Column

We accidentally left for our vacation in Maine a day early. I take full credit—or blame—it depends on who tells the story. There’s nothing wrong with leaving a day early, except that when you get there you won’t have a place to stay.

A quick online search landed us a reservation just outside a picturesque New England town we’d been to before, a charming spot with water, docks, boats, and giant lobsters painted on cafe windows.

Our reservation wasn’t actually in the picture postcard town, but somewhat nearby. As a crow flies. A crow with two broken wings and no brain for navigation.

I couldn’t find pictures of the place where I reserved a room, but when the car is loaded and you’re panicked you don’t waste time on details.

It was long after dark when GPS led us off a state highway and onto a blacktop side road. With no moon or streetlights, we popped the headlights on high, penetrating the thick black night with all the brilliance of a birthday candle.

We drove and drove, curve after winding curve, without a single vehicle coming in the opposite direction. Side roads had no signage. “Enter at your own risk” was understood.

The only sign of life we passed was a few trucks and half-dozen people in a clearing gathered around a fire blazing in a barrel. We didn’t stop to socialize.

Mile after mile, trees hemmed us in on both sides of the road. The forest was dense and ominous, the kind that terrorized Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and Goldilocks.

We kept going. But to where?

I knew where. Deliverance.

I imagined our lodging would turn out to be some grizzled old coot’s ramshackle barn at the far back of his property. Amenities would include an outhouse with a creaky door, lots of flies and no toilet paper. Our sleeping quarters would be two filthy sleeping bags in a rickety hay loft where we would be killed in our sleep.

I shared these thoughts with my husband. Apparently, it’s not easy being married to someone with a vivid imagination.

The blacktop finally dumped us onto a road with other vehicles. GPS directed us down a steep drive that led to one of the most charming places ever. It was part hotel and part inn, like something out of the old Newhart sitcom. Thankfully, there was no sign of Larry, Darryl and Darryl.

The clerk was closing shop for the night but checked us in and mentioned a trail on the backside that led to chairs by the water for a black sky view.

We dumped our bags and headed down a long trail with a small flashlight while dodging goose poo every other step. At the water’s edge we plopped down in Adirondack chairs, looked up and fell silent.

I’d never seen so many layers and layers of stars.

I’d never seen millions of stars all sparkling, twinkling, appearing and disappearing. I’d never seen the Milky Way. I’d never seen that mysterious hazy band that looks like part fog and part cloud weaving among the stars and spiraling throughout the galaxy.

We sat amazed beneath a superdome of stars beyond the power of our comprehension and the capability of numbers.

We went to sleep that night in a comfortable bed in a clean room, giving thanks to the Creator for the wonder of creation, last-minute plans and the road less traveled.

 

Because I love, love, love saving time, I am looking forward to the first weekend in November when the entire nation will save 60 minutes—not the Sunday night news program but an hour on the clock.

Of course, nobody likes to mention the fact that the only reason we are “saving” an hour is because an hour was stolen from us in the spring. The second weekend in March is when 48 of the 50 states willingly consent to theft — to turn the clocks forward, have an hour taken from us, and try to trick our bodies, metabolisms, sleep cycles, plants, animals and small children into believing it is one time when everyone knows it is another.

Fall is when we set the record, or the time on the clock, straight. We gain back the hour that was stolen.

Justice.

The question is, what to do with the hour we gain?

My first instinct is to go to the gym. That is quickly cancelled by my second instinct, which is to celebrate and make a coffee cake. Then maybe I can go to the gym. If there is time.

Or maybe we can redeem the extra hour at the end of the day and have dinner twice.

Why do all my time-saving ideas have to do with food? They call it comfort food for a reason. I am comforted that my stolen hour has been returned.

Here, have some coffeecake.

I’ve tried reporting the stolen hour in spring as a theft and people laugh. Guess who’s laughing now? And enjoying her extra 60 minutes. If it wasn’t stolen, why are they returning it?

Most of our clocks are digital and will reset themselves while we sleep, but a handful will not.

The clock in our bathroom must be reset manually. If you-know-who resets it late Sunday afternoon and doesn’t tell me, I have a moment of panic wondering why I’m going to bed early. Am I sick? I don’t feel sick.

If I wake up, look at the time on my phone and see it doesn’t match the time on the bathroom clock, I have another moment of self-doubt. Am I in in the twilight zone? More importantly, do they observe daylight saving time in the twilight zone?

