Column

Christmas is only five months away. I was hoping to be the first to alert you, but Hobby Lobby beat me by a month.

We had not yet marked Flag Day or the first day of summer when the Christmas creep commenced.

While we were breaking out the shorts, merchants were breaking out artificial trees dusted with artificial snow.

While we were searching for our flip flops, Santa was searching for his boots.

While we were firing up the grill, burning burgers and singeing our eyebrows, Santa was firing up the sleigh.

Turns out the most wonderful time of the year is now a full half of the year.

Ho, ho, ho and pa rum pum pum pum.

It’s topping 90 today. The grass is brittle, the hanging ferns are begging for water and rabbits that ravage the garden are knocking at the back door, panting with their little tongues hanging out.

Who wants to light a Christmas spice candle?

How ‘bout giving that winter wonderland snow globe a good shake? Harder. Harder. That’s it! Ooops.

Please excuse my inner Scrooge. I’ve never liked being rushed. I can move fast, talk fast, make chocolate chip cookies fast, throw sheets a kid got sick on in the wash fast, pack a suitcase fast and exit the house fast—but I can’t stand being told to go faster.I’m going to take my time. I’m going to savor the final scorch of summer and the last bark of the dog days of summer.

I’m going to leisurely stroll through the trashed school supply aisles at the store, throw my arms in the air and yell, “Thank you, Lord, those days are behind us!” I’m going to watch the neighbor kids shuffle to the corner bus stop.

I’m going to observe Labor Day by doing no labor whatsoever.

I’m going to watch the maples, birch and oak turn yellow, orange and crimson. I’m going to relish nights that grow chilly and savor the goodness of a heavy sweater. I’m going to drive on back roads at dusk and hope to see deer.

We’re going to rake enormous piles of leaves in the backyard of this old house, then call our grands who live in a new subdivision with tiny trees you can snap in two with your bare hands and tell them the fun is waiting.

I’m going to make a big deal about turning on the heat. We’ll both rail about the cost of utilities and the monopoly of the gas company. Tradition.

We’re going to enjoy apples, pumpkins, squash and endless zucchini and, come November, I’m going to win another wrestling match with a turkey.

I’m going to watch the very last leaf drop and the very first snowflake fall. Then . . . and only then.

Don’t rush me.

 

“Let’s Scare Grandma” is a major source of entertainment for the grandkids. If someone jumps out from behind the sofa or from inside the hall closet, I simultaneously scream and jump like a WNBA player going for three.

But lately, I’ve lost my bounce. I just don’t scare like I used to.

There was a time when kids spent the night and one of them, dressed like a pirate and brandishing a plastic sword, slithered onto the bed in the early morning dark, I would bolt upright and scream.

These days I open one eye, roll over and say, “Cereal is in the cupboard. Make your own breakfast.”

Another favorite has been waiting until I’m doing dishes at the kitchen sink. Someone creeps outside, climbs on top of the hose box below the kitchen window, jumps up and yells, “SURPRISE!”

On cue, I would shriek and send suds and dirty dishwater cascading down the window.

These days? Nothing. Nada. I just motion for the kid to get back inside and help clear the table.

I wonder out loud if maybe I’ve mellowed – to which the husband emphatically says, “No.”

I recently accompanied an 8-year-old to an old wooden trailer in the woods where she has been catching mice. She lowers a PVC pipe with food in it and when a mouse goes for the bait, she tips the other end of the PVC pipe into a cage.

I don’t do mice. I’ve never done mice. But there I was, standing beside her looking for mice, breathing normally, trying to think of an endearing name for a small disgusting rodent.

Maybe I should see a doctor.

The real fright was when all 11 of them recently spent the night.

There were kids everywhere—on beds, under beds, on the floor, the sofa bed, and maybe even one or two on top of the piano. I can’t remember. It was a long day. The house was finally quiet, the kids were all sleeping, or pretending to be sleeping.

I tiptoed into our bedroom using only the light from the hallway. I took a pillow sham from the bed and saw something in the shadows that looked like it might be a ribbon or long piece of lace.

I picked it up and gently pulled it through my fingers. It didn’t feel like ribbon or lace, so I turned on the lamp.

It was a 4-foot snakeskin that previously belonged to a black rat snake.

Here’s the scary part: I didn’t jump. I didn’t scream. I didn’t hyperventilate. I gently tossed the snakeskin into the corner, crawled into bed and slept like a baby.

I must be losing it.

