there is no such thing. “too tired to snore.” uh-huh.
there is also no such avoidance as “i just won’t sleep on my back.” or “i don’t snore when i turn my face to the left.”
sometimes, snoring happens.
and before you get all up-in-arms about my picking on him, i, yes, sometimes snore too. though naturally, it is delicate whilst in sweet slumber and sounds a bit like a beautiful melody floating over our pillows, wrapping us in a symphony of joy. uh-huh.
there is nothing worse in the middle of the night – pre-menopausal-menopausal-post-menopausal and wide-awake, ruminating over life and all its stuff, desperately trying to go to sleep, staring at the moon out the window, hot-flashing and then freezing, covers-off-ing-covers-on-ing, mushing and re-mushing the pillows, trying to relax through the tiny aches and pains catching up, hungry and thirsty and ignoring the tinkle-urge – than having the person next to you start snoring. like a semi coming through your bedroom. uh-huh.
the mimosa tree grew in the middle of the front yard, its fanning leaves dappling the southern sunshine streaming through it. pink and white flowers adorned its graceful branches; it was beautiful color on a wooded lot full of big oaks and maples. the roots of a mimosa are invasive and the pods and brittleness and attraction to disease put it on the do-not-plant list. but it spelled home, and, though i don’t remember the ultimate reason it needed to be taken down, i do remember how its absence felt.
the pink bloom stopped me in the middle of the botanic garden greenhouse. it wasn’t a duplicate of our mimosa; it may not even have been a mimosa. but the pompom shape and the blossom echoed our tree’s blooms and, instantly, i was taken back home.
the mourning doves have started cooing. we’ve seen robins. wild turkeys were out on the bike trail as we walked and talked. a pudgy squirrel lingered on our deck rail in the sun and the birds are lining up on the fence to take turns at the birdfeeder. it is another spring – soon. it rolls on and on. time.
we watched an interview…a man in ukraine who – devastatingly – lost his wife and two children was talking with erin burnett (cnn) who earlier had been reporting from ukraine but is back in ny now. tears streaming down her face, she struggled to hold onto her composure as she prompted this gentleman to speak about his children, his wife. less than a month ago he had a normal life. i’d believe the thought of losing his family to a violent bombing invasion was far from his mind. in what is mere minutes (only 30,240 minutes) all was gone.
there are mimosas in ukraine. called acacia trees they canopy parks and walkways, their pompoms and curtained branches greeting all those who walk underneath. i would imagine that somewhere there was a house with a front yard. and in that front yard sat a mimosa.
now, 30,240 minutes later, there is nothing. not because the tree’s roots were lifting the sidewalk or the spent blooms were littering the grass or the seeds are toxic to animals. no. they are decimated because they – along with their people – were blown to bits in acts of cruelty, in heinous evil. it takes our breath away. no more mimosas. no more homes.
we were on another planet. we had clearly stepped off the one that was home and we were catapulted into another. we were at the mall.
now, we never go to the mall. so there is that. but we had something to return – which we could have shipped – but the mall in milwaukee was a destination for a cold saturday afternoon and we decided to drive up.
we took all backroads, naturally. went through neighborhoods and farmland. stayed out west going north until it was time to turn east. then hit all the congestion.
the parking lot was full; it was astonishing. we drove around a bit and found a space. littlebabyscion makes that easier. we pulled in, put our coats and gloves back on, grabbed our packages and got out. there was a car in the lane waiting for another spot. the windows were down and we heard, “they have MASKS on!” as we got out. the derisive voice said nothing else. we looked at each other and rolled our eyes, continuing what would be our launch into a different solar system.
we walked into the mall.
there were a zillion people there. and you could pretty much count the ones with masks on with your two hands. we were the anomaly. clearly, a different galaxy. one where there was no pandemic, there were no people still at risk, no variants of the disease, no questions about how to be safe.
