Four little peppers make a good story

Erma Bombeck said, “Never have more children than you have car windows.”

How about, “Never take more small grandchildren with you to a restaurant than you have arms.”

Recently during a mid-week lull in my calendar of events I put the question to four of my grandchildren, who range in age from 4-7, if they would like to go to the local hamburger place with Granny.

I knew the answer would be unanimous before I finished asking the question. I’d like to think their response was based solely on being with the world’s greatest Granny, but I think fries and kids’ meal toys had more to do with the quartet happily saying “Yes!”

Nonetheless I was thrilled watching them all pile into the car with such enthusiasm. There wasn’t much else I wanted in that moment except that as I got closer to the restaurant and decided I needed a body harness to keep them from exploding from the car in the parking lot like the break shot after the eight ball.

However we made it safely into the restaurant at which point there was a 360 degree shift away from what they wanted to eat and straight to the prize that came with the food. They flitted about the toy showcase like bees in search of honey and I just stood there in awe of all that energy.

A bunch of older gentlemen seated at a table nearby expressed their amusement in loud and healthy guffaws.  I’m sure I heard one guy say, “it’s like nailing J-ello to a tree.”  Uh huh. 

Another man chuckled out something that included the words, “slinky,” “monkey”, “chipmunk,” and “slingshot.” 

Uh huh, that’s my brood too.

I finally nailed down the J-ello long enough to get a food list out of each of them and headed to the counter to make an order.

With my back turned, the four sprites made a dash for the soda fountain machine. When I turned around three of the little critters were giggling and watching as the buttons they were pushing allowed soda pop to run freely from the spouts.

I lassoed them in while pondering the quote by Gene Perret. “My grandkids believe I'm the oldest thing in the world. And after two or three hours with them, I believe it, too.”

I managed to keep them seated for about 10 minutes so they could eat their supper and in the meantime I asked one of my granddaughters if she had learned any new words in school that day.

“Sphinx,” I heard her say. 

“Really?” I said, rather impressed that Egyptian history was on a five-year-old’s education plate. “Sphinx?” I repeated.

“No Granny, ‘Spanx.’

“Spanx!” I blurted out, my eyeballs huge as melons, as I became aware that I still had mine on at the end of the workday.

 “You are learning about Spanx in school?!” I said, stunned.

“No Granny, Space!” We learned about Space,” she replied in an adamant tone.

I burst out laughing when I realized she’d said the same word three times. Perhaps it’s time Granny got an audiogram.

One little pepper needed my help in the bathroom and I left the seven-year-old in charge for two minutes. I came back into the room and my five year old grandson was making the leap from one table top to the other. When he saw the dark cloud of displease forming over my head he cleared the table and did a two-foot dismount, ran and sat down like nothing had happened.

I was getting older by the second.

I wanted to feed all of them loads of chocolate and then send them home to their mothers.

Instead we drove to Pither’s Point and watched from the car as the pelicans, geese, seagulls, and ducks took baths in the cold icy lake water. 

There are no words that do justice to the high-pitched glee that tumbled out of those little children when they were all piled up at the car windows saying “Hello” to the birds of spring. 

Wonderment and joy. That’s what little children are made of.

Looking forward to seeing you, grasshopper

 Life is about to change for the summer. That is of course if we ever GET to a summer season around here, but let’s not open on that line of chronic complaining this time around.

As I said, life is about to change for the summer. The change is vibrant, challenging, stubborn, bakes a mean cheesecake, leaves her bath towel on the floor, loves cats, has been known to leave three days worth of cereal dishes in her room but does her own laundry, stays up later than a vampire, carries an interesting conversation, favors rap and most of all adores her mother.

In a week, Daughter #3 will be home from University and for the next 3 ½ months the chores of dishwasher and meal planner—and for the first time since I moved here nearly seven years ago—the job of lawn maintenance will fall to the youngest of my offspring. Woo Hoo! 

If Melody Beattie has taught me anything about letting go, it’s about giving up control of “Big John,” the most awesome lawn tractor on the planet.

Daughter #3 has been asking to cut the grass for years and I’ve been a control freak about doing it myself. I’m giving up the reins.

I texted her just now with the breaking news. I figured she would be as happy as a lark. All I got back was “Ew.” 

