The day I've been waiting for

We were sitting at the kitchen table shelling peanuts and enjoying the salty taste, sipping on a “London Porter,” and reviewing the day’s successes after a pleasant afternoon of ice fishing when he said, “the next time we go ice fishing I think we should go for trout.”

My heart leapt. I tried to contain my inner childlike glee because I’d been hoping he’d say that for weeks now.

I smiled big, my head bobbed back and forth in agreement as I chomped on a mouthful of peanuts and swallowed hard so I could bounce back with, “That would be great. I’m game,” while trying not to give away my absolute enthusiasm at the prospect of landing a fighting machine, cousin to a salmon.

I would take ten-fold passage over to the adventure.

Immediately I pictured myself landing a record weight prize that would take me an hour to reel in. I would use every muscle I had to pull it through the ice hole. Maybe I’d have to cut a bigger hole just to get it out. The trout would be so big I wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Photographs of my catch would appear in newspapers across Northwestern Ontario and Minnesota. My name would become a link in “Wikipedia” references to lake trout.

“But there’s only one catch,” added the smooth talking outdoorsman. I brushed off the cautionary tale I heard in his voice as he stroked his beard in contemplation.

I was too busy thinking about what kind of jig I was going to use to land that rod-snatching bulldog cheetah of freshwater that www.in-fisherman.com had convinced me was the ultimate challenge for this new-born ice fisherwoman.

“The one catch is that we have to snowshoe two miles in to get to the lake I want to take you to,” he said, giving me that anticipatory raise of eyebrow and a smile I knew all too well.

I coughed up the peanut I inhaled in the realization of the price I was going to have to pay to get my trout. Suddenly I wished I hadn’t written that column about the Snowshoe Olympics and my big, fat ego. I had to fight back my “Yosemite Sam” impersonation that was surfacing as fast as that hooked fish I’d been dreaming about.

“Sure,” I replied. “I can do that,” I sputtered, switching gears in my head to rent workout videos so I could get in shape for the day when I would strap on beavertails and channel Dora Keen, Marion Randall Parsons, and Mary Jobe, my three pioneering outdoorswomen heroines, so that I could walk the walk.

A new website I’ve been put on to is www.thelostartofmanliness. I’m at the other end of the spectrum from manly and yet it’s a really great read. I, too, can relate to the story within the story that speaks to memories of youth and gym class.

I dreaded gym class all the time. I loved exercise but I didn’t like gym suits and I didn’t like fitness tests because I could never run as fast as Janelle or jump as high as Janelle. She was the bomb. She got the gold. I got the “below bronze, participatory badge” for effort.  Always.

But I will snowshoe the two miles. I will do whatever it takes to get to that lean, mean fighting machine that is swimming in those deep waters out there in a northern lake and has no idea who’s coming for him.

I win.

Little Miss discovers blue-sky thinking

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and wrote some blues.” The late great Duke Ellington had the right idea.

Sadly, I can pout with the best of them, but I cannot read, write, nor play a lick of music. 

When I pout, all my energy goes into finding a piece of chocolate I stashed in the cupboard, which then leads to the blues because I always eat more of it than I should. 

Hmm, not exactly the kind of productive energy transference Mr. Ellington was talking about.

“I’d stop eating chocolate but I’m no quitter.” Now that’s more like me.

I’m grasping at straws here, wrapped in layers of wool sweaters and a side dish of feeling sorry for myself as another cold night passes through the walls of this old house and into my bones.

I keep thinking of what it would be like to do what my friend Don and so many others do this time of year—drive south until the butter melts.

Someday I will. I’m going to put a pound of butter on a plate in the passenger seat and see how far I have to go before it withers. Some day my time will come when I can blow the cold a goodbye holiday kiss.

But for now what I can do, what I do know how to do is take a really, really hot shower. Lobster hot. It is my escape pod in the deep freeze of winter, my weapon against the blues that chocolate cannot fix.

I’m a hot shower aficionado. In fact if lobster hot showers were an Olympic sport I’d win a gold medal for Canada, even at 53 years old. I’d be an icon of the ages, the oldest woman in history to land a gold medal at the Olympic games. That would be me.

Even “Sochi 2014” champions could not ski, speed skate, nor snowboard their way to the center podium against my lobster hot showers and me.

