"Little Miss" you'll go far, on snowshoes

 I fell in love with snowshoeing in 1972 when I was 12 years old. I loved the sport most because it was something we always did together as a family.

The wooden “Beavertail” snowshoes with leather belted bindings were too big and my winter boots often got stuck in the toe hole because I didn’t push my foot far enough to the bar. My snowshoes were too long for my height and I couldn’t do the 180-degree turn around like my dad could. And when I tried, I invariably ended up in a contorted heap in the snow, like a long-legged newborn giraffe, unable to untangle myself and get up.

I still loved the whole experience.

Those long winter walks over the frozen creek bed, across the field and into the thick forest behind my childhood home remain crystal clear recalls for me, as if they happened yesterday. We had the same destination every time in that forest. 

My parents and my brother and I negotiated up and over the snow-covered rocks and the barbed wire fence, before arriving in the big pines where we’d build a little fire from sticks and pieces of wood lying around.

The canvas pack sack my dad carried on his back would come off and be opened to the eagerness of my brother and I, as the hot dogs went on roasting sticks and the buns, ketchup, and a thermos of hot chocolate made the picnic around the warm fire.

The family dog always came along, and I imagine the hot dog or two it would be passed from the outstretched hand of a child were more than enough reward for the work it took the dog to get there with us through the deep snow.

In all the years since those good old days my love for snowshoeing has never waivered.

Today I fit the Beavertail snowshoes. I fondly have nicknamed them my “Salcherts” and I dream about the Snowshoe Olympics.

I think I could be a contender for a medal. I’m not suggesting I’d strike gold, but I sure feel like a winner when I’m out there piling through all that white stuff that Mother Nature left behind. I love it so much I just want to start snowshoe jogging and never stop.

I tried that on Sunday morning at 8 a.m. when on a field mission to the “Ranch” for buckwheat pancakes and scrambled eggs. The snow was untouched and as deep as the Grand Canyon and I was off on my solo quest, chest puffed out, my Olympic-sized ego in tow, headed for the gathering table and stories about cowboy poets.

Suddenly I had a strong urge to veer right and head for the bush line far across the creek, but then realized I had no pack sack, no food or matches, and no note left behind to tell loved ones where to come looking for me should I go missing.

Back on track and despite the fact that I thought I was going to have a heart attack and keel over into a snowy hole only to be discovered in the month of May, I lapped up the distance in record time.

However I did look back over my shoulder a few times hoping my favorite outdoorsman would suddenly appear on a white snowmobile and offered me a ride. Unfortunately that’s not what happened.

It’s times like these, during strenuous hauls of my Greek Goddess frame, when I am reminded that my piano legs are a mighty tool.

Many years ago someone saw a picture of me wearing shorts and bluntly said, “Your legs could hold up a piano.”

I wasn’t quite sure if that meant my legs looked enormous or strong. I’ve never been model-material but I know for sure that against the odds, my piano legs could beat the pants off the best of them hiking a mountain path or hauling trail on snowshoes. 

The only thing that continues to be missed on a snowshoe hike are those canine capers that used to follow close behind me, refusing to blaze their own trail for fear that I would eat the dog treats they could smell in my coat pocket. In fact, so close did they follow, that they often stepped on my snowshoes, hurling me face first into a snowdrift.

I recall a past snowshoe day when the dogs bolted off down the creek bed with their noses to the ground fast on the scent of creatures unseen and disappeared around the bend.

I was standing there listening to the sound of my heart pounding when the dogs came roaring back in my direction, followed closely by what I thought was a wolf—and they were leading it straight to me in the wake of their own terror. 

My first thought was to release myself from my snowshoes and use them as shields but I didn’t think I could get them off fast enough.

My heart was in need of a defibrillator by the time I realized it was not a wolf, but a much larger neighborhood dog.

All three canines arrived at my feet with tails wagging for those treats I still had in my pocket.

Ah, for one more of those good old snowshoeing dog days. 

A little of this, a little of that

“Drive south until the butter melts.”  I heard that saying last week for the first time and I dare say I was charmed by the enticing “get in your car and go” imagery it evoked.

I could use a warm little holiday like that right about now.

Heaven knows if I were to put the butter dish in the front seat of my car, even with the heat on, it wouldn’t melt anytime soon.

In my neck of the woods, the butter dish—just sitting in its little spot in the kitchen cupboard—is as good a weather gauge as the thermometer is that’s in the unheated porch.