Go figure.

Little does Daughter #3 know—“Ew” or not—there also will be goose poop detail.

By mid-summer my farmyard is a magnet for the flock’s depository. Currently there is just one pair of geese that have staked claims in bare patches of grass near the barn as they feed up before the laying season.

Of course I didn’t help the situation any. The first time I spotted them here a week or so ago, I threw sunflower seeds all over the place to show my support for their arrival.

Stay they did. Feed them and they will come, you fool.

While I was away at work, the geese and several of their cousins wandered hither, pooping and sunning themselves in the most inconvenient place possible—at my back door. As luck would have it I didn’t notice the goosey green turds until I had walked through several of them in my work shoes.

I’m not sure if the poop was a way of saying “thank you,” sort of along the same lines as when I find the dead mouse on the same step after a cat leaves it there for me, suggestive of an oblige for free room and board.

Nonetheless I am pleased to see my feathered friends whose resilience in these unpredictable and unsavory snow days lead me to believe they know something warm and good is just around the corner.

And as far as my grasshopper is concerned, the mother in me looks forward to seeing you step off the plane with that overstuffed suitcase.

It will take a team of wild horses to keep me from running screaming across the tarmac, my arms wide open for hugs and my enthusiasm eager to tell you how much I look forward to having my dishes washed, my supper made, and the grass cut. 

But first let’s eat pizza and watch “chick flicks.”

Welcome home lovey!

Be the thing that moves you forward

“As scarce as the truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.”  How true. How very true.

This is a quote penned by Josh Billings, an American humorist who lived during the 1800’s. His real name was Henry Wheeler Shaw and in the day he was the second most famous humorist in the U.S., next to Mark Twain.

I’d never heard about Billings until last week, when a friend sent me an email with the above quote in it. I’ve thought a lot about Josh Billings since then and I’ve spent some time reading more about this man, who had a wonderful quirky sense of optimism and a wise stroke of words in his penmanship.

Right about now, as snowflakes continue to drib drab the mood of the collective, I’m up for just about any positive vibes I can get my hands on or my head wrapped around, as a warring mechanism against the doldrums of the lingering winter weather.

I was feeling so gunned down by the cold that I turned the corner and vowed with myself to spread sunshine instead of rain.

It all started when I saw a Facebook status Monday morning that read, “Allowing people to drain your energy with their chronic complaints is not kindness, it’s complicity.” How true.

If you are doing the “Spock” eyebrow thing about the word “complicity,” look it up.

Or better yet, look at controlling the things you can do something about and move away from worry about the things you have no affect over. 

I have a truckload of personal experience with co-dependency, a dysfunction I admit to in myself and recognize in others. I continue to teach myself in the language of letting go of it in my life.

Among the lessons? All the alarms go off when I find myself standing within ear shot of a chronic complainer and realize for the umpteenth time that I am a supporter of the negative “Nellys and Neds” of the world if I stick around as their audience. I want to be done with that.

Mike Dooley, a mentor for anyone seeking a positive lifestyle, believes that our thoughts become things and that we should think good ones. I’m a big fan. His daily email is the first good thought I read and absorb every day before I even get out of bed.

Dee Caffari, a British sailor, sailed by herself non-stop around the world in 2006 and 2009, and into the history books as the first woman to do that and to do it in both easterly and westerly directions.

In a radio interview Caffari talked about the greatest lessons she learned while out there, often at “Point Nemo.” (Spock eyebrow again? Look it up.)

Caffari admitted that her default setting was “to say what I don’t want to happen and what I don’t want to do.”

Sound familiar? 

She had to make a conscious effort to change to be a positive person to focus on moving away from what she didn’t want to happen and more toward what she did want to happen.

Repeat after me, girlfriend.  “There is no stronger woman than me, like a train coming down the horizon.” 

Old Man Winter, I insist you desist

“It’s like Chinese water torture—slow and relentless,” he said, sour-toned on the dragging carcass of winter.

I couldn’t have put it better myself in 500 words. But what the heck, I can try.

The weather has played me out and I don’t play out easily. I don’t give up easily either and yet soon—very soon—in fact, perhaps right this minute I’m going to recant everything I said a few weeks ago during a momentary lapse of sanity when I got all syrupy about the emergence of spring.

