear, the only attractive piece of greenery in this red-rock dessert.  It was planted several years ago by the woman who used to live there.  It had become fairly well established by the time the Board of Directors told her that she it had to come down.  “Wh?” she asked.  “Well, all these units are supposed to look alike,” they opined.  “Then I suggest they all palnt their own Bradford pears,” said she, and the tree stayed!  You’ve got to love a woman who stands firmly behind her pear (tree that is)!

Your place or mine...

"The time has come," the Walrus said,     
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

Don’t know why that piece of poetry from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There happened to come to mind just now, except that Mom and I are thinking of moving in together.  Talk about two opposites, well, we beat everything you’ve ever seen!!!

Mom worries about EVERYTHING!!!  Given any situation, she does not look at the pros and cons, she looks at worst case scenarios!!!  Me, I’m oblivious to anything.  Will it work?  Won’t it work?  What happens if it doesn’t work??  Who care!  Let's just try it.  I’m a bit like Scarlett O’Hara:  I’ll think about that tomorrow.  Or, more precisely, I’ll think about it when it either does or doesn’t work.  She will look at every bad thing that could conceivably occur and then invent some extras just in case we haven’t thought of all of them.

I think her blood has thinned out a lot from the 81 mg aspirin she’s been taking, though I take them too.  Plus, older people don’t seem to feel the heat as much, as can be attested to by all those seniors in Florida.  So Mom is constantly cold.  Her house feels like a furnace.  Me, well, I’m usually hot all the time.  They laugh at work because I’ve got my window open constantly.  Even on snowy days when it’s too bad to go driving to work, or even walking to the mailbox, I’ll sit in my office at home in front of a wide-open window!  “You’re from the North,” my neighbor will call out to me from the parking lot below.  “What gave it away?” I ask.  “Uh, Southerners wouldn’t be sitting in front of an open window on a 30^o  day,” he’ll reply with an incredulous sound to his voice.  “But the sun it out,” I’ll resoibd happily.  He shakes his head and walks home.  We have that conversation repeatedly, just about every time it snows, actually.

Today it snowed, and it’s been really, really cold.  Mom said she was wearing just about every piece of clothing she owned.  She had on layer over layer of clothing, topped with a scarf my daughter once knitted, and even went to bed with a hat on her head.  “The temperature in the house says it’s 71,” she commented, “but I’m still cold!”  I my house the thermostat is seldom set above 65, and today I haven’t even gotten dressed because it’s much cooler to sit around in my nightgown with no socks and shoes on.

I like to have everything at hand when I’m working.  That’s why my office is such a mess, I guess.  So all my appliances are sitting right out there on the kitchen counter, ready to use at all times.  Mom has a few appliances on her counter, but even those she unplugs after each use.  So when she’s done making toast, she unplugs the toaster; if you make coffee, you unplug the coffee maker, and so on and so forth.  “Why do you have to unplug everything?” I ask.  “Because they could cause a fire.”  She look s at me like I haven't got a brain in my head.  And then she’ll l;aunch into the tale of the one person whose microwave or curling iron somehow suffered from some internal combustion or something, taking down their whole house in flames.  Never mind the millions of people who have never had that problem; but it COULD happen, so better safe than sorry, is her motto. 

“Why don’t you unplug the stove,” I’ll say sarcastically. “That’s electric and it cooks things too.”  Well, obviously the stove is different, but I haven’t yet figured out how.

Remember that open window I spoke of that I love so much?  Well, I have my bed positioned directly under a window so I can sleep with it open and aim my CPAP-covered nose in that direction.  My mom says that's okay for me, my bedroom is on the second floor, but open windows are not allowed at her house at night where it's all downstairs and anyone could could break in.  Yeah, condos in Yadkinville are notorious for break-ins.  Right.  I had a friend who lived for years on one of the main streets in Yadkinville.  Not only did he NEVEER lock his car doors, he even left his keys in the ignition!  "Aren't you afraid it will get stolen," I asked once.  He smiled condescendingly at me.  "This is Yadkinville," he replied, and that was all the response he felt it was necessary to give.