I win.

The Winter Olympics always get me fired up. I ingested the gold medal Canadians Alexandre Bilodeau, Charles Hamelin, and the Dufour-Lapointe sisters from their Sochi performances and I then I braved the cold weather and set off on my solo quest, chest puffed out, my Olympic-sized ego in tow as I tore down to the frozen creek bed in thigh-deep drifts of unstirred snow, dreaming of my very own Snowshoe Olympics.

And then I got stuck about half way to the starting line. Stuck like cement shoe stuck.

Suddenly I lay prone in the snow after throwing myself backwards in a “flip-out” fit mixed with hopes of wedging free.

I was stuck there long enough that my desire for Olympic greatness passed in favor of cloud spotting and a membership in Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s “Cloud Appreciation Society” (look it up, yes, it’s real.)

The sun was shining, the sky was azure blue, and I saw a cloud that looked like my old dog, “Dot.”

“Clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.”

No Olympic snowshoe race could beat that. I still win.

Hooked, line and sinker, on ice fishing

Ice fishing. I tried it for the first time two weekends ago and all I’ve thought about since is how much fun I had and “When can we go again?”

Where have I been all my life that I didn’t try ice fishing until now? I live in northwestern Ontario for crying out loud!

And not only did I just have my inaugural experience with the sport, but it also was only the second time I’d ever been in a vehicle on a frozen lake ice road and the first time I’d gotten out and walked on water I might sail on one day or drive a motor boat across. How cool was that!

I’ve often written ‘I don’t get out much.’ I never realized until now just what that meant in the context of my evidently small bubble world.

I risk guffaws when I say that the entire ice fishing experience drew as much awe from me as when a small child realizes that Santa Claus just left presents under the Christmas tree. It’s the truth.

I’m 53 and for the first time I watched a manual-driven ice auger go through the ice like it was cutting butter—the volcano of ice shavings pouring forth from the blades loud in their sawing and then muffled by the choke of the icy blue below. Amazing.

I remember staring at that 15-20 second process and saying “Wow!” over again as if I had just seen something magic happen. (Like I said, I don’t get out much.)

And then there was the ice fishing hut, green canvas, and wooden floor, carried across the ice as a suitcase and unfolded like a charm. Suddenly my small bubble world was located in the middle of a frozen lake and included a cozy shelter and a heater. What could be better than that?

And there we were inside, he and I, each of us with an ice fishing pole and a hole—and oh! —did I mention I had a chair to rest my bones upon, and hut temperatures that allowed me to remove my mitts and hat while outside the mercury crawled up the thermometer to -20C? Awesome.

Sunlight reached through snow-covered ice—who knew!—and the ice hole lit up and the minnow on my hook, on its way down down down, glowed until I couldn’t see it anymore. It was a thing of beauty inside the dark hut space. Amazing.

“Fishy Fishy bite my hook. You be the captain, I’ll be the cook.”  (Yes, I actually chanted that a few times.)

I’ve read the ice fishing advice that suggests that the best thing about ice fishing, especially if you’re getting into it for the first time, is that you don’t need a lot of equipment. True, particularly if a fishing partner like mine brings all the stuff I need, including chocolate.

But that wasn’t the best thing about ice fishing, especially for a first-timer like me. The best part, the part I will never forget, was pulling up my line with my hands, in what seemed like a forever moment, and spotting the fish I hooked, lit up in the light of the ice hole like a piece of gold as I pulled it through.

Now that, folks, was a Kodak moment.

What I still know to be true

Just the other day during a quiet moment on the drive home from a wonderful day of snowshoeing, my good friend gently said to me,  “and you have an anniversary coming up?”

I turned my head in his direction with a curious stare of pause.

“An anniversary? No. No anniversary,” I replied, returning to look upon the road to home.

My intuitive friend is a gem, and he knows what is coming. Alas, so do I.

Yet, I was trying to convince myself that two years post would allow the day to pass without feeling it so much. 

Who was I kidding? I’m certainly not kidding my friend, and if he’s clued in, then I’m certainly unable to kid myself either.

As much as I would like to believe there is no anniversary, no annual observation of a past event, I would be in denial or naïve, or both, if I awoke January 19^th and didn’t face what that day means in the journal of my life.