Little did I know that when I wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all,” that those feathers would molt, revealing a scrawny, half-frozen version of hope that is looking more and more like the wide-eyed demented New Orleans’ voodoo doll that I have sitting on my writing desk.

I think I’ve performed my “Yosemite Sam” temper tantrum three times this week, with each episodic fit involving a piece of winter clothing being stomped flat under my feet before I throw it down the stairs to the basement.

I even caught myself pointing a shaking finger at my scarf and my winter boots as I scolded them like small children for even thinking I was going to wear them again. Watching judgingly was “Millie the Cat” on haunches and with a squinty-eyed expression that said “the boss has lost it.”

Frustration over the lack of spring weather has reached its cold-hearted tentacles into my music library too. Instead of the usual upbeat and peppy tunes rocking my speakers, there’s “Country Girl Kiss-off” music blasting out all manner of “tell him to hit the road and to watch his back 'cause a country girl with an attitude always gets her revenge.”  Say what?

The weather has played me out and I’ve lost all good sense.

At the gas station the other day as I pulled my debit card out of the machine at the counter after buying more chocolate, I caught myself mumbling, “I was going to start eating right today but my ‘give a damn is busted’.”

I looked up to the store clerk whose saucer-eyed open-mouthed stupor meant I’d definitely been listening to “kiss-off” music way too much.

Stupid Old Man Winter.

I’ve even gone so far as to re-share a post to my Facebook page of the image of a snowman pummeled with knives and the caption, “Die, Winter, Die!”  What have I become?! 

Old Man Winter, the word is “enough.” Look it up.

And there I was, ready to pitch a suitcase into the back seat of my car and drive south until the butter melts until I realized I don’t have any holidays until August.

In her book “More Language of Letting Go,” Melody Beattie encourages that during the month of April we learn to identify and say what we want for our lives.

I’m pretty sure she isn’t talking about simple stuff like a little bit of warmer weather—but what the heck.

I want spring to come.

Listening to my inner voice is a sweet challenge

“When you don't know what to do, get still. Get very still until you do know what to do.” 

Oprah Winfrey offered this advice to graduates at Stanford University in California during her commencement address there in 2008.

And she was right. If you are quiet long enough to listen, this advice works.

I know it works because before I got still, I had been pulling out my hair for two hours writing and erasing what I’d written while growing increasingly frustrated by my lack of creative integrity for this column space. I’d about given up for a second straight week on my submission.

What I know for sure is that anyone who know me well, also knows I don’t mince words about what I believe in and what I don’t.

I believe in a magic of sorts; a realm of otherworldly wonders labeled as gut feelings, conscience, and intuition.

I believe these three musketeers don’t lie. Trust your instincts. I believe some things are true whether you believe them or not.

I think these soul bodyguards are everywhere and at work in all our lives in magical countless ways even if we don’t believe in fairy dust and the man in the cape who pulls a rabbit from his top hat.

But you have to get still.

Yet I, as much as the next person, still have much to learn about trusting my gut, my conscience, my intuition, and listening to these messages when they whisper to me in subtle and not so subtle ways in my life.

They are, in my belief, part of the Universal plan and these three musketeers are very patient sages. If I don’t follow their lead, they just hang around in the corners of my circus until the next best opportunity arises in which to flag me.

Of late, my intuition has been tugging at my thought process using chocolate as a motivator. Yes, chocolate.

Thanks to a friend who gets extra brownie points for paying attention to and being interested in the things I love, I now have a book that touts chocolate principles as metaphors for life.

(As a brief aside, I must confess that most mornings I eat a small square of milk chocolate with my coffee, before breakfast. I am passionate about my chocolate.)

“What if you could devour life with the same commitment and passion?” queries the book.

“What do you want? How can you make the right choices if you don’t know what you want or where you are heading?”

I’ve been so busy lately running with the “going with the flow” herd, that I think I might be headed in the wrong direction.

“Never assume that the herd knows where it is going; it usually doesn’t.”

Quite frankly, in my life, I don’t know what my answers are to any of these questions I’m being asked by my musketeers—but I’m taking stock.

How about you? What’s your chocolate?