“There’s nothing on TV,” my mom states, “and I’m bored.”  I, on the other hand, am addicted to TV.  I love to read, write, watch TV, and am seldom, if ever, bored.  Besides, I’ve got a million projects in the house under way.  Not finished, just under way.  Which brings up another problem:  Mom needs to have things done immediately, and I’m a card-carrying member of the procrastinator club.  I misplaced my cell phone today.  Now, I know that’s not an unusual occurrence for me, but today I had good reason.  See, I was on the phone with mom this morning, working on the computer to cancel some insurance for her.  When we finished, I went downstairs to get some food, taking my phone with me.  I was up and down stairs all day doing a variety of things.  When I went to look for my phone, it was …. Well, missing!  Now, since I’d been up and down stairs all day, it too could have been in any of those places.  So that’s where I looked:  Upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs.  I looked everywhere!  Couldn’t find it anywhere!!!  I was so desperate I sent an e-mail to my office and asked them to call me so I could track it down!  Before that occurred, however, a neighbor called.  Thank goodness it wasn't on vibrate!  And there was my phone, sitting in the my daughter’s old unused bathroom.  Well, I never would have looked for it there.  We haven’t used that bathroom since she moved to Arizona.  The water isn’t even turned on to the toilet because of the leak she had when she lived here.  Oh, yeah, I suddenly recall,  That’s why my phone is in there.  I went in this morning to survey all the work that needs to be done and promised myself that I’d finally get around to fixing that toilet TODAY!  Then I went downstairs and started going through cookbooks, then emptying bookcases, then sorting craft items for a future yard sale.  I totally forgot about fixing the toilet.  Yeah, I’m just not the do-it-immediately type person.

I read recently about the difference between convergent and divergent thinkers.  Convergent thinkers sort things out, categorize them, prioritize them, and tackle them one at a time.  Divergent thinkers treat them all with the same priority and work a little on this one, a little on that one, and some on the other, all at the same time.  Guess which thinker I am.  Mom will get focused on one thing and can’t concentrate on anything else till that one thing gets done.  She’ll call with a computer problem and it’s so funny.  I’ll be trying to walk her through it one step at a time and she’ll be following directions, talking at the same time about what happened previously, and missing half of what I’m saying because she’s so fixed on the problem at hand.  “Okay, Mom, now put the cursor there and click on your right mouse button.  Okay?”  “Okay.”  “Now, a window will pop up that says so-and-so, but don’t click on anything yet,” I’ll say.  “Oh, I’ve already clicked on such-and-such!  What do I do now?”  “Well, now you’ve got to get out of there because you weren’t supposed to click on such-and-such.”  And on it goes.   We’re like Laurel and Hardy, with her forging ahead without an idea of what she’s doing and me flapping my tie up and down looking really dumb. 

So now comes the BIG decision:  If we live together, where do we live, your place or mine?  She’s got two bedrooms and one bath; I’ve got two bedrooms, two and a half baths.  She’s got a big kitchen; I’ve got a bigger living room.  She’s got lots of windows; and I have … not!  But most important of all, she’s got one floor; I’ve got two, and the showers, well, they’re all UPSTAIRS!  Hmm, not a good place for a shower when one of the members of the family can barely get around because of her arthritis.  So do we put in a chair lift?  My knee is getting to the point where that’s starting to sound good even to me. 

The ideal situation would be if we could sell both homes and get a one-floor, three bedroom/two bath house.  Yes, that would be ideal.  Except for the 30-year mortgage that would attach to it.  I don’t believe I want to work another 30 years.  Let’s see, I’d be about the age my mom is now.  Of course, if they keep making Social Security retirement age further and further away, I might have to work another 30 years anyway.  Might as well have a house we could both be comfortable in during that time.  Wait, that’s my divergent brain working again, isn’t it?  Now it’s not just a choice between your place or mine; now it’s yours, mine or ours?  Yikes!  I think I’ll table that decision, play some Jimmy Buffet and read the Jabberwocky while I contemplate fixing Becka’s toilet once more, juxtaposed against the decisions to paint now or replace the thermostat with a new-fangled one first, or should I re-do the popcorn ceiling in her bath, or take out the popcorn in mine to match hers, and don’t forget that paint I bought for the kitchen; perhaps I should start tearing off the wallpaper today.  Yeah.  Now that’s a plan I can work with!

The First Snow Fall!

