A Truck by Any Other Name

During the summers when I was 12 through 16 years old, I’d live with my aunt and her family “on the lake,” as they say in northern Wisconsin. It doesn’t mean you lived in a floating vessel atop Adam’s ale (water); it means “a lake lies beyond your front, or back, yard,” depending on where you situate your front door, which can be really confusing if you only use the side door as we did.

We’d ski almost every day, pulling the boat in to refuel occasionally and dashing in for peanut butter sandwiches when we got hungry. It was “fend for yourself” there. I was always hungry—and extremely thin.

Because I was the oldest kid—my four cousins were younger than I by two years (Scott), three (Hope), 10 (Kent), and 13 (Alison)—I sometimes had to care for the youngest. An adorable child with black hair due to Native American heritage, a cute little nose, and a sweet, angelic voice, Alison could also be a pain. I have four memorable experiences with that girl, two of which I’ll share.

When I was 15, Hope and I decided to take a walk on the lake road (we actually walk on the road). Out of obligation, we had to take Alison too—just what teenagers want to do. Ali wore only a top and a diaper. After all, she was 18 months old and it was warm, humid summertime. I carried Alison on my shoulders, so Hope and I could walk faster.

About five minutes into our trek, I smelled something putrid very close to my nose and immediately felt that I would vomit. I carefully lifted my cute, little cousin from my shoulders and found that she had filled her diaper. My neck was brown and lumpy.

Another story was Alison’s Lessons in Learning to Talk. My aunt was driving with some of us kids into town one day. Wabeno, Wisconsin: one grocery store, one post office, two gas stations, five saloons. Heading toward us was a big semi rolling through this itty-bitty burg.

In her sweet, angelic voice, empty-boweled Alison squealed, “Look, Mommy, a fruck!”

(Puzzle piece number 31 of 38.)

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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I’m Not Moving

Sitting with a friend in my living room one day, I said, “When my daughter graduates and goes to college, I’m going to sell this place, buy a boat, and sail away.”

“I’m not moving out till I’m 40,” came a quick reply from the otherwise-occupied young lady across the room. “They’re all out to get me out there,” she went on. “Plus I’ve got it pretty good here.”

Stunned, I said to my friend, “When my daughter graduates, I’ll be moving out and going back to college.”

(Puzzle piece number 30 of 38.)

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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To Larisa

Is it fair that a victim is the one who pays the most and loses the greatest in the court system?
Is it fair, when you choose not to lie with the “boss,” he decides to terminate you?
Is it fair, when you’re courageous enough to stand up for what is morally wrong, you are the one who is punished?
Is it fair, when you’ve been accused of the very thing someone else is guilty of, you lose your license, your good name, your confidence?

I’ve learned that others can be greedy, to the extent that they want your peace, your brightness, your lifeblood. They will make up any story to gain that which does not come from the spirit within, and then try to win with your cards. But someone will see through this person, and that someone will know you too, and that someone will reveal the truth. And soon, the malicious, greedy person will shrivel up into dust and blow away.
And when the dust is blowing in the wind toward you, it will fear you and veer toward the water, and become mud.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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Feeding Frenzy

Weekday mornings there’s a feeding frenzy in our kitchen accompanied by all the masticating sounds.

At 6:00 a.m. I grudgingly peel myself away from my bed, pull on whatever clothes are by my bedside, then go and rattle my teenager with a faux-cheerful “rise ’n’ shine.” After my happy, little tune, I stumble to the bathroom and rinse my mush, still at half snore, hoping I don’t drown in the sink.

As I try to remember what she said she wanted for breakfast, I ask my daughter a couple more times if she’s up, to which she always answers yes, even though she’s still dreaming. I flip on KRCC to listen to NPR’s Morning Edition, knowing this will draw her tired little demeanor out of bed.

In the kitchen, there is no routine, which makes morning more confusing. I generally start at night, putting a placemat and napkin (only cloth; I haven’t purchased paper napkins since who knows when) on our floating island. Sometimes I even set out the toaster, silverware, pan, and cover on the way to my nightly read.

Shiloh goes outside and does what dogs do, while Eli the Maine coon and Dusty the gray short-hair circle me like sharks, tails flicking in the air. [Kittens initially were called Piercing and Tattoo: see auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2007/12/tattoo-and-piercing.html.]

Within seconds, momentum sets in.

I open the refrigerator door and remove half its contents. Bread slides into the toaster for my daughter’s PBJ-sandwich lunch, latte heats in the microwave, butter melts in the pan, and water runs through the coffeemaker to heat the animals’ food.

Shiloh comes back in with a man’s hunger and twice as many feet, the two cats I don’t need start sounding like a creaking door and a questioning baby, and the microwave’s high-pitched squeal alerts me to my awaiting warm latte (yippee).