The next morning, I cornered two boys and asked which one put the snakeskin on my pillow. They pleaded not guilty and said they had heard their 6-year-old sister say she was bringing something fun to Grandma’s.

I feel terrible. The poor little thing was so disappointed.

Some people are drawn to social media apps—I’m drawn to weather apps.

I check weather apps more frequently than I check news apps. Weather apps tend to be less alarming than the news apps. Especially during a presidential election year.

I don’t mean to brag, but I know the predicted highs, lows and percentage possibilities for rain for the next five days in three different states. It’s my version of low-cost travel.

Earlier this morning I was lingering along the rocky coast of Maine where it was 65 with partial sun. I refilled my coffee then dropped in on Charleston, S.C., sweltering by mid-afternoon. From there I scrolled on over to the boundary waters of northern Minnesota. Jacket weather.

I check the weather app every night before I go to bed. I like to know if a storm is coming so I can crack a window to hear the rain drumming, the wind blowing and the thunder rolling.

I check the weather app every morning to see what I should wear and what kind of hair day it will be.

If my husband wants to know our local three-day outlook, he consults me, not his phone. I can tell him what the temperature was, is, will be, and if he might want to water the garden.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to know about the weather, you called the bank. Almost every town had a bank with a recorded line that gave the time and temp. To my knowledge, nobody checked it 30 times a day.

Years ago, if someone in a family was serious about the weather, they had a large instrument called a barometer hanging on a wall, often above the television. Back in the day, talking about weather qualified as entertainment. It was before Netflix and Disney+.

A barometer was like a crystal ball. People who knew how to interpret it could tell a storm was coming even before the storm knew it was coming. Those people later got together and founded the Weather Channel.

One of the best things about summer is the colorful language used to describe it. You can sweat bullets, sweat buckets or sweat like a pig, even though pigs don’t sweat. You can also roast, fry, sizzle, melt, wilt and bake. Summer is a culinary wonder.

On extremely humid days, my father-in-law used to say, “It’s close today.”

Initially, I wondered what he felt was closing in on him. After spending a week one summer in the family’s 100-year-old home, with only window fans for cooling, I figured out what he meant.

It was his version of, “It’s not the heat—it’s the humidity.”

A phrase that should be banned for all time, on penalty of having your weather app disabled, is: “Is it hot enough for ya?”

If you have to ask the question, you already know the answer.

When it’s so sweltering outside that even your weather app is melting, remember this—winter will be back before you know it.

We’ve been trying to sell our nearly 20-year-old SUV. Like most sellers, there are things we say about a used vehicle and things we don’t say.

When an interested buyer asked about mileage, I said, “It has 221,500 miles on it.”

What I didn’t say was that I helped put a lot of those early miles on it with my dad when he bought the Ford Explorer, Eddie Bauer edition, two years after Mom died.

One fall, Dad and I drove Eddie to see his remaining brothers in Nebraska. Our last stop was Beaver City, a small bend in the road where his older brother had been town sheriff before retiring. After a good visit and a lot of strong coffee, we left early the next morning heading south on a two-lane that would lead us into Kansas on our way back to Missouri.

Dad was raised on a farm and forever loved open prairies, lone cottonwoods and hot summer days. There wasn’t another soul or vehicle in sight on that straight-line road. The sun inched over the horizon and spread a peach glow across endless fields.

It was so beautiful that neither of us spoke. We just soaked it in—the morning, the beauty and the silence.

“You’ve sure had this vehicle a long time,” the prospective buyer said.

“We have,” I said.

What I didn’t say is that we tried selling it a while back. We were on our way to a dealership to use it as a trade-in on a new car, but I got all weepy, so my better half turned around and we drove back home.

“How many owners?” the interested party asked.

“Just two. My dad and us,” I said. “He took good care of it and so did we.”

What I didn’t say is that when Dad was recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer, he mentioned he had started driving again. I said, “Dad, are you sure you’re strong enough to hit those brakes hard if you need to?”

“You should see the skid marks I laid yesterday!” he said with a roar of laughter. He didn’t really lay skid marks, but he thoroughly enjoyed saying he did.

“How’s the sound system?” our potential buyer asked.

“Good,” I said. “The radio works and so does the 6-slot CD player.”

What I didn’t say is that Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys are in slot No. 6 where Dad always kept them. I’ve never taken them out. Won’t somebody be surprised to hit play and hear a lot of whoopin’ and yee-hawin’ and “Bubbles in My Beer.”

