In Praise of Porches

I am alone, sitting on my screened-in porch perched high above a valley full of horses. I am bundled up to a fare-thee-well against the too-chilly 45-degree weather and there is a soft, chilly rain. But I am not deterred. I have my supplies: my heating pad, a faux fur blanket wrapped around me and tucked in around my legs, a steaming cup of coffee, a bergamot-scented candle burning by my side, a journal, and a good pen. I am trying to squeeze in just a few more days of bearable weather in my favorite spot, overlooking the foothills of the ancient Appalachian mountains in the distance. 

Ah, the screened porch. I am outside, but covered, not bothered by any flying insects. I am inside, but with fresh air, beautiful views, and secluded privacy. I cherish this porch.

When we were planning this house, I entertained having a wrap-around country porch because I often admire big old houses with wide open front porches. An open front porch is like a wide-open smile, a welcoming beacon, an invitation to stop, come up, have a visit. But the more I thought about it, I decided that while we’d have an open deck, I still needed a screened porch because it emits a different kind of energy: it’s private, a refuge, a sanctuary. A screened porch is like a smile with the eyes, the smile a secret garden might give. It, too, is welcoming – I have welcomed many to mine over the years. But unlike an open-air porch, a screened porch is an ensconcement, an enclave. In planning this house, I took inspiration from the book, The Not So Big House, by architect Sarah Susanka, who extols the benefits of having a screened porch room. Having an away spot, removed from the daily shuffle of a busy home, she says, is a thing to treasure. The fact that it is only available for some of the year in northern climes makes it all the more special.

Our previous family home had a lovely backyard screened porch, a step down outside of the family room, nestled behind some bushes. In the twenty-five years we lived there, I took refuge there many times. When my youngest daughter was a newborn, she and I would lie on the couch out there and I would breastfeed her, listening to the sounds of the mourning doves coo-cooing at sunrise and the crickets coming alive every evening. Over the years, I would escape out there to take phone calls away from the busy thrumming of activity inside the house walls. During the pandemic of 2020 we hosted out-of-town cousins from Chicago there, all bundled against the winter cold as we huddled, sitting on chilly cast iron furniture around a too-small space heater that emitted a tiny halo of heat that none of us could really feel. But we were all warmed by the presence of each other, tucked in out there, together.

The screened porch is the ultimate compromise. They're outside, but safely covered from the elements. They’re inside, but free, unencumbered by the formality of a living room. And just like our outdoor shower makes the mundane task of cleaning oneself a joyful, somewhat naughty endeavor, the screened porch makes everyday tasks like reading, working, or journaling way more fun, special, and relaxing.

When we finally did build that screened porch onto our farmhouse, it was really an homage to my mother, who had died only about eight months before. Growing up, my father’s happy place was his brick patio in the backyard, surrounded by begonias, petunias, and family. But my mom was never fully happy out there. Every stinging or biting insect of the season would be drawn to her sweet, pale, Irish skin and feast on her. She would spend most cocktail hours swatting and swearing at the bugs that only she could feel and no one could see. She looked like a crazed airport traffic controller on a tarmac, waving and flapping her arms every which way, fighting them off. She would flee to the safety of the indoors, weepy with indignation, feeling persecuted, sure that my father could be doing something to help her.

One year, he finally did just that, after Mother Nature sent the Blizzard of 1978 upon northeast Ohio. An enormous elm tree fell on the house during that storm, sending a huge branch through the roof of the family room. In repairing the damage, my mother saw an opportunity; there was an unused cement patio outside the sliding doors, near the damaged roof, a perfect spot upon which to build a screened porch. Taking advantage of contractors in the house anyways, she set to work designing the porch of her dreams. It had to be large enough to accommodate a good-sized crowd, but still be cozy. It would have a view of my dad’s shady, manicured yard, but the entrance would be from the family room, with no door to the backyard from the porch. That way, the adults could observe the grandchildren, but it would be difficult for the kids to enter from the yard and get in our way (free range parenting at its finest). There would be no zooming through her quiet refuge. And there would be no screen door to slam, a sound that she could not bear. (For a woman who lived her life in the center of constant chaos, that sound simply unglued her).

She got her porch right around Mother’s Day that year and it quickly became a popular space for seasonal visiting. Often, I would find my mom out there when I would come home from school. She would be on a glider with the late afternoon sunshine streaming in from the side, a baby grandchild blissfully tucked in between her pillowy arms and generous bosom. They would rock back and forth, like a middle-aged Madonna with child. And nary a bug was around to disrupt her reverie. I would drop my backpack, grab some Fig Newton cookies, and pour a cup of tea to join her. Finally, she had her happy place.

Thinking of my mom and her porch now, I see that it has stopped raining outside and the sun is shining on the autumn leaves, giving them a fresh radiance. My mom would love this porch, for its views of the valley, and horses (she adored the strength and grace of horses). It is elevated, right next to an enormous poplar tree, making it feel like a tree house or a sky box. I think of her every time I set myself up in my corner out here, my happy place. 

Porch days are dwindling, in spite of blankets, heating pads, and hot coffee. But I will eke out as much time as I can, as I seek the sanctuary out here, removing myself from the news feeds and political mayhem beyond these screens. In this time of division, it is nice to sit in a place of perfect compromise: it is not all of anything, all inside or all outside. And yet, it pleases all.

The Game of Golf

There is a home movie of me. It is 1968. I am about four years old at the driving range at Oglebay Park in Wheeling, West Virginia. My brothers are there, too, in their goldenrod-colored shorts and tube socks. I am thrashing away at a golf ball, rivulets of sweat running down my bright, apple-red face. My dad, tall, lanky, just starting to develop the paunch that gave him his signature water tower silhouette he was famous for later in life, is maybe 49 or 50 and he is giving me pointers. The air is thick with humidity and, although the 8-millimeter movie has no sound, I can just hear the cicadas singing in the valleys below. Looking at my dad on film I wonder ... when did he take up golf? And why? Surely, he didn’t get started until after World War II. He was the only son of working-class Irish immigrants. How did he find his way to this ridiculous sport?

Jack was a rather serious man, but never took golf too seriously. A member of the Greatest Generation who lived through The Great Depression, World War II, and raising a big family through the Sixties, he realized that golf is a game, not worth getting one’s shorts in a bunch. Perhaps he found that golf is a subtle way of saying, “Life is not all wide fairways and easy greens, my friends.”

Over the years, Jack introduced all nine of his children and even my mother to golf. He never joined a golf club or a league, but each summer would lug the tribe of us down to the hot hollers of West Virginia to golf. He may have found golf was a way to “peek under the hood” of each of us to see what we were all about? He must have known that a day spent golfing with someone gives you a window into someone’s true nature. Is he honest? How patient is he with himself and others? How is her humor? How does she handle the pressure and embarrassment of people watching you give it your all and only move the bloody ball a few feet forward ... if at all? How deep is her vocabulary of swear words (mine is an abyss)?

My dad would take me golfing with him every now and then, complimenting me on my “natural swing.” (It turns out, my swing is a happy accident, benefitting from my spinal curve from scoliosis, but it was dear that he only saw the swing). He was not a verbose man, not one to have deep talks or shower one with praise. But while golfing, the whole afternoon would be filled with gentle encouragements: “That’s the right idea,” “Nice and easy, like sweeping the porch,” “Eyes on the ball, head down,” “Bend those knees, like you’re sitting on a bar stool,” (could there be a more Irish coaching tip?) ... and the inevitable, “That’s enough, pick up and let’s go to the next hole” and “Don’t keep track of your score, it will break your spirit.”

I don’t think Jack even knew his handicap (nor I mine because the whole process feels like an SAT math problem). He consistently golfed 100, which is respectable. Plain old crappy golf takes a long time and to become a good golfer with a low handicap takes a lot of practice = a very, very long time. Golf was low on Jack’s priority list, way, way behind his Big Three: Faith, Family, Work. (I am often suspect of someone with a low handicap, honestly. I mean ... Come on, aren’t you needed somewhere more important than the fairway seven days a week, sir?)

Several years ago, in an effort to better my own golf game, I was convinced to join a women’s league. With my dad’s compliments from childhood ringing in my ears, I went into this league experience feeling rather confident, wearing my snazzy new golf skort and sparkling fresh shoes. “Oh, yes, I’ve been golfing my whole life,” I told the ladies. But what I didn’t realize is that when you’re playing with serious golfers, those who actually keep score – like really keep score (whiffs, flubs and all) – well, my golf score climbed up there. It turns out I am not a good golfer at all.

During one round early on, I was paired with a crabby old bitty of a woman who seemed hell bent on, I don’t know, making me cry? The entire round, she reprimanded me for chatting, for casting my shadow in her lie, (so I guess shadow puppets are a no-no, too?), for taking too long to find my godforsaken ball – so much so that she made me tee it off again. Sure, those are the “actual rules,” but clearly, she was not worried about “breaking my spirit.” She scowled and trudged through her round as if this “game” was a crappy job and I was the new hire, ripe for hazing. The entire round I had that woman on my shoulder like a vulture, sneering at me. The more I worried about her, about my shitty whiffs and flubs, the worse I got. That death march continued for an eternity with me hacking and whacking away, like an old timey prisoner breaking stones, until my arms finally gave out. Yes, that mean ole fuddy duddy did make me cry. She probably went home to her hairless cat, feeling satisfied that she broke another golfer wannabe.

And so, since then, I’ve retreated to golfing mostly with family and a few close friends. When the stakes are low, golfing makes me feel like I’m with my dad, now that he’s gone nearly twenty-five years. It makes me appreciate nature, being outside, just like he did. I love the soft glimmer of the grass in the early morning as I M-F my drive, sending it soaring into another hole’s fairway, n’er to be seen again. I love the long, quiet shadows of late afternoon golf as a hush falls over the green while I putt ... and putt ... and putt again, urging the ball into the hole with a limbo-like dance that only sometimes works. I enjoy taking a close look at the trees surrounding the fairway ... because I spend a lot of time in their dappled shade, bouncing my ball off their strong, stoic trunks or trying to chip my way back to where I’m supposed to be.

I will occasionally golf with my husband, who came to the game only about twenty years ago and now is Sir Golf A Lot. For someone who eschews “the rules” in life in general, he is a strict rule follower in golf, which is a buzz kill, honestly. He does not appreciate my antics on the golf course. No fart noises on the backswing? What’s fun about that?

As I write this, I am unpacking from that annual family vacation where, by some clerical error, I won the annual Women’s Open. I played rounds with my daughters, my sister, my cousin and even a couple of my brothers, which was a treat. When they were adolescents, my brothers were golf hot heads, taking each swing seriously, easily frustrated to the point of throwing clubs into the woods or cracking them over a knee. Watching them swing away ... or hunt and peck for those balls sliced into the “love grass,” they are much more mellow. They have my dad’s same balding pate, sweating in the insufferable West Virginia heat. I think how happy he would be that we are all continuing this tradition of playing golf together. Much like his tradition/torture of gathering us all to do yard work together – an equally time-intensive endeavor, filled with sweat, tears and swearing – this tradition is not really about the golf at all. It’s about just spending a few hours together, taking Jack’s lessons from golf forward into life: keep a sense of humor, enjoy the scenery, don’t keep score, and, when the going gets too rough, pick up and move on.  I mean, it is a game, isn’t it? It’s better than changing a poopy diaper, paying bills, snaking a drain or going to war, for chrissakes. It’s a game. A long, difficult, embarrassing, humbling, enlightening, beautiful, ridiculous game. But with the right people … worth it.

