My Washtub List

There was a movie about a "Bucket List" that caused everyone who saw it to make their own list of things they wanted to do before they die. I didn't much get into that at the time, but now with all these new threats popping up in conjunction with the Gulf oil spill I'm thinking maybe it's time to spend my life a little differently. Just in case. And, I have had so many ideas over my lifetime that didn't come to fruition yet that it would take Grandma's big old wooden washtub to carry them. Not even a five gallon bucket (or the Large sweet tea cup from McDonald's) could carry them all.

My dad used to preface all of his 'doom and gloom' conversations (those that we all hate to have that make us face our own mortality, such as discussing wills, funerals and estates) with "if I were to ever die." He said it quite innocently, although it always made me smile. He was just expressing the phantom thoughts that every person tries to believe, that although we can discuss our death and we can say with certainty that we know we're going to die, every single one of us has a problem believing that death isn't like cheating spouses, fatal diseases and car wrecks. It's just something that happens to other people. Not us.

Even though I don't have death looming over me (assuming it's not written in the stars that I'm to be hit by a bus next Thursday or that a meteorite is going to crash into our house on Sunday next) it's time that I faced some cold hard facts of what I have waited too long to accomplish... the dreams I must now let go.

MY WASHTUB LIST

• My dream of winning the Miss (Mrs?) America pageant are over. Of course, those dreams most likely should have died when I realized that although I had the soul of a dancer I had the ass of a hippopotamus. But, hope springs eternal.
• I will never climb Mt. Everest. Of course, it ain't likely that I'll walk to my mailbox and back again either, so long as there's gas in the golf cart.
• It's entirely possible that I will never be asked to sign the national anthem before a Braves game. And my recording career is going to have to be put on hold until I lose enough weight that gallons of fat don't squelch the high notes. I will have to be content with impressing my dogs by singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" when I'm in the shower.
• The opportunity is gone for me to be a contender for Olympic Gold. Unless they open a new field of competition in typing, sitting at the computer, running in circles or jumping to conclusions.
• I will never visit China. I have no reason to go nor do I have the desire, but still. Now I know I never will. And I have a China sized hole in my washtub.
• Unless I have an affair with a driver who lets me take his car around the track a few times in exchange for 'services rendered' I am not likely to ever sit behind the wheel of a NASCAR car. I will have to make do with exceeding the speed limit whenever I'm behind the wheel of my Mercury.
• The chances of me winning a Nobel Peace Prize get slimmer every time I lose my temper while listening to idiots like Rush Limbaugh and reading far left news rags. I no longer want peace throughout the world, I want the right to be able to pull out an Uzi and blast away the assholes who refuse to realize that the middle is the only ground worth fighting for.
• If you're reading this, you already know that the possibility of a Pulitzer for me fades with every keystroke.
• I must come to grips with the fact that I will never understand what keeps an airplane in the air or puts music on a CD. Or how Sarah Palin continues to be considered seriously as a political candidate by anyone who has heard her speak.
• I will never know what the air smells like when you're standing on the top of an Alaskan glacier. I have to be satisfied with wondering what the smell is coming from underneath my shower.

OK, I'm depressed now. This realizing your own mortality and physical/mental/financial restraints is a real downer. *sigh*

Veg Out

I'm late getting a garden started this year. I've been so busy "helping" Clark and Pete with the greenhouse and the herb garden that I've put aside my love for tomatoes until it's almost too late. I know I could grow them in the greenhouse, but there's something about having to battle the weeds that I never have time to get rid of, and reaching into the bush to pluck out a prize-winner that just can't be duplicated in a sterile environment. (Not that our greenhouse is sterile OR neat for that matter.)

I have a nice assortment of tomato plants in big pots that I've been babying until I get a spot tilled up that was large enough to get them into the ground. Thanks to our neighbor John Brown who brought over his fancy tractor-pulled tiller and churned up a huge plot for me, I'm hoping to get my babies tucked safely into bed in the next couple of days. I have some old varieties (Homestead, Mini-100s) and a lot of new ones. Mr. Stripey, Atkinson, White Pearl (white tommy-toes), Hillbilly, Totem and a few others I've forgotten. Almost all of them already have little golf-ball sized tomatoes on them, so I hope they'll still transplant well.

