First Green

My couch is old old old, maybe from the 30's, 20's, or earlier; this is told by the recipe someone invoked to make a couch. The upholstery is a polished cotton, not the original covering, but a subdued facsimile; the material therefore came from a plant, grown from seed and harvested possibly by hand if gathered before 1940. Machinery was invented in the 1850's, but was not economically feasible because slavery was cheaper than running an engine or keeping up with repairs. Anything made before that time likely passed cotton fiber through human hands. 

Inside the couch is more cotton batting, supplanted by horse hair clipped from tails and manes when the horse was put down. The frame is a heavy oak wood grown as a tree for 20 to 30 years (oaks are long-lived and usually produce acorns only when they reach the age of 50), the springs are tempered steel composed of iron, carbon, manganese, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, and oxygen; the webbing is jute, a fibrous reed grown in Asian climates also used for twine and burlap. I am sitting on a once living thing, a composite of life forms and minerals fashioned by human economy. Did I mention that this once alive being has clawed feet? Think of the possibilities.

Considering the age of the couch, it has supported convenience for decades; the minerals, plant, and animal life was stopped or interrupted almost a century ago, then processed from their original form into usable materials. We stopped time for them, the only place to go is into further deterioration and eventual discard. However, I will fight for this couch and care for it as best as I can. How long it will last has already been several someone's lifetimes, but what happens once I relinquish ownership is undetermined. For now, it is still a luxury of history that has timely conversations bouncing inside its frame of coils and fiber. 

It will only be reborn and refurbished at the desire of the owner, a subordinate fancy to what is now occurring in the natural world. Growing things are coming alive again, as it is springtime here in the Northeast of the United States. This area is lucky to have four seasons, with the quickening of spring providing wonder at the newness of, well, everything.

More foals are being born, more reeds are being planted, trees are exhaling oxygen through their leaves once again, brightening the brain. This is the first green, the greenest time before the growing things show stress and breakage by disease or aging.  Everything is fresh, luxuriously lush, with a show of flowering trees and flowers that lean their now exposed necks to the sun.

Oh tulips, oh daffodils, oh crocus, oh green mantles of ferns in the woods. The mushrooms are emerging in the sequence devised by species; morels are early, then arrive agarics, and slime molds (which are adorably beautiful), all rousing from mycelium just under our feet. Fungi form symbiotic relationships with trees, and behave as a wonderful network enabling the trees to communicate with each other through the system of roots and mycelium, it's rather magnificent to imagine.

The yellow green flowering buds are falling off the maples, covering the ground with a carpet of minuscule cups; petals in pinks and rosy reds rain down from the plums and crabapple trees; look carefully for the blue shells of robin's eggs cleaned out from nests. It is a more colorful, abundant, and soothing promise of life beginning again, life that cannot be stopped. 

Snowdrops have passed their time, as has maple sugaring and the first robins; now there are the warblers migrating back, thousands of them passing through at night, headed for summer homes. Go look for them, they are tiny but spilling over with song; chickadees, which stay winter long, are yelling their heads off, nipping at bugs and buds. Lilacs are opening, their rare perfume here for only a short moment. It is busy, this spring. The hardships of winter are folded away like mittens and woolen scarves, not thought of until October frosts return. For now, it is green shoots and mouse-eared leaves.

Crack a window open, to let the cool night air spill over the sill as you sleep, to breathe in the exhalations of the new grass as dreams run over fresh ground, happily digging in with long-legged strides through soft meadows. The constellation of Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, is above with Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper its fainter companion. Follow the line formed by the Big Dipper's ladle and you will come to the tail end of the Little Dipper's handle; this is Polaris, the North Star.

Sleep well, paddle your night coracle through the flowing Milky Way, sweep stars from your path, and catch the little fish that elude time and memory.

Alphonse the Tree

We lived in a house made of stone, the secret being the walls were double thick; a layer of rectangular-cut blocks layered over what only could be called boulders. The house came at a cheap price, as some of the iron rods holding the two layers together had let go, allowing the south side of the house to develop a bulge, the stone blocks heaving away from the inner wall. It was scary, who knows how long it had taken to develop, but architectural consensus gave the outcome of an exploding stone bomb waiting for a heavy truck to go by to jostle things along. 

Years passed, it was repaired by a stonemason who knew his business well; this is how I was able to see the amount and size of the immense rocks taken out of the opened wall and numbered. The house was stabilized, and became a loved place to live. Not that it wasn't prior to repair, it was one of those circumstances of walking in to view the place and feeling a tide, a current pulling you to home. 