A Room of One’s Own

In these days of forced togetherness, I keep thinking of a friend who is obsessed with the “tiny house” movement. These minimalists espouse the belief that we all should eliminate the superfluous stuff in our lives, Marie Kondo-like, and boil ourselves down to our essence in lilliputian tiny houses that are no bigger than 400 square feet - barely enough room for a double take, let alone a second thought. During the height of the lockdowns of 2020 when so many of us had our adult children back in our houses, I would chuckle, thinking of my friend and her adult triplets all home and underfoot, and think to myself “I’ll bet your normal size house feels pretty tiny right now, Sister!” *

I scroll through tiny house websites, captivated by their efficiency. And I look at photos of young, groovy families who allegedly reside in these tiny houses. I’m all for minimalism, but I don’t understand how they can keep this lifestyle up for too many years. What happens when little Tommy becomes a large, lanky teenager and leaves his size 12 sneakers in the tiny living room? Will he save his allowance for his own tiny house behind the family tiny house? And little Rebecca? When she turns into a hormonal teenage terror, will there be enough room for her, her Sephora beauty products, her volleyball gear AND her attitude? I doubt it. I picture the scene from Alice and Wonderland where poor Alice’s arms and legs are shooting out the windows and doors of the house after she eats those funky mushrooms. 

Perhaps tiny houses are really just meant for one person? Now that I can understand. I have daydreamed of a space, just big enough for me, where I can write, think great thoughts, putter about. Uninterrupted. I’ve been reading Virginia Wolf’s iconic A Room of One’s Own these days. It is revolutionary how this ballsy woman takes on The Man, or rather Men, logically explaining that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Up until the early 19th century, there were very few women writers, poets or artists of any renown. She calmly explains this is due to the fact that women throughout history and up to that point (1924) were not only often denied a proper education (and thus the financial independence that gave them space to create, dream, imagine), but they literally did not have the ROOM. Nowhere to hide, as it were. They were forever under the controlling gaze of fathers, husbands, brothers, children or were simply too damned busy and exhausted with domestic chores to create, write, dream. Exhaustion and misogyny kill a gal’s creativity right quick. 

Which brings me back to the tiny house movement. Looking over the stats, I found that more women than men (55% compared to 45%) are tiny house owners. Makes sense. Every woman I know would jump at the chance to get a home of their own, away from their families, if they could afford it. That’s what the “she shed” craze is all about. And that was before Covid Times. Years ago, when my older sisters were young mothers, they used to fantasize about pooling their resources and purchasing an apartment on the lakefront. The Escape Pod was to be a retreat from everyone and everything. They were going to fill it with their favorite books, movies and snacks. All the sisters and sisters-in-law with small children would have keys, but no one else was to know about The Escape Pod, especially their husbands. By the time I had young children I totally understood their hideout fantasy. They were yearning for “a room of their own.”

Ski lift tree stand

It turns out my husband has had these same urges and he has a tiny house of his own: a deer stand. Or, rather, several deer stands. Each fall, my husband, Tiny House Tim, has a deer hunting “men’s retreat” at our farm. After the first retreat left him shivering in a traditional deer stand (which is nothing more than a rickety ski-lift chair attached to a tree) he discovered these fancy, newfangled deer stands that are quite literally tiny houses in the air. They have windows with lovely views of the forest (and any incoming deer), a door, a chair, some space heaters. Everything a guy needs to be cozy and all alone in the woods, ready to kill something. Testosterone meets domesticity. But Tiny House Tim doesn’t need to be killing something in his bitty abode. He will escape into these hideaways to just sit and think, dream, listen to nature. When he returns from his mini retreats, he talks about watching the sunrise, listening to the forest animals scurry below, and the simple beauty of isolation.

During the nerve-wracking days of the 2020 Covid Lockdown, our family of five retreated to the farm property to hunker down. The thought was that with all that space in the house and the acreage around it, we would not only be removed from humanity’s Covid cooties, but have enough room to navigate around each other with our daughters’ remote classes, our Zoom meetings, phone calls, etc. Well, 24/7 time together in a house can make even a large farm feel pretty small after nine weeks. Tiny House Tim took to “checking on the deer stands” a couple of times of week, just to get the hell away from all the estrogen in the house. And, because it became obvious that the big, open communal spaces of our farm house enable noise to travel everywhere, our youngest daughter, Merriweather, started retreating to the tiny house tree stands to Face Time her boyfriend. I think during those dark lockdown days, it felt nice for her to have “somewhere to go.” Like a real date.

This past summer I was out for a hike in the woods and examined a deer stand for myself. I clambered up the ladder, yanked open the door and hoisted myself up into it, opening the five little windows to let the breeze move through. I took out my ear buds, taking a break from incessant chatter. Up there, with a panoramic view of the forest, I channeled Tiny House Tim and just sat and listened. Scurrying squirrels, a woodpecker in the distance, the buzz of a fly. A cardinal lilting his distinctive song. A passing butterfly. The constant thrum of 2020 all went quiet. I looked out into the thick woods and somehow was overcome with emotion and started crying from exhaustion, fear, gratitude. I can’t travel very far. I can’t be with my large tribe of people and hug them, touch them, laugh and cry all over them. I can’t wave a magic wand to protect them, me, us. But I can be still up here in this tree stand, in this moment, this tiny house. 

Bougie ass tree stand as tiny house.

I think of Virginia Wolf writing “it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” I’ll have to claim one of these tiny houses and create something in a room of my own. The Hell with it, I’ll publish a book of my farm ramblings. Virginia also says “a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.”

I’m going to need a deadbolt.

*Postscript: my friend read my essay and corrected me. “Oh no, no. My husband and children were never invited to my tiny house,” she said. “That was always a fantasy only for me!”

Wildflowers and Butterflies

For the past several years, I have been pining for a wildflower garden on our farm. Our farm manager, The Sheriff and his father, the Mayor are passionate about order, so they have resisted. They love the clean, organized lines of a freshly mowed lawn. Acres and acres of green, tidy pastures adorn our farm and I, too, love it. It is soothing, predictable, orderly. 

But I have been yearning for an unrestrained, wild, colorful field of wildflowers out there ... and this past summer, I got my wish. I finally convinced my husband, The Land Baron, that, of our expansive acreage, we could spare a small patch to indulge my floral fantasy. We walked around the property, trying to find the right location that was out of the way of farm duties like feeding horses, hauling hay, and spreading manure, but in the line of sight from the house. We found a perfect spot, just beyond our vegetable garden, down a slight swale.

The next day, our farm neighbor (a real farmer, not a poser farmer like us) volunteered his services. He dredged a patch of grass, turning over the rich soil beneath it. He then tamped it down and scattered the seed evenly over the roughly 20’ x 60’ area. “Now we wait,” he said. It was all up to Mother Nature to water and feed the field with sunlight.

By mid-summer, the field indeed came to life. And it was glorious. Red, blue, purple, orange, and pink flowers were in a cascading cycle of bloom. The juxtaposition of my wildflower meadow’s wanton disorder against the tidy green acreage around it framed it like a green matte, making a stunning piece of art. Every time we came to the farm this past summer, I immediately went to visit my wildflower field to cut flowers. Sure, there are weeds in there, but honestly, aren’t weeds just wildflowers with better PR? Unlike my more manicured garden at home, in this garden I leave the weeds alone. Live and let live.

Songbirds, hummingbirds, bees, praying mantis and more began visiting. But my favorite interlopers are the butterflies. These silent, beautiful beings are like quiet angels amongst us. Seeing a butterfly in nature is akin to seeing a rainbow; it induces delight and awe in everyone. I think of the Monarch butterfly and its extraordinary migration from North America to Mexico every year. I just found out that in fact, no individual butterfly completes the entire round trip. It is more like an insect relay race, with female monarchs laying eggs for a subsequent generation during the northward migration.  Four generations are involved in the annual cycle. (Talk about logistics!) One of the reasons I wanted that wildflower garden so badly was because I know that Monarch populations were dwindling because of loss of habitat. And so, I am happy to help those brave little travelers by planting a lovely rest stop on their butterfly highways.

When my kids were little, we had a special interaction with a butterfly. Each winter we would make a yearly pilgrimage to Butterfly World in south Florida while we were there visiting my in-laws. Butterfly World is essentially a zoo for butterflies, with enclosed atria housing species from all over the planet in simulated natural habitats. One year we bought a butterfly chrysalis to bring home and watch the miracle of rebirth that happens as the insect sheds its old way of life and emerges resplendent, transformed, victorious. About a week after bringing the chrysalis home, my toddler daughters and I sat transfixed for hours – or at least I did – as the insect started the slow, miraculous process of emerging from its hibernation. The girls ran in circles, squealing, driven crazy with anticipation and frustration, while I kept them from trampling the fragile little guy. When the butterfly finally completed its transformation, it sat for a while, all wet and gooey, drying its wings in the sun. And then, it was off ...

Over the last few weeks this fall, my beautiful wildflower meadow has had a burst of colorful energy. With the end of the season nearing, it’s been like a grand finale of explosive color: cosmos, New England Aster, Milkweed, Coreopsis and Cornflower have been giving it their all before settling down for a long winter slumber. Like all autumn color, I find it bittersweet. It is delightful in the moment, but we all know there are darker days ahead.

In the midst of this wretched pandemic time, I find myself, like my daughters with the butterfly, running in circles from the frustration and angst of just wanting to get on with it already. I’m having trouble writing, thinking creatively and being patient. Perhaps I should stop trying to make orderly, well-manicured sense of this time and just let it all go. Maybe, it’s best to take a cue from that butterfly and that wildflower field and pull in, cocoon myself emotionally and creatively, let the field of my mind lie fallow and metaphorically fall back into the earth. To just be still and ... wait.

Perhaps this time of isolation, contraction, and withdrawal will reveal something beautiful on the other side?

At the very least, there will be a wildflower garden to look forward to next spring.

Butterflies are like silent angels amongst us.

Trees

They say only an optimist plants a tree.

Four years ago, my husband, Johnny Appleseed, got a wild hair and decided to plant not one, but 150 fruit trees at our farm. Or rather, he hired a nice Mennonite family to plant them. We knew exactly nothing about fruit trees, but there they stand, dotting a hillside in mid-Ohio. We planted 25 peach trees, 25 cherry trees and 10 each of 10 varieties of apples. Two peach trees made it through the first winter, six cherry trees. But so far, all of those apple trees are hanging in there. 

 For the past four years, I occasionally drive our four-wheeler by the orchard and give all the trees a pep talk: “You’re doing great! Keep up the good work!” It must be working, because this past month, for the first time in four years, we have apples. They’re not pretty, but there they are, hanging like imperfect jewels from the leafy branches. Honestly, it’s thrilling to behold. I’ll have to keep up the pep talks. And start looking up apple recipes.

While I am learning about fruit trees, I have always admired trees in general. After all, I am from Northeast Ohio, known as The Forest City for all the trees in this area. Every morning as I journal, I observe the trees out my window or on my porch, swaying, shimmering, tickling the air with their leaves. On the farm, our porch juts out right next to an enormous poplar tree, giving the room the feel of a treehouse. One of my favorite sounds in the world is the sound of a breeze through the leaves of that tree.

My real home is in a little town, about 20 minutes west of Cleveland, that is home to thousands of gigantic oak trees, one of which stands proudly in my back yard. This tree is probably 300 years old. I gaze up at her, towering above all the other trees around us and wonder what she has lived through. I imagine her as she grew up in a thick forest, full of native American tribes running past her, hunting and fishing on the southern shores of Lake Erie. She saw the white Europeans move in, pushing the natives out, claiming the land as their own. She saw species of animals that are now extinct or no longer thrive in this area: bears, wolves, large cats. She has seen the American Revolution and the Civil War pass by her branches and as she grew taller, and eventually shaded generations of families under her branches. 

As she pushed her roots down, down, down into the clay earth and stretched herself up, up, up to the sky, eagles soared above her canopy. They vanished from this area for a while, the water being tainted with toxic DDT, but then returned when that practice stopped and now she sees them again, soaring, gliding up and down the great Lake Erie shoreline. 

She saw farmers move in, divide up the land beneath her and plant orchards around her base. Our neighborhood used to be an orchard. She stood tall, like a sentry, peaking over the trees around her to catch a glimpse of the mighty lake to the north, the sun rising over it every morning to the east, setting over it to the west in the summer. To the south, she could see the rolling hills of forested land, pushed in front of the glaciers before they receded and left the Great Lakes in their wake. 