The prospective buyer was growing increasingly interested, so I said, “It leaks oil.”

Silence.

Then I said, “Sometimes it sounds like it doesn’t want to shift out of first.”

More silence.

I said, “When it rains hard, water drips through the sunroof down into the beverage cup holders.”

The potential buyer needed time to think about it.

“No hurry,” I said. “We might not even sell it!”

Our son called that night. We’d offered him the vehicle a few days earlier. He said he and his wife would take it.

What our son didn’t say was that he couldn’t stand to see the last remnants of Grandpa disappear either.

“I assume it’s the standard model that comes with country CDs,” he said.

“Check slot No. 6,” I said.

 

I made my first loaf of sourdough last week. It took less time to give birth to our first child than it took to make that one loaf of bread.

Why did I make sourdough? Because I’m weak. I succumbed to peer pressure. We have granddaughters making sourdough. They nudged and prodded and threw flour in the air until I agreed to give it a try.

The first thing you do to make sourdough is spend hours and hours on the internet reading about why one method is superior to another. Eventually, your eyes cross, your head bobs for the fourth time, then crashes onto your computer keyboard.

Step two is making starter. This is a slurry of flour and water you mix in a bowl, (preferably in a rustic crock suitable for photographs) covered with a tea towel (also suitable for photographs).

You leave this on the counter for five or six days. When have you ever left food sitting at room temperature on the kitchen counter for days on end and trusted it was safe to eat?

Nevertheless, each day you check the mixture, talk nice to it, remove a portion of it and add a fresh measure of flour and water. This is called “feeding the starter.”

Put “feed the starter” on your to-do list or you will forget about it and be caught in an endless cycle of restarting the starter.

On perhaps the fifth or sixth day of feeding the starter, you give it a stir and bubbles appear. This is fermentation. Congratulations! You are now ready to make bread.

For beginners, the most common question is, “What time do I start making the bread?” People ask because the process can take anywhere from six or eight hours to two days.

To prep dough for baking, you mix, rest, fold, turn, fold, turn, circle left, clap, clap, shuffle, shuffle. It’s line dancing for people who love sourdough.

I’m not saying the process is time-consuming, but it’s been a week since I made a decent sit-down dinner for the two of us, days since I answered emails or texts, and now I hear they miss me at the gym and are tossing about words like slacker and uncommitted.

Who kneads them? I’ll roll with it. I’ll rise to the occasion.

The dough is finally ready and into the oven it goes—on approximately day 59, give or take a month.

I wait, worry, pace the floor and watch the clock. I monitor progress through the dirty oven glass. I send text updates to fellow bread makers.

The timer sounds. The bread is finished. I ooh and aah. I take pictures of the bread alone, me cradling the bread in my arms and the bowl and dish towel that made it all possible.

In the morning, I send out bread announcements.

Was it worth all the time? Ab-sh-loot-ley. Sorry, my mouth was full.

But should I ever again buy sourdough bread at a grocery or bakery, I will never, ever, ever, ever complain about the cost.

 

It was a shock to learn the family may be in step with a growing fashion trend. The new look is called “effortless.” It is a look that says, “I randomly grabbed a few things on my way out the door.”

We have two granddaughters who showcase effortless by combining shorts with unicorn T-shirts, fluffy tutus and rain boots. They wear the look well – but they are age 6.

Do you know who else does effortless well? Boys between five- and 14-years-old. Many in that demographic consider soap and shampoo a violation of their civil rights. And they will protest. Loudly. We have two grandsons in this category.

Frustrated, one of their parents will say, “Go ahead, smell his head. Just smell it.”

I’m not going to smell it. I know what it smells like. The boys’ heads smell like their dad’s head when he was their age. I would order him to shower, hear the water running and could tell he was slapping a wet washcloth against the tile wall.

He would emerge 45 seconds later. I would feel the back of his neck and his hair, which were bone dry, then say, “Get back in there and shower.”

A group way out in front with the effortless trend are the kids at the middle school and high school bus stops. For two years, they have been wearing flannel pajama bottoms that look like they were slept in the night before.

That said, I do a version of effortless every morning when I roll out of bed. Half of my hair is smashed to my head and the other half stands straight up. The bags under the eyes are the piece de resistance.

My personal stylist for effortless is Mother Nature. Her rates are good, but the finished look can be brutal.

The effortless hair that celebrities want looks tousled, not tangled. It’s like you did your hair, then stood in front of a large window fan on high speed.