Eggs, milk, and cheeses in the pan, peanut butter and jelly spread, and English muffins now in the toaster, I put vitamins C and E, fish oil, raw meat or chicken soup with some crunchy dry food in Shiloh’s dish. I scoop something dead onto the kitties’ plate and pour hot water from the coffeemaker onto their food, stirring Shiloh’s to distribute the heat, adding cool water if it’s too hot.

Hands washed for the fifth time, muffins buttered, omelette cooked, my daughter saunters into the kitchen with her empty mug longing for hot cocoa.

Soon she’s sitting, mmm’ing, pleased with the flavor (thank goodness). I open the dishwasher, place Shiloh’s warm meal on the lowered door and the cats’ plate below, enabling them safety from a wandering canine tongue. Aside from Morning Edition, all I can hear are mmm’s, lapping, slurps, and crunching.
At last, I reach for my long-awaited mug of—groan—cold latte.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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Road Kill

A group meets in our home sporadically to discuss life’s issues. After centering, we go around the circle and take turns sharing one current thought or situation each. When everyone has had the opportunity to contribute, our leader guides us into what she believes would be a good starting topic and we open the floor to discussion. I suspect it’s like AA without coffee and cigarettes.

I love it. So many perspectives, each allowed to openly state their ideas while others listen. No interruptions jar the spirit, and all is received with complete objectivity and possibility, which isn’t to say we completely agree. We come from different walks of life, religions, states, and party affiliations, yet we receive others’ input respectfully.

Our group is an offshoot of the Institute of Noetic Sciences [noetic.org], whose mission is “advancing the science of consciousness and human experience to serve individual and collective transformation.” Or as I put it, “We work to positively change things from a globally conscious perspective.”

We don’t always talk about deep, growth-oriented issues, though. Our fearless leader, as I call her, had just returned from a jaunt to Mississippi to meet her soon-to-be husband’s family. He was also at the meeting on this particular eve, so when his betrothed started telling a story about one of their experiences with his redneck, hillbilly family, he was right there to pile more details onto a crazy heap of a tale.

He added to her beginning, “Well, my brother and my cousin [which I presume was the same person] were driving back from town with some odds and ends my mom needed for supper [they don’t say dinner in the South]. As they rounded a curve, they hit a deer.

“Well, the deer was killed right away, so they sped back to the farm and got one of the trucks. Then we went back and loaded the deer into the truck. And that’s what we had for supper,” he concluded.

“You ate road kill?” I blurted.

Laughing right along with the rest of the group, our fearless leader nodded her head and said, “I’m not sure I’d had venison before, but it was pretty good.”

I suppose…if it’s fresh.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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Inauguration Day

What a glorious day for the United States of America!

We the people in our republic, democratically elected a gentleman of African American, English, and Irish descent. Many of my friends must feel profound joy in helping bring Barack Obama to his position of Commander in Chief, particularly my black friends, who may not have imagined this success possible.

My sister, whom I met October 6, 1986, isn’t much older than I. She remembers having to nurture her thirst from a drinking fountain for blacks only. It’s hard to imagine a world like that, yet prejudice exists. I know.

And though the reflections in Ecclesiastes 3 say…

“There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.” [NIV]

…my prayer is that the world will see America’s vision to work hard and in peace toward a loving, sustainable home planet, and we will all work together to plant, to build, to dance, to embrace, to be silent, to love in peace [using more contraception], and in a sense, to be born again.

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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Am I Lunch?

A friend and I had finally gotten together for lunch and caught up on the prior year's events. As I grabbed my doggie bag and walked toward the restaurant door, I suggested we go together to the garage below where I was parked, then I'd drive him to his car.

When we arrived at my Trooper, I opened the rear door where Alex, my patient yellow Lab, awaited me. To my friend's shock, I said to Alex, "Look, honey, I brought you lunch!"

My friend thought I meant him.

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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Death to Deer

I am pissed. Profoundly upset. This may not be a typical Auntie Eartha column, but it must be said.

Some limp, cowardly weakling is out there killing our deer with arrows in a populated neighborhood: Tuesday it was a large buck. These are deer you can pet (see me above). They roam our streets and yards, graze on our plants, mount our does. They upset us, because they try to mate with yearlings.

Some of us get perturbed because they eat vegetation we wish they wouldn’t and poop on every square yard of our grass. But dear God, is someone so lame and stupid that he reaches out and kills a dog or something he can rub, like his wife, his child, his pet, or a tame deer?! What is happening to our neighborhood? Break-ins, heroin, Mexican national drug distributors, meth. Who are the mentally disturbed morons living in my area?!? Let’s get them out!!