we hadn’t looked for the outside entrance to the store we needed – that might have saved us some staring – but we thought it might be fun to walk through the mall to the department store. we truly haven’t been in a mall in years. there are a couple outdoor malls we have enjoyed, but nothing really in the hey-let’s-go-to-the-mall of days gone by.
we were the bright-green-with-dark-green-ovals-purple-underside-wavy-leaves of the rattlesnake plant. perfectly harmless, a graceful air purifier, but with a name attached that makes others wary. we were mask-wearers and, let-me-tell-you, people did not refrain from reacting.
we walked directly to the returns desk – where, incidentally, they had masks on – and took care of business. we meandered just a little. i mean, it’s nordstrom’s and i don’t know anyone who doesn’t like, say, that shoe department. then we left and took quick scoots into pottery barn and williams sonoma. there were far fewer people in those shops and we stood at the cutlery, studying it and simultaneously pointing to the one we would pick, if we were picking silverware at this very moment. we laughed to discover it was the same pattern and perused the olive oils and flake salt as we walked out.
it wasn’t far from there to the exterior door. there were many stores we hadn’t even seen, a whole second floor of potential shopping. our hour or so seemed enough. we felt like fish out of water. uncomfortable. like a beautiful plant with great benefits assigned a bad name – “rattlesnake”.
“liberals!” floated from hanging over our heads back into the milky way as we walked outside to the car.
we are relieved to have it over with. our 30+ foot tall steel tripod tv tower – which has been standing right snugged up close to our house for the last at-least-three-decades-probably-more-like-five-or-six-or-so – fell over. it was a windy night…the kind of wind that keeps us awake and anxious in this neighborhood of big old trees. we didn’t hear it fall. all we heard was the fierce wind and i pulled the quilt over my head to try and sleep.
i stood in the kitchen in the morning looking out through the sunroom, sipping my coffee and gazing at the eastern sky and saw it – diagonally placed outside across the big windows – where nothing diagonal or steel or large and unwieldy usually sits. the tv tower with the antenna on the top. the wind had broken it off at the base and it fell north – reception from milwaukee would be really ace leaning that way it occurred to me. it was leaning on the fence and dangling over our neighbor’s stamped concrete driveway and spanish tile garage roof. we wanted neither of those disturbed and were immediately concerned about the danger of the antenna falling on someone. i texted them to say we had noticed and then i texted the village.
“what do you do with this?” i asked all our people. i started getting responses immediately, some suggestions or the oft “i-have-no-idea”. the insurance company was worthless – they couldn’t even point to the first thing we should do. antenna installation experts said it was “out of their wheelhouse”. the tow truck guys didn’t have the right equipment. big jim came over to evaluate it with d. they stared and contemplated a few-strong-men but quickly negated that idea.
ultimately – to save you a long drawn-out story, interesting and quirky (of course) but long nonetheless – a tree care company came the next day to assess the situation. naturally, it was snowing that day and that made the removal more treacherous so it had to be pushed back a day and we had to hope the snow would not accumulate in heavy inches on the tower, there would be no more wind and that no one would go near it.
the next morning, the tree guy admitted to being awake in the night thinking about the removal, plotting. that made us feel a little better since we had some higher anxiety with it precariously dangling out there.
with some sort of backhoe jaws holding the base so the entire tower wouldn’t pivot and do damage and a steel-cutter-thingy, they sawed the tower and antenna into pieces, loaded it into a dumpster they had brought with them and drove away. all in like a half hour! it was done. gone.
the house looks different without the dated tower and antenna like so many houses down here by the lake and scattered throughout our town. i missed it for the first day. and when i sip coffee in bed and look out the east windows i can no longer see it next to the steep roofline, with squirrels scampering up so that they can get on the roof and check out any gutter snacks that might be lingering. there’s plenty to look at though. and plenty to ponder.
the front of the orchid bloom is gorgeous on this plant. stunning, really. but the back…graceful and sturdy, supporting the frame of the blossom.