“Courtney,” who writes ‘athoughfulplaceblog.com’ penned exactly what I am feeling now, and I applaud her insightful words.

“I am not one to sugar coat and I am not one to avoid that which is so clearly in my face. Since the very day [two years ago] I have chosen to walk, crawl, wade, and trudge through the grief. I have to own it and build my life within the context of it. I will not let it consume me but rather shape me into the best person I can be.”

All that I am is measured by the year, this being the second one.

I still believe that making it to the anniversary date of any major traumatic event in life is a milestone of legendary proportions and each of us comes to it in different ways.

I also believe it is a sacred journey. No one but me can decide how to take each step towards healing.

January 19^th, a part of me wants to walk out into the yard at 4:30 p.m. to the spot where life changed in an instant and where I can stand and try to make sense of things.

My good and caring friend thinks it might be a day to instead do good things for myself—take a warm foot bath, a good book in hand, and enjoy some chocolate.

He would, of course, be correct.  

Once again, I am going to get up at sunrise and live the day as fully as I can. I am alive. I am here. I am full of possibility.

I continue to read “The Language of Letting Go,” by Melody Beattie, my nightingale of freedom.

There’s not a morning that goes by where Ms. Beattie doesn’t impress upon me a valuable lesson about giving up control. I let life in and it unfolds before me.

“Sometimes, it takes more courage to do the ordinary things in life than it does to walk to the door of the airplane and jump.”

Bad things happen in life—now there’s a no brainer.

“What matters is not what happens to us, but how we react to it. You can sit around and complain to your friends about how unfair life is, or you can get up, put the empty bowl in the dishwasher, and go fill up your life.”

I have the courage to live my life, to walk my path every day, right where I am. And if I don’t, I will try again tomorrow.

.

Free to choose my own path

What if I had turned left in the hallway at the college I was attending in the fall of 1980? 

What if I had turned left and found a lounge chair in a window vestibule and plopped myself there during a cancelled class instead of going to the cafeteria for a big cornmeal muffin and a coffee.

If I had turned left on that November morning some 33 years ago, how would my life be different today? 

If I had turned left I wouldn’t have met the man I married a year later, after we met in the college cafeteria that day. If I had turned left, I wouldn’t have been punched during that marriage, which ultimately ended it, even though I spent seven more years in it trying to muster the courage to stand up.

I would venture to guess that I am not the only one who has wished at some point in life that I could go back in time and change something in order to get a better outcome. 

I think that’s part of the human experience—wishing things could be different sometimes—and fantasizing, or obsessing perhaps, about how if given the chance to do it over again how we would change a thing.

If I had turned left 33 years ago it would have changed everything, perhaps resulted in some happier times, but also would have denied me the birth of my three beautiful daughters. So, no, I wouldn’t change a thing. 

Besides, that marriage not only gave me motherhood, it also taught me that I am courageous and brave hearted.

I believe in the butterfly effect—that anomalous, mysterious interconnected web to which we all belong. If we truly could go back and change something in our past, it would change everything, as we know it to be in our present day.

I wouldn’t do it.

Melody Beattie says it is easy to romanticize what we don’t know. I venture to say it also is easy to romanticize the past too. But I think it is much more productive to make a storyboard for tomorrow where possibility is alive and well.  

I guess all this fodder has come up to greet me because it’s a new year and I want to meet it fully, and because I am approaching another of those cold memory days that a part of me begs to rewrite. Frankly, I don’t want to because that would change today and I have some very good things in my “now.”

And as Beattie writes, and I concur, “Life is a high-risk sport, and I may become injured along the way. I agree that all the decisions I make are mine and mine alone, including how I choose to handle the events that are beyond my control.”

I am in fact about to sign a page-long waiver that Beattie created, as my new year’s resolution—one that will help me take responsibility for the choices I’m going to make in my life this year.

Left or right, it’s up to me the path I choose.

Here's to another year of discovery

Who are you?
Can you answer this question without using a name title? 

You are not a daughter or son, woman or man, a wife, a husband, a mother, a father, a single parent, or a grandparent. 

You are not a supervisor, or a secretary, divorced, or a homemaker, a cashier, or a farmer, and you are not “retired.”

If you aren’t allowed to use these common identities as part of your response, then who are you?