It is all I can do to break off a decent piece of butter for my toast slice in the morning and by the time I’m done raking the brittle chunk back and forth with a knife, my poor piece of bread looks like it did battle with the cheese grater.

Everything is cold these days and thus I find myself in frequent abandon of my “don’t touch the thermostat” rule in the house. My showers are lobster-hot and I am compelled to heat up my bath towel and my pajamas in the dryer before they come into contact with my skin.

And I am driven to chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

Given my instinct to “feed my furnace” during the winter must mean I come from caveman stock. Why else would I voluntarily eat a full course meal followed by two chocolate bars?

Mitochondrial DNA. That’s the magic gene stuff that only females carry and what is used to track family lineages through time. I’m quite certain that if genealogical researcher John Ashdown-Hill (whose scientific know-it-all helped peg the recent identification of the 500-year old bones found buried under a parking lot in England as those of King Richard III) were to culture my spit DNA in a petrie dish it would grow a Neanderthal look-a-like with a flare for cocoa beans.

Balance. Sometimes I do it well. Sometimes I do it appallingly.

Sometimes I can balance my life like a horse jockey perched to win ‘round a racetrack. Sometimes, and especially where my winter calorie intake is concerned, I am as unbalanced as I would be if two Great Danes dragged me down the street.

Yet, at the best of times I am a wonderful mess, or at least I was a couple of days ago when sitting in my car during my lunch break attempting to reconstruct my eating habits by munching on raw carrots, when suddenly I sneezed.

I opened my eyes a microsecond later to ground up orange debris spread right across my dashboard and the inside of the windshield. What a mess. I laughed so hard I lost all my mascara. I’m still laughing about it three days later.

What are some of the best decisions you’ve ever made? Sometimes you know right away when you make a decision like that and sometimes it takes a bit of hindsight to see that you did.

In my case, I’m just glad I didn’t decide to eat the “Lindt” dark chocolate bar first. Good heavens, what a waste of good food that would have been.

The cold reality of my January escapades

So here we are in the deep freeze dungeon of mid-January where exposed skin can freeze in five minutes. The cold bears down upon us like a giant lead blanket and it will not be moved.

Cars left too long outside in this abominable deep freeze either don’t start at all, or if plugged in do begrudgingly turn over and then bump along on frozen square tires reminiscent of a “Looney Tunes” cartoon or a Hillbilly movie.

Mad dashes from the nice warm house to the garage while holding one’s breath are common.Wiping my dripping nose blob with my mitt less hand and then reaching for the metal garage door handle, which also is at -44C, well, that’s just stupid.

Standing there immobilized and wondering if CAA covers my predicament also is brainless, as is thinking warm spit will help remove my welded fingers.

Forcibly peeling said fingers from cold metal reminded me of how painful it was the first and only time I ripped wax strips off my upper lip.

My moustache, now otherwise invisible to the viewing public thanks to facial hair bleach, suddenly reappears in this hellish cold as a frosted hairy mass during the mad dash from where I park the car at work and remains until all the men in the building have passed me in the hallway at the coffee room. Nice.

The deep-freeze dungeon of January calls to mind the (kick my butt now) question, “why didn’t I book that holiday to Cuba when I had the chance?”

In another monumental lapse of judgment in this lead blanket cold, as I think up ways to burn off the five pounds I’ve gained over the Christmas holidays, I decide to go for a run in my snowshoes down the creek bed.

My face wrapped in scarves with a slit for eyes, I broke into a solid rhythmic jog, lifting one snowshoe above the other. 

Just around the bend I tripped over the twigs sticking out of the ice at a beaver house and did a face plant landing in a contorted mess at the base of the hut. Smarting and ranting, I hoped the heavy “thwack” heard by my nemesis inside the twig tent, as my poundage landed there, would spook them into pulling up stakes. Somehow I doubt it.

By the time I untangled my snowshoes and realigned my spine, the wolves had started to close in for a mid-day snack. However, when I stood up to reveal my steam-frozen headpiece complete with icicles from all the heavy breathing I’d been doing in an effort to untangle myself, the carnivores turned and ran like whelping puppies.

The only thing I can think of that feels better because of this forsaken deep freezing cold is the blistering hot shower taken after my cold-air escapades.

Standing there in the tub as my skin turned fire engine red from toe to crown was heavenly, until it was time to get out and I realized I’d forgotten to replace my bath towel. 