My mother was an absolute garden goddess when it came to growing tomatoes. One of my fond memories of her was the beautiful garden she poured her heart and soul into one year in a competition with a neighbor (see article in my Growing Up Southern blog). I try to follow her instructions for planting and growing my own maters, but I fall far short. She meticulously dug postholes a foot deep, lined the holes with newspaper and chicken manure, trimmed off the bottom leaves and sunk the plants in the ground until only their few upper leaves were showing. She babied them for a while, putting shades over them during the hottest part of the day and feeding them special elixirs made of manure tea and Epsom salts. I admit I'll be doing really well if I manage to lug a few gallons of fish emulsion/Epsom salts mix a few times over the summer.

I'm also going to plant squash. I love crookneck squash. Buttered and baked, it's one of my faves. I have lots of recipes for stuffed squash, so maybe I'll get the urge to actually try it this year. I'll keep you posted.

I also will grow okra of course. What southern garden worth it's dirt doesn't have okra. For those who turn up their nose at it, I only have to say "you ain't it cooked right." Or pickled right. I've been craving okra pickles lately and they're so darned expensive in the store that I only allow myself to buy them occasionally. This year I'm determined to put up a bunch to tide me over until I either win the lottery or get another garden planted next year. (You might wanna grow okra just for its blooms, it's actually a hibiscus you know.)

Cucumbers will be growing up on a piece of rusted wire fence that I'm going to stretch across the back of my new plot. I have lemon cucumbers already growing the greenhouse, blooming and ready to start popping out lemon shaped and colored cucumbers. I also have seeds for a red cucumber. I think that should make some interesting looking pickles!

I absolutely love pickles. No meal is really complete without some sort of pickle. One year my aunt made a new recipe that called for adding red hot candies to the mix. I was the only one in the whole extended family that would eat them, but I ate every crisp cinnamony one. And begged her to make another batch next summer and was pretty miffed when she refused.

I always have big plans for a garden, and it usually ends up thick with weeds and we eat what we want as its growing and we never get anything canned. This year I'm determined to handle things differently.

As Dr. Phil would say, I'll let you know how that works for me.

Anybody got any good pickle recipes they want to share? Pickles are the only thing I bother to put up, but I want to do it right.

Mow, Mow, Mow the Grass, Swiftly In The Yard...

There's nothing as pretty and sweet smelling as fresh cut grass. And few things I hate to do more than mow. It used to be fun... when we first got a riding lawnmower it was almost like bumper cars, avoiding trees and plantings and making sharp turns when I got to the end. The job seemed to fly by. Everyone mentioned how nice the yard always looked when they drove by and that pleased me because I had taken over the job that my grandfather had diligently done in that same yard ever since I was born.

As I'm getting older, the riding lawn mower has lost its charm. Instead of the grass I seem to smell the gas more and now that heat bothers me so much (have I mentioned my broken personal thermostat ever since chemo?) the little bit of breeze that gets kicked up by the mower is heated before it hits my face so I end up sweating, swatting sweat bees and guzzling water as I repeat the mantra "won't this ever be done, won't this ever be done...."

When Peter and I moved to this side of the farm, I told him I wanted to eliminate as much grass cutting as possible. We laid out a tiny front yard that could easily be mowed with a few turns of a push mower, and the rest of the yard was done in perennial beds. The large part out in front of the house that I would have undertaken with the mower in days past, we fenced in and bought goats to keep it mowed.

And then...

Life took us in different directions and I put in another living quarters on the farm and moved into it. And it has a tiny yard. And then the guys moved the goat fence a few feet back, so there's another "tiny yard" to mow. And then we built the greenhouse, which has a huge spot in front of it that has to be mowed. And part of the goat pasture was eliminated by the placement of the greenhouse, so there's another big spot to mow.

