"I've been gone for awhile now...."

I've been away for awhile...well, all summer actually. The last few months have been challenging, a death in the family and a trip to Payson Arizona to take care of my 87 year old mother who wrestles with dementia. My stepfather suffered a heart attack in early august and is recovering from surgery in a rehab facility. My twin sister and I are here to "take over" so to speak, which if you knew us, is sort of scary and confusing, especially to the aged! Yesterday we made my mother laugh so hard she wet her pants twice in one day, a record both of us are proud of! We watch DVD's regularly....harmless, sweet, Tom Hanks happy ending movies, on a T.V. so old all the actresses have the same coral colored lipstick, and at volumes so loud all the neighbors know our bedtime. Last night my sister was watching "Sleepless In Seattle " with my mother, for the umpteenth time, and spotted a rather large, brown, woolly mammoth, crawling across the wall in the dining room. She screamed for me(in the bedroom) to bring the hand-vac or a baseball bat.....what ever would be less damaging to the drywall....to "kill the mother fu*ker"! She only used the F word twice, and when trying her patience, told me to "shut up!" after reassuring me several times that IT WASN'T bigger than a bread box. She managed to do the deed, quite nicely, with the latest issue of Time magazine, smearing John McCain's face with a variation of gooey brown spider guts. My mother watched amused from the couch, and said, " I raise bigger ones in the Cadillac!" I've never seen a spider that large inside a house before!....it's legs were unbelievably long, I swear it had knuckles! The body ALONE was bigger than the green olives I was swallowing whole and chasing with a tumbler of Pinot Grigio.I'm thinking flame thrower.......
Payson is an interesting place....all the cashiers call me "honey"(I'm 54yrs. old) either because they're all over the age of 70 or because they've seen me driving around in a borrowed SUV with a licence plate that reads COWBOY. I've learned that it's better not to make eye contact with ANYONE waiting in line with me at Safeway, the hardware store, or the pharmacy. There is an eagerness, by the local townsfolk( 95% seniors) to share their personal medical histories....tales of fungal toenails, unexpected heart attacks, and constipations only a Paul Bunyon sized plumber's helper could remedy.
We take my mother to visit my stepfather everyday in the rehab center. The staff there is wonderful and very caring...of coarse my stepfather can't wait to get out! When I left today I passed the recreation room and heard an old man singing, rather loudly, It's Now Or Never", accompanied by an old fellow playing a saw...... and I thought.... yep, that's about it in a nut shell... While my mom visited her husband, my sister and I wandered over to our favorite new restaurant..... it has the nicest little bar.... it serves Blue Moon beer on tap with an orange slice! For about 45 minutes we schmooze the bartender and leave a big tip in hopes that tomorrow, he'll see "COWBOY" pull up into the parking lot, and have two 'cold ones' waiting for us. In the meantime we're here enjoying my mother's, sometimes scattered, lucid moments and hoping this all has a happy ending or at least enough Tom Hanks to make it sweeter.