I opened the bathroom door and sprinted buck naked and sopping wet to the towel shelf.

To cop a sentence from Kerry Lynn Dell’s blog “Montana For Real”—“Have you ever stepped onto an icy sidewalk felt both feet fly up in the air and crashed onto the back of your head?”  

That holiday on a Cuban beach looked quite ideal from my prone position on the kitchen floor.

All that I am is measured by the year

“Not what you have, but what you use. Not what you see, but what you choose. Not what seems fair, but what is true. Not what you dream, but what you do. Not what you take, but what you give. Not as you pray, but as you live. These are the things that mar or bless the sum of human happiness.”  

I discovered this beautiful composition in the book, “How to Love,” by Gordon Livingston. Sometimes words just jump off the page and into my soul and these ones certainly did. I printed and framed the piece for my bedroom wall. It smacks of that old familiar tune “To Thine Own Self Be True.”

This week I’m all about “Day 365” and as much as I’d thought beginning a new year at midnight December 31^st would mean a fresh new start, I cannot deny that until I make it past Saturday, January 19^th I won’t truly feel that my new year has begun.

I’ve come to believe that making it to the anniversary date of the first year after any major event in life is an occurrence of legendary proportions and each of us comes to it in different ways. I also have come to believe it is a sacred journey to its crest, no matter how it’s walked.

I’m not sure yet what I’m going to be doing on Saturday, but the closer I get to it, the more I hope I am going to get up at sunrise and live the day as fully as I can. I would be a fool to think that the events of what happened here in my neck of the woods that day one year ago won’t be on my mind. That’s okay. It’s all okay.

I continue to believe that each day I am where I am supposed to be. This conviction carries me. It has carried me through the last 12 months. It carries me in this moment, and this moment is all that I truly know I have in this life.

My friend Patty gave me a bereavement gift last January that I can say without a shred of doubt remains the best gift I have ever received in bad times and in good. It’s a fridge magnet that says “One Day at A Time.”

I’ve tried to live by that code ever since. It takes a lot of the pressure off of projecting myself into tomorrow’s dilemmas and next week’s problems and keeps me grounded right here.

I’ve also been reading the daybook, “The Language of Letting Go,” by Melody Beattie. She’s my nightingale of freedom. There’s not a morning that goes by when she doesn’t impress upon me a valuable lesson about giving up control and the letting in of life as it unfolds before me. These are good things and the good I need will find me when the time is right.

Since January 19, 2012 I have written over 45 columns for this space and I’ve dug deep many times on what it means for me as a survivor left behind by the suicide of a loved one. I wanted to pay forward the German proverb that says, “To bury grief, plant a seed.” I’ve done the best I could.

On Saturday I’m going to think about the road I’ve walked and I’m going to continue to do my best to honor my life, as good as it is, and it is very good. Very good indeed.

In fact, I think I’ll go snowshoeing across one of my snowy fields with my beavertail snowshoes that my dad gave me just before Christmas. The snowshoes once belonged to a fantastic family friend and well- known district auctioneer, the late Rod Salchert.

And as I’m walking along in the cold winter air with the spirits of all the good people I’ve had in my life, I’m going to remember what Melody Beattie said about letting go, and then I’m going to spend my evening sitting by the fire with someone I care about very much.

"I think of letting go as being like throwing a baseball. The problem is I just don't want to let go of the ball. Hanging on to the ball is a temptation. We've got it in our hands. Why not keep it there? At least if we are dwelling on the problem, it feels like we are doing something. But we're not. We're just holding onto the ball, and chances are we are holding up the game.”

A fast draw averts "cat"strophe

“Millie” the cat has been living here for about 13 months and we are joined at the hip. It’s been a rewardingly mutual friendship thus far and her life in this neck of the woods has been luxurious to say the least.

This much I know is true. If I vacuum the floor near where Millie is curled up on her couch pillow, she trusts me enough to know that the loud whir of the machine is not a threat, and she can stay right where she is. Any other cat would be clawing at the door to escape, but not Millie. Millie trusts me.

But just try and get her into a pet carrier and it’s a whole different story.

Monday was my favorite feline’s check up day at the animal clinic. When I woke up that morning at 5 a.m. to her kneading paws on the side of my head and the incessant meowing that smacked of being let out to the ”kitty loo” I smugly and flippantly sparred words with the squinty-eyed annoyance and told her payback would be mine that afternoon when it came time for vaccinations at the vet’s office. 

