Category: Uncategorized

Why We Rescue

One’s a fight-pickin’ dog, that’s who he is – he likes to pick fights, but he can’t win any of the fights he picks. I don’t know why he picks fights. Nobody knows. Boo Radley’s a fine Schnoodle, though, he’s a real good boy. He can’t help that somebody abandoned him and left him for dead and then we came along and brought him home and promised him a better forever. Bites off more trouble than he can chew and then he gets his little @$$ kicked, that’s how it happens every time. It’s just what he does. He tries to be a street fighter, but he can’t. He ain’t no street fighter like his brother. 

Now his brother carries a little knife strapped to the inside of his leg. A Schnauzer shiv. He wears a spiked  black leather jacket and sports his flag and drives this loud little motorcycle. Fitz came from a gang of bad dogs runnin’ the streetz and livin’ off garbage scraps, but we saved him. We rescued him from certain incarceration and brought him and his broken leg home, but he won’t give up his ways. He’d been on the run and we think thrown from a car but we can’t prove it. Had to have eleven teeth yanked out when his breath started smelling like a rotting goat carcass, but now he sleeps with us and we let him kiss us in the face.  He’s a real piece of work, and he don’t take nothin’ off nobody. 

Don’t go handing us any sweet little innocent puppies to love. Give us the dogs with histories and issues. The ones with stories to tell and the spunk  to tell them. 

Mama’s Guidance 

I got her machine out of its case and set it up- the very same one she taught me to sew on. She was a master seamstress who made her own wedding gown and every prom dress I ever wore, and she made us matching mother-daughter dresses when I was little, almost two decades before it became a popular trend in the late 1980s. Ours dresses were penny stretchers – not fashion shows. More like The Sound of Music drapery dresses for two, whenever fabric went on clearance. New pre-made clothes were almost never purchased – as a pastor’s wife, mama knew how to cut more than a few kinds of corners! Hers was necessity sewing – not hobby sewing, but she found joy in it all the same. 

A few months before she died of Parkinson’s, with hands that had been far too shaky to sew for the last seven years of her fight, she passed on her Bernina to me. Although I’m not nearly the dressmaker she was, I still enjoy threading a bobbin and whirring up the needle to stitch up a seam.  Whenever I need to hear her, I start a sewing project and listen carefully. I can still feel her standing over me, guiding my hands along the fabric as I feed it through the foot. 

Today, there were no tears of frustration or crying about having to fix mistakes, and this was what I needed to hear. Rag quilts might be the most mistake-forgiving blankets of all time. Forgiving just like my mother – a sweet, gentle soul who appreciated everything that came her way and knew how to let things go. The frayed edges of the soft flannel backing envelop me, and I hear her whisper words of wisdom in my ear, “Don’t take it all too seriously – life’s too short. Perfection doesn’t offer the extra seam allowances needed to forgive and move on.” Oh, how her reminders come when I most need them! 

Here’s to Hygge! 

I joined the Hygge (pronounced HOOga) Life Facebook page after reading about the Danish concept of comfort. Members share ideas about what makes life more cozy for them. I learn a lot about warm fuzzies from member responses on these pages. Here is a list of 30 ways your life, too, can be more Hygge:

1. plenty of plants/ fresh flowers
2. a heated blanket
3. sherpa-lined slippers
4. the sounds of a trickling fountain 
5. an electric tea kettle 
6. a Keurig
7. a dog or cat 
8. a fireplace 
9. scented candles 
10. fairy lights 
11. stretch jeans 
12. a weighted blanket 
13. artwork of favorite places 
14. cabin socks 
15. a down coat 
16. flannel pajamas
17. a hammock or swinging chair
18. good books 
19. a hand-warmer mug 
20. birdfeeders by windows
21. cheery dishes 
22. an alpaca duvet
23. a memory foam mattress topper
24. wooden windchimes 
25. crystal window rainbow makers
26. China tea sets 
27. a hot tub 
28. a soft rice pack shaped to rest on your shoulders, heated with lavender oil 
29. a variety of herbal teas
30. soft music

Here’s to Hygge in your life! Please share your own tips in the comments. 

 Save the Lions! 

In my dream, I adopted a lioness. We had moved to a village where the next-door neighbor fostered rescue lions and made home placements. She chose us as parents of a half-starved but playful adult cat who spent most of her time on her back baring her sharp teeth, twitching her dustwand-tipped tail, and begging us to scratch her belly. We were enjoying our new family feline when panic suddenly gripped me full-force. 

What have I done? Is this legal? Can we even afford to feed her? 

Oh God, she’ll eat our dogs! 

We set off to see the lion veterinarian (yes, there actually was one in this strange town) to seek advice on what to do to fix our error. I was already making a list of zoos to contact about making a live donation if the vet didn’t pan out.

In dreams, nothing seems out of the ordinary, so we were not surprised that when we stepped inside the office we had to put our lioness in a Walt Disney World-style It’s A Small World boat and ride with her back to the veterinarian’s exam room. Thank God they didn’t play the music. She turned onto her back in the boat, pawing at us to scratch her belly as we floated past a mixed pride of lions all lined up along  the wall awaiting their own appointments.  

Halfway there, I jolted awake and was relieved to begin the day lionless once I got my bearings and realized it was all just a bad dream and decided that perhaps I should quit with the creme de menthe shots before bed. As I was getting dressed, my husband asked what had me all jumpy this morning. I shared my dream with him as he stood before me with his towel around his waist, smelling of a pleasant blend of Lever 2000 and Head and Shoulders. Before turning on the hairdryer, he thought deeply for a moment and then replied, “Hmm…..2021 might be better with a lion. We might shoulda kept her.”

