Gravity

The New Oxford American dictionary on my iBook defines gravity as “the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass,” or maybe just parts of a body. I’m still trying to figure out how gravity found my negative-AAA breasts, which by now could be called belly nipples.

I recently turned 52—yes, finally playing with a full deck—and discovered that, though somewhat slender, I’ve not been able to hide from gravity. For my birthday, I drove to Breckenridge, Colorado, in an attempt to defy gravity by ascending one mile in elevation, but climbing those peaks every morning still made me feel gravity’s embrace, particularly when I collapsed under the ski lift. My friend helped me up and remarked how I resembled a smashed bug on a windshield.

“You can’t escape me,” I heard Father Gravity murmur after John brushed the dirt from my negative-AAAs.

“Well, try this on, you ol’ FG,” I shook my fist at the ground. “I might be old, but I can reverse your bulge-inducing effects by standing on my hands.”

Standing on my hands. It all began during my grade-school years in a Montevideo, Minnesota, summertime. While my parents were at work, I watched Lunch with Casey, a kid’s variety program on WTCN-TV based in the Twin Cities. Casey Jones was a railroad engineer and Roundhouse Rodney acted as his sidekick.

A former Ice Capades skater, Roundhouse would occasionally walk around the set on his hands. I was impressed with his balance and decided to give it a go. I was hooked. From that time on, I could rarely just watch TV. I stood on my hands, did the splits, reverse-curved my spine to make a bridge, did front and back walkovers, and exercised whenever the tube was making noise. If I were to watch TV today, I would probably fall back into the same habit.

Fly forward 10 years and two cities later. I was living in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and still going to university. Rich, a college friend from Chicago, had graduated and moved to a Minneapolis suburb. He frequently invited me to visit on weekends, so in sunny or snowy weather, I’d tootle in my yellow-orange geometric form (Opel station wagon) two hours west.

One day while Rich was in the bathroom, I found a wide, open space in his apartment to secretly drop my hands onto the floor and sling my fuzzy-black-socked feet up to rest against the wall. A while later after he emerged from the loo, Rich glanced up at his wall and said, “What is that?!”

“What?” I asked.

“Look at these black marks on my clean, white wall!” Voiced raised, he appeared to be turning red.

Being insecure, and at this point, scared, I sheepishly looked up into his eyes and said, “I was standing on my hands,” and when he couldn’t calculate the connection, I hesitantly demonstrated.

Rich exhaled an exasperated sigh and handed me a lint remover, so I could pull sock fragments from the popcorn-finished wall.

These days I’m more conscientious about where I place my feet, but ol’ Father Gravity is going to have a tough time keeping them down.

Bee Dipper

Adam’s Mountain Café has grown from a quaint, eclectic restaurant in Manitou Springs, Colorado, to a more cosmopolitan, cultured enclave in the old Spa Building, on Manitou Avenue, the street where it first began.

During the 25 years I’ve dined there, the chefs have continued to create amazing dishes with a classy flair. Primarily known for exquisite vegetarian fare, they also serve tasty dead animals too. With nuts, cheeses, herbs, spices, and sauces, they transform ordinary into an extraordinary expression of flavors.

On a cool summer day, our friend treated my daughter and me to lunch. It felt so good to get out of the house and have someone wait on me. When the waiter brought our beverages, I inhaled the steam from my warm peppermint tea and began to thaw.

I drew the ceramic honey bowl closer to me and removed the notched cover, so I could drizzle some sweet stuff into my tea. As I lifted the little wooden honey dipper, I watched the viscous liquid slowly cascade back into the bowl.

When the dipper was almost drained of its honey, I leaned in to get a closer look. It appeared something was stuck to the wood.

After my eyes focused better, I giggled and said, “Look! Isn’t this a clever idea. This honey dipper has a bee as a decoration to keep the honey from falling so fast.”

My daughter looked into the bowl, then inquisitively at me, “It is a bee, Mom,” she said, “but it’s still a great idea.”

So the moral of the story is, look closely at food or drink before moving it past your lips, because recently, in the middle of the night when I drank my water, I swallowed a spider.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
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Therapy

I’ve been in therapy all day, and I’m exhausted. How could something that’s supposed to help be so painful? My body feels like a wrecking ball, my eyelids like iron curtains.

The results from all this hard work should be worth the effort, though.

Fewer dandelions will poke their little yellow heads through my grass. Freshly planted seeds, blessed with water, time-release food, and sunshine will bring new life, a new perspective, vegetables, and herbs. Yes!

I love gardening and yard work. It’s therapy. Earth has given so much to me; you should see my fingernails and hemorrhoids.

Give me an old knife, a pitchfork, and shovel, and Freddy, look out! Every taproot I hold in my hand is a sign of victory. Auntie over Earth. Auntie loving Earth. Auntie showing Earth what can grow in her yard—and what can’t.

When I first bought this property in 1994, it was riddled with ants, weeds, lumps, and slugs. The former residents were too busy with paying work to work toward the big payoff—a beautiful home and yard.

