A re'butt'al on the study of women's hips

Monday, July 19, 2010

It was a day that began as regular as rain—coffee so strong and thick I could part it with a knife, my favorite morning show, and my surf of the internet for the news of the moment.

And then my muscles contracted as the first sentence of the online article jumped off the screen and nearly caused me to spit my Caldwell coffee all over my laptop keyboard.

“A woman’s body shape may influence how good her memory is. ‘Apple-shaped’ women fared better than ‘pears’ on cognitive tests.”

My bottom lip began to twitch and my eyeballs began to jitter back and forth as I scanned the remaining paragraphs for the punch line. Surely this was some kind of joke.

Nope.

“And pear-shaped women – those with smaller waists but bigger hips – scored particularly poorly.”

I was doomed.

Not only was the incessant growth of grey hair on my head far in advance of the schedule I had for myself at age 49, but now my ample hips were about to get in the way of more than the narrow doorway. They were about to impair my memory and render me unable to remember where I left my sunglasses and house keys.

It wasn’t fair. Just the other day I had finally come to the conclusion that these cougars in a gunnysack were here to stay, and I was okay with the ample part of my anatomy. I could displace my neck when I turned around and looked at my curvaceous baggage in the full-length mirror and then go on with my day and forget about what was back there.

Now it would seem, I really was going to forget about it!

It was happening already, I thought to myself as I sat in my computer chair flexing my gluteal nemesis “Maximus” and his cousins “Medius” and “Minimus.”

I’d forgotten what day it was and to make matters worse, when I looked out the living room window at how much the grass had grown overnight, I couldn’t remember “Did I just cut it yesterday?”

I began talking to myself. Was that also a sign that carrying excess weight on the hips was making matters worse?

“I don’t know,” I said to myself, “but I really doubt it. If I can’t remember that it’s you I’m talking to, then I’ll consider it a problem.”

Then my pathologically positive side kicked in—similar in speed to last week when I realized that not having a husband meant I could turn the barn into a girl cave.

“Think positive,” I shouted out loud at 6:30 a.m. “The junk in the trunk is one of your biggest assets. It’s the foundation of your being, the underside of your existence, the land under the water of your better half!”

And of course, true to their canine nature, the dogs translated my octaves into a call to breakfast and jumped around the kitchen like children on Christmas morning.

I could turn ‘re-butt’ this argument.

Thanks to my Irish and Scottish ancestors I would have a mind like a steel trap until the age of 110.

No pear-shaped behind of mine was going to be the iceberg to my titanic of a brain.

I thought about all the great construction scenarios my hips would be good for in the future, including when I held open the barn door and heaved out bar stools and old tools as the movers carried in the pink couch.

Squirrels, snakes and the superpowers of a canine nose

Monday, July 12, 2010

Each morning at 6 a.m. when I let Dot and Cash outside to pee, there is that moment before they head to their respective bush latrines when their noses filter the surrounding air chemistry and, I imagine, make a mental note on their tiny brains, of everything that has trotted, flown, crept, skulked, and swam by this neck of the woods within the past 12 hours.

If I’m lucky, nothing untoward is on the breeze and they will not take off like bats out of purgatory and bark their loud cries of warning that echo down the creek—noise that has been known to wake the neighbors, cheating them out of the last good moments of morning slumber on any given Sunday.

Experts say the secret to a dog’s exceptional olfactory process is a wet snout, which catches all the scent molecules in the air. Experts also believe that in order to keep their snouts moist, dogs produce about a pint of nose mucus every day.

That explains why I can be more than two meters away from a sneezing dog and still feel like I need to douse myself in antibacterial hand soap and take a shower.

I also was curious enough to query just how much a pint was, thus comparing my jar of breakfast jam to dog nose mucus and thereby ruining the enjoyment of spreading the fruit preserves on my toast each morning.

Dot’s incredible nose is the bane of the resident red squirrel’s existence, unless of course we count the sting of the Lone Ranger’s 22-calibre perfect shot.

But so far the rodent has remained in the lead-free zone of my birdfeeder, where on rare occasion it can enjoy a day out of the tree tops if Dot isn’t around.