Those of you who know me well know also how much I HATE winter.  Growing up in New Jersey I can count on one hand how many times I went sledding as a child.  I lived there close to 40 years and hated each and every winter: the snow, the slush, the dirty slush, the wet slush.  Not to mention the freezing rain day after day throughout February.  I remember as though it were yesterday fighting to open the storm door to get out of the house to go to work.  It’s not easy opening a storm door from inside when the outside part has frozen.  Once opened, I would carefully pick my way out to the street over treacherous ice, though the eternally falling freezing rain to my car, chip open the frozen handle on the car door so I could spend the next hour driving 20 miles to work through frozen streets and sliding cars, only to do the same thing 8 hours later to get home, where once again I had to chip away the ice from the storm door now to be able to get into the house.  But of course you’re not in the house for long; there’s ice to chip off the sidewalk so that no one falls and breaks their neck, like me!  Yeah, those were the days.  That’s what I think of when I think of winter.  That’s why 20 years ago I packed up my stuff into a Penske truck, hitched my car behind me, left my snow shovel on the front porch and headed down south.

So you might find it odd that last Saturday I sat in my upstairs office overlooking the beautiful swirling flakes of snow as they drifted silently past my window to the ground below.  I watched intently as they danced and floated past me down from the burdened clouds above, steel gray and solid, relieving them of their soft, gentle cargo.  I was moved to write a blog.  I waxed on poetically about their uniqueness, their ability to soften everything into silence and glistening beauty, the calmness they instilled in one as they drifted past in dreamy, endless succession. I shared the mirth of watching children outside catching snowflakes on their tongues just as kids have done for thousands of years before us and will probably continue to do for thousands of years into the future.  I shared the wonder of snow in the South that, if it does what it’s supposed to, falls upon trees and grass and bushes, while leaving roads and sidewalks clear (remember that snow shovel I left in New Jersey?  Well I haven’t owned another in the past 20 years.) I wrote of the wonderful first snowfall I shared with my daughter when she was about 15 months old, bundling her up to take her out walking in the silent darkness to greet the snowflakes as they fell upon our cheeks.  I wrote of the poem that my father always quoted in my youth as we peered at the snow piling up outside our windows:

THE SNOW had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.
Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

Pretty, huh?  Well, don't get too excited.  Like all reality, the truth is that that poem was about the death of a child.  No wonder my dad only quoted the first two verses.  It was years later that I read the rest of it.  But whenever the first snowfall comes, I still look out my window and hear his words and I simply indulge myself in the mesmerizing, glistening white miracle taking place right before my eyes. 

So, yes, I wrote of all those things in long poetic prose, so moved was I by the tranquil scene outside my window.  And then I promptly erased it all accidentally when I was doing a spell check and vowed never again to write a blog that wasn’t first created in Word.  That should have been my first warning.

Passionate writing like that only comes on with great inspiration and cannot be duplicated on demand.  So I shut down the computer and went on to other things. 

The next day was Sunday.  I left the house around noon to go to my mom’s and visit my old congregation 30 miles away.  It was an awesome day, set off by one of those rare deep blue, cloudless skies, the like of which are seldom seen in North Carolina where humidity generally fills the atmosphere, robbing us of such clear blue beauty.  Carolina Blue is not just a team color; it’s the color most often seen above us most of the year.  I threw a mohair wrap, more an item of adornment than warmth, in the back seat of the car and drove away.  At 3:30 it was still a beautiful day with a crispness in the air that still did not require me to use that wrap, as I pranced around sans stockings and with a thin mock turtleneck knit top and skirt, enjoying the beauty around me.  By the time the meeting ended, reality had crept in.  It was about 23 degrees when I left the hall to go out the car, with a howling wind that tried to carry me away (and with my weight, that’s not an easy prospect!)

I froze half to death getting in and out of the car to go back to my mom’s house, eat at a friend’s house and finally return home.  I awoke this morning to the same temperature that enveloped us last night. 

Six miles is not very far to drive to work, but it seems like an eternity as you wait for the heater to warm up.  Yes, it’s a short trip, but do you know how many lights there are to make it a long, cold journey into Winston?  No, no, don’t talk to me about pre-heating the car before I get in it.  That would mean going out into the cold three times!  Once to start up the car, then go back to the house, then back to the car.  I can’t handle that.  It’s like some sort of masochistic torture.

The cold was everywhere today: inside, outside, in me!  Every time someone entered the building that was the topic of conversation.  We had a lunch provided by drug reps today, but it meant walking 30 yards to the doctor’s office to fetch it and 30 yards back!  “No thanks,” I snorted, happy I’d had enough forethought for once to bring some lunch with me, “I’d rather starve than go out in that weather!” And I meant it.  And almost did.  One cup of vegetable soup doesn’t quite fill you up when that’s all you’ve had all day.  But I HATE winter!  And there you have it.  Winter is here.  Perhaps not by the calendar, but it’s definitely here.  My poetic, idealist ponderings of gentle snowflakes have tumbled into grim thoughts of reality:  bitter cold and freezing pipes, dead car batteries and frostbitten appendages. 