Our oak saw the city folk march westward, out of the dense, dirty city core during the Industrial Revolution, escaping to the fresh, breezy shoreline to relax, spread out, dip their toes in the water. The people built summer get-away cottages along the lakeshore and eventually permanent homes beneath her boughs. White colonial style homes, brimming with post World War II families, spread out around her with kickballs, firefly hunts and backyard grilling smoke wisping up into her ever-expanding limbs. 

If I were to be a tree, what would I be?

I remember the time when an Amish family came to build a shed in our back yard and, upon finishing, ended up standing around our tree, arms akimbo, craning their necks upward to admire her now expansive 200-foot height. Straight, true, magnificent. They even measured her base, some 30 feet around. The father removed his hat, brushed the dirt off it and shook his head, “That’s a mighty fine tree you’ve got there. If she ever gets sick, I would sell your house, because it’s going to be a fortune to take her down.”

If I were to be a tree, what would I be? While I adore our massive oak, I gotta say, those brown leaves in the autumn are drab, unimpressive. I’d rather be a radiant maple with bright red leaves, pulsing with sexy, tasty syrup. Or perhaps a dramatic weeping willow with my hair flung over my eyes like a gothic princess. Or maybe an aspen, with shimmering, dancing leaves. Back on the farm, walking amongst all those apple trees, I remember the book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein – and realize that, as a mother, I’m an apple tree. “Come Boy, come climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and be happy.” Not sexy or dramatic, but it fits.

I look across the orchard, at the bejeweled trees. It’s odd to think about someone, maybe a grandchild, a great grandchild or a complete future stranger, looking out over these trees in fifty years, wondering, “Who planted these trees here? Why? What was their life like way back then ... wasn’t that during the pandemic of 2020?” Perhaps then one will turn to the other and say, “You know, they say only an optimist plants a tree.”

Kitchen Gadgets

One of my favorite discoveries in the region our farm property is an Amish Country Store named Lehmans Market. “Country Store” belies the enormity of this place. It is more like an Amish Mall of America. This sprawling entity includes everything a good Amish household might need. The hardware section is a walk back through time with potbellied stoves, axes for cutting firewood, and all manner of wrenches, hammers and manly, old-timey devices. The laundry supplies section is filled with drying racks, wringers, washboards and clothes pins. There are provisions for candle making, soap making, “Simple Life” stuff you would need if you didn’t have, modern day distractions like television, internet or electricity … things any End Times home would need.

The book section is an odd collection of titles like “What’s it like to be Amish,” “There’s Room on the Porch Swing,” “Almost Amish” and the intriguing “Mennonite Men Can Cook Too.” Which brings me to the kitchen section: row upon row of accoutrement, large and small. Materials for making, storing, carrying, serving one’s own bread, pasta, jam, cakes, pies, soups, stews, stocks, lemonade, apple cider … stuff that would make Julia Childs drool. It is this department that I just had to bring my best friend to see.

My friend, we’ll call her Kathy, is a wonderful cook and she loves kitchen paraphernalia. She putters effortlessly around her kitchen, using her special gadgets, meant for anything imaginable. Juicing a small lemon? Got the gadget. A large lemon? Got a different gadget. A unique and clever stirring thingy, a special contraption for turning this or that, frying whatever. She’s got it. Sear it, bake it, freeze it, shake it, it’s covered. Observing her in her kitchen, she’s forever picking every last bit of beef off the bone so she can make it into a soup or stew later. She is constantly cooking, storing, freezing food, ready to put on a gorgeous buffet at a moment’s notice. Once, when she hosted my sisters and me for a weekend at her lake home, she disappeared for a few moments and was chatting with us from the other room. We barely knew she was gone before she somehow magically returned with freshly made ice cream (she’s got a gadget for that!) and an apple pie that made us weep it was so good. 

She comes by it naturally. Kathy’s mother is a Hungarian immigrant. She and her sister were raised by their Hungarian grandmother and great aunts, and all the recipes and traditions that came with them. I grew up across the street from Kathy and going into her house as a child was a cultural adventure. The house was subdued, bathed in a late 60’s glow of burnt oranges, pinks and goldenrod yellows. The Hungarian aunties were always in the kitchen, stirring bubbling pots on the stove, steam rising, enveloping their babushkas in mystery. There were smells there that that I never found in my own mother’s kitchen: paprika, roasted peppers, goulash, stews, soups, noodles slathered in something amazing and foreign (probably just butter, but it smelled different there). Their Hungarian chatter, reprimanding us as we wandered through the room with Barbies in tow, was at once exotic and familiar. 

As a teenager, Kathy enlisted her aunties’ help to tackle the painstaking task of making a Hungarian Dobos Torte, a multi-layered, complicated Hungarian delicacy that took her probably two days to make. I remember thinking, “why would you do that when you could just crack open a perfectly good Sarah Lee pound cake and have at it?” But she persevered, creating a lovely, delicate pastry that would make any bakery envious. Tragically, it ended up in a heap, when, while it was setting up in the basement, a load of laundry came down the shoot and blew it to smithereens. 

As I remember Kathy’s kitchen, I hear Hungarian chatter and the aunties’ silhouettes morph into my friend at present day, pecking through the kitchen aisle at Lehman’s, looking for just the right spatula – there are maybe twenty varieties. I chuckle to myself, looking at her, knowing her culinary tradition and comparing it to my own meat and potatoes upbringing. 

My mother’s kitchen door was always open, ready to feed whomever walked happened through. It wasn’t fussy food -- no desserts that took half a week to prepare -- but it was the epitome of comfort food. That kitchen was chaotic and improvisational. My mother liked to cook … enough. It was a necessary part of the job description. Everything was made in large quantities. There was usually an overcooked chicken grilled out in the nice weather, eye of the round and a mountain of mashed potatoes on Sundays. The smoke alarm would go off when the oven door was opened to reveal charred dinner rolls. I was routinely enlisted to scrape the blackened bottoms off the dinner rolls. I don’t remember salad showing up in that kitchen until the mid-80s. My friend Kathy grew up in my mom’s kitchen, probably as much as she was in her own. She spent many, many hours with me in that kitchen, peeling potatoes, setting the table, eating, clearing the table, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, feeding a baby or two at my mother’s expansive kitchen table.

Now, as adults, Kathy and I are both fans of food, cooking, fiddling around in the kitchen, and entertaining. I think we each carry with us our separate and combined kitchen histories. My mother would often say, in reference to family gatherings, “it’s not about the food.” For her, it was about being together, sharing stories, love, laughter. If the roast was burnt, well, that’s fodder for another story. For Kathy’s people, it was all about the food, old world traditions, recipes, history and bringing people together to experience them. Put all those ingredients in a pot, stir it together with time ... and here’s what you get: two middle-aged women pecking through an Amish kitchen aisle, sharing a friendship of some 53 years, getting ready to prepare and sit down to dinner together to share stories, love, laughter, old world traditions, recipes, good food. And maybe some of that homemade ice cream, because there’s a gadget for that.

Autumn Resolutions

There’s a chill in the air and a list coming on!

Sitting on my back porch, there is that familiar chill just barely in the air. Fall is coming, and while it signals an ending – leaves will fall and soon thereafter, so will snow -- it always feels like a new start. A do over. A time to begin again with clean, empty notebooks and new ideas. It’s like January, but with better weather. 

Passing earnest parents and eager children with shiny new backpacks at bus stops all over town, I feel the need to make lists, set goals, buy new desk supplies for myself and label them all with Sharpie pens. I instinctively look at the calendar and mark dates for the new school year, even though my “students” are now 21 and 24 years old. What will I do when they are both out of school next year? Maybe I’ll just make note of the bulk garbage pickup days for the coming year.

A few weeks ago, I brought my last child to college; it was the end of an era for that ritual of packing up the car, heading far, far away, (each of my kids chose colleges out of state), nesting her up, ordering pizza and eating it on the floor or the bed or, in this last case, the pretty decent Walmart dining room table. We spend a couple of days talking about goals for the year, classes chosen, how to roast a chicken and turn it into 3 meals for the week, and figure out when will she come home next. Releasing, letting go. Again. “Love you forever … bye! Make good choices! Don’t shame the family!”

Down on the farm, the fall ritual is very much the same. Yearling horses which were weaned last fall have spent the past twelve months frolicking, living, running, fighting and playing in single-sex fenced-in paddocks with simple “run-in barns” available for them to retreat from the sun or the cold and eat some hay, boys on one side, girls on the other, like Catholic high schools. Now, after learning the ropes of living without their mothers, these young adults are brought inside the big barns for the first time. Unlike the run-in barns, these barns have individual stalls with doors, something that none of these youngins are used to. Walking into the barn a few weeks ago, the stalls were teeming with noisy young horses, unsettled with excitement, fear, agitation and bewilderment. These young fillies and colts went from nursing from their mothers last summer to living together in a wild herd over the past year. Now they are getting ready to go to the big yearling horse sales and they have to learn their manners, learn how to be led, wear a halter, learn how to be alone in a stall, to eat out of a feed bowl, and act civilized. Once they are sold to new owners, most will then be taught how to be race horses, trotters. It’s like horses going to college, without the pizza.

Another ritual of my autumn is my annual Slugfest reunion with my college pals. When it began, some thirty-three years ago, it was a summer affair where we sat on the dock lakeside in upper Minnesota, drank cheap beer and talked and laughed all weekend long. Once we started having children, our schedules became full of swim meets, little league games and family vacations and so our reunions moved to the autumn. Somewhere along the line, at the end of the weekend, we began to make Slug resolutions, or as we like to say, “un-goal goals.” Being good friends and not wanting to burden each other with guilt or pressure, we soft peddled our expectations.  Each year, any one of us will say, “By this time next year, if I feel like it, I will entertain the idea of possibly thinking about accomplishing _____ … maybe.” These un-goal goals range from lofty (getting an MBA, moving to a new city, changing jobs, getting yoga certified or training for a marathon) to the mundane (cleaning out the basement, organizing family photos, learning how to play the ukulele, or writing a blog). 

Each autumn the yearling horses come into the barn and learn their manners.

 I’ve got a long list of things that I haven’t gotten around to accomplishing yet, that roll over from one year to the next: learn conversational German and Italian, organize my photos (that’s thirty years’ running now), clean out my basement (just about as long), lose ten pounds.  And my bar keeps getting lower; getting a good night’s sleep at least once a week and not suffering fools for one second are at the top of this year’s list. But also write more, travel more, seize every mother grabbing day. And on the Zen side: do more yoga, meditate more, be present because Life changes quickly. I am throwing a new one on the heap that feels a little lofty: think about thinking about possibly learning about podcasting. We’ll see …

By the time I finish my Slugfest reunion, I will come home rested, rejuvenated and inspired … just in time for Halloween, then it’s November, Thanksgiving, Christmas and yes, the new year. Perhaps I will have checked off a few of my “to do’s” by then? 

I can tell you right now, probably not. 

That’s what New Year’s Resolutions are for.

To Everything There Is A Season

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” Ecclesiastes 3

It is finally, officially Spring … and not a moment too soon. I’ve been living in a season of sadness lately … a season of funerals. Sometimes, it feels kind of Biblical, Jobian, like I’ve been “walking through the valley of death.” Just when it feels like it’s lifting, another crushing loss comes around.

Years ago, a friend of mine said to me, “I feel like you are always going to baby showers and funerals.” She’s right. The gifts — and challenges — of being part of a big, rambling family is that there is always a lot of a lot. Births, baptisms, First Communions, illness, hospitalizations, funerals, burials. Successes, failures, worries, joys. Like shark teeth, it all just keeps coming and coming and coming.

