Month: November 2025

There were no witnesses, but all I said was, “Get Fred off the table and away from the food.” I thought it was a reasonable request, but from the look on her face I was out of line. Who knew a first grader with beautiful hazel eyes nestled above cherub cheeks could shoot a menacing look?

I was momentarily intimidated, but I also knew I had age, size and rank on her.

“Now,” I said.

She picked up Fred, who was nibbling on leaves in a plastic food storage container covered with a scrap of window screen, and walked away in silence.

Fred is a chubby, fuzzy Isabella caterpillar, more commonly known as a woolly bear caterpillar. Unfortunately, Fred has already had two close brushes with death.

When Fred stopped moving several weeks ago, the father of Fred’s keeper assumed Fred was dead and planned to throw him away when they returned home from their walk. Apparently, Fred overheard the conversation and rallied.

Last week, her mother was doing laundry and found a woolly caterpillar stuck to a T-shirt of Fred’s keeper.  Her mother’s heart raced to think how close Fred had come to death by washing machine. Turned out, it wasn’t Fred at all, but a second woolly.

Full disclosure: I’ve been on the child’s watch list ever since the butterfly incident this past summer. When the family was moving from one home to another, they moved in with us for a brief time. I transported the girls’ and their butterfly net cage holding five chrysalises, from their house to ours by car. Somewhere enroute, three soon-to-be butterflies fell from their perch and tumbled to the bottom of the net cage.

“Grandma killed the butterflies!” one cried.

“I did not kill the butterflies,” I said.

“You were shaking them!”

“I never touched them!” I said.

“It was your driving! You were driving wild and shaking them.”

“I did not drive wild! We were on bad roads with potholes!”

One day you’re a beloved grandma who bakes wonderful chocolate chip cookies and the next day you’re Grandma the Butterfly Killer. It’s a tough life.

As the “Yes, You Did” and “No, I Didn’t” drama continued, one of the girls quietly reattached the chrysalides to the top of the cage.

Days and weeks passed. I hoped, I prayed, I held my breath. The butterflies hatched and were released.

I was exonerated. Another close call for Grandma.

What Fred’s sweet and loving young caretaker doesn’t know, and I’m certainly not about to tell her, is that Fred will have to move outside soon so he can freeze solid. This is the only way Fred will emerge as an orange moth in the spring.

My plan is to be nowhere in the vicinity when all of this goes down. With any luck, we’ll be clear out of town.

There are days I feel like the last surviving gatekeeper to tradition. My mission is to keep the holidays from crashing into one another.

In my rich fantasy world, Labor Day is followed by Halloween, Halloween is followed by Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving is followed by Christmas. Never do they meet, mix or mingle. Welcome to dreamland.

The early Christmas bombardment at the big box stores in 90-degree heat of late summer is disorienting. This is why you see dazed people in the parking lot wildly waving key fobs in the air trying to locate their vehicles.

I’ve heard the reasoning: It’s almost Halloween, so it’s almost Thanksgiving, so it’s almost Christmas. With that line of thought, it’s also almost my birthday.

Our son’s family FaceTimed us on Halloween so we could see the costumes the kids wore for trick or treating. The whole family was gathered in front of a fire roaring in the fireplace—next to a lighted Christmas tree.

“When did the tree go up?” I casually asked.

“Oh, it appeared sometime in October,” came the pre-planned casual answer.

I’m a sequence and order person. I was a kid who separated the peas from the carrots. The ketchup goes next to the fries, not on the fries.  No evergreens in the house until the last slab of Thanksgiving pie has disappeared. Just because I like order doesn’t mean I have issues.

Hold on, I see a dust ball on the floor next to the baseboard.

Neighbors flooded the front of their house with orange and green lights for Halloween nearly the entire month of October. The evening of November 1st, the house was awash in red and green. They must not have November in their calendars. (A phone upgrade can fix that.)

The battle to keep the holidays sensibly separated is like trying to sled uphill or assemble a snowman from the top down.