A small battery-operated clock on my desk needs to be reset manually, which I will forget to do for weeks. One day down the road, I will look at it, panic, scramble, and rush off for some appointment an hour early.

There was some rumbling about curtailing daylight saving time last year, but that’s all it was — noise. All this back and forth, sleeping, not sleeping, switching up schedules for babies and small children, is exactly why we shouldn’t mess with Father Time. There’s a reason the old guy looks grumpy. He knew what we were about to do.

They say birds of a feather flock together and while that may be true most of the time, I have proof it is not true all the time. Our 12-year-old grandson and a jet-black Cayuga duck sitting beside him, with its long neck and head resting on the boy’s shoulder, have been flocking together for weeks.

The boy says it all began because the duck’s mother did not get moody. He actually said broody, but I thought he said moody, which made no sense because every mother is capable of moody.

Apparently, the momma duck did not experience a hormone surge prompting her to get all broody, fuss with the nest, sit on the egg and warn encroaching intruders by quacking and hissing.

The boy took the lonely pale gray egg with black markings inside the house and made a cozy nest for it in an incubator. He misted the egg with water at regular intervals, knowing the egg would have been damp from the mother duck returning from a swim in the pond.

Days passed, weeks passed and the egg began to crack. With a little help, the duckling hatched. When the duckling was big enough to fit in the boy’s cupped hands, he took it outside to a nest made with pine shavings. He tucked the duckling in the nest under a heat lamp, hoping his fowl friend would integrate with new feathered friends.

Didn’t happen. “The other ducks wanted nothing to do with him,” he says. The duck bobs wildly in agreement, quacks twice, and nibbles the boy’s ear lobe.

The duck did integrate eventually, but with the boy, not the other ducks. The new webbed-foot companion and constant shadow was named “Mr. Drake.”

“How did you know the duck was a him?”

“By his voice. He had a raspy voice. Only drakes have raspy voices.”

Mr. Drake takes four swift jabs at the boy’s neck.

“Does that hurt?” I ask.

“Not really,” he says with a grin.

Mr. Drake glares at me and lets out a nasty, angry quack.

Mr. Drake follows the boy whenever he comes outside. The boy walks up the hill; Mr. Drake walks up the hill. The boy pushes the raft into the pond; Mr. Drake pushes into the pond and swims alongside.

The boy shoves a kayak into the pond, climbs in and lifts Mr. Drake onto his lap. The two silently glide, sending waves gently rippling through the water. The green sheen on the duck’s neck shimmers in the dappled sunlight. The quiet is periodically pierced by a deep, throaty quack.

“Does Mr. Drake prefer the kayak over swimming alongside the raft?”

“I think so,” the boy says. “But a lot of times he jumps out of the kayak and swims alongside.”

“Does Mr. Drake ever, well, you know, in your lap?”

The boy just chuckles. There are some things you simply don’t tell Grandma.

And Grandma thanks you.

 

I am an accidental gardener. If anything I plant grows to maturity, and by some fluke of nature becomes edible, it is sheer accident.

If we had to survive on what I grow, we would both be very, very thin. Spaghetti thin. We are not spaghetti thin; we are more like rotini.

Several years ago, I dreamed of growing potatoes. I threw some potatoes in a shoebox, threw the shoebox in a cabinet in the garage and the spuds sprouted wildly. I chopped up those taters, buried them in the ground and forgot about them.

That year we feasted on baked, mashed, sliced and diced potatoes from late summer through Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and into spring. It was a starch marathon.

Last year, I was deliberate about the potatoes, reading, researching, spacing and hilling, tending their every carbohydrate need. They grew to the size of marbles. Not even the chipmunks wanted them.

This spring I ventured into mini-pumpkin territory. Once again, I read, researched, dug and planted according to specs in a diligently-ended vegetable bed. Mission accomplished, I threw a few leftover seeds into a perennial bed that thrives on neglect. I figured the seeds wouldn’t sprout and even if they did 40-pound rabbits would bound out of hiding, devour them, belch to wake the dead and lumber back into hiding.

I tended the carefully-planted pumpkin seeds in the vegetable bed with great devotion and high hopes. I watched and watered and weeded day after day. Days turned into weeks. Nothing.

The seeds in the perennial bed were long forgotten. I may have hit them with the hose a time or two, and if I did it was purely accidental.

Back in the well-tended bed, on what seemed like day No. 479, a single bloom appeared.