Living through these funerals recently, it struck me that planning a funeral is like planning a sad wedding in about three days. The flurry of funeral arrangements, preparing for imminent death, worrying about the widow, the widower, the grieving family, family dynamics at play, worries, fears, facing your own mortality, your siblings/parents/friends’ mortality. Feeding people, crying, laughing, gallows humor, crying some more. Keeping the vigil … “Love you … See you on the other side.” Trippy, strange dreams, sleepless nights. Raging against a church that feels cold, difficult. More trippy dreams, loving remembrances, weepy conversations, staring at the ceiling, staring out the window, talking to the dog, rolling this way and that in bed at night. Comfort food, more comfort food, finding sensible shoes for the marathon of an Irish wake, an Irish funeral, finding clothes that fit. And are clean. 

Buying control top pantyhose so that the dress does fit, after eating all that comfort food.

Worrying about the widow, the widower and the grieving family members, who are falling ill from stress and lack of sleep. Getting the antibiotics, calling the doctor, getting the widow to the doctor. “Is she confused from a UTI? Stress?” Keeping the welcome mat open for family members to come, hide, talk, cry, smoke, drink. Keeping the peace. Assembling family photos of the deceased, making sure all families are represented there, figuring out the technical aspects of sharing those photos with guests, making sure the story of the deceased is told well, appropriately, thoroughly, enough. Bringing family home from out of town, home from Europe, leaving time for the relatives from far and wide to come in, to pay respects, to say good bye … The rambling, out-of-body conversations with well-meaning folks. Meeting people that the deceased not only knew, but impacted profoundly. “How is that I’ve never met this person whose life was changed?” Consoling the folks who are there to console you, knowing it’s ok, you’re cried out anyway. For now. Until that one person shows up and starts up the water works again. Worrying that well-meaning folks are tiring at the wake, that we’re taking too long to chat, to greet, to move through the hundreds of people standing for hours. 

Finding the prayers. Sharing The Funeral File for inspiration and ideas from funerals you’ve liked, or planned, before. Organizing the reservations for dinner. Where do we go after the wake? How many people will come? So many out-of-towners. Trying to keep the crowd manageable. Worrying about … everyone. Choosing the casket. Choosing the days, the church, the priests. Tell the nuns, the friends, the neighbors. Write the obit, find the photo for it. Choose an outfit for the burial. Hating that chore, but realizing how important it is. 

Tears, anger, relief, various and different kinds of grief, crying, exasperation, inspiration. Miracles. Cardinals. Meals shared, dropped off, stories of support, love, tenderness, notes, flowers, letters, chocolates. More love. More support. More miracles. More food.

Worrying about robbers and bad guys who prey on houses emptied for funerals and wakes and hoping there is a special place in Hell for them. Worrying about scammers and predators who prey on grieving spouses and families, tricking them into giving donations, gifts, money. Hoping for good weather, knowing that is completely out of your control. Buying the boots, just in case.

Funeral day. Walking the center aisle. Cue the music. The dark suits, the clutched hands and tear stained cheeks, familiar faces in the congregation, the casket, the shroud over top, unfolded with care. The cross placed gently on top, facing the altar. Painstakingly chosen music, readings, readers, eulogies. Blessings, incense. Praying for those giving the eulogies … they nail it. Good job. It all triggers recall of previous funerals, previous tears, Mom, Dad, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends. The circle getting smaller, tighter, death getting closer. Of course there will be more. Always more funerals. Huddling under the tent at the grave site. Exhaustion.

Finally, the reception, more food. Hell yes, a Bloody Mary. And another. There is laughter, let down, heels kicked off, feet put up on cushioned chairs. It is finished.

And then, a baby toddles by, blissfully unaware of it all. New life. Hope. It will be okay. You will be okay. To everything there is a season.

Rest in peace. We are okay.

Escaping the Storms

I shared an essay recently on the wonder and beauty of snow days … and was called out by a good friend. “I call foul! You cannot blog about snow if you are not in it!!”

Ok, that’s fair. I will come clean. 

It’s true. I launched that essay from the warmth of sunny Florida. There. I said it.

Getting off a plane from Cleveland and stepping out into the warmth and greenery of Florida is like Dorothy opening the door from black and white Kansas to colorful Oz. It’s like being in a different reality, a different planet. "How could I have been in a heavy winter coat this morning and a bathing suit this afternoon?” I thought as I stared blankly at the ocean.

My first trip to Florida was when I was in middle school and my dad had a business trip to Disney World. Rather than leave a twelve year old behind with four teenage brothers, they (wisely) chose to bring me with them. Big Jack was on the board of Geauga Lake Amusement Park in Greater Cleveland and he and his colleague, Dale and his wife, Bonnie were going to learn from Disney World how to make Geauga Lake better. 

So there we were, Marge, Jack, Dale, Bonnie … and twelve year old me at Disney World. While Jack admired the gorgeous landscaping and efficiencies of the park, Dale, Bonnie and I tackled Space Mountain together. (Marge would sooner stand on her head than get on a roller coaster). I only remember the screaming. Of course I had to scream on the roller coaster, but It felt so strange to do so with complete adult strangers. It felt awkward and creepy. (Not as creepy as “It’s a Small World After All,” but still.)

While Jack loved the sun, the flowers and the fresh fish in Florida, Marge didn’t like it much. “Florida is full of old people,” she would say, herself an old person at the time. “And all they ever talk about is the weather, what they just ate, and when they’re eating again.” I have to say, she was right about all of that.

While I do, indeed, enjoy a good warm weather escape, I have a complicated relationship with the beach, Florida, the sun. After all, I’m an Irish gal, so, you know … the sun and I don’t really get along. I love her warmth, I love the ocean … but the idea of laying oneself down in a back yard in Ohio in the middle of a humid summer day to bake in the sun? No, that never appealed to me. Not even in my youth, but that was mostly because if my father ever saw me outside in the yard, he’d give me a chore to do out there. “Mary! Weed that back acre while you’re out there! And go ahead and plant those begonias. And water them, too!” Anyway, just laying there? Sweating? Burning? Getting more … and more … and more freckles, and weak from dehydration. No thank you.

It is a full time job for an Irish gal on the beach. Constantly moving the umbrella, shifting the towels, reapplying factor 100 after swimming, sweating, breathing. I learned my lesson years ago about the importance of reapplying sunscreen. I burned the living snot out of my entire body because I was having such a gosh darned good time playing in the waves for hours. That night, I was up all night with chills and vomiting. It was ugly.

Never again. 

So consequently, for the rest of my adult life I have looked like either a toddler or a paranoid senior citizen on the beach, with my rash guard, SPF shirt, wide brimmed hat and all. Every year I am amazed at the power of sunscreen. Unfailingly, somewhere on my body there is a bright red, blazing sign of the patch of pasty white skin that I missed: a shoulder, the top of a foot, the small of the back. Sometimes it’s a fetching imprint of a hand or finger somewhere on my body that I didn’t quite rub in well enough. Secret scarlet Memento-like messages emblazoned all over my body. This year, the missed real estate was the back of my thighs, right under my butt cheeks. A special look, indeed.

I was never going to be that sexy girl on the beach. After all, when I lived in Spain for a while, my nickname was “La Blanca Muerta” (the dead white girl). When I first started going to Miami with my husband and in-laws, I was in awe of the beach babes there. Bronzed to a fair thee well, scantily clad. I was mesmerized by the cavalier manner in which they just … hung out on the beach. No frantic, fearful cowering from the sun. Only the occasional spritzing of themselves with water, sipping some diet soda or whatever, casually brushing their pert fannies free from sand. While I’m forever picking my wedgie, pulling my suit down to cover my ass, tugging my top to keep myself decent, and picking my own hair out of my mouth, these dames are … just sitting there. They turn their faces turned TOWARDS the sun, hair gently tickling their face and shoulders. I would stand there, staring, thinking, “It’s like we are completely different animals. Like a cat and a dog. Or a gazelle and a turtle.” Then a little old woman would come rushing up to me and say, “Honey! You’ve gotta be careful out here! This sun is very strong you know … I’m just sayin …”

“Yep, I know …”

A few years ago I was invited to a fancy schmancy event and decided I would try a spray tan. Timid, I went for the lightest tint they had available. “I just want my legs to not look like cadavers,” I told the technician as I stood before her naked, but for a paper doily covering my crotch area. Sadly, I ended up looking like I had a liver condition. “Oh the hell with it,” I thought to myself after the soiree. I am what I am.

I’m back in The Great White North now, the swaying palm trees and the roaring ocean just a distant memory. While it is still frigid on the North Coast, it is relaxing on a different level to be back in my element, to let my guard down. No sunscreen sprays, no hiding from the sun, no doing hourly skin checks for signs of burning.

Lord knows, I won’t see the sun in these parts until about June.  

Good thing I’ve got leftover sunscreen.

A quick walk out from under the beach umbrella. No worries! That’s SPF 100 on my legs.

Snow Days

The sweaty brows, the high pitched voices, the pacing back and forth, the pointing at colorful, dynamic, diagrams, maps and radars. Is this the scene of a war room? A police drama? A lunatic asylum?

This, my friends, is The Modern Weather Forecaster in a full lather, sporting The Weather Woody. He is so excited to be noticed, valued, appreciated. No longer just a sidekick, an extra cast member kicking around mindless banter, he is center stage, deadly serious and in command.  

This winter was looking like The Winter that Wasn’t, until … finally … 

“Folks, it’s crazy, I know. But it looks like we’re getting snow. In January. In Cleveland. Can you believe it? And it’s cold. In January. Stay tuned right here for more details.”

Goodness gracious.

I hate to sound officially like an Old Person, with the  “back in my days,” but … back in my day, heavy snow and cold weather was expected in winter. In January. In Cleveland. Hell, it was expected from November all the way until June. I recall plenty of Easters spent with a bulky winter coat donned over my frilly Easter dress, and white wicker hat, my open toed white sandals slipping around in the slush . 

I do love a good snow storm… as long as I’m not driving on the highway in one (not many things more nerve-racking than a white out). Lying in bed the other night, I listened for the dull scraping noise of the snow plows going down the street, finally hearing it in the wee hours of early morning. It’s always barely perceptible, muffled by the thick snowy air. Hearing it reminded me of being a kid, staying up late to watch the news for weather updates (before they were available 24/7), praying for my school to be announced as closed. “Not yet, honey. Better get to bed,” my mom would say as I groaned my way up the stairs.

If a Snow Day was called for overnight, there would be an uncharacteristic quiet in the house the next morning. My older brothers would be roused out of bed to hit the driveway and start hauling the white stuff out of the way. It wasn’t too much of a burden though, because there were dozens of other kids doing the same and soon thereafter, forts and snowballs were being made, strategies of attack planned, snowballs to my face by at least one of my brothers. We would finally come in for warmth, cheeks chapped, mittens soggy, bread bags sticking out of our snow boots (that made them easier to slide on, especially with hand-me-down boots that were a little too small). After sledding and building forts and shoveling, it was time to sit down and catch up on the basics: Dinah Shore, Merv Griffin, Phil Donahue (“You know, he’s from Lakewood, went to St. Ed’s), and The Price is Right with Monty Hall.

In later years, Snow Days became more social affairs. I graduated from the quiet, wimpy swale in our back yard to the titillating teen scene in my friend, Mary Beth’s back yard. The pitch of the sledding hill had to be near 90 degrees, full of a slalom course of trees, and a little creek at the bottom of the hill that completely freaked me out (“I could wipe out in that creek and drown!”). We spent hours careening down that terrifying hill; I can’t believe none of us died back there.

There was never a snow like the infamous Blizzard of 1978, which happened 41 years ago this week. I was 14 years old. It started as I was walking home from high school. Per usual, I was wearing my uniform skirt with bare legs because no one ever wore tights or, God help me, pants in high school. Half-way through the one mile walk home, I had to take refuge in a local Methodist church to use their phone to call home. “I cannot take one more step. I can’t feel my legs. I can’t even see to walk. Can someone come get me?” I pleaded. There was eye rolling and heavy sighing on the other end, as my next older brother got in the car to come retrieve me. 

