Human Clay

I was thinking today about a woman I met a while back. I’d been filling in for the teacher in my Core Training class. The class has gotten fairly popular recently and gets pretty crowded. But back then, only a few of us die-hards would show up on a regular basis. And on that particular day, there was only one woman besides me. Needless to say, it was an easy class to teach! 

So it was that the two of us talked a lot for that hour. And somehow we ended up on the topic of how/where/when we grew up. She, it turns out, was raised in New York City where her first nineteen years were spent in an apartment. She talked about how it felt to live sixteen stories up. How the sound of the street was non-existence and how safety was in height.

She told me about when she’d gotten married, taken straight from daddy’s arms into those of her new husband and how the first thing they did was to move. Out of the city and into the suburbs where her one story, single family house freaked her completely out for the first few months. She told me how terrified she was of being at ground level, to hear traffic on the streets outside. To know that the window of her bedroom was all that separated her from the potential stranger lurking somewhere out there.

How odd that I never considered a lifestyle so different from my own. So different from the farm where I was raised, where safety was in distance not in height. In being close enough to the earth to touch the dirt with my bare feet. To walk outside and get lost in the silence of trees and orchard and land and sky . . . for as far as the eye could see.

I tried to place myself in her setting: a taxi cab at the curb instead of an old, rusty truck. Skipping along crowded sidewalks to get to school rather than that one mile walk along a country road where a car might pass on occasion. Tall buildings that reach toward the clouds and crowd the horizon like they own it. As opposed to those endless almond trees, grape vines and barbed wire fences stretching on and on to infinity.

To a certain extent, we’re all carved and shaped by our beginnings. Formed into the persons we become by the mold of our surroundings. I could no easier imagine being rooted in the city than she could envision living out her youth on the farm. And yet, there we both were, together in Tim’s Core Training Class in Houston,Texas, flung together by life, time, age. And possibly the shared need to transcend our flabby middles—a shape we now shared . . . regardless the earlier molds we were cut from.  

July in the mountains . . .

If a picture paints a thousand words then here is the novel about our two weeks in the Blue Ridge mountains, in the little town of Maggie Valley, North Carolina.

Fourth of July in Maggie Valley . . .  

The reason why they call them The Smoky Mountains (the view from our porch): 

And we found another waterfall! 

Here's my favorite picture from one of our walks 

And those baby birds again. 

The End  

The Perfect Cup?

Teetotaler:         Noun – a person who abstains totally from intoxicating drink

              Well, I suppose I’m more of a tea totaler then—if such a thing exists. Noun - a person who partakes in intoxicating drink on occasion (possibly more often than she should) but totals TEA on a daily basis.

And here I’ve found the perfect cup. The trick, I finally learned, is in paying attention to the recommended steep times. So every morning, I boil up a single cup of water then I add the following in specific and timed sequence:

St. John’s Wort – “supports emotional well being”  IE: keeps me sane and happy. Softens the impulse to drive my car into the next person who cuts me off in traffic. It’s also a healing agent and is good for stomach ailments. And we all know I need that! In loose leaf form, I steep it for ten minutes.

Slippery Elm – “Supports healthy digestion” Nuff said. In leaf form, I steep it for ten minutes.

Stevia Leaf – “Sweet Dietary Supplement.” And here I can really go off on a tangent. This stuff is awesome. It’s a plant, native to South America where it’s been used as a sugar replacement for years. Unlike sugar, it doesn’t mess with the glycemic index in the body . . . which means that it has no effect on the blood sugar. Since it’s natural, it’s much healthier than those artificial sweeteners filled with cancer causing chemicals. You can find it in the stores now in granulated form and I use that too. But for my tea, I prefer the loose leaf which steeps for five minutes.

Berry Blast – “Organic green tea.” It’s just plain yummy! It steeps for only a minute. 

So, when it’s all said and done I’ve invested a little over ten minutes and a few times hitting the timer on the oven. But in the end, I have the most delicious cup of tea on the planet! I kid you not.

I get all my teas at a place here in Houston called Georgia’s Farm to Market http://www.georgiasmarket.com/. They also have organic herbs, spices and produce, free range everything and grass fed natural meats if you're into the carnivore thing. And they serve up a pretty mean lunch too! All organic.

So anyway, that’s what I recommend  . . . To tea up! Totally! 

Life is like a box of widgets . . .

I attended a website development workshop last Saturday. Turns out it’s a “tad” harder than creating a blog; certainly more technical. But a web site offers greater functionality . . . once you learn your way around that is!

But authors need a presence online. Right? And, once I start selling a gazillion books (subsequent to the publishing thereof), I’ll need a place to talk about them. Right?

   

So there I sat in the back row wondering why I remembered virtually nothing from my career in information technology. In fairness to me though, that was eons ago and I did support global technology and not web design. But still, you think I’d remember something!

It was an interesting class though with some fairly metaphorical conversations going on. Like:

“Oh, no . . . I lost my home! Did I delete it by mistake?”