“do you know that there’s still a chance for you ’cause there’s a spark in you? you just gotta ignite the light and let it shine just own the night like the 4th of july ’cause baby, you’re a firework come on, show ’em what you’re worth make ’em go, oh as you shoot across the sky baby, you’re a firework come on, let your colors burst make ’em go, oh“
even as it wanes, it is clearly beautiful. stunning, really. the 0230-pantone-chart-heading-toward-rhodamine-red bloom is attracting attention, its droop the stuff of grand success. as its petals drop to the ground, one-by-one, it feeds next and next. and the flowers nearby sigh, “ohhhh.” and they know, despite anything – age, health, roadblocks, lack of nutrients, overabundance of tending worry, calendar of blooming-period – that there is still a chance for them.
artistry never stops. no matter. its imperative – to bloom – to shoot across the sky – is ceaseless, a perpetual poking, an unfaltering urge. the chance is never gone, never erased, never doused-left-with-no-embers.
i listened to a guided meditation a few days ago. it was merely four minutes long. “the mountain”, it – in only four minutes – made surprising tears stream down my face. its message…to be grounded and solid – rooted – just as a mountain – in all that is going on around you, regardless. to stand in it all. like a mountain. those four minutes were profound.
there are things i would choose to be different right now. many things. this season has been somewhat fraught. yet, there are reasons to be grounded, rooted, to stand here and just wait, to ride it out, to hold on.
all around us were orchids in shatter-the-silence gorgeous bloom. all around us was greenery, textural and rich. all around us were beginnings, closed buds with pent-up energy waiting to burst onto the stage-of-earth.
but this leaning-to-rhodamine caught my eye, in its waning no less, no more than the others. and it whispered, “baby, you’re a firework too.”
“even brighter than the moon, moon, moon it’s always been inside of you, you, you and now it’s time to let it through ’cause baby you’re a firework come on, show ’em what you’re worth make ’em go, oh as you shoot across the sky baby, you’re a firework come on, let your colors burst make ’em go, oh“
we were wandering slowly through the orchid show at chicago botanic gardens, drinking in the colors, the fragile blooms, the deliciousness of being-out-somewhere-doing-something. in the hallway between two larger spaces, there he was. waiting. wearing the imperial margarine crown, large bulbous nose, really long kind-of-jay-leno-chin and a crooked smile, his eyes squeezed a little shut in an engaging invitation, he was waiting.
i stood there staring at him, laughing. he was sitting in front of an old piano painted in bluebird-sky-blue-peely-paint and he winked at me. all the other orchids didn’t have to do anything to get our attention, and, truthfully, neither did he – they were all stunning and refreshing hopeful harbingers of maybe-spring-will-come – but he tried extra hard anyway.
i see him as toothless. but i have no judgements about that at all. i suspect most orchids are toothless, well, except for the one that made me do the “duh-chomp, chomp, chomp—what’s up doc?” bugs bunny imitation in the middle of a room full of people. that one most certainly had teeth. two buck teeth just screaming for us to notice. nevertheless, this guy – the imperial margarine guy – did not have teeth. his jimmy durante schnozzola was all he needed. and those eyes. and that crooked smile. sheesh! what charm!
when we left the botanic garden we felt a rush of fresh air. this wasn’t just the difference between a heightened-warm greenhouse and the cold chicago air. it was a sense of newness. a refreshing, though albeit tiny, touch of “normal”, a reminder of beauty. it was sheer magic. it was diving into a rainbow and immersing, coming out the other side dripping with colors we hadn’t seen in a long time.
it was admiring blossoms of solid colors and stripes and polka-dots and marveling over shapes and sizes and textures. it was reading of orchid seeds sailing over oceans and great expanses of land, steadfastly enduring. it was laughing with orchids which had personality, confidence and humility, joie de vivre.