No NO-Neck Monsters

I didn't raise two no-neck monsters.... they turned out better than average, excellent in fact! Because of that, my summer has gone all pear shaped. There's no one around except me, Big Daddy, an old foolish dog, and one obese cat... whose a bit of a slob. This is our first summer without the offspring and I'm feeling nostalgic for the past...or at least someone else to pick on. For many years, as a family, we drove the 1,000 miles up to my in-laws cabin in the northwest. I would pack the car with a staggering assortment of child friendly snacks (not the usual, edible food stuffs) the crap with a shelf life of at least 50 years, predominantly the color orange, and smelling like the underarms of an old polyester shirt. I purchased dot to dot puzzles, books, and the newest travel games, whose impossibly small pieces were hopelessly lost while trying to tear the package open with your teeth (child friendly scissors are only useful to small fingers, single sheets of paper, and mature adults). Of coarse all these items were discarded or eaten before we reached the first gas station. But, get this...I'm no fool... or a stranger to every parenting book published (one of my favorites being, " Get Out Of My Life!.. but first can you take me to the mall!?")....I know my way around an "I message" and can successfully con my way into any childs' bedroom for at least 10 minutes..... positive reinforcement was always my preferred modus operandi. There are of coarse situations, that... honestly, no parenting book fully appreciates or offers any REAL constructive solutions for......like barreling down the highway with two kids in the backseat who have "eye spied" the last cow an hour earlier and are aching for some physical contact. You could feel that innocent energy turning toward the dark side.... at any moment, orange stained fingers, would try to play "type writer" on the bony ribcage of the other backseat inhabitant. That's when two crisp fifty dollar bills would appear.......I know what you're thinking... but seriously, twenties weren't enough or even worth the risk! I would wave them around slowly, so that both pairs of eyes( glazed over by too many carbohydrates) could lock on, and take in the enormous power I held in my hand. Manna, so to speak, an unexpected source of help or gratification! (The alternative was to pull over at the next truck stop and sell the little ones to the highest bidder). After terms were negotiated, all I had to do.... to nip any foolishness.... was to flash a fifty and pretend to stuff it down my bra! Any commotion coming from the back seat would instantly transform itself to..."Why, sister would you care for a chip?" and the reply," Yes, please...generosity is such an admirable trait in a young man". And so it would go, snark free until we reached our lake destination, and then it was business as usual. I normally spent my time relaxing on a raft outside the range of the super soakers and a few strokes ahead of my son, who took an inordinate amount of pleasure, calculating how far he would have to leap off the dock, to soak me and the book I was pretending to read (those swim lessons were SO not a good idea!). We spent a small fortune on ice cream cones at the rustic (dump) market across the road, which had a socialist manifesto of sorts, in big red block lettering above the front door. We once purchased a box of cereal with a "sell by" date of 1985, five years too late. There was always a feral looking momma cat, and a litter of kittens, in a cardboard box out back........"MOM, you don't even have to pay us the fifty bucks,pleeeeease, they're soooo cute!" The market always smelled like cat piss, old Twinkies, and the garlic bait the local fisherman swore by. For some insane reasoning we were willing to take our chances with the ice cream, although Grandma (who smoked two packs of Virginia Slims a day, rendering her taste buds useless) found earwigs in her maple nut ice cream cone once. We told ourselves it was bug infested only because no one else ever ordered it.... except Grandma once a year. We would spend two glorious weeks at the lake and then make the long journey back home...... tanned, relaxed, and ready to do business!

"I'll see your crap and raise you an Oh sh*t"

You know the words written on your car mirror that say....objects in your rear view mirror are closer than they appear?! Well, nothing says "hi, how are ya!?" quite like the sound of metal crunching on metal. In my defence it was a sweltering day, the temperature was in the triple digits...Calcutta hot... I'm pretty sure I may have been semi-conscious...in a heat induced coma. All I wanted to do was take the dog for a walk at the beach to cool off. I opened the car door and immediately regretted it, the intense heat singed my eyebrows and melted my mascara. I got the car started and James Brown's "It's A Man's World" came blasting out of the speakers ....I nearly gained lucidity.. (I hate it when I don't turn down the radio before I exit the car!)Anyway, I'm frantically flipping switches, opening vents, rolling down windows, trying to steer with totally inadequate fingernails,...knowing full well the skin on my fingers will fuse to the leather of the steering wheel if flesh makes contact....and my driveway is steep and narrow, did I mention that!?....I back down it a hundred times a day....no problem. I look in the mirror as I start my decent and I see that writing..."objects are closer"... and I think.."well they aren't today cuz I just got a little breezy momentum going". The truck parked at the bottom,evidently within my turning radius, about 5 feet from my driveway, spoiled my hasty getaway. I hit it like a heat seeking missile...it wasn't suppose to be there! I put a big dent in my car bumper and scratched up the neighbors truck fender. Said neighbor came out to see what happened, of coarse I apologized, but he just kept saying, "Oh sh*t! I pointed out, that in reality( something I wasn't bothering with at the time) his damage was more "Oh crap" and mine was "Oh sh*t.... ahem.... you know how guys are about their trucks, it's staggering..none the less I did do damage ....I'm waiting for an estimate on his scratches.... meanwhile I've managed to pop out the dented bumper and buff out some of the other offending evidence before my husband notices....before he reminds me about that little saying in the mirror.....