That same day, I happened to walk by the dried and cracked perennial bed and was shocked. A pumpkin vine measuring 30 feet was rolling through black-eyed Susans, twisting around phlox, and cutting straight through a patch of veronica. What’s more, a secondary vine split off, branched north and was heading for the neighbors.

Back in the carefully tended garden bed, the single bloom had collapsed, no doubt doomed by the suffocation of excessive attention.

As for the vine thriving on lack of attention, I peeked beneath the enormous leaves and counted 40 blooms.

We may be harvesting crate loads of miniature pumpkins by the time you read this. We may be selling them in the driveway.

Once again, the accidental gardener has achieved victory. It may have been by chance, but it is still one more in the win column. I’ll take ‘em however I can grow ‘em.

 

My husband is one of those people who can sleep anywhere, anytime.

He can sleep sprawled halfway on and halfway off the sofa, in a straight-back chair with three grands crawling all over him styling his hair, and during cross-country flights with severe turbulence.

It’s a gift. The man is so gifted he can even fall asleep while I’m talking to him.

I do not have the gift of sleep.

The dark circles under my eyes are green with envy.

Now, I am more sleepless than ever after reading about a study from China linking “sleep irregularity” to an increased risk of 172 diseases.

Yes, I did read it right before crawling into bed.

After tossing and turning and pummeling my pillow, I was finally drifting off when I heard a toilet flush and remembered that kidney disease and urinary incontinence are linked to poor sleep. Maybe I should get up and drink some water. Of course, if I did that, I could be getting up again a few hours later.

I put kidney disease and incontinence out of my mind, which meant I had 170 more poor sleep-related diseases to go.

I threw the covers over to his side, was semi-comfortable again and heard my left knee pop. It’s a Rice Krispy knee that often snaps, crackles and pops.

Poor sleep is also linked to bone fractures. Maybe I just fractured my knee. Is that possible? Just when I convinced myself I didn’t have a fractured knee and was feeling drowsy, all the diseases linked to poor sleep began racing through my head like a thoroughbred at the Preakness . . . gangrene, fibrosis, cirrhosis of the liver.

Respiratory failure, heart disease, obesity, diabetes mellitus . . . I was on a runaway train destined for insomnia.

If only visions of sugar plums would dance in my head.

I may not have the gift of sleep, but I do have the gift of waking up. I can tell myself what time to wake up, and I do. I’ve been able to do this my entire adult life.

The next time you can’t sleep, try thinking about what time you want to wake up. I can tell you from first-hand experience, it  wo  r    k

 

We just dropped some serious money on an air purifier thinking it might help with my allergies. I have seasonal allergies. They’re only bad in fall, winter, spring and summer.

I do a lot of sniffing.

Somedays I sniff, hack and cough so much that if you heard it from another room, you’d think an old ranch hand was choking on chewing tobacco and holler to see if the guy was all right.

Everyone is used to me sniffing and coughing. Nobody hollers to ask if I’m all right. That one was decided a long time ago.

If the air purifier works some magic and helps my allergies, it’s possible I could have more energy. I might win more games of Mancala and chess with the grands. I might even be able to reach dishes on the top shelf in the kitchen without having to stand on a chair.

Clearly, I expect a lot for my money.

Not only is our air purifier supposed to help with allergies, but it is also supposed to rid the house of cooking odors. The leaflet that came with it says it will rid the house of bacon, pizza and meatloaf smells.

The cooking smell I’d like to eliminate is salmon. When I cook salmon, I throw open the windows, which lets the salmon smell out and clouds of pollen in.

Salmon tastes good, but it’s not a scent you’re going to dab behind your ears or want to permeate your clothes.

My better half and I were talking about all the different ways people fragrance their bodies—creams, lotions, cologne, deodorant, hair products, hand sanitizers. There are so many different scents and fragrances interacting on one body it’s a wonder we don’t spontaneously combust.

We even load up our homes and cars with fragrances: pomegranate rose water dish soap, mandarin coriander laundry soap (do you cook with it or wash your clothes in it?) calm and bliss-scented fabric softeners. Scented outlet plugs like almond croissant, salted butterscotch and warm apple pie enable you to fragrance while you sleep. I’m afraid I’d wake up and immediately want to start baking. Or eating. Or both.

The husband said, “Do you know what I think a house should smell like?”

“What?” I said.

“Bacon.”

I didn’t respond.

I just let it hang in the air. Along with the salmon and pollen.