And I should learn to leave my kitchen window closed at bedtime to keep the bouquets of the night air from reaching the nostrils of my dogs at the darkest hour.

On one such evening, when I was without fear of the night unknown, I gave way to the dogs’ insistence to track the scent, while I followed behind with my big flashlight.

I stood there shining the 15 million-candlelight on the rustling bushes as Dot and Cash jumped about barking and looking at me as if to shout, “Do you smell that?! Do you hear that?!”

I heard it alright. It was the sound of a skunk revving up its scent glands.

I think the remedy for that incident included baking soda, dish soap, water, vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide and two dogs that slept out in the porch for the rest of the week.

Groundhogs beware. If Dot is on your trail, your time on earth is limited to the split second she smells your “rodescence”, as was the case on Saturday morning when she cornered the four-footed menace behind a piece of discarded fencing.

For quite a time after it bit the dust, Dot stood tirelessly over the rodent trophy in ultimate victory. When I picked up the carcass and flung it into the creek, unbeknownst to me she skulked down to the water’s edge, swam out and waited for the thing to float by, fetched it and brought it back up on shore where she again stood over it until I caught sight of her one hour later.

Dot’s super sensitive snout can not be subdued, even for the quiet times I wish to spend these days sitting in my old wicker chair reading books about inner peace and harmony.

There she appears, gingerly drawing her snout along the lawn edge where it meets the long grass and begins to bark incessantly at “the nothing.”

For a fleeting moment as I listened to her ominous tone I envisioned a large black bear would suddenly leap out of the tall grass and swallow her up, attitude and all.

As I watched the dog have what I considered to be a rather brainless moment in which she would not advance upon the thing she smelled, I stepped forward to see what all the commotion was about.

I peered down into the unknown to see the tail of a thick, slithering garter snake slink deeper into the field grass.

After the dog had gone on to other olfactory adventures the snake must have emerged and molted its skin, which in turn provided much anxiety for Dot, who came back upon the lifeless shedding only to bark at it for the rest of the afternoon.

Cash on the other hand did nothing more than sit on his haunches in his “Ducks Unlimited” regal position and stare out at the field across the creek, quite content just to be, his long nose twitching as he drank up the deer pheromones on the breeze.

That’s the self-controlled Cash I would like to see when I leave a roast chicken sitting on the picnic table while I run back inside to get a carving knife.

But I don’t think he’ll get the benefit of the doubt on that one.

I hang my laundry out to dry with my own clothespins

Monday, July 5, 2010

“Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth,” urges Sheryl Louise Moller.

Okay then. Here it goes.

It’s been six weeks since I’ve had any gumption to plunk out this column on my laptop because six weeks ago I found myself smack dab at the end of something that meant the world to me. My marriage.

Elizabeth Gilbert had the right idea in her book “Eat, Pray, Love,” and it is within the context of her writing that I give you my truth, because I can’t seem to find the right way to put my reading public on notice on my own.

“The many reasons a man called Peter did not want to be this woman’s husband anymore are too personal and too private to share here. I would not ask anyone to believe that I am capable of reporting an unbiased version of our story, and therefore the chronicle of our marriage’s failure will remain untold here. I also will not discuss here the reasons why I do still so very much want to be his wife, and why I am still unable to imagine life without him. Let it be sufficient to say that, he is still my love, my lighthouse, and my albatross in equal measure.”

But I’m an adult and I know when to let go and I’m practicing doing that every day with as much respect, and gratitude, and good wishes as I can rally for the man who means the world to me and who wishes to journey forward on his own.

However I don’t profess to do anything of the sort without bouts of dismal interior dialogue and visits from my old friend ‘Misery,’ though I must admit she is not coming around as much anymore since I was discovered by ‘Shift,’ who has helped me immensely by giving me tours in the department of ‘Thinking Positive.’

I also lean on my women’s circle, chocolate bars, and ice cream for support.

I’m always writing about the Universal Plan and how much I believe in it. My current circumstance is testing me on whether I practice what I preach even when things get really %$#@! difficult.

It can’t always be that life is going to give us cherries and I think this qualifies as the pits.

But I am determined to use the leftovers to build myself a lovely, new orchard.

May I start by saying "Thank you."