“We have a cold front blasting in from Canada,” the weatherman says glibly, smiling at me from the TV screen as he points to U-shaped white lines on his color-coded map. “Looks like chilly weather for the next week,” he grins.  I think of throwing a pillow at him, but it’s covering me up to keep me warm.

So what happened to that wonderment I experienced only two days ago?  Ugly reality! That’s what happened! 

Winter!  I HATE winter!  I hate cold even more than I hate humid, hot, sticky summers.  So remind me again why I moved back here from Washington State?  Oh, yeah, I hate gray skies even more than cold winters and humidity. Wow, I didn’t realize I was such high maintenance.  My only solace is that normally in the South, we only have to put up with nasty weather one week at a time.  Yep, next week is supposed to be in the 50s.  I think I can make it till then.  But just in case, I spent my lunch hour buying fur-lined winter boots.  Hey, I may have left the shovel in NJ, but my little tootsies still get cold!

And everything in its place …

How many times did we hear it growing up?   “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”  A friend of mine had a mom with a slightly different saying, but same sentiment: If you put it away this time, you’ll know where to find it next time.  That same friend made sure he always had a dishwasher in the kitchen.  He told me it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of dishes lying around, clean or dirty, but, personally, I think it was just so he knew where he would always find his dishes.

I don’t know if my daughter ever heard that from me when growing up, though I wouldn’t doubt it, as it is incumbent upon all mothers to pass on such gems to their offspring, but I have good reason to perhaps believe that she did not hear it quite so often in her formative years, if at all, and here’s the reason why.

Now, I do have a place for everything, sort of.  You couldn’t tell it by looking at my office but, really, I do.  Unfortunately, the place for everything seems to all be in the same place.  Be that as it may, I am, if nothing else, a creature of habit.  And for good reason:  I lose everything and can never remember where I’ve left it!  Therefore, once I do find a place to call home for an item, I make it a habit to always (hopefully always) put it back there.  Now, keys are a good example. I have a little key rack on the wall next to the front door.  The first rung is for keys that I have no idea what they belong to, the second rung is for car keys, the third for the mail box key (that one’s easy to find as it’s attached to a Pound Puppy key ring), and then come the pool keys and another set of miscellaneous ones that someday I’ll figure out what they belong to, maybe.  Sometimes, however, when I’m walking in with my arms full of groceries, the keys don’t quite make it to the key rack.  And that’s when the trouble starts.  The other day I was rushing to get to work and got all my gear together, ready to leave the house, when I went to grab for my keys on the key rack and, behold, they were not there!!!  I’d been shopping the night before, so, after checking the pocket on my purse, I ran to the kitchen to see if they’d been left on the kitchen counter, then I ran upstairs to see if they were in the office at my desk, then back down to see if they were in another pocket of my purse, then back upstairs to see if they were on my dresser, or in my jacket pocket or in my bathroom, then downstairs to see if they were in that bathroom, or on the table in the living room where I study. Then when you can’t find them, you start all over again, only this time I start with the car, just in case!  Well, after making the whole circuit a second time, I finally turned on the hall light and there they were, about a foot away from where they belonged.  They had almost made it to the key rack.  Again, I really must use the lights more often.

I used to lose my glasses all the time, but often found them on top of my head.  Now, however, since I am relegated to wearing them all the time, they are harder to lose.  My teeth are another story!  I hate those little suckers.  There are just enough of them to make them not totally necessary but cosmetically preferable.  I take them out, however, whenever I get the opportunity and pop them back in when I have to.  That makes finding a “place” for them a little harder since I’m never in the same place all the time when I decide to give them a little break and enjoy freedom for myself.

I know of people who change purses as frequently as they change underwear, maybe even more frequently.  Even my 90-year-old mother changes purses on a regular basis!  I, however, being a real creature of habit, but only leather purses so that they can last at least 10-20 years so I never have to change them.  I mean, once you find a place for things in your purse, you want to keep up that impetus and not break that habit.  When I do buy a new purse, I have to find one as close to the same design as the last one that I had.  Hopefully after 10-20 years that style has recycled and is back in.  It’s getting harder, however.  This year I had to buy two purses just to get one that was close to the old one!  And then it doesn’t have the same zipper thingy on the front where my keys usually go, so now I have to go through four different compartments trying to find them, fishing around in the pockets and often getting “bit” by my teeth who are hiding out in one of them.  Those little metal prongs on those partials are nasty little things, you know.  I will next have to keep Band Aids in my purse for the boo-boos I get fishing out keys.