It doesn't help anything that we have dogs and cats and other wandering animals that leave us "gifts" in the yard that give new meaning to that old saying about the "sh!t hitting the fan" when you inadvertently run over it with the mower.

And then...

My dad's health worsened, so we've had to take on the job of keeping his grass mowed on top of our own mowing. He has a huge front yard, a massive side yard and a good sized back yard. All in fescue. And all of it grows like crazy in the humid spring weather we've been having.

And so...

Once again I'm sitting here, drenched in sweat, throat parched and dry and tasting like dirt, skin plastered with bits of grass and tree branches and leaves and tiny red bug bites all over, as I try to figure out how the heck this happened. From a "tiny little front yard" a few years ago to this current job that takes two of us on riding mowers literally all day long to get done. And then five days later, it's to do again.

I wish I was living with seven little dwarves who loved to ride a mower. I can hear them now "I Mow, I Mow, It's Off To Work I Go." Hmmm. Maybe we should record a CD....

PS: In case you can't read the "CD case" above, the names of the songs include "You Don't Mow Me", "Nobody Mows the Trouble I've Seen", "Let My People Mow", "Mower and Mower", To Mow, Mow, Mow You," and of course "I'm Gonna' Love You Mower."

Maybe you're right. I should find a day job.

Sausage anyone?

We recently became friends with a couple who have a beautiful pool in their back yard. Now, we'd love these people to death just because they're the sweethearts we're discovering them to be. But, I gotta tell you, that pool is a definite plus. Even if one of them was a cranky old goat (which one is in my personal couple, but I'm not going to name any names) I'd still be their friends because.. well, they've got a pool!

Unfortunately, along with the ability to use a friend's pool comes the necessity to not only purchase a bathing suit but put it on knowing that someone other than your significant other is going to see you wearing it, exposing parts of your body that are probably better left unseen. Like those flaps under my arm that would make a flying squirrel jealous. And the flabby pouch on the inside of my thighs that I didn't even know existed until I looked at myself in the mirror with my swimsuit on. And... the list is long. Suffice it say, in anything other than a flowing muu muu or a long granny dress, I always remind myself of the sausages we used to buy when I was a kid.

The sausage came stuffed tightly into this cloth bag that was tied tightly in a couple of places making it easier to use just a portion of the meat at a time even if it had been frozen. Once I get myself writhed into a swimsuit and pull all my parts up into the place designed for them, that's what I look like. As Dolly Parton said, "Ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound sack."

Looking for a plus size bathing suit is a journey into horror all by itself. I can't even go into the trauma suffered from not only seeing yourself in a bathing suit but being blinded by all that sallow fluorescent-lighted skin that seems to be rippling and expanding before your eyes. Someone wrote a whole book about it once. As I recall it was something about "I Know Why the Manatee Cries." I'm not sure which is the more apt description of me in a bathing suit... a manatee or the oversized bag of stuffed sausage. Suffice to say that there will be no one singing about me in an "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini"... perhaps someone should write a new song about the chubby southern girl who wears the "Twenty Pounds of Spandex With a Full Bra and a Skirt"

I guess the shame and embarrassment of being seen in public with flappy flab uncamouflaged is worth it to be able to SWIM. I am quite sure I was a dolphin in a previous life. I am never quite as happy anywhere else as I am when I'm up to my nose in water. I can't swim all that well, but I can float like nobody's business. I do, you might notice, have two exceptionally nice sized flotation devices affixed to my chest that makes it fairly certain that I won't drown. Even if I try to float face down my flotation devices flip me back over to sunny-side-up.

We used to have a little above-ground pool at our old house. I loved being in it, especially after dark when I could skinny dip without worrying about burning the retinas of any of my neighbors or scaring away wildlife. Once, when we kept getting this algae that nothing seemed to get rid of, I went to a local pool shop and asked them what they'd suggest. The clerk said I should shock the pool. I said "Buddy, I swim in that thing naked every night. If that don't shock it..."