Blown Away

There should be a law against using a leaf blower before 10:00am, especially when you consider all that debris, blasted with a high decibel dirty wind, is headed for a new home... namely your own freshly SWEPT front yard. Isn't that why God made long handled poles with brushes on the business end!?...ahem... so that hopelessly lazy neighbors in rump sprung, ragged black elastic pants, Mickey Mouse T-shirts, green Croc's, and a bumper sticker that reads "peace begins at home".... could get some much needed exercise and QUIETLY straighten up the place? Besides..... that "I just slept for 10 hours" rested, satisfied, goggled face, is particularly annoying if you really want to know the truth. Don't they know that some people are sleep deprived and have family members up in the last frontier called Alaska, dodging bears, wolves, and mooses?! Young daughters, driving impossibly small autos, stopping to take photos of friendly grizzlies near the highway?... or husbands, on motorcycles, crashing into the tailgates of lunatic Texans braking unexpectedly to take their 300th snapshot of a Bear's butt!!? Geez people, where is your humanity, your compassion, your fashion sense, or in the name of all that's holy... your fuse box!? Having criminal thoughts against your neighbors is not a good beginning to your day. I wonder... is that pond deep enough to accommodate more than 2 pink flamingos or do I just throw the whole lot, body and blower, in the Green waste can and take my chances? Usually a six pack of Bud is enough to encourage the garbage guys to take a little bit more....I'm thinking a case of imported might do the trick...

What A Dog!

Our dog, Mocha, flew a kite last Saturday....and not just any kite either...a Spiderman kite with a very long glossy baby blue tail. Of coarse she wasn't aware that she was doing something brilliant, although I like to think she knows she's capable of setting the bar higher for the rest of the hounds in the neighborhood. She was trotting along, on her steady eleven year old legs, looking for bushy-tailed rodents when my husband decided it was high time Mocha learned how to fly a kite. She proved to be a much better student than me, she takes direction better,doesn't give up, and doesn't care how foolish she looks trying. We fastened the string under her collar and she took off across the hill, she kept it up for at least five minutes...it was really something! Mind you, I can't prove it... but my husbands cell phone sports a photo of her doing exactly that...honest! Sometimes Mocha simply amazes me...I'd be bragging about it, but she's very humble..like most Mutts are. Next week end ...maybe roller skating....

Queen Of The Hay

Spring has definitely blossomed in my hometown! The wild flowers this season are heavenly, orange California poppy's, purple lupine, and luscious sweet peas bloom wildly along the highways and foothills. And, like many of my fellow sufferers, my proboscis has gone into overdrive combating the pollens it sucks up like a vacuum cleaner on steroids. I've made friends, good friends, with my Viva paper towels...my snout prefers them to any other hanky hands down. I stare out the window and long to participate in that lovely world outside my glass barrier.....but that's not going to happen as long as there's that poison in the air! So,I decided it was a good time to make myself ....Queen Of The Hay....hay fever that is. I reached for the chicken wire, some lonely baubles, and my book about Marie Antoinette....she had a little trouble with her upper extremities too...hence her image on my newest creation. If I'm trapped indoors I might as well look regal doing it...maybe I'll eat cake too!

Ready to be Royal!

Last sunday, I went to an artist gathering, in a beautiful rustic old barn in a rural area outside San Luis Obispo, California. There was a large crowd, lots of antiques, jewelry, altered art, and my favorite....handmade crowns and tiaras! I saw the most amazing creations, fit for any queen or king. Kerri Judd and Danyel Montecinos were there to demonstrate how to make your own royal headpieces. What a wonderful way to start a new tradition in your framily, to mark holidays and those special milestones in your life. They have written a lovely book, which I quickly snatched up, with great instructions and ideas to get you started. Of coarse the first thing I noticed on the book cover was the crown featuring the" oh so chic "chicken wire. Never has chicken wire looked so elegant......ahem.... except on my earring shrines of coarse! The possibilities are endless...I can't wait to make my own....My favorite quote in the book.."a girl should be two things: classy and fabulous"- Coco Chanel