The demeanor of most of our bucks, does, and their children is placid, even the injured one shown here. Recently a young human driving inattentively and too fast on Parkview Boulevard severely injured one of our babies—its back legs were useless once the young driver in his Volvo hit the young one. A Colorado Springs police office came two hours after it had suffered and shot it twice to ensure it (the baby, not the young driver) was thoroughly dead, since the Volvo’s driver didn’t finish his own kill.

As I write this I want to go door to door and find the limp-membered idiot who thought he would make the world a better place by wounding a buck with his poorly aimed arrows till the buck suffered his death. Someone should do the same to this pitiful menace. Place an arrow strategically through his small part and later assess his situation, maybe stoke the fire…a very small fire.

When this slaughterer gets caught, and they always do, if we had the tax dollars and legal permission, we should send the cretin to Siberia to live on his “skill” to survive. But since it is so easy to call a deer into your presence around here, my prayer is that the bad guy lives a long, useless life starving…which he probably already is…mentally.

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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What Sets You Free?

Boy, it’s been so long since I’ve felt free that I can’t easily remember what would set me free.

Ultimately…death.

Being with friends, saying what’s on your mind, not what they want to hear.

The freedom to feel and express without the fear of ridicule.

To say what’s on your mind without judgment.

To not feel obligated to say, “I love you.”
To remember a number from long ago and not be criticized for knowing something so trivial.

To unravel a truth so simple in life, and not be found stupid.

To make a mistake or say the wrong word, and find a smile or giggle rather than harsh words.

To talk with a friend and really be there without a criticizing ear, whose voice will fault every word and replace hatred with the love you had felt.

To write, without fear, your truths being found,
to share the depths of your heart.
To read with delight the words you enjoy,
to sing every song from the start.

To trust the voice that speaks so clear,
envelop yourself in another.
Take someone’s hand while you look in his eyes.
Freedom is what you’ll discover.

“What sets you free?”
Morning’s here, a sun-filled day,
your body’s firm, able, refreshed.
The cool breeze, birds, and mountains beyond
lead you to new elevations
of thought
and awareness.

Your spirit is pulled,
invisible attraction,
something’s waiting
for you to know.

Inside the eagle
envelops your being…
views like never before.
Your eyes see detail…
some of life’s answers
are open to you now.
Hold them, taste them,
captured in time.
Remember how they feel.
Now close your eyes
in darkness’s arms
Be held in what is real.

Roll in awareness,
savor simplicity,
life so complex
isn’t forever.

Invisible thread binds
(the) greatest of things,
beauty, strength appear.
Light and dark reach depths
never felt,
there’s no such thing as fear.
—July 8, 1991

(Puzzle piece number 29 of 38.)

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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Me

What do you see when you look at me?
A cheerful, loving face?
Maybe you take another stand,
and I’m a hateful, sick disgrace.
But some who try a little harder
get a deeper view …
They see that love was once inside
until I fell for you.
They see a being more complex
than you ever thought of me.
That’s why you don’t understand the girl —
you simply just don’t see.
—June 25, 1991

(Puzzle piece number 28 of 38.)

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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KittenSpeak

I have a friend who has rescued many basset hounds—those floppy, droppy, slow-moving, tail-wagging Hush Puppies dogs. It’s hard to believe, but these canines were bred to hunt rabbits—their sense of smell second only to that of the bloodhound, according to Wikipedia.* But can you imagine a basset chasing a rabbit?

“Spike, fetch that bunny!” you say, and off runs the basset. Two lopes and the overgrown wiener dog has tripped over his ears, somersaulted, and is lying in a puddle of himself.

Hunting was never very big to Joanne, so she just thanked the dogs to dust her hardwood floors with their ears.

One day while living in upstate New York, she went to a feed store to buy dog food. While there, my dear friend had a mental hiccup and came home with a kitten and all the feline accoutrements. I was amazed at the news; had she just forgotten the dog food? But with each conversation as months rolled on, her joy with Kate the cat grew. Between the two of us, stories of our critters abounded.

One day she came home exhausted after another day at the bank and was sitting next to her large, wood desk talking on the phone with a friend. Simultaneously she viewed her sticky-note reminders. She’s the type who has more stickies clinging to her fridge, desk, and bathroom mirror than a hippie has bumper stickers on his VW van. With each new “to do,” thought, or need from the store, she’d post another sticky note: Wack weeds. Get out of banking. Call Jim. Go to the bathroom. Find a decent and reasonable Christian man.

As Joanne leaned back in her chair conversing, Kate the cat jumped up on the desk for a stroke of attention. With raised tail and a swing of her fanny, Kate displayed a sticky note she apparently had sat on that read: Buy cat food and litter.
copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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* Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basset_hound photographs, particularly the third one. Tell me what you see.