Back at home, we all hunkered down and watched the storm rage. And rage it did. The snow just. Kept. Coming. And the temperatures kept dropping. And dropping. Wind chills were something like 50 below zero or more. One of my older brothers stood looking out the backyard window up at an enormous elm tree that was being whipped to and fro by the 100 mile an hour winds. “That tree is going to come down, ma,” he said as he turned away from the window. No sooner had he entered the kitchen than that tree thundered down, schlumping onto the backyard patio and sending an enormous limb through the ceiling where he had been standing. The patio furniture was instantly dwarfed by the enormity of that tree, making the chairs and table look like dollhouse furniture in comparison. I was fascinated by the instant transformation in perspective.

The hurricane force winds found the hole in the ceiling and sent arctic blasts through the house. We all retreated to the far end of the house as someone — probably that same brother — stapled up plastic sheathing to try to keep the winds out of the house.

Now THAT was a snowstorm, my friends. The snow piles and drifts that Blizzard of 1978 left were epic. Veritable mountain ranges lined the parking lots, driveways and streets all over town and stayed there until summer, I think.

On of my favorite Snow Day stories is when my naughty nephews were little, they spent their Snow Day outside in the snow, as would be expected. But they chose to sneak over to their next door neighbor’s house, who was a constant, complaining pain with no sense of humor. Those killjoy neighbors were out of town and the boys were inspired to build an anatomically correct snow man and snow woman. Of course, the snow balls were put in appropriate locations, as were the clumps of grass pulled up from under the snow. The grassy patches had an uncanny likeness to, um … hair, placed onto the snow body. In strategic places. My sister, their mom, could not stop laughing long enough to reprimand them. I just love that image of those X-Rated snow people, staring glassy eyed out at the quiet suburban street, naked as jay birds, like snowy pervs.

Our first snow storm out at the farm happened on the the odd weekend that my husband and I were there alone, with no kids, no guests. Just the two of us, the dog, the fireplace, and some music. My sister had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease earlier that week, which was, unbelievably, just 6 years ago, and I was in mourning. About a year earlier, we had buried my mom, who had suffered from Alzheimer’s for over ten years. That same year that Mom died, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As the snow fell hard outside and piled up, I stretched out in front of the raging fireplace, doing yoga, praying, weeping, pleading for a cure, for some answers, for a miracle. “I hate this disease,” I yelled at God, at the snowdrifts, the fireplace, at no one. 

The next day, the snow sparkled in the winter sun. I was emotionally exhausted from the previous day’s tears and worry. Walking out in the crisp, cold air, trudging through the snow, I thought about those snow days of my youth, of my silly nephews, of my suffering loved ones. “What will we do? What can I do? What will happen?” I ruminated as I trudged on, still weeping. And there it was in front of me … or rather behind me. My deep footsteps in the newly fallen snow. One in front of the other.

“One. Step. At. A. Time.” 

Barn Music

Music is the universal language. It excites, inspires, calms, and motivates. It soothes the savage beast. And evidently, horses love their tunes, too. The barns on our farm are filled with the sounds of music 24/7. Country music, specifically. The horses don’t know the words to the songs (that’s why they just hum along), but are soothed and inspired, nonetheless, by the rhythms and beats. Studies have actually been done on the effects of certain kinds of music on horses’ mood and behavior. Horses in equine science clinical trials were exposed to various genres of music, to different effects. Rap music made them antsy and anxious, resulting in erratic eating habits and pacing. Rock music made them uneasy as well. But, interestingly, both classical and country music had similar effects. Both genres calmed, soothed and encouraged eating, while at the same time, masking the sounds of tractors and other farm equipment outside the barns that may agitate the horses.

I love the idea of playing music to calm and encourage eating, resting, chilling, maturation and growth. If I could go back in time, I would use that philosophy while raising my three daughters years ago. While I didn’t have music playing 24/7 (but almost) I did try to be mindful of the messages my music choices were sending to them. The stakes were high to influence them to be smart, strong, capable, empathetic women.

Looking back now, if I were curating a list of music to be raised by, it might include the following:

Linda Ronstadt: I love, love, loved Linda when I was an adolescent. My sister always said Linda sang “music to kill yourself by,” but I’m a sucker for a good torch song, a tearjerker. More to the point, Linda was a beautiful young woman with a huge voice who could sing any old damn thing she wanted: operetta (“Pirates of Penzance”), big band swing (“What’s New,” “For Sentimental Reasons”), Mexican, (“Canciones de me Padre”), country, and of course, rock. Some of my favorites were: “Simple Dreams,” “Blue Bayou,” “It’s So Easy,” “Tracks of My Tears.” Linda would teach how to reach, stretch, explore, not be pigeon holed, and sing out loud.

Dolly Parton: Years ago, my husband and I simultaneously heard Dolly interviewed on NPR about her then new album, Little Sparrow. We both walked in the door that evening, breathlessly saying, “We’ve got to get that album.” And we did. We played it a lot on daytime family road trips. It was full of lessons for young women: beware the stranger, (“Little Sparrow,” “Mountain Angel,” “Down from Dover”) the joys of love found, (“I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” “I Get a Kick Out of You”). Dolly’s voice is so sincere, sweet, pained and also joyful and playful. Dolly would show that you live through the hard stuff, and sometimes make beauty out of it.

Dixie Chicks:  My country music-loving sister-in-law introduced me to one their music at a concert on their Wide Open Spaces tour. I was blown away and quickly introduced them to my girls. That album became our road trip soundtrack for many years. And the song  “I’ll Take Care of You” was my own personal love story to each of my daughters during the trials and tribulations of middle school. The song “Wide Open Spaces” taught my girls that the world was theirs. It’s an anthem to girl power, growing up and staking your claim on life. I loved it then, but as they actually do just that, grow up and move far away, it’s bitter sweet. I want to say to them now, “Don’t forget about me when I have chin hairs, need help clipping my toenails and fluffing that patch of hair on the back of my head!” Is there a song for that? Dixie Chicks would share the virtues of being a girl group: we are stronger together and have way more fun that way.

Taylor Swift: Yes, T Swizzle. I love her and I don’t care who knows it. She was and is a role model for young women making it on their own terms, turning personal pain into art and outing douchebag boyfriends. She’s a so-so singer, but a great lyricist and she taught my girls important lessons. Haters gonna hate (“Shake It Off”), you can live through bad choices (“I Knew You Were Trouble”), revel in romance (“Love Story”) and, my personal favorite, which my youngest daughter sang in her senior year choral concert and dedicated to me, “Best Day” (I cannot make it through that song without snot crying). Taylor Swift would show how to keep learning and evolving, keep trying, and stay classy.

 India Arie: The song “Video.” I love her for making that song. “I’m not the kind of girl from a video. My worth is not determined by the price of my clothes … My teeth, my eyes, my lips, my thighs. I’m loving what I see.” Amen. God doesn’t make mistakes. I played that song for my girls a lot when they were in middle school, subliminally telling them, “You are a beautiful creature and my treasured girl. Be nice to yourself.” India Arie would send messages about positive body image and celebrating oneself.

Bonnie Riatt: Another gal who can really wring out a good torch song: “Too Soon to Tell,” “Ain’t Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again.” But, she also sings joyously and rocks, as in “The Road is My Middle Name.” Bonnie would show how a woman can age gracefully, but also kick ass.

Joni Mitchell: Ah, Joni. My girls and I love her. She’s full of wisdom, naiveté, heartache, and beauty. Yes, I would play the entire Court & Spark album on repeat. Joni would model how to sing through the laughter and the tears of life. 

Barbara Streisand: Old school, Babs, not the screamy stuff from the late 80’s. Again, she was amazing with the torch songs, jazz standards and quirky forgotten melodies: “My Man,” “Why Did I Choose You,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Babs always rocked her non-movie star nose with pride (I’m sure its size help create the gorgeous resonance of her tone). And those nails … like butta. Babs would demonstrate how to not only sing out loud and proud but also, to be comfortable with one’s imperfections.  

My child rearing playlist wouldn’t all be mushy songs, though. It would include the entire Jagged Little Pill album by Alannis Morrisette because she’s a survivor. The entire M!sunduzstood album by Pink because she lives with self doubt, but still succeeds (granted, I did have to turn down the music at just the right second in order to bleep bad words in both those albums). I love a dance song that gets me moving, setting off endorphins, so I would include: “I Like Big Butts” by Sir Mixalot ; “Use Me Up,”by Bill Withers and “Superstition”by Stevie Wonder because strong bass funk is grounding for the soul; “Stronger” by Kanye West, because, “that that don’t kill me makes me stronger”; “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul because it’s a great beat and also is a good message of “Don’t waste my time. Shit or get off the pot”; “Faith” by George Michael, because it discourages sex without love. And recently, “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” by Justin Timberlake (or any of his dance music) for the unbridled joy of dancing like no one is watching. Oh, and “Twisting by the Pool” by the Dire Straits.

I could go on and on. I haven’t even touched on the importance of show tunes from, among others, Hamilton, West Side Story, The Drowsy Chaperone, The Lion King, Aladdin, and Legally Blonde…. Stage and movie musicals on my playlist would feed the imagination, transport listeners to anywhere in the world, and tell them it’s okay to be quirky, screwy and not too cool.

With all of Life’s outside noise these days – politics, news, disasters, politics, politics, politics – I am more and more inclined to follow the lead of our equine friends, turn off the talk radio and crank up the music, if only for while. Who doesn’t need a little help soothing the soul, encouraging relaxation, eating and digestion? I know I do.

Find these songs and more on Spotify, here: https://open.spotify.com/user/mcsullivan3/playlist/15rVOWd4J22wQ0czNvSFsg?si=2Gxh8T4VRFKSBXkjhOU42g

Ugh, Christmas Tree ...

Driving to and from our mid-Ohio farm, I pass a few Christmas tree farms. This is obviously their big time of year. While cutting down one’s own tree always sounded romantic and enchanted on paper, I never actually went to a tree farm to cut down a tree. I never got why that was supposed to be so fun. You bundle your kids up, trounce out into the cold, find a tree and … what? Chop it down yourself? What am I, Paul Bunyan? A Christmastime Lizzie Borden, whacking away at a tree, just to drag its lifeless body back to my home? The kids would be too cold, I would be too impatient. All this, while there is a perfectly fine garden center five minutes from my house that has done all that work for me? No, thank you. 

Our first year of marriage, I was a wide-eyed young bride with an environmentalist’s heart. I insisted on getting a live Christmas tree, complete with a root ball so that we could plant it in our new back yard after Christmas. Trouble is, live trees are expensive, so we ended up only being able to afford a fat little midget tree that, with its root ball, weighed about 500 pounds. Our elfin, 4-foot high tree looked out of place in our living room, like a landscaper left it there by mistake. But I loved her and decorated her with care. After Christmas, we discovered that the earth was too frozen to plant her in the back yard. So she sat on our back porch, neglected and dropping needles until spring, at which time she was deader than a doornail and sat, lifeless, in our back yard for another year until we pulled her to the curb. It was pathetic; she had lived a sad, short, misspent life.

In the ensuing years, we bought a real tree from the local garden center each year and I reveled in the bright scent of pine that filled my home. The swath of pine needles and dirt on my carpet, not so much. But it was Christmas tradition, dammit. What’s a little stain on the carpet? This tradition came to a screeching halt a few years ago when we brought The Devil Tree into our home.

My daughters, husband and I had made our annual trek to the local garden center to pick out our Christmas tree. It was a terribly cold night, so we were in a hurry. “That one looks good,” my husband said. “Let’s wrap it up and bring it home.” Back home, unpacking the tree and dragging it inside, we discovered that the tree’s trunk was too fat to fit into our tree stand. So, we borrowed a saw, carved around the trunk and shoved it into the stand. That’s when we found that the tree was about one foot too tall for the room (this is not the first time this has happened in our Christmas tree history). So, we whacked off the top of the tree and shoved it into its usual place in the front window. The donning of the lights, garland, and ornaments followed until she was all dressed up for the holidays.

Later that night, as we sat down to dinner, we heard an odd schlumping sound from the living room. The tree had fallen down (not the first time this has happened). No worries … just adjust the tilt of the tree, reapply the ornaments, and off you go, little Tannenbaum.