I scraped windows that had been painted shut and learned how to tie the cast iron weights with rope around pulleys, allowing them to open and stay up without being propped. The original part of the building had been constructed in 1860, and the story goes that it was a central location for farmers to bring produce, hence the double stone to keep things cooler. In 1904, it was purchased and made into a residential house, with a kitchen, dining area, and pantry added onto the back. Echoes of past life permeated its bones; I still have a slug that I dug out of a door, and some of the square-headed nails used for the first roof.

Brian, our boy, loved the house, and one day brought home a tree seedling, growing in a cut-off milk carton from school.  He was ten, in fifth grade, and took care of his little tree which took hold and was transplanted into a regular pot at first, and then to an honored place in the front yard. He named it Alphonse.  

Life changed and the house was sold, but the tree, a honey locust, grew tall; it was a part of my son still attached to a home he had loved. He visited the tree whenever he came back into town with a slow drive down the street, introducing his wife and daughter to the memory. This year, this time, it was different.

"They cut the tree down, must have just happened; there are still wood chips in the front yard". It wasn't our property or our tree any more, things are transient and learning to accept them is a part of growing up. But here I am, even at my grown age, feeling a small pang of loss.  What my son feels is considerably more, a further good bye to a small mark that he put on the earth. 

Who knows what happened; there was a whipping wind storm a couple of weeks ago, the tree may have snapped or been too damaged.  I can't imagine any other reason for a tree that the newer people lived with for years to be taken down mid-winter. Did the roots damage underground pipes, were the tiny leaves clogging gutters? All conjecture, none of that matters, truly. All in all, Alphonse the tree lived for almost 32 seasons of leafing out in spring, sleeping in winter.  

Letting go is one of the best things that one can do; not to forget, but to release tethers that keep you in one spot. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, be kind, don't hurt others. Guess that's my best unasked for advice. Other things to care for will come and go, to exist in memory as a blanket against the tirade of stress and pressure. Yes, they will. I promise, and I never make promises.

Sleep; the dark nights of frost create a yearning to huddle and hibernate. Finnegan the Orange One is meowing for the bedtime snack to be revealed, city lights from my window travel in rows, outlining streets and spires. Make good things happen, fling open windows and breathe the clear, cold January air. Sleep well and deeply, the boat of dreams calls, sail among the stars. Good night.

Something Simple

Here it is, right off the bat; put the words "The Amazing" in front of your name and see how it feels. It throws waves of embarrassment over me badly enough that I want to cry and hide, that there is a falsehood, a bold lie that no one in their proper mind would connect with me.  So, where did this fountain of unease come from?

Since attending college in my later years, I was expected to and thereby taught myself to read introductions in books; the early 18th century authors would write one as an apology, an explanation to their audience that the ideas and stories presented were worthy, however, the writer expressed his, (at the time women were considered hysterical ninnies; but in truth I have found that hysterical ninnies still and will always exist in any gender), concern that the intention of the book was for safe amusement, and hopefully not a path to jackanapery and gin by hoodwinking gentle folk away from embroidery or shoeing the horse.

When I was younger (pre-40), introductions seemed to be paragraphs strung together as so much farfel that wasted reading time before getting to the solid part of the book, and that by reading, I could divine what anyone would pre-say about it, especially if the intro was written by a supposedly notable being who I imagined was a paid shill. Reading an introduction was like going for the thinner shell of a hollow chocolate rabbit before the solid ears; why bother? Just snap the head off before your brother found your bunny and claimed it for himself. We were the House of Headless Rabbits, sort of a French Revolution variant of Easter warfare. 

My skepticism of verity or that a writer could be friends with anyone tamped down the idea that these beginning pages were anything more than a snare--"introduction by Truman Capote", "by Hippocrates", "by the sentient culture growing in the refrigerator that used to be a casserole"--which also padded the book with a number of pages. Writer friendships are difficult, as there is a disposition of the job which needs the concocter to sit alone for weeks, living off of the occasional pet that has the misfortune to wander by. Erudition may not be enlightenment, but more related to indigestion combined with a misdirected pledge to set things right. Opinions. What makes you think that yours is the right one and that you are no more than a member of a gaggle? Well, that's another story to fume over.

More recent, in the past few years, we have been dragged across the cheese grater of introduction blended with saccharine, sappy blathering by authors touting how the family barks for Mom's Special Corn Pie, just like from the olde days when grandpa brought in wood for the fire and Aunt Melda wore her favorite slippers. "I had to fight my husband for the last piece." (See bunny ears, par.2, above). Thank the heavens that there usually is a small button at the top of the article saying "Jump to Recipe", which helps you avoid being hit directly with a cannonball of smarmy, unctuous discharge. No getting completely away, you may yet be sprayed with emotional oozings but you can armor yourself with any newspaper headline ahead of time. 