Oh well. At least I have a gift idea for his birthday – bacon-scented plug-in air fresheners for the house. He’ll be in hog heaven.

We used to tell our kids to act their age. Now they tell us to act our age. We try, but it’s not easy when you are twenty-somethings trapped inside the bodies of seasoned citizens.

The husband spent five days last fall channeling Paul Bunyan, swinging an axe at the roots on a 60-year-old maple tree that a removal service had taken down. In addition to getting most of the roots out, he got two frozen shoulders, a wrist injury, steroid injections and months of physical therapy.

Not to be left out, I injured my back lunging over a seat in a moving SUV to retrieve a coffee mug. The vault went well but my landing was a disaster. I pose no threat to Simone Biles.

We are now trying (at least temporarily) to time our heavy lifting to whenever someone younger stops by. We don’t tag just anybody. We size ‘em up, study their spines, guess how much they can lift and whether they’ll sue us if something goes wrong.

We had new gutter filters installed last week. We signed the paperwork, offered the installer a lemonade and swiped our credit card. The installer hadn’t been out the door for five seconds when the husband charged after him on a dead run.

He caught the fella just in time to help move some heavy patio furniture back into place.

We have a huge hedge that requires being on a ladder and leaning over somewhat precariously to give it a flattop. Our son often spends the night on his way to and from jobsites in the area but usually arrives late at night and leaves before dawn. We’re not sure how the neighbors would feel about electric hedge trimmers buzzing while they sleep.

On the upside, if a delivery guy has a heavy box and I see him coming, most of the time he will gladly set it in the front hall.

Our house is on a crawl space that needs checking every year or so to make sure it is dry. To get in the crawl, you remove a metal partition from a window well, drop down on your arms and squeeze through the opening like a gator. We presented this opportunity to two grandsons as an adventure that would be second only to camping in the Rockies with no adult supervision.

They slithered down, reported the crawl was bone dry and emerged with a dead mouse. Naturally, other grands wanted to go down, but when the boys told them there weren’t any more mice, they lost interest.

We are now eyeing a large, worn, matted area rug in the family room that anchors an extremely heavy sofa sleeper. We may have to wait until the entire family comes for Thanksgiving.

I’m stealth about slipping outside each morning to retrieve newspapers from the driveway. I dread someone driving by, lowering their window and yelling, “Get with the times!”

Oh, darlin’, we’re with the Times—and the Journal and the Star and the News. Two papers in print and four online.

Back when an apple was still a fruit and nobody ever heard of the internet, every house on both sides of the block got a morning newspaper. Today, we are the only house on the block to get a newspaper in the driveway. We might be the only ones in the whole subdivision.

Paper and print are part of our history. We met in college. He was a graduate teaching assistant in the photo lab and I was an undergrad. We met in the darkroom to see what would develop.

We bonded over newsprint, halftones, the deafening roar of offset presses and the smell of darkroom chemicals.

I grew up in a home that received a newspaper in the morning and another in the evening. Mom and Dad had the same thing every day for breakfast: coffee, buttered toast and the morning paper.

They had the same conversation every day, too.

He’d say: “You don’t need to read that to me; I just read it.”

Then she’d say: “Ok, but did you read this—”

Then they’d trade sections.

After dinner, it was the same thing all over again, but without the buttered toast.

My husband’s first job was delivering newspapers door to door on his bicycle. As a girl, I poured through the Women’s section on lazy Sunday afternoons vicariously attending weddings of strangers, learning where they were from, who their parents were, how the groom planned on earning a living, where they would live, and how long the train on the bride’s wedding gown was.

A great aunt used to make sailor hats from newspapers, clean windows with them and wrap tomatoes in need of ripening in them. Newsprint was a multi-use tool.

Newspapers took us through the assassination of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and the horrors of 9/11.

And now? Newspapers in print are novelties — like turntable record players and 35 mm manually-focus cameras.

Before any big family gathering, the husband tears out pages with comics, the crosswords, Sudoku and word puzzles. A son-in-law and half-dozen grandkids charge through the front door and make wild grabs for them. There’s often a cluster working to solve for 61 across: solid fossil fuel.

Yes, you can find everything in print online, but there’s just something about a newspaper in your hands. Maybe it’s the feel or the crinkle. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of wrestling that monster into position. You bat back a page, snap it behind another, give it a shake, fold the whole kit and caboodle and are ready to read. Newspaper aerobics.

Some may think people who still get a newspaper in print are relics. We prefer to think of ourselves as affectionate historians.

