Grits

I have a hankerin' for some grits. A big glop of them on the plate next to the eggs, and a golden pool of butter melting in a well on the top. . . and a light dusting of salt and pepper; or maybe, grits that have been packed into a meat loaf pan and chilled, and then sliced and fried until it is crispy golden, served with syrup on top. . .(So, you may be thinking to yourself, why don't you just shut up about it and go get yourself some grits? And my response: Are you kidding? In this town?) One would think that being this close to the South -- I mean Arkansas is about 45 miles away-- the markets would carry grits. Yes, one might think that, but one would be wrong. I know for sure that the downtown market doesn't have grits. I don't know about uptown market, but I'll be cruising down there soon to find out... if don't forget. That happening a lot too these days: the Senior Moments are coming fast and furious. A friend's mom, who is only 61, was recently diagnosed Alzheimer disease. That's only 4 years older than me that's very scary.

A Close Encounter?

This puzzling sight met our eyes when we looked out the window overlooking the side yard this morning. Did aliens visit us in the night and attempt a crop circle before giving up? Was there some attempted “rolling in the hay” going on in the wee hours of the morning? Did deer do this? A dog? Enquiring minds want to know, but I doubt we will ever find out.

April, Come She Will....

All of us are just a little bit stunned at what nearly a week of very cold temperatures (down into the teens) have done to the newly budded trees and flowers and tomatoes.... and just about everything. Oh yeah, the sugar snap peas we planted did survive. I doubt there will be any local peaches or apples or pears this summer. My heart goes out to Frank, the apple man, who comes to Farmer’s Market loaded with the most wonderful varieties of fruit -- apples, pears, peaches, nectarines; and the folks down the road who own the peach orchard as well. And there probably won’t be deer grazing on windfalls from the old apple tree. Ho hum. It takes a brave person to be a farmer. Here’s a small poem from Ogden Nash. It took me a week to find my small paperback book of Ogden Nash’s poems. Of course, it was not REALLY lost, just about 5 inches away from where I thought it should be, and I simply couldn’t “see” it.. This is happening more and more lately and it is driving me NUTS, but that’s another story. I suppose this poem is really about a woman, but it could just as easily be about this month:

ALWAYS MARRY AN APRIL GIRL

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found an April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true--
I love April, I love you

Remembrance of Things Past, Wherein Nature Runs Amok

Vacant lots appear here and there along the roads leading into town and among the town itself. Houses have caught fire and burned to the ground; the owners have died and the house stays abandoned for years and begins to fall apart, and pretty soon someone comes along and tears it down, or the volunteer fire department torches it as a training exercise and then the land is cleared. On the road to town is a large cleared area where a house and a church once stood. It was demolished last year, and scattered clumps of daffodils are the only evidence that someone’s home once stood there. Indeed, on our own land, an ancient stone-bordered flower bed very near the state highway right-of-way produced daffodils and iris for years and years after the house had been moved for the original highway bypass around the town. This continued until it was wiped out by the highway expansion in the late 1990s. Another victim of the highway expansion was a house across the road. But again, there is no evidence now that a house was ever there, except for the wisteria that someone originally planted to grow along the fence at the back of the property. The fence is still there, and so is the wisteria, but as this plant is prone to do (from personal experience, this is the plant from hell), it apparently grew tired of the fence and has spread... everywhere. It is a most amazing thing to see. And this photograph doesn’t do it justice. It has climbed way up into several large trees and has produced a mass of drooping clusters of purple flowers. It is truly gorgeous.

Pink rain....

The large crabapple in our front yard bursts into bloom overnight, it seems. And within days, the petals of the begin to drift to the ground in the least little breeze. It becomes a rain of pink petals, which carpet the driveway. So many colors to see. The golden flowers of the forsythia, the pink flowers of the redbud and the peach, and the white of the choke cherries by the barn. And the lilacs are about to bloom as well. Underfoot, purple violets dot the lawn along with grape hyacinth and snow drops, which have escaped the flower bed. We took a walk last night after dinner. It was so nice to walk by our neighbors houses and see the tulips and phlox and other flowers just coming into bloom. Oh yeah, that tall teal blue structure in the background is one of the town water towers.

Chick-a-dee-dee-dee

All varieties of bird song fill the air, from the monotone whistle of the Field Sparrow, to the wolf call of the Cardinal (and that's exactly what it sounds like) to the tea-kettle tea-kettle song of the Carolina Wren. After the mostly dead silence of winter, the world suddenly seems very much alive and very noisy indeed. And as the birds calm down for the night and go to sleep--except for the owl, of course (I heard one this morning when my eyes flew open at 4 a.m.)-- the spring peepers* wake up at the pond and they serenade all night long until dawn breaks. Shakespeare said it all:

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Of course, that is what its all about – love. I watched two squirrels chasing each other up and down tree trunks for a while this morning – I know what was on their minds!