That’ll be $300, please.

Celebrities who hire stylists to help create the effortless vibe, wind up with a sophistication that looks like they dressed in the dark.

Of course, jeans are mandatory for the look—faded jeans that look big enough for two and have a huge rip at the knee. Why is it that all the high-fashion people have mean cats with sharp claws?

Some of us come by the effortless look naturally; for others it takes a lot of time, money and effort.

Nothing smells quite as wonderful as the outdoors after it’s been through the gentle rinse cycle. Rain is such a pleasant fragrance that makers of perfumes, body oils, lotions, and even household cleaners, all try to replicate it. But nobody can. Not fully.

Try as they may, it always ends up smelling ever-so-faintly like the inside of an old purse once carried by a woman fond of loose face powder.

I had an uncle who claimed he could smell “rain was coming.” Skeptical at an early age, I wondered how that could be. Maybe he could smell rain coming. Or maybe he’d been rummaging through somebody’s old purse.

A high-end hotel chain boasts that their rooms smell like fresh rain. They even sell it in a bottle. Their rain fragrance comes with “notes of jasmine and grapefruit.”

When was the last time you stepped outside after a good rain and said, “I think I smell grapefruit.”?

As the man hawking the Veg-O-Matic on late night television used to say,” But wait! There’s more!”

Rain comes in a variety of fragrances. There’s fresh rain, clean rain, spring rain, November rain and soothing rain. I imagine soothing rain is the opposite of non-soothing rain that comes with tornado warning sirens. The last thing you’d want to do is mix up your rain fragrances.

The scientific name for the smell of rain is petrichor. As I understand it—and I could be soaking wet on this—petrichor forms when bacteria in the soil and on plants is hit with water droplets, releasing a pleasant scent.

The process sounds remarkably similar to when kids dig a hole in the dirt and then flood it with the garden hose. I’ve done that laundry, and it does not smell like rain. Not even faintly.

It’s not always easy to explain the things you cannot see.

I can explain why the sponge on the kitchen sink smells like mildew, why clothes reek after a workout and why antique shops smell like expired Chanel No. 5, but the scent of rain is clouded in mystery.

The best way to ruin something beautiful is to beat it with the club of over-explanation. So just do this—the next time it starts raining, don’t try to explain it, don’t try to understand it, just open the door and breathe deep.

You might catch a whiff of jasmine.

You may not remember William Safire, but I lived in fear of him. He was a nationally syndicated columnist who wrote about other writers’ writing gaffes. Every Sunday, I would rip open the paper, read his column and exhale to find I had lived to see another misplaced modifier—as if Safire ever read family humor.

That was the effect the man had on me. Or maybe it was affect. Probably both.

Scribe Safire, who loved alliteration, died in 2009 but his spirit lives.

Several readers let me know I committed some flagrant fouls recently. Not wanting to accelerate the ongoing deconstruction of the English language, I would like to own my mistakes. You just heard the creak of the door to the confessional.

Forgive me, Safire, for I have sinned.

After my column on Memorial Day ran, a veteran wrote to inform me that taps is not “played.” Taps is also never “performed.” Play and perform indicate entertainment and a bugle call is never for entertainment. Taps is “sounded.”

He was right. The Associated Press Stylebook and Pentagon back him up. “Sounded” is the correct verb to use with taps. Sounded may not sound right, but it is.

The thing that bothers me most is that taps is not capitalized.

After a column that referenced golf was published, a reader wrote to inform me that one does not “golf”—one “plays golf.”

Runners run, swimmers swim and skiers ski, but golfers do not golf—they play golf. Nor do they “go golfing.” At least not the serious-minded ones.

Both readers who emailed corrections were pleasant in tone. Whether the matter under discussion is writing, plumbing, cooking or learning computer code, correction is always easier to receive when it comes with a measure of kindness as opposed to a hard smack.

I think fast, write fast and edit fast. It is the last one that nips at my heels.

I learned early in my career that a good copy editor is a writer’s best friend, because a good copy editor makes you look smarter than you really are.

In a college news writing class, we were advised to “write short.” I am 5’ 2” so it has worked out well. Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Truthfully, I think we were admonished to write short because it minimizes opportunities for errors.

I’m reading “The Unexpected Abigail Adams,” a book that heavily excerpts from the 2,000 letters she wrote. Her letters are sprinkled with randomly capitalized words, creative spelling, contractions without apostrophes and a heavy smattering of semi-colons and commas used to create run-on sentences.