My goodness, I just wrote an introduction. Yikes.

This morning I picked up a book, and in a flurry of thoroughness taught by my British Lit of the 1700s professor, read the intro. The minor epistle was no more than a rah-rah section of How My Life Turned Around Because of This Book by an invited entity, who is now an instructor for the method. This developed into a hoity-toity suspicious attitude on my part, but I continued on to more meowings and thank yous to this or that, one or the other. Then a phrase caught my eye.

"And thank you to the amazing Carol Waggowitz, who blah blah blah and blah." Amazing? Carol is amazing? Amazing is when you trip while carrying a cup of tea without disaster, or maybe a green lightshow in the sky called the Borealis. Can Carol catch a ball on the back of her neck? I can.  Maybe I am amazing also. Let's try it. "The Amazing..."

Holy molasses. What have I done that would be in that category? Yes, I have caught numerous bowls and cups that were then restored to stability. Maybe amazing, but fleeting and without note in the local paper. Yes, I had a baby, once bench-pressed 90 pounds, have had paranormal experiences, and came out of a horror of childhood, but to me, "Amazing" is a once every three hundred years flash in time. Not Carol, who may be a whiz at delegating jobs, meeting deadlines, or scamming hundreds of followers out of their simoleons, but she is just burning the candle at both ends either with caffeine or a Type A drive to plow her way to success. 

You want to see amazing humans, go watch silent film, especially comedian Buster Keaton. No CGI, few safety nets, mostly genius. 

But can you? Put those words in front of your name and face the feelings that erupt? Loss, failure, gender denial (yes, Dad, I'm a girl; sorry now stop buying me footballs and let me do science) (this is another can of worms), missed opportunity, depression, oppression, fear, mistakes and more mistakes. What makes us fabulous, besides a fairy godmother? Certainly not our own brains, which seem to be hellbent on killing whatever ember still glows under the ash.

Well, you try it and let me know. Am I making too much of a trite turn of phrase? I just know that I am not even close to being so, unless you go into the "we are stardust" area of life, when perhaps we were once charged particles blown by the solar wind through the magnetosphere.  Now that would be amazing.

We are headed towards the winter solstice, when the tilt again will accommodate returning sunlight ever so slowly; we gain a half hour of illumination by the end of January. But now, right now, sleep is one of the most lovely of domains, a pile of blankets a blessing.  Prepare yourself for sleep, starting soon after 7 o'clock, and the fractious cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla will cooperate with the hypothalamus and pineal gland to waft you softly, softly off to slumberland where the little silver minnows of dreams slide through currents and tides. Sleep well, I will watch for you.

Missing Peace

The epic stolen wallet story has been meowed to the tree tops, the store windows as I walk by, and the little worms in last year's apples.  In other words, it's over, with the gracious St. Anthony providing closure.  I was so happy.  Other people came forward with stories of this man coming up with lost rings and lost loves; I shall light a candle for him, which I did.

But how can this get better?  A STATUE!  You know Catholics, even a few of the lapsed ones, are big on representations of dead people who supposedly died in exceptional grace, and it's sort of like collecting Star Wars figures in my mind, no smirking intended because, boy, St. Anthony has come through enough to grant him some respect at this address.  A statue.  Someone to talk to besides cats.

From eBay, selection was easy, nothing too frou-frou, just a simple fella with the painted eyes looking in the same direction.  Representations have St. Tony holding a stem of lilies for his purity, and often a baby Jesus who was found in his arms while having a vision.  Don't forget that the man was ill most of his life, and was treated by medieval medicine based on the Greek idea of your humors out of whack.  Blood letting, rubbing a lump of lard on the patient then feeding it to a dog.  Well, you see.  The deck was stacked against living very long, for those remedies are as effective as butter on a burn.  Like Mom did when the iron left a red streak on my hand. Big fat double spoonful of nope.  But maybe they give you visions.

I waited for the box.  I waited for the cat food and cat toys which were to be delivered by the carrier that isn't the postal service.  The seller's feedback button fussed and harrumphed, let's get on with it, already.  Then came the notice!  Delivered!  Yay!  But to whom and where are a mystery.  Tweren't me.

A case of cat food, a cat playhouse, and two cat toys were missing from my door in the apartment building besides the 3 pounds of St. Anthony statue.  In my mind, and it has happened, the delivery was put at the right number door in one of the six other buildings.  I truly don't believe it was stolen by my neighbors, most everybody knows everyone else, yet, yes, there is the chance.