She blinked back a flat stare, jumped down and rubbed herself along the white skirt ruffle at the bottom of my bed, leaving a sheath of black hair stuck to it before leading me out of the room and to the porch door like a border collie sheep herder.

I followed dutifully, picking a cat hair out of my nostril.

I like to think of myself as a planner organizer. And while I’m okay with uncharted waters and someone else making the decisions that involve me, to a degree I like to have a handle on the ins and outs of my daily life. Who doesn’t?

Planning a smooth trip to the animal clinic is among the things I want to go my way. But we’re talking cats here.

A few days prior I had had a brilliant thought. Straightaway I went to the garage and found the pet carrier. I set it out in the porch with the door propped open, hoping Millie would wander by and investigate, perhaps taking up shop in the thing during siesta time. She’d get used to the cat cove and everything would run smoothly come clinic day.

She took the bait—sort of.

When I walked by on my way to laundry the next day, indeed Millie was sitting inside the cage but was heaving up a hairball and the chunky barf soup of her morning cat chow. I should have known right then it was her way of hinting that the pet carrier scheme wasn’t going to fly. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I shrugged it off and cleaned up the mess.

Monday afternoon I scooped her up in my arms, cooed softly to my furry little friend, carried her to the porch and tried to put her headfirst into the carrier.

Lynn M. Osband penned, “The mathematical probability of a cat doing exactly what it wants, is the one scientific absolute in the world.”

Indeed. She must have tried to put her cat in one of these contraptions too.

Suddenly all four cat legs jettisoned outward as if I’d just pulled the cord on a parachute and her claws shot forth like sharp knives on Freddy Krueger’s glove.

Suddenly I was holding a writhing devil cat with a possessed soul straight out of “The Exorcist” movie as all four legs began spinning backwards against the inevitable opening of the dreaded confinement capsule.

Millie’s head spun around and I caught a glimpse of those bulging wild eyes and a flash of carnivorous molars amidst the moaning sound coming from inside of her.

I held her straight out in front of me and with a skill torn right out of an old western gunslinger film, I pulled the “Plan B” towel from over my shoulder and quick-wrapped the cat and had her in the cage with the door closed before she knew what had happened.

Just call me Nicole Franks.

Experience is a powerful ocean

This particular column and I have been dancing partners for many months. We have tangoed and waltzed together and I dare say met each other on painful ballet tippy toes.

This column is precious to me because it’s the closing number on what has been a very powerful ocean of personal experience in 2012.

I keep a daily diary and I’ve done so for decades. At the end of each year before I close off my journal to start a new one, I revisit the 12-month period and re-acquaint myself with myself. I also look back at my year’s worth of column writing for the same reason.

It’s all about reflection.

On January 1^st, 2012 I had written the following sentence in my diary. “Change is coming and I am okay with my changes. I am still learning to sail my ship.”

I went back a bit further in my old columns and perused the one that bid farewell to 2011 and welcomed 2012.

My sentences smacked of magical thinking. All that talk about staying open to change. Wow, what I didn’t know then.

By the time January 27, 2012 had rolled around, some eight days after the suicide of Dr. Jon Fistler, my diary entry read,  “It is all I can do not to fall down weeping and disappear into the earth.”

There were times in the early months of 2012 when I thought I was going to suffocate and drown in that ocean of grief. Regret and remorse were more than happy to keep me company.

I wanted to give in to the belief that, “the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation, and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.”

But I didn’t give in and I didn’t disappear and I didn’t drown. A very wise counselor told me I deserved to be happy. 

A very wise doctor told me I was allowed to feel anything but remorse. I believed them both right from the get go, and I’ve worked my way forward ever since—sometimes inching along, sometimes leaping, sometimes stumbling, but forward—and I will not be moved from the journey. I made a conscious choice about the “how” of my living.

And I think grief counseling saved my life. Grief wears many different hats and this is a case in favor of “The More You Know.”

Treating grief honorably and with understanding means a whole lot less anger and despair in our lives. And for sure there’s a whole lot less regret, and regret is an appalling waste of energy (to paraphrase Katherine Mansfield.)

One of the greatest personal challenges I have had since January is to practice paying forward in action those six little words I once wrote about. 