It's amazing how much paraphernalia I need to carry along for an activity in which I'm almost naked. I have to carry ear plugs, two towels (we're talking a lot of real estate to dry off later), hair thingie to keep it out of my eyes, a place to put my glasses and if I'm swimming alone I'll need something to read while I'm sunning afterwards. And a bottle of water. And...

Next time you come for a visit bring your swimsuit. Our new friends will be tickled to meet you and I'm sure they'll not mind if we bring you along for a few laps around the pool. But, only if you promise to not laugh and point during the two seconds when I drop my towel and race for the cover of the water.

PS: That's not really me in the drawing. My bathing suit is black and my ankles are fatter.

Sweat Dreams Baby

Nope, that's not a typo. I've had way more sweaty dreams than sweet ones lately. I've awakened every night for the last week with a wet sheet knotted around me, my hair plastered to my sweaty face and my skin as clammy as a...well, as a clam. It could be my meds doing it. It seems like with every birthday I add another 'regular' pill to my regimen for one thing or another. Or, it could just be because this is a freakishly hot spring, that promises to be heading into a freakishly hot summer. That will probably be followed by a freakishly hot fall. And then, well, you get my drift. It's not like it doesn't happen every year, it's just every year it surprises me by being just as bad as I remembered and feared.

I live in Alabama. And it's hot. My grandfather preached a lot about hell when I was a kid sitting on that hard gray bench in the Mount Moriah Methodist church. I can remember once when he laughed and admitted it was a lot easier to make people sit up and take notice of your sermon about hell in Alabama in August than it ever was in Ohio in December. When you're sitting there with your butt sticking to your dress and your dress sticking to the seat, sweat running in rivulets down the back of your neck, the funeral home fan batting wildly in front of your face doing little more than moving hot air around, it's tough to imagine an even hotter place awaiting you if you didn't behave.

I hate it when people make excuses for Alabama heat by saying "It's not so much the heat as it is the humidity." Bullpuckies. It's the heat. The humidity sure as heck doesn't help, and it does drive up the heat index numbers, but lets face it, humidity in, let's say South Dakota right now probably wouldn't have me hovering in my office finding reason after reason to blog, write, design and anything else I can think of to keep me from opening that front door and stepping out into the sauna that I call home 8 months a year (the other 4 months offers fairly nice cool weather, with even an occasional blizzard or tornado to liven things up).

Y'all come on down. Just bring along your funeral fan or an electric equivalent. It's really not so bad down here. And, it's not so much the heat, as it is the.... freakishly hot weather.

Techno Queen

I have become the Techno Queen of my family. I now (through the generosity of a friend) own an iPod. It has my name engraved on it so nobody will think it's just borrowed, and occasionally music even comes out of it so nobody will think it's just a prop.

I hadn't realized how very out of touch I was with technology until I was trying to come up with a way to get music to the garden wedding we had planned. I was fretting over whether I could attach "real" speakers to the computer to play CDs, or whether our little boom box could handle larger speakers. A friend (the generous one) suggested we run our iPod through our stereo mixer (or we could Bluetooth it) and then we could play our downloaded mP3 lists through speakers as large as we liked. iPod? Mixer? Bluetooth? mP3? What strange language was this?

When the little green iPod arrived in the mail, I looked at it with all the awe that those natives had for the Coke bottle that had fallen into their world from the skies in the old movie. I turned it this way and that, looking for an 'on' switch. I knew I was in trouble when I actually had to read the directions to turn it on. And then still couldn't figure out how so many different commands could be understood by nothing more than one little round button. When staticky off-station music blared into my little earphone thingie I knew exactly what the first caveman had felt when he accidentally hit two stones together and created a spark. I felt the thrill that Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his monster wiggled his toes. I had created life from an inanimate object! It's aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive.