The next morning, I came down the stairs to a spray of ornaments in the front hallway and the tree, once again, prostrate on the floor. “Oh, for Christmas sake,” I muttered to myself, wrestling the tree back into position. 

That night at dinner, there was the same schlumping sound, along with a tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of ornaments rolling down the hallway. As we wrested the tree back into place, I took a step back. “This tree has scoliosis,” I said. One look at its trunk revealed a dramatic S curve mid way that, in a human, would surely require surgery.

This ridiculous cycle repeated itself for the next few days. We’d wake each morning to what looked like evidence of a real yuletide rager: tree water spilled, pine needles and ornaments strewn everywhere, broken glass. It was a mess. Meanwhile, my husband, The Big Elf, who is quite an allergic fellow, started sneezing and wheezing more and more each day. One day, about ten days after bringing The Devil Tree into our home, The Big Elf, gasping for air, choked out, “I think I’m allergic to the Christmas tree.” “Nah,” I replied. “You always get sick at Christmastime. It’s the stress.”

 As the next few days went by, the tree continued its cycle of falling, and The Big Elf became more and more ill. It was clear. Something was rotten in Toyland. I stripped the tree of its ornaments (those that were left unbroken), left the lights on it and dragged The Devil Tree into the back yard, plugging him into the outlet outside our family room window. To keep him from falling over into the snow, I had to lean him against the window, giving him the look of a drunken relative put in an outdoor “time out,” peering in at the festivities through the window. Like the “little match girl.” Like a peeping Tom. The tree look embarrassed and forlorn, as if to say, “Sorry about all the falling, guys. And the wheezing. Really. Can I come back in now?”

 Off I went, three days before Christmas, to purchase a fine, pre-lit, fake Christmas tree. I brought her home, plugged her in, dressed her up with the ornaments that were strewn about the room and hung something called “Scentsicles” on her boughs to provide that “real pine scent.” And it was fine. Really, she was a beauty.

It turns out, in retrospect, for the first 25 years of our marriage, my husband was not sick from the stress of the holidays (not solely, anyway). He was sick from the blasted Christmas trees. Each year, I was bringing poison into our home and the poor guy suffered each year. I think the good Lord sent us The Devil Tree that year as a blatant sign: GET A FAKE TREE, YOU IDIOTS. I look back on that tree and feel bad for it. I think the tree was maybe not tumbling down as much as trying to run away all those times. It didn’t want to be, you know, the fall guy.

This Christmas season has been a little busier than most, so I was thankful that all I had to do was drag our fake Christmas tree out of storage and plug it in. As of Christmas Eve, it is still not decorated (there’s still time!). But it has not fallen over and looks swell in our front window. It stands straight and true, just like a Nutcracker soldier. And, my husband can breath, which is also nice. 

Pumpkins, Costumes, and Demons

It’s Halloween season! Festivals, hayrides and autumn-themed outings abound out in the country and around town. After a brief attempt to grow pumpkins in our farm garden, I am back to buying them from people who know what they’re doing. Pumpkins need a lot of room to ramble, it turns out. And somehow, the pumpkins we grew a few years ago looked malformed and sad. I’m done trying to grow pumpkins.

I never thought I would say it, but I’m done carving pumpkins, too. I used to love it, getting my hands all slippery sticky with pumpkin guts and devising just the right smirk or scowl for my pumpkin’s personality. But, with no little people in the house, I’m just not feeling it any more. I am officially that older person with ceramic pumpkins on her front porch. Real candles, though. I mean, come on. There has to be some authenticity left.

When I was little and would go trick-or-treating, people like me would make me sad. “Aww,” I would say to myself, all dressed up as Harpo Marx. “Those pitiful people don’t have the Halloween spirit. I hope they’re not passing out pennies or toothbrushes instead of candy.” (For the record, I’m not that lame.)

I do love Halloween, though. And my mother loved Halloween. When I was little, Marge let me have a Halloween party for several years in a row. Every year a dozen or so girls would come all decked out in their best costumes for a mini rager. We would have a drawing contest, which Patty Connelly always won, and a costume contest, which Patty Connelly also always won (that overachieving little cuss). We would have games, bob for apples, and have a gross-out blindfolded feeling contest in which pumpkin innards were human intestines and peeled grapes were eyeballs. Of course, we would also have a séance in which a circle of us were amazed that, using only our fingertips, we were able to elevate a tiny wisp of a girl up above our heads. (Supernatural powers!) It was all good, wholesome fun with just a little bit of gross and spooky.

I remember the year the much-ballyhooed Patty Connelly came dressed as a Tareyton smoker. In the 60’s, this cigarette brand advertised “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.” The actors in that campaign depicted people from all walks of life that had painted-on black eyes. Picture a darling little eight-year-old girl in blond pigtails with a black eye and cigarettes rolled up in her sleeve. (Ahhh, the years before the PC culture.) It was pretty clever.

My Halloween parties came to an abrupt end my freshman year in high school when Patty Mullen and her boyfriend came dressed as a priest and a pregnant nun. My ultra religious, super Catholic dad did not find that funny. But, at least it wasn’t gross and bloody.

Somewhere along the line, Halloween has become straight up demonic. What the hell happened? In my mind, it is a holiday to gently spook each other, not terrorize the snot out of children (and me). I just don’t understand the concept of these gruesome haunted houses. Seven Floors of Hell? No thank you. Haunted Forest? I’ll pass. Bloody chain saws? Why? Haunted Maze? I don’t need a maze to be haunted as well as confounding. And don’t even get me started on slasher films. First of all, the victims are always dim-minded, perky breasted, scantily clad adolescent women making bad choices that end up dead. Sorry, that’s not entertainment, that’s misogyny. Secondly, why so gruesome? Can’t they just suggest that someone is getting whacked without spraying the screen with her blood? Take a lesson from Alfred Hitchcock (a misogynist in his own right, but, hey, at least he wasn’t violent). Have a scream with a close up on the eyeball, fade to black. Use your imagination a little.

There is a house around the corner from our real home in the suburbs that is artfully decorated every Halloween, complete with dry ice, music, and shadowy lighting. It’s spooky with witches and skeletons and such, without being gruesome. All the kids in the neighborhood work up the courage to go there and come away thrilled, but not terrorized. I’m fine with that. But I passed a different house the other day that was completely covered with a façade to make it look like a bloody butchery. Fake blood oozed out the windows, chainsaws and body parts were hanging from the trees. I mean, how do you help your kids with homework, cook dinner and live a normal life with a fake, bloody corpse swinging from the tree outside your window? I just don’t get it.

And why is Halloween so sexualized? To quote the movie, Mean Girls, “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” True for adult and even teenage girls. But, parents, have you tried to find a costume for your middle school daughter lately? The trickle down of sexy Halloween costumes is drowning our little girls. When my one of my daughters was in middle school she wanted to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Lacking any sewing skills myself, we set off for the Halloween stores in search of a costume. Well, there were plenty of options if I wanted her to look like a little stripper: Vampy Vampire, Nasty Witch, and Slutty Angel, for heaven’s sake. And, of course, Trampy Dorothy with a deep cut top and a veritable doily as a skirt. We bought the blasted costume and I used my meager sewing skills to add about five inches of fabric to the hem and another swath to close up the gap where a blouse should have been. It was maddening, frustrating and sad. “Why can’t my eleven year girl old just dress up, bob for apples, have a séance with friends and not look like a hooker?” I thought.

The world can already be a violent, scary place. Our culture hyper sexualizes everything, including violence. Why do we need to celebrate that?

Frankly, I’d rather switch than fight … or fright, for that matter.

YES!

NO!

Spiders, Man!

My husband, Mr. Outdoors, loves spiders. All throughout our marriage and raising our kids he forbade any of us from killing house spiders. “They’re good luck,” he’d say. “They kill bugs. Leave them be.” And for the most part, we have complied. I don’t really mind spiders. Those that make webs are really impressive. Spider webs are beautiful, fascinating works of art, really. The way they appear out of nowhere in the morning, the dew glistening on them in the sunlight is downright magical.

In our Home home, we live very close to Lake Erie where there are large lake spiders. But, again, they hang out on webs and are very busy catching mosquitos and midges. They are needed and appreciated.

The spiders that really creep me out are those that roam around, the “hunters.” 

A few weeks ago, on a warm autumn day, my daughter Fauna and I got to the farm and excitedly got our swimsuits on for a dip in the pool. We retracted the pool cover and prepared to jump in. But wait … what was that around the edges of the pool? “Holy crap, they’re spiders!” Fauna screamed. “Ewwwww!”  

There, lining the sides of the pool and – I am not lying here – walking ON TOP OF the water and SWIMMING in the water, were about a dozen huge, muzzy black spiders. I immediately called The Sherriff for help. He knows everything about everything and is afraid of nothing. Or so I thought. “Yeah,” he replied to my pleas for help. “I don’t do spiders. They creep me out.” (What?!) “I’ll send someone over to help.” It made me think of that scene from Indiana Jones when Harrison Ford says, “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” We all, it seems, have our week spots.

As Fauna and I cowered in the corner, The Sherriff’s strapping young son came over and patiently scooped up the spiders and squished them with his big cowboy boots. “Yeah, we get these time of year,” he explained. “They come up from the fields looking for the warmth of the pool at night.” That image grossed me out even more. I pictured legions of spiders marching towards our house, invading at night while we naively slept inside. “Thanks for the sleepless nights ahead,” I scoffed. 

Soon, all the arachnids were gone, and Fauna and I jumped in and enjoyed our swim.  The next morning, some spiders were back, so I went and put on my big girl underpants, swallowed hard and channeled The Junior Sherriff, scooping and squashing those bastards like it was my job. I was quite proud of myself. “I mean, I’m a sometimey farm girl,” I told myself. “I got this.”

The following week, I came to the farm alone on another hot, Indian Summer day. “I can’t wait to jump in that pool,” I said to the dog as we drove in. I didn’t give the spiders from the previous week a second thought. First I had to clear off the pool deck, so I grabbed the leaf blower and started cleaning leaves and debris off the pool cover and around the patio. “Oh darn, it looks like we left the pool rafts out from last week,” I said, still chatting with the dog. I turned the leaf blower towards the stack of rafts and pool noodles in the corner. What happened next was like a scene from a horror movie. 

The spiders were back. And they had multiplied … big time. Dozens and dozens of black, muzzy, humongous spiders skittered all. Over. The pool deck. It was like special effects from Stephen King movie, like they were CGI animation. They seemed to just. Keep. Coming. Everywhere. An otherworldly scream came out of my mouth that I don’t remember ever hearing before. The dog took off, clearly creeped out by the spiders, too. Or my screaming. Or both.

“Oh God! Oh Lord! Arghhhhh! Eeeeep!” I tried to squash some of them, but they outnumbered me so much, I just couldn’t keep up. “Go away! Stop! Ewwwwww!” I was totally losing it, becoming more and more unglued by the second.

Pretty soon Mr. Outdoors showed up. He’d been walking the property and heard my screams in spite of his ear buds. “What the hell is going on?” he yelled as he approached, eyeing the dog that was still cowering around the corner of the house. “There are spiders EVERYWHERE. Do something!” I screamed tearfully. “And don’t even start with that ‘they’re good luck’ bullshit.”

I retreated to the water. As I tread water and monitored as Mr. Outdoors dutifully killed the intruding army of arachnids, I realized that Mr. Outdoors and I have a history with big ass spiders. He and I visited Belize years ago and came across an enormous spider web that had been built outside our room while we were out for dinner. As I gazed up at it in shock and awe, he called my attention to another impressive sight. “You think that’s big, check this out,” he chuckled. There, just next to my foot was an agitated tarantula the size of my hand that, when my husband leaned down to pet it (yes, PET IT), reared back on its hind legs and hissed at him. Hissed. At him. Like an angry cat. Another time, way back on our honeymoon, a crazy Australian tour guide pointed out a very, very large spider on its web in the rain forest. “This spidah is so beeg, it eats birds,” he explained. “Wow, Igor (yes, that was his actual name), what’s the name of that spider?” I asked. “Well, mate, that’d be a bird eatin’ spidah.” I chuckled, thinking, “Well, of course that’s not its real name, but that’s pretty funny, mate.” Turns out, old Igor wasn’t bullshitting. That was the spider’s actual name. A bird-eating spider.