*We had one of these little guys as a pet for the winter one year. It came in the house in the late summer (we had about an 1-inch gap at the bottom of the screen door) and I found it in the bathtub. I took it outside and let it go and about an hour later it was back on the porch heading for the house again. So I brought it in and put it shower enclosure, which is made out of redwood and there are some holes in it where knots came out. So the frog stayed there all winter, pretty much sleeping but occasionally waking up and getting on the shower curtain or moving around other the tub. In the spring I put it outside and it went on its merry way

On this day in history...

Some important have happened on this day in history. In 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which drove a wedge in the relationship between the colonies and Britain that eventually led to independence. In 1457 the Gutenberg Bible became the first printed book. In 1733 Joseph Priestly invented carbonated water. And some famous people have been born on this day, among them Marcel Marceau, Louis L’Amour, Chico Marx, and William Shatner. But I think the very best thing to have happened on this day, and the most important person to have been born, was my baby sister. What a blessing she has been to all of us. I love you sweetie. Happy birthday.

Doo Wop a Wop

As much as R and I rail against the university gobbling up the historic homes in the downtown area of West Plains (why in the world didn’t they put the campus on the outskirts of town where there is PLENTY of open land?), if the university hadn’t come to town, there would be no Civic Center and no Community Programs Department, and we would not have gotten to see the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s delightful presentation of Much A Doo-Wop About Nothing, a 50-minute restaging of Much Ado About Nothing in a 1950s era soda fountain. What a treat. We suffered major culture shock when we moved here. Both of us grew up in the bustling suburbs of Los Angeles, where there were plenty of places to go and things to see and a million different restaurants to choose from. Then we lived for a couple of years near a college town in Oregon, which also had community cultural events of the university – in fact, that’s where I learned to play the guitar (semi-funny story that was embarrassing at the time: I had to bring N with me to one of the classes, and while we were walking down the hallway he saw the Fire Alarm button and pressed it). And then here. Seriously rural America, where the nearest decent sit-down restaurant is 12 miles away (I don’t count the truck stop), and the nearest Mall is a 90-mile drive. Well, at least the “culture famine” is easing some now. I’ve written about this before in at least one previous post, so I won’t belabor the point, except to say that we take none of this for granted!

Welcome to the Hotel....

Nope. Forget it. I’m not talking about the Hotel California here (as in the Eagles' song). I’m talking about the lethal accommodations available in the Hotel Roach. Yes, indeed. R tracked down the humble Roach Hotel on the Internet and rooms are now available. Come one, come all. Plenty of room. It may not be Spring on the calendar, but the weather is behaving very Spring-like indeed and Nature is responding. And, suddenly the roaches are everywhere -- coming in from outside. So far, the guests at the Roach Hotel include 2 crickets (I feel sort of bad about them) and 6 roaches. The Bathroom Ants are back – they are the first ants to invade, and we differentiate them from the Kitchen Ants, the Bedroom Ants, and the Office Ants. I have noted that the Bathroom Ants are quick to recycle the dead roaches that I fail to pick after they are squished. Except R sprayed the bathroom last night so the ants are gone, for awhile at least. Some of the insects that live in our house don't bother me that much, but roaches -- whew. This is one critter where "live and let live" does not apply.

A spoon full of sugar...

Since the end of July – after we got a really good look at ourselves in the full-length mirrors in the room we were staying at the Tuscany Suites (a truly wonderful place to stay) – R and I have been focused on loosing weight. We are not on a “diet” per se, but are simply counting calories. The upside is that we can eat anything we want as long as we account for it and don’t go over the limits we have set for ourselves for the day. The downside is that we spend a lot of time calculating how many calories are in the food we eat. At mealtimes we sit across from each other at the table with our solar-powered calculators (we're very energy conscious, doncha know) adding up figures and consulting calorie-counting books. So today I added a tablespoon of powdered sugar to the cocoa I had added to my coffee and thought I better look it up in the book and get it written down. So I did and I announced to R: “Powdered sugar has a tablespoon of calories.” He gave me “the look” and we both started to laugh.

What immediately leaped into my mind was the banquet in the CS Lewis novel That Hideous Strength that occurs at the end of book. Merlin crashes the party and “Babel” breaks out as various dignitaries are giving their speeches. It starts off as mixed-up sentences and then eventually deteriorates into gibberish. “Jules seemed to be saying that the future density of mankind depended on the implosion of the horses of Nature... Then he thought, Come! That is going too far. Even they must see that you can’t talk about accepting the challenge of the past by throwing down the gauntlet of the future... and then came the sentence: “The surrogates esemplanted in a continual of porous variations.” Well. I’m not quite that bad.... not yet anyway.

Oh yeah, I caused something of a disturbance yesterday in the aerobics class when I discovered, much to my delight and surprise, that I have now lost enough weight that can touch my elbow to my knee!!!