I have to admit I'm still not really comfortable using the iPod and I still have to check with my instruction manual more often than I'd like... but I also have to admit that I love the way I look having it strapped to my pocket. Occasionally, if I'm in line at the grocery store and my iPod isn't even on, I sway a little bit just so I look hip, like I'm listening to a few of my fave tunes. I'm the cat's pj's I am!

It's possible that I've made that fatal mistake of being complacent with the technology already at my fingertips and that my thirst for the newest gadget has been slated. This whole Saga of the iPod has made me realize how important it is to keep abreast of the latest tech gadgets and high-tech fads. I used to be a pretty groovy with-it chick. I can remember when my dad thought it was foolish that when they were first on the market, I requested an 8-track tape deck for my birthday so I could listen to music going down the road. He reminded me I had a perfectly good record player at home and the radio in both cars worked just fine. (Obviously the gadget thirst was not an inherited trait)

My dad has never minded the fact that he was far from being a technical guru. To this day, he occasionally comes up with a gem to prove just how far away he is from being technologically competent. Like last week when he called from his land line to tell me that his cell phone was broken. When I asked, "broken how?" he told me solemnly that he wasn't getting a dial tone on it. This was a few days after he told me that his cell phone was broken because after he dialed a number, nothing happened. I reminded him again that there is no 'dial tone' on a cell phone and you have to hit 'send' for the call to go anywhere. He finally let his old television antenna go to the dump and signed up for satellite television a couple of years ago, but at least once a week one of us has to go to his house to figure out what button he's pushed on the remote that put Spanish subtitles on everything or fixed it so he can get nothing but the Irish ballad channel.

These brushes with the Ghost of Me-Future makes me determined to keep up with what's going on in the world of technology. I don't have to actually own every new gadget that comes down the pike (although I did recently buy one of those cute little mini-laptops) but I want to at least be able to discuss them intelligently with those who still have the fever to own the latest and greatest.

I just hope it's not too late. She said as she turned the dial on her radio and pulled up the antennae on her cell phone, reaching for another VHS movie to put in the player.

Tick Tock

They say time is a wonderful healer. I just wish it was a better beautician.

I can barely stand to look in the mirror any more. Some fat old lady keeps stepping in front of me and frankly, sometimes when she doesn't have clothes on I gotta tell you it's just not a pretty sight. The old bat usually has a gray streak showing in the part of her hair (on her head, Lord knows I don't look anywhere else) and she needs to make a standing appointment to get her mustache waxed or else learn how to braid it. The hairs growing out her chin have the consistency of piano wire, and the flap on the bottom of her arms remind me of the "wings" on a flying squirrel. Occasionally her face swells up on one side and then the next time I see her smiling in the mirror there's yet another toothless gap. I close my eyes sometimes thinking she'll go away and I can see me again. You know. Me. The young brunette with the cute cuddly body and the charming dimples when she smiles. I refuse to even harbor the thought that the curmudgeonly creature I see there could possibly actually be me.

What the hell happened?????

Surely it hasn't really been over thirty years since I marched with the high school band and made out with a quarterback under the bleachers. How could it be possible that it's been almost 40 years since I fell of the top of a cheerleader's pyramid wrenching my knees severely. (At least now we know that "much later" approximates to four decades. They told me then that my knee probably wouldn't bother me too bad until "much later." I had one replaced last year and am putting off the other one until a "little later.") Could it be true that twenty-five years has passed since we buried my grandfather, and over ten since I've seen my nieces? They say that life is like a roll of toilet tissue. When you start the roll, it seems to go a long way because it's so thick. As more tissue gets used, the roll spins faster and towards the center of the roll... the end... it flies. I believe it. It used to take eons for Christmas to roll around when I was a kid. Now I hardly see a reason to put the decorations into storage because by the time I get them all there it's time to put them out again. I'm not a big fan of Christmas as much anymore anyway. Someone is always wanting to take my picture and every time that shutter clicks, that old fat woman jumps out in front of me and hogs the shot. She's usually in some strange contortion that makes all of the triple chins show up and surely that must be a pillow she stuffs into her shirt?