This task is not easy because it means going beneath the crust of our every day existence to the core—perhaps where no you has gone before—and not everybody wants to get to know and give words to who exists inside.

There might be a light and bright side in there or perhaps a dark side, where shortcomings and other self-stuff we’d rather not look at, lay in dusty piles.

I think it would make a great conversation among good friends, who could hold each other accountable to the “rules” that come with the question, but then I’m the adventurous type. 

“Who am I” is the question in my life as I perch on the edge of 2014, still searching purposes and paths, still burying the gone and the dead, and reinventing the living of my life. 

As always, this last column of the year has been my dancing partner for many months. We tango and waltz together through the meandering experiences of everyday life, gathering up all my best lessons of the year, be they hard to swallow or a joy to remember. 

I keep working my way forward—sometimes inching along, sometimes leaping, sometimes stumbling backwards and falling into old patterns. I’m still learning to accept whatever it is I’m feeling and then let it go and then go forward.

Every day I try to make a conscious choice about the “how” of my living—to let go of expectations and be true to myself. I think it’s the most challenging job of my life and will be, lifelong. 

I also continue to endorse that another of my greatest personal challenges is to practice the six little words I often have written about. I think by far it’s the greatest gift a true friend can give another. “Mouth closed, ears open, presence available.”  

I recently read a magazine article where Maria Shriver had been interviewed about her life and I was impacted by the words of advice she offered up about living an authentic life. 

“You have to be willing to let go of the life you planned in order to make the life you’re meant to live.”   

I think I’ve been trying to find my way back to who and where I used to be and maybe I’m not supposed to do that. 
I think I have to admit that the really tough life experiences I’ve had took some of the Beth out of the Beth and I’m not going to get her back. I have to stay open to the newer, refined version. 

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.

I’m staying wide open. 

Shriver also said, “First, you have to slow your life down to find out if you’re actually living the life you are meant to live. Are you just gliding? Are you a dead woman or dead man walking? It’s your job to know who you are. What do you value? What’s your mission? What makes you happy? It’s your job to figure that out today, because that’s really what you’re supposed to be doing here.”

Who am I? Imperfect, genuine, and very, very lucky to be me. 

Happy New Year everyone. May you go forward getting to know yourself better.  

A backwards day is what you make of it

I’ve never been one to wake up on a Monday morning and lament that it is indeed Monday. I never figured there was much point in that. I suppose it’s my “glass half-full” mentality. 

I also would rather be caught eating a whole chocolate cake by myself than actually look for reasons why I should anticipate being crabby about the day—Monday or not.

My positivity was challenged one recent Monday morning while hopping around trying to get my other foot into my underwear. 

“Get ready,” the voice on the Internet radio station warned. “The most depressing day of 2014 is just around the corner, folks.”

“On January 20^th you are going to have a really bad day,” said the radioman.

“It’s true,” he said. “A math guy worked six factors into the mix and came up with a formula for “Blue Monday.”

“You’ll wake up and realize you’re in debt doo-doo, the sun won’t be shining enough, your holiday spirit will be deflated, you’ll have failed to keep your New Year’s resolutions AND,” the radio voice emphasized, “you won’t have a lick of motivation left to dig yourself out—not to mention there won’t be anymore holidays for three and a half months.”

I stood there in my bedroom with one leg poised to go into the leg hole of my underpants, frozen aghast by the grim brick wall of hopelessness I’d just been handed by the radioman who clearly needed to quit his day job or get a hug from his mother, or maybe both. 

“Prepare for rock bottom, we’ll be cold, miserable, in debt, out of shape, and losers because we’ve flushed our willpower about our New Year’s resolutions down the loo,” he stressed, and then burst into a fit of laughter that made me think the cheese had just slid off his cracker. 

Suddenly I was thrown into a turbine of mixed emotions. This news was supposed to help me? This was what I had to look forward to—before the sun had even risen on that far off January day?

“A formula?” I said with an out loud disgust as I fought with my underwear.

“So that’s it? On Monday, January 20^th I’ll be a Vitamin D-deprived, miserable, dead-broke loser? “What’s up with that?" I squealed.

The only credible formula I was aware of in that moment contained six fundamental forces of the Universe and Blue Monday hadn’t made the list.

They were magnetism, gravity, duct tape, whining, the television remote control, and the force that pulls dogs toward the groins of strangers. American writer and humorist Dave Barry had said so.