Pens in my house are NOT a problem.  I keep about 50 or so in every room.  But my car, ah, that’s the really big things that I lose.

To me all cars look alike.  Okay, I can tell a Volkswagen bug from an SUV and a white one from a black one, but that’s where the identification stops.  That’s why when I go anywhere, I try always to park in the same place, or as close as possible to that habitual spot.  It’s not just that I won’t remember WHERE I parked otherwise, it’s because I cannot tell my car from every other one in the parking lot!  I parked at the LJV Coliseum last summer for an assembly.  I had with me a friend, so I wasn’t thinking about WHERE we parked; besides, you don’t really have the choice of parking in a “habitual” spot at the coliseum.  Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d lost my car in that lot, and it probably won’t be the last, but what made this time so unique is that my friend remembered distinctly the number of the aisle and said in Spanish (and I’ll spell it phonetically so you can appreciate my confusion) “DOO-BL­Ā B.”  So, we started walking looking for aisle BB.  We walked around the entire coliseum three times looking for that aisle and, thank goodness, we never found it.  Well, we might have found it at one time, I can’t remember any more, but I think I did recognize that it was on the wrong side of the coliseum and did not bother searching through all the adjacent aisles looking for my car which I can only identify by its tag number.  After about an hour I suddenly realized that my gringo/Mexican accent and her Dominican accent had one thing very different:  She pronounces her Vs with a B sound.  Like, duh!  Hello!!  Wish I’d thought about that an hour before.  Anyway, we found aisle VV and the car and made it home in good shape, ready to lose it yet another day.

I’ve had a lot of problems lately getting my key to turn in both the door lock and the ignition.  I think the key is just getting worn out.  The other day I came out of Food Lion and put the key in the door and jiggled it.  My car is easier to find now that the paint has started disappearing and the roof looks really sad.  But I started getting nervous when I had to keep jiggling it without success, thinking, oh, no, this is the day it will leave me stranded, not only incapable of starting the car but not even opening the door.  Then I looked down at the passenger seat.  There was a cute pink notebook there.  I don’t own a cute pink notebook.  But I’m sure I parked here, I thought.  Then I looked around to find my car on the opposite side of the one I was trying to open.  Oops!

So I propose that some inventive soul PLEASE develop a device that will track all my lost items.  It should be a remote control type device that will track down by code different items.  After all, you don’t want to be looking for your car and have it beeping instead your cell phone.  Oh, I almost forgot about the cell phone!  I no longer have a home phone.  Do you know how difficult it is to track down your cell when you don’t have another phone at hand with which to call it?  And then you only hope that you will find it before it runs out of juice or you’ll have to go out and buy a new one and hope you can keep track of that one. 

So my idea is tohave small programmable computer chips that will go into all the various devices you keep losing, each chip having a unique code that can be input into the remote and will thus beep just that particular item.  Of course you’ll have to remember the codes or at least remember where you put them, but I think if you code things by importance it could stay in your memory, unless you lose a whole lot of things and need about 30 chips.  Of course there are things with intuitive numbers, like the licence plate numbers could be for my car, the last 4 digits of my cell number could be for my phone, the number of teeth in my partiail -- well, you get the idea.  But then when you start putting them in order of imporance you have to decide, well, which do I need more, the remote control to the TV or the key to the mailbox, my shoes or my teacup, my hairbrush or my bank book.  Yeah, better write them down and put a chip on the paper; perhaps that should be the one with the #001 code on it.

I think we should call it the Digital Universal Memory Implant system (or DUMI for short).  Now I know that I could get a remote key lock for the car to alleviate the problem I had when I lost it at the airport and after searching three floors of the car park garage finally called the security guard to drive me around, stopping at every dark colored vehicle so I could see the plate number, only to discover that it was on the very first floor right next to the elevator!  I knew I was close to that elevator!  At least I was almost sure I was.  That’s why on each floor I started there and walked up and down every single aisle, working my way out to the edges before going down (or up) to the next floor, only stopping when I finally found a way of calling Security.  The DUMI could have found it immediately, thus eliminating that moment of embarrassment when she found my car within one minute by deductive reasoning.  Of course I’d already done the legwork.  I’d walked all over the other three decks.  Then she comes along and says, well, why don’t we start at the bottom since you haven’t been there.  Duh again! We only had to stop three times for me to read license plates before we found it.