It is far from easy, but therein lies the lesson, because I very much want to be there for you, too, when you need to talk. I strive to keep my “mouth closed, ears open, presence available.”  I think by far it’s the greatest gift a true friend can give another.

When I read through my 2012 diary and columns and see how my life has been lived since that brutally cold winter’s day, there is no doubt in my mind that I am the luckiest girl I know.

I have been given new horizons to sail on and I am so very grateful to be standing on the crest of 2013 and be able to say I love my life. 

And so as I repeat some of what I wrote in the final column of 2011, this time it means so much more to me when I say;

My dear readers stand on the horizon of 2013 and look back at what you’ve seen and done and learned, and what you’ve lived through, cried through, laughed through and shared, and then grant yourself peace and go forward.

The Four Noble Truths encourage us to show up, pay attention, and tell the truth or keep noble silence, and stay wide open to change.

Stay wide open.

Moving forward through the intersections of life is risky. Look both ways and go.

What I learned from a rubber duck

“In 1992 a shipping container fell overboard on its way from China to the United States, releasing 29,000 rubber ducks into the Pacific Ocean. 10 months later the first of these rubber ducks washed ashore on the Alaskan coast. 

Since then these ducks have been found in Hawaii, South America, Australia, and traveling slowly inside the Arctic ice. But 2,000 of the ducks were caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents moving between Japan, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and the Aleutian islands. 

Items that get caught in the Gyre usually stay in the Gyre, doomed to travel the same path, forever circling in the same waters—but not always. Their paths can be altered by a change in the weather, a storm at sea, or a chance encounter with a pod of whales.

20 years after the rubber ducks were lost at sea, they are still arriving on beaches around the world and the number of ducks in the Gyre has decreased. 

This means it is possible to break free. Even after years of circling the same waters it is possible to find a way to shore.”

This isn’t a column about rubber ducks, but the history lesson did strike a chord with me. As I see it, the duck gyre paralleled one of the great mysteries of the human experience. 

Do we risk it and break free?

Imagine a fork in the road of life. A fork in the road, in my opinion, leaves me three choices. Go back, go left, or go right. 

Any one of these three choices can lead me to repeat old habits or force me to adopt new ones. Choice can lead me to stumble and fall. 

Choice can lead me to leap and fly. 

Choice can produce the flat stare, make me use swear words; make me laugh, cry, smile or jump for joy. Choice can lead to wonderful experiences I’ve longed for, some lessons I’ve needed to learn and some I wish I’d never known.

What I know for sure is that I don’t want to be one of the lifers who are destined to travel the path of least resistance, forever circling in the same waters and not thinking I have the power to choose. I don’t want to wait around for my course to be altered by a pod of whales or a windy day.

I want to be the one to break free.

The music band “Five for Fighting” challenges with their lyrics, “What kind of world do you want?”

I’d like to think simpler times would be nice. Times that don’t crowd our days and nights with stress and worry and the incessant blathering of television news programs that perpetuate the frenzy and hype of the terrible misfortune of others.

The suffocating obsession of what one psychiatrist termed “cheap grief” recently put forth in the aftermath of the Connecticut disaster, I think, bodes of a troublesome addiction.

In my opinion, the slogan “The More You Know” does not apply here.

Pay attention to the magic of life

Just when I think I’ve lost my way, life gives me a little something to work with and the clear message that I need to take a deep breath and step outside of what I think is safe. Sometimes I just have to believe.

I was sitting in a local restaurant enjoying a Reuben sandwich, with one juicy mouthful in full swing. Long chewy strands of sauerkraut hung from my lips as the woman approached my table, where I sat with one of my grandchildren. 

The little person of my heart was busy dipping a French fry repeatedly in ketchup and licking off the red glob. We’d been talking about letters to Santa Claus and the excitement of waking up on Christmas morning to find our stockings filled with candies and other delights. 

The little person of my heart was explaining to me how Santa managed to fit himself into each house—even the ones that didn’t have chimneys.

My sandwich was warm and my attention was focused on how good it tasted and on listening to the conversation that revolved around the magic of Santa.

In that moment I was a living, breathing associate member of the “Power of Now” club. Nothing outside of that moment existed—until the woman stopped at our table. 

I looked up at her standing over me and, feeling a piece of sauerkraut dangling from my lip, pushed it in with my finger as she promptly put her hand on the top of my shoulder.