Yet suddenly my fine little Monday morning was all shook up with discontented seeds of thought rot.

I was crabby and the crow’s feet around my eyes tightened and sharp flashes shot from my corneas across the room—missing the laptop screen by a hair.

And because I’d been too busy listening to the predictions of how my day would go in 30-some more sleeps I’d ended up with my panties on backwards.

“Attitude is everything,” I told myself as I rushed through the rest of my morning routine, feigning a smile while slamming my pinkie finger in the sock drawer and choking back a few choice words when I realized 10 minutes after leaving home that I’d left my coffee mug on the counter.

By the time I got to work—late—the misery level was rising until when in the loo later that morning I realized I also had my underwear on inside out.

I smiled a winner’s smile. 

Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.”

I’m right. I can wear my underwear backwards and inside out and, still, I can have a good day. As for Blue Monday, I think I’ll eat chocolate cake that day and celebrate.

Warm thoughts on a cold night

As I wrote this column the evening of December 9^th, the thermostat outside read “deep freeze with a side order of wind chill,” just shy of -30C. Nothing is fun or heartwarming about that.

It is the kind of winter weather that demolishes my otherwise fervent outdoor spirit. The bullish cold drives me to overeat and to sleep, two enemies of the seasonal slowing of metabolic body chemistry and two enemies I cannot afford to entertain if I’m to maintain the status quo on this pleasantly curvy Greek figure of mine.

So I guess it goes without saying that I should not have just eaten three of those melt-in-your-mouth little round truffle balls, huh? I take solace in the minimum 43% cocoa content of the dark “Lindt” lovelies.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” is playing on the stereo. It’s James Taylor in a duet with Natalie Cole. The sound of their voices made me swoon, as I popped another truffle and danced solo around the living room.

“Millie” the cat lifted her head from the “spoiled cat” pillow on the sofa and flat stared me as I swirled about, lost inside the song and dreaming about that hot toddy recipe on my holiday celebration “to-do” list.

I danced, smiling, in front of my Christmas tree, its branches decorated with the ornamental history of my life.

I love my Christmas tree.

If it wasn’t so doggone cold outside I would have donned my wool underwear and ski pants, stuffed my toes into my Sorels, pulled on that checkered wool coat, grabbed the leather mitts, a face mask, scarf, and my Cossack hat and made good on my annual peek.

When I was a kid I wished I could hide inside our Christmas tree and gaze at the world through a rainbow of color—the way the chipmunks did in the Christmas cartoon starring Mickey Mouse. 

Sometimes, I still wish I could do that.

Instead, I do the next best thing. One evening each year during the holidays after the tree is trimmed, I get bundled up, turn out all the house lights except the Christmas ones, and go outside.

Then I pretend I don’t live here and peek in the living room window as a stranger looking in on the Christmas of someone else.

I recall doing this when I owned a mischievous dog that I’d left in the house. As I looked from the outside in, he was trying to climb the Christmas tree to reach one of my favorite J-cloth ornaments.  

I taught Sunday school at Knox United Church here in the early 1990s, and along with the students in my class had made a figure of Jesus out of a green J-cloth. He was a folded and wrapped, soft figurine with a hooded robe. 

Every Christmas since, the faceless humble ornament respectively known to me as “J-cloth Jesus” has sat in my Christmas tree among the branches.

And when I think of all the years since that I have not attended church, I am warmed yet again on a freezing cold day by thoughts of the late Patrick Playfair, who had ministered at Knox United Church here years ago.

By 1996 I’d become “truant” from church services. My well-meaning grandmother at the time had pointed this out to Patrick while the three of us were chatting one day.

Patrick turned to me and said, “That’s okay, I’ve been going for you.” 

It was one of the most profound and heart-warming choices of words anyone had ever offered to me.

Above my writing desk is a framed verse that reads:

“There is a destiny that makes us brothers,

None goes his way alone.

All that we send into the lives of others,

Comes back into our own.”

Gratitude for the small things. Sometimes it is enough to get us through.

A letter is worth its weight in gold

I don’t know what it is lately, but I’m craving an old-fashioned life. 

Maybe it’s the rabbit race and pace of working so much in order to make ends meet that is the red flag for me. 