they reminded us of life, in the middle of a neverending pandemic, in a period of time that would mark the beginning days that ukraine was invaded by russia, the world shocked by the wickedness of it all. the country-of-sunflowers was under siege and the orchids were blooming. all existing at the same time, on the same plane, in the same world. a gentle prod – yet again – to appreciate every last little thing.
maybe that’s what his crooked smile was all about.
clearly, he is an instigator. just the mere suggestion that he’d be ok with registering a complaint, asking for a refund, asking to speak to management sets me in motion. i am not afraid to speak up in these situations. it’s writing-a-letter (ala my sweet momma’s chutzpah) but in person. i’m the one who goes to the service desk. i’m the one who asks for the discount. i’m the one who returns stuff. i’m the one who will go back and let someone know that their product/service/pricing was not acceptable. he shudders. he set me in first gear and released the clutch; he knows there is no stopping. there have truly been times when he will linger at the sidelines of a store simply while i return something – like chicken that was spoiled when we purchased it or something even easier – like dog food when i meant to buy cat food but the dog food package was on the cat food shelf. i mean, c’mon…that is not a big deal nor is it fodder for embarrassment, but he just sort of wanders off, a little spacey, sometimes like a toddler in a department store playing hide-and-go-seek in the rounders of displays. ahhh.
and let me just say – the aarp discount is a thing, though. i will ask ANYwhere if they offer the aarp discount. you would be surprised how often the answer is yes. you should check it out. it’s a deal. the first day i purchased an aarp membership i booked hotel reservations and saved twice as much as i had just spent on the membership fee. a deal, yes?
a long time ago my sweet poppo was the regional president of the aarp chapter. my parents went to aarp conventions and conferences all over. they were avid aarp-ers. he would be happy with my dedication to his cause.
because i was the product of older parents, i read modern maturity magazine well before my time. even now, i thoroughly enjoy the revised, renamed aarp magazine. great articles. many that are empowering. particularly about speaking up. asking for better service. getting a discount. free cups of coffee. starting a ruckus.
my sweet momma and my poppo would hold up their hands in the universally-understood gesture of “i love you” every time we left. walk away, drive away, it mattered not. their hands were always up gesturing, their faces were smiling, but you could see it in their eyes – the leaving. the sign language said words they just couldn’t muster at those moments. i love you. universally understood.
all over the world, in sunshine and in shadow, people use the international hand symbol for “peace”. everyone understands it. it had a different beginning – as the symbol for allied victory in world war II morphing into the symbol for peace. the written peace symbol is just as recognizable. universally understood. dreamed for and ignored, both.
the sun streamed in the morning window and spilled onto the white wall behind me. with early coffee, i was reading news articles, mostly about the invasion in ukraine. heartbreaking and frustrating. i read of people’s lives devastated, of people staunchly fighting for their country, of people on cement basement floors with children and a few possessions, underground and under siege for undetermined periods of time.
i put my coffee mug down and stared at the light streaming in. i raised my hand in the simple peace gesture and held it to the east. i whispered “peace” to our friends far away in distance but close in this galaxy.
universally understood, the shadow whispered as well.
if only it were all that simple. seeing into the future, that is. we might be able to avoid the potholes, the pitfalls, the problems that are in our merry way. but, alas, that is not so. and, unlike oatly and its humorous point-on prediction on the lid of its coffee “ice cream”, we struggle between punting and pure intuition, hopping and skipping and maybe crawling our way into the future.
punting is a given. everyone punts. the older i get, the more i realize people are making it up on the fly. lots of experience, education, research, failures and giant successes help, but it is all kind of punting, after all.
but intuition is a funny thing. we can hear it in our inner ear; we can feel it pokin’ at us, like a snickers bar supposedly pokes at our tummies. sometimes we listen and other times we poo-poo it, dismissing it as frivolous or overly obsessive thinking. there are times, however, when we listen and it is spot-on.
in 1993, in august, i took both my small children to the mall. my daughter was three and my son just seven months old. we went to walk around, watch people, maybe purchase a few things. we were going to stop at mcdonald’s on the way home, as we always did, to have a happy meal. driving back from the mall i made up silly songs about going to mcdonald’s and my little girl was excited. this was our mcdonald’s, the one where she knew how to carry her little meal from the counter, around the corner into the back dining room, to the very back table opposite the rear door, the farthest away from people smoking, because, back then, people still smoked in restaurants.
as we drove down the main road of our town toward the mcdonald’s, in the middle of silly songs and a gleeful child’s anticipation, i heard it.