Maybe there's a reason that our eyesight gets worse as we get older? So we can't see ourselves as clearly and we can live in denial of what we really look like? At least I can laugh about my sagging body, the hair where it isn't supposed to be and my crappy dentition. I occasionally bump into someone at Walmart (I can't see a thing without my glasses and I never can remember where I put them) who is obviously in denial mode about the whole aging thing. Ladies, for the last time, dark hair and wrinkles just ain't natural. I may not be the prettiest old gal to trot out of the gate, but at least I is what I is. Unlike a woman I saw the other day who from the back, with her blonde hair almost to her waist, trim figure and tight jeans caught the eye of almost every man who walked by. Until she turned around and you saw a face that had been lifted so much she's going to be wearing her tits on her cheeks before long.

I don't intend to go gracefully into that dark night of "old age." I'm going to go kicking and screaming. Or at the very least shuffling and bitching. But, I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not along the way. I'm fifty two years old. I've lived through several major surgeries (including one for breast cancer and one total knee replacement) and I have the scars and the diminished capabilities to prove it. I've been around more than one block and I've run into more than one wall. I've cried oceans of tears and I've made more mistakes than any one woman should ever admit to. I have earned the right to be respected for the wisdom that comes with experience and to be able to show my fat ankles in public without worrying about the snappily dressed twig-woman who looks at me with pity. I look right back at her with pity in my eyes. In the time it takes to knock back another Slim-Fast, she's going to be looking at the backside of fifty and I'd be willing to bet she isn't going to like the view in her mirror then any more than I like the view in mine.

One More For the Road

I reckon blogs are like potato chips and men. After you have one, you start craving another one. And another. I've finally lost my craving for men (except for the one I'm blissfully married to) but I still could eat my weight in potato chips (and that's a lot of chips, honey!) and I am even more addicted to blogging.

When I started this "blugging thing" as one of my elderly friends refers to it, I gave it a lot of thought. I made notes for a week before I finally took a deep breath and opened a blogger.com account. My first post was a cut and paste done from a Word document that I'd meticulously spell and grammar checked and read aloud to see if it "flowed" nicely. I posted in that blog for a while (childhood memoirs) until it got a little boring (and sad) doing all that reminiscing, so I decided to do a humor blog. That lasted until Sarah Palin was put on the vice-presidential ticket and for a few months I didn't find much humor in a world that would show such a lapse of good judgment. I still go there occasionally to ponder the meaning of life and the size of soft drink cups or to share my opinions of how they should stop the oil spilling into the Gulf. Which goes along the lines of the old joke, "How many BP executives would it take to fill......" but I'm a long ways from being what you'd call a "dedicated blogger." (Although if you put all my blogs end to end, they would reach almost to the crossroads down at the four-lane).

After Pasture Prime came my rabbit phase and with it the "Bunny Briefs" blog, which isn't really about animals wearing underwear (unlike one of my favorite blogs "Nanny Goats in Panties"). And then there was the herb gardening blog that ties in with one of my passions as well as my "day job" an owner of an herb greenhouse (http://cedarbrook.viviti.com). Somewhere in the middle of all of those was a horse blog with stuff I learned as an owner of a riding stable.

After I celebrated with the masses on the anniversary of the beginning of my fifty-second year of life on this planet (the masses included my husband, my ex-husband/best friend and his girlfriend and the celebration was a shrimp dinner on the Tennessee River; I will warn you now I am prone to exaggerate from time to time) I realized that this impressive milestone could only be successfully marked in one way. Another blog.

So here we are. And once again there's that tingle you get when faced with a new beginning. Being a typical Gemini, I love new beginnings. I like rearranging the furniture in the house, coloring my hair and starting new craft projects. I however don't like cleaning house, taking time to fix my hair in the morning or finishing craft projects. So, if you visit from time to time and I haven't been in in a while, Google me and see if maybe I'm just moving the furniture around in a new location.