I let the pet company know, and their response was to send another duplicate order out to me, free of charge.  That's $70 worth of cat stuff.  This is the company known as Chewy, and brother, they are a part of what is right with the world.  I'm still embarrassed that they did that, but maybe their losses create a substantial tax write-off.  The gesture gave me warm fuzzies, and the cats, well, they are busy playing cat boss with their new fort.

But the other seller, who mailed St. Anthony out on his pilgrimage to my home; they are investigating through the carrier whose name begins with F, and hopefully the GPS or satellite eyeball in the sky will figure out where the package was left.  Not every neighbor in every building has golden wings of honor, and maybe this was a delightful gift of manna from heaven for someone and their own cat.

Maybe it was their poor little scruff of purr who's fed leftover noodles, and the owner saw this as an opportunity to better the feline menu, also with a catnip stuffed raccoon, and a cat fort.  Maybe they recently turned a corner and could use a saintly resin reminder that this ain't all about their own miseries.  Maybe they lost the last written note from a love who went to Greece to teach belly dance and would like to find it to put under a pillow.  I don't know, but maybe that load of stuff was needed elsewhere.

Yet to me, this speaks of irony.  My St. Anthony statue, who is accorded as the finder of lost things, is itself gone with the wind.  Lost.  It's a shame that the small business on eBay is going through a search and rescue, as am I, EXCEPT from this end, Fedex does not want to know anything about me.  Because a signature was not required, they claim no responsibility for where the package was left, which to me is a bunch of hooey.  I know the seller mailed Tony out, I know it wasn't received at my end of the transaction, and can only hope he shows up somewhere.

The conundrum is, who to ask for help finding St. Anthony when he took a left turn at Albuquerque? It's the essence of self-help, asking Anthony to find Anthony, similar to myself at the end of high school, when no clue of who, where, what, or why appeared to magically take my hand.  Now that would be an interesting course of study for teens; what the hell are you supposed to do after taking that last step off the terrazzo floor outside the guidance counselor's office and into the real world if you weren't going to college?  How do you get to your goals?  St. Joseph, patron saint of jobs; St. Matthew, a tax collector for the Romans, the patron saint of finances.  The Archangel Chamuel is a patron of love.  That's enough to get you started; at least, started thinking about things and how to really get there.

I was up at 5 a.m. today to be ready for a doctor's appointment at a preposterous time with a bit of testing tossed in.  Makes for a long day, and the night now pulls at my coattails, whispering of jammies and a bit of a read before.  It's an odd winter, full of fog with smallish puddles of snow every so often, which means more mosquitoes next year if the weather doesn't get cold enough to freeze them off.  But, now it's time to gather the cats.

Sleep well and long, it is still winter, when the outside world bundles up while we watch through glass windows.  Cozy and dark, woolen afghans old as grandmothers and grandfathers, pillows and clocks, cars heading home, far-off channel markers sounding plaintively in the harbor, sleepy children, tired animals, both grateful for a place inside.  Let go the day, have saints and wishes paint your dreams. Good night.

Food Stories

I rarely clip coupons, as the expiration dates, remembering that I have one, or having to buy 2 or 3 items to get a dollar off are reasons uninspiring.  Not that much of anything is used in the household, and certainly not brand name products; thrift stores, Aldi's, and Amazon are the triumvirate powers, the Bermuda Triangle which suck in my debit number and spit products back out.  Cash?  Hardly, and that is why the fast fingered thief who recently took my wallet for a holiday just got away with six dollars.

The counter clerk at the post office was handed the slip, asked me for identification, then trundled over to a small table where about 8 plastic envelopes, golden with a jolly Santa illustration, sat lined up.  It was still a minor miracle sponsored by St. Anthony as I sat in the car and opened the packet, spying that first corner of familiar red, indeed, my wallet.  Everything, every little nuance, cat stickers, friend's house key, wadded tissue, debit card, license, tool kit, Triple A, Blue Cross Blue Shield; all  still there.

Plus more; a Groupon coupon for fast food delivery from a local Thai restaurant that I never would have clipped or used.  Food delivery is not in my history; growing up in the fifties, only the milkman brought food to the door where we lived out in the sticks of Clarence, New York.  Cottage cheese in plastic cups called raffiaware, Squeezies of lemon or orange sherbet, margarine that had a colored tablet to be mooshed into the grayish slab, butter, ice cream in cardboard cartons; that was about it.  When we moved to Tonawanda, a bread man would roll his truck down the street, throwing candy at the kids and ringing a handbell.  But regular food?  There wasn't even a pizzeria to order from, much less have it brought to the house.