“don’t go to mcdonald’s,” the voice said.
it was clear. i looked around, surprised to even hear another voice. but there was no other adult in the minivan.
“don’t go to mcdonald’s,” it repeated.
i shushed what i now believed was the voice in my head and continued singing our mcdonald’s happy song.
it got more demanding, “don’t go to mcdonald’s today. don’t.”
that feeling you get in your belly started. the voice nagged me. i started to backpeddle, “well, maybe we will go home instead,” which made my little girl cry out, “no!” from the back seat.
“go home and make a ham sandwich,” was the weirdest. but it was clear. the voice was a ham-sandwich-pusher.
i started to listen. i had lost my big brother just a year prior and he had shown up from time to time, a wave from the next dimension it seemed. and he loved ham sandwiches.
i had to decide fast because we were rapidly approaching the mcdonald’s. i excitedly told my little girl, who – in three-year-old fashion – did not pivot immediately, that we were going to have a picnic at home instead. that we would have ham sandwiches and potato chips and we’d play we’re-on-a-picnic.
we passed the mcdonald’s and kept heading home, a few miles away.
by the time we were unloading into our house i heard the sirens in the distance. the house phone was ringing when we walked in.
“did you hear what just happened at mcdonald’s?” my girlfriend asked.
my stomach lurched.
a man with a gun had gone in the back door of the restaurant and started shooting people. tragically, two people at the table opposite the back door were killed.
i don’t know if they had happy meals; i know we would have.
i know if i could have seen into the future i would have planned on – and sang songs in the minivan about – ham sandwiches and a picnic on the living room floor. i know that tiny bit of adamant intuition-voice saved our lives. i don’t know how that works. i will not question it.
david said, “really, it’s probably the 5% rule. there are about 5% of people who are not good people.” i answered, “eh. i think it’s more like 10%.”
glancing to the side of the road leading out of the trail i watched a guy in the parking lot duck into his shiny pick-up truck. he pulled out a floor mat as i stared and dumped its accumulated dirt and wrappers and garbage on the ground. “make that 11%,” i grumbled.
though i no longer would do this – i have, in the past, pulled up next to someone or walked up to someone, depending on whether on a road or on a walk – to tell them – in an innocent and informative voice – that they “dropped something.” i usually add i’m not sure if they need it but it’s just “back a ways” if they do. sadly, this did not usually culminate in their retrieval of their garbage, but there was something about letting them know it did not go unnoticed that was helpful. probably more helpful would be if i just followed and picked up the garbage that others are dropping.
“earth is neat,” says the wrapper of the justin’s dark chocolate cashew butter cups. to jaunt through the justins.com website is to read the story of a guy with a passion for peanut butter take it all to the next level. his company is self-built and completely and utterly responsible to people, food and the planet we live on. it makes me want to eat more nut butters, make his 4-ingredient-peanut-butter-banana-oatmeal-cookie recipe, support his obviously-boulder-colorado-beginning efforts. bravo, justin.
the trail on saturday was warm. the first day in months. even the vests we wore were too much, so we peeled them off and relished hiking jacketless, even for a day. i suppose that we will take a couple pairs of gloves and a few garbage bags and go back one day without hiking in mind. it might do our hearts good to pick up the stuff that the 11% has left behind.
because earth IS neat. and it takes all of us to keep it that way.
reverse threading 