This woman, with tousled gray-hair and dressed in sweat pants and a big overcoat, wasn’t someone I knew nor had I ever met. She was a complete stranger.

I’m not normally easily startled and initially I wasn’t in that moment, until I felt her fingers apply what I can only term as a direct and clamping pressure to the muscles near my neck where she had touched me.

I know my eyebrows rose. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t have time.

She looked directly into my eyes with palpable urgency and without blinking said, “There is no choice you've ever made, nor any you will ever make, that will limit you as much as you may fear. Get the mud out of your wings. Do it now.”

And then she let go of me, turned and walked out of the restaurant.

My grandchild hadn’t stopped poking the French fry in ketchup during that few seconds of mysterious intervention. I, on the other hand, had to reach up and catch my dropped jaw before the masticated sauerkraut tumbled out of my mouth onto my plate.

The little person of my heart licked off another red glob and said most confidently, “I’ve seen your wings Granny and they aren’t muddy. You just have to believe you can fly and then leap, like I do.”

There is a quote by an unknown sage that reads,” The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is—a miracle and unrepeatable.”

That’s the truth.

Cheers for great rears!

Sometimes writer’s block is an unexpected and unsavory visitor in my neck of the woods and, yet, when it arrives I am compelled to welcome that dried-up guest honorably. It is usually clearing me out for some new delight. Last week it happened to be cookies.

Of course I ate too many of the little devils and gained five pounds overnight. A diet of lettuce and water then ensued because of a looming date with a swanky little Christmas party dress.

Where did the time go? The last time I looked it was September and I had three months to lose enough weight to be able to fit the dress that I bought one size too small on purpose. How stupid was that?

Suddenly the clock is ticking and if I don’t get my rear in gear that swanky little party dress is going to explode before I get the thing pulled down over my thighs. 

This is where Sara Blakely stepped in and mailed me a lovely little goodie box from southern Ontario and, no, it was not a box of chocolates.

I got the delivery notice in the mail and had to wait until the next day to pick up the package at the post office. It was all I could not to be standing outside the door at sunrise doing the happy dance and waving my little delivery notice in the morning breeze while eating my second cinnamon bun with icing.

What was in the box would fix everything. Ms. Blakely was the seamstress magician, the dream team coordinator of fat molecules, the queen of the undergarment policing committee.

Sara Blakely was going to save my keister with “Spanx.”

Each summer when I was growing up my mom would buy me a new pair of shoes for the start of the school year. I kept the shoe box under my bed and every once in a while I would open it up with such anticipation of the contents.

I freely admit that the thrill of opening my lovely little goodie box from Spanx rated right up there with that childhood excitement.

When I lifted the lid, there it was  . . . wrapped most perfectly in red tissue paper . . .  the miracle worker of this woman’s world.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got your butt covered! Cheers to great rears!” was written inside the box cover, along with translations in eight other languages. How cool was that?! I had something in common with big bums all over the world.

I carefully unfolded the wrapping and slipped my hand inside the garment bag and pulled out a pint-sized slip of spandex hardware.

Suddenly I was stock-still like the 100-year old frozen man in the James Taylor song of the same name and I was sure I was off my rocker. 

I had a déjà vu flashback to a column I wrote in December 2004 after I’d wedged myself into a similar contraption, when “all my softwear was packed into the hardware like an hourglass. So what if it took a chisel and vice to put it on.”

And then I remembered what it was like to have to get out of the thing at the end of the night.

From what I can recall anyone standing within 20 feet of me would have suffered a black eye when off came the body-shaper in one big bang and flew like a slingshot as my womanhood decompressed. 

Shake my head. Here I go again, and girls, make sure your captain isn't watching and then for go it! Cheers to great rears! 

Food for thought is the recipe I share

I ruminated for six days on the contents of this column and came up empty-handed. I went to bed on it, woke up on it and still nothing.

I installed the ritual chocolate and black tea (the best combination since Saturday and Sunday) that are my known catalysts for inspiration, and then proceeded to eat more than my allotted share of the “Dairy Milk” fruit and nut version with hopes that the extra sugar rush would flood the keyboard with ideas. Still nothing, save a strong urge to make myself throw up.

I was sitting at my desk and “Millie” the cat was nestled on my bed as a chocolate burp erupted from me. She gave me a slit-eyed flat stare that smacked of “don’t even think about it lady. Barfing is my department.”