A woman once emailed to invite me to join her book club for lunch at a country club in Malibu. She offered to reserve a parking spot for me near the front door. It was a lovely gesture, but it would have been a 2,100-mile drive.

The trip would have taken four days, maybe five. I stop a lot for Diet Cokes.

Another reader wrote expressing surprise to learn I lived near her in Idaho.

I was surprised, too, because I do not live in Idaho. I know this for sure because another reader wrote to say she was glad to know I live in upstate New York.

I do not.

A woman once recognized me in a grocery store, introduced herself, named the neighborhood where she thought I lived and the church she thought I attended. When I told her where I lived and that I had never been to that church, she looked disappointed and said, “Well, that’s not what I heard.”

Mistaken identity and misinformation can grow tangled on my end as well. A reader once sent an email and mentioned aging, losing her spouse, living alone and having to downsize. She also noted that tomorrow would be 102.

I marveled to the husband that a woman about to turn 102 was writing thoughtful emails and navigating life online. Then I reread the email, noted she lived in Arizona and realized she would not be 102, the temperature would be 102.

It is humbling when readers take time to shoot an email into cyberspace just to say hello or to inquire as to whether we might be neighbors. I try to answer all the emails but sometimes fall behind and miss a few.

For the record, we live in Indianapolis and, what’s more, nobody we live next to gets all that excited about us. But then, most of us have known one another for years, or decades, and in several cases 40 years.

We’ve shared life through kids, graduations, weddings, deaths of parents and the arrival of grandbabies.

We’ve shared extension ladders, snowblowers, garden produce and chatter about the house down the street now on the market.

If you have been fortunate to have good neighbors, you know that good neighbors often become good friends and good friends become like family.

We stay in touch with the neighbors we had as newlyweds in Oregon in the late ‘70s. They lived in one half of the duplex, and we lived in the other. Their two adorable little girls were the inspiration for starting our own family.

We saw them on a trip to the Pacific Northwest last year and drove to the duplex where our friendship began. The place was a trainwreck that elicited gasps of shock and bursts of laughter. Cars were parked in the front yard, the siding was layered in moss and mold, and a rusted grill and mostly empty bag of charcoal sat on the front step.

Times and places may change, but the good memories last forever.

 

Our primary care doctor announced he is joining a concierge practice and invited us to follow him. We were excited, thinking this meant luxurious fluffy white robes in the exam room and 500-thread-count cotton sheets on the table instead of that crinkly deli wrap paper.

Visions of coffee bars danced in our heads. The concierge practice could keep our specialty coffee orders on file along with our cholesterol counts and lists of prescription meds.

I ventured there would probably be a masseuse and spa, too. “Where there’s a spa, there’s a shower,” I said.

“YES!” the husband shouted. “Free little soaps, shampoos and conditioners!”

We wondered if a concierge practice also included valet parking. If there was valet parking, there probably would be fitness-focused excursions—maybe even free membership to a pickleball court.

We were living the dream — until the dream crashed.

After further reading, several voicemail messages, and a slick mailing with a QR code for a video, we learned a concierge practice is where a doctor limits the patient load, guarantees a call back within 24 hours and focuses on preventive care, not just treating illnesses.

In exchange for an annual fee.

Annual means you pay it every year.

Several thousand dollars.

Per warm body.

There’s a shortage of primary care doctors and it is projected to worsen. More and more people are paying annual fees to see a doctor. Luxury concierge practices (the ones that do have fluffy towels and coffee bars) charge as much as $50,000. Our doctor was charging nowhere near that. But still.

If the husband lives as long as his dad did – until almost 98—his concierge fees alone could equal the price of a nice new car. Adjusted for inflation, it could be two new cars and a boat.

We love our doctor. His changing practices rips my heart out. (I’ll need a cardiologist for that.) We were some of his first patients when he began practicing. He gave us his home phone number in case we needed to reach him in an emergency.

We understand why he’s switching to a different practice. We’ll miss him.

Our main concern in choosing a new health professional is age. That’s right, we discriminate and are up front about it. We want doctors who are going to outlive us.

We both made appointments with a new fella. Mine was yesterday. I couldn’t tell his age from the picture online and was eager to see how old he looked.

He swung open the door, said, “Hello” and extended his hand. I instinctively cried, “You’re young! You’re about the age of our son. He’s 43.”

He smiled and said, “I’m 41.”

I think we’re gonna like him.