If you decorate before Thanksgiving, you forfeit the right to complain about the Little Drummer Boy’s “pa rum pum pum pum” played on endless repeat. Ditto for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

In addition to being a sequence and order person, I am also a realist. The battle is futile and I know it. Think I’ll go make a snow angel face down.

We look at paintings of that first Thanksgiving more than 400 years ago, with tables nearly sagging under the weight of wild game, venison, waterfowl, lobster and mussels, corn, beans and pumpkins, we often sigh and say, “Life was so simple back then.”

It was simple. Life was so simple that heat in homes came from logs crackling in a fireplace. There was no central heat with digital thermostats to program or air filters to change. People had no dreaded gas and electric utility bills, but they also sometimes froze to death.

Life was so simple there were no complicated configurations of indoor plumbing, no hot water heaters with annoying calcium and lime build-up, nor reverse osmosis water filters.

Toileting was so simple they didn’t even have to flush. They just waited for a spring thaw and dug a new pit for the privy downwind from the cabin. If you had to go in the middle of the night, you either held it and hoped your bladder didn’t explode, or walked through pitch black to the outhouse praying a bear wouldn’t eat you. Very simple. Hold it or possibly die.

With no sprawling hospitals, emergency rooms or urgent care clinics, disease and dysentery swept through communities wiping out multitudes in a single swath. Very simple. Here one day, gone the next.

As magnificent as the paintings are of that first Thanksgiving, they’re missing the smell of sweat and hard work, the sound of trees being felled, iron pots clanging and the warm feel of fresh kill being butchered for a meal. Paintings can’t convey blisters and calluses, the full measure of agony and fear, or broken hearts grieving the loss of loved ones.

Despite hardships, fear of the known and the unknown, the small band resolved to care for one another, to remain united and to survive.

Because the past is always part of the present, we stand as beneficiaries of those who have gone before. What the early settlers left us was not monetary wealth, but priceless models of courage, tenacity, perseverance and faith. So, how about a moment of thanks this Thanksgiving for those who laid cornerstones to our foundation?

I married a hottie. He loves the heat and the sun.

When the summer sun is scorching and most people hide inside to keep from flash frying, he goes outside to do yardwork.

I tend toward the cool side. Some like it hot, some like it cold, and for some mysterious reason they tend to marry one another.

Our favorite pastime is playing endless rounds of tag with the thermostat. Our banter over the temperature often sounds like a poker game. He says, “I’ll see your 68 and raise you six.”

“That’s 74,” I say. “I can’t do 74. I’m out.” And I will be out—passed out cold once the oppressive heat kicks in.

When summer heat arrived full force this year, I had to hide his flannel-lined jeans, affectionately known as his stuffed scarecrow pants. He spent the bulk of summer outside and I spent the bulk of summer fanning myself in front of the freezer door.

After intense negotiations, we agreed on warmer temps inside the house during the daytime and lowering the thermostat at night. It was a momentary truce in our cold war.

That said, I remain concerned whenever he is outside in blistering heat. When the sun hits the front porch, he goes out, sits in a wicker chair and reads. You know what happens when you read in the warm sun, right? You fall asleep. Your head drops, whatever you are reading falls from your hands and your upper body slumps.

I tell him I am concerned about this because we have numerous runners, walkers and cars passing by our house.

He says I don’t need to be concerned; there is a second chair if someone would like to join him.

My concern is that if people see a man of a certain age slumped in a chair, they could think there is a medical emergency and call 9-1-1. Then a fire truck and ambulance will roar up to the house with sirens screaming, I’ll run outside to see what is happening, see paramedics jerking him out of the wicker chair, then keel over from shock.

“Is that what you want?” I ask.

He says he can’t hear me. He is sitting in a patch of sunlight pretending asleep.

And now, fall has arrived, temperatures are dropping, the furnace is kicking in and winter is within sight.

The flannel-lined jeans have magically reappeared. I ask if the plaid flannel shirts are close behind. He says never question a man in plaid as he always has solid points.

We’re ready for whatever winter brings, my stuffed scarecrow and me.