I’d also just spent the entire weekend alone and while I embraced the change in plans, it was something I hadn’t done in a very, very long time. I half-expected the quiet solitude to raise my writer’s imagination to new levels. Alas, still nothing.

Even though I was on solo, conversations abounded. I’ve always talked to myself. Even in the local grocery store I’ve been known to do this, much to the raised eyebrow of the passerby who catches me talking to the selection of peanut butter.

I never will be bored if stranded alone on a desert island. I know this for sure.

I’ve been known to carry on rather interesting chat sessions on a wide variety of topics with “Yours Truly.” However, the conversations I engaged in this weekend were mostly with inanimate objects like the hammer that slammed into my thumb during a repair job on the plastic covering my screen porch, and the electrical outlet in the garage that I couldn’t find in the dark when I tried to plug in my Christmas lights. Some of that frank discussion was censored material that shall not be repeated here.

Sometimes if I leave the writing table and mess around with a mundane task the ignition on my imagination will light up, so this time I pulled out my recipe drawer and started sorting.

Evidently I am a pack rat. One hour later and none the word wiser, I had a bigger pile of useless, undeniably unappealing recipes on the floor for garbage than what remained in the drawer.

I rolled my eyes and shoved my hand into a baggie that contained assorted and yellowing newspaper cut outs of recipes. I’d had that little collection for at least eight years. It had been given to me. I’d thrown the baggie in the drawer and never looked inside—until now.

I pulled one out.

“Writer’s Block Cookies,” I said, reading what was printed at the top of the 4” x 2” snippet. I laughed out loud and then stared blankly at the unquestionable moment that had just aligned itself with me.

Food for thought is the recipe I share. (True story by the way.)

Writer’s Block Cookies

1 cup butter, softened, 1 ½ cups dark brown sugar, 2 eggs, 2 tsp vanilla, 2 tsp water, 2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp salt, 2 tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp ground cloves, ½ tsp allspice, 2 cups rolled oats, 1-2 cups raisins.

Preheat oven to 350F. Cream butter until light and fluffy. Gradually add sugar. Add eggs, vanilla and water and beat until smooth. Sift dry ingredients together. Add to the butter mixture and mix well. Fold in oats and raisins. Drop by spoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet, leaving enough space for the cookies to spread out. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, until golden. Makes 2 dozen large cookies.

Litte Miss Pioneer goes to hunt camp

I’ve always considered myself a “Northerner.” I’m a hardy soul at home in the elemental outdoors. I grew up loving the open air of the wilderness and I still do.

I also think I would have made a great pioneer woman in the Midwest tending to a small little cabin in the quiet wilderness and living a simple life with my hunter, gatherer, farmer man.

If given the choice today between a primitive cabin in the middle of nowhere or a swanky hotel across from the best shopping plaza, the cabin would win hands down. 

Yet, all of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. I read somewhere that “taking small children into a house with a white carpet” is one of those moments.

I admit that walking down a bush path to the “loo” in the dark of night is one of them too.

And when your hide hangs out in the elements while perched on a makeshift toilet for all the night creatures to see—a toilet that is devoid of four walls and a door—in the freezing cold of a November night, and your flashlight goes out and you drop the toilet paper and it goes rolling down the little hill away from you—into the dark, well, this too tests one’s courage.

Said pioneer woman also should not have picked up her flashlight and shone it into the dark forest that surrounded her. The “Blair Witch Project” was the only thing that came to mind.

I’m sure the look on my face, if captured on canvas, would have sold for a higher bid than Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” did in auction at Sotheby’s.

The famous image of a man holding his head screaming under a streaked, blood-red sky may be the modern symbol of human anxiety but that night I held the world record for the fastest pee.

This was part of my initiation and introduction to hunt camp a couple of weekends ago and despite the “loo business,” it was one of the best weekends I’ve had all year. Hands down.

I was invited to the secret hideaway by a certain outdoorsman who come the fall season, trades his Sperry deck shoes for hunting boots and the helm of his sailboat for a deer stand. 

I was so thrilled to be a part of the wilderness project that I drove the trip with a dose of brave counsel after sunset watching as civilization rose before me and then behind me sank again. I ventured into the middle of nowhere to a destination I had only seen once in the daylight from the passenger’s seat.

I managed this feat of bravery wearing my “big girl” pants while eating chocolate bars and listening to Stan Rogers chant songs about cracking the ramparts of the unknown.