Anyway, I’ll leave this development of that gadget to the more nerdy people I know, like my daughter or my brother, or even my mom the way she’s picking up computer techniques.  As for me, I’ll just reap the benefits of all their efforts and, hopefully, they’ll let me have one for free to “test drive.”  Then all my worries will be over!  I’ll never lose anything ever again!

Now, where is that DUMI remote?  I can’t find my teeth again!

It’s all my daughter’s fault …

Okay, how many times have we heard it, “It’s all my mother’s fault”?  Doesn’t matter what it is, Mom probably is as the core of it.  Freud was famous for blaming all your problems on poor potty training (now, really, is dad going to train the kid?  No, it’s mom’s job, so, again, it’s all her fault), but as radical as his thinking was proclaimed to be at the time, was it really all that earthshaking? Come on, people have been blaming mom for all their problems, shortcomings, bad habits, about as long as Jewish mothers have been making their kids feel guilty (although I must admit that it's not just Jewish mothers that have mastered that technique.) So I thought I’d switch things around and blame everything on my daughter.  After all, I know she blames me for all her problems, and I’m not getting any younger, so she’ll have lots of time after I’m gone to blame me for things when I’m not even here to defend myself.  So here goes.  Let’s see, there must be something I can blame her for.  Ah, yes:  Coffee.

Now, that doesn’t mean she’s to blame for all coffee in the world.  Really, how silly that would be.  I mean, that would be taking the blame thing way too far.  For this to have any real meaning, I’ve got to keep it realistic.  Just ask Freud.  Oh, wait, he’s dead.  Well, never mind.  Keep reading and you’ll get the idea.

See, I’ve been a teetotaler all my life.  I blamed it on my British heritage, but that’s because I didn’t have anywhere else to put the blame.  My mom didn’t drink that much tea, and my father used to love iced coffee in the summer and hot coffee in the winter, and I must admit the smell of it was rather enticing, but the taste!  Yuck!  He said it was an acquired taste, and I saw no reason to put any effort into acquiring anything so revolting as a taste for that bitter stuff.  No, tea was fine.

I grew up in the U.S.  Let me tell you here and now, the U.S. will never be known for its fine tea.  Uh-uh.  I used to drink my tea black.  It was perfect, or so I thought then.  When I was about 13 I went to England for the first time.  My aunt offered me tea and asked how I took it.  “Black,” I stated emphatically, “no sugar.” She gave me a genuinely puzzled and astonished look and repeated for clarification purposes, as though I must have been speaking a foreign language, “Black?”  “Yes,” I said, thinking that my American accent surely wasn’t all that hard to understand, especially when I only said one single word, “black.”  “Okay,” she sighed, and made a nice cup of hot tea for me.

Well, I couldn’t swallow it!  It was so strong that, if I had gotten it down, I’m sure all my hair would have fallen out instantly!  I was not to be beaten, however.  “I think I will have a little milk with it,” I said softly, and poured about half a cup of thick, rich British cream into the cup of steaming liquid.  It was without doubt, the best cup of tea I’d ever had in my whole 13 years of life!!!

But it spoiled me.  I was hooked.  How could I buy Lipton’s anymore?  It was dishwater.  So my search for stronger, more flavorful teas started at an early age, and still continues today.

When I moved to the South twenty-some years ago, you would have thought I brought in a novel idea every time I asked for a “cup of tea” at a restaurant.  I finally got into the habit of asking of “hot tea” so that they’d realized I did not want it iced.  Sweet iced tea must be the “national” drink of the Confederate states, followed by bourbon, sour mash and mint juleps. Even when I got across the idea of an actual cup of HOT tea to the waitress, I then had to fight for milk, cream, anything other than a slice of lemon.  Drinking hot tea with lemon is something I only do to clear phlegm from my throat, not to enjoy with a meal.