Which brings me back to our farm spiders. After a little research, I discovered that our pool spiders are field wolf spiders. They do, indeed, travel in from the fields at the end of the summer to warm themselves in in the pool water at night. And God bless them, it is a nice pool with warm, soothing water. So, perhaps I should get a sense of humor about them. Instead of annihilating them on sight, next time someone sees a field wolf spider in our pool and says, “What is that spider doing in your pool?!” I will re-use that old joke about a fly in the soup, take a deep breath and blithely reply, “Why, he’s doing the backstroke, silly.”

But still … ewe. 

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water …

Got no problem with web spiders.

The Long and Winding Road

This summer, Farmer Brown and I had the mile long gravel road on our farm blacktopped. After looking at the costs involved in repeatedly replacing and spreading the gravel several times a year, coupled with the enormous amount of The Sheriff’s time and energy to do so, it was decided that blacktopping the road was a worthwhile investment.

I have to admit, it’s a beauty. The new road weaves its way from the front gate of the farm, past two barns, two homes (those of The Sheriff and The Mayor), a garage and several fields of bucolic pastureland full of happy, contented horses.  Walking on our gleaming, new, blacktop road I think of the distinctly American penchant for road trips, taking off in a car, heading west or south or wherever to clear one’s mind, roll down the windows, crank up the tunes and find oneself. It’s the stuff car commercials, movies, and novels are made of. 

While I, too, have romantic notions of road tripping, I have a bad history of leaving a little too much of myself behind on trips. All throughout my youth I would get motion sickness and end up puking on car trips. I puked on the way to and from West Virginia every summer. I puked on the way home from Cedar Point every summer (thank you, Tilt-a-Whirl, or rather, Tilt-a-Hurl). I puked in the back of the tour bus on Big Sur in California and my two older brothers had to clean it up (sorry, boys … and everyone at the back of that bus). I puked in my mother’s purse on a bus during a family trip to Ireland (giving new meaning to “the wearing of the green”). Even now, when I am traveling by bus or car, I insist on sitting up front, popping Dramamine, so that I can keep an eye on the horizon.

My dad used to co-own a motorhome when I was little and he would take my brothers on excellent adventures out west to see the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and The Grand Canyon. I was so envious of their great stories of camping, getting lost, and seeing amazing sights. Funny, I never got invited. I guess between my hurling and my bedwetting, I wasn’t a desirable travel companion. I would love to have seen my father, a sensible man who lived in wing tip shoes, “roughing it” with a bunch of knucklehead young men in close quarters, and squeezing his 6’4” frame into that motorhome’s Lilliputian sized bathroom. 

When I was a stay-at-home mom years ago, I would occasionally get an irrational urge to just hit the road. Those were challenging years: three little girls who had various issues (eating disorders, learning disabilities, dietary allergies, anxiety, power struggles, math homework, mean girl drama), an entrepreneur husband with crazy long work hours, and a mother slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Out running errands, alone on I-90, with nothing but road in front of me … I would fantasize about blowing past my exit and heading west to California to … I don’t know. Reinvent myself? Become a soap opera actress? Take up surfing? Get some sleep? “See ya, suckas!” I would say in my imagination, flipping my finger through the car’s moon roof.

Of course, that never happened. Thank God. The road of life eventually got smoother, for a while. Mom’s suffering finally ended, the kids grew up and conquered their challenges, and I got some sleep … for a while.

Last summer I took a road trip with my daughters to bring our youngest back to school in Maine. It’s a fourteen-hour drive, so we decided to break it up into two days. The first day we stopped at a kooky little place in New York State called Lilydale. It is kind of a mystic version of Chautauqua (a cultural retreat also in New York State). We had heard that every year since 1879, droves of people descend upon this little village that reportedly is in a vortex of some kind, to commune with spirits, contact dead relatives, have revelations. So we were all in. Turns out, after spending a fortune on parking and lunch, we didn’t get much. We went to a group “reading” in the woods where a panel of mystics read the crowd for free … and we got what we paid for … a whole lot of vague generalities. 

 “I’m getting something for an Ann. Is there an Ann in the crowd?” Silence. “No … not Ann … Mary. Is there a Mary here?” (Well, hell, of course there’s a Mary or an Ann in the crowd full of women aged 50+ . Doesn’t take a fortuneteller to figure that out.) My favorite “reading” was when one of the mystics asked if a woman had any connection to Bob Seger. When she shook her head, “no,” the mystic pressed on. “Did your person ride a motor cycle?” No. “Is his name Bob? Robert?” No. “Did he wear a leather jacket?” No. “Are you sure his name isn’t Bob?” No. “Well, I’m still getting Bob Seger,” she insisted as she moved on, as if this poor woman was either lying or slow. She must have the Night Moves CD playing on repeat in her car or something.

The rest of that trip was great, though. We had two cars, so I took turns with different combinations of daughters, singing songs from Hamilton, The Drowsy Chaperone, Feist, Billy Joel, listening to podcasts, talking about plans for the future, and telling stories, recounting our ridiculous Lilydale visit. Is there anything better than being a little punchy from a road trip and laughing at something stupid until you cry? Especially with my now adult daughters. It was worth the sore back and frozen hips I got by the end of fourteen hours in the car to have extended time with my girls who are now scattered to the wind, traveling their own roads, finding their own adventures.

These days, I keep thinking of that great Pretenders song, Middle of the Road. Chrissie Hynde says, “I’m standing in the middle of life, with my plans behind me.” I feel you, Chrissie. Except she wrote that song when she was 33 (“I'm not the cat I used to be. I got a kid, I'm thirty-three.”) and I’m in my 50’s. Even still, the gift of being in my 50’s is that, increasingly, I could give a flying fart what people think of me. With Alzheimer’s Disease back in my life ravaging my mother-in-law and sister, I’m all about finding joy, hitting the road, or, my new mantra, “Seize the day, mothafucka!” I have to fight back an uncharacteristically manic drive to DO IT ALL NOW, though, as if I’m racing against time. I do love travel and going on actual road trips, but I also know that part of “seizing the day” is simply relishing walking on a newly paved blacktop road through a gorgeous stand of tall trees, listening to the wind through the leaves, and counting the blessings that got me to the middle of this road. Because, life is about the journey, right?

Walking in the Woods

My husband, The Woodsman, has dragged me on walks in the woods a few times since we acquired this farm property. The first was a few years ago. We went trudging through the woods throughout our property, looking for … I’m not quite sure what. At one point we were visited by a pileated woodpecker, which was dramatic. These birds look straight up tropical and otherworldly with their bright red and blue coloring. They are about the size of an adult forearm and have that distinct cackle, reminiscent of the old Woody Woodpecker cartoons. So, that was cool.

On we trudged that day, this time in the woods behind our house. There, deep in the woods, we came across an ancient garbage dump where we unearthed some random tin boxes and old glass bottles that looked like a traveling salesman of yore had sold someone some elixirs or potions. Who were those people that lived here? What were their maladies? Indigestion? Snoring? Gas? Lactose intolerance? Who knows … those bottles are now vases for my kitchen windowsill and I think of their original owners whenever I fill them with wildflowers.

Another walk in the woods was in the early springtime. The Woodsman was set on finding morel mushrooms. I know exactly nothing about foraging and frankly, the whole thing scares me. I’m terrified of finding what I think are benign mushrooms only to find myself tripping for days or, you know, dead. So, we wisely enlisted the help of our farm neighbor, Johnny Cash, to keep us from danger. (Johnny knows everything about darned near everything about the great outdoors). We pecked and poked our way through the woods that spring day. I was getting more and more exasperated and bored until I noticed the beauty of the woods in springtime. Ferns and mosses pushed optimistically through the warming earth and the ground was coming alive with vernal energy. Johnny instructed us to keep an eye out for morels at the base of trees. “They look like a dog’s pecker,” he shouted through the stillness of the trees. “Oh, God,” I muttered to myself. “What the hell am I doing? I don’t want to find these infernal mushrooms now.” 

“I think what we need is a good rain and then they’ll poke up,” he advised. Unfortunate wording.

We never did find morels that day, but a few days later, after a good soaking rain, Johnny reported that the morels did, you know, poke up out of the ground. He sent us a photo of some. They are oddly beautiful … if you push that dog wiener image out of your mind.

A morel mushroom poking through the forest floor

Ginseng plant, berries and all.

Recently, The Woodsman was hell-bent on going on a ginseng hunt. It seems ginseng season in Ohio starts on September 1st and goes until December 1st. I was vaguely aware that ginseng has some health benefits. A quick Google search revealed that it is believed to boost energy, lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels, reduce stress, promote relaxation, treat diabetes, and manage sexual dysfunction in men. And, it’s quite valuable, too. A pound of dried ginseng goes for about $500 to $600. “Ok, you’ve got my attention,” I thought. “Let’s find some ginseng.”

So, off we went, The Woodsman, our daughter, Fauna, home for a break from graduate school and me. “We’re looking for a low plant with five leaves that has a little cluster of red berries in the center,” The Woodsman instructed. Trouble is, that describes a lot of plants on the forest floor, except for those telltale berries. We trounced into the woods, stopping every now and then to survey the ground, arms akimbo, when all of the sudden, about five minutes into our hunt, Fauna turns around and says, “Oh, isn’t this one right here?” There it was, the elusive ginseng plant, exactly matching its description. “Well, this is going to be easier than I thought!” I exclaimed. 

We promptly dug around the perimeter of the plant and gently unearthed it, per our googled instructions, plucking and replanting the red berries into the soil. “Onward!” I shouted. “Let’s find that ginseng. Mama needs a new pair of shoes!”

We trudged on for about an hour, poking and searching … finding nothing. We relocated to another section of the woods and, just like she was born to do this, Fauna found another patch. “She’s the ginseng genius! That grad school is already paying for itself!” I shouted as we gently dug those roots up, too. But by then, the oppressive heat of the day started to get to us, and the intermittent rewards were just not enough to keep us going. “It’s hotter than the Devil’s balls,” I said, quoting our esteemed farm worker and aspiring poet, Wonder Woman. (What is it about the woods that evokes off-color metaphors?)

All in all, we netted four meager ginseng roots. I think that will pay for maybe one cheap shoe for mama. But it was instructive and, when Fauna found the prizes, thrilling for a short while. 

As I write, The Woodsman is receiving two shiny new tree stands to install in the woods for the upcoming deer hunting season. Unlike the pedestrian tree stands he has now, which look like old-fashioned ski lifts, these babies look like tiny houses in the air, featuring a roof, a door, and some windows. I fear The Woodsman may take up permanent residence in one. But, given his tendency for snoring, it might not be all bad. He, his ginseng and morel mushrooms might be very happy together out there.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have morels and ginseng to seek

And miles to trudge in the stifling heat

For other random stuff to eat

(With apologies to Robert Frost)

Ginseng root, found!

Zen and the Art of Mowing

As anyone who has driven on an interstate highway knows, Ohio has a lot of corn. While some find it monotonous, I have fallen in love with the sight of vast fields of corn, waves of corn, undulating in the hot summer breeze in a beautiful, bucolic ballet. Driving down country roads, I am always reminded of the line “amber waves of grain” from the song, America the Beautiful. Except, these are “emerald waves of corn.” Yes, those fields of corn can get a little old on a long drive to anywhere in the Midwest. But there’s beauty there.