“No . . . home is still there. You just can’t see it from here.”

I thought it was cute until later in the afternoon when I couldn’t find my home either! And then even later when I couldn’t fix my parent/child relationship!

So I got to thinking how building a website can be a lot like life. There you are, trying to figure it all out, trying to visualize what persona you want to portray. You bumble about, testing out new themes, trying on new appearances. Sort of like a teenager standing in front of the mirror making faces at herself just to see how each will look. Finally, you find an image you want to portray and you start enhancing it. You add one widget after another, discarding those that don’t quite fit. You rename your tags and change your priorities. You drag. And you drop.

Sure you make a few (did I say few?) mistakes along the way. But, of course, you can’t see them. It’s only when you click on a different perspective—one that lets you view things as an outsider. That’s when your missteps glare back at you in full RGB color.

And if you get really, really stuck . . . if you really can’t find your way home, if your parent/child relationship seems hopeless, you can always call in the professionals, those schooled in solving this sort of thing.

   

So it was that I raised my hand in class over and over again, picking up tidbits of wisdom every time I did. And I’ve been trying to hone the site ever since I got home. Even so, I think I’m closer at this point to having a good parent/child relationship with my son than I am at having my web site up. 

Nevertheless, I'm determined to make it happen. So stay tuned! It's gonna be great! 

Circling (a story from the top of my mountain)

 When we first got to the cabin it was a mess! Lots of work to do in the yard and the house. After all, it’d been a year since our last visit! So day one saw the Rons outside trimming and mowing and edging while I was inside cleaning the windows, taking the screens down for a good hosing . . . all that spring cleaning type stuff. At the end of the day Ron pulled me outside to a low rhododendron just off the front porch where his trimming had revealed a nest of three spotted eggs. 

During our stay we were privy to the whole process. We watched as the pair of Dark Eyed Junkos meticulously tended the nest. 

Regardless the fact that Ron’s trimming had left the nest exposed and vulnerable, regardless the handful of heavy rain showers we had, the birds were there, loyal to their task.  

We started making it easier by providing a ready supply of dried meal worms which we’d dump in a pile in the posts of the wooden handrail. One morning I went outside and found the pair hopping from post to post, clicking their tongues at me — how dare we let the pile get empty! Long about week two things changed and we were rewarded by the tiny mouths of two hatchlings, all gangly legs, bulging eyes and peach fuzz poking out of their wee tiny heads. 

The third egg hatched that same day and the parents’ work increased. They became a tag team—feeding, sitting, foraging. It was surprising how fast the babies grew! Only a few days and  their eyes had opened and they’d begun sprouting pin feathers.

One morning I peaked in and found one missing. I figured it had been that last one to hatch, the weakest of the three. I figured it had just not made it and the parents had somehow finagled its body out of the next. But on the day before we were to leave we learned what really happened. The parents were throwing a wall eyed fit, flitting from branch to branch and making their peculiar little clicking chirp. When Ron parted the branches he saw a snake sliding back down the brush and Ronnie saw the telltale bulge in its stomach.  

Now I don’t hate snakes like some do. I actually think they are pretty cool. In fact, I used to have a few of them back in my “weird attraction to strange pets” stage which included a tarantula, an iguana and several hermit crabs. And I know all about nature and how some things must die for others to live. But I had become invested in the lives of those little hatchlings and seeing them picked off like that was more than a little heart wrenching.

There was one gangly little one left when we packed up and drove away. We had renters coming in the next day and Ron urged me to give them a call, to ask if they’d peek into the nest and see if the snake had been back. 

But I didn’t call. I didn’t really want to know. I’d rather just imagine that the snake had had its fill and that that last little hatchling survived. And that’s exactly how I’m leaving this story.     

Ketchup!

Yes, please . . . with a dab of mustard and a little relish.

No, not the noun . . . the verb! As in trying to resolve a couple hundred e-mails, a few dozen loads of laundry, a fridge that echoes when it's opened. And 14.5 pounds of unopened mail that our neighbor was nice enough to collect for us. Not to mention the lawn—it looks a little like that scene from the second Jurassic Park movie where the raptors chewed up another couple explorers  . . . “Don’t go into the long grass!”

And then there’s the whole body thing. It’s somehow: a) acclimated itself to the mountain air and feels sluggish and non-responsive in Houston’s oppressive heat. And, b) thickened a bit thanks to all that vacation food and inactivity. So attention is required there too. Time to get back on that exercise program. Time to get the stomach used to three meals a day instead of one long, continuous one.

So that’s the thing about long vacations away from so called “reality.” Away from technology and all that goes along with it. Even after two days back, I’m still a little frenzied, rushing from this to that, trying to dig out. Trying hard to rediscover my “groove.” It’s slow and a tad painful but I’m getting there. I promise to post photos as soon as I get time to upload them! In the meantime, back to the laundry and the mail and oh... did I actually forget to eat@!? Yay!