I’m into the old “pride of ownership” thing. If you’re going to own something, you should take care of it, all the way. The benefits are visible and intrinsic. Guests feel more welcomed when a home is nurtured. My daughter and I feel better, because we’re comfortable and our eyes see loveliness.

In 1994, the ants were having the time of their lives. They owned this property. Being a naturist and naturalist, I wanted to let them know how I felt about their presence, naturally, so I bought bags of oranges, ground them in our blender, and poured pulp and juice over the ants’ primary living area, which was everywhere. Orange juice is supposed to cause their little lives to move toward Ant Hill Heaven.

The ants in our yard, however, must have had scurvy, because they led more productive lives with my generous gifts of vitamin C. They’d lick their little lips, burp, take their little legs and wipe their mouths a few times, burp again, and say, “Thank you, Miss Eartha! We knew living here would be heaven.”

So I bought Diazinon. “Oh, good,” they’d murmur, “here comes Miss Eartha with breakfast.” Yum, yum, croak. Darwin, however, is alive and well, philosophically speaking. Survival of the fittest prevails to this day, and God, are they huge!

The lumps in our yard are clay—not the modeling type. The house moves atop the clay as if it were a boat, not brick, and definitely not good for being pulled on water skis. Cracks in the house open when the ground is dry and close when wet, so they primarily remain open.

I don’t want to fill the cracks, because if I fall into a lot of money before I fall out of this house, I’ll have the house leveled—not razed, but pushed back into place, so the house will sit on the same elevation. Right now the north side is at 6,732, and the south side sits at 6,543. Uneven, but we get a decent workout just going to the bathroom.

And the slugs. They’re those oversize snails sans shells. I tried the natural massacre on them too. Pour beer into a shallow tin, which draws them in (hypothetically), then they drown in beer.

A waste of good barley, but I tried it anyway, ’cause if I were to go naturally, why not drown in beer. That way when I’d pass my final fluffer amongst my sluggish friends, I wouldn’t be alive to experience embarrassment.

But the slugs didn’t like the beer I chose. For me, I like a darker, more expensive brew. When I go to the bathroom, I like to know I had a good brew. For the slugs, as when I was in college, I bought Old Milwaukee. Not a bad beer if you’re broke. Our slugs must have been opulent, livin’ the high life.

“No thanks,” they oozed as they slithered along leaving a slimy film in trails in our yard, “contact us again when you’re serving Black and Tan.”

Eventually, through nurturing and poking holes in our soil, the slugs transmogrified into my former boyfriend, but I kicked his proverbial arse out of my home (slapping hand wipe and a whew!).

So if anyone out there would like a group therapy session, I could use the company…and I have very good beer I will share.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2009/05/therapy.html

Conservation

I am extremely tight…
and very selective about what enters my personal space.

I like warmth with a soft breeze, simplicity and a life of ease. I prefer quietude with splashes of exuberance, a neutral tone accented by color and plant life.
Predictability helps to structure my life. Friends call at special times each year, or on a particular day and time, and some come over on a certain day of the week. My daughter usually begins and ends school at the same time, and she stays at her father’s two days a week, though she vacillates on which days.

Like a menstrual cycle, lovely bills come due on their reliable, selfish, monthly schedules, and every week my generous friend shares her garbage service with me. (Together, four of us fill one small can weekly. We are avid recyclers from the Midwest. I was conserving things in Minnesota at age seven, which my parents couldn’t comprehend. My environmental efforts irritated them. Dad was poor, but not that poor, he probably thought. Mom, on the other hand, was raised with money and permitted pieces of my precocity.)

When winter comes in Colorado, which doesn’t match the snow levels nor frequent blizzards of Minnesota or Wisconsin in July, I survey my home prior to cold’s unwelcome and much-too-long visit looking for ways to keep the warmth in, the chill out.

First I assess my home’s primary occupant. I wear more clothes, layering them, so I can peel as I thaw. Being a household naturist, wearing clothing is against my religion, but I refuse to turn the heat up past 66 during the day, except Fridays when I punch it up to 72 and chip the ice clinging to my windows with a corkscrew.

Some of my ideas may seem crazy, but I’m eccentric and the characteristic will not, by choice, change. Here are three thoughts.

I slide the range hood fan screen out, toss it in the dishwasher, and cover the fan hole with cardboard, which I secure with masking tape. Only once each year do I forget and turn on the fan for a sec, gasping. For freshening, circulating, and removing particulates from the air, I use Clarity, my Honeywell Enviracaire air purifier, and mist with peppermint water (see auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2008/11/sniff-sniff.html).

Cracks and holes are discreetly plugged with old clothes or remnants if caulking doesn’t apply, so the ol’ ranch wears a tighter sweater. Guys like that. And though I’m a friendly person who welcomes a smiling face and lots of light, I keep my drapes drawn and blinds blocking the drafts drifting through my windy windows.

There may not be any more ways I can reduce expenses, as I did when I decided to work part time and be a full-time den mother in 1996, but I can be tight by conserving.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/conservation.html