Minnesota Nice

Flying low on a two-lane highway that connects a succession of small farming towns, I looked up from reading CD covers in the passenger seat, saw 25 mph, and heard, “Crap!”

Oh geez.

The sheriff approached my new husband’s car from behind as Tom rolled down his window. 

“You were goin’ a little fast there,” the sheriff observed. “What brings yeh tö MinnesOta?” he asked, brandishing a chubby, friendly smile.

Always nervous about what might fly out of Tom’s Irish, drinking mouth, I leaned forward, securing eye contact with the sheriff, and answered, “We’re on our honeymoon! In fact, yesterday we visited the folks who bought my family’s farm in Montevideo, where I grew up, and now we’re on our way to St. Paul to visit my friend whose husband is a cop,” I said and nodded reassuringly.

“Congratulations,” Sheriff Keith said, smiling and nodding in return. Staying on course, he refocused on the driver, never losing momentum. “Have you had any citations? Or is your record clean?”

“No, it’s clean,” I heard, as Tom handed over his license and I prayed, since Tom has a habit of stretching more than his gut. 

“Thank you,” Sheriff Keith said. “I’ll be back in a bit,” and strolled to his car.

“How fast were you going?” I asked.

“Fifty, maybe sixty.” Only double or more the posted limit. Oh boy.

Apprehensively, I shuffled CDs around, tidied my two cubic feet of small-car space, and waited, all the while wondering how Tom would look in orange and if we still had cash left after our over-the-top-for-old-farts wedding.

A shadow moved toward the car. “Well, it looks like everything checks out fine,” Sheriff Keith confirmed. “So you said you were headed to St. Paul? Gee, you’re gonna be runnin’ into quite a detour, so just remember to keep your speed down and enjoy the country.”

As late would have it, the primary highway, US-12, leading from Willmar into the Cities was blocked for construction—all two and-a-half-hours’ worth, so we kicked our plans down a gear, texted Katharina to say we’d be late by who knows how long, and enjoyed the green, green grass of home.

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.

Whoa, Bessie!

Mom was a model when she was in her teens. So were her two sisters—cute little French girls with large breasts, tiny waists, and small hips. The kind you don’t want to stand next to.

She thought I’d turn out cute and be a model too, so she had the Inoculator shoot one of my vaccines way underneath my upper arm so it wouldn’t be visible during photo shoots. Turns out she didn’t have to worry about that.

Being a model, Mom dressed herself beautifully and expensively, except for that ugly powder blue and black strapless, one-piece bathing suit. We were living in Minnesota, where Dad was the branch manager for a loan company (the kind where you could get a loan at 20 percent interest or for your firstborn), and Mom ran the appliance department for Northern States Power.

One rare, warm day while I visited friends, Mom and Dad drove out to our land, jumped on our horses, and rode around the ranch.

Dad rode Lucky, his Arabian–quarter horse, and Mom took Red, my graceful, five-gaited American saddlebred. As always, they rode the fence line, checking for loose wire and anything needing repair.

They then rode up our hill, where we intended to build a home “some day.” Once atop the ridge, they rode freely without obstruction. Dad led as he coaxed Lucky into a lope.

At one point, wondering if Mom was following, Dad turned his head and looked behind him. Then did a double take.

Mom’s strapless bathing suit became a birthday suit that hadn’t held up to the rigors of a canter. She was a model of sheer freedom.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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Making Love with Mama Bear

Have you ever met a couple who just shouldn’t have married but did anyway? And the girl wasn’t even pregnant? If so, you’d understand that trying to grow up with parents like mine was a bigger challenge than convincing the pope that “be fruitful and multiply” does not apply anymore: nor do a lot of things in the Old Testament (which I’ve read at least four times, the New Testament, probably 50).

After my dad did the dirty deed and said, “I do,” and my mom did the dirtier deed and said, “I do,” they headed up to the cabin for their cheaper-than-going-out-to-a-nice-dinner honeymoon. Dad’s always been “poor,” and getting married provided no exception to prove his point.

I will admit, we had a really cool cabin in northern Wisconsin near Lone Stone Lake. Grandpa and Dad, both carpenters, built it of beautiful logs cut down from the land and treated to endure the weather—inside and out. They constructed built-in double bunk beds on either side of the large main room, so Mom could sleep on one side, Dad the other. Our cabin also had a wood-burning pot-belly stove, a large wood table in the room’s center under a light, and a pump to draw water into the sink. They later added an additional bedroom on the entrance side, close to the rarely traveled gravel road.

I loved the way our cabin smelled—like cedar. All of our bedding—flannel sheets, pillows, and wonderfully warm quilts—had the same smell that made me want to stay in bed all day. [You know? If I were married and had a cute guy… oh, that’s a different story.]

Did you notice I didn’t mention anything about indoor plumbing?

After we moved to Minnesota in ’65 when I was five, my parents assessed the pros and cons of keeping the cabin, now a seven-hour drive away. They did end up selling it about a year later, but not before we shared a near-death experience.