There was a Hobart's slaughterhouse, however, where you could get really fresh ground beef; my Mom would go with my Auntie Ann, who knew how to drive and had a car.  It put both me and her off from eating hamburger for months.  Aunt Ann and my Uncle Bob would also rent a chicken plucker, then get 100 chickens to process and keep in one of their giganto chest freezers; I would be invited to help, which I did, gladly.  Innards fascinated me, and learning the colors of what each organ was matched the transparent overlays of the human body in my science book.  By the time the chickens got to me and my cousin Michelle, they looked like the supermarket sort, except the guts needed scooping out with rubber gloved hands.  They smelled burnt, for my aunt would singe the pinfeathers over her gas stove after my uncle had defeathered them, after killing.

Sometimes an egg would be there, the shell not quite formed; these went into a plastic sandpail.  You saved out the dark red chicken livers, hearts, and gizzards, were very careful with the green gallbladder, the crop was just above the stomach fascinatingly filled with grit, the lungs were pink, and there was something yellowish, a pear shaped thing.  The guts would go into a metal bucket, which my uncle sold to a farmer down the road, Mr. Wuhlers, for his pigs.  Wuhlers was an old German fellow who had seven springs on his property and stories of bobcats and fishers disturbing his animals, and my father would haul buckets of the spring water for my mother to drink when she was pregnant with my brother.

Even if we went to a drive-in movie, Mom would pop our own corn and take it in the large yellow bowl.  When little, I only remember two places that we ever went to; one was Ted's Hot Dogs under the Peace Bridge when we would visit my Grandma and Grandpa in the city, the other was the Turkey Roost, which was just down the way on Main Street near Gunville Road.  They raised their own white turkeys in a coop around the back.  Noisy things.  A Henry's Hamburgers later opened up on Sheridan Drive with fifteen cent hamburgers that made my father's eyes pop open and his pupils spin like cherries from a one-armed bandit in the cartoons.  Fifteen cents!  A working man's dream.

In the city, there were more offerings such as a popcorn cart, the rag and bottle man, a wagon pulled by a horse with produce, and a fish market that had the live fish swimming against the front window. I don't remember a restaurant down on Grant Street, at least one that we went to except for the counter at Woolworth's, which would sometimes be a stop during a shopping trip, but just for tea.

So when the Groupon coupon appeared in the returned wallet, I knew that it wasn't there prior.  Was it meant as a consolation prize?  Was the man saving it for later and just slid it into one of the card pockets?  Did whoever put the wallet into the mailbox add it?  I don't know, nor  is there any temptation to use it.  $12 dollars off a delivery means that the sum of the product is close to an amount I wouldn't pay for real food from a real grocery.  Plus tip.

Maybe I need to get with the times, friends (younger ones, to be sure) order online and have it brought to the door.  Food trucks ride the streets in battalions, gathering in Larkinville during summer months.  There is an Ice Creamcycle Dude who pedals his wagon all over the city, offering deals if you can answer a geography question.  Food is a way of exploring, of being in sync with your fellow creatures, including the dog and cat.  Funny how it's turning into delivery of pre-measured ingredients for a dinner or as a menu choice from a virtual ghost restaurant.

The wind is coming from the east, with a drop in temperature causing the rain and fog to crystallize into snow.  It's cold in here, since the windows are all on the east, and the hot weather air-conditioner is in one of those windows with drafts abounding.  It is New Year's Eve, a night to watch the old year dwindle and creak quietly away into squalling new resolutions at midnight.  Perhaps later in the week, an unfamiliar venture into online food is in order; after all, paper towels and cat food arrive at my door these days, why not Thai?  My Grandma's recipe for Cabbage and Boiled Wieners in white sauce is shaking its ancient head in dismay, while murmurs of Pho suggest gastronomic ethernet escapades.

Good night, good night all and Happy New Year.  At midnight, my Mom would wake me to hear the factory whistles and church bells sounding at the strike of twelve.  In the lonely darkness, peering out the back screen door at low stars hanging in the pitch black sky, the far off sounds would carry through the cold air, alive, connected, haunted.  I knew that somewhere, a person had toggled a switch, pulled a lever or rope that created a call of celebration acknowledging another revolution around the sun.  It was all that we did, she would hustle me back to bed as if it were a secret, and I would lie under the wool blankets with my cat Smokey, talking to God about wishes.

Sleep well.