I lived in Washington State for three years and still never touched coffee. If the South is known for its sweet tea, Washington must be the coffee capitol of the U.S.  And no wonder!  With 9 months of the year being overcast, you’ve got to stay awake somehow.  As a result, coffee bars are everywhere!  In gas station parking lots; lobbies of every sort of store, office building, hospital, even funeral homes; drive-up coffee houses in every supermarket parking lot.  Yeah, We Southerners now have a Starbucks in the mall and local hospital, but, I kid you not, coffee houses in Washington State are as plentiful as churches in the South or bars in the Irish section of Chicago.

After three years of thinking I had some fatal disease causing me to sleeping 18 hours a day, I moved back to the South to find out that it was nothing more than lack of sunshine.  Who knew?  But then disaster struck.

I’m not sure how it happened, but my daughter somewhere along the line had become a coffee drinker! And just like the alcoholic who needs company while he drinks, she introduced me to the start of my addictions:  the latte!  Thought she loathed Starbucks and was appalled when they took over Seattle’s Finest, that was where my downfall started.  First it was once in a while, then once a month, then every Saturday as a treat on my way to Weight Watchers at 7:00 in the morning.  But addicts just can’t stop!  It became, I’m ashamed to say, every day.  Then twice a day.  I would get one on the way in to work early in the morning and another on the way home at night.  The one on Saturday was not sufficient; I had to stop in the middle of the day to go to Starbucks once again for another Venti nonfat, no foam, no sugar vanilla latte.

Becka had a calendar on her wall about, well, what else, coffee!  On the cover was the most expensive and rare coffee beans of all, the Kopi Luwak.  You’ve never heard of them?  Well, then I guess you can’t afford them.  Of course, neither can I, but that’s not the point.  Seems these coffee beans, most of which come from Sumatra, are (now get ready for this) excreted by the civet cats who eat them for the yummy fruit that surrounds the bean.  Then they poop them out, at which point they are collected, washed (thank goodness) sun dried and ground. Why, you ask, must one only use the beans after they’ve been pooped out by a civet?  Well, apparently the digestion process creates shorter peptides and more free amino acids resulting in an aromatic blend with less bitterness.  I’ve wondered about the “aromatic blend” part, but I’m now hooked on coffee, so I’d love to try it.   

I mean, look at that cute little critter!  Isn’t he adorable?  Oh, come on; do not even dare to cringe at the thought.  I mean, look at where eggs come from, and chickens aren’t near as cute as civets!

One day I figured out that I was spending over $100 a month at Starbucks. Yeah, that was the end of that.  Thank goodness I got a new job, one that supplies me with unlimited amounts of coffee and Crème Brule creamer.  I go through at least 8 cups a day, and it’s all my daughter’s fault.  Yeah, she’s to blame.

Then there’s technology.  Well, not all technology.  I did have her growing up with computers, after all.  But a coworker asked the other day how I wound up with 5 iPods.  I blame my daughter.

You see, she introduced me to the portable CD player, or was it called an MP3 player?  I don’t know.  But it was round and heavy and you put a disc in it and carried it around with you to play music.  Wow, it was almost as good as the transistor radio we all had plugged into our heads as teenagers in the ‘50s!  Just without the DJs and only one album at a time.  But cool, nonetheless.  She showed me that I could get a tape that plugged into the cigarette lighter, the tape deck in the car and the MP3 player so I could play CDs in the car!  Boy, was I impressed. 

Well, unfortunately they tended to break a lot.  I mean, you couldn’t just pop one in your pocket and go for a walk.  They fell off counters when you were working in the kitchen and forgot that you really didn’t have the music in your, not even attached to you, except by a pair of earplugs. So I wound up with a lot of MP3 players.  I still have them too!  Some need rubber bands around them to keep them closed; others probably don’t work at all.  But they are still here in my dresser drawer, along with about a dozen of those tape deck thingies to make them work in the car.  Of course, now my car has a built-in CD player.  But who cares.  I don’t use that anymore either.  It’s so passé.