Counterhackery

When a hacker sends a Facebook Messenger greeting posing as your friend Betty saying, “Hello. How are you doing today?” and you can clearly see that the new fake friend has zero posts and only two mutual friends, you begin to wonder:  is every lie a sin if the friend is inquiring on false pretenses in the first place, or is your best attempt at an injured tomboy adventure story fair game as an answer? You decide to change your own password as a security precaution before responding, brewing your lie in countercrime for a few minutes. 

Betty’s Hacker: 

Hello. How are you doing today? 

You: 

Not well, Betty. I actually fell out of a tree today while trying to rescue my cat that had been stuck there for three days and was being attacked by a hawk that kept coming around. The cat and I both fell, and when we did I fell on him and squished his innards out and killed him in the process, also breaking both of my own legs and one arm. The hawk got away. Thankfully, I am able to text back to let you know how I am doing. Can you please send money to help with my medical expenses?

And then you send a message to the real Betty to tell her the truth about your lie and encourage her to warn her real friends not to take her fake friend requests. Because friends don’t let friends’ hackers get away with attempted lies and foolishness about who they really are.  

What else could you share in the name of friendly counterhackery? 

Kim’s Tea Set

My father recently sold one of his houses, and among the treasures I received was my childhood porcelain  tea set. My mother had taken the time before she left this world to carefully label it “Kim’s” with a blue magic marker. Since I’m the only daughter, that probably wasn’t necessary, but it shows she wanted to make sure I got it when the time came. Our dad has lost his moorings and is now dating a woman with three grown children and 11 grandchildren and who doesn’t like dogs, so perhaps mom‘s labeling was more intuitive than any of us would have believed. In any case, it’s a Hygge feeling to get my tea set back on the other side of 50. I look at the disintegrating box and think of how we’ve both aged, this tea set and I. We both have been broken along the way and are missing a few pieces from our original start up set, but we can still hold water. 

The pink Sears Big Toy Box logo rests in the corner of the box, bringing back all the warm feels of visiting my grandmother at work in the Sears catalog division in downtown Waycross, Georgia in the 1960s days of the Wish Book -yesterday’s Amazon with a slightly longer wait time and a lot more hope. 

My 54 year old hands pick up the teapot and pretend-pour a cup of hot tea into one of the little rosebud cups and wish my mother were here to impart her golden wisdom as the imaginary tea leaves and liquid coalesce and the saucers remember all the once upon a times. 

Flint and Steel 

As aesthetically pleasing merchandise displays go, I would have to say that my favorite luxury soap boutique is on the minimalist spectrum. Its glass doors open to clean white walls  adorned with matching shallow shelves offering highly-fragranced colorful soaps lined up in neat rows with custom-printed label bands on pastel scrapbook papers. The aromatic allure is a modern form of witchcraft. 

Marbleized and solid colored hand-sliced bars promise relaxing or invigorating lathers of sensual transport to other worlds where worries and troubles are vaporized into steamy swirls. 

So many choices: Mystic Quest (rumored to contain dragon’s blood), Oatmeal Honey, Vegan Castile, Morning Citrus, Cool River, Mountain Mist, Lavender Fields, Purple Haze, and the seasonal scents.

I can resist all these, though. I amble, spellbound, over to the men’s shelf and select a bar of Flint and Steel as my husband’s Valentine’s Day gift. I put it to my nose, close my eyes, inhale deeply, and smile. The label doesn’t reveal my suspicions, but I figured out its secret ingredient a long time ago. 

Pheromones. 

Broken Mirrors 

Even with today’s fashion trend of leggings under skirts, it doesn’t take too much to remind me why I choose pants over dresses every time I go shopping. A sighting of a glass elevator, an open staircase, a surfer dude, or an angled shoe mirror, and I’m a time traveler straight back to 1981 to the halls of my South Carolina high school. 

He showed up in French class with his shoulder-length wavy blond hair,

wrinkled t-shirt and flip flops, and Sony Walkman headphones. Madame Howard called the roll, but Doug L. kept right on daydreaming of the beach, with his closed-eye head groove. We didn’t know it then, but in that split second the lasting image of a yearbook “most popular” superlative was forever seared into our minds. 

All the girls wanted to date Doug L., but his heart was somewhere back in California paddling out to catch the next wave. What he hadn’t left there, though, was a prankish bullying sort of humor that wouldn’t quit. He cheated on English tests by writing the answers on a scrap of paper and taping them to the ceiling over his desk using a yardstick so that it appeared to everyone that he was looking up in deep thought to recall the information.  He raised his eyebrows and invoked a romantic accent with an inflected question mark on certain French vocabulary words, especially the week he spent walking up to every girl in the school and asking, “un morceau?” 

But the prank that sticks with most of us still cuts, thirty five years later. He laced a jagged piece of a broken mirror in his shoes and went around looking up every skirt, winning bets about what color underwear we were all wearing, leaving us broke and baffled about how he knew. 

Until we saw all the boys huddled over by the smoking wall, doubled over with laughter and pointing at Doug’s feet.  And that is how a broken mirror or a Walkman or a frayed shoelace moment can shatter a day or a life. 

Itching 

I’m itching for a Covid trip

straight down memory lane

ticket stubs and photographs 

       calling out my name 

where to go and what to do – 

is anybody game? 

A drive to Vail

A flight to Maine 

A train to New York City 

all I need’s a B&B escape 

from my self-pity

Just Write

Three years ago, 

Sarah said to just write. 

Set a goal: 5 or 10 times a month. 

Set a timer: 10 or 20 minutes. 

Pick a topic: whatever comes to mind. 

Open a journal, pick up a pen, and write. 

Bring words to life on the page. 

Make it a habit. 

Some days, revisit seedlings. 

Other days, remain satisfied. 

Watch what happens!