If you spot any errors in this column, no need to email me – just imagine that I am channeling Abigail Adams.

Our youngest was the ripe age of nine when she tacked a brochure, which she had pulled off a display rack at our neighborhood pharmacy, to her bulletin board. It pictured a smiling white-haired couple beside a headline that read: “Retirement: The Golden Years.”

When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, for months and months, possibly years, perhaps even on her college applications, she would answer, “Retired.”

Naturally, this was disconcerting not to mention somewhat embarrassing. Silly us, we had numerous ideas for her immediate future, none of which included walking hand-in-hand on the beach at sunset with an elderly white-haired man in need of a hip replacement.

The brochure painted a rosy—extremely rosy—picture of retirement that focused heavily on the social aspects, primarily the togetherness of a couple enjoying one another’s company, traveling together, playing golf together, sailing together, bicycling together, dining in vineyards together, climbing Mt. Everest together, sitting on a dock dangling their feet in the water together and enjoying hot air balloon rides together.

Clearly, the couple on the brochure had invested well.

There was no mention of how navigating doctor appointments, cholesterol levels, blood pressure diaries, reading glasses, hair loss, joint pain, fallen arches, cardiac stress tests, health insurance, finances and taxes, all become tantamount to an extremely frustrating part-time job.

In part, the brochure was correct: The upside of retirement is that couples can spend more time together. What the brochure neglected to say was that the upside can also have a downside.

Several years ago, a friend called and said, “I’m at the grocery store. Alone.”

“So?” I said.

“So?” she snapped. “It’s the first time I’ve been to the grocery alone in six months since my husband retired.”

Another woman said her recently retired husband was driving her nuts. Asked how, she said, “With all that clicking he does on his computer keyboard.”

Some have a lower tolerance for pain than others.

The old saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” may have been written by a retiree.

Years ago, an older gentleman who was retired told me that he was a night owl who slept in every morning and that his wife was a morning person awake at the crack of dawn. “It’s the secret to our happy marriage in retirement,” he said.

How much togetherness is too much togetherness?

I couldn’t tell you. Every couple must figure that out for themselves.

What I can tell you is that it is 10 a.m. and my better half is still sleeping.

Once again, we find ourselves at that time of year when we commence our annual tradition of cultivating $64 tomatoes, $20 garlic bulbs, $50 red potatoes and assorted herbs that run in the $20-$30 range.

This habit of growing produce at an exorbitant cost is a practice we cannot shake despite living within a two-mile radius of four grocery stores selling the same things we grow, at a fraction of the cost.

Presently, our main garden concern is not plants but rabbits.

Mopsy and Topsy have returned. Every morning the dynamic duo runs the perimeter of the backyard patrolling for invading forces, completely unaware that they are the invading forces. And every morning one of us flies out the back door chasing them, yelling at them and flapping our arms like wounded waterfowl.

They have nibbled all the hostas to the ground and eye every tender, green shoot, which is to say everything we planted. Their appetite is boundless. They enjoy sweet potatoes, Bibb lettuce, romaine, zinnias, peas, cucumbers and beans.

We have been using a humane live trap with hopes of relocating the rabbits. We baited the live trap for eight days and rabbits scored the win 8-0.

We have offered romaine, green leaf, red leaf, apple slices, cilantro and parsley. I’ve even added a small tumbler of apple cider of which rabbits are said to be fond.

Every morning the food has been gone, the trap door has been closed, but the cage has been empty. We suspect the rabbits partnered with a resident raccoon that reaches its clever paw beneath the trap and pockets the bait.

True story: Mopsy just came up to the French door beside the desk where I write and peered inside the house. Maybe she wants brussels sprouts. Maybe she is checking to see if we’ve given up and vacated the place so that they might move inside.

“We’re still here, Mopsy! Still here!”

Even our neighbors’ two yapping dogs do not deter them. The rabbits are fearless. They taunt the dogs with their puffy white tails.

Mopsy and Topsy have grown flopsy in recent days. They waddle when they leap. Their center of gravity shifts as they move. They have grown larger, rounder and fuller.

Our backyard will soon be a bunny maternity ward. Rabbits can have between five and eight bunnies per litter.

The score soon could be: Rabbits 18, Humans 0.

Rabbits can become pregnant again within hours of delivery.

Maybe we’ll open a petting zoo.

We already have a plan for next year – we’ll plant hostas directly inside the trap.