Perhaps it’s the impending materialistic-driven holiday season and my sense of not wanting involvement in it that is sending me backwards in time. 

Maybe it was a recent mid-November retreat to the bush living in a wall tent, where the only sound was the crackling fire in the wood stove, and the sound of my whittling knife on cottonwood. Simple pleasures.

Whatever the catalyst, I’m craving an old-fashioned way of doing things and it’s got me to thinking about how I could get me some of that.

First off there’s the toe-tapping song, “Old, Old Fashioned” by the Scottish Indie band ‘Frightened Rabbit.’ 

The lyrics ring true. “Turn off the TV, it’s killing us we never speak. There’s a radio in the corner, it’s dying to make us see. Give me soft, soft static with a human voice underneath.”  Uh huh.

While looking for an old diary recently, I came upon some old handwritten letters. I can’t remember the last time I handwrote a letter to anyone. That makes me sad.

In fact I don’t remember the last time I received one either but I do remember what it felt like when I did—the glee in seeing that identifiable backstroke scribble or flowing signature flair on an envelope meant just for me.

The thick pile of handwritten letters I’d found were secured with a stiff rubber band that broke when I flexed it. 

There on top was a letter addressed to me from an old friend, Norrie Godin. I could have picked his handwriting out of a line up. He was a gem of a man. We met in 1979 when I was home from college working for the summer. We were coffee-time pals. He was in his 80s. I was 19 years old. He wrote me faithfully for years.

Under Norrie’s letters were those from Grandma Drennan written to me in the mid-80s when I lived in Thunder Bay. I was a young unknowing new mother with so much to learn and she knew it. Her handwritten paragraphs, thick with advice and family happenings, made me feel like I just might be able to do the parenting thing after all.

My Grampa Caldwell, was a very special man to me. He lived in eastern Ontario and wrote me letters as I was growing up. 

The one I treasure most he wrote in 1960 when I was born. Grampa wrote of the wonderful world I had come into and how much better a place it was because I was here. No matter how many times I read it I feel so loved, with a sense of deep gratitude for the time he took to give me the gift of those words immortalized at his own hand. He died when I was just 14 years old. 

In 2006 I received two very old greeting card boxes filled with letters dating back to the early 1920s that Grampa Caldwell had written to his fiancée Pearl Davis, my grandmother. 

The letters, still in their original stamped envelopes, are filled with the days of their then young lives, future hopes, their love; my history. Many of the letters still contain the pressed flowers Grampa slipped inside.

I’m going to do my best to write more letters by hand and mail them. I have six grandchildren. Who better to share some “old fashioned” richness with than my little peppers.

Lynn Nicholas was on the mark. “Handwritten notes become treasures. Emails get deleted.”

Turn off that computer and pick up the phone. Write a letter.

I think I just found myself a good old-fashioned winter project. Insert smile here. 

Rodents have no shelf life here

My finger tips throbbed as if I’d just plunged them into a bucket of ice, kept them there long enough to start hyperventilating, and then pulled them out and hit each of them with a hammer.

That’s what I get for taking the gloves off on a frigid cold day.

And if it hadn’t been for my heat of the moment temper that ignited my insides when I found my winter boot insoles shredded as ingredients for a squirrel’s nest I think my ice-cold fingers would have broken off and fallen to the garage floor.

I stood frozen and watched as the beady-eyed varmint poked its head out of the wicker basket it was stuffing my boot fur into and gave me a “What the?” stare after I’d thrown a small empty milk carton at the basket because I was too chicken to get any closer. 

I’d come face to face with a rogue squirrel before.

The last time I’d met up with such a rodent in the confines of my garage it had sprung from the shelving unit on to the top of my car and I was suddenly aware that I was blocking the escape route.

His beady and wild eyes met mine and in a move straight out of the “Matrix” movie my upper body leaned back as the squirrel flew by me and out the open door.

I wasn’t going to have a repeat of that epic battle, but the squirrel of the moment had to go.

I started to reason with the little bugger in a language I thought it could understand.

I said in no uncertain terms that if it understood English it would be wise to heed my warning to be gone by the time I got back from work.

“The laws of physics and chemistry are not negotiable,” I said. “Neither is having a dog inside my new car or a squirrel living in my garage.”