We invited our new next-door neighbors, Rudy, Alice, Mark, and Mary, to accompany us to northern Wisconsin. After the pain-in-the-prat drive, we unloaded the maroon Buick station wagon and began preparing for the following day’s fishing excursion.

The next morning, Dad, Mark, and I were in our rowboat casting lines, whooping and hollering when we’d land bite-size crappies, sunfish, and bluegills. Yep! We caught quite a string. Too small to eat, Dad decided to put them in back of the cabin next to the biffy (that’s Norwegian for Scheißenhaus) to bait raccoons for dinner.

Teasing.

During the day, Rudy kept busy being nervous: Alice made him that way. Mom and Alice fixed dinner, Mom putting just the right amount of arsenic in Dad’s portion, then setting it aside.

Nighttime finally fell. The parents played poker and talked strangely like Minnesotans do, while we kids did what kids without TV do: We used our brains. That made us tired, so we went to bed.

Occasionally, Dad would get up, dim the interior lights, and turn on the back spotlight to see if a coon had discovered our fish offering. At 10:30 Dad let out a yelp! We didn’t have a coon eating our bluegills, we had a big, mama bear, whose rear end faced us as she dined. “Quick, wake the kids!” he ordered, feeling steely from the arsenic.

Mary and I awakened fairly quickly and were peering excitedly out the back window, while Rudy, Alice, Mom, and Dad stirred, rattled, then jumped on Mark. You see, Mark was a teenager who could sleep through anything. F-i-n-a-l-l-y, Mark rose and joined us in the grand sighting.

But it wasn’t grand enough. Dad insisted that we bang on the window to try to get Mama Bear to face us. She waved her paw at him and told him to forget it. So he decided to go outside and convince her.

Wearing his thongs (they call them “flip-flops” now; thongs are worn elsewhere), he walked the length of our cabin to the only door and stepped into the black outside. Then he walked the entire length of our cabin toward the outhouse and the bear, apparently unfazed by my dad’s presence.

“Raar,” Dad exclaimed, trying to get the big fur ball’s attention. Nothing. “RAAR!” he said again with more passion. That one garnered a turn of the head. “RAAR-ER-RAAR-ER-RAAAR!” Dad growled.

That must have been a mating call or a declaration of war, because that big mama bear turned quickly, bared her teeth, and started loping toward Dad. Flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop went his feet as he yelled, “Joooooooanie, open the door!”

I screamed and started bawling, because I just knew Mom would lock the door and say, “Fend for yourself, sucker!” To my utmost surprise and relief, she actually opened the door for him. He breathlessly fell into the safety of our cabin, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said, “Thanks for not locking the door.”

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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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.

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Seamingly Creative

(Puzzle piece number 10 of 38.)
In “Unearthed,” my first post, I mentioned that my parents were not cut from matrimonial cloth. Rather, they wove an erratic web of discontent. Like pants that were too tight: they kept crawling up each other’s butts.

Their ubiquitous disharmony far surpassed light moments, and their periods of silence superseded even mundane conversation. So one way Mom communicated with Dad was through subterfuge—with a creative streak.

About a year after Mom discovered her sewing machine (see “Secrets”), Dad accepted a transfer from Wisconsin to Minnesota. Mom and I were not thrilled in the least about leaving Nana, her mom, and the comfort of having her nearby. I had just started kindergarten and depended on Nana to walk me across the street to her home on school days. Nevertheless, before winter break, Dad cemented our plans to move from cold to colder.

The first winter in western Minnesota was excruciating. It snowed almost all the time and the frigid winds blew drifts so high, we were able to climb onto our roof. It was that winter when I discovered there was no Santa Claus—even I couldn’t get my little buns down our chimney.

Months after settling into his new position as branch manager, Dad decided to buy a ranch and raise beef cattle—his lifelong dream, Mom’s and my nightmare.

We didn’t live on our ranch; in fact, I wonder if we lived at all. We worked. We all had full-time jobs in addition to being full-time ranchers. Dad ran the loan company, Mom managed an appliance business, and I functioned as student, homemaker, maid, and referee between parents.

We lived in town close to my elementary school and commuted ranchward to care for our cattle, horses, and cats. Workaholism is one of our family addictions (laziness is a sin).

On weekends, Dad practically lived on the ranch. He’d erect fences, build structures, plant oats, wheat, and alfalfa, care for the animals, and expel flatus. Mom would keep her distance as much as possible, thinking of ways to torment my father.

When a person feels the call of nature while in a field or in the woods, one doesn’t run to find a biffy, as Norwegians called the loo. If the person is male, relief is all the easier. So Dad unzipped his overalls, but found no opening in his boxers. Feeling a flood of desperation, he quickly reached to the back of his shorts, figuring he’d put his boxers on backward, only to discover another sewn seam.

Under his breath, he muttered, “That wife.”

Yes, Mom and her sewing machine. What a stitch.

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2008/03/seamingly-creative.html