Little known fact: corn is a relative of grass. Looking out from the deck of our farmhouse, we see a vast field of corn and also its cousin, grass. A lot of grass. The horses grazing on it are in heaven this time of year, enjoying its sweet, juicy nutrients. The Sherriff, The Mayor and now Wonder Woman are meticulous keepers of the grass. If they were in the suburbs, they’d be one of those families who win the Lawn Olympics on their cul de sac. But out here, they’re not out to impress anyone. They just have impeccable standards, a beautiful aesthetic. And they love to cut grass.

Farm work is unending; every day there are dozens of things to get done before noon, not the least of which is keeping many animals alive each day. One of The Sherriff’s favorite escapes is hopping on a riding mower and setting out to cut the acres and acres of grass. He straps on the goggles and ear protectors with built-in speakers for music, fires up the machine and off he goes … steadily riding up and over the hills, occasionally doing a nifty twirl around a tree or a rock. It is a sight to behold. The Sherriff is a Zen Master, painstakingly going over the grass as if it is a sand Zen garden, creating neat, green stripes on the hillsides. It must be very satisfying. Unlike waiting over ten months for a horse to foal, this offers immediate gratification. When he’s finished, the hills stand as a testament to a job well done.

I see all those acres of grass and remember my dad surveying his acre of suburban paradise. I can still smell that freshly cut grass and hear the quiet hiss and click, click, click of the sprinkler. He loved pushing his power mower back and forth for much the same reasons, I imagine: an escape from kids, clients, everything. It was like meditation for him, a prayer. He never got a riding mower, though salespeople over the years tried to convince him. He liked the exercise that pushing a mower gave him. As he grew older, he would sit on his green string chaise lounge and admire his sons and then grandsons pushing his mower for him. He had passed the grass-cutting baton to them, but reluctantly. Nothing pleased him more than cutting the grass, then reclining to admire his work as he sipped hot tea on a sweltering summer afternoon and watched the sprinkler baptize his lawn. 

I never got to cut the grass. As I’ve written before, I was in charge of weeding the grass … and the flowerbeds … and anything else with roots. When my husband, Farmer Brown and I got married and bought our first house, it came with a lawnmower. Farmer Brown handled the lawn mowing for a hot second, but quickly grew tired of it. Watching the jungle grow in front of my house, I took the reins one day. “How hard could this be?” I asked myself, lathering up with sunscreen. 

Back and forth I went on our little plot of suburban land. Easy enough. But when I finished, I looked back and noticed there were little Mohawk tufts of grass between my newly cut rows. “What the?” It seems I didn’t line up the lawnmower correctly in my back and forth march across the yard. So I started to re-cut the grass, slicing down the Mohawk tufts. But now the grass was uneven, so I would dart from spot to spot, slicing down any irregular parts. Pretty soon, I found myself in the middle of the front yard, moving the lawnmower back and forth outward like it was a vacuum. I formed a weird kind of sunflower pattern on the lawn. “This is harder than I thought,” I muttered to myself, sweat dripping from my chins. “How did I lose control like this?”

Just then, a grandmother and her baby grandchild in a stroller walked down from the corner and stopped in front of my house. “We’ve been watching you from down the street and just had to come closer. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Please go on.”

“Glad to amuse you, ma’am!” I hollered over the lawnmower’s buzz. What an exasperating exercise. That’s the last time I mowed a lawn.

The grass around that house was often too long. Farmer Brown would occasionally try to tackle it in the little free time he had as a young entrepreneur. More often than not, he would recruit a willing teenager in the neighborhood to do it for us.

When we bought our forever house several years later, it had twice the size yard. When packing up to move, Farmer Brown gave the mower away. “I’m done with that crap,” he said. “I’m paying someone else to do it.”

Now we have farm property with acres and acres of grassy land. And, we have The Mother of All Riding Mowers. The Sherriff won’t allow Farmer Brown to ride it yet, though. With all those hills and fancy swivel gears on the machine, it’s a bit more complicated than pushing a mower back and forth. And for anyone who doesn’t know what he’s doing (say, us) it could be downright dangerous. Large farm equipment, sexy as it is, is not to be trifled with.

“I’m going to ride that thing someday,” he vows, gazing longingly at the Zen Master riding up and down the hillsides. I chuckle to myself every time he says it, amused by the irony. Funny how life works. I guess he was just waiting for the right kind of grass and the right kind of mower. Timing is everything.

You bet your grass there's a lot of mowing down on the farm.

Ode to the Firefly

One of the great pleasures of summer comes in a tiny, fiery package. Behold, the firefly. 

At the end of a long, hot, sticky day down on the farm recently, Farmer Brown and I kicked back with a glass of wine and sat down to The Night Show outside. At first, it was hard to tell what we were looking at. There, dotting the thick, inky air on the hillside below us were dozens, at first, then slowly, hundreds, then thousands of fireflies punctuating the darkness.

Sparkling, like shiny confetti…. reflections of the stars above…. stars themselves on Earth. It was as if I had just hit my head really hard, like in the cartoons. 

It reminded me of a time, some twenty-five years ago, when my husband and I were on a sailing trip in the Caribbean with his college buddy and had dropped anchor in a calm bay for the night. All of the sudden, tiny, glowing beings appeared in the water around us: glow worms emitting bioluminescence.  It is a natural phenomenon in which microscopic worms literally glow in the water and it took my breath away. These farm fireflies were like that: profuse and magical.

From our farm deck, the firefly display was impressive enough, but riding the four-wheeler down to the bottom of the hill, we were immersed in them, swimming in them, the inky black darkness around us forming a perfect canvas for their light show.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude. What an amazing, simple pleasure. As I reveled in their nighttime glow, I wrote a mental thank you note.

Thank you, fireflies, for being an added bonus of summertime. Thank you for giving children one more game – catching fireflies – at the end of long summer evenings when moms and dads are exhausted and need to sit and sip something cold and look on, remembering their own firefly hunts. Thank you for letting me catch you, put you in a jar and stare at you for hours, fogging up the glass with my grubby breath and boogery nose.  Sorry about squishing you, stepping on you and smearing your iridescence to make a glowing, gorgeous streak on the sidewalk as a kid. I did that only a few times because I couldn’t live with the guilt  of destroying something so beautiful and harmless.

Thank you for being one of the coolest insects ever. To my knowledge, you don’t bite, you delight. Why are you here? Are you just a whimsical gift from God? Did He think, “You know what? Fireflies … why not?” You don’t sting, you don’t buzz. Do you even pollinate?

Thank you for being the much cooler cousin to the beetle and, by the way, thank you for not eating my garden. Picking lettuce in our farm garden the other day, I discovered where you sleep during the day: under the wet lettuce leaves. But you didn’t eat the lettuce. What do you eat? Do you simply survive on the joy of children? Do you only need handclaps and laughter as your food, like Tinkerbelle?

Thank you for being so understated. You’re not much to look at by day, wearing your simple black suit with a smart orange strip down the middle. Very low key. Your big reveal comes when the sun goes down. 

I’ve read that your butt lights are all about attracting mates. That’s downright charming, romantic. Does a glass of rosé come with that candlelight? If I was an insect, I would be so envious that I hadn’t evolved to have luminescence. Well done, you. I hear that you speed up or slow down your blinking pattern: steady glow, flashing blinking, depending on whom you are seducing. Sexy stuff, Firefly. And with a life span of two months, you have no time to waste. Carpe candeo – seize the glow! I think that is my new motto. At least for summertime.

Thank you for choosing Ohio and the Midwest as one of the relatively few places in the country you hang out. You love humidity and we’ve got plenty of that in the summer. The coasts have the oceans, the west has the mountains, we have you. Thank you for summering on our farm. We are so glad to have you.

I guess I took you for granted in my youth, Firefly. You were always there in my dad’s backyard, dotting the thick air back by the pine trees and the railroad tracks. I would catch you, cup you gently in my chubby fist and slowly open my hand up, like a clamshell. There you would be, burning brightly inside my hand cave. Then, up you would rise, silently, effortlessly, lighting on my fingertip as if to check me out as I inspected you. And then, you were off, beaming up into the night sky. I would crane my head back and watch you rise as the enormous oak and elm tree branches would frame you and your shiny friends. 

Bye bye, Firefly! Thanks for the visit! Thanks for the memories! Carpe candeo!

Photo by Mindstyle/iStock / Getty Images

For other amazing photos of fireflies/lightening bugs, check out this website! http://www.fireflyexperience.org/photos/

Game Rooms

“I’m setting up the basement of the farmhouse as a game room,” I said. “Great idea!” my husband replied. “That’s going to be so cool.”

Hmm. I never thought of him as being all that enthusiastic about board games. But I proceeded to bring all the games down to the basement: Scrabble, Bananagrams, Boggle, Uno, Chutes and Ladders (God help me), playing cards and even a ping-pong table. “It will be nice to have rainy day group activities for folks who come down to visit,” I thought.  

Shortly after that, my family and I traveled to the Montreal Jazz Festival in Canada. My husband and I had attended the festival a few times before and wanted to share it with our girls. It is a nonstop musical celebration with incredible musicians from all over the world. And Montreal is an amazing city; it feels like you’re in Europe, without the jet lag. We were all very excited to explore the city when my husband went rogue, as is his wont. “I’ve booked a date with Musky Mike. I’m going musky fishing,” he declared. “Anyone want to join me?”

Silence. We had come all this way to one of the great cities of North America, full of beautiful architecture, great food and of course, world renown music at the jazz festival … No, no one was interested in hanging out with Musky Mike on a cold river when we could be drinking café au lait or wine in the city. Duh.

The girls and I dawdled around Montreal, touring churches, galleries, and local restaurants. When we met up with The Musky Hunter later that day, he was ebullient. “You should see this fish! We were in about 3 feet of water and Musky Mike told me just what to do. It took me about a half hour to get him in, but I landed a huge musky.” And he did. The fish weighed about 35 pounds and stretched about 52 inches. The Musky Hunter could not stop looking at the photo of his epic catch, showing it to friends and strangers alike. This went on literally for years. Still does, actually. Sometimes, even today, I will find him gazing lovingly at the image on his phone.

“I’m going to have a replica made and hang it in the game room at the farm,” he gushed. 

“Well … we’ll see,” I cautioned. 

“But that’s what a game room is for … for showing off your kills. This musky is just the beginning.”

It dawned on me that for the past year we were each talking about different “game.” Me, Parcheesi; him, dead animals.

You see, The Musky Hunter has long had game room envy. Our farm neighbors, Johnny and June Cash have an epic game room, or more appropriately, a trophy room. Some might call it a room of death. Johnny is an avid, accomplished hunter and has traveled all over the world hunting bear, antelope, gnus, wildebeest, crocodiles and of course, good old Ohio deer. And each of these kills has a place in his game room. It’s quite fascinating, really. He has complete reverence for each of his conquests and thrilling stories of how he got them. June is much more quiet about it all, almost apologetic about the still life display of once animated subjects. “I should be named Wife of the Year, honestly,” she says as she gently picks dust fuzzies from the bear. 

So, we now have a very realistic Musky hanging in our game room, all by itself over by the pool towels. I’m hoping he doesn’t get company any time soon, but The Musky Hunter is threatening to hang a big deer head down there when he lands one. Now, I’ve got nothing against hunters, really. Our farm is located in gun country. I get it that hunting animals is a tradition that has been passed down through generations. Johnny Cash has schooled me plenty on how hunting is actually good for animals: it controls the animal population (which, hello, is much needed here with Ohio deer.) And in African villages, it offers jobs and local income for guides, permits, vehicles, etc. as well as literally feeding the locals. It also discourages poaching, which is a completely heinous, immoral act. I get it, I really do.

But I sincerely don’t want to be met with an animal head hanging on my wall. I was afraid of my parents’ painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, for goodness sake. As a child, Jesus’ eyes followed me all over the room. I can only imagine how Mr. Bambi will freak me out. “You spineless, heartless wench. How could you?” he would whisper under his breath to me.

But I know I’m going to lose this fight. The Musky Hunter will eventually be The Deer Slayer one of these days. He says he’s waiting for “the big one” with a giant rack.

Sigh … maybe I can hang my pool towels on its antlers?

A man and his musky