And with that, I backed the car out, and as I lowered the garage door I caught a glimpse of grey running across the shelving unit and back into the wicker basket with what looked vaguely familiar as blue flannel from my sleeping bag.

I fumed about the squirrel all day while at work; about ways to sneak up on it, traps I could set for it, and how I could repatriate the fur ball to the other side of the creek with my slingshot. 

My dad made me that slingshot out of wood and rubber when I was 12 years old. It still has Olympic potential.

It took everything I had not to race home at the end of my workday, my obsession to thwart the garage intruder foremost in my mind, but of course I live on a lousily maintained road just outside of town that is not fit for an ambulance patient, let alone a brand new car. It’s always a turtle’s pace drive.

I parked the car in the yard and walked over to the garage and lifted the door, turned on the lights, stopped, watched, and listened. The wicker basket was vibrating with activity. The scratching and ruffling noise was ceaseless. 

I suddenly missed my canine capers very much and especially “Dot, who could clean the clock of any varmint I set her upon.

I had so many better things to do than have a face-off with the squirrel and in that moment I would have traded dealing with it for cleaning up copious amounts of cat barf and big, hairy spiders.

I walked towards the wicker basket and yelled in my big pants voice at the squirrel, expecting it to leap out and land on my face. 

Instead, it bolted down the shelf and darted up the wall to the garage ceiling where it scuttled along upside down above my head, like the spider walk scene from “The Exorcist” movie. 

Before I knew it the squirrel was making a run for it out the open door with me in chase, but by the time I turned the corner outside, all I could see was its grey carcass making a mad dash for it down the driveway with a black cat in hot pursuit.

“Millie” you rock.

My life takes the cake

I just turned 53 years old. Where has the time gone? Where have I been all my life? How did I get here?

Turn around and I was 10. Turn around and I was 21. Turn around and I was 40. Turn around and here I am, not yet on the high side of 50 and yet feeling as if haven’t yet begun to know who I am.

I was born the day before Halloween and as a kid; my birthdays always were full of spooky celebrations with my girlfriends. 

We would sit in the dark and pass around bowls of cold spaghetti, peeled grapes, jiggle Jell-O, and all manner of other pseudo body parts that my mom had cooked up and prepared for us giggly sorts to sink our fingers into and tell ghost stories about until we were creeped out.  It was gross. It was so much fun.

Then, my mom would top it all off with a birthday cake that to this day, is bar none my favorite of all time. I saw it on my birthday ever year as a child from as far back as I can remember until I was probably 12 years old.  

Those same birthday cakes each year rate above the super awesome “death by chocolate” birthday cake my mom makes for me today—and not because they tasted better. Believe me, the “death by chocolate” birthday cake is among my version of chocolate principles to live by.

It had a new Barbie doll standing in the middle of an inverted sponge cake that billowed outward and was decorated like Barbie’s party dress. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and best of all; the Barbie was mine when all the cake was gone.

Inside the cake, my mom had hidden ten-cent pieces wrapped in wax paper. Magically we all managed to find a dime in our piece of cake. It was amazing and I, for one, felt rich.

When I was growing up I heard stories of how when I was one year old, I put my face in my birthday cake. Plunk. Just like that. Oh, the undeniable free spirit of the young at heart.

When I turned 18, while sitting around the dining table with my family and friends celebrating my day . . . Plunk. Just like that. Now that was funny.

Between my 24^th and 30^th birthday (the “having kids” years) my birthdays were usurped by diapers and drool. I had made a plan to have all my children born before my 30^th birthday. I just made it. Daughter #3 was born seven days before I turned 30. Whew.

Then suddenly it was 2000, I was turning 40, and I wanted to stop the world and celebrate what was sure to be my best year yet. I don’t have to look very far to see a bald reminder of that Halloween birthday party. One of my friends shaved his head for his “The Rock” Dwayne Johnson costume and has never since grown it back.

And then suddenly it is 2013 and I’m 53. Where has the time gone? Where have I been all my life? How did I get here?

I still have my Barbie dolls in a box. I still love birthday cake, especially “death by chocolate” cake.

And yet I wonder where am I going and what does my future hold as I wake up each morning to be this woman who is learning new things about herself every day? 

Some of it I like. Some of it I don’t.

But what the heck.

I think I will make my life my cake and jump in. Plunk. Just like that.