All I knew for sure was that the huntsman would meet me at “the junction” and I was to watch for his headlights on a side road 20 miles into desolation.

I’d be living in a canvas tent with a woodstove for two cold nights in November with a man I hoped would not abandon ship when he saw my camping pajamas.

I arrived safe and sound and when I saw the tent, its chimney stack billowing puffs of smoke, and the glow of the warm light emanating from inside, I was sure I’d just stepped back in time. It looked like the old photographs I’d seen of my grandfather in logging camp in 1932.

I couldn’t find the words to tell the huntsman how much fun I was already having and I hadn’t even rolled out my sleeping bag on the little cot over in that corner. The fact that the cot spoke to me of Ibuprofen before and after sleeping on it fazed me not—and the little fire crackling in the woodstove was more divine than a whole package of “Dove” chocolates.

Supper the first night (and second night) was the huntsman’s homemade recipe—and this man can cook.The meat was tender, the vegetables crisp—and then I asked what it was that I was eating. 

“Texas Antelope Stew,” he replied between spoonfuls.

I gulped down the chunk in my mouth without chewing as I quietly reviewed my knowledge of antelope. There are 91 species most of which live in Africa and I was pretty sure none were loping around in this neck of the woods, so . . . .

A well-known smile and chuckle erupted from the cook when I asked for a qualified answer on just what I was eating. Thankfully he’d substituted venison. 

Morning of the deer hunt came early. 4 a.m. to be exact. I peeled open an eyelid and cracked a smile as the hunter began his morning ritual of stoking the fire, consuming bold brewed camp coffee and breakfast before his long walk to the deer stand before sunrise.

Had he any idea how much fun I was having just being there? I was enjoying the moment. I’d gone back in time and the world had once again dropped away, freeing me from the stressors of a fast-paced whirlwind of responsibilities.

I had a really great time in good company in a little canvas tent in the middle of nowhere on a cold weekend in November.

“This is definitely an element I enjoy,” I wrote in my diary later than morning, except when I had to make mad dashes to the “loo.” Sitting out there in the open wild in shivering constitution even in the daylight—well, that’s another story. 

The cat never forgets who rules the roost

Cat barf. It’s the one globule in this world that I wish I didn’t have to clean up. In fact, I would trade cat barf detail for sifting the solids out of the litter box any day.

In my the neck of the woods, cat barf rates right up there on my nemesis scale with the eight-legged arachnid, mostly because I usually find cat barf with my slipper or spilled over the edge of a cat bed and onto the nice new throw pillow I just purchased.

And said cat of barf just looks at me from her chair of monarchy with a slit-eyed sneer that smacks of, “thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this. Please clean that up.”

Pam Brown once penned, “Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause the most inconvenience.”

I know this statement is true because never in the heaving stage before a barf does “Millie” jump off her cat bed and scamper into the bathroom to the “Ralphing” throne and barf. Nope.

Murphy’s Law says cats work out their innards right where they happen to be sitting.

The only time I know the cat has been at the bathroom throne is when I find kitty paw marks on the toilet seat after she’s drunk the toilet water.

And inevitably I discover this after she’s been in my arms, making amends for the cat barf on the pillow and rubbing her wet whiskers against my cheek.

And then I have a momentary lapse of memory before snapping back to reality to find myself standing over the cat (that is now curled up and sleeping on my reading chair) with my mouth in a tight and evil grin, my eyes wide and bulging and my arms held up in front of me with the fingers on both hands curl over like eagle talons.

I caught a reflection of myself in the mirror and, yes, I looked like a demented cartoon character having a nervous breakdown.

Just as I disengaged my fangs and retracted my claws “Millie” woke up, sprawled onto her back in a “don’t you just love me” gesture, stretched out and poked the sharp nails of her back feet through the microfiber material on the chair three or four times, did a double twist and vaulted into the kitchen to the front door.

The still, small voice of doubt about the pros and cons of feline ownership was getting louder when I opened the door to let her outside but the mice strewn around the yard like a rodent civil war battle of 1812 paid the rent on my dissatisfaction.

Sure I complain. Yet, when push comes to shove, my cat always wins because even though it has a rather independent soul, it carries the same unconditional love message of all pets and I never get tired of being reminded of that.

Now if I could just teach “Millie” to deter skunks and ground hogs like old “Dot” did, I’d have it made. But something tells me a cat that drinks from the toilet is about as talented a feline as I’m going to get.