I vividly remember the day I went to Circuit City to buy yet another MP3 player, having broken the last one I had.  I walked and walked around in a circle, followed by my daughter, looking everywhere for those stupid things and finding none.  What kind of an electronics store is this, I wondered, where not a single player was in sight?  I finally stopped a salesperson in the section where I presumed such items should be kept and asked, extremely miffed by this time at the absence of visible players, “Where are your MP3 players?  I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find any,” I whined.  My daughter said nothing.  He looked at me with a confused daze and swept his hand around in a huge arc, pointing to walls and walls of things that looked like cell phones.  I had no idea what that poor, obviously simple, fellow was trying to convey, so I asked again, this time more slowly and distinctly, attempting to describe through simple words accompanied by hand gestures exactly what I was looking for so that he would not be confused by the question.  I assumed he was one of those mentally deficient people that needed a job and I applauded Circuit City for hiring him.  I certainly did not wish to cause him any grief, I just wanted a simple portable CD player.  “No, these are things that are round,” I described, making a 6-inch circle with my hands so he’d be sure to get the picture. “You put CDs in them,” I explained, “but you can walk around with them,” I smiled, hoping I had finally enlightened him. He slowly turned to his left, sweeping his hand in the direction of a small display hidden at the end of the huge section of electronic things that he’d been showing me previously.  “These,” he asked incredulously.  “Yes,” I affirmed, glad that I could be of some help in educating the lad.  Still my daughter said nothing, but I’m pretty sure she was smirking all the time.

Yeah, it seems that the age of iPods had arrived.  All those cute little gadgets he had pointed out to me, I found out much later (about the time I needed another replacement player), were a variety of itty-bitty players that did so much more than my cumbersome portable one did, and you didn't even have to feed them with CDs to make them work!  

I heard about the iPod Nano somewhere and was determined to get one.  So as soon as it came out, I bought a Nano.  I wore in on my collar all day long at work and figured I’d never need another MP3 player ever again.  I mean, this had something like 1 gig of memory!  My daughter tried to dissuade me from buying it, saying it wouldn’t hold much, but what did she know?  I mean, how much music did one need?  I knew that with that little piece of technology, I would never need another MP3 player ever again to replace it.

Today the Nano has gone through 6 generations. (Hmm, sounds a bit like Dr. Who.)  The newer ones have 16 gig, an FM radio and a pedometer. 

Within a short period of time my Nano outgrew its usefulness, having quickly filled up with no way of expanding.  But by then it was too late, I was hooked again!  Not by coffee, but by technology.  

I bought my next iPod off e-Bay.  That was before I learned how to play the e-Bay auction game, so I’m sure I paid more than I should have.  But it was a refurbished iPod, and I still have it today.  It’s weighs about as much as a small laptop, but it was cutting edge at the time.  I never had a good relationship with that iPod, however.  I named it and everything, but it often refused to work right.  Turns out, as I’ve learned since, that it had its own special cord and could not adapt to using any other iPod cord.  Madeline is a very finicky iPod.  Still, it was serving its purpose of entertaining me, and I did have quite a lot of music on it, enough to give me a great variety.  I was sure it would never need replacing.

My daughter took pity on me one day, probably after hearing me complain about Madeline over and over and over, and she gave me an iPod that she had earned as an award in her work for USAirways.  She was living in Arizona by then and had no idea that I had, meanwhile, ordered another iPod to replace Madeline.  But my new one had not yet arrived and by then I felt that one could never have too many iPods.  Nano was no longer used, Madeline resided in the kitchen plugged into a speaker system, so I really needed something more powerful and better to fill up with all my music and magazines.  Yes, I now found I could download audio magazines to my iPod.  What’s more, I could still use those silly tape deck thingies to run it in the car!  What else could one ask for?  So Gabriel joined my collection, soon to be followed by Kermit who came to me via the US Mail (yet another eBay purchase, but this time it was new, not refurbished).

But then I discovered podcasts, and that meant I needed still more gigs!  I started putting music on Gabriel and magazines and podcasts on Kermit.  Madeline was still in the kitchen, and Nano is still lost in the house, though I know where her cord is: it’s on the floor of my office. Someday I’ll find Nano and introduce her to her cord and bring her back to life again.  Meanwhile, I'd discovered the iPod Touch!!!

By this time I’d learned how to get the best price on eBay, and before too long Magellan joined the household.  Oh, my goodness!  How did I ever get along without him?  He’s sleek and powerful.  He holds all my music, my podcasts, my magazines, audio books, TV programs (yes, he has a screen!!! Can you believe it?  It’s like having a TV in your pocket!)  Plus, my calendar; card games; a program to track service time, return visits and placements for the ministry; a Spanish dictionary; the internet … oh, I could go on forever!  I mean, what more could one ask for?

So here I am, the proud owner of five iPods, and I blame it all on my daughter!  Of course, with my absolute love of technology, coffee and especially my favorite iPod Magellan (shhh, don’t let the other iPods hear that), I’m ever so glad she expanded my horizons!  Wonder if some day when she’s blaming me for stuff she’ll feel the same.